Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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