Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some

children being decidedly more sociable towards strangers than others. It

would be curious to compare the age at which children begin to take

kindly to them. Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his

boy surmounted his timidity; but it is probable that the transition

occurs at very different dates in the case of different children.[138]

-----

Footnote 138:

This true fear of strangers must be distinguished from the later

shyness, which, though akin to it, is a more complex feeling.

-----

It is worth noting that the little boy to whom I referred just now

displayed the same signs of uneasiness at seeing old friends, after an

interval, as at returning to old scenes. When eight months old, “he

moaned in a curious way when his nurse (of whom he was very fond) came

home after a fortnight’s holiday”. Here, however, the signs of fear seem

to be less pronounced than in the case of returning to the old room. It

would be difficult to give the right name to this curious moan.

Partial alteration of the surroundings frequently brings about a measure

of this same mental uneasiness. Preyer’s boy when one year and five

months old was much disturbed at seeing his mother in a black dress.

Children seem to have a special dislike to black apparel. George Sand

describes her fear at having to put on black stockings when her father

died. Yet any change of colour in dress will disturb a child. C., when

an infant, was distressed to tears at the spectacle of a new colour and

pattern on his mother’s dress. This dislike to any change of dress as

such is borne out by other observations. A child manifested between the

age of about seven months and of two and a half years the most marked

repugnance to new clothes, so that the authorities found it very

difficult to get them on. It is presumable that the donning of new

apparel disturbed too rudely the child’s sense of his proper self.

In certain cases the introduction of new natural objects of great extent

and impressiveness will produce a similar effect of childish anxiety, as

though they made too violent a change in the surroundings. One of the

best illustrations of this obtainable from the life of an average

well-to-do child is the impression produced by a first visit to the sea.

Preyer’s boy at the age of twenty-one months showed all the signs of

fear when his nurse carried him on her arm close to the sea.[139] The

boy C. on being first taken near the sea at the age of two was disturbed

by its noise. While, however, I have a number of well-authenticated

cases of such an instinctive repugnance to, and something like dread of

the sea, I find that there is by no means uniformity in children’s

behaviour in this particular. A little boy who first saw the sea at the

age of thirteen months exhibited signs not of fear but of wondering

delight, prettily stretching out his tiny hands towards it as if wanting

to go to it. Another child who also first saw the sea at the age of

thirteen months began to crawl towards the waves. And yet another boy at

the age of twenty-one months on first seeing the sea spread his arms as

if to embrace it.

-----

Footnote 139:

_Op. cit._, p. 131.

-----

These observations show that the strange big thing affects children very

differently. C. had a particular dislike to noises, which was, I think,

early strengthened by finding out that his father had the same

prejudice. Hence perhaps his hostile attitude towards the sea.

Probably, too, imaginative children, whose minds take in something of

the bigness of the sea, will be more disposed to this variety of fear. A

mother writes me that her elder child, an imaginative girl, has not even

now at the age of six got over her fear of going into the sea, whereas

her sister, one and a quarter years younger, and not of an imaginative

temperament, is perfectly fearless. She adds that it is the bigness of

the sea which evidently impresses the imagination of the elder.

Imaginative children, too, are apt to give life and purpose to the big

moving noisy thing. This is illustrated in M. Pierre Loti’s graphic

account of his first childish impressions of the sea, seen one evening

in the twilight. “It was of a dark, almost black green: it seemed

restless, treacherous, ready to swallow: it was stirring and swaying

everywhere at the same time, with the look of sinister wickedness.”[140]

-----

Footnote 140:

_Le Roman d’un Enfant._

-----

There seems enough in the vast waste of unresting waters to excite the

imagination of a child to awe and terror. Hence it is needless to follow

M. Loti in his speculations as to an inherited fear of the sea. He seems

to base this supposition on the fact that at this first view he

distinctly _recognised_ the sea. But such recognition may have meant

merely the objective realisation of what had no doubt been before pretty

fully described by his mother and aunt, and imaginatively pictured by

himself.

The opposite attitude, that of the thoroughly unimaginative child, in

presence of the sea is well illustrated by the story of a little girl

aged two, who, on being first taken to see the watery wonder, exclaimed,

“Oh, mamma, look at the soapy water”. The awful mystery of all the

stretch of ever-moving water was invisible to this child, being hidden

behind the familiar detail of the ‘soapy’ edge.

There is probably nothing in the natural world which makes on the

childish imagination quite so awful an impression as the watery

Leviathan. Perhaps the fear which one of my correspondents tells me was

excited in her when a child by the sudden appearance of a mountain may

be akin to this dread of the sea.

We may now pass to another group of fear-excitants, the appearance of

certain strange forms and movements of objects.

The close connexion between æsthetic dislike and fear is seen in the

well-marked recoilings of children from odd uncanny-looking dolls. The

girl M., when just over six months old, was frightened at a Japanese

doll so that it had to be put in another room. Another child when

thirteen months old was terrified at the sight of an ugly doll. The said

doll is described as black with woolly head, startled eyes, and red

lips. Such an ogre might well call up a tremor in the bravest of

children. In another case, that of a little boy of two years and two

months, the broken face of a doll proved to be highly disconcerting. The

mother describes the effect as mixed of fear, distress, and intellectual

wonder. Nor did his anxiety depart when some hours later the doll, after

sleeping in his mother’s room, reappeared with a new face.

In such cases, it seems plain, it is the ugly transformation of

something specially familiar and agreeable which excites the feeling of

nervous apprehension. Making grimaces, that is the spoiling of the

typical familiar face, may, it is said, disturb a child even at the

early age of two months.[141] It is much the same when the child M., at

the age of thirteen months three weeks, was frightened and howled when a

lady looked at her close with blue spectacles, though she was quite used

to ordinary glasses. Such transformations of the homely and assuring

face are, moreover, not only ugly but bewildering to the child, and

where all is mysterious and uncanny the child is apt to fear. Whether

“inherited associations” involving a dim recognition of the _meaning_ of

these distortions play any part here I do not feel at all certain.

-----

Footnote 141:

Quoted by Tracy, _op. cit._, p. 29. But this observation seems to me

to need confirmation.

-----

Children, like animals, will sometimes show fear at the sight of what

seems to us a quite harmless object. A shying horse is a puzzle to his

rider: his terrors are so unpredictable. Similarly in the case of a

timid child almost anything unfamiliar and out of the way, whether in

the colour, the form, or the movement of an object, may provoke a

measure of anxiety. Thus a little girl, aged one year and ten months,

showed signs of fear during a drive at a row of grey ash trees placed

along the road. This was just the kind of thing that a horse might shy

at.

As with animals, so with children, any seemingly uncaused movement is

apt to excite a feeling of alarm. Just as a dog will run away from a

leaf whirled about by the wind, so children are apt to be terrified by

the strange and quite irregular behaviour of a feather as it glides

along the floor or lifts itself into the air. A little girl of three,

standing by the bedside of her mother (who was ill at the time), was so

frightened at the sight of a feather, which she accidentally pulled out

of the eiderdown quilt, floating in the air that she would not approach

the bed for days afterwards.[142]

-----

Footnote 142:

See _The Pedagogical Seminary_, i., No. 2, p. 220.

-----

In these cases we may suppose that we have to do with a germ of

superstitious fear, which seems commonly to have its starting point in

the appearance of something exceptional and uncanny, that is to say,

unintelligible, and so smacking of the supernatural. The fear of

feathers as uncanny objects plays, I am told, a considerable part in the

superstitions of folk-lore. Such apparently self-caused movements, so

suggestive of life, might easily give rise to a vague sense of a

mysterious presence or power possessing the object, and so lead to a

crude form of a belief in supernatural agents.

In other cases of unexpected and mysterious movement the fear is

slightly different. A little boy when one year and eleven months old was

frightened when in a lady’s house by a toy elephant which shook its

head. The same child, writes his mother, “at one year seven months was

very much scared by a toy cow which mooed realistically when its head

was moved. This cow was subsequently given to him, at about two years

and three months. He was then still afraid of it, but became reconciled

soon after, first allowing others to make it moo if he was at a safe

distance, and at last making it moo himself.”

There may have been a germ of the fear of animals here: but I suspect

that it was mainly a feeling of uneasiness at the signs of life

(movement and sound) appearing when they are not expected, and have an

uncanny aspect. The close simulation of a living thing by what is known

to be not alive is disturbing to the child as to the adult. He will make

his toys alive by his own fancy, yet resent their taking on the full

semblance of reality. In this sense he is a born idealist and not a

realist. More careful observations on this curious group of child-fears

are to be desired.

The fear of shadows is closely related to that of moving toys. They are

semblances, though horribly distorted semblances, and they are apt to

move with an awful rapidity. The unearthly mounting shadows which

accompany the child as he climbs the staircase at night have been

instanced by writers as one of childhood’s freezing horrors. Mr.

Stevenson writes:—

Now my little heart goes beating like a drum,

With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;

And all round the candle the crooked shadows come,

And go marching along up the stair;

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,

The shadow of the child that goes to bed—

All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp,

With the black night overhead.

I have noticed a young cat—the same that showed such terror at the

playing of the piano—watch its own shadow rising on the wall, and, as I

thought, with a look of apprehension.

_The Fear of Animals._

I have purposely reserved for special discussion two varieties of

children’s fear, namely, dread of animals and of the dark. As the former

certainly manifests itself before the latter I will take it first.

It seems odd 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 put out by quite harmless

members of the animal family. We must, however, be careful here in

distinguishing between mere nerve-shock and dislike on the one hand and

genuine fear on the other. Thus a lady whom I know, a good observer,

tells me that her boy, though when he was fifteen months old his nerves

were shaken by the loud barking of a dog, had no real fear of dogs. With

this may be contrasted another case, also sent by a good observer, in

which it is specially noted that the aversion to the sound of a dog’s

barking developed late and was a true fear.

Æsthetic dislikes, again, may easily give rise to quasi-fears, though,

as we all know, little children have not the horrors of their elders in

this respect. The boy C. could not understand his mother’s scare at the

descending caterpillar. A kind of æsthetic dislike appears to show

itself sometimes towards animals of peculiar shape and colour. A black

animal, as a sheep or a cow, seems more particularly to come in for

these childish aversions.

At first it seems impossible to understand why a child in the fourteenth

week should shrink from a cat.[143] This is not, so far as I can gather,

a common occurrence at this age, and one would like to cross-examine the

mother on the precise way in which the child had its first introduction

to the domestic pet. So far as one can speculate on the matter, one

would say that such early shrinking from animals is probably due to

their sudden unexpected movements, which may well disconcert the

inexperienced infant accustomed to comparatively restful surroundings.

-----

Footnote 143:

Quoted by Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 127. The word he uses is “scheuen”.

-----

This seems borne out by another instance, also quoted by Preyer, of a

girl who in the fourth month, as also in the eleventh, was so afraid of

pigeons that she could not bring herself to stroke them. The prettiness

of the pigeon, if not of the cat, ought, one supposes, to ensure the

liking of children; and one has to fall back on the supposition of the

first disconcerting strangeness of the moving animal world for the

child’s mind.

Later shrinkings from animals show more of the nature of fear. It is

sometimes said that children inherit from their ancestors the fear of

certain animals. Thus Darwin, observing that his boy when taken to the

Zoological Gardens at the age of two years and three months showed fear

of the big caged animals whose form was unfamiliar to him (lions,

tigers, etc.), infers that this fear is transmitted from savage

ancestors whose conditions of life compelled them to shun these deadly

creatures. But as M. Compayré has well shown[144] we do not need this

hypothesis here. The unfamiliarity of the form of the animal, its

bigness, together with the awful suggestions of the cage, would be quite

enough to beget a vague sense of danger.

-----

Footnote 144:

_Evolution intellectuelle et morale de l’Enfant_, p. 102.

-----

So far as I can ascertain facts are strongly opposed to the theory of an

inherited fear of animals. Just as in the first months a child will

manifest something like recoil from a pretty and perfectly innocent

pigeon, so later on children manifest fear in the most unlikely

directions. In _The Invisible Playmate_, we are told of a girl who got

her first fright on seeing a sparrow drop on the grass near her, though

she was not the least afraid of big things, and on first hearing the dog

bark in his kennel said with a little laugh of surprise, ‘Oh!

coughing’.[145] A parallel case is sent me by a lady friend. One day

when her daughter was about four years old she found her standing, the

eyes wide open and filled with tears, the arms outstretched for help,

evidently transfixed with terror, while a small wood-louse made its slow

way towards her. The next day the child was taken for the first time to

the “Zoo,” and the mother anticipating trouble held the child’s hand.

But there was no need. A ‘fearless spirit’ in general, she released her

hand at the first sight of the elephant, and galloped after the monster.

If inheritance played a principal part in the child’s fear of animals

one would have expected the facts to be reversed: the elephant should

have excited dread, not the harmless insect.

-----

Footnote 145:

See pp. 26, 27.

-----

So far as my own observations have gone there seems to be but little

uniformity among children’s fears of the animal world. What frightens

one child may delight another at about the same age. Perhaps there is a

tendency to a special dread of certain animals, more particularly the

wolf, which as folk-lore tells us reflects the attitude of superstitious

adults. Yet it is probable that, as the case of the boy C. suggests, the

dread of the wolf grows out of that of the dog, the most alarming of the

domestic animals, while it is vigorously sustained by fairy-story.

For the rest children’s shrinking from animals has much of the caprice

of grown-up people’s. Not that there is anything really inexplicable in

these odd directions of childish fear, any more than in the

unpredictable shyings of the horse. If we knew the whole of the horse’s

history, and could keep a perfect register of the fluctuations of ‘tone’

in his nervous system, we should understand all his shyings. So with the

child. All the vagaries of his dislike to animals would be cleared up if

we could look into the secret workings of his mind and measure the

varying heights of his courage.

That some of this early disquietude at the sight of strange animals is

due to the workings of the mind is seen in the behaviour of Preyer’s boy

when at the age of twenty-seven months he was taken to see some little

pigs. The boy at the first sight looked earnest, and as soon as the

lively little creatures began to suckle the mother he broke out into a

fit of crying and turned away from the sight with all the signs of fear.

It appeared afterwards that what terrified the child was the idea that

the pigs were biting their mother; and this gave rise in the fourth and

fifth years to recurrent nocturnal fears of the biting piglets,

something like C.’s nocturnal fear of the wolf.[146] To an imaginative

child strongly predisposed to fear, anything suggestive of harm will

suffice to beget a measure of trepidation. A child does not want direct

experience of the power of a big animal in order to feel a vague

uneasiness when near it. His own early inductions respecting the

correlation of bigness with strength, aided as this commonly is by

information picked up from others, will amply suffice. In the case of

the dog, the rough shaggy coat, the teeth which he is told can bite, the

swift movements, and worse than all the appalling bark, are quite enough

to disconcert a timid child. Even the sudden pouncing down of a sparrow

may prove upsetting to a fearful mite as suggesting attack; and a girl

of four may be quite capable of imagining the unpleasantness of an

invasion of her dainty person by a small creeping wood-louse—which

though running slowly was running towards herself—and so of getting a

fit of shudders.

-----

Footnote 146:

See Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 130.

-----

It is, I think, undeniable that imaginative children, especially when

sickly and disposed to alarm, are subject to a real terror at the

thought of the animal world. Its very vastness, the large variety of its

uncanny and savage-looking forms—appearing oftentimes as ugly

distortions of the human face and figure—this of itself, as known from

picture-books, may well generate many a vague alarm. We know from

folk-lore how the dangers of the animal world have touched the

imagination of simple peoples, and we need not be surprised that it

should make the heart of the wee weakly child to quake. Yet the child’s

shrinking from animals is less strong than the impulse of companionship

which bears him towards them. Tiny children quite as often show the

impulse to run after ducks and other animals as to be alarmed at them.

Nothing perhaps is prettier in child-life than the pose and look of one

of these defenceless youngsters as he is getting over his trepidation at

the approach of a strange big dog and ‘making friends’ with 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.

_Fear of the Dark._

Fear of the dark, that is, fear excited by the actual experience or the

idea of being in the dark, and especially _alone_ in the dark, and the

allied dread of dark places as closets and caves, is no doubt very

common among children, and seems indeed to be one of their recognised

characteristics. Yet it is by no means certain that it is ‘natural’ in

the sense of developing itself in all children.

It is certain that children have no such fear at the beginning of life.

A baby of three or four months if accustomed to a light may very likely

be disturbed at being deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread

of the dark.[147]

-----

Footnote 147:

A mother sends me a curious observation bearing on this. One of her

children when four months old was carried by her up-stairs in the

dark. On reaching the light she found the child’s face black, her

hands clenched, and her eyes protruding. As soon as she reached the

light she heaved a sigh and resumed her usual appearance. This child

was in general hardy and bold and never gave a second display of

terror. This is certainly a curious observation, and it would be well

to know whether similar cases of apparent fright at being carried in

the dark have been noticed.

-----

Fear of the dark seems to arise when intelligence has reached a certain

stage of development. It apparently assumes a variety of forms. In some

children it is a vague uneasiness, in others it takes the shape of a

more definite dread. A common variety of this dread is connected with

the imaginative filling of the dark with the forms of alarming animals,

so that the fear of animals and of the dark are closely connected. Thus,

in one case reported to me, a boy between the ages of two and six used

at night to see ‘the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked

round the room’. The boy C. saw his _bête noire_ the wolf in dark

places. Mr. Stevens in his note on his boy’s idea of the supernatural

remarks that at the age of one year and ten months, when he began to be

haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky,’ he was temporarily seized with a fear

of the dark.[148] It is important to add that even children who have

been habituated to going to bed in the dark in the first months are

liable to acquire the fear.

-----

Footnote 148:

_Mind_, xi., p. 149.

-----

This mode of fear is, however, not universal among children. One lady,

for whose accuracy I can vouch, assures me that her boy, who is now four

years old, has never manifested the feeling. A similar statement is made

by a careful observer, Dr. Sikorski, with reference to his own

children.[149] It seems possible to go through childhood without making

acquaintance with this terror, and to acquire it in later life. I know a

lady who only acquired the fear towards the age of thirty. “Curiously

enough (she writes) I was never afraid of the dark as a child; but

during the last two years I hate to be left alone in the dark, and if I

have to enter a dark room, like my study, beyond the reach of the maids

from downstairs, I notice a remarkable acceleration in my heart-beat and

hurry to strike a light or rush downstairs as quickly as possible.”

-----

Footnote 149:

Quoted by Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 100. Cf. Perez, _L’Education dès le

berceau_, p. 103.

-----

We can faintly conjecture from what Charles Lamb and others have told us

about the spectres that haunted their nights what a weighty crushing

horror this fear of the dark may become. Hence we need not be surprised

that the writer of fiction has sought to give it a vivid and adequate

description. Victor Hugo, for example, when in _Les Misérables_ he is

painting the feelings of little Cosette, who has been sent out alone at

night to fetch water from a spring in a wood, says she “felt herself

seized by the black enormity of Nature. It was not only terror which

possessed her, it was something more terrible even than terror.”

Different explanations have been offered of this fear. Locke, who when

writing on educational matters was rather hard on nurses and servants,

puts down the whole of these fears to those wicked persons, “whose usual

method is to awe children and keep them in subjection by telling them of

Raw Head and Bloody Bones, and such other names as carry with them the

idea of something terrible and hurtful, which they have reason to be

afraid of when alone, especially in the dark”.[150] Rousseau on the

other hand urges that there is a natural cause. “Accustomed as I am to

perceive objects from a distance, and to anticipate their impressions in

advance, how is it possible for me, when I no longer see anything of the

objects that surround me, not to imagine a thousand creatures, a

thousand movements, which may hurt me, and against which I am unable to

protect myself?”[151]

-----

Footnote 150:

_Thoughts on Education_, sect. 138.

Footnote 151:

_Emile_, book ii.

-----

Rousseau here supplements and corrects Locke. For one thing I have

ascertained in the case of my own child, and in that of others, that a

fear of the dark has grown up when the influence of the wicked nurse has

been carefully eliminated. Locke forgets that children can get

terrifying fancies from other children, and from all sorts of

suggestions, unwittingly conveyed by the words of respectable grown

people. Besides, he leaves untouched the question, why children when

left alone in the dark should choose to dwell on these fearful images,

rather than on the bright pretty ones which they also acquire. R. L.

Stevenson has told us how happy a child can make himself at night with

such pleasing fancies. Yet it must be owned that darkness seems rather

to favour images of what is weird and terrible. How is this? Rousseau

gets some way towards answering the question by saying (as I understand

him to say) that darkness breeds a sense of insecurity. I do not,

however, think that it is the inconvenience of being in the dark which

generates the fear: a child might, I imagine, acquire it without ever

having had to explore a dark place.

I strongly suspect that the fear of darkness takes its rise in a

sensuous phenomenon, a kind of physical repugnance. All sensations of

very low intensity, as very soft vocal sounds, have about them a tinge

of melancholy, a _tristesse_, and this is especially noticeable in the

sensations which the eye experiences when confronted with a dark space,

or, what is tantamount to this, a black and dull surface. The symbolism

of darkness and blackness, as when we talk of ‘gloomy’ thoughts or liken

trouble to a ‘black cloud,’ seems to rest on this effect of melancholy.

Along with this gloomy character of the sensation of dark, and not

always easy to distinguish from it, there goes the craving of the eye

for its customary light, and the interest and the gladness which come

with seeing. When the eye and brain are not fatigued, that is when we

are wakeful, this eye-ache may become an appreciable pain; and it is

probable that children feel the deprivation more acutely than grown

persons, owing to the abundance of their visual activity as well as to

the comparatively scanty store of their thought-resources. Add to this

that darkness, by extinguishing the world of visible things, would give

to a timid child tenacious of the familiar home-surroundings a

peculiarly keen sense of strangeness and of loneliness, of banishment

from all that he knows and loves. The reminiscences of this feeling

described in later life show that it is the sense of solitude which

oppresses the child in his dark room.[152]

-----

Footnote 152:

See especially James Payn, _Gleams of Memory_, pp. 3, 4.

-----

This, I take it, would be quite enough to make the situation of

confinement in a dark room disagreeable and depressing to a wakeful

child even when he is in bed and there is no restriction of bodily

activity. But even this would not amount to a full passionate dread of

darkness. It seems to me to be highly probable that a baby of two or

three months might feel this vague depression and even this craving for

the wonted scene, especially just after the removal of a light; yet such

a baby, as we have seen, gives no clear indications of fear.

Fear of the dark arises from the development of the child’s imagination,

and might, I believe, arise without any suggestion from nurse or other

children of the notion that there are bogies in the room. Darkness is

precisely the situation most favourable to vivid imagination: the

screening of the visible world makes the inner world of fancy vivid and

distinct by contrast. Are we not all apt to shut our eyes when we try to

‘visualise’ or picture things very distinctly? This fact of a

preternatural activity of imagination, taken with the circumstance

emphasised by Rousseau that in the darkness the child is no longer

distinctly aware of the objects that are actually before him, would help

us to understand why children are so much given to projecting into the

unseen black spaces the creatures of their imagination. Not only so—and

this Rousseau does not appear to have recognised—the dull feeling of

depression which accompanies the sensation of darkness might suffice to

give a gloomy and weird cast to the images so projected.

But I am disposed to think that there is yet another element in this

childish fear. I have said that darkness gives a positive sensation: we

_see_ it, and the sensation, apart from any difference of signification

which we afterwards learn to give to it, is of the same kind that is

obtained by looking at a dull black surface. To the child the difference

between a black object and a dark unillumined space is as yet not clear,

and I believe it will be found that children tend to materialise or to

‘reify’ darkness. When, for example, a correspondent tells me that

darkness was envisaged by her when a child as “a crushing power,” I

think I see traces of this childish feeling. I seem able to recall my

own childish sense of a big black something on suddenly waking and

opening the eyes in a very dark room.

But there is still another thing to be noticed in this sensation of

darkness. The black field is not uniform; some parts of it show less

black than others, and the indistinct and rude pattern of comparatively

light and dark changes from moment to moment; while now and again more

definite spots of brightness may focus themselves. The varying activity

of the retina would seem to account for this apparent changing of the

black scene. What, my reader may not unnaturally ask, has this to do

with a child’s fear of the dark? If he will recall what was said about

the facility with which a child comes to see faces and animal forms in

the lines of a cracked ceiling, or the veining of a piece of marble, he

will, I think, recognise the drift of my remarks. These slight and

momentary differences in the blackness, these fleeting rudiments of a

pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the projected images; the

child with a strongly excited fancy sees in these dim traces of the

black formless waste definite forms. These will naturally be the forms

with which he is most familiar, and since his fancy is at the moment

tinged with melancholy they will be gloomy and disturbing forms. Hence

we may expect to hear of children seeing the forms of terrifying living

things in the dark.

Here is a particularly instructive case. A boy of four years had for

some time been afraid of the dark and indulged by having the candle left

burning at night. On hearing that the Crystal Palace had been burned

down he asked for the first time to have the light taken away, fear of

the dark being now cast out by the bigger fear of fire. Some time after

this he volunteered an account of his obsolete terrors to his father.

“Do you know,” he said, “what I thought dark was? A great large live

thing the colour of black with a mouth and eyes.” Here we have the

‘reifying’ of darkness, and we probably see the influence of the

comparatively bright spots in the attribution of eyes to the monster, an

influence still more apparent in the instance quoted above, where a

child saw the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the

room. Another suggestive instance here is that given by M. Compayré, in

which a child on being asked why he did not like to be in a dark place

answered: “I don’t like chimney-sweeps”.[153] Here the blackness with

its dim suggestions of brighter spots determined the image of the black

chimney-sweep with his white flashes of mouth and eyes.[154] I should

like to observe here parenthetically that we still need to learn from

children themselves, by talking to them and inviting their confidence

when the fear of the dark is first noticed, how they are apt to envisage

it.

-----

Footnote 153:

_Op. cit._, pp. 100, 101.

Footnote 154:

It is supposable too that disturbances of the retina giving rise to

subjective luminous sensations, as the well-known small bright moving

discs, might assist in the case of nervous children in suggesting

glaring eyes.

-----

When imagination becomes abnormally active, and the child is haunted by

alarming images, these by recurring with greatest force in the stillness

and darkness of the night will add to the terrifying associations of

darkness. This is illustrated in the case of the boy Stevens, who was

haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky’ at night. Dreams, especially of the

horrible nightmare kind to which nervous children are subject, may

invest the dark with a new terror. A child suddenly waking up and with

open eyes seeing the phantom-object of his dream against the black

background may be forgiven for acquiring a dread of dark rooms. Possibly

this experience gives the clue to the observation already quoted of a

boy who did not want to sleep in a particular room because there were so

many dreams in it.

If the above explanation of the child’s fear of the dark is a sound one

Rousseau’s prescription for curing it is not enough. Children may be

encouraged to explore dark rooms, and by touching blind-like their

various objects rendered familiar with the fact that things remain

unchanged even when enveloped in darkness, that the dark is nothing but

our temporary inability to see things; and this may no doubt be helpful

in checking the fear when calm reflexion becomes possible. But a radical

cure must go farther, must aim at checking the activity of morbid

imagination—and here what Locke says about the effects of the terrifying

stories of nurses is very much to the point—and in extreme cases must

set about strengthening shaky nerves. Mothers would do well to remember

that even religious instruction when injudiciously presented may add to

the terrors of the dark for these wee tremulous organisms. One

observation sent me strongly suggests that a child may take a strong

dislike to being shut up in the dark with the terrible all-seeing God.

_Fears and their Palliatives._

I have probably illustrated the first fears of children at sufficient

length. Without trying to exhaust the subject I have, I think, shown

that fear of a well-marked and intense kind is a common feature of the

first years of life, and that it assumes a Protean variety of shapes.

Much more will no doubt have to be done in the way of methodical

observation, and more particularly statistical inquiry into the

comparative frequency of the several fears, the age at which they

commonly appear, and so forth, before we can build up a theory of the

subject. One or two general observations may, however, be hazarded even

at this stage.

The thing which strikes one most perhaps in these early fears is how

little they have to do with any remembered experience of evil. 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

because experience had made him apprehensive of evil, but because he was

constitutionally and instinctively nervous, and possessed with a feeling

of insecurity. This feeling of weakness and insecurity comes to the

surface in presence of what is unknown in so far as this can be brought

by the child’s mind into a relation to his welfare—as disturbing noises,

and the movements of things, especially when they take on the form of

approaches. The same thing is, as we have seen, illustrated in the fear

of the dark. A like explanation seems to offer itself for other common

forms of fear, especially those excited by others’ threats, as the dread

of the policeman, and little George Sand’s horror at the idea of being

shut up all night in the ‘crystal prison’ of a lamp. The fact that

children’s fears are not the direct product of experience is expressed

otherwise by saying that they are the offspring of the imagination. A

child is apt to be afraid because he fancies things, and it will

probably be demonstrated by statistical evidence that the most

imaginative children (other things being equal) are the most subject to

fear.

In certain of these characteristics, at least, children’s fears resemble

those of animals. In both alike fear is much more an instinctive recoil

from the unknown than an apprehension of known evil. The shying of a

horse, the apparent fear of dogs at certain noises, probably too the

fear of animals at the sight and sound of fire—so graphically described

by Mr. Kipling in the case of the jungle beasts—illustrate this. Animals

too seem to have a sense of the uncanny, when something apparently

uncaused happens, as when Romanes excited fear in a dog by attaching a

fine thread to a bone, and by surreptitiously drawing it from the

animal, giving to the bone the look of self-movement. The same dog was

frightened by soap-bubbles. According to Romanes, dogs are frightened by

portraits. It is to be added, however, that in certain of animal fears

the influence of heredity is clearly recognisable, whereas in children’s

fears I have regarded it as doubtful. The fact that a child is not

frightened at fire, which terrifies many animals, seems to illustrate

this difference.[155]

-----

Footnote 155:

See Perez, _L’Education dès le berceau_, pp. 96-99. On animal fears,

see further Romanes, _Animal Intelligence_, p. 455 f.; Preyer, _op.

cit._, p. 127 ff. and p. 135; Perez, _First Three Years of Childhood_,

p. 64 ff.

-----

Another instructive comparison is that of children’s fears with those of

savages. Both have a like feeling of insecurity, and fall instinctively

in presence of a big unknown into the attitude of dread. In the region

of superstitious fear more particularly, we see how in both a gloomy

fancy forestalls knowledge, investing the new and unexplored with

alarming traits.

Lastly, children’s fears have some resemblance to certain abnormal

mental conditions. Idiots, who are so near normal childhood in their

degree of intelligence, show a marked fear of strangers. More

interesting, however, in the present connexion, is the exaggeration of

the childish fear of new objects which shows itself in certain mental

aberrations. There is a characteristic dread of newness, neophobia, just

as there is a dread of water.[156]

-----

Footnote 156:

See Compayré, _op. cit._, pp. 99, 100.

-----

While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of children’s

fears they are not the only ones. Experience begins to direct the

instinctive fear-impulse from the very beginning. How much it does 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. Careful observations

seem to me to be required on the point, at what definite date signs of

fear arising from experience of pain begin to show themselves in the

child. Some children, at least, have a surprising way of not minding

even considerable amounts of physical pain: the misery of a fall, a

blow, a cut, and so forth, being speedily forgotten. It seems doubtful,

indeed, whether the venerable saw, ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ is

invariably true. It appears, in many cases at least, to take a good

amount of real agony to produce a genuine fear in a young child.[157]

This tendency to belittle pain is not unknown, I suspect, to the tutor

of small boys. It may well be that a definite and precise recalling of

the misery of a scratch, or even of a moderate burn, may not conduce to

the development of a true fear, and that here, too, fear when it arises

in all its characteristic masterfulness is at bottom fear of the

unknown. This seems illustrated by the well-known 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 catastrophe. Is not the same thing true, indeed, of older

fears? Should we dread the wrench of a tooth-extraction if it were

experienced very often, and we had a sufficiently photographic

imagination to be able to estimate precisely the intensity and duration

of the pain?

-----

Footnote 157:

On this point there are some excellent observations made by Miss

Shinn, who points out that physical pain when not too severe is apt to

be lost sight of in the new feeling of personal consequence to which

it gives rise (_Notes on the Development of a Child_, pt. ii., p. 144

ff.)

-----

Much the same thing shows itself in the cases where fear can be clearly

traced to experience and association. In some of these it is no doubt

remembered experience of suffering which causes the fear. A child that

has been seriously burned will unquestionably be frightened at a too

close approach of a red-hot poker. But in many cases of this excitation

of fear by association it is the primary experience of fear itself which

seems to be the real object of the apprehension. Thus a child who has

been frightened by a dog will betray signs of fear at the sight of a

kennel, of a picture of a dog, and so forth. The little boy referred to

above who was afraid of the toy elephant that shook its head showed

signs of fear a fortnight afterwards on coming across a picture of an

elephant in a picture-book. In such ways does fear propagate fear in the

timid little breast.

One cannot part from the theme of children’s fears without a reference

to a closely connected subject, the problem of their happiness. To ask

whether childhood is a happy time, still more to ask whether it is the

happiest, is to raise perhaps a foolish and insoluble question. Later

reminiscences would seem in this case to be particularly untrustworthy.

Children themselves no doubt may have very definite views on the

subject. A child will tell you with the unmistakable marks of profound

conviction that he is _so_ unhappy. But paradoxical as it may seem,

children really know very little about the matter. At the best they can

only tell you how they feel at particular moments. To seek for a precise

and satisfactory solution of the problem is thus futile. Only rough

comparisons of childhood and later life are possible.

In any such comparison the fears of early years claim, no doubt, careful

consideration. There seem to be people who have no idea what the agony

of these early terrors amounts to. And since it is the unknown that

excites this fear, and 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.

George Sand hardly exaggerates when she writes: “Fear is, I believe, the

greatest moral suffering of children”. In the case of weakly, nervous

and imaginative children, more especially, this susceptibility to terror

may bring miserable days and yet more miserable nights.

Nevertheless, it is easy here to pass from one extreme of brutal

indifference to another of sentimental exaggeration. Childish suffering

is terrible while it lasts, but happily it has a way of not lasting. The

cruel distorting fit of terror passes and leaves the little face with

its old sunny out-look. It is to be remembered, too, that while children

are pitiably fearful in their own way, they are, as we have seen in the

case of the little Walter Scott, delightfully fearless also, as judged

by our standards. How oddly fear and fearlessness go together is

illustrated in a story sent me. A little boy fell into a brook. On his

being fished out by his mother, his sister, aged four, asked him: ‘Did

you see any crocodiles?’ ‘No,’ answered the boy, ‘I wasn’t in long

enough.’ The absence of fear of the water itself was as characteristic

as the presence of fear of the crocodile.

It is refreshing to find that in certain cases at least where older

people have done their worst to excite terror, a child has escaped its

suffering. Professor Barnes tells us that a Californian child’s belief

in the supernatural takes on a happy tone, directing itself to images of

heaven with trees, birds, and other pretty things, and giving but little

heed to the horrors of hell.[158] In less sunny climes than California

children may not, perhaps, be such little optimists, and it is probable

that graphic descriptions of hell-fire have sent many a creepy thrill of

horror along a child’s tender nerves. Still it may be said that, owing

to the fortunate circumstance of children having much less fear of fire

than many animals, the misery in which eternal punishment is wont to be

bodied forth does not work so powerfully as one might expect on a

child’s imagination. The author of _The Uninitiated_ illustrates a real

child-trait when she makes her small heroine conceive of hell as a place

that _smelt_ nastily (from its brimstone).[159] Then it is noticeable

that children in general are but little affected by fear at the sight or

the thought of death. The child C. had a passing dread of being buried,

but his young hopeful heart refused to credit the fact of that far-off

calamity. Other children, I find, dislike the idea of death as

threatening to deprive them of their mother. Perhaps they can more

readily suppose that somebody else will die than that they themselves

will do so. This comparative immunity from the dread of death is no

small deduction to be made from the burden of children’s fear.

-----

Footnote 158:

_Pedagogical Review_, ii., 3, p. 445.

Footnote 159:

p. 43.

-----

Not only so, when fear is apt to be excited, Nature has provided the

small timorous person with other instincts which tend to mitigate and

even to neutralise it. It is a happy circumstance that the most prolific

excitant of fear, the presentation of something new and uncanny, is also

provocative of another feeling, that of curiosity, with its impulse to

look and examine. Even animals are sometimes divided in the presence of

something strange between fear and curiosity,[160] and children’s

curiosity is much more lively than theirs. A very tiny child, on first

making acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on the

head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking his head

against something as if experimenting and watching the effect. A clearer

case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child who, after

pulling the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, proceeded to

dive into the bush again.[161] Still more interesting here are the

gradual transitions from actual fear before the new and strange to bold

inspection. The child who was frightened by her Japanese doll insisted

on seeing it every day. The behaviour of one of these small persons on

the arrival at the house of a strange dog, of a dark foreigner, or some

other startling novelty, is a pretty and amusing sight. The first

overpowering timidity, the shrinking back to the mother’s breast,

followed by curious peeps, then by bolder outstretchings of head and

arms, mark the stages by which curiosity and interest gain on fear and

finally leave it far behind. Very soon we know the small timorous

creatures will grow into bold adventurers. They will make playthings of

the alarming animals, and of the alarming shadows too.[162] Later on

still perhaps they will love nothing so much as to probe the awful

mysteries of gunpowder.

-----

Footnote 160:

Some examples are given by Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 135.

Footnote 161:

Miss Shinn, _op. cit._, p. 150.

Footnote 162:

Stevenson, the same who has described the terrors of moving shadows,

illustrates how a child may make a sort of playfellow of his shadow

(_A Child’s Garden of Verses_, xviii.).

-----

One palliative of these early terrors remains to be touched on, the

instinct of sheltering or refuge-taking. The first manifestations of

what is called the social nature of children are little more than the

reverse side of their timidity. A baby will cease crying at night on

hearing the familiar voice of mother or nurse because a vague sense of

human companionship does away with the misery of the black solitude. A

frightened child probably knows an ecstasy of bliss when folded in the

protective embrace of a mother’s arms. Even the most timid children

never have the full experience of terror so long as there is within

reach the secure base of all their reconnoitring excursions, the

mother’s skirts. Happy those little ones who have ever near them loving

arms within whose magic circle the oncoming of the cruel fit of terror

is instantly checked, giving place to a delicious calm.

How unhappy those children must be who, being fearsome by nature, lack

this refuge, who are left much alone to wrestle with their horrors as

best they may, and are rudely repulsed when they bear their

heart-quakings to others, I would not venture to say. Still less should

I care to suggest what is suffered by those unfortunates who find in

those about them not comfort, assurance, support in their fearsome

moments, but the worst source of their terrors. To be brutal to these

small sensitive organisms, to practise on their terrors, to take delight

in exciting the wild stare and wilder shriek of terror, this is perhaps

one of the strange things which make one believe in the old dogma that

the devil can enter into men and women. For here we seem to have to do

with a form of cruelty so exquisite, so contrary to the oldest of

instincts, that it is dishonouring to the savage and to the lower

animals to attempt to refer it to heredity.

To dwell on such things, however, would be to go back to a pessimistic

view of childhood. It is undeniable that children are exposed to

indescribable misery when they are delivered into the hands of a

consummately cruel guardian. Yet one may hope that this sort of person

is exceptional, something of which we can give no account save by saying

that now and again in sport nature produces a monster, as if to show

what she could do if she did not choose more wisely and benignly to work

within the limitations of type.

VII.

RAW MATERIAL OF MORALITY.

_Primitive Egoism._

Perhaps there has been more hasty theorising about the child’s moral

characteristics than about any other of his attributes. The very fact

that diametrically opposed views have been put forward is suggestive of

this haste. By certain theologians and others infancy has been painted

in the blackest of moral colours. According to M. Compayré it is a

bachelor, La Bruyère, and a bishop, Dupanloup, who have said the worst

things of children; and the parent or teacher who wants to see how bad

this worst is may consult M. Compayré’s account.[163] On the other hand,

Rousseau and those who think with him have invested the child with an

untarnished purity. According to Rousseau the child comes from the

Creator’s hand a perfect bit of workmanship, which blundering man at

once begins to mar. Children’s freedom from human vices has been a

common theme of the poet: their innocence was likened by M. About to the

spotless snow of the Jungfrau. Others, as Wordsworth, have gone farther

and attributed to the infant positive excellences, glimpses of a higher

morality than ours, Divine intuitions brought from a prenatal existence.

-----

Footnote 163:

_L’Evolution intell. et mor. de l’Enfant_, chap. xiv., ii.

-----

Such opposite views of the moral status and worth of a child must be the

result of prepossession, and the magnifying of the accidents of

individual experience. A theologian who is concerned to maintain the

doctrine of natural depravity, or a bachelor who happens to have known

children chiefly in the character of little tormentors, may be expected

to paint childhood with black pigments. On the other hand the poet,

attracted by the charm of infancy, may, as we have seen, easily be led

to idealise its moral aspects.

The first thing that strikes one in all such attempts to fix the moral

worth of the child is that they are judging of things by wrong

standards. The infant, though it has a nature capable of becoming moral

or immoral, is not as yet a moral being; and there is a certain

impertinence in trying to force it under our categories of good and bad,

pure and corrupt.

If then we would know what the child’s ‘moral’ nature is like we must be

careful to distinguish. By ‘moral’ we must understand that part of his

nature, feelings and impulses, which has for us a moral significance;

whether as furnishing raw material out of which education may develop

virtuous dispositions, or contrariwise, as constituting forces adverse

to this development. It may be well to call the former tendencies

favourable to virtue, pro-moral, those unfavourable, contra-moral. Our

inquiry, then, must be: In what respects, and to what extent, does the

child show himself by nature, apart from all that is meant by education,

pro-moral or contra-moral, that is, well or ill fitted to become a

member of a good or virtuous community and to exercise what we know as

moral functions?

Our especial object here will be if possible to get at natural

dispositions, to examine the child in his primitive nakedness, looking

out for those instinctive tendencies which according to modern science

are only a little less clearly marked in the young of our own species

than in a puppy or a chick.

Now there is clearly a difficulty here. How, it may be asked, can we

expect to find in a child any traits having a moral significance which

have not been developed by social influences and education? In the case

of pro-moral dispositions more particularly, as kindness, or

truthfulness, we cannot expect to get rid of the effect of the combined

personal influence and instruction of the mother, which is of the

essence of all moral training. Even with regard to contra-moral traits,

as rudeness, or lying, it is evident that example is frequently a

co-operating influence.

The difficulty is no doubt a real one, and cannot be wholly got rid of.

We cannot completely eliminate the influence of the common life in which

the good and bad disposition alike may be said to grow up. Yet we may

distinguish. Thus we may look out for the earliest spontaneous and what

we may call original manifestations of such dispositions as affection

and truthfulness, so as to eliminate the _direct_ action of instruction

and example, and thus to reduce the influence of the social medium on

the child to a minimum. Similarly in the case of brutal and other

unlovely propensities, we may by taking pains get rid of the influence

of bad example.

Let us see, then, how far the indictment of the child is a just one. Do

children tend spontaneously to manifest the germs of vicious

dispositions, and if so, to what extent? Here, as I have suggested, we

must be particularly careful not to read wrong interpretations into what

we see. It will not do, for example, to say that children are born

thieves because they show themselves at first serenely indifferent to

the distinction of _meum_ and _tuum_, and are inclined to help

themselves to other children’s toys, and so forth. To repeat, what we

have to inquire is whether children by their instinctive inclinations

are contra-moral, that is, predisposed to what, if persevered in with

reflexion, we call immorality or vice.

Here we cannot do better than touch on that group of feelings and

dispositions which can be best marked off as anti-social since they tend

to the injury of others, such as anger, envy, and cruelty.

The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells

us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. Their

characteristic passions and impulses are centred in self and the

satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the

boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy

whatever presents itself, and to resent others’ participation in such

enjoyment? For some time after birth the child is little more than an

incarnation of appetite which knows on restraint, and only yields to the

undermining force of satiety.

The child’s entrance into social life through a growing consciousness of

the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their

wishes. His greed, which at the outset was but the expression of a

vigorous nutritive impulse, now takes on more of a contra-moral aspect.

The removal of the feeding-bottle before full satisfaction has been

attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive

utterances of the baby’s ‘will to live,’ and of its resentment of all

human checks to its native impulses. In this outburst we have the first

rude germ of that defiance of control and of authority of which I shall

have to say more by-and-by.

In another way, too, the expansion of the infant’s consciousness through

the recognition of others widens the terrain of greedy impulse. For ugly

envy commonly has its rise in the perception of another child’s

consumption of appetite’s dainties.

Here, it is evident, we are still at the level of the animal. A dog is

passionately greedy like the child, will fiercely resent any

interference with the satisfaction of its appetite, and will be envious

of another and more fortunately placed animal.

Much the same concern for self and opposition to others’ having what the

child himself desires shows itself in the matter of toys and other

possessions of interest. A child is apt not only to make free with

another child’s toys, but to show the strongest objection to any

imitation of this freedom, often displaying a dog-in-the-manger spirit

by refusing to lend what he himself does not want. Not only so, he will

be apt to resent another child’s having toys of his own. This envy of

other children’s possessions is often wide and profound.

As the social interests come into play so far as to make caresses and

other signs of affection sources of pleasure to the child, the field for

envy and its ‘green-eyed’ offspring, jealousy, is still more enlarged.

As is well known, an infant will greatly resent the mother’s taking

another child into her arms.

Here, again, we are at the level of the lower animals. They, too, as

our dogs and cats can show us, can be envious not only in the matter

of eatables, but in that of human caressings, and even of

possessions—witness the behaviour of two dogs when a stick is thrown

into the water.

Full illustrations of these traits of the first years of childhood are

not needed. We all know them. M. Perez and others have culled a

sufficient collection of examples.[164]

-----

Footnote 164:

See for example Perez, _The First Three Years of Childhood_, p. 66

ff.; and _L’Education dès le berceau_, chap. vi.

-----

Out of all this unrestrained pushing of appetite and desire whereby the

child comes into rude collision with others’ wants, wishes and purposes,

there issue the well-known passionateness, the angry outbursts, and the

fierce quarrellings of the child. These fits of angry passion or temper

are among the most curious manifestations of childhood, and deserve to

be studied with much greater care than they have yet received.

The outburst of rage as the imperious little will feels itself suddenly

pulled up has in spite of its comicality something impressive. Hitting

out right and left, throwing things down on the floor and breaking them,

howling, wild agitated movements of the arms and whole body, these are

the outward vents which the gust of childish fury is apt to take. Preyer

observed one of these violent explosions in the seventeenth month. The

outburst tends to concentrate itself in an attack on the offender, be

this even the beloved mamma herself. Darwin’s boy at the age of two

years three months became a great adept at throwing books, sticks, etc.,

at any one who offended him.[165] But almost anything will do as an

object of attack. A child of four on being crossed would bang his chair,

and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion,

banging him, jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with

the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in some cases improved upon by

biting. The boy C. was for some time vigorously mordant in his angry

fits. Another little boy would, under similar circumstances, bite the

carpet.

-----

Footnote 165:

Darwin notes that all his boys did this kind of thing, whereas his

girls did not (_Mind_, ii., p. 288). My own observations agree with

this. A small boy has more of savage attack than a small girl.

-----

Here we have expressive movements which are plainly brutal, which

assimilate the aspect of an angry child to that of an infuriated animal.

The whole outward attitude is one of fierce reckless assault. The

insane, we are told, manifest a like wildness of attack in fits of

anger, smashing windows, etc., and striking anybody who happens to be at

hand.

Yet these are not all the manifestations. Childish anger has its

wretched aspect. There is keen suffering in these early experiences of

thwarted will and purpose. A little boy, rather more than a year old,

used when crossed to throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his

head; and his brother, when fourteen months old, would similarly throw

himself on the floor, bang the back of his head, biting the carpet as

before mentioned. This act of throwing oneself on the floor, which is

common about this age and is apparently quite instinctive, is the

expression of the utter _dejection_ of misery. C.’s attitude when

crossed, gathered into a heap on the floor, was eloquent of this

infantile despair. Such suffering is the immediate outcome of thwarted

purpose, and must be distinguished from the moral feeling of shame which

often accompanies it.

Such stormy outbursts vary no doubt from child to child. Thus C.’s

sister in her angry moments did not bite or roll on the floor, but would

dance about and stamp. Some children show little if anything of this

savage furiousness. Among those that do show it, it is often a temporary

phenomenon only.

This anger, it is to be noted, is due to check, and would show itself to

some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a

child will become angry, resentful, and despairingly miserable if

another child gets effective hold of something which he wants to have.

Yet it is undoubtedly true, as we shall see, that these little storms

are most frequently called up by the imposition of authority, and are a

manifestation of what we call a defiant attitude.

This slight examination may suffice to show that with the child self,

its appetites, its satisfactions, are the centre of its existence, the

pivot on which its action turns. I do not forget the real and striking

differences here, the specially brutal form of boys’ anger as compared

with that of girls, the partial atrophy of some of these impulses,

_e.g._, jealousy, in the more gentle and affectionate type of child. Yet

there seems to be little doubt that these are among the commonest and

most pronounced characteristics of the first years.

Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. If the

order of development of the individual follows and summarises that of

the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least of the

passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the savage

before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilised man. That

he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage and to the brute

suggests how little ages of civilised life with its suppression of these

furious impulses have done to tone down the ancient and carefully

transmitted instincts. The child at birth, and for a long while after,

may then be said to be the representative of wild untamed nature, which

it is for education to subdue and fashion into something higher and

better.

At the same time the child is more than this. In this first clash of his

will with another’s he knows more than the brute’s sensual fury. He

suffers consciously, he realises himself in his antagonism to a world

outside him. It is probable, as I have pointed out before, that even a

physical check bringing pain, as when the child runs his head against a

wall, may develop this consciousness of self in its antagonism to a

not-self. This consciousness reaches a higher phase when the opposing

force is distinctly apprehended as another will. Self-feeling, a germ of

the feeling of ‘my worth,’ enters into this early passionateness and

differentiates it from a mere animal rage. The absolute prostration of

infantile anger seems to be the expression of this keen consciousness of

rebuff, of injury.

While, then, these outbursts of savage instinct in children are no doubt

ugly, and in their direction contra-moral, they must not hastily be

pronounced wholly bad and wicked. To call them wicked in the full sense

of that term is indeed to forget that they are the swift reactions of

instinct which have in them nothing of reflexion or of deliberation. The

angry child venting his spite in some wild act of violence is a long way

from a man who knowingly and with the consent of his will retaliates and

hates. The very fleeting character of the outbreak, the rapid subsidence

of passion and transition to another mood, show that there is here no

real _malice prépense_. These instincts will, no doubt, if they are not

tamed, develop later on into truly wicked dispositions; yet it is by no

means a small matter to recognise that they do not amount to full moral

depravity.

On the other hand, we have seen that we do not render complete justice

to these early manifestations of angry passion if we class them with

those of the brute. The child in these first years, though not yet human

in the sense of having rational insight into his wrong-doing, is human

in the sense of suffering through consciousness of an injured self. This

reflective element is not yet moral; the sense of injury may turn

by-and-by into lasting hatred. Yet it holds within itself possibilities

of something higher. But of this more when we come to envisage the child

in his relation to authority.

The same predominance of self, the same kinship with the unsocial brute

which shows itself in these germinal animosities, is said to reappear in

the insensibility or unfeelingness of children. The commonest charge

against children from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and

sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and

cruel.

That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I

suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother

leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on playing

with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about

some circumstance connected with the affliction which is worse than the

absorption in play through its tantalising want of any genuine feeling.

A brother or a sister may be ill, but if the vigorous little player is

affected at all, it is only through the loss of his companion, if this

is not more than made up for by certain advantages of the solitary

situation. If the mother is ill, the event is interesting merely as

supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half

an hour in his mother’s sick-room, coolly informed his nurse: ‘I have

had a very nice time, mamma’s ill!’ The order of the two statements is

significant of the child’s mental attitude towards others’ sufferings.

If his faithful nurse has her face bandaged, his interest in her

torments does not go beyond a remark on the ‘funniness’ of her new

appearance.

When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling

is still more noticeable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer

of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death.

While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved

inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being affected at

most by a feeling of awe before a great mystery. Even the sight of the

dead body does not always excite grief. Mrs. Burnett in her interesting

reminiscences of childhood has an excellent account of the feelings of a

sensitive and refined child when first brought face to face with death.

In one case she was taken with fearsome longing to touch the dead body,

so as to know what ‘as cold as death’ meant, in another, that of a

pretty girl of three with golden brown eyes and neat small brown curls,

she was impressed by the loveliness of the whole scene, the nursery

bedroom being hung with white and adorned with white flowers. In neither

case was she sorry, and could not cry though she had imagined beforehand

that she would.[166] Even in this case, then, where so much feeling was

called forth, commiseration for the dead companion seems to have been

almost wholly wanting.[167]

-----

Footnote 166:

_The One I Knew Best_, chap. x.

Footnote 167:

_Cf._ Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 84 f.

-----

No one, I think, will doubt that judged by our standards children are

often profoundly and shockingly callous. But the question arises here,

too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. It is one

thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be

indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the

spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We are apt to assume

that children know our sufferings instinctively, or at least that they

can always enter into them when they are openly expressed. But this

assumption is highly unreasonable. A large part of the manifestation of

human suffering is unintelligible to a little child. He is oppressed

neither by our anxieties nor by our griefs, just because these are to a

large extent beyond his sympathetic comprehension.

We must remember, too, that there are moods and attitudes of mind

favourable and unfavourable to sympathy. None of us are uniformly and

consistently compassionate, and children are frequently the subject of

moods which exclude the feeling. They are impelled by their

superabundant nervous energy to wild romping activity, they are

passionately absorbed in their play, they are intensely curious about

the many new things they see and hear of. These dominant impulses issue

in mental attitudes which are indifferent to the spectacle of others’

troubles.

Again, where an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to

spy something besides the sadness. The little girl already spoken of saw

the prettiness of the death-room rather than its mournfulness. A teacher

once told her class of the death of a class-mate. There was of course a

strange stillness, which one little girl presently broke with a loud

laugh. The child is said to have been by no means unemotional, and the

laugh not a ‘nervous’ one. The odd situation—the sudden hush of a

class—had affected childish sensibilities more than the distressing

announcement.

One other remark by way of saving clause here. It is by no means true

that children are always unaffected by the sad and sorrowful things in

life. The first acquaintance with death, as we know from a number of

published reminiscences, has sometimes shaken a child’s whole being with

an infinite, nameless sense of woe.[168]

-----

Footnote 168:

See, for example, the record of the impression produced by a parent’s

death left by Steele in the _Tatler_, and George Sand in her

autobiography. No doubt, as Tolstoi’s reminiscences tell us, a good

deal of straining after emotion and vain affectation may mingle with

such childish sorrow.

-----

Children, says the misopædist, are not only unfeeling where we look for

sympathy and kindness, they are positively unkind, their unkindness

amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the brute in the child is

emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is here understood cold-blooded

infliction of pain. “Cet âge,” wrote La Fontaine of childhood, “est sans

pitié.” The idea that children, especially boys, are cruel in this sense

is, I think, a common one.

This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to other

children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself

supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to

think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to

a feeling of hatred. I have heard of one little girl who was taken with

so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly

as to make attempts to smash its head, much as she would no doubt have

tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The baby, it

is comforting to know, was not really hurt by this precocious explosion

of infanticidal impulse—perhaps the smashing was more than half a

"pretence"—and the little girl has since grown up to be a kind-hearted

woman.

Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably rare. More

common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child’s dealings

with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak

of a child’s cruelty.

At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious intention

in a child’s treatment of animals. The little girl M. when just a year

old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. The

little girl described by Miss Shinn would when two years old run up to a

dog and jerk his ear till he snapped at her, and on one occasion

resolutely thrust her hand into a bush to seize pussy, minding not the

scratches.[169] Do we not see in this mauling of animals, even when it

brings the child himself pain, evidences of a rooted determination to

plague, and of a fierce delight in plaguing?

-----

Footnote 169:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, pt. ii., p. 149 f.

-----

The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too difficult a

one to be discussed here. I will only say that whatever the cruelty of

adults may be children’s so-called cruelty towards animals is very far

from being a pure delight in the sight of suffering. The torments to

which a child will subject a long-suffering cat are, I suspect, due not

to a clear intention to inflict pain, but to the childish impulse to

hold, possess, and completely dominate the pet animal. He feels he must

have the pet, no matter at what cost to himself: of the cost to his

victim he does not think. The stamping on the kittens was perhaps merely

a childish way of holding them fast. Such actions are a manifestation of

that odd mixture of sociability and love of power which makes up a

child’s attachment to the lower animals.

The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is

somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy

of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the

window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an

explanation, then gave it himself: ‘Mr. Fy dom (gone) to by-by’. But he

would not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently remained and

he continued uneasy about it." Here we have, I think, the instinctive

attitude of a child towards the outcome of his destructive impulse. This

impulse, which, as we know, becomes more clearly destructive when

experience has taught what result will follow, is not necessarily cruel

in the sense of including an idea of the animal’s suffering. Animal

movement, especially that of tiny things, has something exciting and

provoking about it. The child’s own activity and the love of power which

is bound up with it impel him to arrest the movements of small

manageable things. This is the meaning, I suspect, of the fascination of

the fly on the window-pane, and of tiny creeping things, and especially,

perhaps, of the worm with its tangle of wriggling movement. The cat’s

prolonged chase of the mouse, into which, as we have seen, something of

a dramatic make-believe enters, probably owes its zest to a like delight

in the realisation of power.

Along with this love of power there goes often something of a child’s

fierce untamable curiosity. A boy of four, finding that his mother was

shocked at hearing him express a wish to see a pigeon which a dog had

just killed, remarked: ‘Is it rude to look at a dead pigeon? I want to

see where its blood is.’ I am disposed to think that the crushing of

flies and moths and the pulling of worms to pieces and so forth are

prompted by this curiosity. The child wants to see where the blood is,

what the bones are like, how the wings are fastened in, and so forth.

Perez tells of a little boy, afterwards an artist, who used to crush

flies between the leaves of a book for the sake of the odd designs

resulting.[170] By such various lines of concentrated activity does the

child-mind overlook the suffering which it causes.

-----

Footnote 170:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 60.

-----

A like combination of love of power and of curiosity seems to underlie

other directions of childish destructiveness, as the breaking of toys

and the pulling of flowers to pieces. In certain cases, as in C.’s

annihilation of a garden of peonies, the love of power or effect may

overtop and outlive the curiosity, becoming a sort of iconoclastic

fury.[171]

-----

Footnote 171:

Ruskin tells us that when a child he pulled flowers to pieces ‘in no

morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder’ (_Præterita_, 88). Goethe

gives an amusing account of his wholesale throwing of crockery out of

the window inspired by the delight of watching the droll way in which

it was smashed on the pavement.

-----

I think, then, that we may give the little child the benefit of the

doubt, and not assign his rough handling of sentient things to a wish to

inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which he is clearly

aware. Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and delight

in showing one’s power and producing an effect, seem sufficient to

explain most of the alleged brutality of the first years.

Probably the same considerations apply to those milder forms of

annoyance which children are apt to practise on other people and animals

alike. That a child early develops a decided taste for ‘teasing’ is, I

think, certain. But whether carried out by word or by action this early

teasing seems to be in the main the outcome of the love of power, the

impulse to impose one’s will on other creatures. We must remember that

these wee beings feel themselves so subject to others’ power that they

are very naturally driven to use all opportunities of shaking off the

shackles, and exercising for themselves a little domination. Cruelty,

that is the impulse to inflict pain, where it appears, grows up later,

and though it has its roots in this love of power ought to be

distinguished from it.

We have now looked at one of the dark sides of the child and have found

that though it is unpleasant it is not so hideous as it has been

painted. Children are no doubt apt to be passionate, ferocious in their

anger, and sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is

consolatory to reflect that their savageness is not quite that of

brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed

from a deliberate and calculating egoism.

_Germs of Altruism._

It now remains to point out that there is another and counterbalancing

side. If a child has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits of

tenderness. If he is now dead to others’ sufferings he is at another

time taken with a most amiable childish concern for their happiness. In

order to be just to him we must recognise both sides.

It must not be forgotten here that children are instinctively attachable

and sociable in so far as they show in the first weeks that they get

used to and dependent on the human presence and are miserable when this

is taken from them. The stopping of an infant’s crying at night on

hearing the familiar voice of its mother or nurse shows this.

In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate

sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion

a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser

realisation of this oneness comes in the case of the dog and of the

child alike after separation. The wild caressing leaps of the quadruped

are matched by the warm embracings of the little biped. Only that here,

too, we see in the child traces of a deeper human consciousness. A girl

of thirteen months was separated from her mother during six weeks. On

the mother’s return she was speechless, and for some time could not bear

to leave her restored companion for a minute. The little girl M. when

nearly seventeen months old received her father after only five days’

absence with special marks of tenderness, rushing up to him, smoothing

and stroking his face and giving him all the toys in the room.

This sense of joining on one’s existence to another’s is not sympathy in

its highest form, that is, a conscious realisation of another’s

feelings, but it is a kind of sympathy after all, and may grow into

something better. This we may see in the return of the childish heart to

its resting place after the estrangement introduced by ‘naughtiness’.

The relenting after passion, the reconciliation after punishment, are

these not the experiences which help to raise the dumb animal sympathy

of the first months into a true human sense of fellowship? But this part

of the development of sympathy belongs to another chapter.

Sympathy, it has been said, is a kind of imitation, and this is

strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A dog will howl piteously in

response to another dog’s howl: similarly a child of nine and a half

months has been known to cry violently when his mother or father

pretended to cry.

One curious manifestation of this early imitative sympathy is the

impulse to do what the mother does and to be what she is. Much of early

imitative play shows this tendency. It is more than a cold distant

copying of another’s doings: it is full of the warmth of attachment, and

it is entered on as a way of getting nearer to the object of attachment.

Out of this, too, there springs the germ of a higher sympathy. It will

be remembered that Laura Bridgman bound the eyes of her doll with a

bandage similar to the one she herself wore. Through this sharing in her

own experience the doll became more a part of herself. Conversely, a

child, on finding that her mother’s head ached, began imitatively to

make-believe that her own head was hurt. Sympathy rests on community of

experience, and it is a curious fact that a child, before he can fully

sympathise with another’s trouble and make it his own by the sympathetic

process itself, should thus try by a kind of childish acting to realise

this community of experience.

From this imitative acting of another’s trouble, so as to share in it,

there is but a step to a direct sympathetic apprehension of it. How

early a genuine manifestation of concern about another’s suffering

begins to show itself it is almost impossible to say. Children probably

differ greatly in this respect. I have, however, one case which is so

curious that I cannot forbear to quote it. It reaches me, I may say, by

a thoroughly trustworthy channel.

A baby aged one year and two months was crawling on the floor. An elder

sister, Katherine, aged six, who was working at a wool mat could not get

on very well and began to cry. Baby looked up and grunted, ‘on! on!’ and

kept drawing its fingers down its own cheeks. Here the aunt called Miss

Katherine’s attention to baby, a device which merely caused a fresh

outburst of tears; whereupon baby proceeded to hitch itself along to

Katherine with many repetitions of the grunts and the mimetic

finger-movements. Katherine, fairly overcome by this, took baby to her

and smiled; at which baby began to clap its hands and to crow, tracing

this time the course of the tears down its sister’s cheeks.

This pretty nursery-picture certainly seems to illustrate a rudiment of

genuine fellow-feeling. Similarly it is hard not to recognise the signs

of a sincere concern when a child of two runs spontaneously and kisses

the place that is hurt, even though it is not to be doubted that the

graceful action has been learnt through imitation.

Very sweet and sacred to the mother are the first clear indications of

the child’s concern for herself. These are sporadic, springing up

rarely, and sometimes, as it looks to us, capriciously. Illness, and

temporary removal are a common occasion for the appearance of a deeper

tenderness in the young heart. A little boy of three spontaneously

brought his story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the

same child used to follow her about after her recovery with all the

devotion of a little knight.

Valuable and entertaining, too, are the first attempts of the child at

consolation. A little German girl aged two and a half who had just lost

her brother seemed very indifferent for some days. She then began to

reflect and to ask about her playmate. On seeing her mother’s distress

she proceeded in truly childish fashion to comfort her; ‘Never mind,

mamma, you will get a better boy. He _was_ a ragamuffin’ (‘Er _war_ ein

Lump’). The co-existence of an almost barbarous indifference for the

dead brother with practical sympathy for the living mother is

characteristic here.[172]

-----

Footnote 172:

A pretty example of such childish consolation is given by P. Lombroso,

_op. cit._, p. 94.

-----

A deeper and more thoughtful sympathy comes with years and reflective

power. Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes the

awakener of this. ‘Are you old, mother?’ asked a boy of five. ‘Why?’ she

answered. ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘the older you are the nearer you are

to dying.’ This child had once before said he hoped his mother would not

die before him, and this suggests that thought of his own forlorn

condition was in his mind here: yet we may hope that there was something

of disinterested concern too.[173]

-----

Footnote 173:

_Cf._ P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 87.

-----

This early consideration frequently takes the practical form of

helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist you in little

household occupations; and though love of activity and the pleasure of

imitating no doubt count for much in these cases, we can, I think,

safely set down something to the wish to be of use. This inference seems

justified by the fact that such practical helpfulness is not always

imitative. A little boy of two years and one month happened to overhear

his nurse say to herself: ‘I wish that Anne would remember to fill the

nursery boiler’. “He listened, and presently trotted off; found the said

Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: ‘Nanna,

Nanna!’ (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled, the child

pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed

to the boiler, and added: ‘Go dare, go dare,’ so that the girl

comprehended and did as he bade her.”

With this practical ‘utilitarian’ sympathy there goes a quite charming

wish to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a year old

was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to

everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness,

and it is odd to observe their alternate play. At an early age, too, a

child tries to make himself agreeable by pretty and dainty courtesies. A

little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise:

‘Please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?’ Regard

for another’s feelings was surely never more charmingly expressed than

in the prayer that in rendering this little service the helper should

not only be willing, but glad.

Just as there are these sporadic growths of affectionate concern and

wish to please in relation to the mother and others, so there is ample

evidence of kindness to animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of

little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we

consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world.

I have touched above on the vague alarms which this animal world has for

tiny children. It is only fair to them to say that these alarms are for

the most part transitory, giving place to interest, attachment and

fellow-feeling. In a sense a child may be said to belong to the animal

community, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s charming account of the Jungle

prettily suggests. Has he not, indeed, at first more in common with the

dog and cat, the pet rabbit or dormouse, than with that grown-up human

community which is apt to be so preoccupied with things beyond his

understanding, and in many cases, at least, to wear so unfriendly a

mien? We must remember, too, that children as a rule know nothing of the

prejudices, of the disgusts, which make grown people put animals so far

from them. The boy C. was nonplussed by his mother’s horror of the

caterpillar. A child has been known quite spontaneously to call a worm

‘beautiful’.

As soon as the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will

take to an animal. A little boy of fifteen months quickly overcame his

fright at the barking of his grandfather’s dog, and began to share his

biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for

his amusement. This mastery of fear by attachment takes a higher form

when later on the child will stick to his dumb companion after suffering

from his occasional fits of temper. Ruskin in his reminiscences gives a

striking example of this triumph of attachment over fear. When five

years old, he tells us, he was taken by the serving-man to see a

favourite Newfoundland dog in the stable. The man rather foolishly

humoured the child’s wish to kiss Leo (the dog) and lowered him so that

his face came near the animal’s. Hereupon the dog, who was dining,

resenting the interruption of his meal, bit out a piece of the boy’s

lip. His only fear after this was lest the dog should be sent away.[174]

-----

Footnote 174:

_Præterita_, pp. 105-6.

-----

Children will further at a quite early age betray the germ of a truly

humane feeling towards animals. The same little boy that bravely got

over his fear of the dog’s barking would, when nineteen months old,

begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street. More passionate

outbursts of pity are seen at a later age. A boy five years and nine

months had a kitten of which he was very fond. One day, after two or

three days’ absence from the house, it came back with one foot much

mutilated and the leg swollen, evidently not far from dying. “When

(writes the mother) he saw it he burst into uncontrollable tears and was

more affected than I have ever seen him. The kitten was taken away and

drowned, and ever since (a month) he has shown great reluctance in

speaking of it, and never mentions it to any one but those who saw the

cat at the time. He says it is too sad to tell any one of it.” The boy

C. when only four was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead

dog taken from a pond.

The indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and

others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in

their hearts. This is one of the most striking manifestations of the

better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself.

It is sometimes asked why children should take animals to their bosoms

in this fashion and lavish so much fellow-feeling on them. It seems easy

to understand how they come to choose animals, especially young ones, as

playmates, and now and again to be ruthlessly inconsiderate of their

comfort in their boisterous gambols; but why should they be so affected

by their sufferings and champion their rights so sturdily? I think the

answer is not hard to find. The sympathy and love which the child gives

to animals grow out of a sort of blind gregarious instinct, and this

again seems to be rooted in a similarity of position and needs. As M.

Compayré well says on this point: “He (the child) sympathises naturally

with creatures which resemble him on so many sides, in which he finds

wants analogous to his own, the same appetite, the same impulses to

movement, the same desire for caresses. To resemble is already to

love.”[175] I think, however, that a deeper feeling comes in from the

first and gathers strength as the child hears about men’s treatment of

animals, I mean a sense of a common danger and helplessness face to face

with the human ‘giant’. The more passionate attachment of the child to

the animal is the outcome of the wide-spread instinct of helpless things

to band together. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and

six years old: ‘Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the animals than to

me’. ‘Perhaps I am,’ he replied, ‘you see they are not so well off as

you are.’ May there not be something of this sense of banding and mutual

defence on the animals’ side too? The idea does not look so absurd when

we remember how responsive, how forbearing, how ready to defend, a dog

will often show itself towards a ‘wee mite’ of a child. This same

instinct to stand up for the helpless inferior shows itself in

children’s attitude towards servants when scolded and especially when

dismissed.[176]

-----

Footnote 175:

_Op. cit._, p. 108.

Footnote 176:

Illustrations are given by Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 96 f.

-----

The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children

with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of

temper and acts of violence, the child’s intercourse with his doll and

his toy ‘gee gee’ is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a

solicitude which is at once tender and corrective and has the enduring

constancy of a maternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a

doll, the wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, to make it

look pretty, and to get it to behave nicely, and note the misery when it

is missing, without acknowledging that in this plaything humanised by

childish fancy, and brought by daily habit into the warmest intimacy of

daily companionship, we have the focal meeting-point of the tender

impulses of the child.

Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and

pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects in

the inanimate world. The manifestations of pity for the falling leaves

and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, referred to

above, show how quick childish feeling is to detect what is sad in the

look of things. Children have even been known to apply the commiserating

vocable ‘poor’ to a torn paper figure, and to a bent pin. It seems fair

to suppose that here, too, the more tender heart of the child saw

occasion for pity.

It is worth noting that childish sorrow at the sufferings of things is

sometimes so keen, that even artistic descriptions which contain a

‘cruel’ element are shunned. A little boy under four "is indignant

(writes his mother) at any picture where an animal suffers. He has even

turned against several of his favourite pictures—German Bilderbogen,

because they are ‘cruel,’ as the bear led home with a corkscrew in his

nose." The extreme manifestation of this shrinking from the

representation of animal or human suffering is dislike for ‘sad

stories’. The unsophisticated tender heart of the child can find no

pleasure in horrors which appear to be the supreme delight of many an

adult reader.

Here, however, it is evident, we verge on the confines of sentimental

pity. It is to be remarked that highly imaginative children shed most

tears over these fictitious sufferings. Children with more

matter-of-fact minds and a practical turn are not so affected. Thus a

mother writes of her two girls: ‘M. being the most imaginative is and

always has been much affected by sad stories, especially if read to her

with dramatic inflexions of voice. From two years old upwards these have

always affected her to tears, whilst P. who is really the most

tender-hearted and helpful, but has little imagination, never cries at

sad stories, and when four years old explained to me that she did not

mind them because she knew they didn’t really happen.’

It appears to me to be incontestable that in this spontaneous outgoing

of fellow-feeling towards other creatures, human and animal, the child

manifests something of a truly moral quality. C.’s stout and persistent

championship of the London horses against the oppression of the

bearing-rein had in it something of righteous indignation. The way in

which his mind was at this period pre-occupied with animal suffering

suggests that his sympathies with animals were rousing the first fierce

protest against the wicked injustice of the world. The boy De Quincey

got this first sense of the existence of moral evil in another way

through his sympathy with a sister who, rumour said, had been brutally

treated by a servant. He could not, he tells us, bear to look on the

woman. It was not anger. ‘The feeling which fell upon me was a

shuddering horror as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a

world of evil and strife.’[177]

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Footnote 177:

_Autobiographical Sketches_, chap. i.

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_Children’s Lies._

We may now turn to the other main charge against children, that of

lying. According to many, children are in general accomplished little

liars, to the manner born and equally adept with the mendacious savage.

Even writers on childhood, by no means prejudiced against them, lean to

the view that untruth is universal among children, and to some extent at

least innate.[178]

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Footnote 178:

See the quotations from Montaigne and Perez, given by Compayré, _op.

cit._, p. 309 f.

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Here, surely, there is need of discrimination. A lie connotes, or should

connote, an assertion made with full consciousness of its untruth, and

in order to mislead. It may well be doubted whether little children have

so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as

to be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult

unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and

feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious. It is

satisfactory to note a tendency to take a milder and more reasonable

view of this infantile fibbing; and in what follows I can but follow up

the excellent recent studies of Dr. Stanley Hall, and M. Compayré.[179]

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Footnote 179:

Stanley Hall, “Children’s Lies,” _Amer. Journal of Psychology_, 1890;

Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 309 ff.