Part 23
This suggestion often combines with other forces. Here is a good example. A little American girl, sent into the oak shrubbery to get a leaf, saw a snake, which so frightened her that she ran home without the leaf. As cruel fate would have it she met her brothers and told them she had seen a ‘’sauger’. “They knew (writes the lady who recalls this reminiscence of her childhood) the difference between snakes and their habits, and, boy-like, wanted to tease me, and said ‘’Twas no ’sauger—it didn’t have a red ring round its neck, now, did it?’ My heated imagination saw just such a serpent as soon as their words were spoken, and I declared it had a ring about ‘its neck’.” In this way she was led on to say that it had scars and a little bell on its neck, and was soundly rated by her brothers as a ‘liar’.[183] Here we have a case of “illusion of memory” induced by suggestion acting on a mind made preternaturally sensitive by the fear from which it had not yet recovered. If there was a germ of mendacity in the case it had its source in the shrinking from the brothers’ ridicule, the wish not to seem utterly ignorant about these boyish matters, the snakes. Yet who would say that such swift unseizable movements of feeling in the dim background of consciousness made the child’s responses lies in the proper sense of the word?
Footnote 183:
Sara E. Wiltshire, _The Christian Union_, vol. xl., No. 26.
It seems paradoxical, yet is, I believe, indisputable, that a large part of childish untruth comes upon the scene in connexion with moral authority and discipline. We shall see by-and-by that unregenerate child-nature is very apt to take up the attitude of self-defence towards those who administer law and inflict punishment. Very little children brought face to face with restraint and punishment will ‘try on’ these ruses. Here are one or two illustrations from the notes on the little girl M. When seventeen and a half months old she threw down her gloves when wheeled in her mail-cart by her mother. The latter picked them up and told her not to throw them away again. She was at first good, then seemed to deliberate and finally called out: ‘Mamma, Bubbo’ (dog). The mother turned to look, and the little imp threw her gloves away again, laughing; there was of course no dog. The fib about the dog formed part of a piece of childish make-believe, of an infantile comedy. It was hardly more when about two months later, after she had thrown down and broken her tea-things, and her mother had come up to her, she said: ‘Mamma broke tea-things—beat mamma,’ and proceeded to beat her. In connexion with such little child-comedies there can be no talk of deception. They are the outcome of the childish instinct to upset the serious attitude of authority by a bit of fun.
The little stratagem begins to look more serious when the child gets artful enough to put the mother off the scent by a false statement. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother ‘monkey,’ and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: “I said I was a monkey”. In some cases the child does not wait to be questioned. A little girl mentioned by Compayré, being put out by something the mother had done or said, cried: ‘Nasty!’ (Vilaine!) then after a significant silence, corrected herself in this wise, ‘Dolly nasty’ (Poupée vilaine). The skill with which this transference was effected without any violence to grammar argues a precocious art.[184]
Footnote 184:
Perez gives a similar story, only that the epithet ‘vilaine’ was here transferred to ‘l’eau’. _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 53.
Our moral discipline may develop untruth in another way. When the punishment has been inflicted and the governor, relenting from the brutal harshness, asks: ‘Are you sorry?’ or ‘Aren’t you sorry?’ the answer is exceedingly likely to be ‘No,’ even though this is in a sense untrue. More clearly is this lying of obstinacy seen where a child is shut up and kept without food. Asked: ‘Are you hungry?’ the hardy little sinner stifles his sensations and pluckily answers ‘No,’ even though the low and dismal character of the sound shows that the untruth is but a half-hearted affair.
I have tried to show how a child’s untruths may be more than half “playing,” how when they are serious assertions they may involve a measure of self-deception, and how even when consciously false they may have their origin in excusable circumstances and feelings. In urging all this I do not wish to deny the statement that children wall sometimes deliberately invent a lie from a base motive, as when a girl of three seeing her little brother caressed by her mother for some minutes and feeling herself neglected fabricated the story that ‘Henri’ had been cruel to the parrot.[185] Yet I am disposed to look on such mean falsehoods as exceptional if not abnormal.
Footnote 185:
Perez, _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 54.
There is much even yet to be done in clearing up the _modus operandi_ of children’s lies. How quick, for example, is a child to find out the simple good-natured people, as the servant-maid, or gardener, who will listen to his romancing and flatter him by appearing to accept it all as gospel. More significant is the fact that intentional deception is apt to show itself towards certain people only. There is many a school-boy who would think it no dishonour to say what is untrue to those he dislikes, especially by way of getting them into hot water, though he would feel it mean and base to lie to his mother or his father, and bad form to lie to the head-master. Similar distinctions show themselves in earlier stages, and are another point of similarity between the child and the savage whose ideas of truthfulness seem to be truthfulness for _my_ people only. This is a side of the subject which would repay fuller inquiry.
Another aspect of the subject which has been but little investigated is the influence of habit in the domain of lying, and the formation of persistent permanent lies. The impulse to stick to an untruth when once uttered is very human, and in the case of the child is enforced by the fear of discovery. This applies not only to falsehoods foisted on persons in authority, but to those by which clever boys and girls take pleasure in befooling the inferior wits of others. In this way there grow up in the nursery and in the playground traditional myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded. Such invention is in part the outcome of the “pleasures of the imagination”. Yet it is probable that these are in all cases reinforced not only by the wish to produce an effect, but by the love of power which in the child not endowed with physical prowess is apt to show itself in hood-winking and practical joking.
Closely connected with the permanence of untruths is the contagiousness of lying. The propagation of falsehood is apt to be promoted by a certain tremulous admiration for the hardihood of the lie and by the impulses of the rebel which never quite slumber even in the case of fairly obedient children. I suspect, however, that it is in all cases largely due to the force of suggestion. The falsehood boldly announced is apt to captivate the mind and hold it under a kind of spell.
This effect of suggestion in generating falsehood is very marked in those pathological or semi-pathological cases where children have been led to give false testimony. It is now known that it is quite possible to provoke an illusion of memory in certain children between the ages of six and fifteen by simply affirming something in their hearing, whether they are in the waking or in the sleeping state, so that they are ready to state that they actually saw happen what was asserted.[186]
Footnote 186:
M. Motet was one of the first to call attention to the forces of childish imagination and the effects of suggestion in the false testimonies of children. _Les Faux Temoignages des Enfants devant la Justice_, 1887. The subject has been further elucidated by Dr. Bérillon.
So much as to the several manners and circumstances of childish lying. In order to understand still better what it amounts to, how much of conscious falsehood enters into it, we must glance at another and closely related phenomenon, the pain which sometimes attends and follows it.
There is no doubt that a certain number of children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering a falsehood. This is evidenced in the well-known devices by which the intelligence of the child thinks to mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally, ‘I do not mean it,’ ‘in my mind,’ or some similar palliative.[187] Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.
Footnote 187:
See Stanley Hall, _loc. cit._, p. 68 f.
The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie, which catches the conscience at its tenderest, has been remembered by many in later life. Here is a case. A lady friend remembers that when a child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but presently remembering the eyes, said: “Poor child, you could not see well”. She knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie. Miss Wiltshire, who tells the story of the mythical snake, gives another recollection which illustrates the keen suffering of a child when he becomes fully conscious of falsehood. She was as a small child very fond of babies, and had been permitted by her mother to go when invited by her aunt to nurse her baby cousin. One day wanting much to go when not invited, she boldly invented, saying that her aunt was busy and had asked her to spend an hour with the baby. ‘I went (she adds) not to the baby, but by a circuitous route to my father’s barn, crept behind one of the great doors, which I drew as close to me as I could, vainly wishing that the barn and the hay-stacks would cover me; then I cried and moaned I do not know how many hours, and when I went to bed I said my prayers between sobs, refusing to tell my mother why I wept.’[188]
Footnote 188:
_Loc. cit._
Such examples of remorse are evidence of a child’s capability of knowingly stating what is false. This is strikingly shown in Miss Wiltshire’s two reminiscences; for she distinctly tells us that in the case of her confident assertion about the imaginary snake with ring and bell, she felt no remorse as she was not conscious of uttering a lie.[189] But these sufferings of conscience point to something else, a sense of awful wickedness, of having done violence to all that is right and holy. How, it may be asked, does it happen that children feel thus morally crushed after telling a lie?
Footnote 189:
_Cf._ what Mrs. Fry says, _Uninitiated_ (‘A Discovery in Morals’).
Here is a question that can only be answered when we have more material. We know that among all childish offences lying is the one which is apt to be specially branded by theological sanctions. The physical torments with which the ‘lying tongue’ is threatened, may well beget terror in a timid child’s heart. I think it likely, too, that the awfulness of lying is thought of by children in its relation to the all-seeing God who, though he cannot be lied to, knows when we lie. The inaudible palliative words added to the lie may be an awkward child-device for putting the speaker straight with the all-hearing God.
Further inquiry is, however, needed here. Do children contract a horror of a lie when no religious terrors are introduced? Is there anything in the workings of a child’s own mind which would lead him to feel after his first lie as if the stable world were tumbling about his ears? Let parents supply us with facts here.
Meanwhile I will venture to put forth a conjecture, and will gladly withdraw it as soon as it is disproved.
So far as my inquiries have gone I do not find that children brought up at home and kept from the contagion of bad example do uniformly develop a lying propensity. Several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously propounded an untruth. I can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose.[190]
Footnote 190:
Stanley Hall, when he speaks of certain forms of lying as prevalent among children, is, as he expressly explains, speaking of children _at school_, where the forces of contagion are in full swing.
This being so, I distinctly challenge the assertion that lying is instinctive in the sense that a child, even when brought up among habitual truth tellers, shows an unlearned aptitude to say what he knows to be false. A child’s quick imitativeness will, of course, lead him to copy grown-up people’s untruths at a very early age.[191]
Footnote 191:
I seem to detect possible openings for the play of imitation in many of the indisputably conscious falsehoods reported by Perez, P. Lombroso, and others.
I will go further and suggest that where a child is brought up normally, that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends, quite apart from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth as what is customary. Consider for a moment how busily a child’s mind is occupied during the first years of linguistic performance in getting at the bottom of words, of fitting ideas to words when trying to understand others, and words to ideas when trying to express his own thoughts, and you will see that all this must serve to make truth, that is, the correspondence of statement with fact, to the child-mind something matter-of-course, something not to be questioned, a law wrought into the very usages of daily life which he never thinks of disobeying. We can see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the signs of a moral shock when they are confronted with assertions which, as they see, do not answer to fact. The child C. was highly indignant on hearing from his mother that people said what he considered false things about horses and other matters of interest: and he was even more indignant at meeting with any such falsity in one of his books for which he had all a child’s reverence. The idea of perpetrating a knowing untruth, so far as I can judge, is simply awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to the practice of truthful statement. May it, then, not well be that when a preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching sense of having violated law—law not wholly imposed by the mother’s command, but rooted in the very habits of social life? I think the conjecture is well worth considering.
Our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will develop into true cruelty and true lying. On the other hand, our study has shown us that these impulses are not the only ones. A child has promptings of kindness, which alternate, often in a capricious-looking way, with those of inconsiderate teasing and tormenting; and he has, I hold, side by side with the imaginative and other tendencies which make for untruthful statement, the instinctive roots of a respect for truth. These tendencies have not the same relative strength and frequency of utterance in the case of all children, some showing, for example, more of the impulse which makes for truth, others more of the impulse which makes for untruth. Yet in all children probably both kinds of impulse are to be observed.
I have confined myself to two of the moral traits of childhood. If there were time to go into an examination of others, as childish vanity, something similar would, I think, be found. Children’s vanity, like that of the savage, has been the theme of more than one chapter, and it is undoubtedly vast to the point of absurdity. Yet, side by side with these impulses to deck oneself, to talk boastfully, there exists a delightful childish candour which, if not exactly what we call modesty, is possibly something better.
We may then, perhaps, draw the conclusion that child-nature is on its moral side wanting in consistency and unity. It is a field of half-formed growths, some of which tend to choke the others. Certain of these are favourable, others unfavourable to morality. It is for education to see to it that these isolated propensities be organised into a system in which those towards the good become supreme and regulative principles.
VIII. UNDER LAW.
_The Struggle with Law._
In the last chapter we tried to get at those tendencies of child-nature which though they have a certain moral significance may in a manner be called spontaneous and independent of the institution of moral training. We will now examine the child’s attitude towards the moral government with which he finds himself confronted.
Here again we meet with opposite views. Children, say some, are essentially disobedient and law-breaking. A child as such is a rebel, delighting in nothing so much as in evading the rule which he finds imposed on him by others.
The view that children are instinctively obedient and law-abiding, has not, I think, been very boldly insisted on. A follower of Rousseau, at least, who sees only clumsy interference with natural development in our attempts to govern children, would say that child-nature must resist the artificial and cramping system which the disciplinarian imposes.
It seems, however, to be allowed by some that a certain number of children are docile and disposed to accept authority with its commands. According to these, children are either obedient or disobedient. This is perhaps the view of many mothers and pedagogues.
Here, too, it is probable that we try to make nature too simple. Even the latter view, in spite of its apparent wish to be discriminating, does not allow for the many-sidedness of the child, and for the many different ways in which the instincts of child-nature may vary.
Now it is worth asking whether, if the child were naturally disposed to look on authority as something wholly hostile, he would get morally trained at all. Physically mastered and morally cowed he might of course become; but this is not the same thing as being morally induced into a habit of accepting law and obeying it.
In inquiring into this matter we must begin by drawing a distinction. There is first the attitude of a child towards the governor, the parent or other guardian, and there is his attitude towards law as such. These are by no means the same thing, and a child of three or four begins to illustrate the distinction. He may seem to be lawless, opposed to the very idea of government, when in reality he is merely objecting to a particular ruler, and the kind of rule (or as the child would say, misrule) which he is carrying out.
Let us look a little into the non-compliant, disobedient attitude of children. As we have seen, their very liveliness, the abundance of their vigorous impulses, brings them into conflict with others’ wills. The ruler, more particularly, is a great and continual source of crossings and checkings. The child has his natural wishes and propensities. He is full of fun, bent on his harmless tricks, and the mother has to talk seriously to him about being naughty. How can we wonder at his disliking the constraint? He has a number of inconvenient, active impulses, such as putting things in disorder, playing with water, and so forth. As we all know, he has a duck-like fondness for dirty puddles. Civilisation, which wills that a child should be nicely dressed and clean, intervenes in the shape of the nurse and soon puts a stop to this mode of diversion. The tyro in submission, if sound in brain and limb, kicks against the restraint, yells, slaps the nurse, and so forth.
Such collisions are perfectly normal in the first years of life. We should not care to see a child give up his inclinations at another’s bidding without some little show of resistance. These conflicts are frequent and sharp in proportion to the sanity and vigour of the child. The best children, best from a biological point of view, have, I think, most of the rebel in them. Not infrequently these resistances of young will to old will are accompanied by more emphatic protests in the shape of slapping, pushing, and even biting. The ridiculous inequality in bodily powers, however, saves, or ought to save, the contest from becoming a serious physical struggle. The resistance where superior force is used can only resolve itself into a helpless protest, a vain shrieking or other utterance of checked and baffled impulse.
If instead of physical compulsion authority is asserted in the shape of a highly disagreeable command, a child, before obedience has grown into a habit, will be likely to disobey. If the nurse, instead of pulling the mite away from the puddle, bids him come away, he may assert himself in an eloquent ‘I won’t,’ or less bluntly, ‘I can’t come yet’. If he is very much in love with the puddle, and has a stout heart, he probably embarks on a tussle of words, in which ‘I won’t,’ or as the child will significantly put it ‘I mustn’t,’ is bandied with ‘you must!’ the nurse having at length to abandon the ‘moral’ method and to resort after all to physical compulsion.
Our sample-child has not, we will assume, yet got so far as to recognise and defer to a general rule about cleanliness. Hence it may be said that his opposition is directed against the nurse as propounding a particular command, and one which at the moment is excessively unpleasant. It is as yet not resistance to law as such, but rather to one specific interference of another will.
At the same time we may detect in some of this early resistance to authority something of the true rebel-nature, that is to say the love of lawlessness, and what is worse, perhaps, the obstinate recklessness of the law-breaker. The very behaviour of a child when another will crosses and blocks the line of his activity is suggestive of this. The yelling and other disorderly proceedings, do not they speak of the temper of the rioter, of the rowdy? And then, the fierce persistence in disobedience under rebuke, and the wild, wicked determination to face everything rather than obey, are not these marks of an almost Satanic fierceness of revolt? The thoroughly naughty child sticks at nothing. Thus a little offender of four when he was reminded by his sister—two years older—that he would be shut out from heaven retorted impiously, ‘I don’t care,’ adding: ‘Uncle won’t go—I’ll stay with him’.[192]
Footnote 192:
My correspondent, discreetly perhaps, does not explain why the uncle was selected as fellow-outcast.
This fierce noisy utterance of the disobedient and law-resisting temper is eminently impressive. Yet it is not the only utterance. If we observe children who may be said to show on the whole an outward submission to authority we shall discover signs of secret dissatisfaction and antagonism. The conflict with rule has not wholly ceased: it has simply changed its manner of proceeding, physical assault and riotous shouts of defiance being now exchanged for dialectic attack.