From three years to about six, the dramatic impulse expresses itself largely in the form of make-believe. The individual creates a play-self living in a play-world. He begins now and continues with increasing power to imitate the idea rather than the thing. The baby could imitate the gestures and tones of his father. A child in this period plays that he is a father. When playing with dolls or soldiers, the child of this era transforms not only the dolls or soldiers and the nursery into an imaginary world full of the people which the dolls or soldiers represent, but he transforms himself into the parent of the dolls or the captain of the soldiers.
The following list of the plays of the larger boys of a California kindergarten during their recreation period illustrates how the play-world enlarges by the time the child has reached his fourth or fifth year: October 24th, Policeman; 25th, Policeman and Hunters; 26th, Wild Horses, Hunters, and Salvation Army; 30th, Butcher and House; November 1st, Butcher, Jail; 2d, Hunting, Cars, Circus; 3d, Butcher, Band, Procession; 6th, Band, Ladder, Steamer and Circus; 7th, Ladder, played with as Steam-engine, and Circus-train; 8th, Ladder, played with as Pipe-organ, and then Wood-saw; 10th, Ladder, as a Steamer; 13th, Dragon; 14th, Wild Pig; 15th, Wild Hog; 16th, Wild Hog, Train, Indians; 17th, Wild Hog, Indians; 20th, Merry-go-round; 21st, Cars; 22d, Circus and Menagerie; 23d, Policeman; 24th, Cars; 28th, Horse; December 5th, Electric Light Men, Noah’s Ark; 6th, Electric Light Men, Circus; 7th, Wild Horse, Bear, Robbers and Policeman, Electric Launch, Steamer and Boats, Indians; 8th, Indians; 11th, Santa Claus, Wild Horse, Store, Street-watering Carts; 12th, Teams of Horses, Telephone.
This list of things that children can do without adult guidance may be helpful to some mother who is called upon to kindle the imagination of her young child by suggestions.
“Making believe,” says Stevenson, “is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book.” And he gives this thoroughly boyish illustration from his own childhood: “When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here an island was still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and traveled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.”
In another place he says: “We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our Friday appetite; but I can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have made it more palatable than the best of sauces. To a grown person cold mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant world, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments. But for the child it still is possible to weave an enchantment from eatables; and, if he has but read of a dish in a storybook, it will be heavenly manna to him for a week.”
The thing that is behind this making-believe seems to be a certain hunger to realize life to its fullest. Sully gives this winsome anecdote to illustrate the realizing power of play: “One day two sisters said to one another, ‘Let us play being sisters.’ This might well sound insane enough to hasty ears; but is it not really eloquent? To me it suggests that the girls felt they were not realizing their sisterhood, enjoying all the possible sweets of it as they wanted to—perhaps there had been a quarrel and a supervening childish coldness. And they felt too that the way to get this more vivid sense of what they were, or ought to be, one to the other, was by playing the part, by acting a scene in which they would come close to one another in warm, sympathetic fellowship.”
This kind of play is individualistic at the beginning and gradually becomes social. By and by the little child wishes for comradeship. If he has no human companions, he usually engages in the pathetic make-believe of inventing an imaginary playmate, with whom he often lives continuously. This sort of expression is as ancient as it is universal. The toys with which children have rebuilt an ideal world have been discovered in the ruins of every buried city.
Children show this faculty of imagining themselves other persons in other circumstances not only in play, but in story-telling. It seems to be true that a child imagines himself the hero of every story that he hears or reads, and every normal child acts out afterward most of the stories he hears or the drama he witnesses. “Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves,” says Stevenson; “some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experiences; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.” Many children go even further and perform continuations of such dramas of their own invention, or play for an entire winter successive chapters of a favorite story.
Another way of creating a world of fancy is by playing grown-up. This is, of course, a reproduction, as far as the child’s powers permit, of literal adult activities, with, however, somewhat more of the imaginative element. Dr. G. Stanley Hall calls attention to the fact that, while little children will imitate animals, there soon comes a time when they cease to do so and imitate only human beings: during childhood those who perform the more active occupations; during adolescent those who express what are to them the ideals of character.
The little child rolls up a piece of paper, and imitates the action of his father when smoking a cigarette. But the growing boy smokes a real cigarette, so that he may feel himself a man. This expression of imagination is sometimes innocent and pleasant; but, where it is a copying of adult follies, an endeavor to enter adult experiences too soon, it gives us a race of blasé young-old persons who have no laid-up treasures.