Part 4

We can most of us perhaps, recall similar experiences, where colours and sounds, in themselves indifferent, took on either through analogy or association a decidedly repulsive character. How far, one wonders, does this process of transformation of things go in the case of imaginative children? There is some reason to say that it may go very far, and that, too, when there is no strong feeling at work cementing the combined elements. A child’s feeling for likeness is commonly keen and subtle, and knowledge of the real relations of things has not yet come to check the impulse to this free far-ranging kind of assimilation. Before the qualities and the connexions of objects are sufficiently known for them to be interesting in themselves, they can only acquire interest through the combining art of childish fancy. And the same is true of associated qualities. A child’s ear may not dislike a grating sound, a harsh noise, as our ear dislikes it, merely because of its effect on the sensitive organ. _En revanche_ it will like and dislike sounds for a hundred reasons unknown to us, just because the quick strong fancy adding its life to that of the senses gives to their impressions much of their significance and much of their effect.

There is one new field of investigation which is illustrating in a curious way the wizard influence wielded by childish imagination over the things of sense. It is well known that a certain number of people habitually ‘colour’ the sounds they hear, imagining, for example, the sound of a vowel, or of a musical tone, to have its characteristic tint which they are able to describe accurately. This ‘coloured hearing,’ as it is called, is always traced back to the dimly recalled age of childhood. Children are now beginning to be tested and it is found that a good proportion possess the faculty. Thus, in some researches on the minds of Boston school-children, it was found that twenty-one out of fifty-three, or nearly 40 per cent., described the tones of certain instruments as coloured.[16] The particular colour ascribed to an instrument, as also the degree of its brightness, though remaining constant in the case of the same child, varied greatly among different children, so that, for example, one child ‘visualised’ the tone of a fife as pale or bright, while another imaged it as dark.[17] It is highly probable that both analogy and association play a part here.[18] As was recently suggested to me by a correspondent the instance given by Locke of the analogy between scarlet and the note of a trumpet may easily be due in part at least to association of the tone with the scarlet uniform.

Footnote 16:

See the article by G. Stanley Hall, “The Contents of Children’s Minds,” _Princeton Review_. New Series, 1883. _Cf._ the same writer’s volume, _The Contents of Children’s Minds on entering School_, 1894.

Footnote 17:

_Ibid._, p. 265.

Footnote 18:

This has been well brought out by Professor Flournoy of Geneva in his volume _Des Phénomènes de Synopsie_ (audition colorée), chap. ii.

I may add that I once happened to overhear a little girl of six talking to herself about numbers in this wise: “Two is a dark number,” “forty is a white number”. I questioned her and found that the digits had each its distinctive colour; thus one was white; two, dark; three, white; four, dark; five, pink; and so on. Nine was pointed and dark, eleven dark green, showing that some of the digits were much more distinctly visualised than others. Just three years later I tested her again and found she still visualised the digits, but not quite in the same way. Thus although one and two were white and black and five pink as before, three was now grey, four was red, nine had lost its colour, and eleven oddly enough had turned from dark green to bright yellow. This case suggests that in early life new experiences and associations may modify the tint and shade of sounds. However this be, children’s coloured hearing is worth noting as the most striking example of the general tendency to overlay impressions of the senses with vivid images. It seems reasonable to suppose that coloured hearing and other allied phenomena, as the picturing of numbers, days of the week, etc., in a certain scheme or diagrammatic arrangement, when they show themselves after childhood are to be viewed as survivals of early fanciful brain-work. This fact taken along with the known vividness of the images in coloured hearing, which in certain cases approximate to sense-perceptions, seems to me to confirm the view here put forth that children’s imagination may alter the world of sense in ways which it is hard for our older and stiff-jointed minds to follow.

I have confined myself here to what I have called the _play_ of imagination, the magic transmuting of things through the sheer liveliness and wanton activity of childish fancy. How strong, how vivid, how dominating such imaginative transformation may become will of course be seen in cases where violent feeling, especially fear, gives preternatural intensity to the mind’s realising power. But this will be better considered later on.

This transformation of the actual surroundings is of course restrained in serious moments, and in intercourse with older and graver folk. There is, however, a region of child-life where it knows no check, where the impulse to deck out the shabby reality with what is bright and gay has all its own way. This region is Play.

_Imagination and Play._

The interest of child’s play in the present connexion lies in the fact that it is the working out into visible shape of an inner fancy. The actual presentation may be the starting-point of this process of imaginative projection: the child, for example, sees the sand, the shingle and shells, and says, ‘Let us play keeping a shop’. Yet this is accidental. The source of play is the impulse to realise a bright idea: whence, as we shall see by-and-by, its close kinship to art as a whole. This image is the dominating force, it is for the time a veritable _idée fixe_, and everything has to accommodate itself to this. Since the image has to be acted out, it comes into collision with the actual surroundings. Here is the child’s opportunity. The floor is instantly mapped out into two hostile territories, the sofa-end becomes a horse, a coach, a ship, or what not, to suit the exigencies of the play.

This stronger movement and wider range of imagination in children’s pastime is explained by the characteristic and fundamental impulse of play, the desire to be something, to act a part. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero steps out of his every-day self and so out of his every-day world. In realising his part he virtually transforms his surroundings, since they take on the look and meaning which the part assigns to them. This is prettily illustrated in one of Mr. Stevenson’s child-songs, “The Land of Counterpane,” in which a sick child describes the various transformations of the bed-scene:—

And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets, All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about.

Who can say to how many and to what strange play-purposes that stolid unyielding-looking object a sofa-head has been turned by the ingenuity of the childish brain?

The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the assimilative instinct. The very infant will, if there is a cup to hand, pretend to drink out of it.[19] Similarly a boy of two will put the stem of his father’s pipe into, or, if cautious, near his mouth, and make believe that he is smoking. A little boy not yet two years old would spend a whole wet afternoon “painting” the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope. In such cases, it is evident, the playing may start from a suggestion supplied by the sight of an object. There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative play children knowingly act a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a fully conscious process of imitative acting.[20] A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. It seems sufficient to say that when at play he is possessed by an idea, and is working this out into visible action. Your notice, your laughter, may bring in a new element of enjoyment; for as we all know, children are apt to be little actors in the full sense, and to aim at producing an impression. Yet the child as little _needs_ your flattering observation as the cat needs it, when he plays in the full sense imaginatively, and in make-believe, with his captured mouse, placing it, for example, deliberately under a copper in the scullery, and amusing himself by the half-illusion of losing it. Indeed your intrusion will be just as likely to destroy or at least to diminish the charm of a child’s play, if only through your inability to seize his idea, and, what is equally important, to rise to his own point of enthusiasm and illusive realisation. Perhaps, indeed, one may say that the play-instinct is most vigorous and dominant when a child is alone, or at least self-absorbed; for even social play, delightful as it is when all the players are attuned, is subject to disturbance through a want of mutual comprehension and a need of half-disillusive explanations.[21]

Footnote 19:

Of course, as Preyer suggests, this drinking from an empty cup may at first be due to a want of discriminative perception.

Footnote 20:

M. Compayré seems to go too far in this direction when he talks of the child’s play with its doll as a charming comedy of maternity (_L’Evolution intell. et morale de l’Enfant_, p. 274).

Footnote 21:

For a good illustration of the disillusive effect of want of enthusiasm in one’s playmates, see Tolstoi, _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_, part i., chap. viii.

The essence of children’s play is the acting of a part and the realising of a new situation. It is thus, as we shall see more fully by-and-by, akin to dramatic action, only that the child’s ‘acting’ is like M. Jourdain’s prose, an unconscious art. The impulse to be something, a sailor, a soldier, a path-finder, or what not, absorbs the child and makes him forget his real surroundings and his actual self. His day-dreams, his solitary and apparently listless wanderings while he mutters mystic words to himself, all illustrate this desire to realise a part. In this playful self-projection a child will become even something non-human, as when he nips the ‘bread-and-cheese’ shoots off the bushes and fancies himself a horse.[22] It is to be noted that such passing out of one’s ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player; the cat or the dog, though able, as Mr. Darwin and others have shown, to go through a kind of make-believe game, remaining always within the limits of his ordinary self.

Footnote 22:

_Uninitiated_, p. 10.

Such play-like transmutation of the self extends beyond what we are accustomed to call play. One little boy of three and a half years who was fond of playing at the useful business of coal-heaving would carry his coal-heaver’s dream through the whole day, and on the particular day devoted to this calling would not only refuse to be addressed by any less worthy name, but ask in his prayer to be made a good coal-heaver (instead of the usual ‘good boy’). On other days this child lived the life of a robin redbreast, a soldier, and so forth, and bitterly resented his mother’s occasional confusion of his personalities. A little girl aged only one year and ten months insisted upon being addressed by a fancy name, Isabel, when she was put to bed, but would not be called by this name at any other time. She probably passed into what seemed to her another person when she went to bed and gave herself up to sweet ‘hypnagogic’ reverie.

In the working out of this impulse to realise a part the actual external surroundings may take a surprisingly small part. Sometimes there is scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child plays out his action with purely imaginary surroundings. Such simple play-actions as going to market to buy imaginary apples occur very early, one mother assuring me that all her children carried them out in the second year before they could talk. Another mother writes of her boy, aged two and a half years: “He amuses himself by pretending things. He will fetch an imaginary cake from a corner, rake together imaginary grass, or fight a battle with imaginary soldiers.” This reminds one of Mr. Stevenson’s lines:—

It is he, when you play with your soldiers of tin, Who sides with the French and who never can win.

This impulse to invent imaginary surroundings, and more especially to create mythical companions, is very common among lonely and imaginative children. A lady friend, a German, tells me that when she was a little girl, a lonely one of course, she invented a kind of _alter ego_, another girl rather older than herself, whom she named ‘Krofa’—why she has forgotten. She made a constant playmate of her, and got all her new ideas from her. Mr. Canton’s little heroine took to nursing an invisible ‘iccle gaal’ (little girl), the image of which she seemed able to project into space.[23] The invention of fictitious persons fills a large space in child-life. Perhaps if only the young imagination is strong enough there is, as already hinted, more of sweet illusion, of a warm grasp of living reality in this solitary play, where fictitious companions perfectly obedient to the little player’s will take the place of less controllable tangible ones. But such purely imaginative make-believe, which derives no help from actual things, is perhaps hardly ‘play’ in the full sense, but rather an active form of day-dreaming or romancing.[24]

Footnote 23:

_The Invisible Playmate_, p. 33 ff.

Footnote 24:

I fail to understand what Professor Mark Baldwin means by saying that an only child is wanting in imagination (_op. cit._, p. 358). In his emphasising of the influence of imitation and external suggestion the writer seems to have overlooked the rather obvious fact that childish imagination in its intenser and more energetic forms means a detachment from the sensible world, and that lonely children are, as more than one autobiography, as well as mother’s record, show, particularly imaginative just because of the absence of engaging activities in the real world.

In much of this playful performance all the interference with actual surroundings that the child requires is change of place or scene. Here is a pretty example of this simple type of imaginative play. A child of twenty months, who is accustomed to meet a _bonne_ and child in the Jardin du Luxembourg, suddenly leaves the family living-room, pronouncing indifferently well the names Luxembourg, nurse, and child. He goes into the next room, pretends to say “good-day” to his two out-door acquaintances, and then returns and simply narrates what he has been doing.[25] Here the simple act of passing into an adjoining room was enough to secure the needed realisation of the encounter in the garden. The movement into the next room is suggestive. Primarily it meant no doubt the child’s manner of realising the out-of-door walk; yet I suspect there was another motive at work. Children love to enact their little play-scenes in some remote spot, withdrawn from notice, where imagination suffers no let from the interference of mother, nurse, or other member of the real environment. How many a thrilling exciting play has been carried out in a corner, especially if it be dark, or better still, screened off. The fascination of curtained spaces, as those behind the window curtains, or under the table with the table-cloth hanging low, will be fresh in the memory of all who can recall their childhood.

Footnote 25:

Egger quoted by Compayré, _op. cit._, pp. 149, 150.

A step towards a more realistic kind of play-action, in which, as in the modern theatre, imagination is propped up by strong stage effects, is taken when a scene is constructed, the chairs and sofa turned into ships, carriages, a railway train, and so forth.

Yet, after all, the scene is but a very subordinate part of the play. Next to himself in his new part, proudly enjoying the consciousness of being a general, or a school-mistress, a child who is not content with the pure creations of his phantasy requires the semblance of living companions. In all play he desires somebody, if only as listener to his talk in his new character; and when he does not rise to an invisible auditor, he will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in the bath, a fire-shovel, a clothes’ prop in the garden, and so forth. In more active play, where something has to be done, he generally desires a full companion and assistant, human or animal. And here we meet with what is perhaps the most interesting feature of childish play, the transmutation of the most meagre and least promising of things into complete living forms. I have already alluded to the sofa-head. How many forms of animal life, vigorous and untiring, from the patient donkey up to the untamed horse of the prairies, has this most inert-looking ridge served to image forth to quick boyish perception.

The introduction of these living things seems to illustrate the large compass of the child’s realising power. Mr. Ruskin speaks somewhere of “the perfection of child-like imagination, the power of making everything out of nothing”. “The child,” he adds, "does not make a pet of a mechanical mouse that runs about the floor.... The child falls in love with a quiet thing—with an ugly one—nay, it may be with one to us totally devoid of meaning. The _besoin de croire_ precedes the _besoin d’aimer_."

The quotation brings us to the focus where the rays of childish imagination seem to converge, the transformation of toys.

The fact that children make living things out of their toy horses, dogs and the rest, is known to every observer of their ways. To the natural unsceptical eye the boy on his rudely carved “gee-gee” slashing the dull flank with all a boy’s glee, looks as if he were realising the joy of actual riding, as if he were possessed with the fancy that the stiff least organic-looking of structures which he strides is a very horse.

The liveliness of this realising imagination is seen in the extraordinary poverty and meagreness of the toys which to their happy possessors are wholly satisfying. Here is a pretty picture of child’s play from a German writer:—

There sits a little charming master of three years before his small table busied for a whole hour in a fanciful game with shells. He has three so-called snake-heads in his domain; a large one and two smaller ones: this means two calves and a cow. In a tiny tin dish the little farmer has put all kinds of petals, that is the fodder for his numerous and fine cattle.... When the play has lasted a time the fodder-dish transforms itself into a heavy waggon with hay: the little shells now become little horses, and are put to the shafts to pull the terrible load.

The doll takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. It is human and satisfies higher instincts and emotions. As the French poet says, the little girl—

Rêve el nom de mère en berçant sa poupée.[26]

Footnote 26:

Goltz, _Buch der Kindheit_, pp. 4, 5.

I read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only: but boys, though they often prefer india-rubber horses and other animals, not infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and are hardly less devoted than girls. Endless is the variety of _rôle_ assigned to the doll as to the tiny shell in our last picture of play. The doll is the all-important comrade in that _solitude à deux_ of which the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs. Burnett tells us that sitting holding her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling adventures. At another time when she wanted to act an Indian chief the doll just as obediently took up the part of squaw.

Very humanely, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her pet, even though, as George Sand reminds us, there come moments of rage and battering.[27] A little boy of two and a half years asked his mother one day: “Will you give me all my picture-books to show dolly? I don’t know which he will like best.” He then pointed to each and looked at the doll’s face for the answer. He made believe that it selected one, and then gravely showed it all the pictures, saying: “Look here, dolly!” and carefully explaining them.

Footnote 27:

See the study of George Sand’s childhood below, chap. xii.

The doll illustrates the childish attitude towards all toys, the impulse to take them into the innermost and warmest circle of personal intimacy, to make them a living part of himself. A child’s language, as we shall see later, points to an early identification of self with belongings. The ‘me’ and the ‘my’ are the same, or nearly the same, to a mite of three. This impulse to attach the doll to self, or to embrace it within the self-consciousness or self-feeling, shows itself in odd ways. In the grown-up child, Laura Bridgman, it took the form of putting a bandage like her own over her doll’s eyes. This resembles a case of a girl of six, who when recovering from measles was observed to be busily occupied with her dolls, each of which she painted over with bright red spots. The dolly must do all, and be all that I am: so the child in his warm attachment seems to argue. This feeling of oneness is strengthened by that of exclusive possession, the sense that the child himself is the only one who really knows dolly, can hear her cry when she cries and so forth.[28] It is another manifestation of the same feeling of intimacy and solidarity when a child insists on dolly’s being treated by others as courteously as himself. Children will often expect the mother or nurse to kiss and say good-night to their pet or pets—for their hearts are capacious—when she says good-night to themselves.

Footnote 28:

_Cf._ Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’enfant_, p. 28.

Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have clearest evidence of play-illusion. The lively imagination endows the inert wooden thing with the warmth of life and love. How large a part is played here by the alchemist, fancy, is known to all observers of children’s playthings. The faith and the devotion often seem to increase as the first meretricious charms, the warm tints of the cheek and the lips, the well-shaped nose, the dainty clothes, prematurely fade, and the lovely toy which once kept groups of hungry-looking children gazing long at the shop-window, is reduced to the naked essence of a doll. A child’s constancy to his doll when thus stript of exterior charms and degraded to the lowest social stratum of dolldom is one of the sweetest and most humorous things in child-life.

And then what rude unpromising things are adopted as doll-pets. Mrs. Burnett tells us she once saw a dirty mite sitting on a step in a squalid London street, cuddling warmly a little bundle of hay tied round the middle by a string. Here, surely, the _besoin d’aimer_ was little if anything behind the _besoin de croire_.