Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/606

586 his cheeks, and he was in such an agony of grief that his grandmother had to take the picture from him and try to divert his thoughts."

Here, it is pretty evident, we have to do with a degree of illusion which equals if it does not surpass that of the most absorbing play. We must remember that a detailed pictorial representation, especially if it is colored, gives to the eye a full presentment of a scene and so favors a particularly clear and vivid imaginative realization. It is probable, too, that the abstract mode of representation in pictorial art, as compared, say, with that of the stage, hardly counts for the child's perception. Even the ordinary adult, innocent of artistic aims and methods, is wont, when gazing upon a painting, to lose all count of the picture as such, his consciousness being focused for the intense imaginative realization of its meaning.

I do not, of course, mean that all realization of form by the young mind is of this illusory intensity. One striking characteristic of children's fancy is to interpret rapidly the boldest hints of a representation of a familiar form, more especially that of man and of animals. All observers of imaginative children can testify as to the quickness with which they detect the semblance of a human or animal form in the irregular lines of a cracked ceiling, in the veining of marble, or in the lineal design of a carpet, not to speak of slight and imperfect pictorial sketches. They are apt, as already remarked, to show this imaginative facility with respect to the forms of letters. Here is an example: The pen of a little boy, well on in his fourth year, when tracing a letter L, happened to slip, so that the horizontal limb formed an angle upward, thus: xxxx. He instantly saw the resemblance to the bent knee of the human form, and said, "Oh, he's sitting down." Similarly, when he made an F turn the wrong way, and then put the correct form to the left, thus, F F, he exclaimed, "They're talking together." Here, it is to be presumed, illusion is less complete, fancy amusing itself, so to speak, with the form and making it suggestive and representative. And probably the same applies to some of the earliest and clumsiest of children's attempts to draw men and horses, and so forth; only that here we have to do with a pre-existing idea and an artistic intention to give outer embodiment to this idea a—circumstance which tends to make the process of imaginative realization steadier and more dominant.

I have here dealt with children's play and kindred forms of activity as the outcome of a strong bent to imaginative realization, to the vivid, half-illusory picturing out of things. At the same time it is to be noticed that, in the forms in which this imaginative impulse works itself out, we see a good deal more of the