There is a kind of thing done in Kindergarten, which retains the best characteristics of childish play, and yet assumes the serious form of occupation.
Fancy-work, if Froebel's method be strictly followed, is the best initiation of industry; for it can serve to a perfect intellectual training.
Childish play has all the main characteristics of art, inasmuch as it is the endeavor to "conform the shows of things to the desires of the mind,"—Bacon's definition of poetry. A child at play is histrionic. He personates characters, with costume and mimic gesture. He also undertakes to represent whatever thing interests his mind by embodiment of it in outward form. Advantage is taken of this, by Froebel, to initiate exquisite manipulation, in several different materials; a veritable artistic work, which trains the imagination to use, and develops the understanding to the appreciation of beauty, symmetry, or order,—"Heaven's first law."
Froebel's first two Gifts, as they are called, are a box of colored worsted balls, and a box containing the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder. These two Gifts belong more especially to the nursery series, and were published some years since in Boston, with little books of rhymes, and suggestions for playing with babies.
But they can be used, in some degree, in the Kindergarten: the first, to give lessons on the harmonies of colors; and the second, to call attention to fundamental differences of form.
It is possible, however, to omit these, and begin a Kindergarten with the Third Gift, which is a little wooden box, containing eight cubes of an inch dimension.
The first plays with these blocks, especially if the children are very young, will be to make what Froebel calls forms of life; that is, chairs, tables, columns, walls, tanks, stables, houses, &c. Everybody conversant with children knows how easily they will "make believe," as they call it, all these different forms, out of any materials whatever; and are most amused, when the materials to be transformed by their personifying and symbolizing fancy are few, for so much do children enjoy the exercise of imagination, that they find it more amusing to have simple forms, which they can "make believe,"—first to be one thing, and then another,—than to have elaborately carved columns, and such like materials, for building. There is nothing in life more charming to a spectator, than to see this shaping fancy of children, making everything of nothing, and scorning the bounds of probability, and even of possibility. It is a prophecy of the unending dominion which man was commanded, at his creation, to have over nature; and gives meaning to the parable of the Lord God's bringing all creatures before Adam, that he might give them their names.
Wordsworth felicitously describes, in that ode which he calls "Intimations of Immortality in Childhood," this victorious play of—
"The seer blest,
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find."
"Behold the child among his new-born blisses;
A six years' darling of a pigmy size;
See where, mid work of his own hand, he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See at his feet some little plan or chart,
Some fragment of his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly learned art,—
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song.
Then he will fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride,
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his humourous stage
With all the persons down to palsied age
That life brings with her in her equipage."
That this is a literal picture, every mother knows; and, in this childish play, there is all the subjective part of a genuine work of art; the effort being to dramatize, or embody in form, the inward fancy, no less than in the case of the most mature and successful artist. The child seizes whatever materials are at hand to give objectivity to what is within; and he is only baffled in the effect, because he is not developed enough in understanding, and has not knowledge enough to discover or appreciate means appropriate to his ends. It is for the adult to show him that the universe is a magazine of materials given to the human race, wherewith each is to build an image of God's creative wisdom, into which he shall inwardly grow by the very act of accomplishing this destiny.