Of Building and Other Matters
A MOMENT of rapturous anticipation lights life when the kind aunt or
uncle has given the bricks, when the flat, sliding lid has been slipped
back, and the smooth wooden cubes and oblongs have tumbled resoundingly
on table or floor.
"I am going to build a palace," says the child. Or a tower or a church.
And, the highest hopes inspiring him, he sets out on the new adventure.
But he does not build a palace or a church, or even a railway station.
What he builds is a factory, or a wall, or, in the case of the
terra-cotta bricks, a portion of a French gentleman's country villa--the
kind you see dozens of along the railway between Paris and Versailles.
And however strong the child's desire that what he shall build shall be
a palace or a church, that is, something beautiful and romantic, what he
does build will always be the last thing he does, or ought to, admire.
The fault is in the materials. They are lacking both in quality and
quantity. No box of bricks that can at present be bought for money will
build anything that can satisfy an imaginative child. An ordinary box of
bricks--a really handsome one--measures, say, 12 by 8 by 2 in. If
anything admirable is to be built from this amount of material the
material ought to be presented in very small cubes, oblongs and
arches--say 1 in. by 1/2 in. for the largest bricks, and going down to 1/4
by 1/4 by 1/4 in. Given these proportions a really pretty though
undistinguished building might result. But in the box of bricks 12 by 8
by 2 in. the smallest cube measures 3/4 in. and the largest brick 9 by 3/4
by 3/4 in. These long slabs of surface cannot be broken and disguised in
such small buildings as the only ones which the materials are enough to
build. Hence, the deadly monotony of facade, broken only by the three
or, in the case of the really handsome box, five arches, and suggesting
nothing so much as a "works" or a workhouse.
[Illustration: THE SQUARE TOWER.]
In the bricks themselves there is not enough variety. The stone bricks,
it is true, have broken out into a variety of ugly shapes and a blue
colour with which you can, if you like, build a Mansard roof. But a
Mansard roof in a coarse ugly blue tint, is no thing of beauty.
Besides, it needs a solid substructure to support it, and if you make
your building solid, every brick in your box will be used up, and all
you will have to show for it will be a partially built wing of a
peculiarly undesirable villa residence, replete with every modern
inconvenience. Nor must it be supposed that the difficulty can be met
by adding more and more boxes of bricks. Add them, by all means; and the
result will be a larger and probably an uglier factory, or a completed,
and therefore more completely hideous, villa. Unless you are a
millionaire, and have a toy cupboard as big as a pantechnicon, you will
never have enough bricks to build up the solid masses which rest the
eye, and give solidity and dignity to architecture. Among such solid
masses _steps_ are not the least important. Every child knows that a
really good flight of steps will take half the bricks in his box and
leave insufficient material for the edifice to which the steps were
intended to lead up. The tall broad smooth wall, its quiet surface
disturbed only by one or two windows, a flight of steps and a doorway,
is for ever out of reach of the child who has only bricks wherewith to
build.
[Illustration: SHELL ARCHES]
The arches supplied with boxes of bricks are usually few and badly
proportioned. There is seldom any provision for setting them up in a
colonnade.
The pillars which will support the ends of two arches are too wide for
the _end_ arch, which is single. This difficulty is dealt with in stone
bricks, but not in wooden ones; at any rate so far as my experience
goes.
There never was a time, one supposes, when so much money was spent on
children and their toys. It is impossible to believe that, should some
toy maker design and put on the market really desirable bricks for
children, there would not be a ready sale for them. I suggest, then,
that bricks are too large, and too small--and that what is needed is
much smaller bricks, and much larger ones. The bricks in the old chest
in our nursery started with 2-in. cubes, and went on in gradations of
2-in. to the largest brick--12 by 2 by 2 in. The chest itself must have
been at least 4 by 2 by 1-1/2 ft. Another detestable quality in our modern
bricks is their inexactness--a sixteenth or even a quarter of an inch,
more or less, is no more to the maker of bricks nowadays than it is to
a bad dressmaker. Our bricks were well and truly cut: they were of
seasoned oak, smooth and pleasant to touch--none of the rough-sawn edges
which vex the hand and render the building unstable; they were heavy--a
very important quality in bricks. They "stayed put." I suggest that such
bricks as these, supplemented by arches of varied curves, but unvarying
thicknesses, and slabs of board varying in breadth but not in length,
would not be a toy beyond the purse of kind uncles and aunts, and
certainly not beyond the means of our Council schools. The slabs of
boards are to build steps with and to make roofs with. Every child who
has ever built with bricks feels the reckless wastefulness of using for
steps the bricks so much needed for walls and towers. And who has not
experienced the aggravation of finding when his tower is built that he
has used up all the long bricks near its foundation and has now none
left which are long enough to lay across its summit and form its roof?
The slabs of board should be, like the bricks, of seasoned oak, and
should be an inch thick. There should be plenty of arches--so as to
render possible some sort of resemblance to Norman and classical
architecture.
But bricks alone, however beautiful and varied, cannot as building
material have the value which material freely chosen would have.
Children love to make mud pies, and to build sand castles, because the
material is plastic and responds with more or less of docility to their
demands upon it. Also there is always enough of it, which there never is
of bricks, or for the matter of that, of plasticine. I can imagine a
splendid happiness for a child in a bushel of plasticine--but the sticks
of plasticine are too small to be made into anything architecturally
satisfying; and much too expensive for ordinary children to have in any
but such quantities as encourage niggling. You will notice that children
never tire of building sand castles on the sea-shore--but they would
soon tire of building with a quart of damp sand on a table. It is true
that the sea washes away your sand castle, usually before it is
finished, but its end is finely catastrophic and full of damp delightful
incident. Also the climax has the great essential of drama--it is
inevitable. How different the demolition of the brick-built house by
mamma, who wants space for cutting out, or by Mary, who desires to lay
the table. The most promising of palaces, the most beautiful of bridges,
are, at the urgence of these grown-up needs, swept away, and so, never
being able to finish anything, the builder becomes discouraged. Perhaps
he takes to the floor as an eligible building site, only to find his
buildings exposed to the tempestuous petticoat of Mary, or the
carelessly stepping high-heeled shoes of mamma. The same thing happens
with a dolls' school, or a dolls' dinner-party, or any game requiring
pageantry of any sort--so that little girls who would like their dolls
to be actors in some scene of magnificence find no safe place for the
actors save in their arms--and nurse with enforced premature maternal
fussings the doll who, in happier circumstances, might be a Druid or a
martyr, or Francis the First at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is
better to the child's mind that the cherished doll should safely be baby
for ever, than that it should be Francis the First and get walked on.
In any house where space makes such a thing possible, a table might be
set aside for children, to be their very own--a table on which neither
food nor millinery should ever trespass. Of course it is needful that
toys and pseudo-toys should be "put away" daily, but it is not necessary
that they should all be put away. Those which are being used in some
splendid half-developed scheme might surely be allowed to stay where
they are, so that it may be possible to go on with the game next day. A
truce might be called of that ruthless tidying up which, every day,
destroys the new idea, and compels the child each day to produce a new
scheme instead of allowing it to work on yesterday's and bring it to
something a little nearer the perfection which it touched when the
child's mind first conceived it. But, it may be urged, children leave
everything half-finished, and go off to something else. Of course they
do--but clear away the half-finished thing, and you will find when they
come back from the butterfly flight after some other interest, that they
will not be pleased with you.
"I've put all your bricks nicely away," you say proudly; and Tommy will
say "Bother!" in his heart, even if his lips are sufficiently trained to
avoid that expletive and to substitute: "I do wish you hadn't: I wanted
to finish building my tower."
You see one thing leads to another. It isn't that children are any more
bird-witted than we are: it is that they have not yet learned to
restrain the thousand curiosities, desires, and creative impulses proper
to their age. You, of course, if you desired to set up a tableau of the
Field of the Cloth of Gold, would sit down with a bit of pencil and the
back of an envelope and jot down all the properties required for staging
the scene. But the child who has "had" the Field "in History," and whose
imagination has been stirred by the name of it--a thing that will happen
under the stupidest of teachers--sets up Henry and Francis in paper
crowns and only then begins to see that tents and banners and cloth of
gold are lacking. Perhaps he goes off to the village shop to get flags,
perhaps to your handkerchief case for tent-cloth, perhaps to the meadow
beyond the orchard to gather buttercups. While on any of these quests
some supremely important event may strike across his plans, and
overshadow them--a new kitten, a gift from the gardener of plants for
his little garden, or the fact that some one is going fishing. Then
Francis and Henry are forgotten, the buttercups left dying on the
doorstep, and the tent-cloth crammed into the pockets among string,
stamps, acid drops, and pieces of the watch he took to pieces last
holidays and never put together again, and he will follow the new trail.
But he will come back to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and if you have
"tidied up" the kings and put their crowns in the wastepaper basket the
child will be disappointed and worried, his imagination checked and his
scheme baffled.
[Illustration: HANDKERCHIEF TENTS.]
His annexation of your handkerchiefs will not occur if you have
accustomed him to come to you or to his nurse for the means to his small
ends; but if there is no one to whom he can apply for help, you will
find that he will not stick at the sacred threshold of your handkerchief
case. The tents of the Field of the Cloth of Gold will be far more
important to him than the inviolability of that scented
treasure-house--unless, of course, you happen to have explained to him
exactly how much you dislike that your handkerchiefs should keep the
sort of company they meet with in his pockets. Then, if he loves you,
and has found you reasonable, he will refrain, while wondering at your
prejudices. But he will--or ought to--find some other material for
tents--letter paper perhaps. Letter paper makes quite good tents, though
not nearly so good, of course, as handkerchiefs folded
diagonally--supported by a central pole, say a penholder, and fastened
down at the tucked-in corners with pins or rose thorns. You can explain
to him that rose-thorns hurt handkerchiefs, but you will not punish him
if this has not occurred to him. And this brings one to the question of
crime and punishment, of which perhaps I had better say what I have to
say before I go on talking about bricks and how to supplement them. As
I was saying, one thing leads to another.