Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/59

 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 45 past go everywhere to show that story-telling is an inevitable and wholly unconscious growth probably arising out of nar- ratives believed to record actual events" (italics mine). And we may compare with this the words of Dr. Stout l : " Hence what may be a transient play of imagination in the civilised mind is the permanent and serious attitude of the savage mind ". These primitive beliefs are also found in children, and are not relevant to the practical activities of life in which they will be required to engage. Such beliefs seem to me so far from being a "preparation" for later and serious views of life, that the very task of consciously directed education is to break them down, working, of course, along the lines of least resistance, entering into them to destroy them. And how far are our own fictional utterances the expres- sion of more primitive views of life ? Is riot the ethic of our most widely read novels still very like that of Jane Austen in whose works " the problem of the hero was to get an income somehow without doing anything to earn it ; and that of the heroine to combine disinterested love with a good final settle- ment " ? " Originally (this ideal) was universal either in the shape of the prince motive or in that of the young man who comes into a fortune. We have it in our best literature as late as Thackeray's Philip and it is still prevalent in the worse." 2 Even a cursory perusal of our Family Heralds and Novel- ettes reveals the same general features, and this is the play- ful pabulum of thousands whose adjustment to practical life takes place in defiance of their fictional predilections. I am aware that such argument may appear to be met by quoting the fiction, drama and poetry which follow the light that never was on sea or land, the ideal state, the problem play, the poem which suggests a future beauty rather than a past. But such efforts are usually regarded by the great mass of our people with absolute indifference, and even those who support them would scarcely regard it as complimentary if you described their interest as a playful one. Moreover there is not the same detachment from the great mass of belief which marks play properly so called. Such things may be ideal, but the ideal is there for real purposes, not art for art's sake, as the phrase goes, but art for the improvement of reality. 1 Manual of Psychology, p. 559. 2 English Humanists, J. M. Robertson, p. 3.