Yet though art-like this play is not fully art. In play a child is too self-centred, if I may so say. The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands, are not produced as having objective value, but rather as providing himself with a new environment. The peculiarity of all imaginative play, its puzzle for older people, is its contented privacy. The idea of a child playing as an actor is said to ‘play’ in order to delight others is a contradiction in terms. As I have remarked above, the pleasure of a child in what we call ‘dramatic’ make-believe is wholly independent of any appreciating eye. “I remember,” writes R. L. Stevenson, “as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork even when there was none to see.”[[223]] The same thing is true of concerted play. A number of children playing at being Indians, or what not, do not ‘perform’ for one another. The words ‘perform,’ ‘act’ and so forth all seem to be out of place here. What really occurs in this case is a conjoint vision of a new world, a conjoint imaginative realisation of a new life.
This difference between play and art is sometimes pushed to the point of saying that art has its root in the social impulse, the wish to please.[[224]] This I think is simplifying too much. Art is no doubt a social phenomenon, as Guyau and others have shown. It has been well said that "an individual art—in the strictest sense—even if it were conceivable is nowhere discoverable".[[225]] That is to say the artist is constituted as such by a participation in the common consciousness, the life of his community, and his creative impulse is controlled and directed by a sense of common or objective values. Yet to say that art is born of the instinct to please or attract is to miss much of its significance. The ever-renewed contention of artists, ‘art for art’s sake,’ points to the fact that they, at least, recognise in their art-activity something spontaneous, something of the nature of self-expression, self-realisation, and akin to the child’s play.
May we not say, then, that the impulse of the artist has its roots in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, the all-engrossing effort to ‘utter,’ that is, give outer form and life to an inner idea, and that the play-impulse becomes the art-impulse (supposing it is strong enough to survive the play-years) when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and a sense of the common worth of things, when, in other words, it becomes conscious of itself as a power of shaping semblances which shall have value for other eyes or ears, and shall bring recognition and renown? Or, to put it somewhat differently, may we not say that art has its twin-rootlets in the two directions of childish activity which we have considered, viz., the desire to please so far as this expresses itself in dress, graceful action, and so forth, and the entrancing isolating impulse of play? However we express the relation, I feel sure that we must account for the origin of art by some reference to play. A study of the art of savages, more especially perhaps of the representations of fighting and hunting in their pantomime-dances, seems to show that art is continuous with play-activity.
To insist on this organic connexion between play and art is not to say that every lively player is fitted to become an art-aspirant. The artistic ambition implies too rare a complex of conditions for us to be able to predict its appearance in this way. It may, however, be thrown out as a suggestion to the investigator of the first manifestations of artistic genius that he might do well to cast his eye on the field of imaginative play. It will possibly be found that although not a romping riotous player, nor indeed much disposed to join other children in their pastimes, the original child has his own distinctive style of play, which marks him out as having more than other children of that impulse to dream of far-off things, and to bring them near in the illusion of outer semblance, which enters more or less distinctly into all art.
I have left myself no space to speak of the child’s first attempts at art as we understand it. Some of this art-activity, more particularly the earliest weaving of stories, is characteristic enough to deserve a special study. I have made a small collection of early stories, and some of them are interesting enough to quote. Here is a quaint example of the first halting manner of a child of two and a half years as invention tries to get away from the sway of models: “Three little bears went out a walk and they found a stick, and they poked the fire with it, and they poked the fire and then went a walk”. Soon, however, the young fancy is apt to wax bolder, and then we get some fine invention. A boy of five years and a quarter living at the sea-side improvised as follows. He related “that one day he went out on the sea in a lifeboat when suddenly he saw a big whale, and so he jumped down to catch it, but it was so big that he climbed on it and rode on it in the water, and all the little fishes laughed so”.
With this comic story may be compared a more serious not to say tragic one from the lips of a girl one month younger, and characterised by an almost equal fondness for the wonderful. “A man wanted to go to heaven before he died. He said, ‘I don’t want to die, and I must see heaven!’ Jesus Christ said he must be patient like other people. He then got so angry, and screamed out as loud as he could, and kicked up his heels as high as he could, and they (the heels) went into the sky, and the sky fell down and broke earth all to pieces. He wanted Jesus Christ to mend the earth again, but he wouldn’t, so this was a good punishment for him.” This last, which is the work of one now grown into womanhood and no longer a story-teller, is interesting in many ways. The wish to go to heaven without dying is, as I know, a motive derived from child-life. The manifestations of displeasure could, one supposes, only have been written by one who was herself experienced in the ways of childish ‘tantrums’. The naïve conception of sky and earth, and lastly the moral issue of the story, are no less instructive.
These samples may serve to show that in the stories of by no means highly-gifted children we come face to face with interesting traits of the young mind, and can study some of the characteristic tendencies of early and primitive art.[[226]] Of the later efforts to imitate older art, as verse writing, the same cannot, I think, be said. Children’s verses so far as I have come across them are poor and stilted, showing all the signs of the cramping effect of models and rules to which the child-mind cannot easily accommodate itself, and wanting all true childish inspiration. No doubt, even in these choking circumstances, childish feeling may now and again peep out. The first prose compositions, letters before all if they may be counted art, give more scope for the expression of a child’s feeling and the characteristic movements of his thought, and might well repay study.[[227]]
There is one other department of this child-art which clearly does deserve to be studied with some care—drawing. And this for the very good reason that it is not wholly a product of our influence and education, but shows itself in its essential characteristics as a spontaneous self-taught activity of childhood which takes its rise, indeed, in the play-impulse. This will be the subject of the next essay.
[197]. L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant, 1888.