In some cases Ruth’s play would take on a form which clearly involved a triumphing over fear. Thus, we are told that when, on the 429th day, she was asked to find “auntie” in the dark she at first stood still and silent. Then, when her head was touched by somebody’s hands, she broke into laughter and started off by herself to explore in the dark. Later on, with the growth of a bolder spirit, this laughing triumph over fear extended itself, so that in the twenty-ninth month she played at bear with her uncle, going into a dark room, with her hand in her aunt’s, and enjoying “the exhilaration of unreal alarm”; and when the uncle sprang out from his dark hiding-place, growling fearfully, she “laughed, shrieked and fled all in one”. If the uncle went a little too far in the use of the alarming she would check him by saying, “Don’t do that again”.
In these cases, it is evident, we have a complex psychosis with alternating phases. The awful delight which vents itself at once in a laugh and in a shriek and a flight is certainly of a mixed feeling-tone. The laughter is the note of a triumphant spirit, and yet of one in which, in the moment of triumph, the nascent fear leaves its trace.
In these laughing games we have clearly an element of {201} make-believe. A firm persuasion, low down in consciousness, of the harmlessness of the coming bump and of the human bear in the blackness keeps the little girl’s heart steady and turns the adventure into fun. At the same time, the play as “pretending” would seem to involve at least a half-formed expectation of something, and probably, too, a final taste of delicious surprise at the fully realised nothingness of the half-expected. In some forms of play-pretence this element of final annihilation of expectation becomes more conspicuous and the distinct source of the hilarious exultation. When, for example, in the eleventh month, Ruth sitting on the floor held out her arms to be taken up, and the mother, instead of doing this, stooped and kissed the child, there was a perfect peal of laughter again and again.
The increase of muscular activity shown in the laughing romps leads to the extension of mirthful enjoyment in another way. A vigorous child, even when a girl, grows aggressive and attempts various forms of playful attack. As we have seen, to tickle another is merely one variety of a large class of teasing operations, in which the teased as well as the teasing party is supposed to find his merriment. Regarding now the child as teaser, we see that he very early begins to exercise at once his own powers and others’ endurance. The pulling of whiskers is one of the earliest forms of practical jokes. Ruth took to this pastime in the first week of the fifth month. By the end of the sixth month the little tormentor had grown aware of her power, and “became most eager to pull, with laughter and exultant clamour, at the nose, ear, and especially the hair, of any one that held her”. The boy C., at the same age, delighted in pulling his sister’s hair, and was moved by her cries only to outbursts of laughter. As intelligence develops, these practical jokes grow more cunning. Another little {202} girl, of whom I have written elsewhere under the initial M., when seventeen months old, asked for her father’s “tick-tick,” looking very saucy; and as he stooped to give it, she tugged at his moustache, “and almost choked with laughter”.
With this teasing of human companions we have that of animals. When sixteen months old, Ruth would chase the cat with shouts of laughter. Another child, a boy, about the same age, went considerably further, and taking the toilet puff from its proper place went deliberately to “Moses,” the cat, who was sitting unsuspectingly before the fire, and proceeded to powder him, each new application of the puff being accompanied by a short chuckle.
There is no need of reading into this laughter the note of cruel exultation over suffering.[128] Ruth’s mischievous doings would take forms which had not even the semblance of cruelty. There was merely impish playfulness in the act of snatching off her grandmother’s spectacles and even her cap, with full accompaniment of laughter, in the twenty-second month when lifted to say good-night. In much the same spirit the other little girl, M., delighted, when two years old, in untying the maid’s apron strings and in other jocose forms of mischief.
The laughing mood in these cases is understandable as a rioting in newly realised powers, a growing exultation as the consciousness of ability to produce striking effects grows clearer. Ruth, in her eleventh month, blew a whistle violently and looked round laughing to her aunt and the others present. Here, surely, the laughter was that of {203} rejoicing in a new power. This sense of power implies a clearer form of “self-feeling”. A child may grow keenly conscious of the self in such moments of newly tried powers, as he grows in “the moments of intense pain”. This laughter, then, furnishes a good illustration of the sudden glory on which Hobbes lays emphasis.
I have assumed that in this laughing mischief we have to do with a form of (playful) teasing. The little assailant enjoys the fun of the attack and counts on your enjoying it also. The indulgence of others, even if they do not show an equal readiness for the pastime, removes all thought of disobedience, of lawlessness.
Yet things do not commonly remain at this point of perfectly innocent fun. The gathering energies of the child, encouraged by indulgence in games of romp, are pretty certain to develop distinctly rowdyish proceedings. Ruth, for example, when about twenty-one months old, scrambled defiantly on to the table at the close of a meal, seized on the salts, and scampered about laughing. About the same time this new spirit of rowdyism showed itself in flinging a plate across the room and other mutinous acts. Little boys, I suspect, are much given to experiments in a violent kind of fun which they know to be disorderly. One of them, aged two years eight and a half months, was fond of “trying it on” by pulling hair-pins out of his mother’s hair, splashing in the puddles in the road, and so forth, to her great perplexity and his plainly pronounced enjoyment.
In these outbursts of laughing rowdyism we see more than an escape of pent-up energies, more than a mere overflow of “high spirits”; they are complicated by a new factor, something of the defiant temper of the rebel. A child of two has had some experience of real disobedience, and may be said to have developed simple ideas of order {204} and law. We may reasonably infer, then, that in this turbulent fun there is some consciousness of setting law at defiance. The presence of this new psychical factor is seen in the alteration of the laughing sounds themselves. In Ruth’s case, we are told, they were “rough” and unlike the natural and joyous utterance. It is further seen in the method of the fun, for, as Miss Shinn observes, Ruth “tried repeatedly to see how far she could go safely in roguish naughtiness”.