Playthings
THE prime instinct of a child at play--I do not mean a child at
games--is to create. I use the word confidently. He will make as well as
create, if you let him, but always he will create: he will use the whole
force of dream and fancy to create something out of nothing--over and
beyond what he will make out of such materials as he has to hand. The
five-year-old will lay a dozen wooden bricks and four cotton reels
together, set a broken cup on the top of them, and tell you it is a
steam-engine. And it is. He has created the engine which he sees, and
you don't see, and the pile of bricks and cotton reels is the symbol of
his creation. He will silently borrow your best scissors and cut a
serrated band of newspaper, which he will fasten round his head (with
your best brooch, if he cannot find a pin), hang another newspaper from
his shoulders, and sit in state holding the hearth-brush. He will tell
you that he is a king--and he is. He has created crown, robes, sceptre,
and kingship. The paper and the rest of it are but symbols.
[Illustration: HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE.]
And you shall observe that the toys which the child loves best are
always those toys which lend themselves to such symbolic use.
[Illustration: THE TOMB IN THE DESERT.
18]]
Christmas is at hand. You go to buy gifts for the child, in memory of
that Other Child whose birthday gifts were gold, frankincense, and
myrrh. You go into the toyshops, elbowing your way as best you can,
looking for such toys as may aid the child in his work of creative
imagination.
You find a vast mass and litter and jumble of incredible
futilities--things made to sell, things made by people who have
forgotten what it is like to be a child. Mechanical toys of all sorts,
stupid toys, toys that will only do one thing, and that thing vulgar and
foolish. And, worst outrage of all, ugly toys, monstrosities,
deformities, lead devils, grinning humpbacked clowns, "comic" dogs and
cats, hideous mis-shapen pigs, incredible negroes, intolerable
golliwogs. All such things the natural child, with a child's decent
detestation of deformity, will thrust from it with screams of fear and
hatred, till the materialistic mother or nurse explains that the horror
is not really, as the child knows it to be, horrible and unnatural, but
"funny." Thus do we outrage the child's inborn sense of beauty, which is
also the sense of health and fitness, and teach it that deformity is not
shocking, not pitiable even, but just "funny." All these ugly toys are
impossible as aids to clean imagination.
So, almost in as great, though not in so harmful a degree, is the
"character doll." The old doll was a doll, and not a character.
Therefore she could assume any character at your choice. The character
doll is Baby Willy, and can never be anything else, unless imagination,
exasperated and baffled, christens him Silly Billy in the moment of
furious projection across the nursery floor. But the old doll, with her
good, expressionless face and clear blue eyes, could be a duchess or a
dairymaid, a captive princess or a greengrocer's wife keeping shop, a
cruel stepmother or Joan of Arc. I beg you to try Baby Willy in the
character of Joan of Arc.
You cannot hope to understand children by common-sense, by reason, by
logic, nor by any science whatsoever. You cannot understand them by
imagination--not even by love itself. There is only one way: to remember
what you thought and felt and liked and hated when you yourself were a
child. Not what you know now--or think you know--you ought to have
thought and liked, but what you did then, in stark fact, like and think.
There is no other way.
Do you remember the toys you liked, the toys you played with? Do you
remember the toys you hated--after the fading of the first day's flush
of novelty, of possession? The houses with doors that wouldn't open? The
stables with horses that wouldn't stand up? The shops whose goods were
part of their painted shelves, whose shopmen were as fast glued behind
the counter as any live shop-assistant before the passing of the Shops
Act?
And the mechanical toys--the clockwork toys. The engine was all right,
even after the clockwork ran down for the last time with that inexorable
whizz which told you all was over; you could build tunnels with the big
brown books in the library and push the engine through with your
hand--it would run quite a long way out on the other side. But the other
clockwork things! How can one love and pet a mouse, no matter how furry
its superficial exterior, when underneath, where its soft waistcoat and
its little feet should be, there is only a hard surface from which
incompetent wheels protrude? And the ostrich who draws a hansom cab, and
the man who beats the boy with a stick? When they have whizzed their
last, who cares for the tin relics outliving their detestable
activities?
Think of the toys you liked: the Noah's Ark--full of characters. What
stirring dramas of the chase, what sporting incidents, what domestic and
agricultural operations could be carried out with that most royal of
toys. Mr. Noah, I remember, was equally competent and convincing as
ploughman or carter. But his chief role was Sitting Bull. His sons were
inimitable as Chingachgook and scalp hunters generally. You cannot play
scalp hunters with the mechanical ostrich indissolubly welded to a
hansom cab.
[Illustration: STONEHENGE.]
You loved your bricks, I think, especially if you lived in the days when
bricks were of well-seasoned oak, heavy, firm, exactly proportioned,
before the boxes of inexact light deal bricks, with the one painted
glass window, began to be made in Germany. How finely those great bricks
stood for Stonehenge, and how submissively Anna, the Dutch doll, whose
arms and legs were gone, played the part of the Sacrifice. If you
remember those bricks you will remember the polished, white wooden dairy
sets in oval white boxes--churns and tubs and kettles and pots all
neatly and beautifully turned. You will remember the doll's house
furniture, rosewood, duly mitred and dovetailed, fine cabinet-makers'
work, little beautiful models of beautiful things. Now the dolls' house
furniture is glued together. You can't trust a light-weight china doll
to sit on the kitchen chairs. . . . But you can get your mechanical
ostrich and your golliwog. . . .
Children in towns are cut off, at least for most of the year, from the
splendid and ever-varying possibilities of clay and mud and sand,
oak-apples and snow-berries, acorn-cups and seaweed, shells and sticks
and stones which serve and foster the creative instinct, the thousand
adjuncts to that play which is dream and reality in one.
For them, even more than for the happier country children, it is good to
choose toys which shall possess, above and before all, the one supreme
quality of a good toy. Let it be a toy that is not merely itself, like
the ostrich of whom I hope you are now as weary as I, but a toy that can
be, at need, other things. A toy, in fine, that your child can, in the
fullest and most satisfying sense, play with.