But the boy has his doll-love also, and is often hardly less faithful than the girl. Endless is the variety of rôle assigned to the doll as to the tiny shell in our just-quoted description 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, in her pleasant memoir of her childhood,[1] tells us that while sitting and holding her doll in the armchair of the parlor she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands, meeting with 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 humanly, 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. 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 in turn, 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. In this way does the child seek to bring his mute playmate into the closest intimacy with himself, sharing his life to the full. The same thing is touchingly illustrated in the fact that Laura Bridgman, when visited by Dickens in 1842, was found to have put a tiny band over her doll's eyes to match the band she herself had to wear. It is illustrated further in the fact that a child is apt to insist on dolly's being treated by others as courteously as himself, expecting them to say good night to it on saying good night to himself, and so forth.
Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have the 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 ways. The faith, 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 its doll when thus stripped 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
- ↑ The One I knew the Best of All.
