Now the child has to acquire the co-ordinations here briefly described. He may have the visual image of the human face or the horse which he wishes to depict. This power of visualising shows itself in other ways and can be independently tested, as by asking a child to describe the object verbally. But he has as yet no inkling of how to reproduce his image. That his inability at the outset is due to a want of co-ordination is seen in the fact that at this stage he cannot draw even when a model is before his eyes.
The process of learning here is very like what takes place when a child learns to speak. The required movements have somehow to be performed and attached to the effects they are then found to produce. Just as a child first produces sounds, partly instinctively or spontaneously, partly by imitating the seen movements of another’s lips, etc., so he produces lines by play-like scribble and by imitating the visible movements of another person’s hand. The tendency to imitate is observable in the first loop-formations, and possibly also in the abrupt angular changes which give a zig-zag look to some of these early tracings.
In this early stage we see a marked want of control. The effort is spasmodic and short-lived: the little draughtsman presently runs off into nonsense scribble. The want of control is seen, too, in the tendency to prolong lines unduly, and to repeat or multiply them, the primitive play-movements being very much under the empire of inertia or habit, i.e., the tendency to repeat or go on with an action. The effect of limitating natural conditions in the motor apparatus is illustrated, not only in the slightly curved form of these first scribble lines, but in the general obliquity or inclination of the line; it being manifestly easier for the hand when brought in front of the body to describe a line running slightly upwards from left to right (or in the reverse direction) than one running horizontally. The want of control by means of a steady visual image is further seen in the absence of any attempt at a plan, at a mapping out of the available space, and at an observation of proportion.
It might be thought that, though a child at this inexperienced stage were unable to produce the correct form of a familiar object, he would at once detect the incorrectness of the one he sets down. No doubt, if he were in the attitude of cold critical observation, he would do so: in fact, as Mr. Cooke and others have shown, he sees the absurdities of his workmanship as soon as they are pointed out to him. But when drawing he is in another sort of mood, akin to that imaginative mood in which he traces forms in the plaster of the ceiling, or in the letters of his spelling-book. He means to draw a man or a horse, and consequently the formless jumble of lines becomes, to his fancy, a man or a horse. His first drawings are thus, in a sense, playthings, which, like the battered stump of a doll, his imaginative intention corrects, supplements, and perfects.
With repetition, and that amount of supervision and guidance which most children who take a pencil in hand manage to get from somebody, he begins to note the actual character of his line-effects, and to associate these with the movements which produce them. A straight horizontal line, a curved line returning upon itself, and so forth, come to be differentiated, and to be co-ordinated with their respective manual movements.
We may now pass to the second stage, the beginning of true linear representation, as illustrated in the first abstract schematic treatment of the human face and figure.
A question arises at the very outset here as to whether, and if so to what extent, children re-discover this method of representation for themselves. Here, as in the case of child-language, such as ‘bow-wow,’ ‘gee-gee,’ tradition and example undoubtedly play their part. A parent, or an older brother and sister, in setting the first models, is pretty certain to adopt a simple scheme, as that of the lunar face; and even where there is no instruction a child is quick at imitating other children’s manner of drawing. Yet this does not affect the contention that such manner of drawing is eminently childish, that is, the one a child finds his way to most readily, any more than the fact of the nurse’s calling the horse ‘gee-gee’ in talking to baby affects the contention that ‘gee-gee’ is eminently a baby-name.
The scanty abstract treatment, the circle enclosing two dots and the vertical and horizontal lines, points to the absence of any serious attempt to imitate a form closely and fully. It seems absurd to suppose that a child of three or four does not image a human face better than he delineates it; and even if this were doubtful it is certain that when he sets down a man without hair, ears, trunk, or arm, his execution is falling far short of his knowledge. How is this to be accounted for? My explanation is that the little artist is still much more of a symbolist than a naturalist, that he does not in the least care about a full and close likeness, but wants only a barely sufficient indication. This scantiness of treatment issuing from want of the more serious artistic intention is of course supported by technical limitations. The lunar face with the two propping lines answers to what the child can do easily and comfortably. Much more than his elder brethren our small limner is bound by the law of artistic economy, the need of producing his effects with the smallest expenditure of labour, and of making every touch tell.
Defects of executive resource and of manual skill appear plainly in other characteristics. The common inclination of the lines of the legs points to the unconscious selection of easiest directions of manual movement.[[285]] The unduly lengthened arm and leg, the multiplication of legs—as seen most strikingly in the case of the quadruped—illustrate the influence of motor or muscular inertia. There is, too, a noticeable want of measurement and management of the space to be covered, as when one eye is put in so large as to leave no room for a second, or when filling in details from above downwards the eyes are put in too near the occipital curve, and so all the features set too high up. The same want of measurement of space may contribute to the child’s habit of drawing the trunk so absurdly small in proportion to the head; for he begins with the head, and by making this large finds he has not left, within the limits of what he considers the right size of figure, space enough for the trunk.
Very noticeable is the influence of habit in this abstract treatment. By habit I here mean hand-memory, or the tendency to combine movements in the old ways, though this is commonly aided, as we shall see, by “association of ideas”. Thus a child falls into a stereotyped way of drawing the human face and figure; line follows line in the accustomed sequence; the only variation showing itself is in the insertion or omission of nose, ears, or arms; these uncertainties being due to fluctuations of energy and concentration. A child’s art is, in respect of its unyielding sameness, a striking example of a conservative conventionality. He gets used to his pencil-forms, and pronounces them right, to the greater and greater neglect of their relation to natural forms. Habit shows itself in other ways too. Notice, for example, how a child, after adding the trunk, will go on inserting the arms into the head as he used to do. Such a habit is an affair not only of the hand but of the eye. The arms have by repeated delineation come in the art-sphere to belong to the head.