One of the most interesting, perhaps also one of the most instructive, phases of child-life is the beginnings of art-activity. This has been recognised by one of the best-known workers in the field of child-psychology, M. Bernard Perez, who has treated the subject in an interesting monograph.^[197] This department of our subject will, like that of language, be found to have interesting points of contact with the phenomena of primitive race-culture.

The art-impulse of children lends itself particularly well to observation. No doubt, as we shall see, there are difficulties for the observer here. It may sometimes be a fine point to determine whether a childish action properly falls under the head of genuine art-production, though I do not think that this is a serious difficulty. On the other hand, the art-impulse where it exists manifests itself directly, and for the most part in so characteristic an objective form that we are able to study its features with special facility.

In its narrow sense as a specialised instinct prompting its possessor to follow a definite line of production, as drawing of the artistic sort, or simple musical composition, the art-impulse is a particularly variable phenomenon of childhood. Some children, who afterwards take seriously to a branch of art-culture, manifest an innate bent by a precocious devotion to this line of activity. Many others, I have reason to believe, have a passing fondness for a particular form of art-activity. On the other hand, there are many children who display almost a complete lack, not only of the productive impulse, but of the Æsthetic sense of the artist. So uncertain, so sporadic are these appearances of a rudimentary art among children that one might be easily led to think that art-activity ought not to be reckoned among their common characteristics.

To judge so, however, would be to judge erroneously by applying grown-up standards. It is commonly recognised that art and play are closely connected. It is probable that the first crude art of the race, or at least certain directions of it, sprang out of play-like activities, and however this be the likenesses of the two are indisputable. I shall hope to bring these out in the present study. This being so, we are, I conceive, justified in speaking of art-impulses as a common characteristic of childhood.

Although we shall find many interesting points of analogy between crude child-art and primitive race-art, we must not, as pointed out above, expect a perfect parallelism. In some directions, as drawing, concerted dancing, the superior experience, strength and skill of the adult will reveal themselves, placing child-art at a considerable disadvantage in the comparison. Contrariwise, the intervention of the educator’s hand tends seriously to modify the course of development of the child’s Æsthetic aptitudes. His tastes get acted upon from the first and biassed in the direction of adult tastes.

This modifying influence of education shows itself more especially in one particular. There is reason to think that in the development of the race the growth of a feeling for what is beautiful was a concomitant of the growth of the art-impulse, the impulse to adorn the person, to collect feathers and other pretty things. Not so in the case of the child. Here we note a certain growth of the liking for pretty things before the spontaneous art-impulse has had time to manifest itself. Most children who have a cultivated mother or other guardian acquire a rudimentary appreciation of what their elders think beautiful before they do much in the way of art-production. We provide them with toys, pictures, we sing to them and perhaps we even take them to the theatre, and so do our best to inoculate them with our ideas as to what is pretty. Hence the difficulty—probably the chief difficulty—of finding out what the child-mind, left to itself, does prefer. At the same time the early date at which such Æsthetic preferences begin to manifest themselves makes it desirable to study them before we go on to consider the active side of child-art. We will try as well as we can to extricate the first manifestations of genuine childish taste.

First Responses to Natural Beauty.

At the very beginning, before the educational influence has had time to work, we can catch some of the characteristics of this childish quasi-Æsthetic feeling. The directions of a child’s observation, and of the movements of his grasping arms, tell us pretty clearly what sort of things attract and please him.

In the home scene it is bright objects, such as the fire-flame, the lamp, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded frame; out-of-doors, glistening water, a meadow whitened by daisies, the fresh show mantle, later the moon and the stars, which seem to impart to the dawning consciousness the first hint of the world’s beauty. Luminosity, brightness in its higher intensities, whether the bright rays reach the eye directly or are reflected from a lustrous surface, this makes the first gladness of the eye as it remains a chief source of the gladness of life.

The feeling for colour as such comes distinctly later. The first delight in coloured objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial delight in brightness. This applies pretty manifestly to the brightly illumined, rose-red curtain which Preyer’s boy greeted with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days, and it applies to later manifestations. Thus Preyer found on experimenting with his boy towards the end of the second year as to his colour-discrimination that a decided preference was shown for the bright or luminous colours, red and yellow.^[198] Much the same thing was observed by Miss Shinn in her interesting account of the early development of her niece’s colour-sense.^[199] Thus in the twenty-eighth month she showed a special fondness for the daffodils, the bright tints of which allured another and older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was banished. About the same time the child conceived a fondness for a yellow gown of her aunt, strongly objecting to the substitution for it of a brown dress. 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 bright partial colours, among the first favourites.^[200]

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 of Preyer, Binet, Baldwin, and others, as to the discrimination of colour, are hardly conclusive as to special likings, though Baldwin’s plan of getting the child to reach out for colours throws a certain light on this point. According to Baldwin blue is one of the first colours to be singled out; but he does not tell us how the colours he used (which did not, unfortunately, include yellow—the child’s favourite according to other observers) were related in point of luminosity.^[201]

No doubt a child of three or four is apt to conceive a special liking for a particular colour which favourite he is wont to appropriate as ‘my colour’. A collection of such perfectly spontaneous preferences is a desideratum in the study of the first manifestations of a feeling for colour. Care must be taken in observing these selections to eliminate the effects of association, and the unintentional influence of example and authority, as when a child takes to a particular colour because it is ‘mamma’s colour,’ that is, the one she appears to affect in her dress and otherwise.

The values of the several colours probably disclose themselves in close connexion with that of colour-contrast. Many of the likings of a child of three in the matter of flowers, birds, dresses, and so on, are clearly traceable to a growing pleasure in colour-contrast. Here again we must distinguish between a true chromatic and a merely luminous effect. The dark blue sky showing itself in a break in the white clouds, one of the coloured spectacles which delighted Miss Shinn’s niece, may have owed much of its attractiveness to the contrast of light and dark. It would be interesting to experiment with children of three with a view to determine whether and how far chromatic contrast pleases when it stands alone, and is not supported by that of chiaroscuro.

I have reason to believe that children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer juxtapositions of colours which lie far from one another in the colour-circle, as blue and red or blue and yellow. It is sometimes said that the practice and the history of painting show blue and red to be a more pleasing combination than that of the complementary colours, blue and yellow. It would be well to test children’s feeling on this matter. It would be necessary in this inquiry to see that the child did not select for combination a particular colour as blue or yellow for its own sake, and independently of its relation to its companion—a point not very easy to determine. Care would have to be taken to eliminate further the influence of authority as operating, not only by instructing the child what combinations are best, but by setting models of combination, in the habitual arrangements of dress and so forth. This too would probably prove to be a condition not easy to satisfy.^[202]

I have dwelt at some length on the first germs of colour-appreciation, because this is the one feature of the child’s Æsthetic sense which has so far lent itself to definite experimental investigation. It is very different when we turn to the first appreciation of form. That little children have their likings in the matter of form, is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. A quite small child will admire the arch of a rainbow, and the roundness of a kitten’s form, though in these instances the delight in form is far from pure. More clearly marked is the appreciation of pretty graceful movements, as a kitten’s boundings. Perhaps the first waking up to the graces of form takes place in connexion with this delight in the forms of motion, a delight which at first is a mixed feeling, involving the interest in all motion as suggestive of life, to which reference has already been made. Do not all of us, indeed, tend to translate our impressions of still forms back into these first impressions of the forms of motion?

One noticeable feature in the child’s first response to the attractions of form is the preference given to ‘tiny’ things. The liking for small natural forms, birds, insects, shells, and so forth, and the prominence of such epithets as ‘wee,’ ‘tiny’ or ‘teeny,’ ‘dear little,’ in the child’s vocabulary alike illustrate this early direction of taste. This feeling again is a mixed one; for the child’s interest in very small fragile-looking things has in it an element of caressing tenderness which again contains a touch of fellow-feeling. This is but one illustration of the general rule of Æsthetic development in the case of the individual and of the race alike that a pure contemplative delight in the aspect of things only gradually detaches itself from a mixed feeling.

If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, regularity of outline, symmetry, proportion, we encounter a difficulty. Many children acquire while quite young and before any formal education commences a certain feeling for regularity and symmetry. But is this the result of a mere observation of natural or other forms? Here the circumstances of the child become important. He lives among those who insist on these features in the daily activities of the home. In laying the cloth of the dinner-table, for example, a child 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 ethical rightness before they are judged as elements of Æsthetic value. As to a sense of proportion between the dimensions or parts of a form, the reflexion that this involves a degree of intellectuality above the reach of many an adult might suggest that it is not to be expected from a small child; and this conjecture will be borne out when we come to examine children’s first essays in drawing.

These elementary pleasures of light, colour, and certain simple aspects of form, may be said to be the basis of a crude perception of beauty in natural objects and in the products of human workmanship. 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 perfectly Æsthetic: awe, an inkling of the social dignity of dress,^[203] perhaps a longing to be embraced by the charmer, may all enter into it; yet a genuine admiration of look for its own sake is the core of the feeling. In other childish admirations, as the girl’s enthusiastic worship of the newly arrived baby, we see a true Æsthetic sentiment mingled with and struggling, so to speak, to extricate itself from such ‘interested’ feelings as sense of personal enrichment by the new possession and of family pride. In the likings for animals, again, which often take what seem to us capricious and quaint directions, we may see rudiments of Æsthetic perceptions half hidden under a lively sense of absolute lordship tempered with affection.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure Æsthetic enjoyment in these first experiences 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 of admiration for beautiful things with which a sort of dumb childish sympathy commonly blends. No doubt there are marked differences among children here. There are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the strong sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers.^[204] 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. It is sometimes said that the love of flowers is, in the main, a characteristic of girls. I think however that if one takes children early enough, before a consciousness of sex and of its proprieties has been allowed to develop under education, the difference will be but slight. Little boys of four or thereabouts often show a very lively sentiment of admiration for these gems of the plant world.

In much of this first crude utterance of the Æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the first manifestations of taste in the race. Delight in bright glistening things, in gay tints, in strong contrasts of colour, as well as in certain forms of movement, as that of feathers—the favourite personal adornment—this is known to be characteristic of the savage and gives to his taste in the eyes of civilised man the look of childishness. On the other hand it is doubtful whether the savage attains to the sentiment of the child for the beauty of flowers. Our civilised surroundings, meadows and gardens, as well as the constant action of the educative forces of example, soon carry the child beyond the savage in this particular.

How far can children be said to have the germ of a feeling for nature, or, to use the more comprehensive modern term, cosmic emotion? It is a matter of common observation that they have not the power to embrace a multitude of things in a single act of contemplation. Hence they have no feeling for landscape as a harmonious complex of picturesquely varied parts. When they are taken to see a ‘view’ their eye instead of trying to embrace the whole, as a fond parent desires, provokingly pounces on some single feature of interest, and often one of but little Æsthetic value. People make a great mistake in taking children to ‘points of view’ under the supposition that they will share in grown people’s impressions. Perez relates that some children taken to the Pic du Midi found their chief pleasure in scrambling up the peak and saying that they were on donkeys.^[205] Mere magnitude or vastness of spectacle does not appeal to the child, for a sense of the sublime grows out of a complex imaginative process which is beyond his young powers. So far as immensity affects him at all, as in the case of the sea, it seems to excite a measure of dread in face of the unknown; and this feeling, though having a certain kinship with the emotion of sublimity, is distinct from this last. It has nothing of the joyous consciousness of expansion which enters into the later feeling. It is only to certain limited objects and features of nature that the child is Æsthetically responsive. He knows the loveliness of the gilded spring meadow, the fascination of the sunlit stream, the awful mystery of the wood, and something too perhaps of the calming beauty of the broad blue sky. That is to say, he has a number of small rootlets which when they grow together will develop into a feeling for nature.

Here, too, the analogy between the child and the uncultured nature-man is evident. The savage has no Æsthetic sentiment for nature as a whole, though he may feel the charm of some of her single features, a stream, a mountain, the star-spangled sky, and may even be affected by some of the awful aspects of her changing physiognomy. Are we not told, indeed, that a true Æsthetic appreciation of the picturesque variety of nature’s scenes of the weird charm of wild places, and of the sublime fascinations of the awful and repellent mountain, are quite late attainments in the history of our race?^[206]

Early Attitude towards Art.

We may now look at the child’s attitude towards those objects and processes of human art which from the first form part of his environment and make an educative appeal to his senses; and here we may begin with those simple musical effects which follow up certain impressions derived from the natural world.

It has been pointed out that sounds form a chief source of the little child-heart’s first trepidations. Yet this prolific cause of disquietude, when once the first alarming effect of strangeness has passed, becomes a main source of interest and delight. Some of nature’s sounds, as those of running water, and of the wind, early catch the ear, and excite wonder and curiosity. Miss Shinn illustrates fully in the case of her niece how the interest in sounds developed itself in the first years.^[207] This pleasure in listening to sounds and in tracing them to their origin forms a chief pastime of babyhood.

Æsthetic pleasure in sound begins to be differentiated out of this general interest as soon as there arises a comparison of qualities and a development of preferences. Thus the sound of metal (when struck) is preferred to that of wood or stone. A nascent feeling for musical quality thus emerges which probably has its part in many of the first likings for persons; certain pitches, as those of the female voice, and possibly timbres being preferred to others.

Quite as soon, at least, as this feeling for quality of sound or tone, there manifests itself a crude liking for rhythmic sequence. It is commonly recognised that our pleasure in regularly recurring sounds is instinctive, being the result of our whole nervous organisation. We can better adapt successive acts of listening when sounds follow at regular intervals, and the movements which sounds evoke can be much better carried out in a regular sequence. The infant shows us this in his well-known liking for well-marked rhythms in tunes which he accompanies with suitable movements of the arms, head, etc.

The first likings for musical composition are based on this instinctive feeling for rhythm. It is the simple tunes, with well-marked easily recognisable time-divisions, which first take the child’s fancy, and he knows the quieting and the exciting qualities of different rhythms and times. Where rhythm is less marked, or grows highly complex, the motor responses being confused, the pleasurable interest declines. It is the same with the rhythmic qualities of verses. The jingling rhythms which their souls love are of simple structure, with short feet well marked off, as in the favourite, ‘Jack and Gill’.

Coming now to art as representative we find that a child’s Æsthetic appreciation waits on the growth of intelligence, on the understanding of artistic representation as contrasted with a direct presentation of reality.

The development of an understanding of visual representation or the imaging of things has already been touched upon. As Perez points out, the first lesson in this branch of knowledge is supplied by the reflexions of the mirror, which, as we have seen, the infant begins to take for realities, though he soon comes to understand that they are not tangible realities. The looking-glass is the best means of elucidating the representative function of the image or ‘Bild’ just because it presents this image in close proximity to the reality, and so invites direct comparison with this.

In the case of pictures where this direct comparison is excluded we might expect a less rapid recognition of the representative function. Yet children show very early that picture-semblances are understood in the sense that they call forth reactions similar to those called forth by realities. A little boy was observed to talk to pictures at the end of the eighth month. This perhaps hardly amounted to recognition. Pollock says that the significance of pictures “was in a general way understood” by his little girl at the age of thirteen months.^[208] Miss Shinn tells us that her niece, at the age of forty-two weeks, showed the same excitement at the sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that of real cats.^[209] Ten months is also given me by a lady as the date at which her little boy recognised pictures of animals by naming them ‘bow-wow,’ etc., without being prompted.

This early recognition of pictures is certainly remarkable even when we remember that animals have the germ of it. The stories of recognition by birds of paintings of birds, and by dogs of portraits of persons, have to do with fairly large and finished paintings.^[210] A child, however, will ‘recognise’ a small and roughly executed drawing. He seems in this respect to surpass the powers of savages, some of whom, at least, are said to be slow in recognising pictorial semblances. This power, which includes a delicate observation of form and an acute sense of likeness, is seen most strikingly in the recognition of individual portraits. Miss Shinn’s niece in her fourteenth month picked out her father’s face in a group of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter.^[211] I noticed the same fineness of recognition in my own children.

One point in this early observation of pictures is curious enough to call for especial remark. A friend of mine, a psychologist, writes to me that his little girl, aged three and a half, “does not mind 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”. The same thing was noticed in the other children of the family, and the mother tells me that her mother observed it in her children. I have found a further illustration of this indifference to the position of a picture in the two children of another friend of mine. Professor Petrie tells me that he once watched an Arab boy looking at a picture-book. One, a drawing of horses and chariot, happened to have a different position from the rest, so that the book being held as before, the horses seemed to be going upwards; but the boy was not in the least incommoded, and without attempting to turn the book round easily made it out. These facts are curious as illustrating the skill of the young eye in deciphering. They may possibly have a further significance as showing how what we call position—the arrangement of a form in relation to a vertical line—is a comparatively artificial view of which a child as yet takes little if any account. He may be able to concentrate his attention so well on form proper that he is indifferent to the point how the form is placed. Yet this matter is one which well deserves further investigation.^[212]

A further question arises as to whether this ‘recognition’ of pictures by children towards the end of the first year necessarily implies a grasp of the idea of a picture, that is, of a representation or copy of something. The first reactions of a child, smiling, etc., on seeing mirror-images and pictures, do not seem to show this, but merely that he is affected much as he would be by the presence of the real object, or, at most, that he recognises the picture as a kind of thing. The same is, I think, true of the so-called recognition of pictures by animals.

That children do not, at first, seize the pictorial or representative function is seen in the familiar fact that they will touch pictures as they touch shadows and otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities. Thus Pollock’s little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a picture and ‘pretended’ to feed some pictorial dogs.

When the first clear apprehension of the pictorial function is reached, it is difficult to say. Miss Shinn thought that her niece “understood the purport of a picture quite well” at the age of forty-five weeks. She draws this conclusion from the fact that at this date the child in answer to the question ‘Where are the flowers?’ leaned over and touched the painted flowers on her aunt’s gown, and then looked out to the garden with a cry of desire.^[213] But this inference seems to me very risky. All that the child’s behaviour proves is that she ‘classed’ real and painted flowers together, while she recognised the superiority of the former as the tangible and probably the odorous ones. The strongest evidence of recognition of pictorial function by children is, I think, their ability to recognise the portrait of an individual. But even this is not quite satisfactory. It is conceivable, at least, that a child may look on a photograph of his father as a kind of ‘double’. The boy C. took his projected photograph very seriously as a kind of doubling of himself. The story of the dog, a Dandy Dinmont terrier, that trembled and barked at a portrait of his dead mistress^[214] seems to me to bear this out. It would surely be rather absurd to say that the demonstrations of this animal, whatever they may have meant, prove that he took the portrait to be a memento-likeness of his dead mistress.

We are apt to forget how difficult and abstract a conception is that of pictorial representation, how hard it is to look at a thing as pure semblance having no value in itself, but only as standing for something else. A like slowness on the part of the child to grasp a sign, as such, shows itself here as in the case of verbal symbols. Children will, quite late, especially when feeling is aroused and imagination specially active, show a disposition to transform the semblance into the thing. Miss Shinn herself points out that her niece, who seems to have been decidedly quick, was as late as the twenty-fifth month touched with pity by a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to lift the painted branch that lay across the lamb. In her thirty-fifth month, again, when looking at a picture of a chamois defending her little one from an eagle, “she asked anxiously if the mamma would drive the eagle away, and presently quite simply and unconsciously placed her little hand edgewise on the picture so as to make a fence between the eagle and the chamois”.^[215] Such ready confusion of pictures with realities shows itself in the fourth year and later. A boy nearly five was observed to strike at the figures in a picture and to exclaim: “I can’t break them”. The Worcester Collection of observations illustrates the first confused idea of a picture. “One day F., a boy of four, called on a friend, Mrs. C., who had just received a picture, representing a scene in winter, in which people were going to church, some on foot and others in sleighs. F. was told whither they were going. The next day he came and noticed the picture, and looking at Mrs. C. and then at the picture said: ‘Why, Mrs. C., them people haven’t got there yet, have they?’”

All this points, I think, to a slow and gradual emergence of the idea of representation or likeness. If a child is capable in moments of intense imagination of confusing his battered doll with a living reality, he may be expected to act similarly with respect to the fuller likeness of a picture. Vividness of imagination tends in the child as in the savage, and indeed in all of us, to invest a semblance with something of reality. We are able to control the illusory tendency and to keep it within the limits of an Æsthetic semi-illusion; not so the child. Is it too fanciful to suppose that the belief of the savage in the occasional visits of the real spirit-god to his idol has for its psychological motive the impulse which prompts the child ever and again to identify his toys and even his pictures with the realities which they represent?

As might be expected this impulse to confuse representation and represented reality shows itself very distinctly in the first reception of dramatic spectacle. If you dress up as Father Christmas, your child, even though he is told that you are his father, will hardly be able to resist the illusion that your disguise so powerfully induces. Cuvier relates that a boy of ten on watching a stage scene in which troops were drawn up for action, broke out in loud protestations to the actor who was taking the part of the general, telling him that the artillery was wrongly placed, and so forth.^[216] This reminds one of the story of the sailors who on a visit to a theatre happened to see a representation of a mutiny on board ship, and were so excited that they rushed on the stage and took sides with the authorities in quelling the movement.

I believe that this same tendency to take art-representations for realities reappears in children’s mental attitude towards stories. A story by its narrative form seems to tell of real events, and children, as we all know, are wont to believe tenaciously that their stories are true. I think I have observed a disposition in imaginative children to go beyond this, and to give present actuality to the scenes and events described. And this is little to be wondered at when one remembers that even grown people, familiar with the devices of art-imitation, tend now and again to fall into this confusion. Only a few days ago, as I was reading an account by a friend of mine of a perilous passage in an Alpine ascent, accomplished years ago, I suddenly caught myself in the attitude of proposing to shout out to stop him from venturing farther. A vivid imaginative realisation of the situation had made it for the moment a present actuality.

Careful observations of the first attitudes of the child-mind towards representative art are greatly needed. We should probably find considerable diversity of behaviour. The presence of a true art-feeling would be indicated by a special quickness in the apprehension of art-semblance as such.

In these first reactions of the young mind to the stimulus of art-presentation we may study other aspects of the Æsthetic aptitude. Very quaint and interesting is the exacting realism of these first appreciations. A child is apt to insist on a perfect detailed reproduction of the familiar reality. And here one may often trace the fine observation of these early years. Listen, for example, to the talk of the little critic before a drawing of a horse or a railway train, and you will be surprised to find how closely and minutely he has studied the forms of things. It is the same with other modes of art-representation. Perez gives an amusing instance of a boy, aged four, who when taken to a play was shocked at the anomaly of a chamber-maid touching glasses with her master on a fÊte day. “In our home,” exclaimed the stickler for regularities, to the great amusement of the neighbours, “we don’t let the nurse drink like that.”^[217] It is the same with story. Children are liable to be morally hurt if anything is described greatly at variance with the daily custom. Æsthetic rightness is as yet confused with moral rightness or social propriety, which, as we have seen, has its instinctive support in the child’s mind in respect for custom.

Careful observation will disclose in these first frankly expressed impressions the special directions of childish 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 how much of a genuine Æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on. Here, again, there is ample room for more careful studies directed to the detection of the first manifestations of a pure delight in things as beautiful, as charming at once the senses and the imagination.

The first appearances of that complex interest in life and personality which fills so large a place in our Æsthetic pleasures can be best noted in the behaviour of the child’s mind towards dramatic spectacle and story. The awful ecstatic delight with which a child is apt to greet any moving semblance carrying with it the look of life and action is something which some of us, like Goethe, can recall among our oldest memories. The old-fashioned moving ‘Schatten-bilder,’ for which the gaudy but rigid pictures of the magic lantern are but a poor substitute, the puppet-show, with what a delicious wonder have these filled the childish heart. And as to the entrancing, enthralling delight of the story—well Thackeray and others have tried to describe this for us.

Of very special interest in these early manifestations of a feeling for art is the appearance of a crude form of the two emotions to which all representations of life and character make appeal—the feeling for the comic, and for the tragic side of things. What we may call the adults fallacy, the tendency to judge children by grown-up standards, frequently shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will follow the directions of our own. I remember having made the mistake of putting those delightful books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, into the hands of a small boy with a considerable sense of fun, and having been humiliated at discovering that there was no response. Children’s fun is of a very elemental character. They are mostly tickled, I suspect, 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 the child’s mind, and any confusion 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.

Since children are apt to take spectacles with an exacting seriousness, it becomes interesting to note how the two moods, realistic stickling for correctness, and rollicking hilarity at the sight of the disorderly, behave in relation one to another. More facts are needed on this point. It is probable that we have here to do in part with a permanent difference of temperament. There are serious matter-of-fact little minds which are shocked by a kind of spectacle or narrative that would give boundless delight to a more elastic fun-loving spirit. But discarding these permanent differences of disposition, I think that in general the sense of fun, the delight in the topsy-turviness of things, is apt to develop later than the serious realistic attitude already referred to. Here, too, it is probable that the evolution of the individual follows that of the race: the solemnities of custom and ritual weigh so heavily at first on the savage-mind that there is no chance for sprightly laughter to show himself. However this be, most young children appear to be unable to appreciate true comedy where the incongruous co-exists with and takes on one half of its charm from serious surroundings. Their laughter is best called forth by a broadly farcical show in which all serious rules are set at nought.

Of no less interest in this attitude of the child-mind towards the representations by art of human character and action are the first rude manifestations of the feeling for the tragic side of life. A child of four or six is far from realising the divine necessity which controls our mortal lives. Yet he will display a certain crude feeling for thrilling situation, exciting adventure, and something, too, of a sympathetic interest in the woes of mortals, quadrupeds as well as bipeds. The action, the situation, may easily grow too painful for an imaginative child disposed to take all representative spectacle as reality: yet the absorbing interest of the action where the sadness is bearable attests the early development of that universal feeling for the sorrowful fatefulness of things which runs through all imaginative writings from the ‘penny dreadful’ upwards.

Beginnings of Art-production.

We have been trying to catch the first faint manifestations of Æsthetic feeling in children’s contemplative attitude towards natural objects and the presentations of art. We may now pass to what is a still more interesting department of childish Æsthetics, their first rude attempts at art-production. We are wont to say that children are artists in embryo, that in their play and their whole activity they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. In order to see whether this idea is correct we must start with a clear idea of what we mean by art-activity.

I would define art-activity as including all childish doings which are consciously directed to an external result recognised as beautiful, as directly pleasing to sense and imagination. Thus a gesture, or an intonation of voice, which is motived by a feeling for what is ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’ is a mode of art-activity as much as the production of a more permanent Æsthetic object, as a drawing.

Now if we look at children’s activity we shall find that though much of it implies a certain germ of Æsthetic feeling it is not pure art-activity. In the love of personal adornment, for example, we see, as in the case of savages, the Æsthetic motive subordinated to another and personal or interested feeling, vanity or love of admiration. On the other hand, in children’s play, which undoubtedly has a kinship with art, we find the Æsthetic motive, the desire to produce something beautiful, very much in the background. We have then to examine these primitive forms of activity so as to try to disengage the genuine art-element.

One of the most interesting of these early quasi-artistic lines of activity is that of personal adornment. The impulse to maintain appearances appears to reach far down in animal life. The animal’s care of its person is supported by two instincts, the impulse to frighten or overawe others, and especially those who are, or are likely to be, enemies, illustrated in the raising of feathers and hair so as to increase size; and the impulse to attract, which probably underlies the habit of trimming feathers and fur among birds and quadrupeds. These same impulses are said to lie at the root of the elaborate art of personal adornment developed by savages. The anthropologist divides such ornament into alluring and alarming, ‘Reizschmuck’ and ‘Schreckschmuck’.^[218]

In the case of children’s attention to personal appearance there is no question of tracing out the workings of a pure instinct. The care of the person is before all other things inculcated and enforced by others, and forms, indeed, a main branch of the nursery training. To a mother, as is perfectly natural, a child is apt to present himself as the brightest of the household ornaments, which has to be kept neat and spotless with even greater care than the polished table and other pretty things. This early drilling is likely to be unpleasant. Many children resent at first not only soap and water and the merciless comb, but even arrayings in new finery. Adornment is forced on the child before the instinct has had time to develop itself, and the manner of the adornment does not always accommodate itself to the natural inclinations of the childish eye. Hence the familiar fact that with children the care of personal appearance when it is developed takes on the air of a respect for law. It is more than half a moral feeling, a readiness to be shocked at a breach of a custom enforced from the first by example and precept.

Again, the instinct of adornment in the child is often opposed by other impulses. I have already touched on a small child’s feeling of uneasiness at seeing his mother in new apparel. A like apprehensiveness shows itself in relation to his own dress. Many little children show a marked dislike to new raiment. As I have remarked above, a change of dress probably disturbs and confuses their sense of personality.

In spite, however, of these and other complicating circumstances I believe that the instinct to adorn the person is observable in children. They like a bit of finery in the shape of a string of beads or of daisies for the neck, a feather for the hat, a scrap of brilliantly coloured ribbon or cloth as a bow for the dress, and so forth. Imitation, doubtless, plays a part here, but it is, I think, possible to allow for this, and still to detect points of contact with the savage’s love of finery. Perhaps, indeed, we may discern the play of both the impulses underlying personal ornament which were referred to above, viz., the alluring and alarming. Allowing for the differences of intelligence, of sexual development and so forth, we may say that children betray a rudiment of the instinct to win admiration by decorating the person, and also of the instinct to overawe. A small boy’s delight in adding to his height and formidable appearance by donning his father’s tall hat is pretty certainly an illustration of this last.

This is not the place to inquire whether the love of finery in children—a very variable trait, as M. Perez and others have shown—is wholly the outcome of vanity. I would, however, just remark that a child lost in the vision of himself reflected in a mirror decked out in new apparel may be very far from feeling vanity as we understand the word. The pure child-wonder at what is new and mysterious may at such a moment overpower other feelings, and make the whole mental condition one of dream-like trance.

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 art-like activity. Yet the quaint attempts of the child to improve his appearance throw an interesting light on his Æsthetic preferences. He is at heart as much a lover of glitter, of gaudy colour, as his savage prototype. With this general crudity of taste, individual differences soon begin to show themselves, a child developing a marked bent, now to modest neatness and refinement, now to gaudy display, and this, it may be, in direct opposition to the whole trend of home influence.^[219]

Another and closely connected domain of activity which is akin to art is the manifestation of grace and charm in action. Much of the beauty 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 and manners, into which stupid conventionality has not yet imported all kinds of awkward restraints, as when the little girl M. would kiss her hand spontaneously to other babies as she passed them in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable savages. Now a feeling for what is graceful in movement, carriage, speech and so forth is no clear proof of a specialised artistic impulse: yet it attests the existence of a rudimentary appreciation of what is beautiful, as also of an impulse to produce this.

In the forms of childish activity just referred to we have to do with mixed impulses in which the true art-element is very imperfectly represented. There is a liking for pretty effect, and an effort to realise it, only the effect is not prized wholly for its own sake, but partly as a means of winning the smile of approval. The true art-impulse is characterised by the love of shaping beautiful things for their own sake, by an absorbing devotion to the process of creation, into which there enters no thought of any advantage to self, and almost as little of benefiting others. Now there is one field of children’s activity which is marked by just this absorption of thought and aim, and that is play.

To say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. Any one can see that when children are at play they are carried away by pleasurable activity, are thinking of no useful result but only of the pleasure of the action itself. They build their sand castles, they pretend to keep shop, to entertain visitors, and so forth, for the sake of the enjoyment which they find in these actions. This clearly involves one point of kinship with the artist, for the poet sings and the painter paints because they love to do so. It is evident, moreover, from what was said above on the imaginative side of play that it has this further circumstance in common with art-production, that it is the bodying forth of a mental image into the semblance of outward life. Not only so, play exhibits the distinction between imitation and invention—the realistic and the idealistic tendency in art—and in its forms comes surprisingly near representing the chief branches of art-activity. It thus fully deserves to be studied as a domain in which we may look for early traces of children’s artistic tendencies.

If by play we understand all that spontaneous activity which is wholly sustained by its own pleasurableness, we shall find the germ of it in those aimless movements and sounds which are the natural expression of a child’s joyous life. Such outpourings of happiness have a quasi-Æsthetic character in so far as they follow the rhythmic law of all action. Where the play becomes social activity, that is, the concerted action of a number, we get something closely analogous to those primitive harmonious co-ordinations of movements and sounds in which the first crude music, poetry and dramatic action of the race are supposed to have had their common origin.

Such naÏve play-activity acquires a greater Æsthetic importance when it becomes significant or representative of something: and this direction appears very early in child-history. The impulse to imitate the action of another seems to be developed before the completion of the first half-year.^[220] In its first crude form, as reproducing a gesture or sound uttered at the moment by another, it enters into the whole of social or concerted play. A number of children find the harmonious performance of a series of dance or other movements, such as those of the kindergarten games, natural and easy, because the impulse to imitate, to follow another’s lead, at once prompts them and keeps them from going far astray.

It is a higher and more intellectual kind of imitation when a child recalls the idea of something he has seen done and reproduces the action. This is often carried out under the suggestive force of objects which happen to present themselves at the time, as when a child sees an empty cup and pretends to drink, or a book and simulates the action of reading out of it, or a pair of scissors and proceeds to execute snipping movements. In other cases the imitation is more spontaneous, as when a child recalls and repeats some funny saying that he has heard.

This imitative action grows little by little more complex, and in this way a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. Here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. A child pantomimically representing some funny action comes, indeed, very near to the mimetic art of the comedian.

Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, viz., the production of semblances in things. 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, once occupied himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which his knife (or spoon) 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.^[221]

Such 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, the same striving to produce images or semblances of things, which possesses the sculptor and the painter. In each case we see a mind dominated by an idea and labouring to give it outward embodiment. The more elaborate constructive play which follows, the building with sand and with bricks, with which we may take the first spontaneous drawings, are the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten occupations, most of all the clay-modelling, make direct appeal to this half-artistic plastic impulse in the child.

In this imitative play we see from the first the tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the acting of the nursery the nurse, the coachman and so forth are given by one or two broad touches, such as the presence of the medicine-bottle or its semblance, or of the whip, together, perhaps, with some characteristic manner of speaking. In this way child-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 seems to be represented. There is a precisely similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline in the first rude attempts of children to form semblances. This will be fully illustrated presently when we examine their manner of drawing.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald abstract representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the representation. Thus the coachman’s talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. A precisely similar process of development is noticeable in the plastic activities. The first raw attempt to represent house or castle is improved upon, and the image grows fuller of characteristic detail and more life-like. Here, again, we may note the parallelism between the evolution of play-activity and of primitive art.

This movement away from bare symbolic indication to concrete pictorial representation involves a tendency to individualise, to make the play or the shapen semblance life-like in the sense of representing an individual reality. Such individual concreteness may be obtained by a mechanical reproduction of some particular action and scene of real life, and children in their play not infrequently attempt a faithful recital or portraiture of this kind. Such close unyielding imitation shows itself, too, now and again in the attempt to act out a story. Yet with bright fanciful children the impulse to give full life and colour to the performance rarely stops here. Fresh individual life is best obtained by the aid of invention, by the intervention of which some new scene or situation, some new grouping of personalities is realised. Nothing is Æsthetically of more interest in children’s play than the first cautious intrusion into the domain of imitative representation of this impulse of invention, this desire for the new and fresh as distinct from the old and customary. Perhaps, too, there is no side of children’s play in which individual differences are more clearly marked or more significant than this. The child of bold inventive fancy is shocking to his companion whose whole idea of proper play is a servile imitation of the scenes and actions of real life. Yet the former will probably be found to have more of the stuff of which the artist is compacted.

All such invention, moreover, since it aims at securing some more vivacious and stirring play-experience, naturally comes under the influence of the childish instinct of exaggeration. I mean by this the untaught art of vivifying and strengthening a description or representation by adding touch to touch. In the representations of play, this love of colour, of strong effect, shows itself now in a piling up of the beautiful, gorgeous, or wonderful, as when trying to act some favourite scene from fairy-story, or some grand social function, now in a bringing together of droll or pathetic incidents so as to strengthen the comic or the tragic feeling of the play-action. In all this—which has its counterpart in the first crude attempts of the art of the race to break the tight bonds of a servile imitation—we have, I believe, the germ of what in our more highly developed art we call the idealising impulse.

I have, perhaps, said enough to show that children’s play is in many respects analogous to art of the simpler kind, also that it includes within itself lines of activity which represent the chief directions of art-development.^[222]

Yet though art-like this play is not fully art. In play a child 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 having objective value, but rather as providing himself with a new environment. The peculiarity of all imaginative play, its puzzle for older people, is its contented privacy. The idea of a child playing as an actor is said to ‘play’ in order to delight others is a contradiction in terms. As I have remarked above, the pleasure of a child in what we call ‘dramatic’ make-believe is wholly independent of any appreciating eye. “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.”^[223] The same thing is true of concerted play. A number of children playing at being Indians, or what not, do not ‘perform’ for one another. The words ‘perform,’ ‘act’ and so forth all seem to be out of place here. What really occurs in this case is a conjoint vision of a new world, a conjoint imaginative realisation of a new life.

This difference between play and art is sometimes pushed to the point of saying that art has its root in the social impulse, the wish to please.^[224] This I think is simplifying too much. Art is no doubt a social phenomenon, as Guyau and others have shown. It has been well said that "an individual art—in the strictest sense—even if it were conceivable is nowhere discoverable".^[225] That is to say the artist is constituted as such by a participation in the common consciousness, the life of his community, and his creative impulse is controlled and directed by a sense of common or objective values. Yet to say that art is born of the instinct to please or attract is to miss much of its significance. The ever-renewed contention of artists, ‘art for art’s sake,’ points to the fact that they, at least, recognise in their art-activity something spontaneous, something of the nature of self-expression, self-realisation, and akin to the child’s play.

May we not say, then, that the impulse of the artist has its roots in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, the all-engrossing effort to ‘utter,’ that is, give outer form and life to an inner idea, and that the play-impulse becomes the art-impulse (supposing it is strong enough to survive the play-years) when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and a sense of the common worth of things, when, in other words, it becomes conscious of itself as a power of shaping semblances which shall have value for other eyes or ears, and shall bring recognition and renown? Or, to put it somewhat differently, may we not say that art has its twin-rootlets in the two directions of childish activity which we have considered, viz., the desire to please so far as this expresses itself in dress, graceful action, and so forth, and the entrancing isolating impulse of play? However we express the relation, I feel sure that we must account for the origin of art by some reference to play. A study of the art of savages, more especially perhaps of the representations of fighting and hunting in their pantomime-dances, seems to show that art is continuous with play-activity.

To insist on this organic connexion between play and art is not to say that every lively player is fitted to become an art-aspirant. The artistic ambition implies too rare a complex of conditions for us to be able to predict its appearance in this way. It may, however, be thrown out as a suggestion to the investigator of the first manifestations of artistic genius that he might do well to cast his eye on the field of imaginative play. It will possibly be found that although not a romping riotous player, nor indeed much disposed to join other children in their pastimes, the original child has his own distinctive style of play, which marks him out as having more than other children of that impulse to dream of far-off things, and to bring them near in the illusion of outer semblance, which enters more or less distinctly into all art.

I have left myself no space to speak of the child’s first attempts at art as we understand it. Some of this art-activity, more particularly the earliest 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 quote. 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, and 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 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.^[226] 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 child-mind cannot easily accommodate itself, and wanting all 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 a child’s feeling and the characteristic movements of his thought, and might well repay study.^[227]

There is one other department of this child-art which clearly does deserve to be studied with some care—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 of childhood which takes its rise, indeed, in the play-impulse. This will be the subject of the next essay.

197. L’Art et la PoÉsie chez l’Enfant, 1888.