The Inspirational Value of This Instinct
Mr. Lee says that “the first really important shock that comes to a young man’s religious sentiment in this world is the number of bored-looking people around, doing right.” Perhaps our greatest moral task with young folks is to persuade them that it is not only wise to be good, but happy to be good. If we are going to do this, we must reveal to them larger sources of joy.
“So many of our children to-day,” Mrs. Braucher says, “are somehow missing the childlike fancy, the buoyant self-forgetfulness, which comes from living in a half-real world. Perhaps they are poor rich children with mechanical toys and so many opportunities to see stupendous productions of the old fairy tales behind real footlights that the home plays seem crude. Perhaps they are rich poor children who live so close to the pain and the burden and the specter that the airy forms of fairy life have quite flitted away. Or, perhaps, they are just normal healthy children whose childlike realism, for want of the suggestive touch of fancy, has shut out the dim fairy figures—whoever they are, wherever they are, do you want them to lose this unreal, very real part of their lives? Books and stories will help—will plant the seed—but only the appeal to the dramatic instinct will cause it to blossom as the rose.”
Dramatic play prevents the emotional nature from becoming inert, and thus keeps the possibility of joyousness forever alive. It retains the imagination and fancy that are so essential to perpetual youth. It is the only possible door to romance and mystery that will remain open for many. It satisfies the human craving to realize the meaning of life regardless of its environment. It is the best way to have life and to have it more abundantly.
Says Mrs. Herts: “A majority of young people as well as children experience a hunger of the soul to live out impulses denied expression in their personal lives. Eternal Personality restricts and shapes us into the limits of our environment. Youth chafes against such limit. The impulses of humanity stir beyond the reach of mere personality, time, and circumstance. Johnnie wants to be a pirate, Miss Smith a queen, young Harry a martyr. This is nature’s provision against spiritual isolation. This hunger of the soul for experience is as elemental a demand for nourishment as the hunger of the body for food. The dramatic instinct is an expression of this elemental hunger.”
Continuing she says: “It is the common, ordinary, free heritage of every child, unconsciously operative in every human being from the cradle to the grave. It is among the great basic forces whereby God shapes humanity.... It is the force which makes the soldier on the battlefield grasp his country’s flag, and raising it high above his head, cry out, ‘On to victory,’ even though that victory includes the death of his own body. It sustains the monk in his vigils, the statesman in his patriotism, the preacher in his pulpit.”
In short, it is the power by which we make real our ideals.
The strongest moral influence of the dramatic instinct comes in adolescence, when it shows itself in the form of aping the manners and copying the ideals of one’s personal hero. O’Shea gives much attention to this. He calls us to notice the fact that “children of all ages normally choose for their companions those of a dynamic nature, who are able ‘to do things.’ Persons of a static tendency, though ‘good’ and ‘respectable,’ are not commonly emulated by the young. In any community it will probably be found that men of action, whatever this may be—men who accomplish things—become dominant in the impersonations of the young.”
Cooley, discussing this particular point, illustrates it in an effective way. Speaking of the child’s love of action, he says that “his father sitting at his desk probably seems an inert and unattractive phenomenon, but the man who can make shavings or dig a deep hole is a hero; and the seemingly perverse admiration which children at a later age show for circus men and for the pirates and desperadoes they read about is to be explained in a similar manner. What they want is evident power. The scholar may possibly be as worthy of admiration as the acrobat or the policeman; but the boy of ten will seldom see the matter in that light.”
Now all this is dramatic. It indicates the strong tendency to copy those who are most easily copied, namely, those whose ideals and actions lend themselves, because of their vigor and theatric picturesqueness, to outward impersonation. The parent is performing the highest moral service to his children who can furnish them heroic dramatic examples, if possible by his own activities and career, or by entering heartily with them into dramatic play of such a character as to create the illusion of adventure, or by exposing them to wholesome persons of an age a little greater than their own who are either spectacular in act or dramatic in play.