THE DRAMATIC INSTINCT IN CHILDREN

AMERICAN HOME SERIES NORMAN E. RICHARDSON, Editor

THE DRAMATIC INSTINCT IN CHILDREN

Prepared originally by THE LITERARY STAFF of the AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CHILD LIFE

FOURTH EDITION (Revised)

THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI

Copyright 1914, by AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CHILD LIFE

INTRODUCTION

The development of the dramatic instinct in children is the special responsibility of parents. The public school and church school programs are gradually including dramatics and the teachers in many of these schools can go far in sharing this responsibility. But it is in the home where room and time, equipment and motive, suggestions and cooperating friends are found. Parental skill is revealed in helping a child to try on a new character or virtue as well as a new blouse or pair of shoes. Social and moral imagination in the child can be realized under the direct guidance of father or mother. Voyages are taken, investigations made, treasure islands discovered, animals subdued, robbers put to flight, the plans of sly Indians frustrated, and fierce battles waged by the child whose parent-teacher is versatile and imaginative. The dull, uninteresting parent, whose chief virtue is that of routine, long-faced fidelity, narrows his children’s world and correspondingly limits the range of their moral development.

What faith is to the adult the dramatic instinct is to the child: it is the substance, the substantial realization of things hoped for. It is the power to make things happen. It is the victory that overcomes the prosaic, saw-dust affairs of life.

If this pamphlet, carefully studied, helps parents to see and properly awaken the sleeping dramatic powers of their children and give them a new motive in guiding its various expressions, the purpose of the writers will have been realized.

Norman E. Richardson.

THE DRAMATIC INSTINCT IN CHILDREN[1]

[1] The material included in this pamphlet, together with other practical studies of the subject of play, is included in “A Manual of Play,” by Forbush, and published by Jacobs and Company.

I. The Nature of the Dramatic Instinct—1. Its Expression in Early Childhood. 2. Its Expression in Middle Childhood. 3. Its Expression in Later Childhood.

II. Educational Value—1. The Moral Value of this Instinct. 2. Its Inspirational Value.

III. Summary—References.

I. The Nature of the Dramatic Instinct

THE dramatic instinct finds expression in the impulse to make playful use of the imagination. It is based on certain fundamental instincts of childhood—imitation, construction, and motor activity. Its expression has been called by Gesell “a vital spark of life dropped into the lap of formalism and routine.”

This impulse is found among the earliest and lowest races. In the individual it is felt from early childhood throughout life. If neglected, it may fade away in maturity until it is hardly noticed; but, if properly developed, it is one of the greatest sources of human joy and strength.

Imagination is said to be of two kinds—passive6 and active. Passive imagination is that which dominates all other mental factors, making them subordinate. Active imagination is that of which the individual himself takes charge. An illustration of passive imagination is daydreaming. Play and dramatics are examples of active imagination. Both have their place in a man’s life. Passive imagination enables the individual to transfigure commonplace circumstances or surroundings in the glamour of beauty and to forecast ideal situations yet to be. It thus fills the present with sunshine and the future with hope. Active imagination begins where passive imagination leaves off, and comes forth to play and work with actual materials or circumstances in an imaginative fashion, and sets about making the fanciful future actual.

With young persons under fourteen active imagination is uppermost. Says Stevenson: “We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall and die, all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else. He works all with lay figures and such properties. When his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of breath. When he comes to ride with the king’s pardon, he must bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and belabor and on which he will so furiously demean himself that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least fiery red with haste.”

W. W. Newell, in Games and Songs of American Children, says: “Observe a little girl who has attended her mother for an airing in some city park. The older person, quietly seated beside the footpath, is half absorbed in reverie; takes little notice of passers-by, or of neighboring sights or sounds, further than to cast an occasional glance, which may inform her of the child’s security. The other,7 left to her own devices, wanders contented within the limited scope, incessantly prattling to herself; now climbing an adjoining rock, now flitting like a bird from one side of the pathway to the other. Listen to her monologue, flowing as incessantly and musically as the bubbling of a spring; if you can catch enough to follow her thought, you will find a perpetual romance unfolding itself in her mind. Imaginary persons accompany her footsteps; the properties of a childish theatre exist in her fancy; she sustains a conversation in three or four characters.”

The expression of the dramatic instinct may be observed on every hand, not only among children, but grown-ups as well. It animates the group conversing on the street corner, arousing the observer to imagine what the topic of conversation may be. It also enlivens the drawing-room, thus helping to make the social function a success. His observation of it may well have stirred the poet to say, “The world’s a stage, and we are players all.” And as our parts on the world stage change with the changing years, so the expression of this instinct is different in each of the three periods of childhood.

Its Expression in Early Childhood

During very early childhood little folks express the dramatic instinct entirely by imitation. They imitate people, birds, animals, noises; they try to enter into every experience which is within their reach by gesture, speech, or repeated action. As Joseph Lee tells us, “The mind first learns things by getting inside them, by being what it studies.” The child’s imagination is not capable of creating new situations, it simply enables him to reproduce the actions of other people in familiar ones. He mirrors the world as he understands it. These expressions are entirely individualistic and usually unconscious.

8 This endeavor to mirror and imitate the life about him is a most important means by which the child educates himself. Evidently, the more varied the life which he sees, the more variety will enter into his play, and the broader will be the child’s intelligence.

From three years to about six, the dramatic impulse expresses itself largely in the form of make-believe. The individual creates a play-self living in a play-world. He begins now and continues with increasing power to imitate the idea rather than the thing. The baby could imitate the gestures and tones of his father. A child in this period plays that he is a father. When playing with dolls or soldiers, the child of this era transforms not only the dolls or soldiers and the nursery into an imaginary world full of the people which the dolls or soldiers represent, but he transforms himself into the parent of the dolls or the captain of the soldiers.

The following list of the plays of the larger boys of a California kindergarten during their recreation period illustrates how the play-world enlarges by the time the child has reached his fourth or fifth year: October 24th, Policeman; 25th, Policeman and Hunters; 26th, Wild Horses, Hunters, and Salvation Army; 30th, Butcher and House; November 1st, Butcher, Jail; 2d, Hunting, Cars, Circus; 3d, Butcher, Band, Procession; 6th, Band, Ladder, Steamer and Circus; 7th, Ladder, played with as Steam-engine, and Circus-train; 8th, Ladder, played with as Pipe-organ, and then Wood-saw; 10th, Ladder, as a Steamer; 13th, Dragon; 14th, Wild Pig; 15th, Wild Hog; 16th, Wild Hog, Train, Indians; 17th, Wild Hog, Indians; 20th, Merry-go-round; 21st, Cars; 22d, Circus and Menagerie; 23d, Policeman; 24th, Cars; 28th, Horse; December 5th, Electric Light Men, Noah’s Ark; 6th, Electric Light Men, Circus; 7th, Wild Horse, Bear, Robbers and Policeman, Electric Launch, Steamer and Boats, Indians; 8th, Indians; 11th, Santa9 Claus, Wild Horse, Store, Street-watering Carts; 12th, Teams of Horses, Telephone.

This list of things that children can do without adult guidance may be helpful to some mother who is called upon to kindle the imagination of her young child by suggestions.

“Making believe,” says Stevenson, “is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book.” And he gives this thoroughly boyish illustration from his own childhood: “When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here an island was still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and traveled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether

secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.”

In another place he says: “We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our Friday appetite; but I can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have made it more palatable than the best of sauces. To a grown person cold mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant world, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments. But for the child it still is possible to10 weave an enchantment from eatables; and, if he has but read of a dish in a storybook, it will be heavenly manna to him for a week.”

The thing that is behind this making-believe seems to be a certain hunger to realize life to its fullest. Sully gives this winsome anecdote to illustrate the realizing power of play: “One day two sisters said to one another, ‘Let us play being sisters.’ This might well sound insane enough to hasty ears; but is it not really eloquent? To me it suggests that the girls felt they were not realizing their sisterhood, enjoying all the possible sweets of it as they wanted to—perhaps there had been a quarrel and a supervening childish coldness. And they felt too that the way to get this more vivid sense of what they were, or ought to be, one to the other, was by playing the part, by acting a scene in which they would come close to one another in warm, sympathetic fellowship.”

This kind of play is individualistic at the beginning and gradually becomes social. By and by the little child wishes for comradeship. If he has no human companions, he usually engages in the pathetic make-believe of inventing an imaginary playmate, with whom he often lives continuously. This sort of expression is as ancient as it is universal. The toys with which children have rebuilt an ideal world have been discovered in the ruins of every buried city.

Children show this faculty of imagining themselves other persons in other circumstances not only in play, but in story-telling. It seems to be true that a child imagines himself the hero of every story that he hears or reads, and every normal child acts out afterward most of the stories he hears or the drama he witnesses. “Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves,” says Stevenson; “some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then11 we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experiences; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.” Many children go even further and perform continuations of such dramas of their own invention, or play for an entire winter successive chapters of a favorite story.

Another way of creating a world of fancy is by playing grown-up. This is, of course, a reproduction, as far as the child’s powers permit, of literal adult activities, with, however, somewhat more of the imaginative element. Dr. G. Stanley Hall calls attention to the fact that, while little children will imitate animals, there soon comes a time when they cease to do so and imitate only human beings: during childhood those who perform the more active occupations; during adolescent those who express what are to them the ideals of character.

The little child rolls up a piece of paper, and imitates the action of his father when smoking a cigarette. But the growing boy smokes a real cigarette, so that he may feel himself a man. This expression of imagination is sometimes innocent and pleasant; but, where it is a copying of adult follies, an endeavor to enter adult experiences too soon, it gives us a race of blasé young-old persons who have no laid-up treasures.

Its Expression in Middle Childhood

During middle childhood, from six to nine, the interest in dramatic play continues to be strong. But the comparative meagerness of the imagination during this period makes the playmate more of a necessity than in preceding years. In early childhood the tendency to create playmates is so strong that the child enjoys playing alone. During the self-assertive years between six and nine, however, the child plays, more or less quarrelsomely, with others, taking them in as characters of his mimic world and enriching his own play by their conjunct12 imaginativeness. This explains why the leader of the gang is usually the most resourceful individual in the group, since he is the one who is depended upon to successfully conduct their imaginative play.

The welcome occasionally extended to adult leadership in youthful gangs has this same explanation: the adult keeps thinking of something new to do when the resourcefulness of his juniors runs dry.

But adult supervision should not prevent the child from using his constructive instinct which is fast developing during this period. It can aid the expression of the dramatic impulse in the creation of costumes, properties, etc., for the representations of characters and scenes from myths and stories. The reading should now be made wide enough to include many models for the child’s dramatic play. A certain amount of dependence upon himself for the construction of his playthings assists in calling forth ingenuity. Some years ago, in Chicago, an Italian boy is said to have invented the “pushmobile” or “autoped,” as it is variously called, which, though repressed then by the city authorities, is to-day such a delight to our boys and girls. This invention has been described as follows:

“He took a board, about four feet long, and fastened half a roller skate to each end. To one end of the upper side he fastened a soap box. Then steadying himself by means of the box and putting one foot on the board and propelling himself with the other he went zip! The speed attained was almost incredible. The boy next door caught sight of him in his flight and looked about for a board, a roller skate and a soap box. Then the boy across the street caught the idea, and before many days there were 10,000 pushmobiles in the city of Chicago. The advantage of the pushmobile was (we are obliged to use the past tense for it has been suppressed) that it was invented, manufactured, and perfected by the boys themselves. It was distinctly the creation of the city boy, the offspring of cement walks and asphalt pavements. It could not have13 come into being in the country. It represented ingenuity, resourcefulness, industry, and progress.”

The writer might have added, it represented in most distinct form the dramatic instinct. One reason why playground leaders have begun to add theatricals to the play-shelters connected with the Chicago playgrounds is because they believe that the origination called forth by story-playing will overcome the dead inertia of the oversupervised and overdictated playgrounds.

It is through environment and the adequate supply of implements, rather than direction, that the dramatic impulse of these years can best be developed. There is “imitation of nearly every occupation or custom known to children,” says Johnson in Education by Plays and Games. He lists “such plays as firemen, expressmen, conductors, soldiers, Indians, cowboys, store, school, house, doll play of infinite variety, traveling, calling, party,” as typical of middle childhood. They suggest to us an important use of the dramatic impulse during the period when the child is becoming acquainted with the world outside his home.

Its Expression in Later Childhood

There comes a time in the life of most children, at about the tenth year, when they take pleasure in expressing dramatic ideas to an audience. The earliest expression of this instinct in the two previous eras was individualistic; this is social. The other two were quite unconscious; this is self-conscious from the beginning. Such expression of the dramatic instinct would seem to have a close relation to and be a preparation for the theatrical profession. On the contrary, however, the desire for dramatic expression belongs to children who have the very slightest dramatic ability. Its organized expression, instead of encouraging young people to become professional actors, usually quite satisfies that fever and is somewhat of an antidote for it.

14 The plays, therefore, include attempts at circus-playing, minstrel shows, wild West shows, etc. The constructive instinct is now so well developed that rather elaborate “properties” can be made to help stage these productions. The intense physical activity of this “Big-Injun” age makes such imitative plays as Indian, hunter, trapper, etc., especially appealing. Though the main ideas for these plays and for those given before an audience have been gained from observation and reading, there is much originality and creativeness exhibited if the dramatic instinct has been allowed to develop in previous years.

In later childhood and youth young people begin to organize themselves into clubs and societies, which represent the people and customs of another age or the social organizations of adults. This instinct is seen even among grown people in the secret lodges, where men, who have apparently outgrown the play spirit, find a genuine satisfaction in being known as “knights,” engaging in secret rites reproductive of magic and mystery, and banding themselves into fraternities which bring down the names, traditions and ideals of mediæval guilds and chivalric orders.