STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 387 



not the power to embrace a multitude of things in a single act of 

 contemplation. Hence they have no feeling for landscape as a 

 harmonious complex of picturesquely varied parts. When they 

 are taken to see a " view," their eye, instead of trying to embrace 

 the whole, as a fond parent desires, provokingly pounces on some 

 single feature of interest, and often one of but little aesthetic value. 

 People make a great mistake in taking children to " points of 

 view " under the supposition that they will share in grown people's 

 impressions. Perez relates that some children taken to the Pic du 

 Midi found their chief pleasure in scrambling up the peak and 

 saying that they were on donkeys.* Mere magnitude or vastness 

 of spectacle does not appeal to the child, for a sense of the sub- 

 lime grows out of a complex imaginative process which is beyond 

 his young powers. So far as immensity affects him at all, as 

 in the case of the sea, it seems to excite a measure of dread in 

 face of the unknown ; and this feeling, though having a certain 

 kinship with the emotion of sublimity, is distinct from this last. 

 It has nothing of the joyous consciousness of expansion which 

 enters into the later feeling. It is only to certain limited objects 

 and features of Nature that the child is aesthetically responsive. 

 He knows the loveliness of the gilded spring meadow, the fascina- 

 tion of the sunlit stream, the awful mystery of the wood, and 

 something too, perhaps, of the calming beauty of the broad blue 

 sky. That is to say, he has a number of small rootlets which 

 when they grow together will develop into a feeling for Nature. 



Here, too, the analogy between the child and the uncultured 

 Nature-man is evident. The savage has no aesthetic sentiment for 

 Nature as a whole, though he may feel the charm of some of her 

 single features, a stream, a mountain, the star-spangled sky, and 

 may even be affected by some of the awful aspects of her changing 

 physiognomy. Are we not told, indeed, that a true aesthetic ap- 

 preciation of the picturesque variety of Nature's scenes, of the 

 weird charm of wild places, and of the sublime fascinations of the 

 awful and repellent mountain, are quite late attainments in the 

 history of our race ? f 



We may now look at the child's attitude toward those objects 

 and processes of human art which from the first form part of his 

 environment and make an educative appeal to his senses ; and 

 here we may begin with those simple musical effects which follow 

 up certain impressions derived from the natural world. 



It has been pqinted out that sounds form a chief source of the 



* Op. cil., p. 103. 



f An excellent sketch of the growth of our feeling for the romantic and sublime beauty 

 of mountains is given by Mr. Leslie Stephen in one of the most delightful of his works, 

 The Playground of Europe. 



