Children's Ways Part 2

All the imaginative play of children seems, so far as we can understand it, to have about it something of illusion. This fact of the full sincere acceptance of the play-world as for the moment the real one, is ill.u.s.trated in the child's jealous insistence that everything shall for the time pa.s.s over from the every-day world into the new one. "About the age of four," writes M. Egger of his boys, "Felix is playing at being coachman; Emile happens to return home at the moment. In announcing his brother, Felix does not say, 'Emile is come;' he says, 'The brother of the coachman is come'." It is ill.u.s.trated further in the keen resentment of any act on the part of the mother or other person which seems to contradict the facts of the new world. A boy of two who was playing one morning in his mother's bed at drinking up p.u.s.s.y's milk from an imaginary saucer on the pillow, said a little crossly to his mother, who was getting into bed after fetching his toys: "Don't lie on de saucer, mammy!" The pain inflicted on the little player by such a contradictory action is sometimes intense. A little girl of four was playing "shops" with her younger sister. "The elder one (writes the mother) was shopman at the time I came into her room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs, I could not understand why. At last she sobbed out: 'Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop'. I had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion."

But there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. The child finds himself confronted by the unbeliever who questions what he says about the doll's crying and so forth, and in this case he will often stoutly defend his creed. "Discussions with sceptical brothers (writes Dr. Stanley Hall), who a.s.sert that the doll is nothing but wood, rubber, wax, etc., are often met with a resentment as keen as that vented upon missionaries who declare that idols are but stocks and stones." It is the same with the toy-horse. "When (writes a mother of her boy) he was just over two years old L. began to speak of a favourite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it were a real living creature. 'No tarpenter (carpenter) made Dobbin,' he would say, 'he is not wooden but kin (skin) and bones and Dod (G.o.d) made him.' If any one said 'it' in speaking of the horse his wrath was instantly aroused, and he would shout indignantly: 'It!

You mut'ent tay _it_, you mut tay _he_.'"

While play in its absorbing moments, and even afterwards, may thus produce a genuine illusion, the state of perfect realisation is of course apt to be broken by intervals of scepticism. This has already been ill.u.s.trated in the case of the doll. The same little boy that played with the imaginary mice was sitting on his stool pretending to smoke like his grandpapa out of a bit of bent cardboard. Suddenly his face clouded over; he stroked his chin, and remarked in a disappointed tone, "I have not got any whiskers". The dream of full manhood was here rudely dispelled by a recall to reality.

A measure of the same fanciful transformation of things that has been ill.u.s.trated in make-believe play, a measure, too, of the illusion which frequently accompanies it, enters, I believe, into all children's pastimes. Whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of the hoop? Is not the interest here due to the circ.u.mstance that the child controls a thing which in the freedom of its movements suggests that it has a will of its own? This seems borne out by the following story. A little girl of five once stopped trundling her hoop and said to her mother she thought that her hoop must be alive, because "it is so sensible; it goes where I want it to". Perhaps the same thing may be said of other toys, as the kite and the sailing boat.

_Serious Side of Play._

I have here treated the whole realm of childish fancy as one of play, as one in which happy childhood finds its own sunny world. Yet it is clear that this is after all only one side of children's dream-world. Like our own world it has its climates, and if fancy is often frolicsome and games deliciously sweet, they sometimes become serious to the point of a quite dreadful solemnity.

That children's imagination is wont to hover, with something of the fascination of the moth, on the confines of the fearful, is known to us all. Some children, no doubt, have much more of the pa.s.sion for the gruesome and blood-curdling than others, since temperament counts for much here; yet it is pretty safe to say that most know something of this horrible fascination. Dreams, whether of the night or of the day, are not always of beautiful fairies and the like. Weird, awful-looking figures have a way of pus.h.i.+ng themselves into the front of the scene.

Especially when the "tone" of the frail young nerves runs down from poor health do these alarming shapes appear, and acquire a mighty hold on the child's imagination. Of the timidity of the early years of life I shall have more to say by-and-by. Here I want to bring out how the very vividness of children's images exposes them to what is sometimes at least their worst form of suffering.

A child, at once sensitive and imaginative, frequently pa.s.ses into a state of half hallucination in which the products of fancy take on visible reality. George Sand, in her delightful reminiscences of childhood, relates more than one of these terrible prostrating hallucinations of the early years.[5]

[5] See my account of George Sand's childhood, in _Studies of Childhood_, chap. xii.

We see the same gloomy turn of the young imagination in the readiness with which children accept superst.i.tions about ghosts, witches, and so forth. Those who are brought up in the country in contact with the superst.i.tious beliefs of the peasant appear to imbibe them with great energy. This is true of George Sand, who gives us an interesting account of the legends of the French peasants, with whom when a little girl she was allowed to a.s.sociate. American children, especially those who come under the influence of the beliefs of the negro and of the Indian, may, as that delightful book, _Tom Sawyer_, tells us, become quite experts in folk-lore. Even in England and among well-to-do people children will show an alarming facility in adopting the superst.i.tious ideas of the servants.

Much the same thing shows itself in children's romancings and in their preferences in the matter of stories. So far from these being always bright and amusing, they frequently show a very decided tinge of blackness. The young imagination seems to be especially plastic under the touch of the gruesome. It loves to be roused to its highest pitch of activity by the presentation of something fearsome, something which sends a wild tremor through the nerves. And even when the story is free from this touch of the dreadful it takes on seriousness by reason of the earnestness which the child's mind brings to it.

Coming now to active play, we find here, too, in the region which seems to owe its very existence to the childish instinct of enjoyment, traces of the same seriousness. For most children, one suspects, play would become a tame thing were there not the fearful to conjure with. The favourite play-haunts, the dark corners under the table, behind the curtains, and so forth, show what a vital element of play is supplied by the excitement of the state of half-dread. It is in the games which set the young nerves gently shaking, when a robber has to be met or a giant attacked in his cave, that one sees best, I think, how terribly earnest children's play may become.

Even where play has in it nothing alarming it is apt to take on a serious aspect. This has been ill.u.s.trated in what has been said about the doll and other play-illusions. Most of children's play is imitative of the serious actions of grown-up folk. In nursing her doll the little girl is taking to her domestic duties in the most serious of moods; similarly when the little boy a.s.sumes the responsibilities of coachman or other useful functionary. The imitative impulse of childhood is wont in these cases to follow out the correct and prescribed order with punctilious exactness. The doll must be dressed, fed, put to bed, and so forth, with the regularity that obtains in the child's own life; the coachman must hold the whip, urge on the horses, or stop them in the proper orthodox manner. And the same fidelity to model and prescription shows itself in those games which reproduce the page of fiction. Here again Tom Sawyer is an excellent example. The way in which that leader of boys lays down the law to Huckleberry Finn when they play at pirates or at Robin Hood and his merry men ill.u.s.trates forcibly this serious aspect of play.

PART II.

AT WORK.

CHAPTER III.

ATTACKING OUR LANGUAGE.

No part of the life of a child appeals to us more powerfully perhaps than the first use of our language. The small person's first efforts in linguistics win us by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse they disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full fruition of human intercourse. The difficulties, too, which we manage to lay upon the young learner of our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half humorous, to this field of infantile activity. A child first begins to work in downright earnest when he tries to master these difficulties.

As we are here studying the child at an age when he has acquired a certain hold on human speech, I shall make no attempt to describe the babbling of the first months which precedes true speech. For the same reason I shall have to pa.s.s by the interesting beginnings of sign-making, and shall only just touch the first stages of articulate performance. All this is, I think, deeply interesting, but it cannot be adequately dealt with here, and I have fully dealt with it in my larger work.

The first difficulty which our little linguist has to encounter is the mechanical one of reproducing, with a recognisable measure of approximation, our verbal sounds. What a very rough approximation it is at first, all mothers know. When, for example, a child expects you to translate his sound "koppa" into "Tommy," or "pots" into "hippopotamus,"

it will be acknowledged that he is making heavy demands. Yet though he causes us difficulties in this way he does so because he finds himself in difficulties. His articulatory organ cannot master the terrible words we put in his way, and he is driven to these short cuts and other make-s.h.i.+fts.

_The Namer of Things._

Leaving now the problem of getting over the mechanical difficulties of our speech, let us see what the little explorer has to do when trying to use verbal sounds with their right meanings. Here, too, we shall find that huge difficulties beset his path, and that his arrival at the goal proves him to have been in his way as valiant and hard-working as an African explorer.

One feature of the early tussle with our language is curious and often quaintly pretty. Having at first but few names, the little experimenter makes the most of these by extending them in new and surprising directions. The extension of names to new objects on the ground of some perceived likeness has been touched on above (p. 3); and many other examples might be given. Thus when one child first saw a star and wanted to name it he called it, as if by a poetic metaphor, an "eye". In like manner the name "pin" was extended by another child to a crumb just picked up, a fly, and a caterpillar, and seemed to mean something little to be taken between the fingers. The same child used the sound "'at"

(hat) for anything put on the head, including a hair-brush. Similarly children often extend the names "Mamma, baby" to express any contrast of size, as when a small coin was called by an American child a "baby dollar".

In this extension of language by the child we find not merely a tendency to move along lines of a.n.a.logy, as in the above instances, but to go from a thing to its accompaniments by way of what the psychologist calls a.s.sociation. This is ill.u.s.trated by the case of Darwin's grandchild, who after learning to use the common children's name for duck, "quack,"

proceeded to call a sheet of water "quack". In like manner a little girl called the gas lamp "pop" from the sound produced when lighting it, and then carried over the name "pop" to the stool on which the maid stood when proceeding to light it.

There is another curious way in which children are driven by the slenderness of their verbal resources to "extend" the names they learn.

They will often employ a word which indicates some relation to express what may be called the inverted relation. For example, like the unschooled yokel they will sometimes make the word "learn" do duty for "teach" also. In one case "spend" was made to express "cost". It was a somewhat similar inversion when a little girl called her parasol blown about by the wind "a windy parasol," and a stone that made her hand sore "a very sore stone".

Not only do the small experimenters thus stretch the application of their words beyond our conventional limitations, they are often daring enough when their stock fails them to invent new names. Sometimes this is done by framing a new composite name out of familiar ones. One child, for example, possessing the word steam-s.h.i.+p and wanting the name sailing-s.h.i.+p, cleverly hit upon the composite form "wind-s.h.i.+p". One little girl, when only a year and nine months old, showed quite a pa.s.sion for cla.s.sing objects by help of such compound names, arranging the rooms, for example, into "morner-room," "dinner-room" (she was fond of adding "er" at this time) and "nursery-room". Savages do much the same kind of thing, as when the Aztecs called a boat a "water-house".

It is no less bold a feat when the hard-pressed tyro in speechland frames a new word on the model of other words which he already knows.

The results are often quaint enough. One small boy talked of the "rainer," the fairy who makes rain, and another little boy dubbed a teacher the "lessoner". Two children invented the quaint substantive "thinks" for "thoughts," and another child used the form "digs" for holes dug in the ground. Other droll inventions occur, as when one small person asked to see another worm "deading," and neatly expressed the act of undoing a parcel by the form "unparcel"; and when another child spoke of his metal toy being "unhotted," lacking our word cooled, and asked, "Can't I be sorried?" for "Can't I be forgiven?"

Just as children invent new general names, so they now and again invent "proper" names in order to mark off one person or thing from another of the same kind. Thus a German professor tells us that his grand-niece introduced her new nurse, who had the same name, "Mary," as her old one, as "Evening Mary," because she had arrived in the evening.

Of course children's experiments in language are not always so neat as this. They are sometimes misled by false a.n.a.logies into the formation of such clumsy words as "sorrified" for "sorry," and "magnicious" for "magnificent".

_The Sentence-builder._

It is an interesting moment when the young linguist tries his hand at putting words together in sentences. As is pretty well known, a child has for some time to try to make known his thoughts and wishes by single vocables, such as "mamma," "milk," "puss," "up," and so forth. Each of these words serves in the first baby language for a variety of sentences. Thus "Puss!" means sometimes "Puss is doing something," at other times "I want puss," and so forth. But somewhere about the age of one year nine months the child makes bold to essay a more explicit and definite form of statement.

The construction of sentences proceeds in a cautious manner. At first the structure is of the simplest, two words being placed one after the other, in what is called apposition, as in the couple, "Big bir" (big bird), "Papa no" (papa's nose), and the like.

Later on longer sentences are attempted of a similar pattern; and it is truly wonderful how much the child manages to express in this rude fas.h.i.+on without any aid from those valuable auxiliaries, prepositions, and the like. For example, one boy when in his twentieth month gave this elaborate order to his father, "Dada toe toe ba," that is, "Dada is to go and put his toes in the bath".

Quaint inversions of our order not infrequently occur in this early sentence-making. Thus one child used the form, "Out-pull-baby 'pecs,"

meaning in our language, "Baby pulls (or will pull) out the spectacles".

Sometimes the order reminds us still more closely of the idiom of foreign languages, as when a little girl said: "How Babba (baby, _i.e._, herself) does feed nicely!"

Another curious feature of children's first style of composition is the fondness for ant.i.thesis. A little boy used when wis.h.i.+ng to express his approval of something, say a dog, to use the form, "This a nice bow-wow, not nasty bow-bow". Similarly a little girl said, "Boo (the name of her cat) dot (got) tail; poor Babba (baby) dot no tail," proceeding to search for a tail under her skirts.

In the first attempts to fit our words together dreadful slips are apt to occur. The way in which children are wont to violate the rules of grammar when using verbs, as in saying "eated" for "ate," "scram" for "screamed," "be'd" for "was," and so on, is well known, and there are many excuses to be found for these very natural errors.

Particularly instructive are the odd confusions which children are apt to fall into when they come to use the p.r.o.nouns, and more particularly "I," "me". Many a child begins by using "I" and "you" with mechanical imitation of others, meaning by "you" his own person, which is, of course, called "you" by others when addressing him. The forms "I," "me"

and "my" are apt to be hopelessly mixed up, as in saying "me go" and "my go" for "I go," "me book" for "my book," and so forth. One little boy used the form "I am" for "I," saying, for example, "I am don't want to".

A little German girl had an odd way of splitting up herself into two persons, saying, for example, "She has made me wet," meaning that she had made herself wet.

Throughout this work of mastering our language a child is wont to eke out his deficiencies by bold strokes of originality. When, for example, a little girl towards the end of the second year, after being jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother also, says, in default of the word "jump," "Make mamma high". Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, when a child, being told by his sick mother that he had not said something she wished him to say, answered, "I said it, but you didn't hear, you are poorly, and so _blind in the ear_". Quite pretty metaphors are sometimes. .h.i.t upon, as when a little boy of two seeing his father putting a piece of wood on the fire said, "Flame going to eat it". A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously said, "It rains off," for "The rain has left off". Once a girl about the same age as the boy hit on the idiom, "No two 'tatoes left," for "Only one potato is left". Pretty constructions sometimes appear in these make-s.h.i.+fts, as when a little girl of whom Mrs. Meynell tells, wis.h.i.+ng to know how far she might go in spending money on fruit, asked, "What mustn't it be more than?"

_The Interpreter of Words._