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.