If instead of physical compulsion authority is asserted in the shape of a highly disagreeable command, a child, before obedience has grown into a habit, will be likely to disobey. If the nurse, instead of pulling the mite away from the puddle, bids him come away, he may assert himself in an eloquent ‘I won’t,’ or less bluntly, ‘I can’t come yet’. If he is very much in love with the puddle, and has a stout heart, he probably embarks on a tussle of words, in which ‘I won’t,’ or as the child will significantly put it ‘I mustn’t,’ is bandied with ‘you must!’ the nurse having at length to abandon the ‘moral’ method and to resort after all to physical compulsion.
Our sample-child has not, we will assume, yet got so far as to recognise and defer to a general rule about cleanliness. Hence it may be said that his opposition is directed against the nurse as propounding a particular command, and one which at the moment is excessively unpleasant. It is as yet not resistance to law as such, but rather to one specific interference of another will.
At the same time we may detect in some of this early resistance to authority something of the true rebel-nature, that is to say the love of lawlessness, and what is worse, perhaps, the obstinate recklessness of the law-breaker. The very behaviour of a child when another will crosses and blocks the line of his activity is suggestive of this. The yelling and other disorderly proceedings, do not they speak of the temper of the rioter, of the rowdy? And then, the fierce persistence in disobedience under rebuke, and the wild, wicked determination to face everything rather than obey, are not these marks of an almost Satanic fierceness of revolt? The thoroughly naughty child sticks at nothing. Thus a little offender of four when he was reminded by his sister—two years older—that he would be shut out from heaven retorted impiously, ‘I don’t care,’ adding: ‘Uncle won’t go—I’ll stay with him’.[[192]]
This fierce noisy utterance of the disobedient and law-resisting temper is eminently impressive. Yet it is not the only utterance. If we observe children who may be said to show on the whole an outward submission to authority we shall discover signs of secret dissatisfaction and antagonism. The conflict with rule has not wholly ceased: it has simply changed its manner of proceeding, physical assault and riotous shouts of defiance being now exchanged for dialectic attack.
A curious chapter in the psychology of the child which still has to be written is the account of the various devices by which the astute little novice called upon to wear the yoke of authority seeks to smooth its chafing asperities. These devices may, perhaps, be summed up under the head of “trying it on”.
One of the simplest and most obvious of these contrivances is the extempore invention of an excuse for not instantly obeying a particular command. A child soon finds out that to say ‘I won’t’ when he is bidden to do something is indiscreet as well as vulgar. He wants to have his own way without resorting to a gross breach of good manners, so he replies insinuatingly, ‘I’s very sorry, but I’s too busy,’ or in some such conciliatory words. This field of invention offers a fine opportunity for the imaginative child. A small boy of three years and nine months on receiving from his nurse the familiar order, “Come here!” at once replied, “I can’t, nurse, I’s looking for a flea,” and pretended to be much engrossed in the momentous business of hunting for this quarry in the blanket of his cot.[[193]] The little trickster is such a lover of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a case like this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told, laughed mischievously as he proffered his excuse. Such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as the uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is hard to be quite as much put out by them.
These excuses often show a fine range of inventive activity. How manifold, for example, are the reasons, more or less fictitious, which a boy when told to make less noise is able to urge in favour of non-compliance. Here, of course, all the great matters of the play-world, the need of getting his ‘gee-gee’ on, of giving his orders to his soldiers, and so forth, come in between the prohibition and compliance, and disobedience in such cases has its excuses. For to the child his play-world, even though in a manner modelled on the pattern of our common world, is apart and sacred; and the conventional restraints as to noise and such like borrowed from the every-day world seem to him to be quite out of place in this free and private domain of his own.
We all know the child’s aptness in ‘easing’ the pressure of commands and prohibitions. If, for example, he is told to keep perfectly quiet because mother or father wants to sleep, he will prettily plead for the reservation of whispering ever so softly. If he is bidden not to ask for things at the table he will resort to sly indirect reminders of what he wants, as when a boy of five and a half years whispered audibly: ‘I hope somebody will offer me some more soup,’ or when a girl of three and a half years, with still greater childish tact, observed on seeing the elder folk eating cake: ‘I not asking’. This last may be compared with a story told by Rousseau of a little girl of six years who, having eaten of all the dishes but one, artfully indicated the fact by pointing in turn to each of the dishes, saying: ‘I have eaten that,’ but carefully passing by the untasted one.[[194]] When more difficult duties come to be enforced and the neophyte in the higher morality is bidden to be considerate for others, and even to sacrifice his own comfort for theirs, he is apt to manifest a good deal of skill in adjusting the counsel of perfection to young weakness. Here is an amusing example. A little boy, Edgar by name, aged five and three-quarter years, was going out to take tea with some little girls. His mother, as is usual on such occasions, primed him with special directions as to behaviour, saying: “Remember to give way to them like father does to me”. To which Edgar, after thinking a brief instant, replied: “Oh, but not all at once. You have to persuade him.”
A like astuteness will show itself in meeting accusation. The various ways in which a child will seek to evade the point in such cases are truly marvellous and show the childish intelligence at its ablest.
Sometimes the dreary talking to, with its well-known deep accusatory tones, its familiar pleadings, ‘How can you be so naughty?’ and the rest is daringly ignored. After keeping up an excellent appearance of listening the little culprit will proceed in the most artless way to talk about something more agreeable. This is trying, but is not the worst. The deepest depth of maternal humiliation is reached when a carefully prepared and solemnly delivered homily is rewarded by a tu quoque in the shape of a correction of something in the delivery which offends the child’s sense of propriety. This befel one mother who, after talking seriously to her little boy about some fault, was met with this remark: “Mamma, when you talk you don’t move your upper jaw”.