Men on Horseback, etc.
Childish drawing moves as the dialectic progress of the Hegelian thought from distinction and antithesis to a synthesis or unity which embraces the distinction. After illustrating the human biped in his contradistinction to the quadruped he proceeds to combine them in a higher artistic unity, the man on horseback. The special interest of this department of childish drawing lies in the fresh and genial manner of the combining. To draw a man and a horse apart is one thing, to fit the two figures one to the other, quite another.
At first the degree of connexion is slight. There is no suggestion of a composite or mixed animal, such as may have suggested to the lively Greek imagination the myth of the centaur. The human figure is pitched on to the quadruped in the most unceremonious fashion. Thus in many cases there is no attempt even to combine the profile aspects, the man appearing impudently in frontal aspect, or what would be so but for the lateral nasal excrescence, as in the accompanying drawing by a boy of five (Fig. 46).
With this indifference to a consistent profile there goes amazing slovenliness in attaching the man to the animal, and this whether the front or side view of the human figure is introduced. No attempt is made in many cases to show attachment: the man is drawn just above the quadruped, that is all. It seems to be a chance whether the two figures meet, whether the feet of the man rest circus-fashion on the animal’s back, or, lastly, whether the human form is drawn in part over the animal, and, if so, at what height it is to emerge from the animal’s back. Various arrangements occur in the same sheet of drawings (see Fig. 47 (a), (b) and (c)).
When this overlapping takes place the presence of the animal’s trunk makes no difference in the treatment of the man. He is drawn with his two legs just as if he were in relief against the horse; and this arrangement is apt to persist even when a child can draw a rude semblance of a horse and knows at what level to place the rider. So difficult to the little artist is this idea of one thing covering another that even when he comes to know that both the legs of the rider are not seen, he may get confused and erase both (see above (p. 376), Fig. 45 (f)).277
The savage is in general as much above the child in the representation of the rider as he is in that of the animal apart. Yet traces of similar confusion do undoubtedly appear. Von den Steinen says that his Brazilians drew the rider with both legs showing. Andree gives an illustration, among the stone-carvings (petroglyphs) of savages, of the employment of a front view of the human figure rising above the horse with no legs showing below (Fig. 48 (a)).278 Even among the drawings of the North American Indians, in which the horse is in general so well outlined, we occasionally find what appear to be the germs of confusions similar to those of the child. Thus Schoolcraft gives among drawings from an inscription on a buffalo skin one in which we have above the profile view of a horse the front view of a man, with arms stretched out laterally while the legs are wanting.279 A clearer case of confusion is supplied by the following drawing, also by a North American Indian, in which the lines of the horse’s body cut those of the rider’s legs (Fig. 48 (b)).280
The same tendency to show the whole man where the circumstances hide a part appears in children’s drawings of a man in a boat, a railway carriage and so forth. Ricci has shown that the different ways in which the child-artist puts a human figure in a boat are as numerous as those in which he sets it on a horse. The figure may stand out above the boat or overlap, in which last case it may be cut across by the deck-line and its lower part shown, or be clapped wholly below the deck, or again be half immersed in the water below the boat, or, lastly, where an attempt to respect fact is made, be truncated, the trunk appearing through the side of the boat, though the legs are wanting.281 A man set in a house, train, or tram car, is seen in his totality (Fig. 49 (a) and (b)). It is much the same thing when a child flattens out a house or other object so as to show us its three sides, that is to say one which in reality is hidden (Fig. 49 (c) and (d)). With these habits of the child may be compared those of the savage. The impulse to show everything, even what is covered, is illustrated in a drawing of a singer in his wigwam by an Indian (Fig. 49 (e)).282 Even where colour comes in and one thing has to be hidden by a part of another thing the savage artist, like the child insists on drawing the whole. This is illustrated in a curious custom, the drawing of two serpents (in dry, coloured powder) by North American fire-dancers. They are drawn across one another, and the artist has first to draw completely the one partly covered, and then the second over the first.283
The child’s drawing of the house, though less remarkable than that of the man and the quadruped, has a certain interest. It illustrates, as we have just seen, not merely his determination to render visible what is hidden, but also his curious feeling for position and proportion. In one case I found that in the desire to display the contents of a house a girl of six had actually set a table between the chimneys. The accompanying drawing done by the boy C. at the age of five years five months illustrates the fine childish contempt for proportion (Fig. 50). A curious feature in these drawings of the house is the care bestowed on certain details, pre-eminently the window. This is even a more important characteristic feature than the chimney with its loops of smoke. Some children give a quite loving care to the window, drawing the lace curtains, the flowers, and so forth.