In the dramatic imitative play of children important distinctions are apparent which are not noticeable in the dramatic art of adults. The play may be so conducted that the player’s own body appears as the exclusive object of the mimic production, or in such a manner that the pretended object serves, either on the ground of an actual resemblance or by sheer force of imagination, as a substitute for the thing represented, or, lastly, in a way that includes both. We have an instance of the first when the boy pretends to be a soldier, of the second when he marches his tin soldiers to battle, and of the third when he himself takes part in the combat, or when a little girl plays that her doll is a real baby and she herself the mother. Since we have reason to believe that dramatic art has developed from the play of children by way of the mimic dance we may be sure that its progress has been selective, and that there is good reason for the perfection of the first of these forms. The second, indeed, appears in the marionette farces which are still much enjoyed by the uneducated classes among ourselves and are in great favour in the East. The third kind, in which the player places himself in direct dramatic relation with the puppet (taking the word in its widest sense), has no analogy in our art, but is most prominent in the fetich cult. And the reason why is easily traced. A fundamental distinction between mimic play and mimic art consists in the fact that the player imitates simply for his own amusement, the artist for the pleasure of others. His is not real play, but exhibition. Bearing this distinction in mind, we see that the third form of play is not applicable to art.
In our short review of dramatic imitative play we will not adhere too closely to the three distinctions, but simply inquire what it is that the child imitates. And first we glance at the strange fact that his impersonating impulse extends even to inanimate objects; the child acts without any feeling of limitation, like the labourers in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, who were ready to take the part of the Wall or the Moon indifferently. During a long and complicated play some child will be a door post, a tree, a seat, a wagon, and a locomotive, and endeavour by his motions and carriage to support these bold illusions. This exhibition of versatility on the part of the child is interesting in its analogy to the expansion of the imitative impulse in æsthetic perception. Such external personification of lifeless objects corresponds to inner imitation which is itself a kind of personifying. A higher object of dramatic imitation is found in the actions of animals which, as we have seen, are apt to lead to strongly marked comic effects. They are a source of the liveliest amusement to children, who will crawl like a snake, grunt like a pig, fly like a bird, swim like a fish, seize and devour prey, make grimaces, wear animal masks, make shadow pictures, notice and laugh at animals, and perhaps even mimic their movements.[565] This last propensity has given name and character to many complicated traditional games, such as “Cat and Mouse,” “Wolf im Garten,” “Fox Chase,” “Hen and Hawk,” “Fox and Chickens,” etc. This manifestation of the child’s deep interest in the animal world is analogous to animal imitation in primitive art and animal veneration in primitive religion. In the former connection the animal dance is most conspicuous, being extremely widespread. Masks representing the different animals are commonly worn, and the movements of domestic animals, especially the dog, as well as of wild beasts, are reproduced in rhythmic order,[566] nor are the dancers daunted by swimming and flying. Probably the masking in Greek and Japanese dances is attributable to such an origin, as also the unnaturally placed tails on ancient figures of fauns, for in these dances animal tails were hung in the belt.[567]
Hall and Allin, in their valuable treatise so frequently cited, attempt to assign a reason for the very special interest which children take in animals. They find my practice and preparation theory in this case “obviously wrong.” As a partial explanation they develop the view that use of a rudiment produces to a certain degree its atrophy, and that consequently childish imitation of animals “marks the harmless development of rudimentary animal instincts as they pass to their needed maximal growth, till the next higher powers that control and subordinate them are unfolded, thus recapitulating with immense rapidity a very long stage in the evolution of the human out of the animal psyche.”[568] It strikes me that this is one of the numerous cases of the too bold application of the seductive but dangerous phylogenetic theory. Entirely apart from the fact that the idea of weakening as a result of practice seems improbable in regard to the imitation of animals as well as in the catharsis theory on which the author seems to base his, it is noteworthy that the child has to make an effort to reproduce the movements, actions, and calls of animals, and this at a time when it has already progressed very far in the acquirement of human capabilities. Therefore, I am unable to subscribe to the theory advanced by these gentlemen. None will deny that the imitative impulse is of great biological importance as practice, and I do not see that any special explanation is needed for its extension to animal actions. If, however, such explanation is required, my theory readily supplies it, for few things are more useful to primitive man than a thorough knowledge of animal life, and playful imitation afforded a much surer means of acquiring this than did mere receptive observation.
We now pass to human activities which are chosen as models by children still more than are the activities of animals. It may be stated in general that there is scarcely anything which engages the energy of man which is not made the object of childish imitation. Children of savages naturally have a much smaller répertoire than those of civilized people, but as far as the fact of imitation is concerned, and as it appears in child’s play, it usually strikes travellers most forcibly, since they are not as a rule alive to the less salient phenomena of experimentation. Livingstone says that in central Africa it is remarkable how few playthings the children have; their life seems to be already a serious one, and their only amusement consists in imitating their elders while they build huts, lay out gardens, or make bows, arrows, shields, and spears. In other places, he says, giving a beautiful instance of childish invention and illusion, many bright children are found who have plenty of attractive toys. They shoot birds with their little bows, and teach captive ones to sing. They are very skilful in setting traps and snares for small birds, as in the preparation and spreading of birdlime. The boys make toy guns out of reeds and shoot grasshoppers.[569] Many other witnesses confirm all this, though their reports are usually less full and lucid, and we may conclude that the games and sports of adults are also early acquired by the children by means of imitation. Among the “wild men” exhibited in Europe, quite small children are often found who perform the dances of their elders with astonishing accuracy, and travellers tell us that they do the same thing in their homes. Captain Jacobsen once attended a regular Indian child’s party, for which the little people painted their faces and stuck feathers in their hair in regulation style. “It was really comical to see little tots of three and four gotten up in this fashion and dancing about with leaps and bounds while older ones beat the wooden drum.”[570] Children of civilized peoples still retain among their plays many heathenish customs which have not been practised by adults within the memory of man. An interesting example will accomplish the transition from savagery, dealing as it does with the powerful influence of the imitation of the uncultured on European children. Signe Rink tells of her childhood spent in Greenland: “Like all European children in the country my brothers and sisters and I had a genuine passion for everything pertaining to Greenland; and accordingly, as soon as the door was shut on our elders we tried in every possible way and by all sorts of mimicry to identify ourselves with our playmates. My brother got himself up as a seal hunter from head to foot, and I became an Eskimo woman with waddling gait, who was sternly forbidden to leave the house.” And of her play in an Eskimo hut and with a Greenlandic girl she gives the following delightful description: “We took off our shoes and sat on the warm, comfortable, half-dark part of the couch behind the backs of the grown people. Wherever I was there was Anna, my best friend among the Greenland children.... We made quite free with pincushions, dishes, and timepieces! We brought mussel shells and bleached seal bones and made a playhouse in the corner. We took cushions from the great pile and made beds for the puppies. We made mural decorations from coloured chips. Over our heads hung boots, hose, skins, trousers, and timiaks (under-jackets) to dry in the warmth of the lamp or to be out of the way. All these surroundings formed elements in our play. In imagination we had sent our husbands off on a seal hunt, and with thimbles on our first fingers, the Greenland custom, we sewed round flaps for the boot soles of the absent ones.”[571] One can not read such a description as this without being impressed with the incalculable influence of imitation on the whole psychic life of the child, not only in relation to externals, but also as affecting their deeply rooted sympathies and antipathies, habits and convictions, all of which are deeply influential on the developing character. Baldwin says: “It is not only likely—it is inevitable—that he makes up his personality, under limitation of heredity by imitation, out of the ‘copy’ set in the actions, temper, emotions of the people who build around him the social inclosure of his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to see what members of the family are giving him his personal ‘copy’—to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what their dispositions are to a degree; whether he is growing to be a person of subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low, unorganized social content from his foreign nurse. For, in Leibnitz’s phrase, the boy or girl is a social monad, a little world, which reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir its sensibilities. And just as far as his sensibilities are stirred he imitates, and forms habits of imitating. And habits?—they are character.”[572]
There is hardly any limit to the rôle playing of civilized children. Under normal conditions they naturally take their own parents as models, and even in societies not governed by caste considerations this must have a conservative influence. But the occupations of others, too, appeal strongly to the imitative impulse, and it is altogether probable that such tests of various possibilities often exert an influence on the later choice of a life’s calling, for play develops predispositions and antipathies. When Schiller was eight or nine years old he was taken to see the magnificent ducal opera house in Ludwigsburg, and was forthwith inspired to produce a similar work; so he built a little theatre of books, and had paper figures to act in it. Soon afterward he got up private theatricals among his sisters and schoolmates. His enjoyment of preaching, too, was shown in his being able, like young Fichte, to repeat, when a child, whole sermons verbatim whose lofty spiritual pathos confirmed his natural inclination toward the priestly calling.
Before proceeding to the consideration of special forms of the imitative impulse, I will make a limited selection from a series of observations calculated to illustrate the variety of childish imitation. The carrier’s wagon, the street car, the railroad are as well represented by his own body as by external objects, though the silver knife-rests on our table seems especially adapted for the last, being hitched together and pushed about the table, passing through tunnels, stopping at stations, etc. An old servant who comes to our house daily to see if anything is wanted from the library or post office, regularly gets letters which the child has placed in old envelopes. Another play is for the child to knock at the front door and say to the maid who opens it, “I am an old letter carrier.” When asked if she has any letters she answers, “Here is some money for you,” and spits in the girl’s hand. She comes with a pile of old papers, and asks if we want to buy one. She travels to Coburg between the house and garden, and visits a friend, saying, when she comes back, “I have told Emmy that she must come here soon.” For months after a visit to a swimming pool she practises swimming in the garden; standing on a chair holding her nose she jumps in the grass, where she tries to copy the movements of swimmers. She said, when five years old, to her doll: “Lisa, in an hour you go to Frau Schneider, and when she asks you, ‘What is, the sky is blue?’ you must say, ‘Le ciel est bleu’; and when she asks, ‘What is, the tree is green?’ you must say, ‘L’arbre est vert.’” At six and a half she gave her doll writing and piano lessons. In the latter she grasped the doll so that by means of pressure on the hidden mechanism she elicited from it accompanying wails, at regular intervals and in good time.
The capacity for illusion is always the most interesting feature of such play. The same child varies greatly in this respect: sometimes he seems entirely given up to self-deception; he will offer you a meal of candy in which one bit represents the meat, another the vegetables, etc., and is quite hurt if you are guilty of confusing these dishes. Sometimes, too, when he has concocted various dainties out of mud, he can not resist the temptation to bite into the brown mass, although in his calmer moments he well knows that mud is not edible. On the other hand, the waking consciousness seems to be unshaken through it all. If you warn the playing child not to hurt his rocking horse, he will answer that it is only a wooden horse, without, however, abating his zeal in the play. Then, again, the whole thing is laid out beforehand, as in this case. Marie: “Then let’s play that I am a thief, and there is a whole roomful of cakes, and the door is shut, and I cut a hole in it and take all the cakes away, and you are the policeman and run after me and get all the cakes back again.” Frieda: “And I will take them to my child. Or shall we play birthday?” When choice is thus offered between various possibilities there is, of course, much variation in the strength of the illusion, and the sudden transitions of the imagination are often very striking. For instance, one small dramatist called two combs which he held together a biscuit, and said it had an excellent taste, and the next moment was rocking them to sleep with tender solicitude. We have already noticed the child’s extraordinary capacity for supplying any deficiencies in the object of his fantasy; he has no difficulty in accepting two upright pencils as towers, an umbrella for a baby, with grass stalks attached to it for flowing locks.
At the risk of giving too much space to this phase of the subject I will describe a baptismal festival in 1896, which was participated in by half a dozen children from five to fourteen years old, at our house. For the adults chairs were provided and placed in regular rows, and they were required to bring tickets of admission which a duly accredited doorkeeper received. All the children were deeply affected during the official parts of the ceremony, especially the young mother, who showed as she brought the doll infant forward a really pallid face, and the fourteen-year-old minister was so moved by his solemn office that he lost his place after the first sentence. On the certificate of baptism was the proverb:
“Ihm ruhen noch im Zeitenschoose
Die schwarzen und die heitern Loose”;[573]