Part 6
The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist the child’s hungry demand for a story? Edgar Quinet in his _Histoire de mes Idées_ tells how when a child an old corporal came to drill him. He had been taken prisoner by the Spaniards and placed on an inaccessible island. Edgar loved to hear the thrilling story of the old soldier’s adventures, and scarcely was the narrative finished when the greedy boy would exclaim, “Encore une fois!” Heine’s delight when a boy at Düsseldorf in drinking in the stories of Napoleon’s exploits from his drummer is another well-known illustration.
Through the perfect gift of visual realisation which a child brings to it the verbal narrative becomes a record of fact, a true history. The intense enjoyment which is bound up with this process of imaginative realisation makes children jealously exact as to accuracy in repetition. The boy C. when a story was repeated to him used to resent even a small alteration of the text. Woe to the unfortunate mother who in telling one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One such, a friend of mine, repeating ‘Puss in Boots’ inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by a sharp volley of ‘No’s!’ The same lady tells me that when narrating the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for the second time only she forgot in describing the effect of the Beast’s sighing to add after the words ‘till the glasses on the table shake’ ‘and the candles are nearly blown out’; whereupon the severe little listener at once stopped the narrator and supplied the interesting detail. The exacting memory of childhood in the matter of stories is the product of a full detailed realisation. In the case just quoted the reality of the story was contradicted by substituting a stupid conventional chair for the box, and by omitting the striking incident of the candles.
Happy age of childhood, when a new and wondrous world, created wholly by the magic of a lively phantasy, rivals in brightness, in distinctness of detail, aye, and in steadfastness too, the nearest spaces of the world on which the bodily eye looks out, before reflexion has begun to draw a hard dividing line between the domains of historical truth and fiction.
As the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. It has added something to the child’s inner supplementary world, given him one more lovely region in which he may live blissful moments. The return of the young mind to the persons and scenes of story is forcibly illustrated in the impulse, already touched on, to act out in play the parts of this and that heroic figure. With many children any narrative which holds the imagination delightfully enthralled is likely to become more fully realised in a visible embodiment. For instance, a child of five years, when told a story of four men going along a railway to stop a train before it neared a bridge which was on fire, at once proceeded to play the incident with his toy train. Here we see how story by contributing lively images to the child’s brain becomes one main stimulative and guiding influence in the domain of play. In like manner the images born of story may, as in the case of Dickens, attach themselves permanently to particular localities and objects.
To this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of figures, human, superhuman, or subhuman. The higher qualities of this invention properly come under the head of child-art, and will have to be considered in another chapter. Here we may glance at these inventions as illustrating the realising power of the child’s imagination.
This invention appears in a sporadic manner in occasional ‘romancings’ which may set out from some observation of the senses. A little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: “Look at that poor ole man, mamma, he has dot (got) a bad leg”. Then romancing, as he was now wont to do: “He dot on a very big ’orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. We must make it well.” Then after a thoughtful pause: “Mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to I”. The unmistakable childish seriousness here, the outflow of young compassion, and the charming enforcement of the nursery prescription, all point to a vivid realisation of this extemporised little romance. This child was moreover more than commonly tender-hearted, and perhaps the more exposed on that account to such amiable self-deception. Another small boy when a little over two years, happening to hear a buzzing on the window, said: “Mamma, bumble-bee in a window says it wants a yump (lump) of sugar”: then shaking his head sternly, added: “Soon make you heat-spots, bumble-bee”. Other examples of this romancing will be met with in the notes on the child C.
In such simple fashion does the child build up a tiny myth on the basis of some passing impression, supplying out of his quaintly stored fancy unlooked-for adornments to the homely occurrences of every-day life.
Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by the independent play of an inventive imagination, children’s minds pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the workers of Christmas miracles, Santa Claus and Father Christmas, as well as the beings fashioned by the child’s imagination on the model of those he knows from story, these live on like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments when the things of sense lose their hold, bringing into the child’s life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, the most real of all realities.
This childish belief in myth is often curiously tenacious. A father was once surprised to find that his boy aged five years and ten months continued naïvely to believe in the real personality of Santa Claus. It was Christmastide and the father, in order to test the child’s credulity, put his own pocket-knife into the stocking which Santa Claus was supposed to fill. The child, though he knew his father’s knife very well, did not in the least suspect that the knife he found in the stocking had been placed there by human hands, but expressed himself as pleased that Santa Claus had sent him one like his father’s. When his father followed this up by telling him that he had lost his knife, and by searching for it in the boy’s presence, the latter asked whether Santa Claus had stolen the knife—thus showing how its close similarity to the knife he had received had impressed him, though he would not for a moment doubt the fact of its coming from the mysterious personage. It might be thought that this child was particularly stupid. On the contrary he was well above the average in intelligence. In proof of this I may relate that the Christmas before this, that is to say when he was under five years, he was the only one among thirty children who recognised his uncle when extremely well disguised as Father Christmas. When asked by his father why he thought it was his uncle, he said at first he didn’t know, but thinking a moment he added, “I don’t see who else there is,” showing that he had reasoned out his belief by a method of exclusion.
Of course it will be said that I am here selecting exceptional cases of childish imagination. I am quite ready to admit the probability of this. The best examples of any trait of the young mind will obviously be supplied by those who have most of this trait. Yet I very much suspect that ordinary and even dull children are wont to hide away a good deal of such superstitious belief. “One of the greatest pleasures of childhood,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes in _The Poet of the Breakfast Table_, “is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders and works up into small mythologies of its own.”
I have treated the myths of children as a product of pure imagination, of the impulse to realise in vivid images what lies away from and above the world of sense. Yet, as we shall see later, they are really more than this. They contain, like the myths of primitive man, a true germ of thought.
In George Sand’s recollections we shall meet with a striking illustration of how the vivid imagination of supernatural beings is followed up by a reflective and half-scientific effort to connect the myth with the facts and laws of the known world. This infusion of childish reason into wonderland, the first crude attempt to adjust belief to belief, and to find points of attachment for the much-loved myth in the matter-of-fact world, is apt to lead, as we shall see, to a good deal that is very quaint and characteristic in the child’s mythology.
The conclusion which observation of children leads us to is that, as compared with adults, they are endowed with strong imaginative power, the activity of which leads to a surprisingly intense inner realisation of what lies above sense. For the child, as for primitive man, reality is a projection of fancy as well as an assurance of sense.
Now this conclusion is, I think, greatly strengthened by all that we know of the conditions of the brain-life in children, and of the many perturbations to which it is liable. With respect to this brain-life we have to remember that in the first years the higher cortical centres which take part in the co-ordinative and regulative processes of thought and volition are but very imperfectly developed. Hence the centres concerned in imagination—which, if not identical with what used to be called the sensorium or seat of sensation, are in closest connexion with it—are not checked and inhibited by the action of the higher centres as is the case with us. By exercising a volitional control over the flow of our ideas, we are able to reason away a fancy, and generally to guard ourselves against error. In young children all ideas that grow clear and full under the stimulus of a strong interest are apt to persist and to become preternaturally vivid. As has been suggested by more than one recent writer on childhood and education, the brain of a child has a slight measure of that susceptibility to powerful illusory suggestion which characterises the brain of a hypnotised subject. Savages, who show so striking a resemblance to children in the vivacity and the dominance of their fancy, are probably much nearer to the child than to the civilised adult in the condition of their brain.
This preternatural liveliness of the images of the imperfectly developed brain exposes children, as we know, to disturbing illusion. The effect of bad dreams, of intense feeling, particularly of fear, in developing illusory belief in sensitive and delicate children is familiar enough, and will be dealt with again later on. Some parents feel the dangers of such disturbance so keenly that they think it best to cut their children off from the world of fiction altogether. But this is surely an error. For one thing children who are strongly imaginative will be certain to indulge their fancies, as the Brontë girls did, even when no fiction is supplied and their eager little minds are thrown on the matter-of-fact newspaper. A child needs not to be deprived of story altogether, but to be supplied with bright and happy stories, in which the gruesome element is subordinate. Specially sensitive children should, I think, be guarded against much that from an older point of view is classic, as some of the ‘creepy’ stories in Grimm, though there are no doubt hardy young nerves which can thrill enjoyably under these horrors. As to confusing a child’s sense of truth by indulging him in story, the evil seems to me problematic, and, if it exists at all, only slight and temporary. But I hope to touch on this aspect of the subject in the next chapter.
III. THE DAWN OF REASON.
_The Process of Thought._
To treat the child’s mind as merely a harbourer of fancies, as completely subject to the illusive spell of its bright imagery, would be the grossest injustice. It is one of the reputable characteristics of childhood that it manages to combine with so much vivacity and force of imagination a perfectly grave matter-of-fact look-out on the actual world.
And here I should like to correct the common supposition that children are imaginative _or_ observant of their surroundings, but not both. I have no doubt that there are many children who show a marked preponderance of the one or of the other tendency: there is the fanciful and dreamy child, and the matter-of-fact child with a tenacious grasp on the realities of things. I have but little doubt, too, that in the case of children who show the two tendencies, the one or the other is apt to preponderate at a certain stage of development: many boys, for example, have their dreamy period, and then become almost stolidly practical. All that I am concerned to make out here is that the two tendencies do co-exist, and as a number of parents have assured me may co-exist each in a high degree of intensity in the same child; the really intelligent children, boys as well as girls, being dispassionate and shrewd inquirers into the make of the actual world while ardently engaged in fashioning a brighter one.
The two tendencies belong to two moods, one of which may be regent for days together, though they often alternate with astonishing rapidity. More particularly the serious matter-of-fact mood readily passes, as if in relief from mental tension, into the playful fanciful one, as when the tiny student, deep in the stupendous lore of the spelling-book, suddenly dashes off to some fanciful conceit suggested by the ‘funny’ look of a particular word or letter.
The child not only observes but begins to reflect on what he observes, and does his best to understand the puzzling scene which meets his eye. And all this gives seriousness, a deep and admirable seriousness, to his attitude. So much is this the case that if we were called on to portray the typical mental posture of the child we might probably do so by drawing the erect little figure of a boy, as with widely open eye he gazes at some new wonder, or listens to some new report of his surroundings from a mother’s lips. Hence, one may forgive the touch of exaggeration when Mr. Bret Harte writes: “All those who have made a loving study of the young human animal will, I think, admit that its dominant expression is _gravity_ and not playfulness”.[37] We may now turn to this graver side of the young intelligence.
Footnote 37:
Works, vol. iii., p. 396.
Here, again, I may as well say that I prefer to observe the phenomenon in its clearer and fuller manifestations, that is to say, to study the serious intelligence of the child in the most intelligent children, or at least in children whose minds are most active. This does not mean that we shall be on the look-out for precocious wisdom or priggish smartness. On the contrary, since it is childish intelligence as such that we are in search of, we shall take pains to avoid as far as possible any encounter with prodigies. By these I mean the unfortunate little people whose mental limbs have been twisted out of beautiful child-shape by the hands of those in whom the better instincts of the parent have been outweighed by the ambition of the showman. We shall seek more particularly for spontaneous openings of the mental flower under the warming rays of a true mother’s love, for confidential whisperings of child-thought to her ever-attentive and ever-tolerant ear.
In order fully to understand the serious work of childish intelligence, we ought to begin with a study of early observation. But I must pass by this interesting subject with only a remark or two.
Much has been written on the deeply concentrated all-absorbing scrutiny of things by the young eye. But to say how much an infant of nine months really sees when he fixes his wide eyes on some new object, is a matter of great uncertainty. What seems certain, is that the infant has to learn to see things, and very probably takes what seems to us an unnecessarily long time to see them at all completely.
We find when the child grows and can give an account of what he notes that his observation, while often surprisingly minute in particular directions, is highly restricted as to its directions, being narrowly confined within the limits of a few dominant attractions. Thus a child will sometimes be so impressed with the colour of an object as almost to ignore its form. A little girl of eighteen months, who knew lambs and called them ‘lammies,’ on seeing two black ones in a field among some white ones called out, “Eh! doggie, doggie!” The likeness of colour to the black dog overpowered the likeness in form to the other lambs close by. Within the limits of form-perception again, we may remark the tendency to a one-sided mode of observing things which has in it something of an abstract quality. For the child C. the pointed head was the main essential feature of the dog, and he recognised this in a bit of biscuit. We shall find further examples of this abstract observation when we come to consider children’s drawings.
This same partiality of observation comes out very clearly in a good deal of the early assimilation or apperception already referred to. The reason why it is so easy for a child to superimpose a fanciful analogy on an object of sense, is that his mind is untroubled by all the complexity of this object. It fastens on some salient feature of supreme attractiveness or interest, and flies away on the wings of this, to what seems to us a far-off resemblance.
This detaching or selective activity in children’s observation, which in a manner is a defect, is also a point of superiority. It has this in common with the observation of the poet, that it is wholly engrossed with what is valuable. Thus one main feature of the eye-lid is certainly that it opens and closes like a curtain; and it is its resemblance to the mysterious curtain shutting out the daylight, which makes it a matter of absorbing interest. Here, then, we have, as we shall see more fully presently, a true germ of thought-activity embedded in the very process of childish observation and recognition. For thought is precisely a more methodical process of bringing the concrete object into its relations to other things.
Yet children’s observation does not remain at this height of grand selectiveness. The pressure of practical needs tends to bring it down to our familiar level. A child finds himself compelled to distinguish things and name them as others do. The lamb and the dog, for example, have to be distinguished by a _complex_ of marks in which the supremely interesting detail of colour holds a quite subordinate place. Individual things, too, have to be distinguished, if only for the purpose of drawing the line between what is ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’. The boy’s mother, his cup, his hat, must be readily recognised, and this necessity forces the attention to grasp a plurality of marks. Thus the mother cannot always be recognised by her height alone, as when she happens to be sitting, nor by her hair alone, as when she happens to have her hat on, so that the weighty problem of recognising her always compels the child to note a number of distinctive marks, some of which will in every case be available.
When once the eye has begun to note differences it makes rapid progress. This is particularly true where the development of a special interest in a group of things leads to a habit of concentration. Thus little boys when the ‘railway interest’ seizes them are apt to be finely observant of the differences between this and that engine and so forth. A boy aged two years and eleven months, after travelling from Dublin to Cork, and thence by another railway, asked his mother if she had noticed the difference in the make of the rails on the two lines. Of course she had not, though she afterwards ascertained that there was a slight difference which the boy’s keener eye had detected.
The fineness of a child’s distinguishing observation is well illustrated in his recognition of small drawings and photographs, as when a child of two will pick out the likeness of his father from a small _carte de visite_ group. But this side of children’s recognition will occupy us later on.
Such fine and ready recognition as that just illustrated shows not merely a penetrating observation of what is distinctive and characteristic, but also a measure of a higher power, that of seizing in one act of attention a complex or group of such marks. In truth, children’s observation, when close and methodical, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as well as exact. The boy, John Ruskin, was not the only one who could look for hours together at such an object as flowing water, noting all its changing features. A mother writes to me that her boy, when three and a half years old, received a picture-book, ‘The Railway Train,’ and looked at it almost uninterruptedly for a week, retaining it even at meals. “At the end of this time he had grasped the smallest detail in every picture.” By such occasional fits of fine exhaustive inspection, a child of the more intelligent sort will now and again come surprisingly near that higher type of observation, at once minute and comprehensive, which subserves, in somewhat different ways, scientific discovery and artistic representation. Many parents when watching these exceptional heights of childish scrutiny have indulged in fond dreams of future greatness. Yet these achievements are, alas, often limited to a certain stage of intellectual progress, and are apt to disappear when the bookish days come on, and the child loses himself hours together over his favourite stories. And in any case the germ of promise must possess a wondrous vitality if it resists all the efforts of our school-system to weed out from the garden of the mind anything so profitless as an observing faculty.
Next to this work of observation we must include in the pre-conditions of childish thought at its best a lively retention of what is observed. Everybody who has talked much with little children must have been struck by the tenacity of their memories, their power of recalling after considerable intervals small features of an object or small incidents which others hardly noted, or, if they noted them at the time, have since forgotten. Stories of this surprising recollection may be obtained in abundance. A little girl when only nine months old was on a walk shown some lambs at the gate of a field. On being taken the same road three weeks later she surprised her mother by calling out just before arriving at the gate ‘Baa, baa!’ Later on children will remember through much longer intervals. A little boy aged two years and ten months when taken to Italy a second time after four or five months’ absence, remembered the smallest details, _e.g._, how the grapes were cut, how the wine was made and so forth.
The gradual gathering of a store of such clear memory-images is a necessary preliminary to reflexion and thought. It is because the child remembers as well as sees, remembering even while he sees, that he grows thoughtful, inquiring about the meaning and reason of this and that, or boldly venturing on some explanation of his own. And just as the child’s mind must take on many pictures of things before it reflects upon and tries to understand the world, so it must collect and arrange pictures of the successive scenes and events of its life, before it will grow self conscious and reflect upon its own strange existence.