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

by James Sully

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.