The Toy Theatre

There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys;
and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys
takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else.
Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world;
and as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to
abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life.
We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy;
we have not enough strength for play. This is a truth which every one
will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all;
any one who has played with bricks, any one who has played with dolls,
any one who has played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work,

which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that
work which earned nothing.

. . . . .

Take the case of bricks. If you publish a book to-morrow
in twelve volumes (it would be just like you) on "The Theory
and Practice of European Architecture," your work may be laborious,
but it is fundamentally frivolous. It is not serious as the work
of a child piling one brick on the other is serious; for the simple
reason that if your book is a bad book no one will ever be able
ultimately and entirely to prove to you that it is a bad book.
Whereas if his balance of bricks is a bad balance of bricks,
it will simply tumble down. And if I know anything of children,
he will set to work solemnly and sadly to build it up again.
Whereas, if I know anything of authors, nothing would induce you
to write your book again, or even to think of it again if you
could help it.

Take the case of dolls. It is much easier to care for an educational
cause than to care for a doll. It is as easy to write an article on
education as to write an article on toffee or tramcars or anything else.
But it is almost as difficult to look after a doll as to look after
a child. The little girls that I meet in the little streets of Battersea
worship their dolls in a way that reminds one not so much of play
as idolatry. In some cases the love and care of the artistic symbol
has actually become more important than the human reality which it was,
I suppose, originally meant to symbolize.

I remember a Battersea little girl who wheeled her large baby sister
stuffed into a doll's perambulator. When questioned on this course of
conduct, she replied: "I haven't got a dolly, and Baby is pretending
to be my dolly." Nature was indeed imitating art. First a doll had
been a substitute for a child; afterwards a child was a mere substitute
for a doll. But that opens other matters; the point is here that such
devotion takes up most of the brain and most of the life;