In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser realisation of this oneness comes in the case of the dog and of the child alike after separation. The wild caressing leaps of the quadruped are matched by the warm embracings of the little biped. Only that here, too, we see in the child traces of a deeper human consciousness. A girl of thirteen months was separated from her mother during six weeks. On the mother’s return she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave her restored companion for a minute. The little girl M. when nearly seventeen months old received her father after only five days’ absence with special marks of tenderness, rushing up to him, smoothing and stroking his face and giving him all the toys in the room.
This sense of joining on one’s existence to another’s is not sympathy in its highest form, that is, a conscious realisation of another’s feelings, but it is a kind of sympathy after all, and may grow into something better. This we may see in the return of the childish heart to its resting place after the estrangement introduced by ‘naughtiness’.[‘naughtiness’.] The relenting after passion, the reconciliation after punishment, are these not the experiences which help to raise the dumb animal sympathy of the first months into a true human sense of fellowship? But this part of the development of sympathy belongs to another chapter.
Sympathy, it has been said, is a kind of imitation, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A dog will howl piteously in response to another dog’s howl: similarly a child of nine and a half months has been known to cry violently when his mother or father pretended to cry.
One curious manifestation of this early imitative sympathy is the impulse to do what the mother does and to be what she is. Much of early imitative play shows this tendency. It is more than a cold distant copying of another’s doings: it is full of the warmth of attachment, and it is entered on as a way of getting nearer to the object of attachment. Out of this, too, there springs the germ of a higher sympathy. It will be remembered that Laura Bridgman bound the eyes of her doll with a bandage similar to the one she herself wore. Through this sharing in her own experience the doll became more a part of herself. Conversely, a child, on finding that her mother’s head ached, began imitatively to make-believe that her own head was hurt. Sympathy rests on community of experience, and it is a curious fact that a child, before he can fully sympathise with another’s trouble and make it his own by the sympathetic process itself, should thus try by a kind of childish acting to realise this community of experience.
From this imitative acting of another’s trouble, so as to share in it, there is but a step to a direct sympathetic apprehension of it. How early a genuine manifestation of concern about another’s suffering begins to show itself it is almost impossible to say. Children probably differ greatly in this respect. I have, however, one case which is so curious that I cannot forbear to quote it. It reaches me, I may say, by a thoroughly trustworthy channel.
A baby aged one year and two months was crawling on the floor. An elder sister, Katherine, aged six, who was working at a wool mat could not get on very well and began to cry. Baby looked up and grunted, ‘on! on!’ and kept drawing its fingers down its own cheeks. Here the aunt called Miss Katherine’s attention to baby, a device which merely caused a fresh outburst of tears; whereupon baby proceeded to hitch itself along to Katherine with many repetitions of the grunts and the mimetic finger-movements. Katherine, fairly overcome by this, took baby to her and smiled; at which baby began to clap its hands and to crow, tracing this time the course of the tears down its sister’s cheeks.
This pretty nursery-picture certainly seems to illustrate a rudiment of genuine fellow-feeling. Similarly it is hard not to recognise the signs of a sincere concern when a child of two runs spontaneously and kisses the place that is hurt, even though it is not to be doubted that the graceful action has been learnt through imitation.
Very sweet and sacred to the mother are the first clear indications of the child’s concern for herself. These are sporadic, springing up rarely, and sometimes, as it looks to us, capriciously. Illness, and temporary removal are a common occasion for the appearance of a deeper tenderness in the young heart. A little boy of three spontaneously brought his story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the same child used to follow her about after her recovery with all the devotion of a little knight.
Valuable and entertaining, too, are the first attempts of the child at consolation. A little German girl aged two and a half who had just lost her brother seemed very indifferent for some days. She then began to reflect and to ask about her playmate. On seeing her mother’s distress she proceeded in truly childish fashion to comfort her; ‘Never mind, mamma, you will get a better boy. He was a ragamuffin’ (‘Er war ein Lump’). The co-existence of an almost barbarous indifference for the dead brother with practical sympathy for the living mother is characteristic here.[[172]]
A deeper and more thoughtful sympathy comes with years and reflective power. Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes the awakener of this. ‘Are you old, mother?’ asked a boy of five. ‘Why?’ she answered. ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘the older you are the nearer you are to dying.’ This child had once before said he hoped his mother would not die before him, and this suggests that thought of his own forlorn condition was in his mind here: yet we may hope that there was something of disinterested concern too.[[173]]