The Healthy Life Part 27

We all long for reality. Most of the amus.e.m.e.nts in the world are imitations of the reality for which we long. They promise a satisfaction they are unable to give. Drink, mechanical love-making, all s.n.a.t.c.hed gratification of the senses, religious excitement, revivalist meetings, and so forth, most theatre-going and sports, all simulate the real glory of life. They bring an illusion of well-being.

They produce a glow in the nervous system. They cause the outlines of everyday life as we know it to grow suffused. They give us a momentary sense of heightened power and freedom. We float easily in a happy world. A sort of relaxation has been achieved. The less common forms of amus.e.m.e.nt bring us nearer to the gateway of reality. For some, they have been the rivers leading to the ocean of truth itself.

Art, for instance, the interpretation of life in terms of beauty; the "artist," the man in whom sensuous perception is supreme, offers us a sublime aspect of reality. He dwells in the universe constructed for him by his senses and tells us of its glories. He achieves "freedom."

The veil covering reality is woven for him far thinner than for common men. He sees life moving eternally behind the forms he separates and "creates." And to those of us who are akin to him, who are temperamentally artistic, he offers freedom of a kind. The contemplation of a work of art releases the tension of the nerves. To use the language of psychology it "arrests" us, suspends the functions of our everyday surface personality, abolishes for a moment time and s.p.a.ce, allows the "free," generally suppressed subconscious self to come up and flood the surface intelligence, allows us for a moment to be ourselves. But, still, this momentary relaxation, this momentary "play," this holiday from the surface "I," remains an affair dependent upon suggestive symbols coming from "without." The supreme artist achieves freedom. We, who in matters of art are the imitative ma.s.s, can only have "change," a new heaven and earth, a fresh "culture."

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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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."

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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 G.o.d, 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sociation of ideas has been established--the a.s.sociation 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.

People may wrangle all night as to whether the normal healthy child is at heart a mystic or a realist; whether he likes fairy tales because they show him a magical world where flowers can talk and umbrellas are turned into black geese, or because they tell of strange romantic things happening to a real human boy like himself; but there can be no shadow of doubt that much of the verse intended for children is either too clever in its humour to make them laugh, or too bald in its matter or tone to stir the romance that is never quite asleep in their hearts. There are really surprisingly few versifiers who have altogether avoided these errors. Some of George Macdonald's _Poems for Children_ are almost perfect, both as regards lyrical form, simplicity of language and in the un.o.btrusiveness of the inner truth they convey.

For example,

"The lightning and thunder They go and they come; But the stars and the stillness Are always at home."

But others come perilously near mere versified moralising. Lewis Carroll's nonsense verses in the two famous _Alice_ books are supreme among their kind; but are they not sometimes just a shade too ingenious, or too adult in wit? Probably Stevenson, in those seemingly artless poems in _A Child's Book of Verse_, comes nearest to a level perfection. Who has ever approached him in his power to understand and express the small child's world, desires and delights, without a trace of the grown-up's condescension or self-consciousness?

Well, these great ones are no longer in the world; yet, with the recognition of their genius, there is the usual danger of bemoaning the lack of worthy successors. Not but what there is some excuse for such lamentation; for this reason that every Christmas there is a veritable flood of children's verse, a great deal of which is either painfully didactic, painfully sentimental, painfully funny or painfully foolish.

What I wish to do at the moment is to call attention to the fact that there is one man alive in England--one of many, I do not doubt: but one at a time!--who is doing "nonsense verses" for children which are guiltless of all the faults I have indicated above.

Jack Goring is known among some of his friends as "The Jolly Rhymster." He writes his verses first for his own children, and then publishes them from time to time for the pleasure of other children.

The secret of his success is partly that he knows that even small children like a story to be an adventure; partly that he understands how their own romances, the things they picture or hum to themselves when well-meaning adults are not worrying them, or rather, trying to amuse them, begin--wherever they may end!--with a perfectly tangible object, such as a pillar-box, a rag-doll or a toy locomotive. One of "The Jolly Rhymster's" best things begins--

"Finger-post, finger-post, why do you stand Pointing all day with your silly flat hand?"

--which is exactly the sort of question that a very small child in all probability does really ask itself when it has seen a finger-post day after day at a cross-roads. How the poem continues and where it ends you must find out for yourself. It's all in a book called _The Ballad of Lake Laloo_.

In the recently published volume[15] that now lies before me, this telling of a tale of wonder which begins with an ordinary thing is again evident. Nip and Flip, aged six and four respectively, are the adventurers; and they make three voyages in this little book. In the first, _The Fourpenny-Ha'penny Ship_, they circ.u.mnavigate the world.

Now please note how Mr Goring strikes the right note at the very outset:

"Nip and Flip Took a holiday trip On a beautiful fourpenny-ha'penny ship With a dear little handkerchief sail; And they sang, 'Yo ho!

We shall certainly go To the end of the world and back, you know, And capture the great Seakale.'"

[15] _Nip and Flip._ By Jack Goring. Ill.u.s.trated by Caterina Patricchio. 1s. net (postage 1+1/2d.). C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 3 Tudor Street, London, E.C.

And there follows a picture (in black and gold) of this strange monster, just to make sure that no one will suppose they were out after a vegetable.

The tale moves along, as such stories should, very rapidly. Thus--

"And when they came to the end of the world, Their dear little handkerchief sail they furled And put on the kettle for tea."

But you have only just time to look at the tea things when--

"But alas! and alack About six o'clock The good ship strack On the Almond Rock And split like a little split pea."

So the story goes on, through divers adventures,

"From Timbuctoo to Timbucthree"

and so at last home again.

The next voyage is to the land of Make-Believe on a Christmas Eve, "in a long, long train of thought." In the course of this tale we are given a little picture of Flip herself, and here it is for you to look at. Only, in the book her shoes and stockings, the inside of her skirt, and the squiggly things on the top of her head are a bright golden colour.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The third voyage is all the fault of a toy monkey--"six three-farthings and cheap at the price"--and takes them among whales, mermaids, sea-serpents and other deep-sea creatures.

Here, then, are delightful little pictures on every page, which even a two-year-old will enjoy. And here are verses which most boys and girls under seven or eight will like to learn. And the best of it is that it doesn't matter a bit if they do "sing-song" them, for they are the kind of verses which only sound right from the lips of quite small children who have never been taught elocution.

EDGAR J. SAXON

PICKLED PEPPERCORNS.

SOUP.--Oxtail from 10 A.M.--From a Restaurant Menu.

What it was in the early morning it would be indiscreet to inquire.

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I learn that a serum for mumps is now being made at the Pasteur Inst.i.tute. "A number of monkeys were inoculated with the serum," says _The Times_ (30th July), "and a mild form of the disease was produced." It is an age of scientific progress, so we may expect news shortly of sera for toothache, hiccough, and the hump. It will not be necessary to inoculate camels for the last.

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