Over-development of the large and cruder muscles dwarfs those smaller and more delicate ones which adapt to the softer and subtler departments of faculty. And while despoiling these smaller muscles which subtend gentle and delicate artistries, the crude larger ones, hypertrophied by athletic activities, become alike a burden and a curse to their possessor. Because not only is their upkeep a continual and a superfluous tax upon her vital powers, but their hunger for continued function in further such crude activities afflicts her with turbulent impulses, for which the more civilised vocations supply no scope. The militant Feminist movement was as much an explosion of suppressed muscularity in young women deprived of other outlet for accumulated muscle-steam, as it was an ebullition of masculine mentality on the part of its leaders.
Hysteria and other neuroses, obsessing hobbies and crazes, are, more often than not, morbid and distressing consequences of habits acquired at school and college, of developing abnormal high-pressures of muscular and nervous energy. Masculine war-occupations have similarly evoked male muscularity and mentality in women. So that—War over—they find it well-nigh unendurable to return to the more refined and humanising womanly employments of their pre-war days. While on the other hand, employers are bewailing the rough and coarsened manners, personality and speech, as too the clumsy movements and ineptitudes of domestic servants, nurses and others, de-sexed by War-work in respect of the higher qualities and efficiencies of their sex. Many of these sturdy motor-drivers, lusty W.A.A.Cs. and strapping Land-girls have lost all taste as well as aptitude for the finer arts of life and of the home. Efficient in the handling of plough or gun or lorry, woe to the hapless babe or invalid subjected to their hard, forceful touch!
V
Language is scarcely emphatic enough to characterise the painful (and insane) exhibitions of Public-school and College "Sports," in which boys and young men, whose vital forces are needed beyond all things for development, may be seen with faces whereon is neither joy of action nor pride of achievement, but only the pained rigidity of supreme heart and nervous strain, as they strive for goals that are no test of true physical fitness, but, on the contrary, prove physical lopsidedness.
In confirmation whereof is the fact that many such athletes die young, and die suddenly. Or they live the years when men should be still in their prime—valetudinarian and hypochondriac. The secret of health and nervous power is the constitutional capacity to store reserves of vital energy, for expenditure as required. Exhausting sports in youth engender habits of over-expenditure thereof.
Trials of skill and of strength are admirable spurs to development and self-discipline. But these should make for excellence in that fine poise of Mind and Muscle which is the hall-mark of human achievement, not for extremes of crude brute-force (muscle being the lowest grade of human powers) which strain the living mechanism; and, straining, leave inevitably weak and warped links, when not actually snapped ones therein. The human body is a marvellous and delicate psychological instrument, not a mere muscular implement. When the hearts of boys are "sounded" after competitive sports, "murmurs" are heard; showing valvular incompetency. Temporary in the majority of cases, but none the less indicative of gravely-weakened states which can but permanently injure the fine-spun valvular apparatus. "Dilated hearts" caused numbers of our "fine young athletes" to be rejected as unfit for military duty.
Young men "in training" suffer from albuminuria, showing serious derangement of the kidney-function; derangement which inevitably entails such permanent structural deterioration as lapses readily, in after years, to grave disease.
The fallacy that the excitement of games distracts the attention of youth from the processes of sex-development has been disproved. While all athletic boys are not vicious, it is now recognised that the most vicious are the athletic. The languors of body and mind reactionary upon the exciting strain of games are unwholesome languors; and breed unwholesome self-absorptions. A fresh and active imagination, to keep the mind interested at every turn, is the best of all safeguards. It is in the imagination, moreover, that higher moral and ideals arise.