RECREATION.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The indoor occupations of civilized life imply the necessity of
providing artificial substitutes for the opportunities of physical
exercise, which men in a state of nature can find abundantly in the
course of such healthful pursuits as hunting, fishing, and primitive
agriculture. For similar reasons civilization ought to compensate the
lost chance of outdoor sports which only the favorites of fortune can
afford to combine with the exigencies of city life. To the children of
nature life is a festival; outdoor recreations, exciting sports, offer
themselves freely and frequently enough to dispense with artificial
supplements; but the dreariness of workshop life makes those
substitutes a moral as well as physical necessity. Under the influence
of unalloyed drudgery the human soul withers like a plant in a sunless
cave, and weariness of heart reacts on the body in a way analogous to
the health-undermining effect of sorrow and repeated disappointment. To
the unbiased judgment of our pagan forefathers the necessity of
providing city dwellers with opportunities for public recreation
appeared, indeed, as evident as the necessity of counteracting the
rigors of the higher latitudes with contrivances for a supply of
artificial warmth. The cities of ancient Greece had weekly and monthly
festivals, besides the yearly reunions of competing athletes and
artists, and once in four years the champions of the land met to
contest the prize of national supremacy in the presence of assembled
millions. Hostilities, even during the crisis of civil war, were
suspended to insure free access to the plains of Corinth, where the
Olympic Games were celebrated with a regularity that made their period
the basis of chronological computation for a space of nearly eight
hundred years. When Rome became the capital of the world, the yearly
disbursements for the subvention of free public recreations equaled the
tribute of a wealthy province. There were free race courses, gymnasia,
music halls, and wrestling-ring; free public baths and magnificent
amphitheaters for the exhibition of free dramatic performances,
gladiatorial combats, and curiosities of art and natural history. Every
proconsul of a foreign province was instructed to collect wild animals
and specimens of rare birds and reptiles; every triumphator devoted a
portion of his spoils to a celebration of free circenses—“circus
games”—by no means limited to the mutual slaughter of prize fighters,
but including horse races, concerts, trials of skill, and new arts. It
would be a mistake to suppose that the liberality of such
establishments offered a premium on idleness. The immense increase of
the metropolitan population justified the constant extension of that
liberality, but even after the erection of permanent amphitheaters the
vigilance of public censors discouraged mendicancy; the complaints of
wives, creditors, and landlords against habitual idlers were made the
basis of penal proceedings, and from the total appropriations for the
support of free municipal institutions the overseers of the poor
deducted considerable sums for purposes of public charity.
Nor did the citizens of the metropolis monopolize the privilege of free
public amusements. At the time of the Antonines not less than fifty
cities of Italy alone had amphitheaters of their own, and the smallest
hamlet had at least a palaestra, where the local champions met every
evening for a trial of strength and skill.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The alternation of day and night should reveal the truth that nature is
averse to permanent gloom. Sunlight is a primary condition of all
nobler life, and only ignorance or basest selfishness can doom a child
of earth to the misery of toil uncheered by the sun-rays of recreation.
For even enlightened selfishness would recognize the advantages of the
pagan plan. The passions of personal ambition burnt then as fiercely as
now, but the Roman world-conquerors thought it wiser, as well as
nobler, to share their spoils with the soldiers who had fought their
battles, with the workmen who had reared their castles, with the
neighbors who had witnessed their triumphs. The very slaves of Greece
and Rome were indulged in periodic enjoyments of all the luxuries
fortune had bestowed upon their masters; at the end of the working-day
menials and artisans forgot their toil amidst the wonders of the
amphitheater, and neither their work nor their work-givers were the
worse for it. The promise of the evening cheered the labors of the day;
minds frequently unbent by the relaxation of diverting pastimes were
less apt to break under the strain of toil, less liable to yield to the
temptation of despondency, envy, and despair.
During the last four weeks of his Egyptian campaign Napoleon relieved
the tedium of camp-life by a series of athletic games and horse-races,
and thus succeeded in sustaining the spirit of his troops under
hardships which at first threatened to demoralize even his veterans.
For similar purposes and with similar success, Marshal Saxe indulged
his men in a variety of exciting sports, and Captain Kane found
dramatic entertainments the best prophylactic against the influence of
a monotonous diet combined with an average temperature of fifty degrees
below zero. Captain Burton ascribes the longevity of the nomadic Arabs
to their habit of passing their evenings as cheerfully as their stock
of provisions and anecdotes will permit, and it is a suggestive
circumstance that the joy-loving aristocracy of medieval France could
boast a surprising number of octogenarians, and that the gay capitals
of modern Europe, with all their vices, enjoy a better chance of
longevity than the dull provincial towns.
C.—PERVERSION.
The superstition which dooms its votaries to a worship of sorrow has
for centuries treated pleasure and sin as synonymous terms. In the era
of the Cæsars the licentious passions of a large metropolis gave that
asceticism a specious pretext; but its true purpose was soon after
revealed by the suppression of rustic pastimes, of athletic sports, and
at last, even of the classic festival which for centuries had assembled
the champions of the Mediterranean nations on the isthmus of Corinth.
With a similar rancor of bigoted intolerance the Puritans suppressed
the sports of “merry old England,” and their fanatical protests against
the most harmless amusements would be utterly incomprehensible if the
secret of Christian asceticism had not been unriddled by the study of
the Buddhistic parent-dogma. The doctrine which the apostle of Galilee
thought it wisest to veil in parables and metaphors, the Indian messiah
of anti-naturalism reveals in its ghastly nakedness as an attempt to
wean the hearts of mankind from their earth-born loves and reconcile
them to the alternative of annihilation—“Nirvana”—the only refuge from
the delusions of a life outweighing a single joy by a hundred sorrows.
Not life only, but the very instincts of life were to be suppressed, to
prevent their revival in new forms of re-birth; and in pursuit of that
plan the prophet of Nepaul does not hesitate to warn his disciples
against sleeping twice under the same tree, to lessen the chance of
undue fondness for any earthly object whatever. The indulgements of
life-endearing desires, that creed denounced as the height of folly and
recommended absolute abstinence from physical enjoyments as the
shortest path to the goal of redemption. In its practical consequences,
if not in its theoretical significances, the same principle asserts
itself in the doctrine of the New Testament, and justified the dread of
the life-loving pagans in realizing the stealthy growth of the Galilean
church, and anticipating the ultimate consequences of that gospel of
renunciation whose ideal of perfection was the other-worldliness of an
earth-despising fanatic. More or less consciously, the suppression of
earthly desires has always been pursued as the chief aim of Christian
dogmatism; the “world” has ever been the antithesis of the Christian
kingdom of God, the “flesh” the irreconcilable antagonist of the
regenerate soul. Hence that rancorous fury against the “worldliness” of
naturalism, against the pagan worship of joy, against the modern
revivals of that worship. Hence the grief of those “whining saints who
groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green;” hence the crusade
against Easter-fires, May-poles, foot-races, country excursions,
round-dances, and picnics; hence the anathemas against the athletic
sports of ancient Greece and the entertainments of the modern theater.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Wherever the fanatics of the Galilean church have trampled the flowers
of earth, the wasted gardens have been covered with a rank thicket of
weeds. Outlawed freedom has given way to the caprice of despots and the
license of crime; outraged common sense has yielded to the vagaries of
superstition; the suppression of healthful recreation has avenged
itself in the riots of secret vice. The history of alcoholism proves
that every revival of asceticism has been followed by an increase of
intemperance, as inevitably as the obstruction of a natural river-bed
would be followed by an inundation. When the convent-slaves of the
Middle Ages had been deprived of every chance of devoting a leisure
hour to more healthful recreations, neither the rigor of their vows nor
the bigotry of their creed could prevent them from drowning their
misery in wine. When the Puritans of the seventeenth century had turned
Scotland into an ecclesiastic penitentiary, the burghers of the
Sabbath-stricken towns sought refuge in the dreamland of intoxication.
The experience of many centuries has, indeed, forced the priesthood of
southern Europe to tolerate Sunday recreations as a minor evil. In
Spain the bull-rings of the larger cities open every Sunday at 2 P.M.
In Italy the patronage of Sunday excursions and Sunday theaters is
limited only by the financial resources of their patrons. In France
Sunday is by large odds the gayest day in the week. In the large cities
of Islam the muftis connive at Sunday dances and Sunday horse-races;
and as a consequence a much less pardonable abuse of holidays is far
rarer in southern Europe than in the cities of the Sabbatarian north,
the consumption of Sunday intoxicants being larger in Great Britain
than in France, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and Italy taken together.
Climatic causes may have their share in effecting that difference;
another cause was revealed when the followers of Ibn Hanbal attempted
to enforce the asceticism of their master upon the citizens of Bagdad.
Ibn Hanbal, the Mohammedan Hudibras, used to travel from village to
village, with a horde of bigots, breaking up dance-houses, upsetting
the tables of the confectionery pedlers, pelting flower-girls, and
thrashing musicians, and when the revolt of a provincial city resulted
in the death of the “reformer,” his fanatical followers assembled their
fellow-converts from all parts of the country, and raided town after
town, till they at last forced their way into the capital of the
caliphate. The recklessness of their zeal overcame all resistance, but
the completeness of their triumph led to a rather unexpected result.
Every play-house of the metropolis was not only closed, but utterly
demolished; musicians were jailed; dance-girls were left to choose
between instant flight and crucifixion; showmen were banished from all
public streets; but the dwellings of private citizens were less easy to
control, and those private citizens before long evinced a passionate
and ever-increasing fondness for intoxicating drinks. Elders of the
mosque were seen wallowing in their gutters, howling blasphemies that
would have appalled the heart of the toughest Giaour; dignitaries of
the green turban staggered along under the weight of a wine-skin, or
waltzed about in imitation of the exiled ballet performers. The
Hanbalites convoked tri-weekly, and at last daily, prayer-meetings, but
things went from bad to worse, till a counter-revolution finally
restored the authority of the old city government, and the flight of
the fanatics was attended with a prompt decrease both of spiritual and
spirituous excesses.
E.—REFORM.
The predictions of our latter-day augurs would seem to indicate that
the civilization of the Caucasian race is drifting toward Socialism;
but a modern philosopher reminds us that “a reform, however great, is
apt to come out in a different shape from that predicted by the
reformers.” The citizens of the coming republic will probably waive
their claim to free government lunch-houses and similar “establishments
for preventing the natural penalties of idleness,” but they will most
decidedly protest against government interference with the legitimate
rewards of industry. Even now, few sane persons can realize the degree
of ignorance that enabled the clergy of the Middle Ages to fatten on
the proceeds of witchcraft trials and heretic hunts, and the time may
be near when our children will find it difficult to conceive the degree
of infatuation that could induce their forefathers to sacrifice their
weekly leisure-day at the bidding of brainless and heartless bigots.
Drudgery will perhaps continue the hard task-master of the
working-week; but the Sundays of the future will be as free as the
light of their sun.