Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (8)

Owing to these difficulties the little learner is always drifting into misunderstanding of words. Such misapprehensions will arise in a passive way by the mere play of association in attaching the word especially to some striking feature or circumstance which is apt to present itself when the word is used in the child’s hearing. In this way, for example, general terms may become terribly restricted in range by the incorporation of accidentals into their meaning, as when a Sunday school scholar rendered the story of the good Samaritan by saying that a gentleman came by and poured some paraffin (_i.e._, oil) over the poor man. A word may have its meaning funnily transformed by such associative suggestions, as when a little girl, being told that a thing was a secret, remarked, ‘Well, mamma, ’ou (you) can whisper it in my ear’. As this example shows, a child in his ‘concreting’ fashion tries to get sensible realities out of our names. A mask was called by a boy of six a ‘grimace,’ this abstract name standing to his mind for the grinning face. A like tendency shows itself in the following quaint story. 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. A somewhat similar effect of association of ideas is seen in the quaint request of the little girl M. that her mamma should ‘smell’ the pudding and make it cool. The action of bringing the face near an object yet so as not to touch it was associated with smelling, as in the little girl who, according to Mr. Punch, had her sense of propriety shocked by some irreverent person who did not “smell his hat” when he took his seat in church. Moral expressions get misunderstood in much the same manner. A little girl of three and a half years, pretending that her mother was her little girl, said: ‘You mustn’t do anything _on purpose_’. The usual verbal context of this highly-respectable phrase (_e.g._, ‘You did it on purpose’) had in the child’s mind given it a naughty meaning.

With these losings of the verbal road through associative by-paths may be taken the host of misapprehensions into which children are apt to fall through the ambiguities of our words and expressions, and our short and elliptical modes of speaking. Thus an American child, noting that children were ‘half price’ at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby now that they were cheap.[116] With this may be compared the following: Jean Ingelow tells us she can well remember how sad she was made by her father telling her one day after dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he ‘had a bone in his leg’.[117] Much misapprehension arises, too, from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way. It would be worth knowing what odd renderings the child-brain has given to such expressions as ‘an upright man,’ ‘a fish out of water,’ and the like.

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Footnote 116:

Worcester Collection, p. 21.

Footnote 117:

_Cf._ the account Goltz gives of the anxiety he felt as a child on
hearing that his uvula (zapfen) had ‘fallen down,’ _op. cit._, p. 261.

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In addition to these comparatively passive misapprehensions there are others which are the outcome of an intellectual effort, the endeavour to penetrate into the mystery of some new and puzzling words or expression. Many of us have had our special horror, our _bête noire_ among words, which tormented us for months and years. I remember how I was plagued by the word ‘wean,’ the explanation of which was very properly, no doubt, denied me by the authorities, and by what quaint fancies I tried to fill in a meaning.

As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural 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’. Again, most of us know what queer renderings the child-mind has given to Scripture language. Mr. James Payn tells us that he knew a boy who for years substituted for the words, ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ ‘Harold be thy name’.[118] In this and similar cases it is not, as might be supposed, defective hearing—children hear words as a rule with great exactness—it is the impulse to give a familiar and significant rendering to what is strange and meaningless.[119] A friend of mine when a boy was accustomed on hearing the passage, ‘If I say peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ etc., to insert a pause after ‘peradventure,’ apprehending the passage in this wise: "If I say ‘Peradventure!’—the darkness," etc. In this way he turned the mysterious ‘peradventure’ into a mystic ‘open sesame,’ and added a thrilling touch of magic to the passage. My friend’s daughter tells me that on hearing the passage, “I ... visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, ... and show mercy unto thousands,” she construed the strange word ‘generation’ to mean an immense number like ‘billion,’ and was thus led to trouble herself about God’s seeming to be more cruel than kind.[120]

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Footnote 118:

In the _Illustrated London News_, 30th June, 1894.

Footnote 119:

Of course defective auditory apprehension may assist in these cases.
Goltz gives an example from his own childhood. He took the words
“Namen nennen Dich nicht” to be “Namen nenne Dich nicht,” and was
sorely puzzled at the idea of bidding a name not to name itself.

Footnote 120:

Psalm cxxxix. and Second Commandment, Prayer-book version.

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In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a child’s brain will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line of interpretation of its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little heroine, who knew the lines in _Strumpelpeter_—

The doctor came and shook his head,
And gave him nasty physic too—

was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, “And will the doctor come and shook my head?”[121] 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.

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Footnote 121:

_The Invisible Playmate_, p. 35.

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There is nothing more instructive in this connexion than the talk of children among themselves about words. They build up quaint speculations about meanings, and try their hand bravely at definitions. Here is an example: A boy of five was instructing his comrade as to the puzzling word ‘home-sick’. He did it in quite a scientific fashion. “It’s like sea-sick, you know: you are sea-sick when you are sick at sea, and so you’re home-sick when you’re sick at home”.

There is something of this same desire to get behind words in children’s word-play, as we call it, their discovery of odd affinities in verbal sounds, and their punning. Though no doubt this contains a genuine element of childish fun, it betokens a more serious trait also, an interest in word-sounds as such, and a curiosity about their origin and purpose. It is difficult for grown-up people to go back in thought to the attitude of the child-mind towards verbal sounds. Just as children show ‘the innocence of the eye’ in seeing the colours of objects as they are and not as our habits of interpretation tend to make them, so they show an innocence of the ear, catching the intrinsic sensuous qualities of a word or a group of words, in a way which has become impossible for us.

This half-playful, half-serious scrutiny of word-sounds leads to the attempt to find by analysis and analogy a familiar meaning in strange words. 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’. A child called his doll ‘Shakespeare’ because its spear-like legs could be shaken. Another boy of three explained ‘gaiters’ as things ‘to go out of the gate with’. Another said that the ‘Master’ which he prefixed to his name meant that he was master of his dog. A little girl in her third year called ‘anchovies’ ‘ham-chovies’ ‘mermaid’ ‘worm-maid,’ ‘whirlwind’ ‘world-wind,’ ‘gnomes’ ‘no-mans’ (un-menschen), taking pleasure apparently in bringing some familiar element—even when this seems to other ears at least not very explanatory—into the strange jumble of word-sound that surrounded her. A child may know that he is ‘fooling’ in such cases, yet the word-play brings a certain satisfaction, which is at least akin to the pleasure of the older linguist.

This quasi-punning transformation of words is curiously like what may be called folk-etymology, where a foreign word is altered by a people so as to be made to appear significant and suitable for its purpose, as in the oft-quoted forms ‘sparrow grass’ (asparagus) and ‘cray-fish’ (from the French écrevisse, _cf._ the O. H. German Krebiz), where the attempt to suit the form to the thing is still more apparent.[122] When, for example, a boy calls a holiday a ‘hollorday,’ because it is a day ‘to holloa in,’ we may say that he is reflecting the process by which adults try to put meaning into strange words, as when a cabman I overheard a few days ago spoke about putting down _ash_phalt (for ‘asphalt’). Some children carry out such transformation and invention of derivation on a large scale, often resorting to pretty myths, as when the butterflies are said to make butter, or to eat butter, grasshoppers to give grass, honeysuckles to yield all the honey, and so forth.[123]

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Footnote 122:

The other form of the word, ‘craw-fish,’ seems a still more ingenious
example of folk-etymology.

Footnote 123:

These last are taken from a good list of children’s punnings in Dr.
Stanley Hall’s article, “The Contents of Children’s Minds”.

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A child will even go further, and, prying into the forms of gender, invent explanatory myths in which words are personified and sexualised. Thus a little boy of five years and three months who had learned German and Italian as well as English was much troubled about the gender of the sun and moon. So he set about myth-making on this wise: “I suppose people[124] think the sun is the husband, the moon is the wife, and all the stars the little children, and Jupiter the maid”. A German girl of six was thus addressed by her teacher: “‘Der’ ist männlich; Was sind ‘Die’ und ‘Das’?” To which she replied prettily: "Die ist dämlich (_i.e._, ‘ladyish’) und das ist kindlich". The tendency to attribute differences of sex and age to names observable in this last is seen in other ways. An Italian child asked why ‘barba’ (beard) was not called ‘barbo’. With this may be compared the pretty myth of another Italian child that ‘barca’ (boat) was the little girl of ‘barcainolo’ (boatman).[125]

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Footnote 124:

That is, I take it, the majority, _viz._, Italians and English.

Footnote 125:

Both of these are given by Paola Lombroso in the work already quoted.

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One other characteristic feature in the child’s attitude towards words must be touched on, because it looks like the opposite of the impulse to tamper with words just dealt with. A child is a great stickler for accuracy in the repetition of all familiar word-forms. The zeal of a child in correcting others’ language, and the comical errors he will now and again fall into in exercising his pedagogic function, are well known to parents. Sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants. ‘Shall I read to you out of this book, baby?’ asked a mother of her boy, about two and a half years old. ‘No,’ replied the infant, ‘not _out_ of dot book, but somepy inside 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’. In the notes on the boy C. we find an example of how jealously the child-mind insists on the _ipsissima verba_ in the recounting of his familiar stories.

Are these little sticklers for verbal correctness, who object to everything figurative in our language, who, when they learn that a person or an animal has ‘lost his head,’ take the expression literally, and who love nothing better than tying us down to literal exactness, themselves given to ‘word-play’ and verbal myth-making, or have we here to do with two varieties of childish mind? My observations do not enable me to pronounce on this point.

I have in this essay confined myself to some of the more common and elementary features of the child’s linguistic experience. Others present themselves when the reading stage is reached, and the new strange stupid-looking word-symbol on the printed page has to do duty for the living sound, which for the child, as we have seen, seems to belong to the object and to share in its life. But this subject, tempting as it is, must be left. And the same must be said of those special difficulties and problems which arise for the child-mind when two or more languages are spoken. This is a branch of child-linguistics which, so far as I know, has never been explored.

VI.
SUBJECT TO FEAR.

_Children’s Sensibility._

In passing from a study of children’s ideas to an investigation of their feelings, we seem to encounter quite another kind of problem. A child has the germs of ideas long before he can give them clear articulate expression; and, as we have seen, he has at first to tax his ingenuity in order to convey by intelligible signs the thoughts which arise in his mind. For the manifestation of his feelings of pleasure and pain, on the other hand, nature has endowed him with adequate expression. The states of infantile discontent and content, misery and gladness, pronounce themselves with a clearness and an emphasis which leave no room for misunderstanding.

This full frank manifestation of feeling holds good more especially of those states of bodily comfort and discomfort which make up the first rude experiences of life. It is necessary for the child’s preservation that he should be able to announce by clear signals the oncoming of his cravings and of his sufferings, and we all know how well nature has provided for this necessity. Hence the fulness with which infant psychology has dealt with this first chapter of the life of feeling. Preyer, for example, gives a full and almost exhaustive epitome of the various shades of infantile pleasure and pain which grow out of this life of sense and appetite, and has carefully described their physiological accompaniments and their signatures.[126]

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Footnote 126:

_Op. cit._, Cap. 6 and 13.

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When we pass from these elementary forms of pleasure and pain to the rudiments of emotion proper, as the miseries of fear, the sorrows and joys of the affections, we have still, no doubt, to do with a mode of manifestation which, on the whole, is direct and unreserved to a gratifying extent. A child of three is delightfully incapable of the skilful repressions, and the yet more skilful simulations of emotion which are easy to the adult.[127] Yet frank and transparent as is the first instinctive utterance of feeling, it is apt to get checked at an early date, giving place to a certain reserve. So that, as we know from published reminiscences of childhood, a child of six will have learnt to hide some of his deepest feelings from unsympathetic eyes.

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Footnote 127:

This does not apply to older children. As Tolstoi’s book, _Childhood,
Boyhood and Youth_, tells us, a boy of twelve may be much given to
straining after feelings which he thinks he ought to experience.

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This shyness of the young heart, face to face with old and strange ways of feeling, exposed to ridicule if not to something worse, makes the problem of registering the pulsations of its emotions more difficult than it at first seems. As a matter of fact we are still far from knowing the precise range and depth of children’s feelings. This is seen plainly enough in the quite opposite views which are entertained of childish sensibility, some describing it as restricted and obtuse, others as morbidly excessive. Such diversity of view may no doubt arise from differences in the fields of observation, since, as we know, children differ hardly less than adults perhaps in breadth and fineness of emotional susceptibility. Yet I think that this contrariety of view points further to the conclusion that we are still far from sounding with finely measuring scientific apparatus the currents of childish emotion.

It seems, then, to be worth while to look further into the matter in the hope of gaining a deeper and fuller insight, and as a step in this direction I propose to inquire into the various forms and the causes of one of the best marked and most characteristic of children’s feelings—namely, fear.

That fear is one of the characteristic feelings of the child needs no proving. 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 fully developed fear or terror shows itself by unmistakable signs, there are many cases where it is difficult to say whether the child is the subject of this feeling. Thus it is doubtful whether the tremblings and disturbances of respiration which are said to betray fear in the new-born infant are a full expression of this state.[128] Again, the reflex movement of a start on hearing a sound hardly amounts to the full reaction of fear, though it is akin to it.[129] A child may, further, show a sort of æsthetic dislike for an ugly form or sound, turning away in evident aversion, and yet not be afraid in the full sense. Fear proper betrays itself in the stare, the grave look, and in such movements as turning away and hiding the face against the nurse’s or mother’s shoulder, and sometimes in covering it with the hands. In severer forms it leads to trembling and to wild shrieking. Changes of colour also occur. It is commonly said that great fear produces paleness; but according to one of my correspondents who has had considerable experience, a child may show the feeling by his face turning scarlet. Fear, if not very intense, leads to voluntary movements, as turning away, putting the object aside, or moving away. In its more violent forms, however, it paralyses the child. It is desirable that parents should carefully observe and describe the first signs of fear in their children.[130]

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Footnote 128:

Perez regards these as signs of fear, and points out that tremulous
movements may occur in the fœtus (_L’Education dès le berceau_, p.
94).

Footnote 129:

For an account of this reflex, see Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 10, 176.

Footnote 130:

I know of no good account of the manifestations of childish fear.
Mosso’s book, _La Peur_, chap. v. and following, will be found most
useful here.

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_Startling Effect of Sounds._

It may be well to begin our study of fear by a reference to the effect of startling. As is well known, sudden and loud sounds, 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 gives an excellent example of this. He had, he tells us, been accustomed to make all sorts of sudden noises with his boy, aged four and a half months, which were well received; but one day having introduced a new sound, that of a loud snoring, he found that the child was quite upset, bursting out into a fit of crying.[131]

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Footnote 131:

_Mind_, vol. ii., p. 288.

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As this incident suggests, it is not every new sound which is thus disconcerting to the little stranger. Sudden sharp sounds of any kind seem to be especially disliked, as those of a dog’s bark. The child M. 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. Louder and more voluminous sounds, too, are apt to have an alarming effect. The big noise of a factory, of a steam-ship, of a passing train, are among the sounds assigned by my correspondents as causes of this early startling and upsetting effect. A little girl when taken into the country at the age of nine months, though she liked the animals she saw on the whole, showed fear by seeking shelter against the nurse’s shoulder, on hearing the bleating of the sheep. So strong is this effect of suddenness and volume of sound that even musical sounds often excite some alarm at first. ‘He (a boy of four months) cried when he first heard the piano,’ writes one lady, and this is but a sample of many observations. A child of five and a half months showed such a horror of a banjo that he would scream if it were played or only touched. Preyer’s boy at sixteen months was apparently alarmed when his father, in order to entertain him, produced what seems to us a particularly pure musical tone by rubbing a drinking-glass. He remarks that this same sound had been produced when the child was four months old without any ill effects.[132]

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Footnote 132:

_Op. cit._, p. 131.

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This last fact suggests that such shrinkings from sound may be developed at a comparatively late date. This idea is supported by other observations. “From about two years four months (writes a mother) to the present time (two years eleven months), he has shown signs of fear of music. At two years five months he liked some singing of rounds, but when a fresh person with a stronger voice than the rest joined, he begged the singer to stop. Presently he tolerated the singing as long as he might stand at the farthest corner of the room.” This child was also about the same time afraid of the piano, and of the organ, when played by his mother in a church.

It is worth noting that animals show a similar dread of musical sounds. I took a young cat of about eight weeks in my lap and struck some chords not loudly on the piano. It got up, moved uneasily from side to side, then bolted to the corner of the room and seemed to try to get up the walls. Dogs, too, certainly seem to be put out, if not to experience fear, at the music of a brass band.

It is sometimes supposed that this startling effect of loud sounds is wholly an affair of nervous disturbance:[133] but the late development of the repugnance in certain cases seems to show that this is not the only cause at work. Of course a child’s nervous organisation may through ill health become more sensitive to this disturbing effect; and, as the life of Chopin tells us, the delicate organisation of a future musician may be specially subject to these shocks. Yet I suspect that vague alarm at the unexpected and unknown takes part here. There is something uncanny to the child in the very production of sound from a silent thing. A banjo lying now inert, harmless, and then suddenly firing off a whole gamut of sound may well shock a small child’s preconceptions of things. The second time that fear was observed in one child at the age of ten months, it was excited by a new toy which squeaked on being pressed.[134] This seems to be another example of the disconcerting effect of the unexpected. In other cases the alarming effect of the mystery is increased by the absence of all visible cause. One little boy of two years used to get sadly frightened at the sound of the water rushing into the cistern which was near his nursery. The child was afraid at the same time of thunder, calling it ‘water coming’.

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Footnote 133:

This seems to be the view of Perez: _The First Three Years of
Childhood_ (English translation), p. 64.

Footnote 134:

Observation of F. H. Champneys, _Mind_, vol. vi., p. 106.

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I am far from saying that all children manifest this fear of sounds. Miss Shinn points out that her niece was from the first pleased with the piano, and this is no doubt true of many children. Children behave very differently towards thunder, some being greatly disturbed by it, others being rather delighted. Thus Preyer’s boy, who was so ignominiously upset by the tone of the drinking-glass, laughed at the thunderstorm; and we know that the little Walter Scott was once found during a thunderstorm lying on his back in the open air clapping his hands and shouting “Bonnie, bonnie!” at the flashes of lightning. It is possible that in such cases the exhilarating effect of the brightness counteracts the uncanny effect of the thunder. More observations are needed on this point.

A complete explanation of these early vague alarms of the ear may as yet not be possible. Children show in the matter of sound capricious repugnances which it is exceedingly difficult to account for. They seem sometimes to have their pet aversions like older folk. Yet I think that a general explanation is possible.

To begin with, then, it is probable that in many of these cases, especially those occurring in the first six months, we have to do with an organic phenomenon, with a sort of jar to the nervous system. To understand this we have to remember that the ear, in the case of man at least, is the sense-organ through which the nervous system is most powerfully and profoundly acted on. Sounds seem to go through us, to pierce us, to shake us, to pound and crush us. A child of four or six months has a nervous organisation still weak and unstable, and we should naturally expect loud sounds to produce a disturbing effect on it.

To this it is to be added that sounds have a way of taking us by surprise, of seeming to start out of nothing; and this aspect of them, as I have pointed out above, may well excite vague alarm in the small creatures to whom all that is new and unlooked for is apt to seem uncanny. The fact that most children soon lose their fear by getting used to the sounds seems to show how much the new and the mysterious has to do with the effect.

Whether heredity plays any part here, _e.g._, in the fear of the dog’s barking and other sounds of animals, seems to me exceedingly doubtful. This point will, however, come up for closer consideration presently, when we deal with children’s fear of animals.

Before considering the manifold outgoings of fear produced by impressions of the eye, we may glance at another form of early disturbance which has some analogy to the shock-like effects of certain sounds. I refer here to the feeling of bodily insecurity which appears very early when the child is awkwardly carried, or let down back-foremost, and later when he begins to walk. 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 withdrawn, show signs of discontent in struggling movements.[135] Bell, Preyer, and others regard this as an instinctive form of fear. Such manifestations may, however, be merely the result of sudden and rude disturbances of the sense of bodily ease which attends the habitual condition of adequate support. A child accustomed to lie in a cradle, on the floor, or on somebody’s lap, might be expected to be put out when the supporting mass is greatly reduced, as in bad carrying, or wholly removed, as in quickly lowering him backwards. The fear of falling, which shows itself during the first attempts to stand, comes, it must be remembered, as an accompaniment of a new and highly strange situation. The first experience of using the legs for support must, one supposes, involve a profound change in the child’s whole bodily consciousness, a change which may well be accompanied with a sense of disturbance. Not only so, it comes after a considerable experience of partial fallings, as in trying to turn over when lying, half climbing the sides of the cradle, etc., and still harder bumpings when the crawling stage is reached. These would, I suspect, be quite sufficient to produce the timidity which is observable on making the bolder venture of standing.[136]

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Footnote 135:

See the quotations from Sir Ch. Bell, Perez, _First Three Years of
Childhood_, p. 63.

Footnote 136:

Preyer seems to regard this as instinctive. _Op. cit._, p. 131.

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_Fear of Visible Things._

Fears excited by visual impressions come later than those excited by sounds. The reason of this seems pretty obvious. Visual sensations do not produce the strong effect of nervous shock which auditory ones produce. Let a person compare the violent and profound jar which he experiences on suddenly hearing a loud sound, with the slight surface-agitation produced by the sudden movement of an object across the field of vision. The latter has less of the effect of nervous jar and more of the characteristics of fear proper, that is, apprehension of evil. We should accordingly expect that eye-fears would only begin to show themselves in the child after experience had begun its educative work.[137]

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Footnote 137:

M. Perez (_op. cit._, p. 65) calls in the evolution hypothesis here,
suggesting that the child, unlike the young animal, is so organised as
to be more on the alert for dangers which are near at hand (auditory
impressions) than for those at a distance (visual impressions). I
confess, however, that I find this ingenious writer not quite
convincing here.

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At the outset it is well, as in the case of the ear-fears, to keep before us the distinction between a mere dislike to a sensation and a true reaction of fear. We shall find that children’s quasi-æsthetic dislikes to certain colours may readily simulate the appearance of fears.

Among the earliest manifestations of fear excited by visual impressions we have those called forth by the presentation of something new and strange, especially when it involves a rupture of customary arrangements. Although children love and delight in what is new, their disposition to fear is apt to give to new and strange objects a disquieting, if not distinctly alarming character. This apprehension shows itself as soon as a child has begun to be used or accustomed to a particular state of things.

Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the customary, we have that of change of place. At first the infant betrays no sign of disturbance on being carried into a new room. But when once it has grown accustomed to a certain room it will feel a new one to be strange, and eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. This sense of strangeness in place sometimes appears very early. The little girl M., on being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery, “looked all round and then burst out crying”. This feeling of uneasiness may linger late. A boy retained up to the age of three years eight months the fear of being left alone in strange hotels or lodgings. Yet entrance on a new abode does not by any means always excite this reaction. A child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look of things. Thus one boy on being taken at the age of fifteen months to a fresh house and given a small plain room looked round and laughed at the odd carpet. Children even of the same age appear in such circumstances to vary greatly with respect to the relative strength of the impulses of fear and curiosity.

How different children’s mental attitude may be towards the new and unfamiliar is illustrated by some notes on a boy sent me by his mother. This child, “though hardly ever afraid of strange people or places, was very much frightened as a baby _of familiar things seen after an interval_”. Thus “at ten months he was excessively frightened on returning to his nursery after a month’s absence. On this occasion he screamed violently if his nurse left his side for a moment for some hours after he got home, whereas he had not in the least objected to being installed in a strange nursery.” The mother adds that “at thirteen months, his memory having grown stronger, he was very much pleased at coming to his home after being away a fortnight”. This case looks puzzling enough at first, and seems to contradict the laws of infant psychology. Perhaps the child’s partial recognition was accompanied by a sense of the uncanny, like that which we experience when a place seems familiar to us though we have no clear recollection of having seen it before.

What applies to places applies also to persons: a sudden change of customary human surroundings by the arrival of a stranger on the scene is apt to trouble the child.

At first all faces seem alike for the child. Later on unfamiliar faces excite something like a grave inquisitorial scrutiny. Yet, for the first three months, there is no distinct manifestation of a fear of strangers. It is only later, when attachment to human belongings has been developed, 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. Preyer gives the sixth and seventh months as the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face. In one set of notes sent me it was remarked that a child of four and a half months would cry on being nursed by a stranger. To be nursed by a stranger, however, is to have the whole baby-world revolutionised; little wonder then that it should bring the feeling of strangeness and homelessness.

Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children being decidedly more sociable towards strangers than others. It would be curious to compare the age at which children begin to take kindly to them. Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity; but it is probable that the transition occurs at very different dates in the case of different children.[138]

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Footnote 138:

This true fear of strangers must be distinguished from the later
shyness, which, though akin to it, is a more complex feeling.

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It is worth noting that the little boy to whom I referred just now displayed the same signs of uneasiness at seeing old friends, after an interval, as at returning to old scenes. When eight months old, “he moaned in a curious way when his nurse (of whom he was very fond) came home after a fortnight’s holiday”. Here, however, the signs of fear seem to be less pronounced than in the case of returning to the old room. It would be difficult to give the right name to this curious moan.

Partial alteration of the surroundings frequently brings about a measure of this same mental uneasiness. Preyer’s boy when one year and five months old was much disturbed at seeing his mother in a black dress. Children seem to have a special dislike to black apparel. George Sand describes her fear at having to put on black stockings when her father died. Yet any change of colour in dress will disturb a child. C., when an infant, was distressed to tears at the spectacle of a new colour and pattern on his mother’s dress. This dislike to any change of dress as such is borne out by other observations. A child manifested between the age of about seven months and of two and a half years the most marked repugnance to new clothes, so that the authorities found it very difficult to get them on. It is presumable that the donning of new apparel disturbed too rudely the child’s sense of his proper self.

In certain cases the introduction of new natural objects of great extent and impressiveness will produce a similar effect of childish anxiety, as though they made too violent a change in the surroundings. One of the best illustrations of this obtainable from the life of an average well-to-do child is the impression produced by a first visit to the sea. Preyer’s boy at the age of twenty-one months showed all the signs of fear when his nurse carried him on her arm close to the sea.[139] The boy C. on being first taken near the sea at the age of two was disturbed by its noise. While, however, I have a number of well-authenticated cases of such an instinctive repugnance to, and something like dread of the sea, I find that there is by no means uniformity in children’s behaviour in this particular. 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. Another child who also first saw the sea at the age of thirteen months began to crawl towards the waves. And yet another boy at the age of twenty-one months on first seeing the sea spread his arms as if to embrace it.

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Footnote 139:

_Op. cit._, p. 131.

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These observations show that the strange big thing affects children very differently. C. had a particular dislike to noises, which was, I think, early strengthened by finding out that his father had the same prejudice. Hence perhaps his hostile attitude towards the sea.

Probably, too, imaginative children, whose minds take in something of the bigness of the sea, will be more disposed to this variety of fear. A mother writes me that her elder child, an imaginative girl, has not even now at the age of six got over her fear of going into the sea, whereas her sister, one and a quarter years younger, and not of an imaginative temperament, is perfectly fearless. She adds that it is the bigness of the sea which evidently impresses the imagination of the elder.

Imaginative children, too, are apt to give life and purpose to the big moving noisy thing. This is illustrated in M. Pierre Loti’s graphic account of his first childish impressions of the sea, seen one evening in the twilight. “It was of a dark, almost black green: it seemed restless, treacherous, ready to swallow: it was stirring and swaying everywhere at the same time, with the look of sinister wickedness.”[140]

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Footnote 140:

_Le Roman d’un Enfant._

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There seems enough in the vast waste of unresting waters to excite the imagination of a child to awe and terror. Hence it is needless to follow M. Loti in his speculations as to an inherited fear of the sea. He seems to base this supposition on the fact that at this first view he distinctly _recognised_ the sea. But such recognition may have meant merely the objective realisation of what had no doubt been before pretty fully described by his mother and aunt, and imaginatively pictured by himself.

The opposite attitude, that of the thoroughly unimaginative child, in presence of the sea is well illustrated by the story of a little girl aged two, who, on being first taken to see the watery wonder, exclaimed, “Oh, mamma, look at the soapy water”. The awful mystery of all the stretch of ever-moving water was invisible to this child, being hidden behind the familiar detail of the ‘soapy’ edge.

There is probably nothing in the natural world which makes on the childish imagination quite so awful an impression as the watery Leviathan. Perhaps the fear which one of my correspondents tells me was excited in her when a child by the sudden appearance of a mountain may be akin to this dread of the sea.

We may now pass to another group of fear-excitants, the appearance of certain strange forms and movements of objects.

The close connexion between æsthetic dislike and fear is seen in the well-marked recoilings of children from odd uncanny-looking dolls. The girl M., when just over six months old, was frightened at a Japanese doll so that it had to be put in another room. Another child when thirteen months old was terrified at the sight of an ugly doll. The said doll is described as black with woolly head, startled eyes, and red lips. Such an ogre might well call up a tremor in the bravest of children. In another case, that of a little boy of two years and two months, the broken face of a doll proved to be highly disconcerting. The mother describes the effect as mixed of fear, distress, and intellectual wonder. Nor did his anxiety depart when some hours later the doll, after sleeping in his mother’s room, reappeared with a new face.

In such cases, it seems plain, it is the ugly transformation of something specially familiar and agreeable which excites the feeling of nervous apprehension. Making grimaces, that is the spoiling of the typical familiar face, may, it is said, disturb a child even at the early age of two months.[141] It is much the same when the child M., at the age of thirteen months three weeks, was frightened and howled when a lady looked at her close with blue spectacles, though she was quite used to ordinary glasses. Such transformations of the homely and assuring face are, moreover, not only ugly but bewildering to the child, and where all is mysterious and uncanny the child is apt to fear. Whether “inherited associations” involving a dim recognition of the _meaning_ of these distortions play any part here I do not feel at all certain.

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Footnote 141:

Quoted by Tracy, _op. cit._, p. 29. But this observation seems to me
to need confirmation.

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Children, like animals, will sometimes show fear at the sight of what seems to us a quite harmless object. A shying horse is a puzzle to his rider: his terrors are so unpredictable. Similarly in the case of a timid child almost anything unfamiliar and out of the way, whether in the colour, the form, or the movement of an object, may provoke a measure of anxiety. Thus a little girl, aged one year and ten months, showed signs of fear during a drive at a row of grey ash trees placed along the road. This was just the kind of thing that a horse might shy at.

As with animals, so with children, any seemingly uncaused movement is apt to excite a feeling of alarm. 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 little girl of three, standing by the bedside of her mother (who was ill at the time), was so frightened at the sight of a feather, which she accidentally pulled out of the eiderdown quilt, floating in the air that she would not approach the bed for days afterwards.[142]

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Footnote 142:

See _The Pedagogical Seminary_, i., No. 2, p. 220.

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In these cases we may suppose that we have to do with a germ of superstitious fear, which seems commonly to have its starting point in the appearance of something exceptional and uncanny, that is to say, unintelligible, and so smacking of the supernatural. The fear of feathers as uncanny objects plays, I am told, a considerable part in the superstitions of folk-lore. Such apparently self-caused movements, so suggestive of life, might easily give rise to a vague sense of a mysterious presence or power possessing the object, and so lead to a crude form of a belief in supernatural agents.

In other cases of unexpected and mysterious movement the fear is slightly different. A little boy when one year and eleven months old was frightened when in a lady’s house by a toy elephant which shook its head. The same child, writes his mother, “at one year seven months was very much scared by a toy cow which mooed realistically when its head was moved. This cow was subsequently given to him, at about two years and three months. He was then still afraid of it, but became reconciled soon after, first allowing others to make it moo if he was at a safe distance, and at last making it moo himself.”

There may have been a germ of the fear of animals here: but I suspect that it was mainly a feeling of uneasiness at the signs of life (movement and sound) appearing when they are not expected, and have an uncanny aspect. The close simulation of a living thing by what is known to be not alive is disturbing to the child as to the adult. He will make his toys alive by his own fancy, yet resent their taking on the full semblance of reality. In this sense he is a born idealist and not a realist. More careful observations on this curious group of child-fears are to be desired.

The fear of shadows is closely related to that of moving toys. They are semblances, though horribly distorted semblances, and they are apt to move with an awful rapidity. The unearthly mounting shadows which accompany the child as he climbs the staircase at night have been instanced by writers as one of childhood’s freezing horrors. Mr. Stevenson writes:—

Now my little heart goes beating like a drum,
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;
And all round the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair;
The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed—
All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.

I have noticed a young cat—the same that showed such terror at the playing of the piano—watch its own shadow rising on the wall, and, as I thought, with a look of apprehension.

_The Fear of Animals._

I have purposely reserved for special discussion two varieties of children’s fear, namely, dread of animals and of the dark. As the former certainly manifests itself before the latter I will take it first.

It seems odd that the creatures which are to become the companions and playmates of children, 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 put out by quite harmless members of the animal family. We must, however, be careful here in distinguishing between mere nerve-shock and dislike on the one hand and genuine fear on the other. Thus a lady whom I know, a good observer, tells me that her boy, though when he was fifteen months old his nerves were shaken by the loud barking of a dog, had no real fear of dogs. With this may be contrasted another case, also sent by a good observer, in which it is specially noted that the aversion to the sound of a dog’s barking developed late and was a true fear.

Æsthetic dislikes, again, may easily give rise to quasi-fears, though, as we all know, little children have not the horrors of their elders in this respect. The boy C. could not understand his mother’s scare at the descending caterpillar. A kind of æsthetic dislike appears to show itself sometimes towards animals of peculiar shape and colour. A black animal, as a sheep or a cow, seems more particularly to come in for these childish aversions.

At first it seems impossible to understand why a child in the fourteenth week should shrink from a cat.[143] This is not, so far as I can gather, a common occurrence at this age, and one would like to cross-examine the mother on the precise way in which the child had its first introduction to the domestic pet. So far as one can speculate on the matter, one would say that such early shrinking from animals is probably due to their sudden unexpected movements, which may well disconcert the inexperienced infant accustomed to comparatively restful surroundings.

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Footnote 143:

Quoted by Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 127. The word he uses is “scheuen”.

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This seems borne out by another instance, also quoted by Preyer, of a girl who in the fourth month, as also in the eleventh, was so afraid of pigeons that she could not bring herself to stroke them. The prettiness of the pigeon, if not of the cat, ought, one supposes, to ensure the liking of children; and one has to fall back on the supposition of the first disconcerting strangeness of the moving animal world for the child’s mind.

Later shrinkings from animals show more of the nature of fear. It is sometimes said that children inherit from their ancestors the fear of certain animals. Thus Darwin, observing that his boy when taken to the Zoological Gardens at the age of two years and three months showed fear of the big caged animals whose form was unfamiliar to him (lions, tigers, etc.), infers that this fear is transmitted from savage ancestors whose conditions of life compelled them to shun these deadly creatures. But as M. Compayré has well shown[144] we do not need this hypothesis here. The unfamiliarity of the form of the animal, its bigness, together with the awful suggestions of the cage, would be quite enough to beget a vague sense of danger.

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Footnote 144:

_Evolution intellectuelle et morale de l’Enfant_, p. 102.

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So far as I can ascertain facts are strongly opposed to the theory of an inherited fear of animals. Just as in the first months a child will manifest something like recoil from a pretty and perfectly innocent pigeon, so later on children manifest fear in the most unlikely directions. In _The Invisible Playmate_, we are told of a girl who got her first fright on seeing a sparrow drop on the grass near her, though she was not the least afraid of big things, and on first hearing the dog bark in his kennel said with a little laugh of surprise, ‘Oh! coughing’.[145] A parallel case is sent me by a lady friend. One day when her daughter was about four years old she found her standing, the eyes wide open and filled with tears, the arms outstretched for help, evidently transfixed with terror, while a small wood-louse made its slow way towards her. The next day the child was taken for the first time to the “Zoo,” and the mother anticipating trouble held the child’s hand. But there was no need. A ‘fearless spirit’ in general, she released her hand at the first sight of the elephant, and galloped after the monster. If inheritance played a principal part in the child’s fear of animals one would have expected the facts to be reversed: the elephant should have excited dread, not the harmless insect.

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Footnote 145:

See pp. 26, 27.

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So far as my own observations have gone there seems to be but little uniformity among children’s fears of the animal world. What frightens one child may delight another at about the same age. Perhaps there is a tendency to a special dread of certain animals, more particularly the wolf, which as folk-lore tells us reflects the attitude of superstitious adults. Yet it is probable that, as the case of the boy C. suggests, the dread of the wolf grows out of that of the dog, the most alarming of the domestic animals, while it is vigorously sustained by fairy-story.