Part 26

It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous to the action of suggestion upon the hypnotised subject. The mother, the right sort of mother, has on the child’s mind something of the subduing influence of the Nancy doctor: she induces ideas of particular actions, gives them force and persistence so that the young mind is possessed by them and they work themselves out into fulfilment as occasion arises.

In order that this effect of ‘obsession,’ or a full occupation of consciousness with the right idea, may result, certain precautions are necessary. As observant parents know, a child may be led by a prohibition to do the very thing he is bidden not to do. We have seen how readily a child’s mind moves from an affirmation to a corresponding negation, and conversely. The ‘contradictoriness’ of a child, his passion for saying the opposite of what you say, shows the same odd manner of working of the young mind. Wanting to do what he is told not to do is another effect of this “contrary suggestion,” as it has been called, aided of course by the child’s dislike of all constraint.[195] If we want to avoid this effect of suggestion and to secure the direct effect, we must first of all acquire the difficult secret of personal influence, of the masterfulness which does not repel but attracts; and secondly try to reduce our forbiddings with their contrary suggestions to a minimum.

Footnote 195:

On the nature of this contrary suggestion see Mark Baldwin, _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_, p. 145 f.

The action in moral training of this influence of a quasi-hypnotic suggestion becomes more clearly marked when difficulties occur; when some outbreak of wilful resistance has to be recognised and met, or some new and relatively arduous feat of obedience has to be initiated. Here I find that intelligent mothers have found their way to methods closely resembling those of the hypnotist. “When R. is naughty and in a passion (writes a lady friend of her child aged three and a half), I need only suggest to him that he is some one else, say a friend of his, and he will take it up at once, he will pretend to be the other child, and at last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.” This mode of suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself from and control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely employed in the moral training of children. Suggestion may work through the emotions. Merely to say, ‘Mother would like you to do this,’ is to set up an idea in the child’s consciousness by help of the sustaining force of his affection. “If (writes a lady) there was anything Lyle particularly wished not to do, his mother had only to say, ‘Dobbin (a sort of canonised toy-horse already referred to) would like you to do this,’ and it was done without a murmur.”

We have another analogue to hypnotic suggestion where a mother prepares her child some time beforehand for a difficult duty, telling him that she expects him to perform it. A mother writes that her boy, when about the age of two and a half years more particularly, was inclined to burst into loud but short fits of crying. “I have found (she says) these often checked by telling him beforehand what would be expected of him, and exacting a promise that he would do the thing cheerfully. I have seen his face flush up ready to cry when he remembered his promise and controlled himself.” This reminds one forcibly of the commands suggested by the hypnotiser to be carried into effect when the subject wakes. Much more, perhaps, might be done in this direction by choosing the right moments for setting up the persistent ideas in the child’s consciousness. I know a lady who got into the way of giving moral exhortation to her somewhat headstrong girl at night before the child fell asleep, and found this very effectual. It is possible that we may be able to apply this idea of preparatory and premunitory suggestion in new and surprising ways to difficult and refractory children.[196]

Footnote 196:

The bearings of (hypnotic) suggestion on moral education have been discussed by Guyau, _Education and Heredity_ (Engl. transl.), chap. i. Compare also Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 267 f., and Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 262.

One other way in which the wise mother will win the child over to duty is by developing his consciousness of freedom and power. A mother, who was herself a well-known writer for children, has recorded in some notes on her children that when one of her little girls had declined to accede to her wish she used to say to her: ‘Oh, yes, I think when you have remembered how pleasant it is to oblige others you will do it’. ‘I will think about it, mamma,’ the child would reply, laughing, and then go and hide her head behind a sofa-pillow which she called her ‘thinking corner’. In half a minute she would come out and say: “Oh, yes, mamma, I have thought about it and I will do it”. This strikes me as an admirable combination of regulative suggestion with exercise of the young will in moral decision. It gave the child the consciousness of using her own will, and yet maintained the needed measure of guidance and control.

As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings for such suggestive guidance will offer themselves. How valuable, for example, is the mother’s encouragement of the weakly child, shrinking from a difficult self-repressive action, when she says with inspiring voice: ‘You _can_ do it if you try’. Thus pilot-like she conducts the little navigator out into the open main of duty where he will have to steer himself.

I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not beyond human powers. It has its strong supports in child-nature, and these, when there are wisdom and method on the ruler’s side, will secure success. I have not said that the trainer’s task is easy. So far from thinking this, I hold that a mother who bravely faces the problem, neither abandoning the wayward will to its own devices, nor, hardly less weakly, handing over the task of disciplining it to a paid substitute, and who by well-considered and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching the perfection I have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the tender and companionable parent, is among the few members of our species who are entitled to its reverence.

IX. THE CHILD AS ARTIST.

One of the most interesting, perhaps also one of the most instructive, phases of child-life is the beginnings of art-activity. This has been recognised by one of the best-known workers in the field of child-psychology, M. Bernard Perez, who has treated the subject in an interesting monograph.[197] This department of our subject will, like that of language, be found to have interesting points of contact with the phenomena of primitive race-culture.

Footnote 197:

_L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, 1888.

The art-impulse of children lends itself particularly well to observation. No doubt, as we shall see, there are difficulties for the observer here. It may sometimes be a fine point to determine whether a childish action properly falls under the head of genuine art-production, though I do not think that this is a serious difficulty. On the other hand, the art-impulse where it exists manifests itself directly, and for the most part in so characteristic an objective form that we are able to study its features with special facility.

In its narrow sense as a specialised instinct prompting its possessor to follow a definite line of production, as drawing of the artistic sort, or simple musical composition, the art-impulse is a particularly variable phenomenon of childhood. Some children, who afterwards take seriously to a branch of art-culture, manifest an innate bent by a precocious devotion to this line of activity. Many others, I have reason to believe, have a passing fondness for a particular form of art-activity. On the other hand, there are many children who display almost a complete lack, not only of the productive impulse, but of the æsthetic sense of the artist. So uncertain, so sporadic are these appearances of a rudimentary art among children that one might be easily led to think that art-activity ought not to be reckoned among their common characteristics.

To judge so, however, would be to judge erroneously by applying grown-up standards. It is commonly recognised that art and play are closely connected. It is probable that the first crude art of the race, or at least certain directions of it, sprang out of play-like activities, and however this be the likenesses of the two are indisputable. I shall hope to bring these out in the present study. This being so, we are, I conceive, justified in speaking of art-impulses as a common characteristic of childhood.

Although we shall find many interesting points of analogy between crude child-art and primitive race-art, we must not, as pointed out above, expect a perfect parallelism. In some directions, as drawing, concerted dancing, the superior experience, strength and skill of the adult will reveal themselves, placing child-art at a considerable disadvantage in the comparison. Contrariwise, the intervention of the educator’s hand tends seriously to modify the course of development of the child’s æsthetic aptitudes. His tastes get acted upon from the first and biassed in the direction of adult tastes.

This modifying influence of education shows itself more especially in one particular. There is reason to think that in the development of the race the growth of a feeling for what is beautiful was a concomitant of the growth of the art-impulse, the impulse to adorn the person, to collect feathers and other pretty things. Not so in the case of the child. Here we note a certain growth of the liking for pretty things before the spontaneous art-impulse has had time to manifest itself. Most children who have a cultivated mother or other guardian acquire a rudimentary appreciation of what their elders think beautiful before they do much in the way of art-production. We provide them with toys, pictures, we sing to them and perhaps we even take them to the theatre, and so do our best to inoculate them with our ideas as to what is pretty. Hence the difficulty—probably the chief difficulty—of finding out what the child-mind, left to itself, does prefer. At the same time the early date at which such æsthetic preferences begin to manifest themselves makes it desirable to study them before we go on to consider the active side of child-art. We will try as well as we can to extricate the first manifestations of genuine childish taste.

_First Responses to Natural Beauty._

At the very beginning, before the educational influence has had time to work, we can catch some of the characteristics of this childish quasi-æsthetic feeling. The directions of a child’s observation, and of the movements of his grasping arms, tell us pretty clearly what sort of things attract and please him.

In the home scene it is bright objects, such as the fire-flame, the lamp, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded frame; out-of-doors, glistening water, a meadow whitened by daisies, the fresh show mantle, later the moon and the stars, which seem to impart to the dawning consciousness the first hint of the world’s beauty. Luminosity, brightness in its higher intensities, whether the bright rays reach the eye directly or are reflected from a lustrous surface, this makes the first gladness of the eye as it remains a chief source of the gladness of life.

The feeling for colour as such comes distinctly later. The first delight in coloured objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial delight in brightness. This applies pretty manifestly to the brightly illumined, rose-red curtain which Preyer’s boy greeted with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days, and it applies to later manifestations. Thus Preyer found on experimenting with his boy towards the end of the second year as to his colour-discrimination that a decided preference was shown for the bright or luminous colours, red and yellow.[198] Much the same thing was observed by Miss Shinn in her interesting account of the early development of her niece’s colour-sense.[199] Thus in the twenty-eighth month she showed a special fondness for the daffodils, the bright tints of which allured another and older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was banished. About the same time the child conceived a fondness for a yellow gown of her aunt, strongly objecting to the substitution for it of a brown dress. Among the other coloured objects which captivated the eye of this little girl were a patch of white cherry blossom, and a red sun-set sky. Such observations might easily be multiplied. Whiteness, it is to be noted, comes, as we might expect, with bright partial colours, among the first favourites.[200]

Footnote 198:

_Op. cit._, p. 7 and p. 11 f.

Footnote 199:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, p. 91 ff.

Footnote 200:

Cf. Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 41 ff.

At what age a child begins to appreciate the value of colour as colour, to like blue or red, for its own sake and apart from its brightness, it is hard to say. The experiments of Preyer, Binet, Baldwin, and others, as to the discrimination of colour, are hardly conclusive as to special likings, though Baldwin’s plan of getting the child to reach out for colours throws a certain light on this point. According to Baldwin blue is one of the first colours to be singled out; but he does not tell us how the colours he used (which did not, unfortunately, include yellow—the child’s favourite according to other observers) were related in point of luminosity.[201]

Footnote 201:

See Baldwin’s two articles on ‘A New Method of Child-study’ in _Science_, April, 1893, and his volume, _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_.

No doubt a child of three or four is apt to conceive a special liking for a particular colour which favourite he is wont to appropriate as ‘my colour’. A collection of such perfectly spontaneous preferences is a desideratum in the study of the first manifestations of a feeling for colour. Care must be taken in observing these selections to eliminate the effects of association, and the unintentional influence of example and authority, as when a child takes to a particular colour because it is ‘mamma’s colour,’ that is, the one she appears to affect in her dress and otherwise.

The values of the several colours probably disclose themselves in close connexion with that of colour-contrast. Many of the likings of a child of three in the matter of flowers, birds, dresses, and so on, are clearly traceable to a growing pleasure in colour-contrast. Here again we must distinguish between a true chromatic and a merely luminous effect. The dark blue sky showing itself in a break in the white clouds, one of the coloured spectacles which delighted Miss Shinn’s niece, may have owed much of its attractiveness to the contrast of light and dark. It would be interesting to experiment with children of three with a view to determine whether and how far chromatic contrast pleases when it stands alone, and is not supported by that of chiaroscuro.

I have reason to believe that children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer juxtapositions of colours which lie far from one another in the colour-circle, as blue and red or blue and yellow. It is sometimes said that the practice and the history of painting show blue and red to be a more pleasing combination than that of the complementary colours, blue and yellow. It would be well to test children’s feeling on this matter. It would be necessary in this inquiry to see that the child did not select for combination a particular colour as blue or yellow for its own sake, and independently of its relation to its companion—a point not very easy to determine. Care would have to be taken to eliminate further the influence of authority as operating, not only by instructing the child what combinations are best, but by setting models of combination, in the habitual arrangements of dress and so forth. This too would probably prove to be a condition not easy to satisfy.[202]

Footnote 202:

The influence of such authority is especially evident in the selection of harmonious shades of colour for dress, etc. _Cf._ Miss Shinn, _op. cit._, p. 95.

I have dwelt at some length on the first germs of colour-appreciation, because this is the one feature of the child’s æsthetic sense which has so far lent itself to definite experimental investigation. It is very different when we turn to the first appreciation of form. That little children have their likings in the matter of form, is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. A quite small child will admire the arch of a rainbow, and the roundness of a kitten’s form, though in these instances the delight in form is far from pure. More clearly marked is the appreciation of pretty graceful movements, as a kitten’s boundings. Perhaps the first waking up to the graces of form takes place in connexion with this delight in the forms of motion, a delight which at first is a mixed feeling, involving the interest in all motion as suggestive of life, to which reference has already been made. Do not all of us, indeed, tend to translate our impressions 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 æsthetic value. As to a sense of proportion between the dimensions or parts of a form, the reflexion 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, colour, 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, colour, grace of movement, the splendour of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the eye is often reinforced by a sweet and winsome quality of voice. Such an admiration is not perfectly æsthetic: awe, an inkling of the social dignity of dress,[203] 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 enthusiastic worship of the newly arrived baby, we see a true æsthetic sentiment mingled with and struggling, so to speak, to extricate itself from such ‘interested’ feelings as sense of personal enrichment by the new possession and of family pride. In the likings for animals, again, which often take what seem to us capricious and quaint directions, we may see rudiments of æsthetic perceptions half hidden under a lively sense of absolute lordship tempered with affection.

Footnote 203:

On the nature of the early feeling for dress see Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure æsthetic enjoyment in these first experiences is the love of flowers. The wee round wonders with their mystery of velvety colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye. I believe most children who live among flowers and have access to them acquire something of this sentiment, a sentiment of admiration for beautiful things with which a sort of dumb childish sympathy commonly blends. No doubt there are marked differences among children here. There are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the strong sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers.[204] Others again care for them mainly as a means of personal adornment, though I am disposed to think that this partially interested fondness is less common with children than with many adults. It is sometimes said that the love of flowers is, in the main, a characteristic of girls. I think however that if one takes children early enough, before a consciousness of sex and of its proprieties has been allowed to develop under education, the difference will be but slight. Little boys of four or thereabouts often show a very lively sentiment of admiration for these gems of the plant world.

Footnote 204:

See Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 90 f.

In much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the first manifestations of taste in the race. Delight in bright glistening things, in gay tints, in strong contrasts of colour, as well as in certain forms of movement, as that of feathers—the favourite personal adornment—this is known to be characteristic of the savage and gives to his taste in the eyes of civilised man the look of childishness. On the other hand it is doubtful whether the savage attains to the sentiment of the child for the beauty of flowers. Our civilised surroundings, meadows and gardens, as well as the constant action of the educative forces of example, soon carry the child beyond the savage in this particular.