Part 20

While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of children’s fears they are not the only ones. Experience begins to direct the instinctive fear-impulse from the very beginning. How much it does in the first months of life it is difficult to say. In the aversion of a baby to its medicine glass, or its cold bath, one sees, perhaps, more of the rude germ of passion or anger than of fear. Careful observations seem to me to be required on the point, at what definite date signs of fear arising from experience of pain begin to show themselves in the child. Some children, at least, have a surprising way of not minding even considerable amounts of physical pain: the misery of a fall, a blow, a cut, and so forth, being speedily forgotten. It seems doubtful, indeed, whether the venerable saw, ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ is invariably true. It appears, in many cases at least, to take a good amount of real agony to produce a genuine fear in a young child.[157] This tendency to belittle pain is not unknown, I suspect, to the tutor of small boys. It may well be that a definite and precise recalling of the misery of a scratch, or even of a moderate burn, may not conduce to the development of a true fear, and that here, too, fear when it arises in all its characteristic masterfulness is at bottom fear of the unknown. This seems illustrated by the well-known fact that a child will be more terrified during a first experience of pain, especially if there be a visible hurt and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of the catastrophe. Is not the same thing true, indeed, of older fears? Should we dread the wrench of a tooth-extraction if it were experienced very often, and we had a sufficiently photographic imagination to be able to estimate precisely the intensity and duration of the pain?

Footnote 157:

On this point there are some excellent observations made by Miss Shinn, who points out that physical pain when not too severe is apt to be lost sight of in the new feeling of personal consequence to which it gives rise (_Notes on the Development of a Child_, pt. ii., p. 144 ff.)

Much the same thing shows itself in the cases where fear can be clearly traced to experience and association. In some of these it is no doubt remembered experience of suffering which causes the fear. A child that has been seriously burned will unquestionably be frightened at a too close approach of a red-hot poker. But in many cases of this excitation of fear by association it is the primary experience of fear itself which seems to be the real object of the apprehension. Thus a child who has been frightened by a dog will betray signs of fear at the sight of a kennel, of a picture of a dog, and so forth. The little boy referred to above who was afraid of the toy elephant that shook its head showed signs of fear a fortnight afterwards on coming across a picture of an elephant in a picture-book. In such ways does fear propagate fear in the timid little breast.

One cannot part from the theme of children’s fears without a reference to a closely connected subject, the problem of their happiness. To ask whether childhood is a happy time, still more to ask whether it is the happiest, is to raise perhaps a foolish and insoluble question. Later reminiscences would seem in this case to be particularly untrustworthy. Children themselves no doubt may have very definite views on the subject. A child will tell you with the unmistakable marks of profound conviction that he is _so_ unhappy. But paradoxical as it may seem, children really know very little about the matter. At the best they can only tell you how they feel at particular moments. To seek for a precise and satisfactory solution of the problem is thus futile. Only rough comparisons of childhood and later life are possible.

In any such comparison the fears of early years claim, no doubt, careful consideration. There seem to be people who have no idea what the agony of these early terrors amounts to. And since it is the unknown that excites this fear, and the unknown in childhood is almost everything, the possibilities of suffering from this source are great enough.

Alike the Good, the Ill offend thy Sight, And rouse the stormy sense of shrill affright.

George Sand hardly exaggerates when she writes: “Fear is, I believe, the greatest moral suffering of children”. In the case of weakly, nervous and imaginative children, more especially, this susceptibility to terror may bring miserable days and yet more miserable nights.

Nevertheless, it is easy here to pass from one extreme of brutal indifference to another of sentimental exaggeration. Childish suffering is terrible while it lasts, but happily it has a way of not lasting. The cruel distorting fit of terror passes and leaves the little face with its old sunny out-look. It is to be remembered, too, that while children are pitiably fearful in their own way, they are, as we have seen in the case of the little Walter Scott, delightfully fearless also, as judged by our standards. How oddly fear and fearlessness go together is illustrated in a story sent me. A little boy fell into a brook. On his being fished out by his mother, his sister, aged four, asked him: ‘Did you see any crocodiles?’ ‘No,’ answered the boy, ‘I wasn’t in long enough.’ The absence of fear of the water itself was as characteristic as the presence of fear of the crocodile.

It is refreshing to find that in certain cases at least where older people have done their worst to excite terror, a child has escaped its suffering. Professor Barnes tells us that a Californian child’s belief in the supernatural takes on a happy tone, directing itself to images of heaven with trees, birds, and other pretty things, and giving but little heed to the horrors of hell.[158] In less sunny climes than California children may not, perhaps, be such little optimists, and it is probable that graphic descriptions of hell-fire have sent many a creepy thrill of horror along a child’s tender nerves. Still it may be said that, owing to the fortunate circumstance of children having much less fear of fire than many animals, the misery in which eternal punishment is wont to be bodied forth does not work so powerfully as one might expect on a child’s imagination. The author of _The Uninitiated_ illustrates a real child-trait when she makes her small heroine conceive of hell as a place that _smelt_ nastily (from its brimstone).[159] Then it is noticeable that children in general are but little affected by fear at the sight or the thought of death. The child C. had a passing dread of being buried, but his young hopeful heart refused to credit the fact of that far-off calamity. Other children, I find, dislike the idea of death as threatening to deprive them of their mother. Perhaps they can more readily suppose that somebody else will die than that they themselves will do so. This comparative immunity from the dread of death is no small deduction to be made from the burden of children’s fear.

Footnote 158:

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

Footnote 159:

p. 43.

Not only so, when fear is apt to be excited, Nature has provided the small timorous person with other instincts which tend to mitigate and even to neutralise it. It is a happy circumstance that the most prolific excitant of fear, the presentation of something new and uncanny, is also provocative of another feeling, that of curiosity, with its impulse to look and examine. Even animals are sometimes divided in the presence of something strange between fear and curiosity,[160] and children’s curiosity is much more lively than theirs. A very tiny child, on first making acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on the head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking his head against something as if experimenting and watching the effect. A clearer case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child who, after pulling the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, proceeded to dive into the bush again.[161] Still more interesting here are the gradual transitions from actual fear before the new and strange to bold inspection. The child who was frightened by her Japanese doll insisted on seeing it every day. The behaviour of one of these small persons on the arrival at the house of a strange dog, of a dark foreigner, or some other startling novelty, is a pretty and amusing sight. The first overpowering timidity, the shrinking back to the mother’s breast, followed by curious peeps, then by bolder outstretchings of head and arms, mark the stages by which curiosity and interest gain on fear and finally leave it far behind. Very soon we know the small timorous creatures will grow into bold adventurers. They will make playthings of the alarming animals, and of the alarming shadows too.[162] Later on still perhaps they will love nothing so much as to probe the awful mysteries of gunpowder.

Footnote 160:

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

Footnote 161:

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

Footnote 162:

Stevenson, the same who has described the terrors of moving shadows, illustrates how a child may make a sort of playfellow of his shadow (_A Child’s Garden of Verses_, xviii.).

One palliative of these early terrors remains to be touched on, the instinct of sheltering or refuge-taking. The first manifestations of what is called the social nature of children are little more than the reverse side of their timidity. A baby will cease crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of mother or nurse because a vague sense of human companionship does away with the misery of the black solitude. A frightened child probably knows an ecstasy of bliss when folded in the protective embrace of a mother’s arms. Even the most timid children never have the full experience of terror so long as there is within reach the secure base of all their reconnoitring excursions, the mother’s skirts. Happy those little ones who have ever near them loving arms within whose magic circle the oncoming of the cruel fit of terror is instantly checked, giving place to a delicious calm.

How unhappy those children must be who, being fearsome by nature, lack this refuge, who are left much alone to wrestle with their horrors as best they may, and are rudely repulsed when they bear their heart-quakings to others, I would not venture to say. Still less should I care to suggest what is suffered by those unfortunates who find in those about them not comfort, assurance, support in their fearsome moments, but the worst source of their terrors. To be brutal to these small sensitive organisms, to practise on their terrors, to take delight in exciting the wild stare and wilder shriek of terror, this is perhaps one of the strange things which make one believe in the old dogma that the devil can enter into men and women. For here we seem to have to do with a form of cruelty so exquisite, so contrary to the oldest of instincts, that it is dishonouring to the savage and to the lower animals to attempt to refer it to heredity.

To dwell on such things, however, would be to go back to a pessimistic view of childhood. It is undeniable that children are exposed to indescribable misery when they are delivered into the hands of a consummately cruel guardian. Yet one may hope that this sort of person is exceptional, something of which we can give no account save by saying that now and again in sport nature produces a monster, as if to show what she could do if she did not choose more wisely and benignly to work within the limitations of type.

VII. RAW MATERIAL OF MORALITY.

_Primitive Egoism._

Perhaps there has been more hasty theorising about the child’s moral characteristics than about any other of his attributes. The very fact that diametrically opposed views have been put forward is suggestive of this haste. By certain theologians and others infancy has been painted in the blackest of moral colours. According to M. Compayré it is a bachelor, La Bruyère, and a bishop, Dupanloup, who have said the worst things of children; and the parent or teacher who wants to see how bad this worst is may consult M. Compayré’s account.[163] On the other hand, Rousseau and those who think with him have invested the child with an untarnished purity. According to Rousseau the child comes from the Creator’s hand a perfect bit of workmanship, which blundering man at once begins to mar. Children’s freedom from human vices has been a common theme of the poet: their innocence was likened by M. About to the spotless snow of the Jungfrau. Others, as Wordsworth, have gone farther and attributed to the infant positive excellences, glimpses of a higher morality than ours, Divine intuitions brought from a prenatal existence.

Footnote 163:

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

Such opposite views of the moral status and worth of a child must be the result of prepossession, and the magnifying of the accidents of individual experience. A theologian who is concerned to maintain the doctrine of natural depravity, or a bachelor who happens to have known children chiefly in the character of little tormentors, may be expected to paint childhood with black pigments. On the other hand the poet, attracted by the charm of infancy, may, as we have seen, easily be led to idealise its moral aspects.

The first thing that strikes one in all such attempts to fix the moral worth of the child is that they are judging of things by wrong standards. The infant, though it has a nature capable of becoming moral or immoral, is not as yet a moral being; and there is a certain impertinence in trying to force it under our categories of good and bad, pure and corrupt.

If then we would know what the child’s ‘moral’ nature is like we must be careful to distinguish. By ‘moral’ we must understand that part of his nature, feelings and impulses, which has for us a moral significance; whether as furnishing raw material out of which education may develop virtuous dispositions, or contrariwise, as constituting forces adverse to this development. It may be well to call the former tendencies favourable to virtue, pro-moral, those unfavourable, contra-moral. Our inquiry, then, must be: In what respects, and to what extent, does the child show himself by nature, apart from all that is meant by education, pro-moral or contra-moral, that is, well or ill fitted to become a member of a good or virtuous community and to exercise what we know as moral functions?

Our especial object here will be if possible to get at natural dispositions, to examine the child in his primitive nakedness, looking out for those instinctive tendencies which according to modern science are only a little less clearly marked in the young of our own species than in a puppy or a chick.

Now there is clearly a difficulty here. How, it may be asked, can we expect to find in a child any traits having a moral significance which have not been developed by social influences and education? In the case of pro-moral dispositions more particularly, as kindness, or truthfulness, we cannot expect to get rid of the effect of the combined personal influence and instruction of the mother, which is of the essence of all moral training. Even with regard to contra-moral traits, as rudeness, or lying, it is evident that example is frequently a co-operating influence.

The difficulty is no doubt a real one, and cannot be wholly got rid of. We cannot completely eliminate the influence of the common life in which the good and bad disposition alike may be said to grow up. Yet we may distinguish. Thus we may look out for the earliest spontaneous and what we may call original manifestations of such dispositions as affection and truthfulness, so as to eliminate the _direct_ action of instruction and example, and thus to reduce the influence of the social medium on the child to a minimum. Similarly in the case of brutal and other unlovely propensities, we may by taking pains get rid of the influence of bad example.

Let us see, then, how far the indictment of the child is a just one. Do children tend spontaneously to manifest the germs of vicious dispositions, and if so, to what extent? Here, as I have suggested, we must be particularly careful not to read wrong interpretations into what we see. It will not do, for example, to say that children are born thieves because they show themselves at first serenely indifferent to the distinction of _meum_ and _tuum_, and are inclined to help themselves to other children’s toys, and so forth. To repeat, what we have to inquire is whether children by their instinctive inclinations are contra-moral, that is, predisposed to what, if persevered in with reflexion, we call immorality or vice.

Here we cannot do better than touch on that group of feelings and dispositions which can be best marked off as anti-social since they tend to the injury of others, such as anger, envy, and cruelty.

The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. Their characteristic passions and impulses are centred in self and the satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents itself, and to resent others’ participation in such enjoyment? For some time after birth the child is little more than an incarnation of appetite which knows on restraint, and only yields to the undermining force of satiety.

The child’s entrance into social life through a growing consciousness of the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their wishes. His greed, which at the outset was but the expression of a vigorous nutritive impulse, now takes on more of a contra-moral aspect. The removal of the feeding-bottle before full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of the baby’s ‘will to live,’ and of its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. In this outburst we have the first rude germ of that defiance of control and of authority of which I shall have to say more by-and-by.

In another way, too, the expansion of the infant’s consciousness through the recognition of others widens the terrain of greedy impulse. For ugly envy commonly has its rise in the perception of another child’s consumption of appetite’s dainties.

Here, it is evident, we are still at the level of the animal. A dog is passionately greedy like the child, will fiercely resent any interference with the satisfaction of its appetite, and will be envious of another and more fortunately placed animal.

Much the same concern for self and opposition to others’ having what the child himself desires shows itself in the matter of toys and other possessions of interest. A child is apt not only to make free with another child’s toys, but to show the strongest objection to any imitation of this freedom, often displaying a dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he himself does not want. Not only so, he will be apt to resent another child’s having toys of his own. This envy of other children’s possessions is often wide and profound.

As the social interests come into play so far as to make caresses and other signs of affection sources of pleasure to the child, the field for envy and its ‘green-eyed’ offspring, jealousy, is still more enlarged. As is well known, an infant will greatly resent the mother’s taking another child into her arms.

Here, again, we are at the level of the lower animals. They, too, as our dogs and cats can show us, can be envious not only in the matter of eatables, but in that of human caressings, and even of possessions—witness the behaviour of two dogs when a stick is thrown into the water.

Full illustrations of these traits of the first years of childhood are not needed. We all know them. M. Perez and others have culled a sufficient collection of examples.[164]

Footnote 164:

See for example Perez, _The First Three Years of Childhood_, p. 66 ff.; and _L’Education dès le berceau_, chap. vi.

Out of all this unrestrained pushing of appetite and desire whereby the child comes into rude collision with others’ wants, wishes and purposes, there issue the well-known passionateness, the angry outbursts, and the fierce quarrellings of the child. These fits of angry passion or temper are among the most curious manifestations of childhood, and deserve to be studied with much greater care than they have yet received.

The outburst of rage as the imperious little will feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of its comicality something impressive. Hitting out right and left, throwing things down on the floor and breaking them, howling, wild agitated movements of the arms and whole body, these are the outward vents which the gust of childish fury is apt to take. Preyer observed one of these violent explosions in the seventeenth month. The outburst tends to concentrate itself in an attack on the offender, be this even the beloved mamma herself. Darwin’s boy at the age of two years three months became a great adept at throwing books, sticks, etc., at any one who offended him.[165] But almost anything will do as an object of attack. A child of four on being crossed would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him, jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in some cases improved upon by biting. The boy C. was for some time vigorously mordant in his angry fits. Another little boy would, under similar circumstances, bite the carpet.

Footnote 165:

Darwin notes that all his boys did this kind of thing, whereas his girls did not (_Mind_, ii., p. 288). My own observations agree with this. A small boy has more of savage attack than a small girl.

Here we have expressive movements which are plainly brutal, which assimilate the aspect of an angry child to that of an infuriated animal. The whole outward attitude is one of fierce reckless assault. The insane, we are told, manifest a like wildness of attack in fits of anger, smashing windows, etc., and striking anybody who happens to be at hand.

Yet these are not all the manifestations. Childish anger has its wretched aspect. There is keen suffering in these early experiences of thwarted will and purpose. A little boy, rather more than a year old, used when crossed to throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his head; and his brother, when fourteen months old, would similarly throw himself on the floor, bang the back of his head, biting the carpet as before mentioned. This act of throwing oneself on the floor, which is common about this age and is apparently quite instinctive, is the expression of the utter _dejection_ of misery. C.’s attitude when crossed, gathered into a heap on the floor, was eloquent of this infantile despair. Such suffering is the immediate outcome of thwarted purpose, and must be distinguished from the moral feeling of shame which often accompanies it.

Such stormy outbursts vary no doubt from child to child. Thus C.’s sister in her angry moments did not bite or roll on the floor, but would dance about and stamp. Some children show little if anything of this savage furiousness. Among those that do show it, it is often a temporary phenomenon only.