Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/414

382 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 aesthetic aptitudes. His tastes get acted upon from the first and biased 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 theater, 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 sesthetic preferences begin to manifest themselves makes it desirable to study them before we go on to consider the active side of childart. We will try as well as we can to extricate the first manifestations of genuine childish taste.

At the very beginning, before the educational influence has had time to work, we can catch some of the characteristics of this childish quasi-aesthetic 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 snow 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.