CHILDREN’S PLAY.
‘O papa, when will you die?’ asked one of the youngest of my children. A strange question, thought I.
‘Why do you ask, my dear?’
‘Oh, because it will be such fun burying you.’
This little experience of the author of Olla Podrida originated in the death of a pet canary which caused the young people great tribulation. ‘To amuse them,’ he says, ‘we made them a paper coffin, put the defunct therein, and sewed on the lid, dug a grave in the garden, and dressing them out in any remnants of black we could find for weepers, made a procession to the grave where it was buried.’ This little divertissement quite took their fancy, and led them to wish for a repetition on a larger scale.
The memory of a back-garden little cemetery of pet birds and kittens, over whose graves the writer had erected head-slates with appropriate epitaphs, occurs to him after hearing of the late obsequies of a pet rabbit at Southport. Little Amy’s bunnie went the way of all rabbits, and her playmates, sympathising with her affliction, determined to give it an appropriate funeral. They arranged a catafalque out of a soap-box, and with great solemnity dragged it in procession to the grave. The children, feeling that a service of some kind ought to be performed, but instinctively recognising the unfitness of the ordinary religious ritual, joined hands around the bier, and sang with dignified pathos the well-known old song, Oh, bring back my Bunnie to me. They did it so seriously, and with such child-like good faith, that even the grown-up listeners behind the blinds forgot the bathos of the situation, and involuntarily sympathised with the young mourners in their grief. A ‘stepping-stone,’ as one of the pall-bearers afterwards described it, was placed over the grave, and the ceremony was over; but even the gorgeousness of the funeral pageant and the impressive burial service could not wholly console the owner for the loss of her rabbit.
A little girl who witnessed the capture of a rat in a trap, exclaimed, with the relentless thoughtlessness of childhood: ‘Me wants you to dead him, so me can see him all buried in the seminary’—this playing at funerals being evidently a fascinating amusement with many little folks.
Much has been said about the power of imagination in the young; but their knowledge and experience being so incomplete, is it not rather the imitative faculty that makes a boy with a wooden gun act the hero or hunter, and a girl with a rag doll, an affectionate though rather capricious mother? On their Lilliput stage children imitate the doings of adults, who are mainly interesting to them as furnishing subjects for representation. They value the reproduction more highly than the realities of life, on which they look callously, and will parody a funeral, an execution, or a prayer-meeting with remarkable cheerfulness. One of the writer’s schoolfellows, by way of appropriate ‘Sunday play,’ once raised an altar of books, placed lighted candles thereon, and tried to persuade some of his companions to join him in further mummeries, which, however, partook much less of levity than earnestness on his part.
A famous American author, who makes some observations which are very apposite, says: ‘During a walk from St Nicholas in the shadow of the majestic Alps, we came across some little children amusing themselves in what seemed at first a most odd and original way; but it wasn’t; it was in simply a natural and characteristic way. They were roped together with a string; they had mimic Alpenstocks and ice-axes; and were climbing a meek and lowly manure-pile with a most blood-curdling amount of care and caution. The “guide” at the head of the line cut imaginary steps in a laborious and painstaking way, and not a monkey budged till the step above him was vacated. If we had waited, we should have witnessed an imaginary accident, no doubt, and we should have heard the intrepid band hurrah! when they made the summit, and looked around upon the magnificent view, and seen them throw themselves down in exhausted attitudes for a rest in that commanding situation.’ The same writer says: ‘In Nevada, I used to see the children play at silver-mining. Of course the great thing was an accident in a mine; and there were two “star” parts—that of the man who fell down the mimic shaft; and that of the daring hero who was lowered into the depths to bring him up. I knew one small chap who always insisted on playing both these parts—and he carried his point. He would tumble into the shaft and die; and then come to the surface and go back after his own remains.’
If half the accounts of American children are true, they must be intolerable little precocities, hard to manage and difficult to please. Japan appears to be the children’s paradise, from recent accounts. In no other country, we are told, are the young people treated with such consideration. The third day of the month is the girls’ festival. In every family you will find dolls in large numbers arranged in one of the rooms reserved for that purpose. The boys’ holiday is the fifth day of the fifth month. After passing under the barber’s hands, the boys, dressed in their best clothes, first go to the temple and offer a prayer, after which the fun of the day begins.
The ways of children are, it seems, beginning to be studied from a scientific standpoint. An American lady has elicited from two hundred and twenty-seven Boston schoolboys particulars of their tastes in collecting. Out of the entire number, only nineteen had abstained from making collections. Stamps were the most popular objects; then marbles, business cards, minerals, woods, leaves or flowers, autographs, buttons, birds’ nests, and many other articles.
There is often a great contrast between the ways in which boys and girls try to amuse themselves. Games which demand small exertions are generally girls’ favourites, though the more active take kindly to rounders, whiptop, and even cricket. But as a rule they are soon tired; everything ‘isn’t fair,’ and they ‘won’t play.’ Boys’ games are more successful. Boys stick much more to rules, and are less careful of their clothes. Their games are often accompanied by loud threats and fierce recriminations, threats which if executed would speedily make the playground present the appearance of a battle-field.
It is the grown-up people who write the stories, and the children carefully preserve the text. What boy has not had his Crusoe raft or cave, or has not attempted to build a log-hut? The business, pleasures, misfortunes, and adventures of life are all rehearsed by the romantic little people. There is a story of Michael Angelo making a statue of snow in a garden, the beauty and proportion of which delighted his companions and gave promise of the genius he was afterwards to display. Charles Dickens tells us of wandering through rooms when a child, armed with a club, in the make-belief that he was an African traveller expecting to be attacked at any moment by wild beasts or savages, and therefore holding himself ready to sell his life as dearly as possible.
This innate tendency to mimicry is sometimes even displayed amongst the melancholy surroundings of a hospital. It must, indeed, be sadly dull for the poor little patients in a children’s hospital, but there are rays of sunshine that gleam upon the scene. A kind-hearted visitor to one of these institutions says: ‘Among the boys, I saw one merry little fellow gravely putting out his tongue, while another felt his pulse. Playing at doctors seemed a fit game for a children’s hospital, and I could picture to myself how mock prescriptions were made up with sham solemnity of manner, and how fanciful experiments with imaginary stethoscopes were attempted by young actors, to beguile the weary time. One little girl I spoke to seemed quite proud of her acquaintance with the ailments of her neighbours, and seriously took me to a bed to see a bad case of “broncheetus;” and to a cot contiguous, where what she called “new-money-here” was waiting to be cured. To lisp out big words like “toobercoolcrosus” appeared to give great pleasure to the solemn little doctress, and I fancied the patients felt some pride in being pointed out as victims of such fine-sounding complaints.’
Children who have few toys are thrown on their own resources for amusement, and frequently develop great ingenuity and cleverness in their play. We have examples in the young Brontës, busy at their desks and playing at being editors, like the girls in Little Women when producing their weekly paper The Pickwick Portfolio. But when our little actors, in their eagerness to secure properties, develop the bump of destructiveness, the results are not so amusing. Captain Marryat remarks that children are a great blessing when they are kept in the nursery; but they certainly do interfere with the papa who has the misfortune to be an author. He little thought, when his youngest girl brought him a whole string of paper dolls, hanging together by the arms, that they had been cut off his memoranda. But so it was; and when he had satisfactorily established the fact, and insisted upon an inquisition to recover his invaluables, he found that they had had an auto da fé, and that the whole string of dolls, which contained on their petticoats his whole string of bewitching ideas, had been burnt like so many witches.
The monkey-like propensity for imitation which makes an infant try to shave himself on getting hold of papa’s razors, when developed in boyhood, takes the form of surreptitious smoking and swaggering, more for the purpose of acting the man than for anything else. The same idea of acting the woman is shown when little girls improvise a long train out of a newspaper or shawl, and sweeping in a dignified way about the room, exclaim, ‘I’m mamma!’
The importance of a child when lent any article of dress, a stick, or an umbrella to play with, is very noticeable. ‘Little boy,’ said a gentleman, ‘why do you hold that umbrella over your head? It’s not raining.’ ‘No.’—‘And the sun is not shining.’ ‘No.’—‘Then why do you carry it?’ ‘’Cause when it rains, father wants it; and when the sun shines, mother wants it; and it’s only when it’s this sort of weather that I can get to use it at all.’
Children possessed of mimetic qualities are happier without any playthings than are their opposites, even when possessed of the costliest scientific toys. Town boys are fond of imagining themselves to be trains and horses, the noise of the former and motions of the latter being often very amusingly represented. Mark Twain has given a lively description of an American lad imitating a river steamer with all proper accompaniments of bell-ringing, going ahead and astern, and whirling one arm round for an imaginary forty-feet side-wheel coming alongside the wharf. The same humorist’s description of some boys camping out on an island, and covering their bare bodies with mud to represent Indian war-paint, will probably occur to our readers.
Any one who has ever watched street boys at play, must have been struck with the power of mimicry many of them possess. The writer was once greatly amused by the antics of a London lad, who along the kerbstone was ‘taking off’ the motions of a tight-rope performer, with most ludicrous attempts at balancing, and a perfect burlesque of reality, that elicited roars of laughter from his admiring companions, some of whom whistled an appropriate accompaniment. Stage struggles and combats, and the ways of heavy tragedians, clowns, nigger minstrels, and acrobats, are often travestied by these youngsters in a way that denotes remarkable cleverness and keen observation. A Volunteer review which the writer witnessed in Cheshire was almost turned into ridicule by the absurd antics of some scores of the street arab genus. As a long line of riflemen advanced, firing, clouds of young ragamuffins kept retreating at some distance in front, and at every volley threw themselves on the ground into all kinds of grotesque attitudes, representing the killed and wounded. Boys’ sham-fights amongst themselves sometimes become rather serious, through the actors waxing too earnest in their enthusiasm. It is not long since a boy was wounded by a pistol-shot when enacting one of the Soudan battles with his companions. Newspaper readers are familiar with accounts of the lamentable results of children playing at hanging not wisely, but too well.