Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (12)

Very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our discipline. The little girl M. when less than two years old, would go to her mother and confess some piece of naughtiness and suggest the punishment. A little boy aged two years and four months was deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for scribbling on the wall-paper. His punishment was, however, tempered by permission to draw when taken downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a picture downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse fetched him she wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected, saying: “No Nana (name for nurse) look at it till Sunday”. And sure enough when Sunday came, and the pencil was restored to him, he promptly showed nurse his picture. This is an excellent observation full of suggestion as to the way in which a child’s mind works. Among other things it seems to show pretty plainly that the little fellow looked on the nursery and all its belongings, including the nurse, during those three days as a place of disgrace into which the privileges of the artist were not to enter. He was allowed the indulgence of drawing downstairs, but he had no right to exhibit his workmanship to the nurse, who was inseparably associated in his mind with the forbidden nursery drawing. Thus a process of genuine child-thought led to a self-instituted extension of the punishment.

A month later this child "pulled down a picture in the nursery"—the nursery walls seem to have had a fell attraction for him—“by standing on a sofa and tugging till the wire broke. He was alone at the time and very much frightened though not hurt. He was soothed and told to leave the picture alone in future, but was not in any way rebuked. He seemed, however, to think that some punishment was necessary, for he presently asked whether he was going to have a certain favourite frock on that afternoon. He was told ‘No’ (the reason being that the day was wet or something similar) and he said immediately: ‘’Cause Neil pulled picture down?’” Here I think we have unmistakable evidence of an expectation of punishment as the fit and proper sequel in a case which, though it did not exactly resemble those already branded by it, was felt in a vague way to be disorderly and naughty.

Such stories of expectation of punishment are capped by instances of correction actually inflicted by the child on himself. I believe it is not uncommon for a child when possessed by a sense of having been naughty to object to having nice things at table on the ground that previously on a like occasion he was deprived of them. But the most curious instance of this moral rigour towards self which I have met with is the following: A girl of nine had been naughty, and was very sorry for her misbehaviour. Shortly after she came to her lesson limping, and remarked that she felt very uncomfortable. Being asked by her governess what was the matter with her she said: “It was very naughty of me to disobey you, so I put my right shoe on to my left foot and my left shoe on to my right foot”.

The facts here briefly illustrated seem to me to show that there is in the child from the first a rudiment of true law-abidingness. And this is a force of the greatest consequence to the disciplinarian. It is something which takes side in the child’s breast with the reasonable governor and the laws which he or she administers. It secures ready compliance with a large part of the discipline enforced. When the impulse urging towards licence has been too strong, and disobedience ensues, this same instinct comes to the aid of order and good conduct by inflicting pains which are the beginning of what we call remorse.

By-and-by other forces will assist. The affectionate child will reflect on the misery his disobedience causes his mother. A boy of four and three-quarter years must, one supposes, have woke up to this fact when he remarked to his mother: “Did you choose to be a mother? I think it must be rather tiresome.” The day when the child first becomes capable of thus putting himself into his mother’s place and realising, if only for an instant, the trouble he has brought on her, is an all-important one in his moral development.

_The Wise Law-giver._

As our illustrations have suggested, and as every thoughtful parent knows well enough, the problem of moral training in the first years is full of difficulty. Yet our study surely suggests that it is not so hopeless a problem as we are sometimes weakly disposed to think. Perhaps a word or two on this may not inappropriately close this essay.

I will readily concede that the difficulty of inculcating in children a sweet and cheerful obedience arises partly from their nature. There are trying children, just as there are trying dogs that howl and make themselves disagreeable for no discoverable reason but their inherent ‘cussedness’. There are, I doubt not, conscientious painstaking mothers who have been baffled by having to manage what appears to be the utterly unmanageable.

Yet I think that we ought to be very slow to pronounce any child unmanageable. I know full well that in the case of these small growing things there are all kinds of hidden physical commotions which breed caprices, ruffle the temper, and make them the opposite of docile. The peevish child who will do nothing, will listen to no suggestion, is assuredly a difficult subject to deal with. But such moodiness and cross-grainedness springing from bodily disturbances will be allowed for by the discerning mother, who will be too wise to bring the severer measures of discipline to bear on a child when subject to their malign influence. Waiving these disturbing factors, however, I should say that a good part, certainly more than one half, of the difficulty of training children is due to our clumsy bungling modes of going to work.

Sensible persons know that there is a good and a bad way of approaching a child. The wrong ways of trying to constrain children are, alas, numerous. I am not writing an ‘advice to parents,’ and am not called on therefore to deal with the much-disputed question of the rightness and wrongness of corporal punishment. Slaps may be needful in the early stages, even though they do lead to little tussles. A mother assures me that these battles with her several children have all fallen between the ages of sixteen months and two years. It is, however, conceivable that such fights might be avoided altogether; yet a man should be chary of dogmatising on this delicate matter.

What is beyond doubt is that the slovenly discipline—if indeed discipline it is to be called—which consists in alternations of gushing fondness with almost savage severity, or fits of government and restraint interpolated between long periods of neglect and _laisser faire_, is precisely what develops the rebellious and law-resisting propensities. But discipline can be bad without being a stupid pretence. Everything in the shape of inconsistency, saying one thing at one time, another thing at another, or treating one child in one fashion, another in another, tends to undermine the pillars of authority. Young eyes are quick to note these little contradictions, and they sorely resent them. It is astonishing how careless disciplinarians can show themselves before these astute little critics. It is the commonest thing to tell a child to behave like his elders, forgetting that this, if indeed a rule at all, can only be one of very limited application. Here is a suggestive example of the effect of this sort of teaching sent me by a mother. “At three and a half, when some visitors were present, she was told not to talk at dinner-time. ‘Why me no talk? Papa talks.’ ‘Yes, but papa is grown up, and you are only a little girl; you can’t do just like grown-up people.’ She was silent for some time, but when I told her ten minutes later to sit nicely with her hands in her lap like her cousins, she replied, with a very humorous smile, ‘Me tan’t (can’t) sit like grown-up people, me is only a little girl’.”

We can fail and make children disloyal instead of loyal subjects by unduly magnifying our office, by insisting too much on our authority. Children who are over-ruled, who have no taste of being left unmolested and free to do what they like, can hardly be expected to submit graciously. Another way of carrying parental control to excess is by exacting displays of virtue which are beyond the moral capabilities of the child. A lady sends me this reminiscence of her childhood. She had been promised sixpence when she could play her scales without fault, and succeeded in the exploit on her sixth birthday. The sixpence was given to her, but soon after her mother suggested that she should spend the money in fruit to give to her (the mother’s) invalid friend. This was offending the sense of justice, for if the child is jealous of anything as his very own it is surely the reward he has earned; and was, moreover, a foolish attempt to call forth generosity where generosity was wholly out of place. An even worse example is that recorded by Ruskin. When a child he was expected to come down to dessert and crack nuts for the grand older folk while peremptorily forbidden to eat any. Such refined cruelties of government deserve to be defeated in their objects. Much of our ill success in governing children would probably turn out to be attributable to unwisdom in assigning tasks, and more particularly in making exactions which wound that sensitive fibre of a child’s heart, the sense of justice.

Parents are, I fear, apt to forget that generosity and the other liberal virtues owe their worth to their spontaneity. They may be suggested and encouraged but cannot be exacted. On the other hand, a parent cannot be more foolish than to discourage a spontaneous outgoing of good impulse, as if nothing were good but what emanated from a spirit of obedience. In a pretty and touching little American work, _Beckonings from Little Hands_, the writer describes the remorse of a father who, after his child’s death, recalled the little fellow’s first crude endeavour to help him by bringing fuel, an endeavour which, alas! he had met with something like a rebuff.

The right method of training, which develops and strengthens by bracing exercise the instinct of obedience, cannot easily be summarised; for it is the outcome of the highest wisdom. I may, however, be permitted to indicate one or two of its main features.

Informed at the outset by a fine moral feeling and a practical tact as to what ought to be expected, the wise mother is concerned before everything to make her laws appear as much a matter of course as the daily sequences of the home life, as unquestionable axioms of behaviour; and this not by a foolish vehemence of inculcation but by a quiet skilful inweaving of them into the order of the child’s world. To expect the right thing, as though the wrong thing were an impossibility, rather than to be always pointing out the wrong thing and threatening consequences; to make all her words and all her own actions support this view of the inevitableness of law; to meet any indications of a disobedient spirit, first with misunderstanding, and later with amazement; this is surely the first and fundamental matter.

The effectiveness of this discipline depends on the simple psychological principle that difficult actions tend to realise themselves in the measure in which the ideas of them become clear and persistent. Get a child steadily to follow out in thought an act to which he is disinclined and you have more than half mastered the disinclination. The quiet daily insistence of the wise rule of the nursery proceeds by setting up and maintaining the ideas of dutiful actions, and so excluding the thought of disobedient actions.

It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous to the action of suggestion upon the hypnotised subject. The mother, the right sort of mother, has on the child’s mind something of the subduing influence of the Nancy doctor: she induces ideas of particular actions, gives them force and persistence so that the young mind is possessed by them and they work themselves out into fulfilment as occasion arises.

In order that this effect of ‘obsession,’ or a full occupation of consciousness with the right idea, may result, certain precautions are necessary. As observant parents know, a child may be led by a prohibition to do the very thing he is bidden not to do. We have seen how readily a child’s mind moves from an affirmation to a corresponding negation, and conversely. The ‘contradictoriness’ of a child, his passion for saying the opposite of what you say, shows the same odd manner of working of the young mind. Wanting to do what he is told not to do is another effect of this “contrary suggestion,” as it has been called, aided of course by the child’s dislike of all constraint.[195] If we want to avoid this effect of suggestion and to secure the direct effect, we must first of all acquire the difficult secret of personal influence, of the masterfulness which does not repel but attracts; and secondly try to reduce our forbiddings with their contrary suggestions to a minimum.

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Footnote 195:

On the nature of this contrary suggestion see Mark Baldwin, _Mental
Development in the Child and the Race_, p. 145 f.

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The action in moral training of this influence of a quasi-hypnotic suggestion becomes more clearly marked when difficulties occur; when some outbreak of wilful resistance has to be recognised and met, or some new and relatively arduous feat of obedience has to be initiated. Here I find that intelligent mothers have found their way to methods closely resembling those of the hypnotist. “When R. is naughty and in a passion (writes a lady friend of her child aged three and a half), I need only suggest to him that he is some one else, say a friend of his, and he will take it up at once, he will pretend to be the other child, and at last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.” This mode of suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself from and control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely employed in the moral training of children. Suggestion may work through the emotions. Merely to say, ‘Mother would like you to do this,’ is to set up an idea in the child’s consciousness by help of the sustaining force of his affection. “If (writes a lady) there was anything Lyle particularly wished not to do, his mother had only to say, ‘Dobbin (a sort of canonised toy-horse already referred to) would like you to do this,’ and it was done without a murmur.”

We have another analogue to hypnotic suggestion where a mother prepares her child some time beforehand for a difficult duty, telling him that she expects him to perform it. A mother writes that her boy, when about the age of two and a half years more particularly, was inclined to burst into loud but short fits of crying. “I have found (she says) these often checked by telling him beforehand what would be expected of him, and exacting a promise that he would do the thing cheerfully. I have seen his face flush up ready to cry when he remembered his promise and controlled himself.” This reminds one forcibly of the commands suggested by the hypnotiser to be carried into effect when the subject wakes. Much more, perhaps, might be done in this direction by choosing the right moments for setting up the persistent ideas in the child’s consciousness. I know a lady who got into the way of giving moral exhortation to her somewhat headstrong girl at night before the child fell asleep, and found this very effectual. It is possible that we may be able to apply this idea of preparatory and premunitory suggestion in new and surprising ways to difficult and refractory children.[196]

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Footnote 196:

The bearings of (hypnotic) suggestion on moral education have been
discussed by Guyau, _Education and Heredity_ (Engl. transl.), chap. i.
Compare also Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 267 f., and Compayré, _op. cit._,
p. 262.

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One other way in which the wise mother will win the child over to duty is by developing his consciousness of freedom and power. A mother, who was herself a well-known writer for children, has recorded in some notes on her children that when one of her little girls had declined to accede to her wish she used to say to her: ‘Oh, yes, I think when you have remembered how pleasant it is to oblige others you will do it’. ‘I will think about it, mamma,’ the child would reply, laughing, and then go and hide her head behind a sofa-pillow which she called her ‘thinking corner’. In half a minute she would come out and say: “Oh, yes, mamma, I have thought about it and I will do it”. This strikes me as an admirable combination of regulative suggestion with exercise of the young will in moral decision. It gave the child the consciousness of using her own will, and yet maintained the needed measure of guidance and control.

As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings for such suggestive guidance will offer themselves. How valuable, for example, is the mother’s encouragement of the weakly child, shrinking from a difficult self-repressive action, when she says with inspiring voice: ‘You _can_ do it if you try’. Thus pilot-like she conducts the little navigator out into the open main of duty where he will have to steer himself.

I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not beyond human powers. It has its strong supports in child-nature, and these, when there are wisdom and method on the ruler’s side, will secure success. I have not said that the trainer’s task is easy. So far from thinking this, I hold that a mother who bravely faces the problem, neither abandoning the wayward will to its own devices, nor, hardly less weakly, handing over the task of disciplining it to a paid substitute, and who by well-considered and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching the perfection I have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the tender and companionable parent, is among the few members of our species who are entitled to its reverence.

IX.
THE CHILD AS ARTIST.

One of the most interesting, perhaps also one of the most instructive, phases of child-life is the beginnings of art-activity. This has been recognised by one of the best-known workers in the field of child-psychology, M. Bernard Perez, who has treated the subject in an interesting monograph.[197] This department of our subject will, like that of language, be found to have interesting points of contact with the phenomena of primitive race-culture.

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Footnote 197:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, 1888.

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The art-impulse of children lends itself particularly well to observation. No doubt, as we shall see, there are difficulties for the observer here. It may sometimes be a fine point to determine whether a childish action properly falls under the head of genuine art-production, though I do not think that this is a serious difficulty. On the other hand, the art-impulse where it exists manifests itself directly, and for the most part in so characteristic an objective form that we are able to study its features with special facility.

In its narrow sense as a specialised instinct prompting its possessor to follow a definite line of production, as drawing of the artistic sort, or simple musical composition, the art-impulse is a particularly variable phenomenon of childhood. Some children, who afterwards take seriously to a branch of art-culture, manifest an innate bent by a precocious devotion to this line of activity. Many others, I have reason to believe, have a passing fondness for a particular form of art-activity. On the other hand, there are many children who display almost a complete lack, not only of the productive impulse, but of the æsthetic sense of the artist. So uncertain, so sporadic are these appearances of a rudimentary art among children that one might be easily led to think that art-activity ought not to be reckoned among their common characteristics.

To judge so, however, would be to judge erroneously by applying grown-up standards. It is commonly recognised that art and play are closely connected. It is probable that the first crude art of the race, or at least certain directions of it, sprang out of play-like activities, and however this be the likenesses of the two are indisputable. I shall hope to bring these out in the present study. This being so, we are, I conceive, justified in speaking of art-impulses as a common characteristic of childhood.

Although we shall find many interesting points of analogy between crude child-art and primitive race-art, we must not, as pointed out above, expect a perfect parallelism. In some directions, as drawing, concerted dancing, the superior experience, strength and skill of the adult will reveal themselves, placing child-art at a considerable disadvantage in the comparison. Contrariwise, the intervention of the educator’s hand tends seriously to modify the course of development of the child’s æsthetic aptitudes. His tastes get acted upon from the first and biassed in the direction of adult tastes.

This modifying influence of education shows itself more especially in one particular. There is reason to think that in the development of the race the growth of a feeling for what is beautiful was a concomitant of the growth of the art-impulse, the impulse to adorn the person, to collect feathers and other pretty things. Not so in the case of the child. Here we note a certain growth of the liking for pretty things before the spontaneous art-impulse has had time to manifest itself. Most children who have a cultivated mother or other guardian acquire a rudimentary appreciation of what their elders think beautiful before they do much in the way of art-production. We provide them with toys, pictures, we sing to them and perhaps we even take them to the theatre, and so do our best to inoculate them with our ideas as to what is pretty. Hence the difficulty—probably the chief difficulty—of finding out what the child-mind, left to itself, does prefer. At the same time the early date at which such æsthetic preferences begin to manifest themselves makes it desirable to study them before we go on to consider the active side of child-art. We will try as well as we can to extricate the first manifestations of genuine childish taste.

_First Responses to Natural Beauty._

At the very beginning, before the educational influence has had time to work, we can catch some of the characteristics of this childish quasi-æsthetic feeling. The directions of a child’s observation, and of the movements of his grasping arms, tell us pretty clearly what sort of things attract and please him.

In the home scene it is bright objects, such as the fire-flame, the lamp, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded frame; out-of-doors, glistening water, a meadow whitened by daisies, the fresh show mantle, later the moon and the stars, which seem to impart to the dawning consciousness the first hint of the world’s beauty. Luminosity, brightness in its higher intensities, whether the bright rays reach the eye directly or are reflected from a lustrous surface, this makes the first gladness of the eye as it remains a chief source of the gladness of life.

The feeling for colour as such comes distinctly later. The first delight in coloured objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial delight in brightness. This applies pretty manifestly to the brightly illumined, rose-red curtain which Preyer’s boy greeted with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days, and it applies to later manifestations. Thus Preyer found on experimenting with his boy towards the end of the second year as to his colour-discrimination that a decided preference was shown for the bright or luminous colours, red and yellow.[198] Much the same thing was observed by Miss Shinn in her interesting account of the early development of her niece’s colour-sense.[199] Thus in the twenty-eighth month she showed a special fondness for the daffodils, the bright tints of which allured another and older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was banished. About the same time the child conceived a fondness for a yellow gown of her aunt, strongly objecting to the substitution for it of a brown dress. Among the other coloured objects which captivated the eye of this little girl were a patch of white cherry blossom, and a red sun-set sky. Such observations might easily be multiplied. Whiteness, it is to be noted, comes, as we might expect, with bright partial colours, among the first favourites.[200]

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Footnote 198:

_Op. cit._, p. 7 and p. 11 f.

Footnote 199:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, p. 91 ff.

Footnote 200:

Cf. Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 41 ff.

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At what age a child begins to appreciate the value of colour as colour, to like blue or red, for its own sake and apart from its brightness, it is hard to say. The experiments of Preyer, Binet, Baldwin, and others, as to the discrimination of colour, are hardly conclusive as to special likings, though Baldwin’s plan of getting the child to reach out for colours throws a certain light on this point. According to Baldwin blue is one of the first colours to be singled out; but he does not tell us how the colours he used (which did not, unfortunately, include yellow—the child’s favourite according to other observers) were related in point of luminosity.[201]

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Footnote 201:

See Baldwin’s two articles on ‘A New Method of Child-study’ in
_Science_, April, 1893, and his volume, _Mental Development in the
Child and the Race_.

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No doubt a child of three or four is apt to conceive a special liking for a particular colour which favourite he is wont to appropriate as ‘my colour’. A collection of such perfectly spontaneous preferences is a desideratum in the study of the first manifestations of a feeling for colour. Care must be taken in observing these selections to eliminate the effects of association, and the unintentional influence of example and authority, as when a child takes to a particular colour because it is ‘mamma’s colour,’ that is, the one she appears to affect in her dress and otherwise.

The values of the several colours probably disclose themselves in close connexion with that of colour-contrast. Many of the likings of a child of three in the matter of flowers, birds, dresses, and so on, are clearly traceable to a growing pleasure in colour-contrast. Here again we must distinguish between a true chromatic and a merely luminous effect. The dark blue sky showing itself in a break in the white clouds, one of the coloured spectacles which delighted Miss Shinn’s niece, may have owed much of its attractiveness to the contrast of light and dark. It would be interesting to experiment with children of three with a view to determine whether and how far chromatic contrast pleases when it stands alone, and is not supported by that of chiaroscuro.

I have reason to believe that children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer juxtapositions of colours which lie far from one another in the colour-circle, as blue and red or blue and yellow. It is sometimes said that the practice and the history of painting show blue and red to be a more pleasing combination than that of the complementary colours, blue and yellow. It would be well to test children’s feeling on this matter. It would be necessary in this inquiry to see that the child did not select for combination a particular colour as blue or yellow for its own sake, and independently of its relation to its companion—a point not very easy to determine. Care would have to be taken to eliminate further the influence of authority as operating, not only by instructing the child what combinations are best, but by setting models of combination, in the habitual arrangements of dress and so forth. This too would probably prove to be a condition not easy to satisfy.[202]

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Footnote 202:

The influence of such authority is especially evident in the selection
of harmonious shades of colour for dress, etc. _Cf._ Miss Shinn, _op.
cit._, p. 95.

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I have dwelt at some length on the first germs of colour-appreciation, because this is the one feature of the child’s æsthetic sense which has so far lent itself to definite experimental investigation. It is very different when we turn to the first appreciation of form. That little children have their likings in the matter of form, is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. A quite small child will admire the arch of a rainbow, and the roundness of a kitten’s form, though in these instances the delight in form is far from pure. More clearly marked is the appreciation of pretty graceful movements, as a kitten’s boundings. Perhaps the first waking up to the graces of form takes place in connexion with this delight in the forms of motion, a delight which at first is a mixed feeling, involving the interest in all motion as suggestive of life, to which reference has already been made. Do not all of us, indeed, tend to translate our impressions of still forms back into these first impressions of the forms of motion?

One noticeable feature in the child’s first response to the attractions of form is the preference given to ‘tiny’ things. The liking for small natural forms, birds, insects, shells, and so forth, and the prominence of such epithets as ‘wee,’ ‘tiny’ or ‘teeny,’ ‘dear little,’ in the child’s vocabulary alike illustrate this early direction of taste. This feeling again is a mixed one; for the child’s interest in very small fragile-looking things has in it an element of caressing tenderness which again contains a touch of fellow-feeling. This is but one illustration of the general rule of æsthetic development in the case of the individual and of the race alike that a pure contemplative delight in the aspect of things only gradually detaches itself from a mixed feeling.

If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, regularity of outline, symmetry, proportion, we encounter a difficulty. Many children acquire while quite young and before any formal education commences a certain feeling for regularity and symmetry. But is this the result of a mere observation of natural or other forms? Here the circumstances of the child become important. He lives among those who insist on these features in the daily activities of the home. In laying the cloth of the dinner-table, for example, a child sees the regular division of space enforced as a law. Every time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress, he has an object-lesson in symmetrical arrangement. And so these features take on a kind of ethical rightness before they are judged as elements of æsthetic value. As to a sense of proportion between the dimensions or parts of a form, the reflexion that this involves a degree of intellectuality above the reach of many an adult might suggest that it is not to be expected from a small child; and this conjecture will be borne out when we come to examine children’s first essays in drawing.

These elementary pleasures of light, colour, and certain simple aspects of form, may be said to be the basis of a crude perception of beauty in natural objects and in the products of human workmanship. A quite small child is capable of acquiring a real admiration for a beautiful lady, in the appreciation of which brightness, colour, grace of movement, the splendour of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the eye is often reinforced by a sweet and winsome quality of voice. Such an admiration is not perfectly æsthetic: awe, an inkling of the social dignity of dress,[203] perhaps a longing to be embraced by the charmer, may all enter into it; yet a genuine admiration of look for its own sake is the core of the feeling. In other childish admirations, as the girl’s enthusiastic worship of the newly arrived baby, we see a true æsthetic sentiment mingled with and struggling, so to speak, to extricate itself from such ‘interested’ feelings as sense of personal enrichment by the new possession and of family pride. In the likings for animals, again, which often take what seem to us capricious and quaint directions, we may see rudiments of æsthetic perceptions half hidden under a lively sense of absolute lordship tempered with affection.

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Footnote 203:

On the nature of the early feeling for dress see Perez, _L’Art et la
Poésie chez l’Enfant_.

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Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure æsthetic enjoyment in these first experiences is the love of flowers. The wee round wonders with their mystery of velvety colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye. I believe most children who live among flowers and have access to them acquire something of this sentiment, a sentiment of admiration for beautiful things with which a sort of dumb childish sympathy commonly blends. No doubt there are marked differences among children here. There are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the strong sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers.[204] Others again care for them mainly as a means of personal adornment, though I am disposed to think that this partially interested fondness is less common with children than with many adults. It is sometimes said that the love of flowers is, in the main, a characteristic of girls. I think however that if one takes children early enough, before a consciousness of sex and of its proprieties has been allowed to develop under education, the difference will be but slight. Little boys of four or thereabouts often show a very lively sentiment of admiration for these gems of the plant world.

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Footnote 204:

See Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 90 f.

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In much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the first manifestations of taste in the race. Delight in bright glistening things, in gay tints, in strong contrasts of colour, as well as in certain forms of movement, as that of feathers—the favourite personal adornment—this is known to be characteristic of the savage and gives to his taste in the eyes of civilised man the look of childishness. On the other hand it is doubtful whether the savage attains to the sentiment of the child for the beauty of flowers. Our civilised surroundings, meadows and gardens, as well as the constant action of the educative forces of example, soon carry the child beyond the savage in this particular.

How far can children be said to have the germ of a feeling for nature, or, to use the more comprehensive modern term, cosmic emotion? It is a matter of common observation that they have not the power to embrace a multitude of things in a single act of contemplation. Hence they have no feeling for landscape as a harmonious complex of picturesquely varied parts. When they are taken to see a ‘view’ their eye instead of trying to embrace the whole, as a fond parent desires, provokingly pounces on some single feature of interest, and often one of but little æsthetic value. People make a great mistake in taking children to ‘points of view’ under the supposition that they will share in grown people’s impressions. Perez relates that some children taken to the Pic du Midi found their chief pleasure in scrambling up the peak and saying that they were on donkeys.[205] Mere magnitude or vastness of spectacle does not appeal to the child, for a sense of the sublime grows out of a complex imaginative process which is beyond his young powers. So far as immensity affects him at all, as in the case of the sea, it seems to excite a measure of dread in face of the unknown; and this feeling, though having a certain kinship with the emotion of sublimity, is distinct from this last. It has nothing of the joyous consciousness of expansion which enters into the later feeling. It is only to certain limited objects and features of nature that the child is æsthetically responsive. He knows the loveliness of the gilded spring meadow, the fascination of the sunlit stream, the awful mystery of the wood, and something too perhaps of the calming beauty of the broad blue sky. That is to say, he has a number of small rootlets which when they grow together will develop into a feeling for nature.

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Footnote 205:

_Op. cit._, p. 103.

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Here, too, the analogy between the child and the uncultured nature-man is evident. The savage has no æsthetic sentiment for nature as a whole, though he may feel the charm of some of her single features, a stream, a mountain, the star-spangled sky, and may even be affected by some of the awful aspects of her changing physiognomy. Are we not told, indeed, that a true æsthetic appreciation of the picturesque variety of nature’s scenes of the weird charm of wild places, and of the sublime fascinations of the awful and repellent mountain, are quite late attainments in the history of our race?[206]

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Footnote 206:

An excellent sketch of the growth of our feeling for the romantic and
sublime beauty of mountains is given by Mr. Leslie Stephen in one of
the most delightful of his works, _The Playground of Europe_.

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_Early Attitude towards Art._

We may now look at the child’s attitude towards those objects and processes of human art which from the first form part of his environment and make an educative appeal to his senses; and here we may begin with those simple musical effects which follow up certain impressions derived from the natural world.

It has been pointed out that sounds form a chief source of the little child-heart’s first trepidations. Yet this prolific cause of disquietude, when once the first alarming effect of strangeness has passed, becomes a main source of interest and delight. Some of nature’s sounds, as those of running water, and of the wind, early catch the ear, and excite wonder and curiosity. Miss Shinn illustrates fully in the case of her niece how the interest in sounds developed itself in the first years.[207] This pleasure in listening to sounds and in tracing them to their origin forms a chief pastime of babyhood.

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Footnote 207:

_Op cit._, p. 115 ff.

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Æsthetic pleasure in sound begins to be differentiated out of this general interest as soon as there arises a comparison of qualities and a development of preferences. Thus the sound of metal (when struck) is preferred to that of wood or stone. A nascent feeling for musical quality thus emerges which probably has its part in many of the first likings for persons; certain pitches, as those of the female voice, and possibly timbres being preferred to others.

Quite as soon, at least, as this feeling for quality of sound or tone, there manifests itself a crude liking for rhythmic sequence. It is commonly recognised that our pleasure in regularly recurring sounds is instinctive, being the result of our whole nervous organisation. We can better adapt successive acts of listening when sounds follow at regular intervals, and the movements which sounds evoke can be much better carried out in a regular sequence. The infant shows us this in his well-known liking for well-marked rhythms in tunes which he accompanies with suitable movements of the arms, head, etc.

The first likings for musical composition are based on this instinctive feeling for rhythm. It is the simple tunes, with well-marked easily recognisable time-divisions, which first take the child’s fancy, and he knows the quieting and the exciting qualities of different rhythms and times. Where rhythm is less marked, or grows highly complex, the motor responses being confused, the pleasurable interest declines. It is the same with the rhythmic qualities of verses. The jingling rhythms which their souls love are of simple structure, with short feet well marked off, as in the favourite, ‘Jack and Gill’.

Coming now to art as representative we find that a child’s æsthetic appreciation waits on the growth of intelligence, on the understanding of artistic representation as contrasted with a direct presentation of reality.

The development of an understanding of visual representation or the imaging of things has already been touched upon. As Perez points out, the first lesson in this branch of knowledge is supplied by the reflexions of the mirror, which, as we have seen, the infant begins to take for realities, though he soon comes to understand that they are not tangible realities. The looking-glass is the best means of elucidating the representative function of the image or ‘Bild’ just because it presents this image in close proximity to the reality, and so invites direct comparison with this.

In the case of pictures where this direct comparison is excluded we might expect a less rapid recognition of the representative function. Yet children show very early that picture-semblances are understood in the sense that they call forth reactions similar to those called forth by realities. A little boy was observed to talk to pictures at the end of the eighth month. This perhaps hardly amounted to recognition. Pollock says that the significance of pictures “was in a general way understood” by his little girl at the age of thirteen months.[208] Miss Shinn tells us that her niece, at the age of forty-two weeks, showed the same excitement at the sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that of real cats.[209] Ten months is also given me by a lady as the date at which her little boy recognised pictures of animals by naming them ‘bow-wow,’ etc., without being prompted.

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Footnote 208:

_Mind_, iii., p. 393.

Footnote 209:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, i., p. 71 f.

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This early recognition of pictures is certainly remarkable even when we remember that animals have the germ of it. The stories of recognition by birds of paintings of birds, and by dogs of portraits of persons, have to do with fairly large and finished paintings.[210] A child, however, will ‘recognise’ a small and roughly executed drawing. He seems in this respect to surpass the powers of savages, some of whom, at least, are said to be slow in recognising pictorial semblances. This power, which includes a delicate observation of form and an acute sense of likeness, is seen most strikingly in the recognition of individual portraits. Miss Shinn’s niece in her fourteenth month picked out her father’s face in a group of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter.[211] I noticed the same fineness of recognition in my own children.

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Footnote 210:

See Romanes, _Animal Intelligence_, pp. 311 and 453 ff. The only
exception is a photograph which is said to have been ‘large,’ p. 453.

Footnote 211:

_Op. cit._, i., p. 74.

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One point in this early observation of pictures is curious enough to call for especial remark. A friend of mine, a psychologist, writes to me that his little girl, aged three and a half, “does not mind whether she looks at a picture the right way up or the wrong; she points out what you ask for, eyes, feet, hands, tail, etc., about equally well whichever way up the picture is, and never asks to have it put right that she may see it better”. The same thing was noticed in the other children of the family, and the mother tells me that her mother observed it in her children. I have found a further illustration of this indifference to the position of a picture in the two children of another friend of mine. Professor Petrie tells me that he once watched an Arab boy looking at a picture-book. One, a drawing of horses and chariot, happened to have a different position from the rest, so that the book being held as before, the horses seemed to be going upwards; but the boy was not in the least incommoded, and without attempting to turn the book round easily made it out. These facts are curious as illustrating the skill of the young eye in deciphering. They may possibly have a further significance as showing how what we call position—the arrangement of a form in relation to a vertical line—is a comparatively artificial view of which a child as yet takes little if any account. He may be able to concentrate his attention so well on form proper that he is indifferent to the point how the form is placed. Yet this matter is one which well deserves further investigation.[212]

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Footnote 212:

Professor Petrie reminds me that a like absence of the perception of
position shows itself in the way in which letters are drawn in early
Greek and Phœnician writings.

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A further question arises as to whether this ‘recognition’ of pictures by children towards the end of the first year necessarily implies a grasp of the idea of a picture, that is, of a representation or copy of something. The first reactions of a child, smiling, etc., on seeing mirror-images and pictures, do not seem to show this, but merely that he is affected much as he would be by the presence of the real object, or, at most, that he recognises the picture as a kind of thing. The same is, I think, true of the so-called recognition of pictures by animals.

That children do not, at first, seize the pictorial or representative function is seen in the familiar fact that they will touch pictures as they touch shadows and otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities. Thus Pollock’s little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a picture and ‘pretended’ to feed some pictorial dogs.

When the first clear apprehension of the pictorial function is reached, it is difficult to say. Miss Shinn thought that her niece “understood the purport of a picture quite well” at the age of forty-five weeks. She draws this conclusion from the fact that at this date the child in answer to the question ‘Where are the flowers?’ leaned over and touched the painted flowers on her aunt’s gown, and then looked out to the garden with a cry of desire.[213] But this inference seems to me very risky. All that the child’s behaviour proves is that she ‘classed’ real and painted flowers together, while she recognised the superiority of the former as the tangible and probably the odorous ones. The strongest evidence of recognition of pictorial function by children is, I think, their ability to recognise the portrait of an individual. But even this is not quite satisfactory. It is conceivable, at least, that a child may look on a photograph of his father as a kind of ‘double’. The boy C. took his projected photograph very seriously as a kind of doubling of himself. The story of the dog, a Dandy Dinmont terrier, that trembled and barked at a portrait of his dead mistress[214] seems to me to bear this out. It would surely be rather absurd to say that the demonstrations of this animal, whatever they may have meant, prove that he took the portrait to be a memento-likeness of his dead mistress.

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Footnote 213:

_Op. cit._, i., p. 72.

Footnote 214:

Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 453.

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We are apt to forget how difficult and abstract a conception is that of pictorial representation, how hard it is to look at a thing as pure semblance having no value in itself, but only as standing for something else. A like slowness on the part of the child to grasp a sign, as such, shows itself here as in the case of verbal symbols. Children will, quite late, especially when feeling is aroused and imagination specially active, show a disposition to transform the semblance into the thing. Miss Shinn herself points out that her niece, who seems to have been decidedly quick, was as late as the twenty-fifth month touched with pity by a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to lift the painted branch that lay across the lamb. In her thirty-fifth month, again, when looking at a picture of a chamois defending her little one from an eagle, “she asked anxiously if the mamma would drive the eagle away, and presently quite simply and unconsciously placed her little hand edgewise on the picture so as to make a fence between the eagle and the chamois”.[215] Such ready confusion of pictures with realities shows itself in the fourth year and later. A boy nearly five was observed to strike at the figures in a picture and to exclaim: “I can’t break them”. The Worcester Collection of observations illustrates the first confused idea of a picture. “One day F., a boy of four, called on a friend, Mrs. C., who had just received a picture, representing a scene in winter, in which people were going to church, some on foot and others in sleighs. F. was told whither they were going. The next day he came and noticed the picture, and looking at Mrs. C. and then at the picture said: ‘Why, Mrs. C., them people haven’t got there yet, have they?’”

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Footnote 215:

_Op. cit._, ii., p. 104.

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All this points, I think, to a slow and gradual emergence of the idea of representation or likeness. If a child is capable in moments of intense imagination of confusing his battered doll with a living reality, he may be expected to act similarly with respect to the fuller likeness of a picture. Vividness of imagination tends in the child as in the savage, and indeed in all of us, to invest a semblance with something of reality. We are able to control the illusory tendency and to keep it within the limits of an æsthetic semi-illusion; not so the child. Is it too fanciful to suppose that the belief of the savage in the occasional visits of the real spirit-god to his idol has for its psychological motive the impulse which prompts the child ever and again to identify his toys and even his pictures with the realities which they represent?

As might be expected this impulse to confuse representation and represented reality shows itself very distinctly in the first reception of dramatic spectacle. If you dress up as Father Christmas, your child, even though he is told that you are his father, will hardly be able to resist the illusion that your disguise so powerfully induces. Cuvier relates that a boy of ten on watching a stage scene in which troops were drawn up for action, broke out in loud protestations to the actor who was taking the part of the general, telling him that the artillery was wrongly placed, and so forth.[216] This reminds one of the story of the sailors who on a visit to a theatre happened to see a representation of a mutiny on board ship, and were so excited that they rushed on the stage and took sides with the authorities in quelling the movement.

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Footnote 216:

Quoted by Perez, _op. cit._, p. 216.

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I believe that this same tendency to take art-representations for realities reappears in children’s mental attitude towards stories. A story by its narrative form seems to tell of real events, and children, as we all know, are wont to believe tenaciously that their stories are true. I think I have observed a disposition in imaginative children to go beyond this, and to give present actuality to the scenes and events described. And this is little to be wondered at when one remembers that even grown people, familiar with the devices of art-imitation, tend now and again to fall into this confusion. Only a few days ago, as I was reading an account by a friend of mine of a perilous passage in an Alpine ascent, accomplished years ago, I suddenly caught myself in the attitude of proposing to shout out to stop him from venturing farther. A vivid imaginative realisation of the situation had made it for the moment a present actuality.

Careful observations of the first attitudes of the child-mind towards representative art are greatly needed. We should probably find considerable diversity of behaviour. The presence of a true art-feeling would be indicated by a special quickness in the apprehension of art-semblance as such.