Another and closely connected domain of activity which is akin to art is the manifestation of grace and charm in action. Much of the beauty of movement, of gesture, of intonation, in a young child may be unconscious, and as much a result of happy physical conditions as the pretty gambols of a kitten. Yet one may commonly detect in graceful children the rudiment of an æsthetic feeling for what is nice, and also of the instinct to please. There is, indeed, in these first actions and manners, into which stupid conventionality has not yet imported all kinds of awkward restraints, as when the little girl M. would kiss her hand spontaneously to other babies as she passed them in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable savages. Now a feeling for what is graceful in movement, carriage, speech and so forth is no clear proof of a specialised artistic impulse: yet it attests the existence of a rudimentary appreciation of what is beautiful, as also of an impulse to produce this. In the forms of childish activity just referred to we have to do with mixed impulses in which the true art-element is very imperfectly represented. There is a liking for pretty effect, and an effort to realise it, only the effect is not prized wholly for its own sake, but partly as a means of winning the smile of approval. The true art-impulse is characterised by the love of shaping beautiful things for their own sake, by an absorbing devotion to the process of creation, into which there enters no thought of any advantage to self, and almost as little of benefiting others. Now there is one field of children’s activity which is marked by just this absorption of thought and aim, and that is play. To say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. Any one can see that when children are at play they are carried away by pleasurable activity, are thinking of no useful result but only of the pleasure of the action itself. They build their sand castles, they pretend to keep shop, to entertain visitors, and so forth, for the sake of the enjoyment which they find in these actions. This clearly involves one point of kinship with the artist, for the poet sings and the painter paints because they love to do so. It is evident, moreover, from what was said above on the imaginative side of play that it has this further circumstance in common with art-production, that it is the bodying forth of a mental image into the semblance of outward life. Not only so, play exhibits the distinction between imitation and invention—the realistic and the idealistic tendency in art—and in its forms comes surprisingly near representing the chief branches of art-activity. It thus fully deserves to be studied as a domain in which we may look for early traces of children’s artistic tendencies.