[17] See the article, “[The Play Spirit],” in the [November issue].
With your contributor's description of the play spirit, that happy leisure from self and its responsibilities in order that time and thought and heart may be filled with wider inspiration, most of your readers will, I think, entirely agree, and all of us will be grateful for the spirited claim on behalf of “play.”
The one criticism that occurs to the mind is that a touch of professionalism, of patronage towards the ordinary person, has crept into the author's thought and peeps out through many of the sentences.
“Common men” ... “ordinary everyday people” ... “average humanity,” ... “a worker” who ... “cannot play”; does the writer of the Play Spirit really show us what is in their hearts? He is an artist in words, he is a keen admirer of other arts, he is interested in thinking; it seems all but impossible to him that anyone can have “freedom” without the power of expressing it, without even the consciousness of its possession.
We are all too apt, I think, to imagine that our own discoveries of the mystery and magic of life are peculiar to ourselves, or shared only with a sympathetic few, passed on sometimes (by the very few who have both will and power to do so) to such of the outsiders as are interested enough to enter into that enchanted garden and take gifts from it. But has not the supreme discovery of the greatest artists, philosophers and teachers been that the “everyday people” do live as deeply and broadly as the thinkers and artists? They are inarticulate and cannot tell what they see, but to them life is made amusing, or interesting, or consecrated according to their temperament.
Who can say what the Cornish sea means to that tired worker? At least it seems a boldness that is almost insolence to decide what it did not mean to her!
Has not every life its revelations? Is it not because we do not see as God does that some one particular life which strikes across our path cannot reveal its revelation over again to us?
Surely “the commonplace is the highest place.” Or rather, there are no hierarchies of the soul. Artist or seamstress or carpenter, we live by the glory that flows to us through whatever curtains of environment are round us.
I have not a word of criticism for the writer's ideal. All that I would suggest is that the ideal is really present in the world, “common” as the “everyday” flowers at his feet. Not all can sing or paint or write, but many more can laugh or run and all, perhaps, can love and pray.
L.E. Hawks.