Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/420

388 little child-heart's first trepidations. Yet this prolific cause of disquietude, when once the first alarming effect of strangeness has passed, becomes a main source of interest and delight. Some of Nature's sounds, as those of running water and of the wind, early catch the ear, and excite wonder and curiosity. Miss Shinn illustrates fully in the case of her niece how the interest in sounds developed itself in the first years. This pleasure in listening to sounds and in tracing them to their origin forms a chief pastime of babyhood.

Æsthetic pleasure in sound begins to be differentiated out of this general interest as soon as there arises a comparison of qualities and a development of preferences. Thus the sound of metal (when struck) is preferred to that of wood or stone. A nascent feeling for musical quality thus emerges which probably has its part in many of the first likings for persons; certain pitches, as those of the female voice, and possibly timbres being preferred to others.

Quite as soon, at least, as this feeling for quality of sound or tone, there manifests itself a crude liking for rhythmic sequence. It is commonly recognized that our pleasure in regularly recurring sounds is instinctive, being the result of our whole nervous organization. We can better adapt successive acts of listening when sounds follow at regular intervals, and the movements which sounds evoke can be much better carried out in a regular sequence. The infant shows us this in his well-known liking for well-marked rhythms in tunes which he accompanies with suitable movements of the arms, head, etc.

The first likings for musical composition are based on this instinctive feeling for rhythm. It is the simple tunes, with well-marked, easily recognizable time divisions, which first take the child's fancy, and he knows the quieting and the exciting qualities of different rhythms and times. Where rhythm is less marked, or grows highly complex, the motor responses being confused, the pleasurable interest declines. It is the same with the rhythmic qualities of verses. The jingling rhythms which their souls love are of simple structure, with short feet well marked off, as in the favorite "Jack and Gill."

Coming now to art as representative, we find that a child's aesthetic appreciation waits on the growth of intelligence, on the understanding of artistic representation as contrasted with a direct presentation of reality.

The development of an understanding of visual representation or the imaging of things has already been touched upon. As Perez points out, the first lesson in this branch of knowledge is