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Title: Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

Author: G. Stanley Hall

Release date: October 1, 2005 [eBook #9173]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2012

Language: English

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YOUTH
ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE

BY
G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D.
President of Clark University and
Professor of Psychology
And Pedagogy

PREFACE

I have often been asked to select and epitomize the practical and especially
the pedagogical conclusions of my large volumes on Adolescence,
published in 1904, in such form that they may be available at a minimum
cost to parents, teachers, reading circles, normal schools, and college
classes, by whom even the larger volumes have been often used. This, with
the coöperation of the publishers and with the valuable aid of
Superintendent C.N. Kendall of Indianapolis, I have tried to do, following
in the main the original text, with only such minor changes and additions as
were necessary to bring the topics up to date, and adding a new chapter on
moral and religions education. For the scientific justification of my
educational conclusions I must, of course, refer to the larger volumes. The
last chapter is not in "Adolescence," but is revised from a paper printed
elsewhere. I am indebted to Dr. Theodore L. Smith of Clark University for
verification of all references, proof-reading, and many minor changes.

G. STANLEY HALL.

CONTENTS

I.—PRE-ADOLESCENCE

Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve—The era of
recapitulating the stages of primitive human development—Life close to
nature—The age also for drill, habituation, memory work, and
regermination—Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very
distinct from it

II.—THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL

Muscles as organs of the will, of character, and even of thought—The
muscular virtues—Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions—The
development of the mind and of the upright position—Small muscles as
organs of thought—School lays too much stress upon these—Chorea—Vast
numbers of automatic movements in children—Great variety of
spontaneous activities—Poise, control, and spurtiness—Pen and tongue
wagging—Sedentary school life vs. free out-of-door activities—Modern
decay of muscles, especially in girls—Plasticity of motor habits at puberty

III.—INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION.

Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international market—
Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen—The effects of a
tariff—Description of schools between the kindergarten and the industrial
school—Equal salaries for teachers in France—Dangers from machinery—
The advantages of life on the old New England farm—Its resemblance to
the education we now give negroes and Indians—Its advantage for all-sided
muscular development

IV.—MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD.

History of the movement—Its philosophy—The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man—A
grammar of our many industries hard—The best we do can reach but few—
Very great defects in manual training methods which do not base on science
and make nothing salable—The Leipzig system—Sloyd is hypermethodic
—These crude peasant industries can never satisfy educational needs—The
gospel of work; William Morris and the arts and crafts movement—Its spirit

desirable—The magic effects of a brief period of intense work—The natural
development of the drawing instinct in the child

V.—GYMNASTICS

The story of Jahn and the Turners—The enthusiasm which this movement
generated in Germany—The ideal of bringing out latent powers—The
concept of more perfect voluntary control—Swedish gymnastics—Doing
everything possible for the body as a machine—Liberal physical culture—
Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements and
correcting defects—The ideal of symmetry and prescribing exercises to
bring the body to a standard—Lamentable lack of correlation between these
four systems—Illustrations of the great good that a systematic training can
effect—Athletic records—Greek physical training

VI.—PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES

The view of Groos partial, and a better explanation of play proposed as
rehearsing ancestral activities—The glory of Greek physical training, its
ideals and results—The first spontaneous movements of infancy as keys to
the past—Necessity of developing basal powers before those that are later
and peculiar to the individual—Plays that interest due to their antiquity—
Play with dolls—Play distinguished by age—Play preferences of children
and their reasons—The profound significance of rhythm—The value of
dancing and also its significance, history, and the desirability of
reintroducing it—Fighting—Boxing—Wrestling—Bushido—Foot-ball—
Military ideals—Showing off—Cold baths—Hill climbing—The
playground movement—The psychology of play—Its relation to work

VII.—FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES.

Classification of children's faults—Peculiar children—Real fault as
distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease—Truancy, its nature
and effects—The genesis of crime—The lie, its classes and relations to
imagination—Predatory activities—Gangs—Causes of crime—The effects
of stories of crime—Temibility—Juvenile crime and its treatment

VIII.—BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH.

Knightly ideals and honor—Thirty adolescents from Shakespeare—Goethe
—C.D. Warner—Aldrich—The fugitive nature of adolescent experience—
Extravagance of autobiographies—Stories that attach to great names—
Some typical crazes—Illustrations from George Eliot, Edison, Chatterton,
Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon,
Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett,
Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey,
Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores of others

IX.—THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS.

Change from childish to adult friends—Influence of favorite teachers—
What children wish or plan to do or be—Property and the money sense—
Social judgments—The only child—First social organizations—Student life
—Associations for youth controlled by adults

X.—INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK.

The general change and plasticity at puberty—English teaching—Causes of
its failure, (1) too much time to other languages, (2) subordination of
literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear
and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words—Children's interest in

words—Their favorites—Slang—Story telling—Age of reading crazes—
What to read—The historic sense—Growth of memory span

XI.—THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.

Equal opportunities of higher education now open—Brings new dangers to
women—Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes
should and do diverge—Different interests—Sex tension—Girls more
mature than boys at the same age—Radical psychic and physiological
differences between the sexes—The bachelor women—Needed
reconstruction—Food—Sleep—Regimen—Manners—Religion—
Regularity— The topics for a girls' curriculum—The eternally womanly

XII.—MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING.

Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain—Difficulties
in teaching morals—Methods in Europe—Obedience to commands—Good
habits should be mechanized—Value of scolding—How to flog aright—Its
dangers—Moral precepts and proverbs—Habituation—Training will
through intellect—Examinations—Concentration—Originality—Froebel
and the naive—First ideas of God—Conscience—Importance of Old and
New Testaments—Sex dangers—Love and religion—Conversion

CHAPTER I

PRE-ADOLESCENCE

Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve—The era of
recapitulating the stages of primitive human development—Life close to
nature—The age also for drill, habituation, memory, work and
regermination—Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very
distinct from it.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human
life. The acute stage of teething is passing, the brain has acquired nearly its
adult size and weight, health is almost at its best, activity is greater and
more varied than it ever was before or ever will be again, and there is
peculiar endurance, vitality, and resistance to fatigue. The child develops a
life of its own outside the home circle, and its natural interests are never so
independent of adult influence. Perception is very acute, and there is great
immunity to exposure, danger, accident, as well as to temptation. Reason,
true morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment are but very
slightly developed.

Everything, in short, suggests that this period may represent in the
individual what was once for a very protracted and relatively stationary
period an age of maturity in the remote ancestors of our race, when the

young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted for themselves
independently of further parental aid. The qualities developed during pre-
adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of the race, far older than
hereditary traits of body and mind which develop later and which may be
compared to a new and higher story built upon our primal nature. Heredity
is so far both more stable and more secure. The elements of personality are
few, but are well organised on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of
these traits inherited from our indefinitely remote ancestors is great, and
they are often clearly distinguishable from those to be added later. Thus the
boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that his qualities are indefinitely
older and existed, well compacted, untold ages before the more distinctly
human attributes were developed. Indeed there are a few faint indications of
an earlier age node, at about the age of six, as if amid the instabilities of
health we could detect signs that this may have been the age of puberty in
remote ages of the past. I have also given reasons that lead me to the
conclusion that, despite its dominance, the function of sexual maturity and
procreative power is peculiarly mobile up and down the age-line
independently of many of the qualities usually so closely associated with it,
so that much that sex created in the phylum now precedes it in the
individual.

Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal
hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery their
fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent reasons to
confirm this view if only a proper environment could be provided. The child
revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting,
roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under
conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be
so organized and directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than
all that the best modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul,
now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later,

would be developed in their season so that we should be immune to them in
maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis for which I have
tried to suggest a far broader application than the Stagirite could see in his
day.

These inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be allowed
some scope. The deep and strong cravings in the individual for those
primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors became
skilful through the pressure of necessity should not be ignored, but can and
should be, at least partially, satisfied in a vicarious way, by tales from
literature, history, and tradition which present the crude and primitive
virtues of the heroes of the world's childhood. In this way, aided by his
vivid visual imagination, the child may enter upon his heritage from the
past, live out each stage of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its
manifold tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past
of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the only
muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity. Thus we not
only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further psychic growth
the results of the higher heredity, which are the most precious and potential
things on earth. So, too, in our urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen
everything before its time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase
is ominous. But we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but
perpetually incite to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers,
animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage
from which modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books
and reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more
active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand. These two
staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of the home and the
environment, constitute fundamental education.

But now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the
manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. We
should transplant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early as eight,
but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect lighting, ventilation,
temperature. We must shut out nature and open books. The child must sit on
unhygienic benches and work the tiny muscles that wag the tongue and pen,
and let all the others, which constitute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if
it be prematurely, he must be subjected to special disciplines and be
apprenticed to the higher qualities of adulthood; for he is not only a product
of nature, but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. To many, if not
most, of the influences here there can be at first but little inner response.
Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the most part only
nascent; and most that pertains to the true kingdom of mature manhood is
embryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child more or less alien,
arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto. There is much passivity, often
active resistance and evasion, and perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But
the senses are keen and alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the
memory is quick, sure and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical
causation, and of many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly
unfolding. Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and
discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new
conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading,
writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and
their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical
elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden hour; and if it
passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired later without a heavy
handicap of disadvantage and loss. These necessities may be hard for the
health of body, sense, mind, as well as for morals; and pedagogic art
consists in breaking the child into them betimes as intensely and as quickly
as possible with minimal strain and with the least amount of explanation or

coquetting for natural interest, and in calling medicine confectionery. This
is not teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and
regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive, authoritative,
dogmatic. The automatic powers are now at their very apex, and they can
do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows or dreams of. Here
we have something to learn from the schoolmasters of the past back to the
middle ages, and even from the ancients. The greatest stress, with short
periods and few hours, incessant insistence, incitement, and little reliance
upon interest, reason or work done without the presence of the teacher,
should be the guiding principles for pressure in these essentially formal and,
to the child, contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply
distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational
factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty, content-full, and
relatively formless as to time of day, method, spirit, and perhaps
environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly somewhat in season of
the year, almost as sharply as work differs from play, or perhaps as the
virility of man that loves to command a phalanx, be a martinet and drill-
master, differs from femininity which excels in persuasion, sympathetic
insight, story-telling, and in the tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous
interests in the young.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human
traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge are far
newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past; the
adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of the race
slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more saltatory,
suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when old moorings
were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate of growth in
height, weight, and strength is increased and often doubled, and even more.
Important functions, previously non-existent, arise. Growth of parts and
organs loses its former proportions, some permanently and some for a

season. Some of these are still growing in old age and others are soon
arrested and atrophy. The old measures of dimensions become obsolete, and
old harmonies are broken. The range of individual differences and average
errors in all physical measurements and all psychic tests increases. Some
linger long in the childish stage and advance late or slowly, while others
push on with a sudden outburst of impulsion to early maturity. Bones and
muscles lead all other tissues, as if they vied with each other; and there is
frequent flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth
for conflict with all the resources at her command—speed, power of
shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw—strengthens and enlarges skull, thorax,
hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman's frame for maternity.

*****

CHAPTER II

THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL

Muscles as organs of the will, of character and even of thought—The
muscular virtues—Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions—The
development of the mind and of the upright position—Small muscles as
organs of thought—School lays too much stress upon these—Chorea—vast
numbers of automatic movements in children—Great variety of
spontaneous activities—Poise, control and spurtiness—Pen and tongue
wagging—Sedentary school life vs free out-of-door activities—Modern
decay of muscles, especially in girls—Plasticity of motor habits at puberty.

The muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent. of the average
adult male human body. They expend a large fraction of all the kinetic
energy of the adult body, which a recent estimate places as high as one-
fifth. The cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over most of the
lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture is brain building. In a
sense they are organs of digestion, for which function they play a very
important rôle. Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs
of the will. They have built all the roads, cities, and machines in the world,
written all the books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done everything
that man has accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow
relaxed and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their

execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense
defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call conduct three-fourths of life,
with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and two-thirds
will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does or that he is the
sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that character is simply
muscle habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art is now slowly superseding
the age of science, and that the artist will drive out with the professor, with
the anonymous author of "Rembrandt als Erzicher";[1] that history is
consciously willed movements, with Bluntschli; or that we could form no
conception of force or energy in the world but for our own muscular effort;
to hold that most thought involves change of muscle tension as more or less
integral to it—all this shows how we have modified the antique Ciceronian
conception vivere est cogitari, [To live is to think] to vivere est velle, [To
live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the importance of muscular
development and regimen.[2]

Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all
efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every change
of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them unconsciously,
modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may be called organs of
thought and feeling as well as of will, in which some now see the true
Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of the world, in the
anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the deeper strata of
belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not words, are the language
of complete men. The motor areas are closely related and largely identical
with the psychic, and muscle culture develops brain-centers as nothing else
yet demonstrably does. Muscles are the vehicles of habituation, imitation,
obedience, character, and even of manners and customs. For the young,
motor education is cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for
all, education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and

perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity,
caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of control and poise, muscular faults.

To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that
characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable
aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all
normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the progress
from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the muscles and
movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips, shoulders, knees,
and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in general man has in
common with the higher and larger animals. Their activities are few, mostly
simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as of the legs in walking, and
predominate in hard-working men and women with little culture or
intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter or accessory movements are
those of the hand, tongue, face, and articulatory organs, and these may be
connected into a long and greatly diversified series, as those used in
writing, talking, piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more
numerous muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a
higher standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements
come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic activity,
which plays upon them by incessantly changing their tensions, if not
causing actual movement. It is these that are so liable to disorder in the
many automatisms and choreic tics we see in school children, especially if
excited or fatigued. General paralysis usually begins in the higher levels by
breaking these down, so that the first symptom of its insidious and never
interrupted progress is inability to execute the more exact and delicate
movements of tongue or hand, or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary
level, it is a devolution that may work downward till very many of the
fundamental activities are lost before death.

Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference between the
fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins as a fin or paddle
or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for locomotion. Some carnivora
with claws use the fore limb also for holding well as tearing, and others for
digging. Arboreal life seems to have almost created the simian hand and to
have wrought a revolution in the form and use of the forearm and its
accessory organs, the fingers. Apes and other tree-climbing creatures must
not only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and
sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for picking,
transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a prime factor in
lifting man to the erect position, without which human intelligence as we
know it could have hardly been possible. "When we attempt to measure the
gap between man and the lower animals in terms of the form of movement,
the wonder is no less great than when we use the term of mentality."[3] The
degree of approximation to human intelligence in anthropoid animals
follows very closely the degree of approximation to human movements.

The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant
admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[4] At first the limbs are
of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk muscles with
those that move the large joints are more or less spasmodically active. Then
comes creeping, with use of the hip muscles, while all below the knee is
useless, as also are the fingers. Slowly the leg and foot are degraded to
locomotion, slowly the great toe becomes more limited in its action, the
thumb increases in flexibility and strength of opposition, and the fingers
grow more mobile and controllable. As the body slowly assumes the
vertical attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest diameter is
transverse instead of from front to back. The shoulder-blades are less
parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till they approximate the same
plane. This gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so that it can be
rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in man as contrasted to one hundred

degrees in apes, thus giving man the command of almost any point within a
sphere of which the two arms are radii. The power of grasping was partly
developed from and partly added to the old locomotor function of the fore
limbs; the jerky aimless automatisms, as well as the slow rhythmic flexion
and extension of the fingers and hand, movements which are perhaps
survivals of arboreal or of even earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and the
bilateral and simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles are
supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized activities which
as the end of the growth period is approached are determined less by
heredity and more by environment. In a sense, a child or a man is the sum
total of his movements or tendencies to move; and nature and instinct
chiefly determine the basal, and education the accessory parts of our
activities.

The entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the
development of all of the arts of expression. These smaller muscles might
almost be called organs of thought. Their tension is modified with the
faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent, inflection, facial
expressions, handwriting, and many forms of so-called mind-reading,
which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. The day-laborer of low
intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not over five hundred words,
who can hardly move each of his fingers without moving others or all of
them, who can not move his brows or corrugate his forehead at will, and
whose inflection is very monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or
atrophy of this later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other hand,
the child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very liable to be
undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and functions. The
full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable condition precedent for the
normal development to full and abiding maturity of the higher and more
refined muscularity, just as conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of
adolescence mark a temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. If

this general conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of
her pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, but lays a
part of the foundation and, after carrying it to an apex, normally goes back
and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher and, if prevented
from so doing, expends her energy in building the apex up at a sharper
angle till instability results. School and kindergarten often lay a
disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory muscles, weighing altogether
but a few ounces, that wag the tongue, move the pen, and do fine work
requiring accuracy. But still at this stage prolonged work requiring great
accuracy is irksome and brings dangers homologous to those caused by too
much fine work in the kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to
small muscles, which lasts until adolescence, is established. Then
disproportion between function and growth often causes symptoms of
chorea. The chief danger is arrest of the development and control of the
smaller muscles. Many occupations and forms of athletics, on the contrary,
place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the neglect
of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy athletics no doubt
coarsen their motor reactions, become not only inexact and heavy but
unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large muscles were hypertrophied
and the small ones arrested. On the other hand, many young men, and
probably more young women, expend too little of their available active
energy upon basal and massive muscle work, and cultivate too much, and
above all too early, the delicate responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best
physiological characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous
and muscular irritability. The great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds
during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to
successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very plastic
quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is probably more
important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality, and health than at
any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time a spurty diathesis, is as

instinctive and desirable as are the copious minor automatisms which
spontaneously give the alphabet out of which complex and finer motor
series are later spelled by the conscious will. Mercier and others have
pointed out that, as most skilled labor, so school work and modern activities
in civilized life generally lay premature and disproportionate strains upon
those kinds of movement requiring exactness. Stress upon basal movements
is not only compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the
disorders of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or
prophylactic for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise,
control, and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach
choreic intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale that
measures the difference between primary and secondary movements and to
make the former predominate.

The number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated,
their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic quantum
in young children, whether we consider movements of the body as a whole,
fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer accessory motions, is
amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a motor response.
Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for four hours, and found,
to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or spontaneous, reflex,
instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive, and even deliberative
movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm, attempts to do almost
anything which appealed to him, and almost inexhaustible efferent
resources. A friend has tried to record every word uttered by a four-year-old
girl during a portion of a day, and finds nothing less than verbigerations. A
teacher noted the activities of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time
of a single school day[6], with similar results.

Lindley[7] studied 897 common motor automatisms in children, which
he divided into 92 classes: 45 in the region of the head, 20 in the feet and

legs, 19 in the hands and fingers. Arranged in the order of frequency with
which each was found, the list stood as follows: fingers, feet, lips, tongue,
head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws, legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. In the
last five alone adolescents exceeded children, the latter excelling the former
most in those of head, mouth, legs, and tongue, in this order. The writer
believes that there are many more automatisms than appeared in his returns.

School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the study of
these activities. They are familiar, as licking things, clicking with the
tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping, twirling a lock of hair or
chewing it, biting the nails (Bérillon's onychophagia), shrugging,
corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling
pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding and shaking the head, squinting and
winking, swaying, pouting and grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing
hands, stroking, patting, flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the fingers,
muffling, squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the
joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking things, etc.

The average number of automatisms per 100 persons Smith found to be
in children 176, in adolescents 110. Swaying is chiefly with children;
playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among
adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with age, and
those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for the
development of attention. Girls excel greatly in swaying, and also, although
less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements of tongue, feet, and
hands. Such movements increase, with too much sitting, intensity of effort,
such as to fix attention, and vary with the nature of the activity willed, but
involve few muscles directly used in a given task. They increase up the
kindergarten grades and fall off rapidly in the primary grades; are greater
with tasks requiring fine and exact movements than with those involving
large movements. Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks.

The restlessness that they often express is one of the commonest signs of
fatigue. They are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of the
fundamental muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with age;
those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but their
frequency in general declines with growing maturity, although there is
increased frequency of certain specialized contractions, which indicate the
gradual settling of expression in the face.

Often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the morbid
automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in the
aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick. In
idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of these
movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels those
partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it prompts the feeble-
minded to strike the head for cerebrations), rockers, rackers, shakers, biters,
etc. Movements often pass to fixed attitudes and postures of limbs or body,
disturbing the normal balance between flexors and extensors, the
significance of which as nerve signs or exponents of habitual brain states
and tensions Warner has so admirably shown.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a
considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children. Many
of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic symptoms, the
fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a vacation, the motor
superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment, extreme effort, excitement,
fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the forms in which we receive the full
momentum of heredity and mark a natural richness of the raw material of
intellect, feeling, and especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All
parts should act in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity
of all other parts and functions. Some of these activities are more essential
for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. Here as

everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded before
the ability to check or even to use them can develop. All movements arising
from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers must be made in order
even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only so, but this purer kind of
innateness must often be helped out to some extent in some children by
stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide repertory of sensation must be made
familiar; more or less and very guarded, watched and limited experiences of
hunger, thirst, cold, heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile
irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off the
vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some cases be
judicious. Conscious and unconscious imitation or repetition of every sort
of copy may also help to establish the immediate and low-level connection
between afferent and efferent processes that brings the organism into direct
rapport and harmony with the whole world of sense. Perhaps the more
rankly and independently they are developed to full functional integrity,
each in its season, if we only knew that season, the better. Premature control
by higher centers, or coördination into higher compounds of habits and
ordered serial activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will of
which they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is
stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly abridged.

But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a
little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked, and
organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The inhibiting
functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the child sets its teeth, holds
the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps makes every muscle tense with a
great effort that very soon exhausts. This repressive function is probably not
worked from special nervous centers, nor can we speak with confidence of
collisions with "sums of arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or
of stimuli that normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell,
being mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic

lability in the sense of Wundt's Mechanik der Nerven. The concept now
suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long circuiting to
higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy, whether
spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These combinations
are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action, and modified by
some Jacksonian third level.[9] Action is now not from independent centers,
but these are slowly associated, so that excitation may flow off from one
point to any other and any reaction may result from any stimulus.

The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and the
lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the whole. The
tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow into those of lower
tension than themselves increases as correspondence in time and space
widens. The more one of a number of activities gains in power to draw on
all the brain, or the more readily the active parts are fed at cost of the
resting parts, the less is rest to be found in change from one of these
activities to another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove
to be dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it is
to connect them. Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends to unity,
so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain with this
switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown independent
of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation, and each act, e.g.,
a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire the whole brain. This helps
us to understand why brain-workers so often excel laborers not only in
sudden dynamometric strength test, but in sustained and long-enduring
effort. In a good brain or in a good machine, power may thus be developed
over a large surface, and all of it applied to a small one, and hence the
dangers of specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of
our ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of
these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the elements of
which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the higher animals;

and of these powers later adolescence is the golden age. The aimless and
archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and complex or in the form
of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are thus, by slow processes of
combined analysis and synthesis, involving changes as radical as any in all
the world of growth, made over into habits and conduct that fit the world of
present environment.

But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of
completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms
refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often
overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those
growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2) those
that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost power from
disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been subjugated because
the central power that should have used them to weave the texture of willed
action—the proper language of complete manhood—was itself arrested or
degenerate. With regard to many of these movements these distinctions can
be made with confidence, and in some children more certainly than in
others. In childhood, before twelve, the efferent patterns should be
developed into many more or less indelible habits, and their colors set fast.
Motor specialties requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing,
drawing, writing, pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting,
singing, and a host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative
arrest of accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and
before its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of
this age, such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet
close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk
backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a string
together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on toes or heels, hop
on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit fingers together rapidly in
succession beginning at the little finger and then reversing, etc., are the very

ones in whom automatisms are most marked or else they are those
constitutionally inert, dull, or uneducable.

In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features of
inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in
stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting, tics or
tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should, they are seen
in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the mirror or facial
consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises; and they may tend to grow
monstrous with age as if they were disintegrated fragments of our
personality, split off and aborted, or motor parasites leaving our psycho-
physic ego poorer in energy and plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction
and anarchy of the individual nature becomes conspicuous and pathetic.

At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is a
new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and qualitative
differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex activities, these
kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together into wrong aggregates if
right ones are not formed. Good manners and correct motor form generally,
as well as skill, are the most economic ways of doing things; but this is the
age of wasteful ways, awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a
constant leakage of vital energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions,
quaint movements, more elaborated than in childhood and often highly
anesthetic and disagreeable, motor coördinations that will need laborious
decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with some
modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and faulty
attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form of overpressure
or misfit between environment and nature. As during the years from four to
eight there is great danger that overemphasis of the activities of the
accessory muscles will sow the seeds of chorea, or aggravate
predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly increased danger, hardly

existing from eight to twelve, that overprecision, especially if fundamental
activities are neglected, will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity.
This is again the age of the basal, e.g., hill-climbing muscle, of leg and back
and shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest
muscles. Now again, the study of a book, under the usual conditions of
sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has a
tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. This is especially harmful
for city children who are too prone to the distraction of overmobility at an
age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor income and expenditure;
and it constitutes not a liberal or power-generating, but a highly and
prematurely specialized, narrowing, and weakening education unless offset
by safeguards better than any system of gymnastics, which is at best
artificial and exaggerated.

As Bryan well says, "The efficiency of a machine depends so far as we
know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction of
its movements and upon the exactness with which below these maxima the
force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be controlled."
The motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in all these respects.
Moreover, the education of the small muscles and fine adjustments of larger
ones is as near mental training as physical culture can get; for these are the
thought-muscles and movements, and their perfected function is to reflect
and express by slight modifications of tension and tone every psychic
change. Only the brain itself is more closely and immediately an organ of
thought than are these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, or
imitative in origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in
arousing the brain to activity, or as Müller suggests, in drawing off
sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract, we
need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, a secondary and late function
—nature's way of making the best of things and utilizing remnants.

With these facts and their implications in mind we can next pass to
consider the conditions under which the adolescent muscles best develop.
Here we confront one of the greatest and most difficult problems of our age.
Changes in modern motor life have been so vast and sudden as to present
some of the most comprehensive and all-conditioning dangers that threaten
civilized races. Not only have the forms of labor been radically changed
within a generation or two, but the basal activities that shaped the body of
primitive man have been suddenly swept away by the new methods of
modern industry. Even popular sports, games, and recreations, so abundant
in the early life of all progressive peoples, have been reduced and
transformed; and the play age, that once extended on to middle life and
often old age, has been restricted. Sedentary life in schools and offices, as
we have seen, is reducing the vigor and size of our lower limbs. Our
industry is no longer under hygienic conditions; and instead of being out of
doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is now specialized,
monotonous, carried on in closed spaces, bad air, and perhaps poor light,
especially in cities. The diseases and arrest bred in the young by life in
shops, offices, factories, and schools increase. Work is rigidly bound to
fixed hours, uniform standards, stints and piece-products; and instead of a
finished article, each individual now achieves a part of a single process and
knows little of those that precede or follow. Machinery has relieved the
large basal muscles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements
that involve nerve strain. The coarser forms of work that involve hard
lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and skilled labor
requires more and more brain-work. It has been estimated that "the
diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity of work in 1884
as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per cent."[11] Personal interest in
and the old native sense of responsibility for results, ownership and use of
the finished products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in
all the past, are in more and more fields gone. Those who realize how small

a proportion of the young male population train or even engage in amateur
sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men strive for
records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of judicious
training, can best understand how far below his possibilities as a motor
being the average modern man goes through life, and how far short in this
respect he falls from fulfilling nature's design for him.

For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered,
made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride
relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with rude
implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone, iron,
and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with infinite pains
and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge of the processes
by which they are made. As hunter he followed game, which, when found,
he chased, fought, and overcame in a struggle perhaps desperate, while we
shoot it at a distance with little risk or effort. In warfare he fought hand to
hand and eye to eye, while we kill "with as much black powder as can be
put in a woman's thimble." He caught and domesticated scores of species of
wild animals and taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill
that compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced
to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears
imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activities in mimic form to
the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures in closed
spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not reproduce, and
fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made pottery which set
our fashions, played games that invigorated body and soul. His courtship
was with feats of prowess and skill, and meant physical effort and
endurance.

Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar and
high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular

development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are the
evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this country now suffer
from too little than from too much physical exercise, while most who suffer
from work do so because it is too uniform, one-sided, accessory, or
performed under unwholesome conditions, and not because it is excessive
in amount. Modern industry has thus largely ceased to be a means of
physical development and needs to be offset by compensating modes of
activity. Many labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the
problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy. Under
present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better in the future.
Healthy natural industries will be less and less open to the young. This is
the new situation that now confronts those concerned for motor education,
if they would only make good what is lost.

Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average measurements
of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control. Despite the
excellence of the few, the testimony of those most familiar with the bodies
of children and adults, and their physical powers, gives evidence of the
ravages of modern modes of life that, without a wide-spread motor revival,
can bode only degeneration for our nation and our race. The number of
common things that can not be done at all; the large proportion of our youth
who must be exempted from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any;
the thin limbs, collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak
hearts, lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways,
automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of
impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only too
necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long neglect of
the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers, and perhaps the
most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful stewards of these puny
and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to strip and stand before stern
judges and render them account, and be smitten with a conviction of their

weakness, guilty deformity, and arrest of growth; if they were brought to
realize how they are fallen beings, as weak as stern theologians once
deemed them depraved, and how great their need of physical salvation, we
might hope again for a physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has
seen but twice or perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three
of the brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the
advancement of the kingdom of man. A vast body of evidence could be
collected from the writings of anthropologists showing how superior
unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic proportions of
body, in many forms of endurance of fatigue, hardship, and power to bear
exposure, in the development and preservation of teeth and hair, in keenness
of senses, absence of deformities, as well as immunity to many of our
diseases. Their women are stronger and bear hardship and exposure,
monthly periods and childbirth, better. Civilization is so hard on the body
that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies
alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious
and germ diseases.

The progressive realization of these tendencies has prompted most of the
best recent and great changes motor-ward in education and also in personal
regimen. Health- and strength-giving agencies have put to school the large
motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and have vastly enlarged their
scope. Thousands of youth are now inspired with new enthusiasm for
physical development; and new institutions of many kinds and grades have
arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnumbered specialists, specialties,
new apparatus, tests, movements, methods, and theories; and the press, the
public, and the church are awakened to a fresh interest in the body and its
powers. All this is magnificent, but sadly inadequate to cope with the new
needs and dangers, which are vastly greater.

[Footnote 1: Dieterich. Göttingen, 1886.]

[Footnote 2: See Chap. xii.]

[Footnote 3: F. Burk in From Fundamental to Accessory. Pedagogical
Seminary, Oct., 1898, vol. 6, pp. 5-64.]

[Footnote 4: Creeping and Walking, by A.W. Trettien. American Journal
of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]

[Footnote 5: A Morning Observation of a Baby. Pedagogical Seminary,
December 1901, vol. 8, pp. 469-481.]

[Footnote 6: Kate Carman. Notes on School Activity. Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 106-117.]

[Footnote 7: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp. 491-
517.]

[Footnote 8: G.E. Johnson. Psychology and Pegagogy of Feeble-Minded
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, vol. 3, pp. 246-301.]

[Footnote 9: Dr. Hughlings Jackson, the eminent English pathologist, was
the first to make practical application of the evolutionary theory of the
nervous system to the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsies and mental
diseases. The practical success of this application was so great that the
Hughlings-Jackson "three-level theory" is now the established basis of
English diagnosis. He conceived the nervous mechanism as composed of
three systems, arranged in the form of a hierarchy, the higher including the
lower, and yet each having a certain degree of independence. The first level
represents the type of simplest reflex and involuntary movement and is
localized in the gray matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and pons. The
second, or middle level, comprises those structures which receive sensory

impulses from the cells of the lowest level instead of directly from the
periphery or the non-nervous tissues. The motor cells of this middle level
also discharge into the motor mechanisms of the lowest level. Jackson
located these middle level structures in the cortex of the central
convolutions, the basal ganglia and the centers of the special senses in the
cortex. The highest level bears the same relation to the middle level that it
bears to the lowest i.e., no continuous connection between the highest and
the lowest is assumed; the structures of the middle level mediate between
them as a system of relays. According to this hierarchical arrangement of
the nervous system, the lowest level which is the simplest and oldest
"contains the mechanism for the simple fundamental movements in reflexes
and involuntary reactions. The second level regroups these simple
movements by combinations and associations of cortical structure in wider,
more complex mechanisms, producing a higher class of movements. The
highest level unifies the whole nervous system and, according to Jackson, is
the anatomical basis of mind."

For a fuller account of this theory see Burk: From Fundamental to
Accessory in the Nervous System and of Movements. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 6, pp. 17-23.]

[Footnote 10: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp. 491-
517.]

[Footnote 11: Encyclopedia of Social Reform, Funk and Wagnalls, 1896,
p. 1095]

*****

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international market—
Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen—The effects of a
tariff—Description of schools between the kindergarten and the industrial
school—Equal salaries for teachers in France—Dangers from machinery—
The advantages of life on the old New England farm—Its resemblance to
the education we now give negroes and Indians—Its advantage for all-sided
muscular development.

We must glance at a few of the best and most typical methods of
muscular development, following the order: industrial education, manual
training, gymnastics, and play, sports, and games.

Industrial education is now imperative for every nation that would excel
in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the growing
intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the apprentice system
and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring only the skill needed for
livelihood. Thousands of our youth of late have been diverted from
secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade classes now established for
horology, glass-work, brick-laying, carpentry, forging, dressmaking,
cooking, typesetting, bookbinding, brewing, seamanship, work in leather,

rubber, horticulture, gardening, photography, basketry, stock-raising,
typewriting, stenography and bookkeeping, elementary commercial training
for practical preparation for clerkships, etc. In this work not only is Boston,
our most advanced city, as President Pritchett[1] has shown in detail, far
behind Berlin, but German workmen and shopmen a slowly taking the best
places even in England; and but for a high tariff, which protects our
inferiority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. In Germany,
especially, this training is far more diversified than here, always being
colored if not determined by the prevalent industry of the region and more
specialised and helped out by evening and even Sunday classes in the
school buildings, and by the still strong apprentice system. Froebelian
influence in manual training reaches through the eight school years and is in
some respects better than ours in lower grades, but is very rarely
coeducational, girls' work of sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, etc., not
being considered manual training. There are now over 1,500 schools and
workshops in Germany where manual training is taught; twenty-five of
these are independent schools. The work really began in 1875 with v. Kass,
and is promoted by the great Society for Boys' Handwork. Much stress is
laid on paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the influence of
Kurufa of Darmstadt. Many objects for illustrating science are made, and
one course embraces the Seyner water-wheel.[2]

In France it is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers
everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country. Adolescence is
the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by practice, so essential
in the struggle for survival. In general this kind of motor education is least
of all free, but subservient to the tool, machine, process, finished product, or
end in view; and to these health and development are subordinated, so that
they tend to be ever more narrow and special. The standard here is maximal
efficiency of the capacities that earn. It may favor bad habitual attitudes,
muscular development of but one part, excessive large or small muscles,

involve too much time or effort, unhealthful conditions, etc., but it has the
great advantage of utility, which is the mainspring of all industry. In a very
few departments and places this training has felt the influence of the arts
and crafts movement and has been faintly touched with the inspiration of
beauty. While such courses give those who follow them marked advantage
over those who do not, they are chiefly utilitarian and do little to mature or
unfold the physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration.

Where not one but several or many professes are taught, the case is far
better. Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor
development. This is due to its great variety of occupations, healthful
conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reënforcement from immemorial
times. I have computed some three-score industries[3] as the census now
classifies them; that were more or less generally known and practiced sixty
years ago in a little township, which not only in this but in other respects
has many features of an ideal educational environment for adolescent boys,
combining as it does not only physical and industrial, but civil and religious
elements in wise proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and
representing the ideal of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was
contemplated by the framers of our Constitution.

Contrast this life with that of a "hand" in a modern shoe factory, who
does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a tanned
hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt shop who is one of thirty-nine,
each of whom does as piece-work a single step requiring great exactness,
speed, and skill, and who never knows how a whole shirt is made, and we
shall see that the present beginning of a revival of interest in muscular
development comes none too early. So liberal is muscular education of this
kind that its work in somewhat primitive form has been restored and copied
many features by many educational institutions for adolescents, of the
Abbotsholme type and grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train

for primitive conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens have
also been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new
impetus to the study of nature. Farm training at its best instills love of
country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's pedagogic
province, and perhaps even from Gilman's pie-shaped communities, with
villages at the center irradiating to farms in all directions. In England,
where by the law of primogeniture holdings are large and in few hands, this
training has never flourished, as it has greatly in France, where nearly every
adult male may own land and a large proportion will come to do so. So of
processes. As a student in Germany I took a few lessons each of a
bookbinder, a glassblower, a shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and
here I have learned in a crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-
fashioned broom-maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory;
and I am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow,
milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete, knit,
spin and even "put in a piece" in an old-fashioned hand loom, and weave
frocking. But thus pride bows low before the pupils of our best institutions
for negroes, Indians, and juvenile delinquents, whose training is often in
more than a score of industries and who to-day in my judgment receive the
best training in the land, if judged by the annual growth in mind, morals,
health, physique, ability, and knowledge, all taken together. Instead of
seeking soft, ready-made places near home, such education impels to the
frontier, to strike out new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit,
beginning so low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus
trained are thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed cap-à-pie
for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are the
bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions, institutions, and
even culture, are more and more dependent, while the old ideals of mere
study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We really retain only the
knowledge we apply. We should get up interest in new processes like that of

a naturalist in new species. Those who leave school at any age or stage
should be best fitted to take up their life work instead of leaving unfitted for
it, aimless and discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened,
we should train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes,
so that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best benefits,
after having wasted the years best fitted for it in profitless studies or in the
hard school of failure. By such methods many of our flabby, undeveloped,
anemic, easy-living city youth would be regenerated in body and spirit.
Some of the now oldest, richest, and most famous schools of the world were
at first established by charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such
institutions have an undreamed-of future. No others so well fit for a life of
respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be central
for all at this stage. This diversity of training develops the muscular
activities rendered necessary by man's early development, which were so
largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making and selling
commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The natural state of man
is not war, hot peace; and perhaps Dawson[4] is right in thinking that three-
fourths of man's physical activities in the past have gone into such
vocations. Industry has determined the nature and trend of muscular
development; and youth, who have pets, till the soil, build, manufacture,
use tools, and master elementary processes and skills, are most truly
repeating the history of the race. This, too, lays the best foundation for
intellectual careers. The study of pure science, as well as its higher
technology, follows rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is the
order of nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and
specialized organs and functions; and such a sequence best weeds out and
subordinates automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds of
training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we have seen
in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some recent methods
have mistakenly assumed; and this prepolytechnic work, wherever and in

whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct of secondary courses than
manual training, the sad fact being that, according to the best estimates,
only a fraction of one per cent of those who need this training in this
country are now receiving it.

[Footnote 1: The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public
Education. Technology Review, January, 1902, vol. 4, pp. 10-37.]

[Footnote 2: See an article by Dr. H.E. Kock, Education, December,
1902, vol. 23, pp. 193-203.]

[Footnote 3: See my Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty
Years Ago. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207.]

[Footnote 4: The Muscular Activities Rendered Necessary by Man's
Early Environment, American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol.
7, pp. 80-85.]

*****

CHAPTER IV

MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD

History of the movement—Its philosophy—The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man—A
grammar of our many industries hard—The best we do can reach but few—
Very great defects in our manual training methods which do not base on
science and make nothing salable—The Leipzig system—Sloyd is
hypermethodic—These crude peasant industries can never satisfy
educational needs—The gospel of work, William Morris and the arts and
crafts movement—Its spirit desirable—The magic effects of a brief period
of intense work—The natural development of the drawing instinct in the
child.

Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted
form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its
best representation here in our new and often magnificent manual-training
high schools and in many courses in other public schools. This work meets
the growing demand of the country for a more practical education, a
demand which often greatly exceeds the accommodations. The philosophy,
if such it may be called, that underlies the movement, is simple, forcible,
and sound, and not unlike Pestalozzi's "keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten,"
[No knowledge without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking

and doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend to
taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to the better
appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for some studies; adds
somewhat to the average length of the school period; gives a sense of
capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation for a number of
vocations. These claims are all well founded, and this work is a valuable
addition to the pedagogic agencies of any country or state. As man excels
the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind,
and since the manual areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and
the cortical centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent
instrument in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is
no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for but an
insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the
young people of the country between fifteen and twenty-four.

When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations of
the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially manual and
offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular tissues of the body lie,
those which respond most to training and are now most in danger of
degeneration at this age; the back and trunk also are little trained.
Consideration of proportion and bilateral asymmetry are practically
ignored. Almost in proportion as these schools have multiplied, the rage for
uniformity, together with motives of economy and administrative efficiency
on account of overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the
principle that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a
double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at first
and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the methods of
industry have undergone vast changes since they were given shape. There
are now between three and four hundred occupations in the census, more
than half of these involving manual work, so that never perhaps was there
so great a pedagogic problem as to make these natural developments into

conscious art, to extract what may be called basal types. This requires an
effort not without analogy to Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of
the marketplace the underlying categories eternally conditioning all
thought, or to construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the
name, not even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in
this field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts and
occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human occupations in
infant form, the processes selected are underived and find their justification
rather in their logical sequence and coherence than in being true norms of
work. If these latter be attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so
snugly in a brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards
of the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more intricate
and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master in any art-craft
must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp an idea and embody it.
2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide repertory of methods, devices,
recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3. Knowledge of the history of the craft.
4. Skill in technical processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the
last.

The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood and
iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the course
treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly tending to
make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the latter, iron in its
rigidity and an excellent school for smiths, mechanics, and machinists.
These courses are not liberal because they hardly touch science, which is
rapidly becoming the real basis of every industry. Almost nothing that can
be called scientific knowledge is required or even much favored, save some
geometrical and mechanical drawing and its implicates. These schools
instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its
educational value or repute in the community because of this strong bias
toward a few trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because

unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect it
and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these schools
were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic methods and
matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of the product, and
to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination is a fatal mistake. To
focus on process only, with no reference to the object made, is here an
almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content to form, which in all history
has been the chief stigma of degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using
animal; but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter prompting
even their invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with
persistent refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be
introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly,
hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades certain
toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites,
and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in
higher grades making simple scientific apparatus more generic than
machines, to open the great principles of the material universe, all is
sacrificed to supernormalized method.

As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is no
control of the work of these schools by the higher technical institutions such
as the college exercises over the high school, so that few of them do work
that fits for advanced training or is thought best by technical faculties. In
most of its current narrow forms, manual training will prove to be
historically, as it is educationally, extemporized and tentative, and will soon
be superseded by broader methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited
only as a low point of departure from which future progress will loom up.

Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the
experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and original
studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work and

modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he has connected
them even with the kindergarten below. In general the whole industrial life
of our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new educational
elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, metallurgical operations,
agriculture, every tool and many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their
choicest pedagogical factors to the final result. In every detail the prime
consideration should be the nature and needs of the youthful body and will
at each age, their hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest
connection with science at every point should do the same for the intellect.
Each operation and each tool—the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel,
draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe—will be studied with reference to its
orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and the
attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in France often
requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all together, upon
count and command, will give place to individuality.

Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful,
deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago as
an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home industry
during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an institution of
its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood only, with little
machinery, and is best developed for children of from eleven to fifteen. It
no longer aims to make artisans; but its manipulations are meant to be
developmental, to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self-active and
self-respecting, and to revere exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes
that all and especially the motor-minded can really understand only what
they make, and that one can work like a peasant and think like a
philosopher. It aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian
system, and to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says,
its best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change of
its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor development of

the middle and upper classes and from the land where it originated to
another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its origin in its models,
the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique features of which persist like
a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.[1]

Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises, tools,
drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every new step in
each series involves a new and next developmental step in all the others,
and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and degree of development of
each power appealed to in the child. Yet there has been hardly an attempt to
justify either the physiological or the psychological reason of a single step
in any of these series, and the coördination of the series even with each
other, to say nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's
development. This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed
constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in
variety, etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But the "45
tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned by
teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four years, are
overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many series at once.
Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is hard enough,
since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork, could it be upon that of the tree
of knowledge itself, incompatible with enjoying its fruit. Although a
philosopher may see the whole universe in its smallest part, all his theory
can not reproduce educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits
of sloyd have caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims
far beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great
transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its literature
and practise for the slightest recognition of the new motives and methods
that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially acclimatized forms to
American conditions, it is all adult and almost scholastic; and as the most
elaborate machinery may sometimes be run by a poor power-wheel, if the

stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty rent that sets toward
motor education would give it some degree of success were it worse and
less economic of pedagogic momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof
from other methods of efferent training and resists coördination with them,
and its provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one
of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing certain few but
precious elements in the greater synthesis that impends. Indian industries,
basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which our
civilization is making lost arts by forcing the white man's industries upon
red men at reservation schools and elsewhere, need only a small part of the
systemization that Swedish peasant work has received to develop even
greater educational values; and the same is true of the indigenous household
work of the old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of
which are only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few
educators.

This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with Carlyle's
gospel of work and Ruskin's medievalism, developed by William Morris
and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridicule of the
comic opera "Patience," and lately revived in some of its features by
Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in various centers in this
country. Its ideal was to restore the day of the seven ancient guilds and of
Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when conscience and beauty inspired work,
and the hand did what machines only imitate and vulgarize. In the past,
which this school of motor culture harks back to, work, for which our
degenerate age lacks even respect, was indeed praise. Refined men and
women have remembered these early days, when their race was in its prime,
as a lost paradise which they would regain by designing and even weaving
tapestries and muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian
purple; printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the
Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging locks,

irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and leather;
seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, as
well as architecture, stained glass, and to some extent in dress and manners;
and all this toil and moil was ad majorem gloriam hominis [To the greater
glory of man] in a new socialistic state, where the artist, and even the
artisan, should take his rightful place above the man who merely knows.
The day of the mere professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the
day of the doer, who creates, has come. The brain and the hand, too long
divorced and each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each
alone vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are
henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to a
higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by the new
socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott, revering
Wagner's revival of the old Deutschenthum that was to conquer
Christenthum, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle—this was its ideal; even as the
Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient traditions of their race and made
their Bible under Ezra; as we begin to revere the day of the farmer-citizen,
who made our institutions, or as some of us would revive his vanishing
industrial life for the red man.

Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it
something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no more, it
shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it is recalled in
maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate the value of its
creations and its possibilities, and really lives again in its glamour and finds
in it its greatest inspiration. Hence it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but
not too much of it, should be felt in all manual education, which is just as
capable of idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content,
beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the
occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and
abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological

quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked. Thus the best
forces from the past should be turned on to shape and reinforce the best
tendencies of the present. The writings of the above gospelers of work not
only could and should, but will be used to inspire manual-training high
schools, sloyd and even some of the less scholastic industrial courses; but
each is incomplete without the other. These books and those that breathe
their spirit should be the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and
forge work; who design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who
study how to shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain
diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all such things. The muse of art
and even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to
gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary motor
training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of adolescents in the
order and proportion that nature and growth stages indicate, drawing, with
this end supreme, upon all the resources that history and reform offer to our
selection. All this can never make work become play. Indeed it will and
should make work harder and more unlike play and of another genus,
because the former is thus given its own proper soul and leads its own
distinct, but richer, and more abounding life.

I must not close this section without brief mention of two important
studies that have supplied each a new and important determination
concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.

The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per
minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not very
difficult and is often attained after two months' practise. This standard for a
receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at schools where it is taught
shows that about seventy-five per cent of those who begin the study fail to
reach this speed and so are not employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained

the rate of improvement in both sending and receiving, with results
represented for one typical subject in the curve on the following page.

From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the dead-line a
few months before the receiving rate, which may fall short. Curves 1 and 2
represent the same student. I have added line 3 to illustrate the three-fourths
who fail. Receiving is far less pleasant than sending, and years of daily
practise at ordinary rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he
remains on the low plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If
forced by stress of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to
make a prolonged and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate
and permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and every
advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former one. At
length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a more complex
process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the above figure would
cross if prolonged. The expert receives so much faster than he sends that
abbreviated codes are used, and he may take eighty to eighty-five words a
minute on a typewriter in correct form.

[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]

The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps
physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This seems
a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In learning a
foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and hearing takes a late but
often sudden start to independence. Perhaps this holds of every ability. To
Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of habits, the plateau of little or no
improvement, meaning that lower order habits are approaching their
maximum but are not yet automatic enough to leave the attention free to
attack higher order habits. The second ascent from drudgery to freedom,
which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One

stroke of attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such
effective speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of
units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack. In
many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a long
discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if here, too, as
we have reason to think in the growth of both the body as a whole and in
that of its parts, nature does make leaps and attains her ends by alternate
rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a low level of interest and
accomplishment and then starts onward, is transformed, converted; the hard
becomes easy; the old life sinks to a lower stratum; and a new and higher
order, perhaps a higher brain level and functions, is evolved. The practical
implication here of the necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition
of advancement is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the
effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training
colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, "It is the
supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is developed
elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned by spontaneous
muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that muscles are thus
organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary attention is motivated by
the same nisus of development even in its most adult form, and that the
products of science, invention, discovery, as well as the association plexus
of all that was originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made
by rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point creating
diversions and recurrence.

The other study, although quite independent, is part a special application
and illustration of the same principle.

At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than scribble,
children's chief interest in pictures is as finished products; but in the second
period, which Lange calls that of artistic illusion, the child sees in his own

work not merely what it represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This,
then, is the golden period for the development of power to create
artistically. The child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in
the act, and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own
head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is
attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed the
teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be abashed at his
production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies, trains, pageants,
battles—everything is graphically portrayed; but only the little artist himself
sees the full meaning of his lines. Criticism or drawing strictly after nature
breaks this charm, since it gives place to mechanical reproduction in which
the child has little interest. Thus awakens him from his dream to a
realization that he can not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of
perceiving things steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in
drawing. Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability
to draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is the
plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own
productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is
discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing
more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the opinion of
our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and improve in
technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition in which most men
remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate steadily increases. Only a
few gifted adolescents about this age begin a to develop a new zest in
production, rivaling that of the period from five to ten, when their
satisfaction is again chiefly in creation. These are the artists whose active
powers dominate.

Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his fourth
period of artistic development, there are those "who during adolescence
experience a rebirth of creative power." Zest in creation then often becomes

a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or profit to be derived from
the finished product, so that in this the propitious conditions of the first
golden age of childhood are repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again
found in the work itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition
period, nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws
the interesting curve shown on the following page.

[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or receptive
interest in the finished product.]

The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate,
roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the domain of
music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development. Certain it is that
the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate never so far outstrips his
power to produce or reproduce as about midway in the teens. Now
impressions sink deepest. The greatest artists are usually those who paint
later, when the expressive powers are developed, what they have felt most
deeply and known best at this age, and not those who in the late twenties, or
still later, have gone to new environments and sought to depict them. All
young people draw best those objects they love most, and their proficiency
should be some test of the contents of their minds. They must put their own
consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of appreciation the
esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to, and instructed in feeling
for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and instruction in technique, detail,
criticism, and learned discrimination of schools of painting should be given
intermittently. Art should not now be for art's sake, but for the sake of
feeling and character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals,
history, and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and
personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide. Insistence
on production should be eased, and the receptive imagination, now so
hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and all other accessories. By

such a curriculum, potential creativeness, if it exists, will surely be evoked
in its own good time. It will, at first, attempt no commonplace drawing-
master themes, but will essay the highest that the imagination can bode
forth. It may be crude and lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps
grand; and if it is original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most
creative painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in
literature or turning points in history, representations of the loftiest truths,
embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who deserve the name of
artist copy anything now, and least of all with objective fidelity to nature;
and the teacher that represses or criticizes this first point of genius, or who
can not pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this age when
ambition ought to be too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor,
a pedagogic Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other
fields, the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so
easily blighted. Just as the child of six or seven should be encouraged in his
strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, so now the
inner life should find graphic utterance in all its intricacy up to the full limit
of unrepressed courage. For the great majority, on the other hand, who only
appreciate and will never create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored
with the best images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best
remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the hand
may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and fairest forms;
and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with vaccine of ideality,
hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will never come again. I believe
that in few departments are current educational theories and practises so
hard on youth of superior gifts, just at the age when all become geniuses for
a season, very brief for most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the
best. We do not know how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense
centers are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand
during the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is

good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its
lowest ebb.

Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is abnormal,
and higher technical education is the chief sufferer. Professor Thurston, of
Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of inspection abroad, reported
that to equal Germany we now need: "1. Twenty technical universities,
having in their schools of engineering 50 instructors and 500 students each.
2. Two thousand technical high schools or manual-training schools, each
having not less than 200 students and 10 instructors." If we have elementary
trade-schools, this would mean technical high schools enough to
accommodate 700,000 students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong
economic arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that
there are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and matter
shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out in a later
chapter.

[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms of
High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High
Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]

[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic
Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 27-53, and July,
1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]

[Footnote 3: A Study of Children's Drawings in the Early Years.
Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also
Drawing in the Early Years, Proceedings of the National Educational
Association, 1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Künstler, von C. Götze.
Hamburg, 1898. The Genetic vs. the Logical Order in Drawing, by F.
Burk. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323.]

[Footnote 4: Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler,
September, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179.]

*****

CHAPTER V

GYMNASTICS

The story of Jahn and the Turners—The enthusiasm which this movement
generated in Germany—The ideal of bringing out latent powers—The
concept of more perfect voluntary control—Swedish gymnastics—Doing
everything possible for the body as a machine—Liberal physical culture—
Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements and
correcting defects—The ideal of symmetry and prescribing exercises to
bring the body to a standard—Lamentable lack of correlation between these
four systems—Illustrations of the great good that a systematic training can
effect—Athletic records—Greek physical training.

Under the term gymnastics, literally naked exercises, we here include
those denuded of all utilities or ulterior ends save those of physical culture.
This is essentially modern and was unknown in antiquity, where training
was for games, for war, etc. Several ideals underlie this movement, which
although closely related are distinct and as yet by no means entirely
harmonized. These may be described as follows:

A. One aim of Jahn, more developed by Spiess, and their successors, was
to do everything physically possible for the body as a mechanism. Many
postures and attitudes are assumed and many movements made that are

never called for in life. Some of these are so novel that a great variety of
new apparatus had to be devised to bring them out; and Jahn invented many
new names, some of them without etymologies, to designate the repertory
of his discoveries and inventions that extended the range of motor life.
Common movements, industries, and even games, train only a limited
number of muscles, activities, and coördinations, and leave more or less
unused groups and combinations, so that many latent possibilities slumber,
and powers slowly lapse through disuse. Not only must these be rescued,
but the new nascent possibilities of modern progressive man must be
addressed and developed. Even the common things that the average
untrained youth can not do are legion, and each of these should be a new
incentive to the trainer as he realizes how very far below their motor
possibilities meet men live. The man of the future may, and even must, do
things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by
heredity. Our somatic frame and its powers must therefore be carefully
studied, inventoried, and assessed afresh, and a kind and amount of exercise
required that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the size but to the
capability of each voluntary muscle. Thus only can we have a truly
humanistic physical development, analogous to the training of all the
powers of the mind in a broad, truly liberal, and non-professional or non-
vocational educational curriculum. The body will thus have its rightful
share in the pedagogic traditions and inspirations of the renaissance. Thus
only can we have a true scale of standardised culture values for efferent
processes; and from this we can measure the degrees of departure, both in
the direction of excess and defect, of each form of work, motor habit; and
even play. Many modern Epigoni in the wake of this great ideal, where its
momentum was early spent, feeling that new activities might be discovered
with virtues hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of special
disciplines, both developmental and corrective, that are pictured and landed
in scores of manuals. Others have had expectations no less excessive in the

opposite direction and have argued that the greatest possible variety of
movements best developed the greatest total of motor energy. Jahn
especially thus made gymnastics a special art and inspired great enthusiasm
of humanity, and the songs of his pupils were of a better race of man and a
greater and united fatherland. It was this feature that made his work unique
in the world, and his disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it
was just about one generation of men after the acme of influence of his
system that, in 1870, Germany showed herself the greatest military power
since ancient Rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of the world
both in education and science.

These theorizations even in their extreme forms have been not only
highly suggestive but have brought great and new enthusiasms and ideals
into the educational world that admirably fit adolescence. The motive of
bringing out latent, decaying, or even new powers, skills, knacks, and feats,
is full of inspiration. Patriotism is aroused, for thus the country can be better
served; thus the German Fatherland was to be restored and unified after the
dark days that followed the humiliation of Jena. Now the ideals of religion
are invoked that the soul may have a better and regenerated somatic
organism with which to serve Jesus and the Church. Exercise is made a
form of praise to God and of service to man, and these motives are
reënforced by those of the new hygiene which strives for a new wholeness-
holiness, and would purify the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. Thus
in Young Men's Christian Association training schools and gymnasiums the
gospel of Christianity is preached anew and seeks to bring salvation to
man's physical frame, which the still lingering effects of asceticism have
caused to be too long neglected in its progressive degeneration. As the
Greek games were in honor of the gods, so now the body is trained to better
glorify God; and regimen, chastity, and temperance are given a new
momentum. The physical salvation thus wrought will be, when adequately
written, one of the most splendid chapters in the modern history of

Christianity. Military ideals have been revived in cult and song to hearten
the warfare against evil within and without. Strength is prayed for as well as
worked for, and consecrated to the highest uses. Last but not least, power
thus developed over a large surface may be applied to athletic contests in
the field, and victories here are valuable as fore-gleams of how sweet the
glory of achievements in higher moral and spiritual tasks will taste later.

The dangers and sources of error in this ideal of all-sided training are,
alas, only too obvious, although they only qualify its paramount good. First,
it is impossible thus to measure the quanta of training needed so as rightly
to assign to each its modicum and best modality of training. Indeed no
method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have
been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other
respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical
experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some
neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been
ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic
emphasis, and what lacks this must at best be feeble; and if new powers are
unfolding, their growth must be very slow and they must be nurtured as
tender buds for generations. Thirdly, too little regard is had for the vast
differences in individuals, most of whom need much personal prescription.

B. In practise the above ideal is never isolated from others. Perhaps the
most closely associated with it is that of increased volitional control. Man is
largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less
automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment. Every new power of
controlling these by the will frees man from slavery and widens the field of
freedom. To acquire the power of doing all with consciousness and volition
mentalizes the body, gives control over to higher brain levels, and develops
them by rescuing activities from the dominance of lower centers. Thus mens
agitat molem. [Footnote: Mind rules the body.] This end is favored by the

Swedish commando exercises, which require great alertness of attention to
translate instantly a verbal order into an act and also, although in somewhat
less degree, by quick imitation of a leader. The stimulus of music and
rhythm are excluded because thought to interfere with this end. A somewhat
sophisticated form of this goal is sought by several Delsartian schemes of
relaxation, decomposition, and recomposition of movements. To do all
things with consciousness and to encroach on the field of instinct involves
new and more vivid sense impressions, the range of which is increased
directly as that of motion, the more closely it approaches the focus of
attention. By thus analyzing settled and established coördinations, their
elements are set free and may be organized into new combinations, so that
the former is the first stage toward becoming a virtuoso with new special
skills. This is the road to inner secrets or intellectual rules of professional
and expert successes, such as older athletes often rely upon when their
strength begins to wane. Every untrained automatism must be domesticated,
and every striated muscle capable of direct muscular control must be
dominated by volition. Thus tensions and incipient contractures that drain
off energy can be relaxed by fiat. Sandow's "muscle dance," the
differentiation of movements of the right and left hand—one, e.g., writing a
French madrigal while the other is drawing a picture of a country dance, or
each playing tunes of disparate rhythm and character simultaneously on the
piano—controlling heart rate, moving the ears, crying, laughing, blushing,
moving the bowels, etc., at will, feats of inhibition of reflexes, stunts of all
kinds, proficiency with many tools, deftness in sports—these altogether
would mark the extremes in this direction.

This, too, has its inspiration for youth. To be a universal adept like
Hippias suggests Diderot and the encyclopedists in the intellectual realm.
To do all with consciousness is a means to both remedial and expert ends.
Motor life often needs to be made over to a greater or less extent; and that
possibilities of vastly greater accomplishments exist than are at present

realized, is undoubted, even in manners and morals, which are both at root
only motor habits. Indeed consciousness itself is largely and perhaps wholly
corrective in its very essence and origin. Thus life is adjusted to new
environments; and if the Platonic postulate be correct, that untaught virtues
that come by nature and instinct are no virtues, but must be made products
of reflection and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is great
indeed. But this implies a distrust of physical human nature as deep-seated
and radical as that of Calvinism for the unregenerate heart, against which
modern common sense, so often the best muse of both psychophysics and
pedagogy, protests. Individual prescription is here as imperative as it is
difficult. Wonders that now seem to be most incredible, both of hurt and
help, can undoubtedly be wrought, but analysis should always be for the
sake of synthesis and never be beyond its need and assured completion. No
thoughtful student fully informed of the facts and tentatives in this field can
doubt that here lies one of the most promising fields of future development,
full of far-reaching and rich results for those, as yet far too few, experts in
physical training, who have philosophic minds, command the facts of
modern psychology, and whom the world awaits now as never before.

C. Another yet closely correlated ideal is that of economic postures and
movements. The system of Ling is less orthopedic than orthogenic,
although he sought primarily to correct bad attitudes and perverted growth.
Starting from the respiratory and proceeding to the muscular system, he and
his immediate pupils were content to refer to the ill-shapen bodies of most
men about them. One of their important aims was to relax the flexor and
tone up the extensor muscles and to open the human form into postures as
opposite as possible to those of the embryo, which it tends so persistently to
approximate in sitting, and in fatigue and collapse attitudes generally. The
head must balance on the cervical vertebra and not call upon the muscles of
the neck to keep it from rolling off; the weight of the shoulders must be
thrown back off the thorax; the spine be erect to allow the abdomen free

action; the joints of the thigh extended; the hand and arm supinated, etc.
Bones must relieve muscles and nerves. Thus an erect, self-respecting
carriage must be given, and the unfortunate association, so difficult to
overcome, between effort and an involuted posture must be broken up. This
means economy and a great saving of vital energy. Extensor action goes
with expansive, flexor with depressive states of mind; hence courage,
buoyancy, hope, are favored and handicaps removed. All that is done with
great effort causes wide irradiation of tensions to the other half of the body
and also sympathetic activities in those not involved; the law of maximal
ease and minimal expenditure of energy must be always striven for, and the
interests of the viscera never lost sight of. This involves educating weak and
neglected muscles, and like the next ideal, often shades over by almost
imperceptible gradation into the passive movements by the Zander
machines. Realizing that certain activities are sufficiently or too much
emphasized in ordinary life, stress is laid upon those which are
complemental to them, so that there is no pretense of taking charge of the
totality of motor processes, the intention being principally to supplement
deficiencies, to insure men against being warped, distorted, or deformed by
their work in life, to compensate specialties and perform more exactly what
recreation to some extent aims at.

This wholesome but less inspiring endeavor, which combats one of the
greatest evils that under modern civilization threatens man's physical weal,
is in some respects as easy and practical as it is useful. The great majority of
city bred men, as well as all students, are prone to deleterious effects from
too much sitting; and indeed there is anatomical evidence in the structure of
the tissues, and especially the blood-vessels of the groins, that, at his best,
man is not yet entirely adjusted to the upright position. So a method that
straightens knees, hips, spine, and shoulders, or combats the school-desk
attitude, is a most salutary contribution to a great and growing need. In the
very act of stretching, and perhaps yawning, for which much is to be said,

nature itself suggests such correctives and preventives. To save men from
being victims of their occupations is often to add a better and larger half to
their motor development. The danger of the system, which now best
represents this ideal, is inflexibility and overscholastic treatment. It needs a
great range of individual variations if it would do more than increase
circulation, respiration, and health, or the normal functions of internal
organs and fundamental physiological activities. To clothe the frame with
honest muscles that are faithful servants of the will adds not only strength,
more active habits and efficiency, but health; and in its material installation
this system is financially economic. Personal faults and shortcomings are
constantly pointed out where this work is best represented, and it has a
distinct advantage in inciting an acquaintance with physiology and inviting
the larger fields of medical knowledge.

D. The fourth gymnastic aim is symmetry and correct proportions.
Anthropometry and average girths and dimensions, strength, etc., of the
parts of the body are first charted in percentile grades; and each individual
is referred to the apparatus and exercises best fitted to correct weaknesses
and subnormalities. The norms here followed are not the canons of Greek
art, but those established by the measurement of the largest numbers
properly grouped by age, weight, height, etc. Young men are found to differ
very widely. Some can lift 1,000 pounds, and some not 100; some can lift
their weight between twenty and forty times, and some not once; some are
most deficient in legs, others in shoulders, arms, backs, chests. By
photography, tape, and scales, each is interested in his own bodily condition
and incited to overcome his greatest defects; and those best endowed by
nature to attain ideal dimensions and make new records are encouraged
along these lines. Thus this ideal is also largely though not exclusively
remedial.

This system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch of zest in watching
their own rapidly multiplying curves of growth in dimensions and
capacities, in plotting curves that record their own increment in girths, lifts,
and other tests, and in observing the effects of sleep, food, correct and
incorrect living upon a system so exquisitely responsive to all these
influences as are the muscles. To learn to know and grade excellence and
defect, to be known for the list of things one can do and to have a record, or
to realize what we lack of power to break best records, even to know that
we are strengthening some point where heredity has left us with some
shortage and perhaps danger, the realization of all this may bring the first
real and deep feeling for growth that may become a passion later in things
of the soul. Growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly
passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps
sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians; but
it is on the whole a healthful regulative, and this form of the struggle toward
perfection and escape from the handicap of birth will later move upward to
the intellectual and moral plane. To kindle a sense of physical beauty of
form in every part, such as a sculptor has, may be to start youth on the
lowest round of the Platonic ladder that leads up to the vision of ideal
beauty of soul, if his ideal be not excess of brawn, or mere brute strength,
but the true proportion represented by the classic or mean temperance
balanced like justice between all extremes. Hard, patient, regular work, with
the right dosage for this self-cultural end, has thus at the same time a unique
moral effect.

The dangers of this system are also obvious. Nature's intent can not be
too far thwarted; and as in mental training the question is always pertinent,
so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to some extent, and in
some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the direction in which we most
excel, to emphasize physical individuality and even idiosyncrasy, rather
than to strive for monotonous uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag

behind are the most easily overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps
permanent injury. Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance
of free sports: it is not inspiring to make up areas; and therapeutic exercises
imposed like a sentence for the shortcomings of our forebears bring a whiff
of the atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into the gymnasium.

These four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as yet far from
harmonized. Swedish, Turner, Sargent, and American systems are each,
most unfortunately, still too blind to the others' merits and too conscious of
the others' shortcomings. To some extent they are prevented from getting
together by narrow devotion to a single cult, aided sometimes by a
pecuniary interest in the sale of their own apparatus and books or in the
training of teachers according to one set of rubrics. The real elephant is
neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor a log, as the blind men in the fable
contended, each thinking the part he had touched to be the whole. This
inability of leaders to combine causes uncertainty and lack of confidence in,
and of enthusiastic support for, any system on the part of the public. Even
the radically different needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the
same partisanship. All together represent only a fraction of the nature and
needs of youth. The world now demands what this country has never had, a
man who, knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the various
great athletic traditions of the past, shall study anew the whole motor field,
as a few great leaders early in the last century tried to do; who shall gather
and correlate the literature and experiences of the past and present with a
deep sense of responsibility to the future; who shall examine martial
training with all the inspirations, warnings, and new demands; and who
shall know how to revive the inspiration of the past animated by the same
spirit as the Turners, who were almost inflamed by referring back to the
hardy life of the early Teutons and trying to reproduce its best features; who
shall catch the spirit of, and make due connections with, popular sports past
and present, study both industry and education to compensate their

debilitating effects, and be himself animated by a great ethical and
humanistic hope and faith in a better future. Such a man, if he ever walks
the earth, will be the idol of youth, will know their physical secrets, will
come almost as a savior to the bodies of men, and will, like Jahn, feel his
calling and work sacred, and his institution a temple in which every
physical act will be for the sake of the soul. The world of adolescence,
especially that part which sits in closed spaces conning books, groans and
travails all the more grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously,
waiting for a redeemer for its body. Till he appears, our culture must remain
for most a little hollow, falsetto, and handicapped by school-bred diseases.
The modern gymnasium performs its chief service during adolescence and
is one of the most beneficent agencies of which not a few, but every youth,
should make large use. Its spirit should be instinct with euphoria, where the
joy of being alive reaches a point of high, although not quite its highest,
intensity. While the stimulus of rivalry and even of records is not excluded,
and social feelings may be appealed to by unison exercises and by the club
spirit, and while competitions, tournaments, and the artificial motives of
prizes and exhibitions may be invoked, the culture is in fact largely
individual. And yet in this country the annual Turnerfest brings 4,000 or
5,000 men from all parts of the Union, who sometimes all deploy and go
through some of the standard exercises together under one leader. Instead of
training a few athletes, the real problem now presented is how to raise the
general level of vitality so that children and youth may be fitted to stand the
strain of modern civilization, resist zymotic diseases, and overcome the
deleterious influences of city life. The almost immediate effects of
systematic training are surprising and would hardly be inferred from the
annual increments tabled earlier in this chapter. Sandow was a rather
weakly boy and ascribes his development chiefly to systematic training.

We have space but for two reports believed to be typical. Enebuske
reports on the effects of seven months' training on young women averaging

22.3 years. The figures are based on the 50 percentile column.

————————+————+
—————————————————+———— | | Strength of | |Lung
| | | |right |left |Total |capacity| legs |back |chest|forearm|forearm|Strength
————————+————+———+——-+——-+———-+———-+
———— Before training | 2.65 | 93 |65.5 | 27 | 26 | 23 | 230 After six
months| 2.87 | 120 |81.5 | 32 | 28 | 25 | 293 ————————+————+
———+——-+——-+———-+———-+————

By comparing records of what he deems standard normal growth with
that of 188 naval cadets from sixteen to twenty-one, who had special and
systematic training, just after the period of most rapid growth in height,
Beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this added a little over an
inch of stature, and that this gain as greatest at the beginning. This increase
was greatest for the youngest cadets. He found also a marked increase in
weight, nearly the same for each year from seventeen to twenty one. This he
thought more easily influenced by exercise than height. A high vital index
ratio of lung capacity to weight is a very important attribute of good
training. Beyer[1] found, however, that the addition of lung area gained by
exercise did not keep up with the increase thus caused in muscular
substance, and that the vital index always became smaller in those who had
gained weight and strength by special physical training. How much gain in
weight is desirable beyond the point where the lung capacity increases at an
equal rate is unknown. If such measurements were applied to the different
gymnastic systems, we might be able to compare their efficiency, which
would be a great desideratum in view of the unfortunate rivalry between
them. Total strength, too, can be greatly increased. Beyer thinks that from
sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed the average or normal increment
fivefold, and he adds, "I firmly believe that the now so wonderful
performances of most of our strong men are well within the reach of the

majority of healthy men, if such performances were a serious enough part
of their ambition to make them do the exercises necessary to develop
them." Power of the organs to respond to good training by increased
strength probably reaches well into middle life.

It is not encouraging to learn that, according to a recent writer,[2] we now
have seventy times as many physicians in proportion to the general
population as there are physical directors, even for the school population
alone considered. We have twice as many physicians per population as
Great Britain, four times a many as Germany, or 2 physicians, 1.8 ministers,
1.4 lawyers per thousand of the general population; while even if all male
teachers of physical training taught only males of the military age, we
should have but 0.05 of a teacher per thousand, or if the school population
alone be considered, 20 teachers per million pupils. Hence, it is inferred that
the need of wise and classified teachers in this field is at present greater
than in any other. But fortunately while spontaneous, unsystematic exercise
in a well-equipped modern gymnasium may in rare cases do harm, so far
from sharing the prejudice often felt for it by professional trainers, we
believe that free access to it without control or direction is unquestionably a
boon to youth. Even if its use be sporadic and occasional, as it is likely to
be with equal opportunity for out-of-door exercises and especially sports,
practise is sometimes hygienic almost inversely to its amount, while even
lameness from initial excess has its lessons, and the sense of manifoldness
of inferiorities brought home by experiences gives a wholesome self-
knowledge and stimulus.

In this country more than elsewhere, especially in high school and
college, gymnasium work has been brought into healthful connection with
field sports and record competitions for both teams and individuals who
aspire to championship. This has given the former a healthful stimulus
although it is felt only by a picked few. Scores of records have been

established for running, walking, hurdling, throwing, putting, swimming,
rowing, skating, etc., each for various shorter and longer distances and
under manifold conditions, and for both amateurs and professionals, who
are easily accessible. These, in general, show a slow but steady advance in
this country since 1876, when athletics were established here. In that year
there was not a single world's best record held by an American amateur, and
high-school boys of to-day could in most, though not in all lines, have won
the American championship twenty-five years ago. Of course, in a strict
sense, intercollegiate contests do not show the real advance in athletics,
because it is not necessary for a man in order to win a championship to do
his best; but they do show general improvement.

We select for our purpose a few of those records longest kept. Not
dependent on external conditions like boat-racing, or on improved
apparatus like bicycling, we have interesting data of a very different order
for physical measurements. These down to present writing—July, 1906—
are as follows: For the 100-yard dash, every annual record from 1876 to
1895 is 10 or 11 seconds, or between these, save in 1890, where Owen's
record of 9-4/5 seconds still stands. In the 220-yard run there is slight
improvement since 1877, but here the record of 1896 (Wefers, 21-1/5
seconds) has not been surpassed. In the quarter-mile run, the beet record
was in 1900 (Long, 47 seconds). The half-mile record, which still stands,
was made in 1895 (Kilpatrick, 1 minute 52-2/5 seconds); the mile run in
1895 (Conneff, 4 minutes 15-3/5 seconds). The running broad jump shows
a very steady improvement, with the best record in 1900 (Prinstein, 24 feet
7-1/4 inches). The running high jump shows improvement, but less, with
the record of 1895 still standing (Sweeney, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches). The record
for pole vaulting, corrected to November, 1905, is 12 feet 132/100 inches
(Dole); for throwing the 16-pound hammer head, 100 feet 5 inches
(Queckberner); for putting the 16-pound shot, 49 feet 6 inches (Coe, 1905);
the standing high jump, 5 feet 5-1/2 inches (Ewry); for the running high

jump, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches (Sweeney). We also find that if we extend our
purview to include all kinds of records for physical achievement, that not a
few of the amateur records for activities involving strength combined with
rapid rhythm movement are held by young men of twenty or even less.

In putting the 16-pound shot under uniform conditions the record has
improved since the early years nearly 10 feet (Coe, 49 feet 6 inches, best at
present writing, 1906). Pole vaulting shows a very marked advance
culminating in 1904 (Dole, 12 feet 132/100 inches). Most marked of all
perhaps is the great advance in throwing the 16-pound hammer. Beginning
between 70 and 80 feet in the early years, the record is now 172 feet 11
inches (Flanagan, 1904). The two-mile bicycle race also shows marked
gain, partly, of course, due to improvement in the wheel, the early records
being nearly 7 minutes, and the best being 2 minutes 19 seconds (McLean,
1903). Some of these are world records, and more exceed professional
records.[3] These, of course, no more indicate general improvement than
the steady reduction of time in horse-racing suggests betterment in horses
generally.

In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its manifold
forms was one of the most characteristic expressions of adolescent nature
and needs. Not a single time or distance record of antiquity has been
preserved, although Grasberger[4] and other writers would have us believe
that in those that are comparable, ancient youthful champions greatly
excelled ours, especially in leaping and running. While we are far from
cultivating mere strength, our training is very one-sided from the Greek
norm of unity or of the ideals that develop the body only for the salve of the
soul. While gymnastics in our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and
measurements independently of games was unknown, the ideal and motive
were as different from ours as was its method. Nothing, so far as is known,
was done for correcting the ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary

defects; and until athletics degenerated there were Do exercises for the sole
purpose of developing muscle.

On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk,
shoulders, and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and ego-centric,
deficient on the side of psychic impulsion, and but little subordinated to
ethical or intellectual development. Yet it does a great physical service to all
who cultivate it, and is a safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is
radical revision and coordination of various cults and theories in the light of
the latest psycho-physiological science.

Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The present academic zeal for
physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with
anthropometry. This important and growing department will be represented
in the ideal gymnasium of the future—First, by courses, if not by a chair,
devoted to the apparatus of measurements of human proportions and
symmetry, with a kinesological cabinet where young men are instructed in
the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers, the sphygmograph,
spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer to plot graphic curves, compute
average errors, and tables of percentile grades and in statistical methods,
etc. Second, anatomy, especially of muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be
taught, and also their physiology, with stress upon myology, the effects of
exercise on the flow of blood and lymph, not excluding the development of
the upright position, and all that it involves and implies. Third, hygiene will
be prominent and comprehensive enough to cover all that pertains to body-
keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and public
hygiene—all on the basis of modern as distinct from the archaic physiology
of Ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in 1839, before this science
was recreated, and the persistence of whose concepts are an anomalous
survival to-day. Mechanico-therapeutics, the purpose and service of each
chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the value of work on stall bars with

chest weights, of chinning, use of the quarter-staff, somersaults, rings,
clubs, dumb-bells, work with straight and flexed knees on machinery, etc.,
will be taught. Fourth, the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest
development in Greece to the present is full of interest and has a very high
and not yet developed culture value for youth. This department, both in its
practical and theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes and
scholarships to stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per cent of students
who are now unaffected by the influence of athletics. By these methods the
motivation of gymnastics, which now in large measure goes to waste in
enthusiasm, could be utilised to aid the greatly needed intellectualization of
those exercises which in their nature are more akin to work than play.
Indeed, Gutsmuths's first definition of athletics was "work under the garb of
youthful pleasure." So to develop these courses that they could chiefly, if
not entirely, satisfy the requirements for the A.B. degree, would coordinate
the work of the now isolated curriculum of the training-schools with that of
the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter; but besides its culture
value, which I hold very high, such a step would prepare for the new,
important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned profession of
physical trainers. This has, moreover, great but yet latent and even
unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic youth. Grote states
that among the ancient Greeks one-half of all education as devoted to the
body, and Galton urges that they as much excelled us as we do the African
negro. They held that if physical perfection was cultivated, moral and
mental excellence would follow; and that, without this, national culture
rests on an insecure basis. In our day there are many new reasons to believe
that the best nations of the future will be those which give most intelligent
care to the body.

[Footnote 1: See H.G. Beyer. The Influence of Exercise on Growth.
American Physical Education Review, September-December, 1896, vol. I,
pp. 76-87.]

[Footnote 2: J.H. McCurdy, Physical Training as a Profession.
Association Seminar, March, 1902, vol. 10, pp. 11-24.]

[Footnote 3: These records are taken from the World Almanac, 1906, and
Olympic Games of 1906 at Athens. Edited by J.E. Sullivan, Commissioner
from the United States to the Olympic Games. Spalding's Athletic
Library, New York, July, 1906.]

[Footnote 4: O.H. Jaeger, Die Gymnastik der Hellenen. Heitz,
Stuttgart 1881. L. Grasberger's great standard work, Erziehung und
Untericht im klassischen Alterthum. Würzburg, 1864-81, 3 vols.]

*****

CHAPTER VI

PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES

The view of Groos partial and a better explanation of play proposed as
rehearsing ancestral activities—The glory of Greek physical training, its
ideals and results—The first spontaneous movements of infancy as keys to
the past—Necessity of developing basal powers before those that are later
and peculiar to the individual—Plays that interest due to their antiquity—
Play with dolls—Play distinguished by age—Play preferences of children
and their reasons—The profound significance of rhythm—The value of
dancing and also its significance, history, and the desirability of re-
introducing it—Fighting—Boxing—Wrestling—Bushido—Foot-ball—
Military ideals—Showing off—Cold baths—Hill climbing—The
playground movement—The psychology of play—Its relation to work.

Play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far older, and more
popular field. Here a very different spirit of joy and gladness rules. Artifacts
often enter but can not survive unless based upon pretty purely hereditary
momentum. Thus our first problem is to seek both the motor tendencies and
the psychic motives bequeathed to us from the past. The view of Groos that
play is practise for future adult activities is very partial, superficial, and
perverse. It ignores the past where lie the keys to all play activities. True
play never practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often

calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a number of
which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves out in play like
the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and used as a stimulus to the
growth of legs which will otherwise never mature. In place of this mistaken
and misleading view, I regard play as the motor habits and spirit of the past
of the race, persisting in the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes of
and always akin to rudimentary organs. The best index and guide to the
stated activities of adults in past ages is found in the instinctive, untaught,
and non-imitative plays of children which are the most spontaneous and
exact expressions of their motor needs. The young grow up into the same
forms of motor activity, as did generations that have long preceded them,
only to a limited extent; and if the form of every human occupation were to
change to-day, play would be unaffected save in some of its superficial
imitative forms. It would develop the motor capacities, impulses, and
fundamental forms of our past heritage, and the transformation of these into
later acquired adult forms is progressively later. In play every mood and
movement is instinct with heredity. Thus we rehearse the activities of our
ancestors, back we know not how far, and repeat their life work in
summative and adumbrated ways. It is reminiscent albeit unconsciously, of
our line of descent; and each is the key to the other. The psycho-motive
impulses that prompt it are the forms in which our forebears have
transmitted to us their habitual activities. Thus stage by stage we reënact
their lives. Once in the phylon many of these activities were elaborated in
the life and death struggle for existence. Now the elements and
combinations oldest in the muscle history of the race are rerepresented
earliest in the individual, and those later follow in order. This is why the
heart of youth goes out into play as into nothing else, as if in it man
remembered a lost paradise. This is why, unlike gymnastics, play has as
much soul as body, and also why it so makes for unity of body and soul that
the proverb "Man is whole only when he plays" suggests that the purest

plays are those that enlist both alike. To address the body predominantly
strengthens unduly the fleshy elements, and to overemphasize the soul
causes weakness and automatisms. Thus understood, play is the ideal type
of exercise for the young, most favorable for growth, and most self-
regulating in both kind and amount. For its forms the pulse of adolescent
enthusiasm beats highest. It is unconstrained and free to follow any outer or
inner impulse. The zest of it vents and satisfies the strong passion of youth
for intense erethic and perhaps orgiastic states, gives an exaltation of self-
feeling so craved that with no vicarious outlet it often impels to drink, and
best of all realizes the watchword of the Turners, frisch, frei, fröhlich,
fromm [Fresh, free, jovial, pious.].

Ancient Greece, the history and literature of which owe their perennial
charm for all later ages to the fact that they represent the eternal
adolescence of the world, best illustrates what this enthusiasm means for
youth. Jäger and Guildersleeve, and yet better Grasberger, would have us
believe that the Panhellenic and especially the Olympic games combined
many of the best features of a modern prize exhibition, a camp-meeting,
fair, Derby day, a Wagner festival, a meeting of the British Association, a
country cattle show, intercollegiate games, and medieval tournament; that
they were the "acme of festive life" and drew all who loved gold and glory,
and that night and death never seemed so black as by contrast with their
splendor. The deeds of the young athletes were ascribed to the inspiration of
the gods, whose abodes they lit up with glory; and in doing them honor
these discordant states found a bond of unity. The victor was crowned with
a simple spray of laurel; cities vied with each other for the honor of having
given him birth, their walls were taken down for his entry and immediately
rebuilt; sculptors, for whom the five ancient games were schools of posture,
competed in the representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree
reaching back to the gods, and Pindar, who sang that only he is great who is
great with his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal

prevalence of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind; and
even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls, but a
body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom weakness was
perilously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin, argues that education
must be so conducted that the body can be safely entrusted to the care of the
soul and suggests, what later became a slogan of a more degenerate
gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well and strong is to be a philosopher—
valare est philosophari. The Greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart
from psychic education, and physical was for the sake of mental training. A
sane, whole mind could hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity
of which it was dependent. Knowledge for its own sake, from this
standpoint, is a dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is disastrous
if it does not give self-control; better ignorance than knowledge that does
not develop a motor side. Body culture is ultimately only for the sake of the
mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is all muscle culture
at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with soft hands, tender
feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an anemic girl prodigy, "in the
morning hectic, in the evening electric," is a monster. Play at its best is only
a school of ethics. It gives not only strength but courage and confidence,
tends to simplify life and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to
the will, brings consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in
trouble and brings out individuality.

How the ideals of physical preformed those of moral and mental training
in the land and day of Socrates is seen in the identification of knowledge
and virtue, "Kennen und Können." [To know and to have the power to do]
Only an extreme and one-sided intellectualism separates them and assumes
that it is easy to know and hard to do. From the ethical standpoint,
philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is the art of being and doing good,
conduct is the only real subject of knowledge, and there is no science but
morals. He is the best man, says Xenophon, who is always studying how to

improve, and he is the happiest who feels that he is improving. Life is a
skill, an art like a handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. Good
moral and physical development are more than analogous; and where
intelligence is separated from action the former becomes mystic, abstract,
and desiccated, and the latter formal routine. Thus mere conscience and
psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually inspiring.

Not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but work
and all exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the past. The
first influence of all right exercise for those in health is feeling of well-
being and exhilaration. This is one chief source of the strange enthusiasm
felt for many special forms of activity, and the feeling is so strong that it
animates many forms of it that are hygienically unfit. To act vigorously
from a full store of energy gives a reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a
passion and may fairly intoxicate. Animals must move or cease growing
and die. While to be weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and
glory. It gives a sense of superiority, dignity, endurance, courage,
confidence, enterprise, power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the
etymological sense of that noble word. To be active, agile, strong, is
especially the glory of young men. Our nature and history have so disposed
our frame that thus all physiological and psychic processes are stimulated,
products of decomposition are washed out by oxygenation and elimination,
the best reaction of all the ganglionic and sympathetic activities is accused,
and vegetative processes are normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit
almost to the point of ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse,
irradiate, and mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature
localization is most deleterious. Just enough at the proper time and rate
contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposition, gives moral
self-control, rouses a love of freedom with all that that great word means,
and favors all higher human aspirations.

In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that
the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral
momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the
combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice raucous
with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are hieroglyphs, to
most of which we have as yet no good key. Many elements are so impacted
and felted together that we can not analyze them. Many are extinct and
many perhaps made but once and only hint things we can not apprehend.
Later the rehearsals are fuller, and their significance more intelligible, and
in boyhood and youth the correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to
see. Pleasure is always exactly proportional to the directness and force of
the current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely
ancestral joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our
play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our life.
Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its traces in us.
Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from play; but the play
field broadens with succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is
always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play
and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the
absence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized
tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know it not.

Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting
than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with accuracy
and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers were eliminated.
Those who could throw unusually well best overcame enemies, killed
game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular systems are
organized with certain definite tendencies and have back of them a racial
setting. So running and dodging with speed and endurance, and hitting with
a club, were also basal to hunting and fighting. Now that the need of these
is leas urgent for utilitarian purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting

the organism. This makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it
represents activities that were once and for a long time necessary for
survival. We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of
great racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these
racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of great
importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so loves to sit all day
and fish! It is because this interest dates back to time immemorial. We are
the sons of fishermen, and early life was by the water's side, and this is our
food supply. This explains why certain exercises are more interesting than
others. It is because they touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the
race. Thus we see that play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is
rehearsing racial history. Plays and games change only in their external
form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic
content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived out up
through the grades, so the physical activities most be played off, each in its
own time.

The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to develop
the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the individual, and it
should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular forms which race habit
has banded down rather than insist upon those arbitrarily designed to
develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of heredity. The best guide to the
former is interest, zest, and spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really
determine, too, the order in which nerve centers come into function. The
oldest, racial parts come first, and those which are higher and represent
volition come in much later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown,
speech uses most of the same organs as does eating, but those concerned
with the former are controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right
mastication, deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus
not only the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best
prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are

seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded by
a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times. Roberts's fifth
parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics, which, if applied at
the right age, produce such immediate and often surprising development of
lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of twelve, because this nascent period
has not yet come. Donaldson showed that if the eyelid of a young kitten be
forced open prematurely at birth and stimulated with light, medullation was
premature and imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we
know that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation of
levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as Flechsig
thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally employed in growth
by cell division, later passes to fiber extension and the development of
latent cells; or as in young children, the nascent period of finger movements
may stimulate that of the thumb which comes later, and the independent
movement of the two eyes, their subsequent coördination, and so on to
perhaps a third and yet higher level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's
first intention and fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good
but great harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is
of great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are the
chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance of
adolescence.

The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight and
nine,[3] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may persist. Children
can give no better reason why they stop playing with dolls than because
other things are liked better, or they are too old, ashamed, love real babies,
etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for marriage, hung up her childhood doll as
a votive offering to Venus. Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made
sumptuous dresses and a four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a
funeral pyre like Dido, after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself
with a penknife by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more

distinctly realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or
feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in secret,
till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single women or married
women with no children, and in rare cases even those who have children,
play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student concluded that the girls who
played with dolls up to or into pubescent years were usually those who had
the fewest number, that they played with them in the most realistic manner,
kept them because actually most fond of them, and were likely to be more
scientific, steady, and less sentimental than those who dropped them early.
But the instinct that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the
subtle points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls
are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always children
or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll
cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but where it lingers it is a
more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the height of the fever dolls are only
in small part representatives of future children, the saying that the first child
is the last doll is probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first
and second dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as
children with too great abandonment are those who make the best mothers
later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of motherhood. The
number of motor activities that are both inspired and unified by this form of
play and that can always be given wholesome direction is almost incredible,
and has been too long neglected both by psychologists and teachers. Few
purer types of the rehearsal by the individual of the history of the race can
probably be found even though we can not yet analyze the many elements
involved and assign to each its phyletic correlate.

In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish
periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to characterize
the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and of later
adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two periods he

says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously, but often do
so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to twelve, games are
almost exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in early adolescence
"two elements predominate—first, the plays are predominantly team games,
in which the individual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which
there is obedience to a captain, in which there is coöperation among a
number for a given end, in which play has a program and an end. The
second characteristic of the period is with reference to its plays, and there
seems to be all of savage out-of-door life—hunting, fishing, stealing,
swimming, rowing, sailing, fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of
animals, etc. This characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls."
"The plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of
courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."

Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of
amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all
others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were represented as
almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among boys as four to
one." The age of the greatest number of different amusements is from ten to
eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but for the next eight or nine years
there is a steady decline of number, and progressive specialisation occurs.
The games of chase, which are suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise
from eleven per cent in boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon
after decline, and at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and
original make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily
and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily from
ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys. "A third or
more of all the amusements of boys just entering their teens are games of
contest—games in which the end is in one way or another to gain an
advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n the struggle between
peers." "As children approach the teens, a tendency arises that is well

expressed by one of the girls who no longer makes playthings but things
that are useful." Parents and society must, therefore, provide the most
favorable conditions for the kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the
child grows older, society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements,
and from the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative
and competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the
accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will
concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be devoted to
each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The instinct is to maintain
one's self independently and ask no odds. At fourteen, especially, the
impulse is, in manual training, to make something and perhaps to coöperate.

McGhee[7] collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found
a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to eighteen,
but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to fifteen, and a
very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. From eleven onward with the most
marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct decline in imitative games
for girls and a slower one for boys. Games involving rivalry increased
rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen and still more rapidly among
girls, their percentage of preference even exceeding that of boys at eighteen,
when it reached nearly seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization
upon a few plays was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas
with girls in general there were a large number of plays which were popular
with none preëminent. Even at this age the principle of organization in
games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. Puberty showed the
greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet, and among
boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most favored for
boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it, it would seem from
his data that plays peculiar to the different seasons were most marked
among boys, in part, at least, because their activities are more out of doors.

Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of
primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic features.
No form of activity is more universal than the dance, which is not only
intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements,
stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every important act, vocation,
sentiment, or event in the life of man in language so universal and symbolic
that music and poetry themselves seem to have arisen out of it. Before it
became specialized much labor was cast in rhythmic form and often
accompanied by time-marking and even tone to secure the stimulus of
concert on both economic and social principles. In the dark background of
history there is now much evidence that at some point, play, art, and work
were not divorced. They all may have sprung from rhythmic movement
which is so deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with
least expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the
human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many work-
songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping, the use of flail,
lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that areas and thesis represent
flexion and extension, that accent originated in the acme of muscular stress,
as well as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. Most of the old
work-canticles are lost, and machines have made work more serial, while
rhythms are obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom
they used to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to
be oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music, as if
the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them, just as all
fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial, special, vastly
complex, end diversified. It is thus natural that during the period of greatest
strength increment in muscular development, the rhythmic function of
nearly all fundamental movements should be strongly accentuated. At the
dawn of this age boys love marching; and, as our returns show, there is a
very remarkable rise in the passion for beating time, jigging, double

shuffling, rhythmic clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of
repetition the more automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new
effort of constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers,
rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war, calisthenics
and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with music, horseback
riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and football, basketball, golf,
polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are concerted and intense. These latter
emphasise the conflict factor, best brought out in fencing, boxing, and
wrestling, and lay more stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill.
The effect of musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly
rejects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to
proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the neuro-
muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.

Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this
change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those who
march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised time
marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of consciousness,
and a marked, and, for mental power and scope, all-conditioning increase in
the carrying power of attention and the sentence-sense. The soul now feels
the beauty of cadences, good ascension, and the symmetry of well-
developed periods—and all, as I am convinced, because this is the
springtime of the strength movements which are predominantly rhythmic.
Not only does music start in time marking, the drum being the oldest
instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content,
both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of
the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed
monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and
inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology
of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive
what war, love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the

parent of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music
is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only in
history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not move in a
continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if
influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound pendulum.

Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor
needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor
education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological irritability and
that it made animal life most vividly conscious of its existence and most
exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient times China ritualised it in the
spring and made it a large part of the education of boys after the age of
thirteen. Neale thinks it was originally circular or orbicular worship, which
he deems oldest. In Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in
Egypt, in the Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised
it; St. Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian
bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and only in
692, and again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and others have
shown how the choral processionals with all the added charm of vestment
and intonation have had far more to do in Christianizing many low tribes,
who could not understand the language of the church, than has preaching.
Savages are nearly all great dancers, imitating every animal they know,
dancing out their own legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error
means death. The character of people is often learned from their dances, and
Molière says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers
are often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some
mysteries can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. If we
consider the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first
invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says that
the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot politics.
The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the polonaise. The gipsy

dances have inspired a new school of music. The Greek drama grew out of
the evolution of the tragic chorus. National dances like the hornpipe and
reel of Scotland, the Reihen, of Germany, the rondes of France, the Spanish
tarantella and chaconne, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig,
etc., express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the stately
pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild salterrelle, the
bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and skippy bolero, the
courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and other peasant dances in
costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon and military dances; in
place of the pristine power to express love, mourning, justice, penalty, fear,
anger, consolation, divine service, symbolic and philosophical conceptions,
and every industry or characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we
have in the dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at
best but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad
associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a work
of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not excepting even
music, the completest language of the emotions and can be made one of the
best schools of sentiment and even will, inculcating good states of mind and
exorcising bad ones as few other agencies have power to do. Right dancing
can cadence the very soul, give nervous poise and control, bring harmony
between basal and finer muscles, and also between feeling and intellect,
body and mind. It can serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence,
predispose the heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward
virtue. That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance
aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although even
questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities in ways
more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find vent. Its
utilization for and influence on the insane would be another interesting
chapter.

Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another
correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of
spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history of the
race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and civilized
races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The former are idle
and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then put forth intense
and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare, migration, or construction,
sometimes dispensing with sleep and manifesting remarkable endurance. As
civilization and specialization advance, hours become regular. The cultured
man is less desultory in all his habits, from eating and sleeping to
performing social and religious duties, although he may put forth no more
aggregate energy in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular
work long before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low
races is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when
harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the monotony of
method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is more intense and
their periods of rest more prolonged and inert. Darwin thinks all vital
function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates are descended from tidal
ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that suggests some other irregular rhythm
more or less independent of day and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature,
but not lunar, and for males. This mode of life not only preceded the
industrial and commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition,
but it lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during this
early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter exhaustion and
collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative existence. We see
abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle habits of adolescents, and, I
think, in student and particularly in college life, which can enforce
regularity only to a limited extent. This is not reversion, but partly
expression of the nature and perhaps the needs of this stage of immaturity,
and partly the same instinct of revolt against uniformity imposed from

without, which rob life of variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and
untrammeled freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of
civilization. The hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable passion and
is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for its own sake or the
desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the utmost possible strength
in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a stage when every tissue can
become erectile and seems, like the crying of infants, to have a legitimate
function in causing tension and flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood
vessels, and forcing the blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to
irrigate newly growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus
fed. When maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the
phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one
factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic expression of a rhythm
trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to compensate for
underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset oversleep at times. This
seems to be nature's provision to expand in all directions its possibilities of
the body and soul in this plastic period when, without this occasional
excess, powers would atrophy or suffer arrest for want of use, or larger
possibilities world not be realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent
periods. This is treated more fully elsewhere.

Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal conflicts,
such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some sense, hunting.
The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and primitive warfare is a
wager of battle, of personal combat of foes contesting eye to eye and hand
to hand, where victory of one is the defeat and perhaps death of the other,
and where life is often staked against life. In its more brutal forms we see
one of the most degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk[10] has
shown how the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out
irresistibly in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate
abandon. Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled,

arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers twisted,
and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge out an eye, pull
off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose, or bones, or dislocate jaws
or other joints, wring the neck, bite off a lip, and torture in utterly nameless
ways. In unrestrained anger, man becomes a demon in love with the blood
of his victim. The face is distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts
and grunts, cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised,
dirty, disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the
spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some morbid
souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything suggestive of even
lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more or less developed in
boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before strength and skill are
sufficiently developed to inflict serious bodily injury, while without the
reductives that orthogenetic growth brings they become criminal. Repulsive
as are these grosser and animal manifestations of anger, its impulsion can
not and should not be eliminated, but its expression transformed and
directed toward evils that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a
good part of moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is
unmanly, craven, and cowardly.[11] An able-bodied young man, who can
not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is
generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. He lacks virility, his masculinity
does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core. Hence, instead
of eradicating this instinct, one of the great problems of physical and moral
pedagogy is rightly to temper and direct it.

Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the great English schools,
where for generations it has been more or less tacitly recognized, it is
regulated by custom, and their literature and traditions abound in
illustrations of its man-making and often transforming influence in ways
well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold. It makes against degeneration, the
essential feature of which is weakening of will and loss of honor. Real

virtue requires enemies, and women and effeminate and old men want
placid, comfortable peace, while a real man rejoices in noble strife which
sanctifies all great causes, casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage.
Bad as is overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a
fight, and I have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour
out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught
boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and brutal,
but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal contest I would
interest a certain class of boys in it and try to devise modes of pedagogic
utilization of the immense store of interest it generates. Like dancing it
should be rescued from its evil associations, and its educational force put to
do moral work, even though it be by way of individual prescriptions for
specific defects of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb
school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and self-
control. The moment this is lost stinging punishment follows. Hence it is
the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has been found to have a
most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition. It has no
mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds of blow and counters, arts of drawing
out and tiring an opponent, hindering but not injuring him, defensive and
offensive tactics, etc., and it addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in
both training and conflict. I do not underestimate the many and great
difficulties of proper purgation, but I know from both personal practise and
observation that they are not unconquerable.

This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its
comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been
warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while
Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of
Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans have
thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. The dark side of
dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which under the code of

the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing, prompting, according to
Ziegler,[12] a club of sixteen students to fight over two hundred duels in
four weeks in Jena early in this century. It is prone to degenerate to an
artificial etiquette demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended
offenses. Although this professor who had his own face scarred on the
mensur, pleaded for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as
infamous and even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown
more inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel
had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judgment, and means that
the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and this is still its
ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and degenerating readily to sport or
spectacle, overpunishing what is often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it
still impresses a certain sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some
physical training, slight and specialized though it be. The code is
conventional, drawn directly from old French military life, and is not true to
the line that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that
wounds normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or
feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best safeguard
of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs rights. If, as is
claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification against corrosive
sensuality, it has generally allied itself with excessive beer-drinking.
Fencing, while an art susceptible of high development and valuable for both
pose and poise, and requiring great quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is
unilateral and robbed of the vest of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.

Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the
Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is
inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a
fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one." It
expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty of living aright
and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and love, for only the bravest

can be the tenderest, and those most in love are most daring, and it includes
politeness and the art of poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and
worth, so the bushi is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the
samurai is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility.
At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given him, which
must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith whose shop is
a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They have the finest hilts
and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a charm or spell, and
symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they must never be drawn lightly.
He is taught fencing, archery, horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and
literature, anatomy, for offence and defense; he must be indifferent to
money, hold his life cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry
is called the soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of
ethics and physical training.

Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis
champion was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion.
They were even and near the end when the American made a bad fluke
which would have lost this country its championship. The English player,
scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar mistake that the
best man might win. The chief evil of modern American football which now
threatens its suppression in some colleges is the lust to win at any price, and
results in tricks and secret practise. These sneaky methods impair the
sentiment of honor which is the best and most potent of all the moral
safeguards of youth, so that a young man can not be a true gentleman on the
gridiron. This ethical degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains,
broken bones and even deaths it causes.

Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a
high development, and which, although now more known and practised as
athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special disciplinary

capacities in its various forms. It represents the most primitive type of the
struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with man. Purged of its
barbarities, and in its Greco-Roman form and properly subject to rules, it
cultivates more kinds of movements than any other form—for limbs, trunk,
neck, hand, foot, and all in the upright and in every prone position. It, too,
has its manual of feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out
wariness, quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Victory need involve no
cruelty or even pain to the vanquished. The very closeness of body to body,
emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a
peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities, developing many
alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many undiscovered forms of
permanent mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer and less interrupted by
pauses than pugilism, and its situations and conclusions often develop
slowly, so that all in all, its character among contests is unique. As a school
of posture for art, its varieties are extremely manifold and by no means
developed, for it contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out
every muscle group and attitude of the human body; hence its training is
most generic and least specialized, and victories have been won by very
many kinds of excellence.

Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman than the
sæva animi tempestas [Fierce tempest of the soul] of anger. A testy,
quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is
repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its victories and
may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well controlled and
kept in leash makes a kinetic character; but in view of bullying, unfair play,
cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of outrageous wrong that the
law can not reach, patience and forbearance may cease to be virtues, and
summary redress may have a distinct advantage to the ethical nature of man
and to social order, and the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or
flabby. If too repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and

sulks, and the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an
outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunderstorm, and
gives the "peace that passeth understanding" so often dilated on by our
correspondents. Rather than the abject fear of making enemies whatever the
provocation, I would praise those whose best title of honor is the kind of
enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a
broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of the
life of one of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and
censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this
indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative.

So closely are love and war connected that not only is individual
pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual maturity, when animals
acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of offense and
defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which makes teams possible
or more permanent. Football, baseball, cricket, etc., and even boating can
become schools of mental and moral training. First, the rules of the game
are often intricate, and to master and observe them effectively is no mean
training for the mind controlling the body. These are steadily being revised
and improved, and the reasons for each detail of construction and conduct
of the game require experience and insight into human nature. Then the
subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates the
social and coöperative instincts, while the honor of the school, college, or
city, which each team represents, is confided to each and all. Group loyalty
in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a marked increment in
coördination and self-subordination at the dawn of puberty as to constitute a
distinct change in the character of sports at this age, can be so utilized as to
develop a spirit of service and devotion not only to town, country, and race,
but to God and the church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit
cultivated that prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game
to the applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won.

The long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers,
who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry belong outside academic
circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment on the
character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of their
educational advantages. The necessity of intervention, which has imposed
such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction with the
frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal enthusiasms,
when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of friends and patrons
and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears sad testimony to the
strength and persistence of warlike instincts from our heredity. But even
thus the good far predominates. The elective system has destroyed the class
games, and our institutions have no units like the English colleges to be
pitted against each other, and so colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage
of students obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering
methods often place second-best men in place of the best. But both students
and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of experience.
On the whole, there is less license in "breaking training" and in celebrating
victories, and even at their worst, good probably predominates, while the
progress of recent years bids us hope.

Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical education are
helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more
wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in
step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of
body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in the
ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves care of
personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform levels social
distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and especially the German
and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or three years of
compulsory military service is often compared to an academic course, and
the army is called, not without some justification, the poor man's university.

It gives severe drill, strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but
wholesome fare and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of
neatness, many useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play
battles; these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great
promoter of national health and intelligence. Naval schools for midshipmen,
who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that visit a wide
curriculum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where each boy is given a
horse to care for, study and train, artillery courses and even an army drill-
master in an academy, or uniform, and a few exterior features of soldierly
life, all give a distinct character to the spirit of any institution. The very
fancy of being in any sense a soldier opens up a new range of interests too
seldom utilized; and tactics, army life and service, military history, battles,
patriotism, the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new
standard of honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in
this line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual
opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy to create
pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history have lived,
thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were won and what causes
triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the best things taught in
detail in the best schools of war in different grades and lands.

A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest factors of
all adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their charms of beauty
and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics in the presence of the
female. This instinct seems somehow continuous with the growth of
ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling, balking, mock fights, etc.,
are forms of animal courtship. The boy who turns cartwheels past the home
of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant, brave, witty, erect, strong in her
presence, and elsewhere dull and commonplace enough, illustrates the same
principle. The true cake-walk as seen in the South is perhaps the purest
expression of this impulse to courtship antics seen in man, but its

irradiations are many and pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives
tonicity to youth's muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which
he is rarely conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory
more glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of
the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its own.
Alas for the young people who are not different with the other sex from
what they are with their own!—and some are transformed into different
beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and
even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical
force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him
with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality
or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less
irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even
intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair
belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome and
refining. As is shown later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker
and is sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by
a sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she be,
although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most influenced
thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and good form. The ideal
knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be brutal, but show capacity
for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity, and forbearance. Evolutionists
tell us that woman has domesticated and educated savage man and taught
him all his virtues by exercising her royal prerogative of selecting in her
mate just those qualities that pleased her for transmission to future
generations and eliminating others distasteful to her. If so, she is still
engaged in this work as much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels
that her presence enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to
him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in
which both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the

disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than
antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best to help,
but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the latter performs her best
in her true rule of sympathetic spectator rather than as fellow player, and is
now an important factor in the physical education of adolescents.

How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our
schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the reason why
only some seven per cent of the young men of the country are in the
churches, while most members and workers are women, is that the qualities
demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer, trust, desire for
fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement—traits not involving ideals that
most stir young men. The church has not yet learned to appeal to the more
virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks why Christ and Buddha alone of
great religious teachers were rejected by their own race and accepted
elsewhere. He answers that these mild beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and
submission, rejected by virile warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were
adopted where women were free and led in these matters. Confucianism,
Mohammedanism, etc., are virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of
faith and worship women have small place. This again suggests how the sex
that rules the heart controls men.

Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at this
age. Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his
hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward partly
by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and tissue
immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the water over all
the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys, lungs, and digestive
apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best possible tonic for dermal
circulation. It is the best of all gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary
muscles and for the heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the

products of excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are
so easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to skin
diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects of
plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not
inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing
overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is unique
in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as are rarely
used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and liberal rather than
directly preparatory for future avocations. Its stimulus for heart and lungs
is, by general consent of all writers upon the subject, most wholesome and
beneficial. Nothing so directly or quickly reduces to the lowest point the
plethora of the sex organs. The very absence of clothes and running on the
beach is exhilarating and gives a sense of freedom. Where practicable it is
well to dispense with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is
enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the free
swim in cold water is most invigorating.

Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly realizing
the great improvement in health and temper that comes from bathing and
are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer baths
and swimming pools; often providing instruction even in swimming in
clothes, undressing in the water, treading water, and rescue work, free as
well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in London, places for nude bathing after
dark; establishing time and distance standards with certificates and even
prizes; annexing toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the
preference of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing
outranks this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according
to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks all
other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the motivation of
runaways. In the immense public establishment near San Francisco,
provided by private munificence, there are accommodations for all kinds of

bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of fresh and salt water, in
closed spaces and in the open sea, for small children and adults, with many
appliances and instructors, all in one great covered arena with seats in an
amphitheater for two thousand spectators, and many adjuncts and
accessories. So elsewhere the presence of visitors is now often invited and
provided for. Sometimes wash-houses and public laundries are annexed.
Open hours and longer evenings and seasons are being prolonged.

Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just
before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like swinging in its
many forms, including the May-pole and single rope varieties. Mr. Lee
reports that children wait late in the evening and in cold weather for a turn
at a park swing. Psychologically allied to these are wheeling and skating.
Places for the latter are now often provided by the fire department, which in
many cities floods hundreds of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and
horse-plowed, perhaps by the park commission, which often provides lights
and perhaps ices the walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and
devises space economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible.
Games of hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey,
tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet, and
sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have great
"thumogenic" or emotional power.

Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part. Man
is by definition an upright being, but only after a long apprenticeship.[16]
Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the
servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the tendency to sedentary
habits in modern schools and life, and helps the mind to helpful action, so
that a peripatetic philosophy is more normal than that of the easy chair and
the study lamp. Hill-climbing is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart,
lungs, and blood. If Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a

mountain-top. Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also
alterative and regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet
fully explained reciprocity between the two. Arm work is relatively too
prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead excessively sedentary
lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and opinion, as
witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of cobblers.

The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to many
other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and even
school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions and
outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to distinctly
augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when, beginning with
spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals, which according to
some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile delinquents; boys'
clubs with more or less self-government of the George Junior Republic and
other types, treated in another chapter; nature-study; the distinctly different
needs and propensities of both good and evil in different nationalities; the
advantages of playground fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth,
and their value as resting places; the liability that "the boy without a
playground will become the father without a job"; the relation of play and
its slow transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age
when a boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest,
not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of play to
sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal zest in and
good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg top, charity,
funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and right use of apparatus,
and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; tan-
bark, clay, the proper alternation of excessive freedom, that often turns boys
stale through the summer, with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of
play" and sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the
hand and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for

all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as digging,
shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises in the form
of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens'
leagues and unions, etc., to all this work—such are the practical problems.

The playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most
crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was
expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are prone to
commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,[17] and are so
disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent the "fathering"
of the police, without, at least, the minimum control of a system of permits
and exclusions. If hoodlums play at all, they become infatuated with
baseball and football, especially punting; they do not take kindly to the soft
large ball of the Hall House or the Civic League, and prefer at first scrub
games with individual self-exhibition to organized teams. Lee sees the
"arboreal instincts of our progenitors" in the very strong propensity of boys
from ten to fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally
occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and catch a
swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to use horizontal
and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but does not
know what he can do and needs more supervision than the country youth.
The young tough is commonly present, and though admired and copied by
younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits.

Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a wealth
of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm which helps
against the triviality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of
students is prone to lapse. It prompts to discussion of diet and regimen. It
gives a new standard of honor. For a member of a team to break training
would bring reprobation and ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame for
his class or college. It supplies a splendid motive against all errors and vices

that weaken or corrupt the body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless
courage that would otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. It supplies
new and advantageous topics for compositions and for terse, vigorous, and
idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect for
deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the necessity of
being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or dull by contrast;
again the business side of managing great contests has been an admirable
school for training young men to conduct great and difficult financial
operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or more, and has thus prepared
some for successful careers. It furnishes now the closest of all links between
high school and college, reduces the number of those physically unfit for
college, and should give education generally a more real and vigorous ideal.
Its obvious dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the
value of victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the
popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and
methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a
disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction with
faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take unpopular sides on
hot questions; action toward license after games, spasmodic excitement
culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of
reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of life, and, in
some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the
accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady
and continued mental toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.

The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of
their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls regimentation,
is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation
which is one of the chief advantages of free play. This, to be sure, has
developed old-fashioned rounders to modern baseball, and this is well, but
it is seen in the elaborate Draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and

legislative procedures, concerning "eligibility, transfer, and even sale of
players." In some games international conformity is gravely discussed.
Even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily
hampering nature and the free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls
and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured,
and every emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet,
jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this separates
games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not
only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each
point and for each sport. Runners, sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told,
on the basis of many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender
bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the average for their height,
the lower leg being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small
arms, narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of
small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer
individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within the
limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative power.
His personal nascent periods must be noted, and initial embarrassment
carefully weeded out.

The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber those of
industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games differ in seasons,
sex, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of some 8,000 children,
that running plays are pretty constant for boys from six to seventeen, but
that girls are always far behind boys and run steadily less from eight to
eighteen. In games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and
seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a still more rapid one
after sixteen. In games of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys
do a slight, pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first
greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year,
both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number

of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these plays are
of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far larger number
440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by school
grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their
educational value as teaching observation, reading and spelling, language,
arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and
specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles,
chest, etc. Most of our best games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have
deteriorated. But children are imitative and not inventive in their games,
and easily learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the
sentiment has grown that these are of national importance and are
preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-
schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to
turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work. Several have
thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays and
games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no
pleasure or true euphoria.

Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work should
not be taught. Education perhaps should really begin with directing childish
sports aright. Froebel thought it the purest and most spiritual activity of
childhood, the germinal leaves of all later life. Schooling that lacks
recreation favors dulness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps all
anabolic activities. Says Brinton, "the measure of value of work is the
amount of play there is in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount
of work there is in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever
accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it."
Sully[21] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or "non-laughers" in our times
in merry old England[22] every one played games; and laughter, their
natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's maids of honor
played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems

taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and tons, age. To requote
Stevenson with variation, as laborari, [To labor] so ludere, et joculari orare
sunt. [To play and to jest are to pray] Laughter itself, as Kühne long ago
showed, is one of the most precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries
of their tension.[23]

The antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived,
for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the psycho-
physic motivations. The young often do their hardest work in play. With
interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in the case Johnson
reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by
kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the stones were buckets of water,
the heavy and long-shirked job was done by tired boys with shouting and
enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of it, is superfluous energy over and
above what is necessary to digest, breathe, keep the heart and organic
processes going; and most children who can not play, if they have
opportunity, can neither study nor work without overdrawing their
resources of vitality. Bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the
necessity of doing things without zest, and this is not only ever repeated but
now greatly emphasized when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to
grind in the mills of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome
only by those who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to
play. Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it
draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its
exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it is
too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful tasks as
work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided personality.
Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and makes for duality
and not totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it works by fear
and not love. Not effort but zestless endeavor is the tragedy of life. Interest
and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not

adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too
feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action.
Play is from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of
all methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function
regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong
directions, exactly as Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata may, if overtense,
result in "hysterical convulsions." It is also the best form of self-expression;
and its advantage is variability, following the impulsion of the idle, perhaps
hyperemic, and overnourished centers most ready to act. It involves play
illusion and is the great agent of unity and totalization of body and soul,
while its social function develops solidarity and unison of action between
individuals. The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein
they rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring
individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless, grinding,
regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended
with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is more liable to
produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as
Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and vice
versa, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the
transition will be less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly
systematised into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this,
we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery and
recreation.

The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic
impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace,
multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui,
flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neurasthenic symptoms
generally. It brings restlessness, and a tendency to many little
heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken the will and leave the mind
like a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces and nothing

legible. All beginnings are easy, and only as we leave the early stages of
proficiency behind and press on in either physical or mental culture and
encounter difficulties, do individual differences and the tendency of weak
will, to change and turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest
disparity between men is the power to make a long concentrative,
persevering effort, for In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister [The
master shows himself in limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is
complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture
that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its
resources to bear at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, to
recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all
the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they
never get together. Thus willed action is the language of complete men and
the goal of education. When things are mechanized by right habituation,
there is still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and
higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus that
determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The person
who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs alternatives is
less completely organised than habits. All will culture is intensive and
should safeguard us against the chance influence of life and the insidious
danger of great ideas in small and feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and
perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or
noetic stage. It makes weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that
obey. It divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and Können, a separation
which the Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in
skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that
the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over
till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with
the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be
ripened to more practical form. Not only do muscles come before mind,

will before intelligence, and sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all really
useless knowledge tends to be eliminated as error or superstition. The roots
of play lie close to those of creative imagination and idealism.

The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of fear,
prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and penalties, which
can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional patterns pricked in,
but which lead an unreal life in the soul because they have no depth of soil
in nature or heredity. However precious and coherent in themselves, all
subject-matters thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such
culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make a scholastic or
sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity
of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of
pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization
accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race
fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate
utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no
other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is
praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil into a boy's soul learning which
he sees and feels not to have the highest worth and which can not become a
part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the
fountains of play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early
desiccation. The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always
play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which
is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is
vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true genius, which always
comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the
contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the
vital strength that carries burdens. Grosswell says that children are young
because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow
old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom,
growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of
research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization,
are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for

they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice, crime, and
decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion. National and racial
decline beginning in eliminating one by one the last and highest styles of
development of body and mind, mental stimulus of excessive dosage lowers
general nutrition. A psychologist that turns his back on mere subtleties and
goes to work in a life of service has here a great opportunity, and should not
forget, as Horace Mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth
one hundred reformers."

[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American
Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]

[Footnote 2: The Influence of Exercise upon Growth by Frederic Burk.
American Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp. 340-
349.]

[Footnote 3: A Study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A.C. Ellis.
Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175.]

[Footnote 4: Studies in Imagination, by Lilian H. Chalmers.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123.]

[Footnote 5: Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popular
Science Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 703-805.]

[Footnote 6: Amusements of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical
Seminary, September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371.]

[Footnote 7: A Study in the Play Life of Some South Carolina Children.
Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 439-478.]

[Footnote 8: Arbeit und Rythmus. Trubner, Leipzig, 1896.]

[Footnote 9: Descent of Man. D. Appleton and Co., 1872, vol. 1, chap. vi,
p. 204 et seq]

[Footnote 10: Teasing and Bullying. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897,
vol. 4, pp. 336-371.]

[Footnote 11: See my Study of Anger. American Journal of Psychology,
July, 1899, vol. 10, pp. 516-591.]

[Footnote 12: Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19 Jahrhunderts, 6th
ed., Göschen, Leipzig, 1896. See also H. P. Shelden: History and Pedagogy
of American Student Societies, New York, 1901, p. 31 et seq.]

[Footnote 13: Bushido: The Soul of Japan. An exposition of Japanese
thought, by Inazo Nitobé. New York, 1905, pp. 203 et seq.]

[Footnote 14: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, 1901, chap. xxii.]

[Footnote 15: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, éditeurs, Paris, 1902.]

[Footnote 16: See A.W. Trettien. Creeping and Walking. American
Journal of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]

[Footnote 17: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, by Joseph Lee.
Macmillan, New York, 1902, chaps. x and xi.]

[Footnote 18: C.O. Bernies. Physical Characteristics of the Runner and
Jumper. American Physical Education Review, September, 1900, vol. 5, pp.
235-245.]

[Footnote 19: A Study in the Play Life of some South Carolina
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478.]

[Footnote 20: Education by Plays and Games. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 97-133.]

[Footnote 21: An Essay on Laughter. Longmans, Green and Co., London,
1902, p. 427 et seq.]

[Footnote 22: See Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3
Vols., London, 1883.]

[Footnote 23: Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G.
Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin. American Journal of Psychology,
October, 1897, vol. 9, pp. 1-41.]

[Footnote 24: I. Breuer and S. Freud. Studien über Hysterie. F.
Deuticke, Wien, 1895. See especially p. 177 et seq.]

[Footnote 25: See a valuable discussion by H. A. Carr. The Survival
Values of Play, Investigations of the Department of Psychology and
Education of the University of Colorado, Arthur Allin, Ph.D., Editor,
November, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 3-47]

*****

CHAPTER VII

FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES

Classifications of children's faults—Peculiar children—Real faults as
distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease—Truancy, its nature
and effects—The genesis of crime—The lie, its classes and relations to
imagination—Predatory activities—Gangs—Causes of crime—The effects
of stories of crime—Temibility—Juvenile crime and its treatment.

Siegert[1] groups children of problematical nature into the following
sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-
brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent,
critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed
to learn, and blasé; patience, foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are
chiefly needed.

A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Közle[2] by collecting
and studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects since
Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of
children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues.
These were classified as native and of external origin, acute and chronic,
egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness,
frivolity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude,

quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; and the latter fifteen were settled on
as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best are quoted.

Bohannon[3] on the basis of questionnaire returns classified peculiar
children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy,
beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in
sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient,
disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous,
sympathetic, inquisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank,
loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous and only child.

Marro[4] tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gymnasial and lyceal
classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given above).
Conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to the
teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the cases; at
eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at fourteen in only 58
per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen and
fourteen were but little better, while it improved at sixteen, seventeen, and
eighteen. In general, conduct was good at eleven; declined at twelve and
thirteen; said, to its worst at fourteen; and then improved in yearly
increments that did not differ much, and at seventeen was nearly as good as
at eleven, and at eighteen four points better.

[Illustration: Percentage x Age]

He computed also the following percentage table of the causes of
punishments in certain Italian schools for girls and boys near pubescent
ages:

Boys Girls
Quarrels and blows 53.90 17.4
Laziness, negligence 1.80 21.3

Untidiness 10.70 24.7
Improper language .41 14.6
Indecent acts and words 1.00 .24
Refusal to work .82 1.26
Various offenses against discipline 19.00 19.9
Truancy 9.60 .0
Plots to run away 1.70 .0
Running away .72 .0

Mr. Sears[5] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments received
by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder, 17-1/3;
disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13-1/3; running away, 12-2/3; quarreling,
10; tardiness, 6-2/3; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5-1/3; lying, 4; stealing, 1;
miscellaneous, 7-1/3. He names a long list of punishable offenses, such as
malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence,
insult, conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule;
injury to books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds
of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of the
child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and
its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc.

Triplett[6] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the teacher.
Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech,
carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness,
dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration
for others, vanity, affectation, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc.,
follow. Inattention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of
their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual
distraction, is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe.
Children's views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very
different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then

come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to
animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' view of this subject Triplett
found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with
teasing, quarreling, dislike of application and effort, and many others
following. The vast number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly
with the seven deadly sins.

In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children
to the weather, Dexter[7] found that excessive humidity was most
productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between 90
and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent, when
between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal barometric
pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per
cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 20 to 66 per cent;
while the time of year and precipitation seemed to have almost no effect.
While the effect of weather has been generally recognized by
superintendents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even
by banks, which in London do not permit clerks to do the more important
bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in
general need larger numbers for more valuable determinations. Temperature
is known to have a very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and
truancy. Workmen do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.
[8]

In his study of truancy, Kline[9] starts with the assumption that the
maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and
that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold
toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truancies and runaways
increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the age of
natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the passion for
out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and nature now arise,

so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against
limitations of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as
against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often
unconscious causes. The habitual environment now begins to seem dull and
there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a
mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just
as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted
liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in
the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors,
especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to
voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and
even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long intensely for the
utter abandon of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent
discarding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to
realise again the conditions of primitive man. The manifestations of this
impulse, if read aright, are grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of
the child's environment to his disposition and nature, and with home
restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are
enormously increased. The truant, although a cording to Kline's
measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and
is generally capable of the greatest activity and usefulness in more out-of-
door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too, just in proportion as legitimate
and interesting physical exercise is denied.

The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis
has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who
abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his
first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of
youth that gives "elsewhere" a special charm. In the immediate present
things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of
familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not

sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the
restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and
pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond
escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external
conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral
state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially irksome, and if
to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual
change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed.
Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from the parental roof,
when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life
must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up
for himself. This is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an
indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel
far and wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end
in wisely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently
developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the
place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The
chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal
stage.

Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only
does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are
caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate
between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies of 300 normal
children, by a method carefully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to
the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies.
It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can
imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and
there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous
statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth
causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination.

More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm
to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres,
play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealising
temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to
assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry tree, and other
Munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new
mental combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is
almost visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which
spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer
asserts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is
imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of crass
facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and
of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the
way for imaginative literature. The life of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his
brother, is one of many illustrations. He fancied cataract of what he named
"jug-force" would burst out in a certain field and flow between populous
banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in
spelling, would prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this
realm—all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with
great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the pseudo-
hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, "Let us play we are
sisters," as if this made the relation more real. Cagliostro found adolescent
boys particularly apt for training for his exhibition of phrenological
impostures, illustrating his thirty-five faculties. "He lied when he confessed
he had lied," said a young Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of
another boy who later admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near
puberty, after reading Roman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of
Constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for hours at a
time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but adolescence is the
golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie which supplements reality

and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a special charm to dramatic
activities and in morbid cases to simulation and dissimulation. It is a state
from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and
mind arise. These are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their
pedagogic regime must be wise.

Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal
likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for
enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but
may collapse and confess when asked if they would have told their mother
thus. Boys best keep up complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught
than girls. It is harder to cheat in school with a teacher who is liked.
Friendships are cemented by confidences and secrets, and when they wane,
promises not to tell weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all
to God, are the worst. All this makes special attention to friendships,
leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of science for
general veracity.

The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children over
many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness and vice.
These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most prevalent. They
are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad habits particularly
predispose to the lie of concealment; for those who do wrong are almost
certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of meanness thus
slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to honor, for so much of which
school life is responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are
frequently resorted to in moments of danger and excitement, are easily
forgotten when it is over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the
pseudomaniac cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal
predispositions.

The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has an
instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow
casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state that their
mother was out when she was in, if it would save her life, although they
perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might
tell an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, saving his
conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was hope, although they had it
while he had none. The end at first in such cases may be very noble and the
fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow.
Youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a
feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous
literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The
youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be
referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as
a private tribunal is now apparent.

Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and
pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as
alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word-
splittings, methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words "not,"
"perhaps," or "I think," sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize
the guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a
sad product of bad methods.

Next to the selfish lie for protection—of special psychological interest
for adolescent crime—is what we may call pseudomania, seen especially in
pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfishness and
affectation and have a passion for always acting a part, attracting attention,
etc. The recent literature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many
striking examples of this diathesis of impostors of both sexes. It is a strange
psychological paradox that some can so deliberately prefer to call black

white and find distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth
and fact. The great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies,
are cases in point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of
power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of making
truth a lie, and of decreeing things into and out of existence.

Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the institutional activities
of American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate from eleven to
fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include bands of robbers, clubs
for hunting and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands between
separate districts, associations for building forts, etc. This form of
association is the typical one for boys of twelve. After this age their
interests are gradually transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs.
Sheldon's statistics are as follows:

Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total No. of predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1
0 25 = Girls societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys

Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they are
not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens and their
energy worked off into athletic societies, they become dangerous. "The
robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder become the real models."
The stealing clubs gather edibles and even useless things, the loss of which
causes mischief, into some den, cellar, or camp in the woods, where the
plunder of their raids is collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the
purpose of entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought
together. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and
connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the East Side of
New York, every corner has its gang with a program of defiance of law and
order, where the young tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous
when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get "pinched" or arrested

and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as
his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and "penny dreadfuls."
Sometimes whole neighborhoods are terrorized so that no one dares to
testify against the atrocities they commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that
"a bare enumeration of the names of the best-known gangs would occupy
the pages of this book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive—hell's
kitchen gang, stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the
soup-house gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and
roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough
kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, junk
club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of the members of
these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as babies wrapped in
newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead infants Riis says were
picked up on the streets in New York in 1889, or of baby farming. They
grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the driftwood of society, its flotsam and
jetsam, or plankton, fighting for a warn corner in their resorts or living in
crowded tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue.
Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A gang stole a
team in East New York and drove down the avenue, shopping to throw in
supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and shooting at all
who interfered. One gang specialized on stealing baby carriages, depositing
their inmates on the sidewalk. Another blew up a grocery store because its
owner refused a gift they demanded. Another tried to saw off the head of a
Jewish pedler. One member killed another for calling him "no gent." Six
murderous assaults were made at one time by these gangs within a single
week. One who is caught and does his "bit" or "stretch" is a hero, and when
a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his
notoriety. A frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The
gang federates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and may be ruined if
it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or "hang-out." A citizen

residing on the Hudson procured a howitzer and pointed it at a boat gang,
forbidding them to land on his river frontage. They have their calls,
whistles, signs, rally suddenly from no one knows where, and vanish in the
alleys, basements, roofs, and corridors they know so well. Their inordinate
vanity is well called the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the
gang a club run wild. They have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck
honor. A young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman's club,
dashed into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and
gave himself up. They batten on the yellowest literature. Those of foreign
descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents, early
learn to despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood, and this is
one cause of epidemics in crime. They passionately love boundless
independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good influence if applied
with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall away. What is the true
moral antitoxin for this class, or at least what is the safety-valve and how
and when to pull it, we are now just beginning to learn, but it is a new
specialty in the great work of salvage from the wreckage of city life. In
London, where these groups are better organised and yet more numerous,
war is often waged between them, weapons are used and murder is not so
very infrequent. Normally this instinct passes harmlessly over into
associations for physical training, which furnishes a safe outlet for these
instincts, until the reductives of maturer years have perfected their work.

The causation of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem
comparable with the origin of sin and evil. First, of course, comes heredity,
bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and childhood,
overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which are always
near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief cause of crime. A
large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously estimated, but probably one-
tenth of all, are vagrants or without homes, and divorce of parents and
illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal as causative agencies. If whatever is

physiologically wrong is morally wrong, and whatever is physiologically
right is morally right, we have an important ethical suggestion from somatic
conditions. There is no doubt that conscious intelligence during a certain
early stage of its development tends to deteriorate the strength and
infallibility of instinctive processes, so that education is always beset with
the danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital tendencies. Its prime
object ought to be moralization, but it can not be denied that in conquering
ignorance we do not thereby conquer poverty or vice. After the free schools
in London were opened there was an increase of juvenile offenders. New
kinds of crime, such as forgery, grand larceny, intricate swindling schemes,
were doubled, while sneak thieves, drunkards, and pick-pockets decreased,
and the proportion of educated criminals was greatly augmented.[14] To
collect masses of children and ram them with the same unassimilated facts
is not education in this sense, and we ought to confess that youthful crime is
an expression of educational failure. Illiterate criminals are more likely to
be detected, and also to be condemned, than are educated criminals. Every
anthropologist knows that the deepest poverty and ignorance among
primitive people are in nowise incompatible with honesty, integrity, and
virtue. Indeed there is much reason to suspect that the extremes of wealth
and poverty are more productive of crime than ignorance, or even
intemperance. Educators have no doubt vastly overestimated the moral
efficiency of the three R's and forgotten that character in infancy is all
instinct; that in childhood it is slowly made over into habits; while at
adolescence more than at any other period of life, it can be cultivated
through ideals. The dawn of puberty, although perhaps marked by a certain
moral hebetude, is soon followed by a stormy period of great agitation,
when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against
each other for its possession, and when there is peculiar proneness to be
either very good or very bad. As the agitation slowly subsides, it is found

that there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements of
the soul, if not indeed of both.

Although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of
schooling, I cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with the
modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against it for the
blind and ignorant assumption that the three R's or any merely intellectual
training can moralize. By nature, children are more or less morally blind,
and statistics show that between thirteen and sixteen incorrigibility is
between two and three times as great as at any other age. It is almost
impossible for adults to realize the irresponsibility and even moral
neurasthenia incidental to this stage of development. If we reflect what a
girl would do if dressed like a boy and leading his life and exposed to the
same moral contagion, or what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to
live like a girl, perhaps we can realize that whatever rôle heredity plays, the
youth who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of
circumstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope. It was
this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct the criminal law of
Italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that made Rollet a self-
constituted advocate, pleading each morning for the twenty or thirty boys
and eight or ten girls arrested every day in Paris.

Those smitten with the institution craze or with any extreme
correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths. First
of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived with, and
understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush and Yoder are doing
in different ways, but each with success. Criminaloid youth is more sharply
individualized than the common good child, who is less differentiated.
Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than sin. There is one right but
there are many wrong ways, hence they need to be individually studied by
every paidological method, physical and psychic. Keepers, attendants, and

even sponsors who have to do with these children should be educators with
souls full of fatherhood and motherhood, and they should understand that
the darkest criminal propensities are frequently offset by the very best
qualities; that juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents,
sisters, children, or pets;[15] they should understand that in the criminal
constitution there are precisely the same ingredients, although perhaps
differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled, etc., by the
environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would, in the great
majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home sentiments need emphasis;
that a little less stress of misery to overcome the effects of economic
malaise and, above all, a friend, mentor, adviser are needed.

I incline to think that many children would be better and not worse for
reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like those of
Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, and other gory tales, and
perhaps later tales like Eugene Aram, and the ophidian medicated novel,
Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis to arouse
betimes the higher faculties which develop later, and whose function it is to
deplete the bad centers and suppress or inhibit their activity. Again, I
believe that judicious and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often
greatly needed, and if rightly administered would be extremely effective,
because it shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil
deeds and tendencies. Special pedagogic attention should be given to the
sentiment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal morals in
boys; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold the beam even,
regardless of personal wish and interest. Further yet benevolence and its
underlying impulse to do more than justice to our associates; to do good in
the world; to give pleasure to those about, and not pain, can be directly
cultivated. Truth-telling presents a far harder problem, as we have seen. It is
no pedagogical triumph to clip the wings of fancy, but effort should be
directed almost solely against the cowardly lies, which cover evil; and the

heroism of telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the
elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in development, and so
often permanently crippled. The money sense, by all the many means now
used for its development in school, is the surest safeguard against the most
common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be taught by precept,
example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of property rights. The
regularity of school work and its industry is a valuable moralizing agent,
but entirely inadequate and insufficient by itself. Educators must face the
fact that the ultimate verdict concerning the utility of the school will be
determined, as Talleck well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children
from personal vice and crime.

Wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must
be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must be
introduced into the environment. In other words, there must be a system of
moral orthopedics. Garofalo's[16] new term and principle of "temibility" is
perhaps of great service. He would thus designate the quantum of evil
feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal impulsion. We can not measure
guilt or culpability, which may be of all degrees from nothing to infinity
perhaps, but we can to some extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if
criminal impulse is not absolutely irresistible. Pain then must be so
organised as to follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural
method as possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good conduct
must also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of criminology for
youth can not be based on the principles now recognised for adults. They
can not be protective of society only, but must have marked reformatory
elements. Solitude[17] which tends to make weak, agitated, and fearful, at
this very gregarious age should be enforced with very great discretion.
There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency or pardon in such
scheme, for, according to the old saw, "Mercy but murders, pardoning those
who kill"; nor on the other hand should there be the excessive disregard of

personal adjustments, and the uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his
highest triumph in the old sentence, "Kill all offenders and suspects, for
God will know his own," should have no part nor lot here. The philosopher
Hartmann has a suggestive article advocating that penal colonies made up
of transported criminals should be experimented upon by statesmen in order
to put various theories of self-government to a practical test. However this
may be, the penologist of youth must face some such problem in the
organization of the house of detention, boys' club, farm, reformatory, etc.
We must pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a term sentence., or the
devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this purpose; we must admit the principle
of regret, fear, penance, material restoration of damage, and understand the
sense in which, for both society and for the individual, it makes no practical
difference whether experts think there is some taint of insanity, provided
only that irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete.

In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to
adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of
circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the
highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental
outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which
ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been
detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rectitude.
The heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but I would
conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods
of teaching and studying ethics in our academic institutions as a
speculative, historical, and abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently
objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood
and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and
virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts,
can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher
philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a

radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, schematic speculations
of many contemporary moralists, taught in our schools and colleges.

[Footnote 1: Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie für Schule und
Haus. Voigtländer, Leipzig, 1889.]

[Footnote 2: Die pädagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19
Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Gütersloh, 1893, p. 494.]

[Footnote 3: Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60.]

[Footnote 4: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, Paris, 1902, p. 72.]

[Footnote 5: Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary,
March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187.]

[Footnote 6: A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
June, 1903, vol. 10, p. 200 et seq.]

[Footnote 7: The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.]

[Footnote 8: Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J.S. Lemon. American
Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.]

[Footnote 9: Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L.W.
Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.]

[Footnote 10: Children's Lies. American Journal of Psychology,
January, 1890, vol. 3, pp. 59-70.]

[Footnote 11: Poems. With memoir by his brother, 2 vols., London,
1851.]

[Footnote 12: American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp.
425-448.]

[Footnote 13: How the Other Half Lives. Scribner's Sons, New York,
1890, p. 229.]

[Footnote 14: The Curse in Education, by Rebecca Harding Davis. North
American Review, May, 1899, vol. 168, pp. 609-614.]

[Footnote 15: Holtzendorff: Psychologie des Mordes. C. Pfeiffer,
Berlin, 1875]

[Footnote 16: La Criminologie. Paris, Alcan, 1890, p. 332]

[Footnote 17: See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M.H.
Small: Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical
Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]

*****

CHAPTER VIII

BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH

Knightly ideals and honor—Thirty adolescents from Shakespeare—Goethe
—C.D. Warner—Aldrich—The fugitive nature of adolescent experience—
Extravagance of autobiographies—Stories that attach to great names—
Some typical crazes—Illustrations from George Eliot, Edison, Chatterton,
Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon,
Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett,
Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey,
Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores of others.

The knightly ideals and those of secular life generally during the middle
ages and later were in striking contrast to the ascetic ideals of the early
Christian Church; in some respects they were like those of the Greeks.
Honor was the leading ideal, and muscular development and that of the
body were held in high respect; so that the spirit of the age fostered
conceptions not unlike those of the Japanese Bushido. Where elements of
Christianity were combined with this we have the spirit of the pure chivalry
of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which affords perhaps
the very best ideals for youth to be found in history, as we shall see more
fully later.

In a very interesting paper, entitled "Shakespeare and Adolescence," Dr.
M.F. Libby[1] very roughly reckons "seventy-four interesting adolescents
among the comedies, forty-six among the tragedies, and nineteen among the
histories." He selects "thirty characters who, either on account of direct
references to their age, or because of their love-stories, or because they
show the emotional and intellectual plasticity of youth, may be regarded as
typical adolescents." His list is as follows: Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia,
Imogen, Perdita, Arviragus, Guiderius, Palamon, Arcite, Emilia, Ferdinand,
Miranda, Isabella, Mariana, Orlando, Rosalind, Biron, Portia, Jessica,
Phebe, Katharine, Helena, Viola, Troilus, Cressida, Cassio, Marina, Prince
Hal, and Richard of Gloucester. The proof of the youth of these characters,
as set forth, is of various kinds, and Libby holds that besides these, the
sonnets and poems perhaps show a yet greater, more profound and
concentrated knowledge of adolescence. He thinks "Venus and Adonis" a
successful attempt to treat sex in a candid, naive way, if it be read as it was
meant, as a catharsis of passion, in which is latent a whole philosophy of
art. To some extent he also finds the story of the Passionate Pilgrim "replete
with the deepest knowledge of the passions of early adolescence" The series
culminates in Sonnet 116, which makes love the sole beacon of humanity. It
might be said that it is connected by a straight line with the best teachings
of Plato, and that here humanity picked up the clue, lost, save with some
Italian poets, in the great interval.

In looking over current autobiographies of well-known modern men who
deal with their boyhood, one finds curious extremes. On the one hand are
those of which Doctor's is a type, where details are dwelt upon at great
length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflections. The
development of his own tastes, capacities, and his entire adult
consciousness was assumed to be due to the incidents of childhood and
youth, and especially the latter stage was to him full of the most serious
problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of his life he has

exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress
more fully perhaps than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have
writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a self-made man, whose early life
was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater
contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All
the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with a forced
drollery and catchy superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every
point upon the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the
precious associations of early life on a New England farm are not only
made absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not a scintilla of
instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life.
Aldrich[3] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet horse and
monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and falling in love with
an older girl whose engagement later blighted his life. Howells,[4] White,
[5] Mitter,[6] Grahame,[7] Heidi,[8] and Mrs. Barnett,[9] might perhaps
represent increasing grades of merit in this field in this respect.

Yoder,[10] in his interesting study of the boyhood of great men, has
called attention to the deplorable carelessness of their biographers
concerning the facts and influences of their youth. He advocates the great
pedagogic influence of biography, and would restore the high appreciation
of it felt by the Bolandists, which Comte's positivist calendar, that renamed
all the days of the year from three hundred and sixty-five such accounts in
1849, also sought to revive. Yoder selected fifty great modern biographies,
autobiographies preferred, for his study. He found a number of lives whose
equipment and momentum have been strikingly due to some devoted aunt,
and that give many glimpses of the first polarization of genius in the
direction in which fame is later achieved. He holds that, while the great men
excelled in memory, imagination is perhaps still more a youthful condition
of eminence; magnifies the stimulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons
become prominent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises the

question whether too exuberant physical development does not dull genius
and talent.

One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its each
and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of adolescence are
extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so that they are often totally
lost to the adult consciousness. Lancaster[11] observes that we are
constantly told by adults past thirty that they never had this and that
experience, and that those who have had them are abnormal; that they are
far more rare than students of childhood assert, etc. He says, "Not a single
young person with whom I have had free and open conversation has been
free from serious thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. A
typical case of many I could gather is that of a lady, not yet in middle life,
precise and carefully trained, who, on hearing a lecture on the typical
phases of adolescence, declared that she must have been abnormal, for she
knew nothing of any of these experiences. Her mother, however, produced
her diary, and there she read for the first time since it was written,
beginning in the January of her thirteenth year, a long series of resolutions
which revealed a course of conduct that brought the color to her face, that
she should have found it necessary to pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and
which showed conclusively that she had passed through about all the phases
described. These phenomena are sometimes very intense and may come late
in life, but it is impossible to remember feelings and emotions with
definiteness, and these now make up a large part of life. Hence we are prone
to look with some incredulity upon the immediate records of the tragic
emotions and experiences typical and normal at this time, because
development has scored away their traces from the conscious soul.

There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says White,[12] in
substance, which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon youth.
An adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games inside, but finds it

all a mockery and himself banished among the purblind grown-ups. The
town of Boyville was old when Nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient
laws; has its own rulers and idols; and only the dim, unreal noises of the
adult world about it have changed.

In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true
pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be
ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the emotional
and instinctive life of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as
scattered hints may be gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the
recollections of others. But the best observers see but very little of what
goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely
subterranean. Only when the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the
process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of
these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic
prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which
often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-
like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence
wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the
youth of men who later achieve distinction, which biographers often
incorporate and attach to the time, place, and person of their heroes.

As Burnham[13] well intimates, many of the literary characterizations of
adolescence are so marked by extravagance, and sometimes even by the
struggle for literary effects, that they are not always the best documents,
although often based on personal experience. Confessionalism is generally
overdrawn, distorted, and especially the pains of this age are represented as
too keen. Of George Eliot's types of adolescent character, this may best be
seen in Maggie Tulliver, with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her
volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions," with her "wide, hopeless
yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on

this earth," and in Gwendolen, who, from the moment she caught Deronda's
eye, was "totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person
of the other sex whom she had never seen before." There was "the resolute
action from instinct and the setting at defiance of calculation and reason, the
want of any definite desire to marry, while all her conduct tended to
promote proposals." Exaggeration, although not the perversions of this age
often found in adult characterizations, is marked trait of the writings of
adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile may appear rational, so that this
suggests that consciousness may at this stage serve as a harmless vent for
tendencies that would otherwise cause great trouble if turned to practical
affairs. If Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the adolescent tyrant slayers of
Greece, had been theorists, they might have been harmless on the principle
that its analysis tends to dissipate emotion.

Lancaster[14] gathered and glanced over a thousand biographies, from
which he selected 200 for careful study, choosing them to show different
typical directions of activity. Of these, 120 showed a distinct craze for
reading in adolescence; 109 became great lovers of nature; 58 wrote poetry,
58 showed a great and sudden development of energy; 55 showed great
eagerness for school; 53 devoted themselves for a season to art and music;
53 became very religious; 51 left home in the teens; 51 showed dominant
instincts of leadership; 49 had great longings of many kinds; 46 developed
scientific tastes; 41 grew very anxious about the future; 34 developed
increased keenness of sensation or at least power of observation; in 32 cases
health was better; 31 were passionately altruistic; 23 became idealists; 23
showed powers of invention; 17 were devoted to older friends; 15 would
reform society; 7 hated school. These, like many other statistics, have only
indicative value, as they are based on numbers that are not large enough and
upon returns not always complete.

A few typical instances from Lancaster must here suffice. Savonarola
was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the world
and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night planning his
career. Shelley during these years was unsocial, much alone, fantastic,
wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and moon, was
attached to an older man. Beecher was intoxicated with nature, which he
declared afterward to have been the inspiration of his life. George Eliot at
thirteen had a passion for music and became a clever pianist. At sixteen she
was religious, founded societies for the poor and for animals, and had
fitting spells of misanthropy. Edison undertook to read the Detroit Free
Library through, read fifteen solid feet as the books stand on the shelves,
was stopped, and says he has read comparatively little since. Tolstoi found
the aspect of things suddenly changed. Nature put on a new appearance. He
felt he might commit the most dreadful crimes with no purpose save
curiosity and the need of action. The future looked gloomy. He became
furiously angry without cause; thought he was lost, hated by everybody,
was perhaps not the son of his father, etc. At seventeen he was solitary,
musing about immortality, human destiny, feeling death at hand, giving up
his studies, fancying himself a great man with new truths for humanity. By
and by he took up the old virtuous course of life with fresh power, new
resolutions, with the feeling that he had lost much time. He had a deep
religious experience at seventeen and wept for joy over his new life. He had
a period before twenty when he told desperate lies, for which he could not
account, then a passion for music, and later for French novels. Rousseau at
this age was discontented, immensely in love, wept often without cause, etc.
Keats had a great change at fourteen, wrestling with frequent obscure and
profound stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowledge which
consumed his days with fire, and "with passionate longing to drain the cup
of experience at a draft." He was "at the morning hour when the whole
world turns to gold." "The boy had suddenly become a poet." Chatterton

was too proud to eat a gift dinner, though nearly starved, and committed
suicide at seventeen for lack of appreciation. John Hunter was dull and
hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did that of Patrick Henry, who
before was a lonely wanderer, sitting idly for hours under the trees.
Alexander Murray awoke to life at fifteen and acquired several languages in
less than two years. Gifford was distraught for lack of reading, went to sea
at thirteen, became a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was
savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do
splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at
fourteen was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on
infinite time and space. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a frenzy for
sciences at fifteen; at seventeen walked nine miles daily to attend lectures at
Cambridge; and at nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. Franklin had a
passion for the sea; at thirteen read poetry all night; wrote verses and sold
them on the streets of Boston; doubted everything at fifteen; left home for
good at seventeen; started the first public library in Philadelphia before he
was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to
nature, art, and literature. He became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left
home at seventeen. Bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently
well thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for
poetic genius and wrote Thanatopsis before he was eighteen. Jefferson
doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seventeen studied fifteen
hours a day. Garfield, though living in Ohio, longed for the sea, and ever
after this period the sight of a ship gave him a strange thrill. Hawthorne was
devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on and on forever and never touch
shore again. He would roam through the Maine woods alone; was haunted
by the fear that he would die before twenty-five. Peter Cooper left home at
seventeen; was passionately altruistic; and at eighteen vowed he would
build a place like his New York Institute. Whittier at fourteen found a copy
of Burns, which excited him and changed the current of his life. Holmes

had a passion for flowers, broke into poetry at fifteen, and had very
romantic attachments to certain trees. J. T. Trowbridge learned German,
French, and Latin alone before twenty-one; composed poetry at the plow
and wrote it out in the evening. Henry followed a rabbit under the Public
Library at Albany, found a hole in the floor that admitted him to the shelves,
and, unknown to any one, read all the fiction the library contained, then
turned to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and developed a passion for
the sciences. He was stage-struck, and became a good amateur actor. H. H.
Boyesen was thrilled by nature and by the thought that he was a Norseman.
He had several hundred pigeons, rabbits, and other pets; loved to be in the
woods at night; on leaving home for school was found with his arms around
the neck of a calf to which he was saying good-by. Maxwell, at sixteen, had
almost a horror of destroying a leaf, flower, or fly. Jahn found growing in
his heart, at this age, an inextinguishable feeling for right and wrong—
which later he thought the cause of all his inner weal and outer woe. When
Nansen was in his teens he spent weeks at a time alone in the forest, full of
longings, courage, altruism, wanted to get away from every one and live
like Crusoe. T. B. Reed, at twelve and thirteen, had a passion for reading;
ran away at seventeen; painted, acted, and wrote poetry. Cartwright, at
sixteen, heard voices from the sky saying, "Look above, thy sins are
forgiven thee." Herbert Spencer became an engineer at seventeen, after one
idle year. He never went to school, but was a private pupil of his uncle. Sir
James Mackintosh grew fond of history at eleven; fancied he was the
Emperor of Constantinople; loved solitude at thirteen; wrote poetry at
fourteen; and fell in love at seventeen. Thomas Buxton loved dogs, horses,
and literature, and combined these while riding on an old horse. At sixteen
be fell in love with an older literary woman, which aroused every latent
power to do or die, and thereafter he took all the school prizes. Scott began
to like poetry at thirteen. Pascal wrote treatises on conic sections at sixteen
and invented his arithmetical machine at nineteen. Nelson went to sea at

twelve; commanded a boat in peril at fifteen, which at the same age he left
to fight a polar bear. Banks, the botanist, was idle and listless till fourteen,
could not travel the road marked out for him; when coming home from
bathing, he was struck by the beauty of the flowers and at once began his
career. Montcalm and Wolfe both distinguished themselves as leaders in
battle at sixteen. Lafayette came to America at nineteen, thrilled by our bold
strike for liberty. Gustavus Adolphus declared his own majority at
seventeen and was soon famous. Ida Lewis rescued four men in a boat at
sixteen. Joan of Arc began at thirteen to have the visions which were the
later guide of her life.

Mr. Swift has collected interesting biographical material[15] to show that
school work is analytic, while life is synthetic, and how the narrowness of
the school enclosure prompts many youth in the wayward age to jump
fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. According to school
standards, many were dull and indolent, but their nature was too large or
their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at the Nikolaischule at
Leipzig was relegated to the third form, having already attained to the
second at Dresden, which so embittered him that he lost all taste for
philology and, in his own words, "became lazy and slovenly." Priestley
never improved by any systematic course of study. W.H. Gibson was very
slow and was rebuked for wasting his time in sketching. James Russell
Lowell was reprimanded, at first privately and then publicly, in his
sophomore year "for general negligence in themes, forensics, and
recitations," and finally suspended in 1838 "on account of continued neglect
of his college duties." In early life Goldsmith's teacher thought him the
dullest boy she had ever taught. His tutor called him ignorant and stupid.
Irving says that a lad "whose passions are not strong enough in youth to
mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his
inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance, will
probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow. I would

compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the tranquility of
dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment, and, consequently,
continue always muddy." Huxley detested writing till past twenty. His
schooling was very brief, and he declared that those set over him "cared
about as much for his intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby
farmers." Humphry Davy was faithful but showed no talent in school,
having "the reputation of being an idle boy, with a gift for making verses,
but with no aptitude for studies of a graver sort." Later in life he considered
it fortunate that he was left so much to himself. Byron was so poor a scholar
that he only stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, it was
inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly said to him, "Now, George,
man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." Schiller's negligence and
lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his final school thesis was
unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor scholar, and at the university it was stated
"that he was of middling industry and knowledge but especially deficient in
philosophy." John Hunter nearly became a cabinetmaker. Lyell had
excessive aversion to work. George Combe wondered why he was so
inferior to other boys in arithmetic. Heine agreed with the monks that Greek
was the invention of the devil. "God knows what misery I suffered with it."
He hated French meters, and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry.
He idled away his time at Bonn, and was "horribly bored" by the "odious,
stiff, cut-and-dried tone" of the leathery professors. Humboldt was feeble as
a child and "had less facility in his studies than most children." "Until I
reached the age of sixteen," he says, "I showed little inclination for
scientific pursuits." He was essentially self-taught, and acquired most of his
knowledge rather late in life. At nineteen he had never heard of botany.
Sheridan was called inferior to many of his schoolfellows. He was
remarkable for nothing but idleness and winning manners, and was "not
only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar."
Swift was refused his degree because of "dulness and insufficiency," but

given it later as a special favor. Wordsworth was disappointing. General
Grant was never above mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the
junior class and served the last year as a private. W. H. Seward was called
"too stupid to learn." Napoleon graduated forty-second in his class. "Who,"
asks Swift, "were the forty-one above him?" Darwin was singularly
incapable of mastering any language. "When he left school," he says, "I was
considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy,
rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification,
my father once said to me, 'You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-
catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to all your family.'"
Harriet Martineau was thought very dull. Though a horn musician, she
could do absolutely nothing in the presence of her irritable master. She
wrote a cramped, untidy scrawl until past twenty. A visit to some very
brilliant cousins at the age of sixteen had much to do in arousing her
backward nature. At this age J. Pierpont Morgan wrote poetry and was
devoted to mathematics. Booker T. Washington, at about thirteen or
fourteen (he does not know the date of his birth), felt the new meaning of
life and started off on foot to Hampton, five hundred miles away, not
knowing even the direction, sleeping under a sidewalk his first night in
Richmond. Vittorino da Feltre,[16] according to Dr. Burnham, had a low,
tardy development, lingering on a sluggish dead level from ten to fourteen,
which to his later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years sometimes
called the middle ages, compared with the remainder which followed when
a new world-consciousness intensified his personality.

Lancaster's summaries show that of 100 actors, the average age of their
first great success was exactly 18 years. Those he chose had taken to the
stage of their own accord, for actors are more born than made. Nearly half
of them were Irish, the unemotional American stock having furnished far
less. Few make their first success on the stage after 22, but from 16 to 20 is
the time to expect talent in this line, although there is a second rise in his

curve before and still more after 25, representing those whose success is
more due to intellect. Taking the average age of 100 novelists when their
first story met with public approval, the curve reaches its highest point
between 30 and 35. Averaging 53 poets, the age at which most first poems
were published falls between 15 and 20. The average age at which first
publication showed talent he places at 18, which is in striking contrast with
the average age of inventors at time of the first patent, which is 33 years.

A still more striking contrast is that between 100 musicians and 100
professional men. Music is by far the most precocious and instinctive of all
talents. The average age when marked talent was first shown is a little less
than 10 years, 95 per cent showed rare talent before 16, while the
professional men graduated at an average age of 24 years and 11 months,
and 10 years must be added to mark the point of recognized success. Of 53
artists, 90 per cent showed talent before 20, the average age being 17.2
years. Of 100 pioneers who made their mark in the Far West, leaving home
to seek fortunes near the frontier, the greatest number departed before they
were 18. Of 118 scientists, Lancaster estimates that their life interest first
began to glow on the average a little before they were 19. In general, those
whose success is based on emotional traits antedate by some years those
whose renown is more purely in intellectual spheres, and taking all together,
the curves of the first class culminate between 18 and 20.

While men devoted to physical science, and their biographers, give us
perhaps the least breezy accounts of this seething age, it may be, because
they mature late, nearly all show its ferments and its circumnutations, as a
few almost random illustrations clearly show:

Tycho Brahe, born in 1596 of illustrious Danish stock, was adopted by an
uncle, and entered the University of Copenhagen at thirteen, where
multiplication, division, philosophy, and metaphysics were taught. When he

was fourteen, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which aroused so much
interest that he decided to devote himself to the study of the heavenly
bodies. He was able to construct a series of interesting instruments on a
progressive scale of size, and finally to erect the great Observatory of
Uraniberg on the Island of Hven. Strange to say, his scientific conclusions
had for him profound astrological significance. An important new star he
declared was "at first like Venus and Jupiter and its effects will therefore
first be pleasant; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a
period of wars, seditions, captivity, and death of princes, and destruction of
cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and
venomous snakes. Lastly, the star became like Saturn, and thus will finally
come a time of want, death, imprisonment, and all kinds of sad things!" He
says that "a special use of astronomy is that it enables us to draw
conclusions from the movements in the celestial regions as to human fate."
He labored on his island twenty years. He was always versifying, and
inscribed a poem over the entrance of his underground observatory
expressing the astonishment of Urania at finding in the interior of the earth
a cavern devoted to the study of the heavens.

Galileo[17] was born in 1564 of a Florentine noble, who was poor. As a
youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself to
painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the
University of Pisa fell in love with mathematics.

Isaac Newton,[18] born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a very
low piece in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at sixteen tried
farming. In one of his university examinations in Euclid be did so poorly as
to incur special censure. His first incentive to diligent study came from
being severely kicked by a high class boy. He then resolved to pass him in
studies, and soon rose to the head of the school. He made many ingenious
toys and windmills; a carriage, the wheels of which were driven by the

hands of the occupants, and a clock which moved by water; curtains, kites,
lanterns, etc.; and before he was fourteen fell in love with Miss Storey,
several yeas older than himself. He entered Trinity College at Cambridge at
eighteen.

William Herschel, born in 1738, at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War,
when he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and after a
battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to England, where
he eked out a precarious livelihood by teaching music. He supported
himself until middle age as an organist. In much of his later work he was
greatly aided by his sister Caroline. When he discovered a sixth planet he
became famous, and devoted himself exclusively to astronomy, training his
only son to follow in his footsteps, and dying in 1822.

Agassiz[19] at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He
memorized Latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of
MSS.", and "modestly expressed the hope that in time he might be able to
give the name of every known animal." At fourteen he revolted at
mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a manifesto planning
to spend four years at a Cermem university, then in Paris, when he could
begin to write. Rooks were scarce, and a little later he copied, with the aid
of his brother, several large volumes, and had fifty live birds in his room at
one time.

At twelve Huxley[20] became an omnivorous reader, and two or three
years later devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply interested in
metaphysics. At fourteen he saw and participated in his first post-mortem
examination, was left in a strange state of apathy by it, and dates his life-
long dyspepsia to this experience. His training was irregular; he taught
himself German with a book in one hand while he made hay with the other;
speculated about the basis of matter, soul, and their relations, on radicalism

and conservatism; and reproached himself that he did not work and get on
enough. At seventeen he attempted a comprehensive classification of
human knowledge, and having finished his survey, resolved to master the
topics one after another, striking them out from his table with ink as soon us
they were done. "May the list soon get black, although at present I shall
hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper." Beneath the top skimmings
of these years he afterward conceived seething depths working beneath the
froth, but could give hardly any account of it. He undertook the practise of
pharmacy, etc.

Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to
reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions of this
age; perhaps because their later lives, on account of their more generic
nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or because, although it is
psychologically shorter than in men, the necessities of earning a livelihood
less frequently arrest its full development, and again because they are more
emotional, and feeling constitutes the chief psychic ingredient of this stage
of life, or they dwell more on subjective states.

Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. Her father was an
engraver in comfortable circumstances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for the
Bible and Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for reading books
of any kind. In the corner of her father's workshop she would read Plutarch
for hours, dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, weeping,
"Why was I not born a Greek?" She desired to emulate the brave men of
old.

Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic
sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society afforded no
opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she fell back upon a

life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St. Elizabeth, and St.
Theresa became her new idols. She longed to follow even to the stake those
devout men and women who had borne obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst,
wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's death for the sake of Jesus. Her
capacities for self-sacrifice became perhaps her leading trait, always
longing after a grand life like George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. She was
allowed at the age of eleven to enter a convent, where, shunning her
companions, she courted solitude apart, under the trees, reading and
thinking. Artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life
with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a
mystic quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full
revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon
youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she came to
doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but clung to the Gospels as the
best possible code of morals, and later realized that while her intellect had
wandered her heart had remained constant. At seventeen she was, if not the
moat beautiful, perhaps the noblest woman in all France, and here the
curtain moat drop upon her girlhood. All her traits were, of course, set off
by the great life she lived and the yet greater death she died.

Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more
children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents, because
of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity
and spontaneity of adolescence persists into maturity. Sometimes even its
passions, reveries, and hoydenish freaks continue. In her "Histoire de Ma
Vie," it is plain that George Sand inherited at this age an unusual dower of
gifts. She composed many and interminable stories, carried on day after
day, so that her confidants tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got
out of the forest yet, etc. She personated an echo and conversed with it. Her
day-dreams and plays were so intense that she often came back from the

world of imagination to reality with a shock. She spun a weird zoological
romance out of a rustic legend of la grande bête.

When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion and
revolt, and was the leader of les diables, or those who refused to be devout,
and engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became profoundly interested
in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing miracles. She entered one
evening the convent church for service, without permission, which was an
act of disobedience. The mystery and holy charm of it penetrated her; she
forgot everything outward and was left alone, and some mysterious change
stole over her. She "breathed an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness" more
with the mind than the senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her
eyes swam; she was enveloped in a white glimmer, and heard a voice
murmur the words written under a convent picture of St. Augustine, Tolle,
lege, and turned around thinking Mother Alicia spoke, but she was alone.
She knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had laid hold of her, as
she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and prayed to the unknown God
till a nun heard her groaning. At first her ardor impelled her not only to
brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums and tomboys, but she
planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing for a recluse life
passed, but left her changed.[21]

When she passed from the simple and Catholic faith of her grisette
mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at Nohant, who was a
disciple of Voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the profound
sentiments inspired by the first communion and the concurrent contempt for
this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all those mummeries through
which, however, for conventional reasons she was obliged to pass. Her
heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction
or metaphor, it occurred to her to invent a story which might be a religion or
a religion which might be a story into any degree of belief in which she

could lapse at will. The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to
her in a dream. He was Corambé, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as
graceful as the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian God,
and as much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex
from her love for her mother. He appeared in many aspects of physical and
moral beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic of
musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the same time
revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability, but with the
fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she composed about a
thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of his mundane
existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on touching the earth,
always in a new group of people who were good, yet suffering martyrdoms
from the wicked known only by the effects of their malice. In this "gentle
hallucination" she could lose herself in the midst of friends, and turn to her
hero deity for comfort. There must be not only sacred books, but a temple
and ritual, and in a garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-
carpeted chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a
wreath hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric, she
proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards, green frogs, and
birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and "after having invoked
the good genius of liberty and protection," opened it. In these mimic rites
and delicious reveries she found the germs of a religion that fitted her heart.
From the instant, however, that a boy playmate discovered and entered this
sanctuary, "Corambé ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim
deserted it," and it seemed unreal. The temple was destroyed with great
care, and the garlands and shells were buried under the tree.[22]

Louisa Alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, when she began to
write poetry, keep a heart journal, and wander by moonlight, and wished to
be the Bettine of Emerson, in whose library she foraged; wrote him letters
which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at midnight; left wild flowers on the

doorstep of her master; sang Mignon's song under his window; and was
refined by her choice of an idol. Her diary was all about herself.

If she looked in the glass at her long hair and well-shaped head, she tried
to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, poverty, impossible
longings, made every day a battle until she hardly wished to live, only
something must be done, and waiting is so hard. She imagined her mind a
room in confusion which must be put in order; the useless thought swept
out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly furnished with good resolutions.
But she was not a good housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to
rule. She was smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her
leisure in writing and acting plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung
sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of
humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty
sentiments. She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself
into Hamlet and declaim in mock heroic style. From sixteen to twenty-three
was her apprenticeship to life. She taught, wrote for the papers, did
housework for pay as a servant, and found sewing a pleasant resource
because it was tranquillizing, left her free, and set her thoughts going.

Mrs. Burnett,[23] like most women who record their childhood and
adolescent memories, is far more subjective and interesting than most men.
In early adolescence she was never alone when with flowers, but loved to
"speak to them, to bend down and say caressing things, to stoop and kiss
them, to praise them for their pretty ways of looking up at her as into the
eyes of a friend and beloved. There were certain little blue violets which
always seemed to lift their small faces childishly, as if they were saying,
'Kiss me; don't go by like that.'" She would sit on the porch, elbows on
knees and chin on hands, staring upward, sometimes lying on the grass.
Heaven was so high and yet she was a part of it and was something even

among the stars. It was a weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeling as she
stared so fixedly and intently that the earth seemed gone, left far behind.
Every hour and moment was a wonderful and beautiful thing. She felt on
speaking terms with the rabbits. Something was happening in the leaves
which waved and rustled as she passed. Just to walk, sit, lie around out of
doors, to loiter, gaze, watch with a heart fresh as a young dryad, following
birds, playing hide-and-seek with the brook-these were her halcyon hours.

With the instability of genius, Beth[24] did everything suddenly. When
twelve or thirteen, she had grown too big to be carried, pulled or pushed;
she suddenly stood still one day, when her mother, commanded her to dress.
She had been ruled before by physical force, but her will and that of her
mother were now in collision, and the latter realised she could make her do
nothing unless by persuasion or moral influence. Being constantly reproved,
scolded, and even beaten by her mother, Beth one day impulsively jumped
into the sea, and was rescued with difficulty. She had spells of being
miserable with no cause. She was well and happy, but would burst into tears
suddenly, which seemed often to surprise her. Being very sensitive herself,
she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others and incessantly
committed grave sins of insincerity without compunction in her effort to
spare them. To those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought
she could do things, her nature expanded, but her mother checked her
mental growth over and over, instead of helping her by saying, "Don't try,
you can't do it," etc.

Just before the dawn of adolescence she had passed through a long period
of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a servant. All the old
woman's signs were very dominant in her life. She even invented methods
of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak when I walk across the room I
shall get through my lessons without trouble." She always preferred to see
two rooks together to one and became expert in the black arts. She used to

hear strange noises at night for a time, which seemed signs and portents of
disaster at sea, fell into the ways of her neighbors, and had more faith in
incantations than in doctors' doses. She not only heard voices and very
ingeniously described them, but claimed to know what was going to happen
and compared her forebodings with the maid. She "got religion" very
intensely under the influence of her aunt, grew thin, lost her appetite and
sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in hell, and tried to save
them.

Beth never thought at all of her personal appearance until she overheard a
gentleman call her rather nice-looking, when her face flushed and she had a
new feeling of surprise and pleasure, and took very clever ways of cross-
examining her friends to find if she was handsome. All of a sudden the care
of her person became of great importance, and every hint she had heard of
was acted on. She aired her bed, brushed her hair glossy, pinched her waist
and feet, washed in buttermilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appetite
in every way, put on gloves to do dirty work, etc.

The house always irked her. Once stealing out of the school by night, she
was free, stretched herself, drew a long breath, bounded and waved her
arms in an ecstasy of liberty, danced around the magnolia, buried her face in
the big flowers one after another and bathed it in the dew of the petals,
visited every forbidden place, was particularly attracted to the water,
enjoyed scratching and making her feet bleed and eating a lot of green fruit.
This liberty was most precious and all through a hot summer she kept
herself healthy by exercise in the moonlight. This revived her appetite, and
she ended these night excursions by a forage in the kitchen. Beth had times
when she hungered for solitude and for nature. Sometimes she would shut
herself in her room, but more often would rove the fields and woods in
ecstasy. Coming home from school, where she had long been, she had to
greet the trees and fields almost before she did her parents. She had a great

habit of stealing out often by the most dangerous routes over roofs, etc., at
night in the moonlight, running and jumping, waving her arms, throwing
herself on the ground, rolling over, walling on all-fours, turning
somersaults, hugging trees, playing hide-and-seek with the shadow fairy-
folk, now playing and feeling fear and running away. She invoked trees,
stars, etc.

Beth's first love affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced boy, who
sat near her pew Sundays. They looked at each other once during service,
and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over her, dwelt on his image,
smiled, and even the next day felt a new desire to please. She watched for
him to pass from school. When he appeared, "had a most delightful thrill
shoot through her." The first impulse to fly was conquered; she never
thought a boy beautiful before. They often met after dark, wrote; finally she
grew tired of him because she could not make him feel deeply, sent him off,
called him an idiot, and then soliloquized on the "most dreadful grief of her
life." The latter stages of their acquaintance she occasionally used to beat
him, but his attraction steadily waned. Once later, as she was suffering from
a dull, irresolute feeling due to want of a companion and an object, she met
a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her own, brightened as they
approached. It was the first appearance of nature's mandate to mate. This
friendly glance suffused her whole being with the "glory and vision of
love." Religion and young men were her need. They had stolen interviews
by night and many an innocent embrace and kiss, and almost died once by
being caught. They planned in detail what they would do after they were
married, but all was taken for granted without formal vows. Only when
criticized did they ever dream of caution and concealment, and then they
made elaborate parades of ignoring each other in public and fired their
imaginations with thoughts of disguises, masks, etc. This passion was
nipped in the bud by the boy's removal from his school.

In preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer[25] became
sober and studious, proposing to model her life on that of each fresh saint
and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience with vengeance.
She wanted to revive the custom of public confession and wrote letters of
penitence and submission, which she tore up later, finding her mind not "all
of a piece." She lay prostrate on her prie-dieu weeping from ecstasy, lying
on the rim of heaven held by angels, wanting to die, now bathed in bliss or
aching intolerably with spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old
nature often reasserted itself. Religion at that time became an intense
emotion nourished on incense, music, tapers, and a feeling of being
tangible. It was rapturous and sensuous. While under its spell, she seemed
to float and touch the wings of angels. Here solemn Gregorian chants are
sung, so that when one comes back to earth there is a sense of hunger,
deception, and self-loathing. Now she came to understand how so many
sentimental and virtuous souls sought oblivion in the narcotic of religious
excitement. Here, at the age of twelve, youth began and childhood ended
with her book.

Pathetic is the account of Helen Keller's effort to understand the meaning
of the word "love" in its season.[26]

Is it the sweetness of flowers? she asked. No, said her teacher. Is it the
warm sun? Not exactly. It can not be touched, "'but you feel the sweetness
that it pours into everything. Without love, you would not be happy or want
to play.' The beautiful truth burst upon my mind. I felt that there were
invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirit of others." This
period seems to have came gradually and naturally to this wonderful child,
whose life has been perhaps the purest ever lived and one of the sweetest.
None has ever loved every aspect of nature accessible to her more
passionately, or felt more keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful

sentiments. The unhappy Frost King episode has been almost the only cloud
upon her life, which unfortunately came at about the dawn of this period,
that is perhaps better marked by the great expansion of mind which she
experienced at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, when she was thirteen.
About this time, too, her great ambition of going to college and enjoying all
the advantages that other girls did, which, considering her handicap, was
one of the greatest human resolutions, was strengthened and deepened. The
fresh, spontaneous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind, which felt
that each individual could comprehend all the experiences and emotions of
the race and that chafed at every pedagogical and technical obstacle
between her soul and nature, and the great monuments of literature, show
that she has conserved to a remarkable degree, which the world will wish
may be permanent, the best impulses of this golden age.

Marie Bashkirtseff,[27] who may be taken as one of the best types of
exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, was rich and of noble birth, and
began in 1873, at the age of twelve, to write a journal that should be
absolutely true and frank, with no pretense, affectation, or concealment. The
journal continues until her death, October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three.
It may be described as in some sense a feminine counterpart of Rousseau's
confessions, but is in some respects a more precious psychological
document than any other for the elucidation of the adolescent ferment in an
unusually vigorous and gifted soul. Twice I have read it from cover to cover
and with growing interest.

At twelve she is passionately in love with a duke, whom she sometimes
saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds many air
castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life together. She
prays passionately to see him again, would dazzle him on the stage, would
lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and would be an ideal wife. She

agonizes before the glass on whether or not she is pretty, and resolves to ask
some young man, but prefers to think well of herself even if it is an illusion;
constantly modulates over into passionate prayer to God to grant all her
wishes; is oppressed with despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in
God because she prayed Him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn
English, both of which He granted. At church some prayers and services
seem directly aimed at her; Paris now seems a frightful desert, and she has
no motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. She has freaky and very
changeable ideas of arranging the things in her room. When she hears of the
duke's marriage she almost throws herself over a bridge, prays God for
pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it horrible to dissemble her
feelings in public; goes through the torture of altering her prayer about the
duke. She is disgusted with common people, harrowed by jealousy, envy,
deceit and every hideous feeling, yet feels herself frozen in the depth, and
moving only on the surface. When her voice improves she welcomes it with
tears and feels an all-powerful queen. The man she loves should never
speak to another. Her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book
that ever was or ever will be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure
that no one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please her;
thinks herself a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in dreams her
future husband, and quarrels with her photographs.

In some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed,
everything smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the next
paragraph the fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and things seem
asleep and unreal. Her attempts to express her feelings drive her to
desperation because words are inadequate. She loves to weep, gives up to
despair to think of death, and finds everything transcendently exquisite. She
comes to despise men and wonder whether the good are always stupid and
the intelligent always false and saturated with baseness, but on the whole
believes that some time or other she is destined to meet one true good and

great man. Now she is inflated with pride of her ancestry, her gifts, and
would subordinate everybody and everything; she would never speak a
commonplace word, and then again feels that her life has been a failure and
she is destined to be always waiting. She falls on her knees sobbing,
praying to God with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost
vows to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to
devote her money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age;
wonders if she can ever love again. On throwing a bouquet from a window
into a crowd in the Corso a young man choked so beautifully a workman
who caught it that by that one act of strangling and snatching the bouquet
she fell in love. The young man calls and they see each other often. Now
she is clad from head to foot in an armor of cold politeness, now vanity and
now passion seem uppermost in their meetings. She wonders if a certain
amount of sin, like air, is necessary to a man to sustain life. Finally they
vow mutual love and Pietro leaves, and she begins to fear that she has
cherished illusions or been insulted; is torments at things unsaid or of her
spelling in French. She coughs and for three days has a new idea that she is
going to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in
her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders if God
takes intentions into account; resolves to read the New Testament, but can
not find one and reads Dumas instead. In novel-reading she imagines
herself the heroine of every scene; sees her lover and they plan their mode
of life together and at last kiss each other, but later she feels humiliated,
chilled, doubts if it is real love; studies the color of her lips to see if they
have changed; fears that she has compromised herself; has eye symptoms
that make her fear blindness. Once on reading the Testament she smiled and
clasped her hands, gazed upward, was no longer herself but in ecstasy; she
makes many programs for life; is haunted by the phrase "We live but once";
wants to live a dozen lives in one, but feels that she does not live one-fourth
of a life; has several spells of solitary illumination. At other times she

wishes to be the center of a salon and imagines herself to be so. She soars
on poets' wings, but often has hell in her heart; slowly love is vowed
henceforth to be a word without meaning to her. Although she suffers from
ennui, she realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and cannot
bear the thought of losing a moment of her life; criticizes her mother; scorns
marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman can attain, but pants
for glory; now hates, now longs to see new faces; thinks of disguising
herself as a poor girl and going out to seek her fortunes; thinks her mad
vanity is her devil; that her ambitions are justified by no results; hates
moderation in anything, would have intense and constant excitement or
absolute repose; at fifteen abandons her idea of the duke but wants an idol,
and finally decides to live for fame; studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to
gauge her success in life; tries target-shooting, hits every time and feels it to
be fateful; at times despises her mother because she is so easily influenced
by her; meets another man whose affection for her she thinks might be as
reverent as religion and who never profaned the purity of his life by a
thought, but finally drops him because the possible disappointment would
be unbearable; finds that the more unhappy any one is for love of us the
happier we are; wonders why she has weeping spells; wonders what love
that people talk so much about really is, and whether she is ever to know.
One night, at the age of seventeen, she has a fit of despair which vents itself
in moans until arising, she seizes the dining-room clock, rushes out and
throws it into the sea, when she becomes happy. "Poor clock!"

At another time she fears she has used the word love lightly and resolves
to no longer invoke God's help, yet in the next line prays Him to let her die
as everything is against her, her thoughts are incoherent, she hates herself
and everything is contemptible; but she wishes to die peacefully while some
one is singing a beautiful air of Verdi. Again she thinks of shaving her head
to save the trouble of arranging her hair; is crazed to think that every
moment brings her nearer death; to waste a moment of life is infamous, yet

she can trust no one; all the freshness of life is gone; few things affect her
now; she wonders how in the past she could have acted so foolishly and
reasoned so wisely; is proud that no advice in the world could ever keep her
from doing anything she wished. She thinks the journal of her former years
exaggerated and resolves to be moderate; wants to make others feel as she
feels; finds that the only cure for disenchantment with life is devotion to
work; fears her face is wearing an anxious look instead of the confident
expression which was its chief charm. "Impossible" is a hideous,
maddening word; to think of dying like a dog as most people do and leaving
nothing behind is a granite wall against which she every instant dashes her
head. If she loved a man, every expression of admiration for anything, or
anybody else in her presence would be a profanation. Now she thinks the
man she loves must never know what it is to be in want of money and must
purchase everything he wishes; must weep to see a woman want for
anything, and find the door of no palace or club barred to him. Art becomes
a great shining light in her life of few pleasures and many griefs, yet she
dares hope for nothing.

At eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in the
name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for her wishes. She would like to
be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the prix de Rome under the guise
of a man and marry Napoleon IV. On winning a medal for her pictures she
does nothing but laugh, cry, and dream of greatness, but the next day is
scolded and grows discouraged. She has an immense sense of growth and
transformation, so that not a trace of her old nature remains; feels that she
has far too much of some things, and far too little of others in her nature;
sees defects in her mother's character, whose pertinacity is like a disease;
realizes that one of her chief passions is to inspire rather than to feel love;
that her temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores that her family
expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her the stimulus of
expecting nothing; declares that she thanks a million thoughts for every

word that she writes; is disgusted with and sometimes absolutely hates
herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is right that
all things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for such
"abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is grieved to
feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual world, to see, learn,
and know everything; admires Balzac because he describes so frankly all
that he has felt; loves Fleury, who has shown her a wider horizon; still has
spells of admiring her dazzling complexion and deploring that she can not
go out alone; feels that she is losing her grip on art and also on God, who no
longer hears her prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is not famous at
thirty.

At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient cries,
calls on God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears that the
young French prince about whom she has spun romances was killed by the
Kaffirs; feels herself growing serious and sensible; despises death; realizes
that God is not what she thought, but is perhaps Nature and Life or is
perhaps Chance; she thinks out possible pictures she might paint; develops
a Platonic friendship for her professor; might marry an old man with
twenty-seven millions, but spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf
gradually, and at nineteen finds three grey hairs; has awful remorse for
days, when she cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes;
makes many good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream;
has spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor finds a serious lung
trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and flannel, she at
first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror of her friends,
but gradually does all that is necessary; feels herself too precocious and
doomed; deplores especially that consumption will cost her her good looks;
has fits of intense anger alternating with tears; concludes that death is
annihilation; realizes the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her
that some time or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and

returns to belief in miracle, and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; distributes
one thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow
through her brain at night and the strange sensations by day. Her eye
symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; she grows superstitious,
believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to embrace and
make up with her mother; at times defies God and death; sees a Spanish
bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of human cowardice, but
has a strange intoxication with blood and would like to thrust a lance into
the neck of every one she meets; coquets a great deal with the thought of
marriage; takes up her art and paints a few very successful pictures; tries to
grapple with the terrible question, "What is my unbiased opinion
concerning myself?" pants chiefly for fame. When the other lung is found
diseased the diary becomes sometimes more serious, sometimes more
fevered; she is almost racked to find some end in life; shall she marry, or
paint? and at last finds much consolation in the visits of Bastien-Lepage,
who comes to see her often while he is dying of some gastric trouble. She
keeps up occasional and often daily entries in her journal until eleven days
before her death, occurring in October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three, and
precipitated by a cold incurred while making an open-air sketch.

The confessional outpourings of Mary MacLane[28] constitute a unique
and valuable adolescent document, despite the fact that it seems throughout
affected and written for effect; however, it well illustrates a real type,
although perhaps hardly possible save in this country, and was inspired very
likely by the preceding.

She announces at the outset that she is odd, a genius, an extreme egotist;
has no conscience; despises her father, "Jim MacLane of selfish memory";
loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her strength and grace of body,
although her daily life is an "empty damned weariness." She is a female

Napoleon passionately desiring fame; is both a philosopher and a coward;
her heart is wooden; although but nineteen, she feels forty; desires
happiness even more than fame, for an hour of which she would give up at
once fame, money, power, virtue, honor, truth, and genius to the devil,
whose coming she awaits. She discusses her portrait, which constitutes the
frontispiece; is glad of her good strong body, and still awaits in a wild,
frenzied impatience the coming of the devil to take her sacrifice, and to
whom she would dedicate her life. She loves but one in all the world, an
older "anemone" lady, once her teacher. She ran not distinguish between
right and wrong; love is the only thing real which will some day bring joy,
but it is agony to wait. "Oh, dame! damn! damn! damn! every living thing
in the world!—the universe be damned!" herself included. She is
"marvelously deep," but thanks the good devil who has made her without
conscience and virtue so that she may take her happiness when it comes.
Her soul seeks but blindly, for nothing answers. How her happiness will
seethe, quiver, writhe, shine, dance, rush, surge, rage, blare, and wreak with
love and light when it comes!

The devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel,
conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and would
marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds imaginary
conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon she will commit
suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. In Butte, Montana,
where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers, the beer jerkers,
biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and barrenness, but finds
everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the bathroom make her wild and
profane. She flirts with death at the top of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out
the stages of decomposition if she yielded herself to Death, who would
dearly love to have her. She confesses herself a thief on several occasions,
but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor.
Sometimes her "very good legs" carry her out into the country, where she

has imaginary love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary,
and cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen.
She has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind devil,
deliver me"—as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly
hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls, lisle-thread stockings, the books of A.C.
Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers, soft old bachelors and widowers, nice
young men, tin spoons, false teeth, thin shoes, etc. She does not seem real to
herself everything is a blank. Though she doubts everything else, she will
keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her
heart. When something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is
for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that people call her
peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can fascinate and
charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for Messalina. She
most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in the sky. "I would live
about seven years of judicious badness, and then death if you will." "I long
to cultivate the of badness in me." She describes the fascination of making
and eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive;
discusses her figure. "In the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric
handkerchiefs cunningly distributed." She discusses her foot, her beautiful
hair, her hips; describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of
Napoleon that she keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows she
would give up even her marvelous genius far one dear, bright day free from
loneliness. When her skirts need sewing, she simply pins them; this lasts
longer, and had she mended them with needle and thread she would have
been sensible, which she hates. As she walks over the sand one day she
vows that she would like a man to come so be that he was strong and a
perfect villain and she would pray him to lead her to what the world calls
her ruin. Nothing is of consequence to her except to be rid of unrest and
pain. She would be positively and not merely negatively wicked. To poison
her soul would rouse her mental power. "Oh, to know just once what it is to

be loved!" "I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived,"
yet she often thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares.
The world is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is
starving for love.

Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is desperately
in earnest.[29] She began to teach school in a squalid, dismal Italian village,
and at eighteen to write the poetry that has made her famous. She lived in a
dim room back of a stable, up two flights, where the windows were not
glass but paper, and where she seems to have been, like her mother, a mill
head before she was a teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of
Duse with enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountain, or even a hill,
lake, or large city, but she had read of them. After she began to write,
friends gave her two dream days in the city. Then she returned, put on her
wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to spell. The poetry
she writes is from the heart of her own experience.

She craved "the kiss of genius and of light;" but the awful figure of
misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes:

"I have no name—my home a hovel damp;
I grew up from the mire;
Wretched and outcast folk my family,
And yet within me burns a flame of fire."

There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. The
black abyss attracts her yet she is softened by a child's caress. She laughs at
the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over thin, wan children
without bread. Her whole life goes into song. The boy criminal on the street
fascinates her and she would kiss him. She writes of jealousy as a ghost of

vengeance. If death comes, she fears "that the haggard doctor will dissect
my naked corpse," and pictures herself dying on the operating-table like a
stray dog and her well-made body "disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too
eager blade" as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and
still gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones, and veins at will,
wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the
mystery of pain, until from her "dead breast gurgles a gasp of malediction."
Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of crying blood dripping
from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty falls, on her heart; the sultry
factories where "monsters, of steel, huge engines, snort all day," and where
the pungent air poisons the blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the
mason who felt from a high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose
funeral she attends, all inspire her to sing occasionally the songs of
enfranchised labor. Misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when
gloomy pinions had overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with
sharp nails all the hope from her breast with which she had defied it. A
wretched old man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is
his happy though humble prime. There is the song of the pickaxe
brandished in revolution when mobs cry "Peace, labor bread," and in mines
of industry beneath the earth. She loves the "defeated" in whose house no
fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes of the mutilation of a
woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen years "a loom, two handsome
eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to me." She is
inspired by a master of the forge beating a red-hot bar, with his bare neck
swelled. He is her demon, her God, and her pride in him is ecstasy. She
describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense that they fight and bite,
and the pure joy of a guileless, intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She
longs for infinite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop
wildly on her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in
the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the

immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe,
millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice of lofty
mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her "sad twenty
years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent." She imagines
herself springing into the water which closes over her, while her naked soul,
ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely dale. She imprecates the
licentious world of crafty burghers, coquettes, gamblers, well-fed
millionaires, cursed geese and serpents that make the cowardly vile world,
and whom she would smite in the face with her indignant verse. "Thou
crawlest and I soar." She chants the champions of the spade, hammer, pick,
though they are ground and bowed with toil, disfigured within, with
furrowed brows. She pants for war with outrage and with wrong; questions
the abyss for its secret; hears moans and flying shudders; and sees
phantoms springing from putrid tombs. The full moon is an old malicious
spy, peeping stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a cursed cage,
and prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light, and let
her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite space will
satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent spirit might bear
her away on unbridled wings. In one poem she apostrophizes Marie
Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who
now is in her coffin among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth.
She would be possessed by her and thrilled as by an electric current. A
dwarf beggar wrings her heart with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed.
Though a daring peasant, she will be free and sing out her pæan to the sun,
though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise of
hammers and wheels.

Literary men who record their experiences during this stage seem to
differ from women in several important respects. First, they write with less
abandon. I can recall no male MacLanes. A Bashkirtseff would be less

impossible, and a Negri with social reform in her heart is still less so. But
men are more prone to characterize their public metamorphoses later in life,
when they are a little paled, and perhaps feel less need of confessionalism
for that reason. It would, however, be too hazardous to elaborate this
distinction too far. Secondly and more clearly, men tend to vent their
ephebic calentures more in the field of action. They would break the old
moorings of home and strike out new careers, or vent their souls in efforts
and dreams of reconstructing the political, industrial, or social world. Their
impracticabilities are more often in the field of practical life and remoter
from their own immediate surroundings. This is especially true in our
practical country, which so far lacks subjective characterizations of this age
of eminent literary merit, peculiarly intense as it is here. Thirdly, they erupt
in a greater variety of ways, and the many kinds of genius and talent that
now often take possession of their lives like fate are more varied and
individual. This affords many extreme contrasts, as, e.g., between Trollope's
pity for, and Goethe's apotheosis of his youth; Mill's loss of feeling, and
Jefferies's unanalytic, passionate outbursts of sentiment; the esthetic
ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive religious emancipation of
Fielding Hall; the moral and religious supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who
was a reincarnation of medieval monkhood, and the riotous storminess of
Müller and Ebers; the abnormalities and precocity of De Quincey, and the
steady, healthful growth of Patterson; the simultaneity of a fleshly and
spiritual love in Keller and Goethe, and the duality of Pater, with his great
and tyrannical intensification of sensation for nature and the sequent
mysticity and symbolism. In some it is fulminating but episodic, in others
gradual and lifelong like the advent of eternal spring. Fourth, in their
subjective states women outgrow less in their consciousness, and men
depart farther from their youth, in more manifold ways. Lastly, in its
religious aspects, the male struggles more with dogma, and his
enfranchisement from it is more intellectually belabored. Yet, despite all

these differences, the analogies between the sexes are probably yet more
numerous, more all-pervasive. All these biographic facts reveal nothing not
found in questionnaire returns from more ordinary youth, so that for our
purposes they are only the latter, writ large because superior minds only
utter what all more inwardly feel. The arrangement by nationality which
follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference unless it be the above
American peculiarity.

In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey[30] remembered
feeling that life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to
which time the influence of his sister three years older had brooded over
him.

His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur before
he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tendencies were
constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was upon the first
glimpse that this was a world of evil. He had been brought up in great
seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and oppression in a silent garden
with three sisters, but the rumor that a female servant had treated one of
them rudely just before her death plunged him into early pessimism. He felt
that little Jane would come back certainly in the spring with the roses, and
he was glad that his utter misery with the blank anarchy confusion which
her death brought could not be completely remembered. He stole into the
chamber where her corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the saddest
he ever heard, that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand
centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind he often had heard
since, and it brought back the open summer window and the corpse. A vault
above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed there, standing by her,
he knew not how long; a worm that could not die was at his heart, for this
was the holy love between children that could not perish. The funeral was

full of darkness and despair for him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed
into the heavens to see his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was
alone. Thus, before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already
adolescent, although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became
dominant and his awakening to it was hard.

As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, he
was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a number
of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters in calamity,
but he found in them humanity, disinterested generosity, courage, and
fidelity. One night, after he had walked the streets for weeks with one of
these friendless girls who had not completed her sixteenth year, as they sat
on the steps of a house, he grew very ill, and had she not rushed to buy from
her slender purse cordials and tenderly ministered to and revived him, he
would have died. Many years later he used to wander past this house, and
he recalled with real tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to
meet the "noble-minded Ann ——" with whom he had so often conversed
familiarly "more Socratico," whose betrayer he had vainly sought to punish,
and yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her some authentic
message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness.

His much older brother came home in his thirty-ninth year to die. He had
been unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was an inspiration,
yet he was hostile to everything pusillanimous, haughty, aspiring, ready to
fasten a quarrel on his shadow for running before, at first inclined to reduce
his boy brother to a fag, but finally before his death became a great
influence in his life. Prominent were the fights between De Quincey and
another older brother on the one hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the
other, a fight incessantly renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory
now on one and now on the other side; fought with stones and sticks, where
thrice he was taken prisoner, where once one of the factory women kissed

him, to the great delight of his heart. He finally invented a kingdom like
Hartley Coleridge, called Gom Broon. He thought first that it had no
location, but finally because his brother's imaginary realm was north and he
wanted wide water between them, his was in the far south. It was only two
hundred and seventy miles in circuit, and he was stunned to be told by his
brother one day that his own domain swept south for eighty degrees, so that
the distance he had relied on vanished. Here, however, he continued to rule
for well or ill, raising taxes, keeping an imaginary standing army, fishing
herring and selling the product of his fishery for manure, and experiencing
how "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." He worried over his
obligations to Gom Broon, and the shadow froze into reality, and although
his brother's kingdom Tigrosylvania was larger, his was distinguished for
eminent men and a history not to be ashamed of. A friend had read Lord
Monboddo's view that men had sprung from apes, and suggested that the
inhabitants of Gom Broon had tails, so that the brother told him that his
subjects had not emerged from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate
the tails. They must be made to sit down for six hours a day as a beginning.
Abdicate he would not, though all his subjects had three tails apiece. They
had suffered together. Vain was his brother's suggestion that they have a
Roman toga to conceal their ignominious appendages. He was greatly
interested in two scrofulous idiots, who finally died, and feared that his
subjects were akin to them.

John Stuart Mill's Autobiography presents one of the most remarkable
modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. No boy ever had
more diligent and earnest training than his father gave him or responded
better. He can not remember when he began to learn Greek, but was told
that it was at the age of three. The list of classical authors alone that he read
in the original, to say nothing of history, political, scientific, logical, and
other works before he was twelve, is perhaps unprecedented in all history.

He associated with his father and all his many friends on their own level,
but modestly ascribes everything to his environment, insists that in natural
gifts he is other below than above par, and declares that everything he did
could be done by every boy of average capacity and healthy physical
constitution. His father made the Greek virtue of temperance or moderation
cardinal, and thought human life "a poor thing at best after the freshness of
youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." He scorned "the intense" and
had only contempt for strong emotion.

In his teens Mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies, and
devoted to the propagation of the theories of Bentham, Ricardo, and
associationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life, viz., to
reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, permanent, and assured
for the future, and the idea of struggling to promote utilitarianism seemed
an inspiring program for life. But in the autumn of 1826, when he was
twenty years of age, he felt into "a dull state of nerves," where he could no
longer enjoy and what had produced pleasure seemed insipid; "the state, I
should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are when smitten by
their first 'conviction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put
the question directly to myself; 'Suppose that all your objects in life were
realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are
looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant; would
this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible self-
consciousness distinctly answered, 'No.' At this my heart sank within me:
the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my
happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The
end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in
the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the
cloud would pass away of itself, but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign
remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a

renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all
companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me
even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to
grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'—I was not
then acquainted with them—exactly described my case:

"'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.'

"In vain I sought relief from my favorite books, those memorials of past
nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength
and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed
feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my love of
mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought
no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one
sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been
in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting or in
anyway respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy.
Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious.
The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But
there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of such
assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have
recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a
case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no
knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if
he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal
it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without
any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result, and I saw no use in

giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure
was probably irremediable, and, at all event, beyond the power of his
remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope
of making my condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly
intelligible to myself, and the more I dwelt upon it the more hopeless it
appeared."

He now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit of
analysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt "stranded at the
commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but
no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully
fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just
as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to
have dried up within me as completely as those of benevolence." His vanity
had been gratified at too early an age, and, like all premature pleasures, they
had caused indifference, until he despaired of creating any fresh association
of pleasure with any objects of human dire. Meanwhile, dejected and
melancholy as he was through the winter, he went on mechanically with his
tasks; thought he found in Coleridge the first description of what he was
feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had made him a being
unique and apart. "I asked myself if I could or if I was bound to go on
living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to
myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year." But
within about half that time, in reading a pathetic page of how a mere boy
felt that he could save his family and take the place of all they had lost, a
vivid conception of the scene came over him and he was moved to tears.
From that moment, his burden grew lighter. He saw that his heart was not
dead and that he still had some stuff left of which character and happiness
are made; and although there were several later lapses, some of which
lasted many months, he was never again as miserable as he had been.

These experience left him changed in two respects. He had a new theory
of life, having much in common with the anti-consciousness theory of
Carlyle. He still held happiness the end of life, but thought it must be aimed
at indirectly and taken incidentally. The other change was that for the first
time he gave its proper place to internal culture of the individual, especially
the training of the feelings which became now cardinal. He relished and felt
the power of poetry and art; was profoundly moved by music; fell in love
with Wordsworth and with nature, and his later depressions were best
relieved by the power of rural beauty, which wrought its charm not because
of itself but by the states and feelings it aroused. His ode on the intimations
of immortality showed that he also had felt that the first freshness of
youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought and found compensation. He
had thus come to a very different standpoint from that of his father, who had
up to this time formed his mind and life, and developed on this basis his
unique individuality.

Jefferies, when eighteen, began his "Story of My Heart,"[31] which he
said was an absolutely true confession of the stages of emotion in a soul
from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and which stood
face to face with nature and the unknown.

His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he
frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air. "Lying
down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air and the
distant sea…. I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. I
addressed the sun, desiring the sole equivalent of his light and brilliance, his
endurance, and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into
its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the
unobtainable flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested,
for pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an emotion

of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it." He prayed by
the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he touched; the dust which he let
fall through his fingers; was filled with "a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus.
With this inflatus I prayed…. I hid my face in the grass; I was wholly
prostrated; I lost myself in the wrestle…. I see now that what I labored for
was soul life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his
face into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt
down into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down to its
center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds, he used for
prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of life." His "Lyra"
prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; enjoy more bodily
pleasure and live long and find power to execute his designs. He often tried,
but failed for years to write at least a meager account of these experiences.
He felt himself immortal just as he felt beauty. He was in eternity already;
the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the
grass, seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a
pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and
broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but he
feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be too
costly. Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature, wrested
from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under conditions as
primitive as those of the cave man, and his most repeated prayer was "Give
me the deepest soul life."

In other moods he felt the world outré-human, and his mind could by no
twist be fitted to the cosmos. Ugly, designless creatures caused him to cease
to look for deity in nature, where all happens by chance. He at length
concluded there is something higher than soul and above deity, and better
than God, for which he searched and labored. He found favorite thinking
places, to which he made pilgrimages, where he "felt out into the depths of
the ether." His frame could not bear the labor his heart demanded. Work of

body was his meat and drink. "Never have I had enough of it. I wearied
long before I was satisfied, and weariness did not bring a cessation of
desire, the thirst was still there. I rode; I used the ax; I split tree-trunks with
wedges; my arms tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed against the
physical weariness." Had he been indefinitely stronger, he would have
longed for more strength. He was often out of doors all day and often half
the night; wanted more sunshine; wished the day was sixty hours long; took
pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's destroyer but its
renewer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled with the problem of the
origin of his soul and destiny, but could find no solution; revolted at the
assertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of intellect and humanity
could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner." He
discovered that no one ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do
not even know what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite,
but lies in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll
back the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice for
his support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future nine-tenths of the time
will be leisure, and to that end he will work with all his heart. "I was not
more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to
me from all the visible universe, and indefinable aspirations filled me."

Interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that
the seventeen years which intervened between the beginning of these
experiences and their final record, coupled with the perhaps unconscious
tendency toward literary effect, detract more or less from their value as
documents of adolescent nature.

Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of "The Soul of a People," has since written
a book[32] in which, beginning with many definitions of Christianity,
weighing the opinion of those who think all our advance is made because

of, against those who think it in spite of Christianity, he proceeds to give the
story of a boy, probably himself, who till twelve was almost entirely reared
by women and with children younger than himself.

He was sickly, and believed not in the Old but in the New Testament; in
the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted and lived by;
that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be a snare; that the ideal
life was that of a poor curate, working hard and unhappy. At twelve, he
went to a boarding-school, passed from a woman's world into a man's, out
of the New Testament into the Old, out of dreams into reality. War was a
glorious opportunity, and all followed the British victories, which were
announced publicly. Big boys were going to Sandhurst or Woolwich; there
were parties; and the school code never turned the other cheek. Wars were
God's storms, stirring stagnant natures to new life; wealth was worshiped;
certain lies were an honor; knowledge was an extremely desirable thing—
all this was at first new and delightful, but extremely wicked. Sunday was
the only other Old Testament rule, but was then forgotten. Slowly a
repugnance of religion in all its forms arose. He felt his teachers hypocrites;
he raised no alarm, "for he was hardly conscious that his anchor had
dragged or that he had lost hold" of it forever. At eighteen, he read Darwin
and found that if he were right, Genesis was wrong; man had risen, not
fallen; if a part was wrong, the whole was. If God made the world, the devil
seemed to rule it; prayer can not influence him; the seven days of creation
were periods, Heaven knows how long. Why did all profess and no one
believe religion? Why is God so stern and yet so partial, and how about the
Trinity? Then explanations were given. Heaven grew repulsive, as a place
for the poor, the maimed, the stupid, the childish, and those unfit for earth
generally.

Faiths came from the East. "The North has originated only Thor, Odin,
Balder, Valkyres." The gloom and cold drive man into himself; do not open
him. In the East one can live in quiet solitude, with no effort, close to
nature. The representatives of all faiths wear ostentatiously their badges,
pray in public, and no one sneers at all religions. Oriental faiths have no
organization; there is no head of Hinduism, Buddhism, or hardly of
Mohammedanism. There are no missions, but religion grows rankly from a
rich soil, so the boy wrote three demands: a reasonable theory of the
universe, a workable and working code of conduct, and a promise of
something desirable hereafter. So he read books and tried to make a system.

On a hill, in a thunder-storm in the East, he realized how Thor was born.
Man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. Deny eyes, legs, and
body of the Deity, and nothing is left. God as an abstract spirit is
unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no God, only law. Necessity, blind
force, law, or a free personal will—that is the alternative. Freedom limits
omnipotence; the two can never mix. "The German Emperor's God,
clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a German Pickelhaube and
swearing German oaths," is not satisfactory. Man's God is what he admires
most in himself; he can be propitiated, hence atonement; you can not break
a law, but you can study it. Inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. Perhaps
both destiny and freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of light.

Thor had no moral code; the Greeks were unmoral. Jehovah at first asked
only fear, reverence, and worship. This gives no guide to life. Most codes
are directed against a foe and against pain. Truth, mercy, courtesy—these
were slowly added to reverence; then sanitary rules, hence castes. Two
codes, those of Christ and Buddha, tower above all others. They are the
same in praising not wealth, greatness, or power, but purity, renunciation of
the world, as if one fitted one's self for one by being unfitted for the other
world.

Is heaven a bribe? Its ideals are those of children, of girl angels, white
wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "Surely there is nothing in all
the world so babyish." One can hardly imagine a man with a deep voice,
with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those baby faces. If happiness
in any act or attitude is perfect, it will last forever. Where is due the
weariness or satiety? But if happiness be perfect, this is impossible; so life
would be monotony akin to annihilation. But life is change, and change is
misery. There is effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that
passes understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because
no enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. It is the shadows
and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. No man that ever
lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any heaven, would
choose the latter. Men die for many things, but all fear the beyond. Thus no
religion gives us an intelligible First Cause, a code or a heaven that we
want. The most religious man is the peasant listening to the angelus, putting
out a little ghi for his God; the woman crying in the pagoda. Thus we can
only turn to the hearts of men for the truth of religion.

Biographies and autobiographies furnish many photographic glimpses of
the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years.

Anthony Trollope's autobiography[33] is pitiful. He was poor and
disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his fellow
pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen he walked
three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a sizar he seemed a
wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill, sitting next the sons of
big peers. All were against him, and he was allowed to join no games, and
learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing but a little Greek and Latin. Once
only, goaded to desperation, he rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was
never able to overcome the isolation of his school position, and while he

coveted popularity with an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed
exceedingly to excel in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know
nothing of them. He remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in
writing, arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their
ferules and they him. He believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any
human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day
at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I have obtained them all."
Prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one. For twelve years of
tuition, he says, "I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson."

At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on …
without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably
happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been
removed from the real misery of school, but had not a single aspiration
regarding his future. Three of his household were dying of consumption,
and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and divided her time between
pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when she was seventy-six she had written
one hundred and forty volumes, the first of which was not written till she
was fifty.

Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his father's
life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the dying household
and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them to die under. Anthony
got a position at the post-office without an examination. He knew no French
nor science; was a bad speller and worse writer and could not have
sustained an examination on any subject. Still he could not bear idleness,
and was always going about with some castle in the air finely built in his
mind, carrying on for weeks and years the same continuous story; binding
himself down to certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero,
excluding everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls
dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the post-

office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fictitious story and
to live in a entirely outside imaginative life. During these seven years he
acquired a character of irregularity and grew reckless.

Mark Pattison[34] shows us how his real life began in the middle teens,
when his energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself"; "to form my
own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the bondage of
unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think,
constituted the whole of my mental fabric." He entered upon life with a
"hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts "something of the steps
by which I emerged from that frozen condition." He believes that to
"remember the dreams and confusions of childhood and never to lose the
recollection of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the great
gifts of the poetic character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily
true of George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of twelve on, a
Fellowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became a
commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so immature
and unimpressionable.

William Hale White[35] learned little at school, save Latin and good
penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves—Sundays and week
days—and he reflects at some length upon the immense dangers of the early
teens; the physiological and yet subtler psychic penalties of error;
callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the conscience; and deplores the
misery which a little instruction might have saved him. At fourteen he
underwent conversion, understood in his sect to be a transforming miracle,
releasing higher and imprisoning lower powers. He compares it to the
saving of a mind from vice by falling in love with a woman who is adored,
or the reclamation of a young woman from idleness and vanity by
motherhood. But as a boy he was convinced of many things which were
mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for the clanship of being

marked off from the world and of walking home with certain girls. He
learned to say in prayer that there was nothing good in him, that he was
rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of putrefying sores; but no one took
him at his word and expelled him from society, but thought the better of
him. Soon he began to study theology, but found no help in suppressing
tempestuous lust, in understanding the Bible, or getting his doubts
answered, and all the lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. An infidel was a
monster whom he had rarely ever seen. At nineteen he began to preach, but
his heart was untouched till he read Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and this
recreated a living God for him, melted his heart to tears, and made him long
for companionship; its effect was instantly seen in his preaching, and soon
made him slightly suspected as heretical.[36]

John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-
like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at
boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate
to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their
studies, bought bits of painted glass for their windows and illuminated
crucifixes with gold dust and vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was
somewhat of an epoch. Preparation was like a plowshare, although it turned
up nothing valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim
way he felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in
faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in Plato
removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray Gothic
churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.

Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own, in
the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn blossoms,
"absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of "seemingly exclusive
predominance of interest in beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of
the senses"; and his later absorbing efforts to estimate the proportion of the

sensuous and ideal, assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and
occasions; associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between
himself and things, till he became more and more "unable to care for or
think of soul but as in an actual body"; comforted in the contemplation of
death by the thought of flesh turning to violets and almost oppressed by the
pressure of the sensible world, his longings for beauty intensifying his fear
of death. He loved to gaze on dead faces in the Paris Morgue although the
haunt of them made the sunshine sickly for days, and his long fancy that
they had not really gone nor were quite motionless, but led a secret, half
fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts
with no great good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate
the ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. His religious
nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in Bible personages in some
indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self, whose
companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a constant
substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met
anywhere. "A deep mysticity brooded over real things and partings,"
marriages and many acts and accidents of life. "The very colors of things
became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of penitence and
peace." "For a time he walked through the world in a sustained, not
unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual recognition, beside every
circumstance and event of life, of its celestial correspondent."

In D. C. Boulger's Life of General Charles Gordon[37] he records how,
like Nelson Clive, his hero was prone to boys' escapades and outbreaks that
often made him the terror of his superiors. He was no bookworm, but
famous as the possessor of high spirits, very often involved in affairs that
necessitated discipline, and seemed greatly out of harmony with the popular
idea of the ascetic of Mount Carmel. As a schoolboy he made wonderful
squirts "that would wet you through in a minute." One Sunday twenty-seven
panes of glass in a large storehouse were broken with screws shot through

them by his cross-bow "for ventilation." Ringing bells and pushing young
boys in, butting an unpopular officer severely in the stomach with his head
and taking the punishment, hitting a bully with a clothes-brush and being
put back six months in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; these are
the early outcrops of one side of his dual character. Although more soldier
than saint, he had a very cheery, genial side. He was always ready to take
even the severest punishment for all his scrapes due to excessive high
spirits. When one of his superiors declared that he would never make an
officer, he felt his honor touched, and his vigorous and expressive reply was
to tear the epaulets from his shoulders and throw them at his superior's feet.
He had already developed some of the rather moody love of seclusion that
was marked later, but religion did not strike him deeply enough to bring
him into the church until he was twenty-one, when he took his first
sacrament. On one occasion he declined promotion within his reach because
he would have had to pass a friend to get it. He acted generally on his
impulses, which were perhaps better than his judgments, took great pleasure
in corresponding on religious topics with his elder sister, and early formed
the habit of excessive smoking which gravely affected his health later. His
was the rare combination of inner repose and confidence, interrupted by
spells of gaiety.

Williamson, in his "Life of Holman Hunt,"[38] tells us that at thirteen he
was removed from school as inapt in study. He began to spend his time in
drawing in his copybooks. He was made clerk to an auctioneer, who
fortunately encouraged his passion, and at sixteen was with a calico printer.
Here he amused himself by drawing flies on the window, which his
employer tried to brush off. There was the greatest home opposition to his
studying art. After being rejected twice, he was admitted at seventeen to the
Academy school as a probationer, and the next year, in 1845, as a student.
Here he met Millais and Rossetti and was able to relieve the strain on his

mind, which the worry of his father concerning his course caused him, and
very soon his career began.

At thirteen Fitzjames Stephen[39] roused himself to thrash a big boy who
had long bullied him, and became a fighter. In his sixteenth year, he grew
nearly five inches, but was so shy and timid at Eton that he says, "I was like
a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys"; but in the
reaction to the long abuse his mind was steeled against oppression, tyranny,
and every kind of unfairness. He read Paine's "Age of Reason," and went
"through the Bible as a man might go through a wood, cutting down trees.
The priests can stick them in again, but they will not make them grow."

Dickens has given us some interesting adolescents. Miss Dingwall in
"Sketches by Boz," "very sentimental and romantic"; the tempery young
Nickleby, who, at nineteen, thrashed Squeers; Barnaby Rudge, idiotic and
very muscular; Joe Willet, persistently treated as a boy till he ran away to
join the army and married Dolly Varden, perhaps the most exuberant, good-
humored, and beautiful girl in all the Dickens gallery; Martin Chuzzlewit,
who also ran away, as did David Copperfield, perhaps the most true to
adolescence because largely reminiscent of the author's own life; Steerforth,
a stranger from home, and his victim, Little Emily; and to some extent Sam
Weller, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Podsnap, the Artful
Dodger, and Charley Bates; while Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and Little
Dorrit, Joe and Turveydrop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as
they were, show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most of his
characters, however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be hardly true
to life.[40]

In the "Romance of John Inglesant,"[41] by J. H. Shorthouse, we have a
remarkable picture of an unusually gifted youth, who played an important
rôle in the days of Cromwell and King Charles, and who was long poised in

soul between the Church of Rome and the English party. He was very
susceptible to the fascination of superstition, romance, and day-dreaming,
and at eleven absorbed his master's Rosicrucian theories of spiritual
existence where spirits held converse with each other and with mankind. A
mystic Platonism, which taught that Pindar's story of the Argo was only a
recipe for the philosopher's stone, fascinated him at fourteen. The
philosophy of obedience and of the subjection of reason to authority was
early taught him, and he sought to live from within, hearing only the divine
law, as the worshipers of Cybele heard only the flutes. His twin brother
Eustace was an active worldling, and soon he followed him to court as page
to the Queen, but delighted more and more in wandering apart and building
air castles. For a time he was entirely swayed, and his life directed, by a
Jesuit Father, who taught him the crucifix and the rosary. At sixteen the
doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He struggled to find the path
of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic forms of
worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop the
divine nature within him and to attain the beatific vision. Soon he was
introduced to the "Protestant nunnery," as it was called, where the venerable
Mr. Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's, was greatly taken by Inglesant's
accomplishments and grace of manner. Various forms of extremely High
Church yet Protestant worship were celebrated here each day with great
devotion, until he became disgusted with Puritanism and craved to
participate in the office of mass. At this point, however, he met Mr. Hobbes,
whose rude but forcible condemnation of papacy restrained him from
casting his lot with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real apparition of
the just executed Strafford. The last act of his youth, which we can note
here, was soon after he was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming
and saintly Mary Collet. The rough Puritan Thorne had made her proposals
at which she revolted, but she and Inglesant confessed love to each other;
she saw, however, that they had a way of life marked out for themselves by

an inner impulse and light. This calling they must follow and abandon love,
and now John plunged into the war on the side of the King.

W. J. Stillman[42] has written with unusual interest and candor the story
of his own early life.

As a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught the whip and
lashed the horses in an unconscious delirium, and always remembered this
as one of the most vivid experiences of his life. He had a period of nature
worship. His first trout was a delirium, and he danced about wildly and
furiously. He relates his very vivid impressions of the religious orthodoxy
in which he was reared, especially revival sermons; his occasional
falsehoods to escape severe punishment; his baptism at ten or eleven in a
river in midwinter; the somberness of his intellectual life, which was long
very apathetic; his phenomenal stupidity for years; his sudden insurrections
in which he thrashed bullies at school; his fear that he should be sent home
in disgrace for bad scholarship; and how at last, after seven years of
dulness, at the age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away suddenly, and
before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than it took to
recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy
story. My memory came back so distinctly that I could recite long poems
after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant
examination at the end of the term than I; and, at the end of the second
term, I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical,
from beginning to end without a question, and the class examination was
recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for
many years. I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this
curious phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some
one interested in psychology."

A. Bronson Alcott[43] was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He began a
diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much restlessness at
the age of nineteen left home with two trunks for Virginia to peddle on foot,
hoping to teach school. Here he had a varying and often very hard
experience for years.

Hornes Bushnell's[44] parents represented the Episcopal and liberal
Congregational Church. His early life was spent on a farm and in attending
a country academy. He became profoundly interested in religion in the early
teens and developed extreme interest in nature. At seventeen, while tending
a carding machine, he wrote a paper on Calvinism. At nineteen he united
with the church, and entered Yale when he was twenty-one, in 1823. Later
he tried to teach school, but left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall;
worked on a journal, but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for
a year, became a tutor at Yale, experienced a reconversion and entered the
ministry.

A well-known American, who wishes his name withheld, writes me of his
youth as follows:

"First came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. My mind was
full of adventure, dreams of underground passages, and imprisoned beauties
whom I rescued. I wrote a story in red ink, which I never read, but a girl
friend did, and called it magnificent. The girl fever, too, made me idealize
first one five years older than I, later another three years older, and still later
one of my own age. I would have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or
two; was extremely gallant and the hero of many romances for two, but all
the time so bashful that I scarcely dared speak to one of them, and no
schoolmate ever suspected it all. Music also became a craze at fourteen.
Before, I had hated lessons, now I was thrilled and would be a musician,

despite my parents' protests. I practised the piano furiously; wrote music
and copied stacks of it; made a list of several hundred pieces and tunes,
including everything musical I knew; would imagine a crowded hall, where
I played and swayed with fine airs. The vast assembly applauded and would
not let me go, but all the time it was a simple piece and I was a very
ordinary player. At fifty years, this is still a relic. I now in hours of fatigue
pound the piano and dreamily imagine dazed and enchanted audiences.
Then came oratory, and I glowed and thrilled in declaiming Webster's
"Reply to Hayne," "Thanatopsis," Byron's "Darkness," Patrick Henry, and
best of all "The Maniac," which I spouted in a fervid way wearing a flaming
red necktie. I remember a fervid scene with myself on a high solitary hill
with a bald summit two miles from home, where I once went because I had
been blamed. I tried to sum myself up, inventory my good and bad points. It
was Sunday, and I was keyed up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer, idealization
of life; all grew all in a jumble. My resolve to go to college was clinched
then and there, and that hill will always remain my Pisgah and Moriah,
Horeb and Sinai all in one. I paced back and forth in the wind and shouted,
'I will make people know and revere me; I will do something'; and called
everything to witness my vow that I never again would visit this spot till all
was fulfilled." "Alas!" he says, "I have never been there since. Once, to a
summer party who went, I made excuse for not keeping this rendezvous. It
was too sacramental. Certainly it was a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten
experience there all alone, when something of great moment to me certainly
took place in my soul."

In the biography of Frederick Douglas[45] we are told that when he was
about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to seek
means of escaping it. He became interested in religion, was converted, and
dreamed of and prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity he extracted
knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of his
acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and was beaten

until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he fought and
whipped the brutal overseer Covey, who would have invoked the law,
which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for shame of
having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection that there was
no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he escape into the new
world of freedom.

Jacob Riis[46] "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth" when
he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a tumultuous
pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made
some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly." She played
among the lumber where he worked, and he watched her so intently that he
scarred his shinbone with an adze he should have been minding. He cut off
his forefinger with an ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and
once fell off a roof when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. At
another time he ordered her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to
take his daughter home a few minutes before the appointed hour of
midnight. Young as he was, he was large and tried to run away to join the
army, but finally went to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a
builder, and here had an interview with Hans Christian Andersen.

Ellery Sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran on
stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he attempted to
enlist on the privateer Terrible. He was restless at home for years, and
shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen.

Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from
"Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. Ward's
"David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy Purcell; Thackeray's
Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of the far older and scheming
Fanny Fotheringay; David in James Lane Allen's "Reign of Law," who read

Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College and the church, and finally
was engaged to Gabriella; and scores more might be enumerated. There is
even Sonny,[47] who, rude as he was and poorly as he did in all his studies,
at the same age when he began to keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a
bow of ribbon to the buggy whip, and grew interested in manners, passing
things, putting on his coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his
menagerie of pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped him
and got help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the
forest and its occupants, all of which is very bien trouvé if not historic truth.

Two singular reflections always rearise in reading Goethe's
autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place, with its
ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in close quarters in the
little province where he lived, were especially adapted to educate children
and absorb them in externals; and, second, that this wonderful boy had an
extreme propensity for moralizing and drawing lessons of practical service
from all about him. This is no less manifest in Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship and Travels, which supplements the autobiography. Both
together present a very unique type of adolescence, the elaborate story of
which defies epitome. From the puppet craze well on into his precocious
university life it was his passion to explore the widest ranges of experience
and then to reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. Perhaps no one ever
studied the nascent stages of his own life and elaborated their every incident
with such careful observation and analysis. His peculiar diathesis enabled
him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he gave them
literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own experience even for
practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with Goethe nothing was wasted
from which self-culture could be extracted.

Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named
Gretchen, who served wine one evening, and whose face and form followed
him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill of pleasure,
and though his love was like many first loves, very spiritual and awakened
by goodness and beauty, it gave a new brightness to the whole world, and to
be near her seemed to him an indispensable condition of his being. Her
fiancé was generally with her, and Goethe experienced a shock in finding
that she had become a milliner's assistant for although, like all natural boys
of aristocratic families, he loved common people, this interest was not
favored by his parents. The night following the coronation day several were
compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his Gretchen, with others, slept,
she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the others had awakened in
the morning. At last they parted at her door, and for the first and last time
they kissed but never met again, although he often wept in thinking of her.
He was terribly affronted to fully realize that, although only two years older
than himself, she should have regarded him as a child. He tried to strip her
of all loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over him.
The sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as childish
the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his mortification that she
regarded him somewhat as a nurse might, gradually helped to work his
cure.

He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and uneducated
people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a new love,
Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears, melted toward her,
and made an idyl. He was also seized with a passion of teasing her and
dominating over her devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice,
venting upon her the ill humor of his disappointments, and grew absurdly
jealous and lost her after she had borne with him with incredible patience
and after terrible scenes with her by which he gained nothing. Frenzied by
his loss, he began to abuse his physical nature and was only saved from

illness by the healing power of his poetic talent; the "Lover's Caprice" was
written with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the midst of many serious
events, a reckless humor, which was due to the excess of life, developed
which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even to court
danger. He played tricks, although rarely with premeditation. Later he
mused much upon the transient nature of love and the mutability of
character; the extent to which the senses could be indulged within the
bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of all that troubled him by
writing song or epigram about it, which made him seem frivolous and
prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by means of church forms,
which he had severed on coming to Leipzig. By degrees he felt an epoch
approaching when all respect for authority was to vanish, and he became
suspicious and even despairing with regard to the best individuals he had
known before and grew chummy with a young tutor whose jokes and
fooleries were incessant. His disposition fluctuated between gaiety and
melancholy, and Rousseau attracted him. Meanwhile his health declined
until a long illness, which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate
for days between life and death; and convalescence, generally so delightful,
was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition was stern, and he
could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity made her
turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the acquaintance of a
religious circle. Again Goethe was told by a hostile child that he was not the
true son of his father. This inoculated him with a disease that long lurked in
his system and prompted various indirect investigations to get at the truth,
during which he compared all distinguished guests with his own
physiognomy to detect his own likeness.

Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown,
unconscious of self; but he soon began to torment himself with an almost
hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, that others' eyes
were turned on his person to fix it in their memories, that he was scanned

and found fault with; and hence he developed a love of the country, of the
woods and solitary places, where he could be hedged in and separated from
all the world. Here he began to throw off his former habit of looking at
things from the art standpoint and to take pleasure in natural objects for
their own sake. His mother had almost grownup to consciousness in her two
oldest children, and his first disappointment in love turned his thought all
the more affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. He was
long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse
that took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed themselves in
sense images. He fell to building air castles of opposition lecture courses
and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university conditions. He first
attended lectures diligently, but suffered much harm from being too
advanced; learned a great deal that he could not regulate, and was thereby
made uncomfortable; grew interested in the fit of his clothes, of which
hitherto he had been careless. He was in despair at the uncertainty of his
own taste and judgment, and almost feared he must make a complete
change of mind, renouncing what he had hitherto learned, and so one day in
great contempt for his past burned up his poetry, sketches, etc.

He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture to
it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without being
a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it which he met
at the university. From youth he had stood on good terms with God, and at
times he had felt that he had some things to forgive God for not having
given better assistance to his infinite good-will. Under all this influence he
turned to cabalism and became interested in crystals and the microcosm and
macrocosm, and fell into the habit of despair over what he had been and
believed just before. He conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic
godhead creating in more and more eccentric circles, until the last, which
rose in contradiction, was Lucifer to whom creation was committed. He
first of all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology

was wrought out in petto. He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a kind
of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning God was
approached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a sudden end to
these celebrations.

Hans Anderson,[48] the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity
school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated Bible stories from pictures
painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told continued stories
to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be famous and finally, at
fourteen, left home for Copenhagen, where he was violently stage-struck
and worked his way from friendship with the bill-poster to the stage as
page, shepherd, etc.; called on a famous dancer, who scorned him, and then,
feeling that he had no one but God to depend on, prayed earnestly and
often. For nearly a year, until his voice broke, he was a fine singer. He wet
with his tears the eyes of a portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for
him. He played with a puppet theater and took a childish delight in decking
the characters with gay remnants that he begged from shops; wrote several
plays which no one would accept; stole into an empty theater one New
Year's day to pray aloud on the middle of the stage; shouted with joy;
hugged and kissed a beech-tree till people thought him insane; abhorred the
thought of apprenticeship to Latin as he did to that of a trade, which was a
constant danger; and was one of the most dreamy and sentimental, and by
spells religious and prayerful, of youth.

George Ebers[49] remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of '48 in
Berlin, soon after which he was placed in Froebel's school at Keilhau. This
great teacher with his noble associates, Middendorf, Barop, and Langekhal,
lived with the boys; told the stirring stories of their own lives as soldiers in
the war of liberation; led their pupils on long excursions in vacation, often
lasting for months, and gave much liberty to the boys, who were allowed to
haze not only their new mates, but new teachers. This transfer from the city

to the country roused a veritable passion in the boy, who remained here till
he was fifteen. Trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the Saale
by moonlight and the lofty Steiger at sunset were explored. There were
swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the school, "Friede,
Freude, Freiheit,"[Peace, joy, freedom] was lived up to. The boys hung on
their teachers for stories. The teachers took their boys into their confidence
for all their own literary aims, loves, and ideals. One had seen the corpse of
Körner and another knew Prohaska. "The Roman postulate that knowledge
should be imparted to boys according to a thoroughly tested method
approved by the mature human intellect and which seems most useful to it
for later life" was the old system of sacrificing the interests of the child for
those of the man. Here childhood was to live itself out completely and
naturally into an ever renewed paradise. The temperaments, dispositions,
and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully studied and
recorded. Some of these are still little masterpieces of psychological
penetration, and this was made the basis of development. The extreme
Teutonism cultivated by wrestling, shooting, and fencing, giving each a spot
of land to sow, reap, and shovel, and all in an atmosphere of adult life, made
an environment that fitted the transition period as well as any that the
history of education affords. Every tramp and battle were described in a
book by each boy. When at fifteen Ebers was transferred to the Kottbus
Gymnasium, he felt like a colt led from green pastures to the stable, and the
period of effervescence made him almost possessed by a demon, so many
sorts of follies did he commit. He wrote "a poem of the world," fell in love
with an actress older than himself, became known as foolhardy for his wild
escapades, and only slowly sobered down.

In Gottfried Kelley's "Der grüne Heinrich,"[50] the author, whom R.M.
Meyer calls "the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth century,"
reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography is a plain and
very realistic story of a normal child, and not adulterated with fiction like

Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy
like all other boys, and his childhood and youth were in no wise
extraordinary. The first part of this work, which describes his youth up to
the age of eighteen, is the most important, and everything is given with
remarkable fidelity and minuteness. It is a tale of little things. All the
friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally
selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved
Army died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found
two kinds of love in his heart—the idea and the sensual, very independent
—the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young
woman years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. He
gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observations about his strange
simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and
his rather prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent
for invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so early
an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of
abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did not of life; his
spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single
life; his habit of story-telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology
and God; the conflict between his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.

From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in
finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught;
where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram to break a
way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it; feeling that the
classical writers were overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had
appeared several times in public as a reciter of his own poems, Max Müller
returned to Leipzig and entered upon the freedom of university life there at
the age of seventeen. For years his chief enjoyment was music.[51] He
played the piano well, heard everything he could in concert or opera, was an
oratorio tenor, and grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he

planned to devote himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school
at Dessau, but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society,
was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that with his
boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now bring culprits
into collision with authorities. He fought three duels, participated in many
pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless attended fifty-three
different courses of lectures in three years. When Hegelism was the state
philosophy, he tried hard to understand it, but dismissed it with the
sentiments expressed by a French officer to his tailor, who refused to take
the trousers he had ordered to be made very tight because they did not fit so
closely that he could not get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the
wildness of his followers repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite
bewildered for a time and began to despair altogether of my reasoning
powers." He wonders how young minds in German universities survive the
storms and fogs through which they pass. With bated breath he heard his
elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but
it all floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period, but
found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon Sanskrit and other
ancient languages, because he felt that he must know something that no
other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard only the after-chime
and not the real striking of the bells of Indian philosophy. From twenty his
struggles and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of
twenty-two, he was fully launched upon his career in Paris, and later went
to Oxford.

At thirteen Wagner[52] translated about half the "Odyssey" voluntarily;
at fourteen began the tragedy which was to combine the grandeur of two of
Shakespeare's dramas; at sixteen he tried "his new-fledged musical wings
by soaring at once to the highest peaks of orchestral achievement without
wasting any time on the humble foot-hills." He sought to make a new
departure, and, compared to the grandeur of his own composition,

"Beethoven's Ninth Symphony appeared like a simple Pleyel Sonata." To
facilitate the reading of his astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of
ink—red for strings, green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass
instruments. He writes that this overture was the climax of his absurdities,
and although the audience before which an accommodating orchestra
played it were disgusted and the musicians were convulsed with laughter, it
made a deep impression upon the author's mind. Even after matriculating at
the university he abandoned himself so long to the dissipations common to
student life before the reaction came that his relatives feared that he was a
good-for-nothing.

In his "Hannele," Hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind of dream
poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl of thirteen
or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so absorbed by the "Brownies
of her brain" that she hardly knows whether she is alive on earth or dead in
heaven, and who sees the Lord Jesus in the form of the schoolmaster whom
she adores. In her closing vision there is a symbolic representation of her
own resurrection. To the passionate discussions in Germany, England, and
France, as to whether this character is true to adolescence, we can only
answer with an emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local color
and in fairy tale items, that it is very material, and that she is troubled by
fears of sin against the Holy Ghost, is answer enough in an ill-used, starving
child with a fevered brain, whose dead mother taught her these things.

Saint-Pierre's "Paul and Virginia" is an attempt to describe budding
adolescence in a boy and girl born on a remote island and reared in a state
of natural simplicity The descriptions are sentimental after the fashion of
the age in France, and the pathos, which to us smacks of affectation and
artificiality, nevertheless has a vein of truth in it. The story really begins
when the two children were twelve; and the description of the dawn of love

and melancholy in Virginia's heart, for some time concealed from Paul, of
her disquiet and piety, of the final frank avowal of eternal love by each, set
of by the pathetic separation, and of the undying love, and finally the tragic
death and burial of each—all this owes its charm, for its many generations
of readers, to its merits as an essentially true picture of the human heart at
this critical age. This work and Rousseau[53] have contributed to give
French literature its peculiar cast in its description of this age.

"The first explosions of combustible constitution" in Rousseau's,
precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations of
erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed "to fall at the feet of
an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore pardon." He only
wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. At ten he was passionately
devoted to a Mlle. Vulson, whom he publicly and tyrannically claimed as
his own and would allow no other to approach. He had very different
sensuous feelings toward Mlle. Goton, with whom his relations were very
passionate, though pure. Absolutely under the power of both these
mistresses, the effects they produced upon him were in no wise related to
each other. The former was a brother's affection with the jealousy of a lover
added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told of the
former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more
to see a perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of prolonged ephebeitis
pervades much of his life.

Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child"[54] was written when the author was
forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner
autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which bring
the author down to the age of fourteen and a half. He vividly describes the
new joy at waking, which he began to feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear
vision into the bottomless pit of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to

nature as comradeship with boys of his own age was lacking; the sudden
desires from pure bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g.,
making a fly omelet and carrying it in a procession with song; the melting
of pewter plates and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of land
with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with keen scent
to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything being done
mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling for the haunting
music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but had not been
interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an elder brother,
with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and this became a long
obsession which finally led him to enlist in the navy, dropping, with a
beating heart, the momentous letter into the post-office after long
misgivings and delays. He had a superficial and a hidden self, the latter
somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridiculous, shared only with a few
intimate friends for whom he would have let himself be cut into bits. He
believes his transition period lasted longer than with the majority of men,
and during it he was carried from one extreme to another; had rather
eccentric and absurd manners, and touched moat of the perilous rocks on
the voyage of life. He had an early love for an older girl whose name he
wrote in cipher on his books, although he felt it a little artificial, but
believed it might have developed into a great and true hereditary friendship,
continuing that which their ancestors had felt for many generations. The
birth of love in his heart was in a dream after having read the forbidden
poet, Alfred de Musset. He was fourteen, and in his dream it was a soft,
odorous twilight. He walked amid flowers seeking a nameless some one
whom he ardently desired, and felt that something strange and wonderful,
intoxicating as it advanced, was going to happen. The twilight grew deeper,
and behind a rose-bush he saw a young girl with a languorous and
mysterious smile, although her forehead and eyes were hidden. As it
darkened rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they were very personal

and seemed to belong to some one already much beloved, who had been
found with "transports of infinite joy and tenderness." He woke with a start
and sought to retain the phantom, which faded. He could not conceive that
was a mere illusion, and as he realized that she had vanished he felt
overwhelmed with hopelessness. It was the first stirring "of true love with
all its great melancholy and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad
enchantment—love which like a perfume endows with a fragrance all it
touches."

It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be recognized as a
class by itself, and have a place of its own in the history of letters and in
criticism. Much of it should be individually prescribed for the reading of the
young, for whom it has a singular zest and is a true stimulus and corrective.
This stage of life now has what might almost be called a school of its own.
Here the young appeal to and listen to each other as they do not to adults,
and in a way the latter have failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and
especially no autobiography, should henceforth be complete if it does not
describe this period of transformation so all-determining for future life to
which it alone can often give the key. Rightly to draw the lessons of this age
not only saves us from waste ineffable of this rich but crude area of
experience, but makes maturity saner and more complete. Lastly, many if
not most young people should be encouraged to enough of the confessional
private journalism to teach them self-knowledge, for the art of self-
expression usually begins now if ever, when it has a wealth of subjective
material and needs forms of expression peculiar to itself.

For additional references on the subject of this chapter, see:

Alcafarado, Marianna, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Translated by
R. H., New York, 1887. Richardson, Abby Sage, Abelard and Héloise, and
Letters of Héloise, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston. Smith, Theodote

L., Types of Adolescent Affection. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1904,
vol. II, pp. 178-203.

[Footnote 1: Pedagogical Seminary, June 1901, vol. 8, pp. 163-205]

[Footnote 2: Being a Boy.]

[Footnote 3: Story of a Bad Boy.]

[Footnote 4: A Boy's Town.]

[Footnote 5: Court of Boyville.]

[Footnote 6: The Spoilt Child, by Peary Chandmitter. Translated by G.
D. Oswell. Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, 1893.]

[Footnote 7: The Golden Age]

[Footnote 8: Frau Spyri.]

[Footnote 9: The One I Knew the Best of All.]

[Footnote 10: The Study of the Boyhood of Great Men. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 134-156.]

[Footnote 11: The Vanishing Character of Adolescent Experiences.
Northwestern Monthly, June, 1898, vol. 8, p. 644.]

[Footnote 12: The Count of Boyville, by William Allen White. New
York, 1899, p. 358.]

[Footnote 13: The Study of Adolescence. Pedagogical Seminary, June,
1891, vol. 1, pp. 174-195.]

[Footnote 14: Lancaster: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence.
Pedagogical Seminary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 106.]

[Footnote 15: Standards of Efficiency in School and in Life.
Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 3-22.]

[Footnote 16: See also Vittorio da Feltre and other Humanist
Educators, by W. H. Woodward. Cambridge University Press, 1897.]

[Footnote 17: See The Private Life of Galileo; from his Correspondence
and that of his Eldest Daughter. Anon, Macmillan, London, 1870.]

[Footnote 18: See Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton. Harper, New
York, 1874.]

[Footnote 19: Louis Agassiz, His Life and Work, by C. F. Holder. G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York, 1893.]

[Footnote 20: Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, by his son Leonard
Huxley. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901.]

[Footnote 21: See also Sully: A Girl's Religion. Longman's Magazine,
May, 1890, pp. 89-99.]

[Footnote 22: Sheldon (Institutional Activities of American Children;
American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, p. 434) describes a
faintly analogous case of a girl of eleven, who organised the worship of
Pallas Athena on two flat rocks, in a deep ravine by a stream where a young
sycamore grew from an old stump, as did Pallas from the head of her father
Zeus. There was a court consisting of king, queen and subjects, and priests
who officiated at sacrifices. The king and queen wore goldenrod upon their
heads and waded in streams attended by their subjects; gathered flowers for
Athena; caught crayfish which were duly smashed upon her altar.

"Sometimes there was a special celebration, when, in addition to the
slaughtered crayfish and beautiful flower decorations, and pickles stolen
from the dinner-table, there would be an elaborate ceremony," which
because of its uncanny acts was intensely disliked by the people at hand.]

[Footnote 23: The One I Know The Best of All. A Memory of the Mind
of a Child. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893]

[Footnote 24: The Beth Book, by Sarah Grand. D. Appleton and Co.,
New
York, 1897.]

[Footnote 25: Autobiography of a Child. Hannah Lynch, W. Blackwood
and
Sons, London, 1899, p. 255.]

[Footnote 26: The Story of My Life. By Helen Keller. Doubleday, Page
and Co., New York, 1903, p. 39.]

[Footnote 27: Journal of a Young Artist. Cassell and Co., New York,
1889, p. 434.]

[Footnote 28: The Story of Mary MacLane. By herself. Herbert S. Stone
and Co., Chicago, 1902, p. 322.]

[Footnote 29: Fate. Translated from the Italian by A.M. Von Blomberg.
Copeland and Day, Boston, 1898.]

[Footnote 30: Confessions of an Opium Eater. Part I. Introductory
Narrative. (Cambridge Classics) 1896.]

[Footnote 31: Longmans, Green and Co. London, 1891, 2nd ed.]

[Footnote 32: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 324.]

[Footnote 33: An Autobiography. Edited by H.M. Trollope. 2 vols.
London, 1883.]

[Footnote 34: See his Memoirs. London, 1885.]

[Footnote 35: See Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (pseudonym for
W.H.
White), edited by Reuben Shapcott. 2 vols. London, 1881.]

[Footnote 36: The rest of the two volumes is devoted to his further life as
a dissenting minister, who later became something of a literary man;
relating how he was slowly driven to leave his little church, how he
outgrew and broke with the girl to whom he was engaged, whom he
marvelously met and married when both were well on in years, and how
strangely he was influenced by the free-thinker Mardon and his remarkable
daughter. All in all it is a rare study of emancipation.]

[Footnote 37: London, 1896, vol. 1.]

[Footnote 38: Macmillan, 1902.]

[Footnote 39: Life of Sir J.F. Stephen. By his brother, Leslie
Stephen, London, 1895.]

[Footnote 40: See the very impressive account of Dicken's
characterization of childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto
inadequately recognized interest and influence as an educator. Dickens as
an Educator. James L. Hughes. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901, p.
319.]

[Footnote 41: John Inglesant: A Romance. 6th ed. Macmillan, 1886.]

[Footnote 42: The Autobiography of a Journalist. 2 vols. Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1901.]

[Footnote 43: A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy. By F. B.
Sanborn and W. T. Harris. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1893.]

[Footnote 44: Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian. By Theodore
F.
Munger. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1899.]

[Footnote 45: By C.W. Chesnutt. (Beacon Biographies.) Small, Maynard
and Co., Boston, 1899.]

[Footnote 46: The Making of an American. Macmillan, 1901.]

[Footnote 47: Sonny. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. The Century Co., New
York, 1896.]

[Footnote 48: The Story of My Life. Works, vol. 8 new edition.
Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1894.]

[Footnote 49: The Story of My Life. Translated by M. J. Safford. D.
Appleton and Co., New York 1893.]

[Footnote 50: Gesammelte Werke. Vierter Band. Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin,
1897.]

[Footnote 51: My Autobiography, p. 106. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New
York, 1901.]

[Footnote 52: Wagner and His Works. By Henry T. Finck. Chas.
Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893.]

[Footnote 53: Les Confessions. Oeuvres Complètes, vols. 8 and 9.
Hachette et Cie., Paris, 1903.]

[Footnote 54: Translated from the French by C.F. Smith. C.C. Birchard
and Co., Boston, 1901.]

*****

CHAPTER IX

THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS

Change from childish to adult friends—Influence of favorite teachers—
What children wish or plan to do or be—Property and the money sense—
Social judgments—The only child—First social organizations—Student life
—Associations for youth, controlled by adults.

In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic
outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever
enlarging environment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual
and prompt obedience. Our very presence enforces one general law—that of
keeping our good-will and avoiding our displeasure. They respect all we
smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant toward the light. Their
early lies are often saying what they think will please. At bottom, the most
restless child admires and loves those who save him from too great
fluctuations by coercion, provided the means be rightly chosen and the
ascendency extend over heart and mind. But the time comes when parents
are often shocked at the lack of respect suddenly shown by the child. They
have ceased to be the highest ideals. The period of habituating morality and
making it habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize freedom, to act on
personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. To act
occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal motives

develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus brings some
new and original force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the
highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical
rule of life. To bring the richest streams of thought to bear in interpreting
the ethical instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live in a moral
interregnum, is the real goal of self-knowledge. This is true education of the
will and prepares the way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty,
perhaps even of conflict. This impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.[1]
And yet, "at no time in life will a human being respond So heartily if treated
by older and wiser people as if he were an equal or even a superior. The
attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you would treat an inferior is
instantly fatal to good discipline."[2] Parents still think of their offspring as
mere children, and tighten the rein when they should loosen it. Many young
people feel that they have the best of homes and yet that they will go crazy
if they must remain in them. If the training of earlier years has been good,
guidance by command may now safely give way to that by ideals, which
are sure to be heroic. The one unpardonable thing for the adolescent is
dullness, stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm in school or
teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great stringency. Least of all, at this
stage, can the curriculum school be an ossuary. The child must now be
taken into the family councils and find the parents interested in all that
interests him. Where this is not done, we have the conditions for the
interesting cases of so many youth, who now begin to suspect that father,
mother, or both, are not their true parents. Not only is there interest in
rapidly widening associations with coevals, but a new lust to push on and
up to maturity. One marked trait now is to seek friends and companions
older than themselves, or next to this, to seek those younger. This is marked
contrast with previous years, when they seek associates of their own age.
Possibly the merciless teasing instinct, which culminates at about the same
time, may have some influence, but certain it is that now interest is

transpolarized up and down the age scale. One reason is the new hunger for
information, not only concerning reproduction, but a vast variety of other
matters, so that there is often an attitude of silent begging for knowledge. In
answer to Lancaster's[3] questions on this subject, some sought older
associates because they could learn more from them, found them better or
more steadfast friends, craved sympathy and found most of it from older
and perhaps married people. Some were more interested in their parents'
conversation with other adults than with themselves, and were particularly
entertained by the chance of hearing things they had no business to. There is
often a feeling that adults do not realize this new need of friendship with
them and show want of sympathy almost brutal.

Stableton,[4] who has made interesting notes on individual boys entering
the adolescent period, emphasizes the importance of sympathy,
appreciation, and respect in dealing with this age. They must now be talked
to as equals, and in this way their habits of industry and even their
dangerous love affairs run be controlled. He says, "There is no more
important question before the teaching fraternity today than how to deal
justly and successfully with boys at this time of life. This is the age when
they drop out of school" in far too large numbers, and he thinks that the
small percentage of male graduates from our high schools is due to "the
inability of the average grammar grade or high-school teacher to deal
rightly with boys in this critical period of their school life." Most teachers
"know all their bad points, but fail to discover their good ones." The fine
disciplinarian, the mechanical movement of whose school is so admirable
and who does not realize the new need of liberty or how loose-jointed,
mentally and physically, all are at this age, should be supplanted by one
who can look into the heart and by a glance make the boy feel that he or she
is his friend. "The weakest work in our schools is the handling of boys
entering the adolescent period of life, and there is no greater blessing that

can come to a boy at this age, when he does not understand himself, than a
good strong teacher that understands him, has faith in him, and will day by
day lead him till he can walk alone."

Small[5] found the teacher a focus of imitation whence many influences,
both physical and mental, irradiated to the pupils. Every accent, gesture,
automatism, like and dislike is caught consciously and unconsciously.
Every intellectual interest in the teacher permeates the class—liars, if
trusted, became honest; those treated as ladies and gentlemen act so; those
told by favorite teachers of the good things they are capable of feel a strong
impulsion to do them; some older children are almost transformed by being
made companions to teachers, by having their good traits recognized, and
by frank apologies by the teacher when in error.

An interesting and unsuspected illustration of the growth of
independence with adolescence was found in 2,411 papers from the second
to eighth grades on the characteristics of the best teacher as seen by
children.[6] In the second and third grades, all, and in the fourth, ninety-five
per cent specified help in studies. This falls off rapidly in the sixth, seventh,
and eighth grades to thirty-nine per cent, while at the same time the quality
of patience in the upper grades rises from a mention by two to twenty-two
per cent.

Sanford Bell[7] collated the answers of 543 males and 488 females as to
who of all their past teachers did them most good, and wherein; whom they
loved and disliked most, and why. His most striking result is presented in
which shows that fourteen in girls and sixteen in boys is the age in which
most good was felt to have been done, and that curves culminating at
twelve for both sexes but not falling rapidly until fifteen or sixteen
represent the period when the strongest and most indelible dislikes were
felt. What seems to be most appreciated in teachers is the giving of purpose,

arousing of ideals, kindling of ambition to be something or do something
and so giving an object in life, encouragement to overcome circumstances,
and, in general, inspiring self-confidence and giving direction. Next came
personal sympathy and interest, kindness, confidence, a little praise, being
understood; and next, special help in lessons, or timely and kindly advice,
while stability and poise of character, purity, the absence of hypocrisy,
independence, personal beauty, athleticism and vigor are prominent. It is
singular that those of each sex have been most helped by their own sex and
that this prominence is far greatest in men. Four-fifths of the men and
nearly one-half of the women, however, got most help from men. Male
teachers, especially near adolescence, seem most helpful for both sexes.

The qualities that inspire most dislike are malevolence, sarcasm, unjust
punishment, suspicion, severity, sternness, absence of laughing and smiling,
indifference, threats and broken vows, excessive scolding and "roasting,"
and fondness for inflicting blows. The teacher who does not smile is far
more liable to excite animosity. Most boys dislike men most, and girls'
dislikes are about divided. The stories of school cruelties and indignities are
painful. Often inveterate grudges are established by little causes, and it is
singular how permanent and indelible strong dislike, are for the majority of
children. In many cases, aversions engendered before ten have lasted with
little diminution till maturity, and there is a sad record of children who have
lost a term, a year, or dropped school altogether because of ill treatment or
partiality.

Nearly two thousand children were asked what they would do in a
specific case of conflict between teacher and parents. It was found that,
while for young children parental authority was preferred, a marked decline
began about eleven and was most rapid after fourteen in girls and fifteen in
boys, and that there was a nearly corresponding increase in the number of
pubescents who preferred the teacher's authority. The reasons for their

choice were also analyzed, and it was found that whereas for the young,
unconditioned authority was generally satisfactory, with pubesecents,
abstract authority came into marked predominance, "until when the children
have reached the age of sixteen almost seventy-five per cent of their reasons
belong to this class, and the children show themselves able to extend the
idea of authority without violence to their sense of justice."

On a basis of 1,400 papers answering the question whom, of anyone ever
heard or read of, they would like to resemble, Barnes[8] found that girls'
ideals were far more often found in the immediate circle of their
acquaintance than boys, and that those within that circle were more often in
their own family, but that the tendency to go outside their personal
knowledge and choose historical and public characters was greatly
augmented at puberty, when also the heroes of philanthropy showed marked
gain in prominence. Boys rarely chose women as their ideals; but in
America, half the girls at eight and two-thirds at eighteen chose male
characters. The range of important women ideals among the girls was
surprisingly small. Barnes fears that if from the choice of relative as ideals,
the expansion to remote or world heroes is too fast, it may "lead to
disintegration of character and reckless living." "If, on the other hand, it is
expanded too slowly we shall have that arrested development which makes
good ground in which to grow stupidity, brutality, and drunkenness—the
first fruits of a sluggish and self-contained mind." "No one can consider the
regularity with which local ideals die out and are replaced by world ideals
without feeling that he is in the presence of law-abiding forces," and this
emphasizes the fact that the teacher or parent does not work in a world
governed by caprice.

The compositions written by thousands of children in New York on what
they wanted to do when they were grown up were collated by Dr. Thurber.

[9] The replies were serious, and showed that poor children looked forward
willingly to severe labor and the increased earnestness of adolescent years,
and the better answers to the question why were noteworthy. All anticipated
giving up the elastic joyousness of childhood and felt the need of patience.
Up to ten, there was an increase in the number of those who had two or
more desires. This number declined rapidly at eleven, rose as rapidly at
twelve, and slowly fell later. Preferences for a teacher's life exceeded in
girls up to nine, fell rapidly at eleven, increased slightly the next year, and
declined thereafter. The ideal of becoming a dressmaker and milliner
increased till ten, fell at eleven, rose rapidly to a maximum at thirteen, when
it eclipsed teaching, and then fell permanently again. The professions of
clerk and stenographer showed a marked rise from eleven and a half. The
number of boys who chose the father's occupation attained its maximum at
nine and its minimum at twelve, with a slight rise to fourteen, when the
survey ended. The ideal of tradesman culminated at eight, with a second
rise at thirteen. The reason "to earn money" reached its high maximum of
fifty per cent at twelve, and fell very rapidly. The reason "because I like it"
culminated at ten and fell steadily thereafter. The motive that influenced the
choice of a profession and which was altruistic toward parents or for their
benefit culminated at twelve and a half, and then declined. The desire for
character increased somewhat throughout, but rapidly after twelve, and the
impulse to do good to the world, which had risen slowly from nine,
mounted sharply after thirteen. Thus, "at eleven all the ideas and tendencies
are increasing toward a maximum. At twelve we find the altruistic desires
for the welfare of parents, the reason 'to earn money'; at thirteen the desire
on the part of the girls to be dressmakers, also to be clerks and
stenographers. At fourteen culminates the desire for a business career in
bank or office among the boys, the consciousness of life's uncertainties
which appeared first at twelve, the desire for character, and the hope of
doing the world good."

"What would you like to be in an imaginary new city?" was a question
answered by 1,234 written papers.[10] One hundred and fourteen different
occupations were given; that of teacher led with the girls at every age
except thirteen and fourteen, when dressmaker and milliner took
precedence. The motive of making money led among the boys at every age
except fourteen and sixteen, when occupations chosen because they were
liked led. The greatest number of those who chose the parent's occupation
was found at thirteen, but from that age it steadily declined and independent
choice came into prominence. The maximum of girls who chose parental
vocations was at fourteen. Motives of philanthropy reached nearly their
highest point in girls and boys at thirteen.

Jegi[11] obtained letters addressed to real or imaginary friends from
3,000 German children in Milwaukee, asking what they desired to do when
they grew up, and why, and tabulated returns from 200 boys and 200 girls
for each age from eight to fourteen inclusive. He also found a steadily
decreasing influence of relatives to thirteen; in early adolescence, the
personal motive of choosing an occupation because it was liked increased,
while from twelve in boys and thirteen in girls the consideration of finding
easy vocations grew rapidly strong.

L. W. Cline[12] studied by the census method returns from 2,594
children, who were asked what they wished to be and do. He found that in
naming both ideals and occupations girls were more conservative than boys,
but more likely to give a reason for their choice. In this respect country
children resembled boys more than city children. Country boys were prone
to inattention, were more independent and able to care for themselves,
suggesting that the home life of the country child is more effective in
shaping ideals and character than that of the city child. Industrial
occupations are preferred by the younger children, the professional and
technical pursuits increasing with age. Judgments of rights and justice with

the young are more prone to issue from emotional rather than from
intellectual processes. Country children seem more altruistic than those in
the city, and while girls are more sympathetic than boys, they are also more
easily prejudiced. Many of these returns bear unmistakable marks that in
some homes and schools moralization has been excessive and has produced
a sentimental type of morality and often a feverish desire to express ethical
views instead of trusting to suggestion. Children are very prone to have one
code of ideals for themselves and another for others. Boys, too, are more
original than girls, and country children more than city children.

Friedrich[13] asked German school children what person they chose as
their pattern. The result showed differences of age, sex, and creed. First of
all came characters in history, which seemed to show that this study for
children of the sixth and seventh grades was essentially ethical or a training
of mood and disposition (Gesinnungsunterricht), and this writer suggests
reform in this respect. He seems to think that the chief purpose of history
for this age should be ethical. Next came the influence of the Bible,
although it was plain that this was rather in spite of the catechism and the
method of memoriter work. Here, too, the immediate environment at this
age furnished few ideals (four and one-fifth per cent), for children seem to
have keener eyes for the faults than for the virtues of those near them.
Religion, therefore, should chiefly be directed to the emotions and not to
the understanding. This census also suggested more care that the reading of
children should contain good examples in their environment, and also that
the matter of instruction should be more fully adapted to the conditions of
sex.

Friedrich found as his chief age result that children of the seventh or
older class in the German schools laid distinctly greater stress upon
characters distinguished by bravery and courage than did the children of the
sixth grade, while the latter more frequently selected characters illustrating

piety and holiness. The author divided his characters into thirty-five classes,
illustrating qualities, and found that national activity led, with piety a close
second; that then came in order those illustrating firmness of faith, bravery,
modesty, and chastity; then pity and sympathy, industry, goodness, patience,
etc.

Taylor, Young, Hamilton, Chambers, and others, have also collected
interesting data on what children and young people hope to be, do, whom
they would like to be, or resemble, etc. Only a few at adolescence feel
themselves so good or happy that they are content to be themselves. Most
show more or less discontent at their lot. From six to eleven or twelve, the
number who find their ideals among their acquaintances falls off rapidly,
and historical characters rise to a maximum at or before the earliest teens.
From eleven or twelve on into the middle teens contemporary ideals
increase steadily. London children are more backward in this expansion of
ideals than Americans, while girls choose more acquaintance ideals at all
ages than do boys. The expansion, these authors also trace largely to the
study of history. The George Washington ideal, which leads all the rest by
far and is greatly overworked, in contrast with the many heroes of equal
rank found in England, pales soon, as imperfections are seen and those now
making history loom up. This is the normal age to free from bondage to the
immediate present, and this freedom is one measure of education. Bible
heroes are chosen as ideals by only a very small percentage, mostly girls,
far more characters being from fiction and mythology; where Jesus is
chosen, His human is preferred to His divine side. Again, it would seem that
teachers would be ideals, especially as many girls intend to teach, but they
are generally unpopular as choices. In an ideal system they would be the
first step in expansion from home ideals. Military heroes and inventors play
leading rôles in the choices of pubescent boys.

Girls at all school ages and increasingly up the grades prefer foreign
ideals, to be the wife of a man of title, as aristocracies offer special
opportunities for woman to shine, and life near the source of fashion is very
attractive, at least up to sixteen. The saddest fact in these studies is that
nearly half our American pubescent girls, or nearly three times as many as
in England, choose male ideals, or would be men. Girls, too, have from six
to fifteen times as many ideals as boys. In this significant fact we realize
how modern woman has cut loose from all old moorings and is drifting with
no destination and no anchor aboard. While her sex has multiplied in all
lower and high school grades, its ideals are still too masculine. Text-books
teach little about women. When a woman's Bible, history, course of study,
etc., is proposed, her sex fears it may reduce her to the old servitude. While
boys rarely, and then only when very young, choose female ideals, girls'
preference for the life of the other sex sometimes reaches sixty and seventy
per cent. The divorce between the life preferred and that demanded by the
interests of the race is often absolute. Saddest and most unnatural of all is
the fact that this state of things increases most rapidly during just those
years when ideals of womanhood should be developed and become most
dominant, till it seems as if the female character was threatened with
disintegration. While statistics are not yet sufficient to be reliable on the
subject, there is some indication that woman later slowly reverts toward
ideals not only from her own sex but also from the circle of her own
acquaintances.

The reasons for the choice of ideals are various and not yet well
determined. Civic virtues certainly rise; material and utilitarian
considerations do not seem to much, if at all, at adolescence, and in some
data decline. Position, fame, honor, and general greatness increase rapidly,
but moral qualities rise highest and also fastest just before and near puberty
and continue to increase later yet. By these choices both sexes, but girls far
most, show increasing admiration of ethical and social qualities. Artistic

and intellectual traits also rise quite steadily from ten or eleven onward, but
with no such rapidity, and reach no such height as military ability and
achievement for boys. Striking in these studies is the rapid increase,
especially from eight to fourteen, of the sense of historic time for historic
persons. These long since dead are no longer spoken of as now living. Most
of these choices are direct expressions of real differences of taste and
character.

Property, Kline and France[14] have defined as "anything that the
individual may acquire which sustains and prolongs life, favors survival,
and gives an advantage over opposing forces." Many animals and even
insects store up food both for themselves and for their young. Very early in
life children evince signs of ownership. Letourneau[15] says that the notion
of private property, which seems to us so natural, dawned late and slowly,
and that common ownership was the rule among primitive people. Value is
sometimes measured by use and sometimes by the work required to produce
it. Before puberty, there is great eagerness to possess things that are of
immediate service; but after its dawn, the desire of possession takes another
form, and money for its own sake, which is at first rather an abstraction,
comes to be respected or regarded as an object of extreme desire, because it
is seen to be the embodiment of all values.

The money sense, as it is now often called, is very complex and has not
yet been satisfactorily analyzed by psychology. Ribot and others trace its
origin to provision which they think animals that hoard food feel.
Monroe[16] has tabulated returns from 977 boys and 1,090 girls from six to
sixteen in answer to the question as to what they would do with a small
monthly allowance. The following table shows the marked increase at the
dawn of adolescence of the number who would save it:

Age. Boys. Girls. | Age. Boys. Girls.
7….43 per cent 36 per cent | 12….82 per cent 64 per cent
8….45 " 34 " | 13….88 " 78 "
9….48 " 35 " | 14….85 " 80 "
10….58 " 50 " | 15….83 " 78 "
11….71 " 58 " | 16….85 " 82 "

This tendency to thrift is strongest in boys, and both sexes often show the
tendency to moralize, that is so strong in the early teens. Much of our
school work in arithmetic is dominated by the money sense; and school
savings-banks, at first for the poor, are now extending to children of all
classes. This sense tends to prevent pauperism, prodigality, is an immense
stimulus to the imagination and develops purpose to pursue a distant object
for a long time. To see all things and values in terms of money has, of
course, its pedagogic and ethical limitations; but there is a stage when it is a
great educational advance, and it, too, is full of phylogenetic suggestions.

Social judgement, cronies, solitude—The two following observations
afford a glimpse of the development of moral judgments. From 1,000 boys
and 1,000 girls of each age from six to sixteen who answered the question
as to what should be done to a girl with a new box of paints who beautified
the parlor chairs with them with a wish to please her mother, the following
conclusion was drawn.[17] Most of the younger children would whip the
girl, but from fourteen on the number declines very rapidly. Few of the
young children suggest explaining why it was wrong; while at twelve, 181,
and at sixteen, 751 would explain. The motive of the younger children in
punishment is revenge; with the older ones that of preventing a repetition of
the act comes in; and higher and later comes the purpose of reform. With
age comes also a marked distinction between the act and its motive and a
sense of the girl's ignorance. Only the older children would suggest

extracting a promise not to offend again. Thus with puberty comes a change
of view-point from judging actions by results to judging by motives, and
only the older ones see that wrong can be done if there are no bad
consequences. There is also with increased years a great development of the
quality of mercy.

One hundred children of each sex and age between six and sixteen asked
what they would do with a burglar, the question stating that the penalty was
five years in prison.[18] Of the younger children nearly nine-tenths ignored
the law and fixed upon some other penalty, but from twelve years there is a
steady advance in those who would inflict the legal penalty, while at
sixteen, seventy-four per cent would have the criminal punished according
to law. Thus "with the dawn of adolescence at the age of twelve or shortly
after comes the recognition of a larger life, a life to be lived in common
with others, and with this recognition the desire to sustain the social code
made for the common welfare," and punishment is no longer regarded as an
individual and arbitrary matter.

From another question answered by 1,914 children[19] it was found that
with the development of the psychic faculties in youth, there was an
increasing appreciation of punishment as preventive; an increasing sense of
the value of individuality and of the tendency to demand protection of
personal rights; a change from a sense of justice based on feeling and on
faith in authority to that based on reason and understanding. Children's
attitude toward punishment for weak time sense, tested by 2,536 children
from six to sixteen,[20] showed also a marked pubescent increase in the
sense of the need of the remedial function of punishment as distinct from
the view of it as vindictive, or getting even, common in earlier years. There
is also a marked increase in discriminating the kinds and degrees of
offenses; in taking account of mitigating circumstances, the inconvenience

caused others, the involuntary nature of the offense and the purpose of the
culprit. All this continues to increase up to sixteen, where these studies
leave the child.

An interesting effect of the social instinct appears in August Mayer's[21]
elaborate study made up on fourteen boys in the fifth and sixth grade of a
Würzburg school to determine whether they could work better together or
alone. The tests were in dictation, mental and written arithmetic, memory,
and Ebbinghaus's combination exercises and all were given with every
practicable precaution to make the other conditions uniform. The
conclusions demonstrate the advantages of collective over individual
instruction. Under the former condition, emulation is stronger and work
more rapid and better in quality. From this it is inferred that pupils should
not be grouped according to ability, for the dull are most stimulated by the
presence of the bright, the bad by the good, etc. Thus work at home is prone
to deteriorate, and experimental pedagogy shows that the social impulse is
on the whole a stronger spur for boys of eleven or twelve than the absence
of distraction which solitude brings.

From the answers of 1,068 boys and 1,268 girls from seven to sixteen on
the kind of chum they liked best,[22] it appears that with the teens children
are more anxious for chums that can keep secrets and dress neatly, and there
is an increased number who are liked for qualities that supplement rather
than duplicate those of the chooser. "There is an apparent struggle between
the real actual self and the ideal self; a pretty strong desire to have a chum
that embodies the traits youth most desire but which they are conscious of
lacking." The strong like the weak; those full of fun the serious; the timid
the bold; the small the large, etc. Only children[23] illustrate differing
effects of isolation, while "mashes" and "crushes" and ultra-crony-ism with
"selfishness for two" show the results of abnormal restriction of the
irradiation of the social instinct which should now occur.[24]

M. H. Small,[25] after pointing out that communal animals are more
intelligent than those with solitary habits, and that even to name all the
irradiations of the social instinct would be write a history of the human
race, studied nearly five hundred cases of eminent men who developed
proclivities to solitude. It is interesting to observe in how many of these
cases this was developed in adolescence when, with the horror of
mediocrity, comes introspection, apathy, irresolution, and subjectivism. The
grounds of repulsion from society at this age may be disappointed hunger
for praise, wounded vanity, the reaction from over-assertion, or the nursing
of some high ideals, as it is slowly realized that in society the individual
cannot be absolute. The motives to self-isolation may be because youth
feels its lack of physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may
be due to the failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate
egotism and are directly proportional to the impulse to magnify self, or to
the remoteness of common social interests from immediate personal desire
or need, and inversely as the number and range of interests seen to be
common and the clearness with which social relations are realized. While
maturity of character needs some solitude, too much dwarfs it, and more or
less of the same paralysis of association follows which is described in the
nostalgia of arctic journeys, deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary
confinement, and in the interesting stories of feral men.[26] In some of
these cases the mind is saved from entire stultification by pets, imaginary
companions, tasks, etc. Normally "the tendency to solitude at adolescence
indicates not fulness but want"; and a judicious balance between rest and
work, pursuit of favorite lines, genuine sympathy, and wise companionship
will generally normalize the social relation.

First forms of spontaneous social organizations.— Gulick has studied the
propensity of boys from thirteen on to consort in gangs, do "dawsies" and
stumps, get into scrapes together, and fight and suffer for one another. The

manners and customs of the gang are to build shanties or "hunkies," hunt
with sling shots, build fires before huts in the woods, cook their squirrels
and other game, play Indian, build tree-platforms, where they smoke or
troop about some leader, who may have an old revolver. They find or
excavate caves, or perhaps roof them over; the barn is a blockhouse or a
battleship. In the early teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or put
pebbles in them, or perhaps have stone-fights between gangs than which no
contiguous African tribes could be more hostile. They become toughs and
tantalize policemen and peddlers; "lick" every enemy or even stranger
found alone on their grounds; often smash windows; begin to use sticks and
brass knuckles in their fights; pelt each other with green apples; carry
shillalahs, or perhaps air-rifles. The more plucky arrange fights beforehand;
rifle unoccupied houses; set ambushes for gangs with which they are at
feud; perhaps have secrets and initiations where new boys are triced up by
the legs and butted against trees and rocks. When painted for their Indian
fights, they may grow so excited as to perhaps rush into the water or into
the school-room yelling; mimic the violence of strikes; kindle dangerous
bonfires; pelt policemen, and shout vile nicknames.

The spontaneous tendency to develop social and political organizations
among boys in pubescent years was well seen in a school near Baltimore in
the midst of an eight-hundred-acre farm richly diversified with swamp and
forest and abounding with birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. Soon after the
opening of this school[27] the boys gathered nuts in parties. When a tree
was reached which others had shaken, an unwritten law soon required those
who wished to shake it further first to pile up all nuts under the tree, while
those who failed to do so were universally regarded as dishonest and every
boy's hand was against them. To pile them involved much labor, so that the
second party usually sought fresh trees, and partial shaking practically gave
possession of all the fruits on a tree. They took birds' eggs freely, and
whenever a bird was found in building, or a squirrel's hole was discovered,

the finder tacked his name on the tree and thereby confirmed his ownership,
as he did if he placed a box in which a nest was built. The ticket must not
blow off, and the right at first lasted only one season. In the rabbit-land
every trap that was set preëmpted ground for a fixed number of yards about
it. Some grasping boys soon made many traps and set them all over a
valuable district, so that the common land fell into a few hands. Traps were
left out all winter and simply set the next spring. All these rights finally
came into the ownership of two or three boys, who slowly acquired the
right and bequeathed their claims to others for a consideration, when they
left school. The monopolists often had a large surplus of rabbits which they
bartered for "butters," the unit being the ounce of daily allowance. These
could be represented by tickets transferred, so that debts were paid with
"butters" that had never been seen. An agrarian party arose and demanded a
redistribution of land from the monopolists, as Sir Henry Maine shows
often happened in the old village community. Legislation and judicial
procedure were developed and quarrels settled by arbitration, ordeal, and
wager, and punishment by bumping often followed the decision of the boy
folk-mote. Scales of prices for commodities in "butters" or in pie-currency
were evolved, so that we here have an almost entirely spontaneous but
amazingly rapid recapitulation of the social development of the race by
these boys.

From a study of 1,166 children's organizations described as a language
lesson in school composition, Mr. Sheldon[28] arrives at some interesting
results. American children tend strongly to institutional activities, only
about thirty per cent of all not having belonged to some such organization.
Imitation plays a very important rôle, and girls take far more kindly than
boys to societies organized by adults for their benefit. They are also more
governed by adult and altruistic motives in forming their organizations,
while boys are nearer to primitive man. Before ten comes the period of free
spontaneous imitation of every form of adult institution. The child

reproduces sympathetically miniature copies of the life around him. On a
farm, his play is raking, threshing, building barns, or on the seashore he
makes ships and harbors. In general, he plays family, store, church, and
chooses officers simply because adults do. The feeling of caste, almost
absent in the young, culminates about ten and declines thereafter. From ten
to fourteen, however, associations assume a new character; boys especially
cease to imitate adult organizations and tend to form social units
characteristic of lower stages of human evolution—pirates, robbers,
soldiers, lodges, and other savage reversionary combinations, where the
strongest and boldest is the leader. They build huts, wear feathers and
tomahawks as badges, carry knives and toy-pistols, make raids and sell the
loot. Cowards alone, together they fear nothing. Their imagination is
perhaps inflamed by flash literature and "penny-dreadfuls." Such
associations often break out in decadent country communities where, with
fewer and feebler offspring, lax notions of family discipline prevail and
hoodlumism is the direct result of the passing of the rod. These barbaric
societies have their place and give vigor; but if unreduced later, as in many
unsettled portions of this country, a semisavage state of society results. At
twelve the predatory function is normally subordinated, and if it is not it
becomes dangerous, because the members are no longer satisfied with mere
play, but are stronger and abler to do harm, and the spice of danger and its
fascination may issue in crime. Athleticism is now the form into which
these wilder instincts can be best transmuted, and where they find harmless
and even wholesome vent. Another change early in adolescence is the
increased number of social, literary, and even philanthropic organizations
and institutions for mutual help—perhaps against vice, for having a good
time, or for holding picnics and parties. Altruism now begins to make itself
felt as a motive.

Student life and organizations. Student life is perhaps the best of all
fields, unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of

adolescence. Its modern record is over eight hundred years old and it is
marked with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features that do
not vary. Cloister and garrison rules have never been enforced even in the
hospice, bursa, inn, "house," "hall," or dormitory, and in loco parentis [In
place of a parent] practises are impossible, especially with large numbers.
The very word "school" means leisure, and in a world of toil and moil
suggests paradise. Some have urged that élite youth, exempt from the
struggle to live and left to the freedom of their own inclinations, might
serve as a biological and ethnic compass to point out the goal of human
destiny. But the spontaneous expressions of this best age and condition of
life, with no other occupation than their own development, have shown
reversions as often as progress. The rupture of home ties stimulates every
wider vicarious expression of the social instinct. Each taste and trait can
find congenial companionship in others and thus be stimulated to more
intensity and self-consciousness. Very much that has been hitherto repressed
in the adolescent soul is now reënforced by association and may become
excessive and even aggressive. While many of the race-correlates of
childhood are lost, those of this stage are more accessible in savage and
sub-savage life. Freedom is the native air and vital breath of student life.
The sense of personal liberty is absolutely indispensable for moral maturity;
and just as truth can not be found without the possibility of error, so the
posse non peccare [Ability not to sin] precedes the non posse peccare,
[Inability to sin] and professors must make abroad application of the rule
abusus non tollit usum [Abuse does not do away with use]. The student
must have much freedom to be lazy, make his own minor morals, vent his
disrespect for what he can see no use in, be among strangers to act himself
out and form a personality of his own, be baptized with the revolutionary
and skeptical spirit, and go to extremes at the age when excesses teach
wisdom with amazing rapidity, if he is to become a true knight of the spirit
and his own master. Ziegler[29] frankly told German students that about

one-tenth of them would be morally lost in this process, but insisted that on
the whole more good was done than by restraint; for, he said, "youth is now
in the stage of Schiller's bell when it was molten metal."

Of all safeguards I believe a rightly cultivated sense of honor is the most
effective at this age. Sadly as the written code of student honor in all lands
needs revision, and partial, freaky, and utterly perverted, tainted and
cowardly as it often is, it really means what Kant expressed in the sublime
precept, "Thou canst because thou oughtest." Fichte said that Faulheit,
Feigheit, and Falschheit [Laziness, cowardice, falsehood] were the three
dishonorable things for students. If they would study the history and enter
into the spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have keener and
broader ideas of honor to which they are happily so sensitive. If professors
made it always a point of honor to confess and never to conceal the
limitation of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of it, place credit for
originality frankly where it belongs, teach no creeds they do not profoundly
believe, or topics in which they are not interested, and withhold nothing
from those who want the truth, they could from this vantage with more
effect bring students to feel that the laziness that, while outwardly
conforming, does no real inner work; that getting a diploma, as a professor
lately said, an average student could do, on one hour's study a day; living
beyond one's means, and thus imposing a hardship on parents greater than
the talent of the son justifies; accepting stipends not needed, especially to
the deprivation of those more needy; using dishonest ways of securing rank
in studies or positions on teams, or social standing, are, one and all, not
only ungentlemanly but cowardly and mean, and the axe would be laid at
the root of the tree. Honor should impel students to go nowhere where they
conceal their college, their fraternity, or even their name; to keep
themselves immaculate from all contact with that class of women which,
Ziegler states, brought twenty-five per cent of the students of the University
of Berlin in a single year to physicians; to remember that other's sisters are

as cherished as their own; to avoid those sins against confiding innocence
which cry for vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which
strengthen the hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem
tedious because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, and which
give a taste for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness; and to avoid
the waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways which Ibsen and
Tolstoi have described. These things are the darkest blot on the honor of
youth.

Associations for youth, devised or guided by adults. Here we enter a very
different realm. Forbush[30] undertakes an analysis of many such clubs
which he divides according to their purpose into nine chief classes: physical
training, handicraft, literary, social, civic and patriotic, science-study, hero-
love, ethical, religious. These he classifies as to age of the boys, his purview
generally ending at seventeen; discusses and tabulates the most favorable
number, the instincts chiefly utilized, the kinds of education gained in each
and its percentage of interest, and the qualities developed. He commends
Riis's mode of pulling the safety-valve of a rather dangerous boy-gang by
becoming an adult honorary member, and interpreting the impulsions of this
age in the direction of adventure instead of in that of mischief. He reminds
us that nearly one-third of the inhabitants of America are adolescents, that
3,000,000 are boys between twelve and sixteen, "that the do-called heathen
people are, whatever their age, all in the adolescent stage of life."

A few American societies of this class we may briefly characterize as
follows:

(a) Typical of a large class of local juvenile clubs is the "Captains of
Ten," originally for boys of from eight to fourteen, and with a later graduate
squad of those over fifteen. The "Ten" are the fingers; and whittling, scrap-
book making, mat-weaving, etc., are taught. The motto is, "The hand of the

diligent shall bear rule"; its watchword is "Loyalty"; and the prime objects
are "to promote a spirit of loyalty to Christ among the boys of the club," and
to learn about and work for Christ's kingdom. The members wear a silver
badge; have an annual photograph; elect their leaders; vote their money to
missions (on which topic they hold meetings); act Bible stories in costume;
hear stories and see scientific experiments; enact a Chinese school; write
articles for the children's department of religious journals; develop
comradeship, and "have a good time."

(b) The Agassiz Association, founded in 1875 "to encourage personal
work in natural science," now numbers some 25,000 members, with
chapters distributed all over the country, and was said by the late Professor
Hyatt to include "the largest number of persons ever bound together for the
purpose of mutual help in the study of nature." It furnishes practical courses
of study in the sciences; has local chapters in thousands of towns and cities
in this and other countries; publishes a monthly organ, The Swiss Cross, to
facilitate correspondence and exchange of specimens; has a small
endowment, a badge, is incorporated, and is animated by a spirit akin to that
of University Extension; and, although not exclusively for young people, is
chiefly sustained by them.

(c) The Catholic Total Abstinence Union is a strong, well-organized, and
widely extended society, mostly composed of young men. The pledge
required of all members explains its object: "I promise with the Divine
assistance and in honor of the Sacred Thirst and the Agony of our Saviour,
to abstain from all intoxicating drinks and to prevent as much as possible by
advice and example the sin of intemperance in others and to discountenance
the drinking customs of society." A general convention of the Union has
been held annually since 1877.

(d) The Princely Knights of Character Castle is an organization founded
in 1895 for boys from twelve to eighteen to "inculcate, disseminate, and
practise the principles of heroism—endurance—love, purity, and
patriotism." The central incorporated castle grants charters to local castles,
directs the ritual and secret work. Its officers are supreme prince, patriarch,
scribes, treasurer, director, with captain of the guard, watchman, porter,
keeper of the dungeon, musician, herald, and favorite son. The degrees of
the secret work are shepherd lad, captive, viceroy, brother, son, prince,
knight, and royal knight. There are jewels, regalia, paraphernalia, and
initiations. The pledge for the first degree is, "I hereby promise and pledge
that I will abstain from the use of intoxicating liquor in any form as a
beverage; that I will not use profane or improper language; that I will
discourage the use of tobacco in any form; that I will strive to live pure in
body and mind; that I will obey all rules and regulations of the order and
not reveal any of the secrets in any way." There are benefits, reliefs,
passwords, a list of offenses and penalties.

(e) Some 35,000 Bands of Mercy are now organized under the direction
of the American Humane Education Society. The object of the organization
is to cultivate kindness to animals and sympathy with the poor and
oppressed. The prevention of cruelty in driving, cattle transportation,
humane methods of killing, care for the sick and abandoned or overworked
animals, are the themes of most of its voluminous literature. It has badges,
hymnbooks, cards, and certificates of membership, and a motto, "Kindness,
Justice, and Mercy to All." Its pledge is, "I will try to be kind to all harmless
living creatures, and try to protect them from cruel usage," and is intended
to include human as well as dumb creatures. The founder and secretary,
with great and commendable energy, has instituted prize contests for
speaking on humane subjects in schools, and has printed and circulated
prize stories; since the incorporation of the society in 1868, he has been
indefatigable in collecting funds, speaking before schools and colleges, and

prints fifty to sixty thousand copies of the monthly organ. In addition to its
mission of sentiment, and to make it more effective, this organization
clearly needs to make more provision for the intellectual element by well-
selected or constructed courses, or at least references on the life, history,
habits, and instincts of animals, and it also needs more recognition that
modern charity is a science as well as a virtue.

(f) The Coming Men of America, although organized only in 1894, now
claims to be the greatest chartered secret society for boys and young men in
the country. It began two years earlier in a lodge started by a nineteen-year-
old boy in Chicago in imitation of such ideas of Masons, Odd-Fellows, etc.,
as its founder could get from his older brother, and its meetings were first
held in a basement. On this basis older heads aided in its development, so
that it is a good example of the boy-imitative helped out by parents. The
organization is now represented in every State and Territory, and boys travel
on its badge. There is an official organ, The Star, a badge, sign, and a secret
sign language called "bestography." Its secret ritual work is highly praised.
Its membership is limited to white boys under twenty-one.

(g) The first Harry Wadsworth Club was established in 1871 as a result of
E.E. Hale's Ten Times One, published the year before. Its motto is, "Look
up, and not down; look forward, and not back; look out, and not in; lend a
hand," or "Faith, Hope, and Charity." Its organ is the Ten Times One
Record; its badge is a silver Maltese cross. Each club may organize as it
will, and choose its own name, provided it accepts the above motto. Its
watchword is, "In His Name." It distributes charities, conducts a Noonday
Rest, outings in the country, and devotes itself to doing good.[31]

[Footnote 1: Tarde: L'Opposition Universelle. Alcan, Paris, 1897, p. 461.]

[Footnote 2: The Adolescent at Home and in School. By E. G. Lancaster.
Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1899, p. 1039.]

[Footnote 3: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Pedagogical
Seminary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 87.]

[Footnote 4: Study of Boys Entering the Adolescent Period of Life. North
Western Monthly, November, 1897, vol. 8, pp. 248-250, and a series
thereafter.]

[Footnote 5: The Suggestibility of Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
December, 1896, vol. 4, p. 211]

[Footnote 6: Characteristics of the Best Teacher as Recognized by
Children. By H.E. Kratz. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896, vol. 3, pp.
413-418. See also The High School Teacher from the Pupil's Point of View,
by W.F. Book. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 239-
288.]

[Footnote 7: A Study of the Teacher's Influence. Pedagogical Seminary,
December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 492-525.]

[Footnote 8: Children's Ideals. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7,
pp. 3-12]

[Footnote 9: Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study, vol. 2,
No. 2, 1896, pp. 41-46.]

[Footnote 10: Children's Ambitions. By H.M. Willard. Barnes's Studies in
Education, vol. 2, pp. 243-258. (Privately printed by Earl Barnes, 4401
Sansom Street, Philadelphia.)]

[Footnote 11: Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study,
October, 1898, vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 131-144.]

[Footnote 12: A Study in Juvenile Ethics. Pedagogical Seminary, June,
1903, vol. 10, pp. 239-266]

[Footnote 13: Die Ideale der Kinder. Zeitschrift für pädagogische
Psychologie, Pathologie und Hygiene, Jahrgang 3, Heft 1, pp. 38-64.]

[Footnote 14: The Psychology of Ownership, Pedagogical Seminary,
December, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 421-470.]

[Footnote 15: Property: Its Origin and Development. Chas. Scribner's
Sons, 1892.]

[Footnote 16: Money-Sense of Children. Will S. Monroe. Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 152-156]

[Footnote 17: A Study of Children's Rights, as Seen by Themselves. By
M.E. Schallenberger. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 87-
96.]

[Footnote 18: Children's Attitude toward Law. By E. M Darrah. Barnes's
Studies in Education, vol. 1, pp. 213-216. (Stanford University, 1897.) G. E.
Stechert and Co., New York.]

[Footnote 19: Class Punishment. By Caroline Frear. Barnes's Studies in
Education, vol. 1, pp. 332-337.]

[Footnote 20: Children's Attitude toward Punishment for Weak Time
Sense. By D.S. Snedden. Barnes's Studies in Education, vol. 1, pp. 344-
351]

[Footnote 21: Ueber Einzel- und Gesamtleistung des Schulkindes. Archiv
für die gesamte Psychologie, 1 Band, 2 and 3 Heft, 1903, pp. 276-416]

[Footnote 22: Development of the Social Consciousness of Children. By
Will S. Monroe. North-Western Monthly, September, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 31-
36.]

[Footnote 23: Bohannon: The Only Child in a Family. Pedagogical
Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 475-496.]

[Footnote 24: J. Delitsch: Über Schülerfreundschaften in einer
Volksschulklasse, Die Kinderfehler. Fünfter Jahrgang, Mai, 1900, pp. 150-
163.]

[Footnote 25: On Some Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude.
Pedagogical Seminary, April 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]

[Footnote 26: A. Rauber: Homo Sapiens Ferus. J. Brehse, Leipzig,
1888. See also my Social Aspects of Education; Pedagogical Seminary,
March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 81-91. Also Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of
Evolution. W. Heinemann, London, 1902.]

[Footnote 27: Rudimentary Society among Boys, by John H. Johnson,
McDonogh, Md. McDonogh School, 1983, reprinted from Johns Hopkins
University Studies Series 2 (Historical and Political Studies, vol. 2,
No. 11).]

[Footnote 28: The Institutional Activities of American Children.
American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448.]

[Footnote 29: Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. 6th
Ed. Göschen, Leipzig, 1896.]

[Footnote 30: The Social Pedagogy of Boyhood. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 307-346. See also his The Boy Problem, with an
introduction by G. Stanley Hall, The Pilgrim Press, Boston, 1901, p. 194.
Also Winifred Buck (Boys' Self-governing Clubs, Macmillan, New York,
1903), who thinks ten million dollars could be used in training club advisers
who should have the use of schools and grounds after hours and evenings,
conduct excursions, organize games, etc., but avoid all direct teaching and
book work generally. This writer thinks such an institution would soon
result in a marked increase of public morality and an augmented demand
for technical instruction, and that for the advisers themselves the work
would be the best training for high positions in politics and reform. Clubs of
boys from eight to sixteen or eighteen must not admit age disparities of
more than two years.]

[Footnote 31: See Young People's Societies, by L.W. Bacon. D. Appleton
and Co., New York, 1900, p. 265. Also, F.G. Cressey: The Church and
Young Men. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1903, p. 233.]

*****

CHAPTER X

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK

The general change and plasticity at puberty—English teaching—Causes of
its failure: (1) too much time to other languages, (2) subordination of
literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear
and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words—Children's interest in
words—Their favorites—Slang—Story telling—Age of reading crazes—
What to read—The historic sense—Growth of memory span.

Just as about the only duty of young children is implicit obedience, so the
chief mental training from about eight to twelve is arbitrary memorization,
drill, habituation, with only limited appeal to the understanding. After the
critical transition age of six or seven, when the brain has achieved its adult
size and weight, and teething has reduced the chewing surface to its least
extent, begins a unique stage of life marked by reduced growth and
increased activity and power to resist both disease and fatigue, which
suggests what was, in some just post-simian age of our race, its period of
maturity. Here belong discipline in writing, reading, spelling, verbal
memory, manual training, practise of instrumental technic, proper names,
drawing, drill in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, the correct
pronunciation of which is far harder if acquired later, etc. The hand is never
so near the brain. Most of the content of the mind has entered it through the

senses, and the eye-and ear-gates should be open at their widest. Authority
should now take precedence of reason. Children comprehend much and
very rapidly if we can only refrain from explaining, but this slows down
intuition, tends to make casuists and prigs and to enfeeble the ultimate vigor
of reason. It is the age of little method and much matter. The good teacher is
now a pedotrieb, or boy-driver. Boys of this age at now not very
affectionate. They take pleasure in obliging and imitating those they like
and perhaps in disobliging those they dislike. They have much selfishness
and little sentiment. As this period draws to a close and the teens begin, the
average normal child will not be bookish but should read and write well,
know a few dozen well-chosen books, play several dozen games, be well
started in one or more ancient and modern languages—if these must be
studied at all, should know something of several industries and how to
make many things he is interested in, belong to a few teams and societies,
know much about nature in his environment, be able to sing and draw,
should have memorized much more than he now does, and be acquainted, at
least in story form, with the outlines of many of the best works in literature
and the epochs and persons in history.[1] Morally he should have been
through many if not most forms of what parents and teachers commonly
call "badness," and Professor Yoder even calls "meanness". He should have
fought, whipped and been whipped, used language offensive to the prude
and to the prim precisian, been in some scrapes, had something to do with
bad, if more with good, associates, and been exposed to and already
recovering from as many forms of ethical mumps and measles as, by having
in mild form now he can be rendered immune to later when they become far
more dangerous, because his moral and religious as well as his rational
nature is normally rudimentary. He is not depraved, but only in a savage or
half-animal stage, although to a large-brained, large-hearted and truly
parental soul that does not call what causes it inconvenience by opprobrious
names, an altogether lovable and even fascinating stage. The more we know

of boyhood the more narrow and often selfish do adult ideals of it appear.
Something is amiss with the lad of ten who is very good, studious,
industrious, thoughtful, altruistic, quiet, polite, respectful, obedient,
gentlemanly, orderly, always in good toilet, docile to reason, who turns
away from stories that reek with gore, prefers adult companionship to that
of his mates, refuses all low associates, speaks standard English, or is as
pious and deeply in love with religious services as the typical maiden
teacher or the à la mode parent wishes. Such a boy is either under-vitalized
and anemic and precocious by nature, a repressed, overtrained,
conventionalized manikin, a hypocrite, as some can become under pressure
thus early in life, or else a genius of some kind with a little of all these.

But with the teens all this begins to be changed and many of these
precepts must be gradually reversed. There is an outburst of growth that
needs a large part of the total kinetic energy of the body. There is a new
interest in adults, a passion to be treated like one's elders, to make plans for
the future, a new sensitiveness to adult praise or blame. The large muscles
have their innings and there is a new clumsiness of body and mind. The
blood-vessels expand and blushing is increased, new sensations and
feelings arise, the imagination blossoms, love of nature is born, music is felt
in a new, more inward way, fatigue comes easier and sooner; and if heredity
and environment enable the individual to cross this bridge successfully
there is sometimes almost a break of continuity, and a new being emerges.
The drill methods of the preceding period must be slowly relaxed and new
appeals made to freedom and interest. We can no longer coerce a break, but
must lead and inspire if we would avoid arrest. Individuality must have a
longer tether. Never is the power to appreciate so far ahead of the power to
express, and never does understanding so outstrip ability to explain.
Overaccuracy is atrophy. Both mental and moral acquisition sink at once
too deep to be reproduced by examination without injury both to intellect
and will. There is nothing in the environment to which the adolescent nature

does not keenly respond. With pedagogic tact we can teach about
everything we know that is really worth knowing; but if we amplify and
morselize instead of giving great wholes, if we let the hammer that strikes
the bell rest too long against it and deaden the sound, and if we wait before
each methodic step till the pupil has reproduced all the last, we starve and
retard the soul, which is now all insight and receptivity. Plasticity is at its
maximum, utterance at its minimum. The inward traffic obstructs the outer
currents. Boys especially are often dumb-bound, monophrastic, inarticulate,
and semi-aphasic save in their own vigorous and inelegant way. Nature
prompts to a modest reticence for which the deflowerers of all ephebic
naiveté should have some respect. Deep interests arise which are almost as
sacred as is the hour of visitation of the Holy Ghost to the religious teacher.
The mind at times grows in leaps and bounds in a way that seems to defy
the great enemy, fatigue; and yet when the teacher grows a little tiresome
the pupil is tired in a moment. Thus we have the converse danger of forcing
knowledge upon unwilling and unripe minds that have no love for it, which
is in many ways psychologically akin to a nameless crime that in some parts
of the country meets summary vengeance.

(A) The heart of education as well as its phyletic root is the vernacular
literature and language. These are the chief instruments of the social as well
as of the ethnic and patriotic instinct. The prime place of the former we saw
in the last chapter, and we now pass to the latter, the uniqueness of which
should first be considered.

The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims to have
250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Unabridged.
Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is said,
will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 compound words, or 380,000
words in all. The dictionary of the French Academy has 33,000; that of the

Royal Spanish Academy, 50,000; the Dutch dictionary of Van Dale, 86,000;
the Italian and Portuguese, each about 50,000 literary, or 150,000
encyclopedic words. Of course, words can really be counted hardly more
than ideas or impressions, and compounds, dialects, obsolete terms,
localisms, and especially technical terms, swell the number indefinitely. A
competent philologist[2] says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to
supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000 American dollars."
Chamberlain[3] estimates that our language contains more than two score
as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage languages
contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few hundred, words. Our
tongue is essentially Saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from the
time when it was despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy,
swallowing with little modification terms not only from classical antiquity,
but from all modern languages—Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian—
according to its needs, its adopted children far outnumbering those of its
own blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of
thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and
nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like
those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.[4]

In this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight. Here his
soul finds its native breath and vital air. He may live as a peasant, using, as
Max Müller says many do, but a few hundred words during his lifetime; or
he may need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like Shakespeare, 20,000 or
30,000, like Huxley, who commanded both literary and technical terms;
while in understanding, which far outstrips, use, a philologist may master
perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 words. The content of a tongue may contain
only folk-lore and terms for immediate practical life, or this content may be
indefinitely elaborated in a rich literature and science. The former is
generally well on in its development before speech itself becomes an abject
of study. Greek literature was fully grown when the Sophists, and finally

Aristotle, developed the rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech being at
first closely related with his ten metaphysical categories. Our modern
tongue had the fortune, unknown to those of antiquity, when it was crude
and despised, to be patronized and regulated by Latin grammarians, and has
had a long experience, both for good and evil, with their conserving and
uniformitizing instincts. It has, too, a long history of resistance to this
control. Once spelling was a matter of fashion or even individual taste; and
as the constraint grew, two pedagogues in the thirteenth century fought a
duel for the right spelling of the word, and that maintained by the survivor
prevailed. Phonic and economic influences are now again making some
headway against orthographic orthodoxy here; so with definitions. In the
days of Johnson's dictionary, individuality still had wide range in
determining meanings. In pronunciation, too: we may now pronounce the
word tomato in six ways, all sanctioned by dictionaries. Of our tongue in
particular it is true, as Tylor says in general, condensing a longer passage,
"take language all in all, it is the product of a rough-and-ready ingenuity
and of the great rule of thumb. It is an old barbaric engine, which in its
highest development is altered, patched, and tinkered into capability. It is
originally and naturally a product of low culture, developed by ages of
conscious and unconscious improvement to answer more or less perfectly
the requirements of modern civilization."

It is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least of all that derived from
the prim, meager Latin contingent of it, is adequate to legislate for the free
spirit of our magnificent tongue. Again, if this is ever done and English ever
has a grammar that is to it what Latin grammar is to that language, it will
only be when the psychology of speech represented, e.g., in Wundt's
Psychologie der Sprache,[5] which is now compiling and organizing the
best elements from all grammars, is complete. The reason why English
speakers find such difficulty in learning other languages is because ours has

so far outgrown them by throwing off not only inflections but many old
rules of syntax, that we have had to go backward to an earlier and more
obsolescent stage of human development. In 1414, at the Council of
Constance, when Emperor Sigismund was rebuked for a wrong gender, he
replied, "I am King of the Romans and above grammar." Thomas Jefferson
later wrote, "Where strictures of grammar does not weaken expression it
should be attended to; but where by a small grammatical negligence the
energy of an idea is condensed or a word stands for a sentence, I hold
grammatical rigor in contempt." Browning, Whitman, and Kipling
deliberately violate grammar and secure thereby unique effects neither
asking nor needing excuse.

By general consent both high school and college youth in this country are
in an advanced stage of degeneration in the command of this the world's
greatest organ of the intellect; and that, despite the fact that the study of
English often continues from primary into college grades, that no topic
counts for more, and that marked deficiency here often debars from all
other courses. Every careful study of the subject for nearly twenty years
shows deterioration, and Professor Shurman, of Nebraska, thinks it now
worse than at any time for forty years. We are in the case of many
Christians described by Dante, who strove by prayers to get nearer to God
when in fact with every petition they were departing farther from him. Such
a comprehensive fact must have many causes.

I. One of these is the excessive time given to other languages just at the
psychological period of greatest linguistic plasticity and capacity for
growth. School invention and tradition is so inveterate that it is hard for us
to understand that there is little educational value—and perhaps it is
deëducational—to learn to tell the time of day or name a spade in several
different tongues or to learn to say the Lord's Prayer in many different
languages, any one of which the Lord only can understand. The polyglot

people that one meets on great international highways of travel are linguists
only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen
instruments equally badly is a musician. It is a psychological impossibility
to pass through the apprenticeship stage of learning foreign languages at the
age when the vernacular is setting without crippling it. The extremes are the
youth in ancient Greece studying his own language only and the modern
high school boy and girl dabbling in three or perhaps four languages. Latin,
which in the eight years preceding 1898 increased one hundred and
seventy-four per cent. in American high schools, while the proportion
entering college in the country and even in Massachusetts steadily declined,
is the chief offender. In the day of its pedagogical glory Latin was the
universal tongue of the learned. Sturm's idea was to train boys so that if
suddenly transported to ancient Rome or Greece they would be at home
there. Language, it was said, was the chief instrument of culture; Latin, the
chief language and therefore a better drill in the vernacular than the
vernacular itself. Its rules were wholesome swathing bands for the modern
languages when in their infancy. Boys must speak only Latin on the
playground. They thought, felt, and developed an intellectual life in and
with that tongue.[6] But how changed all this is now. Statistical studies
show that five hours a week for a year gives command of but a few hundred
words, that two years does not double this number, and that command of
the language and its resources in the original is almost never attained, but
that it is abandoned not only by the increasing percentage that do not go to
college but also by the increasing percentage who drop it forever at the
college door. Its enormous numerical increase due to high school
requirements, the increasing percentage of girl pupils more ready to follow
the teacher's advice, in connection with the deteriorating quality of the girls
—inevitable with their increasing numbers, the sense that Latin means
entering upon a higher education, the special reverence for it by Catholic
children, the overcrowded market for Latin teachers whom a recent writer

says can be procured by the score at less rates than in almost any other
subject, the modern methods of teaching it which work well with less
knowledge of it by the teacher than in the case of other school topics, have
been attended perhaps inevitably by steady pedagogic decline despite the
vaunted new methods; until now the baby Latin in the average high school
class is a kind of sanctified relic, a ghost of a ghost, suggesting Swift's
Struldbrugs, doomed to physical immortality but shriveling and with
increasing horror of all things new. In 1892 the German emperor declared it
a shame for a boy to excel in Latin composition, and in the high schools of
Sweden and Norway it has been practically abandoned. In the present stage
of its educational decadence the power of the dead hand is strongly
illustrated by the new installation of the old Roman pronunciation with
which our tongue has only remote analogies, which makes havoc with
proper names which is unknown and unrecognized in the schools of the
European continent, and which makes a pedantic affectation out of more
vocalism. I do not know nor care whether the old Romans pronounced thus
or not, but if historic fidelity in this sense has pedagogic justification, why
still teach a text like the Viri Romae, which is not a classic but a modern
pedagogue's composition?

I believe profoundly in the Latin both as a university specialty and for all
students who even approach mastery, but for the vast numbers who stop in
the early stages of proficiency it is disastrous to the vernacular. Compare
the evils of translation English, which not even the most competent and
laborious teaching can wholly prevent and which careless mechanical
instruction directly fosters, with the vigorous fresh productions of a boy or
girl writing or speaking of something of vital present interest. The
psychology of translation shows that it gives the novice a consciousness of
etymologies which rather impedes than helps the free movement of the
mind. Jowett said in substance that it is almost impossible to render either

of the great dead languages into English without compromise, and this
tends to injure the idiomatic mastery of one's own tongue, which can be got
only by much hard experience in uttering our own thoughts before trying to
shape the dead thoughts of others into our language. We confound the little
knowledge of word-histories which Latin gives with the far higher and
subtler sentence-sense which makes the soul of one language so different
from that of another, and training in which ought not to end until one has
become more or less of a stylist and knows how to hew out modes of
expressing his own individuality in great language. There is a sense in
which Macaulay was not an Englishman at all, but a Ciceronian Latinist
who foisted an alien style upon our tongue; and even Addison is a foreigner
compared to the virile Kipling. The nature and needs of the adolescent mind
demand bread and meat, while Latin rudiments are husks. In his
autobiography, Booker Washington says that for ten years after their
emancipation, the two chief ambitions of the young negro of the South were
to hold office and to study Latin, and he adds that the chief endeavor of his
life has been against these tendencies. For the American boy and girl, high
school too often means Latin. This gives at first a pleasing sense of
exaltation to a higher stage of life, but after from one to three years the
great majority who enter the high school drop out limp and discouraged for
many reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed. Defective
nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which enhances all the
influences which make boys and girls leave school.

II. The second cause of this degeneration is the subordination of literature
and content to language study. Grammar arises in the old age of language.
As once applied to our relatively grammarless tongue it always was more or
less of a school-made artifact and an alien yoke, and has become
increasingly so as English has grown great and free. Its ghost, in the many
textbooks devoted to it, lacks just the quality of logic which made and

besouled it. Philology, too, with all its magnificence, is not a product of the
nascent stages of speech. In the college, which is its stronghold, it has so
inspired professors of English that their ideal is to be critical rather than
creative till they prefer the minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide
general knowledge, and a typical university announces that "in every case
the examiners will treat mere knowledge of books as less important than the
ability to write good English" that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated,
capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors of English literature
are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful, look with a
certain condescension. Many academic chairs of English are filled by men
whose acquaintance of our literature is very narrow, who wish to be
linguistic and not literary, and this is true even in ancient tongues.

At a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree who had
answered many questions concerning the forms of Lucretius, when asked
whether he was a dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did not know,
and his professor deemed the question improper. I visited the eleventh
recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of
whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its
verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on English on
my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes
than text. Fashion that works from above down the grades and college
entrance requirements are in large measure responsible for this, perhaps
now the worst case of the prostitution of content to form.

Long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to make
students who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over-refined
elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the greater the triumph
of form alone could be. These petty but pretty nothings are like German
confectionery, that appeals to the eye but has little for taste and is worse

than nothing for the digestion. It is like straining work on an empty
stomach. For youth this embroidery of details is the precocious senescence
that Nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary decadence. Language is
vastly larger than all its content, and the way to teach it is to focus the mind
upon story, history, oratory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic, mental, and
above all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. The more
unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment
and that strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense
that they must be told and shared, are what teach us how to command the
resources of our mother tongue. These prescriptions and corrections and
consciousness of the manifold ways of error are never so peculiarly liable to
hinder rather than to help as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new
content and a new sense for it, and so abhors and is so incapable of
precision and propriety of diction. To hold up the flights of exuberant youth
by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of the
gridiron, low tackle, and I would rather be convicted of many errors by such
methods than use them. Of course this has its place, but it must always be
subordinated to a larger view, as in one of the newly discovered logia
ascribed to Jesus, who, when he found a man gathering sticks on Sunday,
said to him, "If you understand what you are doing, it is well, but if not,
thou shalt be damned." The great teacher who, when asked how he obtained
such rare results in expression, answered, "By carefully neglecting it and
seeking utter absorption in subject-matter," was also a good practical
psychologist. This is the inveterate tendency that in other ages has made
pedagogic scribes, Talmudists, epigoni, and sophists, who have magnified
the letter and lost the spirit. But there are yet other seats of difficulty.

III. It is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change, to receive
language through the eye which reads instead of through the ear which
hears. Not only is perception measurably quite distinctly slower, but book