“So from childhood every people has its sympathies expressed or suppressed, and set deeper in its flesh and blood than scholastic ideas.... The children who have no toys seize realities very late, and never form ideals.... The nations rendered famous by their artists, artisans, and idealists have supplied their infants with many toys, for there is more philosophy and poetry in a single doll than in a thousand books.... If you will tell us what your children play with, we will tell you what sort of women and men they will be; so let this Republic make the toys which will raise the moral and artistic character of her children.”
Froebel’s educational toys do us one service, in that they preach a silent but impressive sermon on simplicity.
It is easy to see that the hurlyburly of our modern life is not wholly favorable to the simple creed of childhood, “delight and liberty, when busy or at rest,” but we might make it a little less artificial than we do, perhaps.
Every thoughtful person knows that the simple, natural playthings of the old-fashioned child, which are nothing more than pegs on which he hangs his glowing fancies, are healthier than our complicated modern mechanisms, in which the child has only to “press the button” and the toy “does the rest.”
The electric-talking doll, for example—imagine a generation of children brought up on that! And the toy-makers are not even content with this grand personage, four feet high, who says “Papa! Mamma!” She is passee already; they have begun to improve on her! An electrician described to me the other day a superb new altruistic doll, fitted to the needs of the present decade. You are to press a judiciously located button and ask her the test question, which is, if she will have some candy; whereupon with an angelic detached-movement-smile (located in the left cheek), she is to answer, “Give brother big piece; give me little piece!” If the thing gets out of order (and I devoutly hope it will), it will doubtless return to a state of nature, and horrify the bystanders by remarking, “Give me big piece! Give brother little piece!”
Think of having a gilded dummy like that given you to amuse yourself with! Think of having to play,—to play, forsooth, with a model of propriety, a high-minded monstrosity like that! Doesn’t it make you long for your dear old darkey doll with the raveled mouth, and the stuffing leaking out of her legs; or your beloved Arabella Clarinda with the broken nose, beautiful even in dissolution,—creatures “not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food”? Banged, battered, hairless, sharers of our mad joys and reckless sorrows, how we loved them in their simple ugliness! With what halos of romance we surrounded them! with what devotion we nursed the one with the broken head, in those early days when new heads were not to be bought at the nearest shop. And even if they could have been purchased