Then there is love. That promises, at the outset, complete escape into freedom and reality. And supreme lovers, both of individuals and of “Humanity,” have indeed found freedom and the pathway to reality in love. But ordinary everyday people rushing idolatrously out to find themselves in others find in the end only another I. The religions perhaps work best and longest. But even here average humanity, where the mystical sense is feeble, are thrown back in the end upon ethics—and go somewhat grimly through life doing their duty, living upon the husks of doctrine, the notions and reports of other men.
If the play spirit within us, that longing for the real joy of life, for real relaxation and re-creation, fares so poorly for most of us in the amusements large and small that life offers to our leisure moments, is it any better in the “games” the individual chooses for himself—hobbies, for instance? Can these generally “instructive” and “useful,” generally also solitary, occupations be called play? Are they not merely a reversal of life's engine, rather than an unmaking and a remaking. They are merely a variant of life. They are very truly called a “change of occupation.” They are led and dominated, commonly, by the intelligence. They contain no element of freedom. The same defect is found in all organised “games.”
Real play, like every other reality, comes from what our mechanical and practical intelligences have called “within.”
Real play arises when the “I” is in direct contact with the myself, with Life, with God, with the actuality moving beneath all symbolic representations.
It is only when “I,” the practical, intelligent, abstract-making, idealising, generalising, clever, separated “I,” the “I” which has a past, a present and a future, renounces its usurpation of the steering apparatus, that play can be. “I,” to play or to pray or to love, must be born again. “I” must relinquish all. “I” must have neither experience nor knowledge, neither loves nor hates, neither “thought” nor “feeling” nor “will”—nor anything that can arrest the action of the inner life. When this complete relaxation, which has its physical as well as its mental aspect, is achieved, then and then only can “I” rise up and play. Then “I” shall rediscover all the plays in the world in their origin. “I” shall understand the war-dance of the “savage.” “I” shall know something about the physical convulsions of primitive “conversion.” The arts may begin to be open doors to me. “I” shall have stood “under,” understood my universe, in the brief moment when “I” abandoned myself to the inner reality. The words of the great “teachers” will grow full of meaning. My own “experiences” will be re-read. I shall see more clearly with my surface intelligence what I must do. I shall be personal in everything, personal in my play. Surface self-consciousness which holds me back from all spontaneous activity will disappear in proportion as “I” am immersed in the greater “me.”
Look at that woman walking primly down the lane to the sea with her bathing-dress. She is a worker on a holiday. But she cannot play. She goes down every day to bathe in the Cornish sea, the sea that on a calm sunny day is like liquid Venetian glass and flings at you, under the least breeze, long, green, foam-crested billows that carry you off our feet if you stand even waist-high. She potters in the shallows and splashes herself to avoid taking cold. Her intelligent “I” is uppermost. Her world of every day never leaves her. She will go back to it as she came, unchanged. Her wistful face betrays the seeker lost amidst unrealities. If the “I” were a little more intelligent, she might try to defy the surrounding ocean, to pit her powers against it, to swim. She would learn a most practical and useful and withal invigorating accomplishment. If her busy, watchful “I” could be arrested she might “see” the billows, the sky and the headlands reared on either side of her bay. She might dance into the water, and see her world dance back. She would fling herself amongst the wavelets where she stands and splashes. She might give herself up and know nothing but the beauty and strength around her. It would not teach her to swim, but she would have taken a step towards the great game of walking upon the waters.
D.M. Richardson.
TRAVELS IN TWO COLOURS.
One is often tempted to suspect that in some schools there is a deep-laid plot to destroy in the bud any love for poetry which children may possess. Otherwise how is it that little boys and girls are made to commit to memory William Blake at his highest reach of mystical fire, as in Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, or William Wordsworth at his lowest ebb of uninspired simplicity, as in We are seven? These are very popular, apparently, as poems for children to recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher's power to show children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns on the hungry mind, an evil association of ideas has been established—the association of poetry, the highest of all arts, either with the saying of lines without meaning, or with the learning of “poems” devoid of what wholesome youth really desires or enjoys.