Even when we are about buying for a child the pretty toy, one thing we
always say—“And yet children love their ugly old toys best.” It is not
true, however, that children love ugly toys; they like homely toys, toys
that can be clasped very close; and though homely does mean ugly, in the
American and the obsolete English languages (because we would hurt a
word rather than our ugly fellow-creatures’ feelings), yet what children
like in homeliness is precisely homeliness, something not too bright or
good. Ugliness is dreadful to a child, especially at first sight. He may
learn to love it in a dear parent or dear nurse, as the little boy
evidently loves the bottle-nosed man in Ghirlandajo’s delightful
picture, but ugliness in a stranger is, in the strict sense, frightful.
We are imposing our own sense of humour on children (as usual), and in
its most ignoble form, when we give them grotesque toys. And as for
guys, whereby we invert the natural veneration of images, the Fifth of
November is a date which—for the sake of Sylvia—we all dread.
🥀 When Sylvia was three, she wept and shuddered great part of a day, and
some part of a night, because a guy had suddenly faced her on the
pavement. Now she is four, she cons the difficult task of assuring
herself “They are boys, they are only little boys.” You may watch
through her delicate face the horrible misgiving, the resolute reply,
succeeding each other in that innocent, faltering breast. She says
little of her fear, but gently leads the talk that way; and, when she is
told that the boy-guys have each received a penny, her dear effort is to
establish a human relation with them in her thoughts. “Pennies for them
to buy nice sweets,” she says to herself. There is the thing in common
with her own beauty and tenderness and her little appetites: sweets,
then boys—not devils.
🥀 But if we wrong our children by the grotesque we do so more commonly
by the gift of the worthless toy, a thing that will not last. The doll
is perhaps as significant as the statue, the gargoyle, the coin; it is
generally worse than even the statue. The manufactured image of mankind
given to our little girls to play with is not only ill-designed, but so
fragile as to cause more weeping than joy. The doll of commerce is very
heartlessly made so that she often goes to pieces on the very day of
presentation. Her brief arm comes off first; it had been ineffectually
glued on. Piecemeal she comes apart. She does not preserve such poor
individuality as she had, long enough to get a name. She is never named,
never grows old, never gets the love of habit, never ratifies the
rapture of possession, never justifies the first kiss. A little time—at
the best it is not long—is all that we of larger than doll’s growth have
for that ratification and for that proof. Well, it is hardly moral that
the child and the doll should kiss but for an hour.
🥀 Why, the personality of an honest doll ought to outlast her head—nay,
several (resembling) heads. It was so with the dolls of an elder day and
a simpler country. When one head was unfortunately walked upon, the old
cook took the trunk and the pieces into the town, and matched the type
of beauty—he was very grave and intent, without condescension, over the
business. The face was renewed, but the name and the affection held on
with a persistence that was almost worthy of party politics.
🥀 There have been charming toys in literature, but none much dearer to
the reader of good will than the little horse which Esther Summerson
gave to Peepy after one of his misfortunes—Esther, contemned by the
readers who think to crush Dickens by one word, “Sentimentality” (albeit
this is an emotion that would be good for the majority, and the majority
includes those critics), and by another word, “Caricature” (caricature
being nevertheless a most admirable art). Dickens, of all the greater
masters of our national Letters, has the most perfect memory of
childhood. Not by his strangely over-praised “little Nell” is this
proved, nor by any but certain brief passages of Paul Dombey, but in his
much less famous children, and in the little fists of these are toys.