Recreation

IT would be a blessed relief to drop all talk of school for a while, — we will admit that, — and that is what, we will do. After all, schools should not become obsessions. If we had sense enough, we could get on very well without them. They are not essentials. Something happened to make them seem so. It was a man with a book. He ‘put it over’ the man who had no book. He made him believe that you could not be wise and happy unless you knew what was in his book. He persuaded the man with no book, but with plenty of brains and knowledge of his craft, to hire him to teach. He talked to him about religion and a great many things that were exceedingly interesting, and he finally got himself entrusted with the instruction of his children. And now the man who knows all about books, and is called a ‘ professional ’ man, who gives his directions for doing things in a very autocratic way, is much more honored than the man who knows about materials and tools, who is a craftsman. Esau has sold his birthright to Jacob.

But do not let us deceive ourselves for a single minute. The craftsman is likely to be the better man. The fact that fame remembers him with no familiar name must not deceive anybody. And the reason why he is likely to be a better man, is that he is closer to nature. He is sure to be a better man if he can do one thing, namely, interpret his work in terms of spirit; or, in other words, have the right idea about himself, his life, and his creations. There, he sometimes needs the man with the book, but not always. Now, when it comes to craftsmanship, as between the book-man and the hand-man, both of whom you say are craftsmen after all, listen to this statement of Stevenson’s: ‘If any of us folk who write about things could attain to the dignity of those who do them, we would indeed be worth consideration.’

It’s the man who uses his whole battery of power, not just his head, who is the integral man, the man on his feet with the currents of ihe Earth’s life charging him — not insulated, but a conductor.

From a book by an Englishman named Tomlinson, — a most observant person with wonderful moods and a great gift for scooping up right words out of the sea of words (and there they flip and hiss like a great catch of silver shad in a seine), — I take this, because it bears on this question of craft and manhood:—

‘There is an old fellow I met in this village who will take the ruins of a forest, take pine-boles, metal cordage, and canvas, and without plans, but from the ideal in his eye, build you the kind of lithe and dainty schooner that, with the cadences of her sheer and moulding and the soaring of her masts, would keep you by her side all day in harbor; build you the kind of girded, braced, and immaculate vessels, sound at every point, tuned and sweet to a precision that in a violin would make a musician flush with inspiration; a ship to ride, lissom and light, the uplifted Western ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and the drive of hurricane. She will ride out of ihe storm afterwards, none to applaud her, over the mobile hills, traveling express, the rags of her sails triumphant pennants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from her deck.

‘He, that modest old man, can create such a being as that; and I have heard visitors to this village, leisured and cultured folk, talk down to the old fellow who can think out a vessel like that after supper and go out after breakfast to direct the laying of her keel — talk down to him, kindly enough, of course, and smilingly, as a “working-man.” ’

Recreation is largely an adult word. They — the grown-ups — need recreation, and in general need it very badly, because they have allowed the processes of civilization to tear down a great many fine things which they had given to them as children, among them the capacity for pure play. Some of this loss is inevitable. When you once discover what degree of tragedy goes with human affairs, you cannot have that perfect abandon which you had at fourteen to twenty, and especially earlier.

But a good deal has been lost through carelessness only. For it was assuredly careless to allow anybody to rob us in broad daylight of one of the most precious of our endowments —the capacity for play, for idleness, for vegetation. And yet these assiduous taskmasters, shouting all kinds of catch-penny slogans, have done it. They have got us so bewildered with the music in their bandwagon and the antics of their menagerie, that we actually don’t know what to do with any time left over after they have taken their huge slice, but continue to follow the parade and indulge in their peanuts. Look at the boulevards, the theatres, the summer gardens, the automobiles, the motor-boats, the moving pictures, the victrolas, the Sunday newspapers, the popular magazines.

It would seem that one of the most essential of the lessons of life is this — what to do with leisure time so that it shall always be recreative; so that it shall always renew a right spirit within you. As a matter of fact, if our work was the work most suited to us; if we expressed ourselves very directly in our work and if we did not have too much of it; if we did not violate the dignity and the beauty of it by doing too much in order to secure larger rewards and a quicker recognition; if it was not so much competitive work and was more coöperative and intensely friendly and exhilarating; then recreation would only be a different kind of work. And that is what it is at its best; and yet there is a place for quiescence, for passivity, and a most important place.

If you have had the good fortune to read Hudson’s book, Far Away and Long Ago, you may remember one chapter in which he tells how, at a certain time of his life down there in the great plains of the Argentine, he began to go off by himself, on a pony or afoot, into the vast loneliness of that land. He was a boy, as I remember it, about twelve years of age, and these experiences, surrounded by the silence and beauty of the land and sky, by the subtle influence of the things that grew there and that moved mysteriously there through the grass and tall reeds, were very profound experiences, which eventually worked a kind of magic on him, by the force of which he became part of all he saw. Both the huge things and the little things took him into their confidence, and made him their familiar friend and close associate. Something took place within him which he calls by the name of ‘animism’ — a certain polarity of the mind not only, but of the very blood-corpuscles, so that he felt himself initiated into a kind of society, — the society of the inarticulate earth, — and changed in a peculiar manner, differentiated from his family and friends by a transfusion of blood, and thereafter immune from the fevers and obsesssions of those who are confined to human society.

You may say that Hudson was of a peculiar temperament, and that very few would react to environment as he did. But the fact is that, at a certain age, perhaps adolescence, every child has this peculiar affinity, — this ability to become one with nature, — and very few indeed find the opportunity to indulge it. It takes time and it takes detachment, a certain solitariness, repeated expeditions alone; but once it has worked its beneficent charm, that person knows that he has established an intimacy with the most permanent source of strength and happiness — his own Mother Nature, draped in those astonishing garments, the Earth, the Sea, the Sky. Thereafter, however submerged he may be in the pursuit of a livelihood and a career, he is perfectly aware that this intimacy is his meat and drink; and at every opportunity, when he can escape, you will find him in remote places renewing his youth, recreating himself, recovering that deliberation and poise and serenity and robusticity and resourcefulness, that clarity of vision and inevitability of action that characterize his associates in the wilderness.

Recreation that does not include this experience may still be called by that name, but does not extend to the roots of a man’s or a woman’s nature; and, unless as boy or girl this baptism has been administered, it never will.

Therefore we advocate a sufficient amount of quiet detached life for children: not enough to induce anti-social traits, and produce peculiarities which they themselves will afterwards regret; but certainly enough to enable them to see more and more clearly that their kinship extends to the whole universe of life, and that the part that cannot speak and reason is forever correcting the errors of the part that can, healing its diseases, forgiving its iniquities, satisfying its mouth with good things.

There is that much to be said, then, for passivity, and much more could be said. When it comes to activities, the one most closely allied with the passivity mentioned is that of the naturalist. So far as enjoying life is concerned, I contend that the naturalist has got the best of it on every count. And if that is really so, why should we not have some share in his happiness? In the article on natural history, a plan for securing these blessings of the naturalist, by those who are not to be professionals in that subject, has been discussed, and also some emphasis put upon the fact that the place allowed for that subject in school curricula, and the people entrusted with it, are wholly inadequate. The only way most of us will ever catch the spell of this subject is by association with one who is a naturalist, and who has the art of transmitting his enthusiasm as well as his gifts of observation.

If children could spend a suitable part of their vacations with such a person, you would have a type of recreation that could hardly be improved upon. I suppose that one of the most beneficial things that could possibly happen to city-bred or country-bred boys or girls would be to spend a summer with an Indian, and get some realization of the fact that their own life is one of blindness, deafness, and helplessness. That they depend almost entirely upon assistance from others, and can do little or nothing for themselves. That their resources, when tested by the forces of nature in uninhabited places, are exhausted in a few minutes, and their instincts always misleading and fatal. That it is quite as desirable to know how to take care of one’s self under adverse physical conditions as it is to know banking or law; and that the honors in this world belong to the banker, the lawyer, and the business man, only because they keep closely within a very small area of human experience.

The same might be said of other crafts than woodcraft. Take sailing for instance. Captains Courageous is a good book; so is Two Years before the Mast; so is The Cruise of the Cachalot. In all of these a boy is shown being instructed in the ancient and very honorable art of handling sailing vessels under all conditions. And whether he can become an artist in that department or not, the process of learning it is one of the most important things that can happen to him, for it involves several very fundamental experiences. First is his association with the sea, and with winds, tides, and weather in general. It is necessary to say that the motor-boat is a means whereby the whole significance of the experience is lost. A motor-boat for boys and girls is a complete evasion of the opportunity the sea offers for constructive recreation. But when you introduce a boy — and I include girls as equally interested and able — to a sailboat, you do him a great service. First, because the elements, winds, and water, are exceedingly important things to get on some kind of terms with — to recognize their humors, their playfulness and their rage, and the premonitions of each. Second, because the tradition of the sail is an old and very fascinating one, and the more you know of it, the more the construction and the performance of ships get into your essential interests, the more likely you are to respect every thing whose usefulness has made it beautiful — which grew in beauty as it grew in serviceability.

The very breath of romance, the presence of the Northmen and the Iberian trader, down through the whole vivid story of hulls and canvas, spars and rigging, is in every little boat bobbing at its mooring, with the same salt sea tugging at it and the same old winds tapping its halyards against the mast.

If it has a cabin and can be used for living, then the sense of adventure is complete, even though the voyages are in land-locked bays.

Once you begin to spend nights aboard, you get a better sense of the proportion that really exists between the human and the un-human: how insignificant the former is, compared with the latter; and how dependent a man is upon some kind of shell into which he can creep out of the austerity and chill of the night sky, light his lamp and his stove, and finally sleep, while the dark tides flow beneath him and his boat swings to her cable.

We were anchored one night in a small harbor on the New England coast, and the two boys and I rowed over to a schooner anchored nearby. Hailed by a man aboard, they climbed over her side and went below at his invitation. What led up to the conversation in that cabin, I do not know; but when they came back after an hour or more, they breathlessly told me the things that he recounted to them, the things that made him the man he was — old in years and in knowledge of the sea and ships.

I could imagine the scene in that cabin under the yellow lamp: two boys with bare feet sitting on the locker, and the old shell-back smoking and calmly reciting a little of his vast store of experiences as a Gloucesterman — on the Newfoundland banks; off the coast of Greenland in Baffin Bay; of carrying sail in midwinter gales; of lying at anchor in mountainous seas and a week of blind fog; of picking up lost dories and frozen men; of the run for home with the fleet, with no reefs, in a forty-knot wind — until his son died in the cabin on his last voyage, and the old man quit.

Here was oral tradition in full blast. Here was the thing that puts more color and more flavor into the eyes and ears, the veins and arteries of boys, than years of school, and leaves permanent tracks on their souls, like the tracks of a prehistoric animal on an ancient shore. When you can get a man like this to talk to your boys or girls, — and that is something you can rarely arrange; it has to come by the Grace of God, — you have done more to adjust their compasses and correct their chronometers than any single thing you can mention.

It is clean, it is fine, it is adventurous and involves the endurance of bitter hardship, and it is unconscious of anything extraordinary: it is just a simple tale of a very simple life, unrecognized and soon extinguished. Some sense of values must register permanently as between this kind of man and the soft kind — the indoor man; and a certain relish for the asperities that make small comforts peculiarly grateful and always sufficient, without desire for those gross and upholstered accessories with which the successful man seems determined to suffocate himself and his family.

And then! ‘Who hath smelt woodsmoke at twilight?’ — having come down the little stream, through the great expanse of northern wilds, with his canoe, as one of the parti-colored autumn leaves floating with him; with his trout-rod and his camera, his dufflebag and kit and little silk tent. That evening he camps — he and his boy or girl, perhaps — under a group of golden poplars that make a sanctuary, a hymn, and a benediction.

The chipmunk flashes across the boulder, the chickadee calls with his three exquisite notes, the great woodpecker hammers, the loon laughs from a lake, ‘dark brown flows the river, golden is the sand.’

You take your children into such partnership, on journeys of this sort, as circumstances will allow. You will not have the same sort of experience that you have alone or with a man or two; but you will be fulfilling some of your obligations as a father, and will be making school less necessary; and the less necessary you can make school, the better.

But of all recreation for children, if the word is applicable at all to such newly created beings, the farm is the best, because the farm is the most real, and perhaps also the most practicable. The greatest good fortune that I can wish for any family is to have the kind of grandfather our family had.

He lived on a farm in the lovely country of Maryland near the Susquehanna, and that stream gleamed in the distance with its bright lure, as it flowed through the hills. Every year we escaped for a month — only a month — from the dusty and warm confinement of a New York suburb, and by a breathless progress on trains, through fields of wheat and corn, butterflies and singing grasshoppers, through hot and ugly towns, across shining rivers, we arrived at Paradise — at the delectable land of cows, calves, chickens, pigs, horses, oxen, mules, negroes, brooks, spring-houses, apple-orchards — all in a setting of woods and meadows, filled with the odor of mint and the notes of meadow larks. It was an enchanted land. To arrive was to fulfill every extravagant desire. To leave was to enter the Valley of the Shadow of commonplace routine.

While there, we breathed the very wholesomest air, mental, physical, spiritual. To wake in the morning and, instead of the strident cries of the ‘Micks,’ as we called them, the drone of the hand-organ and the jingle and rattle of the horse-car, to hear the farm sounds, the far-away calls to horses, the long complaint of calves, the mixed staccato of chickens, ducks, and turkeys, the songs of birds, the mourning dove — to wake in the morning was a daily re-creation.

Breakfast in the old low-ceilinged dining-room, prayers in the cool sittingroom, with the old man reading, ‘Lord, Thou hast been our Dwelling Place in all generations’; and then the long, delicious day among all the farm activities, until the scented, velvet-blue night was framed in our bedroom windows. If you have n’t a grandfather with a farm, can you possibly adopt one who will let you interfere with all his employments, who will be as happy to see you each year as you are to see him and his house? No, you cannot. A grandfat her like this cannot be manufactured out of nothing. He must always be a part of destiny, a gift out of the millions of years of earth’s experience, an incomparable gift to children. What shall we do for lack of these grandfathers; Lord, to whom shall we go?

So much for the out-of-door things. Of course, we have barely touched the subject; but there is no room in this paper to go beyond the area of suggestion.

When you come to indoor recreations, there is a most alluring range of choice, toward which children should be definitely moving; so that, combining outdoor things with indoor, they may eventually come into the inheritance of the man who needs not seek good fortune because he continually possesses it.

There is music, and there are books. And now you add to music and books some of these extraordinary experiences with your hands, — some working in wood, in clay, in iron, with a proper place to work in, a place apart, — and another breach is made in the wall of circumstance through which you escape into the enchanted land.

You know, in spite of all romantic argument, the soul is quite unmixable, and its health seems to depend on considerable periods of uninterrupted detachment from all human society.

Then, if it has some of the characteristics of a planet, and not exclusively those of a toy balloon, it begins quietly to turn on its axis and to take on some of the deep and strange colors of its immortality, as it floats in infinite space on an orbit which, one day, will return it, no more to be blown about by gusts of passion and of doubt as it tugs at its thread.

Under the title ‘recreation,’as applied to schools, one would naturally think that athletics was to be the subject discussed.

But this is not a conventional paper; and the recreations I mention are recreations that reach down into the recesses of human life, and are as necessary for the teachers as for the children.

School and college athletics are goodenough things, but have no value comparable with these recreative things I have mentioned. Nevertheless, they have their place as part of the training of Youth for whatever race is set before it. The American and English people, with their sense of ‘the game,’ get a relish out of life that is obtained by the gameless nations at a cost of cleanness and health which is evident.

The game is a great feature in morale and, to a certain extent, in ethics. But the tendency to surrender loo much to group-loyalty, and to idolize victory and aggressiveness generally, is always present and often overshadowing. The defects of the strong Rooseveltian type become sufficiently apparent, together with its virtues. People ‘determined to win’ are hardly more wholesome than people unable to win, because in winning they usually lose more than they gain, both for themselves and for their contemporaries. They lose their souls, their critical judgment, their open mind, their generous heart, and they make it seem that you can afford to lose these things if you win by doing so. A game that involves a real antipathy for an opponent is not a good game. It is the forerunner of the business game, and the business game easily becomes the war game — the game of those who sit in the seat of the scorner, who stand in the way of sinners, who walk in the counsel of the ungodly.