All such invention, moreover, since it aims at securing some more vivacious and stirring play-experience, naturally comes under the influence of the childish instinct of exaggeration. I mean by this the untaught art of vivifying and strengthening a description or representation by adding touch to touch. In the representations of play, this love of colour, of strong effect, shows itself now in a piling up of the beautiful, gorgeous, or wonderful, as when trying to act some favourite scene from fairy-story, or some grand social function, now in a bringing together of droll or pathetic incidents so as to strengthen the comic or the tragic feeling of the play-action. In all this—which has its counterpart in the first crude attempts of the art of the race to break the tight bonds of a servile imitation—we have, I believe, the germ of what in our more highly developed art we call the idealising impulse. I have, perhaps, said enough to show that children’s play is in many respects analogous to art of the simpler kind, also that it includes within itself lines of activity which represent the chief directions of art-development.[222] ----- Footnote 222: The telling of stories to other children does not, I conceive, fall under my definition of play. It is child-art properly so called. ----- Yet though art-like this play is not fully art. In play a child is too self-centred, if I may so say. The scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands, are not produced as having objective value, but rather as providing himself with a new environment. The peculiarity of all imaginative play, its puzzle for older people, is its contented privacy. The idea of a child playing as an actor is said to ‘play’ in order to delight others is a contradiction in terms. As I have remarked above, the pleasure of a child in what we call ‘dramatic’ make-believe is wholly independent of any appreciating eye. “I remember,” writes R. L. Stevenson, “as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork _even when there was none to see_.”[223] The same thing is true of concerted play. A number of children playing at being Indians, or what not, do not ‘perform’ _for_ one another. The words ‘perform,’ ‘act’ and so forth all seem to be out of place here. What really occurs in this case is a conjoint vision of a new world, a conjoint imaginative realisation of a new life. ----- Footnote 223: _Virginibus Puerisque_, ‘Child’s Play’. -----