Children's Ways Part 12

There is, indeed, in these first actions, such as the kissing of the hand to other children in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable of those uncivilised races which we dishonour by calling them savages. This feeling for pleasing effect in bodily carriage and movement, in the use of speech and gesture, is no doubt far from being a pure art-activity. Traces of self-consciousness, of vanity, are often discernible in it; yet at least it attests the existence of a certain appreciation of what is beautiful, and of something akin to the creative impulse of the artist.

A true art-impulse is characterised by a pure love of doing something which, either in itself as an action or in the material result which it produces, is beautiful. Into this there enters, at the moment at least, no consciousness of self. Now there is one field of children's activity which, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, is marked by just this absorption of thought in action for its own sake, and that is play.

To say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. Like art it is inspired and sustained by a pure love of producing. Like art, too, on its representative side, play aims at producing an imitation or semblance of something. The semblance may be plastic, residing in the material product of the action, as in making things such as castles out of cardboard or sand; or it may be dramatic and reside in the action itself, as in much of the childish play already described.

The imitative impulse prompting to the production of the semblance of something appears very early in child-life. A good deal of the imitation which occurs in the second half year is the taking on, under the lead of another's example, of actions which are more or less useful. This applies, for example, to such actions as waving the hand in sign of farewell, and of course to vocal imitation of others' verbal sounds. At an early date we find, further, a perfectly useless kind of imitation which is more akin to that of art. A quite young child will, for example, _pretend_ to do something, as to take an empty cup and carry out the semblance of drinking. The imitation of the sounds and movements of animals, which comes early too, may be said to be imitative in the more artistic sense, inasmuch as it has no aim beyond that of mimetic representation.

Later on, towards the third year, this simple type of imitative action grows more complex, so that a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. A child, for example, occupies himself with pretending to be an organ-grinder's monkey, going duly and in order through the action of jumping down from his seat, and taking off his cap by way of begging for the stranger's contribution. Here, it is evident, we get something closely a.n.a.logous to histrionic performance. This play-like performance, again, gradually divides itself into a more serious kind of action, a.n.a.logous to serious drama, and into a lighter representation of some funny scene, which has in it something akin to comedy.

Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, the fas.h.i.+oning of lasting semblances. Early ill.u.s.trations 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, would occupy himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which the knife 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 in his essay on "Child's Play".

These 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 which possesses the sculptor and the painter.

The more elaborate constructive play which follows--the building with cards and wooden bricks, the moulding with sand and clay, and the first spontaneous drawings--is the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten is, indeed, a kind of smaller art-world where the dramatic and plastic impulses of the child are led into orderly action.

In this imitative play we see from the first the artistic tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the unstudied acting of the nursery, the nurse, the coachman, and the rest, are presented by a few broad touches; characteristic actions, such as pouring out the medicine, jerking the reins, being aided by one or two rough accessories, as the medicine bottle or the whip. In this way child's 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 person, _e.g._, a particular newsboy or gardener, seems to be represented. A similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline is seen in the first rude attempts of children to construct, whether with materials like cards or bricks, or with pencil, the semblance of a house, a garden and so forth.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the play. Thus the coachman's talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. Similarly with the products of the plastic impulse.

With this more realistic tendency to exhibit the characteristic with something like concrete fulness we see the germ at least of the idealistic impulse to transcend the level of common things, to give prominence to what has value, to touch the representation with the magic light of beauty. Even a small child playing with its coloured petals or its sh.e.l.ls will show a rudiment of this artistic feeling for beautiful arrangement.

No doubt there are striking variations among children in this respect.

Play discloses in many ways differences of feeling and ideas: among others, in the unequal degrees of tastefulness of the play scene. Yet the presence of an impulse, however rudimentary, to produce what has beauty and charm for the eye is a fact which we must recognise.

Along with this feeling for the sensuous effect of beauty we can discern the beginnings of fancy and invention whereby the idea represented is made more prominent and potent. This tendency, like the others, shows itself in a crude form at first, as in the earlier and coa.r.s.er art of the race. In children's play we can see much of the uncultured man's love of strong effect. The pathos of the death of the pet animal or of the child has to be made obvious and strongly effective by a ma.s.s of painful detail; the comic incident must be made broadly farcical by heavy touches of caricature; the excitement of perilous adventure has to be intensified by multiplying the menacing forces and the thrilling situations. Yet crude as are these early attempts at strengthening the feebleness of the actual they are remotely akin to the idealising efforts of true art.

Nevertheless, children's play, though akin to it, is not completely art. As pointed out above, the action in a child's play is not intended as a dramatic spectacle. The small player 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 art is produced, for its own worth's sake, but rather as providing a new world into which he may retire and enjoy privacy. A child in playing a part does not "play" in order to delight others. "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_." The same is true when children play at being Indians or what not: they are not "acting" in the theatrical sense of the word.

While, then, one can say that there is something akin to art in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, we must add that, for the development of the true impulse of the artist, a good deal more is needed. The play-impulse will only get specialised into the art-impulse when it is illumined by a growing partic.i.p.ation in the social consciousness, and by a sense of beauty and the aesthetic worth of things; when, further, it begins to concentrate itself on one mode of imitative activity, as, for example, dramatic representation or drawing.

I have chosen here to deal with the more spontaneous manifestations of an art-like impulse in children, rather than to describe their first attempts at art as we understand it. Here--in the case of all but those endowed with a genuine artistic talent--we are apt to find too much of the adult's educative influence, too little of what is spontaneous and original. At the same time, some of this art-activity, more particularly the first 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 be quoted. 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, which is 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 the 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 nave 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. 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 young mind cannot easily accommodate itself, and wanting in true childish inspiration. No doubt, even in these choking circ.u.mstances, 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 this feeling and the characteristic movements of young thought, and might well repay careful study.

There is one other department of children's art which clearly does deserve to be studied with some care--their 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 which takes its rise, indeed, in the play-impulse. To this I propose to devote my next and last chapter.

CHAPTER XII.

FIRST PENCILLINGS.

A child's first attempts at drawing are not art proper, but a kind of play. As he sits at the table and covers a sheet of paper with line-scribble he is wholly self-centred, "amusing himself," as we say, and caring nothing about the production of a thing of aesthetic value.

Yet even in this infantile scribbling we see a tendency towards art-production in the effort of the small draughtsman to make his lines indicative of something to another's eyes, as when he bids his mother look at the "man," "gee-gee," or what else he cheerfully imagines his scribble to delineate. Such early essays to represent objects by lines, though commonly crude enough and apt to shock the aesthetic sense of the matured artist by their unsightliness, are closely related to art, and deserve to be studied as a kind of preliminary stage of pictorial design.

In studying what is really a large subject it will be well for us to narrow the range of our 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. 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 or other instructor, 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?" In one case, however, I have succeeded in getting drawings of a little girl who was carefully left to develop her own ideas. Even in the instances where adult supervision is apt to interfere, we can, I think, by patient investigation distinguish traits which are genuinely childish.

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 roughly the directions of another's pencil.

In this first line-scribble there is no serious intention to trace a particular form. What a child seems to do in this rough imitation of another's movements is to make a tangle of lines, more or less straight, varied by loops, which in a true spirit of play he makes believe to be the semblance of "mamma," "p.u.s.s.y," or what not, as in Fig. 1 (_a_) and (_b_). Possibly in not a few cases the interpretation first suggests itself after the scribble, the child's fancy discerning some faint resemblance in his formless tangle to a human head, a cat's tail, and so forth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1 (_a_).[11]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1 (_b_).[11]]

[11] Fig. 1 (_a_) is a drawing of a man by a child of twenty months, reproduced from Prof. M. Baldwin's _Mental Development_, p. 84; Fig. 1 (_b_) is a drawing of a man by a child of two years three months, reproduced from an article on children's drawings by Mr. H. T. Lukens in _The Pedagogical Seminary_, vol. iv. (1896).

This habit of scribble may persist after a child attempts a linear description of the parts of an object. Thus a little girl in her fourth year when asked to draw a cat produced the two accompanying figures (Fig. 2 (_a_) and (_b_)).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 2 (_a_).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 2 (_b_).]

Here it is evident we have a phase of childish drawing which is closely a.n.a.logous to the symbolism of language. The form of representation is chosen arbitrarily and not because of its likeness to what is represented. This element of symbolic indication will be found to run through the whole of childish drawing.

As soon as the hand acquires a certain readiness in drawing lines and closed lines or "outlines," and begins to connect the forms produced with the necessary movements, drawing takes on a more intentional character. The child now aims at constructing a particular linear representation, that of a man, a horse, or what not. These first attempts to copy in line the forms of familiar objects are among the most curious products of the child's 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.

_The Human Face Divine._

It has been wittily observed by an Italian writer, Signor Corrado Ricci, that children in their drawings reverse the order of natural creation by beginning instead of ending with man. It may be added that they start with the most dignified part of this crown of creation, _viz._, the human head. A child's attempt to represent a man appears commonly to begin by drawing a sort of circle for the front view of the head. A dot or two, sometimes only one, sometimes as many as five, are thrown in as a rough way of indicating the features.

I speak here of the commoner form. There are however variations of this.

Some children draw a squarish outline for head, but these are children _at school_. In one case, that of a little girl aged three years four months, the outline was not completed, the facial features being set between two vertical columns of scribble, which do duty for legs (Fig.

3). Sometimes the features are simply laid down without any enclosing contour; and this arrangement appears not only in children's drawings but in those of savage adults.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 3.[12]]

[12] Reproduced from the article already referred to, by Mr. Lukens.

The representation of the head sometimes appears alone, but a strong tendency to bring in the support of the legs soon shows itself. This takes at first the crude device of a couple of vertical lines attached to the head (see Fig. 4).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 4.]

Coming now to the mode of representing the face, we find at an early stage the commencement of an attempt to differentiate the features. In drawings of children of three we frequently see that while the eyes are indicated by dots the nose is given as a short vertical line. Similarly when the mouth appears it does so commonly as a horizontal line. We notice that more attention is given to the problem of placing a feature than to that of making a likeness of it. Indeed this first drawing is largely a pointing out or noting down of features without any serious effort to draw them. The representation is a kind of local description rather than a true drawing. Curious differences appear in respect of the completeness of this linear noting or enumerating of features. The nose more particularly appears and disappears in a capricious way in the drawings of the same child.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 5.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 6.]