Page:Christmas pictures by children with an introduction by Edmund Dulac.djvu/9

 Introduction.

We have all been brought up with the superstition, that efficiency in drawing and painting is the privilege of a few adults, that it can only be achieved after a long and arduous struggle, and by means only revealed to an intellectual oligarchy.

From time to time, however, the performance of some extraordinary child seems to throw a doubt on this belief and starts us wondering whether in face of such achievements, the result of a few tender years' work, the long efforts of maturity are not so much waste of misplaced energy.

But quite recently in a comprehensive exhibition organised in London by Mr. Hawker, we were shown not a few isolated examples, but an impressive number of works by children between the ages of 6 and 16 done in the schools directed by Professor Čižek of Vienna. These displayed not only the most vivid imagination, and uncanny power of observation, but an unusual freshness of vision, and remarkable ability.

The importance of the problem cannot be overlooked any longer. It goes further than aesthetic pure and simple, it opens a door upon the unexplored and somewhat disturbing processes of the human mind, and the child prodigy can no longer be looked upon as a freak.

Life, some will have it, is a never ending attempt at solving the sempiternal problems that have faced man since his first contact with realities; by seeking his knowledge through them, he evolved Science; when he stretched his activities beyond contingencies in an endeavour to organise the forces hidden behind his consciousness,—Art was born,—Art, which was at the beginning Magic, and has remained Magic.

The Artist put at man's disposal a tangible world of unrealities by means of the most illusory elements, things that have no existence outside our senses—colour, lines, sound—and made him master if he wished of a world that he could conjure up at will.

Through Art man becomes a child again, that is, his consciousness is lulled back into that sleep full of wonders from which he was tragically awakened by the phenomenon of the real world, and whose phantasmagoria lingered through his younger years.

We forget that we had those treasures of imagination, open to our hands and eyes and that we have deliberately buried them under the burden of our growing consciousness, and all the while the child is there refusing to part with them and sometimes making them visible and tangible for us and as perfect as the sophisticated phantasies of those of more mature years!

To our utter astonishment, he uses a technique which we associate with a training of many years, a fact most worthy of notice, for it is evident that a very good knowledge of drawing can be acquired in an incredibly short space of time, and this may lead to an extension of the methods that have accomplished such good results, not only in art, but in all branches of educational training: a different and better comprehension and use of all the different kinds of memories and associations of ideas.