As our example of his dawning powers of conversation may suggest, C. early developed the childish sense of fun. Most if not all children love pretence or make-believe. Here is an example of this childish tendency. When about eighteen months old during a short visit to his father’s room C. happened to be walking in the direction of the door. His father at once said, ‘Ta ta,’ just as if the child were really going away. C. instantly entered into the joke, repeating the ‘ta ta,’ moving towards the door, then returning, and so renewing the pretty little fraud.
Sometimes, as parents know, this impish love of make-believe comes very inconveniently into conflict with discipline and authority. One day, about the same date, he got hold of a photograph portrait of an uncle of his. His mother bade him give it up to her. He walked towards her looking serious enough, nearly put it into her hand, and then suddenly drew his hands back laughing.
In other examples of laughter given in this chapter we see something very like contempt. When two years and eight months old he was observed to laugh out loudly on surveying his small india-rubber horse, the head of which had somehow got twisted back and caught between the hind legs and the tail. He then waxed tender and said pityingly, “Poor gee-gee!” “Here,” writes the father in his most ponderous manner, “we see an excellent example of the capricious and variable attitude of the childish mind towards its toys, an attitude closely paralleled by that of the savage towards his fetich.”
The two or three notes on the development of the active powers have to do with the application of intelligence to manual and other performances. Here is one. At the age of seventeen months he was sitting at table with the family when he found himself in want of some bread and butter. He tried his customary petition, ‘Bup,’ but to no purpose. He then stretched out his hand towards the bread knife, repeating the request. A day or two after this the father put his inventive powers to a severer proof. He placed the knife out of his reach. When the desire for more recurred he grew very impatient, looking towards his father and saying ‘Bup’ with much vehemence of manner. At length, getting more excited, he bethought him of a new expedient and pointed authoritatively to his empty plate.
Some of these practical tentatives were rather amusing. One day, just a month after the date of the last incident, he had two keys, one in each hand. With one of these he proceeded to try the keyhole of the door, oddly enough, however, holding it by the wrong end and inserting the handle. Now came the difficulty of turning it. Two hands at the very least were needed, but unhappily the other hand was engaged with the second key, which was not to be relinquished for an instant. So the little fellow, with the inventive resource of a monkey (the father naturally says of an ‘engineer’), proceeded to use his teeth as pincers, clutching the obstinate key between these and trying to turn it with the head. At this date he had acquired considerable skill in the manipulation of door handles and keys. A certain cupboard was a peculiarly fascinating mystery, appealing at once to the desires of the flesh and to a disinterested curiosity, and he was soon master of the ‘open sesame’ to its spacious and obscure recesses.
By far the most respectable exhibition of will about this time was in the way of self-restraint. I have already remarked how he would try to pull himself together when prostrated by fear of the dog. A similarly quaint attempt at self-mastery would occur during his outbreaks of temper. The father says he had got into the way, when the child was inclined to be impatient and teasing, of putting up his finger, lowering his brow, and saying with emphasis: ‘Cliffy, be good!’ After this when inclined to be naughty he would suddenly and quite spontaneously pull himself up, hold up his finger and lower his brow as if reprimanding himself. “The observation is curious,” writes the father, in his graver manner, “as suggesting that self-restraint may begin by an imitation of the action of extraneous authority.”[[307]]
Third Year.
One cannot help regretting on entering upon the third chapter of C.’s biography that the father gives us no account of his physical development. This is a desideratum not only from a scientific but from a literary point of view. Biographers rightly describe the look of their hero, and, if possible, they aid the imagination of their reader by a portrait. The reader of this child’s history has nothing, not even a bare reference to height, by which he can form an image of the concrete personality whose sayings and doings are here recorded; and these sayings and doings begin now to grow really interesting.
There is very little in the notes of this year respecting the growth of observation. When the child was two years five months old the father appears to have made a rather lame attempt to determine the order in which he learnt the colours. He says that he placed the several colours before him and taught him the names, and found as a result that the order of acquisition was the following: red, blue, yellow, and green. It is added that blue was distinguished some time before green. His observations, taken along with those of Preyer and others, are interesting as seeming to suggest that the order in which the colours are learnt differs considerably in the case of individual children.[[308]] In the eighth month of this year we find a note to the effect that the boy discriminates and recognises colour well. This is illustrated by the fact that he at once calls grey with a slightly greenish tinge ‘green’. The connexion between the possession of suitable vocables and explicit discrimination is seen in the fact that whereas he applies the name blue not only to the several varieties of that colour but also to violet, he uses “red” as the name for certain reds only, excepting pink, which is called “pink,” and deep purple red, which is called “brown”.
The third year is epoch-making in the history of memory. It is now that impressions begin to work themselves into the young consciousness so deeply and firmly that they become a part of the permanent stock-in-trade of the mind. The earliest recollections of most of us do not reach back beyond this date, if indeed so far. In C.’s case the father was able to observe this fixing and consolidating of impressions. For instance, when two years and two months old he had been staying for a month or so at a farmhouse in a little sea-side village, D——, where there was a sheep dog yclept Bob. Some three and a half months later he happened, during one of his walks in his London suburb, to see a sheep dog, whereupon he remarked, ‘Dat old Bob, I dink’. A week or two after this, on seeing the picture of a wind-mill, he remarked, "Dat like down at D——". Later on, six months after this visit, on being asked what honey was, he remarked that he had had some at D——. Nine months after this visit his father was talking to him about the game of cricket. He then said, "Oh, yes (his favourite expression just now when he understands), I ’member, Jingo ran after ball down at D——". As a matter of fact his father and friends used to play tennis at D——, and Jingo, the sheep dog, did pretend to ‘field’ the balls, often in a highly inconvenient fashion.