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18 déc. 2024
The Boyhood of Great Men (by A.H. Yoder)
A. H. Yoder (1894) The Study of the Boyhood of Great Men,
The Pedagogical Seminary, 3:1, 134-156
(Extracts)
II.
In studying a number of great men, one finds a great deal of data too meagre for generalization, and yet so suggestive aa to be valuable. Some of the points upon which noteworthy but inadequate data have been obtained from the biographies mentioned, are the following:
Great men have strong memories. They may be very absent-minded, but in the line of their interest, their memories are sometimes wonderful. This is, perhaps, too apparent to mention but these men probably showed this same ability as children; at least a strong memory in childhood is mentioned in the lives of Watt, Goethe, Hamilton, Webster, Shelley, Macready, Lincoln, Darwin, Napoleon, Johnson and others.
"In my childhood I was praised for the readiness with which I could multiply and divide, by memory alone, two sums of several figures," says Gibbon in his Autobiography. "Blessed with a memory that retained everything he saw and read, and which never failed him in any part of his career when twelve years old he was as familiar with quadrupeds and birds as a first-class naturalist," says Mrs. Leel the wife of an intimate friend of Baron Cuvier. Darwin says or his first school: "Much attention was paid to the learning by heart the lessons of the previous day. This I could effect with great facility, learning forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer whilst I was in chapel."
Of the boy, Edison, it is said: "Even at this early age (ten to twelve), these authors made such an impression on his mind that he could refer, usually, to the very book and page where any fact, incident, or words used in them occurred. This habit still clings to him." Only a few have spoken of their earliest recollections, but I am inclined to think that great men not only have strong memories, but earlier recollections than the average man. "Thomas Jefferson was not more than two years old when his father moved to Tuckahoe yet he often declare that his earliest recollection in life was or being, on that occasion, handed up to a servant on horseback, by whom he was carried on a pillow for a long distance."
George Eliot remembered very early playing or pretending to play on the piano to impress the servant. Some or these men were remakable, also, for their habits of orderly and logical association. Napoleon, for example, says of himself, "Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I want to take up any special business I shut one drawer and open another. None of them ever get mixed and never does this incommode me or fatigue me. When I feel sleepy, I shut all the drawers and go to sleep."
A good memory is evidently a condition of greatness. "No one, probably", as Prof. James has said, "was ever effective on a volummous scale without a high degree of this physiological retentiveness. In the practical as well as in the theoretic life, the man
whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time In relearning what they once knew but have forgotten simply hold their own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a walter Scott, any example, in short, on your quarto or folio editions of mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the purely physiological sort. Men without this retentiveness may excel in the quality of their work at this point or at that, but wil never do such mighty sums of it, or be influential contemporaneously on such a scale."
I believe that a careful study of the boyhood of great men would show them to have more imagination also than the average child. Tennyson's story of "The Old Horse," which took weeks to relate; Dickens' "Tragedy of Misnax", Kingsley's sermons, preached in an improvised pulpit in his nursery with a pinafore for surplice, and empty chairs for a congregation; Blake's vision of angels in the tree, encouraged by a sound thrashing because he persisted in saying he really saw them; Newton's tread-mill, with a mouse for water power; Shelley's imaginary alchemist who lived in an old castle; Stephenson's clay engines, and Edison's attempt to hatch eggs by sitting on them himself, or to get a current by means of a tom-cat are all examples.
One would hardly suspect Prince Bismarck "to have indulged in versifying to a considerable extent," yet he did, and several others whose late lives have been far removed from poetry. Darwin was imaginative to a fault. He told his friends he could produce any colored tiower he wished by watering the plants with certain colored water. This was but a childish exercise of that great scientitic imagination which gave the world the theory of evolution. The imagination may show itself in various ways. The child may be dreaming and retiring, as Tennyson, or morbid, as Altieri' or sensitive as Tolstoi; or imagination may show itself in much building of things, as in the case of Edison, or Stephenson, or Newton; or it may watch the tea-kettle, as in the case of Watt.
A careful study of the imagination of great men as compared with that of ordinary men might give valuable psychological data. One form of imagination, what may be called the dramatic instinct, is very strong, manifesting itself in the various ways known to children. They love livng and active beings, and the theatre or circus, or even puppet show, appeals to this love more strongly than the characters in books. Goethe's love for acting was very marked and is interesting, as he probably gave his own experience when he made Wilhelm tell Mariane of his theatrical attempts. Altieri says of his feelings, after having seen a fine opera:
"This varied and enchanting music sunk deep into my soul, and made the most astonishing impression on my imagination; it agitated the inmost recesses of my heart to such a degre, that for several weeks I experienced the most profound melancholy, which was not, however, wholly unattended with pleasure."
Referring to Tennyson's college life, Waugh says, "Among the many interests of the Cambridge circle, amateur theatricals had their place." Longfellow's father used to tell the children about the theatre in Boston but the boys were forced to substitute circus and menagerie for the more refined theatre. The circus was eagerly attended, and, of course imitated at home. Mrs. Gibson says:
"Then George Stronghill (his chum) would come in with his magic lantern, and they would sing, recite and perform parts of plays. Charles and Fanny often sang togetner. . . . A rather favorite piece for recitation by Charles, at this time, was, 'The Voice of the Sluggard,' from Dr. Watts, and the little boy used to give it with great effect, and with Buch action and Buch attitudes."
Of George Eliot when about twelve and her brother it was said: "On coming home for their holidays the sister and brother began, about thts time, the habit of acting charades together before the household." In Lincoln this desire to imitate and amuse took a form appropriate to his surroundings, for "it is also reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations by making burlesque speeches, or more than that, comic sermons from the top of some tempting stump."
The old people of Black Collerton describe George Stephenson as "quick-witted, and full of fun and tricks - there was nothing under the sun but that he tried to imitate." In Shelley we see still another form of the same desire. He was fond of masquerading, as the following incident shows: "On yet another occasion a lad called upon Col. S., at the Horsham lawyer's house, and asked, in Sussex dialect, to be engaged as game keeper's boy; his wit, it seems, was successful, and then, of course, there was an explosion of laughter, and the jester stood revealed."
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The value of pictures in early education is illustrated also by many passages. "In the interior of the house my eyes were chiefly attracted by a aeries of Roman views, with which my father had ornamented an ante-room. They were engravings by some of the accomplished predecessors of Piranesi, who well understood perspective and architecture and whose toucnes were clear and excellent. There every day I saw the Piazza del Popolo, the Colosseum, the Piazza of St. Peter's, the Castle of St. Angelo, and many other places. These images impressed themselves deeply upon me.""It happened also," says Ruskin, "which was the real cause of the bias of my after life, that my father had a rare love of pictures. ... He used, as a small child, to sit and with his father make pen and ink. sketches."
Of Dumas it is said: "Above all, there was a splendid illustrated Bible whose pictures he was allowed to turn over, and which left an impression as deep as the ponderous 'stock house' which Charles Lamb's incautious fingers tore. This volume with an illustrated Buffon which he found at another house, and was privileged to pore over!. .. was an inexhaustible entertainment."
At Longfellow's home on sunday afternoons, "the mother gathered her children around her, to read in turn from the great family Bible, and to look over, and talk over its rude engravings of Scripture scenes and events." "The child (George Eliot) turns over the book with pictures that she wishes her father to explain to her-or that perhaps she prefers explaininlf to him." "Now, too, he began loitering about among salesrooms, say Ellis and Yeats of Blake, then ten years old, "on the lookout for cheap prints after Raphael, Angelo, Durer, etc."
Cuvier'slove for natural history was brought; to light by the sight of a Gesner with colored plates and by frequent viaits to a house of a relative who possessed a complete copy of Bufron. "As a child, William (Hamilton) took great delight in the natural and graphic picturing of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' and in the scenes of the Apocalypse, the two books, which, above all others, had a charm for him.
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The question when we can say to a child," Know thyself," is a difficult one. A too early awakening to the realization of self is as bad as an ignorance of one's real powers after their development. Dreaming and thinking about self is very dangerous to sensuous natures, especially as it usually comes with the appearance of the sexual instinct. But children today are hustled hither and thither from school to society, from church to athletics; every child belongs to a long list of clubs, societies, and fraternities even - there is no time for the child. He knows his playmates and friends better than himself, probably has spent more time, because of favorable opportunity, in studying his friends than he has in studying himself.
I have been forcibly struck with what may be called solitude in the lives of these great men. Either by nature or by opportunity they have thought a great deal alone. Some have loved the woods or solitary walks. For some, sickness no doubt gave the opportunity for self acquaintance and imagination; and in this use lies the advantage of ill health; but to suppose that poor health has any virtue of its own is on a par with the idea in Charles Lamb's "Dissertation upon Roast Pig." For others, country life furnished the opportunity, as in the case of Tennyson, of whom Waugh says: "His spirit was a little too solitary, a little too shy and over-reserved, he ought to have had more of active life and less time to dream."
A classmate says of Longfellow: "Rather disinclined to general intercourse .... his rambles in the fines and along the river banks, well occupied the uneventful days.' Yet he had a "lively disposition" and firm friends. "Besides," says Altieri, "the perfect solitude in which I lived with my tutor tended to generate a disposition to melancholy and a habit of abstraction after the departure of my sister of whom he was very fond. This loneliness was also caused by his mother's marrying soon after the death of his father. With Shelley the sorrow mood was present in boyhood too. He loved to walk out alone under the starsil contemplating and musing. Scott says: "My lameness and my so tary habtte had made me a tolerable reader." And of Byron it is said:
"The love of solitude and meditation is already traceable in the child. He loves to wander at night among the dark and solitary cloisters of the Abby."
No doubt, as Waugh says, there is sometimes too much solitude. Altieri certainly sutrered intensely and was very morbid for a time on account of too great solitude. His was a case of lack of sympathy rather than of too much solitude. The importance of solitude in education is undoubted, although it has been carried to an extreme by ascetics and others. Emerson certainly recognizes the value both of solitude and of society, but he rightly concludes in favor of the former in the following 'passage referring to his college life:
"'In the morning solitude,' said Pythagoras. By all means give the youth solitude, that nature may speak to his imagination as it never does in company, and for the like reason give a chamber alone, and that was the best thing I found in college."
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