Such naïve play-activity acquires a greater æsthetic importance when it becomes significant or representative of something: and this direction appears very early in child-history. The impulse to imitate the action of another seems to be developed before the completion of the first half-year.[[220]] In its first crude form, as reproducing a gesture or sound uttered at the moment by another, it enters into the whole of social or concerted play. A number of children find the harmonious performance of a series of dance or other movements, such as those of the kindergarten games, natural and easy, because the impulse to imitate, to follow another’s lead, at once prompts them and keeps them from going far astray.
It is a higher and more intellectual kind of imitation when a child recalls the idea of something he has seen done and reproduces the action. This is often carried out under the suggestive force of objects which happen to present themselves at the time, as when a child sees an empty cup and pretends to drink, or a book and simulates the action of reading out of it, or a pair of scissors and proceeds to execute snipping movements. In other cases the imitation is more spontaneous, as when a child recalls and repeats some funny saying that he has heard.
This imitative action grows little by little more complex, and in this way a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. Here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. A child pantomimically representing some funny action comes, indeed, very near to the mimetic art of the comedian.
Meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, viz., the production of semblances in things. 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, once occupied himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which his knife (or spoon) 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.[[221]]
Such 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, the same striving to produce images or semblances of things, which possesses the sculptor and the painter. In each case we see a mind dominated by an idea and labouring to give it outward embodiment. The more elaborate constructive play which follows, the building with sand and with bricks, with which we may take the first spontaneous drawings, are the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. The kindergarten occupations, most of all the clay-modelling, make direct appeal to this half-artistic plastic impulse in the child.
In this imitative play we see from the first the tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. Thus in the acting of the nursery the nurse, the coachman and so forth are given by one or two broad touches, such as the presence of the medicine-bottle or its semblance, or of the whip, together, perhaps, with some characteristic manner of speaking. In this way child-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 seems to be represented. There is a precisely similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline in the first rude attempts of children to form semblances. This will be fully illustrated presently when we examine their manner of drawing.
As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald abstract representation becomes fuller and more life-like. A larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the representation. Thus the coachman’s talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. A precisely similar process of development is noticeable in the plastic activities. The first raw attempt to represent house or castle is improved upon, and the image grows fuller of characteristic detail and more life-like. Here, again, we may note the parallelism between the evolution of play-activity and of primitive art.
This movement away from bare symbolic indication to concrete pictorial representation involves a tendency to individualise, to make the play or the shapen semblance life-like in the sense of representing an individual reality. Such individual concreteness may be obtained by a mechanical reproduction of some particular action and scene of real life, and children in their play not infrequently attempt a faithful recital or portraiture of this kind. Such close unyielding imitation shows itself, too, now and again in the attempt to act out a story. Yet with bright fanciful children the impulse to give full life and colour to the performance rarely stops here. Fresh individual life is best obtained by the aid of invention, by the intervention of which some new scene or situation, some new grouping of personalities is realised. Nothing is æsthetically of more interest in children’s play than the first cautious intrusion into the domain of imitative representation of this impulse of invention, this desire for the new and fresh as distinct from the old and customary. Perhaps, too, there is no side of children’s play in which individual differences are more clearly marked or more significant than this. The child of bold inventive fancy is shocking to his companion whose whole idea of proper play is a servile imitation of the scenes and actions of real life. Yet the former will probably be found to have more of the stuff of which the artist is compacted.
All such invention, moreover, since it aims at securing some more vivacious and stirring play-experience, naturally comes under the influence of the childish instinct of exaggeration. I mean by this the untaught art of vivifying and strengthening a description or representation by adding touch to touch. In the representations of play, this love of colour, of strong effect, shows itself now in a piling up of the beautiful, gorgeous, or wonderful, as when trying to act some favourite scene from fairy-story, or some grand social function, now in a bringing together of droll or pathetic incidents so as to strengthen the comic or the tragic feeling of the play-action. In all this—which has its counterpart in the first crude attempts of the art of the race to break the tight bonds of a servile imitation—we have, I believe, the germ of what in our more highly developed art we call the idealising impulse.
I have, perhaps, said enough to show that children’s play is in many respects analogous to art of the simpler kind, also that it includes within itself lines of activity which represent the chief directions of art-development.[[222]]