One cannot part from the theme of children’s fears without a reference to a closely connected subject, the problem of their happiness. To ask whether childhood is a happy time, still more to ask whether it is the happiest, is to raise perhaps a foolish and insoluble question. Later reminiscences would seem in this case to be particularly untrustworthy. Children themselves no doubt may have very definite views on the subject. A child will tell you with the unmistakable marks of profound conviction that he is so unhappy. But paradoxical as it may seem, children really know very little about the matter. At the best they can only tell you how they feel at particular moments. To seek for a precise and satisfactory solution of the problem is thus futile. Only rough comparisons of childhood and later life are possible.
In any such comparison the fears of early years claim, no doubt, careful consideration. There seem to be people who have no idea what the agony of these early terrors amounts to. And since it is the unknown that excites this fear, and the unknown in childhood is almost everything, the possibilities of suffering from this source are great enough.
Alike the Good, the Ill offend thy Sight,
And rouse the stormy sense of shrill affright.
George Sand hardly exaggerates when she writes: “Fear is, I believe, the greatest moral suffering of children”. In the case of weakly, nervous and imaginative children, more especially, this susceptibility to terror may bring miserable days and yet more miserable nights.
Nevertheless, it is easy here to pass from one extreme of brutal indifference to another of sentimental exaggeration. Childish suffering is terrible while it lasts, but happily it has a way of not lasting. The cruel distorting fit of terror passes and leaves the little face with its old sunny out-look. It is to be remembered, too, that while children are pitiably fearful in their own way, they are, as we have seen in the case of the little Walter Scott, delightfully fearless also, as judged by our standards. How oddly fear and fearlessness go together is illustrated in a story sent me. A little boy fell into a brook. On his being fished out by his mother, his sister, aged four, asked him: ‘Did you see any crocodiles?’ ‘No,’ answered the boy, ‘I wasn’t in long enough.’ The absence of fear of the water itself was as characteristic as the presence of fear of the crocodile.
It is refreshing to find that in certain cases at least where older people have done their worst to excite terror, a child has escaped its suffering. Professor Barnes tells us that a Californian child’s belief in the supernatural takes on a happy tone, directing itself to images of heaven with trees, birds, and other pretty things, and giving but little heed to the horrors of hell.[[158]] In less sunny climes than California children may not, perhaps, be such little optimists, and it is probable that graphic descriptions of hell-fire have sent many a creepy thrill of horror along a child’s tender nerves. Still it may be said that, owing to the fortunate circumstance of children having much less fear of fire than many animals, the misery in which eternal punishment is wont to be bodied forth does not work so powerfully as one might expect on a child’s imagination. The author of The Uninitiated illustrates a real child-trait when she makes her small heroine conceive of hell as a place that smelt nastily (from its brimstone).[brimstone).][[159]] Then it is noticeable that children in general are but little affected by fear at the sight or the thought of death. The child C. had a passing dread of being buried, but his young hopeful heart refused to credit the fact of that far-off calamity. Other children, I find, dislike the idea of death as threatening to deprive them of their mother. Perhaps they can more readily suppose that somebody else will die than that they themselves will do so. This comparative immunity from the dread of death is no small deduction to be made from the burden of children’s fear.
Not only so, when fear is apt to be excited, Nature has provided the small timorous person with other instincts which tend to mitigate and even to neutralise it. It is a happy circumstance that the most prolific excitant of fear, the presentation of something new and uncanny, is also provocative of another feeling, that of curiosity, with its impulse to look and examine. Even animals are sometimes divided in the presence of something strange between fear and curiosity,[[160]] and children’s curiosity is much more lively than theirs. A very tiny child, on first making acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on the head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking his head against something as if experimenting and watching the effect. A clearer case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child who, after pulling the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, proceeded to dive into the bush again.[[161]] Still more interesting here are the gradual transitions from actual fear before the new and strange to bold inspection. The child who was frightened by her Japanese doll insisted on seeing it every day. The behaviour of one of these small persons on the arrival at the house of a strange dog, of a dark foreigner, or some other startling novelty, is a pretty and amusing sight. The first overpowering timidity, the shrinking back to the mother’s breast, followed by curious peeps, then by bolder outstretchings of head and arms, mark the stages by which curiosity and interest gain on fear and finally leave it far behind. Very soon we know the small timorous creatures will grow into bold adventurers. They will make playthings of the alarming animals, and of the alarming shadows too.[[162]] Later on still perhaps they will love nothing so much as to probe the awful mysteries of gunpowder.
One palliative of these early terrors remains to be touched on, the instinct of sheltering or refuge-taking. The first manifestations of what is called the social nature of children are little more than the reverse side of their timidity. A baby will cease crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of mother or nurse because a vague sense of human companionship does away with the misery of the black solitude. A frightened child probably knows an ecstasy of bliss when folded in the protective embrace of a mother’s arms. Even the most timid children never have the full experience of terror so long as there is within reach the secure base of all their reconnoitring excursions, the mother’s skirts. Happy those little ones who have ever near them loving arms within whose magic circle the oncoming of the cruel fit of terror is instantly checked, giving place to a delicious calm.
How unhappy those children must be who, being fearsome by nature, lack this refuge, who are left much alone to wrestle with their horrors as best they may, and are rudely repulsed when they bear their heart-quakings to others, I would not venture to say. Still less should I care to suggest what is suffered by those unfortunates who find in those about them not comfort, assurance, support in their fearsome moments, but the worst source of their terrors. To be brutal to these small sensitive organisms, to practise on their terrors, to take delight in exciting the wild stare and wilder shriek of terror, this is perhaps one of the strange things which make one believe in the old dogma that the devil can enter into men and women. For here we seem to have to do with a form of cruelty so exquisite, so contrary to the oldest of instincts, that it is dishonouring to the savage and to the lower animals to attempt to refer it to heredity.