PART I
_PLAYFUL EXPERIMENTATION_
I. PLAYFUL ACTIVITY OF THE SENSORY APPARATUS
1. _Sensations of Contact_
The newborn infant is susceptible to touch sensations. Movements and loud cries can be induced directly after it has for the first time become quiet, by pinching the skin or slapping the thigh.[9] Experiments with the hands and mouth are most satisfactory, as these organs are extremely sensitive from the first. During its first week the child makes many purely automatic motions with its hands, and frequently touches its face. When contact is had in this way with the lips, they react with gentle sucking movements, and later follows the playful sucking of the fingers so common among children. It is, of course, difficult to say when such movements are conscious or when they are the result of taste stimuli.[10] According to Perez, a two-months-old babe enjoys being stroked softly, and from that moment it is possible that it may seek, by its own movements, to provide touch stimuli for itself. Here play begins. “Touch now controls. At three months the child begins to reach out for the purpose of grasping with his hand; he handles like an amateur connoisseur, and the tendency to seek and to test muscular sensations develops in him from day to day.”[11]
_a._ We will first notice grasping with the hand as it is connected with taste stimuli. The merely instinctive movements of the first few days are multiplied and fixed, by means of inherited adaptation, progressively from the beginning of the second quarter year. The child begins by handling every object which comes within his reach, even his own body, and especially his feet, and one hand with the other.[12] In all this not only the motor element, of which we will speak later, but also the sensor stimulus becomes an object of interest, as Preyer’s observation shows. “In the eighteenth week, whenever the effort to grasp was unsuccessful its fingers were attentively regarded. Evidently the child expected the sensation of contact, and when it was not forthcoming wondered at the absence of the feeling.”[13] This practice in grasping promotes the opposition of the thumb, which first appears toward the end of the first quarter, and from that time the refinement of the sense of contact progresses rapidly. At eight months Strümpell’s little daughter took great pleasure in picking up very small objects, like bread crumbs or pearls.[14] This illustrates the familiar fact that play leads up from what is easy to more difficult tasks, since only deliberate conquest can produce the feeling of pleasure in success. At about this time, too, the child’s explorations of its own body are extended, and their conclusions confirmed by the recognition of constant local signs. “As soon as she discovered her ear,” says Strümpell of his now ten-months-old daughter, “she seized upon it as if she wished to tear it off.” In her third year Marie G—— found on the back of her ear two little projections of cartilage, which she examined with the greatest interest, calling them balls, and wanting everybody to feel them. The nose, too, is repeatedly investigated. Although it is seldom large enough to be grasped, still, as Stanley Hall says, it is handled with unmistakable signs of curiosity, and often pulled or rubbed “in an investigating way.”[15]
The value of the sense of touch for the earliest mental development is testified to by the fact that the child, like doubting Thomas, trusts more to it than to his sight. Sikorski says: “At tea I turn to my eleven-months baby, point to the cracker jar, which she knows, and ask her to give me one. I open the empty jar and the child looks in, but, not satisfied with that, sticks her hand in and explores. The evidence of her eyes does not convince her of the absence of what she wants.”[16]
In Wolfdietrich one verse runs:
“Die Augen in ihren (der Wölfe) Häuptern, die brannten wie ein Licht, Der Knabe war noch thöricht und zagt vor Feinden nicht. Es ging zu einem jeden und griff ihm mit der Hand, Wo er die lichten Augen in ihren Köpfen fand.”[17]
Older children lose the habit of playful investigation quite as little as any of the other manifestations of experimentation, even when the sensations encountered are not particularly agreeable. Richard Wagner liked to handle satin, and Sacher Masoch delighted in soft fur. In later life as well, Perez continues, all the senses strive for satisfaction; when the adult is not forced by necessity to put all his faculties at the service of “attention utile” he becomes a child again. He easily falls back into the habit of gazing instead of looking, of listening instead of hearing, of handling instead of touching, of moving about merely for the sake of sensations agreeable or even indifferent which are produced by these automatic acts.[18] We all know how hard it is for school children to keep their hands still during recitation. “I knew a little girl,” says Compayré, “who would undertake to recite only on condition that she be allowed to use her fingers at the same time, and she would sew and thread her needle while she was spelling.”[19] The knitting of women while they listen is perhaps of the same nature. Wölfflin remarks: “We all know that many people, especially students, in order to think clearly need a sharp-pointed pencil, which they pass back and forth through the fingers, sharpening their wits by the sensation of contact.”[20] Then, too, there are the innumerable toying movements of adults, such as rolling bread crumbs and the like, all of which serves to introduce a short ethnological digression. “In the year 1881,” relates the brilliant W. Joest, “when I was travelling through Siberia, ... I noticed that many of the men, requiring some occupation for their nervous hands during leisure hours, played absently with walnuts, which had become highly polished from constant use.” He saw stones, brass and iron balls, and the Turkish _tespi_, whose original use is devotional, employed for the same purpose; indeed, Levantines, who are not Mohammedans, often regard these latter as special instruments of gaming and vice.[21]
Carrying a walking-stick is another playful satisfaction in which the hand’s sensation of contact has a part, while the lead pencil, small as it is, will sometimes satisfy the demand for “something in the hand.” This is a genuine craving, which betrays itself in all sorts of awkward movements if we try to deny its indulgence. Carrying a cane is a remarkably widespread custom, and some think that the very small stone hatchets so common in ethnological museums as relics of a prehistoric time were used as cane handles in the stone age. Joest says, in the article cited above, that walking-sticks are used in millions of forms, on every continent and island of our earth. The naked Kaffir uses a slender, fragile cane of unusual length, and, according to P. Reichard,[22] his ideal of peace and prosperity is embodied in “going to walk with a cane,” since this implies freedom from the necessity of bearing arms. I close this digression with an instance which borders on the pathological. Sheridan was waiting for the celebrated Samuel Johnson, well known to be eccentric, to dine with him, and saw the doctor approaching from a distance, “walking along with a peculiar solemnity of deportment and an awkward sort of measured step. At that time the broad flagging at each side of the streets was not universally adopted, and stone posts were in use to prevent the annoying of carriages. Upon every post, as he passed along, I could observe he deliberately laid his hand, but, missing one of them, when he had got at some distance he seemed suddenly to recollect himself, and, immediately returning back, carefully performed the accustomed ceremony and resumed his former course, not omitting one till he gained the crossing. This, Mr. Sheridan assured me, however odd it might appear, was his constant practice.”[23]
_b._ The mouth of an infant is, of course, very sensitive to touch stimuli, and the lips and tongue are especially so. When Preyer put the end of an ivory pencil into the mouth of a child whose head only was born as yet, it began to suck, opened its eyes and seemed, to judge from its countenance, “to be very agreeably affected.”[24] It happens very soon that automatic arm movements accidentally bring the fingers near the mouth, and such automatic sucking results. From it the familiar habit of thumb sucking is formed, as well as the practice of carrying every possible object to the mouth. “Your finger, a scrap of cloth, a bottle, fruit, flowers, insects, vases, objects large and small, attractive or repulsive, all seek the same goal.”[25] I think Compayré is right when he says that it is not merely a case of duped appetite which Preyer points out. “The child enjoys the mere contact; it gives him pleasure to test with his lips everything that offers an occasion for the use of his nerves and muscles.”[26] We find that in later life many persons like to play about the lips with fingers, penholder, etc. Many, too, who have outgrown the fascinations of thumb sucking, still lay a finger lightly on the lips when going to sleep or when half awake.[27] The pleasure derived from smoking is due perhaps more than we realize to this instinct, and the common habit of holding in the mouth a broken twig, a leaf, a stalk of grass or hay, so far as it is not practice in chewing, belongs here. In K. E. Edler’s romance, Die neue Herrin (Berlin, 1897, p. 137), portraits of the extinct species of young lady are described. “In this one the lips pressed a cigarette, while in other pictures a rose stalk, the head of a riding crop, or some other object, not excluding her own dainty finger, was held against them, showing that in those days the mouth must have something to do as well as the hands, feet, eyes, and all the rest of the body.”
Finally, it must be remembered that much of the enjoyment of delicate food is due to the sense of contact. When certain viands are consumed without hunger, because “they slip down so easily,” we have play with touch sensations. This has something to do with the popularity of oysters and of effervescing drinks. “It tastes like your foot’s asleep,” said a small maiden on being allowed to taste something of the kind—a proof of the close connection with touch stimuli.
A few words may suffice in regard to playful use of touch sensations in other parts of the body. We have seen that an infant enjoys being softly stroked, and we may assume that a soft bed is appreciated early in life. The question is, whether the child or the adult voluntarily produces such sensations for the sake of the pleasure they afford. Perhaps this is why we like to roll about on a soft bed, and more unmistakably playful is the fondness of children for throwing themselves repeatedly into a well-filled feather bed or on piles of hay, to feel themselves sink into the elastic mass. Violent contact is indulged in in many dances. In the Siederstanz, which I myself learned in the Gymnasium, the thighs were beaten with the hands. Somewhat similar, but decidedly more violent, is the Haxenschlagen of the Bavarian dances, and the ancients practised the ῥαθαπυγίζειν, an alternate striking of the foot soles on the back. A verse is preserved, written in praise of a Spartan maiden who succeeded in keeping this up longer than any one else—one thousand times.[28]
Water affords delightful sensations of touch; in the bath, of course, enjoyment of the movements and temperature is more conspicuous, but the soothing gentleness of the moist element is not to be despised. For confirmation I will cite Mörike’s beautiful verses:
“O Fluss, mein Fluss im Morgenstrahl! Empfange nun, empfange Den sehnsuchtvollen Leib einmal Und küsse Brust und Wange! Er fühlt mir schon her auf die Brust, Er kühlt mit Liebesschauerlust Und jaucbzendem Gesange.
“Es schlüpft der goldne Sonnenschein In Tropfen an mir wider. Die Woge wieget aus und ein Die hingegebnen Glieder; Die Arme hab’ ich ausgespannt, Sie kommt auf mich herzugerannt, Sie fasst und lässt mich wieder.”
“O stream, my stream in the morning beam! Receive me now, receive Me thrilling, longing as I am, And kiss my breast and cheek; I feel already in my breast The cooling, soothing influence Of fresh, delicious showers And joyous, rippling song.
“The golden sunshine rains on me In glittering drops. Soft waves Caress my yielding limbs, My outstretched arms receive them As they hasten up to clasp And then release me.”
Here, as in all specialized pleasures, intensive emotion betrays itself. In sea bathing the principal stimulus is found in the sharp blow from the waves as they break repeatedly over one. Last of all, we notice the sensation of movement in the air. We take off our hats to let the wind play with our hair, and fanning is not always indulged in merely for the sake of cooling off, but also for the sake of the touch stimuli excited by the soft contact with waves of air.
2. _Sensations of Temperature_
There is a scarcity of material under this head, since the occasions to produce such sensations, except for the serious purposes of cooling or warming ourselves, are comparatively rare. Among the few that may safely be called playful, the most prominent is the seeking for strong stimuli for their very intensities’ sake, and because like all powerful excitation, they give us the feeling of “heightened reality” (Lessing). When we court the stinging cold of a winter day, or sit in spring sunshine to get “baked through for once,”[29] we are as much playing, I think, as when watching rippling water, or gazing at heaven’s blue dome.[30] Cool air has the same refreshing effect as a cold bath, while even in a warm bath the pleasantness of the temperature sensation is a satisfaction quite apart from its cleansing and sanitary effects, and most bathers will stretch themselves out to enjoy it for a little while after soap and sponge have done their duty. Among the refinements of the sense of taste, too, the stimulus of heat and cold is conspicuous, as ices and peppermint, hot grog, spices, and spirits witness.
3. _Sensations of Taste_
Brevity of treatment is accorded to this class of sensations as well, though in this case from no lack of data.
Kussmaul’s investigations[31] show that, as a rule, the child prefers sweets from its birth, and will reject anything bitter, sour, or salt, although, until the later developed sense of smell is perfected, it is incapable of more delicate taste distinctions.[32] On the whole, we find that with children such distinctions are less varied than among adults, the sweet of candy and the acid of fruits furnishing the staple material for their playful use of the sense. It is true that the pleasure which they derive from these is extreme. I well remember what unheard-of quantities of these viands were consumed at our birthday _fêtes_ at school in Heidelberg, by children from six to nine years of age, not at all because they were hungry, but from mere pleasure in the taste. For we find even in children that enjoyment of eating is no more confined to the satisfaction of hunger than is æsthetic pleasure limited to the contemplation of the beautiful. When Marie G—— was barely three years old she displayed an unmistakable preference for piquant flavours; even those which were evidently disagreeable in themselves she enjoyed, trying them again and again for the sake of the stimulus they afforded—a taste which is much more common among adults than with children.
A review of the pleasures and practices of the table at various periods and among various peoples is an alluring but here impracticable undertaking. Let it suffice to cite one example from the ancients, that most celebrated of all descriptions of revelry at the board, the cœna Trimalchionis of Petronius, which W. A. Becker has made use of in his Gallus. The following will serve as a characteristic ethnological instance of the enjoyment of flavours, which are, to put it mildly, decidedly equivocal. In Java the durian tree bears green prickly fruit, about the size of cocoanuts and with a flavour which, according to Wallace, furnishes a new sensation well worth journeying to the Orient for. The smell of it is something frightful—a cross between musk and garlic, with suggestions of carrion and “overripe” cheese. The taste is aromatic, satisfying, and nutty, like a combination of cream cheese, onion sauce, and burnt sherry. This fruit is rigidly excluded from the hotels, as its odour would instantaneously pervade every room, but it is sought elsewhere by the guests and eaten with avidity. Semon says of it: “This fruit, like our strong, rich cheeses, is detested by those who are not fond of it.”[33] What various associations are connected with the pleasures of the palate is shown by the _epitheta ornantia_ of a wine list, such as strong, fiery, soft, fresh, lovely, sharp, elegant, hard, spicy, fruity, and smooth. Huysmans, in his novel A Rebours, gives a pathological example of amusement derived from taste association in the following passage. After describing the life of the nervously diseased Des Esseintes, he goes on: “In his dining room was a closet containing miniature casks on dainty sandalwood stands, each one fitted with a silver cock. Des Esseintes called this collection his mouth organ. A rod connected all the cocks, and they could be turned with a single movement answering to the pressure of a knob concealed in the woodwork, filling all the little glasses at once. The organ was standing open, the register with the inscriptions of flûte, cor, voix céleste, etc., displayed, and all was ready for use. Des Esseintes sipped here and there a few drops, playing an inner symphony and deriving from the sensations of his palate pleasure like that produced on the ear by music.”
4. _Sensations of Smell_
The ability to distinguish the character of odours seems to be a later development than taste differentiation. At least this is the case with regard to the enjoyment of agreeable smells. Among children of various ages experimented on by Perez, one of ten months showed some appreciation of the perfume of a rose,[34] but most children are probably first rendered susceptible to pleasure from scents by their association with flavours. Girls, however, seem to enjoy sweet smells as such more than boys do, though M. Guyan relates that he recalls vividly the _émotion penetrante_ which he experienced on inhaling for the first time the perfume of a lily.[35]
With reference to adults, the same writer may be cited: “In spite of its relative incompleteness, the sense of smell has much to do with our enjoyment of landscape, whether actually viewed or vividly portrayed. No portrayal of Italy is complete without the softened atmosphere which recalls the perfume of its oranges, nor of Brittany or Gascony without the crisp sea air which Victor Hugo has so justly celebrated, nor of pine forests without suggestions of its aroma.” “The passion for smoking,” says Pilo (I give this to show how complicated our apparently simple enjoyments may be), “is so general because almost all the senses are flattered impartially by it; visceral, muscular, and taste sensations are involved in the use of the lungs which it calls for, the lips, tongue, teeth, and salivary glands through feelings of temperature; the senses of taste and smell through the piquant, aromatic flavour; hearing, in a very direct and intimate way, through the crackling of the leaves and the rhythmic inhaling and exhaling of the breath; and, finally, the sense of sight in gazing at the glowing cigar and soft, gray ashes and curling smoke which winds and glides upward in a fantastic spiral; while the brain, under the soothing influence of the narcotic, enjoys a repose enlivened by dreams and visions.”[36] Complete as this description appears, it yet misses one point—namely, the sucking movements which, from the recollections of the earliest months of life, we associate with pleasurable feeling. We may find the Des Esseintes of Huysmans’s romance useful once more. “Wishing now to enjoy a beautiful and varied landscape, he began to play full, sonorous chords, which at once called up before the vision a perspective of boundless prairie lands. By means of his vaporizer, the room was filled with an essence skilfully compounded by an artist hand and well deserving of its name—Extract of the Flowery Plain.... Having completed his background, which now stretched itself before his closed eyes in bold lines, he breathed over it all a light spray of essences, ... such as powdered and painted ladies use—stephanotis, ayapapa, opoponax, chypre, champaka, sarkanthus—and added a suspicion of lilac, to lend to this artificial life a touch of natural bloom and warmth of genuine sunshine. Soon, however, he threw open a ventilator, and allowed these waves of heavy odour to pass out, retaining only the fragrance of the fields, whose accent and rhythmical recurrence emphasized the harmony like a _ritornelle_ in poetry. The ladies vanished instantly, the landscape alone remained; after an interval, low roofs appeared along the horizon with tall chimneys silhouetted against the sky, an odour of chemicals and of factory smoke was borne on the breeze his fans now produced, yet Nature’s sweet perfumes penetrated even this heavily weighted atmosphere.”
5. _Sensations of Hearing_[37]
In the consideration of this important sphere of play activity we encounter one of the special problems of our subject. Since Darwin’s time it has been customary to explain the art of tone and the musical element in poetry as an effect of sexual selection. But while I am convinced that these arts do on one side bear the very closest relation to sexual life, yet I believe that Spencer is right in warning us that the exclusive reference of such phenomena to sexual selection is hardly warranted. The courtship arts of birds, it is true, are sufficiently striking, yet we must remember, aside from the fact that prominent investigators have raised serious objections to the application of the theory even to them, that birds have but a distant kinship to man. As regards our closer relatives in the animal world, Darwin himself says, “With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.”[38] And among mammals, again, monkeys are not distinguished by any special arts of courtship. The acoustic phenomena cited by Darwin are summed up in the cry of the howling ape and the musical notes of the species of Gibbon from Borneo and the Sumatran ape described by Selenka.[39] Of other such arts, only one is noteworthy in monkeys as being also practised by man, and even that not directly in connection with love-making—namely, the disposition to display the back. It has not yet been proved that the monkey’s wonderful dexterity serves him especially in courtship. The supposition has much in its favour, it is true, but finds little support from what we know of his sexual life. Brehm covers the ground pretty well when he says, “Knightly courtesy serves him little with the weaker sex; he must take by force the rewards of love.” Ethnology shows us, too, that an exclusive or even a preferential reference of music and poetry to sexuality can not be assumed among primitive races. Having thus stated the doubts in advance, it may be interesting to glance once more over the psychology of play, with a view to discovering which arts and æsthetic pleasures may have arisen independently of sex. In such a review of hearing plays we are likely to find much which tends to expand and also to limit the Darwinian theory—nothing which will refute it.
Hearing plays may serve merely as a means for the satisfaction of acoustic impulses, or to give necessary exercise to motor apparatus, and, while this whole inquiry can not be said to penetrate further than to the antechamber of æsthetic perception and artistic production, an obvious distinction at once becomes apparent—namely, that between the receptive or hearing function and the production of sounds and tones. From the suckling’s delight in his own guttural gurglings to the most refined enjoyment of a concert-goer, from the uncouth efforts of the small child to produce all sorts of sounds, to the creative impulse which controls the musical genius, there is, in the light of history, a progressive and consistent development.
(_a_) Receptive Sound-Play
Pleasure in listening to tones and noises shows itself remarkably early, although, as is well known, the child is born deaf. Infants but two or three days old will stop crying in response to a loud whistle, and Perez has noted signs of enjoyment of vocal and instrumental music during the first month. Preyer reports of the seventh and eighth weeks: “There seems to be a marked sensitiveness to tone, and perhaps to melody as well, for an expression of the most lively satisfaction is discernible on the child’s face when its mother soothes it with lullabys softly sung. Even when it is crying from hunger a gentle sing-song will cause a cessation such as spoken words can not effect. In the eighth week the baby heard music for the first time—that is, piano playing. Unusual intentness of expression appeared in his eyes, while vigorous movements of his arms and legs and laughter at every loud note testified to his satisfaction in this new sensation. The higher and softer notes, however, made no such impression.”[40] The little boy in Sully’s Extracts from a Father’s Diary manifested displeasure at first on hearing piano playing, but soon became reconciled to it, and his mother noticed that while his father was playing the child became heavier in her lap, “as if all his muscles were relaxed in a delicious self-abandonment.”[41] Perez relates of a child six months old, on a visit to two aunts: “As the first of the young women began to sing he listened with evident delight, and when the other one joined in with a rich and melodious voice the child turned toward her, his face expressing the utmost pleasure, mingled with wonder and astonishment.”[42] This seems to indicate that agreeable tones and variety of movement are at first more appreciated than is the actual beauty of the melody. According to Gurney, appreciation of melody as such first appears in the fourth or fifth year.[43] It is otherwise with rhythm. Just as ethnology shows us that from the first inception of music rhythm was more prominent than melody, so it seems that the child too, as a rule, is sensitive to rhythmical cadence even when the beauty of melody is lost upon him. The regular ticking of a watch excites lively interest in the merest infant. Sigismund says: “I have often seen three- and four-year-old children skip about when they heard enlivening band music, as if they wished to catch the time of the rhythmic movement, an impulse which indeed affects adults as well,[44] as all well know.” Here we have inner imitation, the central fact of æsthetic enjoyment, displayed by the veriest babes. Children show their enjoyment of rhythm, too, in their preference for strongly accented poetry.[45] Even half-grown boys and girls take but little note of sense, compared with the interest which they bestow on rhythm and rhyme. That a normally endowed girl could interpret the words of a poem, Singing on its Way to the Sea, as Singing on its Waiter, etc., without having her curiosity aroused, can only be explained by this fact.[46] Is it not a frequent experience of full-grown men to be suddenly struck with the profound truth hidden in some epigrammatic form of expression whose euphony has a hundred times delighted them? They have actually failed up to that time to grasp the clear, logical meaning of the verse or passage. Indifference to the words of their songs is most marked among primitive peoples, while with children an instinctive demand for some employment of their organs of hearing has much to do with their pleasure in harmony and rhythm. The following facts justify this statement: The disposition toward acoustic expression is particularly susceptible to satisfaction from sensuously agreeable stimuli, such as are responsive to harmony, melody and rhythm, partly on known and partly on unknown grounds. Here Fechner’s principle of co-operation is applicable—namely, that two pleasure-exciting causes working together produce a result which is greater than their sum—and is so strong, in fact, as to extend the sphere of sound-play far beyond that of the sensuously agreeable. Absolute silence makes us uncomfortable, and, when it is lasting, conveys to the mind a special quality of emotion, as in optics there is a positive feeling of blackness. So it happens that we take pleasure in noise as such even when it is not agreeable. This applies especially to children. “Les bruits choquants, aigus, glappissants, grondant,” says Perez, “ne leur sont pas désagréable de la même manière qu-aux grandes personnes.” Marie G—— manifested in her third year the liveliest joy in the grinding and squeaking of an iron ring in her swing. To small boys it is a treat to hear a teamster crack his whip. My brother-in-law when a boy cherished for years the ambition to make all the electric clocks in our house chime in concert with a great musical clock. A sense of discomfort is produced sooner, however, by a variety of discordant sounds to which we are passively listening, than when the din is self-produced—a distinction which extends into the domain of art, as testifies many a piano virtuoso.
Among adults it is probably true that sound-play is either entirely or in part connected with the pleasure we derive from ringing and resonance, subject to much the same limitations as we have applied to children. Underlying it all we find, though it is not always easily recognisable, enjoyment of the stimulus as such. I would instance the cheery crackling of flames in a fireplace, the _frou-frou_ of silken garments, the singing of caged birds, the sound of wind, howling of storms, rolling of thunder, rustling of leaves, splashing of brooks, seething of waves, etc. Most of these, it is true, contain elements of intellectual pleasure as well, and so through association link themselves to genuine æsthetic enjoyments. Yet the satisfaction in mere sound as such is also unmistakably present, being most evident perhaps where strong stimuli are involved, since these have a directly exciting effect, while weaker ones, on the contrary, are soothing. Edler’s romance, Die neue Herrin, gives a good instance of this emotional sensibility abnormally exaggerated. “Thomasine was exactly like a child in her dread of silence, and spared no effort to enjoy pleasant sounds, whether produced by herself or from other sources.... When her birds were silent she resorted to the music room, with its musical box and two grand pianos.” This seems to confirm the idea that mere desire for sound as such is an important element in the attention given to music. The art of primitive races illustrates this as well as our own marches, dances, etc. Gurney distinguishes two methods of listening to music: the one accompanied by intelligent appreciation, the other “the indefinite way of hearing music,” which is only cognizant of the agreeable jingle or harmony. I think there is a form of the satisfaction still more crude; when we note the indifference of many habitual concert-goers to fine chamber music we must infer that the power of stimulus is the principal source of their apparently absorbed enjoyment. Gurney, too, seems to recognise this elementary factor when he says: “While it is natural to consider as unmusical those persons in whom a musical ear is lacking or is only imperfectly developed, and who therefore can not at all reproduce or perhaps recognise melodies, such persons often derive extreme pleasure of a vague kind from fine sound, more especially when it rushes through the ear in large masses.”[47]
Not to penetrate too far into the realm of æsthetics, we will attempt to answer but two of its more obvious questions, which, however, are by no means simple ones. Whence is derived the strong emotional effect (1) of rhythm and (2) of melody? (Some thoughts on the acoustic effects of poetry will be presented in the next section.) Rhythm may be regarded as the most salient quality of music, and seems to have antedated melody considerably among primitive peoples. While nothing is easier than to recognise the pleasure it affords, the derivation of its exciting effect on the emotions is most difficult to trace. Widely diverse theories have been advanced in the various attempts to solve this riddle. Rhythm is a conspicuous instance of the unity in variety which characterizes beauty. It satisfies this intellect, and is calculated to rivet the attention by exciting expectation. It answers to our own organization; the step, the heart-beat, breathing, the natural physical processes, are all rhythmic, as well as the alternation of waste and repair in the nervous system. But while these facts undoubtedly contribute to our enjoyment of rhythm, they can hardly account adequately for its intense emotional effects.
At this point the Darwinist comes to the rescue, and says that its employment in courtship sufficiently explains these effects, taking into account their hereditary association. He dwells on the sexual excitation which quivers in the purest enjoyment of music, and is “likely to excite in us in a vague and indefinite manner the strong emotions of a long-past age.”[48] Far be it from me to discard this hypothesis hastily, particularly as I have no better one to offer, but since it appears to afford but a meagre chance of solving the problem, we may venture to seek enlightenment in another supposition. It is to be found in Souriau’s system of æsthetics, which in my opinion is not yet fully appreciated. As Nietzsche has said, “As in art, so with any æsthetic fact or appearance, a physiological condition of transport is essential,”[49] so, too, Souriau insists that art employs every possible means to induce in us a semi-trance or hypnotic state, and through it renders us approachable to a degree which would be impossible when we are normally alert.[50]
Now, rhythm is to the last degree such a transporting agency, owing to its strong hold on the attention. Weinhold and Heidenhain have induced hypnosis by means of the ticking of a watch, and in so doing have only employed an agency which has similar uses the world over. Just as most of the inhabitants of the earth have learned the use of narcotics, so too are they eager to adapt such an intoxicant as rhythm proves to be.[51]
We may read numberless statements of hypnotic conditions being turned to account for religious and magical ends. Next to measured movements of one’s own body, we find that listening to rhythmic sounds and the monotonous repetition of incantations is the surest key to this state of dreamy consciousness.[52] In Salvation Army methods the catchy, swinging songs are an indispensable means of eliciting the ecstatic condition, though, through the power of auto-suggestion, the expectation of the state is also strongly influential. It is the singing, however, as Souriau says, which throws the hearer into a state of mild hypnosis and renders him accessible to any suggestion.[53] When the end in view is a religious one, the ecstatic subject sees all sorts of visions, and can swear to the appearance of saints or gods. When the measure is martial in its suggestions, the subject becomes belligerent; when it excites sexual feeling, he responds in that direction; in short, his soul, being entirely under the influence of the hypnotist, will reflect, and involuntarily respond to, every suggestion. We see, then, that these intense emotional effects are only in part attributable to sound as such; rhythm is not entirely responsible for them, but figures rather as a contingent cause through which suitable suggestions act as the immediate cause of emotional disturbances. “Hypnotism,” says Souriau, “is but a means, never an end. Art employs this means the better to control our minds and keep our imagination in the limits prescribed by her suggestions. What we owe to her is not sleep, but the dream.”[54]
This view seems to correspond with the facts. When we drum a familiar air with the fingers the regular time-beat is not at all stirring, indeed it is sometimes quite the contrary. When, however, agreeable or interesting associations are connected with it the rhythm at once induces in us a condition of the utmost susceptibility to suggestion. Any change in intensity or time then calls forth our capacity for “embodiment” (_Einfühlung_) or inner imitation in such force and completeness as would be altogether unattainable without this deep-seated propensity of ours for measured rhythm. In many cities it is customary, when fire breaks out, to ring a church bell in quicker time than its usual stroke, and by reason of the indirect factor—namely, their significance as a warning—the uniform sounds produce the most profound effect on æsthetically sensitive persons. Even those who would be unaffected by the announcement that another part of the city was in flames are deeply moved on hearing the tolling bell. The harmless tones become appalling. They seem to proclaim the destruction of the world, and the imagination dwells on the idea that nothing will be left in existence but these terrific, all-pervading waves of sound. The intense feeling aroused by drum-beats is similar to this. Since every loud sound is calculated to arouse our involuntary attention, a rhythmical succession of loud sounds irresistibly holds our consciousness, and, in the case of martial or festive music, association aids in casting the spell and, with the acoustic pulsations, forms a strong combination to which for the moment our whole being is subjected.
It is, however, when rhythm develops into melody that we experience the utmost force of its suggestive power.[55] It is interesting to see how well Hanslick describes this preliminary condition of musical enjoyment—this trance-like state—only to censure it. “The elements of music, sound, and movement hold many emotional music lovers willing captives. It is surprising how large the number is of those who hear, or rather feel, music in this way. Since they are susceptible only to what is elementary, they attain but a vague supersensuous and yet sensuous excitement, answering to the commonplace character of the music which appeals to them. Lounging half asleep in the boxes, they yield themselves to the swing of the melody without taking note of the exalted passages which may swell, yearn, jubilate, and throb with increasing appeal. These people, sitting in a state of undefined ecstasy, form the body of ‘the appreciative public,’ and do more than any other class to discredit what is best in music. Science can now supply these hearers who are void of spirituality and seek only the effects of rhythm in music with what they need, by means of an agency which far surpasses art in this effect—namely, chloroform. It will plunge the whole organism into a lethargy pervaded by lovely dreams, and, without the vulgarity of drinking, will produce an intoxication which is not unlike its effect.”[56] Hanslick is quite right in one respect: the trance condition as such is not confined to musical enjoyment; but he overlooks what Nietzsche makes so clear, that it is an indispensable physiological condition of the most intense form of æsthetic pleasure. His position is more that of the critic than that of the pleasure seeker. His saying that “the laity ‘feel’ music most and the cultivated artist least” shows this. First and foremost to him is his “intellectual satisfaction in following and anticipating the motive of the composition, in being confirmed in his judgment here or agreeably disappointed there.”[57] The element of æsthetic enjoyment in this I have characterized, in my Einleitung in die Aesthetik (p. 187), as internal imitative creation. But the purest, highest, and most spontaneous pleasure is that in which we have no thought for the artist, but yield ourselves whole-heartedly to the beautiful object. Here is the essence of the problem, and here the condition of transport becomes most prominent, though it is never entirely wanting, even in the outer circles of æsthetics, where it becomes comparatively unimportant, as, for instance, in the satisfaction afforded us by the happy arrangement of the heads of a discourse.
In trying to find out just what it is that rhythm suggests to us in simple tones that succeed one another at agreeable intervals we may advance the hypothesis—to use a somewhat strained expression—namely, that it makes the impression of a dancing voice. By this I mean that in the enjoyment of melody there is a mental fusion of two kinds of association, one the analogue of pleasing movement in space, and the other the analogue of vocal expression of mental and emotional processes. The two are so incorporated as to produce a new entity which, as a whole, is unlike any other. The fact that we represent tone-beats by up-and-down motion in space has never been satisfactorily explained, although the greatest variety of reasons has been advanced.[58] Yet it is unquestionable that we do, and that the act is one of our most cherished mental recreations; to use Schopenhauer’s expression, nothing else produces the “idea of movement” in such purity and freedom as do tone-beats. A series of tones more or less rapid, says Siebeck, can adequately reproduce the rhythm of movement “without a visible physical basis, which, by reason of its relation to other associated images, would tend to destroy the impression of movement considered purely as such.”[59] On this, too, depends the extraordinary facility of tone movement, of which Köstlin says that it “glides, turns, twists, hops, leaps, jumps up and down, dances, bows, sways, climbs, quivers, blusters, and storms, all with equal ease, while in order to reproduce it in the physical world a man would have to dash himself to pieces or in some way become imponderable.”[60] All this goes to prove that our pleasure in the realization of movement is never more perfectly ministered to than in music. Spellbound by the magic of rhythm, our consciousness repeats, voluntarily and persistently, the varying dance of tones, and, freed from all incumbrances, floats blissfully in boundless space, like Musa in Keller’s dance legend.
But melody is more than a mere alternation of tone. It is also a kind of language, by means of which the soul’s deepest emotions seek expression. While it does suggest up-and-down motion in space, at the same time it stands for the audible expression of our mental life. It would be misleading to attempt to explain this illusion from simple analogies between speech and music, since it is itself primarily a mode of expression, and we involuntarily make known our feelings and desires by means of it; by such association of tone with voice the former comes to point for us to life and its manifestations. There are, however, many points of resemblance between melody and the verbal expression of feeling. Dubos has devoted some attention to this relation, and, among contemporary writers, Spencer has most clearly set forth the analogy. But he makes the mistake of applying it to the origin of music, rather than as an explanation of our enjoyment of it, and is decidedly at fault in the statement that music originated in passionate and excited speech.[61] It can attain reflection only by means of the changing time and stress of melodic and rhythmic movement, as well as the appropriation of the numerous sounds and intervals which are hidden in feeling speech, and which take effect on the listener. Yet even this statement must not be interpreted too literally. Just as scenery often owes its impressiveness to vague suggestions of human interest, just as thunder sounds like an angry voice without being an exact copy of it, so the analogy between music and speech may be very real without their becoming identical at any point. The song of birds will perhaps best illustrate my meaning. Why does the nightingale’s note seem plaintive and that of other birds cheerful or bold? Certainly not because we know the bird’s feelings, but because there is an indefinable likeness between our own vocal expression of emotion and the bird’s song, which, in spite of its vagueness, calls forth in us the most direct response. And it is exactly so in the other case. We can not expect to change an emotional declamation into the same kind of melody simply by fixing the pitch and regulating the intervals, for melody has its own laws, to which speech is not amenable. We see, then, that though the analogy is a real one and a constant, it must not be carried too far. How far variation of stress is concerned with emotional expression is interestingly shown in Wundt’s attempt to classify temperament on this basis:
———-—+—-——————-—-—-—+—-—-—-————— │ Strong. │ Weak. ———-—+—-——————-—-—-—+—-—-—-————— Fast │ Choleric. │ Sanguine. Slow │ Melancholic. │ Phlegmatic. ———-—+—-—-—-——————-—+—-—-—-—————
With regard to intervals, let any one attempt a mournful “O dear!” and a jubilant “All right!” in the major and minor thirds, and he will not remain in doubt for a moment as to which is the suitable one for each occasion. Gurney’s experiments with children resulted in the same emotional effects when the piano was very much out of tune as when it was correct,[62] and the attempt of Helmholtz to find a physical explanation signally failed. All these facts point to the independence of the musical interval.
In concluding, I repeat that these two analogies are capable of fusion, as my figure of “dancing voice” implies.[63] If we try, for instance, to determine what constitutes the masculine, almost harsh, quality of Bach’s melodies, we will find on inspection that his best arias have a variety of formal qualities of which it is difficult to say whether they pertain more to movement in space or to voice expression. There is pre-eminently a fulness of accent which imparts even to the weaker notes a certain impetus (_Béreíté dích Zîón_). Moreover, his propensity to begin with two strong accents directly contiguous (_Méin gläúbiges Heize_, _In Déine Hände_), which impart to the whole a massive character from the very first, as well as the many repetitions abruptly introduced in a different pitch, and the strongly accented final syllables where again two frequently come together; all these are characteristics which tell in two directions. Here is melody governed by the laws of harmony in its forceful, clear, and irresistibly progressive movement, as well as in the expression which it gives to a purely masculine personality, full of earnest purpose and sure of himself and his aims. Only by the fusion of these two lines of association do we get at the full significance of the piece.
(_b_) Productive Sound-Play
An embarrassing copiousness of material greets us when we turn to the subject of sounds and tones spontaneously produced. In them too we recognise the beginnings of, or rather the introduction to, art. Adherence to facts requires our classification to distinguish between vocal and instrumental music, and we will first consider voice practice and afterward the production of acoustic effects by means of other agencies, both in their playful aspects.
The child’s first voice practice consists in screaming. So far as it is a merely reflex expression of discomfort it does not concern us, but it is probable that the crying of children becomes practice for the organs of speech. Discomfort may still be its first occasion, but the continuation of the cry is playful. “L’enfant qui crie,” says Compayré, “a souvent plaiser à crier.”[64] Children of two and three years show this very plainly; the howl begun in earnest is often prolonged from playful experimentation.[65] And the same is probably true of the customary moaning wail of women over their dead. O. Ludwig says somewhere that a woman subdues pain when she can not escape it by means of the sensuous relief which she finds in noisy moaning.
More important than crying are the babbling, chattering, and gurgling of infants, which begin about the middle of the first three months. This instinctive tendency to motor discharge produces movements of the larynx, mouth, and tongue muscles, and the child that attains now to the voluntary production of tone is fairly launched in experimentation. Without this playful practice he could not become master of his voice, and the imperative impulse to imitation which is developed later would lack its most essential foundation. From among the numerous reports of the first efforts of infants in the direction of speech we will select Preyer’s very satisfactory observations: “At first, when the lall-monologue begins the mouth assumes an almost infinite variety of forms. The lips, the tongue, lower jaw, and larynx are all active, and more variously so than in later life; at the same time the breath is expelled loudly, so that now one, now another sound is accidentally produced. The child hears these new sounds, hears his own voice, and delights in making a noise as he enjoys moving his limbs in the bath.[66]... On the forty-third day I heard the first consonants. The child, being comfortably seated, gave utterance to numerous incoherent sounds, but at last said clearly _am-ma_. Of the vowels, only _a_ and _o_ could be distinguished then, but on the following day the baby astonished us by pronouncing the syllables _ta-hu_ with perfect clearness. On the forty-sixth day I heard _gö_, _örö_, and five days later _ara_. On the sixty-fifth day _a-omb_ sounded in his babbling, and on the seventy-first, at a time when he was most contented, the combination _ra-a-ao_. On the seventy-eighth day, with unmistakable signs of satisfaction, _habu_ was pronounced. At five months he said _ögö_, _ma-ö-ĕ_, _hӑ_, _ŏ_, _ho_, _ich_. The rare _i_ (English _e_) was clearer here than in the third month, and at about this time began the loud crowing as an expression of delight. The unusually loud breathing and the clearly voiced _h_ in connection with the labial _r_ in _brrr-hà_, are specially indicative of pleasure, as are also the _aja_, _örrgö ā-ā-i ŏā_ sounds which, toward the end of the first half year, a child lying comfortably, indulges in. To this list, too, should be added the constantly repeated _eu_ and _oeu_ of the French _heure_ and _cœur_, and the German modified vowels _ä_ and _ö_. It often happens that the mouth is partly or entirely closed by the various movements of the tongue, causing the imprisoned breath to seek any possible outlet and giving rise to many sounds that are not employed in our speech, such as a clearly sounded consonant between _b_ and _p_ or _b_ and _d_, and also the labial _brr_ and _m_, all of which evidently please the child. It is noteworthy that without exception these sounds are expiratory, and I have never known any attempt to produce similar inspiratory ones.[67] In the eleventh month the child began to whisper; he also produced strong, high, and full notes of varying tone, as if he were speaking in a language strange to us. In his monologue a vowel sound would be repeated, sometimes alone, sometimes in a syllable, as many as five times without a pause, but usually three or four times.[68] The mechanical repetition of the same syllable such as _papapa_, occurs oftener than alternation with another, as _pata_, and the child will frequently stop short when he notices in the midst of his complicated lip and tongue movements and the expansion and contraction of his mouth that such a variation of acoustic effects is being produced. He actually appears to take pleasure in systematically exercising himself in all sorts of symmetric and asymmetric mouth movements, both silently and vocally.”[69]
Not to prolong this section unduly, I devote only cursory notice to the various voice plays of older children and adults, which may be said to correspond with the lall-monologue of infants and give expression to delight by shouting, whistling, yelling, crowing, humming, smacking, clicking, and the like. An example from the ancients is the “stloppus”: “C’est un amusement qui consiste à enfler see joues et à les faire crever avec explosion en les frappant avec les mains.”[70]
Another example, which, however, distorts the idea of play and makes it border on the pathological, is given in Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, ... sometimes making his tongue play backward from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly, under his breath, _loo_, _too_, _too_; all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile. Generally, when he had concluded a period in the course of a dispute by which he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale.”[71]
Two specially interesting motives are operative in producing playful voice practice—namely, the stimulus of what is agreeable and the stimulus of difficulty—and these we will find introducing us to the formal side of poetry. The pleasurable stimulus here takes the form of enjoyment of the repetition of like and similar sounds of a particular stress. This pleasure in repetition is a remarkable thing from many points of view; on the motor side there is a tendency to use the original sound as a model for the new one (Baldwin’s circular reaction), while in listening to self-originated tones and sounds primary memory is employed, that lingering of what has been heard in the consciousness which makes it possible to secure harmony of the new note with the previous one. The rhythm which we have been investigating is a simple form of such repetition, and a child will enjoy it in poetry as much as in music. At about the beginning of the fourth year children are often observed to make the attempt to talk in measure and assume the rôle of the productive artist. In general, the result is a senseless succession of words and syllables arranged rhythmically.[72] Marie G—— frequently pretended to read such jingles to her dolls. The measure most popular with children seems to be the trochaic.[73] This partiality still earlier takes in whole groups of sounds, as the mechanically measured repetition of the lall-monologue bears witness. Perez gives two good examples. “A little girl,” he says, “repeated from morning till night, for fourteen days, _toro_, _toro_, _toro_, or else _rapapi_, _rapapi_, _rapapi_, and took great delight in the monotonous rhythm. Another child, nearly three years old, kept up these refrains in speaking or crying, and would take a great deal of trouble to use them in answering questions, although his parents made every effort to rid him of this vagary. For three months this little parrot continued to repeat in a loud voice the syllables, unintelligible to himself or any one else,[74] _tabillè_, _tabillè_, _tabillè_.” R. M. Meyer, who sees in the meaningless refrain the germ of poetry, will find in such extraordinary persistence a confirmation of his view.[75] It is difficult to say whether there is not an inherited tendency connected with courtship in the instinctive impulse toward the gratification of such motor and sensor apparatus as is involved in this.
Be that as it may, it is undeniable that the repetition of meaningless rhymes, as well as of reasonable words and passages, is important to poetry as a whole. I would refer in this connection to Grosse’s Beginnings of Art, and for my own part confine myself to selecting a few interesting examples. The first is the chain rhyme, such as always delights a child. The following is from a favourite song of theirs:
“Reben trägt der Weinstock; Hörner hat der Ziegenbock; Die Ziegenbock hat Hörner; Im Wald der wachsen Dörner, Dörner wachsen im Wald. Im Winter ist es kalt, Kalt ist’s im Winter,” etc.
“Vines bear grapes; Billy-goats have horns; Horns has the billy-goat; In the woods grow thorns, Thorns grow in the woods. In winter it is cold, It is cold in winter,” etc.
A negative form is:
“Ein, zwei, drei, Alt ist nicht neu, Neu ist nicht alt, Warm ist nicht kalt, Kalt ist nicht warm, Reich ist nicht arm, Arm ist nicht reich,” etc.
“One, two, three, Old is not new, New is not old. Warm is not cold, Cold is not warm, Rich is not poor, Poor is not rich,” etc.
A chain rhyme which dates back to the fourteenth century has this same echoing effect, and, as Zingerle remarks, “affords a striking proof that the children’s verses of that period had the same form as our own.”[76]
A striking analogue of this is found in many poems of the Molukken dwellers. They consist of four-lined strophes, whose first and third lines form the second and fourth of each preceding one. This often results in absolutely inconsequent insertions, whose only office is to promote the echo effect and onward[77] swing, yet sometimes the thought is well sustained. Here is an instance:
“Jene taube mit ausgebreiteten Flügeln, Sie fliegt in schräger Lage nach dem Fluss. Ich bin ein Fremder, Ich komme hierher in die Verbannung.
“Sie fliegt in schräger Lage nach dem Fluss. Tot wird sie mitten im Meere aufgefischt.
“Ich komme hierher in die Verbannung, Weil ich es wegen meiner elenden Lage so will.
“Tot wird sie mitten im Meere aufgefischt,” etc.[78]
“The dove with wide-spread wings Flies along the winding stream. I am a stranger, I come an exile here.
“She files along the winding stream And is drawn up dead from the sea. I come an exile here, Since that is my bitter fate.
“She is drawn up dead from the sea,” etc.
While the genuine refrain originated in the chiming in of the chorus with the other singers, this chain singing must have begun from new voices taking up the verse where others dropped it. For a last word on the subject, take this exquisite poem of Goethe’s, which combines the chain repetition with the charm of a refrain:
“O gieb vom weichen Pfühle Träumend ein halb Gehör! Bei meinem Saitenspiele Schlafe! Was willst du mehr?
“Bei meinem Saitenspiele Segnet der Sterne Heer Die ewigen Gefühle. Schlafe! Was willst du mehr?
“Die ewigen Gefühle Heben mich hoch und hehr Aus irdischem Gewühle. Schlafe! Was willst du mehr?
“Vom irdischem Gewühle,” etc.
“O from that soft couch Dreamily lend an ear! Lulled by my violin’s music Sleep! What do you wish for more?
“Lulled by my violin’s music Like the spell of the starry skies, A sense of the infinite moves you. Sleep! What do you wish for more?
“A sense of the infinite moves you And me to loftier heights, Away from earth’s striving tumult, Sleep! What do you wish for more?
“Away from earth’s striving tumult,” etc.
When the repetition is of single letters and syllables, instead of whole sentences, we call it alliteration and rhyme. A few examples will suffice to show that both are as important to the sound plays of children as to the poetry of adults. The alliteration may be mere repetition, as even the babbling babe loves to duplicate sounds, and while sometimes logical connection of ideas is conveyed as well (Haus und Hof, hearth and home), children enjoy meaningless sound-play quite as well.
“Hinters’ Hanse Hinterhaus Haut Haus Holderholz Hetzt Hund und Hühnerhund Hart hinter’m Hase her.”
“Meiner Mutter Magd macht mir mein mus mit meiner Mutter Mehl.”
“Können Kaiser Karls’ Köch Kalbsköpf und Kabisköpf kochen?”
“Round the rugged riven rock the ragged rascal rapid ran.”
“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
“Didon dina, dit-on, du dos d’un dodu dindon.”
As an example of original production, take this composition of Willie F——’s, which he liked to recite as he pushed his wagon about the room:
“Wein, wein, wein, wein, wein, wein, wam, Wein, wein, wein, wein, wein, wein, wam,” etc.
The verse of Ennius, “O Tyte, tuti Tati, tibi tanta, tyranne tulisti,” shows that adults, too, enjoy such alliteration, not only as a promoter of poetic beauty, but also for the mere play of sound.
Rhyme is often mere reduplication,[79] its agreeableness being due to the actual musical quality to which identity and variety contribute, to repetition as such, and to its unifying effect on the two words or lines concerned. Children show enjoyment of rhyme at a very early age, and as soon as they can talk often amuse themselves with such combinations as Emma-bemma, Mutter-Butter, Wagon-Pagon, Hester-pester, and the like.[80] And there are many counting out rhymes where the original meaning of the words is lost, and only the jingle remains, as:
“Ane-Kane, Hacke-Packe, Relle-Belle, Rädli-Bägli, Zinke-Pinke, Uff-Puff: Das fûle, futze Galgevögeli Hocket hinten ûff.”
“Wonary, uary, icary, Ann, Philison, folison, Nicholas, John, Quimby, quamby, Virgin Mary, Stringulum, strangulum, Buck!”
“Eindli-Beindli. Drittmann-Eindli, Silberhauke, Finggefauke, Pärli, puff, Bettel duss.”
“Anige hanige, Sarege-sirige, Ripeti-pipeti-knoll!”[81]
To regard these rhymes as the direct inventions of the children themselves would be as mistaken as to attribute folk poetry to the masses. Most songs for children originate with grown people, yet they are childish and contain only what children can appreciate, for the principle of selection decides their fate. At the same time, original artistic production is exhibited by children in alliteration and rhythm as well as in rhyme. Thus, I noticed in Marie G——, when she was about three years old, a disposition to sportive variation of familiar rhymes appearing simultaneously with the rhythmic arrangement of words. The first rhyme evolved entirely from the profundities of her own genius came to light at the beginning of her fourth year, in the shape of this strange couplet, which she repeated untiringly:
“Naseweis vom Wasser weg Welches da liegt noch mehr Dreck.”
Another child, Rudolf F——, also in his fourth year, declaimed persistently this original poem:
“Hennemäs’che, Weideidäs’che, Sind ja lauter Käsebäs’che.”
Pleasure in overcoming difficulties is an essential feature of all play. The determined onset against opposition, which is so conspicuous in play, shows how important is the fighting instinct, so deeply rooted in us all. Even in the lall-monologue, when the child accidentally produces a new sound by means of some unusual muscular effort, he intentionally repeats it (Baldwin’s persistent imitation[82]). Older children playfully cultivate dexterity of articulation by repeating rapidly difficult combinations of sounds. The commonest are those where the difficulty is mainly physiological, as Wachs-Maske, Mess-Wechsel; Der Postkutscher putzt den Postkutschkasten; L’origine ne se desoriginalisera jamais de son originalité; Si six scies scient six cyprès; She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish-sauce shop welcoming him in; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where is the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? And many similar ones. Others require quickness of wits as well, as in these verses:
“This is the key to the gate Where the beautiful maidens wait. The first is called Binka, The second Bibiabinka, The third Senkkrenkknokiabibiabinka. Binka took a stone, And for Senkkrenkknokiabibiabinka broke a bone, So that Senkkrenkknokiabibiabinka began to moan.”[83]
Occasionally some obscurity in the language used involves a comic element, as—
“Basanneli, Basanneli, Schlag ’uff und stand a Licht Es geht a Haus im Geist herum, Ich greif, er fürcht mich an. Zünd’s Kühele an, zünds Kühele an, S’Lauternle will a Kälble han, Und wie der Teig am Himmel steht, Da schiesst der Tag in Ofa.”[84]
A. Bastian relates of the Siamese children that they delight in repeating difficult sentences and alter their meaning while speaking rapidly, as Pho Pu Khün Me Pu (The grandfather near the grandmother) is changed to Pho Ku Khün Me Ku (My father near me, his mother), or Pit Patu Thöt, Pit Patu Thot (Shut the door, Shut the temple door), Mo Loi Ma Ha Phe, Phe Loi Pai Ha Mo (The floating pot bumped against the boat, and _vice versa_), etc.[85] “Negro mothers on the Loango coast,” says Pechnel-Loesche, “teach their children verses which trip the tongue when spoken rapidly.”[86]
A similar sport for adults is afforded by the students’ song, Der Abt von Philippsbronn, in which the syllable “bronn” must be repeated four times. After the first time there is a “Pst!” sound, after the second a “Pfiff!” after the third a “Click!” and after the fourth a snore, all given as rapidly as possible. The accelerated _tempo_ in the country song in Don Juan and in the wedding feast of the dwarfs in Goethe’s Hochzeitslied are of the same character.
Other instruments besides the human voice are employed in sound-play. Even parrots and monkeys have found pleasure in other noises than the practice of their own voices. The young gorilla, in his exuberance of spirits, drums on his own breast, or, with even more satisfaction, on any available hollow object, such as a bowl, a cask, etc. The child’s first auditory satisfaction derived from any act of his own is probably the splashing of water; another is the rustling of paper. Preyer says: “The first sound produced by himself which gave the child evident satisfaction was the rattling of paper. He often indulged in this, especially in his nineteenth week.”[87] Strümpell noticed the same thing at six months, and also that it gave his little daughter pleasure to pat the table with the palm of her hand[88] (rhythmic repetition again). The boy observed by Sully was in the beginning of his eighth month when he one day accidentally dropped a spoon from the table where he was playing with it. “He immediately repeated the action, now, no doubt, with the purpose of gaining the agreeable shock for his ear. After this, when the spoon was put into his hand he deliberately dropped it. Not only so, like a true artist, he went on improving on the first effect, raising the spoon higher and higher, so as to get more sound, and at last using force in dashing and banging it down.”[89] At nine months Preyer’s child beat twelve times on the stopper of a large caraffe with increasing force. “On the three hundred and nineteenth day,” he goes on, “occurred a notable acoustic experiment which denoted much intellectual progress. He struck the spoon on his tray just as his other hand accidentally moved it. The sound was deadened, and the child noticed the difference. He took the spoon in his other hand and struck the tray, deadening the sound intentionally, and so on repeatedly. In the evening the experiment was repeated, with the same result.”[90] Possibly Preyer is right in regarding this as a sort of scientific experiment on the part of the child to investigate the causes of the deadening of the sound, but Perez thinks the child’s action is accounted for by his desire to feel in both hands alternately the effect of the blow and of the shock.[91] However that may be, we are forced to agree with the German student entirely when, from these observations, he finally draws the conclusion: “The restless experimentation of little children and of infants in their first attempts at accommodation, and even their apparently insignificant acts (such as the rattling of paper in the second quarter), are not only useful for the development of their intelligence, but are indispensable as a means of determining reality in a literal sense. We can never estimate how much of the common knowledge of mankind is attained in this way.”[92]
Without pausing to enumerate the various instrumentalities employed in childish sound-play, we will leave the infant and pass on to consider the insatiate demands of our sensory organism. It seems that, in order to maintain our present life, an incessant rain of outer stimuli must beat upon us, like that atomic storm which many believe pours constantly upon the heavenly bodies and accounts for gravitation. Indeed, the opinion has been advanced, and apparently supported by some pathological phenomena, that the cessation of all peripheral stimuli marks the dissolution of psychic existence. Certainly the sense of hearing has large claims to notice in this connection—we all know the gruesomeness of absolute silence. This may be why children are so indefatigable in making noises, patting their hands, cracking their knuckles,[93] snapping and drumming with the fingers, stamping and beating with the feet, dragging sticks about, creaking and slamming doors, beating hollow objects, blowing in keys, banging on waiters, clinking glasses, snapping whips, and, in short, delighting in tearing and smashing noises generally.[94] And adults are not much behind them. These same sounds in other forms please us too, as, for example, the clinking of spurs, snapping a riding whip, rattling sabres, the tinkling of tassels and fringe, the rustle of flowing draperies. The versatile walking cane, too, comes in for a thousand uses here—in striking, beating, and whistling through the air. Going for a walk one winter day, I fell behind two worthy scholars who were deep in an earnest discussion. We came to a place where the drain beside the road was filled with beautiful milk-white ice. Crack! went the older man’s cane through the inviting crust, in the very midst of his learned disquisition. The student everywhere is a past master in such sport, as his unfortunate neighbours find out to their sorrow in the watches of the night. The measured hand clapping, which the child learns so early, occurs in the dances of the people. I have mentioned the maddening rapidity of the Haxenschlagen. Enjoyment of crushing or rending destructible objects is characteristic of every age. I will cite as an example Goethe’s famed boyish exploit. After throwing from a window and smashing all his own store of breakable ware, incited by the appreciative cheers of the neighbours, he descended to the kitchen and seizing first upon a platter found that it made such a delightful crash that he must needs try another. He continued the entertainment until he had demolished all the dishes within his reach. In such a case, of course, enjoyment of the sound is not the only source of pleasure. Joy in being a cause is conspicuous when the clatter is self-originated, and sometimes renders even unpleasant sounds attractive, like scratching with a slate pencil, for instance. Besides, there is the satisfaction of impulses to movement, and often, too, the destructive impulse like that for overcoming difficulties is closely related to the propensity for fighting.
In all this we have not yet touched on the subject of acoustic playthings, and it is so large that I can only throw out a few suggestions as to the likeness between primitive musical instruments and the noise-producing toys of children. We have seen that even the ape has discovered the principle of instrumental music, and puts it to practice by pounding with his hand on a stick or some hollow object. A baby does the same thing, and will take great delight in beating persistently and with a certain regularity on a table with his hand, on the floor with a stick, or on his tray with a spoon. If we regard these sounds thus playfully produced by beating on some foreign object, together with some notion of time, as affording probably the first suggestion of a musical instrument, we are met by two possibilities: either the stick itself is considered as the source of the noise or else the object it strikes is so regarded. In the simple instruments of savages both possibilities are realized. The Australian bell is a thick, bottle-shaped club of hard wood which, on being struck, gives forth a peculiar long note, and the drum with which the women accompany the dancing of the men is only a tightly stretched opossum skin, which they have been wearing on their shoulders.[95] Stringed instruments were derived from the bow; Homer sang of the clear sound which Odysseus drew from the tightly strung bow, and Heraclitus uses a complex figure of speech involving the bow and the lyre. The South African “gora” is only a modified form of this trusty weapon of the Bushman. The modification consists in introducing on one side, between the end of the cord and the bow, a trimmed, leaf-shaped, and flattened quill, which is placed upon the lips of the performer and set in motion by his breath.
How can we explain these inventions otherwise than as the results of indefatigable experimentation on the part of either children or adults? Wind instruments no doubt arose from contracting the lips and blowing through the fist or from playful investigation of the properties of arrows and the hollow ornaments worn on the neck, while vibratory ones, like the gora, no doubt find their prototype in the blowing on leaves and grass blades, which children are so fond of. Where there is no such thing as scientific experimentation, playful experimentation becomes the mother of invention and of discovery.
While it is thus not improbable on the whole that child’s play has had much to do with the origination of primitive instruments, we find, too, that children have borrowed many of their toys from the grown people. Things which, from the crudest beginnings, have been brought to a high degree of perfection are reproduced in miniature and simplified form for the little ones. Instances of this are too common and familiar to require illustration here. Even in remote ages it was the custom to give children little bows, wagons, dolls, etc., as well as copies of musical instruments. In the province of Saxony queer clay drums, shaped like an hourglass, have been unearthed; they must belong to the stone age, and among them is a tiny specimen, which can hardly be anything else than a toy.[96] It often happens that instruments which have entirely gone out of use among adults continue to be playthings for the children for thousands of years. This is the case with the rattles which are now the merest plaything, having no interest for grown people, except as a means of quieting an infant, yet their original connection with it was probably much closer, as our progenitors used such instruments at dances, feasts, etc., for the pious purpose of driving off evil spirits.[97] There is a widespread custom among savage tribes of frightening away the enemies of the stars by noisy demonstrations, especially during the absence of the moon. As these observances gradually become obsolete, the rattling instruments are saved from oblivion by being handed down as toys to the hospitable little people, without, however, entirely losing the glamour of their religious office. Becq de Fouquières says, in speaking of the many religious practices that are connected with children’s toys: “Ses premiers joujoux dont en quelque sorte des talismans et des amulettes.”[98] Many rattles have been found in the graves of prehistoric children, together with clay figures of animals, marbles, etc. Schliemann found a child’s rattle, ornamented with bits of metal, in the “third city” at Hissarlik, and Squier found a snail shell filled with tiny pebbles, with the mummy of a child, in Peru.[99] Amaranthes, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, in his remarkable Woman’s Lexigon, defines a child’s rattle as “a hollow instrument made of silver, lead, wood, or wire, trimmed with bright coral and with little bells either inclosed in it or attached to the outside.”[100] Older boys make a rattle of a dried bladder, with peas in it.
As I have dwelt on the probability of the invention of the first musical instruments by means of playful experimentation, I will now touch briefly upon another view. Karl Bücher, in his admirable treatise on Arbeit und Rhythmus, develops the hypothesis that rhythmic art is derived from physical labour. Physical labour which employs the limbs with perhaps some simple implement assumes spontaneously a rhythmical character, since this tends to conserve psychic as well as physical force. The sounds arising as the work proceeds suggest the germ idea of instrumental music and lead to involuntary vocal imitation. Thus, poetry and music are engendered in the very midst of toil, and only later, when they attain to independent existence, are dance motions substituted for the movements of physical labour, and frequently become adaptations of them (as in pantomime dances, for instance).
Convinced as I am that this theory contains a genuine though perhaps one-sided[101] contribution to the proper explanation of rhythmical art, I am unable to concur in what Bücher regards as its logical consequence—namely, that musical instruments are adaptations of the labourer’s tools. “We know,” he says, “that labour rhythmically carried on has a musical quality, and since savages, having no appreciation of pitch or harmony,[102] value rhythm alone, it is only necessary to strengthen and purify the tone produced by the implement and to complicate the rhythm, in order to produce what is in their estimation high art. Naturally, to accomplish this the tools were differentiated; varying conditions, as they arose in their labours, became the occasion of further efforts for the perfecting of tone and timbre, and the art instinct, struggling for expression, first found it in such rude music. So originated musical instruments from these tools of manual labour, and it is a noteworthy fact that beaten instruments were the first to appear, and are to-day the favourites of savages. We find among them the drum, gong, and tam-tam, while with many tribes the only instrument is the kettledrum, which clearly proclaims its origin, being in many cases nothing more than a skin tightly stretched across the grain mortar or a suitable pot or kettle. Primitive stringed instruments also were struck, like the Greek pleptron, the tone of a violin and of the strings themselves being a later discovery. Wind instruments, too, are of very ancient origin, the commonest being the flute and reed pipe, both of which are rhythmic. The ancient Greeks used them first to mark time and as accompanying instruments.”[103]
I hardly think that this view will meet with general acceptance. The wind instrument, whose importance to primitive peoples Bücher somewhat underestimates, did indeed serve the purposes of rhythm principally, but it would be difficult to trace its derivation from any manual tool. Nor does it follow that rattles and flappers came from the use of hammers; while the drum, whose prototype he finds in the grain mortar, is in use by tribes who have no mortars. I conclude, therefore, that musical instruments can, with more probability, be accounted for as the result of instinctive sound-play and the experimentation with noise-producing implements, which accompanies it.
6. _Sensations of Sight_
Turning his face toward the light is about the only manifestation of sight sensation displayed by the infant during his first few days. Many young animals find themselves very much at home in the outer world as soon as they are born, but such is not the case with a child. He must attain to a clear perception of external objects by toilsome experimentation, which commonly requires about five months for its completion, though the fifth week as well as the fifth month marks an epoch in the practice of sight. “The average time is about the fifth week,” says Raehlmann, “when the capacity to ‘fix’ an object is attained—that is, to take cognizance of the retinal picture of what comes within the line of his vision, as it is thrown on the macula lutea. About this time, too, the eye movements, which till then are not definitely co-ordinated, become regulated, while associated movements, such as elevating and depressing the line of vision (the latter somewhat later than the former), also appear.... But movements for the purpose of directly subjecting to fixation objects which lie in the periphery of the field of vision are entirely wanting at this period. The second epoch, that at five months, is marked by the development of orientation in the field of vision. At this time begin actual glancing movements, which shift the line of vision and bring peripheral retinal images on to the macula lutea. Contemporaneously with this, a definite system of innervations is established, especially for those muscles which are employed in shifting the line of vision. Secondly, the winking reflex is perfected by the approach of objects from the periphery of the field of vision. Thirdly, at this time the first experiments in touch controlled by sight are instituted, and serve to bring tactile perceptions into relation with those of sight. The interval between birth and the fifth week, as well as that from this time to the fifth month, is employed in the acquirement of such sense perceptions as react collectively on the organ and commit it to special uses and control. So, on the authority of repeated experience, whatever is unsuitable is gradually excluded, and only those eye movements are retained which further the proper convergence of the two retinal images.”[104] Of course, the power of vision is by no means completely developed at five months, though the technique of the function, so to speak, is by that time essentially perfected. Now begin the real tasks of visual practice: acquiring familiarity with external objects, imprinting the visual images on the mind, and widening the scope of association. On entering the subject of child’s play which is connected with vision it is evident that there are four points for us to keep in mind—brightness, colour, form, and movement. The inner images and concepts, which go hand in hand with such perception (especially with the notion of movement), do not, so far as I can see, form part of our study, since while an effect of the highest importance they do not constitute one of the objects of play.[105]
(_a_) Sensations of Brightness
Sensations of brilliance seem to arouse feelings of pleasure at a remarkably early period. Thus Preyer says: “Long before the close of the first day the facial expression of the babe held facing the window changed suddenly when I shaded his eyes with my hand.... The darkened face looked much less satisfied.”[106] Toward the end of the first week the child turned his face toward the window when he had been placed otherwise, and seemed pleased to see it again. During the second week a child will sometimes cry when taken into the dark, and can only be quieted by having the sensation of brightness restored. Thus, we see that in the very first week there is at least a premonition of experimentation. In his second month the infant will break out into joyful cries at the sight of gilded picture frames or lighted lamps, illuminated Christmas trees or shining mirrors. Even in Wolfdietrich the delight of children in bright and shining things is recorded:—
“Do vergaz es sînes frostes und spielte mit den ringen sîn. also daz kleine Kindel sîner sorgen gar vergaz, dô greif ez on die ringe und sprach: waz ist daz? des Halsperges schoene daz Kindel nie verdroz.”[107]
And it seems to grow with his growth in other directions. The following are some of Sigismund’s notes on his daughter’s third quarter: “The child is now passionately fond of light, and in the evening, when the darkening room is lighted up, she regularly shouts aloud and dances for joy.... This coincides with the fact that artificial illumination stimulates adults also to a genuine and boisterous gaiety. Our feasts and dances are always held at night, and indeed it is difficult to attain the requisite dithyrambic pitch in the daytime.”[108] Nansen wrote, when the electric light blazed for the first time on the frozen-in Fram: “What a tremendous influence light has on the spirits of men! This light enlivened us like a draught of good wine.”[109]
To what degree this feeling is universal is shown by the fact that bright and shining objects are highly prized the world over. The school child, the savage, the cultured man, display the same preference; there is no essential difference whether it is a scrap of glass for which the negro gives a generous portion of his worldly goods, or the blazing diamond coronet for which the lady in society parts with hers. That our coins are made of gold and silver is attributable to the high polish which they take, and which won great favour for them in prehistoric times. Poets of all ages have celebrated the brightness of the human eye, and because light makes us cheerful we speak of the brilliancy of an entertainment, the beaming joyousness of the golden day. The strongest light effects are produced by flame and by the heavenly bodies. The strange attraction which flame exerts on insects, fish, and birds is familiar to all. Romanes’s sister relates in the journal which she kept, about a capuchin ape, that the clever little fellow rolled strips of newspaper into lamplighters and stuck the end into the fire, to amuse himself watching the flame.[110] Primitive men must have experimented with fire in the same way when they came in contact with it in lightning strokes and volcanic phenomena, and in their earliest use of it for boring their stone hatchets. Without playful experimentation, this most important acquisition of mankind, the mastery of fire, could hardly have been attained. The little ones in our homes would find playing with fire one of their favourite diversions if we did not use every means to prevent it, on account of the danger. In spite of all warnings, the untoward fate of little Polly Flinders of nursery memory is daily becoming the experience of numberless children.
With grown people the light and glow of fire are of the first importance in both religious and secular festivities. I need only refer once more to Sigismund’s saying, quoted above. The charm of moonlit and starlit nights is one of the deepest joys that Nature affords us, which only the regal splendour of sunshine can surpass. Perhaps it has never been more worthily sung than in these verses of Mörike’s, which the very spirit of Shakespeare seems to have dictated:
“Dort, sich, am Horizont lüpft sich der Vorhang schon! Es träumt der Tag, nun sei die Nacht entfloh’n; Die Purperlippe, die geschlossen lag, Haucht, halbgeöffnet, süsse Athemzüge; Auf einmal blitzt das Aug’ und wie ein Gott, der Tag Beginnt im Sprung die königlichen Flüge!”[111]
The human longing for light is so strong that it becomes for him the natural symbol for divinity, a fact on which we have not time to dwell, except to note the significance of the heavenly bodies and of fire in religion. The self-devised Nature worship of young Goethe, who greeted the rising sun with an offering, is interesting, and still more so is the statement of the deaf-mute Ballard that, as a boy of eight years, he arrived by his own unaided efforts at some sort of metaphysical and religious thought, and felt a kind of reverence for the sun and moon.[112] This is the effect of light which has so great a part in the mythology of all peoples. Even in the Old Testament account of the creation light is the first thing which God called out of chaos. “And God saw that the light was good.”
We find brightness of aspect especially affected in the industrial arts and in painting, and the employment of shining and glowing substances in decoration is too familiar to need comment. They are found in the ornaments of the Stone period, such as necklaces of animals’ teeth, bits of ivory and shells, as well as among savage tribes of the present day. Grosse says: “The ornaments of these people may be called brilliant not in a figurative, but in a literal sense, and there is hardly any quality which contributes so much to the decorative effect of an object in savage estimation as brightness. The natives of Fire Island frequently hang fragments of a glass bottle on their neck band, considering them very superior adornments, and Bushmen are happy when they are made the proud possessors of iron or brass rings. However, they are by no means dependent on such windfalls from a higher race, and when the ornaments of civilized man and barbarian are both wanting and precious stones are not available they betake themselves to Nature, who can well supply their needs. The sea tosses up polished shells upon the beach, vegetation furnishes bright seeds and shining stalks, and animals give their shining teeth, as well as fur and feathers.”[113]
In painting, light effects in connection with colour are of the greatest importance, and are skilfully managed by many masters of the art. Rembrandt may be said to possess the highest genius for their treatment. Without going into particulars of technique, I may note that the pleasure which we derive from light effects in painting may be referred to two opposite extremes. We know that it is out of the question for the painter to transfer to his canvas Nature’s extremes of light and shade, only about half of the eight hundred ascertained degrees of brilliancy being available to him.[114] Helmholtz has shown in an interesting manner how the artist may triumph over this difficulty. It proves to be a special case for the application of Weber’s law; the adjustment of intensities is not in proportion to the actual force of the stimuli, but to their relative force. Thus, when the painter tempers the brilliance of Nature he actually gives a more faithful representation, because the toned-down light against the deepened shadows of a picture produces the same effect on the senses as the clear beams of sunlight in contrast with its luminous shadows.[115] This so-called normal technique is objected to on diametrically opposite grounds. Some painters, refusing to darken and falsify Nature, seek to make their shadows as bright as are those in the diffused light of day. As it is impossible, however, to represent the actual intensity of the light, their attempt to reproduce the actual is only half realized. The true contrast between light and dark fails, and the result is the faded, obscure, hazy appearance which characterizes the work of extremists of this school. In the other direction the attempt is sometimes made to darken the shadows so excessively as actually to make the difference between light and shade greater than it is in Nature. Caravaggio and Ribera, Lenbach and Samberger, furnish examples of this kind of painting. Their work is done on the principle of darkening the shade, in order to bring out the light more sharply; eyes, brow, and hands in their pictures seem to surpass the clearness of Nature because of this difference, which is greater than that of reality. These artists are true lovers of light.
(_b_) The Perception of Colour
The exact period in a child’s life when susceptibility to colour impressions arises has not been determined. Preyer’s son seemed interested in a rose-coloured curtain, with the sun shining on it, on his twenty-third day,[116] but who knows whether it was the colour that pleased him or only the brightness? And the same doubt hangs over a hundred other observations taken in the first months of life, as, for example, this of Sully’s: “Like other children, he was greatly attracted by brightly coloured objects. When just seven weeks old he acquired a fondness for a cheap, showy card, with crudely brilliant colouring and gilded border. When carried to the place where it hung, ... he would look up to it and greet his first love in the world of art with a pretty smile.”[117] Since we can not be certain that it was not the mere brilliancy which produced this effect, Sully is quite right when he says: “The first delight in coloured objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial delight in brightness.”[118] Raehlmann thinks, however, judging from the child’s positions and actions, that one can—though not till considerably later than the fifth week—be sure that it perceives a difference between objects of similar form and complementary colour.[119] And it is probably quite safe to assume that there is pleasure in gay colours by the end of the first three months.
Here we are met at once by the question, Does the child prefer any particular colours? Most observers agree that the child displays more interest in the warm colours—red and yellow—than in the colder ones.[120] Baldwin, on the contrary, found from his experiments with a baby nine months old (not using yellow, however) that blue was chosen oftenest.[121] Although Preyer denies the validity of Baldwin’s experiment, it seems to me quite possible that here, as well as elsewhere, there is room for the manifestation of individual preference.[122] The choice of yellow and red can hardly be a necessary one. For example, I find Grosse’s rule, that children will always empty the vermilion cup in a paint box first and will, when allowed to choose, always take a flaming red, by no means invariable. Marie G—— (five years old) turns oftener to the blue in her paint box than to the red. She herself pointed out lilac as her favourite colour, and weeks before my question she persisted in using bits of lilac silk in her embroidery, though her mother had taken them away from her. Having chosen the lilac, she however added, after a pause for reflection, “Red is pretty, too.” Another little girl, Deti K——, at the same time answered the question as to what colour she liked best, “Lilac too, but bright.” Still another named first lilac, then rose, and after these red and yellow. I consider it not improbable that in many children of fine sensibility the stimulus of crude red and yellow is too strong to be particularly agreeable. This supposition perhaps explains the exceptions to the rule, and also seems to interfere with the likening of children to savages, which was formerly so useful. Observations of the children of such tribes have never been made, to my knowledge.
Before going on, however, to consider the case of savages, we must look briefly into the problem suggested by the fact that there is choice of any colour. The child’s susceptibility to the cooler colours, and even its perception of them, especially blue and gray, has been questioned. Preyer says: “The inability of my two-year-old child to recognise blue and gray can be argued not only from his occasional failure to do so, but also from the evident difficulty he encounters in connecting the commonly used and familiar names ‘blue’ and ‘gray’ with any special sensations, while ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ were correctly applied several months ago. Were the sensations of blue and gray as clear as those of red and yellow there would be no failure to recognise the colours. The child does not know what green and blue mean, though he does know red and yellow.... Even at four years blue was oftener called green in the morning twilight, though to me it was clearly blue. The child was greatly astonished to find that his blue stocking had become gray overnight. For years very dark green was called black.”[123] These striking observations seem indeed partially to confirm the hypothesis of Geiger, Gladstone, and Magnus, who came to the conclusion, from the study of ancient picture writing, that primeval man distinguished only the three primary colours (the Young-Helmholtz theory)—red, green, and violet. From these were derived orange and yellow, while blue was the very last to be discovered. Yet, indeed, so far as any philological support is concerned, the hypothesis can hardly be maintained either in regard to the ancients or to modern low-standing tribes.
In the remains of buildings and plastic works, which are older than any picture writings, traces are found of all the colours of the spectrum, and the philological test, when applied to civilized peoples, does not yield the confirmation which advocates of the theory desire. While it is true that the Esthonians have no word of their own for blue (their _sini_ is borrowed from the Russian), but the apparent deduction from that fact is rendered doubtful, to say the least, by this passage from Raehlmann: “Some time ago I tested an old Esthonian peasant woman with a gray starling. She was not quite sure of the name of the colour, and changed it often. On closer questioning about her ideas of colour, she seemed to have the spectral series correctly in mind, distinguishing the colours as blood, wax, grass, and sky. She had never needed other terms with which to express her sensations, but she took pains to convince me that she had perfectly clear ideas on the subject of colour.”[124]
But how is it with the savage tribes? Here we find, indeed, that for the painting of their bodies, as well as for other ornaments, the warm colours are almost exclusively chosen. Besides black and white, hardly any other colours than red and yellow are found at all. “The Australian has always, in his bag of kangaroo skin, a supply of white clay and of red and yellow ochre. For ordinary occasions he contents himself with dabs on cheeks, shoulders, and breast; on holidays he paints his whole body.”[125]
Bushmen rub their faces and hair with red ochre; red is the Fire Islander’s favourite. Other savages use, with deep blue-black, a blazing vermilion, a combination which imparts to their faces the wildest and most forbidding expression. Among the famous discoveries which Fraas has described so well[126] was a lump of kneaded paste about as big as a nut, compounded of iron rust and reindeer fat, and intensely red in colour. Probably every huntsman of the Ice period had one of these to colour his body with. The same colours are chosen for their other ornaments as well. The Australians stripe their girdles and neck and brow bands with red, white, and yellow, and the same or similar colours are in demand with the Bushmen and Fire Islanders. Among the Botoku red feathers, as the most costly decoration, form the insignia of rank. Others wear yellow feathers in the hair, and the same ornament floats above the brow of the Australian hunter. The cool colours are scarcely ever seen in primitive ornamentation, even in combination with red and yellow. Blue decorations are extremely rare, and the Eskimo’s lip wedge of green nephrite is quite unique in colour.[127] From this brief survey we reach the conclusion that primitive man is not so sensitive as we are to the stimulus of the colder colours. In the painting of the body and some other ornamentation the prevalence of red and yellow may be partly attributed to the more general distribution of these pigments, but such a reason can not be assigned in the case of feathers, and we can not therefore deny the probability that for the savage simple green and blue lack the charm which they possess for the cultivated eye.[128] That the cooler colours are imperfectly perceived, however, is an unwarranted supposition in the provisional stage which our knowledge of the subject has up to the present time attained.[129] With them, as with children, probably the cooler colours fail to arrest their attention and excite their interest as they do ours. Whether this is the result of a kind of colour blindness or whether it is due solely to the intensive emotional effect of the warm colours it is difficult to say. The extraordinary want of susceptibility to reflected colour displayed by educated adults proves that the lack of æsthetic interest may assume the form of partial colour blindness. There are thousands, for example, who have never noticed the intense blue of a shaded cement road under a clear sky, although they may have seen it a hundred times. And they will complain bitterly of the gross inaccuracy of a picture which faithfully reproduces what is actually before them.
We may not dwell on the pleasure that is derived from colour in natural scenery, in ornament and in clothing, in the arts and industries, for the theme is practically inexhaustible, and we would hardly have space for even the baldest enumeration of its leading divisions. It would, for example, be well worth while to trace the historical development of the various standards of taste in such matters, to which this pleasure has at different times conformed. The special emphasis given to colour in the last decade has deeply influenced our poetry, and is characteristically illustrated in the writings of Jacobsen and G. Keller. The following passage from Martin Salander could hardly have been written in any century before the present one: “The setting sun, whose level rays shone through the handsome dining room, glittered on the golden lining of a large beaker, which stood before him, freshly filled with ruddy wine. The yellow gleam shot with indescribable beauty through the heart of the rich red transparent fluid. Martin raised his eyes from the glowing colour picture, which, coming direct from the open sky, was like a flaming seal for his thoughts. A sprightly lady sitting opposite him noticed that a rosy shimmer from the cup spread over his animated face, and begged him to sit still, for he looked beautiful. Flattered, he kept his face unmoved while the reflection vibrated with the wine in the cup, for a slight tremor ran along the table and disturbed the contents of the cups.” It is interesting, too, to note that boys concern themselves much less about colour than girls do, and yet the history of painting seems to show that the masculine sex has a finer colour sense than the feminine. This is probably explained by the fact that boys early develop the fighting instinct, and the active motor side of their nature keeping perceptive play activities more in the background, without necessarily depreciating their inborn capacity for enjoyment of colour.
I now turn to the subject of play with colour, as it is practised by adults. In his classification of the arts Kant has, strangely enough, inserted a colour art besides painting, because he looks upon the latter as pre-eminently linear. As a matter of fact, there are several colour arts. Such, to a certain extent, was the glass tinting of the middle ages, which resembles æsthetic tapestry weaving more than it does painting. Pyrotechnics, too, produce very lively enjoyment by means of the play of light and colour, and finally we have that modern invention, the serpentine dance, which seems to be quite near to music in the direction of sensuous gratification, while far below it as a means of intellectual expression. Those modern painters who strive only to impart colour-tone and harmony, to make the effect of their pictures resemble that of music, are far surpassed by the serpentine dance (a fact which is sufficient to prove that such an aim is mistaken). Here is actual rhythmical movement, ecstasy terminating in itself, waving and attenuation as of tone, and, above all, the thing that moves us so, the succession of glowing colours on a dark background, whose intensity takes hold of the beholder’s soul as only the noblest of musical instruments or perfectly harmonious voices can.
(_c_) Perception of Form
Recognition, the first requirement for reproduction, is dependent on perception of form. Later, in considering mental experimentation, I shall return to this subject and treat it more fully. Here I will make only the general statement that the visible form of objects is of higher biological value to the exceedingly important faculty of recognition than is colour or brilliancy. Evidently the child has a very special interest in form, or he could not without great effort distinguish the meaning of simple outline at the relatively early age when we find him doing so. It is remarkable how indifferent little children are to gay colour in pictures. Konrad Lange has treated the subject exhaustively in his well-known book, and Sigismund says: “I can not affirm that there is any preference for coloured pictures at this age (two years). When I laid before the child copies of the same picture done in colours and in black and white he seemed to regard them with equal pleasure.”[130] This indifference is displayed, too, by children who take the liveliest interest in a gaudy ribbon or bright flowers; therefore it seems to me probable that the child is so concentrated in the apperception of form that he has no attention left to bestow on the colour—a legitimate argument for the importance of form in recognition. Very striking, too, is the child’s extraordinary capacity for illusion in the observation of form. When Souriau says, “Regarder un dessin, c’est voir des chimères dans les nuages,” he rightly adds that it applies with special force to children.[131] “Mere outlines,” says Sigismund, “serve for any object of that general shape. My little one calls a square a bonbon, and a circle a waiter.”[132] Preyer’s son called a square drawn on paper with a red pencil a window, a triangle was a roof, and a circle a ring.[133] All this goes to show how strongly the child’s interest is concentrated on the apperception of form.[134] Such a capacity for illusion often has notable results. Thus Marie G——, when three years old, saw a painting which represented the early morning just before sunrise, and asked me to turn the picture round to see if the sun was on the other side.
Recognition and illusion are two of the threads from which the complex web of æsthetic enjoyment is woven. When the child begins to take pleasure in form it is difficult to say, and more difficult still to determine, when the æsthetic personification, which is so important to adults, arises. Experiment may, however, throw some light on both questions. Marie G—— was five years old when I first attempted something of the sort with her. I showed her a straight line, and near it an irregular one, and, in order to excite her interest, told her that I wanted to keep one of them and was in doubt as to which it should be. She pointed at once to the straight one—“I should keep that.” Well-drawn equilateral triangles were preferred to irregular ones, but she gave a characteristic reason for choosing the uneven quadrilateral instead of a perfect rectangle—because, she said, it looked like a hat. Here the less pleasing form was preferred for the sake of its meaning; she was still quite clear in her idea of regularity. She asked me, for instance, to draw “some straight figures and some of the other kind.” By straight she meant regular—she called a perfect circle straight. We thus find in a child the æsthetic rule operative—namely, that formal regularity is agreeable. Personification of the figure by children is also a subject for experimentation. German students of æsthetics found out long ago that the object of our enjoyment is endowed by our imagination with personal attributes analogous to our own. “We conceive of all natural objects,” says Wölfflin, “as analogous to our physical organism.”[135] One of the first requirements of our organism is that it shall maintain its equilibrium, and accordingly an elementary fact in our personification of natural objects is that a distorted figure causes us an unpleasant feeling of disturbed equilibrium. I showed the five-year-old Marie G—— these two figures, and asked which she would rather have. Unhesitatingly she pointed to A. “Why?” I asked. “Because it stands on the point.” “But the other one stands on its point too.” “Yes, but this” (pointing to the angle _S_) “is so low.” She played with the squares, and turned them so that they rested on the horizon line. “Now they hang down,” she said; “but this one” (pointing to B) “is just willing to come down.” That the child at play personifies all possible objects is a familiar fact, and we here find that they can conceive of even abstract figures according to physical analogies.
Savages manifest pleasure in form, more particularly in their ornamentation. It was formerly believed that creative imagination was responsible for some of their geometric patterns, but lately this idea has more and more given place to the opinion that all their patterns, without exception, are the product of imitation. The reports of Ehrenreich and von den Steinen of the tribes of central Brazil go far to confirm this view. With them animals almost invariably furnished the models, their forms being reproduced in a conventionalized manner. Thus a zigzag was derived from the markings of a snake, the cross from those of a lizard, etc.[136] It is possible that this theory attempts to prove too much, for basket work may well account for some patterns which it would be difficult to find in Nature.[137] This possibility being once granted there is no convincing proof that natural models were used in the construction of conventional figures at all. Often the resemblance may have been an afterthought, as a child calls a square a window, though it may have been drawn with no such intention, or the Eskimo explains the peculiar outlines of his characters by likening them to animal forms. However this may be, it is at least certain that these savage people offer a convincing proof that the pleasure which is derived from form is primordial and universal. If geometric figures did originate in imitation of natural models, still the persistence and abstract conventionalizing of them points to a high valuation, which is in one case at least independent of such accidental association—namely, when ornamentation is applied to tools and utensils, and especially if we consider their fine polish and symmetrical form as belonging to the order of embellishments. “Smoothness and good proportion,” says Grosse rightly, “are usually not so much æsthetic as practical qualities. An awkwardly shaped weapon does not reach the mark as surely as does a symmetrical one, and a well-polished arrow or spear head penetrates farther than a roughly finished weapon. Yet we find among primitive people articles which have just as much care bestowed upon them, without any such evident utility. The blubber lamp of the Eskimo need not be either so regular in form or so highly polished in order to shed its light and heat; the Fire Islander’s basket would no doubt be quite as useful were it a little less evenly woven. Australians always carve their talismans symmetrically, though, for all we know to the contrary, they might be just as effective otherwise. In all such cases we may be sure that the workman is satisfying an æsthetic as well as a practical demand.”[138]
Since we can devote but a passing glance to the significance of form in the art of cultured man, I confine myself to some remarks on the æsthetic effect of the simplest of all forms—the straight line. Fr. Carstanjen, in his interesting paper on the developmental factors of the early renaissance in the Netherlands,[139] advances the opinion that progress and development in art are the direct result, psychologically speaking, of dissatisfaction with contemporary art and its productions with which the people have become satiated. As concerns the evolution of form, the common process seems to be that, by a naturalism more or less fortunate, something like style is first acquired by means of the mastery of straight lines. From this point development is in the direction of overcoming their stiffness and angularity. The representation of form is constantly more free, reaching thus a high degree of beauty, but passing on through a period of extravagant exaltation of circles, spirals, swells, and curves to final and inevitable decadence. In following out this succession of styles it becomes apparent that separation from the direct is, æsthetically speaking, separation from repose (as well as from stiffness). So Wölfflin says, in pointing out emotional analogies as they bear on form: “A line composed of short, delicate curves is commonly called tremulous, while one with wider and shallower vibrations indicates dull humming or buzzing. A zigzag rustles and splashes like falling water, and when very pointed sounds shrill like whistling. The straight line is quite still; in architecture it suggests the quiet simplicity of the antique.”[140] It is a most interesting study to note the almost illimitable force of this effect of the straight line in an art which, having reached the pinnacle of its development, allows full swing to the tendency toward rounded forms as well. During the most flourishing period of the Italian renaissance there was scarcely a single master who gloried more in the pride of sensuous loveliness than did Titian, yet even in the midst of his intoxicating triumphs he attained something of that quiet grandeur which, according to Winckelmann, formed the basis of Greek art. How can we account for this? In my opinion it was accomplished, in part at least, though not entirely, by the use of the short straight line which characterizes Titian’s style, and is repeated in the work of many of his imitators—I mean the line that is formed by the peculiar inclination of the head. It is found in the wonderful Madonna of the house of Pesaro, in the Flora of the Uffizi, the Laura de Dianti in the Louvre, in the so-called “Loves” and other works of the master. Their chief common characteristic is a certain commanding dignity impossible to describe. Among those artists influenced by Titian, Moretto has followed him most successfully.
This same line may become almost unpleasing when the figure is too much in profile and the head bends forward, as does Mary Magdalene’s in Titian’s Dresden Madonna. I mention this because it is repeated in the Medea by Feuerbach, who is very faithful to Titian’s ideal. He is, moreover, one of the vanguard of German artists who are leading the way to the new idealism—a thing as yet more hoped for than realized. And just here I have a word to say. An essential of ideal art is that, as opposed to naturalistic reproduction, it _plays_ with conventionalized form and subordinates reality to it. While at the height of the renaissance marvellous effects were achieved by mingled and contrasted curves, such as astonish us in the work of Raphael and sometimes of Rubens, of our modern idealism we may say: if we are justified at all in calling its developments new, it is because, from the standpoint of form, it does possess one unique and original characteristic—namely, that in it for the first time straight lines, and especially the perpendicular, are dominant in a well-mastered technique, which is no longer primitive. There are many traces of this principle in Feuerbach’s work, and it is still more strikingly shown in that of Böcklin, who has close kinship with the Venetians. The tensely upstretched necks of the swans in the Island of the Blest is a perfect example of the new style. It comes out again in the stiff little trees of his spring landscape, in the abrupt lines of the drapery of a Muse at the Arethusan spring, in the perpendicular line extending from the shoulder of the musical shepherd boy quite to his foot, and in many other pictures. Max Klinger is partial to the horizontal, and much of the characteristic power of his Pieta is due to his employment of these lines; three stone steps, the outstretched body of the Redeemer, the stretch of a wall in the background, the straight lines of a thick wood, in contrast to these the upright half figures of John and Mary. Many of our modern idealistic painters have unfortunately abandoned the use of this “line of Praxiteles,” which imparts so finely poised a position to the head and body and that peculiar mysterious dignity and air of detachment to the whole figure—“schöne, stille Menschen.” In the industrial arts this preference for straight lines is most conspicuous in what we wish to appear as new and original, and even in the newest styles for men it gives us the creased trousers, the waistless coat, and the stiff, high hat. These phenomena, however, we will not presume to attribute to the influence of ideal art.
(_d_) Perception of Movement
When sight is the medium of perception movement plays are at the same time visual plays, otherwise consciousness is reached through the sense of touch. We will here give special attention to experimental exercise of the motor apparatus, as actual movement play is treated of in detail in another section. After some general remarks, a few cases will be cited whose most important feature is the pleasure derived from the contemplation of the movement, as is especially the case when it is not self-produced. The powerful attraction which movement has for us is well grounded biologically, for evidently it is of the utmost importance in the struggle for existence that attention should be at once and instinctively aroused by any stir or change in the environment.[141] But perception of movement by means of the eye alone, and consequently the instinct of keeping absolutely motionless, is of great importance to the pursued animal. Thus Edinger says: “I have repeatedly seen a hungry snake pause in the midst of his pursuit of a fleeing mouse, when it crouched down and was quiet. I have seen it recoil from the frog, which it was trying to catch, as soon as the creature kept still.”[142] Even our own involuntary attention to motion has some analogy to instinct, and recalls the violent and sudden reaction with which we respond to an unexpected touch on the bare back.[143] As a matter of psychological fact, there is associated with movement, as with sensations of hearing, a strong emotional effect.
It is no wonder, therefore, that all his life long man shows a peculiar interest in movement, and acquires the capacity to detect its intimations very early in life. Indeed, this capacity is one of the first to be developed, and depends, apart from skin stimuli and the so-called after images which reveal objective movement to the eye at rest, principally on the ability to follow the moving object with the glance. Practice is necessary for the mastery of this capacity. The eyes accompany, in addition to the regular objective motion, a constantly renewed backward movement as well, by means of which we again grasp the escaping object, an effort requiring the simultaneous exercise of volition and attention. “This process requiring continuous and constantly renewed attention,” says L. W. Stern, “this lying in wait that the object may not give us the slip (for any laxity would at once be avenged by an increased difficulty in fixing the object), bears witness to a condition and teaches us that the object with which we are carrying on this game of ‘catcher’ is in motion.”[144] This explains why little children so easily lose sight of a moving object which they wish to follow with the eye.
Here again we find that playful experimentation is essential, and, according to Raehlmann, it commonly appears toward the end of the fifth week, rarely earlier.[145] That Preyer’s boy on the twenty-third day followed with his eyes a slowly moving light was probably an instance of forced development, as a result of much experimenting. On the twenty-ninth day the same child crowed aloud at the sight of a swaying tassel. On the sixty-second day he gazed at a swinging lamp with constant manifestations of delight for nearly half an hour, but his eyes did not follow the swing of the pendulum; they moved, it is true, now left, now right, but not in time with the lamp. “On the one hundred and first day a pendulum making forty complete swings in a minute was for the first time followed with mechanical exactness by his glance.”[146] As his capacity for following the movement increased, the greater his interest in it became. A dog racing away or leaping about the child, the fast horse, the hopping toad, the crawling worm or gliding snake, running water, leaping flame, a rolling wagon, and, more than all, the fast-rushing train, with its cloud of steam—all these excite a really passionate sympathy. The smoke of a cigar, too, gives great satisfaction, and if a father knows how to make the beautiful blue rings he must at once renounce his peaceful contemplative enjoyment of his own play, for the youngster will demand a very different _tempo_ in the repetition than is agreeable to him. In enumerating instances of animal motion I omitted one because it deserves more extended notice—namely, the flight of insects, in which children take such lively interest. The common illusion that an insect which has been caught can be induced to fly away by the recital of a form of words is highly interesting, in itself considered as well as in view of its probable origin. May not such poetic formulæ be traceable to a religious or at least superstitious origin? The commonest of these rhymes are those addressed to the ladybird (_Coccinella septempunctata_) and the June bug. Rochholz has made a collection of the names of the former, and found that in India it was sacred to the god Indra, and among the old Germans to Frega. I give two German forms of the verse:
“Muttergotteshühle, Mückenstühle, Fliege auf, fliege auf! Wohl über die Bussenberg, Dass es besser Wetter wird.”
“Marienkäferchen, wann wird Sonne sein? Morgen oder heut? Flieg weg in den Himmel!”
An English one is:
“Ladybird, ladybird, Fly away home; If you’ll be quick, The sunshine will come.”
All are familiar with the adjuration to the June bug. French children sing:
“Hanneton, vole, vole! Ton mari est a l’école, Il a dit qu’si tu volais, Tu aurais d’la soupe au lait Il a dit qu’si tu n’volais pas, Tu aurais la tête en bas.”
To the butterfly, which is not so easily caught, the invitation is to alight:
“Molketewer sett di, Kömmt e Pogg de frett di!”
And in Scotch:
“Le, la, let, My bonnie pet!”
The snail, too, is addressed in a rhyme which favours the illusion that he will put out his horns to order:
“Schneck’ im Haus, kreich heraus, Strecke deine vier Hörner heraus! Sonst werf ich dich in Graben, Fressen dich die Raben.”
“Snail, snail, put out your horn, Or I’ll kill your father and mother the morn.”[147]
As a final example, I will mention the gruesome custom which, according to Papasliotis, obtains in modern Greece, and especially in Crete, of attaching a small lighted taper to a beetle and releasing it amid the acclamations of excited children. A passage in Aristophanes gives the impression that the children of ancient Greece also indulged in this cruel sport.[148]
The eye of the adult, too, delights in movement; absolute immobility is as disturbing as absolute stillness. Here, as elsewhere, in considering the playful indulgence of sensuous perceptions, we must distinguish between pleasure in movement as such and pleasure in sensuously agreeable movement. Even children seem to exhibit this difference. Some weeks after the experiments in form described above I drew irregular zigzags and some even, wavy lines in the air before Marie G——, then five years old, and asked which she liked better. She chose the latter, though the others were calculated to produce a much more exciting impression, giving as her reason that the wavy lines were “straighter”; evidently meaning, as in the case of the figures, that these were more regular. In adults susceptibility to sensuously agreeable movement is doubtless still stronger, yet with them, too, there is a wide margin of pleasure in movement as such. From the multiplicity of available examples of this I select first the observation of street scenes, which I have already noticed in the case of animals,[149] especially the dog. The pleasure which we find in gazing out of our own windows or from behind the plate glass of a _café_ at the bustle and swarm of a city’s traffic detaches itself from all intellectual or even imaginative associations, and is gradually merged into a dreamy consciousness of a sensation of movement, mingled with mild enjoyment of its contrast with our own repose. With similar sensations we observe the stir of an ant-hill, the swarming of gnats in the evening glow, the confusion of snowflakes, and the whirling of leaves in a wind. A special interest attaches to the witnessing of skilful acrobatics where the feeling of inner imitation is strongly excited, and well does the juggler know how to turn this interest to account. The dexterous leaps which Amaranthus records at the beginning of the eighteenth century furnishes us an historical example: “Many are the leaps by which the jugglers cause the money of the spectators to jump into their own purses, and they have names as strange as they are ridiculous. There is the monkey jump, which throws one backward, landing him on both feet; the trout leap, which does the same thing twice in quick succession and with the legs crossed; twenty-two monkey jumps without stopping; a great variety of table and board jumps; the goat and hare leaps; the leap through eight rings, one from floor to ceiling, over chairs, etc.”[150]
The enjoyment is of course strengthened when the already interesting motion becomes sensuously agreeable; a low degree of such pleasure is experienced in witnessing regular motion in a single direction, such as that of a rushing stream or of clouds sailing across the heavens. In one of his verses Gottfried Keller calls these latter the “friendly companions of the dwellers on earth.” “As they wander on they attract and distract the burdened soul of him who observes them with wonder, and keep him amused all through the weary hours.” Gurgling springs add to their upward gushing motion the soft underground murmur of their waters, while the beauty of circling motion is perhaps never more effectively shown than in the majestic floating of birds of prey. Darwin says in his Voyage of the Beagle round the World: “When the condors are wheeling in a flock round and round any spot their flight is beautiful. Except when rising from the ground, I do not recollect ever having seen one of these birds flap its wings. Near Lima I watched several for nearly half an hour, without once taking off my eyes. They moved in large curves, sweeping in circles, descending and ascending, without giving a single flap.” Perhaps our pleasure is even greater in wave motions, as they roll over the ocean or are produced by the wind on a field of grain, or surge in the current of a rapid stream. These noble verses of Mörike’s on the Rhine falls bear witness to the power of the æsthetic feeling so aroused:
“Halte dein Herz, o Wanderer, fest in gewaltigen Händen! Mir entstürzte vor Lust zitternd das meinige fast. Rastlos donnernde Massen auf donnernde Massen geworfen, Ohr und Auge wohin retten sie sich im Tumult?...
“Rosse der Götter, im Schwung, eins über den Rücken des ander Stürmen herunter und streu’n silberne Mähnen umher; Herrliche Leiber, unzählbare, folgen sich, nimmer dieselben, Ewig dieselbigen—wer wartet das Ende wohl aus?”[151]
Finally, we will notice dancing movements. It is not only among birds that the courted female gazes with interest at the dancing of the male; we see it in all public dancing. This is one of the instances where visual play is as important as the movement, for even among the participants pleasure is heightened by the exciting spectacle of the other dancers,[152] and it is true the world over that spectators of a dance always become as passionately aroused as do the performers themselves. The piercing trills with which the women of some negro tribes at intervals accompany the dance of the males are surely not merely invitations to the latter, but indications as well of their own excitement. For this reason many onlookers are impelled to keep time with the rhythmic dance by clicking the tongue or clapping the hands. “The feeling of pleasure which is kindled in the performer,” says Grosse, “sheds its rays on the beholder as well.... In this way both become passionately excited, intoxicated by the sounds and movements; the transport constantly increasing, swells at last to veritable madness, which often results in violent outbreaks.”[153] The solo dances of primitive peoples presuppose an onlooking public more than mass dances do. Among Bushmen and Eskimos the men dance alone, while, according to Eyre, Australian women do it sometimes alone and sometimes in companies to, arouse the men.[154] Among the civilized people of the Orient professional dancing girls perform in the presence of men, in which case the spectators alone can be said to play. And the same is true of our ballet, which, indeed, except for its direct sexual effect, possesses but little pleasurable quality.[155]
II. PLAYFUL USE OF THE MOTOR APPARATUS
In this new section we by no means cut loose from what is sensory in a subjective sense, for of course we become conscious of our own movements only through the sensory paths of sight and what is collectively called touch, chiefly sensations of contact, and tendon and joint sensations. Yet from an objective standpoint we must enter upon the investigation of an entirely new province, where we shall be concerned not so much with the senses as with the manifold co-ordinated muscular movements of which our bodies are capable, and which are necessary or at least useful for the accomplishment of the tasks of life.
Since these movements are progressively acquired, the child’s first efforts can hardly be said to be voluntary. Many that are instinctive and automatic must be repeated over and over before voluntary ones come, for will implies an image which is a memory picture of the movement to be made. Preyer thinks that no intentional movements are made before the end of the first quarter.[156] Vierordt, indeed, says that their development is gradually progressive. “All indications point to the arm as first becoming obedient to volition, and the sucking movements, too, seem early to lose their reflex character. Then follow intentional movements of the head and neck and some groups of face muscles, and finally those of the lower limbs, which as late as the sixth month still move in the most haphazard manner.”[157] Playful experiment then promotes this acquisition of control over the bodily movements by the will, and strengthens and renders it permanent after it has been acquired.
Playful movements naturally fall into two great subdivisions, namely, those belonging to the organs as such and those directed toward other objects in connection with such organs—a distinction already familiar to us in our study of the production of noises and tones. We will now consider the first of these divisions, the most important phenomenon of which is locomotion.
A. PLAYFUL MOVEMENT OF THE BODILY ORGANS
In other connections we have touched upon many movement plays, such as voice practice and the production of sounds by means of various bodily organs, experimentation with tactile stimuli, and watching moving objects. This sort of exercise often combines motor with sensor play, as has been frequently pointed out. Therefore, to avoid repetition, I will in this section, after a few preliminary remarks suggested by such bearings of the subject as I conceive to be essential, proceed at once to consider the most important and obvious of all movement-plays—namely, those connected with change of place.
In voice practice experiments with the larynx, tongue, lips, and breathing muscles are involved. When children whisper, for example, their enjoyment must be due as much to the lip movements as to the slight sounds produced. The fact that the blind deaf-mute Laura Bridgman[158] playfully indulged in the production of various sounds seems to confirm this, and the principle is applicable too to other noises. The child who claps his hands, splashes in the water, bangs on the table with his fist, or puffs out his cheeks to blow a horn; the grown man who shuffles his feet, drums on the table or window pane, the noisy dancer, and even the piano or violin player who indulges in movements now loud, now soft, now slow, now quick—all derive a considerable part of their pleasure in the sport from the motor discharge which is involved.
No exhaustive demonstration is needed to prove that the same conditions prevail in experimentation with touch stimuli and the observation of motion, which is so often connected with it. “In the first year,” says Preyer, in speaking of the manifold and apparently aimless movements of the infant, “exercise of the muscles is the _raison d’être_ of all this activity which appears to be aimless. An adult lying on his back could not repeat the commonest movements of a seven to twelve months child without extreme fatigue.”[159] In arm movements the development of right-handedness is of especial interest. Formerly it was attributed to the mother’s or nurse’s method of carrying the child, to the greater weight of one side of the body, and similar pretexts; but Baldwin’s investigations show that such extraneous influences have little to do with it, for he found on excluding such agencies a marked preference for the right hand in the seventh and eighth months, displayed first in strenuous grasping movements.[160] An entirely satisfactory explanation has not yet been offered, though Sticker’s theory, is perhaps most probable—namely, that the left brain hemisphere has a better blood supply than the right.[161] When there is some difficulty to overcome, some opportunity to display dexterity, there are heightened stimulus and greater directness in the movements of arms and hands. Older children delight to set themselves such tasks as, for instance, clasping the hands behind the back, so that one arm crosses the shoulder, or placing the open hand on a table and raising the ring finger without any of the others, or laying the fingers over one another, etc. When such efforts are overlooked and directed by parents and teachers, we have the beginning of gymnastics, which remains a play so long as the subject enjoys it. Free-hand movements, exercises with dumb-bells and weights and the like, so far as the interest is not centred in the foreign body, all belong here. The intense desire for movement in many forms of mental disease should also be noted in this connection, since they have an indirect playful character, and by their very exaggeration are calculated to throw some light on the conduct of normal humanity. No psychic derangement shows this more clearly than does mania. The voice of such patients, says Kraepelin, “is usually high-pitched.... They are contented, feel inclined to all sorts of fun, and teasing, singing, and joking,” yet all this is invariably followed by a sudden plunge into the contrary mood. “That grave symptom of derangement, strong propensity to movement seems to stand in the closest connection with liveliness of spirits. The patient fairly revels in emotion; he is uneasy, can not long lie or sit still, stirs about, skips, runs, dances. He gesticulates wildly, claps his hands, makes faces, scribbles and rubs on the ground, walls, and windows, beats and drums on the floor, strips off his clothes, tears them to ribbons, etc.”[162] Since movement and its opposite are closely connected, the question arises whether the strange rigidity of body manifested in catalepsy is not referable to the same cause. There is certainly often a certain designedness about it. “When any attempt is made to change the position of the patient every muscle is found to be tense. If the head is forced aside by pressure, it flies back to its former position when released. To support the head hardly requires more than the weight of a finger. We are best acquainted with the psychic organ of this stubborn resistance in the common cases where the patient responds contrarily to speech suggestions. He can be made to go forward by being ordered back, and _vice versa_, will take a seat when told not to, stand still when commanded to go on, etc.”[163]
Finally, before going on to our principal subject, we should glance at the instinctive chewing motions which were mentioned among tactile plays. When a full-grown man going for a walk sticks a twig in his mouth and gnaws it the movements of his own jaw are of more interest to him than is the stick, except as it promotes sensations of contact. We take genuine pleasure in crunching toast and gnawing on a bone, and the unfortunate habit of biting the finger nails is one form of such play. Many smokers soon chew up the mouth pieces of their pipes and cigar holders, and others constantly bite pencil or penholder, and are unhappy when such indulgence is denied them. Betel-chewing, which, it is true, has the attraction of a narcotic, is indulged in, according to Von Bibra, by one hundred million human beings.[164] New Zealanders use _kauri_, the resin of a certain tree. “In the northern part of Sweden resin obtained from the trunk of a pine tree is very generally chewed.”[165] Americans who twenty-five years ago chewed prepared resin have adopted the chewing-gum habit. Material for it is brought chiefly from Mexico; in 1895 four million pounds of _chicle_ gum was imported for this purpose. Jules Legras says of Russia: “Gnawing sunflower seeds is the favourite amusement of children and of the poorer classes. The streets are full of shops where the beloved grain is sold, and the common people stuff their pockets with it. They skilfully split open the husk with the front teeth, discard it, and mechanically chew the kernel. It is a national habit, inexplicable to an outsider, for the seeds are tasteless; but the jaws are kept busy, and their motion forms an accompaniment to the vague dreaming of the poor people.”[166]
Turning now to our subject proper—namely, playful locomotion or change of place—we find the biological significance of play, the elaboration of certain imperfect instincts, brought out with marked distinctness. The child’s first practice in the direction of future walking is found in the alternative kicking, which is so essential to muscular development.[167] Further progress is marked by raising the body and learning to sit, efforts marking the beginning of the struggle with weights which Souriau regards as the leading stimulus to movement-play. So long as this struggle to retain his equilibrium lasts, the child’s behaviour betrays the direct intention of the play. Preyer says: “In his fourteenth week my sturdy boy easily made his first attempt to sit, having his back well propped. In his twenty-second week the child could raise himself in the effort to reach my face, but not till the thirty-ninth week could he sit alone, and still preferred a back. In his carriage it was necessary for him to hold on even in the fortieth and forty-first weeks. But when for a supreme moment he did manage to sit up unassisted he was evidently delighted, and made the greatest efforts to preserve his equilibrium.”[168]
Creeping is an imperfect though genuine sort of locomotion preparatory to walking. “It is a treat,” says Sigismund, “to watch a creeping child. The tiny creature, seated on the floor, longs for something beyond his reach; straining to get it, he loses his balance and falls over. In that position he still stretches his hand out, and notices that he is nearer the object of his desire, and that a few more such forward motions would attain it. Soon he becomes more active, sure, and courageous, and learns to maintain his centre of gravity on three supports while he lifts the fourth member for his next step forward, for at first the child raises but one limb at a time, though he soon learns to use the right hand and left foot together. I have never seen one so use the hand and foot on the same side. Sometimes the child crawls backward like a crab, even when there is nothing before him which he wishes to shun.”[169] Fouquières gives two beautiful ancient representations of creeping children, the first going toward some fruit which lies on a footstool, and the other gazing at a vase on the ground.[170]
Children who have a lively desire to roam before they are able to walk invent many expedients which afford them great satisfaction; for example, a little boy, Werner H——, has acquired remarkable skill in getting about by stiffening his arms as he stretches them down at his sides and swinging himself forward as if on crutches, as we sometimes see the unfortunates do who have had both legs amputated.
Learning to stand is an essential step preliminary to talking, and causes a child the liveliest satisfaction, giving him further control over his own body, and responding as it does to an inborn impulse. Sigismund places the first efforts in this direction in the eighteenth or twentieth week. “If the nurse holds up a child of this age on her lap, supporting it under the arms, it will dance, hop, and spring perpetually like a hooked fish, bound like a grasshopper, draw up his legs like a closed pocket knife, and twist his head and neck—in short, he will exhibit the same mercurial exuberance of motion which pleases us in young goats, lambs, and kittens. The child’s movements, however, are naturally in the direction of the normal human attitude, and he will make desperate attempts to pull himself up by his nurse’s dress or the edge of a chair or his bath tub, and when by the exertion of this utmost strength he succeeds he commonly breaks out into loud cries of joy.”[171] The playful quality so clearly recognised here appears also in Preyer’s remark that his boy in the fortieth week preferred to be exercised in standing rather than in sitting, although the former was more difficult.[172] This fact no doubt enhanced the pleasure. At the end of the first year or beginning of the second the child is usually far enough on to stand entirely alone. “He is amazed at his own daring, standing anxiously with feet wide apart, and at last letting himself down rather abruptly.”[173]
Coming now to actual walking, it is uncertain whether the alternating kicks of the infant point to special instinctive impulses, but we may be sure that when a child pushes forward on being held with the feet touching the floor he feels the stirrings of instinct. “Champney’s child,” says Preyer, “was held upright for the first time at the end of the nineteenth week, so that his feet rested on the floor, and he was moved forward; his legs worked with regularity, and each step was taken accurately and without hesitation or wavering even when the feet were lifted too high. Only in this case was the alternation interrupted, and he made another effort to take the step with his feet in the air. Resting the body sideways on one foot seemed to transfer the stimulus to the other. These observations ground my belief that walking is an instinctive act.”[174] This happens somewhat later if the child is not moved forward on being held up; thus Baldwin, whose experiment included no such motion, found that the “native walking reflex” suddenly appeared in the ninth month, while previous to that only a single alternation appeared, which might well be ascribed to chance.[175] Independent experimentation begins when, having drawn himself up by a chair, the child walks around it with the help of his hands, all the time resting on the seat, in which progress the achievement of a corner is as critical a movement as the rounding of a jutting crag in the path of a mountain climber. Soon after this arrives the crucial test—the terrible risk of the first step alone, which, when successfully accomplished, throws both parent and child into a transport of joy. The appreciative Sigismund gives a beautiful description of this too: “Forward steps having been practised while the hands cling to some fixed object, he is prepared to venture alone. This first step alone of a little child makes one involuntarily hold his breath at the sight. The small face reveals a conflict between the bold resolve to venture all and the cautious counsels of conservatism. Suddenly one little foot is shoved forward rather than lifted, and one hand at last stretched out as a balance. Sometimes that one step is all, and the little Icarus sinks down again. But often the child to whom the effort is particularly difficult makes, like a boy learning to skate or a man walking a rope, several steps in one direction, especially when the haven of safety is near at hand. Many children make no further attempts for weeks after the first; others, again, follow it up at once. Very gradually walking loses its anxious, doubtful character, and becomes an easy habit not requiring attention.” Froebel has well described the pleasure in success which, together with the gratification of instinctive impulse, makes learning to walk such a satisfaction. “The fact is well established,” he says, “that walking, and especially the first steps, give the child pleasure merely as a demonstration of his strength, although this is soon followed by other elements of enjoyment, such as the realization that it is means of arriving and of obtaining.”[176] As it becomes mechanical, walking, of course, loses its playful character. Pleasure in simple locomotion is experienced by adults, as a rule, only when the discharge of their motor impulses has been hindered by a sedentary life, and even then motion is not the chief source of satisfaction. The regular rhythm of walking acts like a narcotic on an excited mind, which reacts to it unconsciously. I remember that Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann paced up and down like a sick wolf before the door of the wife from whom he was separated; and we find a fearful reminder of the restless walking back and forth of caged animals in the deep-worn footprints of the prisoner of Chillon. We find, though, for all ages games whose object is the conquest of some difficulty, great or small. We frequently see small dogs keep one leg up in the air without any apparent reason and, run along on three, and in the same way children try all sorts of experiments in walking. Now one of them is lame in one foot, now one small leg is stiff, now he drags his feet, now walks with a jerk or on tiptoe. Many of these movements are turned to account in elementary gymnastics, and those pathological subjects whose mania takes a playful turn show quite similar peculiarities in walking.[177] Almost as soon as the child has learned to preserve his equilibrium in ordinary walking he proceeds to complicate the problem by trying to walk on curbstones, in a rut, on a beam, on a balustrade or narrow wall. Unusual facility in these leads on to rope walking, and afterward turns out to be of great service to the mountain climber on narrow ridges and snow-covered ledges. A famous architect was so foolhardy as to walk round the narrow leads of the Königstuhl tower in Heidelberg, and it is recorded of the ancient Norse king Olav Tryggvason that he possessed the accomplishment, among others, of being able to run across the oars of a boat while the men were rowing. Another form of self-imposed difficulty and consequent conversion of locomotion into play is the attempt to step on all the cracks in the pavement or floor or on certain figures in a carpet. Something of this kind must have led to the game of Paradieshüpfen in Germany, hop-scotch in England, la Marelle in France, in which certain spaces are marked out in the sand or on a floor, on whose outlines the foot must not be set.
Running games will form our next subject, and we find that the child’s earliest efforts for locomotion are as much like running as walking. His first steps alone are, it is true most hesitatingly made, but the nearer the goal, especially if it happens to be his mother kneeling with outstretched arms, the more rapid are his movements. Gradually the distinction between running and walking becomes more marked. For an example of genuine practice for a quick run Preyer’s observations may again be cited. He says that on the four hundred and fifty-ninth day the boy stopped short several times in his rapid course and stamped. In his seventy-seventh week this child ran nineteen times without stopping around a large table, calling out “mama,” and “bwa, bwa, bwa,”[178] the while. This simple running soon loses its charm, and is not much used later in play until it is transformed into a contest and acquires a new and higher meaning, of which we shall speak presently. Yet there are many running games whose attraction consists in the difficulties to be overcome, and very rapid running is a delight in itself, throwing us into a sort of transport and exciting in us “je ne sais quelle idée d’infini, de désir sans mesure, de vie surabondante et folle, je ne sais quel dedain de l’individualité quel besoin de se sentir aller sans se retenir, de se perdre dans le tout.”[179]
Running down a smooth slope is a diversion which easily tempts even grown people, and boys at least find something like it in their game of snapping the whip, in which game a chain is made with the strongest boy in front. He has the task of moving the whole line in curves, so that the end ones are obliged to run in dizzy haste. In both cases natural forces, coming to the aid of the individual’s own efforts, add to the enjoyment. Overcoming difficulties is prominent in the Hellenic πιτυλίζειν, which it seems consisted in running on the tips of the toes, as well as in the equally ancient ἐκπλεθρίζειν, which was a peculiar varied running, without curves, in a straight line back and forth, the line growing shorter and shorter till a central point was reached, where, as only one step remained, the runner came to a standstill.[180]
Hopping and skipping are also to be classed with running plays; the body is suspended in the air for an instant in all these movements, though in hopping and skipping the motion is more vertical. They belong in the same category with the vagaries of locomotion which I have pointed out, and any lively child finds it hard to dispense with them when out for a walk, just as lambs and kids do. In the ordinary skip one foot at a time comes with a slight shoving motion on the ground and gives us the beginning of a galop and the principle of the waltz, while hopping forms the foundation for the polka. This hop on one foot is utilized in many plays, such as the hopscotch already mentioned, and in chasing and fighting games, like “Cock Fight” (German Hahnenkampf), “Fox in his Hole,” etc. In Greece the ἀσκωλιάζειν was a popular game, and Grasberger says that their hopping was the same as ours, and in some games he who accomplished the task with the fewest hops won the prize. In a catching game the contestants hopped on a circular line and attempted to touch one another with the free foot. Finally, the drollest and most popular form of the game, which never failed to excite laughter in all beholders, was the genuine Askoliasmos. A skin well oiled on the outside and filled with air was stepped on by the player, who attempted to stand on it while he went through various dancing and hopping motions. The favourite circus trick of running on a rolling cannon ball is a modern form of this.
Children begin to jump by leaping downward. Before the little experimentor has halfway learned to go down steps he likes to reach the ground by a jump from the last one, at first a difficult enough exploit. But soon this palls, and something harder is at once undertaken, just as the habitual drunkard attains to stronger and stronger potations. The three-year-old can take two or three steps or boldly leap from a chair on which he has laboriously clambered with this intent. When some large stone pillars intended for a garden gate lay in the street before my house all the children in the neighbourhood collected to enjoy the pleasure of jumping off of them. Psychologically this pleasure is derived not merely from the agreeable flying motion, but from the stimulus of difficulty to be overcome and a feeling of pride in encountering risks. Chamberlain tells of two small Americans who had in their familiar speech a word for “the feeling you have just before you jump, don’t you know, when you mean to jump and want to do it and are just a little bit afraid to do it,” and another for “the way you feel when you have just jumped and are awfully proud of it.”[181] Perhaps the liveliest feeling of pleasure is caused by the leap into water, because the soft, yielding, and yet resisting element furnishes an unusually long trajectory. Many South Sea islanders have cultivated this art to an astonishing degree. The pleasure of snowshoeing, too, consists chiefly in the circumstance that the path ends suddenly in an abrupt slope, over which the skilful sportsman flies in a tremendous leap amid a whir of soft snow. “To see,” says Nansen in his book on Greenland, “how the practised runner makes his leap into the air is one of the finest spectacles in the world. To see him whizzing boldly down the mountain, collect himself in a few steps before the spring, pause and take position, and then like a sea gull glide through the air, striking the ground at a distance of twenty to twenty-five metres immersed in a cloud of flying snow—all this sends a thrill of sympathetic pleasure through one’s frame.” Later, children learn high and long-distance jumps, the doorstep, a tiny stream and narrow ditch affording opportunity for the first practice, and an older boy leaps gaily over a low hedge, a wide brook, or his comrade’s back in leap-frog. The element of danger exists here and some combativeness, as though it were a sort of conquest of the object; these features are especially prominent when the vault is made over a blazing fire, as in the custom with some mountaineers’ games. It is first heard of in the Palilia, a herdsman’s game of ancient Rome, commemorative of the founding of the city, and the people of the Nicobar Islands believe that leaping through fire is a sure cure for colds, fevers, etc.[182] The salto mortale marked the highest degree of difficulty and danger—a Greek vase shows it as a somersault in the midst of the high jump. Norwegian youths can spring up so high as to touch the ceiling with one foot and agilely regain their upright position. The Greeks used weights of stone or lead, which they swung violently to intensify the force of the leap, the springboard being apparently unknown to them. Grasberger regards the statement that Phayllos of Crete could cover from fifty to fifty-five feet[183] as well authenticated, but it was certainly a prodigious leap. Similar incredible feats are reported of the ancient Germans, one being that of the Viking Halfdan, who jumped over a gorge thirty yards wide.[184] From this is but a step to the world-famed contest between Brunhilde and Gunther, in which Brunhilde hurled a mighty stone and then leaped after it as far as or farther than the stone went, and Siegfried performed the same feat, carrying Gunther with him.
Climbing is probably the outcome of a special instinct. The striking fact that a newborn infant is at once able to cling with his hands certainly points to this. It has been shown by Robinson that infants may cling fast enough to a stick to be lifted from the ground and held suspended in midair.
The first attempts at actual climbing occur in the second year in conjunction with creeping, and are usually efforts to go upstairs. Young animals whose future life demands skill in climbing also manifest this upward tendency. Where Lenz says that the two-weeks-old kid enjoys neck-breaking adventures and makes remarkable leaps, that he always wants to go upon piles of wood or stone, on walls and rocks, and that climbing upstairs is his chief delight,[185] he gives at the same time a faithful picture of dawning human impulses. Little George K——, a year and a half old, made his way in an unguarded moment from the garden to the third story of his father’s house. Numberless accidents have resulted from the climbing upon chairs and tables, which is so indefatigably persisted in, and there are few plays which afford so much pleasure to older children as climbing trees. It is probable that, in spite of the danger of the situation, there is an instinctive feeling of security and comfort when they are cosily settled among the branches. We naturally attribute this, to the habits of their progenitors, but a simpler explanation of their enjoyment of the situation may be that their elders can not get to them. That girls gladly participate in this supposedly masculine indulgence is noteworthy. Marlitt and Mrs. Hungerford give amusing instances of trying situations in which older girls have been placed through this propensity. The tall and glossy beech tree, with all sorts of beauties luring one to its topmost branches, presents special difficulties to adventurers. Climbing steep cliffs, too, is a favourite pastime; one of the pleasantest recollections of my own youth is of climbing a wooded slope in the neighbourhood of St. Blasien in the Black Forest, where I spent half a day with two other children building a moss hut on an almost inaccessible crag. The modern fad of making foolhardy excursions to the highest peaks is too familiar to need enlarging on. It clearly shows that the most difficult movement plays are combative. Th. Wundt, the famous climber, is quite right when he says in his book on the Jungfrau and the Bernese Oberland that the mountain climber “takes Nature by storm; he does not expect that she will present a smiling aspect; he measures strength with her; he seeks a contest which will try him to the uttermost, and the longing for adventure is much stronger than any mere passive enjoyment.” We find traces of this same spirit in old German records, as witness thus: King Olaf Tryggvason, to prove his prowess, climbed the Smalsarhorn, hitherto regarded as unscalable, and fixed his shield to its summit.[186]
With only a passing mention of swimming movements, in which the South Sea Islanders excel, I turn at once to the dance, or what may be called the artistic form of locomotion, confining myself, however, strictly to those forms of it which have to do with pure movement-play. We must, I think, assume that elementary ideas of dancing are present in childhood, but the developed art belongs to adults. Besides the walking, running, hopping, and skipping of which we have spoken, the child makes use of every imaginable turn and attitude of the head, trunk, and limbs, and a careful study of the various gymnastic motions of all times and peoples could hardly reveal greater variety than is found among these little ones. A certain rhythm, too, is noticeable in their ordinary hopping and skipping, but the essential feature of the dance, the regulation of bodily movement by measured music, must be acquired. Preyer’s statement that his child in its twenty-fourth month danced in time with music,[187] it seems to me, is an exception to the rule, for among the large number of small children whom I have seen dancing to music I can not recall a single one who kept time regularly and with assurance without some teaching and example. I myself learned the polka step, moving forward in a straight line, when I was a ten-year-old boy, and I can remember feeling that it was something new and peculiar, and that many of my comrades had great difficulty in achieving it. I am told by a woman teacher that she attempted to teach some little girls between five and eight years old to walk in time to a march played on the piano, and that not a single one of them could do it successfully on the first trial. Yet, on the other hand, it is certain that children learn dancing very quickly through imitation, especially among savages. It is amazing to see with what assurance these little ones can participate in the complicated dances of their elders. I shall return to this in speaking of imitative plays. The ring dances of European children, which we shall shortly refer to under social plays, are derived from mediæval and ancient dances of adults.
To find the sources of pleasure in dancing we must go back to the common ground of satisfaction in obeying the impulse for motion, yet it is not easy to assign a general explanation for the peculiar charm of rhythmical movement. Spencer holds that passionate excitement naturally manifests itself in rhythmic repetition; while Minor, on the contrary, sees in it the expression of a prudential instinct to restrain the fury of passionate feeling.[188] As Schiller, too, says:
“Es ist des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit, Die zum geselligen Tanz ordnet den tobenden Sprung, Die der Nemesis Gleich, an des Rhythmus goldenem Zügel Lenkt die brausende Lust und die verwilderte zähmt.”[189]
This view is quite plausible when applied to the social effect of dancing, as Grosse has pointed out. Rhythm does subdue and order “riotous lust,” and afford a harmless outlet to the general need for some expression of it. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that its effect is always subduing, since, as a matter of fact, it often leads to the wildest tumult. “Oh, thou bold gamester,” an old song runs, “Make for us a long row, Hip, hip, hurrah! how he can go! Heart, lungs, and liver he will overthrow.”[190]
Spencer’s remark makes it clear, from the other point of view, that rhythm is a most suitable instrument for the expression of passionate emotion, be it sad or joyful, but fails to explain why it is in itself intensely exciting and pleasurably so. Grosse justly says of Spencer’s view: “According to this theory the rhythm of dancing movements seems to be only a sharply and strongly intensified form of locomotion. It does not at all explain the pleasurable quality of rhythm, and if we are unwilling to accept description in lieu of explanation we can only regard this statement of fact as introductory to further investigation.”
Since Darwin’s theory, mentioned above, has as yet found little substantial proof, the intoxicating effects of rhythmic motion must find some other explanation here. Such movements are employed among most peoples as a means of producing ecstatic conditions. Selenkas gives a simple instance from Borneo: “The candidate [for the office of doctor] was led before the Manangs as they squatted on the ground. The Dekan, or spokesman, addressed him, and, rising, anointed his forehead with oil and ordered him to go around the ring bearing a lance to which was hung a medicine bag. The Dekan followed him at a trot, and their speed was constantly increased as the accompanying song of the others grew louder, until at last the novitiate, gasping and stumbling as if hypnotized, broke down.”[191]
Here we have in elementary form the kind of intoxication which is so fruitful in the production of religious ecstasy as it is indulged in by many Christian sects, notably the American Puritans in their rolling exercise. Numerous descriptions, however, show that some dance movements may produce the same effect; indeed, some investigators have been led to the belief that all dancing was originally religious, but this view is as one-sided as is the attempt to refer dancing exclusively to courtship. It is safer to regard it rather as an exciting movement-play which possesses, in common with other narcotics, the magic power of abstracting us from commonplace existence and transporting us to a self-created world of dreams. When accompanied by special influences, which relate to fighting or love, the agitation produced is sufficient to stir the soul to its depths; but even without these associations the intoxicating power of movement is apparent, its simplest effects being a kind of anæsthesia, relaxation of all tension, unconsciousness of fatigue, and the illusion of being free from bodily weight, like a spirit floating about in space. As Schiller says, “Befreit von der Schwere des Leibes.” This illusion, in itself productive of great enjoyment, explains our pleasure in such dances as we are considering. Much has been said in criticism of the modern round dance. Apart from sexual considerations, to which, after all, I do not attach much weight, present-day dancing, is said to lack the social effect of mass plays and the stimulus of mimic dances. But if we look upon it as a simple movement-play, and consider it more from the standpoint of the dancer than of the spectator, that criticism loses its force. The slower time of old-fashioned waltzing was certainly more effective, and made a much more dignified spectacle, but from the dancer’s point of view it was a distinct advance when the tempo was quickened, for the present method plunges the dancing pair more surely and quickly into the delicious tumult and madness of motion.[192]
Since it would take too long even to glance at all the gymnastic dances of times gone by, it will serve our purpose to point out those which were controlled by rhythm. The wild leaping of mediæval ring dancing, where it is said that even the ladies jumped a distance of six feet, and flew through the air like birds; the Spartan βίβασις, kept up until exhaustion ensued; the forward, sideward, and backward springing, and the measured tramping of the Australian corroborris; the squatting and kneeling of the Nicobar Islanders; bowing the body, swinging the arms, and nodding the head in the Dajak war dance; the clapping and “Haxenschlagen” of Europeans—all these are typical phenomena. Sometimes, in the midst of the general agitation of the body, one part will remain rigid, as in this instance, described by Man: “The dancer bent his back and threw his whole weight on one leg, whose knee was crooked; the hands were stretched out before his breast, one thumb held between the other thumb and forefinger while the other fingers were strained forward. In this position the dancer turned round, hopping forward on the supporting leg, and with every hop stamping on the floor with the free foot.[193] Similar spreading out of the fingers is mentioned in Selenkas’s picture of a Malay woman’s dancing in Sumatra,[194] and I saw a comic European dancer hold his arm out horizontally, but turned up from the elbow in a stiff manner, which made the immobility of the upper part of his body appear in ridiculous contrast to the lively motion of his legs. It would seem that the inhibition of all involuntary muscular innervation produces more absolute surrender to the prescribed movements of the dance....”
Before entering on the second half of this section we must devote a few words to artificial methods of moving the body, which are divided into two classes, those which are passive and those employed in active locomotion. Naturally the first implement of this kind to be mentioned is the cradle, of whose use among the Greeks we find no evidence, but the Romans had them since the time of Plautus. The oldest German record of them is in the Saxon manuscript at Heidelberg.[195] Of course, the cradle’s rocking motion and its soothing effect should be included in our enumeration of agreeable movements. The same may be said of swinging, which we find practised by many birds and by the ape; indeed, one case is recorded where a monkey himself attached a rope to the projection of a roof and swung himself on it. The human race, too, probably without exception, enjoy the sport. The hammock is in some cases the prototype of the swing. Von den Steinen relates of the Brazilian Bakairi that the men when at home spend most of their time swinging in hammocks.[196] Parkinson describes a still more primitive sort of swing. It seems that the Gilbert Islanders select a stout, well-grown cocoanut tree and attach a cord to it, on the other end of which is a club. A young woman climbs on the trunk, and taking her seat there is swung by a youth, who, watching his chance when the motion is well under way, catches hold with his hands and swings with her.[197] The Greeks had several forms of the swing, among them the joggling board, consisting of a flexible plank supported at its ends on fixed beams, and the rope swing which with its comfortable seat supported by four cords was used by adults. The Berlin Museum possesses a bowl ornamented with the figure of a fawn running under a young girl in such a swing and sending her high in the air. Athens celebrated a special holiday called after the swing, αἰῶραι.[198]
Pleasure in riding and driving being partly due to the control we have over the horses, such enjoyment is a combination of active and passive. Even when we are only steering a boat the illusion is easily supported that we are to some extent responsible for its progress. Riding has other elements of attraction: besides the forward motion and lofty seat there is some peculiar enjoyment of each particular gait, the sensuously agreeable canter and the hard shake of the trot, which, so far as it can be pleasurable, furnishes an instance of more vehement enjoyment. Among artificial means of locomotion, those are most agreeable which afford a swift and yet smooth gliding or rocking motion. Souriau says in his Esthétique du Mouvement that the chief attraction of movement-plays lies in the overcoming of gravitation. But in that case, as I pointed out in my earlier work, downward movement would have no charm, since gravitation is there triumphant. The child’s first jump is, as we have seen, downward, and the downward rush of a sled fills us with exquisite delight. Souriau’s other supposition, that perhaps it is the exemption from friction, from the slight hindrances and detentions which commonly attend our movements, which accounts for our pleasure,[199] seems more probable. It is to be hoped that among the sports of the future, flying either in balloons or with flying machines will be included. Lilienthal, in recounting his experiences in these arts, assures us that gliding through the air in a slanting direction affords a new and delightful sensation.
A long list of inventions, for the most part recreative, meet the demand for aids to active locomotion, notably appliances for rowing and the bicycle. Among ancient implements of this character I mention but two: stilts and snowshoes. Running on stilts is a favourite sport of children, both on account of the difficulties it presents and because of the elevation it affords. It was practised by both Greeks and Romans, and Pollux mentions a Spartan dance which was performed on stilts, probably the kind which is bound to the foot.[200] In speaking of the ethnological distribution of this custom Andree says that stilts are found all over the world. “In China they are very skilfully used, and are not unknown to Africa among many African tribes. The negro boys left of the Congo bind stilts to their ankles to appear taller. They are well known to the Malays and the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands. In Tahiti a limb of a tree is used, having a smaller branch projecting at about a metre from the ground, and in this fork the foot is placed. The beautifully carved stilts of the Marquise Islanders have attained a certain celebrity.”[201] The snowshoe, which has recently become popular once more, seems to be as ancient as the skate.[202]
“In skating,” says Weinhold, “the men and boys emulated the example of Ullr and Skadi, who must have been very gods of snow and ice. But they did not use steel skates like ours, but stood on long boards and held a staff to steady them. Many Norsemen became famous for this kind of running; such sagas of their skill have come down to us.... The Finns were teachers of this art, which was carried to great perfection among them. In their peace treaties any violator of them was menaced with being called a traitor as far as ships sailed or shields glittered, as the sun shone or snow fell, or the Finn could skate.”[203]
B. PLAYFUL MOVING OF FOREIGN BODIES
The primitive impulse to extend the sphere of their power as far as possible leads men to the conquest and control of objects lying around them. We can distinguish six different groups of movement-plays resulting from this impulse: 1, Mere “hustling” things about; 2, destructive or analytic play; 3, constructive or synthetic play; 4, plays of endurance; 5, throwing plays; 6, catching plays.
1. _Hustling Things about_
By this rather inelegant but expressive term we designate a kind of play which belongs to early childhood. From the grasping impulse the tendency is developed in the second quarter to push and pull things about in all directions, to shake and test them with hands and lips, to seize and to push away. External objects are all playthings to the child, says Perez, all objects of his investigating tendencies. “Il les manie, les tourne, les abat, les redresse, les jette, les reprend, les poursuit à quatre pattes, quand il ne peut les atteindre, les attire à lui, les frappe, les uns contre, les autres, fouille dans leurs profondeurs, les entasse et les sépare, enfin joue ou s’instruit par eux de mille manières.”[204] Tearing paper gives particular pleasure. The child “seizes it with avidity, crumples it up in his hand as if pleased to find that there is power enough in the tiny fist to change the form of anything, or he polishes the tables with it as zealously as a Dutch woman.”[205]
“A child delights to play with things that can be put in motion, takes pleasure in shaking a well-filled purse, turning the handle of a coffee mill, pulling out drawers, dabbling in water, and for the same reason older children are fond of handling smooth sand and clay.”[206] Autenrieth gives a good instance of what we call joy in being a cause, which is conspicuous in all play of this class. “All small boys regard it as a treat to be allowed to paddle in street puddles, where they can produce a great effect with little effort.”[207]
Much that might suitably be classed here has already been mentioned in connection with seeing, hearing, and tactile plays, since the impulse to set surrounding objects in motion is very closely connected with the desire for sensuous excitement. To avoid repetition I will simply refer to what has been said, and content myself here with adding one more play to the list, as it has special claim to be classed with them—namely, flying kites and similar play with captive insects. Although a little child can have but a very imperfect conception of the difference between animate and inanimate objects, yet living creatures certainly have a paramount interest for him. Everything which flies or crawls is watched and questioned with an almost passionate interest, and the desire to follow a flying insect and to possess it leads the child to tie a string to some part of its body. K. von den Steinen saw two Bororó boys in Brazil, one of whom had a bee and the other a butterfly fluttering on a cord.[208] In Greece such sport was called μηλολόνδη or μηλολάνδη. Gold beetles were attached to cords three yards long, with pieces of wood on the end, and unmercifully pulled about in the air—veritable “hustling” indeed.[209] Children sometimes treat little birds in the same way. “When a boy catches a sparrow,” says Geiler von Kaisersberg, “he ties a thread one or two ells long to it, letting the bird fly while he holds the cord in his hand. If it darts off and tries to get away the boy jerks the string, and the poor little creature falls down again.”[210]
Paper kites in the form of birds and animals afford similar entertainment, and have a remarkably lifelike appearance as they sail aloft. They impart to their owners a pleasant sense of a widely extended sphere of control. This fine sport originated in China, where it is the national game. Bastion saw Siamese children[211] playing with kites, and the Berlin Museum has paper ones from the Soudan. They are in use also in the South Sea Islands as far down as New Zealand.
In concluding, I remark it was this faculty of busying one’s self with all sorts of objects in this kind of play which first suggested to me the term experimentation which I have found useful in a much wider sense.
2. _Destructive (Analytic) Movement-Play_
The simplest and earliest handling of external objects exhibits the fundamental principle which differentiates the forms of our conscious activity, showing them to be such as make for division or for concentration. Play which separates or analyzes easily acquires a special character which allies it with the fighting instincts and concerts it into wild destructiveness. The veriest infant shows its beginnings in his desire to tear paper, pull the heads off of flowers, rummage in boxes, and the like; and as the child grows older he displays more clearly this analytic impulse—boys as a rule more than girls, be it noted. They are constantly taking their toys to pieces, dissecting tools, weapons, clocks, toys, etc.; and since the child, like the savage, has not our clear perception of the difference between what is living and the lifeless, he will pull to pieces a beetle, a fly, or a bird with the same serenity which accompanies his demolition of a flower. Perez tells this of a child hardly ten months old. “His nurse put him on the grass and gave him a turtle to play with, and as he seemed to be absorbed in watching it, left him for a moment. When she came back one of the creature’s legs was torn half off, and the zealous investigator was applying his powers to another.”[212] As far back as Fischart’s time this was known to be different from actual cruelty, and Keller in his Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe gives us a classic instance. The boy and girl were playing together with a doll which he suddenly jerked away from the little girl and mischievously tossed up in the air. The doll came to grief in his hands, for a little hole appeared in one of her knees and some bran was escaping. The little girl did not seem to notice the hole, so the boy kept quite still busily making it larger with his finger and increasing the flow of bran. His silence at last aroused her suspicion, and she came closer and beheld his wickedness with horror. “Just look at that!” he cried, holding the leg so that some bran fell in her face; and when she tried to reach the doll, he leaped away, and would not stop until the whole leg hung limp and empty as a husk. Then follows a description of how the offended child was finally won over to join the boy in the work of destruction, helping to bore hole after hole in the body of the martyr. Other examples of the workings of the destructive impulse will be adduced under fighting plays.
3. _Constructive (Synthetic) Movement-Play_
Constructive play bears about the same relation to imitation that analytic play bears to the fighting instinct. Circumstances under which this relation can not be traced are comparatively rare and very primitive. However, it is important to bear in mind that back of the μίμησις, in which Aristotle finds the essence of artistic effort, and back of the overflow of dammed-up energies which the new psychology emphasizes, there is still something primeval. Ribot calls it “Le besoin de créer,” or a demand for some external result of our instinctive movements, which is, after all, but a specialized form of joy in being a cause.[213] Pleasure in the work of our own hands, which takes a negative form in destructive sport, here becomes positive creation, the instinct for building, for uniting scattered elements into a new whole. Its simplest form is found in the child’s moulding new forms from some suitable material, their chief charm being their newness. Moist sand is heaped up or dug away, snow tunnelled through or rolled into a great ball, sticks of wood piled, water collected in a pond, etc. Such things are always going on where there are children. “I have a boy in mind,” says Michelet, “hardly eighteen months old, who claps his hands joyously when he succeeds in laying one little stick upon another. He admires his work, and, like a small creator, seems to say: ‘See that? It is very good.’”[214] Marie G—— affords the following pretty instance: One day, when she was about three, she sat on the floor in great distress, with tears pouring down her cheeks. Soon she noticed that the drops rolled down like silver balls on her woollen dress, and at once began to collect the transparent pearls in a fold, and so accumulated as she sobbed a little “heap of woe” in her lap.
We readily see how imitation brings about great variety in the manifestations of the constructive tendency. The fun is not at its height until the sand is converted into mountains, tunnels, moats, and walls, the snow into the figure of a man, the mud to a similitude of dolls, the woodpile to buildings, water to lakes, streams to waterfalls, etc. Arranging the same or similar objects in rows is a more advanced and yet primitive kind of constructiveness. Preyer reports such arrangement of shells, pebbles, and buttons in the twenty-first month.[215] Where this is not imitation of elders it may be regarded as the forerunner of that preference for regular succession which is so prominent in decoration.
Closely connected with all this is the disposition to make collections. The disposition to appropriate and cling to whatever attracts the attention (James[216] makes it a special instinct, which he calls appropriation or acquisitiveness) is a feature of constructive activity. Animals as well as children try to accumulate whatever pleases them. Viscachas, woodrats, various members of the crow family, and many other birds, have the habit of hoarding especially bright objects. The inclination first shows itself in children in their collecting in one place various things of only ordinary interest, as in the pockets of a small boy,[217] or a girl’s bureau drawers; and adults too often retain this habit. G. Keller, whose _metier_ for the grotesque is well known,[218] gives exaggerated instances of the mania for collecting, as in the case of the lacquered cabinet belonging to Züs Bünzlin, one of his heroines. It contained a gilded and painted Easter egg, a half dozen silver teaspoons, the Lord’s Prayer printed in gold on a red transparent substance which she said was human skin, a cherry stone on which a crucifix was carved, a broken ivory box lined with red silk and containing a small mirror and a thimble, another cherry stone inside of which a miniature game of skittles was going on, a nut with a Madonna in it under glass and a silver heart inside, and so on. But the passion for collecting reaches its height only when some particular kind of thing forms its object. It is natural to us all to get together as many things as we can of a kind which especially attracts us. When the four-year-old girl who never tires of picking flowers ties those she had plucked into a bouquet to carry home, we have the beginning of discriminating collection; when she searches for and hoards shells or coloured pebbles of unusually perfect shape, she is really within the charmed circle. Munkacsy tells us of his childhood: “Strange as it may seem, my chief enjoyment was in gathering stones on the street, and many a box on the ear has the habit earned for me. I stuffed my pockets so full that the integrity of my trousers was seriously threatened; and besides, my father had frequently forbidden it.”[219] Boys will collect anything, says James, which they see other boys collect, “from pieces of chalk and peach pits up to books and photographs.”[220] Of the hundred students whom he questioned, only four or five had never collected anything. The words “which they see other boys collect” intimate that imitation and rivalry have much to do with this impulse. Any boy is admired and envied who has very rare butterflies, beetles, eggs, stamps, etc., or a large number of them; as indeed is any man, for the same principle applies to adults. There are other manifestations, too, of the combative emulative spirit which is active in almost all play. The search for more specimens often leads to contests which place even those who are otherwise honourable in an attitude of open hostility, and admits the practice of deceit, treachery, and robbery. Kleptomania is frequently nothing else than an overwhelming and imperative impulse for collecting. Yet the fact that adults collect things which have no intrinsic value shows that imitation and the combative spirit are here only incidental, in spite of their seeming weight. In impulsive insanity the patient carefully saves the refuse from his own body, hair that has been cut off, finger nails, bits of skin, and even more unpleasant things. This must have its origin in a deep-rooted demand for synthetic activity.
4. _Playful Exercise of Endurance_
The play which we have been considering gains, as other kinds do, a further charm when difficulties are associated with it, and it becomes more like fighting play. When Strümpell’s little daughter learned to grasp easily she was no longer satisfied with holding ordinary things, and took to picking up objects so small as to be difficult to get hold of.[221] When she was two and a half years old she enjoyed opening the door of a little clock, and never tired of fitting the small snap into its slot; she could also thread the finest needle. Animals, too, seem to enjoy overcoming difficulties. Parrots like to take out screws, and Miss Romanes says that her monkey tried with indefatigable perseverance to put back the handle on a hearth brush which he had taken apart, and turned away from it at once as soon as he succeeded.[222] There are all sorts of puzzles which indulge this fancy, such as untying apparently fast knots with a single jerk, disentangling intertwined rings, taking balls or rings off an endless cord, taking two corks, held between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, with the thumb and forefinger of the other without leaving the hands joined, and many such things. The Greek χαλκισμός is explained for the first time by Becker in the fifth scene of his Charikles: “It was an attempt to bring a coin spinning on its edge to a standstill by touching it from above with the finger.” Rochholz thus describes the Swiss “Fadmen”: “A boy sitting in a basket which is swung to and fro in the air gets a prize if he succeeds in threading a needle during the process.... In Aargau the contestants sit on a stout bottle with their feet crossed.”[223] Strutt gives two English examples from the fourteenth century. A youth standing on a light flexible pole stretched over water, attempted to put out one candle with another.[224] The familiar Chinese game which we call jackstraws was mentioned by Amaranthus in 1715.[225] The Berlin Museum has many such puzzles from remote parts of the world. O. Finsch mentions two (probably imported) much used in India: the Chut-jueh-mudra, in which a cube is put together from tiny bits, and the “five-horse game,” where two wooden rings strung on a cord are to be removed without loosening the knot, and other such sports as are common among ourselves.[226] The difficult task of forming various figures with a string held stretched between the two hands (cat’s cradle) affords entertainment for hours at a time to the Eskimos in Baffin Land. They call the game _ajarorpoq_.[227] It is found also in Australia, Borneo, New Guinea, New Zealand, and Java, where, Schmetz says, the children play it too. Finally, I may add that von Hartmann classes much of the ladies’ fancy work with such play, inasmuch as it does not possess artistic value, and its intrinsic worth is out of all proportion to the effort expended.[228]
5. _Throwing Plays_
Whereas the forms of movement-play which we have been considering are more or less connected, throwing is regarded by many as a special instinct. Preyer says that it is “undoubtedly instinctive.” When monkeys get excited they throw anything they can get hold of; and a five-year-old idiot whose brain structure was much like that of a monkey did the same thing when he was teased.[229] In any case, throwing is certainly an interesting phenomenon, which, if monkeys did not indulge in it, we should claim as a prerogative of the human race. At first it was defensive, the missile serving at a distance as a substitute for one of the bodily members, and consequently first gave the idea of a machine, if we take the word μηχανή in its more general sense. The next step, and one which monkeys can not attain, is the fashioning of the projectile into a work of art.
Accidental dropping of objects seems to introduce the idea of throwing to the infant mind, and what we have called visual play furthers its development, since the child from watching the falling object comes to repeat the process intentionally, and so learns to throw. The following report of Preyer’s traces this progression: “Thirtieth week: Frequent dropping, but still not noticed. Thirty-fourth week: The child looks after the object dropped, but indifferently. Forty-seventh week: The child throws down anything that is given him after playing with it a little, and often looks after it. On one occasion he threw a book on the floor eight times in succession, and his pursed-up lips indicated serious determination.”[230] Further developments were hampered by the interference of his parents. Sigismund, too, gives valuable notes, and adds some luminous remarks on the biological and psychological significance of such play. “All children like to throw,” he says, “and are often blamed for it very unjustly. We should remember that although some window panes may be endangered by such play, it lays the foundation for man’s supremacy over the other animals, and that by means of it muscles are gradually developed and strengthened. We should rejoice, then, with the children when a stone goes a long way or bounds into the water with a splash. When children get out of doors the desire to throw something takes possession of them; even the yearling picks up pebbles and delights to roll them. The older boys stand on the coping or carriage block, and are engrossed in testing the force and directness of their aim. They are trying the power of will over matter.”[231] This is the correct designation of the peculiar satisfaction derived from throwing. It is that which comes from sending the object from us and, as it were, projecting our individuality into a wider sphere of action. Souriau says: “We take a special interest in the extension of motion originated by ourselves. It becomes a part of us. The force which we behold at work outside of us is our own.”[232]
If we include rolling or sliding in our definition of throwing, we are confronted by a bewildering variety of games;[233] but since the ends of a general psychology of play would not be furthered by an enumeration of these, we will try to single out such as illustrate the varied forms of satisfaction which throwing in general affords. First of all let us keep in mind our principle, that inventive play presupposes a complication of instinctive tendencies through the satisfaction of which enjoyment is greatly enhanced. Usually it is impulses for fighting and imitation which ally themselves with that toward movement and render the play more varied and pleasurable. There are, indeed, very few throwing plays that have not culminated in contests of one kind or another, and many are at the same time imitative, though whether they were originated by children or adults it is difficult or even impossible to say. Our study of primitive acoustic instruments showed that the child is sometimes actively inventive. Trying, then, to keep clear as much as possible of fighting and imitative play, we distinguish several kinds of throwing plays which we may briefly characterize as follows: (_a_) Simple throwing, upward, downward, or horizontally; (_b_) propulsion by means of a blow (_c_) rolling, spinning, shoving, and skipping; (_d_) throwing at a target.
(_a_) Simple Throwing
Downward throwing is, as already said, the easiest and most natural movement of the kind to a child, from the fact that he learns it by letting things fall. It appeals at the same time to his sight, and quite as much perhaps to his hearing. To send toys, spoons, trays, and books rattling, crashing, and slamming on the floor is a pastime which children will keep up as long as they dare, as the young Goethe tossed the dishes and pots out of the window into the street and enjoyed the clatter. A friend of mine was one day holding his two-year-old nephew in his arms near an open window, and gave the child a silver cigarette case to play with. He hurled it to the street below, to the alarm of passers-by, and called out a loving farewell after it. Older children enjoy throwing something down from a bridge or tower, and sometimes in default of other ammunition make use of Nature’s supply of saliva, as many of us perhaps remember from having our ears boxed for such indulgence. The fascination of sending stones over a precipice appeals to adults as well. Throwing forward is learned almost as early as the other; as soon as he can toddle every child tries to throw pebbles across a brook or into a neighbour’s yard, the larger the shot the greater his satisfaction. Most of the toys, borrowed from long-disused practices of adults, which cater to this impulse belong under another head—Throwing at a target.
Among the earliest of these were the catapult, the ancient discus, something like the English quoit, and the sling. We often find grown men testing their strength and skill in throwing. Once when I was on the banks of the Lünersee a young traveller used to try to throw stones into the lake, which appeared to be but a few paces from the house but was in reality much farther. Following his example, other tourists would join in the game in spite of their fatigue, though generally with but little success. At Swiss festivals the herdsmen keep up an ancient Aelplerspiel, which consists in throwing heavy stones as far as possible.[234]
That wonderful passage in the Odyssey where the godlike sufferer threw the discus, the stone hummed loudly as the spectators bent to the earth under the force of the blow, is a classic example of instinctive æsthetic appreciation, and serves as a match for Gretchen’s remark, “Then quivered at every throat the blade which I felt at mine.” Upward throwing is acquired somewhat later, perhaps, because children easily lose sight of the missile which goes far above them. Their first efforts are usually to toss a ball a very little way up, but boys soon acquire the uncomfortable but effective method of bending backward before making the throwing motion. Homer refers to this too: “Behold! He has hurled it [the ball] aloft to the shadowy clouds, bending backward.” As a little fellow I often tried to throw over tall trees, and my grandfather used to tell me how, when he was a young painter in Rome, he used to vie with the street urchins in throwing stones over the Arch of Titus. A favourite game of this kind is played by placing a ball or pebble in a sling which is whirled so rapidly that it hums. In Heidelberg, where many grounds are planted with plane trees, autumn invites the children to a game with the long fruits which hang by threads from their branches, a natural toy which the little ones are quick to take advantage of. Among toys originating in imitation the bow is sometimes used for sending arrows aloft for the simple pleasure of watching their upward flight, though, of course, its chief use is for aiming at a target.
(_b_) Throwing with the Help of a Stroke or Blow
Here we must consider the transference of motion to the missile by means of a sudden blow, a method closely allied to simple throwing, though in some of its modifications, as, for instance, when the radius of the bodily movements is artificially lengthened and the communicated force correspondingly increased, introducing a large circle of new plays in most of which the arms are the only bodily organs employed. I notice first the various games of skill played with rubber balls, principally by girls. The descending ball is met and again impelled upward by the open palm, the closed fist, or even one stiffened outstretched finger. There are similar games requiring more powerful strokes and better suited to masculine taste. Thus the Romans had two kinds of balls, one very large, the follis, and the other smaller, the folliculus, which were struck, the former with the forearm protected with bandages or a wooden ring, and the latter with the fist.[235] The first is still much liked in Italy under the name of giuoco del ballon grosso, the player sheathing his arm in a sort of muff; the other game is preserved in the English handball.[236] For an ethnological example we may turn to the Gilbert Islands; in their game for men, “Oreanne,” they use a cocoanut shell bound with cords, tossing it lightly into the air and propelling it by a blow from the hand.[237] And we may also cite the game carried to perfection in China, and called by the Greeks κωρυκοβολία, in which a huge suspended ball is kept in motion by blows from a number of players. A pretty contrast to this is found in the Samoan game, where an orange instead of a ball is hung in the middle of a room, about sixty centimetres from the floor. The players sit in a circle around it, each being provided with a small pointed stick with which in his turn he gives the orange a blow as it circles past.[238]
The human leg, with its fine muscular development and its long radius, is a favourite and variously used propelling implement. Kicking is a primitive method of fight which children make early use of, and the famous incident in the French Council Chamber is sufficient to establish its adaptability to the requirements of the highest culture. The game of football proclaims its triumph as an instrument for play, where, too, the value of movement-play is obvious. This game, which Anglo-Saxons are wont to regard as their peculiar property, is claimed by Mosso to have originated in Italy in the time of the Renaissance, when physical exercise was a fad with high and low. It is true that such a game was described in great detail in 1555 by Scaino in his celebrated Trattato della Palla under the name of giuoco del calcio, and the writer insists that shoes with soles of buffalo hide are indispensable for the players. While our game of football is a hotly fought contest, Forbes describes a form of it popular in Sumatra which is nothing more than a skilful movement-play. During the dance festivals, which last for several days, “the young people amuse themselves on the village green with a ball game called Simpak, in which they vie with one another in the display of measured and elegant movements in the presence of the girls and the public generally. About twenty youths arrange themselves in a circle and keep a large hollow ball skilfully wrapped with ratan in the air by hitting it as it descends with the side of the foot; they are not allowed to touch it with anything else. In delivering the blow the leg is thrown almost perpendicularly into the air, while the body assumes a horizontal position, and the beauty of the movement consists in the fine swing which restores the body to an upright position without upsetting the player.”[239]
An innumerable variety of games depend on the principle of increasing the arm radius, including many of the favourite amusements of young and old. Golf,[240] cricket, tennis, and croquet may be mentioned as types. Buildings[241] put up especially to play in, witness how much such exercise—which, by the way, develops the body much more systematically than any regular gymnastics can—was formerly valued in Germany. In these buildings games using rackets and bats were most common; one, which was hardly more than mere knocking the ball back and forth was very popular and was called “Pelotieren.”[242]
The citation of primitive examples is more to our purpose, and I select first two games in which bits of wood are employed in lieu of balls. One in the Holstein Klink- or Klischspiel. A chip of a peculiar shape is balanced on the end of a stake driven diagonally into the ground and then hit from below with a sort of club. The other is simpler still: it is called Porscheck in the game books.[243] A cigar-shaped bit of wood is so placed that one end is free, and a blow on this free end sends it whirling in the air. In Heidelberg, where this game is much cultivated, and is dignified by frequent contests, the man about to strike asks “Tenez?” whereupon his antagonist answers “Oui,” neither party having the slightest suspicion that they are speaking French—a proof of the power of tradition.[244] Similar games are played by children, one being accompanied by singing as the piece of wood or arrow is shot into the air, and Rochholz suspects that this is a survival of a religious ceremony symbolic of the flight of winter before the fiery darts of spring. If so, it is one of many games which originated in this way. But how did the religious custom arise? Does not tracing its origin lead us in a circle back to playful experimentation, as we found to be in all probability the case with the discovery and application of some musical instruments? It is most likely.
(_c_) Rolling, Spinning, Shoving, and Skipping Foreign Bodies
In this division I group together such plays as lend a special character to the movement of the object, including them all, however, in the general class of throwing play, since it would unnecessarily complicate matters to make a separate class of them. In all plays with rolling balls, such as tenpins and billiards, pleasure in motion as such forms the undercurrent of the satisfaction afforded, even when they develop into important contests. The thundering roll and crash of the heavy wooden ball, and the noiseless, lightning-quick motion of the elastic ivory one, each has its charm. In a billiard room it is amusing to note how irresistible is the impulse to most players to take the balls from their pockets and roll them on the green surface after the game is over. Primitive forms of such games no doubt originated in experimentation with the round or disc-shaped stones found in every river or brook bed. Many fruits, too, are used in the same way—the horse chestnut, for example, being a favourite plaything wherever it grows. Yet the manufacture of artificial balls is no doubt very ancient, but inquiry into that must not detain us here. After the first years of life, when rolling in itself is an object, such balls are used in relation to some goal, perhaps partly because they are constantly getting lost when knocked aimlessly about, and the children do not wish to risk their precious possessions.
Other rolling toys, such as wheels and hoops, whose motion is kept up by means of continuous striking, offer a very different kind of amusement. The violent running, combining as it does something of the zest of the chase with the pleasure of overcoming a difficulty, forms a delightful compound with the enjoyment of the rolling as such. The Greeks called the hoop τροχός or κρίκος. They were rather large, and made of metal studded with tinkling bells and propelled by a metal rod. Ganymede is often represented with such a hoop. The Romans had an extraordinary fondness for this sport, and Ovid, who refers to a teacher of the art of hoop rolling, says in one of his enumerations of the spring games:
“Usus equi nunc est, levibus nunc luditur armis, Nunc pila, nunc celeri volvitur orbe trochus.”
Fouquières cites a passage from Martial about youths rolling hoops on frozen streams. Another play with wheels consists of whirling a small one on a string passed through its axis, a practice both ancient and modern; and, too, there is the beautiful sport of rolling blazing wheels downhill at night, as is the custom with many mountaineers. Here, of course, the element of pursuit is wanting.
Single discs, such as coins, are used for the spinning of which we have already spoken. Sometimes it was spun horizontally on a peg fixed at its axis, forming the toy called by the Greeks στρόβιλος, and by the Romans turben. But much more important is the conical top, whose dance can be indefinitely prolonged by skilful whipping. There are few plays which foster the illusion of our having a living thing at our pleasure as effectually as this does. H. Wagner tells of a small boy who liked to keep several tops spinning together. “Each had its name, and he talked to them all. The one which spun longest was his favourite, and he tested them by setting them all in violent motion and leaving them while he ran down in the yard. When he came back he rejoiced over those that were still spinning.”[245] This is a good deal like a little girl’s behaviour to her dolls, though the boy’s relation to his toys is rather that of a teacher than parent. This difference comes out strongly when the children play with a puppy: the girl wants to wash and pet it, while the boy will teach it tricks. The widespread popularity of the top is an indication of its importance, and its variety of names among the ancients witnesses to its high favour with them (βέμβηξ, βέβιξ, ῥόμβος, στρόμβος, etc.). It was found in the third city in the Trojan excavations. Boys threw their tops in the courts and streets by a leather string, and accompanied with a monotonous cry τὴν κατὰ σαυτὸν ἔλα, or στρέφου, μὴ ἴστασαι.[246] Tibullus likens his lovesick heart to a top “which a restless child spins on smooth ground with a jerk of the cord.”[247] Its German names are even more numerous than are the antique (Ganzknopf, Topf, Topsch, Triesel, Drudelmadam, Habergais, Krüselding, Schnurrprusel, etc.). In early writings a top humming on ice was used as a figure of rapid motion, and such comparisons are quite frequent with old German poets. This one, which incidentally proves that top cords were used at the time, is particularly striking:
“Ez gewan ine topfe Vor geiseln solhen umbeswanc, Als sî mich âne minen danc Mit slegen umb und umle treip.”[248]
In the Indian archipelago many stone[249] as well as wooden tops are used. Ten Kate gives illustrations of massive yellow painted wooden ones from there. The conical shape is about the same as with our own tops, but it lacks the horizontal grooves.[250] We have Andrée’s authority for the statement that children in Egypt, China, Siam, and Burmah are fond of spinning tops,[251] some Indians having top cords with three thongs.[252]
Skipping stones on ice, as all boys love to do, is dignified in Bavaria and Austria into a game called “Eisschiessen,” in which heavy and carefully polished stone discs with a handle on top are slid over the frozen surface. Gutsmuths says:[253] “This game is played zealously in town and village, and the sturdy sportsmen allow no stress of weather, no untoward circumstance, to interfere with this their winter’s fun. Even the boys have their ice sticks to beguile the way to school. High and low take part in the healthful sport; and as in the Tyrol the village pastor must not fail in archery, so here he enters the lists as a matador of the icy course.” The Scotch use for the same purpose semispherical curling stones from twenty to thirty kilogrammes in weight, and provided with an iron or wooden handle.[254]
Skipping and bouncing, which again call forth the impression of life depending on our own exertions, are prominent in the two very popular and primitive games in which the ball and disc show us another side of their Protean adaptability. One consists of throwing the ball to the floor with such force that it rebounds, and meeting it with a blow as it comes up so that it is struck back again, and the process is repeated indefinitely. Swiss girls sing a little verse in time with the strokes:
“Bälleli ufe, Bällile abe Gump mir nit in nasse Grabe! Gump mir an en trockne Fleck, Gump mir nit in nasse Dreck,” etc.[255]
Niebuhr saw the children on the Euphrates playing the same game. The other amusement of this kind is skipping stones on water; the Greeks called it ἐποστρακισμός. Minucius Felix describes it graphically and with sympathetic insight: “Is lusus est: testam teretem jactatione fluctuum levigatam, legere de litore; eam testam plano situ digitis, comprehensam, inclinem ipsum atque humilem, quantum potest, super undas inrotare; ut illud jaculum vel dorsum maris raderet; vel enataret, dum leni impetu labitur; vel summis fluctibus tonsis emicaret dum assiduo saltu sublevatur. Is se in pueris victorem ferebat, cujus testula et procurreret longius et frequentibus exsiliret.”[256] As many as fifty German names for this sport might be enumerated, some of them showing pretty fancies and æsthetic personification. Fischart, of course, makes his Gargantua a master in this art too. He says in his quaint German, “Gargantua warff breyde Kiesestein am Gastaden schlimms aufs Wasser, dass es ob dem Wasser weiss nicht wie viel Sprung thaten.”[257]
(_d_) Throwing at a Mark
If throwing is, as many believe, an inherited impulse at bottom, then it must belong with the fighting instincts, since it gives a man the power to slay his enemy or his prey without actual contact with either. However that may be, throwing at a mark must have originated in such hostile use of the ability to throw at all, and it is significant that by far the most numerous and popular games of the kind require a target, and belong essentially to the male. Thus it may be questioned whether the whole subject would not better be treated in connection with fighting play; but it seems to me that consciousness of the fact that the target is a symbol of an opponent or of prey hardly forms any considerable element in the satisfaction derived from the sport, and for that reason I deem it fitting to notice it briefly in this connection. Moreover, its biological significance is more extensive than is that of mere belligerence, for it promotes to a higher degree than almost any other play the concentration of attention and the capacity of the organism for swift and sure reaction.
It is easy to see how, with children, throwing at a mark naturally follows simple forward throwing. Perhaps we get a hint of how this comes about from their intentional throwing of objects to the floor with a view to producing a noise, for the floor is then in some sense a goal, though there is as yet no specialization. From my own observation I should say that the first suggestion of the possibility of striking intentionally often arises from the pretence of some older person that he is badly hurt by the falling or rolling object, whereupon the heartless little creature at once tries to repeat the attack, this time with malice aforethought. Further development of this capacity is rather hindered than furthered by the child’s learning to run about; indeed, it is commonly the sixth year or later before he begins to be interested in such games, a manifold variety of which is handed down by tradition.
In this case, too, I can but touch upon a few principal groups, and illustrate them with examples chosen from the wealth of material at hand. In many games the object is to hit a comrade with a ball. In one very popular at Heidelberg all the boys’ caps are placed in a straight row on the ground, and the chosen king throws his ball on one of them, whereupon its owner must instantly seize the ball and hurl it after his fleeing comrades. This comes very near to fighting play, as does another game, which takes the form of pelting some object set or hung up for the purpose, or something in motion.[258] Many games are founded on this principle, from throwing stones at a flowerpot or fruit hanging on a tree up to tenpins, which has been introduced of late into Egypt, and shooting at a target with blowpipe, lance, bow, crossbow, or rifle. An early developed, though, it is true, not purely playful, form of this sport is set forth in a beautiful Greek epigram called the Plaint of the Fruit Tree, which may be thus paraphrased: “Truly they have planted me here by the roadside as an unhappy target for all the playful boys to throw stones at! And how the destroying shower has rained down and torn my blooming crown and broken all my branches! The tree can be of no more use to you with all its harvest ruined. Alas! here have I, most miserable one, borne all this fruit to my own undoing.”[259]
A modification of such plays consists in throwing one missile after another of the same kind, as a ball after a ball, a quoit after a quoit, etc. Thus Burmese children play Tschapieh-Kasah by throwing flat seeds on one another,[260] and many of our own games are essentially the same, especially those played with marbles. These little toys are very generally used, and are quite ancient. Bastian saw them in Burmah and Siam, where the game is called Leu Thoi-Kong.[261] It is popular all through the Orient, and extends to Africa. In old German burial urns, “with the bones of children are found polished round stones, such as modern children play with.”[262] The Romans called marbles ocellata. They are frequently mentioned, too, in old German literature,[263] one instance being of pedagogical interest. In the sixteenth century the sumptuary laws of Zurich included one forbidding marbles among other plays, under penalty of the “Gätterei.” And what was this punishment? The youthful criminal was placed in a revolving wooden machine and whirled until the crisis of dizziness and nausea was reached![264]
Very common, too, are the games in which small discs are thrown one after another. The Greek στρεπτίνδα was an attempt to propel a quoit or coin lying on the floor by means of another thrown toward it. Forbes describes a peculiar form of the game as practised in Sumatra: “All day long the boys under my window amused themselves with a game called Lepar, which interested me very much.... Each player had a sort of quoit made of cocoanut shell, which he threw from a special stand and tried to hit one or more (according to the number of players) of the other quoits lying at a distance of forty or fifty feet.... The manner of propelling the missiles was remarkable. The player turned his back to the goal, laid his quoit flat on the ground, seized it firmly between his heels, and with a rotary motion of his legs shot it forward so that its rim described a cycloidal curve. It was amazing to see with what certainty the best players reckoned on the amount of force necessary for perfecting such a curve as would pass in among the quoits and hit the ones aimed at.”[265]
In the Greek game κυνδαλισμός the object was to dig up with one pointed stick another which was fixed in the ground, and to do it in such a manner that the first stick was left standing up where the other had been. Fischart and Rabelais mention this game.
Still another kind of play belonging to this class (and at this point all connection with fighting play is severed) consists in rolling or throwing the projectile into or through a hole. The familiar game of marbles with holes was known to Greek children, and was called τρόπα. The same principle, too, is employed in the old-fashioned billiards in those games requiring a ring into which the ball is rolled. For other games the ring is made on the ground, as in this described by Nordenskiöld: “Several stand in a circle and take turns at throwing a short tapering iron rod, the object being to cause the iron to fall on its sharp end within the circle and stand upright.”[266] In croquet the balls must roll through wickets. Throwing balls through the open mouth of a figure carved in wood was a mediæval diversion, and Eneas Silvius wrote in 1438 that the youths of Basel hung an iron ring on their playground and amused themselves with batting balls through it.[267] In Genf, little metal balls were tossed through holes bored in the head of a cask.[268] We have a classic description of such a game in Storm’s Schimmel-reiter, where Hauke Haien wins the victory under the eyes of his beloved: “Then it flew like lightning to Hauke’s arms. He stooped a little, turning the ball two or three times in his hand, and as he took aim deathlike silence reigned. All eyes followed the flying ball as it hummed along, cutting the air. Suddenly, far away, the silvery wings of a seagull gleamed, and her thrilling cry sounded from the dikes, but in the same instant the ball crashed into the cask, and all the people cried out ‘Hurrah for Hauke!’ while the word ran through the crowd, ‘Hauke Haien has won the game.’ But he, as they all crowded toward him, reached out for but one hand. She cried, ‘What is the matter, Hauke? The ball is in the cask!’ He only nodded, and did not stir from the spot. It was not till he felt the little hand fast clasped in his own that he spoke. ‘You must be right,’ he said, ‘I do believe I have won.’” Finally, I will recall Ulysses’s marvellous feat in the presence of the drunken suitors, when on his return home he sent an arrow through the ears of twelve oxen standing in a row.
In our last division of this class of games the projectile must cling to the target. Everybody has tried to throw his cap on his head or a peg, and jugglers and clowns give us numberless examples of feats belonging here. One game is played with rings hung on a stick, or caught with a hook, or thrown on an upright stake. At fairs the lucky player gets a prize for tossing rings on knives. Play of this kind has been used by a brilliant American journal to point a satire on American bidding for European titles. The ambitious damsels stand in front of a brightly lighted booth, in which numerous manikins of repulsive appearance, with their armorial bearings suspended round their necks, are ranged on exhibition, and attempt to throw engagement rings over the heads of these figures.
6. _Catching_
Catching and holding moving objects is the direct opposite of throwing, and the two are best understood by being contrasted. Catching, too, is the complement of throwing; the object which has been set in motion, animated, as it were, by human power, comes to our hand to get new life. In no way can our supremacy over matter find more satisfactory expression. It is with difficulty that children learn to catch, for the direction of their necessary motions by means of sight requires so much time that the moving object passes to another place before the hand is ready to seize it. The child usually practises catching a ball rolling on the floor first, then holds up its dress or apron or two hands placed together to form a cup into which the ball thrown skilfully through the air will drop. Many such attempts are required before the art is acquired of controlling the muscular innervation to meet the still distant moving object.
While there are various objects employed in such play—as, for instance, in the Greek πενταλιθίζειν there were five pebbles, bits of china, or what we call jack-stones, thrown up with one hand and caught on its back, and in the beautiful game of magic rings, and trials of skill with sticks, knives, watches, etc.[269]—still the ball is the most perfect and suitable plaything, partly because it is easy to grasp from any direction and partly on account of its lightness and elasticity. It is equally well adapted to solitary or social play. When alone, the player throws it with a view to its return to the starting point, whether its course be perpendicular or a rebound. A game of skill popular with girls consists in throwing the ball, and before it has time to descend taking another ball from a table, then catching the first one with the same hand.[270] In bilboquet, which was played by Henry III of France, and is known to many primitive peoples, as, for instance the Eskimos, the ball is caught in a cup, to which it is attached by a string. The games are much more varied when two or more play together at throwing and catching, though in that case experimentation is usually transformed into a contest. The kadokadoka of the Gilbert Islanders illustrates a simple and universally known form. Women play it by standing in two opposing lines and throw the ball, which must never be allowed to drop, back and forth.[271] In the Greek οὐφρανία σφᾶιρα the ball was thrown as high as possible, and the contest was over who should catch it, or, if only two were playing, in the agility of the leap for it, as in the Odyssey. The victor must throw the ball aloft again before his feet touch the earth. A game practised by the Indians is apparently of a similar character. “The beginner of the game holds a rather hard ball in his hand, throws it directly up, and attempts to catch it. This is by no means an easy task, for around him stands an eager circle each with hands outstretched to seize the ball. The successful one rushes to an appointed goal, while the others try to hinder him.”[272] The game in which one boy rides on another’s back to throw the ball is illustrated in an Egyptian wall picture, and Bastion saw it also in Burmah. In this, imitation becomes prominent, as does the element of rivalry, where the boys vie with one another in clapping, kneeling, and going through various motions before catching the ball. In most games where the ball is struck the contest develops after it is caught. In playing trapball, the ball is placed on a springboard and sent aloft. All try to catch it, and the victor must bounce the ball until he is supplanted by another. In England, trapball can be traced back to the fourteenth century. Strutt gives an illustration of the spoon-shaped board then used.[273]
In closing these remarks on movement-play we will notice briefly the distinction implied in our use of the word “sport,” since many of the games which we have been considering are so designated and practised by adults. What is it that converts play into sport? Preeminently the seriousness, the stress of earnestness with which it is pursued. Yet this statement is too general, for children too, as every one knows, are deeply earnest about their play, which does not on that account become a sport; and a man may play billiards or chess with such perseverance and zeal that his game becomes the principal event of his daily life, and yet he is not called a sportsman. We must evidently find a more specific definition. The fact that in the merest play all sorts of acts and achievements are involved which are not, as such, playful, but rather preparatory for play, may help us to this. In the eyes of adults the interest of a game lies in the construction of a theory for it; they busy themselves with perfection of form in play, with the rules of the game, with practice and training, with the proper outfit and suitable costume, etc. Only he who does so assiduously busy himself is a genuine sportsman, according to this theory. We may then define sport as play pursued reflectively, scientifically. This accounts for the fact that children are never sportsmen, despite the immense importance of their play to them, and that the mountain climber whose highest ideal is to conquer the heights, or the chess player who devotes all his spare time to the game, is still not a sportsman.
III. PLAYFUL USE OF THE HIGHER MENTAL POWERS
Rousseau, who dwells upon the fact that a man’s education begins at his birth, illustrates clearly, if somewhat exaggeratedly (being under the influence of Condillac), the threefold biological significance of youth when he says in the first volume of Émile that if man came into the world full grown he would be “un parfait imbécile, un automate, une statue immobile et presque insensible.” These words exactly fit into our subject and its classification. Having treated of the sensor and motor aspects of experimentation, we now proceed to examine its value to the higher mental life, where by its help man is rescued from the danger of remaining “un parfait imbécile.”
The influence of experimentation is felt in the activity of intellect, feeling, and will alike. Of course all play, including the limited group which we have been considering, is of great importance to the whole mental make-up, since it acts in all directions, sharpening the intellect, exercising the will, and furnishing occasion for the discharge of emotion. But the special aim of the present discussion lies in the investigation of how far these powers of the mind are themselves the subjects of experimental play, and accordingly in what follows we shall not inquire as to the advantageous effect of play on attention, imagination, reason, etc., but will examine cases where these capacities are directly experimented with.
A. EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE MENTAL POWERS
If we ask ourselves what aspects of intellectual activity are most conspicuously subjects of playful experimentation we naturally turn to memory, imagination, attention, and reason. Our first subject for consideration, then, is memory, where again we must distinguish between simple recognition and reflective recollection.
1. _Memory_
(_a_) Recognition
Recognition is the link which connects the present with what we have known in the past. The new psychology repudiates the common idea that the present impression is compared with a memory picture of the past and the two recognised as identical, since it is not borne out by the facts. Neither the emergence of a genuine memory picture nor its comparison with the present object is demonstrable. When I select my own from a number of hats I simply recognise it, and can tell no more about it. But a careful study of cases in which the recognition is hesitating clearly distinguishes the two following stages. First there is the simple knowledge: I have seen this before, the recognition having been accomplished by the “Coefficient of Recognition”[274] (Höffding) without our necessarily knowing why we recognise the object. It is difficult to say what grounds this feeling. Physiologically there may be special reasons for the accompanying nervous processes. Speaking psychologically, there seem to be certain shadowy feelings of warmth and intimacy. In any case the content of the memory picture is genuine, though it does not stand alone, but blends with the impression of the moment by the process of assimilation.[275] A second stage is reached through the fact that we are able to place the object suitably; we know that we have had something to do with it, and this is often facilitated by a hasty reversion to its earlier psychic _milieu_ of space and time relations, as well as of word and idea connections. When not too mechanical, as sometimes when dressing we put on everything in its right relation but without attention, recognition is pre-eminently pleasurable. Even the mere coefficient of recognition is accompanied with a mild satisfaction such as Faust experienced when after a foreign sojourn he found himself once more in his study. “Ah, when in one’s own narrow cell the friendly lamp is burning.” But much more intense is the effect of the second stage, for here comes in joy in accomplishing a task, in overcoming some difficulty, however slight. A short time ago I found on my table a fragment of porcelain decorated with gold. I knew it at once; the pattern was one I had often seen, but where? My glance accidentally fell on the curtain cord, and immediately I felt that the scrap must be from one of the porcelain knobs which it was looped on. The result was lively, almost triumphant satisfaction. The act of recognition being so pleasurable, we would naturally expect man to make use of it for its own sake—that is, experimentally. Aristotle, indeed, grounds appreciation of art in pleasurable recognition, and, while not going to that length, we must admit that the idea deserves consideration.
We have already spoken of visual recognition, which is a prominent division, and will now consider play connected with it. The earliest manifestations of pleasure in the perception of form recorded by child psychologists are no other than acts of recognition. In its second quarter the infant begins to recognise its mother and nurse. There is nothing playful about this, of course, but very soon experimentation becomes prominent as the same form appears in changed conditions with consequent uncertainty involving the stimulus of difficulty to be overcome. At six months Preyer’s baby saw his father’s reflection in a mirror, and made a sudden motion toward it.[276] The little girl observed by Pollock at thirteen months recognised pictures in a newspaper, calling out “Wah, wah” to the animals, trees, etc.[277] In Sully’s beautiful experiment, made in the seventeenth month, the playful character is more evident. “The young thinker,” he says in the diary, “achieved his first success in geometric abstraction, or the consideration of pure form, when just seventeen months old. He had learned the name of his rubber ball. Having securely grasped this, he went on calling oranges ‘Bo.’ This left the father in some doubt whether the child was attending exclusively to form, as a geometrician should, for he was wont to make a toy of an orange, as when rolling it on the floor. This uncertainty was, however, soon removed. One day C—— was sitting at table beside his sire, while the latter was pouring out a glass of beer. Instantly the ready namer of things pointed to the bubbles on the surface, and exclaimed ‘Bo!’ This was repeated on many subsequent occasions. As the child made no attempt to handle the bubbles, it was evident that he did not view them as possible playthings. As he got lost in contemplation, muttering ‘Bo, bo!’ his father tells us that he had the satisfaction of feeling sure that the young mind was already learning to turn away from the coarseness of matter and fix itself on the refined attribute of form.”[278] At this time, too, the child begins to enjoy recognising things from their mere outline. Sigismund records progress in this direction at about the end of the second year. “They already know many things by the simple outline. My boy, who, by the way, has seen few pictures, recognised my shadow in his twenty-first month, being frightened for the first moment, then clearly delighted, calling out ‘Papa!’ and has probably not been afraid of any shadow since. On the contrary, he, like other children of his age, likes to watch shadow pictures,[279] especially moving ones.” They soon learn to know the outlines of their own. How deeply must the essence of individuality be impressed upon them when these meagre outlines of a figure which they are accustomed to seeing filled out are sufficient for recognition! Perhaps for children who do not see pictures early, shadows serve to introduce the latter and explain them, just as, according to the Greek fable, they led to the art of drawing. Children are so fond of looking at pictures that they often enjoy the representation more than the reality. “A house!” exclaims the little picture gazer delightedly when he comes to one, while he would hardly notice the real thing. Does this pleasure arise from the solving of a riddle, as Aristotle seems to say?[280] This would make the enjoyment of recognition identical with that derived from overcoming difficulties, and there can be no doubt that this is an important element in all art appreciation, if it be not, indeed, the very kernel of æsthetic enjoyment. In the enjoyment of a landscape, it is safe to say that for nine tenths of the observers the chief satisfaction comes from recognising the various peaks, villages, castles, etc., in the panorama. There is one more point. As soon as anything like a contest is involved, a stronger shock, a sturdier resistance to the act of recognition, a comic colouring is given to the enjoyment. Marie G——, who from the time she was two years old had a veritable passion for having things drawn for her, considered it a great joke when she could not make out what was meant without some effort. For older children and adults puzzle pictures are skilfully prepared with a view to rendering recognition difficult, and success is followed by triumphant laughter. Finally, it may be added that primitive folk are sometimes unable to see the meaning of photographs and other pictures,[281] a fact which makes their early recognition by children the more wonderful. On the other hand, I recall Charles de Lahitte’s observation of an imprisoned Guayaké, (a little-known and utterly uncivilized tribe of southern Paraguay) which proves that the very lowest savage may recognise a photograph and be overjoyed with it. “He recognised his picture after some instruction, and broke out with expressions of pleasure and astonishment, crying repeatedly as he slapped his body, ‘Gon, gon!’ which equals ‘me!’”[282]
Acoustic recognition, too, is more important and significant for art than one might at first suppose. We find even in children who repeat a simple melody indefatigably that pleasure in repetition forms a psychological basis for a physiological impulse, and in the musical pleasures of adults this feeling is much stronger.[283] The playful feature is emphasized when acoustic conditions vary, as in changed pitch or some other modification, so that overcoming difficulty enters. Potpourri and variations are instances. In Wagner’s music there is a peculiar satisfaction in the emergence of a leading motive from the overwhelming mass of tones; like a friendly island rising in the midst of surging seas. All modern music, indeed, is evolved from the intricacies and modifications of such acoustic play; to follow them and identify the unity in variety is a pleasure which grows with the hearer’s technical appreciation, until at last, in fuguelike movements, actual beauty is subordinated to the artfully ordered formal features of the composition.
In poetry, playful repetition takes manifold forms,[284] such as rhyme, alliteration, and that chainlike reiteration of words referred to earlier. But still more ingenious and charming is the device of bringing the repetition so close on its own heels that the first impression still dwells in the mind when the second demands attention. Pure enjoyment of repetition as such is simplest when the same or similar forms are separated by a long interval, allowing the first impression to sink below the threshold of consciousness before its analogue appears. A passage of this kind occurs in Goethe’s poem quoted above, “O gieb vom weichen Pfuhle,” etc., and is still better illustrated by the similarity of the second and eighth verses of a triolet. Take this of Gleims:
“Ein Triolet soll ich ihr singen? Ein Triolet ist viel zu klein, Ihr grosses Lob hineinzubringen. Ein Triolet soll ich ihr singen? Wie sollt ich mit der Kleinheit ringen, Es müsst’ ein grosser Hymnus sein! Ein Triolet soll ich ihr singen? Ein Triolet ist viel zu klein!”[285]
It is but a step from this to the familiar and primitive refrain.[286] To serve this purpose, interjections, single sounds, words, and sentences are repeated after so long an interval that there can be no question of sensuous enjoyment; it becomes mere repetition. As the soothing satisfaction of a melody is produced by dwelling on the keynote, so with the refrain. This principle is even more strongly brought out in the turn, which is so prominent a feature in much lyric poetry, and also in the form originating in Spain and Portugal in which a single verse of a familiar stanza is made the keynote of a new poem. This is play to the producer and hearers as well. Such analogy of lyric form to musical variation as is shown in the “freien Glosse” actually deserves to be called variation itself.[287]
In the imitation of particular sounds poetry offers further indulgence to the enjoyment of repetition, to the amusement of adults and delight of children. This is really imitative play and as such belongs to a later division of our subject; yet for the listener it is also an exercise in repetition, and is conspicuous in many refrains. Minor says: “The imitation of musical instruments by means of articulate or nondescript sounds is common in folk songs. The shepherd’s pipe, the horn, trumpet, and drum are introduced in pastoral, hunting, and military pieces.”[288] Children are especially partial to the mimicry of animals, and some of the formulæ have become traditional. The German robin sings, it seems,
“Buble witt witt witt, I will dir e Krüi-zerrle gean.”
The sparrow says “Twitter, twitter”; the quail “Bob White, peas ripe?” the cackling hen in English, “Cut, cut, cadahcut,” and in German “Duck di duck Alli Stuck Unter mî Ruck.”
Finally, we must not forget a very popular game founded on recognition. A whole company will dance around a blindfolded person until he hits on the floor with a stick, whereupon they all stand still, and he touches one and attempts to identify him by the sound of his voice, having three trials. Sometimes the sense of touch is allowed to assist the recognition, as in blind-man’s-buff and the Greek μυίνδα.[289]
(_b_) Reflective Memory
Playful exercise of the recollective faculty, dependent on the enjoyment of reproduction as such rather than on any quality of the memory picture, is confined almost exclusively to children, and indeed to those not yet of the school age. From about the third year[290] to the end of the sixth, when enforced mental exercise is begun, we find in children outspoken satisfaction in the voluntary exercise of reproduction. During this time mental feats almost unachievable by adults are performed, such as learning by heart thick books of nursery rhymes, long poems, interminable stories—acquirements which stir the proud parents with hope and mistaken conclusions as to the extraordinary mental endowments of their offspring. That children of this age often burden their minds with lists of unconnected and meaningless words and take pride in reciting them, proves that enjoyment of the mere ability to do it is the chief incentive. Thus, when she was in her sixth year, Marie G—— learned to count in French from one to one hundred, and enjoyed going over the numbers when she supposed herself to be unobserved, as when lying in bed in the morning. Carl Stumpf’s report of the prodigy Otto Poehler,[291] who at two years of age had learned to read fluently without teaching, is highly interesting in this connection. Stumpf says of the boy, then four years old and in other respects normal, having, indeed, a decided disinclination for systematic education when others tried to impose it on him: “Reading is his greatest passion, and the most important thing in his life. He knows the birth and death year of every German Kaiser from Charles the Great, as well as of many poets, philosophers, etc., and can tell the birthday and place of most of them. Besides, he knows the capitals of most countries, and the rivers on which they are situated, etc. He knows all about the Thirty Years’ War from beginning to end, with the leading battles of this and other wars. According to his mother’s statement, he has acquired all this without aid, and by diligent study of a patriotic almanac and similar literature about the house, and from deciphering monumental inscriptions in the city, an amusement which he dotes on. I myself can witness to the lasting impression which such facts make on his mind. At the Seminary I showed him pictures of Fechner, Lotze, and Helmholtz, mentioning their full names. Of each he asked at once when and where he was born and died, and some days later could give not only name and surname of every one, but the full date of birth and death, mentioning day, month, year, and place.” Since Stumpf tells us that there was no trace of vanity or a desire to show off, we must explain these accomplishments as the result of the child’s desire to experiment playfully with his own mental powers.
In assigning such play chiefly to the period between the third and sixth years, I did not by any means intend to imply that it is suspended thereafter. It is, indeed, often seriously impeded by the compulsory methods common in our schools, yet it does not entirely vanish. Lessing is a brilliant example of the scholar by whom even erudition may be turned to playful account, and who is able to assimilate every kind of pabulum that falls in the way of his omnivorous brain. When the teacher is able to direct his pupils to the discharge of their tasks with interest and pleasure, there may still be something playful about the mental exercise of school work. Subordination to authority does not exclude play so long as the obedience is voluntary. Children never submit so absolutely to any one else as to a leader among their playfellows. Fénelon was not far wrong when he said: “The common way of educating is very mistaken—to place everything that is pleasant on one side and all that is disagreeable on the other, connecting the latter with industry and study and regarding the former as waste of time. How can we expect anything else than that the child will grow impatient of the restraint and run to his play with the greatest eagerness?”[292] Those who, on the other hand, protest against making play of instruction are mistaken in supposing that it is thereby turned into a jest, for we well know that play can be prosecuted with great zeal and earnestness. Yet they are not altogether wrong, for it is most important to impress the necessity for doing what is repugnant to us, and for this merely playful study, even if it accomplished all else that we want, would always be inadequate. Finally, with regard to the adult: it does occasionally happen even in our rushing times that some one commits a poem to memory with the avowed intention of giving exercise to his mind. Were this practical end the only one, play, indeed, would not be involved; but, as a rule, pleasure in acquisition as such is combined with the other motive. Such exercise was formerly much more common, and at a time when few could read surprising feats were performed. A survival of this may be found now in the Balkan countries, where the heroic songs are still orally preserved. In mental exercise of this kind it is difficult to draw the line between the emotions aroused by the content of the piece and what pleasure is derived from the act of learning, and we will not here go into that phase of the subject, only mentioning, in closing the section, that conjuring up one’s own past is another form of memory-play with the feelings.
2. _Imagination_
The phenomena which the exigencies of language compel us to include under the words imagination or fantasy naturally fall into two quite clearly differentiated groups, namely, illusion, either playful or serious, and the voluntary or involuntary transformation of our mental content. Considerable controversy has arisen as to which of these groups shall be taken as the basis of a definition, and it is in opposition to the prevailing view that I have designated the capacity for illusion as my choice for that purpose. Yet on reflection I consider it more prudent not to attempt a comprehensive definition, but rather to keep separate the two distinct departments of mental life which the usages of language too closely associate, and which, while they are closely interwoven in some of their aspects, are yet of so heterogeneous a character that we may hope to distinguish between them in all essentials.
(_a_) Playful Illusion
This heading includes all those manifold cases in which mental presentation is accepted as actual, whether they are concerned with genuine memory pictures or merely some mental content worked up for the occasion. When a fever patient sees an absent friend bodily before him, we call this imagination as well as when he seems to see absurd or grotesque things. The distinguishing feature is whether the illusion appears as a substitute for reality, as in dreams, delirium, hypnosis, and insanity, or as the product of conscious self-deception (K. Lange’s “bewusste Selbsttäuschung,” P. Souriau’s “illusion volontaire”), where the knowledge that we have ourselves produced the illusion prevents actual substitution, as in play and art. Transition from one to the other of these states is easy. The dreamer or fever patient may have the feeling that the fantasy in which he lives and suffers is, after all, an unreal thing; and, on the other hand, illusion is often so strong for playing children and artists that it forms a perfect substitute for reality. Just now we are concerned with conscious illusion only. In inquiring how far experimentation is involved in it we must bear in mind that there are two sides to all illusion, one which has reference to an internal image, and the other blending with external phenomena. It is a distinction similar to that between hallucination and illusion in the narrower pathological sense.
The illusion which depends on internal images can, as we have seen, elevate actual memories as well as convertible mental contents to the appearance of reality. So we see that the two kinds of mental activity included under the name imagination are intimately and variously related, while neither alone covers the entire ground. Enjoyment of play with memory pictures which are more than ordinarily faithful to fact is practised almost exclusively by adults, and more especially by the aged. The psychological condition of this is that by means of strong concentration of attention on the mental picture (we are reminded again of hypnosis) the actual present is thrown very much into the background, and the past thus conjured up loses many of the usual characteristics of a past, since the memory picture, from lacking the usual projection, assumes the expression of reality. The following is a beautiful example of this distinction between mere reflective memory and playful illusion where the differentiation was gradually built up. When Goethe as a mature man took up his Faust manuscript, he said to himself, “I thought over this subject a great deal ten years ago; but that would be only a memory.” Yet as he lost himself in the joyful or painful memories connected with that period, he came to ignore the fact that they were long past, and more and more substituted them for the present, which in its turn became gradually submerged. These words reveal the play of his imagination:
“My pulses thrill, tears flow without control, A tender mood my steadfast heart o’ersways; What I possess as from afar I see, What I have lost is the reality to me.”
_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.
The first of these activities is often so capricious in children that it can hardly be called experimentation; it seems a mere disconnected succession of fancies and self-originated images, very much as in the case of mania and other abnormal states. Strümpell’s little daughter, aged one and a half years, is responsible for the following: “Go gramma and buy a pretty doll gramma for me under the bed for me to play the piano. Bring papa golden sheep; take mamma’s white sheep too. Go on, there, driver, gramma is going. Get up, Klinglingling. Gramma comes up the steps. Oh, oh, ah, ah, lying on the floor, all tied up, no cap on. Theodosia [her doll] lie on the bed, bring yellow sheep to Theodosia. Run, tap, tap, tap for Lina. Strawberries, gramma, wolf lie on bed. Go to sleep, darling Theodosia, you are my dearest; everybody is fast asleep. May makes the trees green—let me—on the brook violets are blooming—I want to go to walk. A cat came in here, mamma caught it, it had feet and black boots on—short cap, band on it. Papa ran—the sky—gramma gone—grampa resting,” etc.[301] In this, attention seems to be entirely lacking, so that there can not be said to be any aim, however indefinite. Genuine constructive imagination is more apparent in the attempts of small children to tell stories. I have the following note on Marie G——, made at the age of three years and one month. She insisted that I must lie on the lounge after she had gone through the motions of “making the bed.” Then the little mother warmed the gruel in a heavy cigar cutter, made me drink at the peril of my teeth, and ordered me to shut my eyes. Then she seated herself, pretended to sew, and told a story to put me to sleep: “The other day I went down town. There were beautiful shops and there were flowers. Anna [her doll] wanted to pick one, and a bear came up. All my six children were dreadfully scared and hid in the bathroom stove, and I locked the door and took out the key, and the bear went away; and I was so frightened!” It was evidently her intention to make a connected story, although the first situation, the scene down town, was transferred to a different one without any proper transition. Yet the various processes are easily traced in spite of their complexity. First, the idea of the city where the romancer takes her doll, as she was often taken by her mother. The memory picture of the florists’ shops which led to an overweening desire on the part of the doll to take a flower. Then judicial wrath appears in the frightful shape of the bear, and at once the whole situation is changed; there are now the six children of the familiar tale, who hide. But where? In our bathroom stove (an improvement on the tale), which develops a lock and key for the occasion (confusion with the attributes of a closet door). Here, then, are divisions 1 and 2 clearly defined—namely, the combining of complex presentations, and the detachment and transposition of some features. Analogy with artistic methods is too obvious to need enlarging upon.[302] An interesting example of the inventiveness of an older child endowed with genius is the voluminous romance which the young Goethe used to tell again and again to his playmates, and has transcribed in his biography. It will be seen that the imaginative process is much less easily traced in it than in the earlier instance.[303]
One important branch of imaginative composition is the picturing of the fantastic creatures of mythology, such as animals with human heads, mermaids, and the grotesque blending of animal and vegetable life, yet with the essential features taken from Nature. As Dickens says of his characters, that, being made up of many people, they were composite,[304] so with these creations. The following dialogue of Marie G—— with her doll near the end of her fifth year will illustrate the use of this faculty in the case of concepts which transcend the limits of actuality. “So, little sister Olga, you have come in from your walk. Tell me about everything that you saw. A little lamb, a cow, a dog, a horse. Yes, and what else? Blue bells and green primroses and red leaves—but that can not be; you are fibbing, my little sister.” Such playful and grotesque combinations are often introduced in art, but they no longer appeal to superstitious fear. In the temptations of St. Anthony, in Oriental tales of strangely deformed men, in the taste for grotesque gargoyles and other ornaments, we find instances. In some fantastic creations the imagination is given unbridled license, with the result that the production acquires more of the characteristics of play.[305]
The third division of constructive fantasy, comprising exaggeration and depreciation, is also an object of playful activity. All children delight in giants and dwarfs, whether because they excite pleasurable emotions by their disproportionateness, which appeals to the comic sense, or whether it is the strong stimulus of what is unusual that accounts for the attraction. Marie G—— improvised a rare tale when she was five and a half years old, which well illustrates exaggeration, as well as conscious illusion and imaginative combination. The child was lying in bed in the early morning with a copy of Grimm’s tales, and pretended to be reading from it. “Once upon a time there was a king who had a little daughter. She lay in the cradle. He came in and knew it was his daughter, and they both had a wedding. As they sat at the table the king said, ‘Please draw me some beer in a big glass.’ Then they brought a glass that was thirty yards high, and went to sleep; only the king stayed up as a watchman. And if they are not dead they are living there yet.” Of course the child had no clear idea of how high this glass would be, but she evidently pictured one whose size far transcended the limits of reality—of this I subsequently satisfied myself. Adults are constantly using this sort of imaginative exercise in a playful way in verbal exaggeration. The talk of students and of girls abounds in superlatives, and they are employed by satirists with telling effect—so much so that the recounter himself is sometimes deceived by his own extravagance. Schneegans says in his interesting book: “The grotesque satirist is often carried away by his own work, and gradually loses sight of his original aim; ... and finally the conclusion is forced upon us that the writer has yielded to his passion for gross exaggeration.” This is certainly true of Rabelais, when he says that Pantagruel had but to put out his tongue to protect his whole army from the rain, or that his arrows were as large as the beams of the bridge at Nantes, and yet with one of them he could shoot an oyster from its shell without breaking the latter; or when he describes the people who needed no tailor, since one of their ears served as hose, doublet, and vest, while the other was used like a Spanish mantle. This last morsel recalls some of the folk tales which have amused the masses for more than two thousand years. While we may not lightly affirm that the grotesque extravagance of some of these stories is always due to imaginative play, yet we can trace it in such of them as the Greenland myth of little Kagsagsuk, whom the men lifted by the nostrils until they grew enormous, while the rest of his poorly fed body remained as small as ever, and in the account of his subsequent marvellous strength. Kagsagsuk divided the mob as though it had been made of little fishes, and ran so vigorously that his heels hit the back of his neck, and the snow flying up around him made shining rainbows.[306]
Playful lying should be mentioned along with other forms of exaggeration. Children’s lies have been studied carefully of late years, and the conclusion is general that they are usually playful. Untruthfulness must be playful when it is indulged in merely to tease others or to get amusement from their credulity, or to heighten the recounter’s sense of the marvellous.[307] Only such examples are useful for our purpose as find their chief incentive in the enjoyment of invention. Compayré rightly calls this experimentation, and says that children play with words as they do with sand or blocks.[308] The real stimulus which lying affords to imaginative activity is best demonstrated in the progressive lie: “I have thirty marbles; no, fifty; no, a hundred; no, a thousand!” or “Je viens de voir un papillon grand comme le chat, grand comme la maison.”[309] One of my nephews, Heinrich, was a great romancer, and the same peculiar, almost divergent fixing of his eyes characterized him then as when listening to a marvellous tale. At three and a half years north Berlin was the scene[310] of his inventions, a name which the little Stuttgarter had in some way picked up. There he had seen fish resembling sharks with boots on their feet. On one occasion he related the following: “In north Berlin hares and hounds are on the roofs; they climb up on ladders and play together, and then—and then—comes a telephone, a long wire, you know, and on that they come to Stuttgart. That’s the way they get here.”[311] It is easy to see the connection between this and rudimentary artistic production. Guyan says:[312] “The lying of children is usually the first exercise of their imagination, the first evidence of the germ of art.” Such playful experimentation is, of course, quite different from actual deception. Perhaps nowhere is finer discrimination in this direction shown than in Goethe’s remarks on his boyish story-telling: “It greatly rejoiced the other children when I was the hero of my own story. They were delighted to know that such wonderful things could befall one of their playfellows, and yet they did not seem to marvel that I could play such tricks with time and space as these adventures implied, for they were well aware of my goings and comings and how I was occupied all day long. None the less I must choose the scenes of these adventures, if not in another world, at least in a distant place, and yet tell all as having taken place to-day or yesterday. They therefore made for themselves greater illusions than any I could have palmed off on them. If I had not gradually learned from my natural bent to work up these visions and conceits into artistic forms, such a vainglorious beginning could not have been without injurious consequences to me.” Even when the playful lie becomes artistic production there is always a leaning toward genuine deception. Goethe says: “I took good care not to alter the circumstances much, and by the uniformity of my narrative I converted the fable into reality in the minds of my auditors. Yet,” he adds—and this is proof that the deceit was playful—“I was averse to falsehood and dissimulation, and would by no means lightly indulge in them.”[313] The same remarks apply to the corresponding amusements of adults, such as fishing and hunting stories, and Munchausen tales generally.
In concluding this subject the temptation is strong to go into some of the special forms of fantasy, such as, for instance, the association of sensuous impressions with abstract ideas. Poetry has the task of justifying such combination, and this quatrain affords a simple instance:
“Woher kommt der Blutegel? Aus der Reisfeld treibt er in den Fluss. Woher kommt die Liebe? Aus dem Auge senkt sie sich in’s Herz.”
“Whence comes the leech, then? Out of the rice field it turns to the stream. Whence comes love, then? From the eye it sinks down to the heart.”
From this doggerel to “Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch,” suggested by a view of wooded hills standing in evening quiet, is but a matter of development. Metaphor ensues when abstract form is superseded by sensuous impression. The designer and novelist Töpffer gives a beautiful instance of such materializing of the spiritual in this interesting contribution to child psychology when he tells us how he always conceived of conscience in the form of his teacher. “For a long time I did not distinguish between the inner voice of conscience and the admonitions of my instructor. When I felt the stirrings of the former I pictured the latter before me in his black robes, with his scholarly air, and his spectacles on his nose.”[314]
3. _Attention_
As I have attempted to set forth in former efforts,[315] attention is probably in its earliest manifestations rather a means for the furtherance of the struggle for life than a so-called faculty of the mind. The instinct of lying in wait (by which we must understand not merely holding one’s self in readiness to seize prey, but also a preparedness for flight) is, as I conceive, the elementary form of attention. Some sense-perception called forth by the prey or the enemy, as the case may be, warns the animal to brace his organism for the utmost swiftness and accuracy of aim in view of what is coming; secondly, to hold his muscles tense and ready for lightning-quick reaction to the approaching stimulus; and, thirdly, to keep such restraint on his whole body as to repress all sounds and movements which might betray him. Among the higher animals, and especially man, “theoretic” attention has developed from this motor attention, which reacts to the anticipated stimulus with special external movements. In the former the reaction is an internal, brain process, not involving the second of the steps given above; it is sufficient to seize and master the object—to lie in wait apperceptively, as it were. The characteristic holding of the powers in check seems to argue the derivation of this sort of attention from the motor, thus grounding both on instinct. Expectancy is not then a variation, but rather a fundamental form of attention, and concentration on an object present before it results from a succession of constantly renewed expectations.
Both forms of attention are of real importance in the world of play, but we will note only those cases in which the effort of attending is itself the subject of playful exercise. Sikorski has asserted forcibly that children frequently make use in their play of the expectation of a familiar impression whose memory picture is already present in the mind; what Lewes calls “preperception,” and Sikorski “reproduction préparatoire.” He says: “It is very interesting to notice how children use attention in their play. It is one of the most salient features of all the mental operations of children in all their busyness and destructiveness. It may be called a sort of mental auxiliary which gives variety to play.”[316] He goes on to instance Preyer’s son, who opened and closed the cover of a can seventy-nine times in succession, and evinced the closest attention all the while.[317] The expectation of a resulting sound is no doubt an essential part of such play as this. Alternate stress and relaxation of attention account for the charm of hide and seek. Darwin says that his son on the one hundred and tenth day was delighted when a handkerchief was put over his face or his playfellow’s and then suddenly withdrawn.[318] While surprise was probably the principal cause of this delight at first, on its repetition expectation and the sudden revelation must play a part. When a child throws stones in water or at a mark, batters an old pot, awaits the tossed-up ball or watches a rolling one, we must reckon with the pleasure which is derived from the exercise of close attention, as well as that in movement as such, and in this kind of play the comparison of memory pictures with present reality. “In all such play,” says Sikorski, after instancing several examples, “a particular result is expected and awaited as something desirable. The sound of the stone striking the water, the direction taken by the soap bubble the moment it is tossed off,[319] all such consequences are pictured in advance, and the essence of the enjoyment consists in the coincidence of reality with the mental image.”[320]
At this point we may again take up the process of recollection which is attended with some difficulty. The progressive power of rhythmical repetition, especially when musical or poetic, to whose chains we are such willing captives, is nothing else than attention fixed on what is to come. Still stronger is the tense expectation aroused by artistic productions which require time for their presentation. In the drama and recitation especially must we ascribe value to continuity, for here true art consists not so much in taking the hearer or reader by surprise—indeed, this is an insignificant element—as in contriving to make him suspect the coming situation and await it with intense concentration. On this depends not only the effectiveness of tragedy (O. Harnack has compared Ibsen’s Ghosts in this respect with the antique Œdipus), but in large measure that of all narrative poetry. “The poor satisfaction of a surprise!” exclaims Lessing. “I am far from thinking that the enjoyment we get from the work of a great artist is due to concealment of the denouement. I believe, moreover, that it would not transcend my powers to create a work in which the climax shall be revealed in the first scene, and from that very circumstance derive its strongest interest.” Finally, we must notice the interesting phenomena of attention in its connection with gambling, for the tremendous effects of which many diverse causes must conspire. Ribot says of it, “C’est la complexité qui produit l’intensité.”[321] The tension of interest in gaming depends on the two possibilities, winning and losing. It must be one thing or the other, and this fact differentiates it from our previous examples. Hope of winning usually looms large in the foreground, the possibility of losing assuming more the character of an auxiliary, adding intensity to the process. “Gambling,” says Lazarus justly, “has ruined many, enriched few, yet every player expects to be of the minority.”[322] As games of chance will come up for more exhaustive treatment later, I merely mention here that the effort of attention is one ground of their strong effect.
We now take up playful apperception of new impressions. The deep-rooted impulse to bring everything within the sphere of our own powers is especially powerful in the presence of novelty, of what is unfamiliar. We experience an almost irresistible desire to examine closely any strange object and make ourselves acquainted with its properties. Curiosity is the name given to the playful manifestation of attention which results from this tendency. Since I introduced it among the plays in my work on animals I have been told that curiosity is no play; but if we keep to our principle that the exercise of an impulse merely for the sake of the pleasure we derive from it is to be called play, then I am unable to see why curiosity should form an exception. It stands midway between two kinds of perception as applied to what is new, but is identical with neither. On one side is the impulse to inquire into the practical use of the unfamiliar object, whether it is beneficial or injurious; on the other side is thirst for knowledge, not entirely with a view to appropriation, but more concerned with placing the object properly in our system of things known. But curiosity, while it does depend on the stimulus[323] of novelty, concerns itself primarily neither with the practical value of the thing nor with its theoretic significance. It simply enjoys the agreeable emotional effects which arise when a new concept does not readily adjust itself to the beaten track of the habitual, and requires paths at least partially new to be opened before it. The interest attaching to scientific investigation is logical and formal, but that excited by curiosity may be said to be material. The freshness of the untried belongs to this new mental heritage, and is as exhilarating as the mountain climber’s discovery of a new path to some coveted summit. Where such pleasure becomes the ground of activity, that activity is play. For illustrative purposes let us suppose a landslide. Practical interest would at once apply to the proper authorities to find out the extent of damage caused by the catastrophe; scientific and learned curiosity would investigate the causes; while the simply curious would run from all directions just to see what was happening, using their powers of attention playfully.
In The Play of Animals I have presented quite a collection of examples, and I insert another here, which was not at that time available. When Nansen was on his north polar expedition a valuable gun accidentally fell into the sea. As the water at that place was but ten metres deep an attempt was made to recover the weapon. “While we were so engaged a bearded seal constantly swam around us, regarding us wonderingly, stretching his great head now to this side and now to that side of us, and drawing nearer and nearer as if he were making efforts to discern in what sort of nocturnal labour we were engaged.”[324] When we read such reports and see how widespread these phenomena are in the animal world, we naturally expect to find them universal among men. Yet it has been maintained by some that the lowest orders of savages have extremely little or no curiosity at all. Spencer has published a note in his Data of Sociology to the effect that it is entirely wanting among such peoples: “Where curiosity exists we find it among races of not so low a grade.”[325] I do not think that this can be substantiated. The numerous reports of travellers which seem to give colour to it can, I believe, be explained in two ways: First, the savage is too suspicious to show his curiosity; and, secondly, many reporters in speaking of the lack of curiosity refer rather to scientific curiosity, or thirst for knowledge. The Bakaïri of central Brazil, who are certainly primitive enough, displayed, according to K. von den Steinen, lively curiosity, while they had absolutely no desire for knowledge. “Our clothes,” he says, “were as strange to these good people as their nakedness was to us. I was escorted to the bath by both men and women, and it was amusing to see with what interest my clothes were examined. It never seemed to occur to them that I might resent the inspection. They showed some interest in my Polynesian tattooing, but were evidently disappointed not to find something marvellous concealed under all this careful and unheard-of wrapping.”[326] Just as curiously they investigated the contents of his pockets; admired his watch, which they called “moon,” because it did not sleep at night. A genuine desire for knowledge was nowhere shown, only a playful curiosity. K. von den Steinen has also recognised this distinction. “Nothing could be more mistaken,” he says, “than to suppose that frank curiosity is a genuine desire for knowledge or a longing to understand the cause of things.”[327] He is a firm upholder of the other view, having lived for some time alone among the Bakaïri, and says that much which he had observed as characteristic of them vanished when the larger company arrived; the perfect _naïveté_ disappeared, and their manner became more and more that of the savage as usually described to us.[328] That the higher standing races are extremely curious is a familiar fact, admitted and illustrated by Spencer himself. I instance only Semon’s humorous account of the Ambonese. “A committee from the village made visits lasting for hours on the ship where he was busy with his men. All hints that they might be needed on shore were unavailing, and for two days I bore it uncomplainingly when they crowded into my tiny cabin. On the third day I thought it best to speak to them plainly, and asked them in Malay to sit before the cabin door.... And the rest were just as curious, although they did not come on board ship. My morning dip in the sea was a treat to the whole village. A crowd of spectators gathered to witness the show, observing every detail, and not scrupling to express their criticisms.”[329]
In children, curiosity is useful as an antidote to instinctive shyness in the presence of what is new and strange, and as an introduction to the general desire for knowledge. It is stimulated by surprise, but can be called true curiosity only when the perception of what is unusual has a directly pleasurable effect, as, for example, when an infant six months old regards a veiled face with close attention and signs of delight. Tiedemann reports as early as the end of the second month: “He makes more and more unmistakable efforts to add to his store of ideas, for new objects never seen before are followed longer with the eye.”[330] “All little children,” says Preyer, “make ineffective sympathetic movements of various kinds when they hear new sounds, music or songs. They like to move their arms up and down. The child, on hearing, seeing, or tasting something new, directs his attention toward it, and experiences a pleasant sensation of gratified curiosity which induces motor discharge.”[331] Sully regards curiosity as the best offset to fear in children, and considers it a fortunate circumstance that the commonest causes of fear—namely, new and strange phenomena—are also the originators of a feeling such as curiosity, with its attendant impulses to follow and to examine. It would indeed be detrimental to intellectual development if new things roused feelings of fear exclusively. Yet in spite of these differences, fear and curiosity are probably closely related, since the caution and suspicion which characterize fear may be the point of departure for curiosity. Caution impels the animal to examine with careful attention every unusual object which makes its way into his environment, with an eye to its possible injurious or useful character. Assuming that this impulse is emancipated gradually from its double practical aim, we see it converted into curiosity before our eyes, while ontogenetically it is the antecedent of the thirst for knowledge, just as the practical aim precedes it phylogenetically. Perez has described this evolution beautifully. Playful exercise of the sensor and motor apparatus, which is at first mere obscure impulse toward sensation and movement, achieves more and more the clearness of intellectual activity as it becomes associated with curiosity. Yet all this results “not so much from the necessity for knowing what things are and what they can do, as from the demand for new and fresh impressions.”[332] Veritable thirst for knowledge, with its unappeasable questioning, gradually develops from this, making without difficulty the transition from the realm of play to that of genuine scientific investigation.
This demand for novelty plays a conspicuous rôle in the life of an adult as well. The masculine half of the race exhibits a praiseworthy self-denial in ascribing this quality to the other sex exclusively, but the women are about right when they say that men are quite as curious as themselves. Without going into the merits of this controversy, we will confine our discussion to the province of curiosity in æsthetic enjoyment. It is no doubt true that the highest and most complete æsthetic pleasure is independent of the stimulus of novelty, as is proved by the fact that our appreciation of a work of art is undiminished by repeated examination, and it remains “herrlich wie am ersten Tag.” Yet there is a peculiar charm attaching to a first view of even the most perfect work of genius, which E. von Hartmann has likened to that of the first kiss, and which must be at least in part due to novelty. This advantage depends not entirely on the diminishing of the satisfaction by use, but also on a positive, independent pleasure in the apperception of a new thing, and new, original, in the sense of being a revelation, are the productions of genius. In the development of art, too, a disinclination to get into ruts, together with positive enjoyment of original work, is a decidedly progressive force, as opposed to the multiplication of reproductions and imitations. Before the revolution caused by a new thing has become an accomplished fact, behold! it is no longer new, and the danger is of achieving only the pre-classical, as it were, and not the classical. Of following the prophets, perhaps, but not the Messiah.
4. _Reason_
We need no chain of reasoning to prove that the logical faculty is involved in very many plays, even those of simple movement; but now, as heretofore, we will strictly exclude all uses of it except those in which it is the very object of the play, those in which it is playfully experimented with. Two bearings of the subject will engage our attention: first, causality; and, second, inherence. Both are prominent in the playful use of reason, while some special forms involve the use of judgment as well, as in the play of wit, for instance.
How far the gratification afforded by play is dependent on causality is strikingly shown by the fact that there is not a single form of it which does not exhibit in one shape or another the joy of being a cause as the germ of its attractiveness. It is true that this universal fact directs the attention more to the feeling of being a cause than to the logical idea of causal connection, yet we find enjoyment of logical activity prominent in the categories which we have designated as “hustling things about,” and as destructive and constructive movement play. The tendency toward such play was chosen for our point of departure, and the indications are that it is of the first importance to the child, and that only through frequent repetitions of the _post hoc_ does independent interest in the _propter hoc_ gradually arise. Still, it can not be denied that the true characteristics of play are in inverse ratio to the intensity of the desire for knowledge, and it should be clearly stated that we are now on the frontier territory of play and earnest. The steps by which we have reached this point can be clearly traced by every reader of what goes before; therefore, without stopping to recapitulate, I cite this striking remark of Preyer’s as a fitting climax. He says in reference to the evolution of a feeling of individuality: “Another important factor is the perception of change brought about by his own activity, in the familiar objects by which he is surrounded, and, psychologically speaking, or, indeed, from any standpoint, a red-letter day in the infant’s life is the one on which he first grasps the connection between his own movements and the sense-perceptions caused by them. The sound produced by tearing and crumpling paper was still unrecognised by this child till in his fifth month he discovered that it gave him a new sensation, and he repeated the experiment day after day most energetically until the stimulus of novelty wore away. Still, there was no clear apprehension of causality, but the child had now had the experience of being an originator, and of combined sight and sound perceptions, regular in so far that when he tore paper it became smaller for one thing, and sound resulted for another. Other such amusements were shaking keys on a ring, opening and shutting a box or purse (thirteen months), repeatedly filling and emptying a table drawer, piling up and scattering sand and gravel, rustling the pages of a book (thirteenth to nineteenth month), digging in sand, pulling footstools back and forth, laying stones, shells, and buttons in rows (twenty-one months), pouring water in and out of bottles, cups, and cans (thirty-first to thirty-third month) and throwing stones in water.”[333] Miss Shinn also gives a pretty example in the case of her little niece: “In the twentieth month (five hundred and ninetieth day) I saw her outdoors, especially when driving, cover her eyes several times with her hands. I thought the sunlight might be too brilliant, but it is more likely that she was experimenting, for in the following weeks she would often cover her eyes with her hands, and take them away, hide her face in a cushion or on her own arms, often saying ‘Dark,’ then look up, ‘Light now.’”[334] Tormenting animals is another direction in which the quest for a causal connection is evident. When André Theuriet was a four-year-old boy he threw a newborn puppy in the water just “pour voir,” and then wept bitterly because he could not rescue it.[335] As these demands of reason become prominent we can clearly see that we are approaching the limits of play.
There are other cases, however, where the search for a causal connection can more assuredly be called playful. An essential feature of the enjoyment derived from mental contests is the calculation of the result. Several possibilities are before the player, and he enjoys the intellectual effort of testing each and using the most advantageous. In the solution of whist and chess problems and such like, rivalry becomes an insignificant feature, and logical experimentation forms the central interest. Just so with the common and often ancient mechanical and mathematical puzzles. Pleasure in conquering their logical difficulties is derived from the gratification of a “general impulse or general instinct to exercise the intelligence as such.”[336] Causality plays a prominent part in poetry, too, since we require it to reveal to us the inner relations of the events set forth and to exhibit cause and effect in clearer and more orderly sequence than the complexities of reality admit of.[337] Especially is this the case with tragedy. In my Einleitung in die Aesthetik I expressed the opinion that the treatment of tragical climaxes as logical necessities is an important means of bracing us for the increasingly painful inner imitation which is so essential, without weakening or modifying its effect. “When the course of the tragic tale is so far developed as to suggest that a catastrophe is imminent, it should also appear inevitable. Stern necessity must urge the hero toward the fearful goal so persistently that escape shall be unthinkable, a logical impossibility. This feeling of necessity is calculated to fix the æsthetic illusion, and consequently help on the effect by rendering more strenuous the mental tension and directing it so forcibly toward the climax that consciousness is a captive to inner imitation until the tragedy has culminated. In other words, fear of the catastrophe is so absorbing as to create the illusion that the apprehended event is just at hand, and consequently all sense of the painfulness of the situation is merged in the stress of this illusion, since it alone is competent to relieve the tension.”[338] I might have continued to the effect that such manifestations of the law of cause afford us a positive logical satisfaction, and in spite of the impression forced upon us by the crushing blows of Fate, weave some threads into the intricate texture of æsthetic enjoyment, because in them we recognise a proof of the existence of a universal causal nexus.
A glance over the sphere of inherence, too, will help us to a proper orientation for this inquiry. By the word inherence we signify the relation of a thing to its qualities, or, abstractly speaking, the relation of a concept to its characteristics. A common and well-nigh universal form of play depends on this principle—namely, the making and solving of riddles. The large majority of them involve an effort to find the concept whose characteristics are given, and the task is intentionally rendered difficult, with the result that the solution is attended with a proud sense of success. The exercise easily leads to a contest, but it is grounded in experimentation with the logical faculty, and many persons enjoy the amusement for this reason alone.[339]
Children as young as four years sometimes indulge in a sort of preliminary exercise in riddle solving, such as the simple game in which one child, noticing the peculiar colour of some object in the room, says, “I see something you don’t see, and it’s yellow,” and his comrade must guess it. The play here is connected with sense perception by the relations of things to their qualities, and there are many games for large companies much like it. In a genuine riddle the enumeration of characteristics must be imperfect or in some way misleading to render the solution troublesome, and still sufficiently complete to make it possible; many are made sufficiently puzzling by the lack of logical ὁριδκός without the introduction of other means of mystification; such, for example, as—
“Drufg’schloh, Ufg’ deckt, Usse g’nô, Dra gschmöckt, Und dann wiederum versteckt.” (Tabakdose.)
“Inside whole, Outside full of many holes.” (Thimble.)
“Two legs sits on three legs And milks four legs.” (Milkmaid.)
“Oben spitz und unten breit Durch und durch voll Süssigkeit.” (Zuckerhut.)
“First white as snow, Then green as clover, Then red as blood, They taste to all children good.” (Cherries.)
The play is more genuine, however, when the characteristics are more veiled, as in (1) metaphor and (2) apparent contradiction. The riddles which follow are evidently calculated to put one on the wrong scent. On the coast of Malabar two familiar riddles are “Little man, strong voice,” and “A little pig in the woods.” The answer to the former is Grasshopper, and to the latter Pediculus cervicalis.
“There is a little man With a stomach of stone; He has a red cloak And a black cap on.” (Haw.)
“S’itzt etwas amme Rainle, Es wackelt ihm sein Beinle; Vor Angst und Noth Wird ihm sein Köpfle feuerroth.” (Erdbeere.)
“An iron steed with silken reins, The faster runs the horse the shorter grow the reins.” (Needle and thread.)
Apparent contradiction is a favourite means of mystification, as in the questions “What teaches without speaking?” A book. “What two things are together early and late, and yet never touch each other?” Parallel lines. The East African Schamlala have a riddle which is metaphorical. “My grandfather’s cattle low when they are driven away, and are quiet coming home.” This refers to the water gourds carried by the women, which clatter when taken away empty, and are silent as they come back filled.[340] A German riddle of this kind is:
“Ich hab’ einen Rücken und kann nicht liegen; Ich hab zwei Flügel und kann nicht fliegen; Ich hab ein Bein und kann nicht stehen; Ich kann wohl laufen, aber nicht gehen.” (Nase.)
I can not here examine other forms of logical experimentation with the exception of the phenomena of wit, which are too important to be omitted from our review. Primarily wit should be classed with the comic, of which we shall speak in another connection, but at times it overreaches these limits, and more general grounds must be assigned for it in logical experimentation. When wit is free from sarcasm and assumes the form of playful judgment, as Kuno Fischer says, then its most natural expression is in the riddle and the proverb. The evolution of such serious wit as Jean Paul’s is possible only to a highly cultured people, and Nietzsche, the most brilliant German exponent of modern witticism, displays a certain tendency to proverb. “To be stiff to his inferiors is wisdom for the hedgehog” has the true flavour of the terse sayings found among all primitive people. The satisfaction afforded by true wit is due to the playful conquest of logical difficulties; some statement is made which confuses by its unusual conjunction of ideas, and we hail as a victory the sudden emergence of the hidden meaning. Therefore it would be a mistake to call the pleasure produced by wit exclusively a play with reason, since constructive imagination and the formulation of the abstract are also involved. When the negro produces this—“God keeps the flies off the ox that has no tail”—he gives us an expression of wit illustrating abstract judgment which may be accompanied by the stronger emotion.
B. EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE FEELINGS
That a man may play with his emotions is a well-known fact, but one which has not to my knowledge been adequately investigated in all its ramifications. While the “luxury of grief” is often referred to, the interesting distinction of its varying degrees has not been gone into. It can not be labelled, I think, simple play with pleasurable sensations, partly because the concentration of attention on the feeling itself instead of on the accompanying sensations and ideas tends to weaken the very feeling in question, and also because the division of consciousness which attends such a survey of one’s own emotional life is less operative in the sphere of pleasure.[341] There must be a distinct recognition that it is genuine pain which we are enjoying before the sense of being a spectator arises, and we can become conscious that we are playing with our emotions. The various feelings which may be involved in this process are physical pain, mental suffering, surprise, and fear. Besides these four, the mixed feeling of suspension between pain and pleasure might be mentioned, but as it has already been referred to it will be included in our treatment of surprise.
1. _Physical Pain_
I have frequently had occasion to note that we commonly enjoy stimuli whose effect is distinctly disagreeable because they are calculated to satisfy our craving for intense impressions. A sensitive tooth is constantly visited by the tongue, a stiff neck is constantly experimented with, any slight wound is repeatedly pressed and rubbed, etc. Hall[342] and Allin testify that this is especially the case in childhood. We have already noticed the shock of a cold bath and the sting of sharp drinks. The pleasure which we derive from eating pungent horseradish, which brings tears to the eyes, is a relative, distant and humble it is true, but still unmistakably a relative of our enjoyment of tragedy. Our satisfaction in strong, self-produced excitement is so intense as to make physical pain to a great extent enjoyable. It is true that while these phenomena are so far quite normal, secret but direct paths connect them with the realm of pathology. While some individuals display this in a somewhat anomalous desire for taste stimuli, in others pleasure in petty self-torture develops into a sort of sport, having as its object not merely a test of their power of endurance (of that we shall speak in the section on will) but some obscure delight in actual suffering as well. Cardanus confesses in his autobiography to a diseased condition which could not dispense with pain, so that if he found himself perfectly comfortable he was at once moved by an irresistible impulse to torture his body until tears came. Mantegazza tells of a veteran who took a strange delight in scratching the inflamed edges of an old wound in his leg.[343] In some forms of insanity the patient maltreats his person, inflicting the most frightful wounds and mutilations, which would be incredible if his sensibilities were not to a great degree blunted. In the attempt to explain these phenomena some have thought them an exception to the rule that pleasure accompanies only what is in some way useful, but it seems to me that a sufficient explanation of normal cases is found in the utility of the experimental impulse, which in seeking strong stimuli takes a certain amount of pain with the rest. So long as pleasure predominates over pain in the experience, play is possible. In pathological cases sexual excitement is often aroused sufficiently to neutralize the suffering, and where this is not the case we must suppose a perverse directing of the fighting instinct against one’s own body, furthered by the deadening of sensibility to pain.
2. _Mental Suffering_
Psychologists have given special attention to the enjoyment which is derived from contemplating unpleasant images and subjects. Perhaps the most familiar passage on the subject is that of Spencer’s on the luxury of grief, yet, as he himself admits, his idea of self-pity does not clear it up, and he goes on: “It seems possible that the sentiment which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth as he conceives it, and the treatment he has received—either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast.... That this explanation is the true one, I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion, confessing that this is a peculiar emotion which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me to understand.”[344] This is indeed an unsatisfactory explanation, and the play idea seems to bring us nearer to one, for here, as in the case of physical pain, it is the deep-rooted need of our nature for intense stimuli which enables us to enjoy our own suffering. That unassuageable longing of Faust which had exhausted the meagre emotional recourses of study, and now dragged him out in search of life and experience, was a longing for both pleasure and pain, since both could stir up life’s deep sea, which now lay stagnant:
“Sturzen wer uns in das Rauschen der Zeit, Ins Rollen der Begebenheit! Da mag denn Schmerz und Genuss, Gelingen und Verdruss Mit einander wechseln, wie es kann Nur raselos bethätigt sich der Mann.”
Contemplative natures, not given to activity, have a tendency to play with their suffering, and by a strange division of consciousness stand as on some rocky height, beholding with pleased appreciation the foaming torrent of their own feelings. In the closing chapter of my Play of Animals I treated the subject of divided consciousness at some length, and will not here repeat what is said there. For a specific instance we need only point to the artist who brings a tragic tale to a close with real regret, and, in spite of the suffering it has caused him, is filled with the joy in being a cause, in his power to create. When Kleist finished Penthesilia in Dresden he went to his friend Pfuel in tears. “She is dead!” he wailed, and yet, in spite of his deep and genuine grief over the death of his heroine, in the depths of his soul he was conscious of joy in his creation. This is a good example of play with mental suffering, and Marie Bashkirtseff furnishes another illustration which I have cited in my earlier work. “Can one believe it?” she writes in her journal, at the age of thirteen; “I find everything good and beautiful, even tears and pain. I love to weep, I love to despair, I love to be sad. I love life in spite of all; I wish to live. I must be happy, and am happy to be miserable. My body weeps and moans, but something in me that is above me enjoys it all.” By these words she reveals most clearly that division of consciousness in which, behind the suffering I, another seems to stand, which has the power to change the grief to bliss. Goethe, too, seems often to have felt the same. His Werther blames himself because he is prone to cower before petty ills. Further than this there is such a thing as emotional pessimism founded on temperament. For Schopenhauer it was an evident satisfaction to work himself up to a condition of the utmost indignation over the evils of the world. Kuno Fischer has sharply exposed this playful characteristic of his pessimism. It is true, he says, that Schopenhauer takes a serious and even tragic view of the world, but, after all, it is only a view, a spectacle, a picture. “The world tragedy is played in a theatre; he sits in the audience on a comfortable divan commanding the stage, using his opera glass with discretion. Many of the spectators forget the suffering world at the buffet, none follow the tragedy with such close attention, such deep earnestness, such a comprehensive glance as his. Then, deeply moved and soul-satisfied, he goes home and writes down what he has seen.”[345] Melancholy, too, in the ordinary sense, not the pathological, belongs here, the melancholy of lovers, poets, and artists, the condition typified by the phrase “dégustation complaisante de la tristesse.”[346]
Finally, pleasure in the tragic, of which we have spoken in another connection, should be mentioned here. Augustine, the great prober into the problems of the soul, has set forth this question with inimitable clearness in the third book of his Confessions. “Why,” says he, “should a man sadden himself by voluntarily witnessing what is painful? The spectator does undeniably feel sad, and the very sadness is a pleasure. How can we explain this sympathy with unreal, theatrical sorrows? The hope of ultimate rescue is not the only thing that appeals to him—it is the actual accumulation of misery as well, and he praises the play in proportion as it moves him. When common woes are so represented as not to affect the hearer, he goes away dissatisfied and complaining. If he is affected, on the contrary, he listens attentively, and weeps with delight.” If I understand Augustine aright, he finds the solution of the puzzle in the idea of a sort of sympathy which he distinguishes from real or moral sympathy, and which is at bottom nothing else than the play of inner imitation, that æsthetic feeling of fellowship of which we shall hear more later. He puts his finger on the real reason why fellow-feeling for the sufferer has a special charm when he admits that tragic representation affected him with sharp, creepy sensations, like the scratching of a finger nail. Thus he concludes, as we have done, that the foundation of enjoyment of tragedy is the result of intensive stimuli. As Du Bos[347] remarks, we take the pain accompanying the emotion in the bargain because we like the emotion, the agitation of feeling, so well. This recalls the Aristotelian dogma of the catharsis, but the objection to this theory lies, as its name implies, in the fact that it seeks a practical end for the play of æsthetic pleasure. For Aristotle the question is to establish the purifying effects of a thunderstorm, not the enjoyment of its grandeur, and for this reason the doctrine of the catharsis, however clear it may be, does not directly answer our question. Delight in the tragic element is not concerned with the lull after the storm, but only with the surging might of the tempest itself, in which we are playfully involved. Weil and Bernays seem to me to have the right idea when they speak of the need for violent emotional play, and of enjoyment of ecstatic conditions. And Lessing also, when he says that strong passion gives more reality to feeling. But it is doubtful whether Aristotle considered this side of the question in forming his theory.
3. _Surprise_
Surprise is connected with fear, and for this reason is in itself a disagreeable sensation; yet, on account of its strong psychophysical effect—namely, the shock which it produces—it becomes highly enjoyable in play, and displays, perhaps more clearly than any of the other cases, the charm of strong stimuli. Children indulge very early in play involving the shock of surprise, and its effectiveness as a means of giving pleasure becomes more and more intense. Darwin relates that his son, from the one hundred and tenth day, was wildly delighted when a handkerchief was laid over his face and then suddenly withdrawn, or when his father’s face was hidden and revealed in this way. “He then uttered a little noise, which was an incipient laugh.” I referred to this in speaking of expectancy, which, indeed, goes hand in hand with surprise, however opposed they may appear, since surprise which is entirely unexpected is of course no part of play. There is always playful experimentation with the shock when we expect it, but do not know when or in what form it will appear. It is just this combination which makes the emotional effect of surprise greater than it would otherwise be. When, for example, we hold a lighted match over a lamp, we are the more startled by the slight explosion because we have attentively awaited it; and there are many games for children in which the combined effect of expectation and surprise furnish an essential part of the pleasure, such as those where persons or objects are hidden. The excitement, too, which is caused by loud and sudden sounds is of the same character. M. Reischle, in his fine paper on child’s play, distinguishes a special group of expectation and surprise games, and points out that the little ones peek while their comrades are hiding, and yet are overjoyed to find them, and apparently surprised. In many throwing and catching games both elements are influential in heightening the stimulus, and special plays grow out of them, such as “Hide-and-Seek,” “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “Drop the Handkerchief,” as well as many games of chance. Indeed, in the last named the stimulus of surprise is often of special importance,[348] and one of the chief sources of pleasure is the tension of expectancy followed by the sudden decision on the fall of dice.
Yet more interesting is the significance of surprise in relation to the comic. While the latter is more than a play with surprise, this feature becomes a factor that should by no means be overlooked in studying comic effects, especially when we reflect that previous efforts to explain this modification of aesthetic enjoyment have proved abortive, possibly through failure to give due weight to this very element. E. Hecker advances the theory, it is true, that laughter from tickling accounts for the origin of enjoyment of the comic, but in this purely physiological explanation he seems to overlook the fact that as a rule we laugh only when we are tickled, not when we tickle ourselves—that is to say, that contact with finger tips becomes tickling only when the hand is a strange one. Even in physical tickling, then, there must be some psychic factors, of which surprise may be one, even though it is inadequate alone to explain the phenomena. The fact that surprise not carried far enough to frighten is one of the first causes of laughter in children gives colour to this idea. Zeising has shown conclusively that there is a double surprise in the comic, the first being the intuitive start at something unusual, and contrasted with what is normal and typic, be it occasioned by some anomaly in the object itself or depending only on the momentary _milieu_—such, for instance, as the ridiculous appearance of a tiny cottage in a row of palatial residences.[349] This first shock is followed by a moment of suspense. “When the entirely unexpected happens,” says Goethe in Tasso, “the mind stands still for a moment,” which again is interrupted by the new surprise of finding the first one negatived or reversed.[350] Here we have the counter shock, whose pleasurable effect is strong enough to more than neutralize the first, and render their combined result agreeable.[351] As Kant, with his unrivalled penetration, has remarked, we play with the error as with a ball, tossing it back and forth and looking after it each time; in this way we are hurried through a succession of tensions and relaxations.
While this illustration shows clearly how the essence of comicality is due to the peculiar character of the double shock, yet it remains true that even in this case surprise as such is pleasurable, and plays its part in the complicated effect.
4. _Fear_
That even fear, the most abject of all affections, may become the object of playful experimentation is one of the riddles of soul life. Here, too, we can only apply the theory of pleasure in intense stimulus to that of divided consciousness. When Lukrez dwells upon the pleasure of gazing on a stormy sea from the vantage ground of a rocky crag he illustrates this state, only here the soul is both in the midst of the storm and on the rocks as well. Apart from and above the terror-stricken personality stands another, safe and free, and enjoying the fascination of painful excitement. For the power of fear is fascinating, even benumbing in its effect. Souriau says: “I remember, as a child, seeing a snake, cut in two by a spade, convulsively writhing on the garden walk. The sight filled me with terror, which rooted me to the spot. Fascinated, I stood perfectly still, my eyes following the agonized twisting of the creature while I felt waves of pain surging through my own body.”[352] Of course, such a condition can be playful only in case of an æsthetic illusion when the fear is but apparent, and may be dispelled at will, and when pleasure is stronger than pain in the experience. Nevertheless, there are transitions between real and apparent fear which are particularly operative when curiosity becomes the counter irritant. Every one’s childhood will furnish an example of this. George Sand tells us how she as a little girl tried with a playmate to get a glimpse into the spirit world by means of mystic oaths and incantations. The children waited long in fear and trembling, for blue flames, protruding devil’s horns, etc. This was only a play, “but a play that set our hearts beating.”[353] Although fear in this instance has more the character of a necessary accompaniment than of an object of play, real delight in the gruesome is undeniably evident in the world of art. In the first place, there are legends and stories with horrible fantasies. The child is wrapped in breathless interest in accounts of ghosts, wicked magicians, werewolves, etc., and while safe in his own home enjoys the terrors which these ideas excite. As a small boy I listened with nameless horror to the crude account of the fate of Faust secretly read to me by our gardener out of a popular book. I remember how, when the devil led Faust through the ceiling, his skull was broken and his brains spattered on the wall. For some time after that I was afraid to pass shady places in the garden, even in the daytime. With older boys descriptions of battles and adventures, and, above all, Indian stories, take the place of fairy tales. The Leather Stocking Tales were my chief delight, especially The Pathfinder, and I can still recall the rapt attention with which I followed the frightful perils which threatened my hero, whenever I could get a quarter of an hour off. How meagre is our capacity for æsthetic enjoyment in later years compared with the absolute, unconditional surrender to it of a youthful soul! Adults enjoy the gruesome in poetic creations such as those of Hoffman and Victor Hugo. When we read of the struggle with the polypus in Toilers of the Sea the strong stimulus imparted by fear is certainly the chief source of pleasure. My grandfather in extreme old age liked nothing better than to read such thrilling tales of hairbreadth escapes, and the strong preference for detective stories evinced by the masses is based on the same grounds. Savages, too, like children, always prefer tales which deal with demons and magic.
Finally, we must notice an æsthetic phase which is related to fear—namely, exaltation. Since Kant’s thoroughgoing elucidation the principle is fixed that exaltation is the result of a rebound from fear. First depression, then exaltation. At first, the object of our reverence oppresses us, and for a moment we are painfully conscious of our impotence and nothingness; then comes a reaction; we throw off the oppression and begin to study the revered object with serious pleasure. In my Einleitung in die Aesthetik I did not attribute the first part of this process to æsthetic pleasure, because I found that inner imitation on which I based my investigation only in the second stage.[354] While I still regard it as the highest and most important element in æsthetics, yet I am aware that my view as there presented was somewhat one-sided, as is almost unavoidably the case if one attempts to carry out a theory systematically. As I shall return to this point, let it suffice to say here that probably the depression itself is pleasurable, and so forms a part of the æsthetic satisfaction. It is characteristic of our complex natures that along with our demand to control our surroundings we also feel the need of the domination of a higher power. When we encounter an incontestably overpowering force we gladly surrender unconditionally, and take pleasure in acknowledging that we are insignificant and helpless. The significance of this spirit for religion is apparent. Schiller has designated awe as the noblest human trait, and Schleiermacher found the springs of religion in the feeling of dependence. The first stage in the satisfaction derived from exaltation is akin to this when we enjoy our self-abasement in order to render more conspicuous the subsequent expansion of an individuality, in the second stage when by the exercise of inner imitation we identify ourselves with the revered object, thus partaking of the greatness which at first overawed us. While it is true that only the second part of this process attains the summit of enjoyment, the first, too, is playful. “How felt I myself so small—so great?” asks Faust, and attributes both sentiments to the selfsame moment. This play with depression is facilitated by repeating the whole process frequently. The mind is not only attracted to the object, but alternately repelled from it, and in this process of repetition depression assumes more and more the character of play.
C. EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE WILL
Since our inquiry in this closing section is not as to the general use of the will in play, but rather into playful experimentation with the will itself, we must direct our attention to the control of movement. Play requires that those movements which depend on both inherited and acquired brain paths shall be under voluntary control. The pleasure accompanying this control is founded on the feeling of freedom and of mastery over self; and it is to be specially noted that almost all the related phenomena take the form of contests and appeal to the fighting instincts. The majority of cases require the suppression of emotional expression or of such reflexes as are connected with them. Thus, for example, winking is not an expression of emotion in the ordinary sense, and yet when it follows closely on the sudden presentation of some object before the eyes it seems to indicate that the person is startled or even terrified. Children often play with this refractory reflex, one moving his hand rapidly before the eyes of another, who makes desperate efforts to keep them open, and a forfeit game is played as follows: Two persons sit or stand opposite one another; one moves his hand close to the other’s eyes while the following colloquy takes place: “Are you going in the woods?” “Yes.” “Going to take some bread with you?” “Yes.” “And you want some salt on it?” “Yes.” “Are you afraid of the wolf?” If he holds his eyes open all the time he is not afraid, but if he winks he must pay a forfeit.[355] The attempt is often made, too, to resist the impulse to laugh while two persons gaze into each other’s eyes. Indeed, such games are too numerous to mention. The effort to repress the expression of pain is still more interesting. Self-control during the suffering of physical pain is everywhere regarded as a proof of manliness, and is earnestly cultivated by savages as by our own boys. The quiet submission to painful tattooing, the endurance displayed by Indian children often in gruesome ways, the effort of our schoolboys to bear corporal punishment unflinchingly, the self-control of students who joke while their wounds are being sewed, and—to carry the struggle against self-betrayal into the field of mental suffering as well—the apparent indifference of gamblers to the reverses of fortune; while all of these can by no means be called playful, still the cases are sufficiently numerous in which there is actual playful experimentation with the powers of endurance. For example, Rochholz describes this test: Two persons strike the knuckles of the doubled-up fists together, and measure their will power by the length of time that they can endure the pain. Another is to strike the first and middle fingers against those of the other person. A friend of mine told me that as a boy (probably after reading some Indian tales) he once wagered with a comrade as to how long they could hold lighted matches in their fingers. He won the bet, but had to go with a bandaged hand for a long time.
A playful exercise of the will which suppresses not only every admission of suffering, but the fighting instinct as well, is related by Goethe of his youth. After remarking that “very many sports of youth depend on a rivalry in such endurance, as, for example, when they strike with two fingers or the whole hand until the limbs are numb,” he goes on: “As I made a sort of boast of this endurance, the others were piqued, and as rude barbarity knows no limits, they managed to push me beyond my bounds. Let one instance serve to illustrate. It happened one morning that the teacher did not appear at the hour of recitation. As long as all the children were together we entertained ourselves very well, but when my friends left after waiting the usual time, the others took it into their heads to torment and shame me and to drive me away. Leaving the room for a moment, they came back with switches from a broom. I saw what they meant to do, and, supposing the end of the hour to be near, I at once resolved to resist them until the clock struck. They lashed my legs unmercifully, and in a way that was actually cruel. I did not stir, but soon found that I had miscalculated the time, and that pain greatly lengthened the minutes. My rage swelled the more I endured, and at the first stroke of the clock I grasped my most unsuspecting assailant by the hair, hurled him to the floor in an instant, pressing my knee upon his back. The second, who was younger and weaker, and who attacked me in the rear, I held with his head under my arm. The last, and not the weakest, remained, and only my left hand was free, but I caught hold of his clothes, and by a dexterous twist on my part and an awkward slip on his, I brought him down too, striking his face on the floor.”
Another impulse whose suppression is sometimes an end in play is imitation. Perhaps the most familiar game illustrating it is “All Birds Fly,” in which one of the children says “Pigeons fly, ducks fly, bears fly,” etc., and raises her hands in the air each time, while the others must follow her example only when a bird is mentioned. The Mufti-comme-ça described by Wagner is similar. All stand in a circle except the one who is in the centre making various motions. When he calls out “Mufti,” all stand still; but when he continues “comme ça,” they imitate him. In the English “Simon says,” the players make all the gestures that he commands, regardless of those which he may be making.[356]
All these examples are concerned with the repression of inborn reflexes, expressive movements, and instincts, but acquired habits are no less difficult to withstand. Many games are founded on the assumption that the ability to do so is a proof of will power, and emphasizes the freedom and self-control of the subject. It is particularly well illustrated in vocal exercises. To omit a particular syllable in a familiar rhythmic verse, or possibly several verses, requires a sudden check to the accustomed movements. A well-known German example is the song—
“Europa hat Ruhe, Europa hat Ruh’, Und wenn Europa Ruhe hat, So hat Europa Ruh’”—
in which the first, second, or third syllable of the word Europa, or even the word or all the other words, are omitted. Kreis mentions a similar play for children. It consists simply in substituting other meanings for the words (stretching for bending, for example), so that when the order is given “Bend,” the arm is stretched out, etc.[357] There is such a thing, too, as playful resistance of old habits. How many smokers resolve as a sort of jest to do without cigars for a week! It is the merest playful experimentation; they want to see if they are really absolute slaves of the pleasant vice, or whether the habit is still under the control of their will. If the experiment succeeds, they contentedly go back to their cigars; it is not at all a serious effort to reform. Many frivolous persons play thus with their habits, and take a childish delight in the little conquests achieved by their will, yet without permanently or seriously altering their manner of living.