Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    source of play is the impulse to realise a bright idea: whence, as we shall see by-and-by, its close kinship to art as a whole. This image is the dominating force, it is for the time a veritable idkefixe, and everything has to accommodate itself to this. Since the image has to be acted out, it comes into collision with the actual surroundings. Here is the child’s opportunity. The floor is instantly mapped out into two hostile territories, the sofa-end becomes a horse, a coach, a ship, or what not, to suit the exigencies of the play. This stronger movement and wider range of imagina¬ tion in children’s pastime is explained by the characteristic and fundamental impulse of play, the desire to be some¬ thing, to act a part. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero steps out of his every-day self and so out of his every-day world. In realising his part he virtually transforms his surroundings, since they take on the look and meaning which the part assigns to them. This is prettily illustrated in one of Mr. Steven¬ son’s child-songs, “ The Land of Counterpane,” in which a sick child describes the various transformations of the bed-scene:— And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes through the hills; And sometimes sent my ships in fleets, All up and down among the sheets ; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about. Who can say to how many and to what strange play- purposes that stolid unyielding-looking object a sofa-head has been turned by the ingenuity of the childish brain ? The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the assimilative instinct. The very infant
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