Prodigious Adolescence
Reclaiming the Normal Path to Mature Adulthood
In my research for the articles I write on church music, both here at Touchstone and for the online magazine my wife Debra and I publish, Word and Song, I have frequent occasion to read the biographies of composers of sacred music, organists, choirmasters, ministers, minor poets, and translators of hymns from languages ancient and modern. I am thinking particularly here about men from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What they often did as mere boys astonishes me, and all the more because it seems to have delighted but not astonished the people of their own time.
Children in those days were ushered early into the world of mature human beings and their important work, but unless they were in the company of the corrupt—and, given the moral tenor of the slums and stews of a London or Liverpool, that was not as rare as it ought to have been—they did retain their childlike innocence. Otherwise, the popularity of such boyish authors as Scott, Dickens, Stevenson, and Kipling, none of whom wrote for the sexually precocious, let alone for salacious adults weary of true adulthood and virtue, seems inexplicable.
Unsurprisingly Prodigious
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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