a living reality, he may be expected to act similarly with respect to the fuller likeness of a picture. Vividness of imagination tends in the child as in the savage, and indeed in all of us, to invest a semblance with something of reality. We are able to control the illusory tendency and to keep it within the limits of an aesthetic semi-illusion; not so the child. Is it too fanciful to suppose that the belief of the savage in the occasional visits of the real spirit-god to his idol has for its psychological motive the impulse which prompts the child ever and again to identify his toys and even his pictures with the realities which they represent?
As might be expected, this impulse to confuse representation and represented reality shows itself very distinctly in the first reception of dramatic spectacle. If you dress up as Father Christmas, your child, even though he is told that you are his father, will hardly be able to resist the illusion that your disguise so powerfully induces. Cuvier relates that a boy of ten, on watching a stage scene in which troops were drawn up for action, broke out in loud protestations to the actor who was taking the part of the general, telling him that the artillery was wrongly placed, and so forth.[1] This reminds one of the story of the sailors who on a visit to a theater happened to see a representation of a mutiny on board ship, and were so excited that they rushed on the stage and took sides with the authorities in quelling the movement.
I believe that this same tendency to take art representations for realities reappears in children's mental attitude toward stories. A story by its narrative form seems to tell of real events, and children, as we all know, are wont to believe tenaciously that their stories are true. I think I have observed a disposition in imaginative children to go beyond this, and to give present actuality to the scenes and events described. And this is little to be wondered at when one remembers that even grown people, familiar with the devices of art imitation, tend now and again to fall into this confusion. Only a few days ago, as I was reading an account by a friend of mine of a perilous passage in an Alpine ascent, accomplished years ago, I suddenly caught myself in the attitude of proposing to shout out to stop him from venturing farther. A vivid imaginative realization of the situation had made it for the moment a present actuality.
Careful observations of the first attitudes of the child-mind toward representative art are greatly needed. We should probably find considerable diversity of behavior. The presence of a true art feeling would be indicated by a special quickness in the apprehension of art semblance as such.
In these first reactions of the young mind to the stimulus of
- ↑ Quoted by Perez, op. cit., p. 216.
