The Soul of Play
WHY is it that everybody is taking play so seriously to-day ? We used to think of it as something permissible within limits, something which we might indulge in, something necessary even, for young people, in order that they might be the better prepared for work. ‘All work and no play,’ we used to say, ‘makes Jack a dull boy,’ — dull, of course, at his lessons, which were supposedly the real object of his existence. But despite these admissions, no one would have dreamed, a generation ago, of a National Playground Association, or of groups of sober adults, taking counsel together in prayerful spirit and with missionary zeal, to the end that they may spread abroad the gospel of play! To our fathers it would have sounded as absurd as a gospel of sweetmeats, as blasphemous as a gospel of laxity.
Jack, indeed, has been permitted (for motives of economy and of hygiene) to play, but this indulgent proverb was framed only to excuse the young. There is no hint that married women and professors, clergymen, and bankers In business suits, are also dreadfully prone to dullness if they fail to frisk and gambol on the green. Yet here we are to-day, first broadening out play till it spells recreation,— then dreaming of public recreation as the birthright of all men, women and children, — yes, even venturing since Miss Addams’s latest and greatest book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, to think of recreation as something sacred and holy.
What is it that has come over us so swiftly and so silently? Can we deliberate about play, make a serious study of it, devote time, money, and brains to working it up, without losing our sense of humor and of proportion, — without stultifying ourselves?
To answer these questions with a ‘Yes’ that has a ring to it, and so to confirm myself and others in this joyful radicalism, is the object of the following words. Would they might echo and pass on to you the deep and rallying note of the Spirit of Youth and of the City Streets — both of which I love!
I
Every human being — man, woman, and child, hero and convict, neurasthenic and deep-sea fisherman, athlete and invalid — needs the blessing of God through three, and only three, great channels: responsibility, recreation, and affection; work, play, and love. With these any life is happy, in spite of sorrow and pain, successful despite the bitterest failures. Without them a man breaks his heart, severs his conscious connection with God. If you want to keep a headstrong, fatuous youth from overreaching himself, you try to give him responsibility, recreation, and affection. If you want to put courage and aspiration into the gelatinous character of a street-walker, or the flickering mentality of a hysteric, you labor to furnish just the same trio, — work, recreation, and affection. In every case, the healing power which you want to give is real life, and real life means just these three things. The same needs are fixed for all of us — and if we can get and keep in touch with it, the same all-sufficing bounty in the supply.
Despite many exceptions, we Americans are expert (relatively expert anyway) in our understanding of work. We are the most intelligent, the most resourceful, and I believe the best satisfied workers on the planet. But we are dunces when it comes to recreation, bunglers in all matters of affection. Most of us are ‘stupid in the affections ’ as Eleanor Hallowell Abbott says so keenly in her story, The Amateur Lover. She hits us all, for we are amateur lovers of whomever or whatever we love,— except work. We know how to work. We do not know how to love, nor how to play. So like thousands of others in a penitent spirit I am striving to learn more of this long neglected life-force. Some day perhaps a conference will be called to study, to nourish, and to conserve the other great lifeforce, — to the end that we may be less ‘stupid in the affections.' Who will dare to call such a conference?
II
I have endeavored to cut up existence into these three slices, chiefly because I believe that if, for the moment, we leave work and affection out of account, everything else which we demand of life is left. Like all specialists, I am imperialistic and insist that my territory is much broader than other people suppose. We who have faith in play push forward our boundaries (a step at a time) as follows: —
First, we recognize in play a universal need, not for fooling and slackness, but for recreation, — one of the three essential foods for any healthy life, young or old.
Next, we insist that recreation is precious because it can be pronounced recreation : out of it we arc born again, and better born. We start our work with deeper-seeing eyes, we are less ‘stupid in the affections.’
What is it that art, music, literature, drama, do for us? Is it not just this same re-creating of our jaded, humdrum lives? Art carries us off into a far country, more beautiful, more poignant, more tragic, perhaps more humorous and sparkling, perhaps nobler and more heroic, than is shown us in the workshop or the home. We emerge as from a bath of intense experience, and for a few precious minutes we look upon the world as if our eyes had never seen it before, never been dulled and stupefied by repetition and inattention, never lost the child’s divine power of surprise.
Art and play, then, fulfill the same function, provide us the same refreshment. Moreover they are both their own excuse for being. Each is done for its own sake, not for some ulterior object. In work, and, to some extent, in love, we are building for the future; we are content to save, to sacrifice, and to repress, for the sake of a ‘far-off divine event.’ But in all art, including the variety called play, we anticipate heaven and attain immediate fruition; we give full rein to what is caged and leashed in us. Subject to the rules of the game, or the rules of the art, we let our energies go at full gallop. We utter ourselves like a school-house turned inside out for recess. We all know the sound!
Play and art then are essentially one; beauty lives in each, and though the beauty of athletics or of whist is not always quite obvious, it is no more obscure than the beauty of tragedy or of rhyme. Artificial they all are; an outlet for the cramped human spirit they all furnish.
Luckily for my present thesis, dancing has come so much to the fore of late years that our minds are prepared for the transition from art to athletics and play. Anybody can see without an opera-glass that dancing is at once play, art, and athletics. So are football and baseball, though I fear that some of my readers have not been regular enough in their attendance upon the exhibitions of our greatest national art to thrill with recollection as I mention the exquisite beauty of the line-drive over short-stop, or the noble dignity of the curved throw from third to first. Nothing in the art of dancers like Isadora Duncan is more beautiful than the habitual motions of ball-players as they throw, strike, catch, or slide. Of course beauty is not the whole of baseball nor of any other art. There is also significance, heroism, suspense, success, failure, response from an audience or chorus. Also there are serviceable materials, such as catgut, pigskin, horsehair, oil-paint, grease-paint, printer’s ink, voices, muscles, whereby spiritual meanings are expressed and conveyed from the artists who create to us the receptive artists in the audience.
Furthermore, we get fun and sometimes health from play and from all other arts; but if any reader thinks that athletic games exist merely or chiefly for the sake of fun, let him turn for a moment to another field of art and look over my shoulder at the face of the artist or musician while I inflict upon him that ancient, painful congratulation: ‘What a pleasure it must be to you, Mr. Genius, to produce so much beauty.’ Now, watch his bitter effort to cover with a smile his pitying contempt for your greenhorn’s ignorance. ‘Pleasure?—yes — but at what a cost!’ Art is grinding hard work, — much of the time; so is athletics; and but for this arduous element, half its attraction to the youth would be gone. He wants what is hard, fortuitous, and therefore exhilarating. Things soft and easy, like passing examinations, do not attract him.
My thesis then is this: conduct, in Matthew Arnold’s sense, cannot be three-quarters of life; for play is at least one-third, and the expression of love another third. But play, the part which concerns me now, means recreation, and this is also the essential function of art. Play then is one type or aspect of art, — a fleeting, fragile improvisation in children oftentimes, — a sternly limited, disciplined piece of construction in games like chess, football, or aviation. But like other arts it is at all times relatively complete in itself. It is not, like washing, gymnastics, or telephones, a means to some ulterior end, — a means to life. It is life itself, striving Quixotically for immediate perfection, breaking for a moment into perishable blossoms.
It must be admitted that some of the noblest and wisest men in America still think of athletics chiefly as a means to health and morality. Ex-President Eliot apparently wants the sound body as a means to mental soundness. Like other eminent educators, he thinks of athletics, and even of dancing, as a good method to build up the body and divert sexual energy from vicious outlets. That athletics and dancing often accomplish these ends is certainly true. It is also true that cows are a valuable means to leather boots, and (I believe) to gum-drops; but I doubt if that is the end and aim of the cow’s existence. Violin-playing strengthens the fingers; dancing strengthens the calves; ‘nothing like dissection,’ said Bob Sawyer (you remember), ‘to give one an appetite.’ But, God in Heaven! lives there a man with sense of humor so dead that never to himself hath said, ‘This is infernal nonsense ’?
Violin-playing strengthens the fingers. But it is hardly worth while to remark that we don’t play the violin for our health or for our finger-ends. Violin-playing also flattens, deforms, and callouses the finger-ends, but there are easier ways of attaining these results. The art is good despite these drawbacks. So football is good despite many injuries, not because it always improves health, but because it is a magnificent expression of the human spirit, a fine example of popular art.
We make a ridiculous fetish of health nowadays. Three of the very best things in life — heroism, artistic creation, and child-bearing—are usually bad for the health. To avoid heroism, creative work and child-bearing because they are bad for health would show a conception of life no more warped and distorted than that which bids us dance and be merry because forsooth it is healthy to do so. As a rule, and in the long run, athletics and games probably promote that total enhancement of life, one aspect of which is health. But temporarily, and in some cases permanently, they leave their scars upon the body —though not such scars as are ploughed into mortals by the more strenuous and dangerous activities of helping to create a new machine, a new symphony, or a new child.
Let us therefore give play, recreation, and the other popular arts, their proper place beside the ’fine arts, and avoid the vulgar error which degrades play to a medical instrument. Thus we shall help to preserve the ‘fine arts’ from dying of isolation.
Chilled by our formal respect, discouraged by our practical neglect, mortified by our sentimental petting, musician, sculptor, and painter, are dangerously out of the current of vigorous life in America to-day. Or, to put it from the other side, American life is dangerously neglectful of some forms of art as well as of most forms of science. The drama, baseball, and dancing are the popular arts of America to-day. To realize that they are genuine arts, and so to plant them close beside music, literature, painting, and sculpture, is in my opinion one of the chief tasks for all of us to-day. Such a realization will help to keep vulgarity and repetition out of popular art, and to save the fine arts from degenerating into fastidiousness or dying of super-refinement.
III
There is one more dignity, one more life-saving quality that I wish to attribute to play.
All the games and arts so far referred to are arranged to fill up such gaps as may be left in or after the working day. They come at stated hours; we leave our jobs and our homes to attend them. Doubtless this must always be so with the more heroic and permanent forms of art. We cannot play a football game or a symphony on the hearth-rug. We cannot carve statues or write novels while we wait on customers in a shop. But there are other and less celebrated forms of art which can interpenetrate and irradiate every place and every hour. With them I am concerned in the remainder of this paper.
One of the best recognized of these minor arts is humor; another is good humor, a form of good manners. I have seen a patient dying of lingering disease who by his fun and radiant good humor kept at bay the spectre of death, and in ‘the pleasant land of counterpane’ maintained to the last a successful, happy life.
When on my morning visit I would ask him to turn on his side so that I might examine his back, you would fancy from his expression that I had invited a hungry man to eat. He could have answered with no more engaging alacrity if we had proffered him the chance to step back into health. He took pleasure and gave it in each of the trifling services rendered him in the hospital routine. He beamed and thanked me for shifting a pillow as if I had given him a diamond. He chuckled over my clumsy attempt to tilt the glass feeding-tube into his mouth without forcing him to raise his head; and each morning he smoothed and folded the flap of the top sheet as if it were an act of ritual.
As we exchanged the most unpoetic information about his daily routine, the dull framework of question and answer was irradiated and spangled over with a profusion of delicate, brilliant, meaningful looks that rose and flowered silently over his listening face, or leaped from dull sentences like morning-glories on a trellis. As he went step by step down the last gray week of his life, he taught me all unconsciously as many lessons about art, beauty, and playfulness as about heroism.
One of his greatest and most naïve arts, one of the best of all his good manners, was that million-hued miracle called a smile. I can recall but a tithe of the unspoken verses, the soundless melodies that he wove into our talks by the endless improvisations of his smile, serene, wistful, mischievous, deprecating, tender, joyful, welcoming. Not a moment of his ebbing life seemed prosaic or joyless, for each had in it the foretaste or the after-taste of a smile, born without effort, and dying without pain, — birth, fruition, and end all equally and differently beautiful. Sometimes at the beginning of our talk his face and eyes were silent and only the lines of his eloquent hand spoke to me. Then, at a rousing recollection, there would break from his face a perfect chorus of meanings, each feature carrying its own strand of harmonious but varied melody.
Well — I must stop talking about him and come to the duller business of explaining what he has to do with play and art.
He exemplifies some of the minor arts through which life may be enhanced and refreshed from moment to moment, whatever its literal content, regardless of whether it is marching up hill or down dale. They say that the best crew is the one which gets its rest between every two strokes. We need the games and the arts that recreate us from moment to moment so that our souls shall never get dry, prosaic, or discouraged. Play and beauty running like a gold thread through the warp and woof of our lifefabric are surely as needful as the more concentrated and exclusive recreations. To sing (or whistle) at one’s work, to carry melodies and verses in our heads, to do things with a swing and a rhythm as some Japanese and all sailors do, is to preserve our souls from drouth. The games that we play with vocal intonations, the dramas we carry on with smile and glance and grimace, need not interrupt work. They call for no apparatus and no stage. Best of all, each of us ‘makes the team’ in these games; in these dramas each of us has ‘a speaking part. ’
I have not tried to imagine how these minor arts are to be cultivated and popularized. I should surmise that, like the fine arts and the popular arts, they are contagious, unless we are so unhappy as to be conventional and immune. But doubt less much can be done to favor their growth, — much that I have not time or ability to consider.
Let me end this paper by condensing my themes into as effective a coda as I can make.
First. There are but three prime foods for the human soul. In some form or other, each of us must get his share of these three foods from the Source of all creation. Then only are we safe or sound, for through responsibility, recreation, and affection, God can make a happy and successful life out of any material and in any environment.
Secondly. One of these foods, Recreation, — the re-vitalizing of our lives, the re-charging of our batteries, the subject of this paper, — comes to us out of the fine arts; out of the popular arts, such as athletics, dancing, and the drama; and out of the minor arts, which may be roughly grouped as manners and dress.
Thirdly. All these arts need to be more intimate with one another. In them all there is beauty and renewal of the soul. There is fun and play in them all. A material basis is presupposed for them all. Health is an uncertain by-product in them all. Being thus congenial, they need one another. Popular arts and minor arts can win dignity and strength from closer association with fine arts. The latter will gain inspiration, dash, and effectiveness when they are freed from solitary confinement and allowed to mingle about town with their less self-conscious fellow arts.
It rests with this generation to introduce these long-lost brothers each to each.