Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/419

Rh not the power to embrace a multitude of tilings in a single act of contemplation. Hence they have no feeling for landscape as a harmonious complex of picturesquely varied parts. When they are taken to see a "view," their eye, instead of trying to embrace the whole, as a fond parent desires, provokingly pounces on some single feature of interest, and often one of but little æsthetic value. People make a great mistake in taking children to "points of view" under the supposition that they will share in grown people's impressions. Perez relates that some children taken to the Pic du Midi found their chief pleasure in scrambling up the peak and saying that they were on donkeys. Mere magnitude or vastness of spectacle does not appeal to the child, for a sense of the sublime grows out of a complex imaginative process which is beyond his young powers. So far as immensity affects him at all, as in the case of the sea, it seems to excite a measure of dread in face of the unknown; and this feeling, though having a certain kinship with the emotion of sublimity, is distinct from this last. It has nothing of the joyous consciousness of expansion which enters into the later feeling. It is only to certain limited objects and features of Nature that the child is aesthetically responsive. He knows the loveliness of the gilded spring meadow, the fascination of the sunlit stream, the awful mystery of the wood, and something too, perhaps, of the calming beauty of the broad blue sky. That is to say, he has a number of small rootlets which when they grow together will develop into a feeling for Nature.

Here, too, the analogy between the child and the uncultured Nature-man is evident. The savage has no æsthetic sentiment for Nature as a whole, though he may feel the charm of some of her single features, a stream, a mountain, the star-spangled sky, and may even be affected by some of the awful aspects of her changing physiognomy. Are we not told, indeed, that a true æsthetic appreciation of the picturesque variety of Nature's scenes, of the weird charm of wild places, and of the sublime fascinations of the awful and repellent mountain, are quite late attainments in the history of our race?

We may now look at the child's attitude toward those objects and processes of human art which from the first form part of his environment and make an educative appeal to his senses; and here we may begin with those simple musical effects which follow up certain impressions derived from the natural world.

It has been pointed out that sounds form a chief source of the