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