Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/670

654 of an injured self. This reflective element is not yet moral; the sense of injury may turn by and by into lasting hatred. Yet it holds within itself possibilities of something higher. But of this more when we come to envisage the child in his relation to authority.

The same predominance of self, the same kinship with the unsocial brute which shows itself in these germinal animosities, is said to reappear in the insensibility or unfeelingness of children. The commonest charge against children from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas! from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.

That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone is, I suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some irrelevant circumstances connected with the affliction which is worse than the absorption in play through its tantalizing want of any genuine feeling. Brothers and sisters may be ill; but if the vigorous little player is affected at all, it is only through loss of companions, if this is not more than made up for by certain advantages of the solitary situation. If the mother is ill, the situation is interesting merely as supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half an hour in his mother's sickroom, coolly informed his nurse: "I have had a very nice time; mamma's ill!" The order of the two statements is significant of the child's mental attitude toward others' sufferings. If his faithful nurse has her face bandaged, his interest in her torments does not go beyond a remark on the "funniness" of her new appearance.

When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling is still more remarkable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death. While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved inmate the child preserves his serenity, being affected at most by a feeling of awe before a great mystery. Even the sight of the dead body does not always excite grief. Mrs. Burnett, in her interesting reminiscences of childhood, has an excellent account of the feelings of a sensitive and refined child when first brought face to face with death. In one case she was taken with fearsome longing to touch the dead body so as to know what "as cold as death" meant; in another, that of a pretty girl of three with golden-brown eyes and neat, small brown curls, she was impressed by the loveliness of the whole scene, the nursery bedroom being hung with white and adorned with white flowers. In neither case was she sorry, and could not