Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/363

Rh One can not 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 are in this case rather treacherous evidence to build upon. 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 outlook. It is not remembered, too, that although 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 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. Prof. Barnes tells us that a Californian child's belief in the supernatural takes on a happy tone, directing