This gaiety in taking possession of her new world showed itself in the greeting of friendly faces. The new appearance of her grandfather after an absence excited her laughter on the 133rd day. By about the middle of the year, the child had, like Preyer’s boy, developed a jubilant greeting for her social belongings, nodding a friendly nod with all the signs of huge delight.
These outbursts of laughing joy may sometimes be seen to have been preceded by a distinctly disagreeable state of feeling. In the case of Ruth, we are told that the fit of jollity broke out, on one or two occasions, upon “instantaneous relief from great general discomfort”. Again, on the 222nd day, having awoke and felt timid, she laughed with joy and a sense of relief when her mother came into the room. I have other evidence to show that this laughter of overflowing gladness is often to some extent a relief from constraint. Thus, a boy of one and a half years who had a new nurse, and for some days behaved with great gravity when with her, was during the same period “extremely hilarious” when alone with his parents.
The gladness of the world grew larger to this happy girl when, towards the end of the seventh month, she was taken into the open air, and, shortly after, allowed to lie on a quilt and roll on the ground. The wooing of the passing freshness, the play of sun and shadow, the large stir of life in moving and sounding things, all this possessed her and made her “laugh and ejaculate with pleasure”. With this may be compared a note on a boy nine months old, who, lying in a clothes-basket in a garden one summer’s day, looked up at the leaves dancing in the sunshine and laughed with “a hearty noisy laugh”.
The development of bodily power in this same half-year brought our little maiden much gleeful laughter. {197} Any experience of movement, passive as well as active, filled her with noisy hilarity. To ride on anybody’s foot brought out, at the end of the fifth month, the unmistakable signs of hilarious rapture. A month later, the gleeful explosion was called out by the new frolicsome experience of being jumped and tossed. Similar expressions of mirth occurred when new active movements were accomplished. In the record of the middle of the ninth month, we are told of a medley of movements, tumbling on the floor or lawn, sitting up and lying down, raising herself on the feet and hands, etc., which brought her “singular joy”.
A part of the gleefulness of this widening experience of movement is due to its unexpected results. It seems probable that the first successful experiments in crawling, climbing and the rest may give rise to new complexes of muscular and other sensations which come as a joyful surprise. Such delightful surprises grow more varied and impressive when the arms and hands begin to experiment. For example, a little girl, aged two and a quarter years, happened when throwing a ball at random to jerk it over her head, and was seized with a spasm of hilarity. The gleeful outburst is apt to occur, too, later on when a child first achieves the feat—half-wonderful, half-amusing—of walking, of running and of jumping.[127]
In these expanding processes of jollity or gleefulness we may detect the beginnings of more specialised forms of laughing enjoyment. Thus, in the outburst of merriment which winds up a successful attempt to climb, we recognise the germ of that mode of reaction which is apt to follow at the moment of sudden relaxation of tension on the attainment of an end. We may be sure that a child {198} of nine months finds the effort to stand a very serious and exhausting strain; and may infer that the laughter which occurs in this case is largely due to momentary relaxations of this strain.
But again, these experiences clearly supply conditions favourable to the emergence of that “sudden glory” which enters into successful effort. The “shouting and laughing” of little Ruth (forty-five weeks) on completing the magnificent exploit of climbing the staircase had, as her aunt’s epithet “exultant” recognises, something of the free-breathing jubilation of the successful mountain-climber. We are told further that, in the tenth month, Ruth would break into the same exultant laugh after some successful mental effort, such as pointing out the right picture when this was asked for.
Here, then, we have the laughter of a joyous feeling-tone complicated by new elements. These include, not merely the delightful feeling of relief after prolonged effort, but some dim form of an agreeable consciousness of growing power and of an expanding self. In the glee on mastering a new movement, e.g., riding on somebody’s foot, we see traces of a more distinctly playful mood. We may now follow out the development of this large variety of gamesome mirth.
The overflow of the health-filled reservoirs of muscular activity begins at an early stage to wear an unmistakable aspect of playfulness. The first exercises in crawling, accompanied by various sounds of contentment and gladness, are indeed recognisable by all as a kind of play. As the forces of the organism establish themselves a more manifest bent to a romping kind of game appears. This, as a game in which co-operation enters, involves a development of the social consciousness, and its gleefulness comes {199} in part from the reverberations of mutual sympathy. A good example of the hilarity of a romping game is Ruth’s uproarious delight, in the seventh month, when dragged about on a carpet, an experience which involved, of course, much loss of equilibrium and some amount of awkward bumping. That the bumps were of the essence of the enjoyment is confirmed by the fact that, in the tenth month, she would like to stand, holding on to a chair, and then deliberately to let herself go so as to “come down sitting with a thud,” winding up the performance by “looking up laughing and triumphant”. Another game involving exciting jolts was liked in the middle of the twelfth month. The child was shot in her carriage, now from the aunt to the mother, and now back, each little ride ending up with a jolt, over which she grew very merry. Later on, (at the end of the twentieth month) she laughed heartily on being knocked down by her dog in a too pushful bit of play; and she enjoyed in like manner some pretty rough play at the hands of a nine-year-old boy companion.
This mirthful treatment of romps, which must have involved a palpable amount of discomfort, is interesting as showing how laughter plays about the confines of the serious. This little girl seems, up to the age of three, at least, to have been curiously indifferent to pain. Yet she was not wanting in the common childish timidity. It looks, then, as if the fun of these rather rough games turned on dissolutions of nascent attitudes of apprehension, and, consequently, the laughter expressed something of a joyous contempt of fear. Indeed, it seems likely that an element of this joyous rebound from a half-developed state of fear entered into much of this child’s laughter, already illustrated, on succeeding in a rather risky experiment, such as climbing the staircase. We read that, like other vigorous {200} children, she was a keen pursuer of new experiences, even in cases in which she knew that some pain was involved. The passion for trying new experiments seems to have urged her on, in spite of nascent fear; and the final shouting and laughing may well have announced, along with the joy of successful effort, a sense of triumph over the weaker timid self. The ability, illustrated in these hardy experiments, to turn situations suggestive of danger into “larkish” play, was a singular proof of the firm foundation on which this child’s prevalent mode of gaiety reposed.