Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/119

Rh various ways in which a child will seek to evade the point in such cases are truly marvelous, and show the childish intelligence at its ablest.

Sometimes the dreary "talking to," with its well-known deep accusatory tone, its familiar pleadings, "How can you be so naughty?" and the rest, is daringly ignored. After keeping up an excellent appearance of listening, the small culprit proceeds 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 befell 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."

It is, of course, difficult to say how far a child's interruptions, and what look like turnings of the conversation when receiving rebuke, are the result of deliberate plotting. We know it is hard to hold the young thoughts long on any subject, and the homily makes a heavy demand in this respect, and its theme is apt to seem dull to a child's lively brain. The thoughts will be sure to wander then, and the rude interruptions and digressions may, after all, be but the natural play of the young mind. I fear, however, that design often has a hand here. The first digression to which the weak disciplinarian succumbed may have been the result of a spontaneous movement of child-thought; but its success enables the observant child to try it on a second time with artful aim.

In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, the small wits are busy discovering palliatives and exculpations. Here we have the many ruses, often crude enough, by which the little culprit tries to shake off moral responsibility, to deny the authorship of the action found fault with. The blame is put on anybody or anything. When he breaks something, say a cup, and is scolded, he saves himself by saying it was because the cup wasn't made strong enough, or because the maid put it too near the edge of the table. There are clear indications of fatalistic thought in these childish disclaimers. Things were so conditioned that he could not help doing what he did. This fatalism betrays itself in the childish ruses already referred to by which the ego tries to screen itself shabbily by throwing responsibility on to the bodily agents. This device is sometimes hit upon very early. A wee child of two, when told not to cry, gasped out, "Elsie cry—not Elsie cry—tears cry—naughty tears." This, it must be allowed, is more plausible than C's lame attempt to put off responsibility on his hands; for our tears are in a sense apart from us, and in the first years are wholly beyond control.