In looking over current autobiographies of well-known modern men who deal with their boyhood, one finds curious extremes. On the one hand are those of which Doctor's is a type, where details are dwelt upon at great length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflections. The development of his own tastes, capacities, and his entire adult consciousness was assumed to be due to the incidents of childhood and youth, and especially the latter stage was to him full of the most serious problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery and catchy superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the precious associations of early life on a New England farm are not only made absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not a scintilla of instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life. Aldrich[3] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet horse and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and falling in love with an older girl whose engagement later blighted his life. Howells,[4] White,[5] Mitter,[6] Grahame,[7] Heidi,[8] and Mrs. Barnett,[9] might perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in this field in this respect.
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.