U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES H Q 796 L4 MAIN UC-NRLF B M bSE MMfl •:'::r" :or-, :- 3^ YTHM AND RECREATION BY JOSEPH LEE [ident of the Playground and Recreation Association of America THE ABINGDON PRESS lEW YORK CINCINNATI ;i|: ■;■:'; 'Hi iy- . ■. '', ■ I AMERICAN HOME SERIES ;ri,es :''fx. NORMAN E. RICHAROS0N,:"?.ditor-;i^-'-- 3^ RHYTHM AND RECREATION BY JOSEPH LEE President of the Playground and Recreation Association of America THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI of Charities and Correction, is reprinted as a unit in the American Home Series by special permission of the author. qtO- Nature or Sexual Attraction //^rtCyX^ WE shall approach the question before us not as a problem of evil but as a problem of good, as a question of how to keep this great budding force of nature, the mutual attraction of the sexes, to its true task of producing strength and beauty, instead of permitting it to go to waste or worse. I. The first thing to remember is that this mu- tual attraction is not one but many things. Its issue is all the way from the worst to the best we know. If it has produced much of the evil in the world — if it is so high an explosive that the spiritual doctors in many ages have forbidden it to the holy and to the carefully nurtured young — it is also the source of the best things in life. True love is the dearest possession of the race. Its presence would redeem a world of ugliness. Romance is of the stuff that makes life worth living — partakes of the ultimate, of what the rest is for. II. Sexual attraction is never simple, it is not merely all things to all men, it is apt to be a great many things to each man, whenever it happens to him. In the first place no major instinct ever acts alone. Human nature is a sounding-board, which, when one note is struck, gives forth sympathetic vibrations, discords, harmonies, overtones. This note especially is so deep in us that there is very little in our nature that its awakening may not touch. The instinct of the chase is aroused in pursuit of the flying nymph. The fighting instinct, enlisted in supplanting rivals, may be stronger than the original motive, and sometimes survives it. Where Venus is present Mars is not often far away. George Eliot says there is always some- thing maternal even in a girlish love. Again, at 3 0^> i ') -2 4 RHYTHM AND RECREATION the heart of true love there is a David and Jonathar relation of pure friendship — camaraderie — a marriage of the qualities held in common, supplementing that of opposing attributes. There is, further, in tht social intercourse of boys and girls a large element o) pure gregariousness. A crowd of them at a ball game is not very different from one made up of the boy undergraduates alone. In short, love itself, as the gossip concerning Venus has long suggested, is very susceptible and always brings other emotions in its train. Then in both boy and girl, especially in the girl, the awakening of this feeling is so associated with the whole awakening of life that it is hard to say where the desire to live leaves off and that for love begins. To get into the game, to drink deep of the cup, to spend and be spent, to have lived and loved, to know the joy and beauty of life, its heights and depths — in some such formless way to every young creature comes the great vital impulse. Girls coming out in society are well named buds. It is the budding power of mother Nature that is in them. It is the universal power of life and growth, the strongest power there is, that they are charged with. How far this force is committed to one form of discharge or another is different in every case, and in every case is difficult to know, but that the form varies much according to suggestion and opportunity is unquestionable, and constitutes our great responsibility. III. Besides being attended by other impulses, the love instinct itself is not a simple one. Ro- mantic love is something quite different from mere desire, and has as much influence in checking as in producing it. Romeo's love for JuHet kills his feeling for Rosalind not merely as having a different object but as being in its essence an op- posing force. The truth is that in this matter of the mating of human beings, even in its simplest terms, we en- RHYTHM AND RECREATION 5 counter a larger emotional phenomenon than that of sex alone. There are other motives present in the very passion itself that materially affect the whole relation. The element of personal, romantic love is, it is true, an integral part of sex attrac- tion — forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum. But it is aimed at something different from mere repro- duction. With its advent there came a new thing into the world. This deeper, more lasting, element in human love has solid biological foundation. Its absence, indeed, would have made a controlling factor of our life inexplicable. What has chiefly caused the rise of man and of the higher animals above their myriad competitors has been the great phenomenon of infancy, that long period during which the young are in a plastic state, with a resulting capacity for learning and for adaptation. The existence of in- fancy, in its turn, depends upon the home created and maintained by a monogamous pair who feed and shelter and defend their young during the period of helplessness. But to create the family and home, to build the nest, to sustain the loyalty of the male through the long infancy of the offspring, required an emotional basis far deeper than that which had sufficed for less permanent relations. This great phenomenon of infancy, nature's latest biological invention, responsible in the main for man's supremacy, is the creature, the outgrowth, of the deeper and nobler elements of human love. The lover is, biologically speaking, the decisive ele- ment in human progress. The Practical Problem Our practical problem is how to develop the best in this relation among all the vast possibilities that it contains. I. The solution is partly quantitative. There cannot be too much love in the world, but there 6 RHYTHM AND RF.CREATION is such a thing as too much love-making. It is not properly a routine occupation, and if too steadily pursued, will generate more emotion than can be safely handled. In part the way to escape this danger is, as we all know, by creating a diversion, providing other occupations and pursuits. This motive is largely behind the great modern belief in athletics. It created the muscular Christianity of Thomas Hughes' day, from which we still benefit, and is partly embodied in the Y. M. C. A. It is also largely responsible for school extension, for boys' and girls' clubs, for social centers and, indeed, for all the lines of development we shall discuss. Athletics for girls have not the same instinctive basis as in the case of boys, and can never take anything like the same place. Hard romping games may nevertheless greatly benefit girls in every way, especially in the matter of emotional stability. Miss Kennard tells me that it is necessary in order to develop true tom-boys to catch them young, the crucial time in this respect being not at the age of fourteen, but somewhere in the period from eight to twelve. If they do not become tom-boys then through habitual participation in lively, squeal- ing games, they will be foredoomed to premature young ladyhood. From this purely quantitative point of view the question is one of maintaining due proportion. Every one is familiar with Leigh Hunt's advice to young ladies that they should keep a debit and credit account, balancing so many hours crying over a novel by a proportionate time given to sweeping the floor or other less harrowing pursuits. II. But there are more intimate ways of dealing with the problem. It is not all one of quantity. Besides, what we mainly want to do is not to side- track this great emotion, but to preserve and util- ize it, by encouraging its safer and its nobler ex- pression. The lamentable thing is not the evil that exists but the good that fails. RHYTHM AND RECREATION 7 1. Athletics have partly this effect. They are, in part, an expression of the secondary sexual in- stinct of competition. They are a contemporary form of chivalry, which is the idealization of the sex relation. (Note it must be athletics — hard competitive games, not cat's cradle.) 2. A good prescription, I think, in the case of boys, is the encouragement of romance. It would be a good plan for every boy, before he becomes too wise to take them seriously, to read Scott and Lorna Doone. The better sort of love songs, like the Scotch ballads, have the same effect. Burns may not have been a model of virtue in his own life, but his poetic imagination enabled him to state the case in a way to make the blank prose of mere sensuousness abhorrent. There is no better police power than romantic love. As a mere question of safety it is a good investment. Nothing will make a lower satisfaction look more flat and tawdry than a remembered boyish ideal. With girls, I am credibly informed, again by Miss Kennard, the case is different. They have, as a rule, too much rather than too little of romance, and can be trusted to have enough of it. 3. Then there is novel-reading. It is a remark- able fact, and I think a notable confirmation of my theory that love-making is many things, that we can safely play with this emotion to an almost un- limited extent as presented in good literature. Of the millions of novels read every year (counting each one each time) the effect of those which deal with the matter in the right spirit is chiefly bene- ficial. Exception should, perhaps, be made in the case of the modern English school, which one could forgive if it claimed only to have invented sex and not to have a patent on it. Good literature, especially in the form of novels, in which it is most likely to be consumed, is of great importance in our problem. After all, the chief intercourse of human beings is in the form of talk; and the best gift to any set of young people 8 RHYTHM AND RECREATION is something worth while to talk about. The heavi- est indictment of war is still, as Madame De Stael complained, that it spoils conversation. After they have said "Hello," "Been to the Little Pink Idiot.?" and "See the Blue Sox lick the Dwarfs?" what — under the yellow light of our present written dis- pensation — is left to talk about.'' The idle tongue — though idle, never still — is a more dangerous member than the idle hand. And what worthy occupation can it find among the prevailing interests of our young folks at the present time? I put novel- reading high as a beneficial agent in this whole matter. 4. Art is another pursuit which, besides em- ploying energy and occupying time, is of specific value as satisfying a need of emotional expression that would otherwise take a sexual form. Some people think that all art is sexual. Certainly, all the arts afford a ready channel for this emotion. Many a masterpiece has been wrought out in the heat of a great passion. Singing, poetry, and other forms of music are love's native tongue. Every bird has a love song, and every one in love, or at the special period of love, has a need to sing and must suffer almost physical pain lacking that form of utterance. We must cultivate in our boys and girls every form of art for which we find capacity — or, rather, not cultivate, but cease from stifling. Song is as natural to a young creature of our owm species as to a bird. It is a voice lost to us through the in- hibitions of a too critical civilization. We must restore this natural voice — if in cultivated form, so much the better, but in some form at all events. The monotonous chant of the Spanish peasant girl, or even the frank, unquestioning bellow of the young Italian, is better than our artificial, clod- like silence. We must not, mdeed, forget that art may be a stimulant, may excite more than it satisfies. Just what determines which of these two results shall RHYTHM AND RECREATION 9 be produced — and so gives a balance to one side or the other of the account — we must presently consider in studying the ways of dealing with the great rhythmic instinct which is so largely the source of all the arts. Improvement of Conditions This question of rhythm brings me to the present practical center of our problem: the improvement of the actual conditions under which our boys and girls are brought together. Just now there are in this country three conditions that make this problem especially acute. First, there is the exclusive society of those under twenty-one which we must learn both to recognize as satisfying a sound moral demand, and also to modify, especially by showing children of immigrants that Americanism does not consist in despising one's parents nor in scorning the ideals that have given beauty and nobility to their lives. Second, there is the changing status of women from one derived from the family relation alone to one based partly on direct individual relation to the political and industrial community. This shift in status has made it impossible to handle our problem wholly through the family relation. The family is not dead yet, and will not die so long as there is anything of human nature left in man; and we must continue to act largely through home influence. For the rest, our general policy must be to mobilize the mothers — to turn loose upon society as a whole that surplus of maternal power and instinct that is left over through decreased opportunity in the home. A third, pervasive and overmastering condition in the meeting of our boys and girls, the one that just now makes the problem especially acute, is in the wave of rhythm that is passing over this country at the present time. Dancing has become a national obsession, amounting almost to a mania. lo RHYTHM AND RECREATION both as to amount and kind. Folk dancing, social dancing, aesthetic and dramatic dancing, dancing in imitation of the less graceful of the lower ani- mals, dancing by old and young, by rich and poor, by the wise and the foolish — dancing by all kinds of persons and in every variety of form — is in- cessant in the dance hall, on the playground, on the stage, and in the street. It has invaded the very ballroom and captured professional "society" itself. The Bridge of Avignon, celebrated in song, is nothing to America at the present time. The rhythmic madness is not confined to dancing proper — or improper. Our popular songs are all dance music, and are kept running in our heads so that we waltz through our sermons, write pre- scriptions in three-four time, and add up columns to the music of the Grizzly Bear. Even our politics are set to metre. The failure of Mr. Taft to cap- ture the popular imagination is traceable to a deficient sense of rhythm. The people are all dancing to the Roosevelt rag-time, the Bryan waltz, or the La Follette dithyrambic. Our very conversation is a song and dance. The effect of this wave of rhythm upon the meeting of our boys and girls is seen in the great increase in the amount and what we may perhaps call the intensity of social dancing. The dancing of young people together, when permitted, has in- deed always been, and always will be, popular. All the great forms of recreation are built where two main instincts meet. Our national games, for instance — including football, baseball, basket ball, bridge — are all at the junction of the com- petitive instinct with that of team play. Each of them satisfies, besides, a number of minor in- stincts such as striking, chasing, wrestling, throw ing at a mark, and the great gambling, Micawber- like instinct of waiting for something to turn up — as handed down to us from centuries of watching by the pool or forest path for something good to eat. RHYTHM AND RECREATION ii Rhythm, especially, is the most pervasive of all these active impulses. It is the female instinct, always married to some other in the production of a satisfying blend. But that a popular diver- sion should be established where rhythm and sex attraction meet was in any case inevitable. The present situation simply accentuates a permanent condition. Rhythmic Instinct I want to speak more generally about the rhythmic instinct and its relation to sex expression, of what v/e are going to do with it and what it is likely to do with us. 1. Rhythm in the first place is our measure of time. It is, or comes near being, the very substance of time to us, our only method of conceiving of it. It enables us to drive a peg into a certain point in time so we can identify it as we can with space — is the source of our whole arithmetic of duration. I believe it is a more ultimate measure, means more to our feeling, than the sense of space, and giyes the latter its chief reality. Rhythm is thus a very practical thing. I believe we could hardly do a physical act without it. Foresight of the swing and ictus of a movement is a prerequisite of its performance — as I once discovered when learning to jump a horse over a fence. I found I landed^ uniformly and with precision, just behind his ears, until 1 learned the rhythm of the motion and could foresee it with some accuracy before it started. 2. Rhythm, I think, is very deep in personality. The long-suffering word "temperament" ought at least to mean rhythm — the particular tempo or motif you are set to. The difference between Celt and Saxon is thus truly said to be a matter of tem- perament. It is the quick time against the slow. 3. Rhythm not only creates time for us; it also kills time. It is rhythm that through the long centuries has made monotony bearable to people who have had to walk or row all day, or knit or 12 RHYTHM AND RECREATION spin or tend the loom. We talk of being tired of routine, but more people dread to get away from it. It is hypnotic. That is one reason why chil- dred like to swing, for swinging is said by high authority to be a form of sleep. Rhythm may thus be a narcotic, putting the finer sensibilities to sleep, and leaving the rest to act on without them. Such lulling to rest is a great boon when the road is long and stretches straight ahead. The captain can sometimes safely set the course and go to sleep. But sometimes such sleep is very dangerous. Al- cohol, for instance, as the doctors have now dis- covered, acts chiefly not as a stimulant but as an anaesthetic. Its festive and outwardly p»ositive effects are due not to increased but to diminished self-activity. It lets off the brakes of custom, conscience, and public opinion and leaves the stage free to the chance emotion of the moment. This effect of rhythm has important bearing on the dance-hall problem. 4. Another function of rhythm, which also has direct bearing on the problem of social dancing, is seen in its making possible the great get-together fusion of different minds and temperaments. Only in obedience to its spell does this fusion take place. When people sing, or march, or dance together each knows with accuracy what all the rest are doing and going to do, and in great part how they feel about it. And each knows that the other knows — and so on. To the depth that the song or movement goes the mutual understanding is complete; and the common consciousness goes deeper and deeper with repetition— a ripple, a wave, a ground swell, until the whole emotional being of each member of the company swings to the same pulsation like a tidal wave. The religious dance culminating in the religious orgy was one of the earliest social functions. Almost every great social movement has been set to music, from the musike of the Greeks to modern ragtime and from Luther's hymn to the Carmagnole. Think what the Mar- RHYTHM AND RECREATION 13 seillaise stands for. The story of rhythm has al- most been tfle story of civiHzation. I even beheve that there is significance in the fact that the great rowing nations, the people of the /Egean, of the Baltic, of the German Ocean, with their training in rhythmic cooperation, have been the great democratic nations of the world. Here we have an instinct protean in its mani- festations, which has among its powers a hypnotic influence, the power of abolishing social conven- tions, of putting to sleep the conscience, the brain — a power that has manifested itself in orgies of many sorts, in religious and social frenzies cul- minating often in human sacrifice, from the first tribal ceremony down to the horrors performed to the cry of ca ira. And it is this aboriginal un- tamed power, coming up out of the great sea of our subconscious nature, that is turned loose in our dance halls without any effective regulation or restraint. What are we to do about this situation? The answer, I think, is to be found in the final function of rhythm in our life. There is one good fairy left to make her gift. 5. Rhythm is the common element in all the arts, the true parent of the Muses, who are simply the different incarnations in which the god delights and satisfies mankind. So that in discussing rhythm we are considering not the dance problem alone but the whole question of art and what to do with it. Dancing is the primal expression of the rhyth- mic impulse and always at the core of it. It is as dancing that this instinct first appears in the child. It is as motion, not primarily as sound or sight, that it always appeals to us. It is the reminiscence of motion in music or poetry or architecture that makes its fascination. Chopin derived a part of his inspiration from Fanny Elsler's dancing. Music is simply dancing freed from the limitations of anatomy. Rhythm is less obvious in the arts that act upon 14 RHYTHM AND RECREATION us through the eye. But these also reach us most intimately, come nearest to our feelings by what they suggest to hearing and the sense of motion. Action is the form in which we live; and that which touches us — moves us we say — has roots in motion — that is, in rhythm. You cannot abolish rhythm. It is of the stuff of which our lives are made. You cannot safely leave it to direct itself. What is our safest course? Where is it a benefit, a creator of beauty, an en- hancer of our life, and where does it become a danger or a drug? I believe that the myth of Bacchus contains the answer to our question — Bacchus, the god of art, the god of wine, the god of life and beauty, the god of the great primal forces that well up in us — of song and ecstasy — the god that inspires us and makes us mad; the great god of rhythm who both entrances and intoxicates. The Greeks were very conscious of this problem. Their education was built on music, as they called it, that is, on rhythm in its various forms. They knew what art was if any one has ever known. And they knew its dangers, and prayerfully con- sidered in what direction safety lies. They even had their Puritans, of whom Plato is an illustrious example. And their conclusion is expressed in this great myth — the myth of the great god Bacchus, whom the Thebans imprisoned and who, in revenge for such mistreatment, drove the king and people mad. In that story is compressed the conclusion of what was both the most artistic and the most philosophic race the world has seen. Our safety, according to the Greeks, is found in receiving the great god of life and beauty, of dance and song and rhythm, in listening to his message and obey- ing it; danger lies in the attempt to lock up the god and pretend he is not there. ^ It is not enough simply to receive the god. The world's great mistakes in dealing with him through I See Gilbert Murray, The Ri«c of the Greek Epic. RHYTHM AND RECREATION 15 all the ages have come from supposing that passive reception will be enough. The essence of our piety is in its activity. Inspiration must stir up achieve- ment, not put to sleep. The alternation between the denial of the god and his too passive reception — between license and Puritanism — has been going on from the days of the Greeks down to the present time, and doubt- less it was an old story when the Greek myth grew up. Following the period of ancient art, through the long Middle Ages, Puritanism reigned. The ascetic was the ideal, and it was thought holy to deny the flesh in every form. Human nature at last rebelled, and there came the renaissance, the rebirth of man, of the humanities, the rediscovery of beauty and of art. Then, once again, the god was too strong for the people, or their obedience was too passive. Art descended into sensuality, and we had another Puritan reaction. And now, once more, the god denied by us, as by the ancient Thebans, is breaking from his prison, appearing in his cruder form and threatening to drive us mad. Human virtue, it seems, is like a hotel blanket. When you cover your feet it comes off your shoul- ders. When, feehng that you are too decollete for comfort and that the higher interests are being neglected, you pull it up about your neck, it comes ofi^ your feet, until human nature revolts against the cold. So the race has alternated between license and Puritanism. The solution is that of the Kansas law — that hotel blankets must be long enough, (Kansas, you know, has had some expe- rience with Bacchus and is something of an expert in this matter.) We must stretch our virtue until it will cover human nature as it is; must learn not to deny the god but to receive him heartily, and grant him positive constructive service — take this great element of rhythm and work it into forms of beauty as an essential part of life. Specifically, the danger is in the inartistic, the unformed. It is the too simple rhythm that is i6 RHYTHM AND RFXREATION hypnotic, the rhythm to which you lie passive — that requires no eft'ort of attention — a lullaby to the moral and restraining faculties. I saw at the World's Fair in Chicn