As one thinks of the deep delights of these first excursions into storyland one almost envies the lucky boys whom the young Charles Dickens held spellbound with his tales.
The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist the child’s hungry demand for a story? Edgar Quinet in his Histoire de mes Idées tells how when a child an old corporal came to drill him. He had been taken prisoner by the Spaniards and placed on an inaccessible island. Edgar loved to hear the thrilling story of the old soldier’s adventures, and scarcely was the narrative finished when the greedy boy would exclaim, “Encore une fois!” Heine’s delight when a boy at Düsseldorf in drinking in the stories of Napoleon’s exploits from his drummer is another well-known illustration.
Through the perfect gift of visual realisation which a child brings to it the verbal narrative becomes a record of fact, a true history. The intense enjoyment which is bound up with this process of imaginative realisation makes children jealously exact as to accuracy in repetition. The boy C. when a story was repeated to him used to resent even a small alteration of the text. Woe to the unfortunate mother who in telling one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One such, a friend of mine, repeating ‘Puss in Boots’ inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by a sharp volley of ‘No’s!’ The same lady tells me that when narrating the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for the second time only she forgot in describing the effect of the Beast’s sighing to add after the words ‘till the glasses on the table shake’ ‘and the candles are nearly blown out’; whereupon the severe little listener at once stopped the narrator and supplied the interesting detail. The exacting memory of childhood in the matter of stories is the product of a full detailed realisation. In the case just quoted the reality of the story was contradicted by substituting a stupid conventional chair for the box, and by omitting the striking incident of the candles.
Happy age of childhood, when a new and wondrous world, created wholly by the magic of a lively phantasy, rivals in brightness, in distinctness of detail, aye, and in steadfastness too, the nearest spaces of the world on which the bodily eye looks out, before reflexion has begun to draw a hard dividing line between the domains of historical truth and fiction.
As the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. It has added something to the child’s inner supplementary world, given him one more lovely region in which he may live blissful moments. The return of the young mind to the persons and scenes of story is forcibly illustrated in the impulse, already touched on, to act out in play the parts of this and that heroic figure. With many children any narrative which holds the imagination delightfully enthralled is likely to become more fully realised in a visible embodiment. For instance, a child of five years, when told a story of four men going along a railway to stop a train before it neared a bridge which was on fire, at once proceeded to play the incident with his toy train. Here we see how story by contributing lively images to the child’s brain becomes one main stimulative and guiding influence in the domain of play. In like manner the images born of story may, as in the case of Dickens, attach themselves permanently to particular localities and objects.
To this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of figures, human, superhuman, or subhuman. The higher qualities of this invention properly come under the head of child-art, and will have to be considered in another chapter. Here we may glance at these inventions as illustrating the realising power of the child’s imagination.
This invention appears in a sporadic manner in occasional ‘romancings’ which may set out from some observation of the senses. A little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: “Look at that poor ole man, mamma, he has dot (got) a bad leg”. Then romancing, as he was now wont to do: “He dot on a very big ’orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. We must make it well.” Then after a thoughtful pause: “Mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to I”. The unmistakable childish seriousness here, the outflow of young compassion, and the charming enforcement of the nursery prescription, all point to a vivid realisation of this extemporised little romance. This child was moreover more than commonly tender-hearted, and perhaps the more exposed on that account to such amiable self-deception. Another small boy when a little over two years, happening to hear a buzzing on the window, said: “Mamma, bumble-bee in a window says it wants a yump (lump) of sugar”: then shaking his head sternly, added: “Soon make you heat-spots, bumble-bee”. Other examples of this romancing will be met with in the notes on the child C.
In such simple fashion does the child build up a tiny myth on the basis of some passing impression, supplying out of his quaintly stored fancy unlooked-for adornments to the homely occurrences of every-day life.
Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by the independent play of an inventive imagination, children’s minds pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the workers of Christmas miracles, Santa Claus and Father Christmas, as well as the beings fashioned by the child’s imagination on the model of those he knows from story, these live on like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments when the things of sense lose their hold, bringing into the child’s life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, the most real of all realities.
This childish belief in myth is often curiously tenacious. A father was once surprised to find that his boy aged five years and ten months continued naïvely to believe in the real personality of Santa Claus. It was Christmastide and the father, in order to test the child’s credulity, put his own pocket-knife into the stocking which Santa Claus was supposed to fill. The child, though he knew his father’s knife very well, did not in the least suspect that the knife he found in the stocking had been placed there by human hands, but expressed himself as pleased that Santa Claus had sent him one like his father’s. When his father followed this up by telling him that he had lost his knife, and by searching for it in the boy’s presence, the latter asked whether Santa Claus had stolen the knife—thus showing how its close similarity to the knife he had received had impressed him, though he would not for a moment doubt the fact of its coming from the mysterious personage. It might be thought that this child was particularly stupid. On the contrary he was well above the average in intelligence. In proof of this I may relate that the Christmas before this, that is to say when he was under five years, he was the only one among thirty children who recognised his uncle when extremely well disguised as Father Christmas. When asked by his father why he thought it was his uncle, he said at first he didn’t know, but thinking a moment he added, “I don’t see who else there is,” showing that he had reasoned out his belief by a method of exclusion.