Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (10)

That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some circumstance connected with the affliction which is worse than the absorption in play through its tantalising want of any genuine feeling. A brother or a sister may be ill, but if the vigorous little player is affected at all, it is only through the loss of his companion, if this is not more than made up for by certain advantages of the solitary situation. If the mother is ill, the event is interesting merely as supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half an hour in his mother’s sick-room, coolly informed his nurse: ‘I have had a very nice time, mamma’s ill!’ The order of the two statements is significant of the child’s mental attitude towards others’ sufferings. If his faithful nurse has her face bandaged, his interest in her torments does not go beyond a remark on the ‘funniness’ of her new appearance.

When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling is still more noticeable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death. While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being affected at most by a feeling of awe before a great mystery. Even the sight of the dead body does not always excite grief. Mrs. Burnett in her interesting reminiscences of childhood has an excellent account of the feelings of a sensitive and refined child when first brought face to face with death. In one case she was taken with fearsome longing to touch the dead body, so as to know what ‘as cold as death’ meant, in another, that of a pretty girl of three with golden brown eyes and neat small brown curls, she was impressed by the loveliness of the whole scene, the nursery bedroom being hung with white and adorned with white flowers. In neither case was she sorry, and could not cry though she had imagined beforehand that she would.[166] Even in this case, then, where so much feeling was called forth, commiseration for the dead companion seems to have been almost wholly wanting.[167]

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Footnote 166:

_The One I Knew Best_, chap. x.

Footnote 167:

_Cf._ Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 84 f.

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No one, I think, will doubt that judged by our standards children are often profoundly and shockingly callous. But the question arises here, too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. It is one thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We are apt to assume that children know our sufferings instinctively, or at least that they can always enter into them when they are openly expressed. But this assumption is highly unreasonable. A large part of the manifestation of human suffering is unintelligible to a little child. He is oppressed neither by our anxieties nor by our griefs, just because these are to a large extent beyond his sympathetic comprehension.

We must remember, too, that there are moods and attitudes of mind favourable and unfavourable to sympathy. None of us are uniformly and consistently compassionate, and children are frequently the subject of moods which exclude the feeling. They are impelled by their superabundant nervous energy to wild romping activity, they are passionately absorbed in their play, they are intensely curious about the many new things they see and hear of. These dominant impulses issue in mental attitudes which are indifferent to the spectacle of others’ troubles.

Again, where an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to spy something besides the sadness. The little girl already spoken of saw the prettiness of the death-room rather than its mournfulness. A teacher once told her class of the death of a class-mate. There was of course a strange stillness, which one little girl presently broke with a loud laugh. The child is said to have been by no means unemotional, and the laugh not a ‘nervous’ one. The odd situation—the sudden hush of a class—had affected childish sensibilities more than the distressing announcement.

One other remark by way of saving clause here. It is by no means true that children are always unaffected by the sad and sorrowful things in life. The first acquaintance with death, as we know from a number of published reminiscences, has sometimes shaken a child’s whole being with an infinite, nameless sense of woe.[168]

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Footnote 168:

See, for example, the record of the impression produced by a parent’s
death left by Steele in the _Tatler_, and George Sand in her
autobiography. No doubt, as Tolstoi’s reminiscences tell us, a good
deal of straining after emotion and vain affectation may mingle with
such childish sorrow.

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Children, says the misopædist, are not only unfeeling where we look for sympathy and kindness, they are positively unkind, their unkindness amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the brute in the child is emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is here understood cold-blooded infliction of pain. “Cet âge,” wrote La Fontaine of childhood, “est sans pitié.” The idea that children, especially boys, are cruel in this sense is, I think, a common one.

This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. I have heard of one little girl who was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make attempts to smash its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The baby, it is comforting to know, was not really hurt by this precocious explosion of infanticidal impulse—perhaps the smashing was more than half a "pretence"—and the little girl has since grown up to be a kind-hearted woman.

Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child’s dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of a child’s cruelty.

At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious intention in a child’s treatment of animals. The little girl M. when just a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. The little girl described by Miss Shinn would when two years old run up to a dog and jerk his ear till he snapped at her, and on one occasion resolutely thrust her hand into a bush to seize pussy, minding not the scratches.[169] Do we not see in this mauling of animals, even when it brings the child himself pain, evidences of a rooted determination to plague, and of a fierce delight in plaguing?

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Footnote 169:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, pt. ii., p. 149 f.

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The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too difficult a one to be discussed here. I will only say that whatever the cruelty of adults may be children’s so-called cruelty towards animals is very far from being a pure delight in the sight of suffering. The torments to which a child will subject a long-suffering cat are, I suspect, due not to a clear intention to inflict pain, but to the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate the pet animal. He feels he must have the pet, no matter at what cost to himself: of the cost to his victim he does not think. The stamping on the kittens was perhaps merely a childish way of holding them fast. Such actions are a manifestation of that odd mixture of sociability and love of power which makes up a child’s attachment to the lower animals.

The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an explanation, then gave it himself: ‘Mr. Fy dom (gone) to by-by’. But he would not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently remained and he continued uneasy about it." Here we have, I think, the instinctive attitude of a child towards the outcome of his destructive impulse. This impulse, which, as we know, becomes more clearly destructive when experience has taught what result will follow, is not necessarily cruel in the sense of including an idea of the animal’s suffering. Animal movement, especially that of tiny things, has something exciting and provoking about it. The child’s own activity and the love of power which is bound up with it impel him to arrest the movements of small manageable things. This is the meaning, I suspect, of the fascination of the fly on the window-pane, and of tiny creeping things, and especially, perhaps, of the worm with its tangle of wriggling movement. The cat’s prolonged chase of the mouse, into which, as we have seen, something of a dramatic make-believe enters, probably owes its zest to a like delight in the realisation of power.

Along with this love of power there goes often something of a child’s fierce untamable curiosity. A boy of four, finding that his mother was shocked at hearing him express a wish to see a pigeon which a dog had just killed, remarked: ‘Is it rude to look at a dead pigeon? I want to see where its blood is.’ I am disposed to think that the crushing of flies and moths and the pulling of worms to pieces and so forth are prompted by this curiosity. The child wants to see where the blood is, what the bones are like, how the wings are fastened in, and so forth. Perez tells of a little boy, afterwards an artist, who used to crush flies between the leaves of a book for the sake of the odd designs resulting.[170] By such various lines of concentrated activity does the child-mind overlook the suffering which it causes.

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Footnote 170:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 60.

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A like combination of love of power and of curiosity seems to underlie other directions of childish destructiveness, as the breaking of toys and the pulling of flowers to pieces. In certain cases, as in C.’s annihilation of a garden of peonies, the love of power or effect may overtop and outlive the curiosity, becoming a sort of iconoclastic fury.[171]

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Footnote 171:

Ruskin tells us that when a child he pulled flowers to pieces ‘in no
morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder’ (_Præterita_, 88). Goethe
gives an amusing account of his wholesale throwing of crockery out of
the window inspired by the delight of watching the droll way in which
it was smashed on the pavement.

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I think, then, that we may give the little child the benefit of the doubt, and not assign his rough handling of sentient things to a wish to inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which he is clearly aware. Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and delight in showing one’s power and producing an effect, seem sufficient to explain most of the alleged brutality of the first years.

Probably the same considerations apply to those milder forms of annoyance which children are apt to practise on other people and animals alike. That a child early develops a decided taste for ‘teasing’ is, I think, certain. But whether carried out by word or by action this early teasing seems to be in the main the outcome of the love of power, the impulse to impose one’s will on other creatures. We must remember that these wee beings feel themselves so subject to others’ power that they are very naturally driven to use all opportunities of shaking off the shackles, and exercising for themselves a little domination. Cruelty, that is the impulse to inflict pain, where it appears, grows up later, and though it has its roots in this love of power ought to be distinguished from it.

We have now looked at one of the dark sides of the child and have found that though it is unpleasant it is not so hideous as it has been painted. Children are no doubt apt to be passionate, ferocious in their anger, and sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is consolatory to reflect that their savageness is not quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate and calculating egoism.

_Germs of Altruism._

It now remains to point out that there is another and counterbalancing side. If a child has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits of tenderness. If he is now dead to others’ sufferings he is at another time taken with a most amiable childish concern for their happiness. In order to be just to him we must recognise both sides.

It must not be forgotten here that children are instinctively attachable and sociable in so far as they show in the first weeks that they get used to and dependent on the human presence and are miserable when this is taken from them. The stopping of an infant’s crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of its mother or nurse shows this.

In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser realisation of this oneness comes in the case of the dog and of the child alike after separation. The wild caressing leaps of the quadruped are matched by the warm embracings of the little biped. Only that here, too, we see in the child traces of a deeper human consciousness. A girl of thirteen months was separated from her mother during six weeks. On the mother’s return she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave her restored companion for a minute. The little girl M. when nearly seventeen months old received her father after only five days’ absence with special marks of tenderness, rushing up to him, smoothing and stroking his face and giving him all the toys in the room.

This sense of joining on one’s existence to another’s is not sympathy in its highest form, that is, a conscious realisation of another’s feelings, but it is a kind of sympathy after all, and may grow into something better. This we may see in the return of the childish heart to its resting place after the estrangement introduced by ‘naughtiness’. The relenting after passion, the reconciliation after punishment, are these not the experiences which help to raise the dumb animal sympathy of the first months into a true human sense of fellowship? But this part of the development of sympathy belongs to another chapter.

Sympathy, it has been said, is a kind of imitation, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A dog will howl piteously in response to another dog’s howl: similarly a child of nine and a half months has been known to cry violently when his mother or father pretended to cry.

One curious manifestation of this early imitative sympathy is the impulse to do what the mother does and to be what she is. Much of early imitative play shows this tendency. It is more than a cold distant copying of another’s doings: it is full of the warmth of attachment, and it is entered on as a way of getting nearer to the object of attachment. Out of this, too, there springs the germ of a higher sympathy. It will be remembered that Laura Bridgman bound the eyes of her doll with a bandage similar to the one she herself wore. Through this sharing in her own experience the doll became more a part of herself. Conversely, a child, on finding that her mother’s head ached, began imitatively to make-believe that her own head was hurt. Sympathy rests on community of experience, and it is a curious fact that a child, before he can fully sympathise with another’s trouble and make it his own by the sympathetic process itself, should thus try by a kind of childish acting to realise this community of experience.

From this imitative acting of another’s trouble, so as to share in it, there is but a step to a direct sympathetic apprehension of it. How early a genuine manifestation of concern about another’s suffering begins to show itself it is almost impossible to say. Children probably differ greatly in this respect. I have, however, one case which is so curious that I cannot forbear to quote it. It reaches me, I may say, by a thoroughly trustworthy channel.

A baby aged one year and two months was crawling on the floor. An elder sister, Katherine, aged six, who was working at a wool mat could not get on very well and began to cry. Baby looked up and grunted, ‘on! on!’ and kept drawing its fingers down its own cheeks. Here the aunt called Miss Katherine’s attention to baby, a device which merely caused a fresh outburst of tears; whereupon baby proceeded to hitch itself along to Katherine with many repetitions of the grunts and the mimetic finger-movements. Katherine, fairly overcome by this, took baby to her and smiled; at which baby began to clap its hands and to crow, tracing this time the course of the tears down its sister’s cheeks.

This pretty nursery-picture certainly seems to illustrate a rudiment of genuine fellow-feeling. Similarly it is hard not to recognise the signs of a sincere concern when a child of two runs spontaneously and kisses the place that is hurt, even though it is not to be doubted that the graceful action has been learnt through imitation.

Very sweet and sacred to the mother are the first clear indications of the child’s concern for herself. These are sporadic, springing up rarely, and sometimes, as it looks to us, capriciously. Illness, and temporary removal are a common occasion for the appearance of a deeper tenderness in the young heart. A little boy of three spontaneously brought his story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the same child used to follow her about after her recovery with all the devotion of a little knight.

Valuable and entertaining, too, are the first attempts of the child at consolation. A little German girl aged two and a half who had just lost her brother seemed very indifferent for some days. She then began to reflect and to ask about her playmate. On seeing her mother’s distress she proceeded in truly childish fashion to comfort her; ‘Never mind, mamma, you will get a better boy. He _was_ a ragamuffin’ (‘Er _war_ ein Lump’). The co-existence of an almost barbarous indifference for the dead brother with practical sympathy for the living mother is characteristic here.[172]

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Footnote 172:

A pretty example of such childish consolation is given by P. Lombroso,
_op. cit._, p. 94.

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A deeper and more thoughtful sympathy comes with years and reflective power. Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes the awakener of this. ‘Are you old, mother?’ asked a boy of five. ‘Why?’ she answered. ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘the older you are the nearer you are to dying.’ This child had once before said he hoped his mother would not die before him, and this suggests that thought of his own forlorn condition was in his mind here: yet we may hope that there was something of disinterested concern too.[173]

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Footnote 173:

_Cf._ P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 87.

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This early consideration frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist you in little household occupations; and though love of activity and the pleasure of imitating no doubt count for much in these cases, we can, I think, safely set down something to the wish to be of use. This inference seems justified by the fact that such practical helpfulness is not always imitative. A little boy of two years and one month happened to overhear his nurse say to herself: ‘I wish that Anne would remember to fill the nursery boiler’. “He listened, and presently trotted off; found the said Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: ‘Nanna, Nanna!’ (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed to the boiler, and added: ‘Go dare, go dare,’ so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade her.”

With this practical ‘utilitarian’ sympathy there goes a quite charming wish to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. At an early age, too, a child tries to make himself agreeable by pretty and dainty courtesies. A little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: ‘Please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?’ Regard for another’s feelings was surely never more charmingly expressed than in the prayer that in rendering this little service the helper should not only be willing, but glad.

Just as there are these sporadic growths of affectionate concern and wish to please in relation to the mother and others, so there is ample evidence of kindness to animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world.

I have touched above on the vague alarms which this animal world has for tiny children. It is only fair to them to say that these alarms are for the most part transitory, giving place to interest, attachment and fellow-feeling. In a sense a child may be said to belong to the animal community, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s charming account of the Jungle prettily suggests. Has he not, indeed, at first more in common with the dog and cat, the pet rabbit or dormouse, than with that grown-up human community which is apt to be so preoccupied with things beyond his understanding, and in many cases, at least, to wear so unfriendly a mien? We must remember, too, that children as a rule know nothing of the prejudices, of the disgusts, which make grown people put animals so far from them. The boy C. was nonplussed by his mother’s horror of the caterpillar. A child has been known quite spontaneously to call a worm ‘beautiful’.

As soon as the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will take to an animal. A little boy of fifteen months quickly overcame his fright at the barking of his grandfather’s dog, and began to share his biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for his amusement. This mastery of fear by attachment takes a higher form when later on the child will stick to his dumb companion after suffering from his occasional fits of temper. Ruskin in his reminiscences gives a striking example of this triumph of attachment over fear. When five years old, he tells us, he was taken by the serving-man to see a favourite Newfoundland dog in the stable. The man rather foolishly humoured the child’s wish to kiss Leo (the dog) and lowered him so that his face came near the animal’s. Hereupon the dog, who was dining, resenting the interruption of his meal, bit out a piece of the boy’s lip. His only fear after this was lest the dog should be sent away.[174]

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Footnote 174:

_Præterita_, pp. 105-6.

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Children will further at a quite early age betray the germ of a truly humane feeling towards animals. The same little boy that bravely got over his fear of the dog’s barking would, when nineteen months old, begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street. More passionate outbursts of pity are seen at a later age. A boy five years and nine months had a kitten of which he was very fond. One day, after two or three days’ absence from the house, it came back with one foot much mutilated and the leg swollen, evidently not far from dying. “When (writes the mother) he saw it he burst into uncontrollable tears and was more affected than I have ever seen him. The kitten was taken away and drowned, and ever since (a month) he has shown great reluctance in speaking of it, and never mentions it to any one but those who saw the cat at the time. He says it is too sad to tell any one of it.” The boy C. when only four was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.

The indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their hearts. This is one of the most striking manifestations of the better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself.

It is sometimes asked why children should take animals to their bosoms in this fashion and lavish so much fellow-feeling on them. It seems easy to understand how they come to choose animals, especially young ones, as playmates, and now and again to be ruthlessly inconsiderate of their comfort in their boisterous gambols; but why should they be so affected by their sufferings and champion their rights so sturdily? I think the answer is not hard to find. The sympathy and love which the child gives to animals grow out of a sort of blind gregarious instinct, and this again seems to be rooted in a similarity of position and needs. As M. Compayré well says on this point: “He (the child) sympathises naturally with creatures which resemble him on so many sides, in which he finds wants analogous to his own, the same appetite, the same impulses to movement, the same desire for caresses. To resemble is already to love.”[175] I think, however, that a deeper feeling comes in from the first and gathers strength as the child hears about men’s treatment of animals, I mean a sense of a common danger and helplessness face to face with the human ‘giant’. The more passionate attachment of the child to the animal is the outcome of the wide-spread instinct of helpless things to band together. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years old: ‘Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the animals than to me’. ‘Perhaps I am,’ he replied, ‘you see they are not so well off as you are.’ May there not be something of this sense of banding and mutual defence on the animals’ side too? The idea does not look so absurd when we remember how responsive, how forbearing, how ready to defend, a dog will often show itself towards a ‘wee mite’ of a child. This same instinct to stand up for the helpless inferior shows itself in children’s attitude towards servants when scolded and especially when dismissed.[176]

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Footnote 175:

_Op. cit._, p. 108.

Footnote 176:

Illustrations are given by Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 96 f.

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The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, the child’s intercourse with his doll and his toy ‘gee gee’ is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude which is at once tender and corrective and has the enduring constancy of a maternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a doll, the wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, to make it look pretty, and to get it to behave nicely, and note the misery when it is missing, without acknowledging that in this plaything humanised by childish fancy, and brought by daily habit into the warmest intimacy of daily companionship, we have the focal meeting-point of the tender impulses of the child.

Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects in the inanimate world. The manifestations of pity for the falling leaves and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, referred to above, show how quick childish feeling is to detect what is sad in the look of things. Children have even been known to apply the commiserating vocable ‘poor’ to a torn paper figure, and to a bent pin. It seems fair to suppose that here, too, the more tender heart of the child saw occasion for pity.

It is worth noting that childish sorrow at the sufferings of things is sometimes so keen, that even artistic descriptions which contain a ‘cruel’ element are shunned. A little boy under four "is indignant (writes his mother) at any picture where an animal suffers. He has even turned against several of his favourite pictures—German Bilderbogen, because they are ‘cruel,’ as the bear led home with a corkscrew in his nose." The extreme manifestation of this shrinking from the representation of animal or human suffering is dislike for ‘sad stories’. The unsophisticated tender heart of the child can find no pleasure in horrors which appear to be the supreme delight of many an adult reader.

Here, however, it is evident, we verge on the confines of sentimental pity. It is to be remarked that highly imaginative children shed most tears over these fictitious sufferings. Children with more matter-of-fact minds and a practical turn are not so affected. Thus a mother writes of her two girls: ‘M. being the most imaginative is and always has been much affected by sad stories, especially if read to her with dramatic inflexions of voice. From two years old upwards these have always affected her to tears, whilst P. who is really the most tender-hearted and helpful, but has little imagination, never cries at sad stories, and when four years old explained to me that she did not mind them because she knew they didn’t really happen.’

It appears to me to be incontestable that in this spontaneous outgoing of fellow-feeling towards other creatures, human and animal, the child manifests something of a truly moral quality. C.’s stout and persistent championship of the London horses against the oppression of the bearing-rein had in it something of righteous indignation. The way in which his mind was at this period pre-occupied with animal suffering suggests that his sympathies with animals were rousing the first fierce protest against the wicked injustice of the world. The boy De Quincey got this first sense of the existence of moral evil in another way through his sympathy with a sister who, rumour said, had been brutally treated by a servant. He could not, he tells us, bear to look on the woman. It was not anger. ‘The feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering horror as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife.’[177]

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Footnote 177:

_Autobiographical Sketches_, chap. i.

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_Children’s Lies._

We may now turn to the other main charge against children, that of lying. According to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the manner born and equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even writers on childhood, by no means prejudiced against them, lean to the view that untruth is universal among children, and to some extent at least innate.[178]

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Footnote 178:

See the quotations from Montaigne and Perez, given by Compayré, _op.
cit._, p. 309 f.

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Here, surely, there is need of discrimination. A lie connotes, or should connote, an assertion made with full consciousness of its untruth, and in order to mislead. It may well be doubted whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious. It is satisfactory to note a tendency to take a milder and more reasonable view of this infantile fibbing; and in what follows I can but follow up the excellent recent studies of Dr. Stanley Hall, and M. Compayré.[179]

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Footnote 179:

Stanley Hall, “Children’s Lies,” _Amer. Journal of Psychology_, 1890;
Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 309 ff.

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It is desirable to inspect a little more closely the various forms of this early mendacity. To begin with those little ruses and dissimulations which, according to M. Perez, are apt to appear almost from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is plainly difficult to bring them into the category of full-fledged lies. When, for example, a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your asking for it holds out empty hands, it would be hard to name this action a lie, even though there is in it a germ of deception. We must remember that children have an early developed instinct to secrete things, and the little dissimulation in these actions may be a mere outcome of this hiding propensity, and the accompanying wish that you should not get the hidden thing. Refusals to tell secrets, or as C. called them ‘private secrets’ (a fine distinction), show the same thing. A child when badgered is most jealous in guarding what he has been told, or what his fancy has made a secret. The little ruses or ‘acted lies’ to which I am now referring seem to me at the worst attempts to put you off the scent in what is regarded as a private matter, and to have the minimum of intentional deception. As Mrs. Fry has well shown, this childish passion for keeping things secret may account for later and more serioua-looking falsehoods.[180]

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Footnote 180:

_Uninitiated_ (‘A Discovery in Morals’).

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More distinct marks of mendacity appear when the child comes to use language and proffers statements which if he reflected he might know to be false. It may readily be thought that no child who has the intelligence to make statements at all could make false ones without some little consciousness of the falsity. But here I suspect we judge harshly, applying adult tests to cases where they are inappropriate. Anybody who has observed children’s play and dramatic talk, and knows how readily and completely they can imagine the non-existent so as to lose sight of the existent, will be chary when talking of them of using the word lie. There may be solemn sticklers for truth who would be shocked to hear the child when at play saying, ‘I am a coachman,’ ‘Dolly is crying,’ and so forth. But the discerning see nothing to be alarmed at here. Similarly when a little girl of two and a half after running on with a pretty long rigmarole of sounds devoid of all meaning said: “It’s because you don’t understand me, papa”. Here the love of mystery and secrecy aided by the dramatic impulse _made_ the nonsense talk real talk. The wee thing doubtless had a feeling of superiority in talking in a language which was unintelligible to her all-wise papa.

On much the same level of moral obliquity are those cases where a child will say the opposite of what he is told, turning authoritative utterances upside down. A quaint instance is quoted by Compayré from Guyau. Guyau’s little boy (age not given) was overheard saying to himself: “Papa parle mal, il a dit _sevette_, bébé parle bien, il dit _serviette_”. Such reversals are a kind of play too: the child not unnaturally gets tired now and then of being told that he is wrong, and for the moment imagines himself right and his elders wrong, immensely enjoying the idea.

A graver-looking case presents itself when an ‘untruth’ is uttered in answer to a question. C. on being asked by his mother who told him something, answered, ‘Dolly’. ‘False, and knowingly false,’ somebody will say, especially when he learns that the depraved youngster instantly proceeded to laugh. But let us look a little closer. The question had raised in C.’s small mind the idea that somebody had told him. This is a process of ‘suggestion’ which, as we shall see presently, sways a child’s mind as it sways that of the hypnotised adult. And there close by the child was dolly, and the child’s make-believe includes, as we all know, much important communication with dolly. What more natural than that the idea should at once seize his imagination? But the laugh? Well I am ready to admit that there was a touch of playful defiance here, of young impishness. The expression on the mother’s face showed him that his bold absurd fancy had produced its half-startling, half-amusing effect; and there is nothing your little actor likes more than this after-effect of startling you. But more, it gave him at the same instant a glimpse of the outside look of his fancy, of the unreality of the untruth; and the laugh probably had in it the delight of the little rebel, of the naughty rogue who loves now and then to set law at defiance.

A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these backed by a strong impulse to astonish, and a turn for playful rebellion, seem to me to account for this and other similar varieties of early misstatement. Naughty they no doubt are in a measure; but is it not just that playing at being naughty which has in it nothing really bad, and is removed _toto cœlo_ from downright honest lying? I speak the more confidently as to C.’s case as I happen to know that he was in his serious moods particularly, one might almost say pedantically, truthful.

A somewhat different case is that where the vivid fancy underlying the misstatement may be supposed to lead to a measure of self-deception. When, for example, a child wants to be carried and says, “My leg hurts me and my foot too just here, I can’t walk, I can’t, I can’t,”[181] it is possible at least that he soon realises the tiredness he begins by half feigning. The Worcester collection gives an example. “I was giving some cough syrup, and E (aged three years two months) ran to me saying: ‘I am sick too, and I want some medicine’. She then tried to cough. Every time she would see me taking the syrup bottle afterwards, she would begin to cough. The syrup was very sweet.” This looks simply awful. But what if the child were of so imaginative a turn that the sight of the syrup given to the sick child produced a more or less complete illusion of being herself sick, an illusion strong enough to cause the irritation and the cough? The idea may seem far-fetched, but deserves to be considered before we brand the child with the name liar.

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Footnote 181:

See P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 74.

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The vivid fanciful realisation which in this instance was sustained by the love of sweet things is in many cases inspired by other and later developed feelings. How much false statement—and that not only among little children—is of the nature of exaggeration and directed to producing a strong effect. When, for example, the little four-year-old draws himself up and shouts exultantly, “See, mamma, how tall I am, I am growing so fast, I shall soon be a giant,” or boasts of his strength and tells you the impossible things he is going to do, the element of braggadocio is on the surface, and imposes on nobody.

No doubt these propensities, though not amounting in the stage of development now dealt with to full lying, may if unrestrained develop into this. An unbridled fancy and strong love of effect will lead an older child to say what he knows, vaguely at least, at the moment to be false in order to startle and mystify others. Such exaggeration of the impulses is distinctly abnormal, as may be seen by its affinity to what we can observe in the case of the insane. The same is true of the exaggeration of the vain-glorious or ‘showing off’ impulses, as illustrated for example in the cases mentioned by Dr. Stanley Hall of children who on going to a new town or school would assume new characters which were kept up with difficulty by means of many false pretences.[182]

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Footnote 182:

Article “Children’s Lies,” p. 67.

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A fertile source of childish untruth, especially in the case of girls, is the wish to please. Here we have to do with very dissimilar things. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for mother, aunt or teacher gushes out, ‘Oh I _do_ love you,’ or ‘What sweet lovely eyes you have,’ or other pretty flattery, may be sincere for the moment, the exaggeration being indeed the outcome of a sudden ebullition of emotion. There is more of acting and artfulness in the flatteries which take their rise in a calculating wish to say the nice agreeable thing. Some children are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are presumably those who in later years make the good society actors. In all this childish simulation and exaggeration we have to do with the germs of what may become a great moral evil, insincerity, that is falsity in respect of what is best and ought to be sacred. Yet this childish flattery, though undoubtedly a mild mendacity, is a most amiable mendacity through its charming motive—always supposing that it is a pure wish to please, and is not complicated with an _arrière pensée_, the hope of gaining some favour from the object of the devotion. Perhaps there is no variety of childish fault more difficult to deal with; if only for the reason that in checking the impulse we are robbing ourselves of the sweetest offerings of childhood.

The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and this, I suspect, is a fertile source of childish prevarication. If, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say ‘Yes’ makes it very hard to say ‘No’. Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early experience. When she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the family was called Edith, remarked to her: ‘That’s a pretty name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn’t that a pretty name?’ On being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of ‘Eleanor,’ and yet feared to be rude and say so. She got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as ‘Edith’.

These temptations and struggles, which may impress themselves on memory for the whole of life, illustrate the influence of older persons’ wishes and expectations on the childish mind. It is possible that we have here to do with something akin to “suggestion,” that force which produces such amazing results on the hypnotised subject, and is known to be a potent influence for good or for evil on the young mind. A leading question of the form, ‘Isn’t this pretty?’ ‘Aren’t you fond of me?’ may easily overpower for a moment the child’s own conviction super-imposing that of the stronger mind. Such passive utterance coming from a mind over-ridden by another’s authority is not to be confounded with conscious falsehood.

This suggestion often combines with other forces. Here is a good example. A little American girl, sent into the oak shrubbery to get a leaf, saw a snake, which so frightened her that she ran home without the leaf. As cruel fate would have it she met her brothers and told them she had seen a ‘’sauger’. “They knew (writes the lady who recalls this reminiscence of her childhood) the difference between snakes and their habits, and, boy-like, wanted to tease me, and said ‘’Twas no ’sauger—it didn’t have a red ring round its neck, now, did it?’ My heated imagination saw just such a serpent as soon as their words were spoken, and I declared it had a ring about ‘its neck’.” In this way she was led on to say that it had scars and a little bell on its neck, and was soundly rated by her brothers as a ‘liar’.[183] Here we have a case of “illusion of memory” induced by suggestion acting on a mind made preternaturally sensitive by the fear from which it had not yet recovered. If there was a germ of mendacity in the case it had its source in the shrinking from the brothers’ ridicule, the wish not to seem utterly ignorant about these boyish matters, the snakes. Yet who would say that such swift unseizable movements of feeling in the dim background of consciousness made the child’s responses lies in the proper sense of the word?

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Footnote 183:

Sara E. Wiltshire, _The Christian Union_, vol. xl., No. 26.

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It seems paradoxical, yet is, I believe, indisputable, that a large part of childish untruth comes upon the scene in connexion with moral authority and discipline. We shall see by-and-by that unregenerate child-nature is very apt to take up the attitude of self-defence towards those who administer law and inflict punishment. Very little children brought face to face with restraint and punishment will ‘try on’ these ruses. Here are one or two illustrations from the notes on the little girl M. When seventeen and a half months old she threw down her gloves when wheeled in her mail-cart by her mother. The latter picked them up and told her not to throw them away again. She was at first good, then seemed to deliberate and finally called out: ‘Mamma, Bubbo’ (dog). The mother turned to look, and the little imp threw her gloves away again, laughing; there was of course no dog. The fib about the dog formed part of a piece of childish make-believe, of an infantile comedy. It was hardly more when about two months later, after she had thrown down and broken her tea-things, and her mother had come up to her, she said: ‘Mamma broke tea-things—beat mamma,’ and proceeded to beat her. In connexion with such little child-comedies there can be no talk of deception. They are the outcome of the childish instinct to upset the serious attitude of authority by a bit of fun.

The little stratagem begins to look more serious when the child gets artful enough to put the mother off the scent by a false statement. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother ‘monkey,’ and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: “I said I was a monkey”. In some cases the child does not wait to be questioned. A little girl mentioned by Compayré, being put out by something the mother had done or said, cried: ‘Nasty!’ (Vilaine!) then after a significant silence, corrected herself in this wise, ‘Dolly nasty’ (Poupée vilaine). The skill with which this transference was effected without any violence to grammar argues a precocious art.[184]

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Footnote 184:

Perez gives a similar story, only that the epithet ‘vilaine’ was here
transferred to ‘l’eau’. _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 53.

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Our moral discipline may develop untruth in another way. When the punishment has been inflicted and the governor, relenting from the brutal harshness, asks: ‘Are you sorry?’ or ‘Aren’t you sorry?’ the answer is exceedingly likely to be ‘No,’ even though this is in a sense untrue. More clearly is this lying of obstinacy seen where a child is shut up and kept without food. Asked: ‘Are you hungry?’ the hardy little sinner stifles his sensations and pluckily answers ‘No,’ even though the low and dismal character of the sound shows that the untruth is but a half-hearted affair.

I have tried to show how a child’s untruths may be more than half “playing,” how when they are serious assertions they may involve a measure of self-deception, and how even when consciously false they may have their origin in excusable circumstances and feelings. In urging all this I do not wish to deny the statement that children wall sometimes deliberately invent a lie from a base motive, as when a girl of three seeing her little brother caressed by her mother for some minutes and feeling herself neglected fabricated the story that ‘Henri’ had been cruel to the parrot.[185] Yet I am disposed to look on such mean falsehoods as exceptional if not abnormal.

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Footnote 185:

Perez, _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 54.

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There is much even yet to be done in clearing up the _modus operandi_ of children’s lies. How quick, for example, is a child to find out the simple good-natured people, as the servant-maid, or gardener, who will listen to his romancing and flatter him by appearing to accept it all as gospel. More significant is the fact that intentional deception is apt to show itself towards certain people only. There is many a school-boy who would think it no dishonour to say what is untrue to those he dislikes, especially by way of getting them into hot water, though he would feel it mean and base to lie to his mother or his father, and bad form to lie to the head-master. Similar distinctions show themselves in earlier stages, and are another point of similarity between the child and the savage whose ideas of truthfulness seem to be truthfulness for _my_ people only. This is a side of the subject which would repay fuller inquiry.

Another aspect of the subject which has been but little investigated is the influence of habit in the domain of lying, and the formation of persistent permanent lies. The impulse to stick to an untruth when once uttered is very human, and in the case of the child is enforced by the fear of discovery. This applies not only to falsehoods foisted on persons in authority, but to those by which clever boys and girls take pleasure in befooling the inferior wits of others. In this way there grow up in the nursery and in the playground traditional myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded. Such invention is in part the outcome of the “pleasures of the imagination”. Yet it is probable that these are in all cases reinforced not only by the wish to produce an effect, but by the love of power which in the child not endowed with physical prowess is apt to show itself in hood-winking and practical joking.

Closely connected with the permanence of untruths is the contagiousness of lying. The propagation of falsehood is apt to be promoted by a certain tremulous admiration for the hardihood of the lie and by the impulses of the rebel which never quite slumber even in the case of fairly obedient children. I suspect, however, that it is in all cases largely due to the force of suggestion. The falsehood boldly announced is apt to captivate the mind and hold it under a kind of spell.

This effect of suggestion in generating falsehood is very marked in those pathological or semi-pathological cases where children have been led to give false testimony. It is now known that it is quite possible to provoke an illusion of memory in certain children between the ages of six and fifteen by simply affirming something in their hearing, whether they are in the waking or in the sleeping state, so that they are ready to state that they actually saw happen what was asserted.[186]

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Footnote 186:

M. Motet was one of the first to call attention to the forces of
childish imagination and the effects of suggestion in the false
testimonies of children. _Les Faux Temoignages des Enfants devant la
Justice_, 1887. The subject has been further elucidated by Dr.
Bérillon.

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So much as to the several manners and circumstances of childish lying. In order to understand still better what it amounts to, how much of conscious falsehood enters into it, we must glance at another and closely related phenomenon, the pain which sometimes attends and follows it.