Children's Ways Part 14

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 20 (_a_).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 20 (_b_).]

Other confusions are apt to appear in these early attempts at drawing a man in profile. The trunk, for example, is very frequently represented in front view with a row of b.u.t.tons running down the middle, though the head and feet seem clearly shown in side view. The arms, too, not uncommonly are spread out from the two sides of the trunk just as in the front view.

It would take too long to offer a complete explanation of these characteristics of children's drawings. I must content myself here with touching on one or two of the main causes at work.

First of all, then, it seems pretty evident that most children when they begin to draw are not thinking of setting down a likeness of what they see when they look at an object. In the first simple stage we have little more than a jotting down of a number of linear notes, a kind of rude and fragmentary description in lines rather than in words. Here a child aims at bringing into his scheme what seems to him to have most interest and importance, such as the features of the face, the two legs, and so forth. In the later and more ambitious attempt to draw a man in profile the old impulse to set down what seems important continues to show itself. Although the little draughtsman has decided to give to the nose, to the ear, and possibly to the manly beard and the equally manly pipe, the advantage of a side view, he goes on exhibiting those sovereign members, the two round eyes, and the mouth with its flash of serried teeth, in their full front-view glory. It is enough for him to know that the lord of creation has these members, and he does not trouble about so small a matter as our capability of seeing them all at the same moment. In like manner a child will sometimes, on first clothing the human form, exhibit arms and legs through their covering (see Fig. 21 (_a_) and (_b_)). All this shows that even at this later and decidedly "knowing" stage of his craft he is not much nearer the point of view of our pictorial art than he was in the earlier stage of bald symbolism.

Much the same kind of thing shows itself in a child's manner of treating the forms of animals, which his pencil is wont to attack soon after that of man. Here the desire to exhibit what is characteristic and worthy naturally leads at the outset to a representation of the body in profile. A horse is rather a poor affair looked at from the front. A child must show his four legs, as well as his neck and his tail. But though the profile seems to be the aspect selected, the little penciller by no means confines himself to a strict record of this. The four legs have to be shown not half hidden by overlappings but standing quite clear one of another. The head, too, must be turned towards the spectator, or at least given in a mixed scheme--half front view, half side view (see Fig. 22 (_a_) and (_b_)).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 21 (_a_) (from General Pitt Rivers' collection of drawings).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 21 (_b_) (reproduced from a drawing published by Mr.

H. T. Lukens).]

A like tendency to get behind the momentary appearance of an object and to present to view what the child _knows_ to be there is seen in early drawings of men on horseback, in boats, railway carriages, houses, and so forth. Here the interest in the human form sets at defiance the limitations of perspective, and shows us the rider's second leg through the horse's body, the rower's body through the boat, and so forth.

The widespread appearance of these tendencies among children of different European countries, of half-civilised peoples, like the Jamaica blacks, as well as among adult savages, shows how deeply rooted in the natural mind is this quaint notion of drawing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 22 (_a_).--A horse.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 22 (_b_).--A quadruped.]

At the same time there are, as I have allowed, important differences in children's drawings. A few have the eye and the artistic impulse needed for picturing, roughly at least, the _look_ of an object. I have lately looked through the drawings of a little girl in a cultured home where every precaution was taken to shut out the influences of example and educational guidance. When at the age of four years eight months she first drew the profile of the human face she quite correctly put in only one eye, and added a shaded projection for nose (see Fig. 23). In like manner she was from the first careful to show only one leg of the rider, one rein over the horse's neck, and so forth; and would sometimes, with a child's sweet thoughtfulness, explain to her mother why she proceeded in this way. Yet even in the case of this child one could observe now and again a rudiment of the tendency to bring in what is hidden. Thus in one drawing she shows the rider's near leg through the trouser; in another she introduces the front view of a horse's nostrils (if not also of the ears) in what is otherwise a drawing of the profile (see Fig. 24 (_a_) and (_b_)).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 23.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 24 (_a_).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 24 (_b_).]

Yet while children's drawings are thus so far away from those reproductions of the look of a thing which we call pictures, they are after all a kind of rude art. Even the amusing errors which they contain, though a shock to our notions of pictorial semblance, have at least this point of a.n.a.logy to art, that they aim at selecting and presenting what is characteristic and valuable. In many of the rude drawings with which we have here been occupied we may detect faint traces of individual originality, especially in the endeavour to give life and expression to the form. To this it is right to add that some drawings of young children from two to six which I have seen are striking proofs of the early development now and again of the artist's feeling for what is characteristic in line, and for the economic suggestiveness of a bare stroke (see Fig. 25 (_a_) and (_b_)). When once a child's eye is focussed for the prettiness of things the dawn of aesthetic perception is pretty sure to bring with it a more serious effort to reproduce their look. Among children, as among adults, it is love which makes the artist.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 25 (_a_) (drawn by a boy aged two years one month).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 25 (_b_) (drawn by a girl of five and a half years).]

[Ill.u.s.tration]