The Play of Man. Karl Groos
of experimentation. In his second month the infant will break out into joyful cries at the sight of gilded picture frames or lighted lamps, illuminated Christmas trees or shining mirrors. Even in Wolfdietrich the delight of children in bright and shining things is recorded:—
“Do vergaz es sînes frostes und spielte mit den ringen sîn.
also daz kleine Kindel sîner sorgen gar vergaz,
dô greif ez on die ringe und sprach: waz ist daz?
des Halsperges schoene daz Kindel nie verdroz.”107
And it seems to grow with his growth in other directions. The following are some of Sigismund’s notes on his daughter’s third quarter: “The child is now passionately fond of light, and in the evening, when the darkening room is lighted up, she regularly shouts aloud and dances for joy. … This coincides with the fact that artificial illumination stimulates adults also to a genuine and boisterous gaiety. Our feasts and dances are always held at night, and indeed it is difficult to attain the requisite dithyrambic pitch in the daytime.”108 Nansen wrote, when the electric light blazed for the first time on the frozen-in Fram: “What a tremendous influence light has on the spirits of men! This light enlivened us like a draught of good wine.”109
To what degree this feeling is universal is shown by the fact that bright and shining objects are highly prized the world over. The school child, the savage, the cultured man, display the same preference; there is no essential difference whether it is a scrap of glass for which the negro gives a generous portion of his worldly goods, or the blazing diamond coronet for which the lady in society parts with hers. That our coins are made of gold and silver is attributable to the high polish which they take, and which won great favour for them in prehistoric times. Poets of all ages have celebrated the brightness of the human eye, and because light makes us cheerful we speak of the brilliancy of an entertainment, the beaming joyousness of the golden day. The strongest light effects are produced by flame and by the heavenly bodies. The strange attraction which flame exerts on insects, fish, and birds is familiar to all. Romanes’s sister relates in the journal which she kept, about a capuchin ape, that the clever little fellow rolled strips of newspaper into lamplighters and stuck the end into the fire, to amuse himself watching the flame.110 Primitive men must have experimented with fire in the same way when they came in contact with it in lightning strokes and volcanic phenomena, and in their earliest use of it for boring their stone hatchets. Without playful experimentation, this most important acquisition of mankind, the mastery of fire, could hardly have been attained. The little ones in our homes would find playing with fire one of their favourite diversions if we did not use every means to prevent it, on account of the danger. In spite of all warnings, the untoward fate of little Polly Flinders of nursery memory is daily becoming the experience of numberless children.
With grown people the light and glow of fire are of the first importance in both religious and secular festivities. I need only refer once more to Sigismund’s saying, quoted above. The charm of moonlit and starlit nights is one of the deepest joys that Nature affords us, which only the regal splendour of sunshine can surpass. Perhaps it has never been more worthily sung than in these verses of Mörike’s, which the very spirit of Shakespeare seems to have dictated:
“Dort, sich, am Horizont lüpft sich der Vorhang schon!
Es träumt der Tag, nun sei die Nacht entfloh’n;
Die Purperlippe, die geschlossen lag,
Haucht, halbgeöffnet, süsse Athemzüge;
Auf einmal blitzt das Aug’ und wie ein Gott, der Tag
Beginnt im Sprung die königlichen Flüge!”111
The human longing for light is so strong that it becomes for him the natural symbol for divinity, a fact on which we have not time to dwell, except to note the significance of the heavenly bodies and of fire in religion. The self-devised Nature worship of young Goethe, who greeted the rising sun with an offering, is interesting, and still more so is the statement of the deaf-mute Ballard that, as a boy of eight years, he arrived by his own unaided efforts at some sort of metaphysical and religious thought, and felt a kind of reverence for the sun and moon.112 This is the effect of light which has so great a part in the mythology of all peoples. Even in the Old Testament account of the creation light is the first thing which God called out of chaos. “And God saw that the light was good.”
We find brightness of aspect especially affected in the industrial arts and in painting, and the employment of shining and glowing substances in decoration is too familiar to need comment. They are found in the ornaments of the Stone period, such as necklaces of animals’ teeth, bits of ivory and shells, as well as among savage tribes of the present day. Grosse says: “The ornaments of these people may be called brilliant not in a figurative, but in a literal sense, and there is hardly any quality which contributes so much to the decorative effect of an object in savage estimation as brightness. The natives of Fire Island frequently hang fragments of a glass bottle on their neck band, considering them very superior adornments, and Bushmen are happy when they are made the proud possessors of iron or brass rings. However, they are by no means dependent on such windfalls from a higher race, and when the ornaments of civilized man and barbarian are both wanting and precious stones are not available they betake themselves to Nature, who can well supply their needs. The sea tosses up polished shells upon the beach, vegetation furnishes bright seeds and shining stalks, and animals give their shining teeth, as well as fur and feathers.”113
In painting, light effects in connection with colour are of the greatest importance, and are skilfully managed by many masters of the art. Rembrandt may be said to possess the highest genius for their treatment. Without going into particulars of technique, I may note that the pleasure which we derive from light effects in painting may be referred to two opposite extremes. We know that it is out of the question for the painter to transfer to his canvas Nature’s extremes of light and shade, only about half of the eight hundred ascertained degrees of brilliancy being available to him.114 Helmholtz has shown in an interesting manner how the artist may triumph over this difficulty. It proves to be a special case for the application of Weber’s law; the adjustment of intensities is not in proportion to the actual force of the stimuli, but to their relative force. Thus, when the painter tempers the brilliance of Nature he actually gives a more faithful representation, because the toned-down light against the deepened shadows of a picture produces the same effect on the senses as the clear beams of sunlight in contrast with its luminous shadows.115 This so-called normal technique is objected to on diametrically opposite grounds. Some painters, refusing to darken and falsify Nature, seek to make their shadows as bright as are those in the diffused light of day. As it is impossible, however, to represent the actual intensity of the light, their attempt to reproduce the actual is only half realized. The true contrast between light and dark fails, and the result is the faded, obscure, hazy appearance which characterizes the work of extremists of this school. In the other direction the attempt is sometimes made to darken the shadows so excessively as actually to make the difference between light and shade greater than it is in Nature. Caravaggio and Ribera, Lenbach and Samberger, furnish examples of this kind of painting. Their work is done on the principle of darkening the shade, in order to bring out the light more sharply; eyes, brow, and hands in their pictures seem to surpass the clearness of Nature because of this difference, which is greater than that of reality. These artists are true lovers of light.
(b) The Perception of Colour
The exact period in a child’s life when susceptibility to colour impressions arises has not been determined. Preyer’s son seemed interested in a rose-coloured curtain, with the sun shining on it, on his twenty-third day,116 but who knows whether it was the colour that pleased him or only the brightness? And the same doubt hangs over a hundred other observations taken in the first months of life, as, for example, this of Sully’s: “Like other children, he was greatly attracted by brightly coloured objects. When just seven weeks old he acquired a fondness for a cheap, showy card, with crudely brilliant colouring and gilded border. When carried to the place where it hung, … he would look up to it and greet his first love in the world of art with a pretty smile.”117 Since we can not be certain that it was not the mere