The infant of literature "wails" and wails feebly, with the invariability of a thing unproved and taken for granted.Nothing, nevertheless, could be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child of man catches his first breath.It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and brief, rather deep than shrill in tone.With all deference to old moralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts up his new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and with much the same tone as some of the duck kind there.He does not weep for some months to come.His outcry soon becomes the human cry that is better known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy.And if the infant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too young to be gay.A child's mirth, when at last it begins, is his first secret; you understand little of it.The first smile (for the convulsive movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile) is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable.It is accompanied by a single sound--a sound that would be a monosyllable if it were articulate--which is the utterance, though hardly the communication, of a private jollity.
That and that alone is the real beginning of human laughter.
From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for the first time, and as it were flickeringly, the child's smile begins to grow definite and, gradually, more frequent.By very slow degrees the secrecy passes away, and the dryness becomes more genial.The child now smiles more openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing creature of so much prose and verse.His laughter takes a long time to form.The monosyllable grows louder, and then comes to be repeated with little catches of the breath.The humour upon which he learns to laugh is that of something which approaches him quickly and then withdraws.This is the first intelligible jest of jesting man.
An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark the features of faces near him.Whether because of the greater conspicuousness of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, he addresses his looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to the heads, not the faces, of his friends.These are the ways of all infants, various in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the same things.There are turns in a kitten's play--arched leapings and sidelong jumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances--which the sacred kittens of Egypt used in their time.But not more alike are these repetitions than the impulses of all young children learning to laugh.
In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much of his effect upon the world; not much of the effect of the world upon him.Yet he is compelled to endure the reflex results, at least, of all that pleases, distresses, or oppresses the world.
