The Toy's Morals

ARTHUR SYMONS

A CHILD'S imagination, if it is imaginative, fastens itself, tenaciously, on its toys. They may be of any kind, dressed, undressed, painted, complicated, simple, hideous, lovely, in the form of horses, marionettes, carriages, animals, barbarous, fantastic, primitive, or fabricated out of nothing; what matters it of what kind they are as long as they seem to be living? It is a curious fact that dolls may act on children or that children might react on dolls. Certain of these being gifted with literary or artistic qualities, and to whom their parents have given miniature theatres or moving puppets, may, as they grow up, become passionate for music or for dancing or for acting. In any case one never knows what genius may not find itself, before being concerned with anything else, in the form of an artistic toy.

There is one, very complicated, made of twenty small figures of jugglers or of dancers, which have to be adjusted inside a circle, in which arc pierced twenty windows, and that one moves by a pivot. You look through these windows and make the circles turn. Twenty figures, representing the decomposed central figure, are reflected in a glass opposite you. The rapidity of the rotation transforms the twenty windows into one circling one, across which one sees reflected in the glass these dancing figures, exactly the same and executing the same movements with a fantastical precision. Finally the rapidity becomes invisible, only, in the glass, this rapidity seems motionless.

I KNEW in Cornwall a curious woman, the Spanish wife of a ruined gentleman—who had found her, I believe, dancing in a music-hall in Malaga, called La Chinitas—and she used, in the lazy fashion of Spanish women, to sit indoors, in the winter, by a lire. In the summer, when the extreme heat of the South of Cornwall attracted her, she lay on the grass looking across at the sea, that wailed in the wind as the Moorish muleteeers wail the Malaqueña on country roads as they drive before them their tinkling mules; drawing in with delight the seagull's angry and savage and storm like exaltation. When they sat at table her fingers were always crumbling the bread into tiny crumbs, and often she would take a large slice of bread and mould it into little figures, little nude figures exquisitely proportioned, with all the modelling of the limbs and shoulder-blades. Sometimes she created a woman kneeling at the brink of a little well, leaning over it, as Narcissus bent over springs so as to see the superb beauty of his divine face reflected back to him: an image gazing at the image of itself.

The woman I speak of loved these little figures, and talked about them very seriously, at times very ironically, criticising their defects, not quite content with the lines she had got, seeing them with subtler curves than any she had been able to get. In her sensitive way she was an artist; an artist who created out of intense laziness things of beauty. So queer was she that she would like to have kept some of them, but, though she soaked them in milk, they would always crumble away as soon as the bread dried.

When her son played the piano she looked down at her tiny fingers—the tiny fingers of a Spanish woman—which could pick out form if they would. Unlike most women of her race, who have a passion for music, she had none. Only she could sometimes describe a little scene which the music he was playing called up to her. Once, when he played a ballad of Chopin, she saw two lovers, hidden under trees in a wood out of the rain that was falling on them, and she followed their emotions—in a way he never did—as the music interpreted them to her.

Carmen had a kind of cruelty in her nature, which I have always found in Spaniards; seen most of all in their passion for the bull fights. So, when she was most vexed by her surroundings, or by her need of expressing the inevitable tension of her nerves, she deliberately destroyed the things her fingers had formed so delicateiy, ielting them fall into ruins, as certain painters have a way of doing, Cezanne, for instance, when an unfinished picture stares at them, and a hatred seizes on them, and the picture no longer exists.

I confess to have chosen my title from a delicious essay of Baudelaire's. Luxurious always, he admits that, when a certain famous woman showed him her room filled with an extraordinary amount of dolls, and asked the child to choose the one he wanted, he with the luminous promptitude of youth, when to desire is to act on the instant, seized hold immediately on the finest, the most expensive, the most showy, the most bizzare of all these toys. He, like the others, always spoke with them, made them become actors in life's drama. As for the drama of the Dotiquc, he says: "What an admirable stage-setting! And is not this enough to make the bored public's impotent imagination be ashamed of this stupidity, and to make them realize the mechanical perfection of this invention, on whose stage it is conceivable to suppose that Shakespeare's Tragedies might be acted with a barbarous simplicity?"

This is certainly conceivable to me after having seen in the Costanza Theatre in Rome the marionettes in action, making a wonderful illusion of their mixture of reality with unreality; of their adequate gestures, of their sinister movements, of their fantastic costumes: of, in a word, all that escape that one loves to find after the banality of so many badly acted plays. Even in the Fenice Theatre I have seen the tiniest and most delicious Italian children wildly applauding, with glowing eyes and radiant laughter; who, I am certain, believed even more than I did in the beauty of this singular spectacle.

It is hateful to think of so many children who are deprived from having any toys, on account of their parents' ferocity, who tear them out of their hands, soon after they have been given them by saner minded people, and say: "When you are older you shall have these!" These are, one hopes, in the minority of those who misunderstand even nature, in themselves and in their sons. They have the Puritan stain in their blood that debases so many of these ignorant people. Even to think of them is to say with Baudelaire: "When I remember a certain class of ultra-reasonable and anti-poetical persons from whose contact I have suffered so many tortures, I feel always an intense hatred that acts abominably on my nerves."

There is no question that part of what is as curious as it is cruel in childrens' minds is, for one thing, to find "the soul" of their toys, and, for another thing, to break them into pieces. Agile, as soon as their brain begins to work, their fingers begin to execute their definite intentions. So, as the dog in Rabelais, who spends an infinite time in sucking out the marrow of a bone, these twist their toys, shake them, throw them on the ground, trample on them, until, after those infantile exploits, the marvellous life that resides in dolls is suddenly arrested.