It has been suggested to me by Mr. F. Galton that a useful inquiry might be carried out into the relation between a child’s preference in the matter of doll or other toy and the degree of his imaginativeness as otherwise shown, e.g., in craving for story, and in romancing. So far as I have inquired I am disposed to think that such a relation exists. A lady who has had a large experience as a Kindergarten teacher tells me that children who play with rough shapeless things, and readily endow with life the ball, and so forth, in Kindergarten games are imaginative in other ways. Here is an example:—
P. Mc. L., a girl, observed from three and a half to five years of age, was a highly imaginative child as shown by the power of make-believe in play. The ball of soft india-rubber was to her on the teacher’s suggestion, say, a baby, and on it she would lavish all her tenderness, kissing it, feeding it, washing its face, dressing it in her pinafore, etc. So thorough was her delight in the play that the less imaginative children around her would suspend their play at ‘babies’ and watch her with interest. Whilst a most indifferent restless child at lessons, whenever a story was told she sat motionless and wide-eyed till the close.
Children sometimes make babies of their younger brothers and sisters, going through all the sweet solicitous offices which others are wont to carry out on their dolls.[[31]] This suggests another and closely related question: Do the more imaginative children prefer the inert, ugly doll to the living child in these nursing pastimes? What is the real relation in the child’s play between the toy-companion, the doll or india-rubber dog, and the living companion? Again, a child will occasionally play with an imaginary doll.[[32]] How is this impulse related to the other two forms of doll-passion? These points would well repay a careful investigation.
The vivification of the doll or toy animal is the outcome of the play-impulse, and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to realise an idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its outward expression serves, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, to blot out the incongruities of scene and action which you or I, a cold observer, would note. The play-idea works transformingly by a process analogous to what is called auto-suggestion.
How complete this play-illusion may become here can be seen in more ways than one. We see it in the jealous insistence already illustrated that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new fancy-created one. “About the age of four,” writes M. Egger of his boys, “Felix is playing at being coachman, Emile happens to return home at the moment. In announcing his brother, Felix does not say, ‘Emile is come,’ he says ‘The brother of the coachman is come’.”[[33]]
As we saw above, the child’s absorption in his new play-world is shown by his imperious demand that others, as his mother, shall recognise his new character. Pestalozzi’s little boy, aged three years and a half, was one day playing at being butcher, when his mother called him by his usual diminutive, ‘Jacobli’. He at once replied: “No, no; you should call me butcher now”.[[34]] Here is a story to the same effect, sent me by a mother. A little girl of four was playing ‘shops’ with her younger sister. “The elder one was shopman at the time I came into her room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs, I could not understand why. At last she sobbed out: ‘Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop’. I had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion.”
The intensity of the realising power of imagination in play is seen too in the stickling for fidelity to the original in all playful reproduction, whether of scenes observed in everyday life or of what has been narrated. The same little boy who showed his picture-books to dolly was, we are told, when two years and eight months old, fond of imagining that he was Priest, his grandmamma’s coachman. “He drives his toy horse from the arm-chair as a carriage, getting down every minute to ‘let the ladies out,’ or to ‘go shopping’. The make-believe extends to his insisting on the reins being held while he gets down and so forth.” The same thing shows itself in acting out stories. The full enjoyment of the realisation depends on the faithful reproduction, on the suitable outward embodiment of the distinct idea in the child’s mind.
The following anecdote bears another kind of testimony, a most winsome kind, to the realising 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 realising their sisterhood, enjoying all the possible sweets of it, as they wanted to do—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.
But there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. The child finds himself confronted by the unbelieving adult who questions what he says about the doll’s crying and so forth. One little girl, aged one year and nine months, when asked by her mother how her doll, who had lost his arms, ate his dinner without hands, quickly changed the subject. She did not apparently like having difficulties brought into her happy play-world. But the true tenacious faith shows itself later when the child understands these sceptical questionings of others, and sees that they are poking fun at his play and his day-dreamings. Such cruel quizzings of his make-believe are apt to cut him to the quick. I have heard of children who will cry if a stranger suddenly enters the nursery when they are hard at play, and shows himself unsympathetic and critical.
Play may produce not only this vivid imaginative realisation at the time, but a sort of mild permanent illusion. Sometimes it is a toy-horse, in one case communicated to me it was a funny-looking toy-lion, more frequently it is the human effigy, the doll, which as the result of successive acts of imaginative vivification gets taken up into the relation of permanent companion and pet. Clusters of happy associations gather about it, investing it with a lasting vitality and character. A mother once asked her boy of two and a half years if his doll was a boy or a girl. He said at first, “A boy,” but presently correcting himself added, “I think it is a baby”. Here we have a challenging of the inner conviction by a question, a moment of reflexion, and as a result of this, an unambiguous confession of faith that the doll had its place in the living human family.