THE BATTLE WITH FEARS (_Continued_).
_The Assault of the Beasts._
There are two varieties of children's fears so prominent and so
important that it seems worth while to deal with them separately. These
are the dread of animals and of the dark.
It may well seem strange that the creatures which are to become the
companions and playmates of children, and one of the chief sources of
their happiness, should cause so much alarm when they first come on the
scene. Yet so it is. Many children, at least, are at first terribly put
out by quite harmless members of the animal family.
In some cases, no doubt, as when a child takes a strong dislike to a dog
after having been alarmed at its barking, we have to do with the
disturbing effect of sound merely. Fear here takes its rise in the
experience of shock. In other cases we have to do rather with a sort of
aesthetic dislike to what is disagreeable and ugly than with a true fear.
Children sometimes appear to feel a repugnance to a black sheep or other
animal just because they dislike black objects, though the feeling may
not amount to fear properly so called.
Yet allowing for these sources of repugnance, it seems probable that
many children from about two or three onwards manifest something
indistinguishable from fear at the first sight of certain animals. The
directions of this childish fear vary greatly. Darwin's boy when taken
to the Zoological Gardens at the age of two years three months showed a
fear of the big caged animals whose forms were strange to him, such,
_e.g._, as the lion and the tiger. Some children have shown fear on
seeing a tame bear, others have selected the cow as their pet dread,
others the butting ram, and so forth. Nor do they confine their
aversions to the bigger animals. Snakes, caterpillars, worms, small
birds such as sparrows, spiders and even moths have looked alarming
enough to throw a child into a state of terror.
It is sometimes thought that these early fears of animals are inherited
from remote ancestors to whom many wild animals were really dangerous.
But I do not think that this has been proven. The variety of these
childish recoilings, and the fact that they seem to be just as often
from small harmless creatures as from big and mighty ones, suggest that
other causes are at work here. We may indeed suppose that a child's
nervous system has been so put together and poised that it very readily
responds to the impression of strange animal forms by a tremor. Special
aspects of the unfamiliar animal, aided by special characteristics of
its sounds, probably determine the directions of this tremor.
In many cases, I think, the mere bigness of an animal, aided by the
uncanny look which often comes from an apparent distortion of the
familiar human face, may account for some of these early fears. In other
cases we can see that it is the suggestion of attack which alarms. This
applies pretty certainly to the butting ram, and may apply to pigeons
and other birds whose pecking movements readily appear to a child's mind
a kind of attack. And this supplies an explanation of the fear of one
boy of two years three months at the sight of pigs when sucking; for, as
the child let out afterwards, he thought they were biting their mother.
The unexpectedness of the animal's movements too, especially when, as in
the case of birds, mice, spiders, they are rapid, might excite
uneasiness. In other cases it is something uncanny in the movement which
excites fear, as when one child was frightened at seeing a cat's tail
move when the animal was asleep. The apparent fear of worms and
caterpillars in some children may be explained in this way, though
associations of disagreeable touch probably assist here. In the case of
many of the smaller animals, _e.g._, small birds, mice, and even insects
when they come too near, the fear may not improbably have its source in
a vague apprehension of invasion.
These shrinkings from animals are among the most capricious-looking of
all childish fears. Many robust children with hardy nerves know little
or nothing of them. Here, too, as in the case of new things generally,
the painfulness of fear is opposed and may be overcome by the pleasure
of watching and by the deeper pleasure of "making friends". Quite tiny
children, on first seeing ducks and other animals, so far from being
alarmed, will run after the pretty creatures to make pets of them.
Nothing perhaps is prettier in child-life than the pose and look of one
of these defenceless youngsters when he is making a brave effort to get
the better of his fear at the approach of a strange big dog and to
proffer friendship to the shaggy monster. The perfect love which lies at
the bottom of children's hearts towards their animal kinsfolk soon casts
out fear. And when once the reconciliation has been effected it will
take a good deal of harsh experience to make the child ever again
entertain the thought of danger.
_The Night Attack._
Fear of the dark, and especially of _being alone_ in the dark, which
includes not only the nocturnal dread of the dark bedroom, but that of
closets, caves, woods, and other gloomy places, is no doubt very common
among children. It does not show itself in the early months. A baby of
three or four months if accustomed to a light may no doubt be upset at
being deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread of the dark.
This presupposes a certain development of the mind, and more
particularly what we call imagination. It is said by Dr. Stanley Hall to
attain its greatest strength about the age of five to seven, when images
of things are known to be vivid.
So far as we can understand it the fear of the dark is rarely of the
darkness as such. The blackness present to the eye in a dark room does
no doubt encompass us and seem to close in upon and threaten to stifle
us. We know, too, that children sometimes show fear of mists, and that
many are haunted by the idea of the stifling grave. Hence, it is not
improbable that children seized by the common terror and dizziness on
suddenly waking may feel the darkness as something oppressive. This is
borne out by the fact that a little boy on surmounting his dread told
his father that he used to think the dark "a great large live thing the
colour of black". A child can easily make a substantial thing out of the
dark, as he can out of a shadow.
Yet in most, if not all, cases imagination is active here. The darkness
itself offers points for the play of imagination. Owing to the activity
of the retina, which goes on even when no light excites it, brighter
spots are apt to stand out from the black background, to take form and
to move; and all this supplies food to a child's fancy. I suspect that
the alarming eyes of people and animals which children are apt to see in
the dark receive their explanation in this way. Of course these sources
of uneasiness grow more pronounced when a child is out of health and his
nervous tone falls low. Even older people who have this fear describe
the experience as seeing shadowy flitting forms, and this suggests that
the activity of that wonderful little structure the retina is at the
bottom of it. The same thing seems to be borne out by the common dread
in the dark of _black_ forms, _e.g._, a black coach with headless
coachman dressed in black. A girl of nineteen remembers that when a
child she seemed on going to bed to see little black figures jumping
about between the ceiling and the bed.
The more familiar forms of a dread of the dark are sustained by images
of threatening creatures which lie hidden in the blackness or half
betray their presence in the way just indicated. These images are in
many cases the revival of those acquired from the experiences of the
day, and from storyland. The fears of the day live on undisturbed in the
dark hours of night. The dog that has frightened a child will, when he
goes to bed, be projected into the surrounding blackness. Any shock in
the waking hours may in this way give rise to a more or less permanent
fear of being alone in a dark place. In not a few instances the alarming
images are the product of fairy-stories, or of ghost and other alarming
stories told by nurses and others thoughtlessly. In this way the dark
room becomes for a timid child haunted by a "bogie" or other horror.
Alarming animals, generally black, as that significant expression _bete
noire_ shows, are frequently the dread of these solitary hours in the
dark room. Lions and wolves, monsters not describable except by saying
that they have claws, which they can stretch out, these seem to fill the
blackness for some children. The vague horrors of big black shapeless
things are by no means the lightest to bear.
In addition to this overflow of the day's fears into the unlit hours,
sleep and the transitional states between sleeping and waking also
furnish much alarming material. Probably the worst moment of this
trouble of the night is when the child wakes suddenly from a sleep or
half-sleep with some powerful dream-image still holding him in its
clutches, and when the awful struggle to wake and to be at home with the
surroundings issues in the cry, "Where am I?" It is in these moments of
absolute hopeless confusion that the impenetrable blackness, refusing to
divulge its secret, grows insufferable. The dream-images, but slightly
slackening their hold, people the blackness with nameless terrors. The
little sufferer has to lie and battle with these as best he may,
perhaps till the slow-moving day brings reassuring light and the
familiar look of things.
How terrible beyond all description, all measurement with other things,
these nightmare fears may be in the case of nervous children, the
reminiscences of Charles Lamb and others have told us. It is not too
much, I think, to say that to many a child this dread of the black night
has been the worst of his sufferings. At no time is he really so brave
as when he lies still in a cold damp terror and trusts to the coming of
the morning light.
I do not believe that fear of the dark is universal among young
children. I know a child that did not show any trace of it till some
rather too gruesome stories of Grimm set his brain horror-spinning when
he ought to have been going to sleep. A lady whom I know tells me that
she never had the fear as a child though she acquired it later, towards
the age of thirty. How common it is among children under ten or twelve,
we have as yet no means of judging. Some inquiries of Dr. Stanley Hall
show that out of about 300 young people under thirty only two appear to
have been wholly exempt from it, but the ages at which the fear first
appeared are not given.
Here, again, we have a counterbalancing side. An imaginative child can
fill the dark vacancy of the bedroom with bright pleasing images. On
going to bed and saying good-night to the world of daylight, he can see
his beloved fairies, talk to them and hear them talk. We know how R. L.
Stevenson must, when a child, have gladdened many of his solitary dark
hours by bright fancies. Even when there is a little trepidation a hardy
child may manage to play with his fears, and so in a sense to enjoy his
black phantasmagoria, just as grown-ups may enjoy the horrors of
fiction.
It will perhaps turn out that imaginative children have both suffered
and enjoyed the most in these ways, the effect varying with nervous tone
and mental condition. Yet it seems probable that the fearful suffering
mood has here been uppermost.
Why these nocturnal images tend to be gloomy and alarming may, I think,
be explained by a number of circumstances. The absence of light and the
oncoming of night have, as we know, a lowering effect on the functions
of the body; and it is not unlikely that this might so modify the action
of the brain as to favour the rise of gloomy thoughts. The very
blackness of night, too, which we must remember is actually seen by the
child, would probably tend to darken the young thoughts. We know how
commonly we make black and dark shades of colour symbols of melancholy
and sorrow. If to this we add that in the night a child is apt to feel
lost through a loss of all his customary landmarks, and that, worst of
all, he is, in the midst of this blackness which blots out his daily
home, left to himself, robbed of that human companionship which is his
necessary stay and comfort, we need not, I think, wonder at his so often
encountering "the terror by night".
(_b_) _Damage of the Onslaught._
I have now, perhaps, illustrated sufficiently some of the more common
and characteristic fears of children. The facts seem to show that they
are exposed on different sides to the attacks of fear, and that the
attacking force is large and consists of a variety of alarming shapes.
If now we glance back at these several childish fears, one feature in
them which at once arrests our attention is the small part which
remembered experiences of evil play in their production. The child is
inexperienced, and if humanely treated knows little of the acuter forms
of human suffering. It would seem at least as if he feared not so much
because his experience had made him aware of a real danger in this and
that direction, as because he was constitutionally and instinctively
nervous, and possessed with a feeling of insecurity. More particularly
children are apt to feel uneasy when face to face with the new, the
strange, the unknown, and this uneasiness grows into a more definite
feeling of fear as soon as the least suggestion of harmfulness is added;
as when a child recoils with dread from a stranger who has a big
projecting eye that looks a menace, or a squint which suggests a sly way
of looking at you, or an ugly and advancing tooth that threatens to
bite. How much the fear of the dark is due to inability to see and so to
know is shown by the familiar fact that children and adults who can
enter a strange gloomy-looking room and keep brave as long as things are
before their eyes are wont to feel a creepy sense of "something" behind
them when they turn their backs to retire and can no longer see. It is
shown too in the common practice of children and their elders to look
into the cupboard, under the bed, and so forth, before putting out the
light; for that which has not been inspected retains dire possibilities
of danger.
Where a child does not know he is apt to fancy something. It is the
activity of children's imagination which creates and sustains the larger
number of their fears. Do we not indeed in saying that they are for the
greater part groundless say also that they are "fanciful"?
Children's fears are often compared with those of animals. No doubt
there are points of contact. The misery of a dog when street music is
going on is very suggestive of a state of uneasiness if not of fully
developed fear. Dogs, cats, and other animals will "shy" at the sight of
"uncanny" moving objects, such as leaves, feathers, and shadows. Yet the
great point of difference remains that animals not having imagination
are exempt from many of the fearful foes which menace childhood,
including that arch-foe, the black night.
A much more instructive comparison of children's fears may be made with
those of savages. Both have a like feeling of insecurity in presence of
the big unknown, especially the mysterious mighty things, such as the
storm-wind, and the rare and startling things, _e.g._, the eclipse and
the thunder. The ignorance and simplicity of mind, moreover, aided by a
fertile fancy, which lead to this and that form of childish fear are at
work also in the case of uncivilised adults. Hence the familiar
observation that children's superstitious fears often reflect those of
savage tribes.
While children have this organic predisposition to fear, the sufferings
introduced by what we call human experience begin at an early date to
give definite direction to their fears. How much it does this in the
first months of life it is difficult to say. In the aversion of a baby
to its medicine glass, or its cold bath, one sees, perhaps, more of the
rude germ of passion or anger than of fear. Some children, at least,
have a surprising way of going through a good deal of physical suffering
from falls, cuts and so forth, without acquiring a genuine fear of what
hurts them. It is a noteworthy fact that a child will be more terrified
during a first experience of pain, especially if there be a visible hurt
and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of the
suffering.
Even where fear can be clearly traced to experience it is doubtful
whether in all cases it springs out of a definite expectation of some
particular kind of harm. When, for example, a child who has been
frightened by a dog betrays signs of fear at the sight of a kennel, and
even of a picture of a dog, may we not say that he dreads the sight and
the idea of the dog rather than any harmful act of the animal?
In these fears, then, we seem to see much of the workmanship of Nature,
who has so shaped the child's nervous system and delicately poised it
that the trepidation of fear comes readily. According to some she has
done more, burdening a child's spirit with germinal remains of the fears
of far-off savage ancestors, to whom darkness and the sounds of wild
beasts were fraught with danger. That, however, is far from being
satisfactorily demonstrated. We can see why in the case of children, as
in that of young animals, Nature tempers a bold curiosity of the new by
mingling with it a certain amount of uneasiness, lest the ignorant
helpless things should come to grief by wandering from parental shelter
and supplies. This, it seems to me, is all that Nature has done. And in
so doing has she not, with excellent economy, done just enough?
The extent of suffering brought into child-life by the assaults of fear
is hard to measure. Even the method of questioning young people about
their fears, which is now in vogue, is not likely to bring us near a
solution of this problem. And this for the good reason that children are
never more reticent than when talking of their fears, and that by the
time the fears are surmounted few can be trusted to give from memory an
accurate report of them. One thing seems pretty clear, and the new
questioning of children which is going on apace in America seems to bear
it out, _viz._, that, since it is the unknown which is the primary
occasion of these childish fears, and since the unknown in childhood is
almost everything, the possibilities of suffering from this source are
great enough.
Alike the Good, the Ill offend thy Sight,
And rouse the stormy sense of shrill affright.
(_c_) _Recovery from the Onslaught._
Nevertheless it is quite possible here to go from one extreme of
indifference to another of sentimental exaggeration. Even allowing what
George Sand says, that fear is "the greatest moral suffering of
children," the suffering may turn out to be less cruelly severe than it
looks.
To begin with, then, if children are sadly open to the attacks of fear
on certain sides they are completely defended on other sides by their
ignorance. This is well illustrated in the pretty story of the child
Walter Scott, who was found out of doors lying on his back during a
thunderstorm, clapping his hands and shouting, "Bonnie! bonnie!" at each
new flash.
Again, if, as we have supposed, children's fears are mostly due to a
feeling of insecurity in view of the unknown, they may be said to
correct themselves to a large extent. By getting used to the disturbing
sound, the ugly black doll, and so forth, a child, like a dog, tends to
lose its first fear. One must say "tends," for the well-known fact that
many persons carry with them into later life their early fear of the
dark shows that when once the habit of fearing has got set no amount of
familiarity will suffice to dissolve it.
Not only are the points of attack thus limited; the attack when it does
take place may bring something better than a debasing fear. A child may,
it is certain, suffer acutely when it is frightened. But if only there
is the magic circle of the mother's arms within reach may it not be said
that the fear is more than counterbalanced by the greatest emotional
luxury of childhood, the loving embrace? It is the shy fears, breeding
the new fear of exposure to unloving eyes and possibly to ridicule,
which are the tragedy of childhood.
In addition to these extraneous aids children are provided by Nature
with capacities of self-defence. I have pointed out that the impulses of
curiosity and fear lie close together in a child's mind, so that one can
hardly say beforehand which of the two is going to be awakened first by
the coming of the new and strange thing. The eager desire to know about
things is perhaps the most perfect inward defence against many childish
fears. Even when fear is half awake the passionate longing to see will
force its way. A little girl that was frightened at a Japanese doll just
given her and would not approach it, insisted on seeing it at some
distance every day. The same backing of a timid child's spirit by hardy
curiosity shows itself in his way of peeping at a dog which has just
terrified him and gradually approaching the monster.
Better still, in the hardier race of children Nature has planted an
impulse which not only disarms fear but turns it into a frolicsome
companion. Many children, I feel sure, maintain a double attitude
towards their terrors, the bogies, the giants and the rest. Moments of
cruel suffering alternate with moments of brave exultation. Fear in
children, even more than in adults, is an instinctive process into which
but little thought enters. If the nerves are slack, and if the
circumstances are eerie and fear-provoking, the sudden strange sound,
the appearance of a black something, will send the swift shudder through
the small body; if, on the other hand, the child is cooler and has the
cheering daylight to back him, he may be bold enough to play with his
fears, and to talk of them to others with the chuckle of superiority.[8]
The more real and oppressive the fit of fear the more enjoyable is the
subsequent self-deliverance by a perspicacious laugh likely to be. The
beginnings of childish bravery often take the form of laughing away
their fears. Even when the ugly phantoms are not wholly driven back they
are half seen through, and the child who is strong enough can amuse
himself with them, suffering the momentary compression for the sake of
the joyous expansion which so swiftly follows. A child of two, the same
that asked his mother, "Would you like to take hold of my hand?" was
once taken out by her on a little sledge. Being turned too suddenly he
was pitched into the snow, almost on his head; but on being picked up by
his mother he remarked quite calmly: "I nearly tumbled off". Another
child of six on entering an empty room alone, stamped his foot and
shouted: "Go away everything that's here!" In such ways do the nerves of
a strong child recover themselves after shock and tremor, taking on
something of the steady pose of human bravery.
[8] Mrs. Meynell gives an example of this in her volume _The Children_
("The Man with Two Heads").