VOR nothing has our age more reason to give thanks than for the modern conception of what is permissible in the way of recreation. In a volume entitled John Chinaman at Home a friend of mine describes an eminent mandarin who, walking in the suburbs of a dirty and ill-drained Chinese city, so far forgot himself, when encountering a stream of turbid water, as to gather up his skirts and jump over it. He had no sooner done so, however, than, sensible of the grave impropriety of his conduct, he looked all about him to see if anybody had observed him, and, detecting a small boy at a distance who had evidently witnessed the shocking spectacle with equal amazement and horror, gave him a sum of money and extorted from him a solemn pledge never to say anything about it! It is such a social enslavement which, far more than men, has imprisoned women for generations; and when I meet that young woman whom we have all encountered swinging down the street with both arms going like two ill-adjusted pumphandles, I carefully hug the wall, give her the whole sidewalk, and say to myself, "That young woman is getting even with her grandmother!" Her grandmother, as possibly you may remember, walked to church, or to market, like a trussed fowl; with her hands decorously crossed in front of her, and with a rigidity of movement which was, in her time, defined as being "thoroughly ladylike." Is it any wonder that, if not her children, then her children's children, have at last come to resent an artificiality of movement which was really a cruel bondage, and to dismiss the Copyright, 1906, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All Rights Reserved. 233187 elder "decorum" for a modern freedom which daily includes a larger area of feminine liberty? For such, indeed, in the matter of the physical recreations of woman, is the significant fact. Fifty years ago we allowed to children of either sex a good deal of freedom of motion. But there is many a woman of to-day who can recall the time when she put on long dresses, and what an iron bondage they stood for! I have often met, as has my reader, those dismal processions which emerge, in our great cities, from fashionable schools. You are told that they are "taking their exercise"; and you have wondered why, oftener than otherwise, they look as if they were doing penance for their sins. Thank Heaven, all that is ended now! The really good girls' school usually has a gymnasium; and if you could see in it the young things arrayed for their exercises-and then could see the things that they do-it would give you a new sensation! Of course, looked at a little more widely, this is but part of a larger whole. No historian of the future who undertakes to tell the tale of our time will begin to interpret certain results of its transformations who does not recognize the tremendous change that has come to pass in the diversions and recreations of young men. As it happened, I was born within college walls, and my boyhood was largely occupied with watching the life of several hundred undergraduates. So far as I can remember they played but one game and that the game of cricket, which has never really taken root on American soil. There was some boating and, during those weeks in summertime when the college was in session which were very few some swimming-but that was all. By which I mean, all in the way of athletic exercises. The college had no gymnasium. Baseball, golf, tennis, and their like were equally unknown; and it was not surprising, therefore, that convivialities of a coarse type, and often marked by gross excesses, widely prevailed. On the other hand, the improvement in the habits of self-restraint and self-discipline of the modern gymnastic-trained young man, and in that mastery of the body by the mind, which, whatever may be our theology or our philosophy, will certainly be owned to be a most desirable thing, is certain beyond a question. Will any one tell me, now, why such a result is not equally desirable in the case of women? I sat beside a lady of rare sweetness and benignity of character, but with a fine flavor of social conservatism coloring all her opinions, as, the other day, at a country club, we watched a sharply contested game of lawn-tennis. The young women who, with young men as their companions in the game, were flinging themselves hither and thither, leaping high in the air, running backwards and forwards, with hot and streaming faces, were more or less imperfectly protected by shade-hats from the rays of a fierce sun which was rapidly transforming their lily-white arms and hands into those of a "nut-brown maid" of decidedly rustic aspect. "I don't like it," said my companion. "Complexion is a distinctly feminine note; and if one cannot play tennis without sacrificing it, then tennis is an unwomanly game." Alas! the fallacy here is in that conception of charm in woman which esteems it as consisting in a certain rigidity of pose and a certain porcelain whiteness of cuticle. A friend of mine, who has been in China, tells of a mandarin who, watching a game of somewhat spirited lawn-tennis, was especially arrested by what he evidently regarded as the barbarous antics of a young girl. length he exclaimed, as he saw her running to and fro, and springing hither and thither, "Could she not hire some one to do that?" The words were a perfect illustration of what I may call Orientalism of mind, which, with its fixed and narrow notions of feminine decorum, could not conceive of a recreation which, in the case of woman, invaded the frigid sanctity of the immobile! At For, when we take the whole question out of the realm of mere tradition, what are the facts that confront us? It is not so long ago that in almost every well-to-do home there was an invalid daughter who, having pined through her girlhood, under restraints which, now, thank Heaven, have largely disappeared, came to the burdens and tasks of womanhood, flaccid and feeble and easily disabled. Her sister, who was amiably described by the rest of the family as a "tomboy," had waywardly broken out, mayhap, of a proper" girlhood, and was now a great, strong woman, of whom her contemporaries spoke with bated breath as "a nice girl, you know, but not exactly feminine." No, certainly she was not-if to be feminine was to be limp and meagre and invertebrate; but if to be feminine was to be, first of all, human, and then helpful and wholesome and vital, then was she supremely feminine! And this is the truth that stands at the threshold of the whole subject of women's recreations. One can imagine the cry of horror with which a company of our modern matrons would, a few years ago, have received the suggestion that girls should play baseball. Well, I saw, the other day, a body of young women and young men of distinct refinement and of, often, dainty nurture, playing baseball under conditions that involved, for the young women, every possibility of hard play and rough handling, and which was absolutely free from either! And no one who watched the game could honestly object that, at any point, it invaded the delicacy and propriety that we are wont, to associate with the outdoor sports of young girls. But, on the other hand, one could not but see how, in the breezy movement of such a game, a young girl might often find the challenge that she supremely needed and the provocation to really hard physical work which nothing else could afford her. For it is this, I think, that we are bound to remember whenever we are tempted to seclude women from participation from what people sarcastically call "manly sports"; that unless, somehow, we can permit such participation under whatever restraints of "propriety" you please-we shall be apt to deny to the physical side of a great many women precisely the discipline that they most of all need. In the composite game of baseball which I have just described was a young divine-pastor, I was told, of a church in the village near which the game was played, and obviously an adept in all its details. But far better, I thought, than his skill or cleverness, was his presence in that little company where every youth of either sex felt the whole sport ennobled by such ennobling companionship. They told me that every boy and girl in the village loved and respected him-and I could well believe it! And this brings me to a form of feminine recreation involving graver and more delicate questions than even baseball, but of which I feel bound to speak. The physical recreations and exercises which, thus far, I have been discussing, whatever their merits, have, all of them, a very modern note; but there is another which has held its place through centuries, and which found, in ancient times, a place not only in social, but in religious func tions. Dancing, that is to say, is an art, a use, a ceremony-under all of which heads it might be discussed-which antedates civilization and which illustrates it in the most conventional forms. I may not attempt its history here, though any one who traces backwards its universal prevalence must needs be impressed by the significance of its universality. There has been no tribe so primitive that it has not practised it; there has been no court so formal or ceremonious that it has not indulged in it; and, whether it has been a religious rite, a warrior's exultant festivity, or a diversion for the drawing-room or ball-room, it has equally endured, in spite of anathemas and antagonisms which now the Church and now the doctor have fulminated against it. No thunders have at all shaken its hold upon the popular taste or the popular practice. Let me make haste to say that this has not been at all because of indifference to criticism or disregard of warnings. To both these there has undoubtedly been much that is obnoxious, and it may well be a question for anxious mothers and for anathematizing ecclesiastics whether a recreation which so persists, enjoying often the sanction of the good and the approval of the judicious, may not have, something in it that it is worth while to redeem from vicious associations and to ennoble for innocent use. And that brings us face to face with the relation of rhythmic motion to joyous expression, or mental refreshment and repose. As to the former of these, no one who has studied children can be in any doubt. Rhythmic motion is, with them, not only an instinctive mode of expression, it is also a most healthy bodily alterative. A child is not greatly different from a man or woman in the facility with which inaction degenerates into inertia; and the schoolroom march, with the sharply marked time of the quickstep, or the rattling ictus of the melody of whatever sort, is, we are wont to recognize, an invaluable stimulus to children with "that tired feeling" which so easily degenerates into sloth or stolidity. Now, the interesting problem is to determine at what point in the life of the young creature who was but yesterday in the primary department of life this is to be discontinued. Those who have been working among shop-girls or others of their class who are engaged, all day long, in tasks that are good. There are, e. g., a great many persons physically fatiguing and mentally uninter- whom uninter- whom a "round" dance makes speedily esting, have often been surprised to find how dizzy, and if so there ought not to be any eager these were for an evening's dance. But question about the wisdom of their avoiding the reason ought not to be far to seek. There them. And, just so, there are others upon is a far more intimate connection between whom, in quite a different way, the effects the mind and the body than we are wont to of such dances are equally mischievous and recognize; and, when both these have been unwholesome; but, my reverend brother, you stifled or stupefied by the day's tasks or con- must not take your dirty imagination into finements, they seek some outlet for suppress- the pulpit and denounce as invariably dissoed forces which shall find vigorous and often lute and degrading that which many a decent vehement expression. "Why do they all talk young girl who hears its description from so loud?" asked some one who had come into your lips knows of absolutely in no other way. a great ball-room, where all the women seemed In a word, what may be quite true of some to be almost declaiming with a vigor of vo- coarse natures, and of some low masculine calization which was quite disproportioned minds, is by no means universally true, and to the importance of what they were saying. may not, except with insolent presumption, "Because," was the discerning answer, be universally predicated. "their environment and their tasks have kept. them silent all day!" And he might have carried his reasoning a step farther. If such one had watched the vigor with which these "young things" flung themselves into the mazes of their dance he would have seen there, too, only a farther illustration of the great law of reaction. But," cries some one, impatient of all this platitude of generalization, "are you striving, by these commonplaces of hygiene, to keep out of sight the one gravest aspect of the whole question of dancing-which must inevitably be confronted? What do you mean by dancing? And is yours an argument in favor, e. g., of what are called round dances? Can you be ignorant of what some of the most serious critics have said about these? Or are you indifferent to considerations which, concerning them, have led ecclesiastical and domestic moralists to utter their most vehement prohibitions?" No, verily, I am by no means ignorant as to all these facts; and I have no slightest disposition to ignore them. But all, alike, I am profoundly persuaded, belong to a class of questions with which it is in vain that we deal en bloc. Some such homely proverb as, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," is, in truth, the most philosophic statement of a great many questions which human society, the Church, the state, the municipality, the family, are striving to settle in some other way. And of nothing is this more true than of what are known as "round" dances. In other words, you cannot generalize about them, and say that they are invariably "bad" or invariably And much of this may with equal pertinency be said of another form of feminine recreation which is becoming increasingly popular. I mean dramatic representations. Acting, it is said by some good people, is essentially artificial; and the stage has been almost universally recognized as a corrupter of morals. Undoubtedly acting is the application of art to dramatic representation, and, like the exercise of any other gift or acquirement, carries with it the danger, among others, of feeding the vanity of him who exercises it. But so, if it comes to that, does preaching; for good preaching is an acquirement, and may, easily and often rightly, employ art in the dramatic presentation of the truth. It is, however, no more competent in us to insist that the genius that represents a character in a play is necessarily vain and degrading in its exhibition than it would be to say of the preacher that the arrangement of his discourse or the use of his voice or hands in delivering it is necessarily artificial. Great pictures, we readily own, may speak a great message, or point a noble moral; and we have no more right to impute base and unworthy motives to the actor or actress than to the painter. I do not forget, let me at once say, that the stage has at times fallen very low; and there is much in the life that one must lead who follows it as a calling that involves peril and exposure. But, alas! the stage cannot recall much in the way of unselfish endeavor on the part of those who are swiftest to enjoy its diversion, that has aimed to make it better; while those who know not a few of those who have adorned it know also how beautiful and blameless have been their walk |