It was noticeable that he would at this time play at sentence-making in a varied imitation of others’ assertions, thereby hitting out some quaint fancy which appeared to amuse him. Thus when told that there is a man on the horse he would say, ‘Ningi on horse,’ ‘Tit on horse,’ and so forth. Such playful practice in utterance probably furthers the growth of readiness and precision in the use of sentences.
The point in the intellectual growth of a child at which he acquires such a mastery of language as to carry on a sustained conversation is a proud and happy one for the fond parent. In the case of C. this date, twenty-three months and ten days, is, of course, marked with red letters. He made a great noise running about and shouting in his bedroom. His mother came in and rebuked him in the usual form (‘Naughty! naughty!’). He thereupon replied, “Tit mak noi” (Sister makes the noise). Mother (seriously): “Sister is at school”. C., with a still bolder look: “Mamma make noi”. Mother (with convulsive effort to suppress laughing, still more emphatically): “No, mamma was in the other room”. C. (looking archly at his doll, known as May): “May make noi”. This sally was followed by a good peal of boyish laughter.
The father evidently feels that this incident is highly suggestive of a lack of moral sense. So he thinks it well to add to the observation that the child had all the normal moral sensibility. But of this more presently.
We may now pass to the comparatively few observations (other than those already dealt with under verbal utterance) which refer to the child’s feelings. As already remarked, he was, like most other children, peevish and cross in the first year, and I regret to say that the diary refers more than once to violent outbursts of infantile rage in the second year also. Here is one sample entry (æt. nineteen months): Feelings of greediness, covetousness and spite begin to manifest themselves with alarming distinctness. When asked to give up a bit of pudding he says, “No,” in a coy, shy sort of manner, turning away. When further pressed he grows angry. On the other hand, he clamours for his sister’s dolls, and bears refusal with very ill grace. When, given up as hopelessly naughty, he is handed over to the nurse, and carried out of the room by this long-suffering person, he ferociously slaps her on the face. This slap appears not to be a pure invention, his sister having been driven more than once to visit him with this chastisement. He will also go up and slap his sister when she cries. He probably puts the nurse who carries him out and the sister who cries in the same category of naughty people. Sometimes he seems quite overpowered by vexation of spirit, and will lie down on the floor on his face and have a good, long, satisfying cry.
The child’s timidity has already been touched on. At the age of sixteen months, we are told, the sight of the drawing of a lion accompanied by roaring noises imitated by the father would greatly terrify him, driving him to his mother, in whose bosom he would hide his face, drawing down his under lip in an ominous way. Two months later the diary tells us that the child has had a fright. One day a lady called with a dog, which secreted itself under the table, and later on suddenly rushed out and made for Master C. The shock was such that since that time whenever he hears a strange noise he runs to his mother, exclaiming, ‘Bow-wow!’ in a terrified manner.
Before the close of the year, however, he began to show a manlier temper. The sight of a dog still made him run towards his mother and cling to her, but as soon as the animal moved off he would look up into her face laughingly and repeat the consolatory saying which she herself had taught him: “Ni (nice) bow-wow! bow-wow like Ningi”. In this humble fashion did he make beginning at the big task of manning himself to face the terrors of things.
As pointed out above, he extended his dislike to sudden and loud noises to inanimate objects. Thus in the last week of the year he was evidently put out, if not actually frightened, by hearing distant thunder; and about the same date, as we have seen, he showed a similar dislike to the sea when first taken near it. He would not approach it for some days, and he cried when he saw his father swimming in it.
It is sad in going through the pages of the diary to note that there is scarcely any observation during this second year on the development of kindly feelings. One would have supposed that with all the affection and care lavished on him C. might have manifested a little tenderness in response. The only incident put down under the head of social feeling in this year is the following (æt. twenty months): “When he eats porridge in the morning at the family breakfast he takes a look round and says: ‘Mamma, Tit, papa, Ningi,’ appearing to be pleased at finding himself sharing in a common enjoyment. This (continues the narrator) is a step onward from the anti-social attitude which he took up not long since when some of his mother’s egg was given to his sister and he shouted prohibitively: ‘No! no!’”
The worthy parent appears to be making the most of very small mercies here. Yet in justice to this child it must be said that he seems to have shown even at this tender age the rudiment of a conscience. The father is satisfied, indeed, that he displayed an instinctive respect for command or law. “Thus,” he says, “when sixteen months old the child hung down his head or hid it in his mother’s breast when for the first time I scolded him.” He goes on to say that after having been forbidden to do a thing, as to touch the coal scuttle or to take up his food with his fingers, he will stop just as he is going to do it, and take on a curious look of timidity or shamefacedness.
He seemed, too, before the end of the second year, to be getting to understand something of the meaning of that recurrent nursery-word ‘naughty,’ and the less frequent ‘good’. When seventeen months old his father tried him, on what looked like the approach of an outburst of temper, with a ‘Cliffy, be good!’ uttered in a firm peremptory manner. The child’s noise was at once arrested, and on the father’s asking: ‘Is Cliffy good?’ he answered, ‘Ea,’ his sign for ‘yes’. A little later he showed that he strongly disliked being called naughty,—vigorously remonstrating when so described with an emphatic, ‘No, no! good!’ He seems to have followed the usual childish order in beginning to apply “naughty” to others, his sister more particularly, much sooner than “good”. It was not till the middle of the twenty-first month that he recognised moral desert in this long-suffering sister. After a little upset of temper on her part, when the crying was over, he remarked in a quiet approving tone, ‘Goo!’ and on being asked by his mother who was good he answered, ‘Tit’.