A
440435
SULLY
CHILDREN'S
WAYS
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11:5
594
JUNIV

ARTES
1817
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
και τυλίους και
TUEBOR
· QUÆRIS PENINSULAM AHⱭNAK?
CIRCUMSPICE
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1115
394
CHILDREN'S WAYS

CHILDREN'S WAYS
69507
BEING SELECTIONS FROM THE AUTHOR'S
"STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD,"
WITH SOME ADDITIONAL MATTER
BY
JAMES SULLY, M. A., LL. D.
GROTE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC,
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
AUTHOR OF OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY,
STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD, etc.

INTER
FOLIA
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1897
Authorized Edition.
PREFACE.
""
THE kindly welcome accorded by the press to
my volume Studies of Childhood has suggested
to me that there was much in it which might be
made attractive to a wider class of readers than
that addressed in a psychological work. I have,
accordingly, prepared the following selections,
cutting out abstruse discussions, dropping as far
as possible technical language, and adapting the
style to the requirements of the general reader.
In order to shorten the work the last two
chapters—“ Extracts from a Father's Diary
and "George Sand's Childhood"-have been
omitted. The order of treatment has been
altered somewhat, and a number of stories has
been added. I hope that the result may
succeed in recommending what has long
been to myself one of the most delightful of
subjects to many who would not be disposed to
read a larger and more difficult work, and to
draw on a few of these, at least, to a closer and
more serious inspection of it.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
PART I.-AT PLAY.
I. THE REALM OF FANCY :
THE TRANSFORMING WAND
FANCY'S RESTING-PLACES.
IN STORYLAND .
II. THE ENCHANTMENT OF PLAY.
PAGE
I
2
26∞
8
13
THE YOUNG PRETENDER
MYSTERIES OF DOLLDOM
SERIOUS SIDE OF PLAY
•
13
18
25
PART II.-AT WORK.
III. ATTACKING OUR LANGUAGE
•
THE NAMER OF THINGS
THE SENTENCE-BUILDER
THE INTERPRETER OF WORDS
•
•
IV. THE SERIOUS SEARCHER
THE THOUGHTFUL OBserver.
THE PERTINACIOUS QUESTIONER
V. FIRST THOUGHTS: (a) THE NATURAL World
THE FASHION OF THINGS
THE BIGGER WORLD
DREAMS
BIRTH AND GROWTH
VI. FIRST THOUGHTS: (b) SELF AND Other Mysteries
THE VISIBle Self
THE HIDDen Self
THE UNREACHABLE PAST
THE SUPERNATURAL World
THE GREAT MAKER.
20
29
30
33
36
40
40
44
54
54
58
61
64
•
888
68
68
72
73
76
78
viii
Contents.
CHAPTER
VII. THE BATTLE WITH FEARS: (a) THE Onslaught
THE BATTERY OF SOUNDS
THE ALARMED SENTINEL.
VIII. THE BATTLE WITH FEARS (Continued)
THE ASSAULT OF THE BEASTS
THE NIGHT ATTACK
(b) Damage oF THE ONSLAUGHT
(c) RECOVERY FROM THE Onslaught
IX. GOOD AND BAD IN THE MAKING
TRACES OF THE BRUTE
THE PROMISE OF HUMANITY
PAGB
85
87
90
97
97
100
104
108
112
112
119
THE LAPSE INTO LYING
•
FEALTY TO TRUTH
X. REBEL AND SUBJECT
124
131
135
(a) THE STRUGGLE WITH LAW: FIRST TUSSLE
WITH AUTHORITY
•
135
EVADING THE LAW
•
137
THE PLEA FOR LIBERTY
140
(b) ON THE SIDE OF LAW
142
THE YOUNG STICKLER For the PROPRIETIES
143
THE ENFORCER OF RULES
145
XI. AT THE GATE OF THE TEMPLE
THE GREETING OF BEAUTY
FIRST PEEP INTO THE ART-WORLD
151
151
FIRST VENTURES IN CREATION
XII. FIRST PENCILLINGS
THE HUMAN FACE DIVINE
THE VILE BODY
SIDE VIEWS OF THINGS.
156
161
171
174
177
184
CHILDREN'S WAYS.
PART I.
AT PLAY.
CHAPTER I.
THE REALM OF FANCY.
ONE of the few things we seemed to be certain of
with respect to child-nature was that it is fancy-full.
Childhood, we all know, is the age for dreaming; for
living a life of happy make-believe. Even here,
however, we want more accurate observation. For
one thing, the play of infantile imagination is pro-
bably much less uniform than is supposed. There
seem to be very serious children who rarely, if ever,
indulge in a wild fancy. Mr. Ruskin has recently
told us that when a child he was incapable of acting
a part or telling a tale, that he never knew a child
"whose thirst for visible fact was at once so eager and
so methodic".
One may, nevertheless, safely say that a large
majority of the little people are, for a time at least,
fancy-bound. A child that did not want to play and
cared nothing for the marvels of storyland would
I
2
Children's Ways.
surely be regarded as queer and not just what a child
ought to be.
Supposing that this is the correct view, there still
remains the question whether children's imagination
always plays in the same fashion. Now science is
beginning to bring to light differences of childish
fancy. For one thing it suggests that children have
their favourite type of mental imagery, that one child's
fancy may habitually move in a coloured world, an-
other in a world of sounds, and so forth. The fasci-
nation of Robinson Crusoe to many a boy lies in the
wealth of images of movement and adventure which
it supplies.
With this difference in the material with which a
child's fancy plays, there are other differences which
turn on his temperament and predominant feelings.
Hence, the familiar fact that in some children imagi-
nation broods by preference on gloomy and alarming
objects, whereas in others it selects what is bright and
gladsome.
Perhaps I have said enough to justify my plea for
new observations and for a reconsideration of hasty
theories in the light of these. Nor need we object to
a fresh survey of what is perhaps the most delightful
side of child-life.
(a) The Transforming Wand.
The play of young fancy meets us in the very
domain of the senses: it is active, often bewilderingly
active, when the small person seems busily engaged
in looking at things and moving among them.
We see this fanciful "reading" of things when a
The Realm of Fancy.
3
child calls the star an "eye," I suppose because of its
brightness and its twinkling movement, or says that
a dripping plant is "crying".
This transforming touch of the magic wand of
young fancy has something of crude nature-poetry in
it. This is abundantly illustrated in what may be
called childish metaphors, by which they try to de-
scribe what is new and strange. For example, a little
boy of nineteen months looking at his mother's
spectacles said: "Little windows". Another boy two
years and five months, on looking at the hammers of
a piano which his mother was playing, called out:
"There is owlegie" (diminutive of owl). His eye had
instantly caught the similarity between the round
felt disc of the hammer divided by a piece of wood,
and the owl's face divided by its beak. In like
manner another little boy called a small oscillating
compass-needle a "bird" probably on the ground of
its fluttering movement. Pretty conceits are often
resorted to in this effort to get at home with strange
objects, as when stars were described by one child as
"cinders from God's stove," and butterflies as "pansies
flying".
This play of imagination upon the world of sense
has a strong vitalising or personifying element. A
child is apt to attribute life and sensation to what we
serious people regard as lifeless. Thus he gives not
only a body but a soul to the wind when it whistles or
howls at night. The most unpromising things come
in for this warming, life-giving touch of a child's fancy.
Thus one little fellow, aged one year eight months,
conceived a special fondness for the letter W, address-
ing it thus: "Dear old boy W". Miss Ingelow tells
4
Children's Ways.
us that when a child she used to feel sorry for the
pebbles in the causeway for having to lie always in
one place, and would carry them to another place for
a change.
It is hard for us elders to get back to this childish
way of looking at things. One may however hazard
the guess that there is in it a measure of dreamy
illusion. This means that only a part of what is
present is seen, the part which makes the new object
like the old and familiar one. And so it gets trans-
formed into a semblance of the old one; just as a
rock gets transformed for our older eyes into the
semblance of a human face.
There is another way in which children's fancy may
transmute the objects of sense. Mr. Ruskin tells us
that when young he got to connect or "associate" the
name "crocodile" so closely with the creature that
when he saw it printed it would take on something of
the look of the beast's lanky body.
How far, one wonders, does this process of trans-
formation of external objects go in the case of imagi-
native children? It is not improbable that before the
qualities of things and their connections one with an-
other are sufficiently known for them to be interesting
in themselves they often acquire interest through the
interpretative touch of childish fancy.
There is one new field of investigation which is
illustrating in a curious way the wizard influence
wielded by childish imagination over the things of
sense.
It is well known that a certain number of
people habitually "colour" the sounds they hear,
imagining, for example, the sound of a particular
vowel or musical tone to have its characteristic tint,
The Realm of Fancy.
5
which they are able to describe accurately.
This
coloured hearing," as it is called, is always traced
back to the dimly recalled age of childhood. Children
are now beginning to be tested as to their possession
of this trick of fancy. It was found in the case of a
number of school-children that nearly 40 per cent.
described the tones of certain instruments as coloured.
There was, however, no agreement among these chil-
dren as to the particular tint belonging to a given
sound: thus whereas one child mentally "saw" the
tone of a fife as pale or bright, another saw it as dark.
I have confined myself here to what I have called
the play of imagination, the magical transmuting of
things through the sheer liveliness of childish fancy.
The degree of transmutation will of course vary with
the intensity of the imagination. Sometimes when a
child dwells on the fancy it may grow into a moment-
ary illusion. A little girl of four, sitting by the side
of her mother in the garden, picked up a small pink
worm and said: "Ah! you do look nice; how a
thrush would like you!" and thereupon, realising the
part of the fortunate thrush, proceeded, to her mother's
horror, to eat up the worm quite composedly. The
momentary illusion of something nice to eat, here
produced by a lively realisation of a part, may arise in
other cases from strong feeling, more especially fear,
which, as we shall see, has so large a dominion over
the young mind.
This witchcraft of the young fancy in veiling and
transforming the actual surroundings is a good deal
restrained by the practical needs of every-day life and
by intercourse with older and graver folk. There are,
however, regions of child-life where it knows no
6
Children's Ways.
+
check. One of these is child's play, to be spoken of
presently: another is the filling up of the blank spaces
in the visible world with the products of fancy. We
will call these regions on which the young wing of
fancy is wont to alight and rest, fancy's resting-
places.
Fancy's Resting-places.
Most people, perhaps, can recall from their child-
hood the pleasure of cloud-gazing. The clouds are
such strange-looking things, they change their forms
so quickly, they seem to be doing so many things,
now slumbering lazily, now rushing wildly on. Cloud-
land is safe away from the scrutiny of fingers, so we
never can be sure what they would be if we got to
them. Some children take fright at their big, strange
forms and their weird transformations: but a happy
child that loves day-dreaming will spend many de-
lightful hours in fashioning these forms into wondrous
and delightful things, such as kings and queens, giants
and dwarfs, beautiful castles, armies marching to battle,
or driven in flight, pirates sailing over fair isle-dotted
seas. There is a delicious satisfaction to young minds
in thus finding a habitation for their cherished images.
To project them in this way into the visible world, to
know that they are located in that spot before the
eye, is to “realise" them, in the sense of giving them
the fullest possible reality.
Next to the cloud-world come distant parts of the
terrestrial scene. The chain of hills, perhaps, faintly
visible from the home, has been again and again en-
dowed by a child's fancy with all manner of wondrous
scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures.
The Realm of Fancy.
7
At times when they have shown a soft blue, he has
made fairy-land of them; at other times when stand-
ing out black and fierce-looking against the western
sky at eventide, he has half shuddered at them,
peopling them with horrid monsters.
Best of all, I think, for this locating of images, are
the hidden spaces of the visible world. One child
used to wonder what was hidden behind a long stretch
of wood which closed in a good part of his horizon.
Many a child has had his day-dreams about the country
lying beyond the hills on the horizon. One little girl
who lived on a cattle-station in Australia used to
locate beyond a low range of hills a family of children
whom she called her little girls, and about whom she
related endless stories.
With timid children this tendency to project images
into unseen places becomes a fearful kind of wonder,
not altogether unpleasant when confined to a moderate
intensity. I remember the look of awe on the face of
a small boy whose hand I held as we passed one
summer evening a dark wood, and he whispered to
me that the wolves lived in that wood.
This impulse of timid children to project their dark
fancies into obscure and hidden places often stops short
at vague undefinable conjecture. "When (writes a
German author) I was a child and we played hide
and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or
might be something unheard of hidden away behind
every bundle of straw, and in the corners." Here we
can hardly speak of a housing of images: at such a
moment perhaps the little brain has such a rush of
weird images that no one grows distinct.
The exact opposite of this is where a child has a
8
|
Children's Ways.
very definite image in his mind, and wants to find a
home for it in the external world. This wish seems
to be particularly active in relation to the images
derived from stories. This housing instinct is strong
in the case of the poor houseless fairies. One little
boy put his fairies in the wall of his bedroom, where,
I suppose, he found it convenient to reach them by
his prayers. His sister located a fairy in a hole in a
smallish stone.
As with the fancies born of fairy-tales, so with the
images of humbler human personages known by way of
books. Charles Dickens, when a child, had a strong
impulse to locate the characters of his stories in the
immediate surroundings. He tells us that "every
barn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church,
every foot of the churchyard had some association of
its own in my mind connected with these books
(Roderic Random, Tom Jones, Gil Blas, etc.), and
stood for some locality made famous in them.
have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church.
steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on
his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate."
In Storyland.
I
The reference to stories naturally brings us to
another domain of children's imagination: the new
world opened up by their story-books, which is all
strange and far away from the nursery where they sit
and listen, and in which, nevertheless, they manage
in a sense to live and make a new home.
How is it, one is disposed to ask, that most children,
at any rate, have their imagination laid hold of, and

The Realm of Fancy.
9
fired to a white heat, by mere words? To watch the
small listener in its low chair, with head raised, eyes
fixed, and hands clasped, drinking in every word of·
your story, giving sign by occasional self-cuddling
and other spasmodic movements of the almost over-
powering delight which fills its breast, is to be face to
face with what is a mystery to most "grown-ups ".
Perhaps we elders, who are apt to think that we have
acquired all the knowledge and to forget how much
we have lost, will never understand the spell of a
story for the lively impressionable brain of a child.
One thing, however, is pretty certain: our words have
a way of calling up in children's minds very vivid
and very real images of things, images quite unlike
those which are called up in the minds of most older
people. This magic power of a word to summon the
corresponding image, has, I suspect, a good deal to do
with a child's intense way of realising his stories.
more
The passionate interest in stories means
than this however. It means that the little brain
is wondrously deft at disentangling our rather hard
language and reducing the underlying ideas to an
intelligible simplicity. A mother when reading a
poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, "I'm
afraid you can't understand it, dear," for which she
got rather roughly snubbed by her little master in
this fashion: "Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you
would not explain". The "explaining" is resented
because it interrupts the child's own secret art of
making something" out of our words.
And what glorious inner visions the skilful little in-
terpreter often manages to get from these troublesome
words of ours. Scene after scene of the dissolving
2

ΙΟ
Children's Ways.
view unfolds itself in definite outline and magical
colouring. At each stage the anticipation of the next
undiscernible stage is a thrilling mystery. Perhaps
no one has given us a better account of the state of
dream-like absorption in storyland than Thackeray.
In one of his delightful "Roundabout Papers,” he
thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood:
"Hush! I never read quite to the end of my first
Scottish Chiefs. I couldn't. I peeped in an alarmed
furtive manner at some of the closing pages.
Oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open
tarts of budding boyhood! Do I forget one night
after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed)
lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page
more of my dear Walter Scott-and down came the
monitor's dictionary on my head!"
The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it
generates. Who can resist a child's hungry demand
for a story? and after you have satisfied his first
request, he will ask for more, and if then you are
weak enough to say you know no more stories he
will catch you by answering: "Tell me the same
again".
As a result of the intensity with which a child's
imagination seizes on a narrative it tends to become
afterwards a record of fact, a true history. That
children look at their stories in this way till they
get undeceived seems to be shown by the respect
which they pay to the details and even to the words.
Woe to the unfortunate mother who in repeating one
of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One
such, a friend of mine, when relating "Puss in Boots
inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of
The Realm of Fancy.
I I
on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by
a sharp volley of "Noes!"
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 to the
child's self-created world new territory, in which he
may wander and live blissful moments.
This per-
manent occupation of storyland is shown in the
child's impulse to bring the figures of story-books
into the actual surroundings. It is shown, too, in his
fondness for introducing them into his play, of which
I shall speak presently.
To this lively imaginative reception of what is told
him the child is apt very soon to join his own free
inventions of fairy and other tales. These at first,
and for some time, have in them more of play than
of serious art, and so can be touched on here where
we are dealing with the play of young fancy.
We see the beginning of such fanciful invention in
childish "romancing" which is often started by the
sight of some real object. For example, 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". Later on children of an imagina-
tive turn wax bolder and spin longer stories and
create scenes and persons with whom they live in
I2
Children's Ways.
a prolonged companionship. But of this more pre-
sently.
Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders
of story, partly by a more spontaneous play of crea-
tive fancy, children's minds often pass under the
dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes
and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale,
the generous but discriminating old gentleman who
brings Christmas presents, as well as the beings
fashioned by the more original sort of child for himself,
these live on just like the people of the every-day
world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at
odd dreamy moments during the day, bringing into
the child's life golden sunlight or black awful
shadows, and making in many cases, for a time at
least, the most real of all realities.
I am far from saying that all children make a fancy
world for themselves in this way. As I said at the
beginning of the chapter the differences among chil-
dren in this respect are great. Yet I think it is safe
to say that most children, and especially lonely chil-
dren who have not a full active life provided for
them by companions and opportunities of adventure,
do live a good fraction of their life in dreamland.
Where the active life is provided a child is apt to
play rather than lose himself passively in fancy
dreams. But play, too, is to a large extent a product
of the liveliness of the young imagination. We will
now glance at it in this light.
CHAPTER II.
THE ENCHANTMENT OF PLAY.
CHILDREN'S "play," as the expression is commonly
understood, differs from the sportive movements of
fancy considered in the last chapter by its essentially
active character. We do not speak of a child playing
save when he does something, however slight, by way
of expressing or acting out a fancy. This outer ex-
pression of fancy in some active form is commonly
called by children themselves "pretending" to be or
to do something, by older people when looking back
In order to
on the pretence "making-believe".
understand what childish fancy is like, and how it
works, we must carefully watch it as it moves among
the toys and creates a new play-world.
The Young Pretender.
Child's play is a kind of creation of a make-believe
but half-real world. As such, it has its primal source
in the impulse to act out and embody in sensible form
some interesting idea; in which respect, as we shall
see by-and-by, it has a close kinship to what we call
jart. The image, say of the wood, of the chivalrous
highwayman, or what not, holds the child's brain, and
leverything has to accommodate itself to the mastering
force.

14
Children's Ways.
Now since play is the acting out of some interesting
and exciting fancy, it comes at once into collision with
the child's actual surroundings. Here, however, he
finds his opportunity. The floor of the room is
magically transformed into a prairie, a sea, or other
locality, the hidden space under the table becomes a
robber's cave, a chair serves as horse, ship, or other
vehicle, to suit the exigencies of the particular play.
The passion for play is essentially active; it is the
wild longing to act a part it is thus in a way
dramatic The child-adventurer as he personates,
Robinson Crusoe or other hero becomes another
being. And in stepping, so to say, out of his every
day self he has to step out of his every-day world!
Hence the transformation of his surroundings by what
has been called the "alchemy of imagination". Ever
a sick child confined to his bed will, as Mr. Stevenson
tells us in his pretty child's song, "The Land of
Counterpane," make these transformations of his
surroundings:-

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets,
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
The impulse to act a part, which is the very life
breath of play, meets us in a crude form very early
Even an infant will, if there is a cup at hand, seem to
go through something like a pretence of drinking. A
The Enchantment of Play.
15
little boy of about eighteen months who was digging
in the garden began suddenly to play at having a
bath. He got into the big bucket he was using for
digging, took a handful of earth and dribbled it over
him, saying, “'Ponge, 'ponge," and then stepped out
and asked for "Tow'l, tow'l". Another boy less than
two would spend a whole wet afternoon enjoying his
make-believe "painting" of the furniture with the dry
end of a bit of rope.
There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind
of imitative make-believe children know that they are
acting a part. It is surely to misunderstand the
essence of play to speak of it as a kind of conscious
performance, like that of the stage-actor. A child is
one creature when he is truly at play, another when
he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. When
absorbed in play the last thing he is thinking of is a
spectator. As we know, the intrusion of a grown-up
is very apt to mar children's play, by calling them
back to the dull world of every-day.
This impulse to get away from his common and
tiresome self into a new part will often carry a child
rather far. Not only does he want to be a prince, or
a fairy, he will even make an attempt to become an
animal. He will greatly enjoy going on all fours and
making dreadful noises if only he has a play-com-
panion to be frightened; and possibly he does get
some way towards feeling like the bloodthirsty lion
whom he fancies himself.
It is worth noting that such passing out of one's
ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is con-
fined to the child-player. A cat or a dog will be
quite ready to go through a kind of make-believe
16
Children's Ways.
game, yet even in its play the cat remains the cat,
and the dog the dog.
Such play-like transmutation of the self is some-
times carried over longer periods. A child will play
at being something for a whole day. For example,
a boy of three and a half years would one day lead
the life of a coal-heaver, another day that of a soldier,
and so forth, and was rather particular in expecting
his mother to remember which of his favourite char-
acters he was adopting on this or that day.
In a good deal of this play-action there is scarcely
any adjustment of scene: the child of vigorous fancy
plays out his part with imaginary surroundings.
Children in their second year will act out a scene
purely by means of pantomimic movements. Thus
one little fellow not quite two years old would, when
taken out in his perambulator, amuse himself by
putting out his hand and pretending to catch “little
micies" (mice), which make-believe little rodents he
proceeded to cuddle and to stroke, winding up his play
by throwing them away, or handing them over to his
mother. In like manner he would pretend to feed
chickens, taking imaginary food with one hand out of
the other, and scattering it with an accompaniment
of "Chuck! chuck! chuck!
This tendency of the little player to conjure up
new surroundings, and to bring to his side desirable
companions, is, I suspect, common among lonely
children. One little fellow of four passed much of his
time in journeyings to Edinburgh, "London town,"
China and so forth in quest of his two little boys who
roved about with their "mamsey," a "Mrs. Cock".
They paid him visits when he was alone, always con-
The Enchantment of Play.
17
triving to depart "just two tiny minutes" before any
one came in.¹ Mr. Canton's little heroine took to
nursing an invisible "iccle gaal" (little girl), of whose
presence she seemed perfectly assured.2
If only the young imagination is strong enough
there may be more of sweet illusion, of a warm grasp
of living reality in this sclitary play, where fictitious
companions, perfectly obedient to the little player's
will, take the place of less controllable ones. Yet
this kind of play, which derives no support from the
surroundings, makes heavy demands on the imagina-
tion, and would not, one suspects, satisfy most children.
The character of the little player's actual surround-
ings is, for the most part, a matter of small concern to
him. If only he has a dark corner and a piece of
furniture or two he can build his play-scene.
What he does want is some semblance of a living
companion. Whatever his play he needs somebody,
if only as listener to his make-believe; and when his
imagination cannot rise to an invisible auditor, he
will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in
the bath, a fire-shovel, or a clothes-prop in the garden,
In more active sorts of play, where something has to
be done, he will commonly want a living companion.
In this making of play-companions we see again the
transforming power of a child's fancy. Mr. Ruskin
speaks somewhere of "the perfection of child-like
imagination, the power of making everything out of
nothing". This delightful secret of childhood is illus-
trated in its fondness for toys and its way of be-
having towards them.
¹ From a paper by Mrs. Robert Jardine.
2 The Invisible Playmate, p. 33 ff.
18
Children's Ways.
Later on, I think, children are apt to grow more
sophisticated, to pay more attention to their surround-
ings, and to require more realistic accessories for their
play actions. This, at least Dr. Stanley Hall tells us,
is true of doll-plays.
Mysteries of Dolldom.
The fact that children make living things out of
their toy horses, dogs and the rest is known to every
observer of their ways. To the natural unsceptical
eye the boy on his rudely carved "gee-gee" slashing
the dull flank with all a boy's glee, looks as if he were
possessed with the fancy that the rigid inert-looking
block which he bestraddles is a very horse.
This breathing of life into playthings is seen in all
its magic force in play with dolls. A doll, broadly
conceived, is anything which a child carries about
and makes a pet of. The toy horse, dog or what not
that a little boy nurses, feeds and takes to bed with
him has much of the dignity of a true doll. But
adopting conventional distinctions we shall confine
the word to those things which are more or less
endowed by childish fancy with human form and
character.
I read somewhere recently that the doll is a play-
thing for girls only: but young boys, though they
often prefer india-rubber horses and other animals, not
infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and
are hardly less devoted than girls.
Endless is the variety of rôle assigned to the doll.
It is the all-important comrade in that solitude à deux
of which the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs.
The Enchantment of Play.
19
Burnett tells us that when nursing her doll in the
armchair of the parlour she would sail across en-
chanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of
thrilling adventures.
Very tenderly, on the whole, is the little doll-lover
wont to use her pet, doing her best to keep it clean
and tidy, feeding it, putting it to bed, amusing it, for
example, by showing it her pictures, tending it with
fidelity during bouts of sickness, and giving it the
honours of a funeral when, from the attack of a dog
set on by an unfeeling brother or other cause, it comes
to "die";¹ or when, as in the case of little Jane Welsh
(afterwards Mrs. Carlyle), the time has come for the
young lady to cast aside her dolls.
The doll-interest implies a deep mysterious sympa-
thy. Children wish their dolls to share in their things,
to be kissed when they are kissed, and so to come
close to them in experience and feeling. Not only so,
they look for sympathy from their doll-companions,
taking to them all their childish troubles. So far is
this feeling of oneness carried in some cases that the
passion for dolls has actually rendered the child in-
different to child-companions. It is not every little
girl who like little Maggie Tulliver has only "occasional
fits of fondness" for her nursling when the brother is
absent.
Not only in this lavishing of tenderness and of
sympathy on the doll, but in the occasional discharge
on it of a fit of anger, children show how near it comes
to a human companion. The punishment of the doll
I owe this and other observations on the treatment of dolls to
Dr. Stanley Hall's curious researches.
20
Children's Ways.
is an important element in nursery-life. It is apt to
be carried out with formal solemnity and often with
something of brutal emphasis. Yet tenderness being
the strongest part of the doll-attachment, the little.
disciplinarians are apt to suffer afterwards for their
cruelty, one little girl showing remorse after such a
chastisement of her pet for several days.
I have talked here of "dolls," but I must not be
supposed to be speaking merely of the lovely creatures
with blue eyes and yellow hair with which the well-to-
do child is wont to be supplied. Nothing is more
strange and curious in child-life than its art of manu-
facturing dolls out of the most unpromising materials.
The creative child can find something to nurse and
fondle and take to bed with it in a bundle of hay tied
round with a string, in a shawl, a pillow, a stick, a
clothes-pin, or a clay-pipe. Victor Hugo, with a true
touch, makes the little outcast Cosette, who has never
had a "real doll," fashion one out of a tiny leaden
sword and a rag or two, putting it to sleep in her arms
with a soft lullaby.
Do any of us really understand the child's attitude.
of mind towards its doll? Although gifted writers
like George Sand have tried to take us back to the
feeling of childhood, it may be doubted whether they
have made it intelligible to us. And certainly the
answers to questions collected in America have done
little, if anything, towards making it clear. The
truth is that the perfect child's faith in dolldom passes
away early, in most cases it would appear about the
age of thirteen or fourteen. It is then that the young
people begin clearly to realise the shocking fact that
dolls have no "inner life". Occasionally girls will go
The Enchantment of Play.
21
on playing with dolls much later than this, but not
surely with the old sincerity.
That many children have a genuine delusion about
their dolls seems evident. That is to say when they
talk to them and otherwise treat them as human they
imaginatively realise that they can understand and
feel. The force of the illusion, blotting out from the
child's view the naked reality before its eyes, is a
striking illustration of the vividness of early fancy.
Perhaps, too, this intensity of faith comes in part of
the strength of the impulses which commonly sustain
the doll-passion. Of these the instinct of compan-
ionship, of sympathy, is the strongest. A lady tells
me she remembers that when a child she had a
passionate longing for a big, big doll, which would
give her the full sweetness of cuddling. The imita-
tive impulse, too, prompting the child to carry out on
the doll actions similar to those carried out on itself
by mother and nurse, is a strong support of the
delusion. A doll, as the odd varieties selected show,
seems to be, more than anything else, something to
be dressed. Children's reasons for preferring one doll
to another, as that it can have its face washed, or that
it has real hair which can be combed, show how the
impulse to carry out nursery operations sustains the
feeling of attachment. A girl (the same that wanted
the big doll to fondle) had dolls of the proper sort;
yet she preferred to make one out of a little wooden
stool, because she could more realistically act out with
this odd substitute the experience of taking her pet
out for a walk, making it stand, for example, when
she met a friend.
Of course, the child's faith, like other faith, is not
22
Children's Ways.
always up to the height of perfect ardour. A child of
six or seven, when the passion for dolls is apt to be
strong, will have moments of coolness, leaving “poor
dolly" lying in the most humiliating posture on the
floor, or throwing it away in a sudden fit of disenchant-
ment and disgust. Scepticism will intrude, especially
when the hidden "inside" comes to view as mere
emptiness, or at best as nothing but sawdust.
Children seem, as George Sand says, to oscillate
between the real and the impossible. Yet the intru-
sion of doubt does not, in many cases at least, interfere
with an enduring trust. Dr. Stanley Hall tells us that
"long after it is known that they are wood, wax, etc.,
it is felt that they are of skin, flesh, etc.". Yes, that is
it; the child, seized with the genuine play-mood,
dreams its doll into a living child, or living adult.
How oddly the player's faith goes on living side by
side with a measure of doubt is illustrated in the fol-
lowing story. A little girl begged her mother not to
make remarks about her doll in her (the doll's) pres-
ence, as she had been trying all her life to keep that
doll from knowing that she was not alive.¹
The treating of the doll and images of animals, such
as the wooden or india-rubber horse, as living things is
the outcome of the play-impulse. All the imaginative
play of children seems, so far as we can understand it, to
have about it something of illusion. This fact of the
full sincere acceptance of the play-world as for the
moment the real one, is illustrated in the child's jealous
insistence that everything shall for the time pass over
from the every-day world into the new one.
"C About
1 From an article on "The Philosophy of Dolls," Chambers'
Journal, 1881.
The Enchantment of Play.
23
ད
the age of four," writes M. Egger of his boys, "Felix
is playing at being coachman; Emile happens to return
home at the moment. In announcing his brother,
Felix does not say, 'Emile is come;' he says, 'The
brother of the coachman is come"." It is illustrated
further in the keen resentment of any act on the part
of the mother or other person which seems to contra-
dict the facts of the new world. A boy of two who
was playing one morning in his mother's bed at drink-
ing up pussy's milk from an imaginary saucer on the
pillow, said a little crossly to his mother, who was
getting into bed after fetching his toys: "Don't lie on
de saucer, mammy!" The pain inflicted on the little
player by such a contradictory action is sometimes in-
tense. A little girl of four was playing "shops" with
her younger sister. The elder one (writes the
mother) was shopman at the time I came into her
room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous
sobs, I could not understand why. At last she sobbed
out: 'Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop'.
I had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion."
But there is still another, and some will think a
more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the
reality of the play-illusion. The child finds himself
confronted by the unbeliever who questions what he
says about the doll's crying and so forth, and in this
case he will often stoutly defend his creed. "Dis-
cussions with sceptical brothers (writes Dr. Stanley
Hall), who assert that the doll is nothing but wood,
rubber, wax, etc., are often met with a resentment as
keen as that vented upon missionaries who declare
that idols are but stocks and stones." It is the same
with the toy-horse. "When (writes a mother of her
24
Children's Ways.
boy) he was just over two years old L. began to speak
of a favourite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it were a
real living creature. 'No tarpenter (carpenter) made
Dobbin,' he would say, 'he is not wooden but kin
(skin) and bones and Dod (God) made him.' If any
one said 'it'in speaking of the horse his wrath was
instantly aroused, and he would shout indignantly :
It! You mut'ent tay it, you mut tay he.
While play in its absorbing moments, and even
afterwards, may thus produce a genuine illusion, the
state of perfect realisation is of course apt to be broken
by intervals of scepticism. This has already been
illustrated in the case of the doll. The same little
boy that played with the imaginary mice was sitting
on his stool pretending to smoke like his grandpapa
out of a bit of bent cardboard. Suddenly his face
clouded over; he stroked his chin, and remarked in
a disappointed tone, “I have not got any whiskers".
The dream of full manhood was here rudely dispelled
by a recall to reality.
A measure of the same fanciful transformation of
things that has been illustrated in make-believe play,
a measure, too, of the illusion which frequently ac-
companies it, enters, I believe, into all children's pas-
times. Whence comes the perennial charm, the un-
dying popularity, of the hoop? Is not the interest
here due to the circumstance that the child controls a
thing which in the freedom of its movements suggests
that it has a will of its own? This seems borne out
by the following story. A little girl of five once.
stopped trundling her hoop and said to her mother she
thought that her hoop must be alive, because "it is so
sensible; it goes where I want it to". Perhaps the
The Enchantment of Play.
25
same thing may be said of other toys, as the kite and
the sailing boat.
Serious Side of Play.
I have here treated the whole realm of childish
fancy as one of play, as one in which happy child-
hood finds its own sunny world. Yet it is clear that
this is after all only one side of children's dream-
world. Like our own world it has its climates, and if
fancy is often frolicsome and games deliciously sweet,
they sometimes become serious to the point of a quite
dreadful solemnity.
That children's imagination is wont to hover, with
something of the fascination of the moth, on the con-
fines of the fearful, is known to us all. Some children,
no doubt, have much more of the passion for the
gruesome and blood-curdling than others, since tem-
perament counts for much here; yet it is pretty safe
to say that most know something of this horrible.
fascination. Dreams, whether of the night or of the
day, are not always of beautiful fairies and the like.
Weird, awful-looking figures have a way of pushing
themselves into the front of the scene. Especially
when the "tone" of the frail young nerves runs down
from poor health do these alarming shapes appear,
and acquire a mighty hold on the child's imagina-
tion. Of the timidity of the early years of life I shall
have more to say by-and-by. Here I want to bring
out how the very vividness of children's images ex-
poses them to what is sometimes at least their worst
form of suffering.
A child, at once sensitive and imaginative, fre-
quently passes into a state of half hallucination in
3
26
Children's Ways.
which the products of fancy take on visible reality.
George Sand, in her delightful reminiscences of child-
hood, relates more than one of these terrible prostrating
hallucinations of the early years.¹
We see the same gloomy turn of the young imagi-
nation in the readiness with which children accept
superstitions about ghosts, witches, and so forth.
Those who are brought up in the country in contact
with the superstitious beliefs of the peasant appear to
imbibe them with great energy. This is true of
George Sand, who gives us an interesting account of
the legends of the French peasants, with whom when
a little girl she was allowed to associate. American
children, especially those who come under the influence
of the beliefs of the negro and of the Indian, may, as
that delightful book, Tom Sawyer, tells us, become
quite experts in folk-lore. Even in England and
among well-to-do people children will show an alarm-
ing facility in adopting the superstitious ideas of the
servants.
Much the same thing shows itself in children's
romancings and in their preferences in the matter of
stories. So far from these being always bright and
amusing, they frequently show a very decided tinge of
blackness. The young imagination seems to be especi-
ally plastic under the touch of the gruesome. It loves to
be roused to its highest pitch of activity by the presenta-
tion of something fearsome, something which sends a
wild tremor through the nerves. And even when the
story is free from this touch of the dreadful it takes
¹ See my account of George Sand's childhood, in Studies of Child-
hood, chap. xii.
The Enchantment of Play.
27
on seriousness by reason of the earnestness which the
child's mind brings to it.
Coming now to active play, we find here, too, in the
region which seems to owe its very existence to the
childish instinct of enjoyment, traces of the same
seriousness. For most children, one suspects, play
would become a tame thing were there not the fear-
ful to conjure with. The favourite play-haunts, the
dark corners under the table, behind the curtains,
and so forth, show what a vital element of play is
supplied by the excitement of the state of half-
dread. It is in the games which set the young
nerves gently shaking, when a robber has to be
met or a giant attacked in his cave, that one sees
best, I think, how terribly earnest children's play
may become.
Even where play has in it nothing alarming it is
apt to take on a serious aspect. This has been illus-
trated in what has been said about the doll and other
play-illusions. Most of children's play is imitative of
the serious actions of grown-up folk. In nursing her
doll the little girl is taking to her domestic duties in
the most serious of moods; similarly when the little
boy assumes the responsibilities of coachman or other
useful functionary. The imitative impulse of child-
hood is wont in these cases to follow out the correct
and prescribed order with punctilious exactness. The
doll must be dressed, fed, put to bed, and so forth,
with the regularity that obtains in the child's own life;
the coachman must hold the whip, urge on the horses,
And
or stop them in the proper orthodox manner.
the same fidelity to model and prescription shows
itself in those games which reproduce the page of
28
Children's Ways.
fiction. Here again Tom Sawyer is an excellent
example. The way in which that leader of boys lays
down the law to Huckleberry Finn when they play
at pirates or at Robin Hood and his merry men
illustrates forcibly this serious aspect of play.
PART II
AT WORK.
CHAPTER III.
ATTACKING OUR LANGUAGE.
No part of the life of a child appeals to us more
powerfully perhaps than the first use of our language.
The small person's first efforts in linguistics win us
by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse they
disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full
fruition of human intercourse. The difficulties, too,
which we manage to lay upon the young learner of
our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with
these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half
humorous, to this field of infantile activity. A child
first begins to work in downright earnest when he
tries to master these difficulties.
As we are here studying the child at an age when
he has acquired a certain hold on human speech, I
shall make no attempt to describe the babbling of the
first months which precedes true speech. For the
same reason I shall have to pass by the interesting
beginnings of sign-making, and shall only just touch
All this
the first stages of articulate performance.
is, I think, deeply interesting, but it cannot be
30
Children's Ways.
adequately dealt with here, and I have fully dealt
with it in my larger work.
The first difficulty which our little linguist has to
encounter is the mechanical one of reproducing, with
a recognisable measure of approximation, our verbal
sounds. What a very rough approximation it is at
first, all mothers know. When, for example, a child
expects you to translate his sound "koppa" into
"Tommy," or "pots" into "hippopotamus," it will be
acknowledged that he is making heavy demands.
Yet though he causes us difficulties in this way he
does so because he finds himself in difficulties. His
articulatory organ cannot master the terrible words
we put in his way, and he is driven to these short cuts
and other make-shifts.
The Namer of Things.
Leaving now the problem of getting over the
mechanical difficulties of our speech, let us see what
the little explorer has to do when trying to use verbal
sounds with their right meanings. Here, too, we shall
find that huge difficulties beset his path, and that his
arrival at the goal proves him to have been in his
way as valiant and hard-working as an African ex-
plorer.
One feature of the early tussle with our language is
curious and often quaintly pretty. Having at first.
but few names, the little experimenter makes the
most of these by extending them in new and surpris-
ing directions. The extension of names to new objects
on the ground of some perceived likeness has been
touched on above (p. 3); and many other examples
Attacking our Language.
31
}
might be given. Thus when one child first saw a
star and wanted to name it he called it, as if by a
poetic metaphor, an "eye". In like manner the
name “pin” was extended by another child to a
crumb just picked up, a fly, and a caterpillar, and
seemed to mean something little to be taken between
the fingers. The same child used the sound "at"
(hat) for anything put on the head, including a hair-
brush. Similarly children often extend the names
"Mamma, baby" to express any contrast of size, as
when a small coin was called by an American child a
"baby dollar”.
In this extension of language by the child we find
not merely a tendency to move along lines of analogy,
as in the above instances, but to go from a thing to
its accompaniments by way of what the psycholo-
gist calls association. This is illustrated by the case
of Darwin's grandchild, who after learning to use
the common children's name for duck, "quack,” pro-
ceeded to call a sheet of water "quack". In like
manner a little girl called the gas lamp "pop" from
the sound produced when lighting it, and then carried
over the name "pop" to the stool on which the maid
stood when proceeding to light it.
There is another curious way in which children are
driven by the slenderness of their verbal resources to
“extend” the names they learn. They will often
employ a word which indicates some relation to ex-
press what may be called the inverted relation. For
example, like the unschooled yokel they will some-
times make the word "learn" do duty for "teach"
also. In one case "spend" was made to express
"cost". It was a somewhat similar inversion when
32
Children's Ways.
a little girl called her parasol blown about by the
wind "a windy parasol," and a stone that made her
hand sore a very sore stone".
Not only do the small experimenters thus stretch
the application of their words beyond our conven-
tional limitations, they are often daring enough when
their stock fails them to invent new names. Some-
times this is done by framing a new composite name
out of familiar ones. One child, for example, pos-
sessing the word steam-ship and wanting the name
sailing-ship, cleverly hit upon the composite form
"wind-ship". One little girl, when only a year and
nine months old, showed quite a passion for classing
objects by help of such compound names, arranging
the rooms, for example, into "morner-room," "dinner-
room" (she was fond of adding "er" at this time) and
"nursery-room". Savages do much the same kind of
thing, as when the Aztecs called a boat a "water-house".
It is no less bold a feat when the hard-pressed
tyro in speechland frames a new word on the model
of other words which he already knows. The results
are often quaint enough. One small boy talked of
the "rainer," the fairy who makes rain, and another
little boy dubbed a teacher the "lessoner". Two
children invented the quaint substantive "thinks" for
"thoughts," and another child used the form "digs" for
holes dug in the ground. Other droll inventions
occur, as when one small person asked to see another
worm deading," and neatly expressed the act of
undoing a parcel by the form "unparcel"; and when
another child spoke of his metal toy being "unhotted,"
lacking our word cooled, and asked, "Can't I be
sorried?" for "Can't I be forgiven ?"
66
Attacking our Language.
33
Just as children invent new general names, so they
now and again invent "proper" names in order to
mark off one person or thing from another of the
same kind. Thus a German professor tells us that
his grand-niece introduced her new nurse, who had
the same name, "Mary," as her old one, as "Evening
Mary," because she had arrived in the evening.
Of course children's experiments in language are
not always so neat as this. They are sometimes
misled by false analogies into the formation of such
clumsy words as "sorrified" for "sorry," and "mag-
nicious” for “magnificent”.
The Sentence-builder.
It is an interesting moment when the young linguist
tries his hand at putting words together in sentences.
As is pretty well known, a child has for some time to
try to make known his thoughts and wishes by single
vocables, such as "mamma," "milk," "puss," "up,"
and so forth. Each of these words serves in the first
baby language for a variety of sentences. Thus
"Puss!" means sometimes "Puss is doing something,"
at other times "I want puss," and so forth. But
somewhere about the age of one year nine months
the child makes bold to essay a more explicit and
definite form of statement.
The construction of sentences proceeds in a cautious
manner. At first the structure is of the simplest,
two words being placed one after the other, in what
is called apposition, as in the couple, "Big bir" (big
bird), "Papa no" (papa's nose), and the like.
Later on longer sentences are attempted of a similar
34
Children's Ways.
pattern; and it is truly wonderful how much the child.
manages to express in this rude fashion without any aid
from those valuable auxiliaries, prepositions, and the
like. For example, one boy when in his twentieth
month gave this elaborate order to his father, "Dada
toe toe ba," that is, "Dada is to go and put his toes
in the bath ".
Quaint inversions of our order not infrequently
occur in this early sentence-making. Thus one child
used the form, "Out-pull-baby 'pecs," meaning in our
language, "Baby pulls (or will pull) out the spectacles”.
Sometimes the order reminds us still more closely of
the idiom of foreign languages, as when a little girl said:
"How Babba (baby, i.e., herself) does feed nicely!"
Another curious feature of children's first style of
composition is the fondness for antithesis. A little
boy used when wishing to express his approval of
something, say a dog, to use the form, "This a nice
bow-wow, not nasty bow-bow". Similarly a little
girl said, "Boo (the name of her cat) dot (got) tail;
poor Babba (baby) dot no tail," proceeding to search
for a tail under her skirts.
In the first attempts to fit our words together
dreadful slips are apt to occur. The way in which
children are wont to violate the rules of grammar
when using verbs, as in saying "eated" for "ate,"
"scram" for "screamed,' "be'd" for "was," and so
on, is well known, and there are many excuses to be
found for these very natural errors.
Particularly instructive are the odd confusions
which children are apt to fall into when they come
to use the pronouns, and more particularly “I,"
"me". Many a child begins by using "I" and "you"
Attacking our Language.
35
with mechanical imitation of others, meaning by
"you" his own person, which is, of course, called
"you" by others when addressing him. The forms
"I," "me" and "my" are apt to be hopelessly mixed
up, as in saying "me go" and "my go" for "I
go," "me book" for "my book," and so forth. One
little boy used the form "I am" for "I," saying, for
example, “I am don't want to". A little German
girl had an odd way of splitting up herself into two
persons, saying, for example, "She has made me
wet," meaning that she had made herself wet.
Throughout this work of mastering our language a
child is wont to eke out his deficiencies by bold
strokes of originality. When, for example, a little girl
towards the end of the second year, after being
jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother
also, says, in default of the word "jump," "Make
mamma high". Robert Hamerling, the Austrian
poet, when a child, being told by his sick mother that
he had not said something she wished him to say,
answered, "I said it, but you didn't hear, you are
poorly, and so blind in the ear". Quite pretty
metaphors are sometimes hit upon, as when a little
boy of two seeing his father putting a piece of wood
on the fire said, "Flame going to eat it". A boy of
twenty-seven months ingeniously said, "It rains off,”
for "The rain has left off". Once a girl about the
same age as the boy hit on the idiom, "No two 'tatoes
left," for "Only one potato is left". Pretty construc-
tions sometimes appear in these make-shifts, as when
a little girl of whom Mrs. Meynell tells, wishing to
know how far she might go in spending money on
fruit, asked, "What mustn't it be more than ?"
36
Children's Ways.
:
The Interpreter of Words.
There is one part of this task of mastering our
language which deserves especial notice, viz., the
puzzling out of the meanings we put, or try to put,
into our words.
Many good stories of children show that they have
a way of sadly misunderstanding our words. This
arises often from the ignorance of the child and the
narrowness of his experience, as when a Sunday
school scholar understood the story of the good
Samaritan to mean that a gentleman came and
poured some paraffin (¿.e., oil) over the poor man.
By a child's mind what we call accidentals often
get taken to be the real meaning. A boy and a
girl, twins, had been dressed alike. Later on the
boy was put into a "suit". A lady asked the girl
about this time whether they were not the twins, when
she replied, "No, we used to be".
"Twin" was
inseparably associated in her mind with the similarity
in dress.
It should be remembered, too, that we greatly add to
the difficulties of the small student of our language
by reason of the ambiguities of our expressions, and
of our short and elliptical modes of speaking. It
was a quite natural misconception when an Ameri-
can child, noting that children were "half price" at
a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby
now that they were cheap. Many another child.
besides Jean Ingelow has been saddened at being
told by her father or other grown-up who was dancing
her on his knee that he must put her down as he
"had a bone in his leg". Much misapprehension
Attacking our Language.
37
arises, too from our figurative use of language, which
the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal
way, as when a small boy indignantly resented the
statement of his mother who was driving him behind
a rather skittish pony, " Pony has lost his head".
Children are desirous of understanding us and make
brave efforts to put meanings into our words, some-
times falling comically short of the mark. A little
fellow of two who had been called "fat" by his nurse
when given his bath, afterwards proceeded to call his
father "fat" when he saw him taking his bath. "Fat"
had by a natural misconception taken on the meaning
of "naked". It was a simple movement of childish
thought when a little school-girl answered the question
of the Inspector, "What is an average?" by saying,
"What the hen lays eggs on". She had heard her
mother say, "The hen lays so many eggs 'on the
average' every week," and had no doubt imagined a
little myth about this average.
It is the same with what is read to them. Where
they do not recognise a meaning they invent one, or
if necessary substitute an intelligible word for an un-
intelligible one. Young Hermiston in R. L. Steven-
son's last story naturally enough said in speaking of
his father, the "hanging judge," "It were better for
that man if a milestone were bound about his neck".
Similarly they will invert the relations of words in
order to arrive at something like a meaning. Mr.
Canton relates in his pretty sketch of a child, The
Invisible Playmate, that his little heroine, who knew
the lines in Struwwelpeter—
The doctor came and shook his head,
And gave him nasty physic too-
38
Children's Ways.
was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at
once replied, “And will the doctor come and shook
my head?”
It was so much more natural to suppose
that when the doctor came and did something this
was carried out on the person of the patient.
(C
There is something of this same impatience of
meaningless sayings, of the same keen desire to im-
port a meaning into strange words, in children's
word-play,” as we call it. For example, a little boy
about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse's
neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some
time. He thereupon exclaimed, "I don't think it's
new ralgia, I call it old ralgia". Was this playful
punning or a half-serious attempt to correct a mis-
statement? A child called his doll "Shakespeare"
because its spear-like legs could be shaken. We
know that adults sometimes do the same kind of
thing, as a cabman I once overheard speaking to
somebody about putting down "ashphalt". We all
like to feel at home with words, and if they look
dreadfully strange we do our best to give them a look
of old acquaintance.
It should be added that children, though they eke
out their deficiencies by inventing new verbal forms
and putting new meanings into our words, have on
the whole a vast respect for words. This is seen in
their way of stickling for accuracy when others re-
peat familiar word-forms. The zeal of a child in
correcting the language not only of other children,
but of grown-ups, and the comical errors he will now
and again fall into in exercising his corrective func-
tion, are well known to parents. Sometimes he shows
himself the most absurd of pedants. "Shall I read
Attacking our Language.
39
to you out of this book, baby?" asked a mother of
her boy, about two and a half years old. "No," fe-
plied the infant, "not out of dot book, but somepy in-
side of it." The same little stickler for verbal accuracy,
when his nurse asked him, “Are you going to build
your bricks, baby?" replied solemnly, "We don't
build bricks, we make them and then build with
them". Yet such disagreeable pedantry shows how
conscientiously the small curly head is trying to bring
clearness and order into the dark tangle of our speech,
and it ought not to be treated harshly.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SERIOUS SEARCHER.
IN a former chapter we dealt with a child's mind as a
harbourer of fancies, as subject to the illusive spell of
its bright imagery. Yet with this play of fancy there
goes a respectable quantity of serious inquiry into the
things of the real world. This is true, I believe, even
of highly imaginative children, who now and again
come down from their fancy-created world and regard
the solid matter-of-fact one at their feet with shrewdly
scrutinising eyes. For children, like some of those
patients of whom the hypnotist tells us, live alter-
nately two lives.
The child not only scans his surroundings, he
begins to reflect on what he observes, and does his
best to understand the puzzling scene which meets
his eyes. And all this gives seriousness, a deep and
admirable seriousness, to his attitude; so that 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, ad-
mit that its dominant expression is gravity and not
playfulness". We may now turn to this graver side
of the young intelligence.
The Thoughtful Observer.
This serious examination of things begins early.
The Serious Searcher.
4I
Most of us have been subjected to the searching gaze
of an infant's eyes when we first made it overtures of
friendship. How much this fixed gaze of a child of
six months takes in nobody can say.
What we find when the child grows and can give
an account of his observations is that, while often
surprisingly minute in particular directions, they are
narrowly confined. 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 like-
ness of colour to the black dog overpowered the like-
ness in form to the other lambs close by. We shall
find further examples of this one-sided observation
when we come to consider children's drawings.
The pressure of practical needs tends, however, to
develop a fuller examination of objects. A lamb and
a dog, for example, have to be distinguished by a
number of marks in which the supremely interesting
detail of colour holds a quite subordinate place. In-
dividual things, too, have to be more carefully dis-
tinguished, if only for the purpose of drawing the
line between what is "mine" and "not mine," for
example, spoons and picture-books. The recognition
of the mother, say, exacts this fuller inspection, for
she cannot always be recognised by her height alone,
for example, when she is sitting, nor by her hair alone,
as when she has her hat on, so that a group of distinc-
tive features has to be seized.
When once the eye has begun to note differences
it makes rapid progress. This is particularly true
4
42
Children's Ways.
where the development of a special interest leads to
a habit of concentration on a particular kind of object.
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
over two railways, 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 eyes had detected.
The fineness of children's distinguishing observation
is well illustrated in their recognition of small drawings
and photographs, as when one child of two instantly
picked out the likeness of his father from a small carte
de visite group.
In truth, children's observation, when close and
prolonged, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a
really powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as
well as exact. The boy, John Ruskin, could look
for hours together at flowing water, noting all its
subtle changes. Another little boy, when three
and a half years old, received a picture-book, The
Railway Train, and inspected the drawings almost
uninterruptedly for a week, retaining the treasure
even at meals.
"At the end of this time (writes his
grasped the smallest detail in every
mother) he had
picture."
Along with this serious work of observing things
there often goes a particularly bright and exact recol-
lection of them and their names.
Feats of memory
in the first three years are, I suspect, a common
theme of discourse among admiring mothers. Here
The Serious Searcher.
43
A little girl
is a sample of many stories sent me.
only nine months old when taken out for a walk was
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 of two
years on seeing a girl cousin who lived in the country
where he had visited five months before, at once asked
whether her dog "Bruce" barked.
"Bruce" barked. Another boy aged
two years and ten months on revisiting his mother's
paternal home in Italy after four or five months re-
membered small details, e.g., how the grapes were
cut, and how the wine was made.
Nor does the busy brain of the child stop at observ-
ing and recalling what lies about him. He begins at
an early age to compare this thing with that, and to
note the relations and connections of things, how he
is almost as tall as the table, for example, and a good
deal taller than pussy, how he has a spoon while his
elders have knives and forks, and so forth. And all
the while he is trying to get at the general rule or law
which obtains in this and that realm of things.
The first attempts of a child to grasp the causal
connections of things are apt to be quaint enough.
Professor Preyer tells us that his little boy, having
been told to blow on his hand which had been hurt,
proceeded afterwards when he had struck his head
against something "to blow of his own accord, sup-
posing that the blowing would have a soothing effect,
even when it did not reach the injured part "."
1
¹ The Development of the Intellect (Appleton & Co.), p. 155.
44
Children's Ways.
Since the little searcher in trying to piece his facts
together in their proper connections must, as all of us
do, make use of such experiences as he happens to
have, he will pretty certainly fall into the error of
"hasty generalisation," as we call it, taking things to
be really connected which accidentally occur together,
it may be in a single instance only. An American
boy of ten who had happened to have a teacher
who was short and cross, and a second who was tall
and very kind, said to his new teacher, who struck
him as short, "I'm afraid you'll make a cross teacher".
Yet while we smile at such simplicity ought we not
to remember that older people, too, sometimes com-
mit similar blunders, and that after all the impulse to
reason can only work itself into a good sound faculty
by risking such blunders ?
The Pertinacious Questioner.
The effort of the child to understand the things
about him grows noteworthy somewhere near the end
of the third year, and about the same time there comes
the questioning "mania,” as we are apt to regard it.
The first question was put in the case of a boy in the
twenty-eighth month, in the case of a girl in the
twenty-third month. But the true age of inquisitive-
ness when questions are fired off with wondrous
rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with
the fourth year.
A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant
nurses and mothers is that children's questioning is
one of the ways in which they love to plague their
elders. We shall see presently how much truth there
The Serious Searcher.
45
is in this view. It may be enough here to say that a
good deal of this first questioning is something very
different. A child asks you what this thing is you
wear on your watch-chain, why you part your hair in
the middle, or what not, because he feels that he is
ignorant, and for the moment at any rate he would
like to get his ignorance removed. More than this,
his question shows that he thinks you can satisfy his
curiosity.
Questioning may take various directions. A good
deal of the child's catechising of his long-suffering
mother is prompted by a more or less keen desire for
fact. The typical form of this line of questioning is
"What?" The motive here is commonly the wish to
know something which will connect itself with and
complete a bit of knowledge already gained. "How
old is Rover?" "Where was Rover born?" "Who
was his father?” "What is that dog's name?"
"What sort of hair had you when you were a little
girl?" This kind of questioning may spring out of
pure childish curiosity, or out of some practical need,
as that of acting out a part in play. Thus a Kinder-
garten teacher was wont to be besieged with questions
of this kind from her small boys when playing at
being animals: "Do walruses swim fast or slow?"
"Do lions climb trees? "
One feature in this pursuit of fact is the great store
which a child sets by names of things. It has been
pointed out by a French writer that the form of ques-
tion: "What is this?" often means, "What is it
called?" A child is apt to think that everything has
its own name. One little boy explained to his mother
that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds and
46
Children's Ways
the butterflies had names given to them by their
mothers, just as babies have. Perhaps children when
they find out the name of a new thing feel that they
know it, that they have been introduced to it, so to
speak.
Another motive in this early questioning is the
desire for an explanation of what is seen or heard
about the reason and the cause of things. It takes
the well-known forms, "Why?" "Who made?" and
so forth. Who that has tried to instruct the small
child of three or four does not know the long shrill
whine-like sound of this question?
Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth
interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to inter-
pret, than this simple-looking little "why?"
Let us in judging of this pitiless "why?" try to
understand the situation of the small searcher con-
fronted by so much that is strange and puzzling in
nature, and in human life alike. Just because he is
born a thinker he must try at least to bring the
strange thing into some connection with his familiar
world. And what is more natural than to go to the
wise lips of the grown-up for a solution of the
difficulty?
The demand for the reason or explanation of a
thing may be satisfied by a bare reference to some
other thing which is similar and so fitted to throw the
light of familiarity on what is new and strange. For
example, you may sometimes still a child's question-
ing as to why pussy has fur by telling him that it is
pussy's hair. A child may find an appeasement, too,
of his logical appetite in learning that what is new
and strange to him comes under a general rule, that,
The Serious Searcher.
47
for example, many other animals besides pussy have
fur.
Nevertheless, I suspect that a child's "why?" aims
farther than this; that it is only fully appeased by a
knowledge of what we older folk call a reason, that is to
say of the cause which originates a thing, and of the
purpose which it serves. It is easy to see, indeed, that
this questioning curiosity of the little ones is largely
directed to the subject of origins or makings. What
hours and hours do they not spend in wondering how
the pebbles, the stones, the birds, the babies are
made!
The inquiry into origin starts with the amiable.
presupposition that all things have been produced by
hand-craft after the manner of household possessions.
The world is a sort of big house where everything has
been made by somebody, or at least fetched from
somewhere. And this is perhaps natural enough, for of
the things whose production the child sees are not the
larger number fashioned by human hands? He him-
self makes a considerable number of things, including
these rents in his clothes, messes on the tablecloth,
and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his
memory by the authorities. And, then, he is wont to
watch with a keen interest the making of things by
others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hay-ricks.
To ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the
wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to
apply the type of causation which is familiar to him.
The demand for a reason takes on a more special
meaning when the idea of purpose becomes clear.
The search now is for the use of a thing, the end
which the maker had in view when he fashioned it
48
Children's Ways.
When, for example, a child asks, "Why is there such
a lot of dust?" he seems to be seeking the purpose
which the maker of dust had in mind, or in other
words the use of dust. Similarly when things are
endowed with life and their own purpose, as in asking,
"Why does the wind blow?" Here the child thinks.
of nature's processes as if they were a kind of human
action which we can understand by seeing into its
aim.
Here are some curious observations which seem to
illustrate this childish idea of how nature's processes
originate. A little girl whom we will call M., when
one year eleven months old, happened to be walking
with her mother on a windy day. At first she was
delighted at the strong boisterous wind, but then got
tired and said: "Wind make mamma's hair untidy,
Babba (her own name) make mamma's hair tidy, so
wind not blow adain (again)". About three weeks
later the same child being out in the rain with her
mother said: "Mamma, dy (dry) Babba's hands, so
not rain any more". This little inquirer seems clearly
to have conceived of the wind and rain as a kind of
naughty child who can be got to behave properly by
effacing the effects of its naughtiness.
We may notice something more in this early form
of questioning. Children are apt to think not only
that things behave in general after the manner of
people, that their activity is motived by some aim,
but that this aim concerns us human creatures. The
wind and the rain came and went in our little girl's
nature-theory just to vex and not to vex mamma "
and "Babba". A little boy of two years two months
sitting on the floor one day in a bad temper looked
66
The Serious Searcher.
49
up and saw the sun shining and said captiously, "Sun
not look at Hennie," and then more pleadingly, " Please,
sun, not look at poor Hennie". Such observations
show that children, like savages, and possibly, too,
some persons who would not like to be called savages,
are inclined to look at nature's doings as specially
designed to injure or benefit themselves.
There is reason to think that the idea of use is pro-
minent in the first conceptions of things. A French
inquirer, M. Binet, has brought this fact out by ques-
tioning a considerable number of children. Thus,
when asked what a hat is, one child answered, "Pour
mettre sur la tête". Similarly children asked by
other inquirers, "What is a tree?" answered, "To
make the wind blow," "To sit under," and so forth.
Later on a more scientific form of questioning
arises. The little searcher begins to understand
something about the processes of nature, and tries by
questioning his elders to get a glimpse into their
manner of working. This quest of a natural explana-
tion of things marks the transition to the level of
thought of the civilised man.
Here, again, the small investigator finds much hard
work to be got through, for nature's doings are apt to
be varied and rather complex. A child, for example,
finds that when he dips his
what not, he makes a hole.
water no hole is left behind.
one little fellow asking his
when we put our hand into the water we don't make
a hole in it?"
hand into sand, clay, or
But when he puts it into
Hence we can understand
father, "How is it that
Here we have not mere curiosity; we have per-
plexity at what looks contradictory to the usual run
50
Children's Ways.
of things. The same thing is illustrated in the ques-
tion of another little boy, "Can they (the fish) breathe
with their moufs under water?"
Among the things which are apt to puzzle the
young inquirer is the disappearance of things. He
can as little understand this as the beginning of things,
and so he will ask: "Where does the sea swim to?
or
""
Where does the wind go to?" or Where does
the wet (e.g., on the pavement after rain) go to?"
As the view of things begins to widen and embrace
the absent and the past new puzzles occur and
prompt to a more philosophical kind of questioning.
Sometimes it is the mere vastness of the world, the
multitude of things, which oppresses and confuses the
young understanding. "Mother," asked a small boy
of four, "why is there such a lot of things in the
world if no one knows all these things?" A little
girl about three and a half years old asked her
mother, “Mamma, why do there be any more days,
why do there? and why don't we leave off eating and
drinking?" It is hard for us older folk to get behind.
questions like this so as to understand the source of
the childish bewilderment.
The subject of origins is, as we all know, apt to be
a sore puzzle for the childish mind. The beginnings
of living things are, of course, the great mystery.
"There's such a lot of things," remarked the little
zoologist I have recently been quoting, "I want to
know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want
to know who made God, and I want to know if pussy
has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties."
Finding that this was not so, he observed: "Oh,
then, I s'pose she has to have God to help her if she
The Serious Searcher.
51
doesn't have kitties in eggs given her to sit on".
Another little boy, five years old, found his way to
the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen
and the egg, and asked his mother: "When there is
no egg where does the hen come from? When there
was no egg, I mean, where did the hen come from?"
Another little fellow was puzzled to know how the
first child was suckled, or, as a little girl of four and
a half years put it: "When everybody was a baby-
then who could be their nurse-if they were all babies?"
In this bold sweep of inquiry a child is apt to go
back to the absolute beginnings of things, as when he
asks, "Who made God?" or, "What was there before
God?" The idea that God has always been seems
to be particularly perplexing and even oppressive to
a child's mind.
Sometimes the questioning takes on a still clearer
ring of metaphysics, startling and shocking perhaps
the patient listener. A little boy of three once put
the poser: "If I'd gone upstairs, could God make it
that I hadn't?" Or as another boy of eight put it
to a distinguished biologist, "Mr. —, Mr. ——, if God
wanted me to be good, and I wouldn't be good, who
would win?" Needless to say that this young philo-
sopher was a Britisher.
With many children confronted with the mysteries.
of God and the devil this questioning often reproduces
the directions of theological speculation. Thus the
problem of the necessity of evil is clearly recognisable
in the question once put by an American boy under
eight years of age to a priest who visited his home:
Father, why don't God kill the devil and then there
would be no more wickedness in the world?”
66
52
Children's Ways.
The different lines of questioning here briefly
illustrated are apt to run on concurrently from about
the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about
animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit
of theological inquiry, this again being dropped for an
equally eager inquiry into the making of clocks, rail-
way engines, and so on. Yet, through these alternat-
ing bouts of questioning we can recognise laws of
progress. Thus children will ask first about the things
which first interest them, as, for example, animals and
babies. Again the questioning grows gradually more
intelligent, more reasonable, accommodating itself,
often after much suffering, to the adamantine limits
of human knowledge.
While I have here regarded children's questioning
seriously as the expression of a genuine desire for
knowledge, I am well aware that this cannot be said
of all of it. The hard-pressed mother knows that a
child's "why?" is often used in a sleepy mechanical
way with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance
of answer being accepted without an attempt to put
a meaning into it. A good deal of the more reckless.
kind of children's asking, when one question is
followed by another with an irritating pertinacity,
appears to be of this formal and lifeless character.
Some of it, indeed, as when a little American asked
her mother: "Mamma, why ain't Edna Belle (her
baby sister) me, and why ain't I Edna Belle?"
comes alarmingly near the rage of questioning ob-
served in certain forms of mental disease, and may
perhaps be a symptom of an over-wrought brain.
To admit this, however, is far from saying that we
ought to treat all this questioning with a mild con-
The Serious Searcher.
53
tempt. The little questioners flatter us by attributing
superior knowledge to us, and good manners should
compel us to treat their questions with some attention.
And if now and then they torment us with a string of
random reckless questioning, in how many cases, one
wonders, are they not made to suffer, and that wrong-
fully, by having perfectly serious questions rudely
cast back on their hands?
.
CHAPTER V.
FIRST THOUGHTS: (a) THE NATURAL WORLD.
WE have seen in the last chapter that children have
their characteristic ways of looking at their new
world. These ways often result in the formation of
definite ideas or "thoughts" which may last for years.
We will now try to follow the little thinker in his
first attempt at framing a theory of Nature and her
doings.
Here, too, we shall find that the active little brain
has its work cut out for it. As already suggested,
things are often so puzzling to the child that it is only
by dint of a good deal of questioning that he can
piece them together at all. And even after he has
had his questions answered he sometimes finds it well-
nigh impossible to reconcile one fact with another,
and to reach a clear view of things as a whole.
The Fashion of Things.
The first thoughts on Nature and her processes are
moulded very largely by the tendencies of the young
mind touched on in the last chapter. Like the savage
the child is apt to think of the wind and the thunder
as somebody's doing, and as aimed specially at himself.
Hence the strongly marked mythological or super-
natural element in children's theories. Here, it is
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 55
evident, thought is supported by a somewhat capri-
cious fancy. When, for example, a child accounts
for the wind by saying that somebody is waving a
very big fan somewhere, or, more prettily, that it is
made by the fanning of the angels' wings, he comes
very near that romancing which we have regarded as
the play of imagination. Yet though fanciful it is
still thought, just because it aims, however wildly, at
explaining something in the real world.
With this fanciful and mythological element there
goes a more scientific one. Even the fan myth re-
cognises a mechanical process, viz., the waving of
something to and fro, which does undoubtedly pro-
duce a movement of the air. Children's first theories
of nature often show a queer mingling of supernatural
and natural conceptions.
I propose now to examine a few of the commoner
ideas of children respecting natural objects.
One characteristic of this first thought about things
appears at an early age. A child seems inclined to
take all that he sees for real tangible substance: it is
some time before he learns that "things are not what
they seem". For example, an infant will try to touch
shadows, sunlight dancing on the wall and flat objects
in pictures. This tendency to make things out of all
he sees shows itself in pretty forms, as when a little girl
one year eleven months old, "gathered sunlight in her
hands and put it on her face," and about a month
earlier expressed a wish to wash some black smoke.
This was the same child that tried to make the wind
behave by tidying her mother's hair; and her belief
in the material reality of the wind was shown by her
asking her mother to lift her up high so that she
56
Children's Ways.
might see the wind; which reminds one of R. L.
Stevenson's lines to the wind:-
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all.
In making a reality out of the wind a child is led not
by sight, but by touch. He feels the wind, and so the
wind must be something substantial.
The common childish thought about the wind shows
that the young mind is apt to be much impressed
by the movements of things. Movement seems for
all of us the clearest and most impressive manifesta-
tion of life. When the movement of an object is not
seen to be caused by some other object, but seems to
be spontaneous, it is apt to be taken by children as
by uncivilised races to be the sign of life, and of
something like human impulse. A child of eighteen
months used to throw kisses to the fire. Some chil-
dren in the infant department of a London Board
School were asked what things in the room were alive,
and they promptly replied: "The smoke and the fire".
Big things moving by some internal contrivance of
which the child knows nothing, more especially
engines, are of course endowed with life. A little girl
of thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-fram,
and the author of The Invisible Playmate tells us that
his little girl wanted to stroke the "dear head" of a
locomotive.
Next to movement a sound which seems to be pro-
duced by the thing itself leads children to endow it
with life. Are not movement and vocal sound the
two great channels by which the child itself expresses
its feelings and impulses? The wind often owes
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 57
something of its life to its sound. The common
tendency of children to think of the sea as alive, of
which M. Pierre Loti gives an excellent illustration
in his Roman d'un enfant, is no doubt based on the
perception of its noise and movement. A little boy
assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he
heard it whistling in the night. The impulse, too, to
endow with life an object which looks so very much
of a machine as a railway engine, is probably sup-
ported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling.
Closely related to this impulse to ascribe life to
what we call inanimate objects is the tendency to
conceive of them as growing. This is illustrated in
the remark of a little boy of three and a half years
who when criticised by his mother for trying to make
a walking-stick out of a very short stick, observed:
"Me use it for walking-stick when stick be bigger".
I have referred in the last chapter to children's way
of thinking of things as made by somebody. The
idea of hand-work is extended in odd ways. For
example, quite young children are apt to extend the
ideas broken and mended to all kinds of objects.
Anything which seems to have become reduced by
losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken". Thus
a little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered
by a cloud, remarked: "The moon is broken". On
the other hand, in the case of one little boy, every-
thing not broken or intact was said to be "mended"
Do children when they talk in this fashion really
think that things are constantly undergoing repairs at
the hand of some mysterious mechanic, or are they
using their familiar terms figuratively in default of
others? It is hard to say.
5
58
Children's Ways.
Curious thoughts about Nature's processes arise later
when the inquirer tries to make them intelligible to him-
self. Here the first mechanical conceptions of the wind
deserve attention. An American child, asked what a
tree was, answered oddly, "To make the wind blow ".
A pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child
he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of
two large elms which stood in front of the house not
far from the windows of his bedroom. This putting
of the cart before the horse is funny enough, yet it is
perfectly natural. All the wind-making a child can
observe, as in blowing with his mouth, waving a
newspaper, and so forth, is effected by the movement
of a material object.
The Bigger World.
With respect to distant objects, a child is of course
freer to speculate, and, as we know, his ideas of the
heavenly bodies are wont to be odd enough. His
thoughts about these remote objects are rendered
quainter by his inability to conceive of great dis-
tances.
Children naturally enough take this world to be
what it looks to their uninstructed eyes. Thus the
earth becomes a circular plain, and the sky a sort of
inverted bowl placed upon it. Many children appear
like the ancients to suppose that the sky and the
heavenly bodies touch the earth somewhere, and
could be reached by taking a long, long journey.
Other and similar ideas are formed by some. Thus
one little girl used on looking at the sky to fancy she
was inside a blue balloon. The heavenly bodies are
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 59
apt to be taken for flat discs.
The brother of the
little girl just referred to took the sun to be a big
kind of cask cover, which could be put on the round
globe to make a "see-saw".
When this first simple creed gets corrected, children
go to work to put a meaning into what is told them
by their instructors. Thus they begin to speculate
about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie
reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it
by peeping down a well. When religious instruction
introduces the new region of heaven they are wont to
localise it just above the sky, which to their thought
forms its floor. Some hard thinking is carried out by
the young heads in the effort to reconcile the various
things they learn about the celestial region. Thus
the sky is apt to be thought of as thin, probably by
way of explaining the light of the stars and moon,
which is supposed to shine through the sky-roof. One
American child ingeniously applied the idea of the
thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the
moon when one part is bright and the other faintly
illumined, supposing it to be half-way through a sort
of semi-transparent curtain. Others again prettily ac-
counted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by
saying it was half stuck or half "buttoned" into the sky.
Characteristic movements of childish thought show
themselves in framing ideas of the making of the
world. The boy of four described by Mrs. Jardine
thought that the stars were "cut out" first, and that
then the little bits left over were all rolled into the
moon. Such an idea of cosmogony seems nonsense
till one remembers the work of cutting out the finer
figures in paper.
60
Children's Ways.
In much the same way children try to understand
the movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies
by help of the familiar movements of terrestrial objects.
Thus the sun was thought by American children to
fly, to be blown, perhaps like a soap-bubble or air-
ball, and, by a child with a more mechanical turn, to
roll, presumably as a hoop rolls, and so forth. Theo-
logical ideas, too, are pressed into the service of
childish explanation, as when the disappearance of
the sun is ascribed to God's pulling it up higher out
of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to
bed, and the like.
The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning
give rise in the case of the child as in that of the
Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The Ameri-
can children, as already observed, have different
mechanical illustrations for describing the super-
natural operation here, thunder being thought of as
the noise made by God when groaning, when walking
heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals “run
in "-ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind
humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen
with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the
lightning is attributed to God's lighting the gas, or
striking many matches at once. By a similar use of
familiar household operations God is supposed to
cause rain by turning on a tap, or by letting it down
from a cistern by a hose, or, better, by passing it
through a sieve or a dipper with holes.¹
Throughout the whole region of these mysterious
phenomena we have illustrations of the tendency to
1 I am indebted for these illustrations to an article by Dr. Stanley
Hall on "The Contents of Children's Minds”.
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 61
regard what takes place as designed for us poor
mortals. Thus one of the American children referred
to said charmingly that the moon comes round when
people forget to light the lamps. The little girl of
whom Mr. Canton writes thought "the wind and the
rain and the moon 'walking' came out to see her, and
the flowers woke up with the same laudable object".
When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child
instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little
soul. An earthquake may be thought of as a kind of
wonder show, specially got up for the admiration of a
sufficient body of spectators. Two children, D. and
K., aged ten and five respectively, lived in a small
American town. D., who was reading about an
earthquake, addressed his mother thus: "Oh, isn't it
dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever
have one here?" K., intervening with the character-
istic impulse of the young child to correct his elders,
answered: "Why, no, D., they don't have earthquakes
in little towns like this". Later on Nature's arrange-
ments are criticised from the same point of view. A
girl of seven, going back to the interesting question
of babies, remarked to her mother: "Wouldn't it be
convenient if you laid an egg, and then if you changed
your mind you needn't hatch it?"
Dreams.
Children are apt to have their own thoughts about
the strange semblances of objects which sometimes
present themselves to their eyes, more particularly
the "spectra" which we see after looking at the sun
or when the circulation of the retina is disturbed.
62
Children's Ways.
One little fellow spun quite a romance about the
spectra he used to see when poorly, saying that they
were angels, and that they went into his toy-basket
and played with his toys.
The most common form of such illusory appearance
is, of course, the dream, and I believe that children.
dwell much on the mystery of dreaming. The
simpler kind of child, like the savage, is disposed to
take his dreams for sensible realities. A boy in an
elementary school in London, aged five years, said
one day: "Teacher, I saw an old woman one night
against my bed". Another child, a little girl in the
same school, told her mother that she had seen a
funeral last night, and on being asked, "Where?"
answered quaintly, "I saw it in my pillow". A
little boy whom I know once asked his mother not
to put him to bed in a certain room, "because there
were so many dreams in the room ".
Yet children who reflect soon find out that dream-
objects do not belong to the common world, in the
sights of which we all partake. Another theory has
then to be found. I believe that many children,
especially those who, being imaginative when awake,
make their fairy-stories and their own romancings
very real to themselves, and who, as a result of this,
are wont to return to them in their dreams, are in-
clined to identify dreamland and fairyland. If they
want to see their "fairies" by day they will shut their
eyes; and so the idea may naturally enough occur to
them that when closing their eyes for sleep they are
going to see the beloved fairies again, and for a longer
time. Other ideas about dreams also occur among
children. A gentleman tells me that when a child he
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 63
used to think that dreaming, though different from
actual seeing, was yet more than having one's own
individual fancies; on dreaming, for example, that he
had met certain people he supposed that each of these
must have had a dream in which he had met him.
This, it may be remembered, is very much the fanci-
ful idea of dreaming which Mr. Du Maurier works.
out in his pretty story Peter Ibbetson.
There is some evidence to show that a thoughtful
child, when he begins to grasp the truth that dreams
are only unreal phantasms, becomes confused, and
wonders whether the things too which we see when
waking are not unreal. Here is a quaint example of
this transference of childish doubt from dreamland to
the every-day world. A little boy five years old
asked his teacher: "Wouldn't it be funny if we were
dreaming?" and being satisfied by the reply elicited
that it would be funny, he continued more explicitly:
"Supposing every one in the whole world were dream-
ing, wouldn't that be funny? They might be, mightn't
they?" Receiving a slightly encouraging, "Perhaps
they might," he wound up his argument in this fashion :
"Yes, but I don't think we are-I'm sure we are not.
Perhaps we should wake up and find every one gone
away.” This is dark enough, but suggests, I think,
that doubt as to the bright beautiful forms seen in
sleep is casting its shadow on the real world, on the
precious certainty of the presence of those we love.
A little girl about six and a half years old being
instructed by her father as to the making of the
world remarked: "Perhaps the world's a fancy".
The doubt in this case too was, one may conjecture,
led up to by the loss of faith in dreamland.
64
Children's Ways.
Birth and Growth.
We
may now pass to some of children's character-
istic thoughts about living things, more particularly
human beings, and the familiar domestic animals.
The most interesting of these, I think, are those
respecting growth and birth.
As already mentioned, the growth of things is one
of the most stimulating of childish puzzles. Led no
doubt by what others tell him, a child finds that
things are in general made bigger by additions from
without, and his earliest conception of growth is, I
think, that of such addition. Thus, plants are made
to grow, that is, swell out, by the rain. The idea
that the growth or expansion of animals comes from
eating is easily reached by the childish intelligence,
and, as we know, nurses and parents have a way of
recommending the less attractive sorts of diet by
telling children that they will make them grow. The
idea that the sun makes us grow, often suggested by
parents (who may be ignorant of the fact that growth
is more rapid in the summer than in the winter), is
probably interpreted by the analogy of an infusion of
something into the body.
A number of children, I have found, have the
queer notion that towards the end of life there is a
process of shrinkage. Old people are supposed to
become little again. One of the American children
referred to, a little girl of three, once said to her
mother: "When I am a big girl and you are a little
girl I shall whip you just as you whipped me now".
At first one is almost disposed to think that this
child must have heard of Mr. Anstey's amusing story,
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 65
✓
Vice Versa. Yet I have collected a number of
similar observations. For example, a little boy that
I know, when about three and a half years old, used
often to say to his mother with perfect seriousness of
manner : "When I am big then you will be little,
then I will carry you about and dress you and put
you to sleep". And one little girl asked about some
old person of her acquaintance: "When will she
begin to get small?" Another little girl asked her
grown-up cousin who was reading to her something
about an old woman: "Do people turn back into
babies when they get quite old?"
Another interesting fact to be noted here is that
some children firmly believe that persons after dying
and going to heaven will return to earth as little
children. An American lady writes to me that two
of her boys found their way independently of each
other to this idea. Thus one of them speaking of a
playmate who had been drowned, and who was now,
he was told, in heaven, remarked: "Then God will
let him come back and be a baby again ".
What, it may be asked, is the explanation of this
quaint childish thought? I think it probable that it is
suggested in different ways. One must remember that
as a child grows taller grown-ups may seem by com-
parison to get shorter. Again old people are wont to
stoop and so to look shorter; and then children often
hear in their stories of "little old" people. I suspect,
however, that in some cases there is a more subtle
train of thought. As the belief of the two brothers in
people's coming back from heaven suggests, the idea of
shrinkage is connected with those of birth and death.
May it not be that the more thoughtful sort of child.
66
Children's Ways.
reasons in this way? Babies which are sent from
heaven must have been something there; and people
when they die must continue to be something in
heaven. Why, then, the "dead" people that go to
this place are the very same as the babies that come
from it. To make this theory "square" with other
knowledge, the idea of shrinkage, either before or after
death, has to be called in. That it takes place before
death is supported by what was said above, and pro-
bably also by the information often given to children
that people when they die are carried by angels to
heaven just as the babies are said to be brought down
to earth by the angels.
The origin of babies and young animals furnishes
the small brain, as we have seen, with much food for
speculation. Here the little thinker is not often left
to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient
questionings in this direction have to be firmly
checked, and thus arise the well-known legends
about the doctor, the angel and so forth. With the
various lore thus collected, supplemented by the
pretty conceits of Hans Andersen and other writers of
fairy stories, the young inquirer has to do his best.
How the child-thinker is apt to go to work here is
illustrated in a collection of the thoughts of Ameri-
can school-children. Some of these said that God
drops babies for the women and doctors to catch
them, others that he brings them down to earth by
means of a wooden ladder, others again, that mamma,
nurse, or doctor goes up and fetches them in a
balloon. They are said by other children to grow in
cabbages, or to be placed by God in water, perhaps
in the sewer, where they are found by the doctor,
First Thoughts: (a) The Natural World. 67
who takes them to sick folks that want them. Here
we have delicious touches of childish fancy, quaint
adaptations of fairy and Bible lore, as in the use of
Jacob's ladder and the legend of Moses placed among
the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough
master-stroke of child-genius, the idea of the dark,
mysterious, wonder-producing sewer.
Not all children, by any means, elaborate even
this crude sort of theory. The less speculative and
more practical kind of child accepts what he is told
and proceeds to apply it, sometimes oddly enough.
Thus the Lancet recently contained an amusing letter
from some children, the eldest of whom was seven,
addressed to a doctor asking for a baby for their
mother's next birthday. It was to be "fat and
bonny, with blue eyes and fair hair"—a perfect doll
in fact; and a characteristic postscript asked: “Which
would be the cheaper-a boy or a girl?"
These ideas of children about babies partly com-
municated by others, partly thought out for them-
selves, are naturally enough made to account for the
beginnings of animal life. This is illustrated in the
supposition of the little boy, already quoted, who
thought that God helps pussy to have "ickle kitties,”
seeing that she hasn't any kitties in eggs given her to
sit upon.
CHAPTER VI.
FIRST THOUGHTS: (b) SELF AND OTHER MYSTERIES.
WE may now pass to some of the characteristic
modes of child-thought about that standing mystery,
the self. As our discussion of the child's ideas of
origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good
deal of his most earnest thinking is devoted to pro-
blems relating to himself.
The Visible Self.
The date of the first thought about self, of the
first dim stage of self-awareness, probably varies con-
siderably in the case of different children according to
the rapidity of the mental development and to the
character of the surrounding circumstances. The
little girl, who was afterwards to be known as George
Sand, may be supposed to have had an exceptional
development; and the blow which she received as a
baby in arms, and to which she ascribes the first
dawn of self-consciousness, was, of course, exceptional
too. There are probably many robust and unreflec-
tive children, knowing little of life's misery, who get
on extremely well without any consciousness of self.
The earliest idea of children about "myself" is a
mental picture of the body. They come to learn that
their body is different from other objects of sense by
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 69
a number of experiences, such as grasping the foot,
striking the head, receiving soft caresses, kisses, and
so forth. Such experiences may suffice to develop
even during the first year the idea that their body is
"me" in the sense that it is the living seat of pain
and pleasure.
The moving limbs are, of course, a specially
interesting part of this bodily self. Yet there is
reason to think that children regard the trunk as the
most important and vital part of themselves. Thus
one small boy who, when put to bed, could not get
into a comfortable posture, said queerly: "I can't
get my hands out of the way of myself". This may
be because they learn to connect the impressive
experiences of aches and pains with the trunk, and
because they observe that the maimed can do without
arms and without legs. It is interesting to note that
in the development of the idea of the soul by the race
its seat was placed in the trunk, viz., the heart, long
before it was localised in the head. Children are
probably confirmed in this view of the supreme
importance of the trunk by our way of specially
referring to it when speaking of the "body".
About this interesting trunk-body, what is inside
it, and how it works, the child speculates vastly. The
experience of bleeding has suggested to some chil-
dren that it is filled with blood. When later on the
young thinker hears of the stomach, bones and so
forth, he sets about theorising on these mysterious
matters. Odd twistings of thought occur when the
higher anatomy is talked of in his hearing. A six-
year-old girl, of whom Mr. Canton writes, thus
delivered herself with respect to the brain and its
70
Children's Ways.
functions: "Brain is what you think with in your
head, and the more you think the more crinkles there
are".
The growth of the folds was understood,
with charming childish simplicity, as the immediate
effect of thought, like the crinkling of the skin of the
forehead.
This may
At a later stage of the child's development, no
doubt, when he begins to grasp the idea of a conscious
thinking "I," the head will become a principal portion
of the bodily self. Children are quite capable of
finding their way, in part at least, to the idea that
the mind has its lodgment in the head. But it is
long before this thought grows clear.
be seen in children's talk, as when a girl of four
spoke of her dolly as having no sense in her eyes.
Even after a child has learned from others that we
think with our brains he may go on supposing that
our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we
speak.
Very interesting in connection with the first stages
of development of the idea of self is the experience of
the mirror. It would be absurd to expect a child
when first placed before a glass to recognise his own
face. He will smile at the reflection as early as the
tenth week, though this is probably merely an expres-
sion of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. If
held when about six months old in somebody's arms
before a glass a baby will at once show that he
recognises the image of the familiar face of his carrier
by turning round to the real face, whereas he does.
not recognise his own. He appears at first and for
some months to take it for a real object, sometimes
smiling to it as to a stranger and even kissing it, or,
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 71
as in the case of a little girl (fifteen months old),
offering it things.
An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a
real object and try to touch it. Some children on
noticing their own and other people's shadows on the
wall are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too,
in time, as with young animals, e.g., kittens, the
strange appearance is taken as a matter of course.
One
Some children seem to follow out in part the line
of thought of uncivilised races, and take reflections
and shadows for a kind of "double" of the self.
of Dr. Stanley Hall's correspondents writes to him
that he used to have small panics at his own shadow,
trying to run away from it, and to stamp on it,
thinking it might be his soul. We find another
illustration of this doubling of the self in the auto-
biography of George Sand, which relates that when a
child, reflecting on the impressive experience of the
echo, she invented a theory of her double existence.
We know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge dis-
tinguished among the "Hartleys" a picture Hartley
and a shadow Hartley. To one little boy the idea of
being photographed seemed uncanny, as if it were a
robbing himself of something and the making of
another self. But much more needs to be known
about these matters.
The prominence of the bodily element in a child's
first idea of himself is seen in the tendency to regard
his sameness as limited by unaltered bodily appear-
ance. A child of six, with his shock of curls, will,
naturally enough, refuse to believe that he is the same
as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother
shows him. One boy who had attained to the dignity
72
Children's Ways.
of knickerbockers used to speak of his petticoated
predecessor as a little girl.
The Hidden Self.
In process of time, however, what we call the
conscious self, that which thinks and suffers and wills,
comes to be dimly discerned. It is probable that a
real advance towards this true self-consciousness takes
place towards the end of the third year, when the
difficult forms of language, " I," " me," " mine," com-
“I,'
monly come to be used with intelligence. This is borne.
out by the following story: A little girl of three lying
in bed shut her eyes and said: "Mother, you can't
see me now". The mother replied: "Oh, you little
goose, I can see you but you can't see me". To
which she rejoined: "Oh, yes, I know you can see
my body, mother, but you can't see me". The "me"
here was, I suppose, the expression of the inner self
through the eyes. The same child at about the same
age was concerned as to the reality of her own exist-
ence.
One day playing with her dolls she asked her
mother: "Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like
my dolls?"
The first thought about self as something existing
apart from all that is seen is apt to be very perplexing
to the thoughtful child. As one lady puts it, writing
to me of her childish experience: "The power of
feeling and acting and moving about myself, under
the guidance of some internal self, amazed me con-
tinually ".
As may be seen by this quotation, the first
thought about self is greatly occupied with its action.
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 73
on the body. Among the many things that puzzled
one much-questioning little lad already quoted was
this: "How do my thoughts come down from my
brain to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my
legs walk?" A girl in her fifth year wanted to know
how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when
we want to, while the curtain can't move except
somebody moves it.
The Unreachable Past.
Very curious are the directions of the first thought
about the past self. The idea of what we call per-
sonal identity does not appear to be fully reached at
first; the little boy already quoted who referred to
his past self by saying, "when I was a little girl,"
must have had a very hazy idea of his sameness
with that small petticoated person.
It would seem,
indeed, as if a child found it easy to dissociate his
present self from his past, to deny all kinship with it.
The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his
remote past, is surpassed by that of trying to under-
stand the state of things before he was born. The
true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which
fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning
to be. This is illustrated in the question of a little
boy: "Where was I a hundred years ago? Where
was I before I was born?” It remains a mystery for
all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it
aside.
Even when a child begins to take in the fact that
there was a time when he was not, he is unable to
think of absolute non-existence. A little girl of three
6
74
Children's Ways.
being shown a photograph of her family and not
seeing her own face in the group asked: “Where is
me?" Being duly instructed that she was not here,
or indeed anywhere, she asked: “Was I killed?"
It is curious to note the differences in the attitude
of children's minds towards this mystery, "before you
were born". A child accustomed to be made the
centre of others' interest may be struck with the
blank in the common home life before his arrival.
A little girl of three, on being told by her mother of
something which happened long before she was born,
asked in amazement: "And what did you do without
H.? Did you cry all day for her?"
Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort
of child, the puzzle relates to the past existence of the
outer world. We have all been perplexed by the
thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing
before we were, and going on to exist after we cease
to be; though here again we are apt to "get used"
to the puzzle. Children may be deeply impressed
with this apparent contradiction. Jean Ingelow in
the interesting reminiscences of her childhood writes:
"I went through a world of cogitation as to whether
it was really true that anything had been and lived
before I was there to see it". A little boy of five
who was rather given to saying "clever" things, was
one day asked by a visitor, who thought to rebuke
what she took to be his conceit: "Why, M., however
did the world go round before you came into it?”
M. at once replied: "Why, it didn't go round. It
only began five years ago." This child, too, had
probably felt little Jean Ingelow's difficulty.
A child will sometimes try to escape from this
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 75
puzzle by way of the supernatural ideas already
referred to. If of quick intelligence he will see in the
legend of babies brought from heaven to earth a way
of prolonging his existence backwards. The same
little boy that was so concerned to know what his
mother had done without him, happened one day to
be passing a street pump with his mother, when he
stopped and observed with perfect gravity: "There
are no pumps in heaven where I came from ". He
had evidently worked out the idea of heaven-sent
babies into a theory of pre-natal existence.
"
((
"}
In thinking of their past, children have to en-
counter that terrible mystery, time. They seem at
first quite unable to think of time as we think of
it, in an abstract way. 'To-day," to-morrow
and "yesterday" are spoken of as things which
move. A girl of four asked: "Where is yester-
day gone to?" and "Where will to-morrow come
from?"
Another difficulty is the grasping of great lengths
of time. A child is apt to exaggerate greatly
a short period. The first morning at school has
seemed an eternity to some who have carried the
recollection of it into middle life. Even the minutes
when, as Mrs. Maynell writes, "your mother's visitor
held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her
the excited gabble of the grown-up," may have
seemed very, very big. Possibly this sense of the
immeasurable length of certain experiences of child-
hood gives to the child's sense of past time some-
thing of an aching vastness which older people can
hardly understand. Do not the words "long, long
ago," when we use them in telling a child a story, still
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carry with them for our
sound?
ears a strangely far-off
Again, children find it hard to map out the
divisions of time, and to see the relations of one
period to another. One little boy about five and a
half-finding that something had happened before his
father was born, asked whether it was in the time
of the Romans. His historical perspective had, not
unnaturally perhaps, set the "time of the Romans
just before the life of the oldest of his household.
The Supernatural World.
A child's first acquaintance with the supernatural
is frequently made through the medium of fairy-story
or other fiction. And, as has been suggested in an
earlier chapter, he can put a germ of thought into
the tradition of a fairy-world. It is, however, when
something in the shape of theological instruction
supervenes that the supernatural becomes a problem
for the young intellect. He is told of these mysteri-
ous things as of certainties, and in the measure in
which he is a thinker, he will try to get a clear
intelligent view of things.
Like the beginning of life, its ending is one of the
recurring puzzles of early days. A child appears better
able to imagine others dying than himself; this seems
to be suggested by a story published by Stanley Hall
of a little girl who from six to nine feared that all
other people would die one by one, and that she would
be left alone on the earth.
The first recoil from an inscrutable mystery soon
begins to give place to a feeling of dread. A little
"}
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 77
girl of three and a half years asked her mother to put
a great stone on her head, because she did not want
to die. She was asked how a stone would prevent it,
and answered with perfect childish logic: "Because I
shall not grow tall if you put a great stone on my
head; and people who grow tall get old and then
die".
The first way of regarding death seems to be as
a temporary state like sleep, which it so closely
resembles. A little boy of two and a half years, on
hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend,
at once asked: "Will Mrs. P. still be dead when we
go back to London ?"
The knowledge of burial gives a new and alarm-
ing turn to the child's thought. He now begins to
speculate much about the grave. The instinctive
tendency to carry over the idea of life and feeling
to the buried body is illustrated in the request made
by a little boy to his mother: "Don't put earth on
face when I am buried".
my
In the case of children who pick up something of the
orthodox creed the idea of going to heaven has some-
how to be grasped and put side by side with that of
burial. Here comes one of the hardest puzzles for the
logical child. One boy tried to reconcile the story of
heaven with the fact of burial, at first by assuming
that the good people who went to heaven were not
buried at all; and later by supposing that the
journey to heaven was somehow to be effected after
burial and by way of the grave. Other devices for
getting a consistent view of things are also hit upon.
Some children have supposed that the head only
passes into heaven, partly from taking the "body"
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Children's Ways.
to be the trunk only, and partly from a feeling that
the head is the seat of the thinking mind.
The idea of dead people going to heaven is, as we
know, pushed by the little brain to its logical con-
sequences. Animals when
Animals when they die are, naturally
enough, supposed to go to heaven also.
The Great Maker.
Children seem disposed, apart from religious
instruction, to form ideas of supernatural beings.
Sometimes it is a dreadful person who exerts a
malign influence on the child, sending him, for
example, his pains in the stomach. In other cases it
is a fairy-like being who is created into a mighty
benefactor, and half-worshipped and prayed to in
childish fashion.
Even when religious instruction supplies the form
of the supernatural being the young thinker deals with
this in his own original way. He has to understand
the mysteries of God, Satan and the rest, and he can
only understand them by shedding on them the light
of homely terrestrial facts. Hence the undisguised
materialism of the child's theology. According to
Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries into the thoughts of
American children, God is apt to be imaged as a
big, very strong man or giant. One child thought of
him as a huge being with limbs spread all over the
sky; another, as so tall that he could stand with one
foot on the ground, and touch the clouds. He is
commonly supposed, in conformity with what is told
him, to dwell just above the sky, which last, as we
have seen, is thought of as a dividing floor, through
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 79
the chinks of which we get glimmerings of the glory
of the heaven above. But some children show more
of their own thought in localising the Deity, placing
him, for example, in one of the stars, or the moon, or
lower down "upon the hill".
Differences in childish feeling, as well as in in-
telligence, reflect themselves in the first ideas about
the divine dwelling-place. It seems commonly to be
conceived of as a grand house or mansion. While,
however, some children deck it out with all manner
of lovely things, including a park, flowers, and
birds, others give it a homelier character, thinking,
for example, of doors and possible draughts, like a
little girl who asked God "to mind and shut the
door, because he (ie., grandpapa who had just
died) can't stand the draughts". Some children,
too, of a less exuberant fancy are disposed to think
of heaven as by no means so satisfyingly lovely,
and rather to shrink from a long wearisome stay
in it.
While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the
sky God is supposed to be doing things, and of course
doing them for us, sending down rain and so forth.
What seems to impress children most, especially
boys, in the traditional account of God is his power
of making things. He is emphatically the artificer,
the "demiurgos," who not only has made the world,
the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by
human needs. According to some of the American
school-children he fabricates all sorts of things from
babies to money, and the angels work for him. The
boy has a great admiration for the maker, and one
small English boy once expressed this oddly by
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asking his mother whether a group of working men
returning from their work were "gods".
This admiration for superior power and skill favours ~
the idea of God's omnipotence. This is amply illus-
trated in children's spontaneous prayers, which ask for
things, from fine weather on a coming holiday to a
baby with curly hair and other lovely attributes, with
all a child's naïve faith. Yet a critical attitude will
sometimes be taken up towards this mystery of
unlimited power. The more logical and speculative
sort of child will now and then put a sceptical
question to his elders on this subject. A boy of
eight turned over the problem whether God could
beat him in a foot-race if he were starter and judge
and refused to let God start till he had reached the
goal; and he actually measured out the racecourse
on a garden path and went through the part of
running, afterwards sitting down and giving God
time to run, and then pondering the possibility of his
beating him.
The idea of God's omniscience, too, may come
readily enough to a child accustomed to look up ad-
miringly to the boundless knowledge of some human.
authority, say a clergyman. Yet I know of cases where
the dogma of God's infinite knowledge provoked in
the child's mind a sceptical attitude. One little fellow
remarked on this subject rather profanely: "I know
a 'ickle more than Kitty, and you know a 'ickle more
than me; and God knows a 'ickle more than you, I
s'pose; then he can't know so very much after all".
Another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly
shock the child's intelligence. While he is told that
God has a special abode in heaven, he is told also
ป
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 81
that he is here, there and everywhere, and can see
everything. More particularly the idea of being always▲
watched is, I think, repugnant to sensitive and high-
spirited children. An American lady, Miss Shinn,
speaks of a little girl, who, on learning that she was
under this constant surveillance, declared that she
"would not be so tagged". An English boy of
three, on being informed by his older sister that God.
can see and watch us while we cannot see him,
thought awhile, and then in an apologetic tone said:
"I'm very sorry, dear, I can't (b)elieve you".
When the idea is accepted odd devices are excogi-
tated by the active little brain for making it intel-
ligible. Thus one child thought of God as a very
small person who could easily pass through the key-
hole. The opposite idea of God's huge framework,
illustrated above, is probably but another attempt to
figure the conception of omnipresence. Curious con-
clusions too are sometimes drawn from the supposi-
tion. Thus a little girl of three years and nine
months one day said to her mother in the abrupt
childish manner: "Mr. C. (a gentleman she had
known who had just died) is in this room". Her
mother, naturally a good deal startled, answered:
"Oh, no!" Whereupon the child resumed: “Yes,
he is. You told me he is with God, and you told
me God was everywhere; so as Mr. C. is with God,
he must be in this room.”
It might easily be supposed that the child's readi-
ness to pray to God is inconsistent with what has
just been said. Yet I think there is no real incon-
sistency. Children's idea of prayer appears com- ¿
monly to be that of sending a message to some one
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at a distance. The epistolary manner noticeable in
many prayers, especially at the beginning and the
ending, seems to illustrate this. The mysterious
whispering in which a prayer is often conveyed is, I
suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known
only to the child to transmit itself to the divine.
ear.
Of the child's belief in God's goodness it is need-
less to say much. For these little worshippers he is
emphatically the friend in need who is just as ready
as he is able to help them out of every manner of
difficulty, and who, if they only ask prettily, will send
them all the nice things they long for. Yet, happy
little optimists as they are inclined to be, they will
now and again be saddened by doubt, and wonder
why the nice things asked for don't come, and why
the dear kind God allows them to suffer so much.
While a child is thus apt to think of God as nicer
than the nicest gentleman visitor who is wont to
bring toys and do wondrous things for his delectation,
he commonly imports into his conception a touch of
human caprice. Fear may readily suggest to a child
who has had some orthodox instruction that the wind
howling at night is the noise of God's anger, or that
the thunder is due to a sudden determination of the
Creator to shoot him dead. The sceptical child,
again, who is by no means so rare, may early begin
to wonder how God can be so good and yet allow
men to kill animals, and allow Satan to do such a
lot of wicked things.
One of the hardest puzzles set to a child by the
common religious instruction is the doctrine of God's
eternity. The idea of a vast, endless "for ever,"
First Thoughts: (b) Self and other Mysteries. 83
whether past or future, seems to be positively over-
whelming to many young minds. The continual
frustration of the attempt to reach a resting-place in
a beginning or an end may bring on something of
mental giddiness. Hence the wearisome perplexities
of the first thoughts about God's past. The question,
'Who made God?" seems to be one to which all
inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of
child-thought. When told that God has always been,
unchanging, and knowing no youth, he wants to get
behind this "always was," just as at an earlier stage
of his development he wanted to get behind the
barrier of the blue hills.
Other mysteries of the orthodox faith may under-
go a characteristic solution in the hard-working mind
of a child. A friend tells me that when a child he
was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity.
He happened to be an only child, and so he was led
to put a meaning into it by likening it to his own
family group, in which the Holy Ghost had, rather
oddly, to take the place of the mother.
Thoughtful children by odd processes of early
logic are apt when interpreting the words and actions
of their teachers to endow God with surprising attri-
butes. For example, a boy of four asked his aunt
one Sunday to tell him why God was so fond of
three-penny bits. Asked why he thought God had
this particular liking, he explained by saying that he
noticed that on Sunday morning people ask for a
three-penny bit "instead of" three pennies, and that
as they take it to church he supposed that they gave
it to God.
I have tried to show that the more thoughtful
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Children's Ways.
children seek to put meaning into the communica-
tions about the unseen world which they are wont to
receive from their elders. Perhaps these elders if
they knew what is apt to go on in a child's mind
would reconsider some of the answers which they
give to the little questioner, and select with more
care the truths which, as they flatter themselves, they
are making so plain to their little ones.
CHAPTER VII.
THE BATTLE WITH FEARS: (a) THE ONSLAUGHT.
It is often asked whether children have as lively,
as intense feelings as their elders. Those emotions of
childhood which are wont to break out into violent
expression, such as angry disappointment and glad-
ness, may not, it is said, be in themselves so intense as
they look. In order to get more data for settling the
question we must try to reach their less demonstrative
feelings, those which they are apt to hide from view
out of shame, or some other impulse. Of these none
is more interesting than fear, and it so happens that
a good deal of inquiry has of late been directed to
this feeling.
That we must not expect too much knowledge
here seems certain. Fear is one of the shyest of
the young feelings. A little fellow of two coming
out of his grandpapa's house one evening into the
darkness with his mother, asked her: "Would you
like to take hold of my hand, mammy?" His father
took this to mean the beginning of boyish determina-
tion not to show fear. Still, with the help of observa-
tions of parents, and later confessions and descriptions
of childish fear, we may be able to get some insight
into the dark subject.
That fear is one of the characteristic feelings of
children needs, one supposes, no proving. In spite of
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the wonderful stories of Horatio Nelson, and of their
reflections in literature, e.g., Mr. Barrie's " Sentimental
Tommy," I entertain the gravest doubts as to the
existence of a perfectly fearless child. Children differ
enormously, and the same child differs enormously at
different times in the intensity of his fear, but they
all have the characteristic disposition to fear. It
seems to belong to these wee, weakly things, brought
face to face with a new strange world, to tremble.
They are naturally timid, as all that is weak and
ignorant in nature is apt to be timid.
I have said that fear is well marked in the child.
Yet, though it is true that a state of "being afraid "
when fully developed shows itself by unmistakable
signs, there are many cases where it is by no means
easy to say whether the child experiences the feeling.
People are apt to think that every time a child starts
it is feeling afraid of something, but as we shall pre-
sently see, being startled and really frightened are
two experiences, which, though closely related, must
be carefully distinguished. A child may, further,
show a sort of æsthetic repugnance to certain sounds,
such as those of a piano; to ugly forms, e.g., a hunch-
back figure; to particular touches, such as that of fur
or velvet, without having the full experience of fear.
Observers of children are by no means careful to dis-
tinguish true fear from other feelings which resemble it.
Fear proper shows itself in such signs as these, in
the stare, the grave look, the movement of turning
away and hiding the face against the nurse's or
mother's shoulder, or of covering it with the hands.
In the severer forms, known as terror, it leads to
trembling and to wild shrieking. Changes of colour
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 87
also occur, the child's face turning white, or possibly
in some cases red. When frightened by anything an
older child will commonly run from the object of his
fear, though the violence of the feeling may some-
times paralyse the limbs and chain the would-be
fugitive to the spot. This often happens, I fancy,
with a sudden oncoming of dread at discovering one-
self alone in the dark.
The Battery of Sounds.
As is well known, sudden and loud sounds, such as
that of a door banging, will give a shock to an infant.
in the first weeks of life, which though not amounting
to fear is its progenitor. A clearer manifestation
occurs when a new and unfamiliar sound calls forth
the grave look, the trembling lip, and possibly the fit
of crying. Darwin noticed these in one of his own
boys at the age of four and a half months, when he
produced the new sound of a loud snoring.
It is not every new sound which is thus discon-
certing to the little stranger. Sudden sharp sounds
of any kind seem to be especially disliked, as those of
a dog's bark. A little girl burst out crying on first.
hearing the sound of a baby rattle; and she did the
same two months later on accidentally ringing a hand
bell. Children often show curious caprices in their
objections to sounds. Thus a little girl when taken
into the country at the age of nine months took a
liking to most of the animals she saw, but on hearing
the bleating of the sheep showed a distinct germ of
fear by sheltering herself against her nurse's shoulder.
So disturbing are new sounds apt to be to the
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Children's Ways.
young child that even musical ones are often disliked
at first. The first hearing of the tones of a piano has
upset the comfort of many a child. A child of five
and a half months conceived a kind of horror for
a banjo, and screamed if it were played or only
touched.
Animals may show a similar dread of musical
sounds. I took a young cat of about eight weeks into
my lap and struck some chords not loudly on the
piano. It got up, moved uneasily from side to side,
then bolted to a corner of the room and seemed to.
try to get up the walls. Many dogs, too, certainly
appear to be put out, if not to be made afraid, on
hearing the music of a brass band.
Fear of nature's great sounds, more especially
the wind and thunder, which is common among older
children, owes its intensity not merely to their
volume, which seems to surround and crush, but also
to the mystery of their origin. We should remember
too that sounds are, for the child still more than for
the adult, expressive of feeling and intention. Hence
religious ideas readily graft themselves on to the
noisy utterances of wind and thunder. Wind is con-
ceived of, for example, as the blowing of God when
angry, and thunder, as we have seen, as his snoring,
and so forth.
I am far from saying that all children manifest
this fear of sounds. Many babies welcome the new
and beautiful sounds of music with a joyous greeting.
Even the awful thunder-storm may gladly excite and
not frighten. Children will sometimes get through
the first months without this fear, and then develop it
as late as the second year.
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 89
I think, then, that in these disturbing effects of
sound we have to do with something more than a
mere nervous shock or a start. They involve a rudi-
ment of the feeling of uneasiness at what is unex-
pected and disturbing, and so may be said to be the
beginning of true childish fears. This element of
anxiety becomes more clearly marked where the
sound is not only disturbing but mysterious, as when
a toy emits a sound, or water produces a rushing
noise in some hidden pipe.
There is another kind of disturbance which shows
itself also in the first year, and has a certain analogy to
the discomposing effect of sound. This is the feeling
of bodily insecurity which appears very early when
the child is awkwardly carried, or when in dandling
it, it is let down back-foremost. One child in her fifth
month was observed when carried to hold on to the
nurse's dress as if for safety. And it has been noticed
by more than one observer that on dandling a baby
up and down in one's arms, it will on descending,
that is when the support of the arms is being with-
drawn, show signs of discontent in struggling move-
ments. This is sometimes regarded as an inherited
fear; yet it seems possible that, like the jarring effect
of noise on the young nerves, it is the result of a rude
disturbance. A child accustomed to the support of
its cradle, the floor, or somebody's lap, might be
expected to be put out when the customary support
is withdrawn wholly or partially.
The sense of
equilibrium is disturbed in this case.
Other senses, more particularly that of touch, may
bring their disturbing elements, too. Many children
have a strong repugnance to cold clammy things, such
7
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Children's Ways.
as a cold moist hand, and what seems stranger, to the
touch of something that seems altogether so likable as
fur. Whether the common dislike of children to water
has anything to do with its soft yieldingness to touch
I cannot say. This whole class of early repugnances
to certain sensations seems to stand on the confines
between mere dislikes and fears, properly so called.
A child may very much dislike touching fur without
being in the strict sense afraid of it, though the dislike
may readily develop into a true fear.
The Alarmed Sentinel.
lectual sense, the
We may now pass to the disconcerting and
alarming effects to which a child is exposed through
his sense of sight. This, as we know, is the intel-
sentinel that guards the body,
keeping a look-out for what is afar as for what is
anear. The uneasiness which a child experiences at
seeing things is not, like the uneasiness at sounds, a
mere effect of violent sensation; it arises much more
from a perception of something menacing.
Among the earliest alarmers of sight may be
mentioned the appearance of something new and
strange, especially when it involves a sudden aboli-
tion of customary arrangements. Although we are
wont to think of children as loving and delighting in
what is new, we must not forget that it may also
trouble and alarm. This feeling of uneasiness and
apparently of insecurity in presence of changed sur-
roundings shows itself as soon as a child has begun.
to grow used or accustomed to a particular state of
things.
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 91
.
Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude
departure from the customary, is that of change of
place. When once an infant has grown accustomed
to a certain room it is apt to find a new one strange,
and will eye its features with a perceptibly anxious
look. This sense of strangeness in places sometimes.
appears very early. A little girl on being taken at
the age of four months into a new nursery,“ looked
all round and then burst out crying". Some children
retain this feeling of uneasiness up to the age of
three years and later. Here, again, clearly marked
differences among children disclose themselves. On
entering an unfamiliar room a child may have his
curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look
of things, so that the fear-impulse is kept under by
other and pleasanter ones.
What applies to places applies also to persons.
A child may be said to combine the attachment of
the dog to persons with that of the cat to localities.
Any sudden change of the customary human sur-
roundings, for example, the arrival of a stranger on
the scene, is apt to trouble him.
During the first three months, there is no distinct
manifestation of a fear of strangers. It is only later,
when recurring forms have grown familiar, that the
approach of a stranger, especially if accompanied by
a proposal to take the child, calls forth clear signs of
displeasure and the shrinking away of fear. Professor
Preyer gives between six and seven months as the
date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a
strange face.
Here, too, curious differences soon begin to dis-
close themselves, some children showing themselves

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Children's Ways.
more hospitable than others. It would be curious to
compare the ages at which children begin to take
kindly to new faces. Professor Preyer gives nineteen
months as the date at which his boy surmounted his
timidity.
One strange variety of the fear of strangers is the
uneasiness shown in presence of some one who is
only partially recognisable. One little boy of eight
months moaned in a curious way when his nurse
returned home after a fortnight's holiday. Another
boy of about ten months is said to have shown a
marked shrinking from an uncle who strongly re-
sembled his father. Such facts, taken with the
familiar one that children are apt to be frightened at
the sight of a parent partially disguised, suggest that
half-stranger half-friend may be for a child's mind
worse than altogether a stranger.
The uneasiness which comes from a sense of being
in a new room or face to face with a stranger may
perhaps be described as a feeling of what the Germans
call the "unhomely". The little traveller has lost.
his bearings, and he begins to feel that he himself is
lost. This effect of homelessness is, of course, most
marked when a child finds himself in a strange place.
Much of the acuter fear of children probably has in it
something of this dizzy sickening sense of being lost.
A little girl between the ages of seven and ten used to
wake up in a fright crying loudly because she could
not think where she was. Many a child when ex-
ploring a new and dark room, or still more venture-
somely wandering alone out of doors, has suddenly
woke up to the strange homeless look of things. I
once saw a wee girl at a children's party who

The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 93
appeared to enjoy herself well enough up to a certain
point, but was then suddenly seized by this sense of
being lost in a new room among new faces, so that
all her older sister's attempts to reassure her failed to
stay the paroxysm of grief and terror.
We may see a measure of this same distrust of the
new, this same clinging to the homely, in many of
children's lesser fears, as, for example, that of new
clothes. An infant has been known to break out
into tears at the sight of a new dress on its mother,
though the colour and pattern had, one would
have supposed, nothing alarming. The fear of black
clothes, of which there are many known examples,
probably includes further a special dislike for this
colour.
Here, again, we may see two opposed impulses
at work, of which either one or the other may be
uppermost in different children, or at different times
in the same child. The dread of new clothes has its
natural antagonist in the love of new clothes, which is
often supported in children of a "subjective" turn by
a feeling of something like disgrace at having to go
on wearing the same clothes so long. Sometimes the
love of novelty becomes a passion. The boy Alfred
de Musset at the age of four, watching his mother
fitting on his feet a pair of pretty red shoes, ex-
claimed: "Dépèche toi, maman, mes souliers neufs.
vont devenir vieux".
Some other fears closely resemble that of new
clothes insomuch as they involve an unpleasant trans-
formation of a familiar object, the human figure, the
mainstay of a child's trust. Possibly the alarming
effect of making faces, which is said to disturb a child
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Children's Ways.
within the first three months, illustrates the effect of
shock at the spoiling of what is getting familiar and
liked. The donning of a pair of dark spectacles, by
extinguishing the focus of childish interest, the eye,
will produce a like effect of the uncanny. Children
show a similar dislike and fear at the sight of an
ugly doll with features greatly distorted from the
familiar pattern.
The fear of certain big objects contains, I think,
the germ of this feeling of uneasiness in the presence
of strange surroundings. One of the best illustrations.
of this is produced by a first sight of the sea. Some
children clearly show signs of alarm, nestling towards
their nurses when they are carried near the edge of the
water. Yet here, again, the behaviour of the childish
mind varies greatly. A little boy who first saw the
sea at the age of thirteen months exhibited signs not
of fear but of wondering delight, prettily stretching
out his tiny hands towards it as if wanting to go to it.
I am disposed to think that imaginative children,
whose minds take in something of the bigness of the
sea, are more susceptible of this variety of fear. This
conjecture is borne out by the case of two sisters, of
whom one, an imaginative child, had not even at the
age of six got over her fear of going into the sea,
whereas the sister, who was comparatively unimagin-
ative, was perfectly fearless. The supposition finds a
further confirmation in the descriptions given by im-
aginative writers of their early impressions of the sea,
for example, that of M. Pierre Loti in his volume Le
Roman d'un Enfant.
The fear of an eclipse of the moon and other
celestial phenomena, owes something of its force and
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 95
It
persistence to their unknown and inaccessible char-
acter. A child is easily annoyed at that great white
thing, which seems like a human face to look down
on him, and which never comes a step nearer to let
him know what it really is. It may be conjectured
too that a child's fear of clouds, when they take on
uncanny forms, is supported by their inaccessibility;
for he cannot get near them and touch them.
seems, however, according to some recent researches
in America, that children's fear of celestial bodies,
especially the moon and clouds, is connected with the
thought that they may fall on them. The idea of
these strange-looking objects above the head, having
no visible support, and often taking on a threatening
mien, may well give rise to fear in a child's breast
akin to the superstitious fear of the savage.
Self-moving objects, which are not manifestly living
things, are apt to excite a feeling of alarm in children,
as indeed to some extent in the more intelligent
animals. Just as a dog will run away from a leaf
whirled about by the wind, so children are apt to be
terrified by the strange and quite irregular behaviour
of a feather as it glides along the floor or lifts itself
into the air. A girl of three, who happened to pull
a feather out of her mother's eider-down quilt, was so
alarmed at seeing it float in the air that she would
Shrewd
not come near the bed for days afterwards.
nurses know of this weakness, and have been able
effectually to keep a child in a room by putting
a feather in the keyhole. The fear here seems to be
of something which simulates life and yet is not recog-
nisable as a familiar living form. It was, I suppose,
the same uncanny suggestion of life which made a
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Children's Ways.
child of four afraid at the sight of a leaf.floating on
the water of the bath-tub. Fear of feathers is, I
believe, known among the superstitions of adults.
This simulation of life by what is perceived to
be not alive probably takes part in other forms of
childish dread. Toys which take on too impudently
the appearance of life may excite fear, as, for example,
a toy cow which "moved realistically when it reared
its head," a combination which completely scared its
possessor, a boy about the age of one and a half
years. A child can itself make its toy alive, and so
does not want the toy-maker to do so.
The fear of shadows, which appears among children
as among superstitious adults, seems to arise partly
from their blackness and eerie forms, partly from their
uncanny movements and changes of form. Some of
us can recall with R. L. Stevenson the childish horror
of going up a staircase to bed when,
all round the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair.
One's own shadow is worst of all, doggedly pursuing,
horribly close at every movement, undergoing all
manner of ugly and weird transformations.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE BATTLE WITH FEARS (Continued).
The Assault of the Beasts.
THERE are two varieties of children's fears so prominent
and so important that it seems worth while to deal
with them separately. These are the dread of animals
and of the dark.
It may well seem strange that the creatures which
are to become the companions and playmates of chil-
dren, and one of the chief sources of their happiness,
should cause so much alarm when they first come on
the scene. Yet so it is. Many children, at least, are
at first terribly put out by quite harmless members of
the animal family.
In some cases, no doubt, as when a child takes a
strong dislike to a dog after having been alarmed at
its barking, we have to do with the disturbing effect of
sound merely. Fear here takes its rise in the experi-
ence of shock. In other cases we have to do rather
with a sort of æsthetic dislike to what is disagreeable
and ugly than with a true fear. Children sometimes
appear to feel a repugnance to a black sheep or other
animal just because they dislike black objects, though
the feeling may not amount to fear properly so called.
Yet allowing for these sources of repugnance, it
seems probable that many children from about two
or three onwards manifest something indistinguishable
98
Children's Ways.
from fear at the first sight of certain animals. The
directions of this childish fear vary greatly. Darwin's
boy when taken to the Zoological Gardens at the age
of
two years three months showed a fear of the big caged
animals whose forms were strange to him, such, e.g., as
the lion and the tiger. Some children have shown
fear on seeing a tame bear, others have selected the
cow as their pet dread, others the butting ram, and so
forth. Nor do they confine their aversions to the
bigger animals. Snakes, caterpillars, worms, small
birds such as sparrows, spiders and even moths have
looked alarming enough to throw a child into a state
of terror.
It is sometimes thought that these early fears of
animals are inherited from remote ancestors to whom
many wild animals were really dangerous. But I do
not think that this has been proven The variety of
these childish recoilings, and the fact that they seem
to be just as often from small harmless creatures as
from big and mighty ones, suggest that other causes
are at work here. We may indeed suppose that a
child's nervous system has been so put together and
poised that it very readily responds to the impression
of strange animal forms by a tremor. Special aspects
of the unfamiliar animal, aided by special character-
istics of its sounds, probably determine the direc-
tions of this tremor.
In many cases, I think, the mere bigness of an
animal, aided by the uncanny look which often
comes from an apparent distortion of the familiar
human face, may account for some of these early
fears. In other cases we can see that it is the
suggestion of attack which alarms.
This applies
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 99
pretty certainly to the butting ram, and may apply to
pigeons and other birds whose pecking movements
readily appear to a child's mind a kind of attack.
And this supplies an explanation of the fear of one
boy of two years three months at the sight of pigs
when sucking; for, as the child let out afterwards, he
thought they were biting their mother. The unex-
pectedness of the animal's movements too, especially
when, as in the case of birds, mice, spiders, they are rapid,
might excite uneasiness. In other cases it is some-
thing uncanny in the movement which excites fear,
as when one child was frightened at seeing a cat's tail
move when the animal was asleep. The apparent fear
of worms and caterpillars in some children may be
explained in this way, though associations of dis-
agreeable touch probably assist here. In the case of
many of the smaller animals, e.g., small birds, mice, and
even insects when they come too near, the fear may
not improbably have its source in a vague apprehension
of invasion.
These shrinkings from animals are among the most
capricious-looking of all childish fears. Many robust
children with hardy nerves know little or nothing of
them. Here, too, as in the case of new things gener-
ally, the painfulness of fear is opposed and may be
overcome by the pleasure of watching and by the
deeper pleasure of "making friends". Quite tiny
children, on first seeing ducks and other animals, so
far from being alarmed, will run after the pretty
creatures to make pets of them. Nothing perhaps is
prettier in child-life than the pose and look of one of
these defenceless youngsters when he is making a
brave effort to get the better of his fear at the ap-
Vorm
100
Children's Ways.
proach of a strange big dog and to proffer friendship
to the shaggy monster. The perfect love which lies
at the bottom of children's hearts towards their
animal kinsfolk soon casts out fear. And when
once the reconciliation has been effected it will take
a good deal of harsh experience to make the child
ever again entertain the thought of danger.
The Night Attack.
Fear of the dark, and especially of being alone in
the dark, which includes not only the nocturnal dread
of the dark bedroom, but that of closets, caves, woods,
and other gloomy places, is no doubt very common
among children. It does not show itself in the early
months. A baby of three or four months if ac-
customed to a light may no doubt be upset at being
deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread of
the dark. This presupposes a certain development
of the mind, and more particularly what we call im-
agination. It is said by Dr. Stanley Hall to attain
its greatest strength about the age of five to seven,
when images of things are known to be vivid.
So far as we can understand it the fear of the dark
is rarely of the darkness as such. The blackness
present to the eye in a dark room does no doubt en-
compass us and seem to close in upon and threaten
to stifle us. We know, too, that children sometimes
show fear of mists, and that many are haunted by the
idea of the stifling grave. Hence, it is not improbable
that children seized by the common terror and dizzi-
ness on suddenly waking may feel the darkness as
something oppressive. This is borne out by the fact
Maou
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 101
that a little boy on surmounting his dread told his
father that he used to think the dark" a great large
live thing the colour of black". A child can easily
make a substantial thing out of the dark, as he can
out of a shadow.
Yet in most, if not all, cases imagination is active
here. The darkness itself offers points for the play
of imagination. Owing to the activity of the retina,
which goes on even when no light excites it, brighter
spots are apt to stand out from the black background,
to take form and to move; and all this supplies food
to a child's fancy. I suspect that the alarming eyes
of people and animals which children are apt to see
in the dark receive their explanation in this way. Of
course these sources of uneasiness grow more pro-
nounced when a child is out of health and his nervous
tone falls low. Even older people who have this fear
describe the experience as seeing shadowy flitting
forms, and this suggests that the activity of that
wonderful little structure the retina is at the bottom
of it. The same thing seems to be borne out by the
common dread in the dark of black forms, e.g., a black
coach with headless coachman dressed in black.
A girl of nineteen remembers that when a child she
seemed on going to bed to see little black figures
jumping about between the ceiling and the bed.
The more familiar forms of a dread of the dark are
sustained by images of threatening creatures which lie
hidden in the blackness or half betray their presence
in the way just indicated. These images are in many
cases the revival of those acquired from the ex-
periences of the day, and from storyland. The
fears of the day live on undisturbed in the dark hours
102
Children's Ways.
>
of night. The dog that has frightened a child will,
when he goes to bed, be projected into the surround-
ing blackness. Any shock in the waking hours may in
this way give rise to a more or less permanent fear of
being alone in a dark place. In not a few instances
the alarming images are the product of fairy-stories,
or of ghost and other alarming stories told by nurses
and others thoughtlessly. In this way the dark room
becomes for a timid child haunted by a "bogie" or
other horror. Alarming animals, generally black, as
that significant expression bête noire shows, are fre-
quently the dread of these solitary hours in the dark
room. Lions and wolves, monsters not describable
except by saying that they have claws, which they
can stretch out, these seem to fill the blackness for
some children. The vague horrors of big black
shapeless things are by no means the lightest to
bear.
In addition to this overflow of the day's fears into
the unlit hours, sleep and the transitional states be-
tween sleeping and waking also furnish much alarm-
ing material. Probably the worst moment of this
trouble of the night is when the child wakes sud-
denly from a sleep or half-sleep with some powerful
dream-image still holding him in its clutches, and
when the awful struggle to wake and to be at home
with the surroundings issues in the cry, "Where am
I?" It is in these moments of absolute hopeless con-
fusion that the impenetrable blackness, refusing to
divulge its secret, grows insufferable. The dream-
images, but slightly slackening their hold, people the
blackness with nameless terrors. The little sufferer
has to lie and battle with these as best he may,
The Battle with Fears: (a) The Onslaught. 103
perhaps till the slow-moving day brings reassuring
light and the familiar look of things.
How terrible beyond all description, all measure-
ment with other things, these nightmare fears may be
in the case of nervous children, the reminiscences of
Charles Lamb and others have told us. It is not too
much, I think, to say that to many a child this dread
of the black night has been the worst of his sufferings.
At no time is he really so brave as when he lies still
in a cold damp terror and trusts to the coming of the
morning light.
I do not believe that fear of the dark is universal
among young children. I know a child that did not
show any trace of it till some rather too gruesome
stories of Grimm set his brain horror-spinning when
he ought to have been going to sleep. A lady whom
I know tells me that she never had the fear as a child
though she acquired it later, towards the age of thirty.
How common it is among children under ten or twelve,
we have as yet no means of judging. Some inquiries
of Dr. Stanley Hall show that out of about 300 young
people under thirty only two appear to have been
wholly exempt from it, but the ages at which the
fear first appeared are not given.
Here, again, we have a counterbalancing side. An
imaginative child can fill the dark vacancy of the
bedroom with bright pleasing images. On going to
bed and saying good-night to the world of daylight,
he can see his beloved fairies, talk to them and hear
them talk. We know how R. L. Stevenson must,
when a child, have gladdened many of his solitary
dark hours by bright fancies. Even when there is a
little trepidation a hardy child may manage to play
104
Children's Ways.
with his fears, and so in a sense to enjoy his black
phantasmagoria, just as grown-ups may enjoy the
horrors of fiction.
It will perhaps turn out that imaginative children
have both suffered and enjoyed the most in these
ways, the effect varying with nervous tone and mental
condition. Yet it seems probable that the fearful
suffering mood has here been uppermost.
Why these nocturnal images tend to be gloomy and
alarming may, I think, be explained by a number of
circumstances. The absence of light and the on-
coming of night have, as we know, a lowering effect
on the functions of the body; and it is not unlikely
that this might so modify the action of the brain as
to favour the rise of gloomy thoughts. The very
blackness of night, too, which we must remember is
actually seen by the child, would probably tend to
darken the young thoughts. We know how com-
monly we make black and dark shades of colour
symbols of melancholy and sorrow. If to this we
add that in the night a child is apt to feel lost through
a loss of all his customary landmarks, and that, worst
of all, he is, in the midst of this blackness which blots
out his daily home, left to himself, robbed of that
human companionship which is his necessary stay and
comfort, we need not, I think, wonder at his so often
encountering "the terror by night".
(b) Damage of the Onslaught.
I have now, perhaps, illustrated sufficiently some of
the more common and characteristic fears of children.
The facts seem to show that they are exposed on
Battle with Fears: (b) Damage of Onslaught. 105
different sides to the attacks of fear, and that the
attacking force is large and consists of a variety of
alarming shapes.
If now we glance back at these several childish
fears, one feature in them which at once arrests our
attention is the small part which remembered experi-
ences of evil play in their production. The child is
inexperienced, and if humanely treated knows little of
the acuter forms of human suffering. It would seem
at least as if he feared not so much because his ex-
perience had made him aware of a real danger in this
and that direction, as because he was constitutionally
and instinctively nervous, and possessed with a feeling
of insecurity. More particularly children are apt to
feel uneasy when face to face with the new, the
strange, the unknown, and this uneasiness grows into
a more definite feeling of fear as soon as the least
suggestion of harmfulness is added; as when a child.
recoils with dread from a stranger who has a big
projecting eye that looks a menace, or a squint which
suggests a sly way of looking at you, or an ugly and
advancing tooth that threatens to bite. How much
the fear of the dark is due to inability to see and so
to know is shown by the familiar fact that children
and adults who can enter a strange gloomy-looking
room and keep brave as long as things are before
their eyes are wont to feel a creepy sense of " some-
thing" behind them when they turn their backs to re-
tire and can no longer see.
It is shown too in the
common practice of children and their elders to look
into the cupboard, under the bed, and so forth, before
putting out the light; for that which has not been in-
spected retains dire possibilities of danger.
8
106
Children's Ways.
.
Where a child does not know he is apt to fancy
something. It is the activity of children's imagina-
tion which creates and sustains the larger number of
their fears. Do we not indeed in saying that they
are for the greater part groundless say also that they
are "fanciful"?
Children's fears are often compared with those of
animals. No doubt there are points of contact. The
misery of a dog when street music is going on is very
suggestive of a state of uneasiness if not of fully de-
veloped fear. Dogs, cats, and other animals will
"shy" at the sight of " uncanny" moving objects, such
as leaves, feathers, and shadows. Yet the great point
of difference remains that animals not having imagina-
tion are exempt from many of the fearful foes which
menace childhood, including that arch-foe, the black
night.
A much more instructive comparison of children's
fears may be made with those of savages. Both have
a like feeling of insecurity in presence of the big un-
known, especially the mysterious mighty things, such
as the storm-wind, and the rare and startling things, e.g.,
the eclipse and the thunder. The ignorance and sim-
plicity of mind, moreover, aided by a fertile fancy,
which lead to this and that form of childish fear are at
work also in the case of uncivilised adults. Hence
the familiar observation that children's superstitious
fears often reflect those of savage tribes.
While children have this organic predisposition to
fear, the sufferings introduced by what we call human
experience begin at an early date to give definite
direction to their fears. How much it does this in
the first months of life it is difficult to say. In the
Battle with Fears: (b) Damage of Onslaught. 107
aversion of a baby to its medicine glass, or its cold
bath, one sees, perhaps, more of the rude germ of
passion or anger than of fear. Some children, at
least, have a surprising way of going through a good
deal of physical suffering from falls, cuts and so forth,
without acquiring a genuine fear of what hurts them.
It is a noteworthy fact that a child will be more
terrified during a first experience of pain, especially if
there be a visible hurt and bleeding, than by any
subsequent prospect of a renewal of the suffering.
Even where fear can be clearly traced to experience.
it is doubtful whether in all cases it springs out of a
definite expectation of some particular kind of harm.
When, for example, a child who has been frightened
by a dog betrays signs of fear at the sight of a
kennel, and even of a picture of a dog, may we not
say that he dreads the sight and the idea of the dog
rather than any harmful act of the animal?
In these fears, then, we seem to see much of the
workmanship of Nature, who has so shaped the
child's nervous system and delicately poised it that
the trepidation of fear comes readily. According to
some she has done more, burdening a child's spirit
with germinal remains of the fears of far-off savage
ancestors, to whom darkness and the sounds of wild
beasts were fraught with danger. That, however, is
far from being satisfactorily demonstrated. We can
see why in the case of children, as in that of young
animals, Nature tempers a bold curiosity of the new
by mingling with it a certain amount of uneasiness,
lest the ignorant helpless things should come to grief
by wandering from parental shelter and supplies.
This, it seems to me, is all that Nature has done.
108
Children's Ways.
And in so doing has she not, with excellent economy,
done just enough?
The extent of suffering brought into child-life by
the assaults of fear is hard to measure. Even the
method of questioning young people about their fears,
which is now in vogue, is not likely to bring us near
a solution of this problem. And this for the good
reason that children are never more reticent than
when talking of their fears, and that by the time the
fears are surmounted few can be trusted to give
from memory an accurate report of them. One thing
seems pretty clear, and the new questioning of chil-
dren which is going on apace in America seems to
bear it out, viz., that, since it is the unknown which is
the primary occasion of these childish fears, and since
the unknown in childhood is almost everything, the
possibilities of suffering from this source are great
enough.
Alike the Good, the Ill offend thy Sight,
And rouse the stormy sense of shrill affright.
(c) Recovery from the Onslaught.
Nevertheless it is quite possible here to go from
one extreme of indifference to another of sentimental
exaggeration. Even allowing what George Sand
says, that fear is "the greatest moral suffering of
children," the suffering may turn out to be less cruelly
severe than it looks.
To begin with, then, if children are sadly open to
the attacks of fear on certain sides they are com-
pletely defended on other sides by their ignorance,
This is well illustrated in the pretty story of the
Battle with Fears: (c) Recovery from Onslaught. 109
child Walter Scott, who was found out of doors lying
on his back during a thunderstorm, clapping his hands
and shouting, "Bonnie! bonnie!" at each new flash.
Again, if, as we have supposed, children's fears are
mostly due to a feeling of insecurity in view of the
unknown, they may be said to correct themselves to a
large extent. By getting used to the disturbing sound,
the ugly black doll, and so forth, a child, like a dog,
tends to lose its first fear. One must say "tends," for
the well-known fact that many persons carry with
them into later life their early fear of the dark shows
that when once the habit of fearing has got set no
amount of familiarity will suffice to dissolve it.
Not only are the points of attack thus limited; the
attack when it does take place may bring something
better than a debasing fear. A child may, it is cer-
tain, suffer acutely when it is frightened. But if only
there is the magic circle of the mother's arms within
reach may it not be said that the fear is more than
counterbalanced by the greatest emotional luxury of
childhood, the loving embrace? It is the shy fears,
breeding the new fear of exposure to unloving eyes
and possibly to ridicule, which are the tragedy of
childhood.
In addition to these extraneous aids children are
provided by Nature with capacities of self-defence.
I have pointed out that the impulses of curiosity and
fear lie close together in a child's mind, so that one
can hardly say beforehand which of the two is going
to be awakened first by the coming of the new and
strange thing. The eager desire to know about
things is perhaps the most perfect inward defence.
against many childish fears. Even when fear is half
I IO
Children's Ways.
awake the passionate longing to see will force its
way. A little girl that was frightened at a Japanese
doll just given her and would not approach it, in-
sisted on seeing it at some distance every day. The
same backing of a timid child's spirit by hardy
curiosity shows itself in his way of peeping at a dog
which has just terrified him and gradually approaching
the monster.
Better still, in the hardier race of children Nature
has planted an impulse which not only disarms fear
but turns it into a frolicsome companion. Many
children, I feel sure, maintain a double attitude
towards their terrors, the bogies, the giants and the
rest. Moments of cruel suffering alternate with
moments of brave exultation. Fear in children, even
more than in adults, is an instinctive process into
which but little thought enters. If the nerves are
slack, and if the circumstances are eerie and fear-
provoking, the sudden strange sound, the appearance
of a black something, will send the swift shudder
through the small body; if, on the other hand, the
child is cooler and has the cheering daylight to back
him, he may be bold enough to play with his fears,
and to talk of them to others with the chuckle of
superiority. The more real and oppressive the fit of
fear the more enjoyable is the subsequent self-deliver-
ance by a perspicacious laugh likely to be. The
beginnings of childish bravery often take the form of
laughing away their fears. Even when the ugly
phantoms are not wholly driven back they are half
seen through, and the child who is strong enough can
1
¹ Mrs. Meynell gives an example of this in her volume The
Children ("The Man with Two Heads ").
Battle with Fears: (c) Recovery from Onslaught. 111
amuse himself with them, suffering the momentary
compression for the sake of the joyous expan-
sion which so swiftly follows. A child of two, the
same that asked his mother, “Would you like to
take hold of my hand?" was once taken out by her
on a little sledge. Being turned too suddenly he was
pitched into the snow, almost on his head; but on
being picked up by his mother he remarked quite
calmly: "I nearly tumbled off". Another child of
six on entering an empty room alone, stamped his
foot and shouted: "Go away everything that's here!"
In such ways do the nerves of a strong child recover
themselves after shock and tremor, taking on some-
thing of the steady pose of human bravery.
CHAPTER IX.
GOOD AND BAD IN THE MAKING.
CHILDREN have had passed on their moral character-
istics the extremes of human judgment. By some,
including a number of theologians, they have been
viewed as steeped in depravity; by others, e.g., Rous-
seau, they have been regarded as the perfection of
the Creator's workmanship.
If we are to throw any light on the point in dispute
we must avoid the unfairness of applying grown-up
standards to childish actions, and must expect neither
the vices nor the virtues of manhood. We must
further take some pains to get, so far as this is
possible, at children's natural inclinations so as to see
whether, and if so how far, they set in the direction of
good or of bad.
Traces of the Brute.
Even a distant acquaintance with the first years of
human life tells us that young children have much in
common with the lower animals. The characteristic
feelings and impulses are centred in self and the satis-
faction of its wants. What is better marked, for ex-
ample, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen
desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents
itself, and to resent others' participation in such enjoy-
ment?
Good and Bad in the Making.
113
We note, further, that when later on he makes fuller
acquaintance with his social surroundings, his first
attitude has in it much of the hostility of the
Ishmaelite. The removal of the feeding bottle before
full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the
occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of
the baby's "will to live," and of its resentment of all
human checks to its native impulses. Here we have
the first rude germ of that opposition of will which
makes the Ishmaelite look on others as his foes.
The same attitude of isolating hostility is apt to
show itself towards other children. In the matter
of toys, for example, the natural way of a child is
very frequently not only to make free with other
children's property when he has the chance, but to
show the strongest objection to any imitation of this
freedom by others, sometimes indeed to display a
dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he
himself does not want.
The same vigorous egoism inspires the whole
scale of childish envies and jealousies, from those
having to do with things of the appetite to those
which trouble themselves about the marks of others'
good-will, such as caresses and praises.
In this wide category of childish egoisms we
seem to be near the level of animal ways. Out
of all this fierce pushing of desire whereby the child.
comes into rude collision with others' wishes, there
issue the storms of young passion. The energy
of these displays of wrath as the imperious little will
feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of its
comicality something impressive. We all know the
shocking scene as the boy Ishmaelite gives clearest
114
Children's Ways.
and most emphatic utterance to his will by hitting
out with his arms, stamping and kicking, throwing
things down on the floor and breaking them, and
accompanying this war-dance with savage howlings
and yellings. The outburst tends to concentrate itself
in a real attack on somebody. Sometimes this is the
offender, as when Darwin's boy at the age of two
years and three months would throw books, sticks,
etc., at any one who offended him. But almost any-
body or anything will do as an object of attack. A
child of four on having his lordly purpose crossed
would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent his
displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him,
jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him
with the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in many cases
improved upon by biting.
call them, vary in their
Thus, whereas one little
Such fits of temper, as we
manner from child to child.
boy would savagely bite or roll on the floor, his sister
was accustomed to dance about and stamp. They vary
greatly too in their frequency and their force. Some
children show in their anger little if anything of
savage furiousness. It is to be added, that with those
who do show it, it is wont in most cases to appear
only for a limited period.
The resemblance of this fierce anger to the fury of the
savage and of the brute can hardly fail to be noticed.
Here indeed, as is illustrated in the good hymn of our
nursery days, which bids us leave biting to the dogs, we
see most plainly how firmly planted an animal root lies
at the bottom of our proud humanity. Ages of civilisa-
tion have not succeeded in eradicating some of the most
characteristic and unpleasant impulses of the brute.
Good and Bad in the Making.
115
At the same time a child's passionateness is more
than a brute instinct. He suffers consciously; he
realises himself in lonely antagonism to a world.
This is seen in the bodily attitude of dejection which
often follows the more vigorous stage of the fit, when
the little Ishmaelite, growing aware of the impotence of
his anger, is wont to throw himself on the floor and to
hide his head in solitary wretchedness. This conscious-
ness of absolute isolation and hostility reaches a higher
phase when the opposing force is distinctly appre-
hended as human will. A dim recognition of the
stronger will facing him brings the sense of injury,
of tyrannous power.
Now this feeling of being injured and oppressed is
human, and is fraught with moral possibilities. It is
not as yet morally good; for the sense of injury is
capable of developing, and may actually turn by-and-
by into, hatred. Yet, as we shall see, it holds within
itself a promise of something higher.
This predominance of self, this kinship with the
unsocial brute, which shows itself in these germinal
animosities, seems to be discoverable also in the un-
feelingness of children. A common charge against
them from those who are not on intimate terms with
them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that
they are heartless and cruel.
He
That children often appear to the adult as un-
feeling as a stone, is, I suppose, incontestable. The
troubles which harass and oppress the mother may
leave her small companion quite unconcerned.
either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness,
or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some trivial.
circumstance of her affliction which is worse than the
116
Children's Ways.
absorption in play through its tantalising want of any
genuine feeling. If, for example, she is ill, the event
is interesting to him merely as supplying him with
new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half
an hour in his mother's sick-room, coolly informed his
nurse: "I have had a very nice time, mamma's ill!"
The order of the two statements is significant of
the common attitude of mind of children towards
others' sufferings.
When it comes to the bigger human troubles this
want of fellow-feeling is still more noticeable. No-
thing is more shocking to the adult observer of chil-
dren than their coldness and stolidity in presence of
death. While a whole house is stricken with grief at
the loss of a beloved inmate the child is wont to
preserve his serenity, being often taken with a shock-
ing curiosity to peep into the dead room, and to get
perhaps the gruesome pleasure of touching the dead
body so as to know what as cold as death" means,
and at best showing only a feeling of awe before a
great mystery.
"(
No one, I think, will doubt that judged by our
standards children are often profoundly and shock-
ingly callous. But the question arises here, too,
whether we are right in applying our grown-up
standards. It is one thing to be indifferent with full
knowledge of suffering, another to be indifferent in
the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the
spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We
are apt to forget that a large part of the manifestation
of human suffering is quite unintelligible to a little
child.
Again, when an appeal to serious attention is
Good and Bad in the Making.
117
given, a child is apt to spy something besides the
sadness. The little girl who wanted to touch, and
to know the meaning of "cold as death," on going to
see a dead schoolmate was not unnaturally taken up
with the beauty of the scene, with the white hangings
and the white flowers.
I am far from saying that the first acquaintance
with death commonly leaves a child indifferent to the
signs of woe. I believe, on the contrary, that chil-
dren are frequently affected in a vague way by the
surrounding gloom. In some cases, too, as published
reminiscences of childhood show, the first acquaint-
ance with the cruel monarch has sometimes shaken
a child's whole being with an infinite, nameless sense
of woe.
With this unfeelingness children are frequently
charged with active unkindness, amounting to cruelty.
La Fontaine spoke of the age of childhood as pitiless
(sans pitié).
This appearance of cruelty will now and again show
itself in dealings with other children. One of the trying
situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by
the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason
to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming
shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. One little girl
was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby
which she considered outrageously ugly as to make
a beginning, fortunately only a feeble beginning, at
smashing its head, much as she would no doubt have
tried to destroy an ugly-looking doll.
Such malicious treatment of smaller infants is, I
think, rare. More common is the exhibition of the
signs of cruelty in the child's dealings with animals.
118
Children's Ways.
It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we
speak of his cruelty.
At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of
malevolent intention in a child's treatment of animals.
A little girl when only a year old would lift two
kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. Older
children often have a way of treating even their pets
with a similar roughness.
Yet I think we cannot safely say that such rough
usage is intended to be painful. It seems rather to
be the outcome of the mere energy of the childish
impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate
his pet.
The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small
boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. Let me
give a well-observed instance. A little boy of two
years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on
the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed,
looking round for an explanation, then gave it him-
self: 'Mr. Fly dom (gone) to by-by'. But he would
not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently
remained, and he continued uneasy about it." Here
the arrest of life clearly brought a kind of shock, and
we may safely say was not thought out beforehand.
Children may pounce upon and maul small moving
things for a number of reasons. The wish to gratify
their sense of power-which is probably keener in
children who so rarely gratify it than in grown-ups—
will often explain these actions. To stop all that
commotion, all that buzzing on the window-pane, by
a single tap of the finger, that may bring a delicious
thrill of power to a child. Curiosity, too, is a power-
ful incentive to this kind of maltreatment of animals.
Good and Bad in the Making.
119
Children have something of the anatomist's impulse
to take living things apart, to see where the blood is,
as one child put it, and so forth.
I think, then, that we may give the small offenders
the benefit of the doubt, and not attribute their rough
handling of animals to a wish to inflict pain, or even
to an indifference to pain of which they are clearly
Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experi-
menter, and delight in showing one's power and pro-
ducing an effect, seem sufficient to explain a large
part of the unlearned brutality of the first years.
aware.
We have now looked at one of the darkest sides of
the child and have found that though it is decidedly
unpleasant it is not quite so ugly as it has been painted.
Children are no doubt apt to be greedy, and other-
wise unsociable, to be ferocious in their anger, and to
be sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is
some consolation to reflect that their savageness is not
quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and
cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate and
calculating egoism.
The Promise of Humanity.
Pure Ishmaelite as he seems, however, a child has
what we call the social instincts, and inconsistently
enough no doubt he shows at times that after all he
wants to join himself to those whom at other times he
treats as foes. If he has his outbursts of temper he
has also his fits of tenderness. If he is now dead to
others' sufferings he is at another time taken with a
most amiable childish concern for their happiness.
The germ of this instinct of attachment to society
120
Children's Ways.
may be said to disclose itself in a rude form in the
first weeks of life, when he begins to get used to and
to depend on the human presence, and is miserable
when this is taken from him.
In this instinct of companionship there is involved
a vague inarticulate kind of sympathy. Just as the
attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion a
feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The
intenser realisation of this oneness comes after separa
tion. A girl of thirteen months was separated from he
mother during six weeks. On the return of the latter
she was speechless, and for some time could not bear
to leave her restored companion for a minute. A like
outbreak of tender sympathy is apt to follow a fit of
naughtiness when a child feels itself taken back to the
mother's heart.
Sympathy, it is commonly said, is a kind of imita
tion, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early
forms. A child has been observed under the age of
seven months to look unhappy, drawing down well
the corners of the mouth in the characteristic baby-
fashion when his nurse pretended to cry.
This imitative sympathy deepens with attachment.
We see something of it in the child's make-believe.
When, for example, a little girl on finding that her
mother's head ached pretended to have a bad head,
we appear to see the working of an impulse to get
near and share in others' experiences. The same
feeling shows itself in play, especially in the treat-
ment of the doll, which has to go through all that
the child goes through, to be bathed, scolded, nursed
when poorly, and so forth.
From this imitative acting of another's trouble, so
1
Good and Bad in the Making.
121
as to share in it, there is but a step to that more
direct apprehension of it which we call sympathy.
Children sometimes begin to display such under-
standing of others' trouble early in the second year.
One mite of fourteen months was quite concerned at
the misery of an elder sister, crawling towards her and
making comical endeavours by grunts and imitative
movements of the fingers to allay her crying. I have a
number of stories showing that for a period beginning
early in the second year it is not uncommon for chil-
dren to betray an exuberance of pity, being moved
almost to tears, for example, when the mother says,
Poor uncle!" or when contemplating in a picture
the tragic fate of Humpty Dumpty.
Very sweet and sacred to a mother are the first
manifestations of tenderness towards herself. A child
about the age of two has a way of looking at and
touching its mother's face with something of the
rapturous expression of a lover. Still sweeter, per-
haps, are the first clear indications of loving concern.
The temporary loss of her presence, due to illness or
other cause, is often the occasion for the appearance
of a deeper tenderness. A little boy of three spon-
taneously brought his story-book to his mother when
she lay in bed ill; and the same child used to follow
her about after her recovery with all the devotion of
a little knight. At other times it is the suspicion of an
injury to his beloved one, as when one little fellow
seeing the strange doctor lay hold of his mother's
wrist stood up like an outraged turkey-cock, backing
into his mother's skirts, ready to charge the assaulter.
A deeper and thoughtful kind of sympathy often
comes with the advent of the more reflective years.
9
122
Children's Ways.
Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is some-
times its awakener. “Are you old, mother?" asked
a boy of five. "Why?" she answered. "Because," he
continued, “the older you are the nearer you are to
dying." There was no doubt thought of his own loss
in this question: yet there was, one may hope, a germ
of solicitude for the mother too.
This first thought for others frequently takes the
practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing
better than to assist in little household occupations.
A boy of two years and one month happened to
overhear his nurse say to herself: "I wish that Anne
would remember to fill the nursery boiler". "He
listened, and presently trotted off; found the said
Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron,
saying: 'Nanna, Nanna!' (come to nurse). She
followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all
the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he
pointed to the boiler, and added: 'Go dare, go dare,'
so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade
her."
With this practical form of sympathy there goes a
quite charming disposition to give pleasure in other
ways. A little girl when just a year old was given to
offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to
everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of
childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their
alternate play. Early in the second year, too, children
are wont to show themselves kindly by giving kisses
and other pretty courtesies. In truth from about this
date they are often quite charming in their ex-
pressions of good will, so that the good Bishop Earle
hardly exaggerates when he writes of the child: "He
Good and Bad in the Making.
123
kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is
past, smiles on his beater". Later on a like amiable
disposition will show itself in graceful turns of speech,
as when a little girl, aged three and a quarter, peti-
tioned her mother this wise: "Please, mamma, will
you pin this with the greatest pleasure?"
Just as there are these beginnings of affectionate
concern for the mother and other people, so there is
ample evidence of kindness to animals. The charge
of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen
to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole
behaviour towards the animal world.
When once the first fear of the strangeness is
mastered a child will generally take kindly to an
animal. A little boy of fifteen months quickly over-
came his fright at the barking of his grandfather's
dog, and began to share his biscuits with him, to give
him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for his
amusement.
At a quite early age, too, children will show the
germ of a truly humane feeling towards animals.
The same little boy that bravely got over his fear of
the dog's barking would, when nineteen months old,
begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street.
Stronger manifestations of pity are seen at a later
age. A little boy of four was moved to passionate
grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.
The indignation of children at the doings of the
butcher, the hunter and others, shows how deeply
pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their
hearts. This is one of the most striking manifesta-
tions of the better side of child-nature and deserves a
chapter to itself.
124
Children's Ways.
The close absorbing sympathy which we often
observe between a child and animals seems to come
from a sense of common weaknesses and needs. Per-
haps there is in it something of that instinctive
impulse of helpless things to band together which we
see in sheep and other gregarious animals. A mother
once remarked to her boy, between five and six years.
old: "Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the
animals than to me". Perhaps I am,” he replied,
you see they are not so well off as you are.”
66
<<
The same outpourings of affection are seen in
the dealings of children with their toy babies and
animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of tem-
per and acts of violence, a child's intercourse with his
doll or his toy "gee gee" is a wonderful display of
loving solicitude; a solicitude which has something
of the endurance of a maternal instinct.
Here, too, as we know, children vary greatly; there
are the loving and the unloving moods, and there are
the loving and the unloving children. Yet allowing
for these facts, I think it may be said that in these
first fresh outgoings of human tenderness we have a
comforting set off to the unamiable manifestations
described above.
The Lapse into Lying.
The other main charge against children is that they
tell lies. According to many, children are in general
accomplished little liars, to the manner born, and
equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even
writers on childhood who are by no means prejudiced
against it lean to the view that lying is instinctive
and universal among children.
•
Good and Bad in the Making.
125
Now it is surely permissible to doubt whether little
children have so clear an apprehension of what we
understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this
full sense.
Much of what seems shocking to the
adult unable to place himself at the level of childish
intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be
something far less serious.
To begin with those little ruses and dissimulations
which are said to appear almost from the cradle in
the case of certain children, it is plainly difficult to
bring them into the category of full-fledged lies.
When, for example, a child wishing to keep a thing
hides it, and on your asking for it holds out empty
hands, it would be hard to name this action a lie,
even though there may be in it a germ of deception.
These little ruses or "acted lies" seem at the worst
to be attempts to put you off the scent in what is
regarded as a private matter, and to have the mini-
mum of intentional deception. This childish passion
for guarding secrets may account for later and more
serious-looking falsehoods.
There is a more alarming appearance of mendacity
when the child comes to the use of language and
proffers statements which, if he reflected, he might
know to be false. Even here, however, we may easily
apply grown-up standards unfairly. Anybody who
has observed children's play and knows how real to
them their fancies become for the moment will be
chary of applying to their sayings the word "lie".
There may be solemn sticklers for truth who would
be shocked to hear the child when at play´saying,
"I am a coachman," "Dolly is crying," and so forth.
But the discerning see nothing to be alarmed at here.
126
Children's Ways.
On the same level of moral obliquity I should be
disposed to place those cases where a child will con-
tradictingly say the opposite of what he is told. A
little French boy was overheard saying to himself:
"Papa parle mal, il a dit sevette, bébé parle bien, il dit
serviette". Such reversals may be a kind of play too :
the child not unnaturally gets tired now and then of
being told that he is wrong, and for the moment
imagines himself right and his elders wrong, im-
mensely enjoying the idea.
The case looks graver when an "untruth" is
uttered in answer to a question. A little boy on
being asked by his mother who told him something,
answered, "Dolly". "False, and knowingly false,"
somebody will say, especially when he learns that
the depraved youngster instantly proceeded to laugh.
But is not this laugh just the saving clause of the
story, suggesting that it was play and the spirit of
mischief at bottom?
In this case, I suspect, there was co-operant a
strongly marked childish characteristic, the love of
producing an effect. A child has a large measure of
that feeling which R. L. Stevenson attributes to the
light-hearted Innes in Weir of Hermiston, "the mere
pleasure of beholding interested faces". The well-
known "cock and bull" stories of small children are
inspired by this love of strong effect. It is the
dramatic impulse of childhood endeavouring to bring
life into the dulness of the serious hours. Childish
vanity often assists, as where a little girl of five would
go about scattering the most alarming kind of false
news, as, for example, that baby was dead, simply to
court attention and make herself of some importance.
Good and Bad in the Making.
127
A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting
a part, these, backed by a strong impulse to astonish,
and a playful turn for contradiction and paradox,
seem to me to account for most of this early fibbing
and other similar varieties of early misstatement.
Naughty it is, no doubt, in a measure; but is it quite
fairly branded as lying, that is, as a serious attempt
to deceive?
In some cases, I think, the vivid play of imagina-
tion which prompts the untrue assertion may lead to a
measure of self-deception. When, for example, an
Italian child, of whom Signorina Lombroso tells us,
who is out for a walk, and wanting to be carried
says, "My leg hurts me and my foot too just here,
I can't walk, I can't, I can't," it is possible at least
that the vivid imagination of the South produces
at the moment an illusory sense of fatigue. And
if so we must hesitate to call the statement wholly
a falsehood.
A fertile source of childish "untruth," which may
be more true than untrue in the sense of express-
ing the conviction of the moment, is the wish to
please. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of
tenderness for his mother gushes out, "You're the
best mother in the whole world!" may be hardly
conscious of any exaggeration. There is more of
artfulness in the flatteries which appear to involve a
calculating intention to say the nice agreeable thing.
Some children, especially little girls, are, I believe,
adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the
impulse is strong and dominant are perhaps those
who in later years make the good society actors.
Yet if there is a measure of untruth in such pretty
128
Children's Ways.
flatteries, one needs to be superhuman in order to
condemn them harshly.
The other side of this wish to please is the fear to
give offence, and this, I suspect, may point to a more
intentional and conscious kind of untruth. If, for
example, a child is asked whether he does not like or
admire something, his feeling that the questioner
expects him to say "Yes" makes it very hard to say
"No". Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this
early experience. When she was less than three, she
writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having
found out that the baby newly added to the family
was called Edith, remarked to her: "That's a pretty
name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn't that a pretty
name?" On being thus questioned she felt in a
dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of
"Eleanor," and yet feared to be rude and say so.
She got out of it by saying she did not like the name
as well as "Edith ".
In such cases as this the fear to give offence may
be reinforced by the mastering force of "suggestion".
Just as the hypnotiser "suggests" to his subject the
idea that he is ill, that the dirty water in this glass is
wine, and so forth, compelling him to accept and act
out the idea, so we all exercise a kind of suggestive
sway over children's minds. Our leading questions,
as when we say, "Isn't this pretty?" may for a
moment set up a half belief that the thing must
be so.
Thus in a double fashion do our words
control children's thoughts, driving them now into
contradiction, drawing them at other times and in
other moods into submissive assent. Wordsworth
has illustrated how an unwise and importunate
Good and Bad in the Making.
129
demand for a reason from a child may drive him
into invention.¹
I do not say that these are the only impulses which
prompt to this early fibbing. From some records of the
first years I learn that a child may drift into something
like a lie under the pressure of fear, more especially
fear of being scolded. One little fellow, more than
once instanced in this work, a single child brought up
wholly by his mother, perpetrated his first fib when
he was about twenty-two months old. He went, it
seems, and threw his doll down stairs in one of those
capricious outbursts towards favourites which children.
share with certain sovereigns, then went to his mother
and making great pretence of grief said, "Poor dolly
tumbled". If this had stood alone I should have
been ready to look on it as a little childish comedy;
but the same child a month or two afterwards would
invent a fib when he wanted his mother to do some-
thing. For example, he was one morning lying in bed
with his mother and wanted much to get up. His
mother told him to look for the watch and see what
time it was. He felt under the pillow pretending to
find and consult the time-teller, saying: "Time to
get up". Here it was clearly the force of the young
will resisting an unpleasant check which excited the
sober faculties to something like deception.
To say that our moral discipline with its injunc-
tions, its corrections, is a great promoter of childish
untruth may sound shocking, but it is I think an in-
disputable truth. We can see how this begins to
work in the first years. For example, a mite of three
1 See his poem, Anecdote for Fathers, showing how the practice of
lying may be taught. ("Poems referring to the period of childhood.")
130
Children's Ways.
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". A child is
often driven into such ruses by the instinct of self-
protection.
Our system of discipline may develop untruth in
other ways too. When, for example, punishment has
been inflicted and its inflicter, relenting, asks: "Are
you sorry?" or "Aren't you sorry?" the answer is
exceedingly likely to be "No," even though this may
at the moment be half felt to be untrue. From such
partial untruths the way is easy to complete ones, as
when a naughty little boy who is shut up in his room
and kept without food, is asked: "Are you hungry?"
and with the hardihood of a confirmed sinner answers
"No," even though the low and dismal tone of the
word shows how much the untruth goes against the
grain.
I think there is no doubt, then, that at a certain
age children may, more especially under a severe
home authority, develop, apart from contagion, a
tendency to falsehood. Some may see in this, as in
childish fears and cruelties, rudiments of character-
istics which belonged to remote uncivilised ancestors.
However this be, it is hard to say that these fibs
have that clear intention to deceive which constitutes
a complete lie.
There are curious points in the manner of childish
fibbing. A good many children seem to be like
savages in distinguishing those to whom one is
bound to speak the truth. The "bad form" of tell-
ing a lie to the head-master is a later illustration of
the same thing. On the other hand it seems to be
Good and Bad in the Making.
131
thought that there are people who are specially fitted
to be the victims of untruth. Even young children
soon find out who it is among the servants that
being credulous supplies the best listener to their
amazing inventions.
Another interesting point is the way in which the
perfectly baseless fictions of children are apt to grow
into permanent "stories". In the nursery and in the
playground there are wont to be developed myths
and legends which are solemnly believed by the
simple-minded, and may be handed down to suc-
cessors. In all such cases of propagated untruths the
impulse of imitation and the tendency of the child's
mind to accept statements uncritically are of course
at work. The "lie" propagated by this influence of
contagion very soon ceases to be a lie.
Fealty to Truth.
In order to understand what childish untruth really
amounts to we must carefully note its after-effects on
the perpetrator. It seems certain that many children
experience a qualm of conscience when uttering that,
of the falsity of which they are more or less aware.
This is evidenced in the well-known devices by which
the young casuist 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. 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.
The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially
Uor M
A
132
Children's Ways.
the first lie, which catches the conscience at its ten-
derest, is much more than this passing qualm, and has
been remembered by many in later life. Here is a
case.
A young lady whom I know 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.
Such remorse, in certain cases prolonged beyond the
first lie, comes to the little offender as he or she lies in
bed and recalls the untruths of the day. Some children
suffer greatly from this periodic reflection on their lies.
Some of the more poignant of the sufferings which
come to the sensitive child from saying what is false
are those of fear, fear of those terrific penalties which
religious teaching attaches to the lying tongue. It
seems likely that childish devices for allaying their
qualms when saying what is untrue are intended
somehow to make things right with God, and so
to avoid the dreaded chastisement. I am sure, too,
that the subsequent remorse, especially at night, is
very largely a dread of some awful manifestation of
God's wrath.
While I should set down much of this horror of
children at discovering themselves liars to a dread of
supernatural penalties, I should not set down the
whole. I am disposed to think that there is another
force at work in the little people's consciousness.
Good and Bad in the Making.
133
In order to explain what I mean, I must begin by
saying that a tendency towards conscious falsehood,
though common, does not seem to be universal among
children. Several mothers assure me that their chil-
dren have never seriously put forth an untruth. I
can say the same about two children who have been
especially observed for the purpose.
I am ready to go further and to 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. One
may easily see that children accustomed to truth-
speaking show all the signs of a moral shock when
they are confronted with a false statement.
I re-
member after more than twelve years one little boy's
outbreaks of righteous indignation at meeting with
untrue statements about his beloved horses and other
things in one of his books, for which he had all a
child's reverence. The idea of knowingly perpetrat-
ing an 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?
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 de-
velop into the vices of cruelty and lying. On the
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Children's Ways.
other hand it has shown us that there are other and
counteracting impulses, germs of human sympathy and
of respect for the binding custom of truthfulness. So
far from saying that child-nature is utterly bad or
beautifully perfect, we should say that it is a dis-
orderly jumble of impulses, each pushing itself upwards
in lively contest with the others, some towards what
is bad, others towards what is good. It is on this
motley group of tendencies that the hand of the moral
cultivator has to work, selecting, arranging, organising
into a beautiful whole.
CHAPTER X.
REBEL AND SUBJECT.
CHILDREN are early confronted with our laws, and it
is worth while asking how they behave in relation to
these. Many persons seem to think that children
generally are disobedient, lawless creatures; others,
that some are obedient, others disobedient. Perhaps
neither of these views is quite exact enough.
(a) The Struggle with Law: First Tussle with
Authority.
Let us begin our study by looking a little more
closely at what we call the disobedient attitude of
children. That it exists nobody, surely, can well
doubt. The very liveliness of young limbs and young
wits brings their possessors into conflict with our
sedate customs. The person who tries to wield
authority over these small people is constantly intro-
ducing unpleasant checkings of vigorous impulse. A
child has large requirements in the matter of move-
ments and experiments with things, which are apt to
clash with what the mother considers orderliness;
when he is out of doors he exhibits a duck-like fond-
ness for dirty water, whereas civilisation, represented
by his tidy nurse, wills it that man should, at least when
not in the arctic regions, be clean; he shows a perverse
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Children's Ways.
passion for fun and tricks when the mother thinks it
the right time for serious talk, and so forth.
ways there comes the tussle with human law.
In these
Yet surely, if we consider the matter impartially,
we shall see that these collisions in the early years.
are perfectly normal and right. In the interests of
the race, at any rate, we ought perhaps to regard
him as the better child, as the child of finer promise,
who will not subject himself to human law without a
considerable show of resistance.
The first and most impressive form of resistance
to the laws of grown-ups is the use of physical force,
which has already been touched on. There is some-
thing pathetically comic in the spectacle of these
mites resorting to the arbitrement of force, trying
their small hand at pushing, striking, and the like;
and as we have seen the effort is wont soon to ex-
haust itself in childish despair.
As soon as our authority begins to assert itself in
the issuing of commands the child's disposition to
disobey, that is to have his way rather than ours, is
apt to show itself now and again in decided refusals.
When, let us say, the nurse gives up pulling him from
the dirty pool, and bids him come away, he may very
likely assert himself in an eloquent, "I won't," or less
bluntly, "I can't come yet".
Here, of course, there may be no wilful rejection of
recognised law, but merely resistance to this particular
disagreeable order coming from this particular person.
Nevertheless we must, I fear, admit that such refusals
to obey orders have in them something of true law-
lessness. The whole attitude of the child when he thus
"tries on" defiance of commands is certainly sugges-
Rebel and Subject.
137
Nobody is so completely
When the fit is on him
tive of the rebel's temper.
reckless as the child-rebel.
he pays not the least attention to the most awful of
warnings. One 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, for reasons best known to
himself, "uncle won't go-I'll stay with him ".
Evading the Law.
In addition to this first impressive form of opposi-
tion there are later ones which plainly show the spirit
of antagonism. The conflict with law now takes on
the aspect of evasion or "trying it on ".
One of the simplest of these childish tricks is the
invention of an excuse for not instantly obeying a
command, as "Come here!" "Don't tease pussy!"
A child soon finds out that to say "I won't" when he
is bidden to do something is indiscreet as well as
vulgar. He wants to have his own way without re-
sorting to a gross breach of good manners, so he re-
plies insinuatingly, "I's very sorry, but I's too busy,"
or in some such conciliatory words. This field of
invention offers a fine opportunity for the imaginative
child. A small boy of three years and nine months
on receiving from his nurse the familiar order, “Come
here!" at once replied, "I can't, nurse, I's looking for
a flea,” and pretended to be much engrossed in the
momentous business of hunting for this quarry in the
blanket of his cot. The little trickster is such a lover
of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a
case like this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told,
ΤΟ
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Children's Ways.
laughed mischievously as he proffered his excuse.
Such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as the
uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is
hard to be quite as much put out by them.
It is a further refinement when the staunch little
lover of liberty sets about "easing" the pressure of
commands. If, for example, he is told to keep
perfectly quiet because mother or father wants to
sleep, he will prettily plead for the reservation of
whispering ever so softly. If he is forbidden to ask
for things at the table he will resort to sly indirect re-
minders of what he wants, as when a boy of five and
a half years whispered audibly: "I hope somebody
will offer me some more soup," or when a girl of three
and a half years, with more subtle insinuation, observed
on seeing the elder folk eating cake: "I not asking".
A like astuteness will show itself in meeting the
dismal accusations and scoldings. Sometimes the
fault-finding is daringly ignored, and the small culprit,
after keeping up an excellent appearance of listening,
proceeds in the most artless way to talk about some-
thing more agreeable, or, what is worse, to criticise the
manner of his correction; as when a small boy inter-
rupted his mother's well-prepared homily by remark-
ing: “Mamma, when you talk you don't move your
upper jaw".
In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the
accusation, the small wits are wont to be busy dis-
covering exculpations. Here we have the ruses,
often crude enough, by which the little culprit tries
to shake off moral responsibility, to deny the author-
ship of the "naughty" action. The blame is put on
anybody or anything-if there is no other scape-goat
Rebel and Subject.
139.
in view, then on the hands or other "bodily agents".
This last device is sometimes hit upon very early,
as when a mite of two who was told to stop crying
gasped out: "Elsie cry-not Elsie cry-tears cry
-naughty tears!" We find too at an early age
a suggestion of fatalism, as when a boy of three who
was blamed for not eating his crusts, and his pro-
cedure contrasted with that of his virtuous sire, re-
marked: "Yes, but, papa, you see God had made
you and me different".
Next to these denials of the "naughty" action come
attempts at justification. Sometimes these look like
pitiful examples of quibbling. A boy had been rough
with his baby brother. His mother chid him, telling
him he might hurt baby. He then asked his mother,
"Isn't he my own brother?" and on his mother ad-
mitting so incontestable a proposition, exclaimed
triumphantly, "Well, you said I could do what I
liked with my own things". At other times they
have a dreadful look of being fibs invented for the
purpose of covering a fault. Under a severe mode of
discipline a child is apt, as already hinted, to slip over
the boundary line of truth in his self-protective efforts
to escape blame and punishment.
One other illustration of this keen childish dialectic
when face to face with the accuser deserves to be
touched on. The sharpened faculties have something
of a lawyer's quickness in detecting a flaw in the in-
dictment. Any exaggeration into which a feeling of
indignation happens to betray the accuser is instantly
pounced upon. If, for example, a child is scolded for
pulling kitty's ears and making her cry it is enough
for the little stickler for accuracy to be able to say:
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Children's Ways.
<<
•
I wasn't pulling kitty's ears, I was only pulling one
of her ears". The ability to deny the charge in its
initial form gives him a great advantage, and robs
the accusation in its amended form of much of its
sting. Whence, by the way, one may infer that wis-
dom in managing children shows itself in nothing
more than in a scrupulous exactness in the use of
words.
The Plea for Liberty.
While there are these isolated attacks on various
points of the daily discipline, we see now and again a
bolder line of action in the shape of a general protest
against its severity. Sometimes the parental authority
is contrasted unfavourably with that of some other
mother. The small boy who invented a family, viz.,
a mother called Mrs. Cock and her little boys, fre-
quently referred to this lady for the purpose of giving
point to protests against the severity of the real
mother. "For instance (writes the latter) when mother
refuses her paint-box as a plaything, or declines to
supply unlimited note-paper for 'scwibbleation,' a
reproachful little voice is heard, 'Mrs. Cock always
gives her paint-box and all her paper to my little.
boys'. A pause. Then follows suggestively: 'I fink
she loves them vewy much '."¹ On the other hand,
if the child accepts the mother's plea, that she has to
impose restraints because she is a good mother, he is
apt to wish that she were a shade less good. A boy
of four had one morning to remain in bed till ten
1 From a published article by Mrs. Robert Jardine (compare above,
pp. 16, 17).
Rebel and Subject.
141
o'clock as a punishment for misbehaviour. He pro-
ceeded to address his mother in this wise: "If I had
any little children I'd be a worse mother than you—
I'd be quite a bad mother; I'd let the children get up
directly I had done my breakfast at any rate".
Enough has been said to illustrate the ways in
which the natural child kicks against the imposition
of restraints on his free activity. He begins by
showing himself an open foe to authority. For a
long time after, while making a certain show of sub-
mission, he harbours in his breast something of the
rebel's spirit. He does his best to evade the most
galling parts of the daily discipline, and displays an
admirable ingenuity in devising excuses for apparent
acts of insubordination. And, lastly, where candour
is permitted, he is apt to prove himself an exceedingly
acute critic of the system which is imposed on him.
All this, moreover, seems to show that a child ob-
jects not only to the particular administration under
which he happens to live, but to all law as implying
restraints on free activity. Thus, from the child's
point of view, so far as we have yet examined it,
punishment as such is a thing which ought not to be.
So strong and deep-reaching is this antagonism to
law and its restraints apt to be that the common long-
ing to be "big" is, I believe, largely grounded on the
expectation of liberty. To be big seems to the child
more than anything else to be able to do what one
likes without interference from others.
"Do you
know," asked a little fellow of four years, "what I
shall do when I'm a big man? I'll go to a shop and
buy a bun and pick out all the currants." One must
have left in him much of the child in order to under-
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Children's Ways.
stand the fascination of that forbidden pleasure of
daintily selecting the currants.
(b) On the Side of Law.
If, however, we look closer we shall find that this
hostility is not the whole, perhaps not the most funda-
mental part, of a child's attitude towards law. It is
evident that the early criticism of parental govern-
ment referred to above, so far from implying rejection
of all rule, plainly implies its acceptance. Some of
the earliest and bitterest protests against interference
are directed against what looks to the child irregular
or opposed to law, as when, for example, he is allowed
for some time to use a pair of scissors as a plaything,
and is then suddenly deprived of it. And does not
all the exercise of childish ingenuity in excuses imply
in an indirect way that if he had done what is de-
scribed in the indictment it would be naughty and
deserving of punishment?
Other facts in early life bear out the conjecture that
a child has law-abiding as well as law-resisting im-
pulses. I think we may often discern evidence of
this in his suffering when in disgrace. When he
is too young perhaps to feel the shame, he will feel,
and acutely too, the estrangement, the loneliness,
the sudden shrinkage of his beloved world. The
greater the love and the dependence, the greater will
be this feeling of devastation. The same little boy
who said to his mother: "I'd be a worse mother,"
emarked to her a few months later that if he could
say what he liked to God it would be: "Love me
when I'm naughty".
Rebel and Subject.
143
There is, perhaps, in this childish suffering often
something more than the sense of being homeless and
outcast. A child of four or five may, I conceive, when
suffering disgrace have a dim consciousness of having
broken with his normal orderly self, of having set
at defiance that which he customarily honours and
obeys.
Now this setting up of an orderly law-abiding self
seems to me to imply that there are impulses which
make for order. A child, as I understand the little
sphinx, is at once the subject of ever-changing caprices
-whence the delight in playful defiance of all rule
and order and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule.
And, as I conceive, this reverence for precedent and
rule is the deeper and the stronger impulse.
The Young Stickler for the Proprieties.
I believe that those who know young children will
agree with me that they show an instinctive respect
for what is customary and according to rule, such as
a particular way of taking food, dressing, and definite
times for doing this and that. Nor can we regard
this as merely a reflection of our respect for law, for
as we shall presently see it reaches far beyond the
limits of the rules laid down by adults. It seems to
be a true instinct which comes before education and
makes education possible. It is related to habit, the
great principle which runs through the whole of life.
The first crude manifestation of this disposition to
make rule is seen in the insistence on the customary,
as to the places of things, the order of procedure at
meals and such like. The little boy of two, often
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Children's Ways.
quoted here, showed a punctilious feeling for order in
the placing of things. He protested one morning in
his mother's bedroom against a hair-brush being
placed on the washing-stand near the tooth-brushes,
saying quaintly: "That toof-brush is a brush one".
Older children are apt to be sticklers for order at
the meal-table: thus, the cup and the spoon have to
be put in precisely the right place. Similarly, the
sequences of the day, e.g., the lesson before the walk,
the walk before bed, have to be rigorously observed.
This feeling for order may develop itself even where
the system of parental government is by no means
characterised by rigorous insistence on such minutiæ
of procedure.
This impulse to extend rule appears more plainly
in many of the little ceremonial observances of the
child. Very charmingly is this respect for rule
exhibited in all dealings with animals, also dolls and
other pets. Not only are they required to do things
in a proper orderly manner, but people have to treat
them with due deference. One little fellow when saying
good-night to his mother insisted on her going through
with his doll precisely the same round of kissing and
hand-shaking that he required in his own case.
This jealous regard for ceremony and the proprieties
of behaviour is seen in the enforcement of rules of
politeness by children who will extend them far be-
yond the scope intended by the parent. A delightful
instance of this fell under my own observation, as I
was walking on Hampstead Heath. It was a spring
day, and the fat buds of the chestnuts were bursting
into magnificent green plumes. Two well-dressed
"misses," aged, I should say, about nine and eleven,
Rebel and Subject.
145
were taking their correct morning walk. The elder
called the attention of the younger to one of the trees,
pointing to it. The younger exclaimed in a highly
shocked tone: “Oh, Maud (or was it 'Mabel'?), you
know you shouldn't point!"
The domain of prayer well illustrates the same
tendency. The child is wont, as we have seen, to
think of God as a very, very grand person, and
naturally, therefore, extends to him all the courtesies
he knows of. Thus he must be addressed politely
with the due forms, "Please," "If you please," and
the like. The German child shrinks from using the
familiar form "Du" in his prayers. As one maiden
of seven well put it in reply to a question why she
used "Sie" (the polite form of “you”) in her prayers :
"Ich werde doch den lieben Gott nicht Du nennen:
ich kenne ihn ja gar nicht" (But I mustn't call God
"thou": I don't know him, you see). On the other
hand, God must not be kept waiting. “Oh, mamma,”
said a little boy of three years and eight months
(the same that was so insistent about the kissing and
hand-shaking), "how long you have kept me awake
for you; God has been wondering so whenever I was
going to say my prayers." All the words must be
nicely said to him. A little boy, aged four and three-
quarter years, once stopped in the middle of a prayer
and asked his mother: "Oh! how do you spell that
word?" The question is curious as suggesting that
the child may have regarded his silent communication
to the far-off King as a kind of letter.
The Enforcer of Rules.
Not only do children thus of themselves extend the
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Children's Ways.
scope
of our commands, they show a disposition to
make rules for themselves. If, after being told to do a
thing on a single occasion only, a child is found repeat-
ing the action on other occasions, this seems to show
the germ of a law-making impulse. A little boy of
two years and one month was once asked to give a
lot of old toys to the children of the gardener. Some
time after, on receiving some new toys, he put away,
of his own accord, his old ones as before for the less
fortunate children.
That the instinct for order assists moral discipline
may be seen in the fact that children are apt to pay
enormous deference to our rules. Nothing is more
suggestive here than their talk among themselves, the
emphasis they are wont to lay on the "must" and
"must not". The truth is that children have a
tremendous belief in the sacredness of rules.
This recognition of the absolute imperativeness of
a rule properly laid down by the recognised authority
is seen in the frequent insistence on its observance
in new circumstances. It has been pointed out by
Professor Preyer that a child of two years and eight
months will follow out the prohibitions of the mother
when he falls into other hands, sternly protesting, for
example, against the nurse giving him the forbidden
knife at table. Very proper children rather like to
instruct their aunts and other ignorant persons as to
the right way of dealing with them, and will rejoice
in the opportunity of setting them straight even when
it means a deprivation for themselves. The self-deny-
ing ordinance, "Mamma doesn't let me have many
sweets," is by no means beyond the powers of a very
correct little person.
Rebel and Subject.
147
A still clearer evidence of this respect for law as
such, apart from its particular enforcement by the
parent, is supplied by children's way of extending the
rules imposed on themselves to others. No trait is
better marked in the normal child than the impulse to
subject others to his own disciplinary system. With
what amusing severity are they wont to lay down
the law to their dolls, and to their animal playmates,
subjecting them to precisely the same prohibitions
and punishments as those to which they themselves
are subject! Nor do they stop here. They enforce
the duties just as courageously on their human elders.
A mite of eighteen months went up to her elder
sister, who was crying, and with perfect mimicry of
the nurse's corrective manner, said: "Hush! hush!
papa!" pointing at the same time to the door.
This judicial bent of the child is a curious one and
often develops a priggish fondness for setting others
morally straight. Small boys have to endure much
in this way from the hands of slightly older sisters
proficient in matters of law and delighting to enforce
the moralities. But sometimes the sisters lapse into
naughtiness, and then the small boys have their
chance. They too can on such occasions be priggish
if not downright hypocritical. A little boy had been
quarrelling with his sister named Muriel just before
going to bed. On kneeling down to say his prayers
and noticing that Muriel was sitting near and listening,
he prayed aloud in this wise, "Please, God, make
Muriel a good girl," then looked up and said in an
angry voice, "Do you hear that, Muriel ?" and after
this digression resumed his petition.
This mania for correction shows itself too in rela-
148
Children's Ways.
tion to the authorities themselves. A collection of
rebukes and expositions of moral precept supplied by
children to their erring parents would be amusing
and suggestive. Here is an example: A boy of two
-the moral instruction of parents by the child begins
betimes-would not go to sleep when bidden to do so
by his father and mother. At length the father, losing
patience, addressed him with a man's fierce emphasis.
This mode of admonition so far from cowering the
child simply offended his sense of propriety, for he re-
joined: "You s'ouldn't, s'ouldn't, Assum (¿.e., ' Arthur,'
the father's name), you s'ould speak nicely ".
We may now turn to what some will regard as still
clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children,
viz., their spontaneous self-submission to its com-
mands. We are apt to think of these little ones as
doing right only when under compulsion: but this is
far from the truth. A very young child will show
the germ of a disposition freely to adopt a law. A
little girl, when only twenty months old, would, when
left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself:
"Tay dar" (Stay there). About the same time, after
being naughty and squealing “like a railway-whistle,"
she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, “ Be
dood, Babba" (her name). In like manner the little
boy often quoted at the age of twenty months said
to himself when walking down the garden, "Sonny
darling, mind nettles". Here, no doubt, we see
quaint mimicries of the mother's fashion of control,
but they seem, too, to indicate a movement in the
direction of self-control.
Very instructive here is the way in which children
will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our
Rebel and Subject.
149
discipline. The girl just quoted, when less than two
years old, would go to her mother and confess some
piece of naughtiness and suggest the punishment.
A little boy aged two years and four months was
deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for
scribbling on the wall-paper. His punishment was,
however, tempered by permission to draw when taken
downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a picture
downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse
fetched him she wanted to look at the drawing, but
the boy strongly objected, saying: "No, Nanna (name
for nurse), look at it till Sunday". And sure enough
when Sunday came, and the pencil was restored to
him, he promptly showed nurse his picture.
That there is this tendency to fall in with punish-
ment for breach of rule is borne out by some recent
questionings of school children in America as to their
views of the justice of their punishments. The results
appear to show that they regard a large part of their
corrections for naughtiness as a matter of course,
the younger ones being apparently harsher in their
views of what constitutes a proper punishment than
the older ones.
These evidences of an impulse to look on correction
as a quite proper thing are corroborated by stories of
self-punishment. Here is an example: A girl of nine
had been naughty, and was very sorry for her misbe-
haviour. Shortly after she came to her lesson limping,
and remarked that she felt very uncomfortable. Being
asked by her governess what was the matter with
her she said: "It was very naughty of me to disobey
you, so I put my right shoe on to my left foot and
my left shoe on to my right foot".
150
Children's Ways.
The facts here briefly illustrated seem to me to
show that there is in the child from the first a rudiment
of true law-abidingness, which exists side by side and
struggles with the childish love of liberty and re-
belliousness. And this is a force of the greatest con-
sequence to the disciplinarian. It is something which
takes side in the child's breast with the reasonable
governor and the laws which he or she administers.
It secures in many cases, at least, a ready compliance
with a large part of the discipline enforced.
CHAPTER XI.
AT THE GATE OF THE TEMPLE.
ONE of the most interesting phases of a child's ac-
tivity is its groping after what we call art. Although a
decided bent towards some special form of our art may
be rare among children, most of them betray some
rudiment of a feeling for beauty and of an impulse
to produce it. It will be well to begin by glancing at
the responses of children to the various presentations
of beauty in nature and art, and then to examine
their attempts at artistic production.
The Greeting of Beauty.
In looking in a young child for responses to the
beauty of things, we must not, of course, expect a clear
appreciation of its several phases. Here our aim will
be to collect evidences of a natural feeling which may
afterwards under favourable conditions grow into a
discerning taste.
Even in infancy we may detect in the movements
of the arms, the admiring cooing sounds, this greeting
of nature's beauty as of something kindred. In the
home interior it is commonly some bit of bright light,
especially when it is in movement, which first charms
the eye of the novice; the dancing fire-flame, for ex-
ample, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a
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Children's Ways.
gilded frame, the great globe of the lamp just created.
In some cases it is a patch of bright colour or a gay
pattern on the mother's dress which calls forth a full
vocal welcome in the shape of baby “talking”. In
the out-of-door scene, too, it is the glitter of the
running water, or a meadow all white with daisies,
which captivates the glance. Light, the symbol of
life's joy, seems to be the first language in which the
spirit of beauty speaks to a child.
A feeling for the charm of colour comes distinctly
later. The first pleasure from coloured toys and
pictures is hardly distinguishable from the welcome of
the glad light, the delight in mere brightness. This
applies pretty manifestly to the strongly illumined
rose-red curtain which Professor Preyer's boy greeted
with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three
days. Later on, too, when it is possible to test a
child's feeling for colour, it has been found that
a decided preference is shown for the bright or
"luminous" tints, viz., red and yellow. An American
observer, Miss Shinn, tells us that her niece in her
twenty-eighth month had a special fondness for the
daffodils-the bright tints of which allured, as we know,
an older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all
brightness was banished. Among the other coloured
objects which captivated the eye of this little girl were
a patch of white cherry blossom, and a red sun-set
sky. Such observations might easily be multiplied.
Whiteness, it is to be noted, comes, as we might
expect, with the brighter tones of the other colours
among the first favourites.
At what age a child begins to appreciate the value
of colour as colour, to like blue or red for its own
At the Gate of the Temple.
153
sake and apart from its brightness, it is hard to say.
The experiments made so far are not conclusive,
though they seem to show that taste for colour does
not always develop along the same lines. Thus,
according to the observer of one child, blue is one of
the first to be preferred, though this is said not to
be true of other children. Later on, I believe, a
child is wont to have his favourite colour, and to be
ready to defend it against the preferences of others.
Liking for a single colour is a considerably smaller
display of mind than an appreciation of the relation
of two colours. Many adults, it is said, hardly have
a rudiment of this feeling, pairing the most fiercely
antagonistic tints. Common observation shows that
most children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer
juxtapositions of colours which are strongly opposed,
such as blue and red or blue and yellow. It would
be interesting to know whether there is any general
preference as between these two combinations. It is,
of course, a long step from this recognition of the
contrast and mutual emphasising of colour to that of
its quiet harmonious combinations.
That little children have their likings in the matter
of form is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those
of the cultivated adult. One of the first out-goings
of admiration towards form is the child's praise
of "tiny" things. The common liking of children
for small natural forms, e.g., those of the lesser birds,
insects, and sea-shells, is well known. How they love
to" pile up" the endearing epithets "wee," "tiny" (or
"teeny"), and the rest! Here, as in so many of
have to do not with
these childish admirations, we
a purely æsthetic perception.
The feeling for the
II
154
Children's Ways.
tiny things probably has in it the warmth of a young
personal sympathy.
If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, such
as symmetry and proportion, we encounter a difficulty.
A child may acquire while quite young and before any
methodical education commences a certain feeling for
regular form. But can we be sure that this is the re-
sult of his own observations? We have to remember
that his daily life, where the home is orderly, helps to
impress on him regularity of form. In the laying of
the cloth on the dinner-table, for example, he sees the
regular division of space enforced as a law. Every
time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress, he has an
object-lesson in symmetrical arrangement.
And so
these features take on a kind of moral rightness before
they are judged of as pleasing to the eye and as
beautiful. The feeling for proportion, as, for example,
between the height of a horse and that of a house, is,
as children's drawings show us, in general very defective
A susceptibility to the pleasures of light, colour, and
certain simple aspects of form, may be said to supply
the basis of a crude perception of beauty. A quite
small child is capable of acquiring a real admiration
for a beautiful lady, in the appreciation of which
brightness, colour, grace of movement, the splendour
of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the
eye is often reinforced by a sweet and winsome quality
of voice. Such an admiration is not of course a pure
appreciation of beauty: awe, some feeling for the
social dignity of dress, perhaps a longing to be em-
braced by the charmer, may all enter into it; yet
delight in the look of a thing for its own sake is surely
the core of the feeling.
At the Gate of the Temple.
155
Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure æsthetic en-
joyment in these early days is the love of flowers. The
wee round wonders with their mystery of velvety
colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye.
I believe most children who live among flowers and
have access to them acquire something of this senti-
ment, a sentiment in which admiration for beautiful
things combines with a kind of dumb childish sympa-
thy. No doubt there are marked differences among
children here. There are some who care only, or
mainly, for their scent, and the keen sensibilities of
the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do
with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of
flowers. Others again care for them mainly as a
means of personal adornment, though I am disposed
to think that this partially interested fondness is less.
common with children than with many adults.
In much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic
sense of the child we have points of contact with
the manifestations of taste among uncivilised races.
Admiration for brilliant colours, for moving things,
such as feathers, is common to the two. Yet a child
coming under the humanising influences of culture
soon gets far away from the level of the savage.
Perhaps his almost perfectly spontaneous love of tiny
flowers is already a considerable advance on his so-
called prototype.
Many adults assume that a child can look at a land-
scape as they look at it, taking in the whole picturesque
effect. When he is taken to Switzerland and shown
a fine "view," his eye, so far from seizing the whole,
will provokingly pounce on some unimportant detail
of the scene and give undivided attention to this,
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Children's Ways.
That the eye of a child of ten or less can enjoy the
reddening of a snow-peak, or the emergence of a bright
green alp from the mountain mist, I fully believe.
But it is quite another thing to expect him to appreci-
ate great extent of view and all the unnameable rela-
tions of form, of light and shade, and of colour, which
compose a landscape.
First Peep into the Art-world.
While Nature is thus speaking to a child through
her light, her colour and her various forms, human art
makes appeal also. In a cultured home a child finds
himself at the precincts of the art-temple, and feels
there are wondrous delights within if he can only get
there.
One of the earliest of these appeals is to the ear.
A child outside the temple of art hears its music before
he sees its veiled beauties. I have had occasion to
show how sadly new sounds may perturb the spirit
of an infant. Yet these same waves of sound, which
break upon and shake the young nerves, give them,
too, their most delightful thrill. Nowhere in adult
experience do pleasure and sadness lie so near one
another as in music, and a child's contrasting responses,
as he now shrinks away with trouble in his eyes, now
gratefully reaches forth and falls into joyous sympa-
thetic movement, are a striking illustration of this
proximity.
In the case of many happy children the interest in
the sounds of things, e.g., the gurgle of running water,
the soughing of the trees, is a large one.
An ap-
proach to æsthetic pleasure is seen in the responses
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157
to rhythmic series of sounds. Rhythm, it has been
well said, is a universal law of life: all the activities
of the organism have their regular changes, their
periodic rise and fall. The rhythm of a simple.
tune plays favourably on a child's ear, enhancing
life according to this great law. His ear, his brain,
his muscles take on a new joyous activity, and the
tide of life rises higher. Nursery rhymes, which, it has
recently been suggested, should be banished, bring
something of this joy of ordered movement, and help
to form the rhythmic ear.
A child's pre-
perhaps, a half
With this feeling for rhythm there soon appears a
discerning feeling for quality of tone. First of all,
I suspect, comes the appreciation of moderation and
smoothness of sound; it is the violent sounds
which mostly offend the young ear.
ference for the mother's singing is,
reminiscence of the soft-low tones of the lullaby.
Purity or sweetness of tone, little by little, makes
itself felt, and a child takes dislikes to certain voices
as wanting in this agreeable quality. Much later, in
the case of all but gifted children, do the mysteries of
harmony begin to take on definite form and meaning.
The arts which give to the eye semblances or re-
presentations of objects appeal to a child much more
through his knowledge of things. The enjoyment of
a picture means the understanding of it as a picture,
and this requires a process of self-education. A child
begins to make acquaintance with the images of things
when set before a mirror. Here he can inspect what
he sees, say the reflection of the face of his mother
or nurse, and compare it at once with the original.
With pictures there is no such opportunity of
158
Children's Ways.
directly comparing with the original, and children
have to find out as best they may what the draw-
ings in their picture-books mean.
A dim discernment of what a drawing represents
may appear early. A little boy was observed to talk
to pictures at the end of the eighth month. A girl of
forty-two weeks showed the same excitement at the
sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that of a real
cat. Another child, a boy, recognised pictures of
animals by spontaneously naming them "bow-wow,"
etc., at the age of ten months.
The early recognition of pictured objects, of which
certain animals have a measure, is often strikingly
discerning. A child a little more than a year old has
been known to pick out her father's face in a group
of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quarter
of an inch in diameter.
Another curious point in this early deciphering of
drawings and photographs is that a child seems in-
different to the position of the picture, holding it as
readily inverted as in its proper position. One little
girl of three and a half “does not mind (writes her
father) whether she looks at a picture the right way
up or the wrong; she points out what you ask for,
eyes, feet, hands, tail, etc., about equally well which-
ever way up the picture is, and never asks to have it
put right that she may see it better". A like in-
difference to the position of a picture, and of a letter,
has been observed among backward races.
Surprising as this early recognition of pictures un-
doubtedly is, it is a question whether it necessarily
implies any idea of the true nature of them, as being
merely semblances or representations of things.
At the Gate of the Temple.
159
That children do not, at first, clearly seize the
meaning of pictures is seen in the familiar fact that
they will touch them just as they touch shadows, and
otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities.
One little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a
drawing and pretended to feed some pictorial dogs.
This may have been half play. But here is a more
convincing example. A girl was moved to pity by
a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to
lift the branch that lay across the animal. With
less intelligent children traces of this tendency to
take pictorial representation for reality may appear
as late as four. One American boy having looked at
a picture of people going to church in the snow,
and finding on the next day that the figures in
the drawing were exactly in the same position,
seemed perplexed, and remarked naïvely: "Why,
Mrs. C., these people haven't got there yet, have
they?"
It is not surprising after this to learn that some
children are slow in seizing the representative char-
acter of acting. If, for example, a father at Christmas-
tide disguises himself as Santa Claus, his child will
only too readily take him to be what he represents
himself to be, and this when the disguise, especially
in the matter of the voice, leaves much to be desired.
Children, like uneducated adults, have been known
to take a spectacle on the stage of a theatre too
seriously. Yet their own play, which, though serious
at the moment, is known afterwards to be "pre-
tending," probably renders many of them particularly
quick in interpreting dramatic play.
This tendency to take art-representations for reali-
160
Children's Ways.
ties reappears even in the mental attitude of a child
towards his stories. A verbal narrative has of course
in itself nothing similar to the scenes and events of
which it tells. In this it differs from the semblance of
the picture and of the dramatic spectacle. Yet a story,
just because it uses our common forms of language
and takes the guise of a narrative about people who
lived at such a time and place, may well appear to a
child's mind to tell of real events. At any rate we
know that he is wont to believe tenaciously in the
truth of his stories.
Careful observations of these first movements of the
child's mind towards art will illustrate the variable
directions of his taste. The preferences of a boy of
four in the matter of picture-books tell us where his
special interests lie, what things he finds pretty, and
may supply a hint as to how much of a genuine
æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on.
It is curious to note children's first manifestations
of a sense of the pathetic and the comic as represented.
in art. Here marked differences present themselves.
Those of a more serious turn are apt to show a
curious preference for the graver aspects of things.
They like stories, for example, with a certain amount
of tension and even of thrill in them. There are
others who disclose a special susceptibility to the
more simple effects of pathos. There are senti-
mental children, as there are sentimental adults, who
seem never happier than when the tears are ready
to start. It may be suspected from the number of
descriptions of early deaths in literature for the young
that some at least must take pleasure in this kind of
description. A child's strong feeling of attachment to
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161
animals is apt at a certain age to give to stories
about the hardships of horses and the like something
of an overpowering sadness.
The sense of the comic in children is a curious sub-
ject to which justice has not yet been done. The
tendency to judge them by our grown-up standards
shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will
follow the directions of our own. Their fun is,
I suspect, of a very elemental character. They are
apt to be tickled by the spectacle of some upsetting
of the proprieties, some confusion of the established
distinctions of rank. Dress, as we have seen, has an
enormous symbolic value for their mind, and any
incongruity here is apt to be specially laughter-pro-
voking. One child between three and four was con-
vulsed at the sight of his baby bib fastened round the
neck of his bearded sire. There is, too, a considerable
element of rowdiness in children's sense of the comical,
as may be seen by the enduring popularity of the
spectacle of Punch's successful misdemeanours and
bravings of the legal authority. The sense of humour
which is finely percipient and half reflective is far
from their level, as indeed it is from that of the
average adult. Hence the fact familiar to parents that
stories which treat of child-life with the finer kind
of humour may utterly fail to tickle a young reader.
First Ventures in Creation.
It is sometimes said that children are artists in
embryo, that in their play and throughout their activity
they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. It seems
worth while to examine the saying.
162
Children's Ways.
There is no doubt that in much of the first spon-
taneous activity there is a trace of æsthetic feel-
ing and the impulse to produce something pretty.
Yet the feeling is in most children weak and vacil-
lating, and is wont to be mixed with other and less
noble ones.
One of the lower and mixed forms of artistic
activity, in the case of the child and of the race alike,
is personal adornment. The impulse to study ap-
pearances appears to reach far down in animal life.
Two impulses seem to be at work here: to frighten or
overawe others, as seen in the raising of feathers and
hair so as to increase size, and to attract, which
possibly underlies the habit of trimming feathers and
fur among birds and quadrupeds. The same two im-
pulses are said to lie at the root of the elaborate art of
personal adornment developed by savages.
In the case of children brought up in the ways of
civilisation where personal cleanliness and adornment
are peremptorily enforced in the face of many a tear-
ful protest, it seems at first vain to look for the play
of instinctive tendencies. Yet I think if we observe
closely we shall detect traces of a spontaneous impulse
towards self-adornment. Children, like uncultured
adults, are wont to prize a bit of finery in the shape of
a string of beads or of daisies for the neck, a feather for
the hat, and so forth. Imitation of the ways of their
elders doubtless plays a part here, but it is aided by an
instinct for adornment. Little girls perhaps repre-
sent the attractive function of adornment: they like
to be thought pretty. Little boys when decking them-
selves out with tall hat and monstrously big clothes
seem to be trying to put on an alarming aspect.
At the Gate of the Temple.
163
Since children are left so little free to deck them-
selves, it is of course hard to study the development
of æsthetic taste in this domain of their activity. Yet
their quaint attempts to improve their appearance
throw an interesting side-light on their æsthetic
preferences. While in general they have in their
hearts almost as much love of glitter, of gaudy colour,
as uncivilised adults, they betray striking differ-
ences of feeling; some developing, for example, a
bent towards modest neatness and refinement, and
this, it may be, in direct opposition to the whole
trend of home influence.
Another domain of childish activity which is akin
to art is the manifestation of grace. A good deal
of the charm of movement, of gesture, of intonation,
in a young child may be unconscious, and as much a
result of happy physical conditions as the pretty
gambols of a kitten. Yet one may commonly detect
in graceful children the rudiment of an æsthetic feel-
ing for what is nice, and also of the instinct to please.
There is, indeed, in these first actions, such as the kiss-
ing of the hand to other children in the street, something
of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable
of those uncivilised races which we dishonour by
calling them savages. This feeling for pleasing
effect in bodily carriage and movement, in the use of
speech and gesture, is no doubt far from being a pure
art-activity. Traces of self-consciousness, of vanity,
are often discernible in it; yet at least it attests the
existence of a certain appreciation of what is beauti-
ful, and of something akin to the creative impulse of
the artist.
A true art-impulse is characterised by a pure love
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Children's Ways.
of doing something which, either in itself as an action
or in the material result which it produces, is beauti-
ful. Into this there enters, at the moment at least,
no consciousness of self. Now there is one field of
children's activity which, as was suggested in an
earlier chapter, is marked by just this absorption of
thought in action for its own sake, and that is play.
To say that play is art-like has almost become a
commonplace. Like art it is inspired and sustained
by a pure love of producing. Like art, too, on its
representative side, play aims at producing an imita-
tion or semblance of something. The semblance may
be plastic, residing in the material product of the
action, as in making things such as castles out of
cardboard or sand; or it may be dramatic and reside
in the action itself, as in much of the childish play
already described.
The imitative impulse prompting to the production
of the semblance of something appears very early in
child-life. A good deal of the imitation which occurs
in the second half year is the taking on, under the
lead of another's example, of actions which are more or
less useful. This applies, for example, to such actions
as waving the hand in sign of farewell, and of course
to vocal imitation of others' verbal sounds. At an
early date we find, further, a perfectly useless kind
of imitation which is more akin to that of art. A quite
young child will, for example, pretend to do something,
as to take an empty cup and carry out the semblance
of drinking. The imitation of the sounds and move-
ments of animals, which comes early too, may be said
to be imitative in the more artistic sense, inasmuch as
it has no aim beyond that of mimetic representation.
At the Gate of the Temple.
165
Later on, towards the third year, this simple type of
imitative action grows more complex, so that a pro-
longed make-believe action may be carried out. A
child, for example, occupies himself with pretending
to be an organ-grinder's monkey, going duly and in
order through the action of jumping down from his
seat, and taking off his cap by way of begging for the
stranger's contribution. Here, it is evident, we get
something closely analogous to histrionic performance.
This play-like performance, again, gradually divides
itself into a more serious kind of action, analogous to
serious drama, and into a lighter representaation of
some funny scene, which has in it something akin to
comedy.
Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing,
the fashioning of lasting semblances. Early illustra-
tions of this impulse are the making of a river out of
the gravy in the plate, the pinching of pellets of bread
till they take on something of resemblance to known
forms. One child, three years old, would occupy
himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in
which the knife and fork were made to act as hands,
and cherry stones put round the plate to represent
the hours. Such table-pastimes are known to all
observers of children, and have been prettily touched
on by R. L. Stevenson in his essay on "Child's Play".
These formative touches are, at first, rough enough,
the transformation being effected, as we have seen,
much more by the alchemy of the child's imagination
than by the cunning of his hands. Yet, crude as it
is, and showing at first almost as much of chance as
of design, it is a manifestation of the same plastic
impulse which possesses the sculptor and the painter.
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Children's Ways.
The more elaborate constructive play which follows-
the building with cards and wooden bricks, the mould-
ing with sand and clay, and the first spontaneous draw-
ings-is the direct descendant of this rude formative
activity. The kindergarten is, indeed, a kind of
smaller art-world where the dramatic and plastic im-
pulses of the child are led into orderly action.
In this imitative play we see from the first the
artistic tendency to set forth what is characteristic in
the things represented. Thus in the unstudied acting
of the nursery, the nurse, the coachman, and the rest,
are presented by a few broad touches; characteristic
actions, such as pouring out the medicine, jerking the
reins, being aided by one or two rough accessories, as the
medicine bottle or the whip. In this way child's play,
like primitive art, shows a certain unconscious selec-
tiveness. It presents what is constant and typical,
imperfectly enough no doubt. The same selection of
broadly distinctive traits is seen where some indi-
vidual person, e.g., a particular newsboy or gardener,
seems to be represented. A similar tendency to a
somewhat bald typicalness of outline is seen in the
first rude attempts of children to construct, whether
with materials like cards or bricks, or with pencil, the
semblance of a house, a garden and so forth.
As observation widens and grows finer, the first
bald representation becomes fuller and more life-like.
A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into
the play. Thus the coachman's talk becomes richer,
fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour
is given to the dramatic picture. Similarly with the
products of the plastic impulse.
With this more realistic tendency to exhibit the
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167
characteristic with something like concrete fulness we
see the germ at least of the idealistic impulse to
transcend the level of common things, to give promi-
nence to what has value, to touch the representation
with the magic light of beauty. Even a small child
playing with its coloured petals or its shells will
show a rudiment of this artistic feeling for beautiful
arrangement.
No doubt there are striking variations among
children in this respect. Play discloses in many
ways differences of feeling and ideas: among others,
in the unequal degrees of tastefulness of the play
scene. Yet the presence of an impulse, however rudi-
mentary, to produce what has beauty and charm for
the eye is a fact which we must recognise.
Along with this feeling for the sensuous effect of
beauty we can discern the beginnings of fancy and
invention whereby the idea represented is made more
prominent and potent. This tendency, like the others,
shows itself in a crude form at first, as in the earlier and
coarser art of the race. In children's play we can see
much of the uncultured man's love of strong effect.
The pathos of the death of the pet animal or of the
child has to be made obvious and strongly effective
by a mass of painful detail; the comic incident must be
made broadly farcical by heavy touches of caricature;
the excitement of perilous adventure has to be in-
tensified by multiplying the menacing forces and the
thrilling situations. Yet crude as are these early
attempts at strengthening the feebleness of the actual
they are remotely akin to the idealising efforts of
true art.
Nevertheless, children's play, though akin to it, is
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Childrens Ways.
not completely art. As pointed out above, the action in
a child's play is not intended as a dramatic spectacle.
The small player is too self-centred, if I may so say.
The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with
his hands, are not produced, as art is produced, for its
own worth's sake, but rather as providing a new world
into which he may retire and enjoy privacy. A child
in playing a part does not "play" in order to delight
others. "I remember," writes R. L. Stevenson, “as
though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the
dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of
mustachios in burnt cork even when there was none to
see." The same is true when children play at being
Indians or what not: they are not "acting" in the
theatrical sense of the word.
While, then, one can say that there is something
akin to art in the happy semi-conscious activity of the
child at play, we must add that, for the development
of the true impulse of the artist, a good deal more is
needed. The play-impulse will only get specialised
into the art-impulse when it is illumined by a growing
participation in the social consciousness, and by a sense
of beauty and the æsthetic worth of things; when,
further, it begins to concentrate itself on one mode of
imitative activity, as, for example, dramatic represen-
tation or drawing.
I have chosen here to deal with the more spon-
taneous manifestations of an art-like impulse in chil-
dren, rather than to describe their first attempts at
art as we understand it. Here in the case of all
but those endowed with a genuine artistic talent-we
are apt to find too much of the adult's educative in-
fluence, too little of what is spontaneous and original.
At the Gate of the Temple.
169
At the same time, some of this art-activity, more par-
ticularly the first weaving of stories, is characteristic
enough to deserve a special study. I have made a
small collection of early stories, and some of them are
interesting enough to be quoted. Here is a quaint
example of the first halting manner of a child of two
and a half years as invention tries to get away from
the sway of models: "Three little bears went out a
walk, and they found a stick, and they poked the fire
with it, and they poked the fire and then went a
walk". Soon, however, the young fancy is apt to
wax bolder, and then we get some fine invention.
boy of five years and a quarter living at the sea-side
improvised as follows. He related "that one day he
went out on the sea in a lifeboat, when suddenly he
saw a big whale, and so he jumped down to catch it;
but it was so big that he climbed on it and rode on it
in the water, and all the little fishes laughed so”.
A
With this comic story may be compared a more
serious not to say tragic one from the lips of a girl one
month younger, which is characterised by an almost
equal fondness for the wonderful. "A man wanted
to go to heaven before he died. He said, 'I don't
want to die, and I must see heaven!' Jesus Christ
said he must be patient like other people. He then
got so angry, and screamed out as loud as he could,
and kicked up his heels as high as he could, and they
(the heels) went into the sky, and the sky fell down
and broke the earth all to pieces. He wanted Jesus
Christ to mend the earth again, but he wouldn't, so
this was a good punishment for him." This last,
which is the work of one now grown into womanhood
and no longer a story-teller, is interesting in many
12
170
Children's Ways.
ways. The wish to go to heaven without dying is,
as I know, a motive derived from child-life. The
manifestations of displeasure could, one supposes,
only have been written by one who was herself ex-
perienced in the ways of childish "tantrums". The
naïve conception of sky and earth, and lastly the
moral issue of the story, are no less instructive.
These samples may serve to show that in the stories
of by no means highly gifted children we come face to
face with interesting traits of the young mind, and can
study some of the characteristic tendencies of early
and primitive art. Of the later efforts to imitate
older art, as verse writing, the same cannot, I think,
be said. Children's verses, so far as I have come
across them, are poor and stilted, showing all the
signs of the cramping effect of models and rules to
which the young mind cannot easily accommodate
itself, and wanting in true childish inspiration. No
doubt, even in these choking circumstances, childish
feeling may now and again peep out.
The first prose
compositions, letters before all if they may be counted
art, give more scope for the expression of this feeling
and the characteristic movements of young thought,
and might well repay careful study.
There is one other department of children's art which
clearly does deserve to be studied with some care
their drawing. And this for the very good reason that
it is not wholly a product of our influence and educa-
tion, but shows itself in its essential characteristics as
a spontaneous self-taught activity which takes its rise,
indeed, in the play-impulse. To this I propose to de-
vote my next and last chapter.
CHAPTER XII.
FIRST PENCILLINGS.
A CHILD'S first attempts at drawing are not art
proper, but a kind of play. As he sits at the table
and covers a sheet of paper with line-scribble he is
wholly self-centred, "amusing himself," as we say,
and caring nothing about the production of a thing of
æsthetic value.
Yet even in this infantile scribbling we see a
tendency towards art-production in the effort of the
small draughtsman to make his lines indicative of
something to another's eyes, as when he bids his
mother look at the "man," "gee-gee," or what else
he cheerfully imagines his scribble to delineate.
Such early essays to represent objects by lines,
though commonly crude enough and apt to shock
the æsthetic sense of the matured artist by their
unsightliness, are closely related to art, and deserve
to be studied as a kind of preliminary stage of
pictorial design.
In studying what is really a large subject it will be
well for us to narrow the range of our inquiry by
keeping to delineations of the human figure and of
animals, especially the horse. These are the favourite
topics of the child's pencil, and examples of them are
easily obtainable.
As far as possible I have sought spontaneous
172
Children's Ways.
drawings of quite young children, viz., from between
two and three to about six. In a strict sense, of
course, no child's drawing is absolutely spontaneous
and independent of external stimulus and guidance.
The first attempts to manage the pencil are com-
monly aided by the mother or other instructor, who,
moreover, is wont to present a model drawing, and,
what is even more important at this early stage, to
supply model-movements of the arm and hand. In
most cases, too, there is some slight amount of critical
inspection, as when she asks, “Where is papa's
nose?" "Where is doggie's tail?" In one case,
however, I have succeeded in getting drawings of a
little girl who was carefully left to develop her own
ideas. Even in the instances where adult super-
vision is apt to interfere, we can, I think, by patient
investigation distinguish traits which are genuinely
childish.
A child's drawing begins with a free aimless swing-
ing of the pencil to and fro, which movements produce
a chaos of slightly curved lines. These movements
are purely spontaneous, or, if imitative, are so only in
the sense that they follow roughly the directions of
another's pencil.
In this first line-scribble there is no serious inten-
tion to trace a particular form. What a child seems
to do in this rough imitation of another's movements
is to make a tangle of lines, more or less straight,
varied by loops, which in a true spirit of play he
makes believe to be the semblance of "mamma,"
"pussy," or what not, as in Fig. 1 (a) and (b). Possi-
bly in not a few cases the interpretation first suggests
itself after the scribble, the child's fancy discerning
First Pencillings.
173
some faint resemblance in his formless tangle to a
human head, a cat's tail, and so forth.


by
Fig. 1 (a).¹
Fig. 1 (b).¹
This habit of scribble may persist after a child
attempts a linear description of the parts of an
object. Thus a little girl in her fourth year when
asked to draw a cat produced the two accompanying
figures (Fig. 2 (a) and (b)).
Here it is evident we have a phase of childish draw-


Fig. 2 (a).
Fig. 2 (b).
1 Fig. 1 (a) is a drawing of a man by a child of twenty months,
reproduced from Prof. M. Baldwin's Mental Development, p. 84;
Fig. 1 (b) is a drawing of a man by a child of two years three
months, reproduced from an article on children's drawings by Mr.
H. T. Lukens in The Pedagogical Seminary, vol. iv. (1896).
174
Children's Ways.
ing which is closely analogous to the symbolism of
language. The form of representation is chosen
arbitrarily and not because of its likeness to what
is represented. This element of symbolic indication
will be found to run through the whole of childish
drawing.
As soon as the hand acquires a certain readiness in
drawing lines and closed lines or "outlines," and be-
gins to connect the forms produced with the necessary
movements, drawing takes on a more
a more intentional
character. The child now aims at constructing a
particular linear representation, that of a man, a horse,
or what not. These first attempts to copy in line the
forms of familiar objects are among the most curious
products of the child's mind. They follow standards.
and methods of their own; they are apt to get
hardened into a fixed conventional manner which
may reappear even in mature years.
They exhibit
with a certain range of individual difference a curious
uniformity, and they have their parallels in what we
know of the first crude designs of the untutored
savage.
The Human Face Divine.
It has been wittily observed by an Italian writer,
Signor Corrado Ricci, that children in their drawings
reverse the order of natural creation by beginning in-
stead of ending with man. It may be added that they
start with the most dignified part of this crown of
creation, viz., the human head. A child's attempt
to represent a man appears commonly to begin by
drawing a sort of circle for the front view of the head.
A dot or two, sometimes only one, sometimes as many
First Pencillings.
175
as five, are thrown in as a rough way of indicating
the features.
I speak here of the commoner form. There are
however variations of this.
Some children draw a squarish
outline for head, but these are
children at school. In one case,
that of a little girl aged three
years four months, the outline
was not completed, the facial
features being set between two
vertical columns of scribble,
which do duty for legs (Fig. 3).
Sometimes the features are
simply laid down without any

M
Fig. 3.¹
enclosing contour; and this arrangement appears not
only in children's drawings but in those
of savage adults.
The representation of the head some-
times appears alone, but a strong ten-
dency to bring in the support of the
legs soon shows itself. This takes at
first the crude device of a couple of
vertical lines attached to the head (see
Fig. 4).
Coming now to the mode of re-
presenting the face, we find at an
early stage the commencement of an
attempt to differentiate the features.
In drawings of children of three we
frequently see that while the eyes are
indicated by dots the nose is given as a

>
Fig. 4.
1 Reproduced from the article already referred to, by Mr. Lukens.
176
Children's Ways.
short vertical line. Similarly when the mouth appears
it does so commonly as a horizontal line. We notice.
that more attention is given to the problem of placing
a feature than to that of making a likeness of it.
Indeed this first drawing is largely a pointing out
or noting down of features without any serious effort
to draw them. The representation is a kind of local
description rather than a true drawing. Curious
differences appear in respect of the completeness of


FULL
WAY
Fig. 6.
Fig. 5.
this linear noting or enumerating of features. The
nose more particularly appears and disappears in a
capricious way in the drawings of the same child.
Odd differences, reflecting differences of intelli-
gence, show themselves in the management of this
diagram of the human face. One child, a Jamaica
girl of seven, went so far as to draw the face with
only one eye (Fig. 5). Again though, as I have said,
a child will try to give a correct local arrangement,
First Pencillings.
177
for example putting the nose between and below the
eyes, he does not always reach accuracy of localisa-
tion. Many children habitually set the two eyes
far up towards the crown of the head, as in Fig. 6.
When the features begin to be represented by some-
thing more like a form we find in most cases a
curious want of proportion. The eye, for instance, is
often greatly exaggerated; so is the mouth, which is
sometimes drawn right across the face, as in Fig. 6.
As the drawing progresses we note a kind of
evolution of the features. In the case of the eye, for
example, we may often trace a gradual development,
the dot being displaced by a small circle or ovoid, this
last supplemented by a second outer circle, or by an
arch or pair of arches. In like manner the mouth,
from being a bare symbolic indication, gradually takes
on form and likeness. There appears a rude attempt
to picture the mouth cavity and to show those in-
teresting accessories, the teeth. The nose, too, tries
to look more like a nose by help of various ingenious
expedients, as by drawing an angle, a triangle, and
a kind of scissors arrangement in which the holders
stand for the nostrils (see Fig. 7 (a) and (b); compare
above, Fig. 4).
Ears, hair, and the other adjuncts come in later as
after-thoughts. Much the same characteristics are
observable in the treatment of these features.
The Vile Body.
At first, as I have observed, the trunk is commonly
omitted. The indifference of the young mind to this
is seen in the obstinate persistence of the first scheme
·178
Children's Ways.
...
of a head set on two legs, even when two arms are
added and attached to the sides of the head. Indeed
a child will sometimes complete the drawing by adding
feet and hands before he troubles to bring in the trunk
(see Fig. 8).
From this common way of spiking the head on two
forked or upright legs there occurs an important de-
viation. The contour of the head may be left incom-
plete, and the upper part of the curve be run on into
育​我
​

Fig. 7 (a).
Fig. 7 (b).
the leg-lines, as in the accompanying example by a
Jamaica girl (Fig. 8).
The drawing of the trunk may commence in
different ways. Sometimes a lame attempt is made
to indicate it by leaving space between the head
and the legs, that is, by not attaching the legs to
the head. Another contrivance is where the space
between the legs is shown to be the trunk by shading
or by drawing a vertical row of buttons. In other
cases the contour of the head appears to be elongated
First Pencillings.
179
so as to serve for head and trunk. A better expedient
is drawing a line across the two vertical lines and so
marking off the trunk (see Fig. 9 (a) to (d)).
14
Fig. 8.
Fig. 9 (a).¹
In





Fig. 9 (b).
Fig. 9 (c).
Fig. 9 (d).
¹ Fig. 9 (a) is a reproduction of a drawing of a girl of four and a
half years, from Mr. Lukens' article.
180
Children's Ways.
drawings made by Brazilian Indians we see another
device, viz., a pinching in of the vertical lines (see
Fig. 9 (e)).
After the trunk has been recognised by the young
draughtsman he is apt to show his want of respect
for it by making it absurdly small in proportion to
the head, as in Fig. 10. It assumes a variety of
shapes, triangular, rectangular, and circular or ovoid,
this last being, however, the most common.
At this stage there is no attempt to show the
joining on of the head to the trunk by means of the



Fig. 9 (e).
Fig. 10.
Fig. 11.
neck. When this is added it is apt to take the ex-
aggerated look of caricature, as in Fig. II.
A curious feature which not infrequently appears
in this first drawing of the trunk is the doubling of
the corporeal ovoid, one being laid upon the other.
As this appears when a neck is added it looks like a
clumsy attempt to indicate the pinch at the waist-
presumably the female waist (see Fig. 12).
The introduction of the arms is very uncertain. To
.
First Pencillings.
181
the child, as also to the savage, the arms seem far less
important than the legs, and are omitted in rather
more than one case out of two. After all, the divine
portion, the head, can be supported very well with-
out their help.
The arms, being the thin lanky members, are, like
the legs, commonly represented by lines. The same
thing is noticeable in the drawings of savages. They
appear, in the front view of the figure, as more or less


婴
​др
am
Fig. 13.
Fig. 12.
stretched out, so as to show beyond the trunk; and
their appearance always gives a certain liveliness to
the form, an air of joyous expression, as if to say,
"Here I am!" (see Fig. 13, the drawing of a boy of
six).
In respect of their structure a process of gradual
evolution may be observed. The primal rigidity of
the straight line yields later on to the freedom of an
organ. Thus an attempt is made to represent by
182
Children's Ways.
means of a curve the look of the bent arm, as in the
accompanying drawing by a boy of five (Fig. 14). In
other cases the angle of the elbow is indicated. This
last improvement seems to come comparatively late
in children's drawings, which here, as in other respects,
lag behind the crudest outline sketches of savages.
The mode of insertion or attachment of the arms
is noteworthy. Where they are added to the trunk-
less figure they sometimes appear as emerging from


Fig. 15.
Fig. 14.
the sides of the head, as in a drawing by a boy of two
and a half years (see Fig. 15), but more commonly,
from the point of junction of the head and legs (see
above, Fig. 7 (b)). After the trunk is added they
appear to sprout from almost any point of this. It
may be added that their length is often grotesquely
exaggerated.
The arm in these childish drawings early develops
the interesting adjunct of a hand. Like other features
First Pencillings.
183
this is apt at first to be amusingly forced into promi-
nence by its size.
The treatment of the hand illustrates in a curious
way the process of artistic evolution, the movement
from a bare symbolic indication towards a more life-
like representation. Thus one of the earliest and
rudest devices I have met with, though in a few cases
only, is that of drawing strokes across the line of the
arm to serve as signs of fingers (Fig. 16).
It is an important advance when the branching lines.


жж
Fig. 16.-Humpty
Dumpty on the wall.
Fig. 17.
are set in a bunch-like arrangement at the extremity
of the arm-line. From this point the transition is
easy to the common "toasting-fork" arrangement,
in which the finger-lines are set on a hand-line (see
above, Figs. 8 and 7 (b)). From this stage, again,
there is but a step to the first crude attempt to give
contour first to the hand alone, as in Fig. 13, and
then to hand and fingers, as in Figs. II and 17.
Various odd arrangements appear in the first at-
tempts to outline arm and hand. In one, which occurs
184
Children's Ways.
not infrequently, a thickened arm is made to expand
into something like a fan-shaped
hand, as in Fig. 18.

Fig. 18.
There is a corresponding de-
velopment of the foot from a
bare indication by a line to
something like a form in which
toes are commonly represented
by much the same devices as
fingers. In the better drawings,
however, one notes signs of a
tendency to hide the toes, and to indicate the notch
between the heel and the sole of the boot.
Side Views of Things.
So far, I have dealt only with the child's treatment
of the front view of the human face and figure. New
and highly curious characteristics begin to appear when
he attempts to give the profile aspect.
tr
A child, it must be remembered, prefers the full face
arrangement, as he wants to indicate all its important
features, especially the two eyes. 'If," writes a
Kindergarten teacher, "one makes drawings in profile
for quite little children, they will not be satisfied un-
less they see two eyes; and sometimes they turn a
picture round to see the other side." This reminds
one of a story told, I believe, by Catlin of the Indian
chief, who was so angry at a representation of himself
in profile that the unfortunate artist went in fear of
his life.
At the same time children do not rest content with
this front view. After a time they try, without any aid
First Pencillings.
185
from the teacher, to grope their way to a new mode of
representing the face and figure, which, though it would
be an error to call it a profile drawing, has some of its
characteristics.
The first clear indication of an attempt to give the
profile aspect of the face is the introduction of the
side view of the nose into the contour. The little
observer is soon impressed by the characteristic, well-
marked outline of the nose in profile; and the motive
to bring this in is strengthened by his inability, already
illustrated, to make much of the front view of the organ.
The addition is made either by adding a spindle-like
projection after completing the circle of the head, as in
Figs. 6 and 7 (a), or more adroitly by modifying the
circular outline. The other features, the eyes and the
mouth, are given in full view as before.
It may well seem a puzzle to us how a normal
child of five or six can complacently set down this
self-contradictory scheme of a human head. How
little any idea of consistency troubles the young
draughtsman is seen in the fact that he will, not
infrequently, reach the absurdity of doubling the
nose, retaining the vertical line which did duty
in the first front view along with the added nasal
projection (see Fig. 19).
This appearance of the nose as a lateral projection
is apt to be followed by a similar side view of the ear
(as seen in Fig. 19), of the beard and other adjuncts
which the little artist wants to display in the most
advantageous way.
Some children stop at this mixed scheme, continu-
ing to give the two eyes and the mouth, as in the
front view, and frequently also the front view of the
13
186
Children's Ways.
body. This becomes a fixed conventional way of
representing a man. With children of finer percep-
tion the transition to a correct profile view may be
carried much further. Yet a lingering fondness for
the two eyes is apt to appear at a later stage in this
development of a consistent treatment of the profile;
a feeling that the second eye is not in its right place
prompting the artist in some cases to place it outside
the face (see Fig. 20 (a) and (b)).



Fig.19.-Aminer.
Fig. 20 (b).
Fig. 20 (a).
Other confusions are apt to appear in these early
attempts at drawing a man in profile. The trunk, for
example, is very frequently represented in front view
with a row of buttons running down the middle,
though the head and feet seem clearly shown in side
view. The arms, too, not uncommonly are spread out
from the two sides of the trunk just as in the front
view.
It would take too long to offer a complete expla-
nation of these characteristics of children's drawings.
First Pencillings.
187
I must content myself here with touching on one or
two of the main causes at work.
First of all, then, it seems pretty evident that most
children when they begin to draw are not thinking of
setting down a likeness of what they see when they
look at an object. In the first simple stage we have
little more than a jotting down of a number of linear
notes, a kind of rude and fragmentary description in
lines rather than in words. Here a child aims at
bringing into his scheme what seems to him to have
most interest and importance, such as the features of the
face, the two legs, and so forth. In the later and more
ambitious attempt to draw a man in profile the old
impulse to set down what seems important continues
to show itself. Although the little draughtsman has
decided to give to the nose, to the ear, and possibly to
the manly beard and the equally manly pipe, the ad-
vantage of a side view, he goes on exhibiting those
sovereign members, the two round eyes, and the
mouth with its flash of serried teeth, in their full front-
view glory. It is enough for him to know that the
lord of creation has these members, and he does not
trouble about so small a matter as our capability of
seeing them all at the same moment. In like manner
a child will sometimes, on first clothing the human
form, exhibit arms and legs through their covering
(see Fig. 21 (a) and (b)). All this shows that even at
this later and decidedly "knowing" stage of his craft
he is not much nearer the point of view of our pictorial
art than he was in the earlier stage of bald symbolism.
Much the same kind of thing shows itself in a
child's manner of treating the forms of animals, which
his pencil is wont to attack soon after that of man.
188
Children's Ways.
Here the desire to exhibit what is characteristic and
worthy naturally leads at the outset to a representa-
tion of the body in profile. A horse is rather a
poor affair looked at from the front. A child must
show his four legs, as well as his neck and his tail.
But though the profile seems to be the aspect selected,
the little penciller by no means confines himself to a
strict record of this. The four legs have to be shown.


דת
Fig. 21 (a) (from General
Pitt Rivers' collection
of drawings).
Fig.21(b) (repro-
duced from a
drawing pub.
lished by Mr.
H.T.Lukens).
not half hidden by overlappings but standing quite
clear one of another. The head, too, must be turned
towards the spectator, or at least given in a mixed
scheme-half front view, half side view (see Fig. 22 (a)
and (b)).
A like tendency to get behind the momentary
appearance of an object and to present to view what
the child knows to be there is seen in early drawings
of men on horseback, in boats, railway carriages,
First Pencillings.
189
houses, and so forth. Here the interest in the human
form sets at defiance the limitations of perspective,
and shows us the rider's second leg through the
horse's body, the rower's body through the boat,
and so forth.
The widespread appearance of these tendencies
among children of different European countries, of
half-civilised peoples, like the Jamaica blacks, as well
as among adult savages, shows how deeply rooted in
the natural mind is this quaint notion of drawing.
At the same time there are, as I have allowed, im-

A
A
00000

Fig. 22 (a).—A horse.
Fig. 22 (b). A quadruped.
portant differences in children's drawings. A few
have the eye and the artistic impulse needed for
picturing, roughly at least, the look of an object. I
have lately looked through the drawings of a little
girl in a cultured home where every precaution was
taken to shut out the influences of example and
educational guidance. When at the age of four
years eight months she first drew the profile of the
human face she quite correctly put in only one eye,
and added a shaded projection for nose (see Fig. 23).
In like manner she was from the first careful to show
only one leg of the rider, one rein over the horse's
190
Children's Ways.
neck, and so forth; and would sometimes, with a
child's sweet thoughtfulness, explain to her mother
why she proceeded in this way. Yet even in the case
of this child one could observe now and again a
rudiment of the tendency to bring in what is hidden.
Thus in one drawing she shows the rider's near leg
through the trouser; in another she introduces the
front view of a horse's nostrils (if not also of the ears)

is
Fig. 23.
in what is otherwise a drawing of the profile (see
Fig. 24 (a) and (b)).
Yet while children's drawings are thus so far away
from those reproductions of the look of a thing which
we call pictures, they are after all a kind of rude
art. Even the amusing errors which they contain,
though a shock to our notions of pictorial semblance,
have at least this point of analogy to art, that they
aim at selecting and presenting what is characteristic
First Pencillings.
191
and valuable. In many of the rude drawings with
which we have here been occupied we may detect
faint traces of individual originality, especially in the
endeavour to give life and expression to the form.
To this it is right to add that some drawings of
young children from two to six which I have seen
are striking proofs of the early development now and
again of the artist's feeling for what is characteristic

Fig. 24 (a).
in line, and for the economic suggestiveness of a bare
stroke (see Fig. 25 (a) and (b)). When once a child's
eye is focussed for the prettiness of things the dawn
of æsthetic perception is pretty sure to bring with it a
more serious effort to reproduce their look. Among
children, as among adults, it is love which makes the
artist.
192
Children's Ways.

Fig. 24 (b).
First Pencillings.
193


Fig. 25 (a) (drawn by a boy aged
two years one month).
Fig. 25 (b) (drawn by a girl of
five and a half years).
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Transcendental Physiology.
The Nebular Hypothesis,
Illogical Geology.
The Social Organism.
The Origin of Animal Worship.
Morals and Moral Sentiments,
The Comparative Psychology of Man.
Mr. Martineau on Evolution.
Bain on the Emotions and the Will. The Factors of Organic Evolution.*
CONTENTS
The Genesis of Science.
The Classification of the Sciences.
Reasons for dissenting from the Phi-
losophy of M. Comte.
On Laws in General, and the Order
of their Discovery.
The Valuation of Evidence.
What is Electricity?
Mill versus Hamilton-The Test of
Truth.
OF VOLUME II.
Replies to Criticisms.
Prof. Green's Explanations.
The Philosophy of Style.t
Use and Beauty.
The Sources of Architectural Types
Gracefulness.
Personal Beauty.
The Origin and Function of Music.
The Physiology of Laughter.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.
Manners and Fashion.
Railway Morals and Railway
Policy.
The Morals of Trade.
Prison-Ethics.
The Ethics of Kant.
Absolute Political Ethics.
Over-Legislation.
Representative Government—
What is it good for?
* Also published separately. 12mo.
† Also published separately. 12mo.
Also published separately. 12mo.
State-Tampering with Money and
Banks
Parliamentary Reform: the Dangers
and the Safeguards.
"The Collective Wisdom."
Political Fetichism.
Specialized Administration.
From Freedom to Bondage.
The Americans.‡
Index.
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Paper, 10 cents.
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