Child’s Play in Art and Science, The Story of Una Hunt

Some ideas keep turning up like lucky pennies on the sidewalk. Take this one. Across the centuries, creative endeavor in the arts and sciences has often been compared to child's play. Any number of famous individuals have remarked upon the subject. So have many people who (as the George Eliot once put it) "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." And in some cases, these "unhistoric" individuals have helped illuminate "the growing good of the world..." We submit Una Hunt as a case in point.

Child's play is exactly the reason we came across Una Hunt's narrative of growing up in America in the last years of the 19th century. As part of our research on make-believe in middle childhood, we came across Hunt's books: Una Mary, The Inner Life of a Child (1914) and Young in the "Nineties" (1927). Both add up to an extraordinary account of what may have been ordinary play for the 1880s and 90s. Born the eldest child in 1876 in Cincinnati, Una spent a great amount of time indoors and out, making up her own play. There were none of the electronic distractions our own children experience and many fewer commercial toys and games available. Una explored her own inner imagination and her natural surroundings-combining the two in play.

Una's father, Frank Wilgglesworth Clarke (1837-1941), was both instances her greatest teacher. Clarke began his career in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati (1874-83) and finished it out Chief Chemist of the U.S. Geological Survey (1883-1925) and ‘honorary curator' of minerals at the Smithsonian. He was a well-respected and dedicated scientist. Temperamentally, according to Una, he was also "a poet, and I think what most appealed to him in science was the tremendous swing its theories allowed to the imagination." He loved nature, she recalled, "both scientifically and for its beauty."

And he passed that dual love on to his daughter. Almost before she could keep up with his long strides, he took her on field trips into the woods and fields, collecting mushrooms and minerals. On one of these first trips Una experienced a communion with nature so profound that she folded it into her pretend play in an imaginary world she envisioned in her mother's Persian rug. Long after ‘My Country' moved from the rug to internal regions of her mind, it remained in important locus for Una's make-believe as well as nature-inspired interests.

We don't know if Una ever came across any speculations about child's play and adult creativity. Perhaps she-or her father-had read Isaac Newton on the subject? "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore..." that mathematician observed. Or perhaps she was familiar with the philosopher Friederich Nietzche's statement: "To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play." Or perhaps she heard that that the sculptor Brancusi once said, "Who is no longer a child is no longer an artist."

These are in large part metaphorical observations. Child's play is like mature creativity, no more. But it can be something more as well. Perhaps, just perhaps, Una came across the point of view of Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal, both scientist and artist, neurobiologist and photographer, felt that childhood play had much more of a causal impact on adult affairs. "For my part," he wrote, "I have always believed that the games of children are an absolutely essential preparation for life; thanks to them the infantile brain hastens its development, receiving, according to the hobbies preferred and the amusements carried on, a definite moral and intellectual stamp upon which the future will largely depend."

Which raises a very interesting question: Might there be some experiences in childhood play that stimulate interest in art and science both?

Una seems to have thought so.

As an adolescent, her father often took her with him to work, where she mingled with her father's colleagues. She listened to them talk of Alexander Graham Bell, a friend of her father's at work on the telephone. She went to visit the sheds of Samuel Pierpont Langley, at work on a flying machine. And some of the wondering, tinkering spirit of these and other scientists and inventors rubbed off. In her mid teens, Una designed a machine "for using the energy of the tides." Some of the neighbor boys with whom she hung out "worked out the details of my machine with the help of Uncle Averill who let them use his tools." Patching together a miniature paddle-wheel, some cogs and a leather belt, they "made [the] model work by putting it in a foot tub and sloshing the water back and forth."

And there the inventing floundered, though not Una's enthusiasm for science. "So many simple things were still unknown that I felt I might easily play my part in the advancement of Science," she wrote. Collecting with her father, she found a new variety of fern and puzzled with him over the secret of firefly light. In high school, she thought she might be a naturalist; then again an ethnologist who would illustrate her own books. In the end, however, she opted to be an artist-it was difficult for women to become scientists in those days. But that was not the only reason. "While Papa hoped he was training me to be a scientist, it was really my imagination and sense of beauty that were stimulated by his own unconscious enthusiasm; and he made me long, instead, to be a painter."

Una studied art at the Art Museum School in Boston and at the Arts Student League in Washington, D.C. She joined the Watercolor Club in that city, and exhibited her works. In later years, when writing her childhood memoirs, she wondered about the possibilities inherent in her games, hobbies and interests as a child, surmising a link between art and science: "It is curious how often science and the arts run through families, cropping out in alternate generations. I have noticed it again and again in reading biographies, which would seem to prove that really they [art and science] are of the same spirit, these two apparently opposed points of view, differing only in method and emphasis."

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It's an idea that makes sense. Art and science certainly ran together in Una's experience. Do they both run in yours?

© Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein 2010

SOURCES

"..the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

Una Hunt, Una Mary: The Inner Life of a Child. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914.

Una Hunt, Young in the "Nineties", New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927.

For Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, see wikipedia article @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wigglesworth_Clarke

and

L.M. Dennis, Biographical Memoir of Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, 1847-1931. National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, vol. XV, 1932.