Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/602

582 a step in a squalid London street, blissfully engaged in cuddling warmly a little bundle of bay tied round the middle by a string. Laura Bridgman made a "baby" of a man's large boot. In these cases, surely, the besoin d'aimer was little if any behind the besoin de croire.

Do any of us really understand this doll superstition? Writers with 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. The truth is, the doll illusion is one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who make a point, when they attain the years of enlightenment, of saving their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect that the pets, when thus retained, are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face and hair, and most of all of their 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 to the child its true beauty.

Yet, if we can not 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 sweet 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, like toys such as dolls, Noah's arks, etc. The same writer remarks that the doll is "a hybrid between the baby and the fetich, and that it exhibits the contradictory character of its parents." Perhaps the changes of mood toward the doll of which George Sand writes illustrate the alternating preponderance of the baby and the fetich aspect. 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.

The vivification of the doll is the outcome of the play impulse, and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to realize an idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its outward expression serves to blot out the incongruities of scene and actors which you or I, a cold observer, would note.

How complete this play illusion may become here can be seen in more ways than one. We perceive it in the child's jealous insistence that everything shall for the time pass over from the everyday world into the new fancy-created one. About the age of four, writes M. Egger of his boy, "Felix is playing at being coachman. Emile happens to return home at the moment. In