Children's "play," as the expression is commonly understood, differs from the sportive movements of fancy considered in the last chapter by its essentially active character. We do not speak of a child playing save when he does something, however slight, by way of expressing or acting out a fancy. This outer expression of fancy in some active form is commonly called by children themselves "pretending" to be or to do something, by older people when looking back on the pretence "making-believe". In order to understand what childish fancy is like, and how it works, we must carefully watch it as it moves among the toys and creates a new play-world.

The Young Pretender.

Child's play is a kind of creation of a make-believe but half-real world. As such, it has its primal source in the impulse to act out and embody in sensible form some interesting idea; in which respect, as we shall see by-and-by, it has a close kinship to what we call art. The image, say of the wood, of the chivalrous highwayman, or what not, holds the child's brain, and everything has to accommodate itself to the mastering force.

Now since play is the acting out of some interesting and exciting fancy, it comes at once into collision with the child's actual surroundings. Here, however, he finds his opportunity. The floor of the room is magically transformed into a prairie, a sea, or other locality, the hidden space under the table becomes a robber's cave, a chair serves as horse, ship, or other vehicle, to suit the exigencies of the particular play.

The passion for play is essentially active; it is the wild longing to act a part; it is thus in a way dramatic. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero becomes another being. And in stepping, so to say, out of his every-day self he has to step out of his every-day world. Hence the transformation of his surroundings by what has been called the "alchemy of imagination". Even a sick child confined to his bed will, as Mr. Stevenson tells us in his pretty child's song, "The Land of Counterpane," make these transformations of his surroundings:—

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets,
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

The impulse to act a part, which is the very life-breath of play, meets us in a crude form very early. Even an infant will, if there is a cup at hand, seem to go through something like a pretence of drinking. A little boy of about eighteen months who was digging in the garden began suddenly to play at having a bath. He got into the big bucket he was using for digging, took a handful of earth and dribbled it over him, saying, "'Ponge, 'ponge," and then stepped out and asked for "Tow'l, tow'l". Another boy less than two would spend a whole wet afternoon enjoying his make-believe "painting" of the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope.

There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative make-believe children know that they are acting a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a kind of conscious performance, like that of the stage-actor. A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. When absorbed in play the last thing he is thinking of is a spectator. As we know, the intrusion of a grown-up is very apt to mar children's play, by calling them back to the dull world of every-day.

This impulse to get away from his common and tiresome self into a new part will often carry a child rather far. Not only does he want to be a prince, or a fairy, he will even make an attempt to become an animal. He will greatly enjoy going on all fours and making dreadful noises if only he has a play-companion to be frightened; and possibly he does get some way towards feeling like the bloodthirsty lion whom he fancies himself.

It is worth noting that such passing out of one's ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player. A cat or a dog will be quite ready to go through a kind of make-believe game, yet even in its play the cat remains the cat, and the dog the dog.

Such play-like transmutation of the self is sometimes carried over longer periods. A child will play at being something for a whole day. For example, a boy of three and a half years would one day lead the life of a coal-heaver, another day that of a soldier, and so forth, and was rather particular in expecting his mother to remember which of his favourite characters he was adopting on this or that day.

In a good deal of this play-action there is scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child of vigorous fancy plays out his part with imaginary surroundings. Children in their second year will act out a scene purely by means of pantomimic movements. Thus one little fellow not quite two years old would, when taken out in his perambulator, amuse himself by putting out his hand and pretending to catch "little micies" (mice), which make-believe little rodents he proceeded to cuddle and to stroke, winding up his play by throwing them away, or handing them over to his mother. In like manner he would pretend to feed chickens, taking imaginary food with one hand out of the other, and scattering it with an accompaniment of "Chuck! chuck! chuck!"

This tendency of the little player to conjure up new surroundings, and to bring to his side desirable companions, is, I suspect, common among lonely children. One little fellow of four passed much of his time in journeyings to Edinburgh, "London town," China and so forth in quest of his two little boys who roved about with their "mamsey," a "Mrs. Cock". They paid him visits when he was alone, always contriving to depart "just two tiny minutes" before any one came in.[1] Mr. Canton's little heroine took to nursing an invisible "iccle gaal" (little girl), of whose presence she seemed perfectly assured.[2]

If only the young imagination is strong enough there may be more of sweet illusion, of a warm grasp of living reality in this solitary play, where fictitious companions, perfectly obedient to the little player's will, take the place of less controllable ones. Yet this kind of play, which derives no support from the surroundings, makes heavy demands on the imagination, and would not, one suspects, satisfy most children.

The character of the little player's actual surroundings is, for the most part, a matter of small concern to him. If only he has a dark corner and a piece of furniture or two he can build his play-scene.

What he does want is some semblance of a living companion. Whatever his play he needs somebody, if only as listener to his make-believe; and when his imagination cannot rise to an invisible auditor, he will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in the bath, a fire-shovel, or a clothes-prop in the garden. In more active sorts of play, where something has to be done, he will commonly want a living companion.

In this making of play-companions we see again the transforming power of a child's fancy. Mr. Ruskin speaks somewhere of "the perfection of child-like imagination, the power of making everything out of nothing". This delightful secret of childhood is illustrated in its fondness for toys and its way of behaving towards them.Later on, I think, children are apt to grow more sophisticated, to pay more attention to their surroundings, and to require more realistic accessories for their play actions. This, at least Dr. Stanley Hall tells us, is true of doll-plays.

Mysteries of Dolldom.

The fact that children make living things out of their toy horses, dogs and the rest is known to every observer of their ways. To the natural unsceptical eye the boy on his rudely carved "gee-gee" slashing the dull flank with all a boy's glee, looks as if he were possessed with the fancy that the rigid inert-looking block which he bestraddles is a very horse.

This breathing of life into playthings is seen in all its magic force in play with dolls. A doll, broadly conceived, is anything which a child carries about and makes a pet of. The toy horse, dog or what not that a little boy nurses, feeds and takes to bed with him has much of the dignity of a true doll. But adopting conventional distinctions we shall confine the word to those things which are more or less endowed by childish fancy with human form and character.

I read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only: but young boys, though they often prefer india-rubber horses and other animals, not infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and are hardly less devoted than girls.

Endless is the variety of rÔle assigned to the doll. It is the all-important comrade in that solitude À deux of which the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs. Burnett tells us that when nursing her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling adventures.

Very tenderly, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her pet, doing her best to keep it clean and tidy, feeding it, putting it to bed, amusing it, for example, by showing it her pictures, tending it with fidelity during bouts of sickness, and giving it the honours of a funeral when, from the attack of a dog set on by an unfeeling brother or other cause, it comes to "die";[3] or when, as in the case of little Jane Welsh (afterwards Mrs. Carlyle), the time has come for the young lady to cast aside her dolls.

The doll-interest implies a deep mysterious sympathy. Children wish their dolls to share in their things, to be kissed when they are kissed, and so to come close to them in experience and feeling. Not only so, they look for sympathy from their doll-companions, taking to them all their childish troubles. So far is this feeling of oneness carried in some cases that the passion for dolls has actually rendered the child indifferent to child-companions. It is not every little girl who like little Maggie Tulliver has only "occasional fits of fondness" for her nursling when the brother is absent.

Not only in this lavishing of tenderness and of sympathy on the doll, but in the occasional discharge on it of a fit of anger, children show how near it comes to a human companion. The punishment of the doll is an important element in nursery-life. It is apt to be carried out with formal solemnity and often with something of brutal emphasis. Yet tenderness being the strongest part of the doll-attachment, the little disciplinarians are apt to suffer afterwards for their cruelty, one little girl showing remorse after such a chastisement of her pet for several days.

I have talked here of "dolls," but I must not be supposed to be speaking merely of the lovely creatures with blue eyes and yellow hair with which the well-to-do child is wont to be supplied. Nothing is more strange and curious in child-life than its art of manufacturing dolls out of the most unpromising materials. The creative child can find something to nurse and fondle and take to bed with it in a bundle of hay tied round with a string, in a shawl, a pillow, a stick, a clothes-pin, or a clay-pipe. Victor Hugo, with a true touch, makes the little outcast Cosette, who has never had a "real doll," fashion one out of a tiny leaden sword and a rag or two, putting it to sleep in her arms with a soft lullaby.

Do any of us really understand the child's attitude of mind towards its doll? Although gifted writers like George Sand have tried to take us back to the feeling of childhood, it may be doubted whether they have made it intelligible to us. And certainly the answers to questions collected in America have done little, if anything, towards making it clear. The truth is that the perfect child's faith in dolldom passes away early, in most cases it would appear about the age of thirteen or fourteen. It is then that the young people begin clearly to realise the shocking fact that dolls have no "inner life". Occasionally girls will go on playing with dolls much later than this, but not surely with the old sincerity.

That many children have a genuine delusion about their dolls seems evident. That is to say when they talk to them and otherwise treat them as human they imaginatively realise that they can understand and feel. The force of the illusion, blotting out from the child's view the naked reality before its eyes, is a striking illustration of the vividness of early fancy. Perhaps, too, this intensity of faith comes in part of the strength of the impulses which commonly sustain the doll-passion. Of these the instinct of companionship, of sympathy, is the strongest. A lady tells me she remembers that when a child she had a passionate longing for a big, big doll, which would give her the full sweetness of cuddling. The imitative impulse, too, prompting the child to carry out on the doll actions similar to those carried out on itself by mother and nurse, is a strong support of the delusion. A doll, as the odd varieties selected show, seems to be, more than anything else, something to be dressed. Children's reasons for preferring one doll to another, as that it can have its face washed, or that it has real hair which can be combed, show how the impulse to carry out nursery operations sustains the feeling of attachment. A girl (the same that wanted the big doll to fondle) had dolls of the proper sort; yet she preferred to make one out of a little wooden stool, because she could more realistically act out with this odd substitute the experience of taking her pet out for a walk, making it stand, for example, when she met a friend.

Of course, the child's faith, like other faith, is not always up to the height of perfect ardour. A child of six or seven, when the passion for dolls is apt to be strong, will have moments of coolness, leaving "poor dolly" lying in the most humiliating posture on the floor, or throwing it away in a sudden fit of disenchantment and disgust. Scepticism will intrude, especially when the hidden "inside" comes to view as mere emptiness, or at best as nothing but sawdust.

Children seem, as George Sand says, to oscillate between the real and the impossible. Yet the intrusion of doubt does not, in many cases at least, interfere with an enduring trust. Dr. Stanley Hall tells us that "long after it is known that they are wood, wax, etc., it is felt that they are of skin, flesh, etc.". Yes, that is it; the child, seized with the genuine play-mood, dreams its doll into a living child, or living adult. How oddly the player's faith goes on living side by side with a measure of doubt is illustrated in the following story. A little girl begged her mother not to make remarks about her doll in her (the doll's) presence, as she had been trying all her life to keep that doll from knowing that she was not alive.[4]

The treating of the doll and images of animals, such as the wooden or india-rubber horse, as living things is the outcome of the play-impulse. All the imaginative play of children seems, so far as we can understand it, to have about it something of illusion. This fact of the full sincere acceptance of the play-world as for the moment the real one, is illustrated in the child's jealous insistence that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new one. "About the age of four," writes M. Egger of his boys, "Felix is playing at being coachman; Emile happens to return home at the moment. In announcing his brother, Felix does not say, 'Emile is come;' he says, 'The brother of the coachman is come'." It is illustrated further in the keen resentment of any act on the part of the mother or other person which seems to contradict the facts of the new world. A boy of two who was playing one morning in his mother's bed at drinking up pussy's milk from an imaginary saucer on the pillow, said a little crossly to his mother, who was getting into bed after fetching his toys: "Don't lie on de saucer, mammy!" The pain inflicted on the little player by such a contradictory action is sometimes intense. A little girl of four was playing "shops" with her younger sister. "The elder one (writes the mother) was shopman at the time I came into her room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs, I could not understand why. At last she sobbed out: 'Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop'. I had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion."

But there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. The child finds himself confronted by the unbeliever who questions what he says about the doll's crying and so forth, and in this case he will often stoutly defend his creed. "Discussions with sceptical brothers (writes Dr. Stanley Hall), who assert that the doll is nothing but wood, rubber, wax, etc., are often met with a resentment as keen as that vented upon missionaries who declare that idols are but stocks and stones." It is the same with the toy-horse. "When (writes a mother of her boy) he was just over two years old L. began to speak of a favourite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it were a real living creature. 'No tarpenter (carpenter) made Dobbin,' he would say, 'he is not wooden but kin (skin) and bones and Dod (God) made him.' If any one said 'it' in speaking of the horse his wrath was instantly aroused, and he would shout indignantly: 'It! You mut'ent tay it, you mut tay he.'"

While play in its absorbing moments, and even afterwards, may thus produce a genuine illusion, the state of perfect realisation is of course apt to be broken by intervals of scepticism. This has already been illustrated in the case of the doll. The same little boy that played with the imaginary mice was sitting on his stool pretending to smoke like his grandpapa out of a bit of bent cardboard. Suddenly his face clouded over; he stroked his chin, and remarked in a disappointed tone, "I have not got any whiskers". The dream of full manhood was here rudely dispelled by a recall to reality.

A measure of the same fanciful transformation of things that has been illustrated in make-believe play, a measure, too, of the illusion which frequently accompanies it, enters, I believe, into all children's pastimes. Whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of the hoop? Is not the interest here due to the circumstance that the child controls a thing which in the freedom of its movements suggests that it has a will of its own? This seems borne out by the following story. A little girl of five once stopped trundling her hoop and said to her mother she thought that her hoop must be alive, because "it is so sensible; it goes where I want it to". Perhaps the same thing may be said of other toys, as the kite and the sailing boat.

Serious Side of Play.

I have here treated the whole realm of childish fancy as one of play, as one in which happy childhood finds its own sunny world. Yet it is clear that this is after all only one side of children's dream-world. Like our own world it has its climates, and if fancy is often frolicsome and games deliciously sweet, they sometimes become serious to the point of a quite dreadful solemnity.

That children's imagination is wont to hover, with something of the fascination of the moth, on the confines of the fearful, is known to us all. Some children, no doubt, have much more of the passion for the gruesome and blood-curdling than others, since temperament counts for much here; yet it is pretty safe to say that most know something of this horrible fascination. Dreams, whether of the night or of the day, are not always of beautiful fairies and the like. Weird, awful-looking figures have a way of pushing themselves into the front of the scene. Especially when the "tone" of the frail young nerves runs down from poor health do these alarming shapes appear, and acquire a mighty hold on the child's imagination. Of the timidity of the early years of life I shall have more to say by-and-by. Here I want to bring out how the very vividness of children's images exposes them to what is sometimes at least their worst form of suffering.

A child, at once sensitive and imaginative, frequently passes into a state of half hallucination in which the products of fancy take on visible reality. George Sand, in her delightful reminiscences of childhood, relates more than one of these terrible prostrating hallucinations of the early years.[5]

We see the same gloomy turn of the young imagination in the readiness with which children accept superstitions about ghosts, witches, and so forth. Those who are brought up in the country in contact with the superstitious beliefs of the peasant appear to imbibe them with great energy. This is true of George Sand, who gives us an interesting account of the legends of the French peasants, with whom when a little girl she was allowed to associate. American children, especially those who come under the influence of the beliefs of the negro and of the Indian, may, as that delightful book, Tom Sawyer, tells us, become quite experts in folk-lore. Even in England and among well-to-do people children will show an alarming facility in adopting the superstitious ideas of the servants.

Much the same thing shows itself in children's romancings and in their preferences in the matter of stories. So far from these being always bright and amusing, they frequently show a very decided tinge of blackness. The young imagination seems to be especially plastic under the touch of the gruesome. It loves to be roused to its highest pitch of activity by the presentation of something fearsome, something which sends a wild tremor through the nerves. And even when the story is free from this touch of the dreadful it takes on seriousness by reason of the earnestness which the child's mind brings to it.

Coming now to active play, we find here, too, in the region which seems to owe its very existence to the childish instinct of enjoyment, traces of the same seriousness. For most children, one suspects, play would become a tame thing were there not the fearful to conjure with. The favourite play-haunts, the dark corners under the table, behind the curtains, and so forth, show what a vital element of play is supplied by the excitement of the state of half-dread. It is in the games which set the young nerves gently shaking, when a robber has to be met or a giant attacked in his cave, that one sees best, I think, how terribly earnest children's play may become.

Even where play has in it nothing alarming it is apt to take on a serious aspect. This has been illustrated in what has been said about the doll and other play-illusions. Most of children's play is imitative of the serious actions of grown-up folk. In nursing her doll the little girl is taking to her domestic duties in the most serious of moods; similarly when the little boy assumes the responsibilities of coachman or other useful functionary. The imitative impulse of childhood is wont in these cases to follow out the correct and prescribed order with punctilious exactness. The doll must be dressed, fed, put to bed, and so forth, with the regularity that obtains in the child's own life; the coachman must hold the whip, urge on the horses, or stop them in the proper orthodox manner. And the same fidelity to model and prescription shows itself in those games which reproduce the page of fiction. Here again Tom Sawyer is an excellent example. The way in which that leader of boys lays down the law to Huckleberry Finn when they play at pirates or at Robin Hood and his merry men illustrates forcibly this serious aspect of play.