The father evidently feels that this incident is highly suggestive of a lack of moral sense. So he thinks it well to add to the observation that the child had all the normal moral sensibility. But of this more presently.
We may now pass to the comparatively few observations (other than those already dealt with under verbal utterance) which refer to the child’s feelings. As already remarked, he was, like most other children, peevish and cross in the first year, and I regret to say that the diary refers more than once to violent outbursts of infantile rage in the second year also. Here is one sample entry (æt. nineteen months): Feelings of greediness, covetousness and spite begin to manifest themselves with alarming distinctness. When asked to give up a bit of pudding he says, “No,” in a coy, shy sort of manner, turning away. When further pressed he grows angry. On the other hand, he clamours for his sister’s dolls, and bears refusal with very ill grace. When, given up as hopelessly naughty, he is handed over to the nurse, and carried out of the room by this long-suffering person, he ferociously slaps her on the face. This slap appears not to be a pure invention, his sister having been driven more than once to visit him with this chastisement. He will also go up and slap his sister when she cries. He probably puts the nurse who carries him out and the sister who cries in the same category of naughty people. Sometimes he seems quite overpowered by vexation of spirit, and will lie down on the floor on his face and have a good, long, satisfying cry.
The child’s timidity has already been touched on. At the age of sixteen months, we are told, the sight of the drawing of a lion accompanied by roaring noises imitated by the father would greatly terrify him, driving him to his mother, in whose bosom he would hide his face, drawing down his under lip in an ominous way. Two months later the diary tells us that the child has had a fright. One day a lady called with a dog, which secreted itself under the table, and later on suddenly rushed out and made for Master C. The shock was such that since that time whenever he hears a strange noise he runs to his mother, exclaiming, ‘Bow-wow!’ in a terrified manner.
Before the close of the year, however, he began to show a manlier temper. The sight of a dog still made him run towards his mother and cling to her, but as soon as the animal moved off he would look up into her face laughingly and repeat the consolatory saying which she herself had taught him: “Ni (nice) bow-wow! bow-wow like Ningi”. In this humble fashion did he make beginning at the big task of manning himself to face the terrors of things.
As pointed out above, he extended his dislike to sudden and loud noises to inanimate objects. Thus in the last week of the year he was evidently put out, if not actually frightened, by hearing distant thunder; and about the same date, as we have seen, he showed a similar dislike to the sea when first taken near it. He would not approach it for some days, and he cried when he saw his father swimming in it.
It is sad in going through the pages of the diary to note that there is scarcely any observation during this second year on the development of kindly feelings. One would have supposed that with all the affection and care lavished on him C. might have manifested a little tenderness in response. The only incident put down under the head of social feeling in this year is the following (æt. twenty months): “When he eats porridge in the morning at the family breakfast he takes a look round and says: ‘Mamma, Tit, papa, Ningi,’ appearing to be pleased at finding himself sharing in a common enjoyment. This (continues the narrator) is a step onward from the anti-social attitude which he took up not long since when some of his mother’s egg was given to his sister and he shouted prohibitively: ‘No! no!’”
The worthy parent appears to be making the most of very small mercies here. Yet in justice to this child it must be said that he seems to have shown even at this tender age the rudiment of a conscience. The father is satisfied, indeed, that he displayed an instinctive respect for command or law. “Thus,” he says, “when sixteen months old the child hung down his head or hid it in his mother’s breast when for the first time I scolded him.” He goes on to say that after having been forbidden to do a thing, as to touch the coal scuttle or to take up his food with his fingers, he will stop just as he is going to do it, and take on a curious look of timidity or shamefacedness.
He seemed, too, before the end of the second year, to be getting to understand something of the meaning of that recurrent nursery-word ‘naughty,’ and the less frequent ‘good’. When seventeen months old his father tried him, on what looked like the approach of an outburst of temper, with a ‘Cliffy, be good!’ uttered in a firm peremptory manner. The child’s noise was at once arrested, and on the father’s asking: ‘Is Cliffy good?’ he answered, ‘Ea,’ his sign for ‘yes’. A little later he showed that he strongly disliked being called naughty,—vigorously remonstrating when so described with an emphatic, ‘No, no! good!’ He seems to have followed the usual childish order in beginning to apply “naughty” to others, his sister more particularly, much sooner than “good”. It was not till the middle of the twenty-first month that he recognised moral desert in this long-suffering sister. After a little upset of temper on her part, when the crying was over, he remarked in a quiet approving tone, ‘Goo!’ and on being asked by his mother who was good he answered, ‘Tit’.
As our example of his dawning powers of conversation may suggest, C. early developed the childish sense of fun. Most if not all children love pretence or make-believe. Here is an example of this childish tendency. When about eighteen months old during a short visit to his father’s room C. happened to be walking in the direction of the door. His father at once said, ‘Ta ta,’ just as if the child were really going away. C. instantly entered into the joke, repeating the ‘ta ta,’ moving towards the door, then returning, and so renewing the pretty little fraud.
Sometimes, as parents know, this impish love of make-believe comes very inconveniently into conflict with discipline and authority. One day, about the same date, he got hold of a photograph portrait of an uncle of his. His mother bade him give it up to her. He walked towards her looking serious enough, nearly put it into her hand, and then suddenly drew his hands back laughing.
In other examples of laughter given in this chapter we see something very like contempt. When two years and eight months old he was observed to laugh out loudly on surveying his small india-rubber horse, the head of which had somehow got twisted back and caught between the hind legs and the tail. He then waxed tender and said pityingly, “Poor gee-gee!” “Here,” writes the father in his most ponderous manner, “we see an excellent example of the capricious and variable attitude of the childish mind towards its toys, an attitude closely paralleled by that of the savage towards his fetich.”
The two or three notes on the development of the active powers have to do with the application of intelligence to manual and other performances. Here is one. At the age of seventeen months he was sitting at table with the family when he found himself in want of some bread and butter. He tried his customary petition, ‘Bup,’ but to no purpose. He then stretched out his hand towards the bread knife, repeating the request. A day or two after this the father put his inventive powers to a severer proof. He placed the knife out of his reach. When the desire for more recurred he grew very impatient, looking towards his father and saying ‘Bup’ with much vehemence of manner. At length, getting more excited, he bethought him of a new expedient and pointed authoritatively to his empty plate.
Some of these practical tentatives were rather amusing. One day, just a month after the date of the last incident, he had two keys, one in each hand. With one of these he proceeded to try the keyhole of the door, oddly enough, however, holding it by the wrong end and inserting the handle. Now came the difficulty of turning it. Two hands at the very least were needed, but unhappily the other hand was engaged with the second key, which was not to be relinquished for an instant. So the little fellow, with the inventive resource of a monkey (the father naturally says of an ‘engineer’), proceeded to use his teeth as pincers, clutching the obstinate key between these and trying to turn it with the head. At this date he had acquired considerable skill in the manipulation of door handles and keys. A certain cupboard was a peculiarly fascinating mystery, appealing at once to the desires of the flesh and to a disinterested curiosity, and he was soon master of the ‘open sesame’ to its spacious and obscure recesses.
By far the most respectable exhibition of will about this time was in the way of self-restraint. I have already remarked how he would try to pull himself together when prostrated by fear of the dog. A similarly quaint attempt at self-mastery would occur during his outbreaks of temper. The father says he had got into the way, when the child was inclined to be impatient and teasing, of putting up his finger, lowering his brow, and saying with emphasis: ‘Cliffy, be good!’ After this when inclined to be naughty he would suddenly and quite spontaneously pull himself up, hold up his finger and lower his brow as if reprimanding himself. “The observation is curious,” writes the father, in his graver manner, “as suggesting that self-restraint may begin by an imitation of the action of extraneous authority.”[307]
One cannot help regretting on entering upon the third chapter of C.’s biography that the father gives us no account of his physical development. This is a desideratum not only from a scientific but from a literary point of view. Biographers rightly describe the look of their hero, and, if possible, they aid the imagination of their reader by a portrait. The reader of this child’s history has nothing, not even a bare reference to height, by which he can form an image of the concrete personality whose sayings and doings are here recorded; and these sayings and doings begin now to grow really interesting.
There is very little in the notes of this year respecting the growth of observation. When the child was two years five months old the father appears to have made a rather lame attempt to determine the order in which he learnt the colours. He says that he placed the several colours before him and taught him the names, and found as a result that the order of acquisition was the following: red, blue, yellow, and green. It is added that blue was distinguished some time before green. His observations, taken along with those of Preyer and others, are interesting as seeming to suggest that the order in which the colours are learnt differs considerably in the case of individual children.[308] In the eighth month of this year we find a note to the effect that the boy discriminates and recognises colour well. This is illustrated by the fact that he at once calls grey with a slightly greenish tinge ‘green’. The connexion between the possession of suitable vocables and explicit discrimination is seen in the fact that whereas he applies the name blue not only to the several varieties of that colour but also to violet, he uses “red” as the name for certain reds only, excepting pink, which is called “pink,” and deep purple red, which is called “brown”.
The third year is epoch-making in the history of memory. It is now that impressions begin to work themselves into the young consciousness so deeply and firmly that they become a part of the permanent stock-in-trade of the mind. The earliest recollections of most of us do not reach back beyond this date, if indeed so far. In C.’s case the father was able to observe this fixing and consolidating of impressions. For instance, when two years and two months old he had been staying for a month or so at a farmhouse in a little sea-side village, D——, where there was a sheep dog yclept Bob. Some three and a half months later he happened, during one of his walks in his London suburb, to see a sheep dog, whereupon he remarked, ‘Dat old Bob, I dink’. A week or two after this, on seeing the picture of a wind-mill, he remarked, "Dat like down at D——". Later on, six months after this visit, on being asked what honey was, he remarked that he had had some at D——. Nine months after this visit his father was talking to him about the game of cricket. He then said, "Oh, yes (his favourite expression just now when he understands), I ’member, Jingo ran after ball down at D——". As a matter of fact his father and friends used to play tennis at D——, and Jingo, the sheep dog, did pretend to ‘field’ the balls, often in a highly inconvenient fashion.
It is evident from these quotations that the experiences at D——, just at the beginning of the third year, had woven themselves into the tissue of his permanent memory. The father remarks in a footnote that C. retains a certain recollection of D—— at present, that is to say, in his fourteenth year.
These lively recallings show a growth of imaginative power, and this was seen in other ways too. Thus it is remarked by the father in the fourth month of the year that he was getting much comfort from anticipation. If there are apples or other things on the table which he likes but must not have, he will philosophically remark, “Ningi have apples by-and-by when he big boy”. He says this with much emphasis, rising at the end to a shouting tone, and half breaking out into jubilant laughter.
The childish power of vivid imaginative realisation was abundantly illustrated in his play. Here is a sample (end of fourth month). His sister went to the end of the room and said (with a reference to their recent visit to the sea-side): ‘I’m going far away on the beach’. He then began to whisper something, and went under the table and said distinctly: ‘Ningi go away from Tit, far away on beach’. He repeated this with tremulous voice, and at length burst out crying. He wept also when his sister pretended to do the same, so that these little tragic representations had to be stopped as dangerously exciting.
It has often been said that ‘fibbing’ in young children is the outcome of a vivid imagination. C. illustrated this. As the example given under the second year shows, his daring in inventing untruth and passing it off as truth was pure play, and frankly shown to be so by the accompaniment of a hearty laugh. This tendency to invent continued to assert itself. Thus when (in the eighth month) he is asked a question, as, “Who told you so?” and has no suitable answer ready he will say, ‘Dolly,’ showing his sense of the fun of the thing by a merry laugh. The father remarks that it is a little difficult to bring heavy moral artillery to bear on this playful fibbing which is evidently intended much more to astonish than to deceive.[309]
We may now see what progress C. was making in thinking power during this year. It is during the third year that children may be expected to get a much better hold on the slippery forms of language, and at the same time to show in connexion with a freer and more extensive use of language a finer and deeper insight into the manifold relations of things.
In C.’s case, to judge by the journal, the progress of speech advanced at a normal pace, neither hurrying nor yet greatly loitering. Articulation, the father remarks early in the year, has got much more precise, only a few sounds seeming to occasion difficulty, as for example the initial s, which he transforms into an aspirate, saying, for example, ‘huga’ for sugar.
A noticeable linguistic advance is registered in the fourth month of the year, viz., a kind of sudden and energetic raid on the names of objects and persons. “He is always asking the names of things now (writes our chronicler). Thus, after calling a common object, as a brush, by its name he will ask me, ‘What is the name of this?’ Perhaps he thinks that everything has its own exclusive or ‘proper’ name as he has. He is beginning to note, too, that some things have more than one proper name, that his mother, for example, though called ‘ma’ by himself, is addressed by her Christian name by me, and so forth. When asked, ‘What is Ningi’s name?’ he now answers, ‘Kifford’.”
What is far more significant, he now (æt. two years three months) began to use ‘you’ in addressing his father or mother, also ‘me’ and ‘I’. But these changes are so momentous and epoch-making in the history of the young intelligence that they will have to be specially considered later on.
Like other children he showed a fine contempt for the grammatical distinctions of pronominal forms. Thus ‘me’ was used for ‘mine,’ ‘her’ for ‘she,’ ‘she’s’ for ‘hers,’ ‘him’ for ‘he’ and for ‘his,’ ‘us’ for ‘our,’ and so forth.[310] It is pretty clear that none of these solecisms was due to an imitation of others’ incorrect speech, and they appear to show the action of the principle of biological economy, a few word-sounds being made to do duty for a number of relations (e.g., in the use of ‘me’ for ‘my’), and familiar word-sounds being modified according to analogy of other modifications where older people use a quite new form (‘she’s’ for ‘hers’). A similar disposition to simplify and rationalise the tongue of his ancestors showed itself in the use of verbs. Thus, if his mother said, ‘Cliffy, you are not good,’ he would reply in a perfectly rational manner, “Yes, I are”. “It was odd,” writes the father, “to hear him bring out in solemn judge-like tones such terrible solecisms as ‘Him haven’t,’ yet there was a certain logical method in his lawlessness.” Another simplification on which he hit in common with other children was the use of ‘did’ as a sign of past tense, thus saving himself all the trouble of understanding the irregular behaviour of our verbs.[311]
One or two quaint applications of words are noted. Thus towards the end of the third month of this year he took to using ‘cover’ in a somewhat puzzling fashion. Thus he once pointed to the back of his hand and remarked, ‘No milk on this cover’. The father suspects that the term connoted for his consciousness an outside part or the outer surface of an object.
A very noticeable improvement took place in the forming of sentences. All sorts of questions (writes the chronicler) are now put correctly and neatly, as, ‘Where are you going to?’ ‘Where did that come from?’ He is now striking out most ambitiously in new and difficult directions, not fighting shy even of such school-horrors as conditional clauses (as they used to be called, at least). Very funny it must have been to watch these efforts, and the ingenuities of construction to which the little learner found himself driven. For example, he happened one morning (end of fourth month) when in his father’s bedroom to hear a knocking in the adjoining room. He walked about the room remarking to himself, ‘I can’t make out somebody,’ which seemed his own original fashion of avoiding the awkwardness of our elaborate form, “I can’t make out who the person is (that is knocking)”. A still quainter illustration of the skill with which he found his way out of linguistic difficulties is the following. His sister once said to him (first week of fifth month), ‘You had better not do that,’ whereupon he replied, “I think me better will”. Here is a sample of his mode of dealing with conditionals (end of sixteenth month), “If him (a tree) would be small, I would climb up”.
His highly individualised language, remarks the father, was rendered more picturesque by the recurrence of certain odd expressions which he picked up and applied in his own royal fashion. One of these was, “Well, it might be different,” which he often used when corrected for a fault, and on other occasions as a sort of formula of protestation against what he thought to be an exaggerated statement.
We may now notice some new manifestations of thinking power. All thought, we are told, proceeds by the finding out of similarities and dissimilarities. C. continued to note the resemblances of things. Thus one day (end of second month) he noticed the dog Jingo breathing quickly after a smart run and observed, ‘Like puff-puff’. But what was much more noticeable this year was the boy’s impulse to draw distinctions and contrasts. It may certainly be said in his case that likeness was distinctly apprehended before difference, that in the development of his rhetoric the antithesis followed the simile. One of the first contrasts to impressimpress the tender consciousness of children is that of size. This comes out among other ways in their habit of setting their own puny persons in antithesis to big grown-up folk, a habit sufficiently attested by the recurring expressions, “When I am big,” “When I am a man”. C., like other children, took to denoting a contrast of size by a figurative extension of the relation, mamma—baby. Thus it was noted (end of seventh month) that he would call a big tree “mamma tree,” and a shrub “baby tree”. One day he pointed to the clock on the mantel-piece and talked of the ‘big mamma clock’. He had, it seems, just before been playing with his father’s watch, which he also called clock.[312]
This love of contrasting appeared in a striking manner in connexion with the use of propositions. If, for example (third month), his father says, “That’s a little watch,” he at once brings out the point of the statement by adding, ‘That not a big watch’. The same perception of contrast would sometimes help him to take the edge off a disagreeable prohibition when unguardedly worded. Thus when told one day not to make much noise, he considered and rejoined, “Make little noise”.
A more subtle perception of contrast betrayed itself towards the end of the ninth month. His father had been speaking to him of the little calf which made a big noise. He mentally turned over this astonishing bit of contrariness in the order of things, and then observed with a sage gravity, “Big calf not make little noise,” which so far as the limited faculties of the observer could say appeared to mean that the contrast between size and sound did not hold all round, that the big sound emerging from the little thing was an exception to the order of nature.
In connexion with this habit of opposing qualities and statements reference may be made to the curious manner in which the boy expressed negation. It was evidently a difficulty for him to get hold of the negative particle, and to deny straight away, so to speak. At first (beginning of the year) he seemed to indicate negation or rejection merely by tone of voice. Thus he would say about something which he evidently did not like, ‘Ningi like that,’ with a peculiar querulous tone which was apparently equivalent to the appendage ‘N.B. ironical’. About a fortnight later he expressed negation by first making the correlative affirmation and adding ‘No,’ thus: "Ningi like go in water—no!" A week later, it is noted, ‘no’ was prefixed to the statement, as when he shouted, ‘No, no, naughty Jingo,’ in contradiction of somebody who had called the dog naughty. Towards the end of the third month ‘not’ came to be used as an alternative for ‘no’ which little by little it displaced.
The father remarks that C.’s sister had had a similar trick of opposing statements, e.g., “Dat E.’s cup, not mamma’s cup”. He then proceeds to observe in his somewhat heavy didactic manner that these facts are of curious psychological and logical interest, showing us that negation follows affirmation, and can at first only be carried out by a direct mental confronting of an affirmation, and so forth.[313]
As already shown by the reference to the use of ‘somebody’ C.’s thought was growing slightly more abstract. Yet how slow this advance was is illustrated in his way of dealing with time-relations, some of the most difficult, as it would seem, for the young mind to grapple with. At the end of the second month the ideas of time, we are told, were growing more exact, so far at least that he was able to distinguish a present time from both a past and a future. He called the present variously ‘now,’ ‘a day’ (to-day) or ‘dis morning’.[314] The present seemed, so far as the father could judge, to be conceived of as a good slice of time. ‘To-morrow’ and ‘by-and-by’ now served to express the idea of futurity, the former referring to a nearer and more definitely conceived tract of time than the latter. That the child had no clear apprehension of our time-divisions is seen not only in his loose employment of ‘dis morning,’ but in his habitual confusion of the names of meals, as in calling dinner ‘tea,’ tea ‘dinner’ or ‘breakfast,’ and so forth.
Another abstruse idea for the child’s mind is that of absence. It would seem as if this were thought of at first as a disappearance. As all mothers know, when a child is asked where somebody is he answers, ‘All gone’. C., on his return from D—— (end of second month), when asked where the people and the highly interesting Jingo were, would say, ‘All gone,’ and sometimes add picturesquely, ‘in the puff-puff’.[315]
The acquisition of clearer ideas about self and others has been touched on in connexion with the growth of the boy’s language. The first use of ‘I’ and the contemporaneous first use of ‘you’ (end of third month) seem to point to a new awakening of the intelligence to the mystery of self, and of its unique position in relation to other things. There is to the father evidently something pathetic in the gradual abandonment of the self-chosen name, ‘Ningi,’ of the early days, and the adoption of the common-place ‘I’ of other people. But we need not attend to his sentimental musings on this point. The exchange, we are told, was effected gradually, as if to make it easier to his hearers. At first (beginning of year) we have ‘me’ brought on the scene, which, be it observed, did duty both for ‘me’ and for ‘my’.[316] Later on followed ‘I,’ as an occasional substitute for ‘me,’ as if he were beginning to see a difference between the two, though unable to say wherein precisely it lay. Within less than a month, we are told, the child was beginning to use “Kikkie” as his name in place of “Ningi,” which “Kikkie” was afterwards improved into “Kifford”. “It was evident (writes the narrator) that in venturing on the slippery ground of ‘I’ and ‘you’ he experienced a sudden accession of manly spirit, as a result of which he began to despise the ‘Ningi’ of yore.” But dear old ‘Ningi’ did not go out all at once, and we read so late as the end of the third month of his amusing his mother when standing on the window-sill of the nursery by remarking thoughtfully, “How am I, Ningi, come down?” Here, it would seem evident, the addition of ‘Ningi’ was intended to help the faculties of his mother in case this still puzzling “I” should prove too much for them. By the end of the fourth month we read that ‘I’ was growing less shy, not merely coming on the scene in familiar and safe verbal companionship, as in expressions like ‘I can,’ but boldly pushing its way alone or in new combinations.[317] By the sixth month (æt. two and a half) the name Ningi may be said to have disappeared from his vocabulary. His rejection of it was formally announced at the age of two years seven and a half months. On being asked at this date whether he was Ningi he answered, “No, my name Kiffie”. He then added, “Ningi name of another little boy,” very much as in a remarkable case of double personality described by M. Pierre Janet, the transformed personality looking back on the original observed, “That good woman is not myself”. He looked roguish in saying this, as if there were something funny in the idea of altered personality. The determination to be conventional was shown at the same date in the fact that when, for example, the mother or father, following the old habit, would bid him go and ask the nurse to wash “Cliffie’s hands,” he would, in delivering the message, substitute “my hands”. By the end of the year ‘I’ came to be habitually used for self, as in answering a question, e.g., “Who did this or that?” Tyrannous custom had now completely prevailed over infantile preferences.
During the third year C. seemed determined to prove to his parents and sister that he had attained the age of reason. He began to ply these well-disposed persons with all manner of questionings. Sometimes, indeed, as when in the case already referred to he would ask for the names of things just after calling them by their names, the long-suffering mother was half inclined to regret the acquisition of speech, so much did it present itself at this stage in the light of an instrument of torture. But the child’s questionings were rarely attributable to a spirit of persecution or to sheer “cussedness”. He began in the usual manner of children to ask: ‘Who made this and that?’ (early in the fourth month). That there is a simple process of reasoning behind this question is seen in his sometimes suggesting an answer thus: “Who made papa poorly? Blackberries;” where there was obviously a reference to an unpleasant personal experience. His mind about this time seemed greatly exercised in the matter of sickness and health. One day (middle of sixth month) walking out with his mother he met a man, whereupon ensued this dialogue: C. ‘Is that a poorly gentleman?’ M. ‘No.’ C. ‘Is that a well gentleman?’ M. ‘Yes.’ C. ‘Then who made him well?’ From which (writes the father) it would look as if, just as Plato could only conceive of pleasure as a transition from pain, Master C. could only conceive of health as a process of convalescence.[318]
Another way of prying into the origin of things seems worth mentioning. Having found out that certain pretty things in the house had been “bought,” he proceeded with the characteristic recklessness of the childish mind to assume that all nice things come to us this way. One day (middle of third month) he asked his father, “Who bought lady?” lady being an alabaster figure of Sappho. The father then asked him, and he answered: “Mamma”. Asked further where, he replied: “In town”. This looked like romancing, but it is hard to draw the line between childish romancing and serious thought. He may have really inferred that the alabaster lady had come to the house that way. A still funnier example of the application of his purchasing idea occurred at the date, three months and one week. Stroking his mother’s face he said: “Nice dear mother, who bought you?” What, asks the father, did he understand by "bought"? Perhaps only some mysterious way of obtaining possession of nice pretty things.
The other form of reason-hunting question, ‘What for?’ or ‘Why?’ came to be used about the same time as “Who made?” etc. In putting these questions he would sometimes suggest answers of a deliciously childish sort (as the writer has it). Thus one day (beginning of fourth month) he saw his father putting small numbered labels on a set of drawers, and after his customary “What dat for?” added half inquiringly, “To deep drawers nice and warm?” C. would pester his parents by asking not only why things were as they were, but why they were not different from what they were. Thus (end of third month) on seeing in a nursery book a picture of Reynard the fox waving his hat he asked in his slow emphatic way: ‘Why not dat fox put on his hat?’ In a similar way he would ask his mother why she did not go to school, and so forth.[319]
With this questioning there went a certain amount of confident assertion respecting the reasons of things. At first C. proceeded modestly, reproducing reasons given by an adequate authority. Thus when told during his stay at D—— that he would not go into the sea to-day, he would supplement the announcement by adding the reason as given before by his mother, e.g., “’Cause it’s too cold,” or, “’Cause big waves to-day”. Very soon, however, he took a step forward and discovered reasons for himself. One day (end of fifth month) his father was seating him at table, and was about to add a second cushion to the chair when he remarked in his gravest of manners, “I can’t put my leg in, you know (i.e., under the table), if me be higher”. Here is another of these specimens of reasoning, dating two weeks later, and based like the first on direct observation. His father was walking out with him on the famous Heath of their suburb. The former, probably more than half lost in one of his trains of philosophic speculation, observed absent-mindedly, “Why are these babas (sheep) running away?” C. promptly took up the question and answered with vigour, “’Cause the bow-wow dare with man”. As a matter of fact a man was approaching with a small dog, which the father in his reverie had failed to see.
Of course, the reasoning was not always so consonant with our standard as in these two examples. C. appears to have had his own ideas about the way in which things come about. For example, he seems to have argued, like certain scholastic logicians, that the effect must resemble the cause. At least, after finding out that his milk came from the cow, he referred the coldness of his milk one morning (towards end of fourth month) to the coldness of the cow,—which property of that serviceable quadruped was, of course, a pure invention of his own. Just three months later he came out one morning with the momentous announcement, "Milk comes from the white cow down at D——"; and on being asked by his ever-attentive father what sort of milk the brown cow gave, instantly replied, ‘Brown milk’; where, again, it must be admitted, he came suspiciously near romancing.
He seems, further, to have shown slight respect for the logical maxim that the same effect may be brought about in more than one way. For C. nature was delightfully simple, and everything happened in one way, and in one way only. So that, for example, when during a walk (end of sixth month) his glove happened to slip off, he proceeded in a most hasty and unfair manner to set down the catastrophe to the malignity of the wind, exclaiming, “Naughty wind to blow off glove”.
A like want of maturity of judgment in dealing with the subtle connexions of nature’s processes showed itself in other ways. Thus he argued as if the same agency would always bring about like results, whatever the material dealt with. An amusing illustration of this occurred in the latter half of the tenth month. He was observed towards the end of a meal pouring water on sundry bits of bread on his plate, and on being asked why he was doing this, said: ‘To melt them, of course’.
One of his thoroughly original ideas was that other things besides living ones grow bigger with time. One day (middle of sixth month) he began to use a short stick as a walking-stick. His mother objected that it was not big enough, on which he observed: “Me use it for walking-stick when stick be bigger”. In like manner just a month later he remarked, apropos of a watch-key which was too small for the father’s watch, that it would be able to wind up the watch ‘when it grow bigger’. So far as the father could observe it was only little things which he thought would increase in size. It thus looked, adds the father, like a kind of extension of the supreme law of his own small person to the whole realm of wee and despised objects.[320]
C. followed other children and the race which he so well represented in supposing that sensation is not confined to the animal world. Thus towards the end of the eleventh month when warned in the garden not to touch a bee as it might sting, he at once observed: “It might sting the flower”. “It is odd,” interpolates the father here, “that C.’s sister, when, towards the end of her fourth year, she was bidden not to touch a wasp on the window-pane, had gone further than C. by suggesting that it might sting the glass. Everything seems to live and to feel in the child’s first fancy-created world.”[321]
Towards the end of the year, it appears, C. developed considerable smartness in logical fencings with his mother and others, warding off unpleasant prohibitions by a specious display of argument. For example, when told that something he wanted would make him poorly, he rejoined: ‘I am poorly,’ evidently thinking that he had convicted his estimable parent of what logicians call irrelevant conclusion.
One cannot say that these first incursions into the domain of logic do Master C. particular credit. Perhaps we may see later on that he came to use his rational faculty with more skill and precision, and to turn it to nobler uses than the invention of subterfuges whereby he might get his wilful way.
The notes on the development of the feelings continue to be rather scanty. I will reproduce one or two of the more note-worthy.
The visit to D—— was attended with a great change in his feeling for animals. He no longer feared them. Jingo, spite of his warlike name, was an amiable creature, and seems to have reconciled him to the canine species. Cats, too, now came in for special affection. He would watch the animals in D——, horses, cows, and especially ducks, with quiet delight for many minutes, imitating their sounds. Strange to say, now that fear had gone he showed himself disposed to take liberties with animals. Thus he would slap Jingo and even his favourite cat in moments of displeasure, just as he and his sister before him used to slap their dolls.
A new emotion showed itself towards the end of the fourth month, viz., shyness. If his parents unguardedly spoke about him at table he would hang down his head and put his hands over his face. So far as the father could observe this expression of shyness was unlearned. His sister, it appears, had not been remarkable for the feeling. The father observes that the fact of this new feeling synchronising with the acquisition of the use of ‘I,’ ‘my,’ etc., seems to show that it was connected with the growth of self-consciousness.
His sense of fun continued to develop, though it still had a decidedly rude and primitive character. When just four months on in the year his father amused him by battering in an old hat of his own. He broke into loud laughter at this performance. We know, writes the observer, how the sight of a hat in trouble convulses the grown mind. Can it be that C. was already forming associations of dignity with this completion and crown of human apparel?
Tender emotion, as became a boy, perhaps, was in abeyance. He rarely indulged in manifestations of love, or if he did, it must have been towards his mother secretly in a confidence that was never violated. Here is one of the few instances recorded (beginning of eighth month). He happened to see his own picture in his mother’s eye and said in a highly sentimental tone: “Dear pitty little picture, I do love ’oo,” and then proceeded to kiss his mother’s eyelid. It was little things, as kittens, flowers, and so forth, which seemed to move him to this occasional melting mood.
The sympathetic feelings though still weak may be said to be slowly developing. Thus in the first month of the year it is remarked that he now thinks of his sister when absent, so that if he has the highly-prized enjoyment of a biscuit he will suggest that ‘Tit have bisc too’.
This year witnessed the formation of more definite æsthetic likings in the matter of colours and forms. His dislike for a black cat and black things generally, may perhaps be called in a way a preference of taste. In his animal picture-books, of which he was now growing very fond, he showed a marked dislike for a monkey with an open mouth, also for the rhinoceros, and strong likings, on the other hand, for birds in general, also for horses and zebras.
He began to learn nursery rhymes, and showed a good ear for rhyme. Thus in saying:—
he was observed (end of tenth month) to correct the rhyme by first pronouncing the a in “wander” less broadly than is our wont, just as in “gander,” and then substituting the conventional pronunciation.
The moral side of the child’s nature appears during this year to have undergone noticeable changes. The most striking fact which comes out in the picture of the boy as painted in the present chapter is the sudden emergence of self-will. He began now to show himself a veritable rebel against parental authority. Thus we read (about the end of the sixth week) that when corrected for slapping Jingo, or other fault, he would remain silent and half laugh in a cold contemptuous way, which must have been shocking to his worthy parents. A month later we hear of an alarming increase of self-will. He would now strike each of these august persons, and follow up the sacrilege with a profane laugh. As might be expected from his general use of subterfuge about this time, he showed a lamentable want of moral sensibility in trying to shirk responsibility. Thus (middle of seventh month) he was noticed by his mother putting a spill of paper over the fire-guard into the fire so as to light it. His mother at once said: “Ningi mustn’t do that”. Whereupon he impudently retorted: “Ningi not doing that, paper doing it”.[322]
All this is dreadful enough, yet it is probable that many children go through a longer or shorter stage of rebellion, who afterwards turn out to be well-behaved, respectable persons. And, as his father is not slow to point out, C., even in these rebellious outbursts, showed the rudiments of moral feeling in the shape of a deep sensitiveness to injury and more definitely to unjust treatment. Thus we are told (middle of seventh month) that when his sister eats the leavings of his pudding or other dainty he shows a well-marked moral indignation. He gets very excited at such moments, his eyes dilating, his voice rising in pitch, and his arms executing a good deal of violent gesticulation. When scolded by his mother for doing a thing which he has only appeared to do, he will turn and exclaim, with all the signs of righteous wrath, “Mamma naughty say dat!” One day (end of seventh month) when, after being very naughty, his mother had to carry him upstairs, he broke out into a more than usually violent fit of crying. His mother asked him what he meant by making such a noise when being carried upstairs; whereupon he replied, “’Cause you carry me up like a pig” (as represented in one of his picture-books).
There is nothing particularly meritorious in all this, yet it is significant as showing how, in this third year, the consciousness of self was developing not only on its intellectual but on its moral side, as a sense of personal dignity and rightful claim, which, after all, is a very essential element in a normal and robust moral sentiment.
The reports of progress during the fourth year are still scantier than their predecessors: perhaps the observer was getting tired of his half-playful work. Nevertheless, there are some interesting observations in this chapter also.
C.’s observation seems to have been decidedly good, to judge by an incident that occurred at the end of the third week of the year. He had been to the Zoological Gardens. His father asked him about the seals, and more particularly as to whether they had legs. He answered at once, “No, papa, they had foot-wings”. The chronicler is evidently proud of this feat, and thinks it would have satisfied Professor Huxley himself. But allowance must here as elsewhere be made for parental pride.
The child’s colour-sense, we are told about the same time, was developing quite satisfactorily. He could now (end of fifth week) discriminate and name intermediate shades of colour. Thus he called a colour between yellow and green quite correctly ‘yellowish green,’ and this way of naming colours was, so far as the father could ascertain, quite spontaneous. Later (three and a half months), on being questioned as to violet, which he first said was blue, he replied correcting his first answer, “and purple”. Later on (beginning of last quarter), he could distinguish a ‘purplish blue’ from a “purplish pink”.
Along with a finer observation we find a more active and inventive imagination. It was during this year that he began to create fictitious persons and animals, and to surround himself with a world, unseen by others, but terribly real to himself.
About the middle of the third month he made his first essay in story-fabrication. Considering that he had a lively and imaginative elder sister, who was constantly regaling him with fairy and other stories, this argues no particular precocity. His first style in fiction was crude enough. He would pile up epithets in a way that makes the most florid of journalistic diction seem tame by comparison. Thus he would begin the description of a dog by laying on a miscellaneous pile of colour-adjectives, blue, red, green, black, white, and so forth. With a similar disregard for verisimilitude and concentration of aim on strong effect, he would pile up the agony in a story, relating, for example, how the dog that had killed a rabbit (“bunny”) had his head beaten off, was then drowned, and so on, through a whole Iliad of canine calamity. Here is another example of his literary sensationalism (middle of ninth month). While he and his father were taking a walk in the country, where the family was staying, they found the feathers and bones of a bird in a tiny cleft in the tree. The father thereupon began to weave for him a little story about the unfortunate bird, how it had taken shelter there one cold winter’s day weary and hungry, and had grown too weak to get away. This did not satisfy the strong palate of our young poet, who proceeded to improve on the tragedy. “P’haps a snake there, p’haps dicky bird flew there one cold winter day and snake ate it up, and then spit it out again,” and so forth. “P’haps (he ended up) he (the bird) thought there was nothing but wind (air) there.”
He had, of course, his super-sensible world, made up of mysterious beings of fairy-like nature, who, like the spirits of primitive folk-lore, were turned to account in various ways. The following incident (seven months one week) may illustrate the modus operandi of the child’s myth-making impulse. He was eagerly looking forward to going to a circus. His father told him that if it rained he would not be able to go, for nobody could drive away the rain. Whereupon he instantly remarked: “The Rainer can”. His father asked him who this wonderful person was, and he replied: "A man who lives in the forest—my forest—and has to drive rain away". The expression “drive away” used by the father had been enough to give this curious turn to his fancy.
His fairy-world was concocted from a medley of materials drawn from his observations of animals, his experiences at the circus, including the ladies in beautifully tinted short dresses, whom, with childish awe, he named ‘fairies,’ and the book-lore that his sister was imparting to him from Stories of Uncle Remus, and other favourites. In the ninth month he got into the way of talking of his fairy-world, of the invisible fairies, horses, rabbits, and so forth, to which he gave a local habitation in the wall of his bedroom. When in a difficulty he thinks his fairies can help him out. Nothing is too wonderful for their powers: they can even solace his pitiful heart by making a dead dog alive again. For the rest, like other imaginative children, he peoples the places he knows, especially dark and mysterious ones, with imaginary beings. Thus one day, on walking in a wood with his mother, he was overheard by her talking to himself dreamily in this wise: “Here there used to be wolves, but long, long time ago”.
It is noticeable that at this same period of his myth-making activity he began to speak of his dreams. He evidently takes these dream-pictures for sensible realities, and when relating a dream insists that he has actually seen the circus-horses and fairies which appear to him when asleep. Possibly, writes the father, this dreaming, as in the case of the primitive race, had much to do in developing his intense belief in a supernatural world. It may be added that during this same period he was in the habit of seeing the forms of his animals, as lions, “gee-gees,” in such irregular and apparently unsuggestive groupings of line as those made by the cracks in the ceiling of his nursery.[323]
There is little to note in the way of verbal invention. Here is one amusing specimen (third week of third month). His father asked him whether his toy-horse was tired, whereupon he answered: ‘No, I make him untired’. This leads off the writer to an abstruse logical discussion of “negative terms,” and how it comes about that we do not all of us talk in C.’s fashion and say ‘untired,’ ‘unfatigued’. Another quaint invention was the use of ‘think’ as a noun. It was funny, writes the father, to hear him rejecting his sister’s statements by the contemptuous formula: “That’s only your thinks”.
His understanding was slowly ripening in spite of his free indulgence in the intoxicating pleasures of the imagination. He could understand much that was said to him by the aid of a liberal application of metaphor. Thus one day (end of the year) his father when walking with him late in the evening in a park where sheep were grazing told him that animals did not want bed-clothes, but could lie on the grass wet with dew and afterwards be dried with the sun. He said: “Yes, the sun is their towel to make them dry”.
The subtleties of time were still too much for him. In the fourth month of the year when his sister was narrating an incident of the evening before and used the term ‘yesterday,’ he corrected her saying: “No, E., last night”. Yet he was now beginning to penetrate into the mysteries of the subject. His father happened one day (end of seventh month) to speak of to-morrow. C. then asked: “When is to-morrow? To-morrow morning?” He then noticed that his hearers were remarking on his question, and proceeded to expound his own view of these wonderful things. “There are two kinds of to-morrow, to-morrow morning and this morning;” and then added with the sagest of looks: “To-morrow morning is to-morrow now”.
At this the father tells us both he and the mother were sorely puzzled, and if one may be allowed to read between the lines, it is not improbable that the latter must have indulged in some such exclamation as this: “There! this comes of your stimulating the child’s brains too much”. However this be, it is certain that the observer’s mind was greatly exercised about this dark and oracular deliverance of the child. What could he have meant? At length he bethought him that the child was unable as yet to think of pure abstract time. To-morrow had to be filled in with some concrete experience, wherefore his wishing to define it as “to-morrow morning” with the interesting experiences of the early hours of the day. And if “to-morrow” means for his mind to-morrow’s experience, he is quite logical in saying that it becomes to-day’s experience. Whether the father has here caught the subtle thread of childish thought may be doubted.[324] Who among the wisest of men could be sure of seizing the precise point which the child makes such praiseworthy effort to render intelligible to us?
It would appear as if C. were still rather muddled about numbers. One day (end of third month) he was looking at some big coloured beads on a necklace, and touching the biggest he said to his mother: “These are six,” then some smaller ones: “these five,” then some still smaller ones: “these four,” and so on. He was apparently failing as yet to distinguish number from that other mode of quantity which we call magnitude.
The use of the word “self” at this time showed that it had reference mainly to the body, and apparently to the central trunk. Thus one evening towards the end of the eleventh month, after being put to bed, he was heard by his mother crying out peevishly. Asked by her what was the matter he answered, “I can’t get my hands out of the way of myself”; which, being interpreted by his mother, was his way of saying that he could not wriggle about and get into cool places (the evening was a warm one) as he would like to do.
As might be inferred from his essays in fictitious narrative, he was getting quite an expert in the matter of assertion. It was odd sometimes, observes the journal, to hear the guarded manner in which he would proffer a statement. Thus, on one occasion (beginning of twelfth month), he reported to his father, who had been from home for some days, that he had been behaving quite satisfactorily during his absence, and then added cautiously, “I did not see mamma punish me, anyhow”.
During this year he followed up his questioning relentlessly, often demanding the reasons of things, as children are wont to do, in a sorely perplexing fashion. His interrogatory embraced all manner of objects, both of sense-perception and of thought. Thus he once asked his mother (seventh month) how it was that he could put his hand through water and not through the soap. A matter that came to puzzle him especially just now was growth. Thus, when told by his father (tenth month) that a little tree would grow big by-and-by, he asked, "How is it that everything grows—flowers, trees, horses, and people?" or, as he worded it a few days later, “How can trees and sheep grow without anybody making them?” He seems now (notes the father) to have given up his belief in the growth of lifeless things. The inequalities of size among fully grown things were also a puzzle to him. Thus, when just four years old, he was much concerned to know why ponies did not grow big like other horses.[325]
The father must doubtless at this time have had his hands full in satisfying the intellectual cravings of the child. But, happily, the small inquirer would sometimes come forward to help out the explanation. One day (end of the year) his father, when walking out with him, pointed to a big dray-horse and said: “That is a strong horse”. On which the child observed: “Ah! that horse can gallop fast”. He was then told that heavy horses did not go fast. He looked puzzled for a moment and then asked: “Do you mean can’t lift themselves up?” “Had he,” asks the father, “noticed that when weighted with thick clothes or other impedimenta he was less springy, and so found his way, as is the manner of children, from his own experience to explaining the apparent contradiction of the strong and slow horse?”
Other questionings were less amenable to purposes of instruction. He would often get particularly thoughtful immediately after going to bed, and put posers to his mother. For example, one evening (tenth month) he asked in his slow, earnest way, “Where was I a hundred years ago?” and then more precisely, “Where was I before I was born?” These are, as everybody knows, stock questions of childhood, and, perhaps, are hardly worth recording. It is otherwise with a curious poser which he set his father about the middle of the last month: “When are all the days going to end, papa?” It is a pity that the diary does not record the answer given to the question. In lieu of this we have the customary pedantic style of speculation about the “concept” of infinity with references to Sir W. Hamilton and I don’t know what other profound metaphysicians. The answer, if any was attempted, does not appear to have been very satisfactory to Master C., for we read further on that more than three months after this date he put the same question about all the days ending to his mother.
With this questioning about the causes of things there went much assigning of reasons. By the end of the fourth month, it is remarked, he was getting more accurate in his thinking, substituting limited generalisations such as, “Some people do this,” for the first hasty and sweeping ones. He appears, further, to have grown much more ready in finding reasons, bringing out “’cause” (because) on all manner of occasions, much to his own satisfaction and hardly less to that of his observant father. He continued, it is added, to display the greatest ingenuity in finding reasons for his own often capricious-looking behaviour, and especially in discovering excuses whereby a veil of propriety might be thrown over actions which he knew full well would, if left naked, have a naughty look.
The tendency to give life to things observable in the last year was less marked, but broke out now and again, as when sitting one day (beginning of tenth month) on his chair on a loose cushion and wriggling about as his manner was, he felt the cushion slipping from under him and exclaimed: “Hullo! I do b’lieve this cushion is alive. It moves itself.” About a month after this the father set about testing the state of his mind by asking him whether trees did not feel pain when they were cut. This “leading question” was not to entrap Master C., who answered with something of contempt in his tone: “No, they only made of wood”. He was not so sure about dead rabbits, however, saying first “yes” and then “no”.
The intricate relations of things continued to trouble his mind. His father chanced one day (end of eleventh month) to remark at table that C. did not take his milk so nicely as he used to do. C. pondered this awhile and then said: “It’s funny that little babies behave better than big boys. They don’t know so much as boys.” From which the father appears to have inferred that children, like certain Greek philosophers, are wont to identify virtue with cognition.
There are not many brilliant strokes of childish rationality to record during this year. It is worth noting, perhaps, that when just seven months and one week of the year had passed, he showed that he had found his own way to an axiomatic truth familiar to students of geometry. He had been to the circus the day before, where a gorgeous pantomimic spectacle had greatly delighted him. He talked to his father of the beautiful things, and among others, of “the fairies going up in the air”. His father asked him how they were able to fly. Whereupon with that good-natured readiness to enlighten the darkness of grown-up people which makes the child the most charming of instructors, he proceeded to explain in this wise: “They had wings, you know. Angels have wings like birds, and fairies are like angels, and so you see fairies are like birds.”
The first development of reason in the child is apt to be trying to parents and others, on account not only of the thick hail-like pelting of questions to which it gives rise, but still more, perhaps, of the circumstance that the young reasoner will so readily turn his new instrument to a confusing criticism of his elders. The daring interference of childish dialectic with moral discipline in C.’s case has already been touched on. Sometimes he would follow up a series of questions so as to put his logical antagonist into a corner, very much after the manner of the astute Socrates. Here is an example of this highly inconvenient mode of dialectical attack (middle of seventh month). He was at this time like other children, much troubled about the killing of animals for food. Again and again he would ask with something of fierce impatience in his voice: “Why do people kill them?” On one occasion he had plied his mother with these questionings. He then contended that people who eat meat must like animals to be killed. Finally, to clench the matter, he turned on his mother and asked: “Do you like them to be killed?” Here is another example of his persistent dialectical attack (end of eleventh month). A small caterpillar happening to drop on the shoulder of the father, the mother expressed the common dislike for these creatures. C. was just now championing the whole dumb creation against hard-hearted man, and he at once saw his opportunity. ‘Why,’ he demanded in his peremptory catechising tone, ‘don’t you like caterpillars?’ To which the mother, amused perhaps with his grave argumentative manner, thought to escape the attack by answering playfully: “Because they make the butterflies”. But there was no room for jocosity in C.’s mind when it was a matter of liking or disliking a living creature. So he followed up his questioning with the true Socratic irony, asking: “Why don’t you like butterflies?” On this both the parents appear to have laughed; but he was not to be upset, and ignoring the patent subterfuge of the butterfly returned to the caterpillar. “Caterpillars,” he observed thoughtfully, “don’t make a noise.” He had doubtless generalised that the pet aversions of his parents, more especially his father, were dogs, cocks and other noise-producing animals. Whether he returned to the subject of the caterpillar is not stated. Perhaps his mother’s dislike for the wee soft noiseless thing was to be added to the stock of unexplained childish mysteries.
Passing to manifestations of feeling, we have a curious note on a new emotional expression. It seems that when a suckling the child had got into the way of accompanying the bliss of an ambrosial meal by soft caressing movements of the fore-finger along the mother’s eyebrows. When three years and ten months old he was sitting on his father’s lap in one of his softer moods when he touched this parent’s eyebrows in the same dainty caressing manner. The observer suspects that we have here an example of a movement becoming an emotional sign by association and analogy. At first associated with the ne plus ultra of infantile happiness it came to indicate the oncoming of any analogous state of feeling, and especially of the luxurious mood of tenderness.
Two or three curious examples of fear are recorded in this chapter. In the second week of the fourth month he went with his mother to the photographer’s to have his likeness taken. When he reached the house he strongly objected, clung to his mother and showed all the signs of a true fear. On entering the room he told the photographer in his quiet authoritative manner that he was not going to have his likeness taken. The process, an instantaneous one, was accomplished, however, without his knowing it. Next morning when asked by his sister how he liked having his likeness taken, he answered snappishly: “Haven’t had my likeness taken. Don’t you see I can talk?” The father suspects that the child feared he would be transformed by the black art of the camera into a speechless photograph. It is curious that savages appear to show a similar dread of the photographic camera. Thus, in a recent number of the Graphic (November, 1893) there was a drawing of Europeans and natives having their likeness taken in a camp in South Africa. One native, terror-struck, is hiding behind a tree so as not to be taken. The text explains that the drawing represents a real incident, and that the fear of the native came from his belief that there is an evil spirit in the camera, and adds that, on finding out that after all he was in the group, the poor fellow instantly disappeared from the camp. Is there not for all of us something uncanny in that black box turned towards us bent on snatching from us the film or image of our very self?
The other instances of C.’s fear point to a like superstitious frame of mind at this time. Thus in the last month he happened one day to see some white linen swaying in the breeze on a hill not far off. He took it for a light and was afraid, saying it was a wolf. This was, we are told, his first experience of ghosts. At the same date he showed fear when passing through a wood with his father about nine o’clock on a summer evening. Though his father was carrying him he said he could not help being afraid of the dark. He fancied there must be wolves in the dark. He afterwards informed his father that his sister had told him so. The wolf appears at this time (by a quaint confusion of zoology) to have been the descendant of his old bête noire, the “bow-wow”. “Have we,” writes the father, “a sort of parallel here to the superstition of the were-wolf so familiar in folk-lore?”
A new development of angry outburst is recorded. In the third month, to the horror of his parents and the disgust of his sister, he positively took to biting others, an action, it is needless to say, which he could not have picked up from his highly respectable human environment. Was this, asks the father, with praiseworthy detachment of mind, an instinct, a survival of primitive brute-like habit, and happily destined in the case of a child born into a civilised society, like other instincts, as pilfering, to be rudimentary and transient?
As implied in the account of his much questioning, the feeling which was most strongly marked and dominant during this year was wonder. His father would surprise him sometimes standing on the sofa and looking at an engraving of Guido’s “Aurora” hanging on the wall above. The woman’s figure in front, perfectly buoyant on the air, the horses and chariot firmly planted on the cloud, all this fascinated his attention and filled him with delightful astonishment.
With wonder there often went in these days sore perplexity of spirit. The order of things was not only intricate and difficult to take apart, it seemed positively wrong. That animals should be beaten, slaughtered, eaten by his own kith and kin, this, as already hinted, filled him with dismay. In odd contrast to this, he would protest with equal warmth against any ordinance which affected his own comfort. Thus, having on one occasion (middle of seventh month) taken a lively interest in the manufacture of jellies, custards, and other dainties, and having learned the next day that they had been disposed of by a company of guests, he asked his mother querulously why she had “wisitors,” and then added in a comical tone of self-compassion, “Didn’t the ‘wisitors’ know you had a little boy?” “It is odd to note,” writes the father, “how a humane concern for the lower creation coexisted with utter indifference to the duties of hospitality. Perhaps, however,” he adds, succumbing to paternal weakness, and saying the best he can for his boy, “there was no real contradiction here. The compassionateness of childhood goes forth to weak, defenceless things, and to C.’s mind the ‘wisitors’ may very likely have appeared as over-fed, greedy monsters who robbed poor children of their small perquisites.”
The wondering impulse of the child assumed now and again a quasi-religious form in speculations about death and heaven. Early in the year he had lost his grandpapa by sudden death, and the event set his thoughts in this direction. In the ninth month his mother read him Wordsworth’s well-known story, “Lucy Gray”. He was much saddened by the account of Lucy’s death. On hearing the line “In heaven we all shall meet,” he began questioning his mother about heaven. She gave him the popular description of heaven, but apparently in a way that left him uncertain as to whether she believed what she said. Whereupon he exclaimed: ‘We shall meet,’ and then after a moment’s pause, as though not quite certain, added, ‘shan’t we?’ Five weeks later, when driving in the country with his mother on a lovely May day, he was in his happiest mood, looking at the flowers in the fields and hedgerows, and suddenly exclaimed: “I shall never die!” The question of immortality (observes the father) had thus early begun to wring the child’s soul.
There are, I regret to say, in this chapter, hardly any remarks about the development of the child’s will and moral character. The father appears to have been disproportionately interested in the boy’s intellectual advancement. The reader is left to hope that Master C. was growing a more orderly and law-abiding child than the incident of the biting would suggest. The one remark which can be brought under this head refers to the growth of practical intelligence in applying rules to action. C. had been told it was well to keep nice things to the end, and he proceeded to work out the consequences of the rule in an amusing fashion. Thus we read (end of eleventh month) that he would take all the currants out of his cake and stick them round the corner of his plate so as to eat them last. A still more amusing instance of the same thing occurred about the same date. On putting him to bed one evening his mother noticed that he carefully sought out the middle of the bed, saying to himself, “I’ll keep these last”. Questioned by her as to what he meant by ‘these,’ he explained, “These nice cool places at the edge of the bed”. “Children,” remarks the chronicler, “do not drop their originality even when they make a show of following our lead. Obedience would be far more tedious than it is but for the occasional opportunities of a play of inventive fancy in the application of a rule to new and out-of-the-way cases.”