Part 41

The story about what he would do if his family were ship-wrecked suggests that self-sacrifice was as yet not a strong element in the boy’s moral constitution. Egoism, it might well seem, was still the foundation of his character. This egoism would peep out now and again in his talk. One day (middle of eighth month) when the family was lodging in a cottage his mother had reason to scold him for walking on the flower-beds in the cottage garden. Whereupon he answered: “It isn’t your garden, it’s Mr. G.’s”. To this the mother observed: “I know, dear, but I have to be all the more particular because it is not mine”; which observation drew forth the following: “I should think Mr. G. would be all the more particular because it is his”. It was evident, writes the father, from this somewhat cynical observation that caring for things and resenting any injury to them seemed to C. to devolve on the owner and on nobody else.

He himself certainly did repel any encroachment on his rights. Here is an amusing illustration. One day (the end of seventh month) he was playing on the Heath under the eye of his mother. He had put on one of the seats a lot of grass and sand as fodder for his wooden horse. While he went away for a minute a strange nurse and children arrived, making a perfectly legitimate use of the bench by seating themselves on it, and in order to get room brushing away the precious result of his foraging expedition. On coming back and seeing what had happened he turned to his mother and swelling with indignation exclaimed loudly: “What do you mean by it, letting these children move away my things?” Of course this was intended to intimidate the real culprits, the children. Finding that they were not abashed at this, but on the contrary were looking at one another with a look of high-bred astonishment, he turned to them and shouted: “What do you mean by it?” This outburst, observes the father, showed a preternatural heat of indignation, for in general he was very distant and reserved towards strange children.

Yet C. was very far from being wholly absorbed in himself and his own interests. It cannot be said indeed that self monopolised the intensest of his feelings, for he felt just as strongly for others too. There was, we are told, a marked development of sympathy during this year. His sister was now away from home at school, and the absence seems to have drawn out kindly feeling. So that when, on one occasion (middle of seventh month), his father and aunt were going to visit her, and to take her to the Crystal Palace, though he wanted dreadfully to go himself, he made a great effort, and in answer to his father’s question, what message he had for his sister, answered a little tremulously, “Give her my love,” and then, waxing more valiant, added, “I hope she will enjoy herself at Crystal Palace”.

Some months later (end of ninth month), he proved himself considerate for his father, whose repugnance to noises has already been alluded to. A man had come to repair a window and his father had been forced to stop his work and to go out. On his return C. met him in the garden and asked him loudly, evidently so that the man might hear, “Does that man disturb you, papa?” He had previously talked to his mother in an indignant way about the noises which disturbed his father. About a fortnight after this, on hearing some children make an uproar in the passage, he asked indignantly, “What are those children about, making papa not do his work?” “He was at this time,” writes the father, “transferring some of that chivalrous protection which he first bestowed on animals to his own kith and kin. He became to me just at this time something of a guardian angel.”

His compassion for the lower creation had meanwhile by no means lessened. Here is a story which shows how the killing of animals by human hands still tortured his young heart. One day (towards end of fourth month) he was looking at his beloved picture-book of animals. _Apropos_ of a picture of some seals he began a talk with his mother in the usual way by asking her a question.

C. “What are seals killed for, mamma?”

M. “For the sake of their skins and oil.”

C. (turning to a picture of a stag). “Why do they kill the stags? They don’t want _their_ skins, do they?”

M. “No, they kill them because they like to chase them.”

C. “Why don’t policemen stop them?”

M. “They can’t do that, because people are allowed to kill them.”

C. (loudly and passionately). “Allowed, allowed? People are not allowed to take other people and kill them.”

M. “People think there is a difference between killing men and killing animals.”

C. was not to be pacified this way. He looked woe-begone and said to his mother piteously, “You don’t understand me”. He added that he would tell his friend the Heath-keeper about these things.

The father observes on this: “There was something almost heart-breaking in that cry ‘You don’t understand me’. How can we, with minds blinded by our conventional habits and prejudices, hope to catch the subtle and divine light which is reflected from the untarnished mirror of a child’s mind?” Somehow, the father’s sentimental comments seem less out of place here. But already the boy’s wrestlings of spirit with the dreadful ‘must,’ which turns men into killers, were proving too much for his young strength. He was learning, sullenly enough, to adjust his eye to the inevitable realities. This accommodation of thought to stern necessity was illustrated by an incident which occurred at the end of the fourth month. He had had some leaden soldiers given him at Christmas. Some time after this he had been observed to break off their guns. His mother now asked him why he had broken them off. He replied: “Oh! that was when I didn’t know what soldiers were for, when I thought they were just naughty men who liked to kill people”. On his mother then asking him what he now thought soldiers were for, he explained: “Oh! when some people want to do harm to some _other_ people, then those other people must send their soldiers to fight them, to stop them from doing harm”.

One moral quality had, it seems, always been distinctly marked in C., _viz._, a scrupulous regard for truth. His father believes the child had never knowingly made a false statement, save playfully, when throwing for a moment the reins on the neck of fancy and allowing it to come dangerously near the confines of truth. This scrupulosity the father connects, reasonably enough, with certain intellectual qualities, as close observation and accurate description of what was observed. Sometimes this scrupulous veracity would display itself in a quaint form. One morning (end of tenth month) C. was obstinate and would not say his lesson to his mother, so that she had to threaten him with forfeiture of his toys till the lesson was got through. On this C. said rebelliously: “Very well, I won’t say them”. His mother then talked to him about his naughtiness. He grew very unhappy, and said sobbing and looking the very picture of misery: “It’s a good deal worse to break my promise than not to say my lesson”.

Another incident of about the same date throws a curious light on the quality of his moral feeling at this period. He had been out one afternoon in the garden with a girl companion of about his own age, and the two little imps between them had managed to strip that unpretending garden of its spring glory, to wit, about twenty buds of peonies. The sacrilege betrayed itself in C.’s red-dyed fingers. A condign chastisement was administered by the mother, and the culprit was sent to bed immediately after tea in the hope that solitude might bring reflexion and remorse. In order to ensure so desirable a result the mother before leaving him in bed enlarged on the heinousness of the offence. At last he began to get downright miserable, and the mother, expectant of a confession of guilt, overheard him say to himself: “I’m _so_ sorry I picked the flowers. I didn’t have half enough tea.” The next day, referring to his mischievous act, his mother happened to say: “You were not sorry for it at the time”. Whereupon he burst out in a contemptuous tone: “Eh! you didn’t suppose I was sorry at the time? I liked doing it.” “Shocking enough, no doubt,” writes the father on this in his characteristic manner, “yet may we not see in this defiant avowal of enjoyment in wrong-doing the germ of a true remorse, which in its essence is the resolute confronting of the lower by the higher self?”

His mind was still occupied about the mysteries of God, death, and heaven. Following the example of his sister he would occasionally on going to bed quite spontaneously say his prayers. One evening at the end of the eleventh month, having knelt down and muttered over some words, he asked his mother whether she had heard him. She said no, and he remarked that he had not wished her to hear. On her asking why not, he rejoined: “If anybody hears what I say perhaps God won’t listen to me,” which seems to suggest that talking to God was to him something particularly confidential, what he himself once described as telling another a “private secret”.[327]

Footnote 327:

Compare above, p. 283 f.

When his mother asked him what he had been praying for he said it was for a fine day on his birthday. He thought much of God as the maker of things, and wondered. One day (middle of tenth month) he asked how God made us and “put flesh on us,” and made “what is inside us”. He then proceeded to invent a little theory of creation. “I s’pose he made stone men and iron men first, and then made real men.” “This myth,” writes the father, “might readily suggest that the child had been hearing about the stone and the iron age, and about sculptors first modelling their statues in another material. It seems probable, however, that it was invented by a purely childish thought as a way of clearing up the mystery of the living thinking man.” There is subsequent evidence that his theory did not fully satisfy him. In the eleventh month he continued to ask how God made things, and wanted to know whether ‘preachers’ could resolve his difficulty. (His sister appears about this time to have had the common childish awe for the clergy.) On learning from his mother that even these well-informed persons might not be able to satisfy all his questions, he observed: “Well, anyhow, if we go to heaven when we die we shall know,” and added after a pause, “and if we don’t it doesn’t much matter”. “From this,” writes the father, “it seems fully clear that the child was beginning to adjust his mind to the fact of mystery, to the existence of an impenetrable region of the unknown.”

C.’s deepest interest just now in religious matters grew out of the feelings awakened by the thought of death. In the early part of the year he plied his mother with questions about death and burial. He was manifestly troubled about the prospect of being put under ground. One night (end of third month) when his mother was seeing him to bed, he said: “Don’t put earth on my face when I am buried”. The touch of the bed-clothes on his face had no doubt suggested the stifling effect of the earth. About the same date he remarked in his characteristic abrupt manner, after musing for some time: “Mamma, perhaps the weather will be _very_, _very_ fine, much finer than we have ever seen, when we are not there”. The mother was not unnaturally puzzled by this dark utterance and asked him what he meant. He replied: “I mean when we are buried, and then we shall be very sorry”. “Who can tell,” writes the father, “what this fancy of lying under the ground, yet catching the whispering of the most delicious of summer breezes, and the far-off touch of the gladdest of sunbeams, and the faint scent of the sweetest of flowers, may have meant for the wee dreamy sensitive creature?”

The following dialogue between C. and his mother at the beginning of the fourth month may further illustrate his feeling about this subject.

C. “Why must people die, mamma?”

M. “They get worn out, and so can’t live always, just as the flowers and leaves fade and die.”

C. “Well, but why can’t they come to life again just like the flowers?”

M. “The same flowers don’t come to life again, dear.”

C. “Well, the little seed out of the flower drops into the earth and springs up again into a flower. Why can’t people do like that?”

M. “Most people get very tired and want to sleep for ever.”

C. “Oh! _I_ shan’t want to sleep for ever, and when I am buried I shall try to wake up again; and there won’t be any earth on my eyes, will there, mamma?”

The difficulty of coupling the fact of burial with after-existence in heaven then began to trouble him. One day (middle of eighth month) he and his mother were passing a churchyard. He looked intently at the gravestones and asked: “Mamma, it’s only the naughty people who are buried, isn’t it?” Being asked why he thought so he continued: “Because auntie said all the good people went to heaven”. On his mother telling him that all people are buried he said: “Oh, then heaven must be under the ground, or they couldn’t get there”. Another way by which he tried to surmount the difficulty was by supposing that God would have to come up through the ground to take us to heaven. He clung tenaciously to the idea of heaven as an escape from the horror of death. That the hope of heaven was the core of his religious belief is seen in the following little talk between him and his mother and sister one evening at the end of the first month.

C. “Does God ever die?”

E. (the sister). “No, dear, and when we die God will take us to live with him in heaven.”

C. (to mother). “Will he, mamma?”

M. “I hope so, dear.”

C. “Well, what is God good for if he won’t take us to heaven when we die?”[328]

Footnote 328:

On children’s attempts to understand about being buried and going to heaven, see above, p. 120 ff.

_Sixth Year._

The sixth year, the last with which the diary attempts to deal, is very meagrely represented. The observation was plainly becoming intermittent and lax. I have, however, thought it worth while to complete this sketch of a child’s mental development by a reference to this fragmentary chapter.

The child continued to be observant of the forms of things. He began to attend the Kindergarten at the beginning of this year, and this probably served to develop his visual observation. We have, however, no very striking illustrations of his perceptual powers. It might interest the naturalist to know that he compared the head of Mr. Darwin, which he saw in a photograph, to that of an elephant, and being asked why he thought them like one another, answered: “Because it is so far from the top of the head to the ear”. Perhaps admirers of our great naturalist may be ready to pardon the likening of their hero’s head to that of one of the most intelligent of the large animal family which he showed to be our kinsfolk.

Another remark of his at about the same date seems to show that he still entertained a particularly gross form of the animistic conception that things are double, and that there is a second filmy body within the solid tangible one. He was looking at the pictures in Darwin’s _Descent of Man_, and came on some drawings of the human embryo. His mother asked him what they looked like, and he replied: “Why, like the inside of persons of course”. Asked to explain this he pointed to the head, the eye, the stomach, and so forth.

He spontaneously began to talk (middle of eighth month) about opposition of colours. He was looking at his coloured soldiers and talking to himself in this wise: “Which colour is most opposite colour to blue?” He said that red was its opposite, not yellow as suggested by his father, in which opinion he probably has a good many older people on his side. He also observed to his father at the same date: “I tell you, papa, what two colours are very like one another, blue and green”. The father remarks, however, that he was now mixing pigments and using them, and that the knowledge so gained probably made him bring blue and green nearer to one another than he used to do.

An opportunity of testing his memory occurred at the beginning of the sixth month. He met a gentleman who had been kind to him during that memorable visit to the sea-side village D—— just three and a half years before, and whom he had not seen since. His father asked the child whether he knew Mr. S. He looked at him steadily, and answered yes. Asked where he had seen him, he answered: "Down at ——". He had forgotten the name of the place. On his father further asking him what he remembered about him he said: “He made me boats and sailed them in a pool”. This was quite correct. So far as the father can say the fact had not been spoken of to him since the time. If this is so, it seems worth recording that a child of five and a half should recall such distinct impressions of what had occurred when he was only just two.

Fancy, the old frisky, wonder-working fancy, was now getting less active. At least, we meet this year with none of the pretty fairy-myths of earlier years. So far as the journal tells us, it was only in sleep that C. entered the delightful region of wonderland. Here is a quaint dream of his (end of fifth month). It was Christmas time, and he had been seeing a huge prize-ox, a shaggy Highland fellow with big head and curled horns. He had taken a violent fancy to it and wanted his father to draw it for him. A morning or two afterwards he told his father that he had had a funny dream. Both his father and his mother were turned into oxen, and it was a “very nice dream”.

For the rest, the brain of our little Kindergärtner was being engrossed with the business of getting knowledge, and, as a result of this fancy, was being taken in hand by sober understanding and drilled to the useful and necessary task of discovering truth.

We get one or two pretty glimpses of the boy trundling his hoop beside his father in a late evening walk and now and again stopping to ask questions. Here is one (end of third month): They were walking home together across the sands at Hunstanton at the rosy sun-set hour. C. was much impressed and began asking his father how far off the sun was. On finding out that the clouds were not a hard substance but could be passed through, he wanted to know what was on the other side. “Is it another world, papa, like this?”

Shortly after this date he was talking about the size of the sun, when he remarked: “I s’pose the sun’s big enough to put on the world and make see-saw”. He seemed to think of the sun as a disc, and imagined that it might be balanced on the earth-globe.

What with home instruction and the ‘lessons’ at the Kindergarten his little brain was being confronted with quite a multitude of new problems. It was interesting, remarks the father, to note how he would try to piece together the various scraps of knowledge he thus gathered. For instance, we find him in the ninth month trying hard to make something out of the motley presentations of the ‘world’ which he had got from classical myths as known through the _Tanglewood Tales_ and from his elementary geography lessons. He asked whether Atlas could stand in the middle of the sea and not be drowned. On his father’s trying to evade this awkward question, the boy inquired whether the sea came half way up the world. Asked to explain what he meant, he continued: “You know the shore gets lower and lower or else the sea would not go out; and out in the middle it goes down very deep. Now, where the sea comes in, is that half way up the world?” One would like to know how the father met this dark inquiry.

He would sometimes apply his newly-gained knowledge in an odd fashion. One day (middle of ninth month), he observed that his porridge was hottest in the middle, and remarked: “That’s just like the earth. It’s hottest in the middle. There’s real fire there.” This smacks just a little perhaps of pedantry, and the child, on entering the new world of school-lore, is, we know, apt to display the pride of learning. Yet we must beware, writes the ever-apologetic father, of judging the child’s ways too rigorously by our grown-up standards.

The progress in the more abstract kind of thinking and in the correlative use of abstract language was very noticeable at this stage. An odd example of an original way of expressing a newly attained relation of thought occurred towards the end of the third month. C. was at this time much occupied with the subject of the bearing-rein, the cruelty of which he had learnt from a favourite story, the autobiography of a horse, called _Black Beauty_. One day when walking out, and, as was his wont, vigilantly observant of all passing horses, he said: “That horse has bearing-rein at all,” by which he seems to have meant that the horse had it somewhere or wore it sometimes. The use of expressions like these, which at once made his statements more cautious and showed a better grasp of the full sweep of a proposition, was very characteristic at this period.

Even now, however, he found himself sometimes compelled to eke out his slender vocabulary by concrete and pictorial descriptions of the abstract. Thus one day (end of eighth month) he happened to overhear his father say that he should oppose a proposal of a member of the Library Committee to which he belonged. C., boy-like, interested in the prospect of a tussle, asked: "Who is the greatest man, you or Mr. ——?" Asked by his father, who imagined that the child was thinking of a physical contest with the honourable gentleman, “Do you mean taller?” he answered: “No. Who is most like a king?” In this wise, observes the chronicler, did he try to express his new idea of authority or influence over others.

While he thus pushed his way into the tangle of abstract ideas, he found himself now and again pulled up by a thorny obstacle. Some of us can remember how when young we had much trouble in learning to recognise the difference between the right and the left hand. C. experienced the same difficulty. One evening (towards the end of the eleventh month) after being put to bed he complained of a sore spot on his foot. Being asked on which foot, the right or the left, he said: “I can’t tell when in bed. I can’t say when my clothes are off. I know my right side by my pockets.” It would seem as if the differences in the muscular and other sensations by help of which we come to distinguish the one side of the body from the other are too slight to be readily recognised, and that a clear intuition of this simple and fundamental relation of position is the work of a prolonged experience.[329]

Footnote 329:

According to Professor Baldwin’s observations the infant shows a decided right-handedness, that is, a disposition to reach out with the right hand rather than with the left, by the seventh or eighth month (quoted by Tracy, _The Psychology of Childhood_, p. 55). But of course this is a long way from a definite intuition and idea of the right and the left hand. Mr. E. Kratz finds that more than one-fourth of children of five coming to a primary school cannot distinguish the right hand from the left.

By the end of the fourth month—a month after joining the Kindergarten—he was able to count up to a century. His interest in counting, which was particularly lively just now, is illustrated in the fact that in the fifth month, after showing himself very curious about the word ‘fortnight,’ saying again and again that it was a funny word, and asking what it meant, he put the question: “Does it mean fourteen nights?”