Part 28

I would define art-activity as including all childish doings which are consciously directed to an external result recognised as beautiful, as directly pleasing to sense and imagination. Thus a gesture, or an intonation of voice, which is motived by a feeling for what is ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’ is a mode of art-activity as much as the production of a more permanent æsthetic object, as a drawing.

Now if we look at children’s activity we shall find that though much of it implies a certain germ of æsthetic feeling it is not pure art-activity. In the love of personal adornment, for example, we see, as in the case of savages, the æsthetic motive subordinated to another and personal or interested feeling, vanity or love of admiration. On the other hand, in children’s play, which undoubtedly has a kinship with art, we find the æsthetic motive, the desire to produce something beautiful, very much in the background. We have then to examine these primitive forms of activity so as to try to disengage the genuine art-element.

One of the most interesting of these early quasi-artistic lines of activity is that of personal adornment. The impulse to maintain appearances appears to reach far down in animal life. The animal’s care of its person is supported by two instincts, the impulse to frighten or overawe others, and especially those who are, or are likely to be, enemies, illustrated in the raising of feathers and hair so as to increase size; and the impulse to attract, which probably underlies the habit of trimming feathers and fur among birds and quadrupeds. These same impulses are said to lie at the root of the elaborate art of personal adornment developed by savages. The anthropologist divides such ornament into alluring and alarming, ‘Reizschmuck’ and ‘Schreckschmuck’.[218]

Footnote 218:

See Grosse, _Die Anfänge der Kunst_, pp. 106, 107.

In the case of children’s attention to personal appearance there is no question of tracing out the workings of a pure instinct. The care of the person is before all other things inculcated and enforced by others, and forms, indeed, a main branch of the nursery training. To a mother, as is perfectly natural, a child is apt to present himself as the brightest of the household ornaments, which has to be kept neat and spotless with even greater care than the polished table and other pretty things. This early drilling is likely to be unpleasant. Many children resent at first not only soap and water and the merciless comb, but even arrayings in new finery. Adornment is forced on the child before the instinct has had time to develop itself, and the manner of the adornment does not always accommodate itself to the natural inclinations of the childish eye. Hence the familiar fact that with children the care of personal appearance when it is developed takes on the air of a respect for law. It is more than half a moral feeling, a readiness to be shocked at a breach of a custom enforced from the first by example and precept.

Again, the instinct of adornment in the child is often opposed by other impulses. I have already touched on a small child’s feeling of uneasiness at seeing his mother in new apparel. A like apprehensiveness shows itself in relation to his own dress. Many little children show a marked dislike to new raiment. As I have remarked above, a change of dress probably disturbs and confuses their sense of personality.

In spite, however, of these and other complicating circumstances I believe that the instinct to adorn the person is observable in children. They like a bit of finery in the shape of a string of beads or of daisies for the neck, a feather for the hat, a scrap of brilliantly coloured ribbon or cloth as a bow for the dress, and so forth. Imitation, doubtless, plays a part here, but it is, I think, possible to allow for this, and still to detect points of contact with the savage’s love of finery. Perhaps, indeed, we may discern the play of both the impulses underlying personal ornament which were referred to above, _viz._, the alluring and alarming. Allowing for the differences of intelligence, of sexual development and so forth, we may say that children betray a rudiment of the instinct to win admiration by decorating the person, and also of the instinct to overawe. A small boy’s delight in adding to his height and formidable appearance by donning his father’s tall hat is pretty certainly an illustration of this last.

This is not the place to inquire whether the love of finery in children—a very variable trait, as M. Perez and others have shown—is wholly the outcome of vanity. I would, however, just remark that a child lost in the vision of himself reflected in a mirror decked out in new apparel may be very far from feeling vanity as we understand the word. The pure child-wonder at what is new and mysterious may at such a moment overpower other feelings, and make the whole mental condition one of dream-like trance.

Since children are left so little free to deck themselves, it is of course hard to study the development of æsthetic taste in this domain of art-like activity. Yet the quaint attempts of the child to improve his appearance throw an interesting light on his æsthetic preferences. He is at heart as much a lover of glitter, of gaudy colour, as his savage prototype. With this general crudity of taste, individual differences soon begin to show themselves, a child developing a marked bent, now to modest neatness and refinement, now to gaudy display, and this, it may be, in direct opposition to the whole trend of home influence.[219]

Footnote 219:

The whole subject of the attitude of the child-mind towards dress and ornament is well dealt with by Perez, _op. cit._, chap. i.

Another and closely connected domain of activity which is akin to art is the manifestation of grace and charm in action. Much of the beauty of movement, of gesture, of intonation, in a young child may be unconscious, and as much a result of happy physical conditions as the pretty gambols of a kitten. Yet one may commonly detect in graceful children the rudiment of an æsthetic feeling for what is nice, and also of the instinct to please. There is, indeed, in these first actions and manners, into which stupid conventionality has not yet imported all kinds of awkward restraints, as when the little girl M. would kiss her hand spontaneously to other babies as she passed them in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable savages. Now a feeling for what is graceful in movement, carriage, speech and so forth is no clear proof of a specialised artistic impulse: yet it attests the existence of a rudimentary appreciation of what is beautiful, as also of an impulse to produce this.

In the forms of childish activity just referred to we have to do with mixed impulses in which the true art-element is very imperfectly represented. There is a liking for pretty effect, and an effort to realise it, only the effect is not prized wholly for its own sake, but partly as a means of winning the smile of approval. The true art-impulse is characterised by the love of shaping beautiful things for their own sake, by an absorbing devotion to the process of creation, into which there enters no thought of any advantage to self, and almost as little of benefiting others. Now there is one field of children’s activity which is marked by just this absorption of thought and aim, and that is play.

To say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. Any one can see that when children are at play they are carried away by pleasurable activity, are thinking of no useful result but only of the pleasure of the action itself. They build their sand castles, they pretend to keep shop, to entertain visitors, and so forth, for the sake of the enjoyment which they find in these actions. This clearly involves one point of kinship with the artist, for the poet sings and the painter paints because they love to do so. It is evident, moreover, from what was said above on the imaginative side of play that it has this further circumstance in common with art-production, that it is the bodying forth of a mental image into the semblance of outward life. Not only so, play exhibits the distinction between imitation and invention—the realistic and the idealistic tendency in art—and in its forms comes surprisingly near representing the chief branches of art-activity. It thus fully deserves to be studied as a domain in which we may look for early traces of children’s artistic tendencies.

If by play we understand all that spontaneous activity which is wholly sustained by its own pleasurableness, we shall find the germ of it in those aimless movements and sounds which are the natural expression of a child’s joyous life. Such outpourings of happiness have a quasi-æsthetic character in so far as they follow the rhythmic law of all action. Where the play becomes social activity, that is, the concerted action of a number, we get something closely analogous to those primitive harmonious co-ordinations of movements and sounds in which the first crude music, poetry and dramatic action of the race are supposed to have had their common origin.

Such naïve play-activity acquires a greater æsthetic importance when it becomes significant or representative of something: and this direction appears very early in child-history. The impulse to imitate the action of another seems to be developed before the completion of the first half-year.[220] In its first crude form, as reproducing a gesture or sound uttered at the moment by another, it enters into the whole of social or concerted play. A number of children find the harmonious performance of a series of dance or other movements, such as those of the kindergarten games, natural and easy, because the impulse to imitate, to follow another’s lead, at once prompts them and keeps them from going far astray.

Footnote 220:

Preyer places the first imitative movement in the fourth month (_op. cit._, cap. 12). Baldwin, however, dates the first unmistakable appearance in the case of his little girl in the ninth month (_Mental Development_, p. 131).

It is a higher and more intellectual kind of imitation when a child recalls the idea of something he has seen done and reproduces the action. This is often carried out under the suggestive force of objects which happen to present themselves at the time, as when a child sees an empty cup and pretends to drink, or a book and simulates the action of reading out of it, or a pair of scissors and proceeds to execute snipping movements. In other cases the imitation is more spontaneous, as when a child recalls and repeats some funny saying that he has heard.

This imitative action grows little by little more complex, and in this way a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. Here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. A child pantomimically representing some funny action comes, indeed, very near to the mimetic art of the comedian.

Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, _viz._, the production of semblances in things. Early illustrations of this impulse are the making of a river out of the gravy in the plate, the pinching of pellets of bread till they take on something of resemblance to known forms. One child, three years old, once occupied himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which his knife (or spoon) and fork were made to act as hands, and cherry stones put round the plate to represent the hours. Such table-pastimes are known to all observers of children, and have been prettily touched on by R. L. Stevenson.[221]

Footnote 221:

_Virginibus Puerisque_, ‘Child’s Play’.

Such formative touches are, at first, rough enough, the transformation being effected, as we have seen, much more by the alchemy of the child’s imagination than by the cunning of his hands. Yet, crude as it is, and showing at first almost as much of chance as of design, it is a manifestation of the same plastic impulse, the same striving to produce images or semblances of things, which possesses the sculptor and the painter. In each case we see a mind dominated by an idea and labouring to give it outward embodiment. The more elaborate constructive play which follows, the building with sand and with bricks, with which we may take the first spontaneous drawings, are the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten occupations, most of all the clay-modelling, make direct appeal to this half-artistic plastic impulse in the child.

In this imitative play we see from the first the tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the acting of the nursery the nurse, the coachman and so forth are given by one or two broad touches, such as the presence of the medicine-bottle or its semblance, or of the whip, together, perhaps, with some characteristic manner of speaking. In this way child-play, like primitive art, shows a certain unconscious selectiveness. It presents what is constant and typical, imperfectly enough no doubt. The same selection of broadly distinctive traits is seen where some individual seems to be represented. There is a precisely similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline in the first rude attempts of children to form semblances. This will be fully illustrated presently when we examine their manner of drawing.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald abstract representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the representation. Thus the coachman’s talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. A precisely similar process of development is noticeable in the plastic activities. The first raw attempt to represent house or castle is improved upon, and the image grows fuller of characteristic detail and more life-like. Here, again, we may note the parallelism between the evolution of play-activity and of primitive art.

This movement away from bare symbolic indication to concrete pictorial representation involves a tendency to individualise, to make the play or the shapen semblance life-like in the sense of representing an individual reality. Such individual concreteness may be obtained by a mechanical reproduction of some particular action and scene of real life, and children in their play not infrequently attempt a faithful recital or portraiture of this kind. Such close unyielding imitation shows itself, too, now and again in the attempt to act out a story. Yet with bright fanciful children the impulse to give full life and colour to the performance rarely stops here. Fresh individual life is best obtained by the aid of invention, by the intervention of which some new scene or situation, some new grouping of personalities is realised. Nothing is æsthetically of more interest in children’s play than the first cautious intrusion into the domain of imitative representation of this impulse of invention, this desire for the new and fresh as distinct from the old and customary. Perhaps, too, there is no side of children’s play in which individual differences are more clearly marked or more significant than this. The child of bold inventive fancy is shocking to his companion whose whole idea of proper play is a servile imitation of the scenes and actions of real life. Yet the former will probably be found to have more of the stuff of which the artist is compacted.

All such invention, moreover, since it aims at securing some more vivacious and stirring play-experience, naturally comes under the influence of the childish instinct of exaggeration. I mean by this the untaught art of vivifying and strengthening a description or representation by adding touch to touch. In the representations of play, this love of colour, of strong effect, shows itself now in a piling up of the beautiful, gorgeous, or wonderful, as when trying to act some favourite scene from fairy-story, or some grand social function, now in a bringing together of droll or pathetic incidents so as to strengthen the comic or the tragic feeling of the play-action. In all this—which has its counterpart in the first crude attempts of the art of the race to break the tight bonds of a servile imitation—we have, I believe, the germ of what in our more highly developed art we call the idealising impulse.

I have, perhaps, said enough to show that children’s play is in many respects analogous to art of the simpler kind, also that it includes within itself lines of activity which represent the chief directions of art-development.[222]

Footnote 222:

The telling of stories to other children does not, I conceive, fall under my definition of play. It is child-art properly so called.

Yet though art-like this play is not fully art. In play a child is too self-centred, if I may so say. The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands, are not produced as having objective value, but rather as providing himself with a new environment. The peculiarity of all imaginative play, its puzzle for older people, is its contented privacy. The idea of a child playing as an actor is said to ‘play’ in order to delight others is a contradiction in terms. As I have remarked above, the pleasure of a child in what we call ‘dramatic’ make-believe is wholly independent of any appreciating eye. “I remember,” writes R. L. Stevenson, “as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork _even when there was none to see_.”[223] The same thing is true of concerted play. A number of children playing at being Indians, or what not, do not ‘perform’ _for_ one another. The words ‘perform,’ ‘act’ and so forth all seem to be out of place here. What really occurs in this case is a conjoint vision of a new world, a conjoint imaginative realisation of a new life.

Footnote 223:

_Virginibus Puerisque_, ‘Child’s Play’.

This difference between play and art is sometimes pushed to the point of saying that art has its root in the social impulse, the wish to please.[224] This I think is simplifying too much. Art is no doubt a social phenomenon, as Guyau and others have shown. It has been well said that "an individual art—in the strictest sense—even if it were conceivable is nowhere discoverable".[225] That is to say the artist is constituted as such by a participation in the common consciousness, the life of his community, and his creative impulse is controlled and directed by a sense of common or objective values. Yet to say that art is born of the instinct to please or attract is to miss much of its significance. The ever-renewed contention of artists, ‘art for art’s sake,’ points to the fact that they, at least, recognise in their art-activity something spontaneous, something of the nature of self-expression, self-realisation, and akin to the child’s play.

Footnote 224:

According to Mr H. Rutgers Marshall art-activity takes its rise in the instinct to attract others (_Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics_).

Footnote 225:

Grosse, _Anfänge der Kunst_, p. 48.

May we not say, then, that the impulse of the artist has its roots in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, the all-engrossing effort to ‘utter,’ that is, give outer form and life to an inner idea, and that the play-impulse becomes the art-impulse (supposing it is strong enough to survive the play-years) when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and a sense of the common worth of things, when, in other words, it becomes conscious of itself as a power of shaping semblances which shall have value for other eyes or ears, and shall bring recognition and renown? Or, to put it somewhat differently, may we not say that art has its twin-rootlets in the two directions of childish activity which we have considered, _viz._, the desire to please so far as this expresses itself in dress, graceful action, and so forth, and the entrancing isolating impulse of play? However we express the relation, I feel sure that we must account for the origin of art by some reference to play. A study of the art of savages, more especially perhaps of the representations of fighting and hunting in their pantomime-dances, seems to show that art is continuous with play-activity.

To insist on this organic connexion between play and art is not to say that every lively player is fitted to become an art-aspirant. The artistic ambition implies too rare a complex of conditions for us to be able to predict its appearance in this way. It may, however, be thrown out as a suggestion to the investigator of the first manifestations of artistic genius that he might do well to cast his eye on the field of imaginative play. It will possibly be found that although not a romping riotous player, nor indeed much disposed to join other children in their pastimes, the original child has his own distinctive style of play, which marks him out as having more than other children of that impulse to dream of far-off things, and to bring them near in the illusion of outer semblance, which enters more or less distinctly into all art.

I have left myself no space to speak of the child’s first attempts at art as we understand it. Some of this art-activity, more particularly the earliest weaving of stories, is characteristic enough to deserve a special study. I have made a small collection of early stories, and some of them are interesting enough to quote. Here is a quaint example of the first halting manner of a child of two and a half years as invention tries to get away from the sway of models: “Three little bears went out a walk and they found a stick, and they poked the fire with it, and they poked the fire and then went a walk”. Soon, however, the young fancy is apt to wax bolder, and then we get some fine invention. A boy of five years and a quarter living at the sea-side improvised as follows. He related “that one day he went out on the sea in a lifeboat when suddenly he saw a big whale, and so he jumped down to catch it, but it was so big that he climbed on it and rode on it in the water, and all the little fishes laughed so”.

With this comic story may be compared a more serious not to say tragic one from the lips of a girl one month younger, and characterised by an almost equal fondness for the wonderful. “A man wanted to go to heaven before he died. He said, ‘I don’t want to die, and I must see heaven!’ Jesus Christ said he must be patient like other people. He then got _so_ angry, and screamed out as loud as he could, and kicked up his heels as high as he could, and they (the heels) went into the sky, and the sky fell down and broke earth all to pieces. He wanted Jesus Christ to mend the earth again, but he wouldn’t, so this was a good punishment for him.” This last, which is the work of one now grown into womanhood and no longer a story-teller, is interesting in many ways. The wish to go to heaven without dying is, as I know, a motive derived from child-life. The manifestations of displeasure could, one supposes, only have been written by one who was herself experienced in the ways of childish ‘tantrums’. The naïve conception of sky and earth, and lastly the moral issue of the story, are no less instructive.