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The interest of child’s play in the present connexion lies in the fact that it is the working out into visible shape of an inner fancy. The actual presentation may be the starting-point of this process of imaginative projection: the child, for example, sees the sand, the shingle and shells, and says, ‘Let us play keeping a shop’. Yet this is accidental. The source of play is the impulse to realise a bright idea: whence, as we shall see by-and-by, its close kinship to art as a whole. This image is the dominating force, it is for the time a veritable idée fixe, and everything has to accommodate itself to this. Since the image has to be acted out, it comes into collision with the actual surroundings. Here is the child’s opportunity. The floor is instantly mapped out into two hostile territories, the sofa-end becomes a horse, a coach, a ship, or what not, to suit the exigencies of the play.

This stronger movement and wider range of imagination in children’s pastime is explained by the characteristic and fundamental impulse of play, the desire to be something, to act a part. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero steps out of his every-day self and so out of his every-day world. In realising his part he virtually transforms his surroundings, since they take on the look and meaning which the part assigns to them. This is prettily illustrated in one of Mr. Stevenson’s child-songs, “The Land of Counterpane,” in which a sick child describes the various transformations of the bed-scene:—

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.

Who can say to how many and to what strange play-purposes that stolid unyielding-looking object a sofa-head has been turned by the ingenuity of the childish brain?

The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the assimilative instinct. The very infant will, if there is a cup to hand, pretend to drink out of it.^[19] Similarly a boy of two will put the stem of his father’s pipe into, or, if cautious, near his mouth, and make believe that he is smoking. A little boy not yet two years old would spend a whole wet afternoon “painting” the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope. In such cases, it is evident, the playing may start from a suggestion supplied by the sight of an object. There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative play children knowingly act a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a fully conscious process of imitative acting.^[20] A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. It seems sufficient to say that when at play he is possessed by an idea, and is working this out into visible action. Your notice, your laughter, may bring in a new element of enjoyment; for as we all know, children are apt to be little actors in the full sense, and to aim at producing an impression. Yet the child as little needs your flattering observation as the cat needs it, when he plays in the full sense imaginatively, and in make-believe, with his captured mouse, placing it, for example, deliberately under a copper in the scullery, and amusing himself by the half-illusion of losing it. Indeed your intrusion will be just as likely to destroy or at least to diminish the charm of a child’s play, if only through your inability to seize his idea, and, what is equally important, to rise to his own point of enthusiasm and illusive realisation. Perhaps, indeed, one may say that the play-instinct is most vigorous and dominant when a child is alone, or at least self-absorbed; for even social play, delightful as it is when all the players are attuned, is subject to disturbance through a want of mutual comprehension and a need of half-disillusive explanations.^[21]

The essence of children’s play is the acting of a part and the realising of a new situation. It is thus, as we shall see more fully by-and-by, akin to dramatic action, only that the child’s ‘acting’ is like M. Jourdain’s prose, an unconscious art. The impulse to be something, a sailor, a soldier, a path-finder, or what not, absorbs the child and makes him forget his real surroundings and his actual self. His day-dreams, his solitary and apparently listless wanderings while he mutters mystic words to himself, all illustrate this desire to realise a part. In this playful self-projection a child will become even something non-human, as when he nips the ‘bread-and-cheese’ shoots off the bushes and fancies himself a horse.^[22] It is to be noted that such passing out of one’s ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player; the cat or the dog, though able, as Mr. Darwin and others have shown, to go through a kind of make-believe game, remaining always within the limits of his ordinary self.

Such play-like transmutation of the self extends beyond what we are accustomed to call play. One little boy of three and a half years who was fond of playing at the useful business of coal-heaving would carry his coal-heaver’s dream through the whole day, and on the particular day devoted to this calling would not only refuse to be addressed by any less worthy name, but ask in his prayer to be made a good coal-heaver (instead of the usual ‘good boy’). On other days this child lived the life of a robin redbreast, a soldier, and so forth, and bitterly resented his mother’s occasional confusion of his personalities. A little girl aged only one year and ten months insisted upon being addressed by a fancy name, Isabel, when she was put to bed, but would not be called by this name at any other time. She probably passed into what seemed to her another person when she went to bed and gave herself up to sweet ‘hypnagogic’ reverie.

In the working out of this impulse to realise a part the actual external surroundings may take a surprisingly small part. Sometimes there is scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child plays out his action with purely imaginary surroundings. Such simple play-actions as going to market to buy imaginary apples occur very early, one mother assuring me that all her children carried them out in the second year before they could talk. Another mother writes of her boy, aged two and a half years: “He amuses himself by pretending things. He will fetch an imaginary cake from a corner, rake together imaginary grass, or fight a battle with imaginary soldiers.” This reminds one of Mr. Stevenson’s lines:—

It is he, when you play with your soldiers of tin, Who sides with the French and who never can win.

This impulse to invent imaginary surroundings, and more especially to create mythical companions, is very common among lonely and imaginative children. A lady friend, a German, tells me that when she was a little girl, a lonely one of course, she invented a kind of alter ego, another girl rather older than herself, whom she named ‘Krofa’—why she has forgotten. She made a constant playmate of her, and got all her new ideas from her. Mr. Canton’s little heroine took to nursing an invisible ‘iccle gaal’ (little girl), the image of which she seemed able to project into space.^[23] The invention of fictitious persons fills a large space in child-life. Perhaps if only the young imagination is strong enough there is, as already hinted, 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 tangible ones. But such purely imaginative make-believe, which derives no help from actual things, is perhaps hardly ‘play’ in the full sense, but rather an active form of day-dreaming or romancing.^[24]

In much of this playful performance all the interference with actual surroundings that the child requires is change of place or scene. Here is a pretty example of this simple type of imaginative play. A child of twenty months, who is accustomed to meet a bonne and child in the Jardin du Luxembourg, suddenly leaves the family living-room, pronouncing indifferently well the names Luxembourg, nurse, and child. He goes into the next room, pretends to say “good-day” to his two out-door acquaintances, and then returns and simply narrates what he has been doing.^[25] Here the simple act of passing into an adjoining room was enough to secure the needed realisation of the encounter in the garden. The movement into the next room is suggestive. Primarily it meant no doubt the child’s manner of realising the out-of-door walk; yet I suspect there was another motive at work. Children love to enact their little play-scenes in some remote spot, withdrawn from notice, where imagination suffers no let from the interference of mother, nurse, or other member of the real environment. How many a thrilling exciting play has been carried out in a corner, especially if it be dark, or better still, screened off. The fascination of curtained spaces, as those behind the window curtains, or under the table with the table-cloth hanging low, will be fresh in the memory of all who can recall their childhood.

A step towards a more realistic kind of play-action, in which, as in the modern theatre, imagination is propped up by strong stage effects, is taken when a scene is constructed, the chairs and sofa turned into ships, carriages, a railway train, and so forth.

Yet, after all, the scene is but a very subordinate part of the play. Next to himself in his new part, proudly enjoying the consciousness of being a general, or a school-mistress, a child who is not content with the pure creations of his phantasy requires the semblance of living companions. In all play he desires somebody, if only as listener to his talk in his new character; and when he does not rise to an invisible auditor, he will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in the bath, a fire-shovel, a clothes’ prop in the garden, and so forth. In more active play, where something has to be done, he generally desires a full companion and assistant, human or animal. And here we meet with what is perhaps the most interesting feature of childish play, the transmutation of the most meagre and least promising of things into complete living forms. I have already alluded to the sofa-head. How many forms of animal life, vigorous and untiring, from the patient donkey up to the untamed horse of the prairies, has this most inert-looking ridge served to image forth to quick boyish perception.

The introduction of these living things seems to illustrate the large compass of the child’s realising power. Mr. Ruskin speaks somewhere of “the perfection of child-like imagination, the power of making everything out of nothing”. “The child,” he adds, "does not make a pet of a mechanical mouse that runs about the floor.... The child falls in love with a quiet thing—with an ugly one—nay, it may be with one to us totally devoid of meaning. The besoin de croire precedes the besoin d’aimer."

The quotation brings us to the focus where the rays of childish imagination seem to converge, the transformation of toys.

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 realising the joy of actual riding, as if he were possessed with the fancy that the stiff least organic-looking of structures which he strides is a very horse.

The liveliness of this realising imagination is seen in the extraordinary poverty and meagreness of the toys which to their happy possessors are wholly satisfying. Here is a pretty picture of child’s play from a German writer:—

There sits a little charming master of three years before his small table busied for a whole hour in a fanciful game with shells. He has three so-called snake-heads in his domain; a large one and two smaller ones: this means two calves and a cow. In a tiny tin dish the little farmer has put all kinds of petals, that is the fodder for his numerous and fine cattle.... When the play has lasted a time the fodder-dish transforms itself into a heavy waggon with hay: the little shells now become little horses, and are put to the shafts to pull the terrible load.

The doll takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. It is human and satisfies higher instincts and emotions. As the French poet says, the little girl—

Rêve el nom de mère en berçant sa poupée.^[26]

I read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only: but 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 as to the tiny shell in our last picture of play. The doll 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 sitting holding her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling adventures. At another time when she wanted to act an Indian chief the doll just as obediently took up the part of squaw.

Very humanely, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her pet, even though, as George Sand reminds us, there come moments of rage and battering.^[27] A little boy of two and a half years asked his mother one day: “Will you give me all my picture-books to show dolly? I don’t know which he will like best.” He then pointed to each and looked at the doll’s face for the answer. He made believe that it selected one, and then gravely showed it all the pictures, saying: “Look here, dolly!” and carefully explaining them.

The doll illustrates the childish attitude towards all toys, the impulse to take them into the innermost and warmest circle of personal intimacy, to make them a living part of himself. A child’s language, as we shall see later, points to an early identification of self with belongings. The ‘me’ and the ‘my’ are the same, or nearly the same, to a mite of three. This impulse to attach the doll to self, or to embrace it within the self-consciousness or self-feeling, shows itself in odd ways. In the grown-up child, Laura Bridgman, it took the form of putting a bandage like her own over her doll’s eyes. This resembles a case of a girl of six, who when recovering from measles was observed to be busily occupied with her dolls, each of which she painted over with bright red spots. The dolly must do all, and be all that I am: so the child in his warm attachment seems to argue. This feeling of oneness is strengthened by that of exclusive possession, the sense that the child himself is the only one who really knows dolly, can hear her cry when she cries and so forth.^[28] It is another manifestation of the same feeling of intimacy and solidarity when a child insists on dolly’s being treated by others as courteously as himself. Children will often expect the mother or nurse to kiss and say good-night to their pet or pets—for their hearts are capacious—when she says good-night to themselves.

Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have clearest evidence of play-illusion. The lively imagination endows the inert wooden thing with the warmth of life and love. How large a part is played here by the alchemist, fancy, is known to all observers of children’s playthings. The faith and the devotion often seem to increase as the first meretricious charms, the warm tints of the cheek and the lips, the well-shaped nose, the dainty clothes, prematurely fade, and the lovely toy which once kept groups of hungry-looking children gazing long at the shop-window, is reduced to the naked essence of a doll. A child’s constancy to his doll when thus stript of exterior charms and degraded to the lowest social stratum of dolldom is one of the sweetest and most humorous things in child-life.

And then what rude unpromising things are adopted as doll-pets. Mrs. Burnett tells us she once saw a dirty mite sitting on a step in a squalid London street, cuddling warmly a little bundle of hay tied round the middle by a string. Here, surely, the besoin d’aimer was little if anything behind the besoin de croire.

Do any of us really understand this doll-superstition? Writers of a clear long-reaching memory have tried to take us back to childhood, and restore to us for a moment the whole undisturbed trust, the perfect satisfaction of love, which the child brings to its doll. Yet even the imaginative genius of a George Sand is hardly equal, perhaps, to the feat of resuscitating the buried companion of our early days and making it live once more before our eyes.^[29] The truth is the doll-illusion is one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who, when they attain the years of enlightenment, make a point of saving their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect the pets when thus retained are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face and hair, and still more for the lovely clothes, than for the inherent worth of the doll itself, of what we may call the doll-soul which informs it and gives it, for the child, its true beauty and its worth.

Yet if we cannot get inside the old doll-superstition we may study it from the outside, and draw a helpful comparison between it and other known forms of naïve credulity. And here we have the curious fact that the doll exists not only for the child but for the “nature man”. Savages, Sir John Lubbock tells us,^[30] like toys, such as dolls, Noah’s Arks, etc. The same writer remarks that the doll is “a hybrid between the baby and the fetish, and that it exhibits the contradictory characters of its parents”. Perhaps the changes of mood towards the doll, of which George Sand writes, illustrate the alternating preponderance of the baby and the fetish half. But as Sir John also remarks, this hybrid is singularly unintelligible to grown-up people, and it seems the part of modesty here to bow to one of nature’s mysteries.

It has been suggested to me by Mr. F. Galton that a useful inquiry might be carried out into the relation between a child’s preference in the matter of doll or other toy and the degree of his imaginativeness as otherwise shown, e.g., in craving for story, and in romancing. So far as I have inquired I am disposed to think that such a relation exists. A lady who has had a large experience as a Kindergarten teacher tells me that children who play with rough shapeless things, and readily endow with life the ball, and so forth, in Kindergarten games are imaginative in other ways. Here is an example:—

P. Mc. L., a girl, observed from three and a half to five years of age, was a highly imaginative child as shown by the power of make-believe in play. The ball of soft india-rubber was to her on the teacher’s suggestion, say, a baby, and on it she would lavish all her tenderness, kissing it, feeding it, washing its face, dressing it in her pinafore, etc. So thorough was her delight in the play that the less imaginative children around her would suspend their play at ‘babies’ and watch her with interest. Whilst a most indifferent restless child at lessons, whenever a story was told she sat motionless and wide-eyed till the close.

Children sometimes make babies of their younger brothers and sisters, going through all the sweet solicitous offices which others are wont to carry out on their dolls.^[31] This suggests another and closely related question: Do the more imaginative children prefer the inert, ugly doll to the living child in these nursing pastimes? What is the real relation in the child’s play between the toy-companion, the doll or india-rubber dog, and the living companion? Again, a child will occasionally play with an imaginary doll.^[32] How is this impulse related to the other two forms of doll-passion? These points would well repay a careful investigation.

The vivification of the doll or toy animal is the outcome of the play-impulse, and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to realise an idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its outward expression serves, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, to blot out the incongruities of scene and action which you or I, a cold observer, would note. The play-idea works transformingly by a process analogous to what is called auto-suggestion.

How complete this play-illusion may become here can be seen in more ways than one. We see it in the jealous insistence already illustrated that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new fancy-created 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’.”^[33]

As we saw above, the child’s absorption in his new play-world is shown by his imperious demand that others, as his mother, shall recognise his new character. Pestalozzi’s little boy, aged three years and a half, was one day playing at being butcher, when his mother called him by his usual diminutive, ‘Jacobli’. He at once replied: “No, no; you should call me butcher now”.^[34] Here is a story to the same effect, sent me by a mother. A little girl of four was playing ‘shops’ with her younger sister. “The elder one 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.”

The intensity of the realising power of imagination in play is seen too in the stickling for fidelity to the original in all playful reproduction, whether of scenes observed in everyday life or of what has been narrated. The same little boy who showed his picture-books to dolly was, we are told, when two years and eight months old, fond of imagining that he was Priest, his grandmamma’s coachman. “He drives his toy horse from the arm-chair as a carriage, getting down every minute to ‘let the ladies out,’ or to ‘go shopping’. The make-believe extends to his insisting on the reins being held while he gets down and so forth.” The same thing shows itself in acting out stories. The full enjoyment of the realisation depends on the faithful reproduction, on the suitable outward embodiment of the distinct idea in the child’s mind.

The following anecdote bears another kind of testimony, a most winsome kind, to the realising power of play. One day two sisters said to one another: “Let us play being sisters”. This might well sound insane enough to hasty ears; but is it not really eloquent? To me it suggests that the girls felt they were not realising their sisterhood, enjoying all the possible sweets of it, as they wanted to do—perhaps there had been a quarrel and a supervening childish coldness. And they felt too that the way to get this more vivid sense of what they were, or ought to be, one to the other, was by playing the part, by acting a scene in which they would come close to one another in warm sympathetic fellowship.

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 unbelieving adult who questions what he says about the doll’s crying and so forth. One little girl, aged one year and nine months, when asked by her mother how her doll, who had lost his arms, ate his dinner without hands, quickly changed the subject. She did not apparently like having difficulties brought into her happy play-world. But the true tenacious faith shows itself later when the child understands these sceptical questionings of others, and sees that they are poking fun at his play and his day-dreamings. Such cruel quizzings of his make-believe are apt to cut him to the quick. I have heard of children who will cry if a stranger suddenly enters the nursery when they are hard at play, and shows himself unsympathetic and critical.

Play may produce not only this vivid imaginative realisation at the time, but a sort of mild permanent illusion. Sometimes it is a toy-horse, in one case communicated to me it was a funny-looking toy-lion, more frequently it is the human effigy, the doll, which as the result of successive acts of imaginative vivification gets taken up into the relation of permanent companion and pet. Clusters of happy associations gather about it, investing it with a lasting vitality and character. A mother once asked her boy of two and a half years if his doll was a boy or a girl. He said at first, “A boy,” but presently correcting himself added, “I think it is a baby”. Here we have a challenging of the inner conviction by a question, a moment of reflexion, and as a result of this, an unambiguous confession of faith that the doll had its place in the living human family.

Here is a more stubborn exhibition on the part of another boy of this lasting faith in the plaything called out by others’ sceptical attitude. "When (writes a lady correspondent) 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 mutt’ent tay “it,” you mut tay he’. He imagined the horse was possessed of every virtue and it was strange to see what an influence this creature of his own imagination exercised over him. If there was anything L. particularly wished not to do his mother had only to say: ‘Dobbin would like you to do this,’ and it was done without a murmur."

There is another domain of childish activity closely bordering on that of play where a like suffusion of the world of sense by imagination meets us. I refer to pictures and artistic representations generally. If in the case of adults there is a half illusion, a kind of oneirotic or trance condition induced by a picture or dramatic spectacle, in the case of the less-instructed child the illusion is apt to become more complete. A picture seems very much of a toy to a child. A baby of eight or nine months will talk to a picture as to a living thing; and something of this tendency to make a fetish of a drawing survives much later. But it will be more convenient to deal with the attitude of the child-mind towards pictorial representations in connexion with his art-tendencies.

The imaginative transformation of things, more particularly the endowing of lifeless things with life, 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 moving thing which in the capricious variations of its course simulates a free will of its own? As I understand it, trundling the hoop is imaginative play hardly less than riding the horse-stick and slashing its flanks. Who again that can recall early experiences will doubt that the delight of flying the kite, of watching it as it sways to the right or to the left, threatening to fall head-foremost to earth, and most of all perhaps of sending a paper ‘messenger’ along the string to the wee thing poised like a bird so terribly far away in the blue sky, is the delight of imaginative play? The same is true of sailing boats, and other pastimes of early childhood.

I have here touched merely on the imaginative and half-illusory side of children’s play. It is to be remembered, however, that play is much more than this, and reflects much more of the childish mind. Play proper as distinguished from mere day-dreaming is activity and imitative activity; and children show marked differences in the energy of this activity, and in the quickness and closeness of their responses to the model actions of the real nurse, real coachman, and so forth. That is to say, observation of others will count here. Again, while social surroundings, opportunities for imitation, are important, they are by no means all-decisive. Children show a curious selectiveness in their imitative games, germs of differential interest, sexual and individual, revealing themselves quite early. It may be added that a child with few opportunities of observation may get quite enough play-material from storyland. But play is never merely imitative, save indeed in the case of unintelligent and ‘stoggy’ children. It is a bright invention into which all the gifts of childish intelligence may pour themselves. The relation of play to art will engage us later on.