Footnote 260:
In rare cases the pipe sticks out from the side of what is clearly the
primitive full face. Schoolcraft gives an example of this, too, in
Indian drawing, _op. cit._, pt. ii., pl. 41.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 28 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 28 (_b_).]
At the same time the front features themselves undergo modification. The
big grinning mouth is dropped and one of the eyes omitted. The exact way
in which this occurs appears to vary with different children. In certain
cases it is clear that the front view of the mouth cavity disappears,
giving place to a rough attempt to render a side view, before the second
eye is expunged; and in one case I have detected a survival of the two
eyes in what otherwise would be a consistent profile drawing of head and
figure (Fig. 29 (_a_); _cf._ above, p. 349, Fig. 18 (_b_)). This late
survival of the two eyes agrees with the results of observation on the
drawings of the uncultured adult. One of General Pitt-Rivers’ African
boys inserted the two eyes in a profile drawing. Von den Steinen’s
Brazilians drew by preference the full face, so that we cannot well
judge as to how they would have treated the profile. Yet it is curious
to note that in what is clearly a drawing of a side view of a fish one
of these Brazilians introduces both eyes (Fig. 29 (_b_)). The insertion
of two eyes is said by some never to occur in the drawings of savages on
stone, hide, etc.[261] But I have come across what seems to me a clear
example of it, and this in a fairly good sketch of a profile view of the
human figure on an Indian vase (Fig. 29 (_c_)).[262] Yet this late
retention of the two eyes in profile, though the general rule in
children’s drawings, is liable to exceptions. Thus I have found a child
retaining the big front view of the mouth along with a single eye.
-----
Footnote 261:
Ricci’s remarks seem to me to come to this, _op. cit._, p. 25.
Footnote 262:
From _The Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1880-1, p. 406.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 29 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 29 (_b_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 29 (_c_).]
It may be added that children at a particular stage show a preference
for some one arrangement; for example, the profile nose and mouth, and
the two front-view eyes, which tends to become the habitual form used,
though a certain amount of variation is observable. The differences
noticeable among different children’s drawings suggest that all of them
do not go through the same stages. Thus some may pass by the two-eyed
profile stage altogether, or very soon rise above it, whereas others may
linger in it.[263]
-----
Footnote 263:
Ricci says that seventy per cent. insert two eyes in their first
profile drawings (_op. cit._, p. 17). But this seems a rather loose
statement.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 30.]
One notices, too, curious divergences with respect to the mixture of
incompatible features. Differences in the degree of intelligence show
themselves here also. Thus in one case a child, throughout whose
drawings a certain feeble-mindedness seems to betray itself, actually
went so far as to introduce the double nose without having the excuse of
the two eyes (Fig. 30). In such odd ways do the tricks of habit assert
themselves.
[Illustration: Fig. 31 (a).]
The difficulty which the child feels in these profile representations is
seen in the odd positions given to the eyes. These are apt to be pushed
very high up, to be placed one above the other, and, what is more
significant, to be put far apart and close to the line of contour (see
above, Fig. 29 (_a_)). In the following drawing by a boy of five one of
the eyes may be said to be on this line (Fig 31 (_a_)). In General
Pitt-Rivers’ collection we find a still more striking instance of this
in a drawing by a boy of eleven, the second eye appearing to be
intentionally put outside the contour, as if to suggest that we must
look round to the other side of the facial disc in order to see it (Fig.
31 (_b_)). Curious variations of treatment appear, as in inserting two
eyes between the same pair of curves as in Fig. 20 (_b_), p. 350, and in
enclosing two pairs of dots or small circles in two larger circles as in
Figs. 14 (_b_), and 22 (_a_), pp. 346, 352 (both by the same boy).[264]
-----
Footnote 264:
I assume that these are intended for two eyes; but the scheme is not
easy to interpret.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 31 (_b_).]
It may be added that even when only one eye is drawn, a reminiscence of
the anterior view is seen in its form. It is the round or spindle-shaped
contour of the eye as seen in front. That is to say the eye of the
profile like that of the full face looks directly at the spectator, so
that in a manner the one-eyed profile is a front view (see for an
example, Fig. 5 (_a_), p. 339). The designs of savages, and the archaic
art of civilised races, including a people so high up as the Egyptians,
share this tendency of children’s drawings of the profile, though we
find scarcely a trace of the tendency to insert both eyes.
A like confusion or want of differentiation shows itself in the
management of other features in the profile view. As observed, a good
large ear at the back sometimes helps to indicate the side view (see
above, p. 341, Fig. 6 (_a_)). But the wish to bring in all the features,
seen in the obstinate retention of the two eyes, shows itself also in
respect of the ears. Thus one occasionally finds the two ears as in the
front view (see above, p. 346, Fig. 14 (_a_), where the aspect is
clearly more front view than profile), and sometimes, according to M.
Passy—as if the profile nose interfered with this arrangement—both
placed together on one side. The treatment of the moustache when this is
introduced follows that of the mouth. So imposing a feature must be
given in all the glory of the front view (see above, p. 350, Fig. 20
(_b_)).
[Illustration: Fig. 32.]
Other curious features of this early crude attempt to deal with the
profile show themselves in the handling of the trunk and the limbs. I
have met with only one or two instances of a profile head appearing
before the addition of the trunk as in Fig. 28 (_a_) (p. 358). In the
large majority of cases the trunk appears and retains the circular or
oval form of the primitive front view. When, as very frequently happens,
the interesting vertical row of buttons is added it is apt to be
inserted in the middle, giving a still more definitely frontal aspect.
The juxtaposition of this with the head turned to the left need cause no
difficulty to the little draughtsman, after what he has comfortably
swallowed in the shape of incompatibilities in the face itself (see
above, p. 347, Fig. 15 (_b_)). In rare cases, however, one may light on
a distinctly lateral treatment of the buttons. In one instance I have
found it in a drawing which would be a consistent profile but for the
insertion of the second eye, and the frontal treatment of the legs and
feet (Fig. 32).
[Illustration: Fig. 33.]
In the arrangement of the arms there is more room for confusion. The
management of these in the profile view naturally gives difficulty to
the little artist, and in some cases we find him shirking the point by
retaining the front view or spread-eagle arrangement. This occurs as a
rule where the profile modification is limited to the introduction of a
lateral nose or nose and pipe (see, _e.g._, Figs. 24 (_a_) and 28 (_b_),
pp. 354, 358). What is more surprising is that it appears in rare cases
in drawings which otherwise would be fairly consistent profile sketches.
[Fig. 33; all this child’s completed drawings, four in number, adopt the
same front-view scheme of arms.]
The view of the profile with both arms stretched out in front seems,
however, early to impress itself on the child’s imagination, and an
attempt is made to introduce this striking arrangement. The addition of
the forward-reaching arms helps greatly to give a profile aspect to the
figure (see above, p. 349, Fig. 18 (_b_)).
[Illustration: Fig. 34.]
The addition of the forward-reaching arms is carried out more especially
when it is desired to represent an action, as in the drawing given
above, p. 342, Fig. 7 (_c_), by a boy of six, which represents a nurse
apparently walking behind a child, and in the accompanying figure, by a
boy of eight and a half, of an Irishman knocking a man’s head inside a
tent (Fig. 34).
[Illustration: Fig. 35a.]
[Illustration: Fig. 35b.]
The crudest mode of representing the side view of the forward-reaching
arms is by drawing the lines from the contour, as in Fig. 35 (_a_).
Difficulties arise when the lines are carried across the trunk. Very
often both arms are drawn in this way, as in Fig. 35 (_b_). There is a
certain analogy here to the insertion of the two eyes in the profile
representation, a second feature being in each case added which in the
original object is hidden.[265]
-----
Footnote 265:
According to Ricci the second arm is supposed to be seen through the
body.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 36.]
When the two arms are thus introduced their position varies greatly,
whether they start from the contour or are drawn across the body. That
is to say, they may be far one from the other (as in Fig. 35 (_b_)), or
may be drawn close together. And again the point of common origin may be
high up at the meeting point of trunk and chin, as in a drawing by a boy
of five (Fig. 36), or at almost any point below this.
In the cases I have examined the insertion of both arms in profile
representations is exceptional. More frequently, even when action is
described, one arm only is introduced, which may set out from the
anterior surface of the trunk, or, as we have seen, start from the
posterior surface and cross the trunk (see above, pp. 353, 356, Figs. 23
(_a_) and 26 (_c_)). In most cases where no action such as walking and
holding a cane is signified both arms are omitted. The uncertainty of
the arms is hardly less here than in the front view.
With respect to the legs, we find, as in the primitive frontal view, an
insertion of both. An ordinary child can still less represent a human
figure in profile with only one leg showing than he can represent it
with only one eye. As a rule, so long as he is guided by his own inner
light only he does not attempt to draw one leg over and partially
covering the other, but sets them both out distinctly at a respectful
distance one from the other. The refinement of making the second foot or
calf and foot peep out from behind the first, as in Fig. 29 (_a_) (p.
359), and possibly also Fig. 18 (_c_) (p. 349), shows either an
exceptional artistic eye, or the interference of the preceptor.
[Illustration: Fig. 37.]
The treatment of the feet by the childish pencil is interesting. It is
presumable that at first no difference of profile and front view
attaches to the position of the foot. It has to be shown, and as the
young artist knows nothing of perspective and foreshortening, and,
moreover, would not be satisfied with that mode of delineation if he
could accomplish it, he proceeds naturally enough to draw the member as
a line at right angles to that of the leg. This is done in one of two
ways, in opposed directions outwards, or in the same direction,
answering to what we should call the front or the side view. At first, I
believe, no significance of front and side view is attached to these
arrangements. Thus in some sketches by a little girl of four and a half
I find the primitive front view of the head combined with each of these
arrangements of the foot. In drawings, too, of older children of six and
upwards I have met with cases both of a profile representation of head
and trunk with spread-eagle feet, as also of a side view of the feet
with a front face (see Figs. 5 (_a_) and 13 (_c_), pp. 339, 345). This
last arrangement, I find, appears in a profile treatment of the whole
leg and foot among the drawings of North American Indians (Fig. 37); and
this suggests that the side view in which the two feet point one way is
more easily reached and fixed by the untutored draughtsman.
[Illustration: Fig. 38.]
A regular and apparently intelligent addition of the side view of the
feet to the child’s crude profile drawing of the human figure produces a
noticeable increase of definiteness. One common arrangement, I find, in
the handling of the profile is the combination of the side view of the
feet with a more or less consistent profile view of the head, while the
bust is drawn in front view (see above, Figs. 35 (_a_), 36). The effect
is of course greater where the side view of the bent leg is added (see
Fig. 38 and compare with this Fig. 37). I find a liking for this same
arrangement in the drawings of the unskilled adult. An example may be
seen in a drawing by an English carpenter in General Pitt-Rivers’ Museum
at Farnham. In the pictographs of the North American Indians we meet
with cases of a similar treatment.[266] In the drawings on the Egyptian
Mummy cases in the British Museum instances of a precisely similar
treatment are to be found. We seem to have here a sort of transition
from the first crude impossible conception to a more naturalistic and
truthful conception. This twist of the trunk does not shock the eye with
an absolutely impossible posture, as the early artistic solecisms shock
it, and it is an arrangement which displays much that is characteristic
and valuable in the human form.[267]
-----
Footnote 266:
_Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology_, 1882-3, p. 160.
Footnote 267:
Professor Petrie has pointed out to me that the Egyptian of to-day
with his more supple body easily throws himself into this position.
-----
One point to be noticed among these drawings of the profile by children
is that in a large majority of cases the figure looks to the left of the
spectator. In the drawings which I have examined this appears like a
rule to which there is scarcely any exception, save where the child
wants to make two figures face one another in order to represent a fight
or the less sensational incident of a salute. The way in which the new
direction of the figure is given in these cases shows that children are
not absolutely shut up to the one mode of representation by any
insuperable difficulty. There is a like tendency observable in the
treatment of the quadruped, which nearly always looks to the left. It
may be added that a similar habit prevails in the drawings of untutored
adults, as the pictographs of the North American Indians. The
explanation of this, as well as of other generalisations here reached,
will be touched on later.
I conceive, then, that there reveals itself in children’s drawings of
the human figure between the ages of three or four and eight a process
of development involving differentiation and specialisation. This
process, instead of leading to a fuller and more detailed treatment of
the front view, moves in the direction of a new and quasi-profile
representation, although few children arrive at a clear and consistent
profile scheme. Different children appear to find their way to different
modifications of a mixed front and side view, some amazingly raw, others
less so according to the degree of natural intelligence, and probably
also the amount of good example put in their way by drawings in books,
and still more by model-drawings of mother or other instructor.
I have met with only a few examples of a contemporaneous and
discriminative use of front view and profile. Here and there, it is
true, one may light on a case of the old lunar scheme surviving side by
side with the commoner mixed scheme; but this sporadic survival of an
earlier form does not prove clear discrimination. In the case of one boy
of five the two forms were clearly distinguished, but this child was
from a cultured family, and had presumably enjoyed some amount of home
guidance. In the case of the rougher and less sophisticated class of
children it appears to be a general rule that the draughtsman settles
down to some one habitual way of drawing the human face and figure,
which can be seen to run through all his drawings, with only this
difference, that some are made more complete than others by the addition
of mouth, arms, etc. Even the fact of the use of one or two eyes by the
same child at the same date does not appear to me to point to a clear
distinction in his mind between a front and side view. The omissions in
these cases may more readily be explained as the result of occasional
fatigue and carelessness, or, in some cases, of want of room, or as
indicating the point of transition from an older and cruder to a later
and more complete scheme of profile. This conclusion is supported by the
fact that a child of six or seven, when asked to draw from the life,
will give the same scheme, whether the model presents a front or a side
view. This has been observed by M. Passy in the drawings of himself
which he obtained from his own children, by General Pitt-Rivers in the
drawings of uneducated adults, and by others. We may say, then, that
children left to themselves are disposed each to adopt some single
stereotyped mode of representing the human figure which happens to
please his fancy.[268]
-----
Footnote 268:
These results do not seem to agree with those of M. Passy or of
Professor Barnes. M. Passy distinguishes in children’s drawings a
front and a side view, both of which may be used by the same child at
the same time. The former consists of nose and mouth of profile and
eyes and ears of full face, the latter, of nose and mouth of profile
with one eye and one ear; that is to say the two differ only in the
number of eyes and ears (_Revue Philosophique_, 1891, p. 614 ff.). It
would be interesting to know on how large an examination this
generalisation is based. As suggested above, the occasional omission
of the second eye and ear where both are commonly used can be
explained without supposing the child to distinguish between profile
and full face. Professor Barnes goes so far as to state with numerical
exactness the relative frequency of profile and full face by children
at different stages. He makes, however, no serious attempt to explain
the criterion by which he would distinguish the two modes of
representation (see his article, _Pedagogical Seminary_, ii., p. 455
ff.).
-----
In this naïve childish art of profile drawing we have something which at
first seems far removed from the art of uncivilised races. No doubt, as
Grosse urges, the drawings of savages discovered in North America,
Africa, Australia, are technically greatly superior to children’s clumsy
impossible performances. Yet points of contact disclose themselves. If a
North American Indian is incapable of producing the stupid scheme of a
front view of the mouth and side view of the nose, he may, as we have
seen, occasionally succumb to the temptation to bring both eyes into a
profile drawing. We may see, too, how in trying to represent action, and
to exhibit the active limb as he must do laterally, the untutored
nature-man is apt to get odd results, as may be observed in the
accompanying drawing by a North American Indian of a man shooting (Fig.
39 (_a_)).[269] This may be compared with the accompanying Egyptian
drawing (Fig. 39 (_b_)).[270]
-----
Footnote 269:
Taken from Schoolcraft, vol. i., pl. 48.
Footnote 270:
From Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. 469.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 39 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 39 (_b_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 40 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 40 (_b_).]
I have already touched on the modifications which appear in a child’s
drawing of the human figure when the sculpturesque attitude of repose
gives place to the dramatic attitude of action. This transition to the
representation of action marks the substitution of a more realistic
concrete treatment for the early abstract symbolic treatment. Very
amusing are some of the devices by which a child tries to indicate this.
As Ricci has pointed out, the arm will sometimes be curved in order to
make it reach, say, the face of an adversary (Fig. 40 (_a_)). A similar
introduction of curvature appears in the accompanying drawing from a
scalp inscription (Fig. 40 (_b_)). Sometimes a curious symbolism
appears, as if to eke out the deficiencies of the artist’s technical
resources, as when a boy of five represents the junction of two persons’
hands by connecting them with a line (Fig. 40 (_c_)).[271] With this may
be compared the well-known device of indicating the direction of sight
by drawing a line from the eye to the object.[272] The most impossible
attitudes occur when new positions of the legs are attempted, as in the
accompanying endeavours to draw the act of running, kneeling to play
marbles, and kicking a football (Fig. 40 (_d_), (_e_), and (_f_)).
-----
Footnote 271:
This I take to be the meaning of this odd arrangement.
Footnote 272:
_Cf._ Barnes, _loc. cit._
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 40 (_c_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 40 (_e_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 40 (_d_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 40 (_f_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 41.]
One other point needs to be referred to before we leave the human
figure, _viz._, the treatment of accessories. As pointed out, the child
when left to himself is for the most part oblivious of dress, though the
triangular cape-like form of the body may be a rude attempt to delineate
a clothed figure. In general he cares merely to crown his figure with
the hat of dignity, and, at most, to ornament the body with a row of
buttons. Even when he grows sophisticated and attempts clothes he still
shows his primitive respect for the natural frame. A well-known
anthropologist tells me that his little boy on watching his mother draw
a lady insisted on her putting in the legs before shading in the
petticoats. In General Pitt-Rivers’ collection there is a drawing by a
boy of ten which in clothing the figure naïvely indicates the limbs
through their covering (Fig. 41). This agrees with what Von den Steinen
tells us of the way the Brazilian Indians drew him and his companions.
[Illustration: Fig. 42 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 42 (_b_).]
Yet the artificial culture which children in the better classes of a
civilised community are wont to receive is apt to develop a precocious
respect for raiment, and this respect is reflected in their drawings.
The early introduction of buttons has been illustrated above. One boy of
six was so much in love with these that he covered the bust with them
(Fig. 42 (_a_)). Girls are wont to lay great emphasis on the lady’s
feathered hat and parasol, as in the accompanying drawing by a maiden of
six (Fig. 42 (_b_)). Throughout this use of apparel in the crude stage
of child-art we see the desire to characterise sex, rank, and office, as
when the man is given his hat, the soldier his military cap, and so
forth. This applies, too, of course, to such frequent accessories as the
walking-stick (or less frequently the whip, as in Fig. 35 (_b_), p. 363)
and the pipe, each of which is made the most of in giving manliness of
look. The pipe, it may be added, figures bravely in a drawing of a
European by one of Von den Steinen’s Brazilians.
_First Drawings of Animals._
Many of the characteristics observable in the child’s treatment of the
human figure reappear in his mode of representing animal forms. This
domain of child-art follows quickly on the first. Children’s interest in
animals, especially quadrupeds, leads them to draw them at an early
stage. In prescribed exercises, moreover, the cat and the duck appear to
figure amongst the earliest models. An example of this early attempt to
draw animals has been given above (p. 334, Fig. 1).
[Illustration: Fig. 43 (_a_).—A duck.]
The first crude attempts about the age of three or four to draw animal
forms exhibit great incompleteness of conception and want of a sense of
position and proportion. In one case the head seems to be drawn, but no
body—if, indeed, head and body are not confused; and in others where a
differentiation of head and trunk is attempted there is no clear local
separation, or if this is attempted there is no clear indication of the
mode of connexion (see, for example, Fig. 43 (_a_)). In the case of
animals the side view is for obvious reasons hit on from the first. But,
needless to say, there is no clear representation of the profile head.
As a rule we have the front view, or at least the insertion of the two
eyes. Both eyes appear in Mr. Cooke’s illustrations of drawings of the
cat by children between three and four (Fig. 43 (_b_)), as also commonly
in drawings of horses. The position of the eyes is often odd enough,
these organs being in one drawing by a boy of five pushed up into the
ears (Fig. 43 (_c_)).[273] The front view of the animal head along with
profile body appears occasionally in savage drawings also.[274] In some
of children’s drawings we see traces of a mixed scheme. Thus I have a
drawing by a boy of five in which a front view is reached by a kind of
doubling of the profile (Fig. 43 (_d_)).
-----
Footnote 273:
Mr. Cooke kindly informs me that in an early Greek drawing in the
First Vase Room in the British Museum, the eye of a fish is placed in
the back part of the mouth.
Footnote 274:
An example is given by Schoolcraft, _op. cit._, pt. iv., pl. 18.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 43 (_b_).—Two cats.]
[Illustration: Fig. 43 (_d_).—A horse.]
[Illustration: Fig. 43 (_c_).—A horse.]
[Illustration: Fig. 44 (_a_).—A horse.]
More remarkable than all, perhaps, we have in one case a clear instance
of the scheme of the human face, the features, eyes, nose, and mouth
being arranged horizontally to suit the new circumstances (Fig. 44
(_a_)). With this may be compared the accompanying transference of the
animal ear to the human figure, though this suggests—especially in view
of the pipe—a bit of jocosity on the part of the young draughtsman (Fig.
44 (_b_)).
[Illustration: Fig. 44 (_b_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 44 (_c_).—A dog.]
[Illustration: Fig. 44 (_d_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 44 (_e_).—A horse.]
The forms of both head and trunk vary greatly. In a few drawings I have
found the extreme of abstract treatment in the drawing of the trunk,
_viz._, by means of a single line, a device which, so far as I have
observed, is only resorted to in the case of the human figure for the
neck and the limbs. An example of this was given above in Fig. 1 (p.
334). The following drawing of a dog by a little girl between five and
six years old illustrates the same thing (Fig. 44 (_c_)).[275] On the
other hand we see sometimes a tendency to give the trunk abnormal
thickness, as if the model used had been the wooden toy-horse, as in the
accompanying drawing by a boy of five (Fig. 44 (_d_)). Rectilinear
instead of rounded forms occur, and the head is often triangular, these
rectilinear contours being probably suggested by the teacher in his
model schemes (see Fig. 44 (_e_)).
-----
Footnote 275:
Line drawings of animals as well as of men are found in savage art:
see, for example, Schoolcraft, _op. cit._, pt. iv., pl. 18. Mr. Cooke
gives examples from drawings of the Trojans. Hence line drawing may,
as he infers, be the primitive mode.
-----
[Illustration:
Fig. 45 (_a_).—A cat.
1 Whiskers; 2 Tail.
]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_d_).—Some quadruped.]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_b_).—A bird.]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_c_).—A quadruped.]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_e_).—A mouse.]
The legs are of course all visible. The strangest inattention to number
betrays itself here. As we saw, a child in beginning his
scribble-drawing piles on lines for the legs (see above, p. 334, Fig.
1). A girl between three and four years of age endowed a cat with two
legs and a bird with three (see Fig. 45 (_a_) and (_b_)).[276] A boy in
his sixth year drew a quadruped with ten legs (Fig. 45 (_c_)). They are
often drawn absurdly out of position. In more than one case I find them
crowded behind, as in the accompanying drawing of some quadruped by the
same little girl that drew the cat and the bird, and in a drawing of a
mouse by another child about the same age, viz., three and a half years
(Fig. 45 (d) and (e)). They commonly remain apart from one another
throughout their course, following roughly a parallel direction. But
this simple scheme is soon modified, first of all by enlarging the space
between the fore and the hind legs, and then by introducing some change
of direction answering to the look of the animal in motion. This is most
easily effected by making the fore and the hind pair diverge downwards,
as in Fig. 43 (_b_) and (_c_) (p. 373). In rarer cases the divergence
appears between the two legs of the fore and of the hind pair (Fig. 45
(_f_)). The knee-bend is early introduced as a means of suggesting
motion. Either the legs are all bent backwards, as in Fig. 45 (_g_)
(_cf._ above, Fig. 44 (_e_)); or, with what looks like a perverted
feeling for symmetry, each pair is bent inwardly, as in Fig. 45 (_h_).
The forms are often extraordinary enough, a preternatural thickness of
leg being not infrequently given, and the knee-joint occasionally taking
on grotesque shapes as if the little draughtsman had just been attending
a class on the anatomy of the skeleton. The hoof is drawn in a still
freer manner, various designs, as the bird-foot, the circle, and the
looped pattern, appearing here as in the case of the human foot (Fig. 45
(_i_) and (_j_); _cf._ Figs. 43 (_c_) and 44 (_a_) (p. 373)).
-----
Footnote 276:
This is the way in which Mr. Cooke, who sends me these two drawings,
explains them to me. The beak (?) in Fig. 45 (_b_) is added to the
contour, as is the human nose in a few cases.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_f_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_g_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_h_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_i_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 45 (_j_).]
In this unlearned attempt to draw animal forms the child falls far below
the level of the untutored savage. The drawings of animals by the North
American Indians, by Africans, and others, have been justly praised for
their artistic excellence. A fine perception of form is, in many cases,
at least, clearly recognisable, the due covering of one part by another
is represented, and movement is vigorously suggested. Lover though he is
of animals, the child, when compared with the uncivilised adult, shows
himself to be woefully ignorant of his pets.
_Men on Horseback, etc._
Childish drawing moves as the dialectic progress of the Hegelian thought
from distinction and antithesis to a synthesis or unity which embraces
the distinction. After illustrating the human biped in his
contradistinction to the quadruped he proceeds to combine them in a
higher artistic unity, the man on horseback. The special interest of
this department of childish drawing lies in the fresh and genial manner
of the combining. To draw a man and a horse apart is one thing, to fit
the two figures one to the other, quite another.
At first the degree of connexion is slight. There is no suggestion of a
composite or mixed animal, such as may have suggested to the lively
Greek imagination the myth of the centaur. The human figure is pitched
on to the quadruped in the most unceremonious fashion. Thus in many
cases there is no attempt even to combine the profile aspects, the man
appearing impudently in frontal aspect, or what would be so but for the
lateral nasal excrescence, as in the accompanying drawing by a boy of
five (Fig. 46).
[Illustration: Fig. 46.]
With this indifference to a consistent profile there goes amazing
slovenliness in attaching the man to the animal, and this whether the
front or side view of the human figure is introduced. No attempt is made
in many cases to show attachment: the man is drawn just above the
quadruped, that is all. It seems to be a chance whether the two figures
meet, whether the feet of the man rest circus-fashion on the animal’s
back, or, lastly, whether the human form is drawn in part over the
animal, and, if so, at what height it is to emerge from the animal’s
back. Various arrangements occur in the same sheet of drawings (see Fig.
47 (_a_), (_b_) and (_c_)).
[Illustration: Fig. 47 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 47 (_b_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 47 (_c_).]
When this overlapping takes place the presence of the animal’s trunk
makes no difference in the treatment of the man. He is drawn with his
two legs just as if he were in relief against the horse; and this
arrangement is apt to persist even when a child can draw a rude
semblance of a horse and knows at what level to place the rider. So
difficult to the little artist is this idea of one thing covering
another that even when he comes to know that both the legs of the rider
are not seen, he may get confused and erase both (see above (p. 376),
Fig. 45 (_f_)).[277]
[Illustration: Fig. 48 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 48 (_b_).]
The savage is in general as much above the child in the representation
of the rider as he is in that of the animal apart. Yet traces of similar
confusion do undoubtedly appear. Von den Steinen says that his
Brazilians drew the rider with both legs showing. Andree gives an
illustration, among the stone-carvings (petroglyphs) of savages, of the
employment of a front view of the human figure rising above the horse
with no legs showing below (Fig. 48 (_a_)).[278] Even among the drawings
of the North American Indians, in which the horse is in general so well
outlined, we occasionally find what appear to be the germs of confusions
similar to those of the child. Thus Schoolcraft gives among drawings
from an inscription on a buffalo skin one in which we have above the
profile view of a horse the front view of a man, with arms stretched out
laterally while the legs are wanting.[279] A clearer case of confusion
is supplied by the following drawing, also by a North American Indian,
in which the lines of the horse’s body cut those of the rider’s legs
(Fig. 48 (_b_)).[280]
-----
Footnote 277:
_Cf._ Ricci, _op. cit._, Fig. 21 (p. 27).
-----
Footnote 278:
_Op. cit._, pl. 2; _cf._ pl. 6, where a drawing from Siberia with the
same mode of treatment is given.
Footnote 279:
_Op. cit._, pt. iv, pl. 31 (p. 251).
Footnote 280:
From the _Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1882-83, p. 206.
The common appearance of both legs in these Indian drawings means, I
take it, that the rider is on the side of the horse.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 49 (_a_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 49 (_d_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 49 (_b_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 49 (_c_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 49 (_e_).]
The same tendency to show the whole man where the circumstances hide a
part appears in children’s drawings of a man in a boat, a railway
carriage and so forth. Ricci has shown that the different ways in which
the child-artist puts a human figure in a boat are as numerous as those
in which he sets it on a horse. The figure may stand out above the boat
or overlap, in which last case it may be cut across by the deck-line and
its lower part shown, or be clapped wholly below the deck, or again be
half immersed in the water below the boat, or, lastly, where an attempt
to respect fact is made, be truncated, the trunk appearing through the
side of the boat, though the legs are wanting.[281] A man set in a
house, train, or tram car, is seen in his totality (Fig. 49 (_a_) and
(_b_)). It is much the same thing when a child flattens out a house or
other object so as to show us its three sides, that is to say one which
in reality is hidden (Fig. 49 (_c_) and (_d_)). With these habits of the
child may be compared those of the savage. The impulse to show
everything, even what is covered, is illustrated in a drawing of a
singer in his wigwam by an Indian (Fig. 49 (_e_)).[282] Even where
colour comes in and one thing has to be hidden by a part of another
thing the savage artist, like the child insists on drawing the whole.
This is illustrated in a curious custom, the drawing of two serpents (in
dry, coloured powder) by North American fire-dancers. They are drawn
across one another, and the artist has first to draw completely the one
partly covered, and then the second over the first.[283]
-----
Footnote 281:
See Ricci, _op. cit._, pp. 17-23.
Footnote 282:
Andree observes that in Australian drawings objects behind one another
are put above one another as in a certain stage of Egyptian art (_op.
cit._, p. 172).
Footnote 283:
_Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology_, 1883-84, p. 444 ff.
-----
[Illustration: Fig. 50.]
The child’s drawing of the house, though less remarkable than that of
the man and the quadruped, has a certain interest. It illustrates, as we
have just seen, not merely his determination to render visible what is
hidden, but also his curious feeling for position and proportion. In one
case I found that in the desire to display the contents of a house a
girl of six had actually set a table between the chimneys. The
accompanying drawing done by the boy C. at the age of five years five
months illustrates the fine childish contempt for proportion (Fig. 50).
A curious feature in these drawings of the house is the care bestowed on
certain details, pre-eminently the window. This is even a more important
characteristic feature than the chimney with its loops of smoke. Some
children give a quite loving care to the window, drawing the lace
curtains, the flowers, and so forth.
_Résumé of Facts._
We may now sum up the main results of our study. We find in the drawings
of untrained children from about the age of three to that of eight or
ten a curious mode of dealing with the most familiar forms. At no stage
of this child-art can we find what we should regard as elements of
artistic value: yet it has its quaint and its suggestive side.
The first thing that strikes us here is that this child-delineation,
crude and bizarre as it is, illustrates a process of development. Thus
we have (_a_) the stage of vague formless scribble, (_b_) that of
primitive design, typified by what I have called the lunar scheme of the
human face, and (_c_) that of a more sophisticated treatment of the
human figure, as well as of animal forms.
This process of art-evolution has striking analogies with that of
organic evolution. It is clearly a movement from the vague or indefinite
to the definite, a process of gradual specialisation. Not only so, we
may note that it begins with the representation of those rounded or
ovoid contours which seem to constitute the basal forms of animal
organisms, and proceeds like organic evolution by a gradual
differentiation of the ‘homogeneous’ structure through the addition of
detailed parts or organs. These organs in their turn gradually assume
their characteristic forms. It is, perhaps, worth observing here that
some of the early drawings of animals are strongly suggestive of embryo
forms (compare, _e.g._, Fig. 45 (_b_) and (_d_), p. 375).
If now we examine this early drawing on its representative side we find
that it is crude and defective enough. It proceeds by giving a bare
outline of the object, with at most one or two details thrown in. The
form neither of the whole nor of the parts is correctly rendered. Thus
in drawing the foot it is enough for the child to indicate the angle:
the direction of the foot-line is comparatively immaterial. In this
respect a child’s drawing differs from a truly artistic sketch or
suggestive indication by a few characteristic lines, which is absolutely
correct so far as it goes. The child is content with a schematic
treatment, which involves an appreciable and even considerable departure
from truthful representation. Thus the primitive lunar drawing of the
human face is manifestly rather a diagrammatic scheme than an imitative
representation of a concrete form.
In this non-imitative and merely indicative treatment there is room for
all sorts of technical inaccuracies. Form is woefully misapprehended, as
in the circular trunk, the oblong mouth, the claw foot, and so forth.
Proportion—even in its simple aspect of equality—is treated with
contempt in many instances (_cf._ the legs of the quadruped and the bird
in Fig. 45 (_a_), (_b_), and (_c_) (p. 375)). What is no less important,
division of space and relative position of parts, which seem vital even
to a diagrammatic treatment, are apt to be overlooked, as in drawing the
facial features high up, in attaching the arms to the head, and so
forth. Even the element of number is made light of, and this, too, in
such simple circumstances as when drawing the legs of an animal.
[Illustration: Fig. 51 (_a_).]
One of the most curious of these misrepresentations comes into view in
the third or sophisticated stage, _viz._, the introduction of more than
is visible. This error, again, assumes a milder and a graver form,
_viz._, (_a_) the giving of the features more distinctly and completely
than they appear in the object represented, and (_b_) the introducing of
features which have no place in the object represented. Examples of the
first are the introduction of the nasal angle into the front view of the
human face; the separation throughout their length of the four legs of
the horse; and such odd tricks as detaching the reins of the horse from
the animal, as in Fig. 51 (_a_). Illustrations of the second are
numerous and varied. They include first of all the naïve introduction of
features of an object which are not on the spectator’s side and so in
view, as the second eye and the second arm in what are predominantly
profile representations. With these may be classed the attempt to
exhibit three sides of a house. Closely related to these errors of
perspective is the exposure of objects or parts of objects which are
covered by others. It is possible that the spread-eagle arrangement of
the two joined arms is an attempt to represent a feature of childish
anatomy, _viz._, the idea that the arms run through and join in the
middle of the trunk. A clearer example of this attempt to expose to view
what is covered is the exhibition of the whole human figure in a boat,
house or carriage. With this may be compared the disclosure of the whole
head of a horse when drinking, as in the accompanying drawing by a boy
of five (Fig. 51 (_b_)), of the whole head of the man through his hat
(see above, p. 350, Fig. 20 (_b_)), and of the human limbs through the
clothes (Fig. 41, p. 371).
[Illustration: Fig. 51 (_b_).]
A class of confusions, having a certain similarity to some of these,
consists in the transference of the features of one object to a second,
as when a man or quadruped is given a bird-like foot (Figs. 7 (_d_) and
43 (_c_), pp. 342, 373), and still more manifestly when the facial
scheme of the man is transferred to the quadruped or _vice versâ_ (Fig.
44 (_a_) and (_b_), pp. 373, 374).
These last errors clearly illustrate the tendency to a conventional
treatment, a tendency which, as I have observed already, runs through
children’s spontaneous drawings. This free conventional handling of
natural forms has been illustrated in the habitual drawing of the mouth
and eyes, and still more strikingly in that of the hands and feet.
Paradoxical though it may seem, these drawings, while in general bare
and negligent of details, show in certain directions a quite amusing
attention to them. Thus, we find at a very early stage certain details,
as the pipe of the man, insisted on with extravagant emphasis; and may
observe at a somewhat later stage in the elaborate drawing of hair,
buttons, parasol, and so forth, a tendency to give some feature to which
the child attaches value a special prominence and degree of
completeness.
The art of children is a thing by itself, and must not straight away be
classed with the rude art of the untrained adult. As adult, the latter
has knowledge and technical resources above those of the little child;
and these points of superiority show themselves, for example, in the
fine delineation of animal forms by Africans and others.[284] At the
same time, after allowing for these differences, it is, I think,
incontestable that a number of characteristic traits in children’s
drawings are reflected in those of untutored savages.
-----
Footnote 284:
The tendency to identify the drawings of the child and the savage led
to an amusing error on the part of a certain Abbé Domenech, who in
1860 published his so-called _Livre des Sauvages_, which purported to
contain the graphic characters and drawings of North American Aztecs,
but proved in reality to be nothing but the scribbling book of a boy
of German parentage. The drawings are of the crudest, and show the
artist to be much more nasty-minded than the savage draughtsmen.
-----
_Explanation of Facts._
Let us now see how we are to explain these characteristics. In order to
do so we must try to understand what process a child’s mind goes through
when he draws something, and to compare this with what passes in the
mind of an adult artist. The problem has, it is evident, to do with
drawing from memory or out of one’s head, for though the child may begin
to draw by help of models, he develops his characteristic art in
complete independence of these.
In order to draw an object from memory two things are obviously
necessary. We must have at the outset an idea of the form we wish to
represent, and this visual image of the form must somehow translate
itself into a series of manual movements corresponding to its several
parts. In other words, it presupposes both an initial conception and a
correlated process of execution.
In psychological language this correlation or co-ordination between the
idea of a form and the carrying out of the necessary movements of the
hand is expressed by saying that the visual image, say, of the curve of
the full face, calls up the associated image of the manual movement.
This last, again, may mean either the visual image of the hand executing
the required movement, or the image of the muscular sensations
experienced when the arm is moved in the required way, or possibly both
of these.
The process of drawing a whole form is of course more complex than this,
each step in the operation being adjusted to preceding steps. How far
the movements of the draughtsman’s hands are guided here by a visual
image of the form, which remains present throughout, how far by
attention to what has already been set down, may not be quite certain.
Judging from my own case, I should describe the process somewhat after
this fashion. In drawing a human face we set out with a visual image of
the whole, which is incomplete in respect of details, but represents
roughly size and general form or outline. This image is projected
indistinctly and unsteadily, of course, on the sheet of paper before us,
and this projected image controls the whole operation. But as we advance
we pay more and more attention to the visual presentation supplied by
the portion of the drawing already produced, and only realise with any
distinctness that part of the projected visual image which is just in
advance of the pencil.
It is evident that the carrying out of such a prolonged operation
involves a perfected mechanism of eye, brain and hand connexions; for
much of the manual adjustment is instantaneous and sub-conscious. At the
same time the process illustrates a very high measure of volitional
control or concentration. Unless we keep the original design fixed
before us, and attend at each stage to the relations of the executed to
the unexecuted part, we are certain to go wrong.
Practice tends, of course, to reduce the conscious element in the
process. In the case of a person accustomed to draw the outline of a
human head, a cat or what not, the operation is very much one of
hand-memory into which visual representations enter only faintly. The
movements follow one another of themselves without the intervention of
distinct visual images (whether that of the linear form or of the moving
hand). There is an approach here to what happens when we put last year’s
date to a letter, the hand following out an old habit.
Now the child has to acquire the co-ordinations here briefly described.
He may have the visual image of the human face or the horse which he
wishes to depict. This power of visualising shows itself in other ways
and can be independently tested, as by asking a child to describe the
object verbally. But he has as yet no inkling of how to reproduce his
image. That his inability at the outset is due to a want of
co-ordination is seen in the fact that at this stage he cannot draw even
when a model is before his eyes.
The process of learning here is very like what takes place when a child
learns to speak. The required movements have somehow to be performed and
attached to the effects they are then found to produce. Just as a child
first produces sounds, partly instinctively or spontaneously, partly by
imitating the seen movements of another’s lips, etc., so he produces
lines by play-like scribble and by imitating the visible movements of
another person’s hand. The tendency to imitate is observable in the
first loop-formations, and possibly also in the abrupt angular changes
which give a zig-zag look to some of these early tracings.
In this early stage we see a marked want of control. The effort is
spasmodic and short-lived: the little draughtsman presently runs off
into nonsense scribble. The want of control is seen, too, in the
tendency to prolong lines unduly, and to repeat or multiply them, the
primitive play-movements being very much under the empire of inertia or
habit, _i.e._, the tendency to repeat or go on with an action. The
effect of limitating natural conditions in the motor apparatus is
illustrated, not only in the slightly curved form of these first
scribble lines, but in the general obliquity or inclination of the line;
it being manifestly easier for the hand when brought in front of the
body to describe a line running slightly upwards from left to right (or
in the reverse direction) than one running horizontally. The want of
control by means of a steady visual image is further seen in the absence
of any attempt at a plan, at a mapping out of the available space, and
at an observation of proportion.
It might be thought that, though a child at this inexperienced stage
were unable to produce the correct form of a familiar object, he would
at once detect the incorrectness of the one he sets down. No doubt, if
he were in the attitude of cold critical observation, he would do so: in
fact, as Mr. Cooke and others have shown, he sees the absurdities of his
workmanship as soon as they are pointed out to him. But when drawing he
is in another sort of mood, akin to that imaginative mood in which he
traces forms in the plaster of the ceiling, or in the letters of his
spelling-book. He means to draw a man or a horse, and consequently the
formless jumble of lines becomes, to his fancy, a man or a horse. His
first drawings are thus, in a sense, playthings, which, like the
battered stump of a doll, his imaginative intention corrects,
supplements, and perfects.
With repetition, and that amount of supervision and guidance which most
children who take a pencil in hand manage to get from somebody, he
begins to note the actual character of his line-effects, and to
associate these with the movements which produce them. A straight
horizontal line, a curved line returning upon itself, and so forth, come
to be differentiated, and to be co-ordinated with their respective
manual movements.
We may now pass to the second stage, the beginning of true linear
representation, as illustrated in the first abstract schematic treatment
of the human face and figure.
A question arises at the very outset here as to whether, and if so to
what extent, children re-discover this method of representation for
themselves. Here, as in the case of child-language, such as ‘bow-wow,’
‘gee-gee,’ tradition and example undoubtedly play their part. A parent,
or an older brother and sister, in setting the first models, is pretty
certain to adopt a simple scheme, as that of the lunar face; and even
where there is no instruction a child is quick at imitating other
children’s manner of drawing. Yet this does not affect the contention
that such manner of drawing is eminently childish, that is, the one a
child finds his way to most readily, any more than the fact of the
nurse’s calling the horse ‘gee-gee’ in talking to baby affects the
contention that ‘gee-gee’ is eminently a baby-name.
The scanty abstract treatment, the circle enclosing two dots and the
vertical and horizontal lines, points to the absence of any serious
attempt to imitate a form closely and fully. It seems absurd to suppose
that a child of three or four does not image a human face better than he
delineates it; and even if this were doubtful it is certain that when he
sets down a man without hair, ears, trunk, or arm, his execution is
falling far short of his knowledge. How is this to be accounted for? My
explanation is that the little artist is still much more of a symbolist
than a naturalist, that he does not in the least care about a full and
close likeness, but wants only a barely sufficient indication. This
scantiness of treatment issuing from want of the more serious artistic
intention is of course supported by technical limitations. The lunar
face with the two propping lines answers to what the child can do easily
and comfortably. Much more than his elder brethren our small limner is
bound by the law of artistic economy, the need of producing his effects
with the smallest expenditure of labour, and of making every touch tell.
Defects of executive resource and of manual skill appear plainly in
other characteristics. The common inclination of the lines of the legs
points to the unconscious selection of easiest directions of manual
movement.[285] The unduly lengthened arm and leg, the multiplication of
legs—as seen most strikingly in the case of the quadruped—illustrate the
influence of motor or muscular inertia. There is, too, a noticeable want
of measurement and management of the space to be covered, as when one
eye is put in so large as to leave no room for a second, or when filling
in details from above downwards the eyes are put in too near the
occipital curve, and so all the features set too high up. The same want
of measurement of space may contribute to the child’s habit of drawing
the trunk so absurdly small in proportion to the head; for he begins
with the head, and by making this large finds he has not left, within
the limits of what he considers the right size of figure, space enough
for the trunk.
-----
Footnote 285:
This is supported, in the case of children who have begun to wield the
pen, by the exercises of the copy-book.
-----
Very noticeable is the influence of habit in this abstract treatment. By
habit I here mean hand-memory, or the tendency to combine movements in
the old ways, though this is commonly aided, as we shall see, by
“association of ideas”. Thus a child falls into a stereotyped way of
drawing the human face and figure; line follows line in the accustomed
sequence; the only variation showing itself is in the insertion or
omission of nose, ears, or arms; these uncertainties being due to
fluctuations of energy and concentration. A child’s art is, in respect
of its unyielding sameness, a striking example of a conservative
conventionality. He gets used to his pencil-forms, and pronounces them
right, to the greater and greater neglect of their relation to natural
forms. Habit shows itself in other ways too. Notice, for example, how a
child, after adding the trunk, will go on inserting the arms into the
head as he used to do. Such a habit is an affair not only of the hand
but of the eye. The arms have by repeated delineation come in the
art-sphere to belong to the head.
Coming now to the more elaborate and sophisticated stage of five or
thereabouts, in which the shape of eyes, mouth, and nose is shadowed
forth, the difficult appendages as hands and feet attempted, and the
profile aspect introduced, we notice first of all a step in the
direction of naturalism. The child like the race gets tired of his bald
primitive symbolism, and essays to bring more of concrete fulness and
life into his forms. Only this first attempt does not lead to a
continued progress, but stops short at what is rude and arbitrary
enough, substituting merely a second rigid conventionalism for the
first.
This transition indicates an advance in technical skill; hence we find a
measure of free and bold invention, as in the management of the facial
features, _e.g._, the scissors-shaped nose, and still more in the
treatment of hands and feet, which is at once exaggerative, as in the
big burr forms, and freely conventional, as in the leaf-pattern for the
hand, and the wondrous loop-designs for the foot.
Yet though this freer treatment shows a certain technical advance it
illustrates the effect of the limitations of the child’s executive
power. Thus the new partially profile figures are very apt to lean,
looking as if they were falling backwards. It is probable that the
wide-spread tendency to make the profile face look towards the
spectator’s left rather than his right is due to the circumstance that
the eye can much better follow and control the pencil in this case than
in the opposite one. In the latter the hand is apt to interfere with
seeing the line of the face, especially if the pencil is held near its
point.
Habit, too, continues to assert its dominion. The tendency noticeable
now and again, even among English children, to treat the feet after the
manner of the hands illustrates this. Habit is further illustrated in
the tendency to a transference of forms appropriate to the man to the
animal; or, when (owing to the interposition of the instructor) the
drawing of animals is in advance of the other, in the reverse process;
as when a cat is drawn with two legs, or a horse is given a man’s face,
or the human form develops a horse’s ears, or a bird’s feet. With these
may be compared the transference of a bird-like body and tail to a
quadruped in Fig. 45 (_i_), p. 377. The accompanying two drawings by a
child of six show how similar forms are apt to be used for the man and
for the animal (Fig. 52).
[Illustration:
Man. Bird.
Fig. 52.
]
But the really noticeable thing in this later sophisticated treatment is
the bringing into view of what in the original is invisible, as the
front view of the eye as well as both eyes into what otherwise looks a
side view of the face, the two legs of the rider and so forth. Here, no
doubt, we may still trace the influence of technical limitations and of
habit. The influence of the former is seen in the completing of the
contour of the head before or after drawing the hat: for the child would
not know how to start with the lines which form the commencement of the
visible part of the head. The influence of habit is also recognisable
here. A child having learned first of all to draw the front view of the
eye, the two eyes and the two legs side by side, tends partly as the
result of organised hand-trick, partly in consequence of ‘association of
ideas,’ to go on drawing in the same fashion in the new circumstances. A
specially clear illustration of this effect of habit already alluded to
is the introduction of the front view of the nose in the mixed scheme.
These cases are exactly paralleled by the Egyptian drawing in which
while one shoulder is pulled round the other is left in square front
view (see above, p. 369, Fig. 39 (_b_)). Still, habit does not account
for everything here. It does not, for example, explain why the child
brings into view three sides of a house. The technical deficiencies of
the small draughtsman, his want of serious artistic purpose, seem an
insufficient explanation of these later sophistries. They appear to
point plainly to certain peculiarities of the process of childish
conception. We are compelled then to inquire a little more closely into
the characteristics of children’s observation and of their mental
representation of objects.
We are apt to think that children when they look at things at all
scrutinise them closely, and afterwards imagine clearly what they have
observed. But this assumption is hardly justified. No doubt they often
surprise us by their attention to small unimportant details of objects,
especially when these are new and odd-looking. But it is a long way from
this to a careful methodic investigation of objects. Children’s
observation is for the most part capriciously selective and one-sided.
They apprehend one or two striking or especially interesting features
and are blind to the rest. This is fully established in the case of
ordinary children by the wondrous ignorance they display when questioned
about common objects. It is hardly necessary to add that their
spontaneous untrained observation is quite unequal to that careful
analytical attention to form-elements in their relations which underlies
all clear grasp of the direction of linear elements, the relative
position of the several parts of a figure, and proportion.
This being so it maybe said that defects of observation are reflected in
children’s drawing through all its phases. Thus the primitive bare
schematism of the human face answers to an incomplete observation and
consequently incomplete mode of imagination, just as it answers to a
want of artistic purpose and to technical incapacity. How far defective
observation assists at this first stage I do not feel sure. Further
experimental inquiries are needed on this point. I lean to the view
already expressed, that at this stage manual reproduction is far behind
visual imagination.
When, however, we come on to the delineation of an object under its
different aspects the defects of mental representation assume a much
graver character. We must bear in mind that a child soon gets beyond the
stage of recalling and imagining the particular look of an object, say
the front view of his mother’s face, or of his house. He begins as soon
as he understands and imitates others’ language to synthesise such
pictorial images of particular visual presentations or appearances into
the wholes which we call ideas of things. A child of four or five
thinking of his father or his house probably recalls in a confused way
disparate and incompatible visual aspects, the front view as on the
whole the most impressive being predominant, though striking elements of
the side view may rise into consciousness also. With this process of
synthesising aspects into the concrete whole we call a thing there goes
the further process of binding together representations of this and that
thing into generic or typical ideas answering to man, horse, house, in
general. A child of five or six, so far from being immersed in
individual presentations and concrete objects, as is often supposed, has
carried out a respectable measure of generalisation, and this largely by
the help of language. Thus a ‘man’ reduced to visual terms has come to
mean for him (according to his well-known verbal formula) something with
a head, two eyes, etc., etc., which he does not need to represent in a
mental picture because the verbal formula serves to connect the features
in his memory.
Hence when he comes to draw he has not the artist’s clear mental vision
of the actual look of things to guide him. He is led not by a lively and
clear sensuous imagination, but by a mass of generalised knowledge
embodied in words, _viz._, the logical form of a definition or
description. This, I take it, is the main reason why with such supreme
insouciance he throws into one design features of the full face and of
the profile; for in setting down his linear scheme he is aiming not at
drawing a picture, an imitative representation of something we could
see, but rather at enumerating, in the new expressive medium which his
pencil supplies, what he knows about the particular thing. Since he is
thus bent on a linear description of what he knows he is not in the
least troubled about the laws of visual appearance, but setting
perspective at naught compels the spectator to see the other side, to
look through one object at another, and so forth.
Since the process at this sophisticated stage is controlled by knowledge
of things as wholes and not by representations of concrete appearances
or views, we can understand why the visible result does not shock the
draughtsman. The little descriptor does not need to compare the look of
his drawing with that of the real object: it is right as a description
anyhow. How strongly this idea of description controls his views of
pictures has already been pointed out. Just as he objects to a correct
profile drawing as an inadequate description, so he objects to a drawing
of the hind part of a horse entering the stable, and asks, ‘Where is his
head?’ We may say then that what a lively fancy did in the earlier
play-stages childish logic does now, it blinds the artist to the actual
look of what his pencil has created.
Use soon adds its magic force, and the impossible combination, the two
eyes stuck on at the side of the profile nose, the two legs of the rider
untroubled by the capacious trunk of the animal which he strides, the
man wholly exposed to view inside the boat or carriage, gets stereotyped
into the right mode of linear description.
All this shows that the child’s eye at a surprisingly early period loses
its primal ‘innocence,’ grows ‘sophisticated’ in the sense that instead
of seeing what is really presented it sees, or pretends to see, what
knowledge and logic tell it is there. In other words his
sense-perceptions have for artistic purposes become corrupted by a too
large admixture of intelligence. This corruption is closely analogous to
what we all experience when we lose the primal simplicity of the eye for
colour, and impart into our ‘visual impressions,’ as we call them,
elements of memory and inference, saying, for example, that a distant
mountain side is ‘green’ just because we can make out that it is
grass-covered and know that grass when looked at nearer is of a green
colour.
I have dwelt on what from our grown-up standpoint we must call the
defects of children’s drawing. Yet in bringing this study to a close it
is only just to remark that there are other and better qualities well
deserving of recognition. Crude, defective, self-contradictory even, as
these early designs undoubtedly are, they are not wholly destitute of
artistic qualities. The abstract treatment itself, in spite of its
inadequacy, is after all in the direction of a true art, which in its
essential nature is selective and suggestive rather than literally
reproductive. We may discern, too, even in these rude schemes a nascent
sense of values, of a selection of what is characteristic. Even the
primitive trunkless form seems to illustrate this, for though, as we
have seen in a previous essay, the trunk plays an important part in the
development of the idea of self, it is for pictorial purposes less
interesting and valuable than the head. However this be, it is clear
that we see this impulse of selection at work later on in the addition
of the buttons, the pipe, the stick, the parasol and so forth.
It is to be noted, too, that even in these untutored performances, where
convention and tradition exercise so great a sway, there are faint
indications of a freer individual initiative. Witness, for example, the
varying modes of representing hair, hands, and feet. We may say then
that even rough children in elementary schools who are never likely to
develop artistic talent display a rudiment of art-feeling. It is only
fair to them to testify that in spite of the limitations of their stiff
wooden treatment they express a certain individuality of feeling and
aim, that like true artists they convey a personal impression. These
traits appear most plainly in the later representations of action, but
they are not altogether absent from the earlier statuesque figures.
Compare, for example, the look of alert vigour in Fig. 5 (_a_) (p. 339),
of grinning impudence in Fig. 6 (_a_) (p. 341), of provoking
‘cheekiness’ in Fig. 20 (_b_) (p. 350), of a seedy ‘swagger’ in Fig. 32
(p. 362), of inebriate gaiety in Fig. 17 (p. 348), of absurd
skittishness in Fig. 24 (_b_) (p. 354), of insane flurry in Fig. 26
(_a_) (p. 355), of Irish easy-goingness even when somebody has to be
killed in Fig. 34 (p. 363), of wiry resoluteness in Fig. 29 (_a_) (p.
359), of sly villainy in Fig. 38 (p. 365), and of demure simplicity in
Fig. 26 (_c_) (p. 356); and note the delicious variety of equine
character in Fig. 45 (_f_) (p. 376) and following.
If a finer æsthetic feeling is developed the first rude descriptive
drawing loses its attractions. A friend, a well-known psychologist, has
observed in the case of his children that when they try to draw
something pretty, _e.g._, a beautiful lady, they abandon their customary
mode of description and become aware of the look of their designs and
criticise them as bad. This seems to me a most significant observation.
It is the feeling for what is beautiful which makes a child attend
closely to the bare look of things, and the beginning of a finer
observation of forms commonly takes its rise in this nascent sense of
beauty. Indeed, may one not say that only when a germ of the æsthetic
feeling for beauty arises, and a child falls in love with the mere look
of certain things, can there appear the beginnings of genuinely artistic
work, of a conscientious endeavour to render on paper the aspect which
pleases the eye?
XI.
EXTRACTS FROM A FATHER’S DIARY.
There has just come into my hands a curious document. It is a sort of
diary kept by a father in which he chronicles certain of the early
doings and sayings of his boy. It makes no pretence to being a regular
and methodical register of progress, such as Mr. F. Galton has shown us
how to carry out. It may be said by way of extenuation that the diary
sets out in the year 1880, that is to say, two years before Professor
Preyer published his model record of an infant’s progress. _En
revanche_, it is manifestly the work of a psychologist given to
speculation, and this of a somewhat bold type. In the present paper I
propose to cull from this diary what seem to me some of the choicer
observations and comments on these. If these do not always come up to
the requirements of a rigidly scientific standard in respect of
completeness, precision, and grave impartiality, they may none the less
prove suggestive of serious scientific thought, while any extravagances
of fancy and any levity of manner may well be set down to the play of a
humorous sentiment, which betrays the father beneath the observer.
I may begin my sketch of the early history of this boy by remarking that
he appears to have been a normal and satisfactory specimen of his
class,—healthy, good-natured, and given to that infantile way of
relieving the pressure of his animal spirits which is, I believe, known
as crowing. Not believing in the classifications of temperament adopted
by the physiologists of a past age, the father forbears from describing
his child’s. For my lady readers I may add that he seems, at least by
his father’s account, to have been a good-sized, chubby little fellow,
fair and rosy in tint, with bright blue eyes, and a limited crop of
golden hair of an exceptionally rich, I don’t know how many carat gold,
hue. I shall speak of him under his initial, C.
_First Year._
The early pages of the record do not, one must confess, yield any very
striking observations. This is, no doubt, due to the circumstance that
the observer, not being a naturalist, was not specially interested in
the dim mindless life of the first weeks. For the first few days Master
C. appears to have been content to vegetate like other babies of a
similar age. Although a bonny boy, he began life in the usual way—with a
good cry; though we now know, on scientific authority, that this, being
a purely reflex act, has not the deep significance which certain
pessimistic philosophers have attributed to it. Science would probably
explain in a similar way a number of odd facial movements which this
baby went through on the second day of his earthly career, and which,
the father characteristically remarks, were highly suggestive of a
cynical contempt for his new surroundings.
Yet, though content in this early stage to do little but perform the
vegetal functions of life, the infant comes endowed with a nervous
system and organs of sense, and these are very soon brought into active
play. According to this record, the sense of touch is the first to
manifest itself.[286] Even when only two hours old, at a period of life
when there is certainly no sound for the ear and possibly no light for
the eye, C. immediately clasped the parental finger which was brought
into the hollow of its tiny hand. The functional activity of touch was
observed still more plainly on the second day, when the child was seen
to carry out awkwardly enough what looked like exploring movements of
the hands over his mouth and face. This early development in the child
of the tactual sense agrees, says the biographer, with what Aristotle
long since taught respecting the fundamental character of this sense, an
idea to which the modern doctrine of evolution has given a new
significance.
-----
Footnote 286:
Taste, as involved in the necessary act of taking nourishment, is
probably at first hardly differentiated from touch.
-----
A distinct step is taken during the first four days towards acquiring
knowledge of things through a progressive use of the eyes and hands.
C.’s father noticed on the second day that a good deal of ocular
movement was forthcoming. Much of this was quite irregular, each eye
following its own path. Sometimes, however, the eyes moved harmoniously
or symmetrically now to this side, now to that, and now and again seemed
to converge and fix themselves on some near object in front of them.
Sufficiently loud sounds increased these ocular movements.
On the third day the father, when chuckling and calling to the child at
a short distance, fondly supposed that his offspring showed appreciation
of these attentions by regarding him with a sweet expression and
something like the play of a smile about the lips and eyelids. But it is
possible that this apparent amiability was nothing but a purely animal
satisfaction after a good meal. As to _seeing_ his father’s face at that
early age, there is room for serious doubt. Preyer found that long
before the close of the first day his child wore a different expression
when his face, turned towards the window, was suddenly deprived of light
by the intervention of the professor’s hand. If the child is thus
sensible to the pleasure of light it is, of course, conceivable that
C.’s eyes, happening in their aimless wanderings to be brought together
opposite the bright patch of the father’s face, might maintain that
attitude under the stimulus of the pleasure. The father argues in favour
of this view by quoting the fact that C.’s sister was observed on the
fourth day to have her eyes arrested by a light or the father’s face if
brought pretty near the child; yet such blank staring at mere brightness
is, of course, a long way off from distinct vision of an object.
On the fourth day, continues the sanguine father, the child showed a
distinct advance in the use of the hands. Having clasped his sire’s
finger he now moved it in what looked like an abortive attempt to carry
it to his mouth. There follow some remarks on the impulse of infants to
carry objects to their mouths, in which again there seems an approach to
frivolity in the conjecture that the human animal previous to education
is all-devouring. It is to be noted, however, that these early movements
are probably quite accidental. As we shall see, it is some weeks before
the child learns to carry objects to his mouth. As to the connexion
between this movement and infantile greed our observer is not so poor a
psychologist as not to see that it may be due to the circumstance that
the lips and the tip of the tongue form one of the most delicate parts
of the _tactual_ organ. It is not improbable that in the evolution of
man before the tactual sensibility of the hand was developed these parts
were chiefly employed as a tactual apparatus in distinguishing and
rejecting what is hard, gritty and so forth in food. However this be, it
is probable that, as Stanley Hall has suggested, an infant may get a
kind of “æsthetic” pleasure by bringing objects into contact with the
lips and the gums.
At this period, the diary remarks, the child was very cross for some
weeks and not a good subject for observation. This new difficulty, added
to that of overcoming natural scruples in his guardians, appears to have
baffled the observer for a time, for the next observations recorded take
up the thread of the child’s history at the sixth week.
About this date, the father notes, the power of directing the eyes had
greatly improved. The child could now converge his eyes comfortably and
without going through a number of unpleasant squinting-like failures on
a near object. The range of sight had greatly increased, so that the
boy’s universe, instead of consisting merely of a tiny circle of near
objects, as his mother’s face held close to him, began to embrace
distant objects, as the clock, the window, and so forth. He was
observed, too, to carry out more precise movements of the head and eyes
in correspondence with the direction of sounds. This ability to look
towards the direction of a sound is an important attainment as implying
that the infant mind has now come to learn that things may exist when
not actually seen.
This new command of the visual apparatus led to a marked increase in
observation. The boy may indeed be said to have begun about this date
something like a serious scrutiny of objects. Like other children he was
greatly attracted by brightly coloured objects. When just seven weeks
old he acquired a fondness for a cheap showy card with crudely brilliant
colouring and gilded border. When carried to the place where it hung,
above the glass over the fire-place, he would look up to it and greet
his first-love in the world of art with a pretty smile. By the ninth or
tenth week, the father adds, he began to notice the pattern of the
wall-paper and the like.
In these growing intervals of observation between the discharge of the
vegetal functions of feeding and sleeping, C. was observed to examine
not only any foreign object, such as his mamma’s dress, which happened
to be within sight, but also the visible parts of his own organism. In
the ninth week of his existence he was first surprised in the act of
surveying his own hands. Why he should at this particular moment have
woke up to the existence of objects which had all along lain within easy
reach of the eye, is a question which has evidently greatly exercised
the father’s ingenuity. He hints, but plainly in a half-hearted,
sceptical way, at a possible dim recognition by the little contemplator
of the fact that these objects belong to himself, forming, indeed, the
outlying portion of the Ego. He also asks (and here he seems to grow
positively frivolous) whether the child is taking after the somewhat
extravagant ways of his mother and beginning to dote on the exquisite
modelling of his tiny members.
Psychologists are now agreed that our knowledge of the properties of
material objects is largely obtained by what they call _active_ touch,
that is, by moving the hands over objects and exploring the space around
them. This is borne out by the observations made on C. at this period of
his existence. While viewing things about him he actively manipulated
them. The organs of sight and touch worked indeed in the closest
connexion. Thus our little visitor was no mere passive spectator of his
new habitat; he actively took possession of his surroundings: like the
Roman general, he at once saw and conquered. From the eighth to the
tenth week his manual performances greatly improved in quality. He was
rapidly learning to carry the organ of touch to the point of which his
eye told him. An account of his progress in reaching objects may however
be postponed till we come to speak of the development of his active
powers.
The growing habit of looking at, reaching out to, and manually
investigating objects, soon leads to the accumulation of a store of
materials for the construction of those complex mental products which we
call perceptions. And often-repeated perceptions, when they become more
clearly distinguished, supply the basis of definite acts of recognition.
The first object that is clearly recognised through a special act of
attention is, of course, the face of the mother. In the case of C., the
father’s face was apparently recognised about the eighth week—at least,
the youngster first greeted his parent with a smile about this time—an
event, I need hardly say, which is recorded in very large and easily
legible handwriting. The occurrence gives rise to a number of odd
reflexions in the parental mind. The observer’s belief in the necessary
co-operation of sight and touch in the early knowledge of material
objects leads him to remark that C.’s manual experience of his face, and
more particularly of the bearded chin, has been extensive—an experience
which, he adds, has left its recollection in his own mind, too, in the
shape of a certain soreness. He then goes on to consider the meaning of
the smile. “I cannot,” he writes, “be of any interest to him as a
psychological student of his ways. No, it must be in the light of a
bearded plaything that he regards my face.” Further observation bears
out this argument by going to show that the recognition was not
individual but specific: that it was simply a recognition of one of a
class of bearded people; for when a perfect stranger also endowed with
the entertaining appendage presented himself, C. wounded his father’s
heart by smiling at him in exactly the same way. Here the diary goes off
into some abstruse speculations about the first mental images being what
Mr. Galton calls generic images—speculations into which we need not
follow the writer. As we shall see, the father takes up the subject of
childish generalisation more fully later on. The power of recognising
objects appeared to undergo rapid development towards the end of the
fourth month. The father remarks that the child would about this time
recognise him in a somewhat dark room at a distance of three or four
yards.[287]
-----
Footnote 287:
The clear recognition of individual objects is said to show itself in
average cases from about the sixth month (Tracy, _op. cit._, pp.
15-16).
-----
The germ of true imagination, of the formation of what Höffding calls a
free or detached image of something not seen at the moment, appeared
about the same time. The moment when the baby’s mind first passes on
from the sight of his bottle to a foregrasping or imagination of the
blisses of prehension and deglutition—a moment which appears to have
been reached by C. in his tenth week—marks an epoch in his existence. He
not only perceives what is actually present to his senses, he pictures
or represents what is absent. This is the moment at which, to quote from
the parent’s somewhat high-flown observations on this event, “mind rises
above the limitations of the actual, and begins to shape for itself an
ideal world of possibilities”.
This rise of the ideal to take the place of the real appeared in other
ways too. Thus when just eighteen weeks old the child had been lying on
his nurse’s lap and gazing on some pictures on the wall of which he was
getting fond. The nurse happening to turn round suddenly put an end to
his happiness. Still the child was not to be done, but immediately began
twisting his head back in order to bring the pictures once more into his
field of view. Here we have an illustration of a mental image appearing
immediately after a perception, a rude form of what psychologists are
now getting to call a primary memory-image.
The expression of the _gourmet’s_ delight at the sight of the bottle
(tenth week) involves a simple process of association. Between the ages
of five and six months the child’s progress in building up associations
was very marked. Thus he would turn from a reflexion of the fire on the
glass of a picture to the fire itself, and a little later would look
towards a particular picture, Cherry Ripe, when the name was uttered.
Further, not only had he now learnt to connect the sight of the bottle
with the joys of a repast, but on seeing the basin in which his food is
prepared he would glance towards the cupboard where the bottle is kept.
The diary contains but few observations on the growth of the power of
understanding things and reasoning about them during the first year. One
of the most interesting of these relates to the understanding of
reflexions, shadows, etc. We know that these things played a
considerable part in the development of the first racial ideas of the
supernatural, and we might expect to see them producing an impression on
the child’s mind. C. when he first began to notice reflexions of the
fire and other objects in a mirror showed considerable marks of
surprise. What quaint fancies he may have had respecting this odd
doubling of things we cannot of course say. What is certain is that he
distinctly connected the reflexion with the original, as is shown by the
fact already mentioned, his turning from the first to the second. By the
end of the sixth month the marks of surprise had visibly lessened, so
that the child was apparently getting used to the miracle, even though
he could not as yet be said to understand it. It is worth notice that
though the experiment of showing him his own reflexion was repeated
again and again he remained apparently quite indifferent to the image.
Perhaps, suggests the father, he did not as yet know himself as visible
object sufficiently to recognise nature’s portrait of him in the glass.
The above may perhaps serve as a sample of the observations made on the
intellectual development of this privileged child during the first year
of his earthly existence. I will now pass on to quote a remark or two on
his emotional development. I may add that the record of this phase of
the boy’s early mental life is certainly the most curious part of the
document, containing many odd speculations on the course of primitive
human history.
The earliest manifestations of the life of feeling are the elemental
forms of pain and pleasure, crying and incipient laughing in the form of
the smile.[288] In C.’s case, as in others, crying of the genuine
miserable kind preceded smiling by a considerable interval. The child,
remarks our observer, seems to need to learn to smile, whereas his
crying apparatus is in good working order from the first.
-----
Footnote 288:
With the smile there ought perhaps to be taken the infantile crow.
-----
The growth of the smile is a curious chapter in child-psychology, and
has been carefully worked out by Preyer. The observations on C. under
this head are incomplete. The father thought he detected an attempt at a
smile on the third day, when the child was lying replete with food, in
answer to certain chuckling sounds with which he sought to amuse him.
The movements constituting this quasi-smile are said to have been the
following: a drawing in of the under lip; a drawing inwards and
backwards of the corners of the mouth: increase of oblique line from the
corner of the mouth upwards; and a furrowing or ridging of the eyelids.
It is probable, however, that this was not a true smile, _i.e._, an
expression of pleasure. He remarks, moreover, that in the case of the
child’s sister the first approach to a smile was not observed before the
tenth day, this, too, by-the-bye, in that state of blissful complaisance
which follows a good meal. It may be added that in the case of the
brother, too, the smile seems to have grown noticeably bright and
significant about the same time (eighth to tenth week). At this stage
the boy expressed his pleasure at seeing his father’s face not only by a
“bright” smile, but by certain cooing sounds. At the same date a playful
touch on the child’s cheek was sufficient to provoke a smile.[289]
-----
Footnote 289:
Darwin puts the first true smile on the forty-fifth day. The first
_quasi_-smiles are probably quite mechanical and destitute of meaning.
-----
Very early in the infant’s course the germs of some of our most
characteristic human feelings begin to appear. One of the earliest is
anger, which though common to man and many of the higher animals, takes
on a peculiar form in his case. Angry revolt against the order of things
showed itself early in C.’s case as in that of his sister, the occasion
being in each instance a momentary difficulty in seizing the means of
appeasing appetite. It is of course difficult to say at what moment the
mere vexation of disappointment passes into true wrath, but in this
boy’s case the father is compelled to admit that the ugly emotion
displayed itself distinctly by the third week.
To detect the first clear signs of a _humane_ feeling, of kindliness and
sympathy, is still more difficult. Reference has already been made to
the signs of pleasure, the smile and the cooing sounds, which C.
manifested at the sight of his father’s face. About the same time,
_viz._, the ninth and tenth weeks, he began to show himself particularly
responsive to soothing sounds. The impulse to imitate soft low sounds
was of great service in checking his misery. When utterly broken by
grief he would often pull himself together if appealed to by the right
soothing sound and join in a short plaintive duet. Such responses like
the early imitative smile may, it is true, be nothing but a mechanical
imitation, destitute of any emotive significance. It is probable,
however, that the first crude form of fellow-feeling, of the impulse to
accept and to give sympathy in joy and grief, takes its rise in such
simple imitative movements. The first advance to signs of a truer
fellow-feeling was made when the child was six and a half months old.
His father pretended to cry. Thereupon C. bent his head down so that his
chin touched his breast and began to paw his father’s face, very much
after the manner of a dog in a fit of tenderness. Oddly enough, adds the
chronicler, there was no trace of sadness in the child’s face. The
experiment was repeated and always with a like result. A smile on the
termination of the crying completed the curious little play. Who would
venture to interpret that falling of the head and that caressing
movement of the hand? The father saw here something of a divine
tenderness; and I am not disposed to question his interpretation.
Emotion soon begins to manifest itself, too, in connexion with the
child’s peerings into his new world. As the little brain grows stronger
and the organs of sense come under better management, the child spends
more time in examining things, and this examination is accompanied by a
profound wonder. C. would completely lose himself in marvelling at some
new mystery, as the face of a clock, to which he appeared to talk as to
something alive, or the play of the sunlight on the wall of his room;
and the closeness of his attention was indicated by the occurrence of a
huge sigh when the strain was over.
The directions of this early childish attention are, as in the example
of the clock and the sunlight, towards what has some attraction of
brightness, or other stimulating quality. The fascination of bright
colour for C. has already been referred to. Sounds, too, very soon began
to capture his attention and hold it spellbound. Thus it is recorded
that in the tenth week the sound produced by striking a wine-glass
excited an agreeable wonder. The sound of the piano, by-the-bye, made
him cry the first time he heard it, presumably because it was strange
and disconcertingly voluminous. But he soon got to like it, and his
mother remarked that when his father played the child seemed to grow
heavier in her lap, as if all his muscles were relaxed in a delicious
self-abandonment.[290]
-----
Footnote 290:
See above, p. 195 and p. 308.
-----
Certain things became favourite objects of this quasi-æsthetic
contemplation. When six weeks old the child got into the way of taking
special note of one or two rather showy coloured pictures on the wall.
In these it seemed to be partly the brightness of colouring in the
picture or the frame, partly the reflexions of objects in the glass
covering, which attracted him. Other things which appeared to give him
repeated and endless enjoyment of a quiet sort were the play of sunlight
and of shadow on the walls of his room, the reflexion of the shooting
fire-flame sent back by the window-pane or the glass covering of a
picture, the swaying of trees, and the like. He soon got to know the
locality of some of his favourite works of art, and to look out
expectantly, when taken into the right room, for his daily show.
Yet the new does not always awaken this pleasurable admiration. The
child’s organism soon begins to adapt itself to what is customary, and
sudden departures from the usual order of things come as a shock, jar
the nerves, and produce the first crude form of fear. C.’s sensitiveness
to the disturbing effect of new and loud sounds has been referred to in
speaking of the first impression of the piano. A strong wind making
uproar in the trees quite upset him when he was about five months old,
though he soon got over his dislike and would laugh at the wind even
when it blew cold. In like manner he appeared to be much put out by the
voices of strangers, especially when these were loud. A similar effect
of shock showed itself when something in the familiar scene was suddenly
transmuted. For example, when just twelve weeks old, he was quite upset
by his mother donning a red jacket in place of the usual flower-spotted
dress. He was just proceeding to take his breakfast when he noticed the
change, at the discovery of which all thoughts of feasting deserted him,
his lips quivered, and he only became reassured of his whereabouts after
taking a good look at his mother’s face.
This clinging to the familiar and alarm at a sudden intrusion of the new
into his little world showed themselves in a curious way in his attitude
towards strangers. When ten weeks old he would still greet new faces
with a gracious smile. But this amiable disposition soon underwent a
change. When he began to discriminate people one from another and to
single out particular faces, those of the mother, father, sister, etc.,
as familiar, he took up what looked like a less hospitable attitude
towards strangers. By the fifteenth week he no longer greeted their
advent with his welcoming smile. A month later the diary chronicles a
new development of timidity. He now turned away from a stranger with all
the signs of shrinking.[291]
-----
Footnote 291:
Compare what was said above, p. 201.
-----
That this repugnance to the new depends on a kind of shock-like effect
on the nervous system seems to be borne out by the fact that the same
object would produce now joyous admiration, now something
indistinguishable from fear, according to the boy’s varying condition of
health and spirits.
Changes of sentiment analogous to those which marked his behaviour
towards strangers occurred in his treatment of inanimate objects. For
instance, a not very alarming-looking doll belonging to his sister,
after having been a pleasant object of regard, suddenly acquired for
him, when he was nearly five months old, a repulsive aspect. Instead of
talking to it and making a sort of amiable deity of it as heretofore, he
now shrieked when it was brought near. There seems to have been nothing
in his individual experience which could account for this sudden
accession of fear.
These observations led C.’s father to some characteristic speculations
as to the inheritance of certain feelings. Thus he hints that the eerie
sort of interest taken by his child in the reflexions of things in the
glass may be a survival of the primitive feeling of awe for the ghosts
of things which certain anthropologists tell us was first developed in
connexion with the phenomena of reflected images and shadows. He goes on
to ask whether the fear called forth by the doll and the face of
strangers at a certain stage of the child’s development is not clearly
due to an instinct now fixed in the race by the countless experiences of
peril in its early, pre-social, and Ishmaelitic condition. But here,
too, perhaps, his speculations appear, in the light of what has been
said above, a little wild.
Among other feelings displayed by the child was that of amusement at
what is grotesque and comical. When between four and five months old he
was accustomed to watch the antics of his sister, an elfish being given
to flying about the room, screaming, and other disorderly proceedings,
with all the signs of a sense of the comicality of the spectacle. So far
as the father could judge, this sister served as a kind of jester to the
baby monarch. He would take just that distant, good-natured interest in
her foolings that Shakespeare’s sovereigns took in the eccentric
unpredictable ways of their jesters. The sense of the droll became still
more distinctly marked at six months. About this date the child
delighted in pulling his sister’s hair, and her shrieks would send him
into a fit of laughter. Among other provocatives of laughter at this
time were sudden movements of one’s head, a rapid succession of sharp
staccato sounds from one’s vocal organ (when these were not
disconcerting by their violence), and of course sudden reappearances of
one’s head after hiding in the game of bo-peep.[292]
-----
Footnote 292:
Darwin tells us that his boy uttered a rude kind of laugh when only
one hundred and ten days old, after a pinafore had been thrown over
his head and suddenly withdrawn. C.’s sense of humour was hardly as
precocious as this.
-----
It is hardly necessary to follow the diary into its record of the first
stirrings of what psychologists used to call the Will (with capital _W_
of course). If a baby in the first months can be said to have a will in
any sense it must be that unconscious metaphysical “will to live” about
which we have recently heard so much. On the other hand it is certainly
true that the child manifests in the first weeks certain active
impulses, the working out of which leads in about four months to the
acquisition of the power of carrying out movements for a purpose.
Reference has already been made to this progress in motor activity when
speaking of the senses. It may suffice to add one or two further
observations.
The father remarks that about the end of the ninth week there was a
vigorous use of the muscles of the arms and hands in aimless movement.
This superabundance of muscular activity is important, as giving
children the chance of finding out the results of their movements. C.
was just ten and a half weeks old when he first showed himself capable
lying on his back of turning his head to the side, and even of half
turning his body also, in order to have a good view of his father moving
away to a distant part of the room.
About the same date, too, purposive movements began to be clearly
differentiated from expressive movements; such, for example, as the
quick energetic movement of the limbs when excited by pleasure. For
instance, on the seventy-second day the father was surprised and
delighted to see the boy add to the usual signs of joy at his approach
the movement of leaning forward and holding out the arms as if to try to
get near. Was this, he asks, the sudden emergence of an unlearnt
instinct, or was it an imitation in baby fashion of his elders’
behaviour when they took possession of him?
The gradual growth of a voluntary movement into a perfect artistic
action nicely adjusted to some desired end was strikingly illustrated in
the boy’s mastery of the grasping movement, the movement of stretching
out the hand to seize an object seen. On the seventy-sixth day, the
father writes, he had carefully watched to see whether the child could
voluntarily direct his hand to an object. He had tried him by holding
before him attractive objects, as a bit of coloured rag or his hand,
which he would regard very attentively. For the last week or ten days he
had been very observant of objects, including his own hands.
Among the objects that attracted him was his mamma’s dress, which had a
dark ground with a small white flower pattern. On this memorable day his
hand accidentally came in contact with one of the folds of her dress
lying over the breast. Immediately, it seemed to strike him for the
first time that he could _reach_ an object, and for a dozen times or
more he repeated the movement of stretching out his hand, clutching the
fold and giving it a good pull, very much to his own satisfaction.
A hasty reasoner might easily suppose that the child had now learnt to
reach out to an object when only seen. But the sequel showed that this
was not the case. Four weeks later the diary observes that the child as
yet made no attempt to grasp an object offered to him (although there
were manifest attempts to uncover the mother’s breast). The clutching at
the dress was thus a blind movement due to the stimulus of pleasurable
elation. Yet it was doubtless a step in the process of learning to
grasp.
The next advance registered occurred when the boy was a little over four
months old. He would now bring his two hands together just above the
level of his eyes and then gaze on them attentively, striking out one
arm straight in front of him, and upwards almost vertically, as if he
were trying some new gymnastic exercises, while he accompanied each
movement with his eye, and showed the deepest interest in what he was
doing. By such exercises, we may suppose, he was exploring space with
hand and eye conjointly and noting the correspondences between looking
in a given direction and bringing his hand into the line of sight.
The next noticeable advance occurred at the end of the nineteenth week.
The boy’s father held a biscuit (the value of which was already known)
just below his face and well within his reach. There was a very earnest
look and then a series of rapid jerky movements of the hands. These were
uncertain at first, but on repetition of the experiment soon grew more
precise. At first the biscuit was dropped (the child had not yet learnt
to handle things). But after repeated trials he managed to hold on to
the treasure and bear it triumphantly to his mouth. The discovery of the
new delight of thus feeding himself led to more violent efforts to seize
the biscuit when presented again. Indeed, the youngster’s impatience led
him to reach forward with the upper part of his body so as to seize the
biscuit with his mouth. It may be added here as throwing light on the
carrying of the biscuit to the mouth that the child had before this
acquired considerable facility in raising his hand to his mouth and to
the region of his head generally. Thus he had been noticed to scratch
his head with a comical look of sage reflexion when he was fifteen weeks
old.
The consummation of the act of seizing an object involving a perception
of distance was observed when he was just six months old. The father
writes: “I held an object in front of him two or three inches beyond his
reach. The astute little fellow made no movement. I then gradually
brought it closer, and when it came within his reach he held out his
hand and grasped it. I repeated the experiment with slight variations,
and satisfied myself that he could now distinguish with some degree of
precision the near and the far, the attainable and the unattainable,
that his eyes could now inform him by what Bishop Berkeley called visual
language of the exact limit, the ‘Ultima Thule’ of his tangible world.”
It is natural, no doubt, that the father should go off into another high
flight here. But being a psychologist he might have moderated his
parental elation by reflecting that his wonderful boy had after all
taken six months to learn what a chick seems to know as soon as it
leaves the shell. It is doubtful, indeed, whether Master C.’s hand could
as yet aim with the precision of the beak of the newly hatched chick. If
he had only chanced on a later decade he might have known that five
months is the time given by a recent authority (Raehlmann) as the period
commonly taken in learning the grasping movements, and so had his pride
in his boy’s achievement wholesomely tempered.[293]
-----
Footnote 293:
Preyer’s boy perfected the action in the fifth month. For differences
in precocity here, see F. Tracy, _The Psychology of Childhood_, pp.
12, 13.
-----
These early movements are acquired under the stimulus of certain
impulses which constitute the instinctive basis of volition. Thus it is
obvious that the movement of carrying to the mouth as also that of
reaching and grasping was inspired by the nutritive or feeding instinct,
that deep-seated impulse which is common to man and the whole animal
kingdom, and is the secret spring of so much of his proud achievement.
The impulse to seize and appropriate may perhaps be regarded as an
instinct which has become detached from its parental stock, the
nutritive impulse. Our observer remarks, with a touch of cynicism, that
the predominance of the grasping propensities of the race was
illustrated by the fact that his boy only manifested the impulse to
relinquish his hold on an object some time after he had displayed in its
perfection the impulse to seize or grasp an object. Thus it was some
months later that he was first observed deliberately to cast aside, as
if tired of it, a thing with which he had been playing.
One of the deepest and most far-reaching instincts is to get rid of pain
and to prolong pleasure. In C.’s case the working of the first was
illustrated in a large number of movements, such as twisting the body
round, scratching the head, and so forth. An illustration of the impulse
to renew an agreeable effect occurred in the early part of the eighth
month. The child was sitting on his mother’s lap close to the table
playing with a spoon. He accidentally dropped it and was impressed with
the effect of sound. He immediately repeated the action, now, no doubt,
with the purpose of gaining the agreeable shock for his ear. After this
when the spoon was put into his hand he deliberately dropped it. Not
only so, like a true artist, he went on improving on the first effect,
raising the spoon higher and higher so as to get more sound, and at
length using force in dashing or banging it down.
Children, as everybody knows, are wont to render their elders that
highest form of flattery, imitation. Our chronicle is unfortunately
rather meagre in observations on the first imitative movements. There is
no evidence that the writer went to work in Preyer’s careful way to test
this capability. He thinks he saw distinct traces of imitation (of the
pointing movement) at the end of the fifteenth week, though he admits
that a deliberate attempt to copy a movement was only placed beyond
doubt some time later.
There is, I regret to say, a terrible gap in the chronicle between the
ninth and the sixteenth month. This is particularly unfortunate because
this is just the period when the child is making a beginning at some of
the most difficult of accomplishments, _e.g._, mastering the speech of
his ancestors. To make up for this loss, the record becomes fuller and
decidedly more interesting as we enter upon the second year. To this
next stage of the history we may now pass.
_Second Year._
The observations from the date of the resumption of the diary, at the
age of sixteen months, begin to have more of human interest about them.
It is not till this year has advanced that the child makes headway in
handling the knotty intricacies of an elaborate language like ours, and
it is through the medium of this mastered speech that he is best able to
disclose himself to the observer. The observations on C.’s progress
during the second year relate largely to language and intelligence as
expressing itself in language. We may, accordingly, begin this section
by giving a brief sketch of the child’s linguistic progress.[294]
-----
Footnote 294:
This should be read in connexion with Study V.
-----
During the first six months nothing was observable in the way of vocal
sounds but the ordinary baby-singing utterances of the ‘la-la’ category.
In this tentative vocalisation vowel sounds, of course, preponderated.
There was quite a gamut of quaint vowel sounds, ranging from the broad
_a_ to the cockney _ow_, that is, _a-oo_. These sounds were purely
emotional signs. Thus a prolonged _ā_ sound indicated surprise with a
dash of displeasure when the child suddenly encountered an obstacle to
his movements, as on catching his dress or striking his head gently.
Again, a kind of _ō_ or _oo_ sound, formed by sucking in the breath,
appeared to indicate that the small person was pleased with some new
object of contemplation, as a freshly discovered picture.
A sudden enlargement of the range of articulatory excursion was
noticeable on the completion of the twenty-seventh week, when C.
astonished his parents by breaking out into a series of ‘da-da’s’ and
‘ba-ba’s’ or ‘pa-pa’s’. These reduplications were quite in keeping with
his earlier sounds, _e.g._, _a-oo_, _a-oo_. He soon followed up this
brilliant success by other experiments, as in the production of the
sounds _ou-a_ and _ditta_, also _ung_ and _ang_.[295]
-----
Footnote 295:
This rather bald account of early vocal sounds should be contrasted
with those of Preyer and others referred to in Study V.
-----
Coming now to the commencement of the true linguistic period, that is to
say, when C. had attained the age of sixteen months, we find him by no
means precocious in the matter of speech. He reproduced very few of the
many names the meaning of which he perfectly understood. As to other
verbal signs he seems to have acted on the principle of biological
economy, saving himself the articulatory effort. Thus although he used
sounds for expressing assent, _viz._, “ey,” with falling inflection, he
contented himself in the case of negation with the old declining or
refusing gesture, _viz._, shaking the head. The movement of nodding
seems to have been first used as an affirmative sign at the age of
seventeen months when he was asked whether his food was hot.[296]
-----
Footnote 296:
Perez speaks of both the affirmative and negative movement of the head
appearing about the fifteenth month (_First Three Years of Childhood_,
Engl. transl., p. 21). Darwin finds that the sign of affirmation
(nodding) is less uniform among the different races of men than that
of negation. According to Preyer, while the gesture of negation
appears under the form of a turning away or declining movement as an
instinct in the first days of life, the accepting gesture of nodding
(which afterwards becomes the sign of affirmation) is acquired and
appears much later (see his full account of the growth of these
movements, _Die Seele des Kindes_, p. 242).
-----
C. illustrated the common childish impulse to mimic natural sounds. Thus
when sixteen months old he spontaneously imitated in a rough fashion the
puffing sound produced by his father when indulging in the solace of
tobacco; and he uttered a similar explosive sound when hearing the wind.
Yet this child does not seem to have been a particularly good
illustration of the onomatopoetic impulse.