Part 22

This early consideration frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist you in little household occupations; and though love of activity and the pleasure of imitating no doubt count for much in these cases, we can, I think, safely set down something to the wish to be of use. This inference seems justified by the fact that such practical helpfulness is not always imitative. A little boy of two years and one month happened to overhear his nurse say to herself: ‘I wish that Anne would remember to fill the nursery boiler’. “He listened, and presently trotted off; found the said Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: ‘Nanna, Nanna!’ (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed to the boiler, and added: ‘Go dare, go dare,’ so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade her.”

With this practical ‘utilitarian’ sympathy there goes a quite charming wish to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. At an early age, too, a child tries to make himself agreeable by pretty and dainty courtesies. A little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: ‘Please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?’ Regard for another’s feelings was surely never more charmingly expressed than in the prayer that in rendering this little service the helper should not only be willing, but glad.

Just as there are these sporadic growths of affectionate concern and wish to please in relation to the mother and others, so there is ample evidence of kindness to animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world.

I have touched above on the vague alarms which this animal world has for tiny children. It is only fair to them to say that these alarms are for the most part transitory, giving place to interest, attachment and fellow-feeling. In a sense a child may be said to belong to the animal community, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s charming account of the Jungle prettily suggests. Has he not, indeed, at first more in common with the dog and cat, the pet rabbit or dormouse, than with that grown-up human community which is apt to be so preoccupied with things beyond his understanding, and in many cases, at least, to wear so unfriendly a mien? We must remember, too, that children as a rule know nothing of the prejudices, of the disgusts, which make grown people put animals so far from them. The boy C. was nonplussed by his mother’s horror of the caterpillar. A child has been known quite spontaneously to call a worm ‘beautiful’.

As soon as the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will take to an animal. A little boy of fifteen months quickly overcame his fright at the barking of his grandfather’s dog, and began to share his biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for his amusement. This mastery of fear by attachment takes a higher form when later on the child will stick to his dumb companion after suffering from his occasional fits of temper. Ruskin in his reminiscences gives a striking example of this triumph of attachment over fear. When five years old, he tells us, he was taken by the serving-man to see a favourite Newfoundland dog in the stable. The man rather foolishly humoured the child’s wish to kiss Leo (the dog) and lowered him so that his face came near the animal’s. Hereupon the dog, who was dining, resenting the interruption of his meal, bit out a piece of the boy’s lip. His only fear after this was lest the dog should be sent away.[174]

Footnote 174:

_Præterita_, pp. 105-6.

Children will further at a quite early age betray the germ of a truly humane feeling towards animals. The same little boy that bravely got over his fear of the dog’s barking would, when nineteen months old, begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street. More passionate outbursts of pity are seen at a later age. A boy five years and nine months had a kitten of which he was very fond. One day, after two or three days’ absence from the house, it came back with one foot much mutilated and the leg swollen, evidently not far from dying. “When (writes the mother) he saw it he burst into uncontrollable tears and was more affected than I have ever seen him. The kitten was taken away and drowned, and ever since (a month) he has shown great reluctance in speaking of it, and never mentions it to any one but those who saw the cat at the time. He says it is too sad to tell any one of it.” The boy C. when only four was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.

The indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their hearts. This is one of the most striking manifestations of the better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself.

It is sometimes asked why children should take animals to their bosoms in this fashion and lavish so much fellow-feeling on them. It seems easy to understand how they come to choose animals, especially young ones, as playmates, and now and again to be ruthlessly inconsiderate of their comfort in their boisterous gambols; but why should they be so affected by their sufferings and champion their rights so sturdily? I think the answer is not hard to find. The sympathy and love which the child gives to animals grow out of a sort of blind gregarious instinct, and this again seems to be rooted in a similarity of position and needs. As M. Compayré well says on this point: “He (the child) sympathises naturally with creatures which resemble him on so many sides, in which he finds wants analogous to his own, the same appetite, the same impulses to movement, the same desire for caresses. To resemble is already to love.”[175] I think, however, that a deeper feeling comes in from the first and gathers strength as the child hears about men’s treatment of animals, I mean a sense of a common danger and helplessness face to face with the human ‘giant’. The more passionate attachment of the child to the animal is the outcome of the wide-spread instinct of helpless things to band together. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years old: ‘Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the animals than to me’. ‘Perhaps I am,’ he replied, ‘you see they are not so well off as you are.’ May there not be something of this sense of banding and mutual defence on the animals’ side too? The idea does not look so absurd when we remember how responsive, how forbearing, how ready to defend, a dog will often show itself towards a ‘wee mite’ of a child. This same instinct to stand up for the helpless inferior shows itself in children’s attitude towards servants when scolded and especially when dismissed.[176]

Footnote 175:

_Op. cit._, p. 108.

Footnote 176:

Illustrations are given by Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 96 f.

The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, the child’s intercourse with his doll and his toy ‘gee gee’ is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude which is at once tender and corrective and has the enduring constancy of a maternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a doll, the wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, to make it look pretty, and to get it to behave nicely, and note the misery when it is missing, without acknowledging that in this plaything humanised by childish fancy, and brought by daily habit into the warmest intimacy of daily companionship, we have the focal meeting-point of the tender impulses of the child.

Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects in the inanimate world. The manifestations of pity for the falling leaves and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, referred to above, show how quick childish feeling is to detect what is sad in the look of things. Children have even been known to apply the commiserating vocable ‘poor’ to a torn paper figure, and to a bent pin. It seems fair to suppose that here, too, the more tender heart of the child saw occasion for pity.

It is worth noting that childish sorrow at the sufferings of things is sometimes so keen, that even artistic descriptions which contain a ‘cruel’ element are shunned. A little boy under four "is indignant (writes his mother) at any picture where an animal suffers. He has even turned against several of his favourite pictures—German Bilderbogen, because they are ‘cruel,’ as the bear led home with a corkscrew in his nose." The extreme manifestation of this shrinking from the representation of animal or human suffering is dislike for ‘sad stories’. The unsophisticated tender heart of the child can find no pleasure in horrors which appear to be the supreme delight of many an adult reader.

Here, however, it is evident, we verge on the confines of sentimental pity. It is to be remarked that highly imaginative children shed most tears over these fictitious sufferings. Children with more matter-of-fact minds and a practical turn are not so affected. Thus a mother writes of her two girls: ‘M. being the most imaginative is and always has been much affected by sad stories, especially if read to her with dramatic inflexions of voice. From two years old upwards these have always affected her to tears, whilst P. who is really the most tender-hearted and helpful, but has little imagination, never cries at sad stories, and when four years old explained to me that she did not mind them because she knew they didn’t really happen.’

It appears to me to be incontestable that in this spontaneous outgoing of fellow-feeling towards other creatures, human and animal, the child manifests something of a truly moral quality. C.’s stout and persistent championship of the London horses against the oppression of the bearing-rein had in it something of righteous indignation. The way in which his mind was at this period pre-occupied with animal suffering suggests that his sympathies with animals were rousing the first fierce protest against the wicked injustice of the world. The boy De Quincey got this first sense of the existence of moral evil in another way through his sympathy with a sister who, rumour said, had been brutally treated by a servant. He could not, he tells us, bear to look on the woman. It was not anger. ‘The feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering horror as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife.’[177]

Footnote 177:

_Autobiographical Sketches_, chap. i.

_Children’s Lies._

We may now turn to the other main charge against children, that of lying. According to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the manner born and equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even writers on childhood, by no means prejudiced against them, lean to the view that untruth is universal among children, and to some extent at least innate.[178]

Footnote 178:

See the quotations from Montaigne and Perez, given by Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 309 f.

Here, surely, there is need of discrimination. A lie connotes, or should connote, an assertion made with full consciousness of its untruth, and in order to mislead. It may well be doubted whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious. It is satisfactory to note a tendency to take a milder and more reasonable view of this infantile fibbing; and in what follows I can but follow up the excellent recent studies of Dr. Stanley Hall, and M. Compayré.[179]

Footnote 179:

Stanley Hall, “Children’s Lies,” _Amer. Journal of Psychology_, 1890; Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 309 ff.

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.