Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

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 often taken with a shocking curiosity to peep into the dead room, and to get perhaps the gruesome pleasure of touching the dead body so as to know what "as cold as death" means, and at best showing only a feeling of awe before a great mystery.

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 forget that a large part of the manifestation of human suffering is quite unintelligible to a little child.

Again, when an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to spy something besides the sadness. The little girl who wanted to touch, and to know the meaning of "cold as death," on going to see a dead schoolmate was not unnaturally taken up with the beauty of the scene, with the white hangings and the white flowers.

I am far from saying that the first acquaintance with death commonly leaves a child indifferent to the signs of woe. I believe, on the contrary, that children are frequently affected in a vague way by the surrounding gloom. In some cases, too, as published reminiscences of childhood show, the first acquaintance with the cruel monarch has sometimes shaken a child's whole being with an infinite, nameless sense of woe.

With this unfeelingness children are frequently charged with active unkindness, amounting to cruelty. La Fontaine spoke of the age of childhood as pitiless (sans pitié).

This appearance of cruelty will now and again show itself in dealings with 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. One little girl was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make a beginning, fortunately only a feeble beginning, at smashing its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy an ugly-looking doll.

Such malicious treatment of smaller infants is, I think, 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 his cruelty.

At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malevolent intention in a child's treatment of animals. A little girl when only a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. Older children often have a way of treating even their pets with a similar roughness.

Yet I think we cannot safely say that such rough usage is intended to be painful. It seems rather to be the outcome of the mere energy of the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate his pet.

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. Fly 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 the arrest of life clearly brought a kind of shock, and we may safely say was not thought out beforehand. Children may pounce upon and maul small moving things for a number of reasons. The wish to gratify their sense of power—which is probably keener in children who so rarely gratify it than in grown-ups—will often explain these actions. To stop all that commotion, all that buzzing on the window-pane, by a single tap of the finger, that may bring a delicious thrill of power to a child. Curiosity, too, is a powerful incentive to this kind of maltreatment of animals. Children have something of the anatomist's impulse to take living things apart, to see where the blood is, as one child put it, and so forth.