One of the most interesting phases of a child's activity is its groping after what we call art. Although a decided bent towards some special form of our art may be rare among children, most of them betray some rudiment of a feeling for beauty and of an impulse to produce it. It will be well to begin by glancing at the responses of children to the various presentations of beauty in nature and art, and then to examine their attempts at artistic production.

The Greeting of Beauty.

In looking in a young child for responses to the beauty of things, we must not, of course, expect a clear appreciation of its several phases. Here our aim will be to collect evidences of a natural feeling which may afterwards under favourable conditions grow into a discerning taste.

Even in infancy we may detect in the movements of the arms, the admiring cooing sounds, this greeting of nature's beauty as of something kindred. In the home interior it is commonly some bit of bright light, especially when it is in movement, which first charms the eye of the novice; the dancing fire-flame, for example, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded frame, the great globe of the lamp just created. In some cases it is a patch of bright colour or a gay pattern on the mother's dress which calls forth a full vocal welcome in the shape of baby "talking". In the out-of-door scene, too, it is the glitter of the running water, or a meadow all white with daisies, which captivates the glance. Light, the symbol of life's joy, seems to be the first language in which the spirit of beauty speaks to a child.

A feeling for the charm of colour comes distinctly later. The first pleasure from coloured toys and pictures is hardly distinguishable from the welcome of the glad light, the delight in mere brightness. This applies pretty manifestly to the strongly illumined rose-red curtain which Professor Preyer's boy greeted with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days. Later on, too, when it is possible to test a child's feeling for colour, it has been found that a decided preference is shown for the bright or "luminous" tints, viz., red and yellow. An American observer, Miss Shinn, tells us that her niece in her twenty-eighth month had a special fondness for the daffodils—the bright tints of which allured, as we know, an older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was banished. Among the other coloured objects which captivated the eye of this little girl were a patch of white cherry blossom, and a red sun-set sky. Such observations might easily be multiplied. Whiteness, it is to be noted, comes, as we might expect, with the brighter tones of the other colours among the first favourites.

At what age a child begins to appreciate the value of colour as colour, to like blue or red for its own sake and apart from its brightness, it is hard to say. The experiments made so far are not conclusive, though they seem to show that taste for colour does not always develop along the same lines. Thus, according to the observer of one child, blue is one of the first to be preferred, though this is said not to be true of other children. Later on, I believe, a child is wont to have his favourite colour, and to be ready to defend it against the preferences of others.

Liking for a single colour is a considerably smaller display of mind than an appreciation of the relation of two colours. Many adults, it is said, hardly have a rudiment of this feeling, pairing the most fiercely antagonistic tints. Common observation shows that most children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer juxtapositions of colours which are strongly opposed, such as blue and red or blue and yellow. It would be interesting to know whether there is any general preference as between these two combinations. It is, of course, a long step from this recognition of the contrast and mutual emphasising of colour to that of its quiet harmonious combinations.

That little children have their likings in the matter of form is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. One of the first out-goings of admiration towards form is the child's praise of "tiny" things. The common liking of children for small natural forms, e.g., those of the lesser birds, insects, and sea-shells, is well known. How they love to "pile up" the endearing epithets "wee," "tiny" (or "teeny"), and the rest! Here, as in so many of these childish admirations, we have to do not with a purely Æsthetic perception. The feeling for the tiny things probably has in it the warmth of a young personal sympathy.

If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, such as symmetry and proportion, we encounter a difficulty. A child may acquire while quite young and before any methodical education commences a certain feeling for regular form. But can we be sure that this is the result of his own observations? We have to remember that his daily life, where the home is orderly, helps to impress on him regularity of form. In the laying of the cloth on the dinner-table, for example, he sees the regular division of space enforced as a law. Every time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress, he has an object-lesson in symmetrical arrangement. And so these features take on a kind of moral rightness before they are judged of as pleasing to the eye and as beautiful. The feeling for proportion, as, for example, between the height of a horse and that of a house, is, as children's drawings show us, in general very defective.

A susceptibility to the pleasures of light, colour, and certain simple aspects of form, may be said to supply the basis of a crude perception of beauty. A quite small child is capable of acquiring a real admiration for a beautiful lady, in the appreciation of which brightness, colour, grace of movement, the splendour of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the eye is often reinforced by a sweet and winsome quality of voice. Such an admiration is not of course a pure appreciation of beauty: awe, some feeling for the social dignity of dress, perhaps a longing to be embraced by the charmer, may all enter into it; yet delight in the look of a thing for its own sake is surely the core of the feeling.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure Æsthetic enjoyment in these early days is the love of flowers. The wee round wonders with their mystery of velvety colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye. I believe most children who live among flowers and have access to them acquire something of this sentiment, a sentiment in which admiration for beautiful things combines with a kind of dumb childish sympathy. No doubt there are marked differences among children here. There are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the keen sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers. Others again care for them mainly as a means of personal adornment, though I am disposed to think that this partially interested fondness is less common with children than with many adults.

In much of this first crude utterance of the Æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the manifestations of taste among uncivilised races. Admiration for brilliant colours, for moving things, such as feathers, is common to the two. Yet a child coming under the humanising influences of culture soon gets far away from the level of the savage. Perhaps his almost perfectly spontaneous love of tiny flowers is already a considerable advance on his so-called prototype.

Many adults assume that a child can look at a landscape as they look at it, taking in the whole picturesque effect. When he is taken to Switzerland and shown a fine "view," his eye, so far from seizing the whole, will provokingly pounce on some unimportant detail of the scene and give undivided attention to this, That the eye of a child of ten or less can enjoy the reddening of a snow-peak, or the emergence of a bright green alp from the mountain mist, I fully believe. But it is quite another thing to expect him to appreciate great extent of view and all the unnameable relations of form, of light and shade, and of colour, which compose a landscape.

First Peep into the Art-world.

While Nature is thus speaking to a child through her light, her colour and her various forms, human art makes appeal also. In a cultured home a child finds himself at the precincts of the art-temple, and feels there are wondrous delights within if he can only get there.

One of the earliest of these appeals is to the ear. A child outside the temple of art hears its music before he sees its veiled beauties. I have had occasion to show how sadly new sounds may perturb the spirit of an infant. Yet these same waves of sound, which break upon and shake the young nerves, give them, too, their most delightful thrill. Nowhere in adult experience do pleasure and sadness lie so near one another as in music, and a child's contrasting responses, as he now shrinks away with trouble in his eyes, now gratefully reaches forth and falls into joyous sympathetic movement, are a striking illustration of this proximity.

In the case of many happy children the interest in the sounds of things, e.g., the gurgle of running water, the soughing of the trees, is a large one. An approach to Æsthetic pleasure is seen in the responses to rhythmic series of sounds. Rhythm, it has been well said, is a universal law of life: all the activities of the organism have their regular changes, their periodic rise and fall. The rhythm of a simple tune plays favourably on a child's ear, enhancing life according to this great law. His ear, his brain, his muscles take on a new joyous activity, and the tide of life rises higher. Nursery rhymes, which, it has recently been suggested, should be banished, bring something of this joy of ordered movement, and help to form the rhythmic ear.

With this feeling for rhythm there soon appears a discerning feeling for quality of tone. First of all, I suspect, comes the appreciation of moderation and smoothness of sound; it is the violent sounds which mostly offend the young ear. A child's preference for the mother's singing is, perhaps, a half reminiscence of the soft-low tones of the lullaby. Purity or sweetness of tone, little by little, makes itself felt, and a child takes dislikes to certain voices as wanting in this agreeable quality. Much later, in the case of all but gifted children, do the mysteries of harmony begin to take on definite form and meaning.

The arts which give to the eye semblances or representations of objects appeal to a child much more through his knowledge of things. The enjoyment of a picture means the understanding of it as a picture, and this requires a process of self-education. A child begins to make acquaintance with the images of things when set before a mirror. Here he can inspect what he sees, say the reflection of the face of his mother or nurse, and compare it at once with the original.

With pictures there is no such opportunity of directly comparing with the original, and children have to find out as best they may what the drawings in their picture-books mean.

A dim discernment of what a drawing represents may appear early. A little boy was observed to talk to pictures at the end of the eighth month. A girl of forty-two weeks showed the same excitement at the sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that of a real cat. Another child, a boy, recognised pictures of animals by spontaneously naming them "bow-wow," etc., at the age of ten months.

The early recognition of pictured objects, of which certain animals have a measure, is often strikingly discerning. A child a little more than a year old has been known to pick out her father's face in a group of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter.

Another curious point in this early deciphering of drawings and photographs is that a child seems indifferent to the position of the picture, holding it as readily inverted as in its proper position. One little girl of three and a half "does not mind (writes her father) whether she looks at a picture the right way up or the wrong; she points out what you ask for, eyes, feet, hands, tail, etc., about equally well whichever way up the picture is, and never asks to have it put right that she may see it better". A like indifference to the position of a picture, and of a letter, has been observed among backward races.

Surprising as this early recognition of pictures undoubtedly is, it is a question whether it necessarily implies any idea of the true nature of them, as being merely semblances or representations of things.

That children do not, at first, clearly seize the meaning of pictures is seen in the familiar fact that they will touch them just as they touch shadows, and otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities. One little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a drawing and pretended to feed some pictorial dogs. This may have been half play. But here is a more convincing example. A girl was moved to pity by a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to lift the branch that lay across the animal. With less intelligent children traces of this tendency to take pictorial representation for reality may appear as late as four. One American boy having looked at a picture of people going to church in the snow, and finding on the next day that the figures in the drawing were exactly in the same position, seemed perplexed, and remarked naÏvely: "Why, Mrs. C., these people haven't got there yet, have they?"

It is not surprising after this to learn that some children are slow in seizing the representative character of acting. If, for example, a father at Christmas-tide disguises himself as Santa Claus, his child will only too readily take him to be what he represents himself to be, and this when the disguise, especially in the matter of the voice, leaves much to be desired. Children, like uneducated adults, have been known to take a spectacle on the stage of a theatre too seriously. Yet their own play, which, though serious at the moment, is known afterwards to be "pretending," probably renders many of them particularly quick in interpreting dramatic play.

This tendency to take art-representations for realities reappears even in the mental attitude of a child towards his stories. A verbal narrative has of course in itself nothing similar to the scenes and events of which it tells. In this it differs from the semblance of the picture and of the dramatic spectacle. Yet a story, just because it uses our common forms of language and takes the guise of a narrative about people who lived at such a time and place, may well appear to a child's mind to tell of real events. At any rate we know that he is wont to believe tenaciously in the truth of his stories.

Careful observations of these first movements of the child's mind towards art will illustrate the variable directions of his taste. The preferences of a boy of four in the matter of picture-books tell us where his special interests lie, what things he finds pretty, and may supply a hint as to how much of a genuine Æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on.

It is curious to note children's first manifestations of a sense of the pathetic and the comic as represented in art. Here marked differences present themselves. Those of a more serious turn are apt to show a curious preference for the graver aspects of things. They like stories, for example, with a certain amount of tension and even of thrill in them. There are others who disclose a special susceptibility to the more simple effects of pathos. There are sentimental children, as there are sentimental adults, who seem never happier than when the tears are ready to start. It may be suspected from the number of descriptions of early deaths in literature for the young that some at least must take pleasure in this kind of description. A child's strong feeling of attachment to animals is apt at a certain age to give to stories about the hardships of horses and the like something of an overpowering sadness.

The sense of the comic in children is a curious subject to which justice has not yet been done. The tendency to judge them by our grown-up standards shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will follow the directions of our own. Their fun is, I suspect, of a very elemental character. They are apt to be tickled by the spectacle of some upsetting of the proprieties, some confusion of the established distinctions of rank. Dress, as we have seen, has an enormous symbolic value for their mind, and any incongruity here is apt to be specially laughter-provoking. One child between three and four was convulsed at the sight of his baby bib fastened round the neck of his bearded sire. There is, too, a considerable element of rowdiness in children's sense of the comical, as may be seen by the enduring popularity of the spectacle of Punch's successful misdemeanours and bravings of the legal authority. The sense of humour which is finely percipient and half reflective is far from their level, as indeed it is from that of the average adult. Hence the fact familiar to parents that stories which treat of child-life with the finer kind of humour may utterly fail to tickle a young reader.

First Ventures in Creation.

It is sometimes said that children are artists in embryo, that in their play and throughout their activity they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. It seems worth while to examine the saying.

There is no doubt that in much of the first spontaneous activity there is a trace of Æsthetic feeling and the impulse to produce something pretty. Yet the feeling is in most children weak and vacillating, and is wont to be mixed with other and less noble ones.

One of the lower and mixed forms of artistic activity, in the case of the child and of the race alike, is personal adornment. The impulse to study appearances appears to reach far down in animal life. Two impulses seem to be at work here: to frighten or overawe others, as seen in the raising of feathers and hair so as to increase size, and to attract, which possibly underlies the habit of trimming feathers and fur among birds and quadrupeds. The same two impulses are said to lie at the root of the elaborate art of personal adornment developed by savages.

In the case of children brought up in the ways of civilisation where personal cleanliness and adornment are peremptorily enforced in the face of many a tearful protest, it seems at first vain to look for the play of instinctive tendencies. Yet I think if we observe closely we shall detect traces of a spontaneous impulse towards self-adornment. Children, like uncultured adults, are wont to prize a bit of finery in the shape of a string of beads or of daisies for the neck, a feather for the hat, and so forth. Imitation of the ways of their elders doubtless plays a part here, but it is aided by an instinct for adornment. Little girls perhaps represent the attractive function of adornment: they like to be thought pretty. Little boys when decking themselves out with tall hat and monstrously big clothes seem to be trying to put on an alarming aspect.

Since children are left so little free to deck themselves, it is of course hard to study the development of Æsthetic taste in this domain of their activity. Yet their quaint attempts to improve their appearance throw an interesting side-light on their Æsthetic preferences. While in general they have in their hearts almost as much love of glitter, of gaudy colour, as uncivilised adults, they betray striking differences of feeling; some developing, for example, a bent towards modest neatness and refinement, and this, it may be, in direct opposition to the whole trend of home influence.

Another domain of childish activity which is akin to art is the manifestation of grace. A good deal of the charm of movement, of gesture, of intonation, in a young child may be unconscious, and as much a result of happy physical conditions as the pretty gambols of a kitten. Yet one may commonly detect in graceful children the rudiment of an Æsthetic feeling for what is nice, and also of the instinct to please. There is, indeed, in these first actions, such as the kissing of the hand to other children in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable of those uncivilised races which we dishonour by calling them savages. This feeling for pleasing effect in bodily carriage and movement, in the use of speech and gesture, is no doubt far from being a pure art-activity. Traces of self-consciousness, of vanity, are often discernible in it; yet at least it attests the existence of a certain appreciation of what is beautiful, and of something akin to the creative impulse of the artist.

A true art-impulse is characterised by a pure love of doing something which, either in itself as an action or in the material result which it produces, is beautiful. Into this there enters, at the moment at least, no consciousness of self. Now there is one field of children's activity which, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, is marked by just this absorption of thought in action for its own sake, and that is play.

To say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. Like art it is inspired and sustained by a pure love of producing. Like art, too, on its representative side, play aims at producing an imitation or semblance of something. The semblance may be plastic, residing in the material product of the action, as in making things such as castles out of cardboard or sand; or it may be dramatic and reside in the action itself, as in much of the childish play already described.

The imitative impulse prompting to the production of the semblance of something appears very early in child-life. A good deal of the imitation which occurs in the second half year is the taking on, under the lead of another's example, of actions which are more or less useful. This applies, for example, to such actions as waving the hand in sign of farewell, and of course to vocal imitation of others' verbal sounds. At an early date we find, further, a perfectly useless kind of imitation which is more akin to that of art. A quite young child will, for example, pretend to do something, as to take an empty cup and carry out the semblance of drinking. The imitation of the sounds and movements of animals, which comes early too, may be said to be imitative in the more artistic sense, inasmuch as it has no aim beyond that of mimetic representation.

Later on, towards the third year, this simple type of imitative action grows more complex, so that a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. A child, for example, occupies himself with pretending to be an organ-grinder's monkey, going duly and in order through the action of jumping down from his seat, and taking off his cap by way of begging for the stranger's contribution. Here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. This play-like performance, again, gradually divides itself into a more serious kind of action, analogous to serious drama, and into a lighter representation of some funny scene, which has in it something akin to comedy.

Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, the fashioning of lasting semblances. Early illustrations of this impulse are the making of a river out of the gravy in the plate, the pinching of pellets of bread till they take on something of resemblance to known forms. One child, three years old, would occupy himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which the knife and fork were made to act as hands, and cherry stones put round the plate to represent the hours. Such table-pastimes are known to all observers of children, and have been prettily touched on by R. L. Stevenson in his essay on "Child's Play".

These formative touches are, at first, rough enough, the transformation being effected, as we have seen, much more by the alchemy of the child's imagination than by the cunning of his hands. Yet, crude as it is, and showing at first almost as much of chance as of design, it is a manifestation of the same plastic impulse which possesses the sculptor and the painter.

The more elaborate constructive play which follows—the building with cards and wooden bricks, the moulding with sand and clay, and the first spontaneous drawings—is the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten is, indeed, a kind of smaller art-world where the dramatic and plastic impulses of the child are led into orderly action.

In this imitative play we see from the first the artistic tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the unstudied acting of the nursery, the nurse, the coachman, and the rest, are presented by a few broad touches; characteristic actions, such as pouring out the medicine, jerking the reins, being aided by one or two rough accessories, as the medicine bottle or the whip. In this way child's play, like primitive art, shows a certain unconscious selectiveness. It presents what is constant and typical, imperfectly enough no doubt. The same selection of broadly distinctive traits is seen where some individual person, e.g., a particular newsboy or gardener, seems to be represented. A similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline is seen in the first rude attempts of children to construct, whether with materials like cards or bricks, or with pencil, the semblance of a house, a garden and so forth.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the play. Thus the coachman's talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. Similarly with the products of the plastic impulse.

With this more realistic tendency to exhibit the characteristic with something like concrete fulness we see the germ at least of the idealistic impulse to transcend the level of common things, to give prominence to what has value, to touch the representation with the magic light of beauty. Even a small child playing with its coloured petals or its shells will show a rudiment of this artistic feeling for beautiful arrangement.

No doubt there are striking variations among children in this respect. Play discloses in many ways differences of feeling and ideas: among others, in the unequal degrees of tastefulness of the play scene. Yet the presence of an impulse, however rudimentary, to produce what has beauty and charm for the eye is a fact which we must recognise.

Along with this feeling for the sensuous effect of beauty we can discern the beginnings of fancy and invention whereby the idea represented is made more prominent and potent. This tendency, like the others, shows itself in a crude form at first, as in the earlier and coarser art of the race. In children's play we can see much of the uncultured man's love of strong effect. The pathos of the death of the pet animal or of the child has to be made obvious and strongly effective by a mass of painful detail; the comic incident must be made broadly farcical by heavy touches of caricature; the excitement of perilous adventure has to be intensified by multiplying the menacing forces and the thrilling situations. Yet crude as are these early attempts at strengthening the feebleness of the actual they are remotely akin to the idealising efforts of true art.

Nevertheless, children's play, though akin to it, is not completely art. As pointed out above, the action in a child's play is not intended as a dramatic spectacle. The small player is too self-centred, if I may so say. The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands, are not produced, as art is produced, for its own worth's sake, but rather as providing a new world into which he may retire and enjoy privacy. A child in playing a part does not "play" in order to delight others. "I remember," writes R. L. Stevenson, "as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork even when there was none to see." The same is true when children play at being Indians or what not: they are not "acting" in the theatrical sense of the word.

While, then, one can say that there is something akin to art in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, we must add that, for the development of the true impulse of the artist, a good deal more is needed. The play-impulse will only get specialised into the art-impulse when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and by a sense of beauty and the Æsthetic worth of things; when, further, it begins to concentrate itself on one mode of imitative activity, as, for example, dramatic representation or drawing.

I have chosen here to deal with the more spontaneous manifestations of an art-like impulse in children, rather than to describe their first attempts at art as we understand it. Here—in the case of all but those endowed with a genuine artistic talent—we are apt to find too much of the adult's educative influence, too little of what is spontaneous and original. At the same time, some of this art-activity, more particularly the first weaving of stories, is characteristic enough to deserve a special study. I have made a small collection of early stories, and some of them are interesting enough to be quoted. Here is a quaint example of the first halting manner of a child of two and a half years as invention tries to get away from the sway of models: "Three little bears went out a walk, and they found a stick, and they poked the fire with it, and they poked the fire and then went a walk". Soon, however, the young fancy is apt to wax bolder, and then we get some fine invention. A boy of five years and a quarter living at the sea-side improvised as follows. He related "that one day he went out on the sea in a lifeboat, when suddenly he saw a big whale, and so he jumped down to catch it; but it was so big that he climbed on it and rode on it in the water, and all the little fishes laughed so".

With this comic story may be compared a more serious not to say tragic one from the lips of a girl one month younger, which is characterised by an almost equal fondness for the wonderful. "A man wanted to go to heaven before he died. He said, 'I don't want to die, and I must see heaven!' Jesus Christ said he must be patient like other people. He then got so angry, and screamed out as loud as he could, and kicked up his heels as high as he could, and they (the heels) went into the sky, and the sky fell down and broke the earth all to pieces. He wanted Jesus Christ to mend the earth again, but he wouldn't, so this was a good punishment for him." This last, which is the work of one now grown into womanhood and no longer a story-teller, is interesting in many ways. The wish to go to heaven without dying is, as I know, a motive derived from child-life. The manifestations of displeasure could, one supposes, only have been written by one who was herself experienced in the ways of childish "tantrums". The naÏve conception of sky and earth, and lastly the moral issue of the story, are no less instructive.

These samples may serve to show that in the stories of by no means highly gifted children we come face to face with interesting traits of the young mind, and can study some of the characteristic tendencies of early and primitive art. Of the later efforts to imitate older art, as verse writing, the same cannot, I think, be said. Children's verses, so far as I have come across them, are poor and stilted, showing all the signs of the cramping effect of models and rules to which the young mind cannot easily accommodate itself, and wanting in true childish inspiration. No doubt, even in these choking circumstances, childish feeling may now and again peep out. The first prose compositions, letters before all if they may be counted art, give more scope for the expression of this feeling and the characteristic movements of young thought, and might well repay careful study.

There is one other department of children's art which clearly does deserve to be studied with some care—their drawing. And this for the very good reason that it is not wholly a product of our influence and education, but shows itself in its essential characteristics as a spontaneous self-taught activity which takes its rise, indeed, in the play-impulse. To this I propose to devote my next and last chapter.