In these first reactions of the young mind to the stimulus of art-presentation we may study other aspects of the æsthetic aptitude. Very quaint and interesting is the exacting realism of these first appreciations. A child is apt to insist on a perfect detailed reproduction of the familiar reality. And here one may often trace the fine observation of these early years. Listen, for example, to the talk of the little critic before a drawing of a horse or a railway train, and you will be surprised to find how closely and minutely he has studied the forms of things. It is the same with other modes of art-representation. Perez gives an amusing instance of a boy, aged four, who when taken to a play was shocked at the anomaly of a chamber-maid touching glasses with her master on a fête day. “In our home,” exclaimed the stickler for regularities, to the great amusement of the neighbours, “we don’t let the nurse drink like that.”[[217]] It is the same with story. Children are liable to be morally hurt if anything is described greatly at variance with the daily custom. Æsthetic rightness is as yet confused with moral rightness or social propriety, which, as we have seen, has its instinctive support in the child’s mind in respect for custom.
Careful observation will disclose in these first frankly expressed impressions the special directions of childish 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 how much of a genuine æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on. Here, again, there is ample room for more careful studies directed to the detection of the first manifestations of a pure delight in things as beautiful, as charming at once the senses and the imagination.
The first appearances of that complex interest in life and personality which fills so large a place in our æsthetic pleasures can be best noted in the behaviour of the child’s mind towards dramatic spectacle and story. The awful ecstatic delight with which a child is apt to greet any moving semblance carrying with it the look of life and action is something which some of us, like Goethe, can recall among our oldest memories. The old-fashioned moving ‘Schatten-bilder,’ for which the gaudy but rigid pictures of the magic lantern are but a poor substitute, the puppet-show, with what a delicious wonder have these filled the childish heart. And as to the entrancing, enthralling delight of the story—well Thackeray and others have tried to describe this for us.
Of very special interest in these early manifestations of a feeling for art is the appearance of a crude form of the two emotions to which all representations of life and character make appeal—the feeling for the comic, and for the tragic side of things. What we may call the adults fallacy, the tendency to judge children by grown-up standards, frequently shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will follow the directions of our own. I remember having made the mistake of putting those delightful books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, into the hands of a small boy with a considerable sense of fun, and having been humiliated at discovering that there was no response. Children’s fun is of a very elemental character. They are mostly tickled, I suspect, 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 the child’s mind, and any confusion 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.
Since children are apt to take spectacles with an exacting seriousness, it becomes interesting to note how the two moods, realistic stickling for correctness, and rollicking hilarity at the sight of the disorderly, behave in relation one to another. More facts are needed on this point. It is probable that we have here to do in part with a permanent difference of temperament. There are serious matter-of-fact little minds which are shocked by a kind of spectacle or narrative that would give boundless delight to a more elastic fun-loving spirit. But discarding these permanent differences of disposition, I think that in general the sense of fun, the delight in the topsy-turviness of things, is apt to develop later than the serious realistic attitude already referred to. Here, too, it is probable that the evolution of the individual follows that of the race: the solemnities of custom and ritual weigh so heavily at first on the savage-mind that there is no chance for sprightly laughter to show himself. However this be, most young children appear to be unable to appreciate true comedy where the incongruous co-exists with and takes on one half of its charm from serious surroundings. Their laughter is best called forth by a broadly farcical show in which all serious rules are set at nought.
Of no less interest in this attitude of the child-mind towards the representations by art of human character and action are the first rude manifestations of the feeling for the tragic side of life. A child of four or six is far from realising the divine necessity which controls our mortal lives. Yet he will display a certain crude feeling for thrilling situation, exciting adventure, and something, too, of a sympathetic interest in the woes of mortals, quadrupeds as well as bipeds. The action, the situation, may easily grow too painful for an imaginative child disposed to take all representative spectacle as reality: yet the absorbing interest of the action where the sadness is bearable attests the early development of that universal feeling for the sorrowful fatefulness of things which runs through all imaginative writings from the ‘penny dreadful’ upwards.
Beginnings of Art-production.
We have been trying to catch the first faint manifestations of æsthetic feeling in children’s contemplative attitude towards natural objects and the presentations of art. We may now pass to what is a still more interesting department of childish æsthetics, their first rude attempts at art-production. We are wont to say that children are artists in embryo, that in their play and their whole activity they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. In order to see whether this idea is correct we must start with a clear idea of what we mean by art-activity.
I would define art-activity as including all childish doings which are consciously directed to an external result recognised as beautiful, as directly pleasing to sense and imagination. Thus a gesture, or an intonation of voice, which is motived by a feeling for what is ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’ is a mode of art-activity as much as the production of a more permanent æsthetic object, as a drawing.
Now if we look at children’s activity we shall find that though much of it implies a certain germ of æsthetic feeling it is not pure art-activity. In the love of personal adornment, for example, we see, as in the case of savages, the æsthetic motive subordinated to another and personal or interested feeling, vanity or love of admiration. On the other hand, in children’s play, which undoubtedly has a kinship with art, we find the æsthetic motive, the desire to produce something beautiful, very much in the background. We have then to examine these primitive forms of activity so as to try to disengage the genuine art-element.