Few children are quite free from obsession. Some must step on stones; others must walk on, or avoid, cracks; some must ascend the stairs with the right foot first; many must kick posts or touch objects a certain number of times. Some must count the windows, pictures, and figures on the wallpaper; some must bite the nails or pull the eye-winkers. Consider the nail-biter. It cannot be said that he toils not, but to what end? Merely to gratify an obsession. He nibbles a little here and a little there, he frowns, elevates his elbow, and inverts his finger to reach an otherwise inaccessible corner. Does he enjoy it? No, not exactly; but he would be miserable if he discontinued.
An unusual, but characteristic obsession is told by a lady in describing her own childhood. She thought that on retiring she must touch nothing with her hands, after she had washed them, until she touched the inside of the sheets. In case she failed she must return and wash the hands again. The resulting manoeuvres are still fresh in her mind, particularly when her sister had preceded her to bed and she had to climb the footboard.
It is during childhood that we form most of the automatic habits which are to save time and thought in later life, and it is not surprising that some foolish habits creep in. As a rule, children drop these tendencies at need, just as they drop the rôles assumed in play, though they are sometimes so absorbing as to cause inconvenience. An interesting instance was that of the boy who had to touch every one wearing anything red. On one occasion his whole family lost their train because of the prevalence of this color among those waiting in the station.
The longer these tendencies are retained in adult life, the greater the danger of their becoming coercive; and so far as the well-established case is concerned the obsessive act must be performed, though the business, social, and political world should come to a stand-still. Among the stories told in illustration of compulsive tendency in the great, may be instanced the touching of posts, and the placing of a certain foot first, in the case of Dr. Johnson, who, it appears, would actually retrace his steps and repeat the act which failed to satisfy his requirements, with the air of one with something off his mind.
A child who must kick posts is father to the man who cannot eat an egg which has been boiled either more or less than four minutes; who cannot work without absolute silence; who cannot sleep if steam-pipes crackle; and who must straighten out all the tangles of his life, past, present, and future, before he can close his eyes in slumber or take a vacation. The boy Carlyle, proud, shy, sensitive, and pugnacious, was father to the man who made war upon the neighbor's poultry, and had a room, proof against sound, specially constructed for his literary labors.
The passive obsessions are peculiarly provocative of worry. Such are extreme aversions to certain animals, foods, smells, sounds, and sights, or insistent discomfort if affairs are not ordered to our liking. A gentleman once told me that at the concert he did not mind if his neighbor followed the score, but when he consulted his programme during the performance it distressed him greatly.
Such instances illustrate the fact that when our obsessions rule us it is not the noise or the sight, but our idea of the fitness of things, that determines the degree of our annoyance. A person who cannot endure the crackling of the steam-pipe can listen with pleasure to the crackling of an open fire or the noise of a running brook.
It is said that the sensitive and emotional Erasmus had so delicate a digestion that he could neither eat fish nor endure the smell of it; but we are led to suspect that obsession played a part in his troubles when we further learn that he could not bear an iron stove in the room in which he worked, but had to have either a porcelain stove or an open fire.
If we can trust the sources from which Charles Reade drew his deductions regarding the character of the parental stock, Erasmus came fairly by his sensitive disposition. In "The Cloister and the Hearth" we find the father of Erasmus, fleeing from his native land, in fear of his life on account of a crime he thought he had committed, frozen, famished and exhausted, unable to enter the door of a friendly inn on account of his aversion to the issuing odors. Forced by his sufferings at last to enter the inn, he visits each corner in turn, analyzing its peculiar smell and choosing finally the one which seems to him the least obnoxious.
I have heard somewhere, but cannot place, the story of a prominent writer who was so disturbed by the mechanical lawn-mower of his neighbor that he insisted upon the privilege of defraying the expense of its replacement by the scythe.