The Country-Life Movement in the United States

by L. H. Bailey

The care of all the public or semi-public property of a township or a neighborhood is somebody's responsibility, and this responsibility should be recognized in organization. The pride of the community could be greatly stimulated if a group of people should associate to look after roadsides, lake shores and river banks, waste places, deserted and dilapidated buildings, weeds, raw spots, paths, dangerous places, mosquito ponds, breeding places of insects, stray dogs, horse sheds, trees, birds, wild flowers, telegraph and telephone depredations, cemeteries, church grounds, school grounds, almshouse grounds, picnic grounds, historic places, patriotic events, bits of good scenery, and to give advice on lawns, back-yards and barn-yards, advertising signs.

Entertainment.

All persons seem to be agreed that more entertainment and recreation should be provided for country residents; but it does not follow that vaudeville, and the usual line of moving pictures, and the traveling concert would add anything really worth while, although these are often recommended by town folk. The Board Walk kind of pageant may very well be left at the sea-shore.

But we certainly need entertainment that will help country people over the hard and dry places, and raise their lives out of monotony. The guiding principles are two: an entertainment that shall express the best that there is in country life; one that shall set the people themselves at work to produce it, rather than to bring it in bodily from the outside.

I would not eliminate good things merely because they come from the outside, and no one would deny the countryman the touch with any of the masterpieces; but I am speaking now of a form of effort that shall quicken an entire country district and leave a permanent impression on it. I would rather leave the situation as it is than to introduce the meaningless performances of the city thoroughfare and the resorts.

The movement to provide new and better sports, games, and general recreation is now well under way, and I do not need to explain it here; but two things ought to begin to receive attention: music and drama.

The music spirit seems to be dying out in the country. I hear very little joyous song there, even though the people may be joyous. The habit of self-expression in song and music needs much to be encouraged in home and school and grange and church. I think the lack is in part due to the over-mastering influence of professional town music, and in part to the absence of study of simple country forms. Simplicity is not now the fashion in music. The single player with a simple theme and the single singer with a melodious and untrilled strain are not much heard at gatherings now. Some of the best singing I hear is now and then out among the folk,—a simple direct song as plain and sweet as a bird's note. I hope we shall not lose it.

A drama of some kind is very much needed for country districts. It should be a new form, something in the way of representing the end of the planting, the harvest, the seasons, the leading crops, the dairy, the woods, the history and traditions of the neighborhood or the region. Many of the pieces should be acted out of doors, and they should be produced chiefly by local talent. Such simple plays for the most part need yet to be written, but the themes are numerous. Why not have a festival or a generous spectacle of Indian corn, and then fill the whole occasion full of the feeling of the corn? As pure entertainment, this would be worth any number of customary theatricals, and as a means of bringing out the talent of the community it would have very positive social value. The traveling play usually leaves nothing behind it.

The themes for short, simple, and strong dramatic presentation are almost numberless,—such episodes and events, for example, as the plowing, the reaping, the husking, the horse-shoeing, the hay-stacking, the wood-chopping, the threshing, the sugaring, the raising of the barn, the digging of the well, the herding of the cattle, the felling of the tree, the building of the church, the making of the wagon, the bridging of the creek, the constructing of the boat, the selling of the farm, the Indians, the settlers, the burst of spring, the dead of winter, the season of bloom, the heyday of summer.

We do not sufficiently appreciate how widespread and native is the desire to dramatize. The ritual of fraternal orders is an illustration. We see it in the charades of evening parties. The old school "exhibition" made a wonderful appeal. Every community likes to see its own people "take parts." At nearly every important grange meeting, and at other country meetings, some one must "recite," and the recitation usually has characters, situations, and "take-offs." It is too bad that we do not have better literature to put in the hands of these reciters; in the meantime, I hope that the custom will not die out.