There sits a little charming master of three years before his small table busied for a whole hour in a fanciful game with shells. He has three so-called snake-heads in his domain; a large one and two smaller ones: this means two calves and a cow. In a tiny tin dish the little farmer has put all kinds of petals, that is the fodder for his numerous and fine cattle.... When the play has lasted a time the fodder-dish transforms itself into a heavy waggon with hay: the little shells now become little horses, and are put to the shafts to pull the terrible load.
The doll takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. It is human and satisfies higher instincts and emotions. As the French poet says, the little girl—
Rêve el nom de mère en berçant sa poupée.[[26]]
I read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only: but boys, though they often prefer india-rubber horses and other animals, not infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and are hardly less devoted than girls. Endless is the variety of rôle assigned to the doll as to the tiny shell in our last picture of play. The doll is the all-important comrade in that solitude à deux of which the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs. Burnett tells us that sitting holding her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling adventures. At another time when she wanted to act an Indian chief the doll just as obediently took up the part of squaw.
Very humanely, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her pet, even though, as George Sand reminds us, there come moments of rage and battering.[[27]] A little boy of two and a half years asked his mother one day: “Will you give me all my picture-books to show dolly? I don’t know which he will like best.” He then pointed to each and looked at the doll’s face for the answer. He made believe that it selected one, and then gravely showed it all the pictures, saying: “Look here, dolly!” and carefully explaining them.
The doll illustrates the childish attitude towards all toys, the impulse to take them into the innermost and warmest circle of personal intimacy, to make them a living part of himself. A child’s language, as we shall see later, points to an early identification of self with belongings. The ‘me’ and the ‘my’ are the same, or nearly the same, to a mite of three. This impulse to attach the doll to self, or to embrace it within the self-consciousness or self-feeling, shows itself in odd ways. In the grown-up child, Laura Bridgman, it took the form of putting a bandage like her own over her doll’s eyes. This resembles a case of a girl of six, who when recovering from measles was observed to be busily occupied with her dolls, each of which she painted over with bright red spots. The dolly must do all, and be all that I am: so the child in his warm attachment seems to argue. This feeling of oneness is strengthened by that of exclusive possession, the sense that the child himself is the only one who really knows dolly, can hear her cry when she cries and so forth.[[28]] It is another manifestation of the same feeling of intimacy and solidarity when a child insists on dolly’s being treated by others as courteously as himself. Children will often expect the mother or nurse to kiss and say good-night to their pet or pets—for their hearts are capacious—when she says good-night to themselves.
Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have clearest evidence of play-illusion. The lively imagination endows the inert wooden thing with the warmth of life and love. How large a part is played here by the alchemist, fancy, is known to all observers of children’s playthings. The faith and the devotion often seem to increase as the first meretricious charms, the warm tints of the cheek and the lips, the well-shaped nose, the dainty clothes, prematurely fade, and the lovely toy which once kept groups of hungry-looking children gazing long at the shop-window, is reduced to the naked essence of a doll. A child’s constancy to his doll when thus stript of exterior charms and degraded to the lowest social stratum of dolldom is one of the sweetest and most humorous things in child-life.
And then what rude unpromising things are adopted as doll-pets. Mrs. Burnett tells us she once saw a dirty mite sitting on a step in a squalid London street, cuddling warmly a little bundle of hay tied round the middle by a string. Here, surely, the besoin d’aimer was little if anything behind the besoin de croire.
Do any of us really understand this doll-superstition? Writers of a clear long-reaching memory have tried to take us back to childhood, and restore to us for a moment the whole undisturbed trust, the perfect satisfaction of love, which the child brings to its doll. Yet even the imaginative genius of a George Sand is hardly equal, perhaps, to the feat of resuscitating the buried companion of our early days and making it live once more before our eyes.[[29]] The truth is the doll-illusion is one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who, when they attain the years of enlightenment, make a point of saving their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect the pets when thus retained are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face and hair, and still more for the lovely clothes, than for the inherent worth of the doll itself, of what we may call the doll-soul which informs it and gives it, for the child, its true beauty and its worth.
Yet if we cannot get inside the old doll-superstition we may study it from the outside, and draw a helpful comparison between it and other known forms of naïve credulity. And here we have the curious fact that the doll exists not only for the child but for the “nature man”. Savages, Sir John Lubbock tells us,[[30]] like toys, such as dolls, Noah’s Arks, etc. The same writer remarks that the doll is “a hybrid between the baby and the fetish, and that it exhibits the contradictory characters of its parents”. Perhaps the changes of mood towards the doll, of which George Sand writes, illustrate the alternating preponderance of the baby and the fetish half. But as Sir John also remarks, this hybrid is singularly unintelligible to grown-up people, and it seems the part of modesty here to bow to one of nature’s mysteries.