Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matterSully, James
Science
Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter
Sully, James
Child development; Child psychology
Along with this feeling for the sensuous effect of beauty we can discern
the beginnings of fancy and invention whereby the idea represented is
made more prominent and potent. This tendency, like the others, shows
itself in a crude form at first, as in the earlier and coarser art of
the race. In children's play we can see much of the uncultured man's
love of strong effect. The pathos of the death of the pet animal or of
the child has to be made obvious and strongly effective by a mass of
painful detail; the comic incident must be made broadly farcical by
heavy touches of caricature; the excitement of perilous adventure has to
be intensified by multiplying the menacing forces and the thrilling
situations. Yet crude as are these early attempts at strengthening the
feebleness of the actual they are remotely akin to the idealising
efforts of true art.
Nevertheless, children's play, though akin to it, is not completely
art. As pointed out above, the action in a child's play is not intended
as a dramatic spectacle. The small player is too self-centred, if I may
so say. The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands,
are not produced, as art is produced, for its own worth's sake, but
rather as providing a new world into which he may retire and enjoy
privacy. A child in playing a part does not "play" in order to delight
others. "I remember," writes R. L. Stevenson, "as though it were
yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that
came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork _even when there was none
to see_." The same is true when children play at being Indians or what
not: they are not "acting" in the theatrical sense of the word.
While, then, one can say that there is something akin to art in the
happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, we must add that,
for the development of the true impulse of the artist, a good deal more
is needed. The play-impulse will only get specialised into the
art-impulse when it is illumined by a growing participation in the
social consciousness, and by a sense of beauty and the æsthetic worth of
things; when, further, it begins to concentrate itself on one mode of
imitative activity, as, for example, dramatic representation or drawing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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