Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (13)

In these first reactions of the young mind to the stimulus of art-presentation we may study other aspects of the æsthetic aptitude. Very quaint and interesting is the exacting realism of these first appreciations. A child is apt to insist on a perfect detailed reproduction of the familiar reality. And here one may often trace the fine observation of these early years. Listen, for example, to the talk of the little critic before a drawing of a horse or a railway train, and you will be surprised to find how closely and minutely he has studied the forms of things. It is the same with other modes of art-representation. Perez gives an amusing instance of a boy, aged four, who when taken to a play was shocked at the anomaly of a chamber-maid touching glasses with her master on a _fête_ day. “In our home,” exclaimed the stickler for regularities, to the great amusement of the neighbours, “we don’t let the nurse drink like that.”[217] It is the same with story. Children are liable to be morally hurt if anything is described greatly at variance with the daily custom. Æsthetic rightness is as yet confused with moral rightness or social propriety, which, as we have seen, has its instinctive support in the child’s mind in respect for custom.

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Footnote 217:

_Op. cit._, pp. 215, 216.

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Careful observation will disclose in these first frankly expressed impressions the special directions of childish taste. The preferences of a boy of four in the matter of picture-books tell us where his special interests lie, what things he finds pretty, and how much of a genuine æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on. Here, again, there is ample room for more careful studies directed to the detection of the first manifestations of a pure delight in things as beautiful, as charming at once the senses and the imagination.

The first appearances of that complex interest in life and personality which fills so large a place in our æsthetic pleasures can be best noted in the behaviour of the child’s mind towards dramatic spectacle and story. The awful ecstatic delight with which a child is apt to greet any moving semblance carrying with it the look of life and action is something which some of us, like Goethe, can recall among our oldest memories. The old-fashioned moving ‘Schatten-bilder,’ for which the gaudy but rigid pictures of the magic lantern are but a poor substitute, the puppet-show, with what a delicious wonder have these filled the childish heart. And as to the entrancing, enthralling delight of the story—well Thackeray and others have tried to describe this for us.

Of very special interest in these early manifestations of a feeling for art is the appearance of a crude form of the two emotions to which all representations of life and character make appeal—the feeling for the comic, and for the tragic side of things. What we may call the adults fallacy, the tendency to judge children by grown-up standards, frequently shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will follow the directions of our own. I remember having made the mistake of putting those delightful books, _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_, into the hands of a small boy with a considerable sense of fun, and having been humiliated at discovering that there was no response. Children’s fun is of a very elemental character. They are mostly tickled, I suspect, by the spectacle of some upsetting of the proprieties, some confusion of the established distinctions of rank. Dress, as we have seen, has an enormous symbolic value for the child’s mind, and any confusion here is apt to be specially laughter-provoking. One child between three and four was convulsed at the sight of his baby bib fastened round the neck of his bearded sire. There is, too, a considerable element of rowdiness in children’s sense of the comical, as may be seen by the enduring popularity of the spectacle of Punch’s successful misdemeanours and bravings of the legal authority.

Since children are apt to take spectacles with an exacting seriousness, it becomes interesting to note how the two moods, realistic stickling for correctness, and rollicking hilarity at the sight of the disorderly, behave in relation one to another. More facts are needed on this point. It is probable that we have here to do in part with a permanent difference of temperament. There are serious matter-of-fact little minds which are shocked by a kind of spectacle or narrative that would give boundless delight to a more elastic fun-loving spirit. But discarding these permanent differences of disposition, I think that in general the sense of fun, the delight in the topsy-turviness of things, is apt to develop later than the serious realistic attitude already referred to. Here, too, it is probable that the evolution of the individual follows that of the race: the solemnities of custom and ritual weigh so heavily at first on the savage-mind that there is no chance for sprightly laughter to show himself. However this be, most young children appear to be unable to appreciate true comedy where the incongruous co-exists with and takes on one half of its charm from serious surroundings. Their laughter is best called forth by a broadly farcical show in which all serious rules are set at nought.

Of no less interest in this attitude of the child-mind towards the representations by art of human character and action are the first rude manifestations of the feeling for the tragic side of life. A child of four or six is far from realising the divine necessity which controls our mortal lives. Yet he will display a certain crude feeling for thrilling situation, exciting adventure, and something, too, of a sympathetic interest in the woes of mortals, quadrupeds as well as bipeds. The action, the situation, may easily grow too painful for an imaginative child disposed to take all representative spectacle as reality: yet the absorbing interest of the action where the sadness is bearable attests the early development of that universal feeling for the sorrowful fatefulness of things which runs through all imaginative writings from the ‘penny dreadful’ upwards.

_Beginnings of Art-production._

We have been trying to catch the first faint manifestations of æsthetic feeling in children’s contemplative attitude towards natural objects and the presentations of art. We may now pass to what is a still more interesting department of childish æsthetics, their first rude attempts at art-production. We are wont to say that children are artists in embryo, that in their play and their whole activity they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. In order to see whether this idea is correct we must start with a clear idea of what we mean by art-activity.

I would define art-activity as including all childish doings which are consciously directed to an external result recognised as beautiful, as directly pleasing to sense and imagination. Thus a gesture, or an intonation of voice, which is motived by a feeling for what is ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’ is a mode of art-activity as much as the production of a more permanent æsthetic object, as a drawing.

Now if we look at children’s activity we shall find that though much of it implies a certain germ of æsthetic feeling it is not pure art-activity. In the love of personal adornment, for example, we see, as in the case of savages, the æsthetic motive subordinated to another and personal or interested feeling, vanity or love of admiration. On the other hand, in children’s play, which undoubtedly has a kinship with art, we find the æsthetic motive, the desire to produce something beautiful, very much in the background. We have then to examine these primitive forms of activity so as to try to disengage the genuine art-element.

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]

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Footnote 218:

See Grosse, _Die Anfänge der Kunst_, pp. 106, 107.

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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]

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Footnote 219:

The whole subject of the attitude of the child-mind towards dress and
ornament is well dealt with by Perez, _op. cit._, chap. i.

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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.

Such naïve play-activity acquires a greater æsthetic importance when it becomes significant or representative of something: and this direction appears very early in child-history. The impulse to imitate the action of another seems to be developed before the completion of the first half-year.[220] In its first crude form, as reproducing a gesture or sound uttered at the moment by another, it enters into the whole of social or concerted play. A number of children find the harmonious performance of a series of dance or other movements, such as those of the kindergarten games, natural and easy, because the impulse to imitate, to follow another’s lead, at once prompts them and keeps them from going far astray.

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Footnote 220:

Preyer places the first imitative movement in the fourth month (_op.
cit._, cap. 12). Baldwin, however, dates the first unmistakable
appearance in the case of his little girl in the ninth month (_Mental
Development_, p. 131).

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It is a higher and more intellectual kind of imitation when a child recalls the idea of something he has seen done and reproduces the action. This is often carried out under the suggestive force of objects which happen to present themselves at the time, as when a child sees an empty cup and pretends to drink, or a book and simulates the action of reading out of it, or a pair of scissors and proceeds to execute snipping movements. In other cases the imitation is more spontaneous, as when a child recalls and repeats some funny saying that he has heard.

This imitative action grows little by little more complex, and in this way a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. Here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. A child pantomimically representing some funny action comes, indeed, very near to the mimetic art of the comedian.

Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, _viz._, the production of semblances in things. Early illustrations of this impulse are the making of a river out of the gravy in the plate, the pinching of pellets of bread till they take on something of resemblance to known forms. One child, three years old, once occupied himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which his knife (or spoon) and fork were made to act as hands, and cherry stones put round the plate to represent the hours. Such table-pastimes are known to all observers of children, and have been prettily touched on by R. L. Stevenson.[221]

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Footnote 221:

_Virginibus Puerisque_, ‘Child’s Play’.

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Such formative touches are, at first, rough enough, the transformation being effected, as we have seen, much more by the alchemy of the child’s imagination than by the cunning of his hands. Yet, crude as it is, and showing at first almost as much of chance as of design, it is a manifestation of the same plastic impulse, the same striving to produce images or semblances of things, which possesses the sculptor and the painter. In each case we see a mind dominated by an idea and labouring to give it outward embodiment. The more elaborate constructive play which follows, the building with sand and with bricks, with which we may take the first spontaneous drawings, are the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten occupations, most of all the clay-modelling, make direct appeal to this half-artistic plastic impulse in the child.

In this imitative play we see from the first the tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the acting of the nursery the nurse, the coachman and so forth are given by one or two broad touches, such as the presence of the medicine-bottle or its semblance, or of the whip, together, perhaps, with some characteristic manner of speaking. In this way child-play, like primitive art, shows a certain unconscious selectiveness. It presents what is constant and typical, imperfectly enough no doubt. The same selection of broadly distinctive traits is seen where some individual seems to be represented. There is a precisely similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline in the first rude attempts of children to form semblances. This will be fully illustrated presently when we examine their manner of drawing.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald abstract representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the representation. Thus the coachman’s talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. A precisely similar process of development is noticeable in the plastic activities. The first raw attempt to represent house or castle is improved upon, and the image grows fuller of characteristic detail and more life-like. Here, again, we may note the parallelism between the evolution of play-activity and of primitive art.

This movement away from bare symbolic indication to concrete pictorial representation involves a tendency to individualise, to make the play or the shapen semblance life-like in the sense of representing an individual reality. Such individual concreteness may be obtained by a mechanical reproduction of some particular action and scene of real life, and children in their play not infrequently attempt a faithful recital or portraiture of this kind. Such close unyielding imitation shows itself, too, now and again in the attempt to act out a story. Yet with bright fanciful children the impulse to give full life and colour to the performance rarely stops here. Fresh individual life is best obtained by the aid of invention, by the intervention of which some new scene or situation, some new grouping of personalities is realised. Nothing is æsthetically of more interest in children’s play than the first cautious intrusion into the domain of imitative representation of this impulse of invention, this desire for the new and fresh as distinct from the old and customary. Perhaps, too, there is no side of children’s play in which individual differences are more clearly marked or more significant than this. The child of bold inventive fancy is shocking to his companion whose whole idea of proper play is a servile imitation of the scenes and actions of real life. Yet the former will probably be found to have more of the stuff of which the artist is compacted.

All such invention, moreover, since it aims at securing some more vivacious and stirring play-experience, naturally comes under the influence of the childish instinct of exaggeration. I mean by this the untaught art of vivifying and strengthening a description or representation by adding touch to touch. In the representations of play, this love of colour, of strong effect, shows itself now in a piling up of the beautiful, gorgeous, or wonderful, as when trying to act some favourite scene from fairy-story, or some grand social function, now in a bringing together of droll or pathetic incidents so as to strengthen the comic or the tragic feeling of the play-action. In all this—which has its counterpart in the first crude attempts of the art of the race to break the tight bonds of a servile imitation—we have, I believe, the germ of what in our more highly developed art we call the idealising impulse.

I have, perhaps, said enough to show that children’s play is in many respects analogous to art of the simpler kind, also that it includes within itself lines of activity which represent the chief directions of art-development.[222]

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Footnote 222:

The telling of stories to other children does not, I conceive, fall
under my definition of play. It is child-art properly so called.

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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.

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Footnote 223:

_Virginibus Puerisque_, ‘Child’s Play’.

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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.

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Footnote 224:

According to Mr H. Rutgers Marshall art-activity takes its rise in the
instinct to attract others (_Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics_).

Footnote 225:

Grosse, _Anfänge der Kunst_, p. 48.

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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]

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Footnote 226:

The child’s feeling for climax shown in these is further illustrated
in a charming story taken down by Miss Shinn, but unfortunately too
long to quote here. See _Overland Monthly_, vol. xxiii., p. 19.

Footnote 227:

Perez deals with children’s literary compositions in the work already
quoted (chap. ix.). Cf. Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, cap. viii. and ix.

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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.

X.
THE YOUNG DRAUGHTSMAN.

_First Attempts to Draw._

A child’s first attempts at drawing are pre-artistic and a kind of play, an outcome of the instinctive love of finding and producing semblances of things illustrated in the last essay. Sitting at the table and covering a sheet of paper with line-scribble he is wholly self-centred, ‘amusing himself,’ as we say, and caring nothing about the production of “objective values”.

Yet even in the early stages of infantile drawing the social element of art is suggested in the impulse of the small draughtsman to make his lines indicative of something to others’ eyes, as when he bids his mother look at the ‘man,’ ‘gee-gee,’ or what else he fancies that he has delineated.[228] And this, though crude enough and apt to shock the æsthetic sense of the matured artist by its unsightliness, is closely related to art, forming, indeed, in a manner a preliminary stage of pictorial design.

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Footnote 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.

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We shall therefore study children’s drawings as a kind of rude embryonic art. In doing this our special aim will be to describe and explain childish characteristics. This, again, will compel us to go to some extent into the early forms of observation and imagination. It will be found, I think, that the first crude drawings are valuable as throwing light on the workings of children’s minds. Perhaps, indeed, it may turn out that these spontaneous efforts of the childish hand to figure objects are for the psychologist a medium of expression of the whole of child-nature, hardly less instructive than that of early speech.

In carrying out our investigation of children’s drawings we shall need to make a somewhat full reference to the related phenomena, the drawings of modern savages and those of early art. While important points of difference will disclose themselves the resemblances are important enough to make a comparison not only profitable but almost indispensable.

I have thought it best to narrow the range of the inquiry by keeping to delineations of the human figure and of animals, especially the horse. These are the favourite topics of the child’s pencil, and examples of them are easily obtainable.

As far as possible I have sought spontaneous drawings of quite young children, _viz._, from between two and three to about six.[229] In a strict sense of course no child’s drawing is absolutely spontaneous and independent of external stimulus and guidance. The first attempts to manage the pencil are commonly aided by the mother, who, moreover, is wont to present a model drawing, and, what is even more important at this early stage, to supply model-movements of the arm and hand. In most cases, too, there is some slight amount of critical inspection, as when she asks, ‘Where is papa’s nose?’ ‘Where is doggie’s tail?’ Yet perfect spontaneity, even if obtainable, is not necessary here. The drawings of men and quadrupeds of a child of five and later disclose plainly enough the childish fashion, even though there has been some slight amount of elementary instruction. Hence I have not hesitated to make use of drawings sent me by kindergarten teachers. I may add that I have used by preference the drawings executed by children in elementary schools, as these appear to illustrate the childish manner with less of parental interference than is wont to be present in a cultured home.

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Footnote 229:

Only a few drawings of older children above seven have been included.

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A child’s drawing begins with a free aimless swinging of the pencil to and fro, which movements produce a chaos of slightly curved lines. These movements are purely spontaneous, or, if imitative, are so only in the sense that they follow at a considerable distance the movements of the mother’s pencil.[230] They may be made expressive or significant in two ways. In the first place, a child may by varying the swinging movements accidentally produce an effect which suggests an idea through a remote resemblance. A little boy when two years and two months, was one day playing in this wise with the pencil, and happening to make a sort of curling line, shouted with excited glee, ‘Puff, puff!’ _i.e._, smoke. He then drew more curls with a rudimentary intention to show what he meant. In like manner when a child happens to bend his line into something like a closed circle or ellipse he will catch the faint resemblance to the rounded human head and exclaim, ‘Mama!’ or ‘Dada!’

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Footnote 230:

E. Cooke gives illustrations of these in his thoughtful and
interesting articles on “Art-teaching and Child-nature,” published in
the _Journal of Education_, Dec., 1885, and Jan., 1886.

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But intentional drawing or designing does not always arise in this way. A child may set himself to draw, and make believe that he is drawing something when he is scribbling. This is largely an imitative play-action following the direction of the movements of another’s hand. Preyer speaks of a little boy who in his second year was asked when scribbling with a pencil what he was doing and answered ‘writing houses’. He was apparently making believe that his jumble of lines represented houses.[231] Almost any scribble may in this earliest stage take on a meaning through the play of a vigorous childish imagination.

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Footnote 231:

Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 47.

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The same play of imagination is noticeable in the child’s first endeavours to draw an object from memory when he is asked to do so. Thus a little girl in her fourth year referred to by Mr. E. Cooke when asked to draw a cat produced a longish irregularly curved line crossed by a number of shorter lines, which strange production she proceeded quite complacently to dignify by the name ‘cat,’ naming the whiskers, legs, and tail (Fig. 1 (_a_); compare the slightly fuller design in Fig. 1 (_b_)).[232]

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Footnote 232:

Taken from E. Cooke’s articles already quoted, drawings 19 and 20.

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Here it is evident we have a phase of childish drawing which is closely analogous to the symbolism of language. The representation is arbitrarily chosen as a symbol and not as a likeness. This element of a non-imitative or symbolic mode of representation will be found to run through the whole of childish drawing.

Even this chaotic scribble shows almost from the beginning germs of formative elements, not merely in the fundamental line-elements, but also in the loops, and in the more abrupt changes of direction or angles. A tendency to draw a loop-like rudimentary contour soon emerges, and thus we get the transition to a possible outlining of objects. Miss Shinn gives a good example of an ovoid loop drawn by her niece in her hundred and ninth week.[233] With practice the child acquires by the second or third year the usual stock in trade of the juvenile draughtsman, and can draw a sort of straight line, curved lines, a roughish kind of circle or oval, as well as dots, and even fit lines together at angles.[234] When this stage is reached we begin to see attempts at real though rude likenesses of men, horses and so forth. These early essays are among the most curious products of the child-mind. They follow standards and methods of their own; they are apt to get hardened into a fixed conventional manner which may reappear even in mature years. They exhibit with a certain range of individual difference a curious uniformity, and they have their parallels in what we know of the first crude designs of the untutored savage.

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Footnote 233:

_Op. cit._, pt. ii., p. 97; “fifty-sixth week” is, she informs me, an
error for hundred and ninth week.

Footnote 234:

I am much indebted to Mr. Cooke for the sight of a series of early
scribbles of his little girl. _Cf._ Baldwin, _Mental Development_,
chap. v., where some good examples of early line-tracing are given.
According to Baldwin angles or zig-zag come early, and are probably
due to the cramped, jerky mode of movement at this early stage. Preyer
seems to me wrong in saying that children cannot manage a circular
line before the end of the third year (_op. cit._, p. 47). Most
children who draw at all manage a loop or closed curved line before
this date.

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_First Drawings of the Human Figure._

It has been wittily observed by an Italian writer on children’s art that they reverse the order of natural creation in beginning instead of ending with man.[235] It may be added that they start with the most dignified part of this crown of creation, _viz._, the human head. A child’s first attempt to represent a man proceeds, so far as I have observed, by drawing the front view of his head. This he effects by means of a clumsy sort of circle with a dot or two thrown in by way of indicating features in general. A couple of lines may be inserted as a kind of support, which do duty for both trunk and legs. The circular or ovoid form is, I think, by far the most common. The square head in my collection appears only very occasionally and in children _at school_, who presumably have had some training in drawing horizontal and vertical lines. The accompanying example (Fig. 2) is the work of a Jamaica girl of five, kindly sent me by her teacher.

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Footnote 235:

Corrado Ricci, _L’Arte dei Bambini_ (1887), p. 6.

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This first attempt to outline the human form is, no doubt, characterised by a high degree of arbitrary symbolism. The use of a rude form of circle to set forth the human head reminds one of the employment by living savage tribes of the same form as the symbol of a house (hut?), a wreath, and so forth.[236] Yet there is a measure of resemblance even in this abstract symbolism: the circle does roughly resemble the contour of the head: as, indeed, the square or rectangle may be said less obviously to do when hair and whiskers and the horizontal line of the hat break the curved line.

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Footnote 236:

See Von den Steinen, _op. cit._, p. 247.

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But it is not the mere contour which represents the face: it is a circle picked out with features. These, however vaguely indicated, are an integral part of the facial scheme. This is illustrated in the fact that among the drawings by savages and others collected by General Pitt-Rivers, one, executed by an adult negro of Uganda, actually omits the contour, the human head being represented merely by an arrangement of dark patches and circles for eyes, ears, etc. (Fig. 3).[237]

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Footnote 237:

These drawings, of the highest interest to the student of child-art as
well as to the anthropologist, are to be seen in the General’s Museum
at Farnham (Dorset) (7th room).

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Coming now to the mode of representing the features, we find at an early stage of this schematic delineation an attempt to differentiate and individualise features, not only by giving definite position but by a rough imitation of form. Thus we get the vertical line as indicating the direction of the nose, the horizontal line that of the mouth, and either a rounded dot or a circular line as representative of the curved outline of the eye—whether that of the iris, of the visible part of the eyeball, or of the orbital cavity. A precisely similar scheme appears in the drawings of savages.[238]

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Footnote 238:

Schoolcraft has a good example of this facial scheme in the drawing of
a man shooting (_The Indian Tribes of the United States_, i., pl. 48).

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At first the child is grandly indifferent to completeness in the enumeration of features. Even ‘the two eyes, a nose and a mouth’ are often imperfectly represented. Thus when dots are used we may have one or more specks ranging, according to M. Perez, up to five.[239] The use of a single dot for facial feature in general has its parallel in the art of savage tribes.[240] It is, however, I think, most common to introduce three dots in a triangular arrangement, presumably for eyes and mouth,—a device again which reappears in the art of uncivilised races.[241] Even when the young draughtsman has reached the stage of distinguishing the features he may be quite careless about number and completeness. Thus a feature may be omitted altogether. This funnily enough happens most frequently in the case of that one which seems to us ‘grown-ups’ most self-assertive and most resentful of indignity, _viz._, the nose. These moon-faces with two eyes and a mouth are very common among the first drawings of children. The mouth, on the other hand, is much less frequently omitted. The same thing seems to hold good of the drawings of savages.[242] The eyes are rarely omitted. The single dot may perhaps be said to stand for ‘eye’. Some drawings of savages have the two eyes and no other feature, as in the accompanying example from Andree, plate 3 (Fig. 4 (_a_)). On the other hand, a child will, as we have seen, sometimes content himself with one eye. This holds good not only where the dot is used but after something like an eye-circle is introduced, as in the accompanying drawing by a Jamaica girl of seven (Fig. 4 (_b_)).

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Footnote 239:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 186.

Footnote 240:

For an illustration see Andree, _Eth. Parallelen und Vergleiche_, pl.
3, fig. 19.

Footnote 241:

See for an example, Schoolcraft, iv., pl. 18.

Footnote 242:

According to Stanley Hall the nose comes after the mouth. This may be
an approximate generalisation, but there are evidently exceptions to
it. On the practice of savage draughtsmen see the illustrations of
Australian cave drawings in Andree, _op. cit._, p. 159. _Cf._ the
drawings of Brazilian tribes, plate iii., 15. In some cases there
seems a preference for the nose, certain of the Brazilian drawings
representing facial features merely by a vertical stroke.

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In these first attempts to sketch out a face we miss a sense of relative position and of proportion. It is astonishing what a child on first attempting to draw a human or animal form can do in the way of dislocation or putting things into the wrong place. The little girl mentioned by E. Cooke on trying, about the same age, to draw a cat from a model actually put the circle representing the eye outside that of the head. With this may be compared the drawings of Von den Steinen and other Europeans made by his Brazil Indian companions, in which what was distinctly said by the draughtsman to be the moustache was in more than one instance set above the eyes (Fig. 4 (_c_)). When dots are inserted in the linear scheme they are apt at first to be thrown in anyhow. The two eyes, I find, when these only are given, may be put one above the other as well as one by the side of the other, and both arrangements occur in the drawings of the same child. And much later when greater attention to position is observable there is a general tendency to put the group of features too high up, _i.e._, to make the forehead or brain region too small in proportion to the chin region (_cf._ above, Fig. 2, p. 336).[243]

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Footnote 243:

M. Passy calls attention to this in his interesting note on children’s
drawings, _Revue Philosophique_, 1891, p. 614 ff. I find however that
though the error is a common one it is not constant.

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The want of proportion is still more plainly seen in the treatment of the several features. The eye, as already remarked, is apt to be absurdly large. In the drawing of Mr. Cooke’s little girl mentioned above it is actually larger than the head outside which it lies. This enlargement continues to appear frequently in later drawings, more particularly when one eye only is introduced, as in the accompanying drawing by a boy in his seventh year (Fig. 5 (_a_); _cf._ above, Fig. 4 (_b_)). The mouth is apt to be even more disproportionate, the child appearing to delight in making this appalling feature supreme, as in the following examples, both by boys of five (Fig. 5 (_b_) and (_c_)). The ear, when it is added, is apt to be enormous, and generally the introduction of new details as ears, hair, hands, is wont to be emphasised by an exaggeration of their magnitude.

Very interesting is the gradual artistic evolution of the features. Here, as in organic evolution, there is a process of specialisation, the primordial indefinite form taking on more of characteristic complexity. In the case of the eye, for example, we may often trace a gradual development, the dot being displaced by a small circle or ovoid, this last supplemented by a second circle outside the first,[244] or by one or by two arches, the former placed above, the latter above and below the circle. The form remains throughout an abstract outline or scheme, there being no attempt to draw even the lines—_e.g._, those of the lid-margins—correctly, or to indicate differences of light and dark, save in the case where a central black dot is used. In this schematic treatment so striking and interesting a feature as the eye-lash only very rarely finds a place. A similar schematic treatment of the eye in the use of a dot, a dot in a circle, and two circles, is observable in the drawings of savages and of Egyptian and other archaic art.[245]

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Footnote 244:

In one case I find the curious device of two dots or small circles,
one above the other within a larger circle, and this form repeated in
the eye of animals.

Footnote 245:

An example of circle within circle occurs in a drawing by a male Zulu
in General Pitt-Rivers’ collection.

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The evolution of the mouth is particularly interesting. It is wont to begin with a horizontal line (or what seems intended for such) which is frequently drawn right across the facial circle. But a transition soon takes place to a more distinctive representation. This is naturally enough carried out by the introduction of the characteristic and interesting detail, the teeth. This may be done, according to M. Perez, by keeping to the linear representation, the teeth being indicated by dots placed upon the horizontal line. In all the cases observed by me the teeth are introduced in a more realistic fashion in connexion with a contour to suggest the parted lips. The contour—especially the circular or ovoid—occasionally appears by itself without teeth, but the teeth seem to be soon added. The commonest forms of tooth-cavity I have met with are a narrow rectangular and a curved spindle-shaped slit with teeth appearing as vertical lines (see the two drawings by boys of six and five, Fig. 6 (_a_) and (_b_)). These two forms are improved upon and more likeness is introduced by making the dental lines shorter, as in Fig. 5 (_c_) (p. 340). With this may be compared a drawing by a boy of five (Fig. 6 (_c_)), where however we see a movement from realism in the direction of a freer decorative treatment.

A somewhat similar process of evolution is noticeable in the case of the nose, though here the movement is soon brought to a standstill. Thus the vertical line gives place to an angle, which may point to the side, as in the drawing of a country-boy between three and four (Fig. 7 (_a_)), but more frequently, I think, points upwards, as in the drawing of a boy of six (Fig. 7 (_b_)). This in its turn leads to an isosceles triangle with an acute angle at the apex, as in the drawing of a boy of six (Fig. 7 (_c_)). In a few cases a long spindle-shaped or rectangular form similar to that of the mouth is employed, as in a drawing of a nervous child of six (Fig. 7 (_d_)). Refinements are introduced now and again by an attempt at the nostrils, as in the accompanying curious drawing by a seven-years-old Jamaica girl (Fig. 7 (_e_)).[246]

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Footnote 246:

It is possible that in this drawing the two short lines added to the
mouth are an original attempt to give the teeth.

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