Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, the fashioning of lasting semblances. Early illustrations of this impulse are the making of a river out of the gravy in the plate, the pinching of pellets of bread till they take on something of resemblance to known forms. One child, three years old, would occupy himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which the knife and fork were made to act as hands, and cherry stones put round the plate to represent the hours. Such table-pastimes are known to all observers of children, and have been prettily touched on by R. L. Stevenson in his essay on "Child's Play".

These formative touches are, at first, rough enough, the transformation being effected, as we have seen, much more by the alchemy of the child's imagination than by the cunning of his hands. Yet, crude as it is, and showing at first almost as much of chance as of design, it is a manifestation of the same plastic impulse which possesses the sculptor and the painter.

The more elaborate constructive play which follows—the building with cards and wooden bricks, the moulding with sand and clay, and the first spontaneous drawings—is the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten is, indeed, a kind of smaller art-world where the dramatic and plastic impulses of the child are led into orderly action.

In this imitative play we see from the first the artistic tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the unstudied acting of the nursery, the nurse, the coachman, and the rest, are presented by a few broad touches; characteristic actions, such as pouring out the medicine, jerking the reins, being aided by one or two rough accessories, as the medicine bottle or the whip. In this way child's play, like primitive art, shows a certain unconscious selectiveness. It presents what is constant and typical, imperfectly enough no doubt. The same selection of broadly distinctive traits is seen where some individual person, e.g., a particular newsboy or gardener, seems to be represented. A similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline is seen in the first rude attempts of children to construct, whether with materials like cards or bricks, or with pencil, the semblance of a house, a garden and so forth.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the play. Thus the coachman's talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. Similarly with the products of the plastic impulse.

With this more realistic tendency to exhibit the characteristic with something like concrete fulness we see the germ at least of the idealistic impulse to transcend the level of common things, to give prominence to what has value, to touch the representation with the magic light of beauty. Even a small child playing with its coloured petals or its shells will show a rudiment of this artistic feeling for beautiful arrangement.

No doubt there are striking variations among children in this respect. Play discloses in many ways differences of feeling and ideas: among others, in the unequal degrees of tastefulness of the play scene. Yet the presence of an impulse, however rudimentary, to produce what has beauty and charm for the eye is a fact which we must recognise.

Along with this feeling for the sensuous effect of beauty we can discern the beginnings of fancy and invention whereby the idea represented is made more prominent and potent. This tendency, like the others, shows itself in a crude form at first, as in the earlier and coarser art of the race. In children's play we can see much of the uncultured man's love of strong effect. The pathos of the death of the pet animal or of the child has to be made obvious and strongly effective by a mass of painful detail; the comic incident must be made broadly farcical by heavy touches of caricature; the excitement of perilous adventure has to be intensified by multiplying the menacing forces and the thrilling situations. Yet crude as are these early attempts at strengthening the feebleness of the actual they are remotely akin to the idealising efforts of true art.

Nevertheless, children's play, though akin to it, is not completely art. As pointed out above, the action in a child's play is not intended as a dramatic spectacle. The small player is too self-centred, if I may so say. The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands, are not produced, as art is produced, for its own worth's sake, but rather as providing a new world into which he may retire and enjoy privacy. A child in playing a part does not "play" in order to delight others. "I remember," writes R. L. Stevenson, "as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork even when there was none to see." The same is true when children play at being Indians or what not: they are not "acting" in the theatrical sense of the word.

While, then, one can say that there is something akin to art in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, we must add that, for the development of the true impulse of the artist, a good deal more is needed. The play-impulse will only get specialised into the art-impulse when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and by a sense of beauty and the æsthetic worth of things; when, further, it begins to concentrate itself on one mode of imitative activity, as, for example, dramatic representation or drawing.