THE YOUNG DRAUGHTSMAN. 535 



able distance the movements of the mother's pencil.* They may 

 be made expressive or significant in two ways. In the first place, a 

 child may by varying the swinging movements accidentally pro- 

 duce an effect which suggests an idea through a remote resem- 

 blance. A little boy, when two years and two months, was one day 

 playing in this wise with the pencil, and happening to make a 

 sort of curling line, shouted with excited glee, " Puff, puff ! " i. e., 

 smoke. He then drew more curls with a rudimentary intention 

 to show what he meant. In like manner, when a child happens 

 to bend his line into something like a closed circle or ellipse, he 

 will catch the faint resemblance to the rounded human head and 

 exclaim, " Mamma ! " or " Dada ! " 



But intentional drawing or designing does not always arise in 

 this way. A child may set himself to draw, and make believe 

 that he is drawing something when he is scribbling. This is 

 largely an imitative play- action following the directions of the 

 movements of another's hand. Preyer speaks of a little boy who 

 in his second year was asked when scribbling with a pencil what 

 he was doing and answered, " Writing houses." 

 He was apparently making believe that his 

 jumble of lines represented houses, f 



The same play of imagination is notice- 

 able in the child's first endeavors to draw an 

 object from memory when he is asked to do 

 so. Thus a little girl in her fourth year, re- 

 ferred to by Mr. E. Cooke, when asked to 

 draw a cat, produced a longish, irregularly 

 curved line crossed by a number of shorter FIG. i. 



lines, which strange production she proceeded 

 quite complacently to dignify by the name of " cat/' naming the 

 whiskers, legs, and tail (Fig. 1, a) ; compare the slightly fuller 

 design in Fig. 1, b. 



Here it is evident we have a phase of childish drawing which 

 is closely analogous to the symbolism of language. The repre- 

 sentation is arbitrarily chosen as a symbol and not as a like- 

 ness. This element of a nonimitative or symbolic mode of repre- 

 sentation will be found to run through the whole of childish 

 drawing. 



Even this chaotic scribble shows almost from the beginning 

 germs of formative elements, not merely in the fundamental line 

 elements, but also in the loops, and in the more abrupt changes 

 of direction or angles. A tendency to draw a looplike rudimen- 



* E. Cooke gives illustrations of these in his thoughtful and interesting articles on Art. 

 teaching and Child-nature, published in the Journal of Education, December, 1885, and 

 January, 1886. | Preyer, op. cit., p. 47. 



