Mrs. Ewing says on this subject:
“If there are young intellects so imperfect as to be incapable of distinguishing between Fancy and Falsehood, it is most desirable to develop in them the power to do so, but, as a rule, in childhood, we appreciate the distinction with a vivacity which as elders our care-clogged memories fail to recall.”
Mr. P. A. Barnett, in his book on the “Commonsense of Education,” says, alluding to Fairy Tales:
“Children will act them but not act upon them, and they will not accept the incidents as part of their effectual belief. They will imagine, to be sure, grotesque worlds, full of admirable and interesting personages to whom strange things might have happened. So much the better; this largeness of imagination is one of the possessions that distinguish the better nurtured child from others less fortunate.”
The following passage from Stevenson's essay on Child Play[41] will furnish an instance of children's aptitude for creating their own dramatic atmosphere:
“When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of a meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal, were in the case of calves' feet jelly. It was hardly possible not to believe, and you may be quite sure, so far from trying it, I did all I could to favour the illusion—that some part of it was hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of that golden rock. There, might some Red-Beard await this hour; there might one find the treasures of the Forty Thieves. And so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without because the cream dimmed the transparent fractures.”
In his work on Imagination, Ribot says: “The free initiative of children is always superior to the imitations we pretend to make for them.”
The passage from Robert Stevenson becomes more clear from a scientific point of view when taken in connection with one from Karl Groos' book on the “Psychology of Animal Play”: