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By Canon Barnett.

July, 1907.

1 From “The Cornhill Magazine”. By permission of the Editor.

Work may, as Carlyle says, be a blessing, but work is not undertaken for work’s sake. Work is part of the universal struggle for existence. Men work to live. But the animal world early found that existence does not consist in keeping alive. All animals play. They let off surplus energy in imitating their own activities, and they recreate exhausted powers by change of occupation. Man, as soon as he came into his inheritance of reason, recognized play as an object of desire, and as well as working for his existence, and perhaps even before he worked to obtain power and glory, he worked to obtain recreation. A man, according to Schiller’s famous saying, is fully human only when he plays.

Work, then, let it be admitted, is undertaken not for work’s sake but largely for the sake of recreation. England has been made the workshop of the world, its fair fields and lovely homesteads have been turned into dark towns and grimy streets, partly in the hope that more of its citizens may have enjoyment in life. Men toil in close offices under dark skies, not just to increase the volume of exports and imports, and not always to increase their power, or to win honour from one another; they dream of happy hours of play, they picture themselves travelling in strange countries or tranquilly enjoying their leisure in some villa or pleasant garden. Men spend laborious days as reformers, on public boards or as public servants, very largely so as to release their neighbours from the prison house of labour, where so many, giving their lives “to some unmeaning taskwork, die unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest”.

Recreation is an object of work. The recreations of the people consume much of the fruit of the labour of the people. Their play discloses what is in their hearts and minds and to what end they will direct their power. Their use of leisure is a sign-post showing whether the course of the nation is towards extinction in ignorance and self-indulgence, or towards greater brightness in the revelation of character and the service of mankind. By their idle words and by the acts of their idle times men are most fairly judged.

The recreation of the people is therefore a subject of greater importance than is always remembered. The country is being lost or saved in its play, and the use of holidays needs as much consideration as the use of workdays.

Would that some Charles Booth could undertake an inquiry into “the life and leisure of the people” to put alongside that into their life and work! Without such an inquiry the only basis for the consideration which I invite is the impression left on the minds of individuals, and all I can offer is the impression made on my mind by a long residence in East London.

People during the last quarter of a century have greatly increased their command of leisure. The command, as Board of Trade inspectors remind us, is not sufficient as long as the rule of seventy or even sixty hours of work a week still holds in some trades. But the weekly half-holiday has become almost universal, some skilled trades have secured an eight or nine hours’ day, many workshops every year close for a week, and the members of the building trades begin work late and knock off early during the winter months. There is thus much leisure available for recreation. What do the people do? How do these crowds who swarm through the streets on Saturday afternoons spend their holiday?

Many visit the public-houses and try to drink themselves out of their gloom. “To get drunk,” we have been told, is “the shortest way out of Manchester,” and many citizens in every city go at any rate some distance along this way. They find they live a larger, fuller life as, standing in the warm bright bar, they drink and talk as if they were “lords”. The returns which suggest that the drink bill of a workman’s family is 5s. or 6s. a week prove how popular is this use of leisure, and they who begin a holiday by drinking probably spend the rest of it in sleeping. The identification of rest with sleep is very common, and a workman who knows he has a fair claim to rest thinks himself justified in sleeping or dozing hour after hour during Saturday and Sunday. “What,” I once asked an engineer, “should I find most of your mates doing if I called on Sunday?” His answer was short: “Sleeping”.

Another large body of workers as soon as they are free hurry off to some form of excitement. They go in their thousands to see a football-match, they yell with those who yell, they are roused by the spectacle of battle, and they indulge in hot “sultry” talk. Or they go to some race or trial of strength on which bets are possible. They feel in the rise and fall of the chance of winning a new stirring of their dull selves, and they dream of wealth to be enjoyed in wearing a coat with a fur collar and in becoming owners of sporting champions. Or they go to music halls—1,250,000 go every week in London—where if the excitement be less violent it still avails to move their thoughts into other channels. They see colour instead of dusky dirt, they hear songs instead of the clash of machinery, they are interested as a performer risks his life, and the jokes make no demands on their thoughts. The theatres probably are less popular, at any rate among men, but they attract great numbers, especially to plays which appeal to generous impulses. An audience enjoys the easy satisfaction of shouting down a villain. The same sort of excitement is that provided on Sunday mornings in the clubs, where in somewhat sordid surroundings, a few actors and singers try to stir the muddled feelings of their audience by appeals, which are more or less vulgar.

There is finally another large body of released workers who simply go home. They are more in number than is generally imagined, and they constitute the solid part of the community. They are not often found at meetings or clubs. Their opinions are not easily discovered. Large numbers never vote. They go home from work, they make themselves tidy, they do odd jobs about the house, they go out shopping with their wives, they walk with the children, they, as a family party, visit their friends, they sleep, and they read the weekly paper. All this is estimable, and the mere catalogue makes a picture pleasant to the middle-class imagination of what a workman’s life should be. The workers get repose, but from a larger point of view it cannot be said they return to work invigorated by new thoughts and new experiences, with new powers and new conceptions of life’s use. Repose is sterilized recreation.

These, it seems to me, are the three main streams which flow from work to leisure—that towards drink, that towards excitement, and that towards home repose.

There are other workers—an increasing number, but small in comparison with those in one of the main streams—who use their leisure to attend classes, to study with a view to greater technical skill or to read the books now so easily bought. There are some who take other jobs, forgetting that the wages which buy eight hours’ work should buy also eight hours’ sleep and eight hours’ play. There are many who bicycle, some it may be for the excitement of rapid motion, but some also for the joy of visiting the country and of social intercourse. There are many who play games and take vigorous exercise. There are a few—markedly a few—who have hobbies or pursuits on which they exercise their less used powers of heart or head or limb.

Such is the general impression which long experience has left on my mind as to the recreations of the people. It is, however, possible to give a closer inspection to some popular forms of amusement.

Consider first one of the seaside resorts during the month of August. Look at Blackpool, or Margate, or Weston. On the Saturday before Bank Holiday £100,000 was drawn out of the banks at Blackburn and £200,000 from the banks at Oldham, to be spent in recreation, mostly at Blackpool. How was it spent?

The sight of the beach of one of these resorts is familiar. There is the mass of people brightly coloured and loudly talking, broken into rapidly changing groups. There are the nigger singers, the buffoons, the acrobats; there are the great restaurants and hotels inviting lavish expenditure on food. There are bookstalls laden with trashy novels. There are the overridden beasts and the overworked maid-servants; there is the loafing on the pier, and the sleep after heavy meals. Nothing especially wicked, much that shows good-nature, but everything so vulgar—so empty of interest, so far below what thinking men and women should enjoy, so unworthy the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds earned by hard work.

Consider again the music hall. Mr. Stead has lent his eyes. “If,” he says, “I had to sum up the whole performance in a single phrase I should say, ‘Drivel for dregs’. For three and a half hours I sat patiently listening to the most insufferable banality and imbecility which ever fell on human ears. There was neither beauty nor humour, no appeal to taste or to intelligence, nothing but vulgarity and stupidity to recreate the heirs of a thousand years of civilization and the citizens of an empire on which the sun never sets.” And in one year there are some 70,000,000 admissions to music halls in London! Consider, too, the football fields or the racecourses. The crowd of spectators is often 100,000 to 200,000 persons. What can they find worthy the interest of a reasonable creature? Would they be present if it were not for the excitement of gambling, the mind-destroying pleasure of risking their money to get their neighbours’ money? “If,” as Sir James Crichton-Browne says, “you would see the English physiognomy at its worst, go to the platform of a railway station on the day of a suburban race meeting when the special trains are starting. On most of the faces you detect the grin of greed, on many the leer of low cunning, on some the stamp of positive rascality.”

Consider once more the crowds who go to the country in the summer. “One of the saddest sights of the Lake District during the tourist season,” says Canon Rawnsley, “is the aimless wandering of the hard-worked folk who have waited a whole year for their annual holiday, and, having obtained it, do not know what to do with it. They stand with Skiddaw, glorious in its purple mantle of heather, on one side and the blue hills of Borrowdale and the shining lake on the other, and ask ‘Which is the way to the scenery?’” The people, according to this observer, are dull and bored amid the greatest beauty. The excursionist finds nothing in nature which is his; he reads the handwriting of truth and beauty, but understands not what he reads.

But enough of impressions of popular recreations. There are brighter sides to notice. There is, for instance, health in the instinct which turns to the country for enjoyment. There is hope in the prevalent good temper, in the untiring energy and curiosity which is always seeking something new. There are better things than have been mentioned and there are worse things, but as a general conclusion it may, I think, be agreed that the recreations of the people are not such as recreate human nature for further progress. The lavish expenditure of hardly earned wages on mere bodily comfort does not suggest that the people are cherishing high political ideals, and the galvanized idleness which characterizes so much popular pleasure does not promise for the future an England which will be called blessed or be itself “merrie”.

England in her great days was “Merrie England”. Many of our forefathers’ recreations were, judged by our standard, cruel and horribly brutal. They had, however, certain notable characteristics. They made greater demands both on body and mind. When there were neither trains nor trams nor grand stands people had to take more exertion to get pleasure, and they themselves joined in the play or in the sport. Their delight, too, was often in the fellowship they secured, and “fellowship,” as Morris says, “is life and lack of fellowship is death”. Our fathers’ sports, even if they were cruel—and the “Book of Sports” shows how many were not cruel but full of grace—had often this virtue of fellowship. Their pageants and spectacles—faithfully pictured by Scott in his account of the revels of Kenilworth, were not just shows to be lazily watched; they enlisted the interest and ingenuity of the spectators, and stirred their minds to discover the meaning of some allegory or trace out some mystery.

The recreations which made England “merrie” were stopped in their development by the combined influence of puritanism and of the industrial revolution. Far be it from me to consider as evil either the one or the other. In all progress there is destruction. The puritan spirit put down cruel sports such as bull baiting and cock fighting, and with them many innocent pleasures. The industrial revolution drew the people from their homes in the fields and valleys, established them in towns, gave them higher wages and cheaper food. Under the combined influence work took possession of the nation’s being. It ruled as a tyrant, and the gospel of work became the gospel for the people.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century signs of reaction are apparent. Sleary, in Dickens’s “Hard Times,” urges on the economist the continual refrain: “The people, Squire, must be amused,” and Herbert Spencer, returning from America in 1882, declares the need of the “Gospel of Recreation”. Recreation has since increased in pace. The right to shorter and shorter hours of labour is now admitted, and the provision of amusement has become a great business. The demand which has secured shorter hours may safely be left to rescue further leisure from work; but demand has not, as we have seen, been followed by the establishment of healthy recreation. A child knows a holiday is good, but he needs also to know how to enjoy it or he will do mischief to himself or others. The people also need, as well as leisure, the knowledge of what constitutes recreation.

The subject is not simple, and Professor Karl Groos, in his book “The Play of Man,” has with Teutonic thoroughness analysed the subject from the physiological, the biological, and the psychological standpoints. The book is worthy of study by students, but it seems to me that recreation must involve (1) some excitement, (2) some strengthening of the less used fibres of the mind or body, (3) the activity of the imagination.

(1) Recreation must involve some excitement, some appeal to an existing interest, some change, some stirring of the wearied or sleeping embers of the mind. Routine work, tending to become more and more routine, wears life. It is “life of which our nerves are scant,” and recreation should revive the sources of life. Most people, as Mr. Balfour, look askance at efforts which, under the guise of amusing, aim to impart useful culture. Recreation must be something other than repose—something more stirring than sleep or loafing—it must be something attractive and not something undertaken as a duty.

(2) Recreation must involve the strengthening of the less used fibres of the mind and the body; the embers which are stirred by excitement need to be fed with new fuel, or the flames will soon sink into ashes. Gambling and drink, sensational dramas, and exciting shows stir but do not strengthen the mind. Mere change—the fresh excursion every day, the spectacle of a contest—wears out the powers of being. “The crime of sense is avenged by sense which wears with time.” On the other hand, games well played fulfil the condition, and there is no more cheering sight than that of playing-fields where young and old are using their limbs intent on doing their best. Music, foreign travel, congenial society, reading, chess, all games of skill, also fulfil the condition, as they make a claim on the activity of heart or mind, and so strengthen their fibres. A good drama is recreation if the spectator is called to give himself to thought and to feeling. He then becomes in a sense a fellow creator with the author, he has what Professor Groos says satisfies every one, “the joy of being a cause,” or, as he explains in another passage, “it is only when emotion is in a measure our own work do we enjoy the result”. Recreation must call out activity, it fails if it gives and requires nothing. We only have what we give. He that would save his life loses it.

(3) The last and most notable mark of recreation is the use of the imagination. Recreation comes from within and not from without the man. It depends on that a man is and not upon what a man has. A child grows tired of his toys, a man wearies of his possessions, but there is no being tired of the imagination which leaps ahead and every day reveals something new. Sleary was wrong when he said, “People must be amused”. He should have said, “People must amuse themselves”. Their recreation must, that is, come from the use of their own faculties of heart and mind. “The cultivation of the inner life,” it was truly said in a discussion on the hard lot of the middle classes, “is the only cure for the commercial tyrannies and class prejudices of that class.” The Japanese are the best holiday takers I have ever met; they have in themselves a taste for beauty, and they go to the country to enjoy the use of that taste. A man who because he is interested in mankind sets himself on his holiday to observe and study the habits of man; or, because he cares for Nature, looks deeper into her secrets by the way of plants or rocks or stars; or, because he is familiar with history, seeks in buildings and places illustrations of the past; a holiday maker who in such ways uses his inner powers will come home refreshed. His pleasure has come from within; he, on the other hand, who has lounged about a pier, moved from place to place, travelled from sight to sight, looking always for pleasure from outside himself, will come home bored.

If such be the constituents of recreation one reflection stands out clearly, and that is the importance of educating or directing the demand for amusement. Popular demand can only choose what it knows; it could not choose the pictures for an art gallery or the best machines for the workshop, neither can it settle the amusements which are recreative. Children and young people are with great care fitted for work and taught how to earn a living; there is equal need that the people be fitted for recreation, and taught how to enjoy their being. They must know before they can choose. Education, and not the House of Lords, is the safeguard of democratic government.

Mr. Dill’s “History of Social Life in the Towns of the Roman Empire during the First and Second Centuries” shows that there is a striking likeness between the condition of those times to that which prevails in England. The millionaires made noble benefactions, there were magnificent spectacles, there were contests which roused lunatic excitement as one of the combatants succeeded in some brutal strife, there was lavish provision of games and great enjoyment in feasting. The amusement was provided by others’ gifts, and, as Mr. Dill remarks, the people were more and more drawn from “interest in the things of the mind”. The games of Rome were steps in the decline and fall of Rome.

The lesson which modern and ancient experience offers is that people must be as thoughtfully and as seriously prepared for their recreation as for their work.

The first illusion which must, I think, be destroyed is that a holiday means a vacation or an empty time. It is not enough to close the school and let the children have no lessons. It is not enough to enact an eight hours’ day and leave the people without resources. If the spirit of toil be turned out of men’s lives and they be left swept and garnished, there are spirits of leisure that will return which may be ten times worse. It is a pathetic sight often presented in a playground, when after some aimless running and pushing, the children gradually grow listless, fractious, and quarrelsome. They came to enjoy themselves and cannot. Many a boy for want of occupation for his leisure has taken to crime. It is not always love of evil or even greed which makes him a thief, it is in the pure spirit of adventure that he stalks his prey on the coster’s cart, risks his liberty and dodges the police. It is because they have no more interesting occupation that eager little heads pop out of windows when the police make a capture, and eager little tongues tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes have seen. The empty holiday is a burden to a child, and every one has heard of the bus driver who could think of nothing better to do on his off day than to ride on a bus beside a mate. The idea that, given leisure, the people will find recreation is not justified. A kitten may be satisfied with aimless play, but a spark disturbs mankind’s clod and his play needs direction.

The other illusion which must be dissipated is that amusement should call for no effort on the part of those to be amused. It is the common mistake of benevolence that it tries to remove difficulties, rather than strengthen people to surmount difficulties. The gift which provides food is often destructive of the powers which earn food. In the same way the benevolence which, as among the Romans, provides shows, entertainments, and feasts, destroys at last the capacity for pleasure. Toys often stifle children’s imaginations and develop a greed for possession; children enjoy more truly what they themselves help to create, so that a bit of wood with inkspots for eyes, which they themselves have made, is more precious than an expensive doll. Grown people’s amusements to be satisfying must also call out effort.

The shattering of these two illusions leaves society face to face with the obligation to teach people to play as well as to work. It is not enough to give leisure and leave amusement to follow. Neither is it enough to provide popular amusement. James I was not a great King but he was a collector of wisdom, and he laid down for his son a guide for his games as well as for his work. Teachers and parents with greater experience might, like the King, guide their children.

(1) It is not, I think, waste of time to watch infants when at play, to encourage their efforts, to welcome their calls to look, and to enter into their imaginings. This watching, so usual among the children of the richer classes, is missed by the children of the poorer and often leaves a gap in their development.

(2) It would not either be wasted expenditure to employ game-teachers in the elementary schools, who, on Saturdays and out of school hours would teach children games, indoor and outdoor, conduct small parties to places of interest, and organize country walks or excursions such as are common in Swiss schools.

(3) It is, I think, reasonable to ask that the great school buildings and playgrounds should be more continually at the children’s service. They have been built at great expense. They are often the most airy and largest space in a crowded neighbourhood. Why should they be in the children’s use for only some twenty-five hours a week? Why should they be closed during two whole months? The experience gained in the vacation schools advocated by Mrs. Humphry Ward gives an object lesson in what might be done. During the afternoon hours between five and seven, and in the summer holidays, the children, with the greatest delight to themselves, might be drawn to see new things, to use new faculties of admiration or develop new tastes. Every child might thus be given a hobby. Recreation means, as we have seen, change. If the children ended their school days with more interests, with eyes opened to see in the country not only a nest to be taken but a brood of birds to be watched, with hands capable not only to make things but to create beauty, the limits within which they could find change would be greatly enlarged.

If I may now extend my suggestion to parents I would say that those of all classes might do more in planning holidays for their children. There is now a strong disposition to leave all responsibility to the teachers, and parents are in the danger of losing parental authority. In the holidays is their chance of regaining authority; for every day they could plan occupation, put aside time to join in some common pursuit, arrange visits, and make themselves companions of their own children. The teacher may be held responsible, but his work is often spoiled in the idle hours of a holiday, when bad books are read, vulgar sights enjoyed, low companions found, and habits of loafing developed. But it is not only teachers and parents by whom children are guided. There is a host of men and women who plan treats, excursions, and country holidays. Their efforts could, I think, be made more valuable. The monster day treats, which give excitement and turn the children’s minds in a direction towards the excitements of crowds and of stimulants from without, might be exchanged for small treats where ten or twenty children in close companionship with their guide would enjoy one another’s company, find new interests, and store up memories of things seen and heard. Tramps through England might be organized for elder boys and girls in which visits might be paid to historic fields and scenes of beauty, and objects of interest sought. Children about to be sent to the country by a Holiday Fund might, as is now very happily done by a committee in connexion with the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, by means of pictures and talk be taught what to look for and be encouraged to tell of their discoveries. Habits of singing might be developed, as among the Welsh or the Swiss. And in a thousand ways thought might be drawn to the observation of nature. Good people might, if I may say so, give up the provision of those entertainments which now, absorbing so much of the energy of curates and laywomen, seem only to prepare the children to look for the entertainment of the music halls. They might instead teach children one by one to find amusement, each one in his own being.

The hope of the future lies obviously in the training of the children, but the elder members of the community might also have more chances of growth. Employers, for instance, might more generally substitute holidays of weeks for holidays of days, and so encourage the workpeople to plan their reasonable use. They might also enlarge their minds by informing them about the material on which they work, whence it comes and whither it goes. Miss Addams tells of a firm in Ohio where the hands are gathered to hear the reports of the travellers as they return from Constantinople, Italy, or China, and learn how the goods they have made are used by strange people. In the same firm lantern lectures are given on the countries with which the firm has dealings, and generally the hands are made partners in the thoughts of the heads. “This,” as Miss Addams says, “is a crude example of the way in which a larger framework may be given to the worker’s mind,” and she adds, “as a poet bathes the outer world for us in the hues of human feeling, so the workman needs some one to bathe his surrounding with a human significance.” Employers also, following the example of Messrs. Cadbury, might require their young people not only to attend evening classes to make them fitter for work, but also to attend one class which will fit them to ride hobbies, which will carry them from the strain and routine of work into other and recreating surroundings. Municipal bodies have in these latter days done much in the right direction by opening playing fields, picture galleries, and libraries, and by giving free performances of high-class music. They might perhaps do more to break up the monotony of the streets, introducing more of the country into town, and requiring dignity as well as healthiness in the great buildings. Such variety adds greatly to the joy of living, diverts the minds of weary workers, and stimulates the admiration which is one-third of life.

But, after all, improvement starts from individuals, and it is the action of individual men and women which will reform popular reaction. They must, each one as if the reform depended on him alone, be morally thoughtful about the amusements they encourage or patronize, and be considerate in preparing for their own pleasure. Each one must develop his own being, and stir up the faculties of his own mind. Each one must practise the muscles of his mind as a racer practises the muscles of his legs.

The most completely satisfying recreation is possibly in the intercourse of friends, and it is a sad feature in English holidays that men and their wives, who are naturally the closest friends, seem to find so little pleasure in one another’s company. They walk one behind the other in the country, they are rarely found together at places of entertainment, and they are seldom seen talking with any vivacity. The fault lies in the fact that they have not developed their own being, they have neither interests nor hobbies nor ideas, and so have nothing to talk about save wages, household difficulties, and the shortest way home.

Enough, however, in the way of suggestion as to what may be done in guiding people towards recreation. Under guidance recreations would take another than their present character. People, having a wider range of interests, would find change within those interests, and cease to turn from sensation to sleep and from sleep to sensation. People having active minds would look to exercise their minds in a game of skill, in searching Nature’s secrets, in spirited talk, in some creative activity, in following a thought-provoking drama, in the use, that is, of their highest human faculties. The forms of recreation would be changed. Much of the difficulty about what seems Sunday desecration would then vanish. The play of the people would no longer be fatal to the quiet of the day, or inconsistent with the worship which demands the consecration of the whole being. It is not recreation so much as the form of recreation which desecrates Sunday. This, however, is part of another subject.

As a conclusion of the whole matter I would say how it seems to me that Merrie England need be not only in the past. The present time is the best of times. There are to-day resources for men’s enjoyment such as never existed in any other age or country. There are fresh and pure capacities in human nature which are evident in many signs of energy, of admiration, and of good will. If the resources were used, if the capacities were developed, there would soon be popular recreations to attract human longings, and encourage the hope of a future when the glory of England shall not be in its possessions of gold and territory, but in a people happy in the full use of their powers of heart and of head.

Samuel A. Barnett.