This transformation of the actual surroundings is of course restrained in serious moments, and in intercourse with older and graver folk. There is, however, a region of child-life where it knows no check, where the impulse to deck out the shabby reality with what is bright and gay has all its own way. This region is Play.
Imagination and Play.
The interest of child’s play in the present connexion lies in the fact that it is the working out into visible shape of an inner fancy. The actual presentation may be the starting-point of this process of imaginative projection: the child, for example, sees the sand, the shingle and shells, and says, ‘Let us play keeping a shop’. Yet this is accidental. The source of play is the impulse to realise a bright idea: whence, as we shall see by-and-by, its close kinship to art as a whole. This image is the dominating force, it is for the time a veritable idée fixe, and everything has to accommodate itself to this. Since the image has to be acted out, it comes into collision with the actual surroundings. Here is the child’s opportunity. The floor is instantly mapped out into two hostile territories, the sofa-end becomes a horse, a coach, a ship, or what not, to suit the exigencies of the play.
This stronger movement and wider range of imagination in children’s pastime is explained by the characteristic and fundamental impulse of play, the desire to be something, to act a part. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero steps out of his every-day self and so out of his every-day world. In realising his part he virtually transforms his surroundings, since they take on the look and meaning which the part assigns to them. This is prettily illustrated in one of Mr. Stevenson’s child-songs, “The Land of Counterpane,” in which a sick child describes the various transformations of the bed-scene:—
And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets, All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about.
Who can say to how many and to what strange play-purposes that stolid unyielding-looking object a sofa-head has been turned by the ingenuity of the childish brain?
The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the assimilative instinct. The very infant will, if there is a cup to hand, pretend to drink out of it.[[19]] Similarly a boy of two will put the stem of his father’s pipe into, or, if cautious, near his mouth, and make believe that he is smoking. A little boy not yet two years old would spend a whole wet afternoon “painting” the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope. In such cases, it is evident, the playing may start from a suggestion supplied by the sight of an object. There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative play children knowingly act a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a fully conscious process of imitative acting.[[20]] A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. It seems sufficient to say that when at play he is possessed by an idea, and is working this out into visible action. Your notice, your laughter, may bring in a new element of enjoyment; for as we all know, children are apt to be little actors in the full sense, and to aim at producing an impression. Yet the child as little needs your flattering observation as the cat needs it, when he plays in the full sense imaginatively, and in make-believe, with his captured mouse, placing it, for example, deliberately under a copper in the scullery, and amusing himself by the half-illusion of losing it. Indeed your intrusion will be just as likely to destroy or at least to diminish the charm of a child’s play, if only through your inability to seize his idea, and, what is equally important, to rise to his own point of enthusiasm and illusive realisation. Perhaps, indeed, one may say that the play-instinct is most vigorous and dominant when a child is alone, or at least self-absorbed; for even social play, delightful as it is when all the players are attuned, is subject to disturbance through a want of mutual comprehension and a need of half-disillusive explanations.[[21]]
The essence of children’s play is the acting of a part and the realising of a new situation. It is thus, as we shall see more fully by-and-by, akin to dramatic action, only that the child’s ‘acting’ is like M. Jourdain’s prose, an unconscious art. The impulse to be something, a sailor, a soldier, a path-finder, or what not, absorbs the child and makes him forget his real surroundings and his actual self. His day-dreams, his solitary and apparently listless wanderings while he mutters mystic words to himself, all illustrate this desire to realise a part. In this playful self-projection a child will become even something non-human, as when he nips the ‘bread-and-cheese’ shoots off the bushes and fancies himself a horse.[[22]] It is to be noted that such passing out of one’s ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player; the cat or the dog, though able, as Mr. Darwin and others have shown, to go through a kind of make-believe game, remaining always within the limits of his ordinary self.
Such play-like transmutation of the self extends beyond what we are accustomed to call play. One little boy of three and a half years who was fond of playing at the useful business of coal-heaving would carry his coal-heaver’s dream through the whole day, and on the particular day devoted to this calling would not only refuse to be addressed by any less worthy name, but ask in his prayer to be made a good coal-heaver (instead of the usual ‘good boy’). On other days this child lived the life of a robin redbreast, a soldier, and so forth, and bitterly resented his mother’s occasional confusion of his personalities. A little girl aged only one year and ten months insisted upon being addressed by a fancy name, Isabel, when she was put to bed, but would not be called by this name at any other time. She probably passed into what seemed to her another person when she went to bed and gave herself up to sweet ‘hypnagogic’ reverie.