Hence when he comes to draw he has not the artist’s clear mental vision of the actual look of things to guide him. He is led not by a lively and clear sensuous imagination, but by a mass of generalised knowledge embodied in words, viz., the logical form of a definition or description. This, I take it, is the main reason why with such supreme insouciance he throws into one design features of the full face and of the profile; for in setting down his linear scheme he is aiming not at drawing a picture, an imitative representation of something we could see, but rather at enumerating, in the new expressive medium which his pencil supplies, what he knows about the particular thing. Since he is thus bent on a linear description of what he knows he is not in the least troubled about the laws of visual appearance, but setting perspective at naught compels the spectator to see the other side, to look through one object at another, and so forth.
Since the process at this sophisticated stage is controlled by knowledge of things as wholes and not by representations of concrete appearances or views, we can understand why the visible result does not shock the draughtsman. The little descriptor does not need to compare the look of his drawing with that of the real object: it is right as a description anyhow. How strongly this idea of description controls his views of pictures has already been pointed out. Just as he objects to a correct profile drawing as an inadequate description, so he objects to a drawing of the hind part of a horse entering the stable, and asks, ‘Where is his head?’ We may say then that what a lively fancy did in the earlier play-stages childish logic does now, it blinds the artist to the actual look of what his pencil has created.
Use soon adds its magic force, and the impossible combination, the two eyes stuck on at the side of the profile nose, the two legs of the rider untroubled by the capacious trunk of the animal which he strides, the man wholly exposed to view inside the boat or carriage, gets stereotyped into the right mode of linear description.
All this shows that the child’s eye at a surprisingly early period loses its primal ‘innocence,’ grows ‘sophisticated’ in the sense that instead of seeing what is really presented it sees, or pretends to see, what knowledge and logic tell it is there. In other words his sense-perceptions have for artistic purposes become corrupted by a too large admixture of intelligence. This corruption is closely analogous to what we all experience when we lose the primal simplicity of the eye for colour, and impart into our ‘visual impressions,’ as we call them, elements of memory and inference, saying, for example, that a distant mountain side is ‘green’ just because we can make out that it is grass-covered and know that grass when looked at nearer is of a green colour.
I have dwelt on what from our grown-up standpoint we must call the defects of children’s drawing. Yet in bringing this study to a close it is only just to remark that there are other and better qualities well deserving of recognition. Crude, defective, self-contradictory even, as these early designs undoubtedly are, they are not wholly destitute of artistic qualities. The abstract treatment itself, in spite of its inadequacy, is after all in the direction of a true art, which in its essential nature is selective and suggestive rather than literally reproductive. We may discern, too, even in these rude schemes a nascent sense of values, of a selection of what is characteristic. Even the primitive trunkless form seems to illustrate this, for though, as we have seen in a previous essay, the trunk plays an important part in the development of the idea of self, it is for pictorial purposes less interesting and valuable than the head. However this be, it is clear that we see this impulse of selection at work later on in the addition of the buttons, the pipe, the stick, the parasol and so forth.
It is to be noted, too, that even in these untutored performances, where convention and tradition exercise so great a sway, there are faint indications of a freer individual initiative. Witness, for example, the varying modes of representing hair, hands, and feet. We may say then that even rough children in elementary schools who are never likely to develop artistic talent display a rudiment of art-feeling. It is only fair to them to testify that in spite of the limitations of their stiff wooden treatment they express a certain individuality of feeling and aim, that like true artists they convey a personal impression. These traits appear most plainly in the later representations of action, but they are not altogether absent from the earlier statuesque figures. Compare, for example, the look of alert vigour in Fig. 5 [(a)] (p. 339), of grinning impudence in Fig. 6 [(a)] (p. 341), of provoking ‘cheekiness’ in Fig. 20 [(b)] (p. 350), of a seedy ‘swagger’ in Fig. [32] (p. 362), of inebriate gaiety in Fig. [17] (p. 348), of absurd skittishness in Fig. 24 [(b)] (p. 354), of insane flurry in Fig. 26 [(a)] (p. 355), of Irish easy-goingness even when somebody has to be killed in Fig. [34] (p. 363), of wiry resoluteness in Fig. 29 [(a)] (p. 359), of sly villainy in Fig. [38] (p. 365), and of demure simplicity in Fig. 26 [(c)] (p. 356); and note the delicious variety of equine character in Fig. 45 [(f)] (p. 376) and following.
If a finer æsthetic feeling is developed the first rude descriptive drawing loses its attractions. A friend, a well-known psychologist, has observed in the case of his children that when they try to draw something pretty, e.g., a beautiful lady, they abandon their customary mode of description and become aware of the look of their designs and criticise them as bad. This seems to me a most significant observation. It is the feeling for what is beautiful which makes a child attend closely to the bare look of things, and the beginning of a finer observation of forms commonly takes its rise in this nascent sense of beauty. Indeed, may one not say that only when a germ of the æsthetic feeling for beauty arises, and a child falls in love with the mere look of certain things, can there appear the beginnings of genuinely artistic work, of a conscientious endeavour to render on paper the aspect which pleases the eye?
[228]. This indicative or communicative function of drawing has, we know, played a great part in the early stages of human history. Modern savages employ drawings in sand as a means of imparting information to others, e.g., of the presence of fish in a lake, see Von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Braziliens, kap. x., s. 243 f.
[229]. Only a few drawings of older children above seven have been included.