The Lost Art of Play
I
THIS country is destined to cope with the problems of leisure on a scale never before experienced. No matter what we think of technocracy and its alarming conclusions, it is obvious that the necessary work of the world can now be done in comparatively few working hours. This conclusion is inescapable, although the figures of the technocrats have now been scaled down to something like scientific accuracy and show no such crisis as its propounders would have us believe. But, even in a time of prosperity, production was increasing faster than jobs for displaced workers. After the exaggerated figures and the melancholy interpretations are discounted, it is still evident that technological unemployment has been a bigger factor in the depression than was at first suspected; so, even when we settle the major problem of a job (or at least an income) for every breadwinner, the problem of greatly increased leisure will remain with us.
The increase of leisure is not a new thing. It began fifty years ago when working hours and waking hours were almost identical, and no one had yet heard of technological unemployment. Stores were open from seven in the morning until nine at night, and later on Saturdays. Professional men got to their offices at seven-thirty and remained until six. As a young advertising man I was rebuked by the president of one of the large manufacturing companies of the Middle West because I did not reach my office until eight o’clock. He had been waiting half an hour. He was at his office, he said, every morning at seven, summer and winter. Each successive generation has snipped off an hour or so.
My first job, in 1885, was from sixthirty to six-thirty (with one hour off at noon for dinner) on week days, and one hour less on Saturdays — 65 hours a week. I was the ‘devil,’ and came earlier and worked later than the journeyman printers, but even they put in 59 hours, as did I as soon as I graduated to a ‘case.’ In some occupations the hours were longer. After I had walked home, washed up, and eaten my supper, it was time to go to bed, especially in view of the early rising which this schedule imposed. Not much thought was given to leisure then, but, in the fifty years since, the average working time has steadily decreased. Not only the machine, but more efficient methods, contributed, and behind this was the steady, insistent demand for shorter hours. The eight-hour workday, the Saturday-afternoon holiday, the two weeks’ vacation, and daylight saving brought daytime leisure to millions. The motor car, moving pictures, radio, and athletic sports took up the slack. Machines that created the leisure produced the apparatus for enjoying it.
The depression has added a larger number of people with more leisure than they know how to occupy. The effect has been apparent in every field that supplies entertainment or recreation. Libraries have been thronged; playgrounds and community centres are crowded; correspondence courses, adult schools, and other methods of self-improvement available at little or no cost are patronized as never before. The proprietors of amusement parks in convention assembled the last month of the old year heard their president predict a bigger and better year for merry-go-rounds, scenic railways, and Ferris wheels. The report of the Westchester Park Association contained the gratifying information that the work is self-supporting, the income from concessions and recreations for which a fee is charged, such as public golf links and bathhouses, showing a net profit over the costs of operation. The National Recreation Association, the body that guides the movement toward community centres and playgrounds, finds the public turning to these amusements in greater numbers. Already, before the economic problem is solved, the demand for recreation has reached impressive proportions, and is steadily increasing.
Just how much of our time will be needed to do the work of supplying every consumer with what he needs has not been and cannot be worked out until we have first solved that delicate problem of balance between machine production and human consumption, but the disproportion between them is bound to increase. Speaking to the toy manufacturers recently, Paul T. Cherington said: —
‘With labor leaders threatening to use force to get a 30-hour work week, you have something real to think about. There are 112 waking hours in a week of 7 days of 16 hours each. Subtracting these 30 hours spent in gainful labor would leave 82 hours. Allow 21 hours for meals, and there arc left 61 hours of waking time with which 45,000,000 working people are to do as they please. They will sorely need a technique for utilizing leisure. That will be more play time than we had in our childhood. You as toy manufacturers will find your best abilities called on to provide the equipment by which the play technique can be developed and exercised. It will take something more absorbing than ordinary games to keep 45,000,000 adults happy for 3172 hours a year each. They will need toys to teach them how to play, and playing equipment to enable them to do it as adults.’
The grown-up who takes his pleasures and himself seriously may be affronted to hear his apparatus of sport and recreation characterized as toys. There is an anecdote which may give him another point of view. A maid putting a room to rights came upon the chessboard still set up for an unfinished game, and asked her mistress, ‘ Shall I put the master’s little playthings away, or will he be using them?’
II
Millions of people, presumably, are going to have in the near future, whether they want it or not, more time off than they ever dreamed of. An entire nation which has never learned to play has been presented with the great gift of leisure. Our playing is, for the most part, done by proxy. We make paid entertainers rich by our inexperience in amusing ourselves. ‘Since the war,’ says Professor Cherington, ‘American expenditure on the various forms of recreation has more than doubled. The Business Week estimated that expenditures for recreation in 1919 were $1,700,000,000. In 1927 they were over $4,000,000,000, and in 1929 they were $5,200,000,000, and even in 1930 they were still over $4,000,000,000.’
But vicarious amusements are not going to suffice to fill the spare hours which the future will bring. We must do better than that. At the rate that labor-saving machinery is being developed, even Mr. Green’s 30-hour week may be outmoded. True, his firm demand in the interest of organized labor was more concerned with distributing what employment still exists than in increasing the leisure of workers, but the outcome will be the same in any case. We must consider, therefore, what we are going to do with so much spare time. We have not been trained for it, and all our traditions are against it. We do not, as a people, care for those quieter and simpler amusements which are easily and cheaply available, which do so much for the spirit — walking, observing, studying, learning, gardening, practising a craft, engaging in community activities, making the most of human companionship. It is an encouraging sign that many of the unemployed have turned to self-improvement, but these are a small fraction of the army, and their studies are mainly devoted to improving their earning capacity rather than to developing their qualities as well-rounded human beings.
Play for grown-ups is just beginning to figure in the scheme of things. Before the days of leisure it was a small problem for adults. The craving for amusement and recreation was checked by the fact that it was a full-time job to earn a living. The century-old houses which we modernize for our summer homes had no porches, no outdoor sitting rooms. Their occupants had no time to sit down and admire the scenery. Play was then the heritage only of children, who, when they grew up, put away childish things for the serious business of life. But now we have to consider what use might profitably be made of leisure by some fifty million adults with at least nineteen solid weeks a year free from all duties, who will finish their short workday with abundant energy, and must find a safe, sane, satisfying outlet for that energy if their new-found leisure is not to become a menace.
These people now turn naturally to popular organized amusements which are destitute of the spirit of play. They must acquire a new conception of play, one that demands active participation instead of passive acceptance. Radio, movies, athletic spectacles, will all have a large place, but they will no longer suffice for a grown-up, healthy population. There must be something to make demands upon them physically and mentally, to develop and express them, and to give exercise to invention and imagination. Since play begins in childhood and is the natural expression of the young, when not stiffed by too many predigested toys, it is well to look at the playthings of children today to see what they promise for a future that, will offer so many opportunities.
III
Possibly the art of play is lost in childhood. I wonder if children play to-day as they did when I was a boy. A glance at contemporary toys convinces me that little is left for a child to do. Just the other day I saw a marvelous miniature railroad train — indeed, the complete rolling stock of a system, with engines both electric and steam, cars both passenger and freight, day coaches, Pullmans, baggage cars, freight cars, gondolas, and tanks, faithful in detail and accurately reproduced to scale — designed for boys whose parents are able to pay five hundred dollars for a toy. When a modern boy is confronted with a plaything so complete and so realistic, I wonder what he does with it. Does he get a tithe of the fun out of it Lhat 1 did sixty years ago from a string of cars of oblong pasteboard box covers mounted on empty spools?
The gap between my primitive train and the real thing was the measure of my amusement.; I had to fill the gap with imagination. Modern toys seem to overshoot the mark they aim at. They leave nothing for the child to do. Child psychology is peculiar in these matters; it goes unerringly to the heart of the thing. The child is honest in his preferences; he cares nothing for cost, and he knows what he likes; he selects the toys that still have some play left in them. Who has n’t seen a little girl pass up dolls with real hair, eyes that open and shut, and a wardrobe like a movie star, for some forlorn, shapeless rag baby?
On the last Christmas of the preslump era, I spent the day with a brother at a family gathering where there were many of the third generation, including three grandsons. The child who was host brought out his toys for his cousins to play with — a great box of corrugated packing board filled with realistic models of motor cars, trucks, railroad trains, and airplanes, of the sort that fascinates grown-ups more than children. The boys examined the toys with interest, but soon I noticed that they were all piled in the corner of the room, and the boys were playing with the pasteboard box. They played with it all the afternoon, and the toys never got another look. They were too complete, too finished. There are a lot of things you can do with a big pasteboard box and a little imagination.
Why has no one thought of asking children what toys they prefer? That is the approved method in other fields. Research is used to test out and improve all sorts of products, from vegetable shortenings to free wheeling in motor cars, but so far as I know no toy maker has made a sLudy of child play habits to learn what toys have the most play in them. This should be a research directed at the ultimate consumer, not the grown-up intermediary. Presents for children are selected by parents and other adult relatives, and represent what they think children like. Those toys presumably bought for children but monopolized by the grownups have become a standing joke. Perhaps it is something more than a joke.
IV
Some worthy folks gathered together at the New York Museum, the week before Christmas, an exhibition of toys of other days. Most of these dated from the sixties, about the time of my own childhood, but they did not represent to any great degree the toys I knew best. The very fact of their preservation showed that they were not played with, that they were far too fine and good for childhood nature’s daily food. They were, in fact, antiques of considerable virtuosity, examples of skilled craftsmanship, preserved rather than used. Toys which stimulate the qualities of real play are not likely to survive.
I missed among this collection the simpler and more inspiring playthings of my childhood. Here were paper dolls, but they were a special handpainted set — the work, no doubt, of some gifted mother, brought out to show the minister or Aunt Marion and then put away on the whatnot in the parlor, but not played with. I should have liked to see a sheet of paper soldiers, a toy drum, a monkey on a stick, a cat’s cradle, a buzzer. This last was a round disk of tin with holes in the centre, through which a string was passed; when made to revolve rapidly by the twisting and untwisting of the string, it emitted a faint hum, the pitch of which could be changed by cutting notches in the disk. There was but one small bag of marbles, which properly should have been represented by a complete set — commies, clay of all colors (ten for a cent), chinas (two for a cent), potteries, glassies, agates (one cent), and carnelians, usually reserved for taws by affluent sportsmen (five and ten cents).
It was significant that toys for girls showed greater powers of survival. There were many dolls of the more elegant class, with complete wardrobes in contemporary styles, even to gloves, shoes, and stays; there were beds that were fully equipped, sets of furniture, trunks, and a miniature practicable cookstove. But I missed the dolls we knew as ‘one-cent dolls,’ ‘five-cent dolls,’ and ‘ten-cent dolls.’ The onecent dolls, about 1 1/2 inches tall, had stiff bodies of china, but the five-andten variety had flexible cloth bodies with china heads, hands, and feet. I should have liked to see a specimen of that lethal weapon, the rubber gun (a crotch with two rubber bands and a leather tab for the missile), and a whistle made from a willow wand. There should have been quantities of building blocks in various geometrical shapes, one of the most satisfying toys ever devised.
The supreme advantage of the toys of the past was their limitations. Even this selection at the New York Museum lacked the almost ferocious realism and efficiency and completeness of the playthings which fill the windows of modern toy emporiums. Ours were largely homemade, by grown-ups sometimes, but often by the child. They were crude, primitive, and quaint, lacking the slickness and technological completeness of modern machine-made toys. Ingenuity, invention, resourcefulness, and imagination were required, not only to make them, but to play with them. Toys are not a means to an end; they are not tools. Efficiency, therefore, is a drawback rather than an advantage.
Bought toys were mostly of European origin, largely handmade products of German and Swiss craftsmen, and they reflected, of course, the life of the country of origin. The dolls were European types in European dress; the animals those common to European barnyards — asses and oxen, so familiar to the Bavarian peasant, but rarely seen by prairie-bred children. The houses were made of their stone instead of our wood. The building blocks were adapted to the construction of German or Swiss buildings. From them emanated an atmosphere which we, as children, thought to be the peculiar mark of toys, though it was, of course, simply the reflection of their European origin. To-day toys are replicas of the life the child sees around him. Ninety per cent are now made in this country. There may be some educational value in this, though there is a loss of charm and picturesqueness; but the question is: Has not something of the spirit of play been sacrificed in making toys so sophisticated?
V
Let me use my own childhood as a temporary laboratory. Most of our playthings were handmade. When Mother’s tired fingers dropped a plate, the fragments became a set of dishes on which we partook of Barmecide repasts. When the local dry-goods store delivered a dray load of packing cases to be later chopped up into kindling, we made houses of several rooms, each room a box, and built a small village which lasted until the hatchet fell. With a piece of chalk and a handful of beans, grains, and nuts, we laid out a farm on the attic floor, drawing the ground plan with chalk — here the house, there the barn, cowsheds, and fields — and stocking the place with beans for horses and cattle. There was a black-and-white bean that made admirable Holsteins. Or we set up circuses, with hazelnuts for deer, peanuts for camels, ‘niggertoes’ for rhinoceri, and butternuts with the bark on for elephants. There was a set of chessmen, never used for its ancient and honorable purpose, out of which we created ceremonies and pageants, the unlikeness of the pieces to what we pretended they were giving the games their charm.
The most useful ‘ boughten ’ toy appears to have been building blocks, originally those oblongs and cubes with ‘A a,’ ‘Bb’ on them. They rapidly became more complex and versatile, until they culminated in the ‘erector’ outfits of to-day. Even in their primitive form they were a source of unending amusement. Their combinations were infinite, and developed our ingenuity amazingly. There was a variety known as Anchor, made of clay, their weight adding to the stability of the structures built of them, with arches and keyed shapes and rounded pillars, the possibilities of which seemed inexhaustible. Do the complete and expensive toys of to-day offer as much?
Shrewd parents got home tasks done by disguising them as games. I did a lot of weeding when I was a boy by pretending I was George Washington and the weeds were Hessians. I pinned up my straw broad-brim into a cocked hat and wore a belt with a wooden sword. The big burdock in the onion bed was General Burgoyne. It was useless for him to surrender. He died with his cohorts.
There is more play in riding a stick than in a lifelike mechanical horse. Children arc able to evolve complete games with only a few anomalous objects as counters, to which they assign names and functions of their own. This creative faculty is precious, and should be encouraged. Toys and playthings too complete and realistic stifle it, besides adding to cost without corresponding advantages.
VI
The child is father of the man; as the twig is bent the tree is inclined — so runs a whole chapter of proverbial philosophy. Only after one has lived a considerable portion of his life does the truth of such sayings come home with full force. I realize that much of my ability to get the most out of life in the way of amusement, occupation, entertainment, is the direct product of learning to play as a boy. My present interests are largely the lengthened shadow of my boyhood hobbies. Having been deaf most of my life, I have been driven, more than most normal persons, to find my amusements within myself. Even so, I am merely a little more complete example of the resources of intelligent intellectual and physical amusement which are stored up in most human beings.
I find in myself the same curiosities and satisfactions which I remember experiencing as a boy, — the pleasure of making, of doing things with my hands, with tools, with pen and pencil and brush, — and in them I find my primary escape. I realize now how deep were the impressions made in childhood, and wonder whether this is sufficiently considered by those who design toys and playthings. No one seems to ask whether they are of the sort which will create that proper spirit of play which is going to be so necessary for adults in the greater leisure that impends. Children are in danger of losing all that knack of using their faculties for amusement, that handiness, adaptability, resourcefulness. These are the qualities which lend color to life, the qualities which once made Robinson Crusoe a best seller.
There is some contemporary realization of this. There are play schools where children are taught along the lines of their interest, where no great divide exists between play and work; but such institutions are few and small, available only to the well-to-do. Such methods have not penetrated the public schols, though the latter have advanced greatly since my day, when the processes of education were painful and any effort to make school interesting was looked upon with suspicion. To-day we are just beginning to realize what an ideal approach to a child’s mind is afforded by the painless method of teaching by play.
The Boy Scout movement is intended to teach and encourage proficiency in various crafts and skills that are in danger of disappearing in our present-day civilization. There are groups of boys interested in miniatureyacht racing and model-airplane flying, though the yachts and planes are too frequently bought rather than made. An important contribution toward the development of craftsmanship among boys has been made in the last two years by the Fisher Body Corporation, which deserves for its efforts more commendation than it has obtained. This is the offer of valuable prizes to boys from thirteen to nineteen who complete miniature models of Napoleon’s coach. I had supposed that this was a publicity stunt pure and simple, but the company has actually made little capital out of it, preferring, perhaps wisely, to let it advertise itself.
Briefly, the awards, which total $30,000, are led by four grand prizes of full courses in any technical school the winner selects, with smaller state prizes and awards for excellence in particular phases of the work. The contestants are supplied with complete working plans to scale, and the problem is one that would lax the patience, skill, and taste of an experienced model maker. It requires exactness to fractions of an inch, intelligence in reading plans and setting off measurements, exceptional skill in handling wood, metal, cloth, leather, glass, and paint. Over 400,000 boys have entered the two contests, and over 2000 completed coaches were submitted to the judges last year. Herr Walther Leuschner, the German craftsman who made the pattern coach and drew the plans, admits that at least one of these youngsters equaled his own master model.
To complete such a coach involves wood carving and turning, joinery, pattern making, metal casting, gluing, soldering, and brazing, the use of taps and dies, needlework and upholstery, leather working, painting, and decorating. No boy can undertake the task without learning much, and no boy can finish among the winners without having acquired skills that will be useful all his life — not the least of which are patience and thoroughness, and, particularly, the satisfaction that comes from doing something extremely well.
VII
Play is active. All the connotations of the word suggest the idea of movement. The word ‘amuse’ might be analyzed etymologically as signifying ‘away from musing,’ coming out of one’s self. Even stronger in this sense is the word ‘distract,’ to draw away, or ‘divert,’ to turn away. Play is an alternative for those lazy entertainments which find us idle and leave us passive, since it gives us something we can do or make to exercise our faculties and cause us to experience that glorious sense of achievement.
Play may be either mental or physical, but the best form is that which is both, which exercises mind and body, a game that demands brain and brawn, a walk heightened by understanding interest in the surroundings, scenery, bird life, or growing things, in topography or geology. Walking is a stimulus to the mind, and the mind should have something to work on. Play divides also into social and solitary kinds. I am more proficient, in the solitary kinds because my deafness is a bar to social intercourse. But the advantages of self-starting amusements should not be ignored by even the keenest-eared and most socially disposed. They make one independent and perhaps bring the most satisfying reward. They divide roughly into study, craft, and collecting, though each borrows something from the other two. Social amusements range all the way from games to intelligent participation in community activities.
High on the list of activities which may be pursued as private hobbies but which shower their benefits on the public is the ancient art of gardening. Like Portia’s famous quality of mercy, it blesses both gardener and beholder. A love of gardens and a bit of ground upon which to lavish that affection are a fortunate equipment. For not only is gardening full of rewards and surprises for the gardener, but, since a community is only a number of plots, each under the control of a different individual, the collective result of numerous gardens is a beautiful community, and ultimately a beautiful country. No one can care for a home place, and endeavor to make it æsthetically pleasing, and remain indifferent to the condition of his neighbors’ yards. Thus community spirit is developed by emulation.
Gardening is a combination of physical and mental effort, that combination of mind and muscle which gives to any effort its interest. There is the joy of digging in the earth with the sun on one’s back, which is so satisfying, and the study of flowers, which can be carried as far and made as special as one pleases. Its inevitable progress is to landscape next, developing an interest in the country which belongs to all, streets, parks, and public buildings. If we loved gardening as universally as the Swiss or the English, the country would be transformed, for there would be developed a public opinion to influence public projects, highways, reservations, the great heritage of scenery, and save them from the vulgarization and destruction that now threaten them. Professionally our gardens are unsurpassed. An English visitor recently bore testimony to that fact. But it is like our golf or tennis. A few play well enough to beat the best; English, but the average is much lower here than there. Nearly every country cottage yard in England is ablaze with color of homely old-fashioned flowers, and gardening fills a large place in the lives of many people.
It is inevitable that many in this new era of daylight playtime will turn to gardening, but there is need of a popularizer, something that will make the interest as keen as it now is in contract bridge.
The wise use of leisure may easily be an important, perhaps the most important influence on the future course of our civilization. People express themselves more frankly in their play than in their work. When they are free they turn naturally to that which they most want to do. If these diversions are of the kind that develops the complete man, mentally, socially, and physically, they will profoundly influence the course of human events, and have economic reverberations as well. Already amusement is a big business, though unfortunately it has developed thus far more largely along the ‘escape’ side than the auto-creative. It offers forgetfulness of dreary tasks rather than the inspiration of self-expression.
But all forms of recreation, even those followed by devotees at least cost, when sufficiently popular and widespread, create demands that must be supplied — not merely what Professor Cherington calls ‘adult toys,’ but paths for pedestrians, community playgrounds, and other public works. It is easily possible that the millions freed by short working hours will create entirely new consumption of goods, products, and services to supply the needs of diversion. It is a new version of writing a nation’s songs rather than making its laws.
Professor Cherington was talking to toy makers when he advised the creation of more grown-up playthings, and these will surely come. Trust American enterprise to see to that. But what are most sorely needed and should be given the most earnest thought are less artificial occupations, those things which develop the spirit, satisfy the whole being, call forth one’s powers, capacity for study or research, skill, proficiency — a new language, a musical instrument, interpretative dancing, not in a showy sense, as accomplishments, but for one’s own satisfaction.
Few people can do common everyday things well. How many are there who can tie a knot? Most still use the granny knot, when what sailors call a square knot is easy to tie, is unslippable, and can be untied as easily as tied. The other day I noticed a tennis net at a small hotel held by guy ropes the loops of which had been neatly spliced. I suspected a sailor and found him in the handy man of the place, formerly able seaman on a Danish bark. Why should not more of us know how to make a splice, or a hitch, or a tackle? Why do we not learn the simple laws of mechanics that apply to the things around us, which we use daily? It would reduce the friction of living if we were all handier, and there is a certain indefinable satisfaction in using one’s hands and wits aptly.
It would be futile to catalogue all the ways in which the human spirit expresses itself in those hours which are gloriously its own. A glance at the windows of any sporting-goods store suggests that there are at least a thousand games and sports played with apparatus, and this is but. one and not perhaps the highest department of human diversion. While it does take skill and brains to play many games (though it denotes something, I am not sure what, that so many games are conditioned by the element of chance), games and sports do not as a rule develop the creative instinct which is the divinest impulse in our natures. But it will be a real advance if any large number of people can be taught or persuaded to play in any capacity. That is the first step.
Perhaps this is the opportunity of the National Recreation Association. It is organized around the idea of affording facilities for community amusement. It is a non-profit body, privately supported, which acts as leader and guide to local groups desiring to create community houses, public playgrounds, and other nuclei of recreation. It is significant of the spirit in which it takes its work that this Association inspired and sponsored the visit to this country of Dr. L. P. Jacks, whose lectures on recreation through education or vice versa set up an admirable programme for t he Association that backed him.