It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick. They are, on
the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, until advancing
age teaches them agility. This is not lack of sensitiveness, but mere
length of process. For instance, a child nearly newly born is cruelly
startled by a sudden crash in the room--a child who has never learnt to
fear, and is merely overcome by the shock of sound; nevertheless, that
shock of sound does not reach the conscious hearing or the nerves but
after some moments, nor before some moments more is the sense of the
shock expressed. The sound travels to the remoteness and seclusion of
the child's consciousness, as the roar of a gun travels to listeners half
a mile away.
So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eager
with us of later age that no point of time is lost in its touches--direct
as the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered by
trivialities; even so immediate is the communication of pain. But you
could count five between the prick of a surgeon's instrument upon a
baby's arm and the little whimper that answers it. The child is then too
young, also, to refer the feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it.
Even when pain has groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to bring
local tidings thither. The baby does not turn his eyes in any degree
towards his arm or towards the side that is so vexed with vaccination. He
looks in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random.
See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older child
trudges after the nimbleness of a conjurer. It is the greatest failure
to take these little _gobe-mouches_ to a good conjurer. His successes
leave them cold, for they had not yet understood what it was the good man
meant to surprise them withal. The amateur it is who really astonishes
them. They cannot come up even with your amateur beginner, performing at
close quarters; whereas the master of his craft on a platform runs quite
away at the outset from the lagging senses of his honest audience.
You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from under his
ingenuous eyes, send him off in chase of it, and have it in its place and
off again ten times before the little breathless boy has begun to
perceive in what direction his sweets have been snatched.
Teachers of young children should therefore teach themselves a habit of
awaiting, should surround themselves with pauses of patience. The simple
little processes of logic that arrange the grammar of a common sentence
are too quick for these young blunderers, who cannot use two pronouns but
they must confuse them. I never found that a young child--one of
something under nine years--was able to say, "I send them my love" at the
first attempt. It will be "I send me my love," "I send them their love,"
"They send me my love"; not, of course, through any confusion of
understanding, but because of the tardy setting of words in order with
the thoughts. The child visibly grapples with the difficulty, and is
beaten.
It is no doubt this unreadiness that causes little children to like twice-
told tales and foregone conclusions in their games. They are not eager,
for a year or two yet to come, for surprises. If you hide and they
cannot see you hiding, their joy in finding you is comparatively small;
but let them know perfectly well what cupboard you are in, and they will
find you with shouts of discovery. The better the hiding-place is
understood between you the more lively the drama. They make a convention
of art for their play. The younger the children the more dramatic; and
when the house is filled with outcries of laughter from the breathless
breast of a child, it is that he is pretending to be surprised at finding
his mother where he bade her pretend to hide. This is the comedy that
never tires. Let the elder who cannot understand its charm beware how he
tries to put a more intelligible form of delight in the place of it; for,
if not, he will find that children also have a manner of substitution,
and that they will put half-hearted laughter in the place of their
natural impetuous clamours. It is certain that very young children like
to play upon their own imaginations, and enjoy their own short game.
There is something so purely childlike in the delays of a child that any
exercise asking for the swift apprehension of later life, for the flashes
of understanding and action, from the mind and members of childhood, is
no pleasure to see. The piano, for instance, as experts understand it,
and even as the moderately-trained may play it, claims all the immediate
action, the instantaneousness, most unnatural to childhood. There may
possibly be feats of skill to which young children could be trained
without this specific violence directed upon the thing characteristic of
their age--their unreadiness--but virtuosity at the piano cannot be one
of them. It is no delight, indeed, to see the shyness of children, or
anything that is theirs, conquered and beaten; but their poor little
slowness is so distinctively their own, and must needs be physiologically
so proper to their years, so much a natural condition of the age of their
brain, that of all childishnesses it is the one that the world should
have the patience to attend upon, the humanity to foster, and the
intelligence to understand.
It is true that the movements of young children are quick, but a very
little attention would prove how many apparent disconnexions there are
between the lively motion and the first impulse; it is not the brain that
is quick. If, on a voyage in space, electricity takes thus much time,
and light thus much, and sound thus much, there is one little jogging
traveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten their journey,
and this is the perception of a child. Surely our own memories might
serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably missed the
principal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders to
furnish us with a historical remembrance for the future. It was not our
mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses,
of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through the
important moments of the passing of an Emperor at a different rate from
theirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of anything else
of interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic answers from
our parents' eyes, left us stragglers. We fell out of all ranks. Among
the sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best was
an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure. In good time we found the moon
in the sky, in good time the eclipse set in and made reasonable progress;
we kept up with everything.
It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselves
to the world, practised and alert. But it would be more to the purpose
that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings with
them. Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of the
tardiest. But we are apt to command instant obedience, stripped of the
little pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without. It is
not a child of ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creature
who has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be startled.
We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of senses
and of an unprepared consciousness--this capacity for receiving a great
shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or three
appreciable moments--if we would know anything of the moments of a baby
Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long for
children, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is too short
for them. When it is exceedingly short they cannot, without an unnatural
effort, have any perception of it. When children do not see the jokes of
the elderly, and disappoint expectation in other ways, only less
intimate, the reason is almost always there. The child cannot turn in
mid-career; he goes fast, but the impetus took place moments ago.