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.