THE EXTINCTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE
"We may outrun,
By violent swiftness, that which we run at,
And lose by over-running."
_Shakespeare._
I
How now, in detail, does the Feminist creed lend itself to the
biological developments and indications of Nature described in the last
chapter?
Unfortunately, as already intimated, it ignores, violently combats at
every turn, and only too frequently wholly frustrates them.
Feminist leaders have shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to
biological and to sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the
intrinsic and eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood--and more
particularly Motherhood--they have made, all along the line, not for the
true emancipation of woman but for her commercialisation, merely.
The economic viewpoint has obsessed them wholly. Not to free woman from
disabilities under which her womanhood, her wifehood, and her motherhood
were suffering, but to convert her powers into industrial and marketable
commodities has been the aim. That higher ideals are bound up with
economics, is true. The rights of honest self-support and adequate wage,
leading to kindlier, healthier and happier life-conditions, are, by
improving constitution and character, important assets on the side of
Evolution. But by far the most urgent and important consideration in
economics, as these affect women, is the fundamental biological
principle that, because their greatest of all values lie in their
evolutionary and racial endowments, rather than in their concrete and
commercial efficiencies, the sex requires and is entitled to such more
lenient and privileged social and industrial adjustments as admit of due
quota of its vital resources, physical and mental, remaining conserved
in the potential. In place of these being differentiated and expended to
the degree natural to man, and exacted of him by his prescribed role in
progress.
In direct and violent opposition to Nature, the Feminist system does
everything possible, however, to frustrate that normal phase of arrest
along lines of concrete development whereon the higher evolution of
woman--and in woman, of the Race--depends. Just at the age when Nature
locks the door upon her constitutional resources, for the purpose of
evolving these to higher organisation, the schools and industries do a
strenuous best to keep the door forcibly open, and to wrest the
resources from the storehouse of potential. With a view to fitting woman
to compete with the male, in whom such arrest of individuation, in the
racial interests, is occurring to vastly less degree.
In all ways, the natural languors and disabilities of the girl's
adolescent phase are vigorously combated. The unfortunate young
developing creature is exhorted, spurred--compelled by rigid rule,
indeed (whatsoever her physiological disabilities), to take her part in
strenuous exertions; hard drill, cricket, hockey, football; with the aim
of developing masculine muscles where feminine muscles should be. At the
same time, her brain is forced, crammed and exploited by perpetual
mental tasks; by competitive examinations, or by some or another strain
of specialism, intellectual or industrial. The result is that she is
forcibly precluded from evolving to those higher, subtler modes of body
and of mind, which are the essence, the charm and the inspiration of
the sex; and the model of the Race to be.
Our school-girls and work-girls, in whose already impoverished, or
degenerate, bodies this battle for their resources between Nature and
Culture (or Industrialism) is waged--the one to make them normal, the
other to make them abnormal--are all more or less in states of disease;
are chlorotic, anaemic, neurotic, dyspeptic, hysterical; or suffer from
ailments special to their sex. While some are sturdy and florid and
buxom (prematurely middle-aged), more are neurasthenic and attenuated,
ill-nourished, spectacled, breastless, hipless, pale or pimply; are
restless, emotionless, joyless, cynical, discontented. In but few
are found the thrill and joy, the pulse and spring and natural
enthusiasms of healthy, happy young creatures in the dawn and grace of
maidenhood. Such as are charming and pretty possess these natural
woman-characteristics only too often in fragile and weed-like
form. The constitutional degeneracy of some shows in precocious
sex-development--all precocity being degeneracy, development too
rapid and exhaustive, and entailing therefore flimsy and unstable
tissue-cells, faulty functioning and premature decline.
A proportion, one is thankful to say, are normal and healthful and
charming, endowed with the attributes and graces, personal and mental,
for which Nature is shaping in the sex. Others are, biologically
speaking, mere lamentable "spoiled copies"; amazons of the hockey,
football, tennis or hunting-fields, only just distinguishable in general
characteristics from the male, and lacking more or less wholly in
womanly psychology and aptitude, and in all the fairer and nobler
attributes of their sex. Still others, although handsome and finely
female of physique, are "splendidly null" in respect of the emotions,
and of the other subtler and psychical developments of natural
womanhood.
The Greeks, with their intuitive apprehension, pourtrayed both Athene,
goddess of Intellect, and Artemis, goddess of Sports, as sexless,
passionless, unwedded and childless; scorners of men, devoid of all
womanly impulse and sentiment. (Strangely enough, as though anticipating
the argument of this book, Athene is described as having sprung, in full
life, from her father's brain. While Scripture tells of Eve derived from
Adam's side.)
In _The New System of Gynaecology_, the latest and most authoritative
treatise by eminent specialists in women's diseases, the following
passage occurs, under heading, "Derangement of the Sex-Characteristics":
"It is our belief that the more truly feminine a woman is, psychically
and physically, in instinct and in performance, so much the more
complete and normal will be the functions of her mind and body. We have
already alluded to inverted instincts. And in the perversion of
functions and characteristics (physical phenomena) we may observe all
grades from almost complete masculinity in appearance, _with the
disappearance of the feminine functions_, to the lesser degrees of
disordered function and characteristics."
II
Nature is so complex, yet so subtly consistent in her workings, that
the neuter-state shows in the faces of many of our women as the
typical look of the mule--cross between horse and ass, a creature
incapable of reproduction. In the eyes of young women of strenuous
pursuits--academic, industrial, or athletic, this characteristic sterile
glint, part boldness, part antagonism, is common.
The normal condition of woman is attended by the normal expression of
woman. The womanly biology entails the womanly psychology. And modesty
is one of the natural female secondary Sex-characteristics, attendant
upon healthy structural development and function. The hard, bold
glance--the "mule"-look--of some masculine girls and women by no means
necessarily implies conscious immodesty. It is mainly biological and
subconscious; sign of an attribute missing, as result of deterioration
of the function in which the attribute is normally rooted.
With reduced values of that Reproductive function it is modesty's
province to defend, the attribute of modesty declines.
The girls and women of old Sparta, as ignorant of biology as women are
to-day, made a cult of athletics--good and zealous, but mistaken
patriots!--for the express purpose of mothering a fine, athletic race.
These high and praiseworthy aims failed signally. For Sparta, with all
her zeal of racial improvement (so drastic in its methods that she
killed her weakly girl-infants) fell upon decline and degeneracy. Noble
civilisation that she had been, she died in decadent corruption.
And showing the relation between athletic pursuits and extinction of
womanly qualities, the Spartan cult of Maleness led to such decay of
modesty that it became the custom for women to run with the men in The
Games, naked as they. A custom that sprang less from actual immodesty
than from lapse of that normal Sex-specialisation, whence arises the
normal sex-consciousness which engenders wholesome reserve between the
sexes. Modern developments of a similar extinction of womanly modesty
are seen in the conduct of latter-day girls and women in public parks
and elsewhere; in the unseemly familiarities of mixed bathing; in the
decadent, unduly-familiar or frankly indecent dances, and the frankly
indecent modes of dress just now in vogue. As too in that so-called
"candour" which permits women of culture to talk openly of the most
intimate physiological functions, and, without sense of shame, to
discuss across the dinner-table prurient scandals and other unsavoury
topics.
The mystery of the creative powers of Life occulted in her has ever
invested woman, for man, with glamour and reverence, enhancing a
thousandfold her charm and appeal to his chivalry and tenderness. In
stripping herself of womanly reserve and dignity, alike in demeanour and
dress, she shatters her mystery for him and forfeits her supremest claim
upon his manhood; while robbing him of his fairest illusions and most
inspiring incentives.
III
In cases of sex-transformation in the lower creatures, the lapse to a
masculine type is found to be accompanied by atrophy of reproductive
glands. As recorded in a previous chapter, investigations by Roerig show
that when the ovaries of female deer atrophy from any cause, male
antlers develop.
Mannish sex-characteristics in women are as abnormal and as unnatural,
and arise from a similar cause as do male antlers in female deer.
With the wane of parental power, normal to middle-age, there occurs a
like--but in such case a natural--atrophy of glands. And this it is that
causes some women to acquire masculine traits at this epoch.
Degrees, greater or less, of such a decline (natural to middle-aged
women) are being artificially, and prematurely, induced in our girls and
young women. Some of them become actually sterilised, and are wholly
incapable of reproduction. The greater number are only partially
sterilised. They are capable still of being mothers. But the function,
in place of being the crown and the fulfilment of their natures, is a
disability; is more or less of a morbid process, indeed. And their
offspring are more or less deteriorate. Not a few, after
marriage--called upon to fulfil functions the resources whereof have
been sapped by other and abnormal activities--become invalids; a number
require surgical treatment.
Non-development, similar atrophy, or other deterioration of the mammary
glands precludes the vast majority of our young mothers from nourishing
their babes--a deplorable injury to these as well as to the mothers
themselves; physical and psychical function being closely and subtly
allied.
Women who fence or play hockey and other rough games during girlhood,
become, owing to such degenerative atrophy, incapacitated for lactation.
The following is an interesting example of the manner in which cruder
and lower-grade power may be increased at the cost of higher faculties.
A patient told me that, having been naturally a poor walker--two miles
having been her limit--she had determined to train herself out of this
which she regarded as an infirmity. Accordingly, by persistent practice,
she succeeded in raising her walking-power to ten miles daily. She
mentioned incidentally--seeing no relation of cause and effect--that,
for several years (the years during which her walking-powers had been
increasing) _she had become progressively deaf_.
That she had been, in point of fact, sapping the potential of the
complex, invaluable faculty of hearing, in order to equip her
leg-muscles, was confirmed for me a few weeks later, when I
read of a number of cyclists, who, after one of those deplorable
pacing-exhibitions common to-day, came in, one and all, stone deaf: a
consequence of nervous strain. The deafness in these cases passed off
with rest. But it is easy to understand that from such temporary
functional depletions frequently recurring, permanent structural
deterioration must result inevitably. Thus it is that over-use, in
sports and games, of the muscles of shoulder and chest, occasions
atrophy of mammary glands.
By no other way than by artificially inducing in them a premature
(partial) climacteric, by perverting their young organisations to the
quasi-masculine type of the middle-aged woman, and thereby releasing,
for available output, power which should have remained conserved for
many years in organisation, can women be fitted for masculine pursuits.
And such sterilisation, where it is not producing actually diseased and
degenerate offspring, is producing a pitiful race of pallid and
enfeebled babes and children; dyspeptic and spectacled,
adenoid-afflicted, unchildlike and generally deteriorate.
That other factors contribute to the wave of Racial decline now menacing
our modern civilisations, great and small, is true. Yet mothers of fine
vital potential are able to counteract and to minimise the effects of
constitutional disease in the other parent to degrees but little
realised. Because such mothers are so lamentably rare.
IV
It is the natural release of vital forces, consequent upon the normal
wane of mother-power at middle-age, that has been mainly responsible for
the errors of the Woman's Movement.
In all its aims and methods it has been essentially a Middle-aged
Woman's movement. There are no young ideals in it; no concessions to
youth, to love, to graciousness or sentiment; none to wifehood or to
motherhood. It has been, for the most part, a grim, dour striving after
neuter standards, neuter models, neuter efficiencies, neuter lives and
neuter recompenses.
Identity of brain and muscle, of aims and claims, of games and
avocations; equal rights and equal work and equal pay have been the
watchwords of its propaganda. "Fair play and no privileges!" its
promoters rigorously demand for these poor weedy girl-neurotics who,
beyond all else, require industrial concessions and the human clemency
of adequate rest and leisure, to allow of normal and healthful
development of their growing brains and bodies.
Pioneered by strenuous, middle-aged women--with the best intentions, be
it said--Feminists have adopted the fatal policy of sternly impressing
the model of their own quasi-masculine middle-age as the standard of
youthful development. Without, for a moment, suspecting that such
wresting of male energies and efficiencies from its young women-victims
has inevitably entailed upon them degrees of that climacteric of
womanhood which is the herald of decline. On the contrary, this
middle-aged, quasi-masculine state, because of its release of power for
sterner purposes, has been hailed as a triumph of Emancipation and of
higher education; proof positive that woman is not man--only because she
has lacked opportunity to become so.
In point of fact, these unfortunate young creatures have been, and are
being all the while ever further despoiled of their youth, of their sex,
and their fair heritage of life and happiness, of function and of
faculty. And the Race has been robbed of priceless living wealth in
human health and capability.
The breasts of these despoiled have shrunk, in place of blossoming.
There are no founts of altruistic life in them. Never will they be
capable of nurturing babes, or of contributing their mysterious due to
psychical attribute. The pelvis remains narrow and puerile. Never can it
serve as hostel for a babe of normal, healthful type.
In the vast majority of modern girls and women, the reproductive organs
are structurally immature or functionally defective.
Dr. Gaillard Thomas, an eminent American gynaecologist, estimated, some
years since, that only about 4 per cent. of American women proper were
physiologically fitted to become wives and mothers.
The United States have been and are all the while deriving fresh influx
of vigour and vitality in stock, from the continuous immigration of
simpler and more vitalised peoples. But American women proper have never
recovered from the strain and hardships of adaptation to a new
environment, which settlers in alien and undeveloped countries
necessarily encounter; the deteriorative influences whereof are shown in
constitutional impoverishment of the parent-stock. This is true, as
well, of our Colonial kin. Not only the strain of acclimatisation, but
too the hard and rough life-conditions women have to cope with in
undeveloped lands are responsible for the constitutionally-debilitated,
or, on the other hand, for the rawer and less highly-organised racial
types found in new settlements.
In the United States, moreover, the standards of culture and of training
are pre-eminently artificial. Democratic sentiment and material
prosperity induce persons of working-class biological organisation to
over-tax their children's brains and constitutions by forcing these to
the educational standards and culture of stock that has evolved, by
generations of higher nurture, to higher evolutionary grades. The
"newly-rich," eager for their families to profit (as they regard it) by
opportunities denied themselves, invariably commit this radical error of
over-estimating academic education and social accomplishment. They fail
to realise that one can no more attain culture than one can acquire
breeding in a single generation. It takes _three_ generations of
culture--of comparative ease and freedom from the strain of industrial
labour and living--to evolve the crude muscular arm of a working woman
into the shapely, refined arm of a gentlewoman. And so it must be with
brains. In nineteen cases out of twenty, a 'Varsity education serves as
irreparable injury rather than as benefit to a working-class youth,
depleting health or warping character as it inevitably does.
The strain of living above the evolutionary level is exhaustive and
harmful, physically and mentally, both to individuals and to stock. The
prudence of apportioning education to the grade of evolutionary
development is strikingly shown in the cases of negroes, who, when
over-taxed by the education normal to white races, not seldom become
blind or consumptive. And always the morale deteriorates. The forcing
upon our own labouring-classes of an education above that suited to
their natural powers has contributed largely to the constitutional
deterioration and the neurasthenia common among them to-day.
One of the factors of modern Labour-unrest, indeed, is the physical
unfitness of debilitated and neurotic working-men to cope capably and
cheerfully with the tasks of earlier and sturdier generations.
The urgent need of all our over-civilised races is not more education
but more _native faculty_.
Every form of disease and degeneracy, physical and mental, is rampant. A
well-known authority on brain-diseases warns us that if mental
defectiveness continues to increase at its present rapid pace, soon we
shall be unable to support the asylums required to accommodate and
segregate the unfortunate victims thereof. They must remain at large--to
perpetuate and multiply indefinitely their terrible afflictions.
Yet how is it possible that such weedy, half-sterilised creatures as are
so many of our modern mothers, should bear sound and sane and vigorous
offspring?
Inherited debilitation and defect are further aggravated by present-day
educational methods.
Our modern rendering of the training of the young is the _straining_ of
the young.
Developing creatures should never be allowed to over-use function or
faculty. Because to over-tire an immature faculty is to deplete its
vital resources of development. Nor should young developing creatures be
permitted to do anything too strenuously or for too long a time.
Narrowness and mental warp result inevitably from too early and too long
periods of concentration in one direction, of the ductile shaping brain.
In defiance, nevertheless, of this first principle of rearing, boys and
girls, after the morning's brain-work, are kept at strenuous games for
hours in succession.
Body and mind, after having been cramped between the covers of
text-books, now are cramped within the narrow rules and rigid form of
such miscalled "games," supervised by over-keen experts--the whole
business exacting sustained muscular tension, temperamental excitement
and competitive nervous strain. The powers are stretched to win some
goal, in place of being unbent in leisure and in pleasure. True play is
spontaneous enjoyment of the moment, not fierce concentration upon
goals. This latter induces excitement, which may be pleasurable, but it
entails its tax in reactionary exhaustion. Because of the spur of
competition in them, sports and games, as now rendered, act as powerful
nerve-stimulants that deplete and waste the vital powers.
School-boys and school-girls live, for the most part, in alternating
states of high tension in sports and reactionary languors from the heart
and nervous strain resulting therefrom.
Since sports and athletics became a cult, heart-diseases have increased
by 50 _per cent._ We complain that our young men are limp and
unintelligent, lacking in initiative and enterprise. Apart from the
serious circumstance that, mentally, they have been trained for
cricket, not for life, most of them (to employ their own phrase) have
"gone stale" in heart and brain, in consequence of forced athletics,
long before they come to the momentous business of living. Even their
muscles have wasted, in place of developing. With the result that
instead of being finely-built and graceful, numbers of our youths are
stiff, stoop-shouldered and abnormally attenuated.
Education should aim at keeping young persons fresh and unstrained;
charged with vital energies for growth of mind and body, filled with
zest and enthusiasm for the career before them.
Everywhere, mothers deplore bitterly that they can obtain neither duty,
obedience, nor affection from their girls. Many will not mend their
clothes even; refuse so slight a domestic concession as to arrange
flowers for the home. Lacking the morbid excitement of competitive rough
games, an abnormal craving for which has been artificially created, and
home-tastes extinguished, at school, modern girls are bored and
disaffected save when indulging in sports or in other excitements. The
more delicate, sympathetic, and humanising amenities have no appeal for
them.
All the subtler, vital and inspiring impulses of natural womanhood have
been rudely smothered in tussles of big muscles, in sensational crazes
for making hockey-goals, and similar crude aims, quite alien to natural
girlhood. The recurring stimulus of such, in addition to over-developing
male muscles and proclivities in them, creates both the habit and the
craving for excitement; effects pernicious and demoralising as are those
of all habitual strong nerve-excitants.
It is impossible to exaggerate the cumulative effect of habit upon
disposition--and this particularly upon the plastic, shaping
dispositions of young girls.
Youth is at the mercy of its pastors and its masters, to spoil or to
foster its best growth. We feed the bodies and cram the brains of our
young people, while, in sending them away from the home which is their
natural environment, we starve and dwarf their emotions and affections;
giving these nothing to evoke, nothing to nurture them. The abnormal
cold-heartedness and self-absorption latter-day mothers bewail in their
girls are the inevitable outcome of their unnatural upbringing.
The spectacle of young women, with set jaws, eyes strained tensely on a
ball, a fierce battle-look gripping their features, their hands
clutching some or other implement, their arms engaged in striking and
beating, their legs disposed in coarse ungainly attitudes, is an
object-lesson in all that is ugly in action and unwomanly in mode. The
so-called "tennis-grin," which on many women's faces does duty for
smile, shows how the muscular tension of forceful effort permanently
mars higher attribute. So too, the proverbial quarrelsomeness of
tennis-playing women results from the combative habit of mind. Light and
exhilarating, in place of strenuous competitive exercises, enable girls
to develop their womanhood in healthy structure, efficient function, and
beauty of body and mind. Dancing--the poetry of motion--particularly
conduces to health and to grace. True dancing, that is, not the
acrobatics of the professional dancer, which result in coarsened ugly
limbs and stilted action.
There is a well-known Girls college which makes pre-eminently for the
cult of Mannishness.
And here are seen, absorbed in fierce contest during the exhausting heat
of summer afternoons, grim-visaged maidens of sinewy build, hard and
tough and set as working-women in the forties; some with brawny throats,
square shoulders and stern loins that would do credit to a prize-ring.
All of which masculine developments are stigmata of abnormal
Sex-transformation precisely similar in origin to male antlers in
female-deer; namely, deterioration of important sex-glands, with
consequent obliteration of the secondary Sex-characteristics arising
normally out of the functional efficiency of these.
It has been said that the "hardening" process for children succeeds in
rearing sturdy families, by killing off those of more delicate (and
higher) organisation. And this and other such latter-day schools earn a
reputation for rearing amazons, by so breaking the health and
constitution of their more delicately-constituted members that these are
compelled to withdraw. Following the rule that healthy bodies rebel in
terms of illness against deteriorative conditions, it is the normal and
healthfully-constituted girls who fail beneath such injurious strain.
While organisations less sound of constitutional morale, in place of
sustaining their typal ideals, conform to these deteriorative methods,
and degenerate from higher to lower-grade standards of structure and
function. Precisely as happens to minds when exposed to demoralising
influences.
And to what end is it all? The training of modern young persons should
fit them for Twentieth-Century existence in all its varied, complex and
psychical developments. Yet now-a-days we train our girls as though
their destiny were carpet-beating or the forge, rather than the higher
human amenities. It is not surprising, therefore, that they frequently
play hockey with the higher amenities. So impressionable and mimetic the
sex is, and such its bent toward extremes, that women trained to Sports
comport themselves in after-life as though playing a competitive game. A
mental warp which has been one of the sources of latter-day
strenuousness, as too of that fierce social rivalry which is wrecking
older and fairer ideals and methods of friendship and hospitality.
Over-development of the large and cruder muscles dwarfs those smaller
and more delicate ones which adapt to the softer and subtler departments
of faculty. And while despoiling these smaller muscles which subtend
gentle and delicate artistries, the crude larger ones, hypertrophied by
athletic activities, become alike a burden and a curse to their
possessor. Because not only is their upkeep a continual and a
superfluous tax upon her vital powers, but their hunger for continued
function in further such crude activities afflicts her with turbulent
impulses, for which the more civilised vocations supply no scope. The
militant Feminist movement was as much an explosion of suppressed
muscularity in young women deprived of other outlet for accumulated
muscle-steam, as it was an ebullition of masculine mentality on the part
of its leaders.
Hysteria and other neuroses, obsessing hobbies and crazes, are, more
often than not, morbid and distressing consequences of habits acquired
at school and college, of developing abnormal high-pressures of muscular
and nervous energy. Masculine war-occupations have similarly evoked male
muscularity and mentality in women. So that--War over--they find it
well-nigh unendurable to return to the more refined and humanising
womanly employments of their pre-war days. While on the other hand,
employers are bewailing the rough and coarsened manners, personality and
speech, as too the clumsy movements and ineptitudes of domestic
servants, nurses and others, de-sexed by War-work in respect of the
higher qualities and efficiencies of their sex. Many of these sturdy
motor-drivers, lusty W.A.A.Cs. and strapping Land-girls have lost all
taste as well as aptitude for the finer arts of life and of the home.
Efficient in the handling of plough or gun or lorry, woe to the hapless
babe or invalid subjected to their hard, forceful touch!
V
Language is scarcely emphatic enough to characterise the painful (and
insane) exhibitions of Public-school and College "Sports," in which boys
and young men, whose vital forces are needed beyond all things for
development, may be seen with faces whereon is neither joy of action nor
pride of achievement, but only the pained rigidity of supreme heart and
nervous strain, as they strive for goals that are no test of true
physical fitness, but, on the contrary, prove physical lopsidedness.
In confirmation whereof is the fact that many such athletes die young,
and die suddenly. Or they live the years when men should be still in
their prime--valetudinarian and hypochondriac. The secret of health and
nervous power is the constitutional capacity to _store reserves_ of
vital energy, for expenditure as required. Exhausting sports in youth
engender habits of _over-expenditure_ thereof.
Trials of skill and of strength are admirable spurs to development and
self-discipline. But these should make for excellence in that fine poise
of Mind and Muscle which is the hall-mark of human achievement, not for
extremes of crude brute-force (muscle being the lowest grade of human
powers) which strain the living mechanism; and, straining, leave
inevitably weak and warped links, when not actually snapped ones
therein. The human body is a marvellous and delicate psychological
instrument, not a mere muscular implement. When the hearts of boys are
"sounded" after competitive sports, "murmurs" are heard; showing
valvular incompetency. Temporary in the majority of cases, but none the
less indicative of gravely-weakened states which can but permanently
injure the fine-spun valvular apparatus. "Dilated hearts" caused numbers
of our "fine young athletes" to be rejected as unfit for military duty.
Young men "in training" suffer from albuminuria, showing serious
derangement of the kidney-function; derangement which inevitably entails
such permanent structural deterioration as lapses readily, in after
years, to grave disease.
The fallacy that the excitement of games distracts the attention of
youth from the processes of sex-development has been disproved. While
all athletic boys are not vicious, it is now recognised that the most
vicious are the athletic. The languors of body and mind reactionary upon
the exciting strain of games are unwholesome languors; and breed
unwholesome self-absorptions. A fresh and active imagination, to keep
the mind interested at every turn, is the best of all safeguards. It is
in the imagination, moreover, that higher moral and ideals arise.
It has been said that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the
playing-fields of Eton." It was far more likely won in the pages of
_Jack the Giant Killer_! Because in war, as in most other things, moral
is more potent than muscle. There is, it is true, a moral of Games. But
its outlook and its application are both contracted of range and
artificial of form. Games are useful in forming habits and in exercising
faculties of co-operation in concerted action. But being played in
company with others, and played in obedience to rule and regulation,
they allow no scope for the development of individualism in mind or
character, initiative or resource--outside the narrow boundaries of
cricket-pitch or football field.
By perpetual absorption of the powers in the movements of a ball, the
mind becomes contracted and set in puerile mould, during years when it
should be germinating and expanding in response to the countless varied
and inspiring stimuli and factors of natural environment. Over-keenness
in sports destroys the sense of beauty, love of art and love of Nature.
The grey matter of the brain--the medium of Mind--wherein arise
imagination, inspiration and those noble talents and the noble dreams of
enterprise which make for noble lives--this highest and most complex of
the human tissue-cells becomes starved and atrophied from continued
waste of brain-resources by those lower-grade cerebral motor-tracts
which control and energise the muscles.
The popular impression, both lay and medical, that muscular exertion
supplies rest to the brain and recuperation to the nervous system, is a
sad delusion. One cannot raise a finger without expending brain and
nervous force, the muscles being implements by way of which the brain
transforms purpose into action--being _brain_-implements therefore. So
that brains--and particularly young brains--unduly taxed by muscular
activities are robbed of power to develop or to function in their
intellectual and other higher departments.
If my hypothesis be true, and the right side of the body with its allied
brain-hemisphere is the executive and expenditure side, while the left
is the Life and asset side, it is obvious that excessive brain-work, or
Sports, for which the executive power is supplied by this right side and
its allied brain half, must necessarily deplete and exhaust the left
side, which is the power-house and reservoir of Life and Mind whence the
executive half derives its mental, nervous and vital potential.
It goes without saying that such careful economy of the powers is
superfluous in truly healthful and normally vigorous males. But
latter-day stock has been, for the most part, so far depleted by
generations of neglect of natural law as to require the strictest
husbandry of its vital expenditure, in order to apportion its means to
the best all-round advantage.
Object-lessons in such extremes of athleticism as destroy the normal
balance of the counter-poising Sex-traits have been supplied by War.
The faces--as the natures--of some of our soldiers have become crude,
coarse and deteriorate in intelligence, others abnormally harsh and
fierce; the softer human qualities having been trampled out of them by
stress of militarism, some to degrees of brutalisation and criminality,
even. While a very great number show lined and haggard from heart or
nervous strain.