One of the most interesting of these early quasi-artistic lines of activity is that of personal adornment. The impulse to maintain appearances appears to reach far down in animal life. The animal’s care of its person is supported by two instincts, the impulse to frighten or overawe others, and especially those who are, or are likely to be, enemies, illustrated in the raising of feathers and hair so as to increase size; and the impulse to attract, which probably underlies the habit of trimming feathers and fur among birds and quadrupeds. These same impulses are said to lie at the root of the elaborate art of personal adornment developed by savages. The anthropologist divides such ornament into alluring and alarming, ‘Reizschmuck’ and ‘Schreckschmuck’.[[218]]
In the case of children’s attention to personal appearance there is no question of tracing out the workings of a pure instinct. The care of the person is before all other things inculcated and enforced by others, and forms, indeed, a main branch of the nursery training. To a mother, as is perfectly natural, a child is apt to present himself as the brightest of the household ornaments, which has to be kept neat and spotless with even greater care than the polished table and other pretty things. This early drilling is likely to be unpleasant. Many children resent at first not only soap and water and the merciless comb, but even arrayings in new finery. Adornment is forced on the child before the instinct has had time to develop itself, and the manner of the adornment does not always accommodate itself to the natural inclinations of the childish eye. Hence the familiar fact that with children the care of personal appearance when it is developed takes on the air of a respect for law. It is more than half a moral feeling, a readiness to be shocked at a breach of a custom enforced from the first by example and precept.
Again, the instinct of adornment in the child is often opposed by other impulses. I have already touched on a small child’s feeling of uneasiness at seeing his mother in new apparel. A like apprehensiveness shows itself in relation to his own dress. Many little children show a marked dislike to new raiment. As I have remarked above, a change of dress probably disturbs and confuses their sense of personality.
In spite, however, of these and other complicating circumstances I believe that the instinct to adorn the person is observable in children. They like a bit of finery in the shape of a string of beads or of daisies for the neck, a feather for the hat, a scrap of brilliantly coloured ribbon or cloth as a bow for the dress, and so forth. Imitation, doubtless, plays a part here, but it is, I think, possible to allow for this, and still to detect points of contact with the savage’s love of finery. Perhaps, indeed, we may discern the play of both the impulses underlying personal ornament which were referred to above, viz., the alluring and alarming. Allowing for the differences of intelligence, of sexual development and so forth, we may say that children betray a rudiment of the instinct to win admiration by decorating the person, and also of the instinct to overawe. A small boy’s delight in adding to his height and formidable appearance by donning his father’s tall hat is pretty certainly an illustration of this last.
This is not the place to inquire whether the love of finery in children—a very variable trait, as M. Perez and others have shown—is wholly the outcome of vanity. I would, however, just remark that a child lost in the vision of himself reflected in a mirror decked out in new apparel may be very far from feeling vanity as we understand the word. The pure child-wonder at what is new and mysterious may at such a moment overpower other feelings, and make the whole mental condition one of dream-like trance.
Since children are left so little free to deck themselves, it is of course hard to study the development of æsthetic taste in this domain of art-like activity. Yet the quaint attempts of the child to improve his appearance throw an interesting light on his æsthetic preferences. He is at heart as much a lover of glitter, of gaudy colour, as his savage prototype. With this general crudity of taste, individual differences soon begin to show themselves, a child developing a marked bent, now to modest neatness and refinement, now to gaudy display, and this, it may be, in direct opposition to the whole trend of home influence.[[219]]
Another and closely connected domain of activity which is akin to art is the manifestation of grace and charm in action. Much of the beauty of movement, of gesture, of intonation, in a young child may be unconscious, and as much a result of happy physical conditions as the pretty gambols of a kitten. Yet one may commonly detect in graceful children the rudiment of an æsthetic feeling for what is nice, and also of the instinct to please. There is, indeed, in these first actions and manners, into which stupid conventionality has not yet imported all kinds of awkward restraints, as when the little girl M. would kiss her hand spontaneously to other babies as she passed them in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable savages. Now a feeling for what is graceful in movement, carriage, speech and so forth is no clear proof of a specialised artistic impulse: yet it attests the existence of a rudimentary appreciation of what is beautiful, as also of an impulse to produce this.
In the forms of childish activity just referred to we have to do with mixed impulses in which the true art-element is very imperfectly represented. There is a liking for pretty effect, and an effort to realise it, only the effect is not prized wholly for its own sake, but partly as a means of winning the smile of approval. The true art-impulse is characterised by the love of shaping beautiful things for their own sake, by an absorbing devotion to the process of creation, into which there enters no thought of any advantage to self, and almost as little of benefiting others. Now there is one field of children’s activity which is marked by just this absorption of thought and aim, and that is play.
To say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. Any one can see that when children are at play they are carried away by pleasurable activity, are thinking of no useful result but only of the pleasure of the action itself. They build their sand castles, they pretend to keep shop, to entertain visitors, and so forth, for the sake of the enjoyment which they find in these actions. This clearly involves one point of kinship with the artist, for the poet sings and the painter paints because they love to do so. It is evident, moreover, from what was said above on the imaginative side of play that it has this further circumstance in common with art-production, that it is the bodying forth of a mental image into the semblance of outward life. Not only so, play exhibits the distinction between imitation and invention—the realistic and the idealistic tendency in art—and in its forms comes surprisingly near representing the chief branches of art-activity. It thus fully deserves to be studied as a domain in which we may look for early traces of children’s artistic tendencies.
If by play we understand all that spontaneous activity which is wholly sustained by its own pleasurableness, we shall find the germ of it in those aimless movements and sounds which are the natural expression of a child’s joyous life. Such outpourings of happiness have a quasi-æsthetic character in so far as they follow the rhythmic law of all action. Where the play becomes social activity, that is, the concerted action of a number, we get something closely analogous to those primitive harmonious co-ordinations of movements and sounds in which the first crude music, poetry and dramatic action of the race are supposed to have had their common origin.