Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/425

Rh art presentation we may study other aspects of the æsthetic aptitude. Very quaint and interesting is the exacting realism of these first appreciations. A child is apt to insist on a perfect detailed reproduction of the familiar reality. And here one may often trace the fine observation of these early years. Listen, for example, to the talk of the little critic before a drawing of a horse or a railway train, and you will be surprised to find how closely and minutely he has studied the forms of things. It is the same with other modes of art representation. Perez gives an amusing instance of a boy, aged four, who when taken to a play was shocked at the anomaly of a chambermaid touching glasses with her master on a fête day. "In our home," exclaimed the stickler for regularities, to the great amusement of the neighbors, "we don't let the nurse drink like that." It is the same with story. Children are liable to be morally hurt if anything is described greatly at variance with the daily custom. Æsthetic rightness is as yet confused with moral rightness or social propriety, which, as we have seen, has its instinctive support in the child's mind in respect for custom.

Careful observation will disclose in these first frankly expressdexpressed [sic] impressions the special directions of childish taste. The preferences of a boy of four in the matter of picture-books tell us where his special interests lie, what things he finds pretty, and how much of a genuine æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on. Here, again, there is ample room for more careful studies directed to the detection of the first manifestations of a pure delight in things as beautiful, as charming at once the senses and the imagination.

The first appearances of that complex interest in life and personality which fills so large a place in our æsthetic pleasures can be best noted in the behavior of the child's mind toward dramatic spectacle and story. The awful ecstatic delight with which a child is apt to greet any moving semblance carrying with it the look of life and action is something which some of us, like Goethe, can recall among our oldest memories. The old-fashioned moving "Schatten-bilder" for which the gaudy but rigid pictures of the magic lantern are but a poor substitute, the puppet-show, with what a delicious wonder have these filled the childish heart! And as to the entrancing, enthralling delight of the story well have Thackeray and others tried to describe this for us.

Of very special interest in these early manifestations of a feeling for art is the appearance of a crude form of the two emotions to which all representations of life and character make appeal the feeling for the comic and for the tragic side of things. What