Children's Ways E-Book

James Sully

• Herausgeber: Publisher s11838
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Children's Ways written by James Sully who was an English psychologist. This book was published in 1897. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

Children's Ways

By

James Sully

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

PART I. AT PLAY.

CHAPTER I. THE REALM OF FANCY.

CHAPTER II. THE ENCHANTMENT OF PLAY.

PART II.AT WORK.

CHAPTER III. ATTACKING OUR LANGUAGE.

CHAPTER IV. THE SERIOUS SEARCHER.

CHAPTER V. FIRST THOUGHTS: (a) THE NATURAL WORLD.

CHAPTER VI. FIRST THOUGHTS: (b) SELF AND OTHER MYSTERIES.

CHAPTER VII. THE BATTLE WITH FEARS: (a) THE ONSLAUGHT.

CHAPTER VIII. THE BATTLE WITH FEARS (Continued).

CHAPTER IX. GOOD AND BAD IN THE MAKING.

CHAPTER X. REBEL AND SUBJECT.

CHAPTER XI. AT THE GATE OF THE TEMPLE.

CHAPTER XII. FIRST PENCILLINGS.

PREFACE.

The kindly welcome accorded by the press to my volume Studies of Childhood has suggested to me that there was much in it which might be made attractive to a wider class of readers than that addressed in a psychological work. I have, accordingly, prepared the following selections, cutting out abstruse discussions, dropping as far as possible technical language, and adapting the style to the requirements of the general reader. In order to shorten the work the last two chapters—"Extracts from a Father's Diary" and "George Sand's Childhood"—have been omitted. The order of treatment has been altered somewhat, and a number of stories has been added. I hope that the result may succeed in recommending what has long been to myself one of the most delightful of subjects to many who would not be disposed to read a larger and more difficult work, and to draw on a few of these, at least, to a closer and more serious inspection of it.

PART I. AT PLAY.

CHAPTER I. THE REALM OF FANCY.

One of the few things we seemed to be certain of with respect to child-nature was that it is fancy-full. Childhood, we all know, is the age for dreaming; for living a life of happy make-believe. Even here, however, we want more accurate observation. For one thing, the play of infantile imagination is probably much less uniform than is supposed. There seem to be very serious children who rarely, if ever, indulge in a wild fancy. Mr. Ruskin has recently told us that when a child he was incapable of acting a part or telling a tale, that he never knew a child "whose thirst for visible fact was at once so eager and so methodic".

One may, nevertheless, safely say that a large majority of the little people are, for a time at least, fancy-bound. A child that did not want to play and cared nothing for the marvels of storyland would surely be regarded as queer and not just what a child ought to be.

Supposing that this is the correct view, there still remains the question whether children's imagination always plays in the same fashion. Now science is beginning to bring to light differences of childish fancy. For one thing it suggests that children have their favourite type of mental imagery, that one child's fancy may habitually move in a coloured world, another in a world of sounds, and so forth. The fascination of Robinson Crusoe to many a boy lies in the wealth of images of movement and adventure which it supplies.

With this difference in the material with which a child's fancy plays, there are other differences which turn on his temperament and predominant feelings. Hence, the familiar fact that in some children imagination broods by preference on gloomy and alarming objects, whereas in others it selects what is bright and gladsome.

Perhaps I have said enough to justify my plea for new observations and for a reconsideration of hasty theories in the light of these. Nor need we object to a fresh survey of what is perhaps the most delightful side of child-life.

(a) The Transforming Wand.

The play of young fancy meets us in the very domain of the senses: it is active, often bewilderingly active, when the small person seems busily engaged in looking at things and moving among them.

We see this fanciful "reading" of things when a child calls the star an "eye," I suppose because of its brightness and its twinkling movement, or says that a dripping plant is "crying".

This transforming touch of the magic wand of young fancy has something of crude nature-poetry in it. This is abundantly illustrated in what may be called childish metaphors, by which they try to describe what is new and strange. For example, a little boy of nineteen months looking at his mother's spectacles said: "Little windows". Another boy two years and five months, on looking at the hammers of a piano which his mother was playing, called out: "There is owlegie" (diminutive of owl). His eye had instantly caught the similarity between the round felt disc of the hammer divided by a piece of wood, and the owl's face divided by its beak. In like manner another little boy called a small oscillating compass-needle a "bird" probably on the ground of its fluttering movement. Pretty conceits are often resorted to in this effort to get at home with strange objects, as when stars were described by one child as "cinders from God's stove," and butterflies as "pansies flying".

This play of imagination upon the world of sense has a strong vitalising or personifying element. A child is apt to attribute life and sensation to what we serious people regard as lifeless. Thus he gives not only a body but a soul to the wind when it whistles or howls at night. The most unpromising things come in for this warming, life-giving touch of a child's fancy. Thus one little fellow, aged one year eight months, conceived a special fondness for the letter W, addressing it thus: "Dear old boy W". Miss Ingelow tells us that when a child she used to feel sorry for the pebbles in the causeway for having to lie always in one place, and would carry them to another place for a change.

It is hard for us elders to get back to this childish way of looking at things. One may however hazard the guess that there is in it a measure of dreamy illusion. This means that only a part of what is present is seen, the part which makes the new object like the old and familiar one. And so it gets transformed into a semblance of the old one; just as a rock gets transformed for our older eyes into the semblance of a human face.

There is another way in which children's fancy may transmute the objects of sense. Mr. Ruskin tells us that when young he got to connect or "associate" the name "crocodile" so closely with the creature that when he saw it printed it would take on something of the look of the beast's lanky body.

How far, one wonders, does this process of transformation of external objects go in the case of imaginative children? It is not improbable that before the qualities of things and their connections one with another are sufficiently known for them to be interesting in themselves they often acquire interest through the interpretative touch of childish fancy.

There is one new field of investigation which is illustrating in a curious way the wizard influence wielded by childish imagination over the things of sense. It is well known that a certain number of people habitually "colour" the sounds they hear, imagining, for example, the sound of a particular vowel or musical tone to have its characteristic tint, which they are able to describe accurately. This "coloured hearing," as it is called, is always traced back to the dimly recalled age of childhood. Children are now beginning to be tested as to their possession of this trick of fancy. It was found in the case of a number of school-children that nearly 40 per cent. described the tones of certain instruments as coloured. There was, however, no agreement among these children as to the particular tint belonging to a given sound: thus whereas one child mentally "saw" the tone of a fife as pale or bright, another saw it as dark.

I have confined myself here to what I have called the play of imagination, the magical transmuting of things through the sheer liveliness of childish fancy. The degree of transmutation will of course vary with the intensity of the imagination. Sometimes when a child dwells on the fancy it may grow into a momentary illusion. A little girl of four, sitting by the side of her mother in the garden, picked up a small pink worm and said: "Ah! you do look nice; how a thrush would like you!" and thereupon, realising the part of the fortunate thrush, proceeded, to her mother's horror, to eat up the worm quite composedly. The momentary illusion of something nice to eat, here produced by a lively realisation of a part, may arise in other cases from strong feeling, more especially fear, which, as we shall see, has so large a dominion over the young mind.

This witchcraft of the young fancy in veiling and transforming the actual surroundings is a good deal restrained by the practical needs of every-day life and by intercourse with older and graver folk. There are, however, regions of child-life where it knows no check. One of these is child's play, to be spoken of presently: another is the filling up of the blank spaces in the visible world with the products of fancy. We will call these regions on which the young wing of fancy is wont to alight and rest, fancy's resting-places.

Fancy's Resting-places.

Most people, perhaps, can recall from their childhood the pleasure of cloud-gazing. The clouds are such strange-looking things, they change their forms so quickly, they seem to be doing so many things, now slumbering lazily, now rushing wildly on. Cloud-land is safe away from the scrutiny of fingers, so we never can be sure what they would be if we got to them. Some children take fright at their big, strange forms and their weird transformations: but a happy child that loves day-dreaming will spend many delightful hours in fashioning these forms into wondrous and delightful things, such as kings and queens, giants and dwarfs, beautiful castles, armies marching to battle, or driven in flight, pirates sailing over fair isle-dotted seas. There is a delicious satisfaction to young minds in thus finding a habitation for their cherished images. To project them in this way into the visible world, to know that they are located in that spot before the eye, is to "realise" them, in the sense of giving them the fullest possible reality.

Next to the cloud-world come distant parts of the terrestrial scene. The chain of hills, perhaps, faintly visible from the home, has been again and again endowed by a child's fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. At times when they have shown a soft blue, he has made fairy-land of them; at other times when standing out black and fierce-looking against the western sky at eventide, he has half shuddered at them, peopling them with horrid monsters.

Best of all, I think, for this locating of images, are the hidden spaces of the visible world. One child used to wonder what was hidden behind a long stretch of wood which closed in a good part of his horizon. Many a child has had his day-dreams about the country lying beyond the hills on the horizon. One little girl who lived on a cattle-station in Australia used to locate beyond a low range of hills a family of children whom she called her little girls, and about whom she related endless stories.

With timid children this tendency to project images into unseen places becomes a fearful kind of wonder, not altogether unpleasant when confined to a moderate intensity. I remember the look of awe on the face of a small boy whose hand I held as we passed one summer evening a dark wood, and he whispered to me that the wolves lived in that wood.

This impulse of timid children to project their dark fancies into obscure and hidden places often stops short at vague undefinable conjecture. "When (writes a German author) I was a child and we played hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might be something unheard of hidden away behind every bundle of straw, and in the corners." Here we can hardly speak of a housing of images: at such a moment perhaps the little brain has such a rush of weird images that no one grows distinct.

The exact opposite of this is where a child has a very definite image in his mind, and wants to find a home for it in the external world. This wish seems to be particularly active in relation to the images derived from stories. This housing instinct is strong in the case of the poor houseless fairies. One little boy put his fairies in the wall of his bedroom, where, I suppose, he found it convenient to reach them by his prayers. His sister located a fairy in a hole in a smallish stone.

As with the fancies born of fairy-tales, so with the images of humbler human personages known by way of books. Charles Dickens, when a child, had a strong impulse to locate the characters of his stories in the immediate surroundings. He tells us that "every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (Roderic Random, Tom Jones, Gil Blas, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate."

In Storyland.

The reference to stories naturally brings us to another domain of children's imagination: the new world opened up by their story-books, which is all strange and far away from the nursery where they sit and listen, and in which, nevertheless, they manage in a sense to live and make a new home.

How is it, one is disposed to ask, that most children, at any rate, have their imagination laid hold of, and fired to a white heat, by mere words? To watch the small listener in its low chair, with head raised, eyes fixed, and hands clasped, drinking in every word of your story, giving sign by occasional self-cuddling and other spasmodic movements of the almost overpowering delight which fills its breast, is to be face to face with what is a mystery to most "grown-ups". Perhaps we elders, who are apt to think that we have acquired all the knowledge and to forget how much we have lost, will never understand the spell of a story for the lively impressionable brain of a child. One thing, however, is pretty certain: our words have a way of calling up in children's minds very vivid and very real images of things, images quite unlike those which are called up in the minds of most older people. This magic power of a word to summon the corresponding image, has, I suspect, a good deal to do with a child's intense way of realising his stories.

The passionate interest in stories means more than this however. It means that the little brain is wondrously deft at disentangling our rather hard language and reducing the underlying ideas to an intelligible simplicity. A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, "I'm afraid you can't understand it, dear," for which she got rather roughly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: "Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain". The "explaining" is resented because it interrupts the child's own secret art of "making something" out of our words.

And what glorious inner visions the skilful little interpreter often manages to get from these troublesome words of ours. Scene after scene of the dissolving view unfolds itself in definite outline and magical colouring. At each stage the anticipation of the next undiscernible stage is a thrilling mystery. Perhaps no one has given us a better account of the state of dream-like absorption in storyland than Thackeray. In one of his delightful "Roundabout Papers," he thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood: "Hush! I never read quite to the end of my first Scottish Chiefs. I couldn't. I peeped in an alarmed furtive manner at some of the closing pages.... Oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open tarts of budding boyhood! Do I forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page more of my dear Walter Scott—and down came the monitor's dictionary on my head!"

The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist a child's hungry demand for a story? and after you have satisfied his first request, he will ask for more, and if then you are weak enough to say you know no more stories he will catch you by answering: "Tell me the same again".

As a result of the intensity with which a child's imagination seizes on a narrative it tends to become afterwards a record of fact, a true history. That children look at their stories in this way till they get undeceived seems to be shown by the respect which they pay to the details and even to the words. Woe to the unfortunate mother who in repeating one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One such, a friend of mine, when relating "Puss in Boots" inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by a sharp volley of "Noes!"

As the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. It has added to the child's self-created world new territory, in which he may wander and live blissful moments. This permanent occupation of storyland is shown in the child's impulse to bring the figures of story-books into the actual surroundings. It is shown, too, in his fondness for introducing them into his play, of which I shall speak presently.

To this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of fairy and other tales. These at first, and for some time, have in them more of play than of serious art, and so can be touched on here where we are dealing with the play of young fancy.

We see the beginning of such fanciful invention in childish "romancing" which is often started by the sight of some real object. For example, a little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: "Look at that poor ole man, mamma; he has dot (got) a bad leg". Then romancing, as he was now wont to do: "He dot on a very big 'orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. We must make it well." Then after a thoughtful pause: "Mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to I". Later on children of an imaginative turn wax bolder and spin longer stories and create scenes and persons with whom they live in a prolonged companionship. But of this more presently.

Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by a more spontaneous play of creative fancy, children's minds often pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the generous but discriminating old gentleman who brings Christmas presents, as well as the beings fashioned by the more original sort of child for himself, these live on just like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments during the day, bringing into the child's life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, and making in many cases, for a time at least, the most real of all realities.

I am far from saying that all children make a fancy world for themselves in this way. As I said at the beginning of the chapter the differences among children in this respect are great. Yet I think it is safe to say that most children, and especially lonely children who have not a full active life provided for them by companions and opportunities of adventure, do live a good fraction of their life in dreamland.

Where the active life is provided a child is apt to play rather than lose himself passively in fancy dreams. But play, too, is to a large extent a product of the liveliness of the young imagination. We will now glance at it in this light.

CHAPTER II. THE ENCHANTMENT OF PLAY.

Children's "play," as the expression is commonly understood, differs from the sportive movements of fancy considered in the last chapter by its essentially active character. We do not speak of a child playing save when he does something, however slight, by way of expressing or acting out a fancy. This outer expression of fancy in some active form is commonly called by children themselves "pretending" to be or to do something, by older people when looking back on the pretence "making-believe". In order to understand what childish fancy is like, and how it works, we must carefully watch it as it moves among the toys and creates a new play-world.

The Young Pretender.

Child's play is a kind of creation of a make-believe but half-real world. As such, it has its primal source in the impulse to act out and embody in sensible form some interesting idea; in which respect, as we shall see by-and-by, it has a close kinship to what we call art. The image, say of the wood, of the chivalrous highwayman, or what not, holds the child's brain, and everything has to accommodate itself to the mastering force.

Now since play is the acting out of some interesting and exciting fancy, it comes at once into collision with the child's actual surroundings. Here, however, he finds his opportunity. The floor of the room is magically transformed into a prairie, a sea, or other locality, the hidden space under the table becomes a robber's cave, a chair serves as horse, ship, or other vehicle, to suit the exigencies of the particular play.

The passion for play is essentially active; it is the wild longing to act a part; it is thus in a way dramatic. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero becomes another being. And in stepping, so to say, out of his every-day self he has to step out of his every-day world. Hence the transformation of his surroundings by what has been called the "alchemy of imagination". Even a sick child confined to his bed will, as Mr. Stevenson tells us in his pretty child's song, "The Land of Counterpane," make these transformations of his surroundings:—

And sometimes for an hour or soI watched my leaden soldiers go,With different uniforms and drills,Among the bed-clothes through the hills;And sometimes sent my ships in fleets,All up and down among the sheets;Or brought my trees and houses out,And planted cities all about.

The impulse to act a part, which is the very life-breath of play, meets us in a crude form very early. Even an infant will, if there is a cup at hand, seem to go through something like a pretence of drinking. A little boy of about eighteen months who was digging in the garden began suddenly to play at having a bath. He got into the big bucket he was using for digging, took a handful of earth and dribbled it over him, saying, "'Ponge, 'ponge," and then stepped out and asked for "Tow'l, tow'l". Another boy less than two would spend a whole wet afternoon enjoying his make-believe "painting" of the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope.

There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative make-believe children know that they are acting a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a kind of conscious performance, like that of the stage-actor. A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. When absorbed in play the last thing he is thinking of is a spectator. As we know, the intrusion of a grown-up is very apt to mar children's play, by calling them back to the dull world of every-day.

This impulse to get away from his common and tiresome self into a new part will often carry a child rather far. Not only does he want to be a prince, or a fairy, he will even make an attempt to become an animal. He will greatly enjoy going on all fours and making dreadful noises if only he has a play-companion to be frightened; and possibly he does get some way towards feeling like the bloodthirsty lion whom he fancies himself.

It is worth noting that such passing out of one's ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player. A cat or a dog will be quite ready to go through a kind of make-believe game, yet even in its play the cat remains the cat, and the dog the dog.

Such play-like transmutation of the self is sometimes carried over longer periods. A child will play at being something for a whole day. For example, a boy of three and a half years would one day lead the life of a coal-heaver, another day that of a soldier, and so forth, and was rather particular in expecting his mother to remember which of his favourite characters he was adopting on this or that day.

In a good deal of this play-action there is scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child of vigorous fancy plays out his part with imaginary surroundings. Children in their second year will act out a scene purely by means of pantomimic movements. Thus one little fellow not quite two years old would, when taken out in his perambulator, amuse himself by putting out his hand and pretending to catch "little micies" (mice), which make-believe little rodents he proceeded to cuddle and to stroke, winding up his play by throwing them away, or handing them over to his mother. In like manner he would pretend to feed chickens, taking imaginary food with one hand out of the other, and scattering it with an accompaniment of "Chuck! chuck! chuck!"