-----

It is desirable to inspect a little more closely the various forms of

this early mendacity. To begin with those little ruses and

dissimulations which, according to M. Perez, are apt to appear almost

from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is plainly difficult

to bring them into the category of full-fledged lies. When, for example,

a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your asking for it

holds out empty hands, it would be hard to name this action a lie, even

though there is in it a germ of deception. We must remember that

children have an early developed instinct to secrete things, and the

little dissimulation in these actions may be a mere outcome of this

hiding propensity, and the accompanying wish that you should not get the

hidden thing. Refusals to tell secrets, or as C. called them ‘private

secrets’ (a fine distinction), show the same thing. A child when

badgered is most jealous in guarding what he has been told, or what his

fancy has made a secret. The little ruses or ‘acted lies’ to which I am

now referring seem to me at the worst attempts to put you off the scent

in what is regarded as a private matter, and to have the minimum of

intentional deception. As Mrs. Fry has well shown, this childish passion

for keeping things secret may account for later and more serioua-looking

falsehoods.[180]

-----

Footnote 180:

_Uninitiated_ (‘A Discovery in Morals’).

-----

More distinct marks of mendacity appear when the child comes to use

language and proffers statements which if he reflected he might know to

be false. It may readily be thought that no child who has the

intelligence to make statements at all could make false ones without

some little consciousness of the falsity. But here I suspect we judge

harshly, applying adult tests to cases where they are inappropriate.

Anybody who has observed children’s play and dramatic talk, and knows

how readily and completely they can imagine the non-existent so as to

lose sight of the existent, will be chary when talking of them of using

the word lie. There may be solemn sticklers for truth who would be

shocked to hear the child when at play saying, ‘I am a coachman,’ ‘Dolly

is crying,’ and so forth. But the discerning see nothing to be alarmed

at here. Similarly when a little girl of two and a half after running on

with a pretty long rigmarole of sounds devoid of all meaning said: “It’s

because you don’t understand me, papa”. Here the love of mystery and

secrecy aided by the dramatic impulse _made_ the nonsense talk real

talk. The wee thing doubtless had a feeling of superiority in talking in

a language which was unintelligible to her all-wise papa.

On much the same level of moral obliquity are those cases where a child

will say the opposite of what he is told, turning authoritative

utterances upside down. A quaint instance is quoted by Compayré from

Guyau. Guyau’s little boy (age not given) was overheard saying to

himself: “Papa parle mal, il a dit _sevette_, bébé parle bien, il dit

_serviette_”. Such reversals are a kind of play too: the child not

unnaturally gets tired now and then of being told that he is wrong, and

for the moment imagines himself right and his elders wrong, immensely

enjoying the idea.

A graver-looking case presents itself when an ‘untruth’ is uttered in

answer to a question. C. on being asked by his mother who told him

something, answered, ‘Dolly’. ‘False, and knowingly false,’ somebody

will say, especially when he learns that the depraved youngster

instantly proceeded to laugh. But let us look a little closer. The

question had raised in C.’s small mind the idea that somebody had told

him. This is a process of ‘suggestion’ which, as we shall see presently,

sways a child’s mind as it sways that of the hypnotised adult. And there

close by the child was dolly, and the child’s make-believe includes, as

we all know, much important communication with dolly. What more natural

than that the idea should at once seize his imagination? But the laugh?

Well I am ready to admit that there was a touch of playful defiance

here, of young impishness. The expression on the mother’s face showed

him that his bold absurd fancy had produced its half-startling,

half-amusing effect; and there is nothing your little actor likes more

than this after-effect of startling you. But more, it gave him at the

same instant a glimpse of the outside look of his fancy, of the

unreality of the untruth; and the laugh probably had in it the delight

of the little rebel, of the naughty rogue who loves now and then to set

law at defiance.

A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these backed

by a strong impulse to astonish, and a turn for playful rebellion, seem

to me to account for this and other similar varieties of early

misstatement. Naughty they no doubt are in a measure; but is it not just

that playing at being naughty which has in it nothing really bad, and is

removed _toto cœlo_ from downright honest lying? I speak the more

confidently as to C.’s case as I happen to know that he was in his

serious moods particularly, one might almost say pedantically, truthful.

A somewhat different case is that where the vivid fancy underlying the

misstatement may be supposed to lead to a measure of self-deception.

When, for example, a child wants to be carried and says, “My leg hurts

me and my foot too just here, I can’t walk, I can’t, I can’t,”[181] it

is possible at least that he soon realises the tiredness he begins by

half feigning. The Worcester collection gives an example. “I was giving

some cough syrup, and E (aged three years two months) ran to me saying:

‘I am sick too, and I want some medicine’. She then tried to cough.

Every time she would see me taking the syrup bottle afterwards, she

would begin to cough. The syrup was very sweet.” This looks simply

awful. But what if the child were of so imaginative a turn that the

sight of the syrup given to the sick child produced a more or less

complete illusion of being herself sick, an illusion strong enough to

cause the irritation and the cough? The idea may seem far-fetched, but

deserves to be considered before we brand the child with the name liar.

-----

Footnote 181:

See P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 74.

-----

The vivid fanciful realisation which in this instance was sustained by

the love of sweet things is in many cases inspired by other and later

developed feelings. How much false statement—and that not only among

little children—is of the nature of exaggeration and directed to

producing a strong effect. When, for example, the little four-year-old

draws himself up and shouts exultantly, “See, mamma, how tall I am, I am

growing so fast, I shall soon be a giant,” or boasts of his strength and

tells you the impossible things he is going to do, the element of

braggadocio is on the surface, and imposes on nobody.

No doubt these propensities, though not amounting in the stage of

development now dealt with to full lying, may if unrestrained develop

into this. An unbridled fancy and strong love of effect will lead an

older child to say what he knows, vaguely at least, at the moment to be

false in order to startle and mystify others. Such exaggeration of the

impulses is distinctly abnormal, as may be seen by its affinity to what

we can observe in the case of the insane. The same is true of the

exaggeration of the vain-glorious or ‘showing off’ impulses, as

illustrated for example in the cases mentioned by Dr. Stanley Hall of

children who on going to a new town or school would assume new

characters which were kept up with difficulty by means of many false

pretences.[182]

-----

Footnote 182:

Article “Children’s Lies,” p. 67.

-----

A fertile source of childish untruth, especially in the case of girls,

is the wish to please. Here we have to do with very dissimilar things.

An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for mother, aunt or

teacher gushes out, ‘Oh I _do_ love you,’ or ‘What sweet lovely eyes you

have,’ or other pretty flattery, may be sincere for the moment, the

exaggeration being indeed the outcome of a sudden ebullition of emotion.

There is more of acting and artfulness in the flatteries which take

their rise in a calculating wish to say the nice agreeable thing. Some

children are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the

impulse is strong and dominant are presumably those who in later years

make the good society actors. In all this childish simulation and

exaggeration we have to do with the germs of what may become a great

moral evil, insincerity, that is falsity in respect of what is best and

ought to be sacred. Yet this childish flattery, though undoubtedly a

mild mendacity, is a most amiable mendacity through its charming

motive—always supposing that it is a pure wish to please, and is not

complicated with an _arrière pensée_, the hope of gaining some favour

from the object of the devotion. Perhaps there is no variety of childish

fault more difficult to deal with; if only for the reason that in

checking the impulse we are robbing ourselves of the sweetest offerings

of childhood.

The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and

this, I suspect, is a fertile source of childish prevarication. If, for

example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something,

his feeling that the questioner expects him to say ‘Yes’ makes it very

hard to say ‘No’. Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early

experience. When she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a

friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the

family was called Edith, remarked to her: ‘That’s a pretty name. My baby

is Eleanor. Isn’t that a pretty name?’ On being thus questioned she felt

in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of ‘Eleanor,’

and yet feared to be rude and say so. She got out of it by saying she

did not like the name as well as ‘Edith’.

These temptations and struggles, which may impress themselves on memory

for the whole of life, illustrate the influence of older persons’ wishes

and expectations on the childish mind. It is possible that we have here

to do with something akin to “suggestion,” that force which produces

such amazing results on the hypnotised subject, and is known to be a

potent influence for good or for evil on the young mind. A leading

question of the form, ‘Isn’t this pretty?’ ‘Aren’t you fond of me?’ may

easily overpower for a moment the child’s own conviction super-imposing

that of the stronger mind. Such passive utterance coming from a mind

over-ridden by another’s authority is not to be confounded with

conscious falsehood.

This suggestion often combines with other forces. Here is a good

example. A little American girl, sent into the oak shrubbery to get a

leaf, saw a snake, which so frightened her that she ran home without the

leaf. As cruel fate would have it she met her brothers and told them she

had seen a ‘’sauger’. “They knew (writes the lady who recalls this

reminiscence of her childhood) the difference between snakes and their

habits, and, boy-like, wanted to tease me, and said ‘’Twas no ’sauger—it

didn’t have a red ring round its neck, now, did it?’ My heated

imagination saw just such a serpent as soon as their words were spoken,

and I declared it had a ring about ‘its neck’.” In this way she was led

on to say that it had scars and a little bell on its neck, and was

soundly rated by her brothers as a ‘liar’.[183] Here we have a case of

“illusion of memory” induced by suggestion acting on a mind made

preternaturally sensitive by the fear from which it had not yet

recovered. If there was a germ of mendacity in the case it had its

source in the shrinking from the brothers’ ridicule, the wish not to

seem utterly ignorant about these boyish matters, the snakes. Yet who

would say that such swift unseizable movements of feeling in the dim

background of consciousness made the child’s responses lies in the

proper sense of the word?

-----

Footnote 183:

Sara E. Wiltshire, _The Christian Union_, vol. xl., No. 26.

-----

It seems paradoxical, yet is, I believe, indisputable, that a large part

of childish untruth comes upon the scene in connexion with moral

authority and discipline. We shall see by-and-by that unregenerate

child-nature is very apt to take up the attitude of self-defence towards

those who administer law and inflict punishment. Very little children

brought face to face with restraint and punishment will ‘try on’ these

ruses. Here are one or two illustrations from the notes on the little

girl M. When seventeen and a half months old she threw down her gloves

when wheeled in her mail-cart by her mother. The latter picked them up

and told her not to throw them away again. She was at first good, then

seemed to deliberate and finally called out: ‘Mamma, Bubbo’ (dog). The

mother turned to look, and the little imp threw her gloves away again,

laughing; there was of course no dog. The fib about the dog formed part

of a piece of childish make-believe, of an infantile comedy. It was

hardly more when about two months later, after she had thrown down and

broken her tea-things, and her mother had come up to her, she said:

‘Mamma broke tea-things—beat mamma,’ and proceeded to beat her. In

connexion with such little child-comedies there can be no talk of

deception. They are the outcome of the childish instinct to upset the

serious attitude of authority by a bit of fun.

The little stratagem begins to look more serious when the child gets

artful enough to put the mother off the scent by a false statement. For

example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother

‘monkey,’ and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: “I said

I was a monkey”. In some cases the child does not wait to be questioned.

A little girl mentioned by Compayré, being put out by something the

mother had done or said, cried: ‘Nasty!’ (Vilaine!) then after a

significant silence, corrected herself in this wise, ‘Dolly nasty’

(Poupée vilaine). The skill with which this transference was effected

without any violence to grammar argues a precocious art.[184]

-----

Footnote 184:

Perez gives a similar story, only that the epithet ‘vilaine’ was here

transferred to ‘l’eau’. _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 53.

-----

Our moral discipline may develop untruth in another way. When the

punishment has been inflicted and the governor, relenting from the

brutal harshness, asks: ‘Are you sorry?’ or ‘Aren’t you sorry?’ the

answer is exceedingly likely to be ‘No,’ even though this is in a sense

untrue. More clearly is this lying of obstinacy seen where a child is

shut up and kept without food. Asked: ‘Are you hungry?’ the hardy little

sinner stifles his sensations and pluckily answers ‘No,’ even though the

low and dismal character of the sound shows that the untruth is but a

half-hearted affair.

I have tried to show how a child’s untruths may be more than half

“playing,” how when they are serious assertions they may involve a

measure of self-deception, and how even when consciously false they may

have their origin in excusable circumstances and feelings. In urging all

this I do not wish to deny the statement that children wall sometimes

deliberately invent a lie from a base motive, as when a girl of three

seeing her little brother caressed by her mother for some minutes and

feeling herself neglected fabricated the story that ‘Henri’ had been

cruel to the parrot.[185] Yet I am disposed to look on such mean

falsehoods as exceptional if not abnormal.

-----

Footnote 185:

Perez, _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 54.

-----

There is much even yet to be done in clearing up the _modus operandi_ of

children’s lies. How quick, for example, is a child to find out the

simple good-natured people, as the servant-maid, or gardener, who will

listen to his romancing and flatter him by appearing to accept it all as

gospel. More significant is the fact that intentional deception is apt

to show itself towards certain people only. There is many a school-boy

who would think it no dishonour to say what is untrue to those he

dislikes, especially by way of getting them into hot water, though he

would feel it mean and base to lie to his mother or his father, and bad

form to lie to the head-master. Similar distinctions show themselves in

earlier stages, and are another point of similarity between the child

and the savage whose ideas of truthfulness seem to be truthfulness for

_my_ people only. This is a side of the subject which would repay fuller

inquiry.

Another aspect of the subject which has been but little investigated is

the influence of habit in the domain of lying, and the formation of

persistent permanent lies. The impulse to stick to an untruth when once

uttered is very human, and in the case of the child is enforced by the

fear of discovery. This applies not only to falsehoods foisted on

persons in authority, but to those by which clever boys and girls take

pleasure in befooling the inferior wits of others. In this way there

grow up in the nursery and in the playground traditional myths and

legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded. Such invention

is in part the outcome of the “pleasures of the imagination”. Yet it is

probable that these are in all cases reinforced not only by the wish to

produce an effect, but by the love of power which in the child not

endowed with physical prowess is apt to show itself in hood-winking and

practical joking.

Closely connected with the permanence of untruths is the contagiousness

of lying. The propagation of falsehood is apt to be promoted by a

certain tremulous admiration for the hardihood of the lie and by the

impulses of the rebel which never quite slumber even in the case of

fairly obedient children. I suspect, however, that it is in all cases

largely due to the force of suggestion. The falsehood boldly announced

is apt to captivate the mind and hold it under a kind of spell.

This effect of suggestion in generating falsehood is very marked in

those pathological or semi-pathological cases where children have been

led to give false testimony. It is now known that it is quite possible

to provoke an illusion of memory in certain children between the ages of

six and fifteen by simply affirming something in their hearing, whether

they are in the waking or in the sleeping state, so that they are ready

to state that they actually saw happen what was asserted.[186]

-----

Footnote 186:

M. Motet was one of the first to call attention to the forces of

childish imagination and the effects of suggestion in the false

testimonies of children. _Les Faux Temoignages des Enfants devant la

Justice_, 1887. The subject has been further elucidated by Dr.

Bérillon.

-----

So much as to the several manners and circumstances of childish lying.

In order to understand still better what it amounts to, how much of

conscious falsehood enters into it, we must glance at another and

closely related phenomenon, the pain which sometimes attends and follows

it.

There is no doubt that a certain number of children experience a qualm

of conscience when uttering a falsehood. This is evidenced in the

well-known devices by which the intelligence of the child thinks to

mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds

mentally, ‘I do not mean it,’ ‘in my mind,’ or some similar

palliative.[187] Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a

hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations

of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.

-----

Footnote 187:

See Stanley Hall, _loc. cit._, p. 68 f.

-----

The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie,

which catches the conscience at its tenderest, has been remembered by

many in later life. Here is a case. A lady friend remembers that when a

child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking

out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in

front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but

presently remembering the eyes, said: “Poor child, you could not see

well”. She knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and

for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie.

Miss Wiltshire, who tells the story of the mythical snake, gives another

recollection which illustrates the keen suffering of a child when he

becomes fully conscious of falsehood. She was as a small child very fond

of babies, and had been permitted by her mother to go when invited by

her aunt to nurse her baby cousin. One day wanting much to go when not

invited, she boldly invented, saying that her aunt was busy and had

asked her to spend an hour with the baby. ‘I went (she adds) not to the

baby, but by a circuitous route to my father’s barn, crept behind one of

the great doors, which I drew as close to me as I could, vainly wishing

that the barn and the hay-stacks would cover me; then I cried and moaned

I do not know how many hours, and when I went to bed I said my prayers

between sobs, refusing to tell my mother why I wept.’[188]

-----

Footnote 188:

_Loc. cit._

-----

Such examples of remorse are evidence of a child’s capability of

knowingly stating what is false. This is strikingly shown in Miss

Wiltshire’s two reminiscences; for she distinctly tells us that in the

case of her confident assertion about the imaginary snake with ring and

bell, she felt no remorse as she was not conscious of uttering a

lie.[189] But these sufferings of conscience point to something else, a

sense of awful wickedness, of having done violence to all that is right

and holy. How, it may be asked, does it happen that children feel thus

morally crushed after telling a lie?

-----

Footnote 189:

_Cf._ what Mrs. Fry says, _Uninitiated_ (‘A Discovery in Morals’).

-----

Here is a question that can only be answered when we have more material.

We know that among all childish offences lying is the one which is apt

to be specially branded by theological sanctions. The physical torments

with which the ‘lying tongue’ is threatened, may well beget terror in a

timid child’s heart. I think it likely, too, that the awfulness of lying

is thought of by children in its relation to the all-seeing God who,

though he cannot be lied to, knows when we lie. The inaudible palliative

words added to the lie may be an awkward child-device for putting the

speaker straight with the all-hearing God.

Further inquiry is, however, needed here. Do children contract a horror

of a lie when no religious terrors are introduced? Is there anything in

the workings of a child’s own mind which would lead him to feel after

his first lie as if the stable world were tumbling about his ears? Let

parents supply us with facts here.

Meanwhile I will venture to put forth a conjecture, and will gladly

withdraw it as soon as it is disproved.

So far as my inquiries have gone I do not find that children brought up

at home and kept from the contagion of bad example do uniformly develop

a lying propensity. Several mothers assure me that their children have

never seriously propounded an untruth. I can say the same about two

children who have been especially observed for the purpose.[190]

-----

Footnote 190:

Stanley Hall, when he speaks of certain forms of lying as prevalent

among children, is, as he expressly explains, speaking of children _at

school_, where the forces of contagion are in full swing.

-----

This being so, I distinctly challenge the assertion that lying is

instinctive in the sense that a child, even when brought up among

habitual truth tellers, shows an unlearned aptitude to say what he knows

to be false. A child’s quick imitativeness will, of course, lead him to

copy grown-up people’s untruths at a very early age.[191]

-----

Footnote 191:

I seem to detect possible openings for the play of imitation in many

of the indisputably conscious falsehoods reported by Perez, P.

Lombroso, and others.

-----

I will go further and suggest that where a child is brought up normally,

that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends, quite apart

from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth as what is

customary. Consider for a moment how busily a child’s mind is occupied

during the first years of linguistic performance in getting at the

bottom of words, of fitting ideas to words when trying to understand

others, and words to ideas when trying to express his own thoughts, and

you will see that all this must serve to make truth, that is, the

correspondence of statement with fact, to the child-mind something

matter-of-course, something not to be questioned, a law wrought into the

very usages of daily life which he never thinks of disobeying. We can

see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the signs of a

moral shock when they are confronted with assertions which, as they see,

do not answer to fact. The child C. was highly indignant on hearing from

his mother that people said what he considered false things about horses

and other matters of interest: and he was even more indignant at meeting

with any such falsity in one of his books for which he had all a child’s

reverence. The idea of perpetrating a knowing untruth, so far as I can

judge, is simply awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to

the practice of truthful statement. May it, then, not well be that when

a preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the

boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching

sense of having violated law—law not wholly imposed by the mother’s

command, but rooted in the very habits of social life? I think the

conjecture is well worth considering.

Our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying

alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have

tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will

develop into true cruelty and true lying. On the other hand, our study

has shown us that these impulses are not the only ones. A child has

promptings of kindness, which alternate, often in a capricious-looking

way, with those of inconsiderate teasing and tormenting; and he has, I

hold, side by side with the imaginative and other tendencies which make

for untruthful statement, the instinctive roots of a respect for truth.

These tendencies have not the same relative strength and frequency of

utterance in the case of all children, some showing, for example, more

of the impulse which makes for truth, others more of the impulse which

makes for untruth. Yet in all children probably both kinds of impulse

are to be observed.

I have confined myself to two of the moral traits of childhood. If there

were time to go into an examination of others, as childish vanity,

something similar would, I think, be found. Children’s vanity, like that

of the savage, has been the theme of more than one chapter, and it is

undoubtedly vast to the point of absurdity. Yet, side by side with these

impulses to deck oneself, to talk boastfully, there exists a delightful

childish candour which, if not exactly what we call modesty, is possibly

something better.

We may then, perhaps, draw the conclusion that child-nature is on its

moral side wanting in consistency and unity. It is a field of

half-formed growths, some of which tend to choke the others. Certain of

these are favourable, others unfavourable to morality. It is for

education to see to it that these isolated propensities be organised

into a system in which those towards the good become supreme and

regulative principles.

VIII.

UNDER LAW.

_The Struggle with Law._

In the last chapter we tried to get at those tendencies of child-nature

which though they have a certain moral significance may in a manner be

called spontaneous and independent of the institution of moral training.

We will now examine the child’s attitude towards the moral government

with which he finds himself confronted.

Here again we meet with opposite views. Children, say some, are

essentially disobedient and law-breaking. A child as such is a rebel,

delighting in nothing so much as in evading the rule which he finds

imposed on him by others.

The view that children are instinctively obedient and law-abiding, has

not, I think, been very boldly insisted on. A follower of Rousseau, at

least, who sees only clumsy interference with natural development in our

attempts to govern children, would say that child-nature must resist the

artificial and cramping system which the disciplinarian imposes.

It seems, however, to be allowed by some that a certain number of

children are docile and disposed to accept authority with its commands.

According to these, children are either obedient or disobedient. This is

perhaps the view of many mothers and pedagogues.

Here, too, it is probable that we try to make nature too simple. Even

the latter view, in spite of its apparent wish to be discriminating,

does not allow for the many-sidedness of the child, and for the many

different ways in which the instincts of child-nature may vary.

Now it is worth asking whether, if the child were naturally disposed to

look on authority as something wholly hostile, he would get morally

trained at all. Physically mastered and morally cowed he might of course

become; but this is not the same thing as being morally induced into a

habit of accepting law and obeying it.

In inquiring into this matter we must begin by drawing a distinction.

There is first the attitude of a child towards the governor, the parent

or other guardian, and there is his attitude towards law as such. These

are by no means the same thing, and a child of three or four begins to

illustrate the distinction. He may seem to be lawless, opposed to the

very idea of government, when in reality he is merely objecting to a

particular ruler, and the kind of rule (or as the child would say,

misrule) which he is carrying out.

Let us look a little into the non-compliant, disobedient attitude of

children. As we have seen, their very liveliness, the abundance of their

vigorous impulses, brings them into conflict with others’ wills. The

ruler, more particularly, is a great and continual source of crossings

and checkings. The child has his natural wishes and propensities. He is

full of fun, bent on his harmless tricks, and the mother has to talk

seriously to him about being naughty. How can we wonder at his disliking

the constraint? He has a number of inconvenient, active impulses, such

as putting things in disorder, playing with water, and so forth. As we

all know, he has a duck-like fondness for dirty puddles. Civilisation,

which wills that a child should be nicely dressed and clean, intervenes

in the shape of the nurse and soon puts a stop to this mode of

diversion. The tyro in submission, if sound in brain and limb, kicks

against the restraint, yells, slaps the nurse, and so forth.

Such collisions are perfectly normal in the first years of life. We

should not care to see a child give up his inclinations at another’s

bidding without some little show of resistance. These conflicts are

frequent and sharp in proportion to the sanity and vigour of the child.

The best children, best from a biological point of view, have, I think,

most of the rebel in them. Not infrequently these resistances of young

will to old will are accompanied by more emphatic protests in the shape

of slapping, pushing, and even biting. The ridiculous inequality in

bodily powers, however, saves, or ought to save, the contest from

becoming a serious physical struggle. The resistance where superior

force is used can only resolve itself into a helpless protest, a vain

shrieking or other utterance of checked and baffled impulse.

If instead of physical compulsion authority is asserted in the shape of

a highly disagreeable command, a child, before obedience has grown into

a habit, will be likely to disobey. If the nurse, instead of pulling the

mite away from the puddle, bids him come away, he may assert himself in

an eloquent ‘I won’t,’ or less bluntly, ‘I can’t come yet’. If he is

very much in love with the puddle, and has a stout heart, he probably

embarks on a tussle of words, in which ‘I won’t,’ or as the child will

significantly put it ‘I mustn’t,’ is bandied with ‘you must!’ the nurse

having at length to abandon the ‘moral’ method and to resort after all

to physical compulsion.

Our sample-child has not, we will assume, yet got so far as to recognise

and defer to a general rule about cleanliness. Hence it may be said that

his opposition is directed against the nurse as propounding a particular

command, and one which at the moment is excessively unpleasant. It is as

yet not resistance to law as such, but rather to one specific

interference of another will.

At the same time we may detect in some of this early resistance to

authority something of the true rebel-nature, that is to say the love of

lawlessness, and what is worse, perhaps, the obstinate recklessness of

the law-breaker. The very behaviour of a child when another will crosses

and blocks the line of his activity is suggestive of this. The yelling

and other disorderly proceedings, do not they speak of the temper of the

rioter, of the rowdy? And then, the fierce persistence in disobedience

under rebuke, and the wild, wicked determination to face everything

rather than obey, are not these marks of an almost Satanic fierceness of

revolt? The thoroughly naughty child sticks at nothing. Thus a little

offender of four when he was reminded by his sister—two years older—that

he would be shut out from heaven retorted impiously, ‘I don’t care,’

adding: ‘Uncle won’t go—I’ll stay with him’.[192]

-----

Footnote 192:

My correspondent, discreetly perhaps, does not explain why the uncle

was selected as fellow-outcast.

-----

This fierce noisy utterance of the disobedient and law-resisting temper

is eminently impressive. Yet it is not the only utterance. If we observe

children who may be said to show on the whole an outward submission to

authority we shall discover signs of secret dissatisfaction and

antagonism. The conflict with rule has not wholly ceased: it has simply

changed its manner of proceeding, physical assault and riotous shouts of

defiance being now exchanged for dialectic attack.

A curious chapter in the psychology of the child which still has to be

written is the account of the various devices by which the astute little

novice called upon to wear the yoke of authority seeks to smooth its

chafing asperities. These devices may, perhaps, be summed up under the

head of “trying it on”.

One of the simplest and most obvious of these contrivances is the

extempore invention of an excuse for not instantly obeying a particular

command. A child soon finds out that to say ‘I won’t’ when he is bidden

to do something is indiscreet as well as vulgar. He wants to have his

own way without resorting to a gross breach of good manners, so he

replies insinuatingly, ‘I’s very sorry, but I’s too busy,’ or in some

such conciliatory words. This field of invention offers a fine

opportunity for the imaginative child. A small boy of three years and

nine months on receiving from his nurse the familiar order, “Come here!”

at once replied, “I can’t, nurse, I’s looking for a flea,” and pretended

to be much engrossed in the momentous business of hunting for this

quarry in the blanket of his cot.[193] The little trickster is such a

lover of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a case like

this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told, laughed mischievously as

he proffered his excuse. Such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as

the uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is hard to be

quite as much put out by them.

-----

Footnote 193:

_Cf._ the excuse given by a little girl of three when her grandmother

called her, “I can’t come, I am suckling baby” (the doll). P.

Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 126.

-----

These excuses often show a fine range of inventive activity. How

manifold, for example, are the reasons, more or less fictitious, which a

boy when told to make less noise is able to urge in favour of

non-compliance. Here, of course, all the great matters of the

play-world, the need of getting his ‘gee-gee’ on, of giving his orders

to his soldiers, and so forth, come in between the prohibition and

compliance, and disobedience in such cases has its excuses. For to the

child his play-world, even though in a manner modelled on the pattern of

our common world, is apart and sacred; and the conventional restraints

as to noise and such like borrowed from the every-day world seem to him

to be quite out of place in this free and private domain of his own.

We all know the child’s aptness in ‘easing’ the pressure of commands and

prohibitions. If, for example, he is told to keep perfectly quiet

because mother or father wants to sleep, he will prettily plead for the

reservation of whispering ever so softly. If he is bidden not to ask for

things at the table he will resort to sly indirect reminders of what he

wants, as when a boy of five and a half years whispered audibly: ‘I hope

somebody will offer me some more soup,’ or when a girl of three and a

half years, with still greater childish tact, observed on seeing the

elder folk eating cake: ‘I not asking’. This last may be compared with a

story told by Rousseau of a little girl of six years who, having eaten

of all the dishes but one, artfully indicated the fact by pointing in

turn to each of the dishes, saying: ‘I have eaten that,’ but carefully

passing by the untasted one.[194] When more difficult duties come to be

enforced and the neophyte in the higher morality is bidden to be

considerate for others, and even to sacrifice his own comfort for

theirs, he is apt to manifest a good deal of skill in adjusting the

counsel of perfection to young weakness. Here is an amusing example. A

little boy, Edgar by name, aged five and three-quarter years, was going

out to take tea with some little girls. His mother, as is usual on such

occasions, primed him with special directions as to behaviour, saying:

“Remember to give way to them like father does to me”. To which Edgar,

after thinking a brief instant, replied: “Oh, but _not_ all at _once_.

_You_ have to _persuade_ him.”

-----

Footnote 194:

_Emile_, livre v., quoted by Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez

l’Enfant_, p. 127. Rousseau uses this story in order to show that

girls are more artful than boys.

-----

A like astuteness will show itself in meeting accusation. The various

ways in which a child will seek to evade the point in such cases are

truly marvellous and show the childish intelligence at its ablest.

Sometimes the dreary talking to, with its well-known deep accusatory

tones, its familiar pleadings, ‘How can you be so naughty?’ and the rest

is daringly ignored. After keeping up an excellent appearance of

listening the little culprit will proceed in the most artless way to

talk about something more agreeable. This is trying, but is not the

worst. The deepest depth of maternal humiliation is reached when a

carefully prepared and solemnly delivered homily is rewarded by a _tu

quoque_ in the shape of a correction of something in the delivery which

offends the child’s sense of propriety. This befel one mother who, after

talking seriously to her little boy about some fault, was met with this

remark: “Mamma, when you talk you don’t move your upper jaw”.

It is of course difficult to say how far a child’s interruptions and

what look like turnings of the conversation when receiving rebuke are

the result of deliberate plotting. We know it is hard to hold the young

thoughts long on any subject, and the homily makes a heavy demand in

this respect, and its theme is apt to seem dull to a child’s lively

brain. The thoughts will be sure to wander then, and the rude

interruptions and digressions may after all be but the natural play of

the young mind. I fear, however, that design often has a hand here. The

first digression to which the weak disciplinarian succumbed may have

been the result of a spontaneous flow of childish ideas: but its success

enables the observant child to try it on a second time with artful aim.

In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, the small

wits are busy discovering palliatives and exculpations. Here we have the

many ruses, often crude enough, by which the little culprit tries to

shake off moral responsibility, to deny the authorship of the action

found fault with. The blame is put on anybody or anything. When he

breaks something, say a cup, and is scolded, he saves himself by saying

it was because the cup was not made strong enough, or because the maid

put it too near the edge of the table. There are clear indications of

fatalistic thought in these childish disclaimers. Things were so

conditioned that he could not help doing what he did. This fatalism

betrays itself in the childish subterfuges already referred to, by which

the ego tries to screen itself shabbily by throwing responsibility on to

the bodily agents. This device is sometimes hit upon very early. A wee

child of two when told not to cry gasped out: "Elsie cry—_not_ Elsie

cry—tears cry—naughty tears!" This, it must be allowed, is more

plausible than C.’s lame attempt to put off responsibility for some

naughty action on his hands. For our tears are in a sense apart from us,

and in the first years are wholly beyond control.

The fatalistic form of exculpation meets us later on under the familiar

form, ‘God made me like that’. A boy of three was blamed for leaving his

crusts, and his conduct contrasted with that of his model papa.

Whereupon he observed with a touch of metaphysical precocity: “Yes, but,

papa, you see God had made you and me different”.

These denials of authorship occur when a charge is brought home and no

clear justification of the action is forthcoming. In many cases the

shrewd intelligence of the child—which is never so acute as in this art

of moral self-defence—discovers justificatory reasons. In such a case

the attitude is a very different one. It is no longer the helpless

lifting of hands of the irresponsible one, but the bold steady glance of

one who is prepared to defend his action.

Sometimes these justifications are pitiful examples of quibbling. A boy

had been rough with his baby brother. His mother chid him, telling him

he might hurt baby. He then asked his mother, ‘Isn’t he my own brother?’

and on his mother admitting so incontestable a proposition, exclaimed

triumphantly, “Well, you said I could do what I liked with _my own_

things”. The idea of the precious baby being a boy’s own to do what he

likes with is so remote from older people’s conceptions that it seems

impossible to credit the boy with misunderstanding. We ought, perhaps,

to set him down as a depraved little sophist and destined—but

predictions happily lie outside our _métier_.

In some cases these justifications have a dreadful look of being

after-thoughts invented for the express purpose of self-protection and

knowingly put forward as fibs. Yet there is need of a wise

discrimination here. Take, for example, the following from the Worcester

Collection. A boy of three was told by his mother to stay and mind his

baby-sister while she went downstairs. On going up again some time after

she met him on the stairs. “Being asked why he had left the baby he said

there was a bumble-bee in the room and he was afraid he would get stung

if he stayed there. His mother asked him if he wasn’t afraid his little

sister would get stung. He said, ‘Yes,’ but added that if he stayed in

the room the bee might sting them both, and then she would have two to

take care of.” Now with every wish to be charitable I cannot bring

myself to think that the small boy had really gone through that subtle

process of disinterested calculation before vacating the room in favour

of the bumble-bee, if indeed there was a bumble-bee. To be caught in the

act and questioned is, I suspect, a situation particularly productive of

such specious fibbing.

One other illustration of this keen childish dialectic when face to face

with the accuser deserves to be touched on. The sharp little wits have

something of a lawyer’s quickness in detecting a flaw in the indictment.

Any exaggeration into which a feeling of indignation happens to betray

the accuser is instantly pounced upon. If, for example, a child is

scolded for pulling kitty’s ears and making her cry it is enough for the

little stickler for accuracy to be able to say: ‘I wasn’t pulling

kitty’s _ears_, I was only pulling _one_ of her ears’. This ability to

deny the charge in its initial form gives the child a great advantage,

and robs the accusation in its amended form of much of its sting.

Whence, by the way, one may infer that wisdom in managing children shows

itself in nothing more than in a scrupulous exactness in the use of

words.

While there are these isolated attacks on various points of the daily

discipline, we see now and again a bolder line of action in the shape of

a general protest against its severity. Children have been known to urge

that the punishments inflicted on them are ineffectual; and, although

their opinion on such matters is hardly disinterested, it is sometimes

pertinent enough. An American boy aged five years ten months began to

cry because he was forbidden to go into the yard to play, and was

threatened by his mother with a whipping. Whereupon he observed: “Well

now, mamma, that will only make me cry more”.

These childish protests are, as we know, wont to be met by the

commonplaces about the affection which prompts the correction. But the

child finds it hard to swallow these subtleties. For him love is love,

that is caressing, and doing everything for his present enjoyment; and

here is the mother who says she loves him, and often acts as if she did,

transforming herself into an ogre to torment him and make him miserable.

He may accept her assurance that she scolds and chastises him because

she is a good mother; only he is apt to wish that she were a shade less

good. A boy of four had one morning to remain in bed till ten o’clock as

a punishment for misbehaviour. He proceeded to address his mother in

this wise: "If I had any little children I’d be a worse mother than

you—I’d be quite a bad mother; I’d let the children get up directly I

had done my breakfast at any rate". If, on the other hand, the mother

puts forward her own comfort as the ground of the restraint she may be

met by this kind of thing: “I wish you’d be a little more

self-sacrificing and let me make a noise”.

Enough has been said to illustrate the ways in which the natural child

kicks against the imposition of restraints on his free activity. He

begins by showing himself an open foe to authority. For a long time

after, while making a certain show of submission, he harbours in his

breast something of the rebel’s spirit. He does his best to evade the

most galling parts of the daily discipline, and displays an admirable

ingenuity in devising excuses for apparent acts of insubordination.

Where candour is permitted he is apt to prove himself an exceedingly

acute critic of the system which is imposed on him.

All this, moreover, seems to show that a child objects not only to the

particular administration under which he happens to live, but to all law

as implying restraints on free activity. Thus, from the child’s point of

view, so far as we have yet examined it, punishment as such is a thing

which ought not to be.

So strong and deep-reaching is this antagonism to law and its restraints

apt to be that the childish longing to be ‘big’ is, I believe, grounded

on the expectation of liberty. To be big seems to the child more than

anything else to be rid of all this imposition of commands, to be able

to do what one likes without interference from others. This longing may

grow intense in the breast of a quite small child. “Do you know,” asked

a little fellow of four years, “what I shall do when I’m a big man? I’ll

go to a shop and buy a bun and pick out all the currants.” This funny

story is characteristic of the movements of young desire. The small

prohibition not to pick out the currants is one that may chafe to

soreness a child’s sensibility.

_On the Side of Law._

If, however, we look closer we shall find that this hostility is not the

whole, perhaps not the most fundamental part of the child’s attitude. It

is evident, to begin with, that a good deal of this early criticism of

parental government, so far from implying rejection of all rule, plainly

implies its acceptance. Some of the earliest and bitterest protests

against interference are directed against what looks to the child

irregular or opposed to law. He is allowed, for example, for some time

to use a pair of scissors as a plaything, and is then suddenly deprived

of it, his mother having now first discovered the unsuitability of the

plaything. In such a case the passionate outburst and the long bitter

protest attest the sense of injustice, the violation of custom and

unwritten law. Again, the keen resentful opposition of the child to the

look of anything like unfairness and partiality in parental government

shows that he has a jealous feeling of regard for the universality and

the inviolableness of law. Much, too, of the criticism dealt with above,

reveals a fundamental acknowledgment of law—at least for the purposes of

the argument. Thus the very attempt to establish an excuse, a

justification, may be said to be a tacit admission that if the action

_had been_ done as alleged it would have been naughty and deserving of

punishment. In truth the small person’s challengings of the _modus

operandi_ of his mother’s rule, just because they are often in a true

sense _ethical_, clearly start from the assumption of rules, and of the

distinction of right and wrong.

This of itself shows that there are in the child compliant as well as

non-compliant tendencies towards law and towards authority so far as

this is lawful. We may now pass to other parts of a child’s behaviour

which help to make more clear the existence of such law-abiding

impulses.

Here we may set out with those exhibitions of something like remorse

which often follow disobedience and punishment in the first tender

years. These may, at first, be little more than physical reactions, due

to the exhaustion of the passionate outbursts. But they soon begin to

show traces of new feelings. A child in disgrace, before he has a clear

moral sense of shame, suffers through a feeling of estrangement, of

loneliness, of self-restriction. If the habitual relation between mother

and child is a loving and happy one the situation becomes exceedingly

painful. The pride and obstinacy notwithstanding, the culprit feels that

he is cut off from more than one half of his life, that his beautiful

world is laid in ruins. The same little boy who said: ‘I’d be a worse

mother,’ remarked to his mother a few months later that if he could say

what he liked to God it would be: ‘Love me when I’m naughty’. I think

one can hardly conceive of a more eloquent testimony to the suffering of

the child in the lonesome, loveless state of punishment.

Is there any analogue of our sense of remorse in this early suffering?

The question of an instinctive moral sense in children is a perplexing

one, and I do not propose to discuss it now. I would only venture to

suggest that in these poignant griefs of child-life there seem to be

signs of a consciousness of violated instincts. This is, no doubt, in

part the smarting of a loving heart on remembering its unloving action.

But there may be more than this. A child of four or five is, I conceive,

quite capable of reflecting at such a time that in his fits of

naughtiness he has broken with his normal orderly self, that he has set

at defiance that which he customarily honours and obeys.

What, it may be asked, are these instincts? In their earliest

discernible form they seem to me to be respect for rule, for a regular

manner of proceeding as opposed to an irregular. A child, as I

understand the little sphinx, is at once the subject of ever-changing

caprices—whence the delight in playful defiance of all rule and

order—and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule. And, as I conceive,

this reverence for precedent and rule is the deeper and stronger,

holding full sway in his serious moments.

If this view is correct the suffering of naughty children is not, as has

been said by some, wholly the result of the externals of discipline,

punishment, and the loss of the agreeable things which follow good

behaviour, though this is commonly an element; nor is it merely the

sense of loneliness and lovelessness, though that is probably a large

slice of it; but it contains the germ of something nearer a true

remorse, _viz._, a sense of normal feelings and dispositions set at

nought and contradicted.

And now we may ask what evidence there is for the existence of this

respect for order and regularity other than that afforded by the

childish protests against apparent inconsistencies in the administration

of discipline.

Mr. Walter Bagehot tells us that the great initial difficulty in the

formation of communities was the fixing of custom. However this be in

the case of primitive communities it seems to me indisputable that in

the case of a child brought up in normal surroundings there is a clearly

observable instinct to fall in with a common mode of behaviour.

This respect for custom is related to the imitative instincts of the

child. He does what he sees others do, and so tends to fall in with

their manner of life. We all know that these small people take their cue

from their elders as to what is allowable. Hence one difficulty of moral

training. A little boy when two years and one month old had happened to

see his mother tear a piece of calico. The next day he was discovered to

have taken the sheet from the bed and made a rent in it. When scolded,

he replied in his childish German, ‘Mamma mach put,’ _i.e._, ‘macht

caput’ (breaks calico). It is well when the misleading effect of

‘example’ is so little serious as it was in this case.

In addition to this effect of others’ doings in making things allowable

in the child’s eyes, there is the binding influence of a repeated

regular manner of proceeding. This is the might of ‘custom’ in the full

sense of the term, the force which underlies all a child’s conceptions

of ‘right’. In spite of the difficulties of moral training, of drilling

children into orderly habits—and I do not lose sight of these—it may

confidently be said that they have an inbred respect for what is

customary, and wears the appearance of a rule of life. Nor is this, I

believe, altogether a reflexion, by imitation, of others’ orderly ways,

and of the system of rules which is imposed on him by others. I am quite

ready to admit that the institution of social life, the regular

procession of the daily doings of the house, aided by the system of

parental discipline, has much to do with fixing the idea of orderliness

and regularity in the child’s mind. Yet I believe the facts point to

something more, to an innate disposition to follow precedent and rule,

which precedes education, and is one of the forces to which education

can appeal. This disposition has its roots in habit, which is apparently

a law of all life: but it is more than the blind impulse of habit, since

it is reflective and rational, and implies a recognition of the

universal.

The first crude manifestation of this disposition to make rule, to

rationalise life by subjecting it to a general method, is seen in those

actions which seem little more than the working of habit, the insistence

on the customary lines of procedure at meals and such like. A mother

writes that her boy when five years old was quite a stickler for

punctilious order in these matters. His cup and spoon had to be put in

precisely the right place, the sequences of the day, as the lesson

before the walk, the walk before bed, had to be rigorously observed. Any

breach of the customary was apt to be resented as a sort of impiety.

This may be an extreme instance, but my observation leads me to say that

such punctiliousness is not uncommon. What is more, I have seen it

developing itself where the system of parental government was by no

means characterised by severe insistence on such minutiæ of order. And

this would seem to show that it cannot wholly be set down to the

influences of such government. It seems rather to be a spontaneous

extension of the realm of rule or law.

This impulse to extend rule appears more plainly in many of the little

ceremonial observances of the child. Very charmingly is this respect for

rule exhibited in relation to his animals, dolls and other pets. Not

only are they required to do things in a proper orderly manner, but

people have to treat them with due deference.

“Every night,” writes a mother of her boy aged two years seven months,

"after I have kissed and shaken hands with him, I have to kiss his

‘boy,’ that is his doll, who sleeps with him, and to shake its two

hands—also to shake the four hoofs of a tiny horse which lies at the

foot of his cot. When all this has been gone through, he stands up and

entreats, ‘More tata, please, more tata,’ _i.e._, ‘kiss me again and

say more good-nights’. These customs of his with regard to kissing are

peculiar to himself—he kisses his ‘boy’ (doll), also pictures of

horses, dogs, cocks and hens, and he puts his head against us _to be

kissed_; but he will only shake hands and will not kiss people

himself: he reserves his kisses for what he seems to feel inferior

things. We kiss our boy, he kisses his; but he insists upon being

shaken hands with for his part. If other children come to play he

gives them toys, watches them with delight, tries to give them rides

on his ‘go-go’s,’ but does not kiss them; though he will stroke their

hair he does not return their kisses. It seems to me that he regards

it as an action to be reserved for an inferior thing."

I have quoted at length this careful bit of maternal observation because

it seems to indicate so clearly a spontaneous extension of a custom. The

practice of the mother and father in kissing him was generalised into a

rule of ceremony in the treatment of all inferiors.

This subject of childish ceremonial is a curious one, and deserves a

more careful study. It is hardly less interesting than the origin and

survival of adult ceremonial, as elucidated by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The

respect for orderly procedure on all serious occasions, and especially

at church, is as exacting as that of any savage tribe. _Punch_

illustrated this some years ago by a picture of a little girl asking her

mamma if Mr. So and So was not a very wicked man, because he didn’t

“smell his hat” when he came into his pew.

This jealous regard for ceremony and the proprieties of behaviour is

seen in the enforcement of rules of politeness by children who will

extend them far beyond the scope intended by the parent. A delightful

instance of this fell under my own observation, as I was walking on

Hampstead Heath. It was a spring day, and the fat buds of the chestnuts

were bursting into magnificent green plumes. Two well-dressed ‘misses,’

aged, I should say, about nine and eleven, were taking their correct

morning walk. The elder called the attention of the younger to one of

the trees, pointing to it. The younger exclaimed in a highly shocked

tone: “Oh, Maud (or was it ‘Mabel’?), you know you _shouldn’t_ point!”

The notion of perpetrating a rudeness on the chestnut tree was funny

enough. But the incident is instructive as illustrating the childish

tendency to stretch and generalise rules to the utmost.

The domain of prayer well illustrates the same tendency. The child

envisages God as a very, very grand person, and naturally, therefore,

extends to him all the courtesies he knows of. Thus he must be addressed

politely with the due forms ‘Please,’ ‘If you please,’ and so forth. The

German child shrinks from using the familiar form ‘Du’ in his prayers.

As one maiden of seven well put it in reply to a question why she used

‘Sie’ in her prayers: “Ich werde doch den lieben Gott nicht Du nennen:

ich kenne ihn ja gar nicht”. Again, a child feels that he must not worry

or bore God (children generally find out that some people look on them

as bores), or treat him with any kind of disrespect. C. objected to his

sister’s remaining so long at her prayers, apparently on the ground

that, as God knew what she had to say, her much talking would be likely

to bore him. An American boy of four on one occasion refused to say his

prayers, explaining, “Why, they’re old. God has heard them so many times

that they are old to him too. Why, he knows them as well as I do

myself.” On the other hand, God must not be kept waiting. “Oh, mamma,”

said a little boy of three years eight months (the same that was so

insistent about the kissing and hand-shaking), “how long you have kept

me awake for you; God has been wondering so whenever I was going to say

my prayers.” All the words must be nicely said to him. A little boy,

aged four and three-quarter years, once stopped in the middle of a

prayer and asked his mother: “Oh! how do you spell that word?” The

question is curious as suggesting that the child may have envisaged his

silent communications to the far-off King as a letter. In any case, it

showed painstaking and the wish not to offend by slovenliness of

address.

Not only do children thus of themselves extend the scope and empire of

rule, they show a disposition to make rules for themselves. If a child

that is told to do a thing on a single occasion only is found repeating

the action on other occasions, this seems to show the germ of a

law-making impulse. A little boy of two years one month was once told to

give a lot of old toys to the children of the gardener. Some time after,

on receiving some new toys, he put away his old ones as before for the

less fortunate children. Every careful observer of children knows that

they are apt to proceed this way, to erect particular actions and

suggestions into precedents. This tendency gives something of the

amusing priggishness to the ways of childhood.

There is little doubt, I think, that this respect for proper orderly

behaviour, for precedent and general rule, forms a vital element in the

child’s submission to parental law. In fixing our attention on

occasional acts of disobedience and lawlessness we are apt to overlook

the ease, the absence of friction with which normal children, if only

decently trained, fall in with the larger part of our observances and

ordinances.

That the instinct for order does assist moral discipline may be seen in

the fact that children are apt to pay enormous deference to our rules.

Nothing is more suggestive here than the talk of children among

themselves, the emphasis they are wont to lay on the ‘must’ and ‘must

not’. The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law: a rule

is apt to present itself to their imagination as a thing supremely

sacred and awful before which it prostrates itself.

This recognition of the absolute imperativeness of a rule properly laid

down by the recognised authority is seen in children’s jealous

insistence on the observance of the rule in their own case and in that

of others. As has been observed by Preyer a child of two years eight

months will follow out the prohibitions of the mother when he falls into

other hands, sternly protesting, for example, against the nurse giving

him the forbidden knife at table. Very proper children rather like to

instruct their aunts and other ignorant persons as to the right way of

dealing with them, and will rejoice in the opportunity of setting them

right even when it means a deprivation for themselves. The self-denying

ordinance: ‘Mamma doesn’t let me have many sweets,’ is by no means

beyond the powers of such a child. One can see here, no doubt, traces of

a childish sense of self-importance, a feeling of the much-waited-on

little sovereign for what befits his supreme worth. Yet, allowing for

such elements, there seems to me to be in this behaviour a residue of

genuine respect for parental law.

These carryings out of the parental behest when entrusted to other hands

are instructive as suggesting that the child feels the constraining

force of the command when its author is no longer present to enforce it.

Perhaps a clearer evidence of respect for the law as such, apart from

its particular enforcement by the parent, is supplied by children’s way

of extending the rules laid down for their own behaviour to that of

others. This point has already been illustrated in the tendency to

universalise the observances of courtesy and the like. No trait is

better marked in the normal child than the impulse to subject others to

his own disciplinary system. In truth, children are for the most part

particularly alert disciplinarians. With what amusing severity are they

wont to lay down the law to their dolls, and their animal playmates,

subjecting them to precisely the same prohibitions and punishments as

those to which they themselves are subject! Nor do they stop here. They

enforce the duties just as courageously on their human elders. A mite of

eighteen months went up to her elder sister, who was crying, and with

perfect mimicry of the nurse’s corrective manner, said: “Hush! Hush!

papa!” pointing at the same time to the door. The little girl M. when

twenty-two months old was disappointed because a certain Mr. G. did not

call. In the evening she said: "Mr. D. not did tum—was very naughty, Mr.

D. have to be whipped". So natural and inevitable to the intelligence of

a child does it seem that the system of restraints, rebukes, punishments

under which he lives should have universal validity.

This judicial bent of the child is a curious one and often develops a

priggish fondness for setting others morally straight. Small boys have

to endure much in this way from the hands of slightly older sisters

proficient in matters of law and delighting to enforce the moralities.

But sometimes the sisters lapse into naughtiness, and then the small

boys have their chance. They too can on such occasions be priggish if

not downright hypocritical. A little boy had been quarrelling with his

sister named Muriel just before going to bed. When he was undressed he

knelt down to say his prayers, Muriel sitting near and listening. He

prayed (audibly) in this wise: “Please, God, make Muriel a good girl,”

then looked up and said in an angry voice, “Do you hear that, Muriel?”

and after this digression resumed his petition. I believe fathers when

reading family prayers have been known to apply portions of Scripture in

this personal manner to particular members of the family; and it is even

possible that extempore prayers have been invented, as by this little

prig of a boy, for the purpose of administering a sort of back-handed

corrective blow to an erring neighbour.

This mania for correction shows itself too in relation to the

authorities themselves. A collection of rebukes and expositions of moral

precept supplied by children to their erring parents would be amusing

and suggestive. As was illustrated above, a child is especially keen to

spy faults in his governors when they are themselves administering

authority. Here is another example: A boy of two—the moral instruction

of parents by the child begins betimes—would not go to sleep when bidden

to do so by his father and mother. At length the father, losing

patience, addressed him with a man’s fierce emphasis. This mode of

admonition so far from cowering the child simply offended his sense of

propriety, for he rejoined: “You s’ouldn’t s’ouldn’t, Assum (_i.e._,

‘Arthur,’ the father’s name), you s’ould speak nicely”.

The lengths to which a child with the impulse of moral correction strong

in him will sometimes go, are quite appalling. One evening a little girl

of six had been repeating the Lord’s prayer. When she had finished, she

looked up and said: ‘I don’t like that prayer, you ought not to ask for

_bread_, and all that _greediness_, you ought only to ask for goodness!’

There is probably in this an imitative reproduction of something which

the child had been told by her mother, or had overheard. Yet allowing

for this, one cannot but recognise a quite alarming degree of precocious

moral priggishness.

We may now turn to what my readers will probably regard as still clearer

evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, _viz._, their voluntary

submission to its commands. We are apt to think of these little ones as

doing right only under external compulsion. But although a child of four

may be far from attaining to the state of ‘autonomy of will’ or

self-legislation spoken of by the philosopher, he may show a germ of

such free adoption of law. It is possible that we see the first faint

traces of this in a small child’s way of giving orders to, rebuking, and

praising himself. The little girl M., when only twenty months old,

would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself: ‘Tay

dar’ (stay there). About the same time, after being naughty and

squealing ‘like a railway-whistle,’ she would after each squeal say in a

deep voice, ‘Be dood, Babba’ (her name). At the age of twenty-two months

she had been in the garden and misbehaving by treading on the box

border, so that she had to be carried away by her mother. After

confessing her fault she wanted to go into the garden again, and

promised, ‘Babba will not be naughty adain’. When she was out she looked

at the box, saying, “If oo (you) do dat I shall have to take oo in,

Babba”. Here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the external control,

but they seem to me to indicate a movement in the direction of

self-control.

Very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come

and submit themselves to our discipline. The little girl M. when less

than two years old, would go to her mother and confess some piece of

naughtiness and suggest the punishment. A little boy aged two years and

four months was deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for

scribbling on the wall-paper. His punishment was, however, tempered by

permission to draw when taken downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a

picture downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse fetched him she

wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected, saying:

“No Nana (name for nurse) look at it till Sunday”. And sure enough when

Sunday came, and the pencil was restored to him, he promptly showed

nurse his picture. This is an excellent observation full of suggestion

as to the way in which a child’s mind works. Among other things it seems

to show pretty plainly that the little fellow looked on the nursery and

all its belongings, including the nurse, during those three days as a

place of disgrace into which the privileges of the artist were not to

enter. He was allowed the indulgence of drawing downstairs, but he had

no right to exhibit his workmanship to the nurse, who was inseparably

associated in his mind with the forbidden nursery drawing. Thus a

process of genuine child-thought led to a self-instituted extension of

the punishment.

A month later this child "pulled down a picture in the nursery"—the

nursery walls seem to have had a fell attraction for him—“by standing on

a sofa and tugging till the wire broke. He was alone at the time and

very much frightened though not hurt. He was soothed and told to leave

the picture alone in future, but was not in any way rebuked. He seemed,

however, to think that some punishment was necessary, for he presently

asked whether he was going to have a certain favourite frock on that

afternoon. He was told ‘No’ (the reason being that the day was wet or

something similar) and he said immediately: ‘’Cause Neil pulled picture

down?’” Here I think we have unmistakable evidence of an expectation of

punishment as the fit and proper sequel in a case which, though it did

not exactly resemble those already branded by it, was felt in a vague

way to be disorderly and naughty.

Such stories of expectation of punishment are capped by instances of

correction actually inflicted by the child on himself. I believe it is

not uncommon for a child when possessed by a sense of having been

naughty to object to having nice things at table on the ground that

previously on a like occasion he was deprived of them. But the most

curious instance of this moral rigour towards self which I have met with

is the following: A girl of nine had been naughty, and was very sorry

for her misbehaviour. Shortly after she came to her lesson limping, and

remarked that she felt very uncomfortable. Being asked by her governess

what was the matter with her she said: “It was very naughty of me to

disobey you, so I put my right shoe on to my left foot and my left shoe

on to my right foot”.

The facts here briefly illustrated seem to me to show that there is in

the child from the first a rudiment of true law-abidingness. And this is

a force of the greatest consequence to the disciplinarian. It is

something which takes side in the child’s breast with the reasonable

governor and the laws which he or she administers. It secures ready

compliance with a large part of the discipline enforced. When the

impulse urging towards licence has been too strong, and disobedience

ensues, this same instinct comes to the aid of order and good conduct by

inflicting pains which are the beginning of what we call remorse.

By-and-by other forces will assist. The affectionate child will reflect

on the misery his disobedience causes his mother. A boy of four and

three-quarter years must, one supposes, have woke up to this fact when

he remarked to his mother: “Did you choose to be a mother? I think it

must be rather tiresome.” The day when the child first becomes capable

of thus putting himself into his mother’s place and realising, if only

for an instant, the trouble he has brought on her, is an all-important

one in his moral development.

_The Wise Law-giver._

As our illustrations have suggested, and as every thoughtful parent

knows well enough, the problem of moral training in the first years is

full of difficulty. Yet our study surely suggests that it is not so

hopeless a problem as we are sometimes weakly disposed to think. Perhaps

a word or two on this may not inappropriately close this essay.

I will readily concede that the difficulty of inculcating in children a

sweet and cheerful obedience arises partly from their nature. There are

trying children, just as there are trying dogs that howl and make

themselves disagreeable for no discoverable reason but their inherent

‘cussedness’. There are, I doubt not, conscientious painstaking mothers

who have been baffled by having to manage what appears to be the utterly

unmanageable.

Yet I think that we ought to be very slow to pronounce any child

unmanageable. I know full well that in the case of these small growing

things there are all kinds of hidden physical commotions which breed

caprices, ruffle the temper, and make them the opposite of docile. The

peevish child who will do nothing, will listen to no suggestion, is

assuredly a difficult subject to deal with. But such moodiness and

cross-grainedness springing from bodily disturbances will be allowed for

by the discerning mother, who will be too wise to bring the severer

measures of discipline to bear on a child when subject to their malign

influence. Waiving these disturbing factors, however, I should say that

a good part, certainly more than one half, of the difficulty of training

children is due to our clumsy bungling modes of going to work.

Sensible persons know that there is a good and a bad way of approaching

a child. The wrong ways of trying to constrain children are, alas,

numerous. I am not writing an ‘advice to parents,’ and am not called on

therefore to deal with the much-disputed question of the rightness and

wrongness of corporal punishment. Slaps may be needful in the early

stages, even though they do lead to little tussles. A mother assures me

that these battles with her several children have all fallen between the

ages of sixteen months and two years. It is, however, conceivable that

such fights might be avoided altogether; yet a man should be chary of

dogmatising on this delicate matter.

What is beyond doubt is that the slovenly discipline—if indeed

discipline it is to be called—which consists in alternations of gushing

fondness with almost savage severity, or fits of government and

restraint interpolated between long periods of neglect and _laisser

faire_, is precisely what develops the rebellious and law-resisting

propensities. But discipline can be bad without being a stupid pretence.

Everything in the shape of inconsistency, saying one thing at one time,

another thing at another, or treating one child in one fashion, another

in another, tends to undermine the pillars of authority. Young eyes are

quick to note these little contradictions, and they sorely resent them.

It is astonishing how careless disciplinarians can show themselves

before these astute little critics. It is the commonest thing to tell a

child to behave like his elders, forgetting that this, if indeed a rule

at all, can only be one of very limited application. Here is a

suggestive example of the effect of this sort of teaching sent me by a

mother. “At three and a half, when some visitors were present, she was

told not to talk at dinner-time. ‘Why me no talk? Papa talks.’ ‘Yes, but

papa is grown up, and you are only a little girl; you can’t do just like

grown-up people.’ She was silent for some time, but when I told her ten

minutes later to sit nicely with her hands in her lap like her cousins,

she replied, with a very humorous smile, ‘Me tan’t (can’t) sit like

grown-up people, me is only a little girl’.”

We can fail and make children disloyal instead of loyal subjects by

unduly magnifying our office, by insisting too much on our authority.

Children who are over-ruled, who have no taste of being left unmolested

and free to do what they like, can hardly be expected to submit

graciously. Another way of carrying parental control to excess is by

exacting displays of virtue which are beyond the moral capabilities of

the child. A lady sends me this reminiscence of her childhood. She had

been promised sixpence when she could play her scales without fault, and

succeeded in the exploit on her sixth birthday. The sixpence was given

to her, but soon after her mother suggested that she should spend the

money in fruit to give to her (the mother’s) invalid friend. This was

offending the sense of justice, for if the child is jealous of anything

as his very own it is surely the reward he has earned; and was,

moreover, a foolish attempt to call forth generosity where generosity

was wholly out of place. An even worse example is that recorded by

Ruskin. When a child he was expected to come down to dessert and crack

nuts for the grand older folk while peremptorily forbidden to eat any.

Such refined cruelties of government deserve to be defeated in their

objects. Much of our ill success in governing children would probably

turn out to be attributable to unwisdom in assigning tasks, and more

particularly in making exactions which wound that sensitive fibre of a

child’s heart, the sense of justice.

Parents are, I fear, apt to forget that generosity and the other liberal

virtues owe their worth to their spontaneity. They may be suggested and

encouraged but cannot be exacted. On the other hand, a parent cannot be

more foolish than to discourage a spontaneous outgoing of good impulse,

as if nothing were good but what emanated from a spirit of obedience. In

a pretty and touching little American work, _Beckonings from Little

Hands_, the writer describes the remorse of a father who, after his

child’s death, recalled the little fellow’s first crude endeavour to

help him by bringing fuel, an endeavour which, alas! he had met with

something like a rebuff.

The right method of training, which develops and strengthens by bracing

exercise the instinct of obedience, cannot easily be summarised; for it

is the outcome of the highest wisdom. I may, however, be permitted to

indicate one or two of its main features.

Informed at the outset by a fine moral feeling and a practical tact as

to what ought to be expected, the wise mother is concerned before

everything to make her laws appear as much a matter of course as the

daily sequences of the home life, as unquestionable axioms of behaviour;

and this not by a foolish vehemence of inculcation but by a quiet

skilful inweaving of them into the order of the child’s world. To expect

the right thing, as though the wrong thing were an impossibility, rather

than to be always pointing out the wrong thing and threatening

consequences; to make all her words and all her own actions support this

view of the inevitableness of law; to meet any indications of a

disobedient spirit, first with misunderstanding, and later with

amazement; this is surely the first and fundamental matter.

The effectiveness of this discipline depends on the simple psychological

principle that difficult actions tend to realise themselves in the

measure in which the ideas of them become clear and persistent. Get a

child steadily to follow out in thought an act to which he is

disinclined and you have more than half mastered the disinclination. The

quiet daily insistence of the wise rule of the nursery proceeds by

setting up and maintaining the ideas of dutiful actions, and so

excluding the thought of disobedient actions.

It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child

through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous

to the action of suggestion upon the hypnotised subject. The mother, the

right sort of mother, has on the child’s mind something of the subduing

influence of the Nancy doctor: she induces ideas of particular actions,

gives them force and persistence so that the young mind is possessed by

them and they work themselves out into fulfilment as occasion arises.

In order that this effect of ‘obsession,’ or a full occupation of

consciousness with the right idea, may result, certain precautions are

necessary. As observant parents know, a child may be led by a

prohibition to do the very thing he is bidden not to do. We have seen

how readily a child’s mind moves from an affirmation to a corresponding

negation, and conversely. The ‘contradictoriness’ of a child, his

passion for saying the opposite of what you say, shows the same odd

manner of working of the young mind. Wanting to do what he is told not

to do is another effect of this “contrary suggestion,” as it has been

called, aided of course by the child’s dislike of all constraint.[195]

If we want to avoid this effect of suggestion and to secure the direct

effect, we must first of all acquire the difficult secret of personal

influence, of the masterfulness which does not repel but attracts; and

secondly try to reduce our forbiddings with their contrary suggestions

to a minimum.

-----

Footnote 195:

On the nature of this contrary suggestion see Mark Baldwin, _Mental

Development in the Child and the Race_, p. 145 f.

-----

The action in moral training of this influence of a quasi-hypnotic

suggestion becomes more clearly marked when difficulties occur; when

some outbreak of wilful resistance has to be recognised and met, or some

new and relatively arduous feat of obedience has to be initiated. Here I

find that intelligent mothers have found their way to methods closely

resembling those of the hypnotist. “When R. is naughty and in a passion

(writes a lady friend of her child aged three and a half), I need only

suggest to him that he is some one else, say a friend of his, and he

will take it up at once, he will pretend to be the other child, and at

last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.” This mode of

suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself from and

control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely employed in

the moral training of children. Suggestion may work through the

emotions. Merely to say, ‘Mother would like you to do this,’ is to set

up an idea in the child’s consciousness by help of the sustaining force

of his affection. “If (writes a lady) there was anything Lyle

particularly wished not to do, his mother had only to say, ‘Dobbin (a

sort of canonised toy-horse already referred to) would like you to do

this,’ and it was done without a murmur.”

We have another analogue to hypnotic suggestion where a mother prepares

her child some time beforehand for a difficult duty, telling him that

she expects him to perform it. A mother writes that her boy, when about

the age of two and a half years more particularly, was inclined to burst

into loud but short fits of crying. “I have found (she says) these often

checked by telling him beforehand what would be expected of him, and

exacting a promise that he would do the thing cheerfully. I have seen

his face flush up ready to cry when he remembered his promise and

controlled himself.” This reminds one forcibly of the commands suggested

by the hypnotiser to be carried into effect when the subject wakes. Much

more, perhaps, might be done in this direction by choosing the right

moments for setting up the persistent ideas in the child’s

consciousness. I know a lady who got into the way of giving moral

exhortation to her somewhat headstrong girl at night before the child

fell asleep, and found this very effectual. It is possible that we may

be able to apply this idea of preparatory and premunitory suggestion in

new and surprising ways to difficult and refractory children.[196]

-----

Footnote 196:

The bearings of (hypnotic) suggestion on moral education have been

discussed by Guyau, _Education and Heredity_ (Engl. transl.), chap. i.

Compare also Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 267 f., and Compayré, _op. cit._,

p. 262.

-----

One other way in which the wise mother will win the child over to duty

is by developing his consciousness of freedom and power. A mother, who

was herself a well-known writer for children, has recorded in some notes

on her children that when one of her little girls had declined to accede

to her wish she used to say to her: ‘Oh, yes, I think when you have

remembered how pleasant it is to oblige others you will do it’. ‘I will

think about it, mamma,’ the child would reply, laughing, and then go and

hide her head behind a sofa-pillow which she called her ‘thinking

corner’. In half a minute she would come out and say: “Oh, yes, mamma, I

have thought about it and I will do it”. This strikes me as an admirable

combination of regulative suggestion with exercise of the young will in

moral decision. It gave the child the consciousness of using her own

will, and yet maintained the needed measure of guidance and control.

As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings

for such suggestive guidance will offer themselves. How valuable, for

example, is the mother’s encouragement of the weakly child, shrinking

from a difficult self-repressive action, when she says with inspiring

voice: ‘You _can_ do it if you try’. Thus pilot-like she conducts the

little navigator out into the open main of duty where he will have to

steer himself.

I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not beyond

human powers. It has its strong supports in child-nature, and these,

when there are wisdom and method on the ruler’s side, will secure

success. I have not said that the trainer’s task is easy. So far from

thinking this, I hold that a mother who bravely faces the problem,

neither abandoning the wayward will to its own devices, nor, hardly less

weakly, handing over the task of disciplining it to a paid substitute,

and who by well-considered and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching

the perfection I have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the

tender and companionable parent, is among the few members of our species

who are entitled to its reverence.

IX.

THE CHILD AS ARTIST.

One of the most interesting, perhaps also one of the most instructive,

phases of child-life is the beginnings of art-activity. This has been

recognised by one of the best-known workers in the field of

child-psychology, M. Bernard Perez, who has treated the subject in an

interesting monograph.[197] This department of our subject will, like

that of language, be found to have interesting points of contact with

the phenomena of primitive race-culture.

-----

Footnote 197:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, 1888.

-----

The art-impulse of children lends itself particularly well to

observation. No doubt, as we shall see, there are difficulties for the

observer here. It may sometimes be a fine point to determine whether a

childish action properly falls under the head of genuine art-production,

though I do not think that this is a serious difficulty. On the other

hand, the art-impulse where it exists manifests itself directly, and for

the most part in so characteristic an objective form that we are able to

study its features with special facility.

In its narrow sense as a specialised instinct prompting its possessor to

follow a definite line of production, as drawing of the artistic sort,

or simple musical composition, the art-impulse is a particularly

variable phenomenon of childhood. Some children, who afterwards take

seriously to a branch of art-culture, manifest an innate bent by a

precocious devotion to this line of activity. Many others, I have reason

to believe, have a passing fondness for a particular form of

art-activity. On the other hand, there are many children who display

almost a complete lack, not only of the productive impulse, but of the

æsthetic sense of the artist. So uncertain, so sporadic are these

appearances of a rudimentary art among children that one might be easily

led to think that art-activity ought not to be reckoned among their

common characteristics.

To judge so, however, would be to judge erroneously by applying grown-up

standards. It is commonly recognised that art and play are closely

connected. It is probable that the first crude art of the race, or at

least certain directions of it, sprang out of play-like activities, and

however this be the likenesses of the two are indisputable. I shall hope

to bring these out in the present study. This being so, we are, I

conceive, justified in speaking of art-impulses as a common

characteristic of childhood.

Although we shall find many interesting points of analogy between crude

child-art and primitive race-art, we must not, as pointed out above,

expect a perfect parallelism. In some directions, as drawing, concerted

dancing, the superior experience, strength and skill of the adult will

reveal themselves, placing child-art at a considerable disadvantage in

the comparison. Contrariwise, the intervention of the educator’s hand

tends seriously to modify the course of development of the child’s

æsthetic aptitudes. His tastes get acted upon from the first and biassed

in the direction of adult tastes.

This modifying influence of education shows itself more especially in

one particular. There is reason to think that in the development of the

race the growth of a feeling for what is beautiful was a concomitant of

the growth of the art-impulse, the impulse to adorn the person, to

collect feathers and other pretty things. Not so in the case of the

child. Here we note a certain growth of the liking for pretty things

before the spontaneous art-impulse has had time to manifest itself. Most

children who have a cultivated mother or other guardian acquire a

rudimentary appreciation of what their elders think beautiful before

they do much in the way of art-production. We provide them with toys,

pictures, we sing to them and perhaps we even take them to the theatre,

and so do our best to inoculate them with our ideas as to what is

pretty. Hence the difficulty—probably the chief difficulty—of finding

out what the child-mind, left to itself, does prefer. At the same time

the early date at which such æsthetic preferences begin to manifest

themselves makes it desirable to study them before we go on to consider

the active side of child-art. We will try as well as we can to extricate

the first manifestations of genuine childish taste.

_First Responses to Natural Beauty._

At the very beginning, before the educational influence has had time to

work, we can catch some of the characteristics of this childish

quasi-æsthetic feeling. The directions of a child’s observation, and of

the movements of his grasping arms, tell us pretty clearly what sort of

things attract and please him.

In the home scene it is bright objects, such as the fire-flame, the

lamp, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded frame;

out-of-doors, glistening water, a meadow whitened by daisies, the fresh

show mantle, later the moon and the stars, which seem to impart to the

dawning consciousness the first hint of the world’s beauty. Luminosity,

brightness in its higher intensities, whether the bright rays reach the

eye directly or are reflected from a lustrous surface, this makes the

first gladness of the eye as it remains a chief source of the gladness

of life.

The feeling for colour as such comes distinctly later. The first delight

in coloured objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial

delight in brightness. This applies pretty manifestly to the brightly

illumined, rose-red curtain which Preyer’s boy greeted with signs of

satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days, and it applies to later

manifestations. Thus Preyer found on experimenting with his boy towards

the end of the second year as to his colour-discrimination that a

decided preference was shown for the bright or luminous colours, red and

yellow.[198] Much the same thing was observed by Miss Shinn in her

interesting account of the early development of her niece’s

colour-sense.[199] Thus in the twenty-eighth month she showed a special

fondness for the daffodils, the bright tints of which allured another

and older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was

banished. About the same time the child conceived a fondness for a

yellow gown of her aunt, strongly objecting to the substitution for it

of a brown dress. Among the other coloured objects which captivated the

eye of this little girl were a patch of white cherry blossom, and a red

sun-set sky. Such observations might easily be multiplied. Whiteness, it

is to be noted, comes, as we might expect, with bright partial colours,

among the first favourites.[200]

-----

Footnote 198:

_Op. cit._, p. 7 and p. 11 f.

Footnote 199:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, p. 91 ff.

Footnote 200:

Cf. Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 41 ff.

-----

At what age a child begins to appreciate the value of colour as colour,

to like blue or red, for its own sake and apart from its brightness, it

is hard to say. The experiments of Preyer, Binet, Baldwin, and others,

as to the discrimination of colour, are hardly conclusive as to special

likings, though Baldwin’s plan of getting the child to reach out for

colours throws a certain light on this point. According to Baldwin blue

is one of the first colours to be singled out; but he does not tell us

how the colours he used (which did not, unfortunately, include

yellow—the child’s favourite according to other observers) were related

in point of luminosity.[201]

-----

Footnote 201:

See Baldwin’s two articles on ‘A New Method of Child-study’ in

_Science_, April, 1893, and his volume, _Mental Development in the

Child and the Race_.

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No doubt a child of three or four is apt to conceive a special liking

for a particular colour which favourite he is wont to appropriate as ‘my

colour’. A collection of such perfectly spontaneous preferences is a

desideratum in the study of the first manifestations of a feeling for

colour. Care must be taken in observing these selections to eliminate

the effects of association, and the unintentional influence of example

and authority, as when a child takes to a particular colour because it

is ‘mamma’s colour,’ that is, the one she appears to affect in her dress

and otherwise.

The values of the several colours probably disclose themselves in close

connexion with that of colour-contrast. Many of the likings of a child

of three in the matter of flowers, birds, dresses, and so on, are

clearly traceable to a growing pleasure in colour-contrast. Here again

we must distinguish between a true chromatic and a merely luminous

effect. The dark blue sky showing itself in a break in the white clouds,

one of the coloured spectacles which delighted Miss Shinn’s niece, may

have owed much of its attractiveness to the contrast of light and dark.

It would be interesting to experiment with children of three with a view

to determine whether and how far chromatic contrast pleases when it

stands alone, and is not supported by that of chiaroscuro.

I have reason to believe that children, like the less cultivated adults,

prefer juxtapositions of colours which lie far from one another in the

colour-circle, as blue and red or blue and yellow. It is sometimes said

that the practice and the history of painting show blue and red to be a

more pleasing combination than that of the complementary colours, blue

and yellow. It would be well to test children’s feeling on this matter.

It would be necessary in this inquiry to see that the child did not

select for combination a particular colour as blue or yellow for its own

sake, and independently of its relation to its companion—a point not

very easy to determine. Care would have to be taken to eliminate further

the influence of authority as operating, not only by instructing the

child what combinations are best, but by setting models of combination,

in the habitual arrangements of dress and so forth. This too would

probably prove to be a condition not easy to satisfy.[202]

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Footnote 202:

The influence of such authority is especially evident in the selection

of harmonious shades of colour for dress, etc. _Cf._ Miss Shinn, _op.

cit._, p. 95.

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I have dwelt at some length on the first germs of colour-appreciation,

because this is the one feature of the child’s æsthetic sense which has

so far lent itself to definite experimental investigation. It is very

different when we turn to the first appreciation of form. That little

children have their likings in the matter of form, is, I think,

indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. A quite

small child will admire the arch of a rainbow, and the roundness of a

kitten’s form, though in these instances the delight in form is far from

pure. More clearly marked is the appreciation of pretty graceful

movements, as a kitten’s boundings. Perhaps the first waking up to the

graces of form takes place in connexion with this delight in the forms

of motion, a delight which at first is a mixed feeling, involving the

interest in all motion as suggestive of life, to which reference has

already been made. Do not all of us, indeed, tend to translate our

impressions of still forms back into these first impressions of the

forms of motion?

One noticeable feature in the child’s first response to the attractions

of form is the preference given to ‘tiny’ things. The liking for small

natural forms, birds, insects, shells, and so forth, and the prominence

of such epithets as ‘wee,’ ‘tiny’ or ‘teeny,’ ‘dear little,’ in the

child’s vocabulary alike illustrate this early direction of taste. This

feeling again is a mixed one; for the child’s interest in very small

fragile-looking things has in it an element of caressing tenderness

which again contains a touch of fellow-feeling. This is but one

illustration of the general rule of æsthetic development in the case of

the individual and of the race alike that a pure contemplative delight

in the aspect of things only gradually detaches itself from a mixed

feeling.

If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, regularity of outline,

symmetry, proportion, we encounter a difficulty. Many children acquire

while quite young and before any formal education commences a certain

feeling for regularity and symmetry. But is this the result of a mere

observation of natural or other forms? Here the circumstances of the

child become important. He lives among those who insist on these

features in the daily activities of the home. In laying the cloth of the

dinner-table, for example, a child sees the regular division of space

enforced as a law. Every time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress,

he has an object-lesson in symmetrical arrangement. And so these

features take on a kind of ethical rightness before they are judged as

elements of æsthetic value. As to a sense of proportion between the

dimensions or parts of a form, the reflexion that this involves a degree

of intellectuality above the reach of many an adult might suggest that

it is not to be expected from a small child; and this conjecture will be

borne out when we come to examine children’s first essays in drawing.

These elementary pleasures of light, colour, and certain simple aspects

of form, may be said to be the basis of a crude perception of beauty in

natural objects and in the products of human workmanship. A quite small

child is capable of acquiring a real admiration for a beautiful lady, in

the appreciation of which brightness, colour, grace of movement, the

splendour of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the eye is

often reinforced by a sweet and winsome quality of voice. Such an

admiration is not perfectly æsthetic: awe, an inkling of the social

dignity of dress,[203] perhaps a longing to be embraced by the charmer,

may all enter into it; yet a genuine admiration of look for its own sake

is the core of the feeling. In other childish admirations, as the girl’s

enthusiastic worship of the newly arrived baby, we see a true æsthetic

sentiment mingled with and struggling, so to speak, to extricate itself

from such ‘interested’ feelings as sense of personal enrichment by the

new possession and of family pride. In the likings for animals, again,

which often take what seem to us capricious and quaint directions, we

may see rudiments of æsthetic perceptions half hidden under a lively

sense of absolute lordship tempered with affection.

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Footnote 203:

On the nature of the early feeling for dress see Perez, _L’Art et la

Poésie chez l’Enfant_.

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Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure æsthetic enjoyment in these first

experiences is the love of flowers. The wee round wonders with their

mystery of velvety colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye.

I believe most children who live among flowers and have access to them

acquire something of this sentiment, a sentiment of admiration for

beautiful things with which a sort of dumb childish sympathy commonly

blends. No doubt there are marked differences among children here. There

are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the strong

sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do

with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers.[204]

Others again care for them mainly as a means of personal adornment,

though I am disposed to think that this partially interested fondness is

less common with children than with many adults. It is sometimes said

that the love of flowers is, in the main, a characteristic of girls. I

think however that if one takes children early enough, before a

consciousness of sex and of its proprieties has been allowed to develop

under education, the difference will be but slight. Little boys of four

or thereabouts often show a very lively sentiment of admiration for

these gems of the plant world.

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Footnote 204:

See Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 90 f.

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In much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic sense of the child

we have points of contact with the first manifestations of taste in the

race. Delight in bright glistening things, in gay tints, in strong

contrasts of colour, as well as in certain forms of movement, as that of

feathers—the favourite personal adornment—this is known to be

characteristic of the savage and gives to his taste in the eyes of

civilised man the look of childishness. On the other hand it is doubtful

whether the savage attains to the sentiment of the child for the beauty

of flowers. Our civilised surroundings, meadows and gardens, as well as

the constant action of the educative forces of example, soon carry the

child beyond the savage in this particular.

How far can children be said to have the germ of a feeling for nature,

or, to use the more comprehensive modern term, cosmic emotion? It is a

matter of common observation that they have not the power to embrace a

multitude of things in a single act of contemplation. Hence they have no

feeling for landscape as a harmonious complex of picturesquely varied

parts. When they are taken to see a ‘view’ their eye instead of trying

to embrace the whole, as a fond parent desires, provokingly pounces on

some single feature of interest, and often one of but little æsthetic

value. People make a great mistake in taking children to ‘points of

view’ under the supposition that they will share in grown people’s

impressions. Perez relates that some children taken to the Pic du Midi

found their chief pleasure in scrambling up the peak and saying that

they were on donkeys.[205] Mere magnitude or vastness of spectacle does

not appeal to the child, for a sense of the sublime grows out of a

complex imaginative process which is beyond his young powers. So far as

immensity affects him at all, as in the case of the sea, it seems to

excite a measure of dread in face of the unknown; and this feeling,

though having a certain kinship with the emotion of sublimity, is

distinct from this last. It has nothing of the joyous consciousness of

expansion which enters into the later feeling. It is only to certain

limited objects and features of nature that the child is æsthetically

responsive. He knows the loveliness of the gilded spring meadow, the

fascination of the sunlit stream, the awful mystery of the wood, and

something too perhaps of the calming beauty of the broad blue sky. That

is to say, he has a number of small rootlets which when they grow

together will develop into a feeling for nature.

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Footnote 205:

_Op. cit._, p. 103.

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