This early consideration frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist you in little household occupations; and though love of activity and the pleasure of imitating no doubt count for much in these cases, we can, I think, safely set down something to the wish to be of use. This inference seems justified by the fact that such practical helpfulness is not always imitative. A little boy of two years and one month happened to overhear his nurse say to herself: ‘I wish that Anne would remember to fill the nursery boiler’. “He listened, and presently trotted off; found the said Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: ‘Nanna, Nanna!’ (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed to the boiler, and added: ‘Go dare, go dare,’ so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade her.”
With this practical ‘utilitarian’ sympathy there goes a quite charming wish to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. At an early age, too, a child tries to make himself agreeable by pretty and dainty courtesies. A little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: ‘Please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?’ Regard for another’s feelings was surely never more charmingly expressed than in the prayer that in rendering this little service the helper should not only be willing, but glad.
Just as there are these sporadic growths of affectionate concern and wish to please in relation to the mother and others, so there is ample evidence of kindness to animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world.
I have touched above on the vague alarms which this animal world has for tiny children. It is only fair to them to say that these alarms are for the most part transitory, giving place to interest, attachment and fellow-feeling. In a sense a child may be said to belong to the animal community, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s charming account of the Jungle prettily suggests. Has he not, indeed, at first more in common with the dog and cat, the pet rabbit or dormouse, than with that grown-up human community which is apt to be so preoccupied with things beyond his understanding, and in many cases, at least, to wear so unfriendly a mien? We must remember, too, that children as a rule know nothing of the prejudices, of the disgusts, which make grown people put animals so far from them. The boy C. was nonplussed by his mother’s horror of the caterpillar. A child has been known quite spontaneously to call a worm ‘beautiful’.
As soon as the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will take to an animal. A little boy of fifteen months quickly overcame his fright at the barking of his grandfather’s dog, and began to share his biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for his amusement. This mastery of fear by attachment takes a higher form when later on the child will stick to his dumb companion after suffering from his occasional fits of temper. Ruskin in his reminiscences gives a striking example of this triumph of attachment over fear. When five years old, he tells us, he was taken by the serving-man to see a favourite Newfoundland dog in the stable. The man rather foolishly humoured the child’s wish to kiss Leo (the dog) and lowered him so that his face came near the animal’s. Hereupon the dog, who was dining, resenting the interruption of his meal, bit out a piece of the boy’s lip. His only fear after this was lest the dog should be sent away.[[174]]
Children will further at a quite early age betray the germ of a truly humane feeling towards animals. The same little boy that bravely got over his fear of the dog’s barking would, when nineteen months old, begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street. More passionate outbursts of pity are seen at a later age. A boy five years and nine months had a kitten of which he was very fond. One day, after two or three days’ absence from the house, it came back with one foot much mutilated and the leg swollen, evidently not far from dying. “When (writes the mother) he saw it he burst into uncontrollable tears and was more affected than I have ever seen him. The kitten was taken away and drowned, and ever since (a month) he has shown great reluctance in speaking of it, and never mentions it to any one but those who saw the cat at the time. He says it is too sad to tell any one of it.” The boy C. when only four was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.
The indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their hearts. This is one of the most striking manifestations of the better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself.
It is sometimes asked why children should take animals to their bosoms in this fashion and lavish so much fellow-feeling on them. It seems easy to understand how they come to choose animals, especially young ones, as playmates, and now and again to be ruthlessly inconsiderate of their comfort in their boisterous gambols; but why should they be so affected by their sufferings and champion their rights so sturdily? I think the answer is not hard to find. The sympathy and love which the child gives to animals grow out of a sort of blind gregarious instinct, and this again seems to be rooted in a similarity of position and needs. As M. Compayré well says on this point: “He (the child) sympathises naturally with creatures which resemble him on so many sides, in which he finds wants analogous to his own, the same appetite, the same impulses to movement, the same desire for caresses. To resemble is already to love.”[[175]] I think, however, that a deeper feeling comes in from the first and gathers strength as the child hears about men’s treatment of animals, I mean a sense of a common danger and helplessness face to face with the human ‘giant’. The more passionate attachment of the child to the animal is the outcome of the wide-spread instinct of helpless things to band together. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years old: ‘Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the animals than to me’. ‘Perhaps I am,’ he replied, ‘you see they are not so well off as you are.’ May there not be something of this sense of banding and mutual defence on the animals’ side too? The idea does not look so absurd when we remember how responsive, how forbearing, how ready to defend, a dog will often show itself towards a ‘wee mite’ of a child. This same instinct to stand up for the helpless inferior shows itself in children’s attitude towards servants when scolded and especially when dismissed.[[176]]
The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, the child’s intercourse with his doll and his toy ‘gee gee’ is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude which is at once tender and corrective and has the enduring constancy of a maternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a doll, the wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, to make it look pretty, and to get it to behave nicely, and note the misery when it is missing, without acknowledging that in this plaything humanised by childish fancy, and brought by daily habit into the warmest intimacy of daily companionship, we have the focal meeting-point of the tender impulses of the child.
Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects in the inanimate world. The manifestations of pity for the falling leaves and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, referred to above, show how quick childish feeling is to detect what is sad in the look of things. Children have even been known to apply the commiserating vocable ‘poor’ to a torn paper figure, and to a bent pin. It seems fair to suppose that here, too, the more tender heart of the child saw occasion for pity.