Читать книгу The Romance of the Commonplace - Gelett Burgess - Страница 9

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Time was when we made our own toys; when a piece of twine, a spool, a few nails and a bit of imagination could keep us busy and happy all day long. There were no new-fangled iron toys "made in Germany," so tiresome in their inevitable little routine of performance, so easily got out of order, and so hard, metallic and realistic as to be hardly worth the purchase. A penny would, indeed, buy some funny carved wooden thing that aroused a half-hour's excitement, but it was never quite so alluring as when in the front window of the toy-shop. Such queer animals never became thoroughly acclimated to the nursery, and they lost their lustre in a half-holiday. The things that gave permanent satisfaction were home-made, crude and capable of transformation. A railway train might, with a small effort of the fancy, become a ship or a dragon. Are there such amateur toy-builders now, in this age when everything is perfect and literal, when even a box of building-blocks contains a book of plans to supply imaginative design to the modern child? Indeed, many children are nowayears too lazy even to do their own playing. I have heard of one who was used to sit on a chair and order his nurse to align his ninepins and bowl them down for him!

Perhaps one notices the lack of creative ability in children more in the city where ready-made toys are cheap and accessible, than in the country where the whole world is full of wonderful possibilities for entrancing pastime. Nature is the universal playmate, perpetually parodying herself in miniature for the benefit of those who love to amuse themselves with her toys. Every brook is a little river, every pond an unfathomable sea. She plants tiny forests of fern and raises microscopic mountains in every sand-bank. Flowers and plants furnish provender for Lilliputian groceries, the oak showers acorn cups; what wonder we believe, as long as we can, in fairies?

And yet, strange to say, it is the city more often than the country child who feels the charm of these marvels. The freshness and the strangeness breed a fascinated wonder; it is, after flagged pavements and brick walls, almost too good to be true. The juvenile rustic is more familiar with Nature. It is his business to know when the flowers come, where berries ripen and birds nest. It is scarcely play to him, it is a science to be applied to his personal profit. The woods and rivulets are his familiar domain, to be forayed and hunted specifically for gain. And this, though it is delightful, is not play. For him, there is no glamour over the fields until long after, when his native countryside has become inaccessible.

Perhaps the art of playing is, after all, a matter more of temperament than environment, for one sees, at times, good sport even in the city streets, though it is rare nowadays. I had my own full share of it, for my youth was an age of pure romance. My clan had its own code and its own traditions. Every man of us had his suit of wooden armour, his well-wrought weapons and his fiery steed. We were all for Scott. We had our Order, small, but well up in the technique of feudal ways, facile in sword-play, both with the thin, sinewy hard-pine rapier, and the huge, two-handed, double-hiked battle-sword that should stand just as high as one's head. On the brick sidewalks we tilted on velocipedes, full in the view of the anxious passers-by. Cap-à-pie in pine sheathed with tin, with a shield blazoned with a tiger couchant, and inscribed with a Latin motto out of the back of the dictionary, many a long red lance I shivered, and many a wheel I broke. On Warren Avenue I did it, opposite the church. What would I not give, now, to see such sights in town!--instead, I watch little boys smoking cigarettes upon the street corners, waiting for their girls.

I knew a youngster, too, who organized in his town a postoffice department, established letter-boxes and a regular service of boy carriers. He drew and coloured the stamps himself--you will find them in few collections, though they should have enormous value from their rarity. Such games are consummate play, even though the sport goes awry all too soon; it is too great to last!

It is the older brother who should give finesse to such sport. Without him, complications arise which accomplish at last the ruin of the game. Many of us do not truly learn to play until it is too late to do so with dignity, and to these, the appreciation of the young gives a fine excuse for prolonging the diversion. We fancy we cannot, when grown up, play imaginative games for the pure joy of it, as does the child; we think we must have an ulterior motive. Yet the father, who whittles out a boat for his son, often gets more delight than the child, who would far rather do it himself, no matter how much more crudely accomplished.

The theater is the typical play for grown-ups; the name itself, "play," is significant of the unquenchable tendency of youth. And this reminds me of a most amusing case where two grown-ups dared to be absolutely ingenuous. It was upon a honeymoon, when if ever, adults have the right to yield to juvenile impulses. As the groom was titled and the bride fair, society took it ill that the two should retire to their country house and deny access to all neighbours. One at last called, too important to be denied admittance by the servants, and the astonished visitor discovered the happy pair stretched over the dining-room table, training flies whose wings had been clipped, to pull, in a harness of threads, little paper wagons! This had been their absorbing occupation for ten blissful days!

An important element of play seems to be the doing of things in miniature. See Stevenson, for instance, prone upon the floor, involved in romantic campaigns, massing his troops of tin soldiers, occupying strategic positions in hall and passage, skirmishing over the upstairs "roads of the Third Class, impassable for artillery," intercepting commissary trains labouring up from the Base of Operations in the kitchen, deploying cavalry-screens upon the rug, and out-manoeuvering the wily foe that defends the verandah, both being bound by the strict treaties of the play. There is your ideal big brother, and the game of toy soldiers is glorified into weeks of excitement!

The Japanese, immortal children, carry the game of diminution to its extreme. The dwarfed trees and the excruciating carved ivories are not the only symptoms of this delightful disease; for the perfection of the spirit of play one must see their miniature gardens, often the life-employment of the owners. No matter how small the patch of ground employed, every inch is perfect. Pebble by pebble, almost grain by grain, the area is arranged, the tiny rivulet is guided between carefully curved banks, wee bridges span the shores, little lanterns and pagodas are artfully placed, plants and flowers are sown, trees planted, fishes are domiciled, till the garden is a replica of Nature at her best. Each view is a toy landscape, and without a scale, as seen in a photograph, for instance, one might think it a garden of the gods. And yet, there is a sort of play where one may use infinite distances, macrocosms for microcosms, if one has the courage and the power of visualization. These games are purely mental, feats of the imagination, though not nearly so difficult as might be thought. I know a sober, workaday lawyer, for instance, who combines the two methods with extraordinary cleverness. His income is not derived solely from his practice, I need hardly say. You will not catch him at his fascinating diversion, for his table is strewn with books and papers, and his playthings are not noticeable amongst the professional litter.

I have known him to sit for hours gazing at the table, and, once in his confidence--for there is a fraternity of players, and one must give the grip and prove fellowship--he will tell you that he has shrunk to but an inch in height, so that, to him, his desk seems to be some three hundred feet long by a hundred feet wide, and its plateau is elevated some two hundred feet above the floor; as high, that is, as a church. Assuming that he has, by some miraculous means shrunk to one-fiftieth of his stature, the size of everything visible is, of course, increased in a like proportion. His diverting occupation, under this queer state of things, is to explore his little domain, and exist as well as is possible. What adventures has he not had! There was the terrific combat with a cockroach as big as a dragon, which he finally slew with a broken needle! There was the dust storm, when the care-taker swept, and the huge snow crystals like white pie-plates, that came in when the window was opened. He had an enormous difficulty in getting water from a glass tumbler, and he broke his teeth upon the crystals of sugar that, as a lawyer, he had been thoughtful enough to strew upon the table for the benefit of himself as an Inchling. I believe he is now attempting to escape to the floor by means of a spool of thread, if he cannot make up his mind to risk a descent by means of a paper parachute. It is a world of his own, as real to him as the child's toy paradise, a retreat immune from the cares of his daily life, a never-tiring playground, with perpetual discoveries possible. He, if any one, has discovered not only the art of playing, but has applied the science as well!