Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/426

394 we may call the adult's fallacy, the tendency to judge children by grown-up standards, frequently shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will follow the directions of our own. I remember having made the mistake of putting those delightful books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, into the hands of a small boy with a considerable sense of fun, and having been humiliated at discovering that there was no response. Children's fun is of a very elemental character. They are mostly tickled, I suspect, by the spectacle of some upsetting of the proprieties, some confusion of the established distinctions of rank. Dress, as we have seen, has ah enormous symbolic value for the child's mind, and any confusion here is apt to be specially laughter-provoking. One child between three and four was convulsed at the sight of his baby bib fastened round the neck of his bearded sire. There is, too, a considerable element of rowdiness in children's sense of the comical, as may be seen by the enduring popularity of the spectacle of Punch's successful misdemeanors and bravings of the legal authority.

Since children are apt to take spectacles with an exacting seriousness, it becomes interesting to note how the two moods, realistic stickling for correctness, and rollicking hilarity at the sight of the disorderly, behave in relation one to another. More facts are needed on this point. It is probable that we have here to do in part with a permanent difference of temperament. There are serious, matter-of-fact little minds which are shocked by a kind of spectacle or narrative that would give boundless delight to a more elastic, fun-loving spirit. But discarding these permanent differences of disposition, I think that in general the sense of fun, the delight in the topsy-turviness of things, is apt to develop later than the serious realistic attitude already referred to. Here, too, it is probable that the evolution of the individual follows that of the race: the solemnities of custom and ritual weigh so heavily at first on the savage mind that there is no chance for sprightly Laughter to show himself. However this be, most young children appear to be unable to appreciate true comedy where the incongruous coexists with and takes on one half of its charm from serious surroundings. Their laughter is best called forth by a broadly farcical show in which all serious rules are set at naught.

Of no less interest in this attitude of the child-mind toward the representations by art of human character and action are the first rude manifestations of the feeling for the tragic side of life. A child of four or six is far from realizing the divine necessity which controls our mortal lives. Yet he will display a certain crude feeling for thrilling situation, exciting adventure, and something, too, of a sympathetic interest in the woes of mortals, quadrupeds as well as bipeds. The action, the situation, may