RECREATION
I have said that the power to defer our pleasures is a mark of
civilization. There is another mark which, in this busy America of
ours, is often denied to the well-to-do as much as to the poor, and
that is the power to enjoy our pleasures after we have earned them.
Charity workers still underestimate the value of the power to enjoy.
They are likely to regard mere contentment as a model virtue in the
poor, whereas that discontent which has its root in more varied and
higher wants is a splendid spur to progress. Professor F. G. Peabody
quotes Lasalle in naming as one of the greatest obstructions to
progress among the poor, "The cursed habit of not wanting anything."
The power of enjoyment seems dead in many a down-trodden, sordid life,
while in many others it wastes itself upon unworthy and degrading
pleasures.
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There is a passage in one of Miss Octavia Hill's essays that throws a
flood of light on this question. She says that the love of adventure,
the restlessness so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon, makes him, under
certain conditions, the greatest of explorers and colonizers, and that
this same energy, under other conditions, helps to brutalize him.
Dissatisfied with the dull round of duties that poverty enforces upon
him, he seeks artificial excitement in the saloon and the gambling den.
It is useless to preach contentment to such a man. We must substitute
healthier excitements, other and better wants, or society will fail to
reform him. In all the forms of play, all the amusements of the
people, though some of them may seem to us coarse and degrading, there
is this same restless seeking to express what is highest and best in
man; not only to express his love of adventure, but his love of social
intercourse and his love of beauty. When we once realize that certain
vices are merely a perversion of good instincts, we have taken the
first step toward finding their cure.
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It has been said that a man's pleasures give us his true measure, and
that to change the measure is to change the man. From this point of
view, the subject of recreation is very near the heart of the friendly
visitor's relation with the poor. We may have made a conscientious
study of the family expenses and income, of the sanitary surroundings,
of the work record and diet, but we shall not know the family until we
know what gives them pleasure. One visitor says that she never feels
acquainted with a poor family until she has had a good laugh with them.
A defective sense of humor in the visitor is a great hindrance to
successful work: poor people are no fonder of dismal folk than the rest
of us. When we come to recreations, friendly visiting not only makes
large demands upon what we know, but upon what we are. Our pleasures
measure us quite as much as they measure our poor friends, and, unless
we have kept fresh our own power of enjoyment, we cannot hope to impart
this power to the poor, or to give them new and better wants.
Granting that we have them ourselves, what {130} are some of the
healthy wants that we should try to pass on to the poor? Taking the
simplest first, we should try to introduce simple games and a love of
pure fun into the family circle. I am indebted to Miss Beale of the
Boston Children's Aid Society for the following list of simple games,
so arranged as to include standing and sitting games for each evening:
FIRST EVENING. SECOND EVENING.
1. Hiding the thimble. 1. Stage coach.
2. Bean bag. 2. Buzz.
3. Dominoes. 3. Elements.
THIRD EVENING. FOURTH EVENING.
1. Hot butter blue beans. 1. How, when, and where.
2. Jack straws. 2. Counting buzz.
3. Fruit basket. 3. Magical spelling.
FIFTH EVENING. SIXTH EVENING.
1. Go-bang. 1. Tea-kettle.
2. Spot on the carpet. 2. Musical chairs.
3. Throwing lights. 3. Logomachy.
SEVENTH EVENING. EIGHTH EVENING.
1. Telling a story. 1. Pigs in clover.
2. Blowing the feather. 2. I have a rooster to sell.
3. Authors. 3. Courtesying.
In teaching such games it is best to begin with the children, but the
parents can {131} sometimes be induced to join in. Story-telling is
also an unfailing resource in our efforts to amuse the children.
But, during a good part of the year, there are many outdoor games in
which the children can be interested, and, now that the trolley cars
have brought the country so much nearer, country trips for the whole
family should be planned at frequent intervals. There are few things
more pathetic than the dread with which many of our city poor think of
the country, and to teach them country pleasures is to restore to them
a birthright of which they have been robbed. A love of plants and
window-gardening is another healthful pleasure. Mignonette, geranium,
wandering Jew, and saxifrage grow well in small spaces. To one family,
living in tenement rooms where there was no sun, a visitor gave a pot
of geranium. Later, the woman said: "We have taken it out on the roof
every day when it was pleasant to let the sun shine on it When I
couldn't take it, Mary did; and, for fear it should get stolen, we stay
and sit by it. I take the baby with me too, {132} and the baby likes
the sun as well as the flower does."
With all the added interest in outdoor exercise, and the freer,
healthier life of our time, we are slow to pass such advantages on to
the poor. The women of the family need much urging, sometimes, to get
them to take any outdoor exercise. Bicycles are becoming cheaper, and
a bicycle would be a good investment in any family where all the adults
are working at indoor occupations. If the visitor find a gymnasium not
too far away, the boys and their father should be induced to go to it.
With these added interests, a holiday will no longer be a thing to be
dreaded by the wife and mother, for there will be interesting things to
do, instead of mere loafing on the corner or at the saloon. One
visitor helped to cure a man of drinking by getting him an accordion--a
fact that has a touch of pathos, as indicating the poverty of interests
in the poor fellow's life.
The pleasures of books, music, and pictures ought to touch every life
at some point. Some aesthetic pleasures, it is true, are won only
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in its appeal. So far as books are concerned, our free libraries have
made us familiar with this view. The visitor should know the rules of
the nearest library, and should be ready to go there with some member
of the family, in case it is unknown to them. The saloon-keepers in
Ward 10, Boston, complain that the new branch of the Public Library
opened there has interfered with their business. Beside encouraging
the use of a lending library, the visitor should be ready to lend
books, newspapers, and magazines, and should be glad to borrow a book
from the family, when this will help to strengthen friendly relations.
The refining influence of good pictures is just beginning to be
recognized by the charitable. Friendly visitors cannot always organize
large loan exhibitions, such as are given in the poorer neighborhoods
of London, New York, and Boston, but they can lend a good photograph or
engraving, when they are going away, and can replace it, from time to
time, by another picture. Such loans have {134} been known, like the
Eastlake screen in Stockton's story, to revolutionize the arrangement
of the household. Then, too, a picture often conveys a lesson more
effectively than a sermon can. Mrs. Barnett tells, in "Practicable
Socialism," [1] of a loan exhibition in Whitechapel, where Oxford
students acted as guides and explained the pictures. "Mr. Schmalz's
picture of 'Forever' had one evening been beautifully explained, the
room being crowded by some of the humblest people, who received the
explanation with interest, but in silence. The picture represented a
dying girl to whom her lover had been playing his lute, until, dropping
it, he seemed to be telling her with impassioned words that his love is
stronger than death, and that, in spite of the grave and separation, he
will love her _forever_. I was standing outside the exhibition in the
half-darkness, when two girls, hatless, with one shawl between them
thrown round both their shoulders, came out. They might not be living
the worst life, but, if not, they were low down enough to be familiar
with it, and to see {135} in it only the relation between men and
women. The idea of love lasting beyond this life, making eternity
real, a spiritual bond between man and woman, had not occurred to them
until the picture with the simple story was shown them. 'Real
beautiful, ain't it all?' said one. 'Ay, fine, but that "Forever" I
did take on with that,' was the answer."
I have lived nearly all my life in a community where, during the last
twenty-five years, there has been a great change in musical taste.
George Peabody left money to found a Conservatory of Music, and a few
music lovers spent time and money to keep alive an Oratorio Society.
Later, the visits of Thomas' Orchestra and of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra added to the strength of these local musical centres; but for
many years the Peabody Conservatory was ridiculed and misunderstood,
and the Oratorio Society was usually in financial straits. I mention
these facts, because persons who are dependent upon the Conservatory
and the visiting orchestras for all the good music they know have said
to me that it must be impossible for poor people ever to appreciate
good {136} music. But for the benefactions of George Peabody, and of
Mr. Higginson (who made the Boston Orchestra possible), and of a few
others, they themselves could never have known the pleasure of enjoying
great and noble music, and, to this extent, at least, they are as
dependent as the poorest; but they are quite sure that the great
composers have no message for the poor. There is difficult music, of
course, which only the scholarly musician can appreciate; but much of
the very best music, if we once have a chance to become familiar with
it, appeals to all of us. Then the artistic temperament is not a
matter of either condition or race, as one of our young American
musicians has pointed out. Lecturing with musical illustrations to
audiences on the East Side in New York, and to audiences of negroes in
Philadelphia, he is convinced that "if good music were accessible to
the masses, it would be appreciated, and go far to elevate them."
"My boy," wailed a poor mother, "was that fond of music it took him
straight to the bad!" And no wonder, for music--apart from the
tawdriest of gospel hymn tunes--meant for {137} him the saloon and the
low concert hall. We need, to counteract such influences, plenty of
cheap concerts of good music; concerts following the plan of Theodore
Thomas with his well-to-do audiences, who were given first the best
that they liked, and then were taught gradually to like better and
better selections.
All the higher recreations encroach upon the field of education, and I
am tempted to mention, in passing, some of the most promising
educational efforts for encouraging study among the people. The
American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, which has
its headquarters at Philadelphia, has conducted very successful courses
of lectures in poor neighborhoods. The enormous attendance upon the
free evening lectures given by the Department of Education in New York
school buildings is also significant. The popularity of the
educational classes in working girls' clubs, Christian associations,
and people's institutes is another good sign. But I mention these here
merely to emphasize their importance as tools for the visitor. In
families where an ambition has been aroused, the visitor {138} should
foster it by making connection with some such educational agencies.
There is a very obvious form of snobbery that we are quick enough to
detect, the snobbery that looks down on people who have to work hard
and wear shabby clothes. But an even more dangerous form of snobbery,
because not so obvious, is the intellectual form, which claims an
exclusive right to culture, and looks down upon the simple and
unsophisticated. The fact is, that, save for a very gifted few, we are
all of us dependent upon the gifts of others for what we know and what
we enjoy. Probably there never was a neighborhood so exclusive but
many were there upon whom education, refinements, and beautiful things
were quite wasted; and there never was a neighborhood so poor but some
were there who longed for beauty, education, and a larger and fuller
life.
It will be seen in the next chapter that, when we attempt to supply the
poor with the necessities of life, our path is beset with difficulties.
But when we give them those things which, though not necessary to life,
yet refine {139} and elevate it, we can do them only unmixed good.
Gifts of books, flowers, growing plants, pictures, and simple
decorations, or, as in one instance known to me, the present of several
rolls of light-colored wall-paper to brighten a dark room--these help
to express our friendliness, and have an added value as coming from a
friend. Above all, however, we should not hesitate to share with the
poor our delight in healthful and refining pleasures, and should find
it natural to talk freely with them about our own interests.
Collateral Readings: "Parlor Games for the Wise and Otherwise," H. E.
H. "Faggots for the Fireside," Mrs. L. P. Hale. "American Girls' Own
Book of Work and Play," Mrs. Helen Campbell. "Gymnastic Games,"
published by Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. "Methods of Social
Reform," W. S. Jevons. "Picture Exhibitions in Lower New York," A. C.
Bernheimer in "Forum," Vol. XIX, pp. 610 _sq_.
[1] pp. 119 _sq_.
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