twenty-one months, showed all the signs of fear when his nurse carried him on her arm close to the sea.[1] 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 behavior 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 toward 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 toward 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 toward 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, fifteen months 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."Le Roman d'un Enfant.
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 recognized the sea. But such recognition may have meant merely the objective realization 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
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 131.
