Part 21

This anger, it is to be noted, is due to check, and would show itself to some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a child will become angry, resentful, and despairingly miserable if another child gets effective hold of something which he wants to have. Yet it is undoubtedly true, as we shall see, that these little storms are most frequently called up by the imposition of authority, and are a manifestation of what we call a defiant attitude.

This slight examination may suffice to show that with the child self, its appetites, its satisfactions, are the centre of its existence, the pivot on which its action turns. I do not forget the real and striking differences here, the specially brutal form of boys’ anger as compared with that of girls, the partial atrophy of some of these impulses, _e.g._, jealousy, in the more gentle and affectionate type of child. Yet there seems to be little doubt that these are among the commonest and most pronounced characteristics of the first years.

Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. If the order of development of the individual follows and summarises that of the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least of the passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the savage before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilised man. That he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage and to the brute suggests how little ages of civilised life with its suppression of these furious impulses have done to tone down the ancient and carefully transmitted instincts. The child at birth, and for a long while after, may then be said to be the representative of wild untamed nature, which it is for education to subdue and fashion into something higher and better.

At the same time the child is more than this. In this first clash of his will with another’s he knows more than the brute’s sensual fury. He suffers consciously, he realises himself in his antagonism to a world outside him. It is probable, as I have pointed out before, that even a physical check bringing pain, as when the child runs his head against a wall, may develop this consciousness of self in its antagonism to a not-self. This consciousness reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as another will. Self-feeling, a germ of the feeling of ‘my worth,’ enters into this early passionateness and differentiates it from a mere animal rage. The absolute prostration of infantile anger seems to be the expression of this keen consciousness of rebuff, of injury.

While, then, these outbursts of savage instinct in children are no doubt ugly, and in their direction contra-moral, they must not hastily be pronounced wholly bad and wicked. To call them wicked in the full sense of that term is indeed to forget that they are the swift reactions of instinct which have in them nothing of reflexion or of deliberation. The angry child venting his spite in some wild act of violence is a long way from a man who knowingly and with the consent of his will retaliates and hates. The very fleeting character of the outbreak, the rapid subsidence of passion and transition to another mood, show that there is here no real _malice prépense_. These instincts will, no doubt, if they are not tamed, develop later on into truly wicked dispositions; yet it is by no means a small matter to recognise that they do not amount to full moral depravity.

On the other hand, we have seen that we do not render complete justice to these early manifestations of angry passion if we class them with those of the brute. The child in these first years, though not yet human in the sense of having rational insight into his wrong-doing, is human in the sense of suffering through consciousness of an injured self. This reflective element is not yet moral; the sense of injury may turn by-and-by into lasting hatred. Yet it holds within itself possibilities of something higher. But of this more when we come to envisage the child in his relation to authority.

The same predominance of self, the same kinship with the unsocial brute which shows itself in these germinal animosities, is said to reappear in the insensibility or unfeelingness of children. The commonest charge against children from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.

That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some circumstance connected with the affliction which is worse than the absorption in play through its tantalising want of any genuine feeling. A brother or a sister may be ill, but if the vigorous little player is affected at all, it is only through the loss of his companion, if this is not more than made up for by certain advantages of the solitary situation. If the mother is ill, the event is interesting merely as supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half an hour in his mother’s sick-room, coolly informed his nurse: ‘I have had a very nice time, mamma’s ill!’ The order of the two statements is significant of the child’s mental attitude towards others’ sufferings. If his faithful nurse has her face bandaged, his interest in her torments does not go beyond a remark on the ‘funniness’ of her new appearance.

When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling is still more noticeable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death. While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being affected at most by a feeling of awe before a great mystery. Even the sight of the dead body does not always excite grief. Mrs. Burnett in her interesting reminiscences of childhood has an excellent account of the feelings of a sensitive and refined child when first brought face to face with death. In one case she was taken with fearsome longing to touch the dead body, so as to know what ‘as cold as death’ meant, in another, that of a pretty girl of three with golden brown eyes and neat small brown curls, she was impressed by the loveliness of the whole scene, the nursery bedroom being hung with white and adorned with white flowers. In neither case was she sorry, and could not cry though she had imagined beforehand that she would.[166] Even in this case, then, where so much feeling was called forth, commiseration for the dead companion seems to have been almost wholly wanting.[167]

Footnote 166:

_The One I Knew Best_, chap. x.

Footnote 167:

_Cf._ Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 84 f.

No one, I think, will doubt that judged by our standards children are often profoundly and shockingly callous. But the question arises here, too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. It is one thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We are apt to assume that children know our sufferings instinctively, or at least that they can always enter into them when they are openly expressed. But this assumption is highly unreasonable. A large part of the manifestation of human suffering is unintelligible to a little child. He is oppressed neither by our anxieties nor by our griefs, just because these are to a large extent beyond his sympathetic comprehension.

We must remember, too, that there are moods and attitudes of mind favourable and unfavourable to sympathy. None of us are uniformly and consistently compassionate, and children are frequently the subject of moods which exclude the feeling. They are impelled by their superabundant nervous energy to wild romping activity, they are passionately absorbed in their play, they are intensely curious about the many new things they see and hear of. These dominant impulses issue in mental attitudes which are indifferent to the spectacle of others’ troubles.

Again, where an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to spy something besides the sadness. The little girl already spoken of saw the prettiness of the death-room rather than its mournfulness. A teacher once told her class of the death of a class-mate. There was of course a strange stillness, which one little girl presently broke with a loud laugh. The child is said to have been by no means unemotional, and the laugh not a ‘nervous’ one. The odd situation—the sudden hush of a class—had affected childish sensibilities more than the distressing announcement.

One other remark by way of saving clause here. It is by no means true that children are always unaffected by the sad and sorrowful things in life. The first acquaintance with death, as we know from a number of published reminiscences, has sometimes shaken a child’s whole being with an infinite, nameless sense of woe.[168]

Footnote 168:

See, for example, the record of the impression produced by a parent’s death left by Steele in the _Tatler_, and George Sand in her autobiography. No doubt, as Tolstoi’s reminiscences tell us, a good deal of straining after emotion and vain affectation may mingle with such childish sorrow.

Children, says the misopædist, are not only unfeeling where we look for sympathy and kindness, they are positively unkind, their unkindness amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the brute in the child is emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is here understood cold-blooded infliction of pain. “Cet âge,” wrote La Fontaine of childhood, “est sans pitié.” The idea that children, especially boys, are cruel in this sense is, I think, a common one.

This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. I have heard of one little girl who was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make attempts to smash its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The baby, it is comforting to know, was not really hurt by this precocious explosion of infanticidal impulse—perhaps the smashing was more than half a "pretence"—and the little girl has since grown up to be a kind-hearted woman.

Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child’s dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of a child’s cruelty.

At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious intention in a child’s treatment of animals. The little girl M. when just a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. The little girl described by Miss Shinn would when two years old run up to a dog and jerk his ear till he snapped at her, and on one occasion resolutely thrust her hand into a bush to seize pussy, minding not the scratches.[169] Do we not see in this mauling of animals, even when it brings the child himself pain, evidences of a rooted determination to plague, and of a fierce delight in plaguing?

Footnote 169:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, pt. ii., p. 149 f.

The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too difficult a one to be discussed here. I will only say that whatever the cruelty of adults may be children’s so-called cruelty towards animals is very far from being a pure delight in the sight of suffering. The torments to which a child will subject a long-suffering cat are, I suspect, due not to a clear intention to inflict pain, but to the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate the pet animal. He feels he must have the pet, no matter at what cost to himself: of the cost to his victim he does not think. The stamping on the kittens was perhaps merely a childish way of holding them fast. Such actions are a manifestation of that odd mixture of sociability and love of power which makes up a child’s attachment to the lower animals.

The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an explanation, then gave it himself: ‘Mr. Fy dom (gone) to by-by’. But he would not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently remained and he continued uneasy about it." Here we have, I think, the instinctive attitude of a child towards the outcome of his destructive impulse. This impulse, which, as we know, becomes more clearly destructive when experience has taught what result will follow, is not necessarily cruel in the sense of including an idea of the animal’s suffering. Animal movement, especially that of tiny things, has something exciting and provoking about it. The child’s own activity and the love of power which is bound up with it impel him to arrest the movements of small manageable things. This is the meaning, I suspect, of the fascination of the fly on the window-pane, and of tiny creeping things, and especially, perhaps, of the worm with its tangle of wriggling movement. The cat’s prolonged chase of the mouse, into which, as we have seen, something of a dramatic make-believe enters, probably owes its zest to a like delight in the realisation of power.

Along with this love of power there goes often something of a child’s fierce untamable curiosity. A boy of four, finding that his mother was shocked at hearing him express a wish to see a pigeon which a dog had just killed, remarked: ‘Is it rude to look at a dead pigeon? I want to see where its blood is.’ I am disposed to think that the crushing of flies and moths and the pulling of worms to pieces and so forth are prompted by this curiosity. The child wants to see where the blood is, what the bones are like, how the wings are fastened in, and so forth. Perez tells of a little boy, afterwards an artist, who used to crush flies between the leaves of a book for the sake of the odd designs resulting.[170] By such various lines of concentrated activity does the child-mind overlook the suffering which it causes.

Footnote 170:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 60.

A like combination of love of power and of curiosity seems to underlie other directions of childish destructiveness, as the breaking of toys and the pulling of flowers to pieces. In certain cases, as in C.’s annihilation of a garden of peonies, the love of power or effect may overtop and outlive the curiosity, becoming a sort of iconoclastic fury.[171]

Footnote 171:

Ruskin tells us that when a child he pulled flowers to pieces ‘in no morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder’ (_Præterita_, 88). Goethe gives an amusing account of his wholesale throwing of crockery out of the window inspired by the delight of watching the droll way in which it was smashed on the pavement.

I think, then, that we may give the little child the benefit of the doubt, and not assign his rough handling of sentient things to a wish to inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which he is clearly aware. Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and delight in showing one’s power and producing an effect, seem sufficient to explain most of the alleged brutality of the first years.

Probably the same considerations apply to those milder forms of annoyance which children are apt to practise on other people and animals alike. That a child early develops a decided taste for ‘teasing’ is, I think, certain. But whether carried out by word or by action this early teasing seems to be in the main the outcome of the love of power, the impulse to impose one’s will on other creatures. We must remember that these wee beings feel themselves so subject to others’ power that they are very naturally driven to use all opportunities of shaking off the shackles, and exercising for themselves a little domination. Cruelty, that is the impulse to inflict pain, where it appears, grows up later, and though it has its roots in this love of power ought to be distinguished from it.

We have now looked at one of the dark sides of the child and have found that though it is unpleasant it is not so hideous as it has been painted. Children are no doubt apt to be passionate, ferocious in their anger, and sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is consolatory to reflect that their savageness is not quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate and calculating egoism.

_Germs of Altruism._

It now remains to point out that there is another and counterbalancing side. If a child has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits of tenderness. If he is now dead to others’ sufferings he is at another time taken with a most amiable childish concern for their happiness. In order to be just to him we must recognise both sides.

It must not be forgotten here that children are instinctively attachable and sociable in so far as they show in the first weeks that they get used to and dependent on the human presence and are miserable when this is taken from them. The stopping of an infant’s crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of its mother or nurse shows this.

In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser realisation of this oneness comes in the case of the dog and of the child alike after separation. The wild caressing leaps of the quadruped are matched by the warm embracings of the little biped. Only that here, too, we see in the child traces of a deeper human consciousness. A girl of thirteen months was separated from her mother during six weeks. On the mother’s return she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave her restored companion for a minute. The little girl M. when nearly seventeen months old received her father after only five days’ absence with special marks of tenderness, rushing up to him, smoothing and stroking his face and giving him all the toys in the room.

This sense of joining on one’s existence to another’s is not sympathy in its highest form, that is, a conscious realisation of another’s feelings, but it is a kind of sympathy after all, and may grow into something better. This we may see in the return of the childish heart to its resting place after the estrangement introduced by ‘naughtiness’. The relenting after passion, the reconciliation after punishment, are these not the experiences which help to raise the dumb animal sympathy of the first months into a true human sense of fellowship? But this part of the development of sympathy belongs to another chapter.

Sympathy, it has been said, is a kind of imitation, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A dog will howl piteously in response to another dog’s howl: similarly a child of nine and a half months has been known to cry violently when his mother or father pretended to cry.

One curious manifestation of this early imitative sympathy is the impulse to do what the mother does and to be what she is. Much of early imitative play shows this tendency. It is more than a cold distant copying of another’s doings: it is full of the warmth of attachment, and it is entered on as a way of getting nearer to the object of attachment. Out of this, too, there springs the germ of a higher sympathy. It will be remembered that Laura Bridgman bound the eyes of her doll with a bandage similar to the one she herself wore. Through this sharing in her own experience the doll became more a part of herself. Conversely, a child, on finding that her mother’s head ached, began imitatively to make-believe that her own head was hurt. Sympathy rests on community of experience, and it is a curious fact that a child, before he can fully sympathise with another’s trouble and make it his own by the sympathetic process itself, should thus try by a kind of childish acting to realise this community of experience.

From this imitative acting of another’s trouble, so as to share in it, there is but a step to a direct sympathetic apprehension of it. How early a genuine manifestation of concern about another’s suffering begins to show itself it is almost impossible to say. Children probably differ greatly in this respect. I have, however, one case which is so curious that I cannot forbear to quote it. It reaches me, I may say, by a thoroughly trustworthy channel.

A baby aged one year and two months was crawling on the floor. An elder sister, Katherine, aged six, who was working at a wool mat could not get on very well and began to cry. Baby looked up and grunted, ‘on! on!’ and kept drawing its fingers down its own cheeks. Here the aunt called Miss Katherine’s attention to baby, a device which merely caused a fresh outburst of tears; whereupon baby proceeded to hitch itself along to Katherine with many repetitions of the grunts and the mimetic finger-movements. Katherine, fairly overcome by this, took baby to her and smiled; at which baby began to clap its hands and to crow, tracing this time the course of the tears down its sister’s cheeks.

This pretty nursery-picture certainly seems to illustrate a rudiment of genuine fellow-feeling. Similarly it is hard not to recognise the signs of a sincere concern when a child of two runs spontaneously and kisses the place that is hurt, even though it is not to be doubted that the graceful action has been learnt through imitation.

Very sweet and sacred to the mother are the first clear indications of the child’s concern for herself. These are sporadic, springing up rarely, and sometimes, as it looks to us, capriciously. Illness, and temporary removal are a common occasion for the appearance of a deeper tenderness in the young heart. A little boy of three spontaneously brought his story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the same child used to follow her about after her recovery with all the devotion of a little knight.

Valuable and entertaining, too, are the first attempts of the child at consolation. A little German girl aged two and a half who had just lost her brother seemed very indifferent for some days. She then began to reflect and to ask about her playmate. On seeing her mother’s distress she proceeded in truly childish fashion to comfort her; ‘Never mind, mamma, you will get a better boy. He _was_ a ragamuffin’ (‘Er _war_ ein Lump’). The co-existence of an almost barbarous indifference for the dead brother with practical sympathy for the living mother is characteristic here.[172]

Footnote 172:

A pretty example of such childish consolation is given by P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 94.

A deeper and more thoughtful sympathy comes with years and reflective power. Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes the awakener of this. ‘Are you old, mother?’ asked a boy of five. ‘Why?’ she answered. ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘the older you are the nearer you are to dying.’ This child had once before said he hoped his mother would not die before him, and this suggests that thought of his own forlorn condition was in his mind here: yet we may hope that there was something of disinterested concern too.[173]

Footnote 173:

_Cf._ P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 87.