Part 39

All this is dreadful enough, yet it is probable that many children go through a longer or shorter stage of rebellion, who afterwards turn out to be well-behaved, respectable persons. And, as his father is not slow to point out, C., even in these rebellious outbursts, showed the rudiments of moral feeling in the shape of a deep sensitiveness to injury and more definitely to unjust treatment. Thus we are told (middle of seventh month) that when his sister eats the leavings of his pudding or other dainty he shows a well-marked moral indignation. He gets very excited at such moments, his eyes dilating, his voice rising in pitch, and his arms executing a good deal of violent gesticulation. When scolded by his mother for doing a thing which he has only appeared to do, he will turn and exclaim, with all the signs of righteous wrath, “Mamma naughty say dat!” One day (end of seventh month) when, after being very naughty, his mother had to carry him upstairs, he broke out into a more than usually violent fit of crying. His mother asked him what he meant by making such a noise when being carried upstairs; whereupon he replied, “’Cause you carry me up like a pig” (as represented in one of his picture-books).

There is nothing particularly meritorious in all this, yet it is significant as showing how, in this third year, the consciousness of self was developing not only on its intellectual but on its moral side, as a sense of personal dignity and rightful claim, which, after all, is a very essential element in a normal and robust moral sentiment.

_Fourth Year._

The reports of progress during the fourth year are still scantier than their predecessors: perhaps the observer was getting tired of his half-playful work. Nevertheless, there are some interesting observations in this chapter also.

C.’s observation seems to have been decidedly good, to judge by an incident that occurred at the end of the third week of the year. He had been to the Zoological Gardens. His father asked him about the seals, and more particularly as to whether they had legs. He answered at once, “No, papa, they had foot-wings”. The chronicler is evidently proud of this feat, and thinks it would have satisfied Professor Huxley himself. But allowance must here as elsewhere be made for parental pride.

The child’s colour-sense, we are told about the same time, was developing quite satisfactorily. He could now (end of fifth week) discriminate and name intermediate shades of colour. Thus he called a colour between yellow and green quite correctly ‘yellowish green,’ and this way of naming colours was, so far as the father could ascertain, quite spontaneous. Later (three and a half months), on being questioned as to violet, which he first said was blue, he replied correcting his first answer, “and purple”. Later on (beginning of last quarter), he could distinguish a ‘purplish blue’ from a “purplish pink”.

Along with a finer observation we find a more active and inventive imagination. It was during this year that he began to create fictitious persons and animals, and to surround himself with a world, unseen by others, but terribly real to himself.

About the middle of the third month he made his first essay in story-fabrication. Considering that he had a lively and imaginative elder sister, who was constantly regaling him with fairy and other stories, this argues no particular precocity. His first style in fiction was crude enough. He would pile up epithets in a way that makes the most florid of journalistic diction seem tame by comparison. Thus he would begin the description of a dog by laying on a miscellaneous pile of colour-adjectives, blue, red, green, black, white, and so forth. With a similar disregard for verisimilitude and concentration of aim on strong effect, he would pile up the agony in a story, relating, for example, how the dog that had killed a rabbit (“bunny”) had his head beaten off, was then drowned, and so on, through a whole Iliad of canine calamity. Here is another example of his literary sensationalism (middle of ninth month). While he and his father were taking a walk in the country, where the family was staying, they found the feathers and bones of a bird in a tiny cleft in the tree. The father thereupon began to weave for him a little story about the unfortunate bird, how it had taken shelter there one cold winter’s day weary and hungry, and had grown too weak to get away. This did not satisfy the strong palate of our young poet, who proceeded to improve on the tragedy. “P’haps a snake there, p’haps dicky bird flew there one cold winter day and snake ate it up, and then spit it out again,” and so forth. “P’haps (he ended up) he (the bird) thought there was nothing but wind (air) there.”

He had, of course, his super-sensible world, made up of mysterious beings of fairy-like nature, who, like the spirits of primitive folk-lore, were turned to account in various ways. The following incident (seven months one week) may illustrate the _modus operandi_ of the child’s myth-making impulse. He was eagerly looking forward to going to a circus. His father told him that if it rained he would not be able to go, for nobody could drive away the rain. Whereupon he instantly remarked: “The Rainer can”. His father asked him who this wonderful person was, and he replied: "A man who lives in the forest—_my_ forest—and has to drive rain away". The expression “drive away” used by the father had been enough to give this curious turn to his fancy.

His fairy-world was concocted from a medley of materials drawn from his observations of animals, his experiences at the circus, including the ladies in beautifully tinted short dresses, whom, with childish awe, he named ‘fairies,’ and the book-lore that his sister was imparting to him from _Stories of Uncle Remus_, and other favourites. In the ninth month he got into the way of talking of his fairy-world, of the invisible fairies, horses, rabbits, and so forth, to which he gave a local habitation in the wall of his bedroom. When in a difficulty he thinks his fairies can help him out. Nothing is too wonderful for their powers: they can even solace his pitiful heart by making a dead dog alive again. For the rest, like other imaginative children, he peoples the places he knows, especially dark and mysterious ones, with imaginary beings. Thus one day, on walking in a wood with his mother, he was overheard by her talking to himself dreamily in this wise: “Here there used to be wolves, but long, long time ago”.

It is noticeable that at this same period of his myth-making activity he began to speak of his dreams. He evidently takes these dream-pictures for sensible realities, and when relating a dream insists that he has actually seen the circus-horses and fairies which appear to him when asleep. Possibly, writes the father, this dreaming, as in the case of the primitive race, had much to do in developing his intense belief in a supernatural world. It may be added that during this same period he was in the habit of seeing the forms of his animals, as lions, “gee-gees,” in such irregular and apparently unsuggestive groupings of line as those made by the cracks in the ceiling of his nursery.[323]

Footnote 323:

Compare above, p. 28 ff.

There is little to note in the way of verbal invention. Here is one amusing specimen (third week of third month). His father asked him whether his toy-horse was tired, whereupon he answered: ‘No, I make him untired’. This leads off the writer to an abstruse logical discussion of “negative terms,” and how it comes about that we do not all of us talk in C.’s fashion and say ‘untired,’ ‘unfatigued’. Another quaint invention was the use of ‘think’ as a noun. It was funny, writes the father, to hear him rejecting his sister’s statements by the contemptuous formula: “That’s only your thinks”.

His understanding was slowly ripening in spite of his free indulgence in the intoxicating pleasures of the imagination. He could understand much that was said to him by the aid of a liberal application of metaphor. Thus one day (end of the year) his father when walking with him late in the evening in a park where sheep were grazing told him that animals did not want bed-clothes, but could lie on the grass wet with dew and afterwards be dried with the sun. He said: “Yes, the sun is their towel to make them dry”.

The subtleties of time were still too much for him. In the fourth month of the year when his sister was narrating an incident of the evening before and used the term ‘yesterday,’ he corrected her saying: “No, E., last night”. Yet he was now beginning to penetrate into the mysteries of the subject. His father happened one day (end of seventh month) to speak of to-morrow. C. then asked: “When is to-morrow? To-morrow morning?” He then noticed that his hearers were remarking on his question, and proceeded to expound his own view of these wonderful things. “There are two kinds of to-morrow, to-morrow morning and this morning;” and then added with the sagest of looks: “To-morrow morning is to-morrow _now_”.

At this the father tells us both he and the mother were sorely puzzled, and if one may be allowed to read between the lines, it is not improbable that the latter must have indulged in some such exclamation as this: “There! this comes of your stimulating the child’s brains too much”. However this be, it is certain that the observer’s mind was greatly exercised about this dark and oracular deliverance of the child. What could he have meant? At length he bethought him that the child was unable as yet to think of pure abstract time. To-morrow had to be filled in with some concrete experience, wherefore his wishing to define it as “to-morrow _morning_” with the interesting experiences of the early hours of the day. And if “to-morrow” means for his mind to-morrow’s experience, he is quite logical in saying that it becomes to-day’s _experience_. Whether the father has here caught the subtle thread of childish thought may be doubted.[324] Who among the wisest of men could be sure of seizing the precise point which the child makes such praiseworthy effort to render intelligible to us?

Footnote 324:

Compare what was said above, p. 119.

It would appear as if C. were still rather muddled about numbers. One day (end of third month) he was looking at some big coloured beads on a necklace, and touching the biggest he said to his mother: “These are six,” then some smaller ones: “these five,” then some still smaller ones: “these four,” and so on. He was apparently failing as yet to distinguish number from that other mode of quantity which we call magnitude.

The use of the word “self” at this time showed that it had reference mainly to the body, and apparently to the central trunk. Thus one evening towards the end of the eleventh month, after being put to bed, he was heard by his mother crying out peevishly. Asked by her what was the matter he answered, “I can’t get my hands out of the way of myself”; which, being interpreted by his mother, was his way of saying that he could not wriggle about and get into cool places (the evening was a warm one) as he would like to do.

As might be inferred from his essays in fictitious narrative, he was getting quite an expert in the matter of assertion. It was odd sometimes, observes the journal, to hear the guarded manner in which he would proffer a statement. Thus, on one occasion (beginning of twelfth month), he reported to his father, who had been from home for some days, that he had been behaving quite satisfactorily during his absence, and then added cautiously, “I did not see mamma punish me, anyhow”.

During this year he followed up his questioning relentlessly, often demanding the reasons of things, as children are wont to do, in a sorely perplexing fashion. His interrogatory embraced all manner of objects, both of sense-perception and of thought. Thus he once asked his mother (seventh month) how it was that he could put his hand through water and not through the soap. A matter that came to puzzle him especially just now was growth. Thus, when told by his father (tenth month) that a little tree would grow big by-and-by, he asked, "How is it that everything grows—flowers, trees, horses, and people?" or, as he worded it a few days later, “How can trees and sheep grow without anybody making them?” He seems now (notes the father) to have given up his belief in the growth of lifeless things. The inequalities of size among fully grown things were also a puzzle to him. Thus, when just four years old, he was much concerned to know why ponies did not grow big like other horses.[325]

Footnote 325:

Compare what was said above, pp. 88, 104.

The father must doubtless at this time have had his hands full in satisfying the intellectual cravings of the child. But, happily, the small inquirer would sometimes come forward to help out the explanation. One day (end of the year) his father, when walking out with him, pointed to a big dray-horse and said: “That is a strong horse”. On which the child observed: “Ah! that horse can gallop fast”. He was then told that heavy horses did not go fast. He looked puzzled for a moment and then asked: “Do you mean can’t lift themselves up?” “Had he,” asks the father, “noticed that when weighted with thick clothes or other _impedimenta_ he was less springy, and so found his way, as is the manner of children, from his own experience to explaining the apparent contradiction of the strong and slow horse?”

Other questionings were less amenable to purposes of instruction. He would often get particularly thoughtful immediately after going to bed, and put posers to his mother. For example, one evening (tenth month) he asked in his slow, earnest way, “Where was I a hundred years ago?” and then more precisely, “Where was I before I was born?” These are, as everybody knows, stock questions of childhood, and, perhaps, are hardly worth recording. It is otherwise with a curious poser which he set his father about the middle of the last month: “When are all the days going to end, papa?” It is a pity that the diary does not record the answer given to the question. In lieu of this we have the customary pedantic style of speculation about the “concept” of infinity with references to Sir W. Hamilton and I don’t know what other profound metaphysicians. The answer, if any was attempted, does not appear to have been very satisfactory to Master C., for we read further on that more than three months after this date he put the same question about all the days ending to his mother.

With this questioning about the causes of things there went much assigning of reasons. By the end of the fourth month, it is remarked, he was getting more accurate in his thinking, substituting limited generalisations such as, “Some people do this,” for the first hasty and sweeping ones. He appears, further, to have grown much more ready in finding reasons, bringing out “’cause” (because) on all manner of occasions, much to his own satisfaction and hardly less to that of his observant father. He continued, it is added, to display the greatest ingenuity in finding reasons for his own often capricious-looking behaviour, and especially in discovering excuses whereby a veil of propriety might be thrown over actions which he knew full well would, if left naked, have a naughty look.

The tendency to give life to things observable in the last year was less marked, but broke out now and again, as when sitting one day (beginning of tenth month) on his chair on a loose cushion and wriggling about as his manner was, he felt the cushion slipping from under him and exclaimed: “Hullo! I do b’lieve this cushion is alive. It moves itself.” About a month after this the father set about testing the state of his mind by asking him whether trees did not feel pain when they were cut. This “leading question” was not to entrap Master C., who answered with something of contempt in his tone: “No, they only made of wood”. He was not so sure about dead rabbits, however, saying first “yes” and then “no”.

The intricate relations of things continued to trouble his mind. His father chanced one day (end of eleventh month) to remark at table that C. did not take his milk so nicely as he used to do. C. pondered this awhile and then said: “It’s funny that little babies behave better than big boys. They don’t know so much as boys.” From which the father appears to have inferred that children, like certain Greek philosophers, are wont to identify virtue with cognition.

There are not many brilliant strokes of childish rationality to record during this year. It is worth noting, perhaps, that when just seven months and one week of the year had passed, he showed that he had found his own way to an axiomatic truth familiar to students of geometry. He had been to the circus the day before, where a gorgeous pantomimic spectacle had greatly delighted him. He talked to his father of the beautiful things, and among others, of “the fairies going up in the air”. His father asked him how they were able to fly. Whereupon with that good-natured readiness to enlighten the darkness of grown-up people which makes the child the most charming of instructors, he proceeded to explain in this wise: “They had wings, you know. Angels have wings like birds, and fairies are like angels, and so you see fairies are like birds.”

The first development of reason in the child is apt to be trying to parents and others, on account not only of the thick hail-like pelting of questions to which it gives rise, but still more, perhaps, of the circumstance that the young reasoner will so readily turn his new instrument to a confusing criticism of his elders. The daring interference of childish dialectic with moral discipline in C.’s case has already been touched on. Sometimes he would follow up a series of questions so as to put his logical antagonist into a corner, very much after the manner of the astute Socrates. Here is an example of this highly inconvenient mode of dialectical attack (middle of seventh month). He was at this time like other children, much troubled about the killing of animals for food. Again and again he would ask with something of fierce impatience in his voice: “_Why_ do people kill them?” On one occasion he had plied his mother with these questionings. He then contended that people who eat meat must like animals to be killed. Finally, to clench the matter, he turned on his mother and asked: “Do _you_ like them to be killed?” Here is another example of his persistent dialectical attack (end of eleventh month). A small caterpillar happening to drop on the shoulder of the father, the mother expressed the common dislike for these creatures. C. was just now championing the whole dumb creation against hard-hearted man, and he at once saw his opportunity. ‘Why,’ he demanded in his peremptory catechising tone, ‘don’t you like caterpillars?’ To which the mother, amused perhaps with his grave argumentative manner, thought to escape the attack by answering playfully: “Because they make the butterflies”. But there was no room for jocosity in C.’s mind when it was a matter of liking or disliking a living creature. So he followed up his questioning with the true Socratic irony, asking: “Why don’t you like butterflies?” On this both the parents appear to have laughed; but he was not to be upset, and ignoring the patent subterfuge of the butterfly returned to the caterpillar. “Caterpillars,” he observed thoughtfully, “don’t make a noise.” He had doubtless generalised that the pet aversions of his parents, more especially his father, were dogs, cocks and other noise-producing animals. Whether he returned to the subject of the caterpillar is not stated. Perhaps his mother’s dislike for the wee soft noiseless thing was to be added to the stock of unexplained childish mysteries.

Passing to manifestations of feeling, we have a curious note on a new emotional expression. It seems that when a suckling the child had got into the way of accompanying the bliss of an ambrosial meal by soft caressing movements of the fore-finger along the mother’s eyebrows. When three years and ten months old he was sitting on his father’s lap in one of his softer moods when he touched this parent’s eyebrows in the same dainty caressing manner. The observer suspects that we have here an example of a movement becoming an emotional sign by association and analogy. At first associated with the _ne plus ultra_ of infantile happiness it came to indicate the oncoming of any analogous state of feeling, and especially of the luxurious mood of tenderness.

Two or three curious examples of fear are recorded in this chapter. In the second week of the fourth month he went with his mother to the photographer’s to have his likeness taken. When he reached the house he strongly objected, clung to his mother and showed all the signs of a true fear. On entering the room he told the photographer in his quiet authoritative manner that he was not going to have his likeness taken. The process, an instantaneous one, was accomplished, however, without his knowing it. Next morning when asked by his sister how he liked having his likeness taken, he answered snappishly: “Haven’t had my likeness taken. Don’t you see I can talk?” The father suspects that the child feared he would be transformed by the black art of the camera into a speechless photograph. It is curious that savages appear to show a similar dread of the photographic camera. Thus, in a recent number of the _Graphic_ (November, 1893) there was a drawing of Europeans and natives having their likeness taken in a camp in South Africa. One native, terror-struck, is hiding behind a tree so as not to be taken. The text explains that the drawing represents a real incident, and that the fear of the native came from his belief that there is an evil spirit in the camera, and adds that, on finding out that after all he was in the group, the poor fellow instantly disappeared from the camp. Is there not for all of us something uncanny in that black box turned towards us bent on snatching from us the film or image of our very self?

The other instances of C.’s fear point to a like superstitious frame of mind at this time. Thus in the last month he happened one day to see some white linen swaying in the breeze on a hill not far off. He took it for a light and was afraid, saying it was a wolf. This was, we are told, his first experience of ghosts. At the same date he showed fear when passing through a wood with his father about nine o’clock on a summer evening. Though his father was carrying him he said he could not help being afraid of the dark. He fancied there must be wolves in the dark. He afterwards informed his father that his sister had told him so. The wolf appears at this time (by a quaint confusion of zoology) to have been the descendant of his old _bête noire_, the “bow-wow”. “Have we,” writes the father, “a sort of parallel here to the superstition of the were-wolf so familiar in folk-lore?”

A new development of angry outburst is recorded. In the third month, to the horror of his parents and the disgust of his sister, he positively took to biting others, an action, it is needless to say, which he could not have picked up from his highly respectable human environment. Was this, asks the father, with praiseworthy detachment of mind, an instinct, a survival of primitive brute-like habit, and happily destined in the case of a child born into a civilised society, like other instincts, as pilfering, to be rudimentary and transient?