Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/417

Rh of still forms back into these first impressions of the forms of motion?

One noticeable feature in the child's first response to the attractions of form is the preference given to "tiny" things. The liking for small natural forms, birds, insects, shells, and so forth, and the prominence of such epithets as "wee," "tiny" or "teeny," "dear little," in the child's vocabulary alike illustrate this early direction of taste. This feeling again is a mixed one; for the child's interest in very small fragile-looking things has in it an element of caressing tenderness which again contains a touch of fellow-feeling. This is but one illustration of the general rule of æsthetic development in the case of the individual and of the race alike that a pure contemplative delight in the aspect of things only gradually detaches itself from a mixed feeling.

If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, regularity of outline, symmetry, proportion, we encounter a difficulty. Many children acquire while quite young and before any formal education commences a certain feeling for regularity and symmetry. But is this the result of a mere observation of natural or other forms? Here the circumstances of the child become important. He lives among those who insist on these features in the daily activities of the home. In laying the cloth of the dinner table, for example, a child sees the regular division of space enforced as a law. Every time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress, he has an object lesson in symmetrical arrangement. And so these features take on a kind of ethical rightness before they are judged as elements of aesthetic value. As to a sense of proportion between the dimensions or parts of a form, the reflection that this involves a degree of intellectuality above the reach of many an adult might suggest that it is not to be expected from a small child; and this conjecture will be borne out when we come to examine children's first essays in drawing.

These elementary pleasures of light, color, and certain simple aspects of form may be said to be the basis of a crude perception of beauty in natural objects and in the products of human workmanship. A quite small child is capable of acquiring a real admiration for a beautiful lady, in the appreciation of which brightness, color, grace of movement, the splendor of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the eye is often re-enforced by a sweet and winsome quality of voice. Such an admiration is not perfectly aesthetic: awe, an inkling of the social dignity of dress, perhaps a longing to be embraced by the charmer, may all enter into it; yet a genuine admiration of look for its own sake is the core of the feeling. In other childish admirations, as the girl's