C. (loudly and passionately). “Allowed, allowed? People are not allowed
to take other people and kill them.”
M. “People think there is a difference between killing men and killing
animals.”
C. was not to be pacified this way. He looked woe-begone and said to his
mother piteously, “You don’t understand me”. He added that he would tell
his friend the Heath-keeper about these things.
The father observes on this: “There was something almost heart-breaking
in that cry ‘You don’t understand me’. How can we, with minds blinded by
our conventional habits and prejudices, hope to catch the subtle and
divine light which is reflected from the untarnished mirror of a child’s
mind?” Somehow, the father’s sentimental comments seem less out of place
here. But already the boy’s wrestlings of spirit with the dreadful
‘must,’ which turns men into killers, were proving too much for his
young strength. He was learning, sullenly enough, to adjust his eye to
the inevitable realities. This accommodation of thought to stern
necessity was illustrated by an incident which occurred at the end of
the fourth month. He had had some leaden soldiers given him at
Christmas. Some time after this he had been observed to break off their
guns. His mother now asked him why he had broken them off. He replied:
“Oh! that was when I didn’t know what soldiers were for, when I thought
they were just naughty men who liked to kill people”. On his mother then
asking him what he now thought soldiers were for, he explained: “Oh!
when some people want to do harm to some _other_ people, then those
other people must send their soldiers to fight them, to stop them from
doing harm”.
One moral quality had, it seems, always been distinctly marked in C.,
_viz._, a scrupulous regard for truth. His father believes the child had
never knowingly made a false statement, save playfully, when throwing
for a moment the reins on the neck of fancy and allowing it to come
dangerously near the confines of truth. This scrupulosity the father
connects, reasonably enough, with certain intellectual qualities, as
close observation and accurate description of what was observed.
Sometimes this scrupulous veracity would display itself in a quaint
form. One morning (end of tenth month) C. was obstinate and would not
say his lesson to his mother, so that she had to threaten him with
forfeiture of his toys till the lesson was got through. On this C. said
rebelliously: “Very well, I won’t say them”. His mother then talked to
him about his naughtiness. He grew very unhappy, and said sobbing and
looking the very picture of misery: “It’s a good deal worse to break my
promise than not to say my lesson”.
Another incident of about the same date throws a curious light on the
quality of his moral feeling at this period. He had been out one
afternoon in the garden with a girl companion of about his own age, and
the two little imps between them had managed to strip that unpretending
garden of its spring glory, to wit, about twenty buds of peonies. The
sacrilege betrayed itself in C.’s red-dyed fingers. A condign
chastisement was administered by the mother, and the culprit was sent to
bed immediately after tea in the hope that solitude might bring
reflexion and remorse. In order to ensure so desirable a result the
mother before leaving him in bed enlarged on the heinousness of the
offence. At last he began to get downright miserable, and the mother,
expectant of a confession of guilt, overheard him say to himself: “I’m
_so_ sorry I picked the flowers. I didn’t have half enough tea.” The
next day, referring to his mischievous act, his mother happened to say:
“You were not sorry for it at the time”. Whereupon he burst out in a
contemptuous tone: “Eh! you didn’t suppose I was sorry at the time? I
liked doing it.” “Shocking enough, no doubt,” writes the father on this
in his characteristic manner, “yet may we not see in this defiant avowal
of enjoyment in wrong-doing the germ of a true remorse, which in its
essence is the resolute confronting of the lower by the higher self?”
His mind was still occupied about the mysteries of God, death, and
heaven. Following the example of his sister he would occasionally on
going to bed quite spontaneously say his prayers. One evening at the end
of the eleventh month, having knelt down and muttered over some words,
he asked his mother whether she had heard him. She said no, and he
remarked that he had not wished her to hear. On her asking why not, he
rejoined: “If anybody hears what I say perhaps God won’t listen to me,”
which seems to suggest that talking to God was to him something
particularly confidential, what he himself once described as telling
another a “private secret”.[327]
-----
Footnote 327:
Compare above, p. 283 f.
-----
When his mother asked him what he had been praying for he said it was
for a fine day on his birthday. He thought much of God as the maker of
things, and wondered. One day (middle of tenth month) he asked how God
made us and “put flesh on us,” and made “what is inside us”. He then
proceeded to invent a little theory of creation. “I s’pose he made stone
men and iron men first, and then made real men.” “This myth,” writes the
father, “might readily suggest that the child had been hearing about the
stone and the iron age, and about sculptors first modelling their
statues in another material. It seems probable, however, that it was
invented by a purely childish thought as a way of clearing up the
mystery of the living thinking man.” There is subsequent evidence that
his theory did not fully satisfy him. In the eleventh month he continued
to ask how God made things, and wanted to know whether ‘preachers’ could
resolve his difficulty. (His sister appears about this time to have had
the common childish awe for the clergy.) On learning from his mother
that even these well-informed persons might not be able to satisfy all
his questions, he observed: “Well, anyhow, if we go to heaven when we
die we shall know,” and added after a pause, “and if we don’t it doesn’t
much matter”. “From this,” writes the father, “it seems fully clear that
the child was beginning to adjust his mind to the fact of mystery, to
the existence of an impenetrable region of the unknown.”
C.’s deepest interest just now in religious matters grew out of the
feelings awakened by the thought of death. In the early part of the year
he plied his mother with questions about death and burial. He was
manifestly troubled about the prospect of being put under ground. One
night (end of third month) when his mother was seeing him to bed, he
said: “Don’t put earth on my face when I am buried”. The touch of the
bed-clothes on his face had no doubt suggested the stifling effect of
the earth. About the same date he remarked in his characteristic abrupt
manner, after musing for some time: “Mamma, perhaps the weather will be
_very_, _very_ fine, much finer than we have ever seen, when we are not
there”. The mother was not unnaturally puzzled by this dark utterance
and asked him what he meant. He replied: “I mean when we are buried, and
then we shall be very sorry”. “Who can tell,” writes the father, “what
this fancy of lying under the ground, yet catching the whispering of the
most delicious of summer breezes, and the far-off touch of the gladdest
of sunbeams, and the faint scent of the sweetest of flowers, may have
meant for the wee dreamy sensitive creature?”
The following dialogue between C. and his mother at the beginning of the
fourth month may further illustrate his feeling about this subject.