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]]