Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

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.