The Play of Man

by Karl Groos

Miss Swanwick’s translation.

A strange characteristic of these playful reminiscences is that what displeased us at the time of its occurrence may give pleasure when revived by memory. When, for instance, a traveller recounts his adventures on a mountain tour he takes pleasure in dwelling on the hardships which he endured. Is this entirely due to the knowledge that it is all over now? I think not. First comes self-congratulation on having borne such grievous difficulties, i.e., the feeling of power which we find to be the chief source of satisfaction in almost all play.

Playful pretence[293] that the personified and elaborated mental contents are real is psychologically important to productive artists, and still more so to the enjoyment of poetic creations. Artists often refer to their as yet unembodied conceptions as to very real things, and frequently these assume the rôle of relentless taskmasters or of veritable demoniacal possessions. Then, of course, they cease to be playful. A. Feuerbach writes: “If it were not for this Gastmahl I would be happy; but it pervades everything and gets in my way. It haunts my thoughts. It feeds on my heart’s blood and saps my inmost life.”[294] Yet the artist often exults in the fact that he has a self-created world all his own—he plays with the illusion. “It would concern the reader little, perhaps,” says Dickens about his David Copperfield, “to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two years’ imaginative task; or how an author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world when a crowd of the creatures of his own brain are going from him forever. Yet I have nothing else to tell, unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.” This sort of illusion is essential to æsthetic enjoyment in hearing or reading poetic creations. The child who listens absorbedly to a fairy story,[295] the boy for whom the entire external world sinks and vanishes while he is lost in a tale of adventure, or the adult who follows with breathless attention the development of a captivating romance; all allow the authors’ creations to get possession of their consciousness to the exclusion of reality, and yet not as an actual substitute for it.

In a second kind of conscious illusion the mental content blends with actual external phenomena and shares in their reality. Here, according to Wundt’s terminology, we have a kind of simultaneous association which is very like the imagination that transforms reality. Each of our ordinary concepts is a mixture of sensuous impression with its associated memory picture, and it first becomes illusion when the association assumes the character of hallucination, and is susceptible of correction by an appeal to common experience. When a white spot dimly revealed by the moonlight appears to me as unmistakably a towel, I see more than sense-perception warrants; but when I firmly believe that it is a white-robed figure, then I have fallen into an illusion, and, as they say, my imagination has played me a trick. Yet there are degrees of difference between serious illusion and the playful kind which concerns us here. When I had fever, as a boy, I saw on the bright coverlet the most marvellous feast spread out, and at the same time had an amused consciousness that it was all an illusion caused by my illness. Von Bibra’s experiences from hasheesh-smoking were quite similar to this, as he tells us in his book previously cited. In this are two distinct kinds of play, first the substitution of an image for its original, and second the lending, as it were, of our own personality. The first has been treated exhaustively by K. Lange in his study of conscious illusion. Not only the little girl who makes a favourite baby of a knotted handkerchief or some other formless object, and the boy who calls a stick a horse, a pile of sand a mountain, a collection of chairs a railroad train, etc., but also the adult in his enjoyment of plastic art and scenic effect, using his own mental content to verify the appearance, is making playful use of his capacity for illusion, and he, too, takes pleasure in so doing. Lending one’s own personality reveals illusion as operative in another direction; here we impart our own mental states to the object under consideration; we “lend” to it the emotions which we conceive would be ours under like conditions (the shoe is made to fit the last). From our feeling of sympathy or inner imitation we then experience all the resulting states of mind, cheerfulness and brightness from what is attractive, or solemnity from the sublime. In speaking of imitation we shall have occasion to refer to this again.

(b) Playful Transformation of the Memory-Content

Simple recollective processes by no means give an adequate picture of reality. In the tenth chapter of his book on illusions Sully gives such a list and description of important mental illusions as is calculated to shake our faith in the trustworthiness of memory. It seems that our recollections are often mere fragments of a formerly well-known whole (we may recall, for example, only one or two features of an acquaintance), and as a result of this analytic process we are prone to make new combinations of the detached elements. Thus, a short time ago I thought that I could clearly picture to myself the house of my brother-in-law by the power of association, but I afterward discovered that I had conceived the bricks to be far too bright a red, and had evidently substituted the colour of some other house. What we call constructive imagination then turns out to be constantly renewed manipulation of previously verified impressions. We need not here touch upon the wide field of involuntary productive imagination, since it is only play directed by the will that is engaging us; yet before going on to concrete cases, it should be stated that in constructive imagination as well the pictures formed are to a considerable extent involuntary, the will aiding more by its influence in concentrating the attention on the trend of the internal processes and in discriminating between them, than in forming the picture itself. This is why the efforts of great artists are so often like inspirations.

Building air castles is the simplest exercise of constructive imagination.[296] It most commonly manifests itself as voluntary playful forming of cheerful and ambitious images of ourselves or our friends amid the most fortunate surroundings.[297] We may see how it is done by watching little children who have enjoyed a new kind of treat at a birthday party or some such occasion—how they will remember and repeat it in their future plays. All the details will be copied sometimes just as in the model, sometimes in new combinations, or turned into a joke. The inestimable value of such play for making life worth living is self-evident. It veils the sordidness of everyday existence with a double illusion, the first being our conception of the air castle as a reality, and so getting immediate possession of this radiant dream (here the two kinds of imagination converge). Such illusion supplies the psychological interest in Faust’s bargain; he enjoys the “schönsten Augenblick,” although his present satisfaction is merely premonitory. The second illusion is exemplified in our implicit trust that the future will verify our hope,[298] that buoyant and vivifying emotion which accompanies us all through life.

Conjuring up all sorts of hindrances, difficulties, and dangers is a modification of this castle building, and gives more play to the intellectual faculties as we weigh the varying possibilities of success or failure, develop the probable consequences of a proposed step, and try to find the best and easiest road to success. By such processes the crude picture is moulded into shape. Here, again, the capacity for illusion is of importance in connection with imaginative combination, since each possibility that is considered has the appearance of reality in its turn, but such mental activity is playful only when the combinations as such are enjoyable. Every creative artist, statesman, writer, or scholar must often work on an imaginative basis which he knows he can never verify. Many persons like to take, with the help of a Baedeker, long journeys which they can never hope to indulge in in any other way, and to solve complicated problems based on hypothetical games of chess.

Leaving castle building, let us see what other forms of constructive fantasy can be practiced playfully. In speaking of illusions we have noticed the blending of memories with external phenomena, which is so conspicuous in child play and in æsthetic enjoyment. The process of “assimilation” which grounds playful self-deception is so closely related to constructive imagination that it is difficult to locate the boundary between them. The psychic process which transforms a splinter into a doll’s milk-bottle, a few chips stuck up into men and trees, a cloud[299] into the greatest variety of faces, animals, etc., which endows lifeless objects with our own spiritual capacities of desire, emotion, and temper—all this is synthetic activity which may quite as well be called assimilation as constructive imagination. Its pleasurable quality is inherent,[300] especially where a perfect imitation of reality would give us so little room for the exercise of imagination as to be on the whole less satisfactory.

Constructiveness which is concerned purely with ideas, not blending them with external objects, is quite as important. One of its uses, though one not clearly defined, may be to direct the attention, when there exists but a vague idea of the completed picture, to a choice among the multifarious internal images which make up the material supplied by memory. This process is of the greatest importance in the origination of artistic compositions, but its relatively simple beginnings may be clearly traced in the play of children. While we may not hope to follow the imaginative process into all its ramifications and refinements, nor to account for individual variations in memory content, visual, motor, etc., three general, constantly recurring forms of its constructive activity are distinguishable: 1. The conjunction of concepts which are not connected, or not so connected in reality. 2. The abstraction of certain elements from a complex and their transference to other combinations. 3. Exaggeration and depreciation. It will be readily seen that these three forms of imaginative activity are useful for playful experimentation as well as in actual artistic production, which, however, rarely makes playful use of fantasy.