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.