Make-Belief.

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 45, 17 July 1915, Page 15

Make-Belief.

REGARDING the assertions of a friend of mine who yesterday informed me most solemnly that "things are not what they seem," that "the child is father of the man," and other spontaneous brightnesses of the kind, I am constrained to make a few remarks. All people of all grades of all ages in every land! live largely a life of "make-believe." And the abnormal person who doesn't pretend has a poor run for his money. If an admiral went aboard his fiagsbap attired in. a bathing suit, and so attired took charge of a fleet, no one would obey him. But the confident .person who wore the admiral s uniform and went aboard the flagship and told everybody, to let go the after spring and throw the magazine abaft the forrard stanchion would probably get a good hearing Hope itself, which is the thing that keeps us plodding, is. a branch of the "make-believe" industry. All children live a delnghtful life of makebelieve, and children are better worth studying than Euclid s propositions or how to make a grocer believe you are a millionaire when you don't know how to pay his bill. * * *

To illustrate this quality in children with an anecdote which is not mine. Three boys abreast puffing down a hill at "a great rate haul the citizen to the trio "What are you fellows doing?" Replied the spokesman, "Oh, we are a motor car " A little boy puffed wildly behind at a distance of fifty yards. "What are you?" shouted the zen as the boy swept past. On, I'm the smell!" came back on the wind. , i i Little girls the world over makebelieve they are mothers, but little boys of the masculine gender (I use the phrase knowing What I mean) never pretend they are fathers. Their natural instinct is to make believe that they are adult fighters ot some kind. Very few boys ever make believe that they are parsons. Most of them are bushrangers or Indians or somebody whose daily avocation is blood. They "throw back in instinct to their forbears who fought for existence. I can't imagine that any of the suffragettes who smite Cabinet Ministers with whips, or chain themselves to iron bars, or do other weird stupidities of the kind,, ever made believe that their dolls were babies or that they ever took the least interest in dolls at all. But I know that the female chiUdl with the true feminine instinct, whether she lives on the banks of the Congo or Ponsonby, insists on the make-believe of motherhood. It doesn't matter whether the baby is a bit of bark, ,a wad of rag or a six guinea wax effigy of a grown lady, and it doesn t matter whether the little mother is black, white, or ecru as to colour. I watched a number of tiny girls playing for some time and from day to day. One was called repeatedly "Elma," another was "Mabel," and a third "Sophie." But I discovered that these were only the names used by these kiddies at their play, and that their real names were Mary, Madge, and Minnie. They each took turns in being mother to the others and each administered 1 , the requisite "hidings" to the naughty ones of the family. This is a very beautiful kind of deception, and is Nature's way of training the young instinct—God's own way in fact. But the devil has shares in the company, andl this natural instinct for harmless dissimulation may sometimes develop into an unnatural desire to dissimulate to the advantage of the dissimulator,

(By 149.)

kletoru's hair-breadth escapes plainly show how gallant photographers may get left if they are not careful. The business of heroism is, frankly, one of my pet aversions, and the idea of any man carefully selecting a spot to do a theatrical trek with Laden sledges, so that a photographer may take a cinematogram, 6eems to me to be the last thing in commercial melodrama (without the music). This is l the sort of make-be-lieve that is not the make-believe referred to above. An expedition that carefully slays ponies because there is nothing to carry and takes a load of cinematographic apparatus in order that somebody may get a knighthood, doesn't appeal to me as much as do "Elma" and her dolls. I would much rather see Crackleton in the presence of a burst steam pipe in the engine room of a destroyer than on, a, definitely arranged and commercially managed trek in some place believed by people who have never been to the South Pole to be somewhere in the vicinity mentioned in the advertisements.

For instance, a person named Crack'Teton went to the North Shore —of course, I mean, the South Pole. It was very good indleed of him to go, because the ontly possible things he could gain by going were a fortune, a knighthood or two, and the great and lasting admiration of everybody who didn't know a thing about it. It is obvious to the meanest intellect that Crackleton underwent a. hardier time than the pauper who' bias been without tucker for a week —because the moving pictures which were carefully taken of Crac-

If I were a humorist I might make people laugh at the farcical side of adult make-belief. The politician, for instance, who reads another chap's stuff fiTes it off and makes the hit of his life as a "statesman ; the woman who takes a most culiar pleasure in having a 'figure believes that contour was given her for effect only and for no useful pur- . pose; the nigger who wears a tiger

skin kaross under the assumption that he is something 'better than a mere bipedi and has become one of the feliade; the parson who believes that collars and olasped hands are holiness; the doctors who cannot be dissuaded from the belief that a solemn mien and three halfpence worth of coloured water are worth anything from one to five guineas; the lawyer who insists that for the writing of a letter by an underpaid clerk demanding 10s 6d from a client's debtor he shall pay five shillings for the 'half-pennyworth of work the clerk has done; the builder who buys five pounds' worth of microbe haunted premises and sticks it up somewhere else calling it a new house; and the innumerable other makebelief persons who have so far overcome Nature as to make themselves conclude that they are following in the footsteps of the little girls who play "mothers" because they can't help it. Every single person with common intellect makes believe. And it is worth mentioning that all lunatic® make 'believe harder than ever. There are more Napoleons and Wheel-barrows, Kings of Spain and Bath Buns in lunatic asylums than

anywhere else. We don't want anybody to think that we are the common clay we ousrselives know ourselves to be.

The milk-vendor owns a "milk palace," the seller of toys a "Pantheon," no tailor was ever anything but a "merchant tailor," an inn is always a "hotel," the commonest person boasts' about bis aristocratic relatives and there are even aristocrats who have joined the Labour party and pretend a knowledge of and sympathy with the horny-hand-ed. It is all very quaint and very interesting and unexplainable.

Just think for one moment of the imitations that occur in daily life.

The hair that isn't hair, the clothgfei that mren't woman, the horsehair and buckram that are not men, the coffee that is burnt flour or pepper, the butter that is grease, the wool! that is cotton and mineral, the bottles that are thick with a failse end, the prices that are "right" in the window and wrong in the shop, the men who are friends face to face and enemies back to back. The women who kiss in one's presence and hiss away from it, the people who pray on Sunday and are ready to flay on Monday.

After all I ©hall go back and study the mothering of Elma by her little friend Sophie. There is no harm in her "make-belief,"