382 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ent study. This being so, "we are, I conceive, justified in speaking 

 of art impulses as a common characteristic of childhood. 



Although we shall find many interesting points of analogy 

 between crude child-art and primitive race-art, we must not, as 

 pointed out above, expect a perfect parallelism. In some direc- 

 tions, as drawing, concerted dancing, the superior experience, 

 strength, and skill of the adult will reveal themselves, placing 

 child-art at a considerable disadvantage in the comparison. Con- 

 trariwise, the intervention of the educator's hand tends seriously 

 to modify the course of development of the child's aesthetic apti- 

 tudes. His tastes get acted upon from the first and biased in the 

 direction of adult tastes. 



This modifying influence of education shows itself more es- 

 pecially in one particular. There is reason to think that in the 

 development of the race the growth of a feeling for what is beau- 

 tiful was a concomitant of the growth of the art impulse, the 

 impulse to adorn the person, to collect feathers and other pretty 

 things. Not so in the case of the child. Here we note a certain 

 growth of the liking for pretty things before the spontaneous art 

 impulse has had time to manifest itself. Most children who have 

 a cultivated mother or other guardian acquire a rudimentary ap- 

 preciation of what their elders think beautiful before they do 

 much in the way of art production. We provide them with toys, 

 pictures, we sing to them, and perhaps we even take them to the 

 theater, and so do our best to inoculate them with our ideas as to 

 what is pretty. Hence the difiiculty probably the chief diffi- 

 culty of finding out what the child-mind, left to itself, does pre- 

 fer. At the same time the early date at which such sesthetic 

 preferences begin to manifest themselves makes it desirable to 

 study them before we go on to consider the active side of child- 

 art. We will try as well as we can to extricate the first mani- 

 festations of genuine childish taste. 



At the very beginning, before the educational influence has 

 had time to work, we can catch some of the characteristics of this 

 childish quasi-aesthetic feeling. The directions of a child's obser- 

 vation, and of the movements of his grasping arms, tell us pretty 

 clearly what sort of things attract and please him. 



In the home scene it is bright objects, such as the fire flame, 

 the lamp, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded 

 frame ; out of doors, glistening water, a meadow whitened by 

 daisies, the fresh snow mantle, later the moon and the stars, 

 which seem to impart to the dawning consciousness the first hint 

 of the world's beauty. Luminosity, brightness in its higher in- 

 tensities, whether the bright rays reach the eye directly or are 

 reflected from a lustrous surface, this makes the first gladness of 

 the eye, as it remains a chief source of the gladness of life. 



