a living companion. Something alive there must be, or at least something to simulate life, if only a railway engine. And here we meet with what is perhaps the most interesting feature of childish play—the transmutation of the most meager and least promising things into complete living forms. I have already alluded to the sofa. 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 realizing power. Mr. Ruskin speaks somewhere of "the perfection of childlike 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, unskeptical eye the boy on his rude-carved wooden "gee-gee," slashing the dull flanks with all a boy's glee, is realizing the joy of actual riding; is possessed for the moment with the glorious ideas that the stiff, least organic-looking of structures which he strides is a very horse.
The liveliness of this realizing imagination is seen in the extraordinary poverty and meagerness 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 wagon with hay; the little shells now become little horses, and are put to the shaft to pull the terrible load."[1]
The doll takes a supreme place in this fancy-realm of play. It is human, and satisfies higher instincts and emotions. As a French poet says, the little girl
"Rêve le nom de mère en berçant sa poupée."
- ↑ Goltz, Buch der Kindheit, pp. 4, 5.
