represent? Things that are large, things that are attractive in
colour, things round which its pleasurable associations most
cluster--human beings from whom it has received so many emotions; cows
and dogs which interest by the many phenomena they present; houses that
are hourly visible and strike by their size and contrast of parts. And
which of the processes of representation gives it most delight?
Colouring. Paper and pencil are good in default of something better; but
a box of paints and a brush--these are the treasures. The drawing of
outlines immediately becomes secondary to colouring--is gone through
mainly with a view to the colouring; and if leave can be got to colour a
book of prints, how great is the favour! Now, ridiculous as such a
position will seem to drawing-masters who postpone colouring and who
teach form by a dreary discipline of copying lines, we believe that the
course of culture thus indicated is the right one. The priority of
colour to form, which, as already pointed out, has a psychological
basis, should be recognised from the beginning; and from the beginning
also, the things imitated should be real. That greater delight in colour
which is not only conspicuous in children but persists in most persons
throughout life, should be continuously employed as the natural stimulus
to the mastery of the comparatively difficult and unattractive form: the
pleasure of the subsequent tinting should be the prospective reward for
the labour of delineation. And these efforts to represent interesting
actualities should be encouraged; in the conviction that as, by a
widening experience, simpler and more practicable objects become
interesting, they too will be attempted; and that so a gradual
approximation will be made towards imitations having some resemblance to
the realities. The extreme indefiniteness which, in conformity with the
law of evolution, these first attempts exhibit, is anything but a reason
for ignoring them. No matter how grotesque the shapes produced; no
matter how daubed and glaring the colours. The question is not whether
the child is producing good drawings. The question is, whether it is
developing its faculties. It has first to gain some command over its
fingers, some crude notions of likeness; and this practice is better
than any other for these ends, since it is the spontaneous and
interesting one. During early childhood no formal drawing-lessons are
possible. Shall we therefore repress, or n