One noticeable feature in the child’s first response to the attractions
of form is the preference given to ‘tiny’ things. The liking for small
natural forms, birds, insects, shells, and so forth, and the prominence
of such epithets as ‘wee,’ ‘tiny’ or ‘teeny,’ ‘dear little,’ in the
child’s vocabulary alike illustrate this early direction of taste. This
feeling again is a mixed one; for the child’s interest in very small
fragile-looking things has in it an element of caressing tenderness
which again contains a touch of fellow-feeling. This is but one
illustration of the general rule of æsthetic development in the case of
the individual and of the race alike that a pure contemplative delight
in the aspect of things only gradually detaches itself from a mixed
feeling.
If now we turn to the higher aspects of form, regularity of outline,
symmetry, proportion, we encounter a difficulty. Many children acquire
while quite young and before any formal education commences a certain
feeling for regularity and symmetry. But is this the result of a mere
observation of natural or other forms? Here the circumstances of the
child become important. He lives among those who insist on these
features in the daily activities of the home. In laying the cloth of the
dinner-table, for example, a child sees the regular division of space
enforced as a law. Every time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress,
he has an object-lesson in symmetrical arrangement. And so these
features take on a kind of ethical rightness before they are judged as
elements of æsthetic value. As to a sense of proportion between the
dimensions or parts of a form, the reflexion that this involves a degree
of intellectuality above the reach of many an adult might suggest that
it is not to be expected from a small child; and this conjecture will be
borne out when we come to examine children’s first essays in drawing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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