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