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