Of no less interest in this attitude of the child-mind towards the representations by art of human character and action are the first rude manifestations of the feeling for the tragic side of life. A child of four or six is far from realising the divine necessity which controls our mortal lives. Yet he will display a certain crude feeling for thrilling situation, exciting adventure, and something, too, of a sympathetic interest in the woes of mortals, quadrupeds as well as bipeds. The action, the situation, may easily grow too painful for an imaginative child disposed to take all representative spectacle as reality: yet the absorbing interest of the action where the sadness is bearable attests the early development of that universal feeling for the sorrowful fatefulness of things which runs through all imaginative writings from the ‘penny dreadful’ upwards. _Beginnings of Art-production._ We have been trying to catch the first faint manifestations of æsthetic feeling in children’s contemplative attitude towards natural objects and the presentations of art. We may now pass to what is a still more interesting department of childish æsthetics, their first rude attempts at art-production. We are wont to say that children are artists in embryo, that in their play and their whole activity they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. In order to see whether this idea is correct we must start with a clear idea of what we mean by art-activity. I would define art-activity as including all childish doings which are consciously directed to an external result recognised as beautiful, as directly pleasing to sense and imagination. Thus a gesture, or an intonation of voice, which is motived by a feeling for what is ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’ is a mode of art-activity as much as the production of a more permanent æsthetic object, as a drawing. Now if we look at children’s activity we shall find that though much of it implies a certain germ of æsthetic feeling it is not pure art-activity. In the love of personal adornment, for example, we see, as in the case of savages, the æsthetic motive subordinated to another and personal or interested feeling, vanity or love of admiration. On the other hand, in children’s play, which undoubtedly has a kinship with art, we find the æsthetic motive, the desire to produce something beautiful, very much in the background. We have then to examine these primitive forms of activity so as to try to disengage the genuine art-element.