Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/599

Rh The essence of play is the realizing of an imaginary situation or action; it is thus in a sense dramatic; only that the child's drama, like M. Jourdain's prose, is unconscious. In this impulse to he something, the actual external surroundings play a greater or less part according to the needs of the player. Sometimes there is scarcely any adjustment of the actual objects and scene; the child plays out its action with purely imaginary surroundings, including companions or playmates. Thus one mother writes of her boy, aged two years and a half: "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." As a recent little work shows, some children have adopted permanently an invisible playmate. In such vivid realization the utmost interference with actual surroundings that is needed is change of place. Here is a pretty example of this simple imaginative play. A child of twenty months, who was accustomed to meet a bonne and child in the Jardin du Luxembourg, suddenly leaves the family living room, pronouncing indifferently well the names "Luxembourg," "bonne," and "enfant." He goes into the next room, pretends to say "good day" to his two outdoor acquaintances, and then returns and narrates what he has been doing. Here the simple act of passing into an adjoining room was enough to secure the needed realization of the encounter in the garden. The movement into the next room is suggestive. Primarily it meant, no doubt, that it was the child's way of realizing the out-of-door walk; yet I suspect that 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 Children love to enact their little play-scenes in some remote spot, withdrawn from notice, where imagination suffers no let from the intrusion of mother, nurse, or other member of the real environment.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, under the table with the tablecloth hanging low, will be fresh in the memory of all who can recall their childhood.

A step toward a more realistic kind of play-action, in which, as in the modern theater, imagination is propped up by strong scenic 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 this infantile play. Next to itself proudly enjoying the part of the rider, the soldier, the engine-driver, or what not, the child wants