Chapter XVII: 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.