Fear of Visible Things
Fears excited by visual impressions come later than those excited by sounds. The reason of this seems pretty obvious. Visual sensations do not produce the strong effect of nervous shock which auditory ones produce. Let a person compare the violent and profound jar which he experiences on suddenly hearing a loud sound, with the slight surface-agitation produced by the sudden movement of an object across the field of vision. The latter has less of the effect of nervous jar and more of the characteristics of fear proper, that is, apprehension of evil. We should accordingly expect that eye-fears would only begin to show themselves in the child after experience had begun its educative work.137
At the outset it is well, as in the case of the ear-fears, to keep before us the distinction between a mere dislike to a sensation and a true reaction of fear. We shall find that children’s quasi-æsthetic dislikes to certain colours may readily simulate the appearance of fears.
Among the earliest manifestations of fear excited by visual impressions we have those called forth by the presentation of something new and strange, especially when it involves a rupture of customary arrangements. Although children love and delight in what is new, their disposition to fear is apt to give to new and strange objects a disquieting, if not distinctly alarming character. This apprehension shows itself as soon as a child has begun to be used or accustomed to a particular state of things.
Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the customary, we have that of change of place. At first the infant betrays no sign of disturbance on being carried into a new room. But when once it has grown accustomed to a certain room it will feel a new one to be strange, and eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. This sense of strangeness in place sometimes appears very early. The little girl M., on being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery, “looked all round and then burst out crying”. This feeling of uneasiness may linger late. A boy retained up to the age of three years eight months the fear of being left alone in strange hotels or lodgings. Yet entrance on a new abode does not by any means always excite this reaction. A child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look of things. Thus one boy on being taken at the age of fifteen months to a fresh house and given a small plain room looked round and laughed at the odd carpet. Children even of the same age appear in such circumstances to vary greatly with respect to the relative strength of the impulses of fear and curiosity.
How different children’s mental attitude may be towards the new and unfamiliar is illustrated by some notes on a boy sent me by his mother. This child, “though hardly ever afraid of strange people or places, was very much frightened as a baby of familiar things seen after an interval”. Thus “at ten months he was excessively frightened on returning to his nursery after a month’s absence. On this occasion he screamed violently if his nurse left his side for a moment for some hours after he got home, whereas he had not in the least objected to being installed in a strange nursery.” The mother adds that “at thirteen months, his memory having grown stronger, he was very much pleased at coming to his home after being away a fortnight”. This case looks puzzling enough at first, and seems to contradict the laws of infant psychology. Perhaps the child’s partial recognition was accompanied by a sense of the uncanny, like that which we experience when a place seems familiar to us though we have no clear recollection of having seen it before.
What applies to places applies also to persons: a sudden change of customary human surroundings by the arrival of a stranger on the scene is apt to trouble the child.
At first all faces seem alike for the child. Later on unfamiliar faces excite something like a grave inquisitorial scrutiny. Yet, for the first three months, there is no distinct manifestation of a fear of strangers. It is only later, when attachment to human belongings has been developed, that the approach of a stranger, especially if accompanied by a proposal to take the child, calls forth clear signs of displeasure and the shrinking away of fear. Preyer gives the sixth and seventh months as the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face. In one set of notes sent me it was remarked that a child of four and a half months would cry on being nursed by a stranger. To be nursed by a stranger, however, is to have the whole baby-world revolutionised; little wonder then that it should bring the feeling of strangeness and homelessness.
Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children being decidedly more sociable towards strangers than others. It would be curious to compare the age at which children begin to take kindly to them. Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity; but it is probable that the transition occurs at very different dates in the case of different children.138
It is worth noting that the little boy to whom I referred just now displayed the same signs of uneasiness at seeing old friends, after an interval, as at returning to old scenes. When eight months old, “he moaned in a curious way when his nurse (of whom he was very fond) came home after a fortnight’s holiday”. Here, however, the signs of fear seem to be less pronounced than in the case of returning to the old room. It would be difficult to give the right name to this curious moan.
Partial alteration of the surroundings frequently brings about a measure of this same mental uneasiness. Preyer’s boy when one year and five months old was much disturbed at seeing his mother in a black dress. Children seem to have a special dislike to black apparel. George Sand describes her fear at having to put on black stockings when her father died. Yet any change of colour in dress will disturb a child. C., when an infant, was distressed to tears at the spectacle of a new colour and pattern on his mother’s dress. This dislike to any change of dress as such is borne out by other observations. A child manifested between the age of about seven months and of two and a half years the most marked repugnance to new clothes, so that the authorities found it very difficult to get them on. It is presumable that the donning of new apparel disturbed too rudely the child’s sense of his proper self.
In certain cases the introduction of new natural objects of great extent and impressiveness will produce a similar effect of childish anxiety, as though they made too violent a change in the surroundings. One of the best illustrations of this obtainable from the life of an average well-to-do child is the impression produced by a first visit to the sea. Preyer’s boy at the age of twenty-one months showed all the signs of fear when his nurse carried him on her arm close to the sea.139 The boy C. on being first taken near the sea at the age of two was disturbed by its noise. While, however, I have a number of well-authenticated cases of such an instinctive repugnance to, and something like dread of the sea, I find that there is by no means uniformity in children’s behaviour in this particular. A little boy who first saw the sea at the age of thirteen months exhibited signs not of fear but of wondering delight, prettily stretching out his tiny hands towards it as if wanting to go to it. Another child who also first saw the sea at the age of thirteen months began to crawl towards the waves. And yet another boy at the age of twenty-one months on first seeing the sea spread his arms as if to embrace it.
These observations show that the strange big thing affects children very differently. C. had a particular dislike to noises, which was, I think, early strengthened by finding out that his father had the same prejudice. Hence perhaps his hostile attitude towards the sea.
Probably, too, imaginative children, whose minds take in something of the bigness of the sea, will be more disposed to this variety of fear. A mother writes me that her elder child, an imaginative girl, has not even now at the age of six got over her fear of going into the sea, whereas her sister, one and a quarter years younger, and not of an imaginative temperament, is perfectly fearless. She adds that it is the bigness of the sea which evidently impresses the imagination of the elder.
Imaginative children, too, are apt to give life and purpose to the big moving noisy thing. This is illustrated in M. Pierre Loti’s graphic account of his first childish impressions of the sea, seen one evening in the twilight. “It was of a dark, almost black green: it seemed restless, treacherous, ready to swallow: it was stirring and swaying everywhere at the same time, with the look of sinister wickedness.”140
There seems enough in the vast waste of unresting waters to excite the imagination of a child to awe and terror. Hence it is needless to follow M. Loti in his speculations as to an inherited fear of the sea. He seems to base this supposition on the fact that at this first view he distinctly recognised the sea. But such recognition may have meant merely the objective realisation of what had no doubt been before pretty fully described by his mother and aunt, and imaginatively pictured by himself.
The opposite attitude, that of the thoroughly unimaginative child, in presence of the sea is well illustrated by the story of a little girl aged two, who, on being first taken to see the watery wonder, exclaimed, “Oh, mamma, look at the soapy water”. The awful mystery of all the stretch of ever-moving water was invisible to this child, being hidden behind the familiar detail of the ‘soapy’ edge.
There is probably nothing in the natural world which makes on the childish imagination quite so awful an impression as the watery Leviathan. Perhaps the fear which one of my correspondents tells me was excited in her when a child by the sudden appearance of a mountain may be akin to this dread of the sea.
We may now pass to another group of fear-excitants, the appearance of certain strange forms and movements of objects.
The close connexion between æsthetic dislike and fear is seen in the well-marked recoilings of children from odd uncanny-looking dolls. The girl M., when just over six months old, was frightened at a Japanese doll so that it had to be put in another room. Another child when thirteen months old was terrified at the sight of an ugly doll. The said doll is described as black with woolly head, startled eyes, and red lips. Such an ogre might well call up a tremor in the bravest of children. In another case, that of a little boy of two years and two months, the broken face of a doll proved to be highly disconcerting. The mother describes the effect as mixed of fear, distress, and intellectual wonder. Nor did his anxiety depart when some hours later the doll, after sleeping in his mother’s room, reappeared with a new face.
In such cases, it seems plain, it is the ugly transformation of something specially familiar and agreeable which excites the feeling of nervous apprehension. Making grimaces, that is the spoiling of the typical familiar face, may, it is said, disturb a child even at the early age of two months.141 It is much the same when the child M., at the age of thirteen months three weeks, was frightened and howled when a lady looked at her close with blue spectacles, though she was quite used to ordinary glasses. Such transformations of the homely and assuring face are, moreover, not only ugly but bewildering to the child, and where all is mysterious and uncanny the child is apt to fear. Whether “inherited associations” involving a dim recognition of the meaning of these distortions play any part here I do not feel at all certain.
Children, like animals, will sometimes show fear at the sight of what seems to us a quite harmless object. A shying horse is a puzzle to his rider: his terrors are so unpredictable. Similarly in the case of a timid child almost anything unfamiliar and out of the way, whether in the colour, the form, or the movement of an object, may provoke a measure of anxiety. Thus a little girl, aged one year and ten months, showed signs of fear during a drive at a row of grey ash trees placed along the road. This was just the kind of thing that a horse might shy at.
As with animals, so with children, any seemingly uncaused movement is apt to excite a feeling of alarm. Just as a dog will run away from a leaf whirled about by the wind, so children are apt to be terrified by the strange and quite irregular behaviour of a feather as it glides along the floor or lifts itself into the air. A little girl of three, standing by the bedside of her mother (who was ill at the time), was so frightened at the sight of a feather, which she accidentally pulled out of the eiderdown quilt, floating in the air that she would not approach the bed for days afterwards.142
In these cases we may suppose that we have to do with a germ of superstitious fear, which seems commonly to have its starting point in the appearance of something exceptional and uncanny, that is to say, unintelligible, and so smacking of the supernatural. The fear of feathers as uncanny objects plays, I am told, a considerable part in the superstitions of folk-lore. Such apparently self-caused movements, so suggestive of life, might easily give rise to a vague sense of a mysterious presence or power possessing the object, and so lead to a crude form of a belief in supernatural agents.
In other cases of unexpected and mysterious movement the fear is slightly different. A little boy when one year and eleven months old was frightened when in a lady’s house by a toy elephant which shook its head. The same child, writes his mother, “at one year seven months was very much scared by a toy cow which mooed realistically when its head was moved. This cow was subsequently given to him, at about two years and three months. He was then still afraid of it, but became reconciled soon after, first allowing others to make it moo if he was at a safe distance, and at last making it moo himself.”
There may have been a germ of the fear of animals here: but I suspect that it was mainly a feeling of uneasiness at the signs of life (movement and sound) appearing when they are not expected, and have an uncanny aspect. The close simulation of a living thing by what is known to be not alive is disturbing to the child as to the adult. He will make his toys alive by his own fancy, yet resent their taking on the full semblance of reality. In this sense he is a born idealist and not a realist. More careful observations on this curious group of child-fears are to be desired.
The fear of shadows is closely related to that of moving toys. They are semblances, though horribly distorted semblances, and they are apt to move with an awful rapidity. The unearthly mounting shadows which accompany the child as he climbs the staircase at night have been instanced by writers as one of childhood’s freezing horrors. Mr. Stevenson writes:—
Now my little heart goes beating like a drum,
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;
And all round the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair;
The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed—
All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.
I have noticed a young cat—the same that showed such terror at the playing of the piano—watch its own shadow rising on the wall, and, as I thought, with a look of apprehension.