I The Play School: T was my good fortune last winter to be so placed that I could follow the work of the Play School, one of the schools included by Professor John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey among the schools of to-morrow. There are no repressive measures used in the school. It is a laboratory both for children and teachers, and as it gathers material, a laboratory for the community. It began its third year this last September. The life of the school, like that of other laboratories, is the children's curiosity, the consuming force of normal children when it is not suppressed. The school offers each child an opportunity to carry his curiosity about things through experiment to discovery. It is equipped with an apparatus which is not fixed but is constantly extended. This includes work-benches furnished with full-sized tools. Girls as well as boys of four and five years use hammers, saws and planes without dire consequences to tools or fingers. Toys are a serious part of the equipment. They have been selected with careful regard for the use to which the children will put them. The men, women, and child dolls are proportionate in size, and related to them are horses, carts, domestic animals, trains of cars, and all sizes of blocks for use as building material. The children supplement these toys with boats, auto-trucks, derricks, steam shovels and house furnishings which they make at the bench. Their construction-enterprises reach from railroad systems and ocean transportation to the domestic furnishing of a kitchen. Books and endless supplies of drawing materials are part of the equipment. With the help of such tools and by dramatization the children reconstruct the world of adults that is, the part with which they come in contact-in miniature. Given this opportunity to interpret their environment, an understanding of it becomes for them a very pressing need. It is this condition of mind that the school sets out to induce. Children are entered at the age of four because it is realized that the most deeply graven impressions of life come from the experiences of the very early years. They say at the school, "We can do little to establish mental habits after the seventh year, and we refuse to take children over five years except on probation." The school is finding that even at four the children have made many blind adjustments to their environment; that besides working out many relationships on false bases, they have established the mental habit of accepting much of their environment without trying to understand it. The environment of the New York city child is as complex as any in the world; the processes are never seen from inception to completion. After a time the panorama of the street ceases to be a matter of inquiry; since it has no content it is something to throw stones at. The Play School opens up the passing scene and brings to the children a realization that every truck that rattles through their street is out on some errand which is a part of the life of a great romantic city. The school says, in a statement which it has issued: "We trace the interdependence of traffic and industry. We watch wagons and guess what they contain, where they are going and where they came from. We trace them to the railroads and back to the stores, we follow them to the river, loaded with rocks and dirt which we have already seen taken out of the subway excavations; and then we see these loaded on boats." The life of the city is thus transformed from an itinerant circus to a field of discovery, marvelous in content and intellectual stimulus. The excursions of discovery do not parallel the information trips which are common in school programs. The Play School excursions are made several times a week and are not special occasions. Sometimes they are made in search of definite information, but usually they keep to the spirit of children of seven years or younger, which is one of exploration and adventure. If a region once visited proves of high interest the trip is repeated at short intervals. The river and the docks, for instance, are inexhaustible. What the children see on their expeditions is not turned by the teacher on their return to the school into a lesson, nor is its use dictated by her. The school, endowed with the patience of science, leaves all that to the children. It is richly rewarded for its confidence as it sees each child turn to the material for help in working out his interests in their sequence. The teacher could not possibly give them the sense of its value or purpose which they get in their own experimenting. Also, in breaking in on their sequence of thought she might weaken their own efforts at concentration; there is no reason why material relevant to a teacher's plan of a day's work should be relevant to the thought processes of each small child. A little later on we learn to manage irrelevant matter without its affecting so seriously our immediate interests. As a result of leaving use and time of use of material to children, the most striking characteristic of the school is concentration. A group of six-yearold children spend the greater part of a morning in a room alone, carrying forward their play schemes and accomplishing an amount of work which would satisfy an efficiency expert. Between the hours of nine-thirty and eleven-thirty in the morning the school is one of the busiest workshops in New York city; there are no malingerers, neither are there any bonuses, stop-watches or foremen. Not only habits of concentration but habits of logical thought have their best opportunity for development. The teachers watch for signs of thought-sequence and inquire of the child his purpose and further intention; he is receiving in this way strong stimulus to follow out the road he has chosen until he is ready finally to draw his deductions and pass on to other things. If his interests are wayward, the teachers use discouragements against his taking up new material until he has finished what he started. The instinct of all children is to turn the life of the adult world over into miniature through play. But for New York children there is a phase of poverty shared by all, rich and poor alike; that is the poverty of opportunity and encouragement for free, imaginative play. Every conceivable entertainment is devised for them, but the impulse for free play, when it has the courage to break through the plan of things arranged by the "Olympians," is as a matter of necessity suppressed. The perversion of the play instinct would be more startling if adults had not lost the distinction between free play and entertainment, if they had not accepted as substitutes for free play such artificial diversions as "movies" and jumping-jack toys which do for children the stunts which in play they would do for themselves-substitutes which turn them from actors and creators into spectators, inhibiting directly the instincts which belong to child life. There was only one child out of eleven entering the school for the first year who had held on to her play thoughts. The four-year-old children admitted the second year showed more encouraging signs of the play spirit, but it was weak and unsustained. It is interesting to note that the second group were, on an average, nearly a year younger than the children admitted the first year, and the influences of repression had had a shorter life. I have not the space to speak of the relation which the school recognizes between the art and the play impulse; of the increase of rhythm that comes out in the children's dancing as their play impulse is freed. Nor can I more than allude, in so brief an account of a new experiment, to the physical arrangements of the school which provide each child with a floor space of his own, partially screened, within which he carries out his play schemes undisturbed by the other children. The school takes the position that if children under seven are given opportunity to gain content which they can use alone to test out their power, they will be in better shape to take their place in a group than if they had been forced into group work before they had gained confidence, before they knew that they had something of value to contribute, and before they could appreciate the contributions of others. The belief is that the socialization of children is advanced if the instinct of this early period for individual effort is given the fullest opportunity for development. It is a common tendency to regard such experiments as isolated, bearing no relation to the great public problem of education. What presses on the conscience of the community is not the intensive cultivation of children, but the school attendance of the whole child population. Yet the findings of the Freud school of psychologists are poignant reminders that extensive education is not a substitute for intensive; that the socialization of the children, the first object of a public school system, depends upon a scientific regard for the desires of the individual child, particularly the children below the grammar school grades. These experiments in intensive education will assume an important place in the community as the effects of repression-the accompaniment of the present extensive education-during the most impressionable period of life are realized. HELEN MAROT. S CORRESPONDENCE Peace that is Inconclusive IR: What memories of our Civil War are stirred by the letter in your issue of September 18th from your English "Copperhead" correspondent, J. A. Hobson. It is all there; the North straining to the breaking point at the front, in their rear this effort for the attrition of the moral strength of the North by unceasing criticism and doubting: suppressing and belittling always the great principles at stake, magnifying always all mistakes of those who bear the brunt, fearful always that with possible victory too severe penalties may be exacted of the enemy, pressing always for peace, any peace, for an "inconclusive peace," and for the first time in his letter it is an "inconclusive peace," that makes Mr. Hobson hearty and ungrudging. In justice to himself will he now specifically state to his American readers what he thinks England should exact of Germany as to Belgium before England looks toward peace? Were I an Englishman there are questions concerning England on which I should like him to define himself and defend himself-from the appearance of a tepid loyalty. Indianapolis, Ind. article, E. L. SWIFT. Mr. Hobson's Reply [In a not particularly courteous commentary on my "Britain's Changing War-Mind," Mr. E. L. Swift raises two issues of some importance. The first relates to the rights or duties of free discussion in war-time by a member of a belligerent nation. My article, not critical in any hostile sense of that term, expressed the opinion that the early enthusiasm with which the British nation, like every other, had thrown itself into the war, was sobering down into a duller hue of resolution, and that the popular over-confidence in early and complete success which once prevailed had been worn away by the slow course of events. I set forth some of the evidence upon which this analysis was based-information of no esoteric sort, but accessible to all the world. I gather that this appears to Mr. Swift reprehensible, not because of misstatements or false interpretation of the facts, but because such truths are calculated to hearten the enemy or to injure the cause of my country. For Mr. Swift, writing from Indianapolis, cannot and indeed does not question the accuracy either of my statements or my reasoning. Now my contention is that in a tough, protracted struggle, like that in which my country is engaged, a clear understanding both of the actual situation, military, political and economic, and of the actual mind of the belligerent peoples, is of prime importance to us as a condition of safety or success. After all proper allowance is made for the utility of concealing from the enemy certain concrete facts relating to our forces, our plans and recent military events, the fullest and most accurate information regarding facts and feelings is the soundest war economy for a nation which is fighting, not as the obedient serfs of war lords, but as a free self-governing community. It is good for such a nation not to try to boost itself with empty phrasing and posturing to a shallow over-confidence not in accordance with the actualities of the situation, but to cultivate that steady self-command which a plain facing of the sober facts requires. Self-criticism is an essential factor in this sound economy, though by no means the only factor. It is as valuable for us to know what the German nation is feeling and thinking as it is for us to know our own mind. It will no doubt be retorted, "Yes; but you also let the enemy know." Here there lurks a wholly false assumption that it is always a good thing to deceive the enemy. Now this foolishness is nowise better illustrated than in the wholly false presentment of our ultimate war-purposes which such economy of truth upon our part has enabled the war government of Germany to impose upon the mind of its people. Why does the German people believe with a passionate conviction that the Allies, and England in particular, are determined to crush and dismember their country, to destroy its trade, and to deny it any fair share of developing the resources of the world? Our government, our people, have never seriously entertained any such intention. But idle and furious phrases, uttered by our less responsible politicians and journalists, are served out by the German war-lords to lash up the drooping spirit of their people. If the enemy did know our war-mind, and if we ourselves had a clearer understanding of it, such knowledge would neither hearten the enemy nor impair our own morale. Quite the contrary. The enemy would then know the strength as well as the limits of our determination: and we should be able to direct our moral and intellectual, as well as our material, resources more providently towards a clearly conceived material purpose. Nowhere has this importance of getting a clear understanding of our true mind been stated more frankly than by Dr. C. W. Eliot in one of the earlier letters of his correspondence with Mr. Schiff: Have you any means of getting into the minds of some of the present rulers of Germany that idea that no such alternative as life or death is presented to Germany in this war, and that the people need only abandon their world-empire ambitions, while securing safety in the heart of Europe and a chance to develop all that is good in German civilization. Even here there is probably a misunderstanding in imputing to "the people" of Germany "world-empire ambitions," which illustrates again the urgent need of such free self-analysis on the part of each belligerent people as that for which I plead. For it must be remembered that if the sort of analysis I offer be true, its repression does not mean a mere concealment of our true mind from ourselves and from our enemy; it means the substitution of a false mind. Now it cannot really help us in the war to pretend that we are other than we know we are, and that we have other intentions than we know we have. Such "bluff" might conceivably assist us to steal some sudden passing advantage, but it must react with damaging effect upon our deeper sanity of purpose, which is needed for the long and serious task in which we are engaged. I foresee a time, perhaps not distant, when the failure to make our mind quite clear to ourselves and to our enemy may be the chief obstacle to a possible termination of the war. Mr. Swift, quite falsely and with no tittle of support from any passage in my former article, imputes to me and other "Copperheads" the willingness to accept "any peace." Now I know no body of men or women, scarcely any individual, in this nation against whom this charge could truthfully be made. I know no one who would quit fighting upon any terms which left Germany in possession of any of the lands of Belgium, France, Russia, or the Balkans which she has temporarily occupied, or which failed to make adequate provision for the re-establishment of Belgium. These conditions are indispensable to any peace upon which the Allies can voluntarily enter. Nothing short of an almost unthinkable success of the Central Powers, which left them in a position to dictate terms to the broken forces of the Allies, could lead to any abatement of any of these conditions. And such a peace could have no long endurance. For the claims of Belgium, in particular, upon England and on France are of a quite absolute obligation, in view not primarily of the treaty of neutrality, but of the arrangement by which these two great Powers induced the smaller Power to bear the horrors and barbarities of the invasion in their defence. But, it may be said, the conditions you name amount after all to the status quo ante bellum. Can the Allies bring themselves to entertain the possibility of so unsatisfactory, so inconclusive a peace? Probably not. But, all the same, it is worth while distinguishing the conditions which are absolutely indispensable to a peace which is even moderately satisfactory to the Allies from other conditions however important, such, for example, as the restitution to France of the entire province of Alsace-Lorraine, the setting up of an independent Poland, the rescue of the Slav populations from the grip of Austria-Hungary, and the destruction or cession of the Germany navy. These and certain other terms no doubt appear to the great bulk of our people essential to "a conclusive peace." But all, I think, would distinguish these, as regards honor and obligation, from those first named. Among these terms of secondary obligation degrees of importance will be found. If France insists, it will be held that we must keep on fighting until Alsace-Lorraine is taken from Germany and restored to France or to complete autonomy. But no purpose can here be served by a discussion of all the separate changes in the political map of Europe, or of the world, which may seem conducive to a satisfactory settlement. The practical issue which may come up is this. Suppose that, after further costly experiments, both belligerent groups come clearly to recognise that no conclusive issue is attainable, and that further continuance of fighting, while wearing down the human and economic resources of each nation, brings no prospect of an early settlement, even by exhaustion. Will their statesmen then be able to persuade themselves that it may be better to seek or to accept, or at least to consider, terms of settlement which will appear to each of them "inconclusive" rather than incur the certainty of further carnage? The answer to this question turns, I think, upon the degree of inconclusiveness that appears to attach to such a settlement. And that I venture to think turns largely upon the information that each nation has of the other's disposition and intentions. If, for example, we were able to believe that the complete failure of the aggressive designs of military Prussia, and the terrible sufferings which that aggression had brought to the German people, would discredit Prussianism in Germany, while the exposure of the unreality of the Slav menace removed the chief defensive purpose in German militarism-we might then entertain terms which seemed impossible upon another reading of the German mind. Similarly, if Germany could be got to understand the genuineness of the pacific intentions of the Allies, it might make all the difference in the formal terms she might be willing to accept, when once the hope of victory had disappeared from her mind. It would indeed be a lamentable thing if, at such a juncture as I here contemplate, neither party would listen to the voice of reason or humanity, because the mind of each had been poisoned by false representations of the other's mind. For in the end the degree of " conclusiveness" attaching to a peace must depend less upon the immediate concrete terms than upon the intentions of each of the parties. And for this purpose it is essential that each nation shall by free discussion and fearless analysis of fact and motive know its own mind and make that knowledge known to others. London. J. A. HOBSON. P. S. Since writing the above lines the following story in the Manchester Guardian has caught my eye: According to a wounded officer, a day before the great attack a curious thing happened. A board was hoisted in the German trenches bearing the inscription "The English are Fools." No one wasted a bullet on such poor abuse. The board went down and reappeared with the addition "The French are Fools." It was ignored by the British. Then the board came up again with a third line "We are Fools." A lively interest was now awakened in the board. On its last appearance it bore the inscription"Why not all go home?" Whether the story be literally true I cannot tell. But that it is a true rendering of the feelings of the fighting units of all nations there can be little doubt. All would earnestly desire to 'go home.' And all the anxious watchers in their homes would like to have them back. Why cannot they go home? Because those who sent them out are paralysed by mutual fears and the misreading of each other's mind. S Anti-Ragtime IR: Once I asked J. A. H.] a rather famous artist to express in music the most immoral feeling possible. He threw up his hand with a quick snap of his finger, and I had his answer forthwith in a whistled snatch of ragtime. In your issue of October 16th Hiram K. Moderwell attempts to dignify this delectable sister of folly under the disguise, "folk-music." His exact words are, "I am sure that many a native composer could save his soul if he would open his ears to this folk-music of the American city." The confusion of thought in this article is exasperating because nowadays one hears so much of its kind. The fundamental idea seems to be that if you can pervert the taste of ten million persons in these United States-no matter how inferior they are as a class-into liking a thing, you may then, with the fervor of a religious zealot, call the thing American and insist that it is necessarily the fullest expression of the life of the people. This sort of reasoning everywhere infests our national life. The editor with his dozen reports of murder and sexual laxity flashing from the front page of his morning paper; the novelist and dramatist with their liberal laxative of filth and their crass sugaring of sentiment; the minister with his startling vulgarity and his hypnotism; the music-master with his ragtime-all these bow the knee to Baal. These men, however, insist that they are expressing the true American feeling by giving the people what they want. The concrete product of such rasoning is found in men of the type of William R. Hearst, Harold Bell Wright, Billy Sunday, and George M. Cohan. The harm lies in the delusion that these are the true Americans. If one has heard, "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings," how could he save his soul by opening his ears to "When the frost is on the pumpkin and the fodder's in the shock?" Or if one has comprehended "What a piece of work is a man," why should he imagine that he is expressing the real American spirit when he spurts through a quid of tobacco, "Lord! we all know we're as common as sin!" So long as some people remember that America has produced Greeley and Bryant, Emerson and Hawthorne, Phillips Brooks, MacDonald, Damrosch, and Muck, shall they find their souls when they [Ragtime is American, exactly as skyscrapers are American-having been invented, developed and chiefly used in America. On that point there can be no dispute. How much you like it is another matter. The correspondent feels that the taste for ragtime is a depraved taste and that the class which entertains it is an inferior class. Of course he is assuming that he is the superior. Now, if I may be allowed the liberties of controversy for a moment, the man who argues in this fashion is technically known as a snob. A snob, of course, may be right. But just suppose in this case that the taste for ragtime were not depraved; the correspondent could never know that fact because, being superior, he could not share the tastes of the inferior. The weakness of the snob is his helpless imprisonment in this vicious circle. If he should happen to be wrong he could never know it. I certainly do not suppose that "ragtime is the" fullest expression of the life of the people. And I freely admit that bad ragtime is written in about as great proportion as bad lieder and bad symphonies. The important point is that ragtime, whether it be adjudged good or bad, is original with Americans it is their own creation. And a people must do its own art-creation, for the same reason that an individual must do his own lovemaking. Η. Κ. Μ.] K After the Play NOWING "An Ideal Husband" was to be given at the Irving Place, and not being any too sure of my German, I thought I'd better reread the play. Knowing too that Oscar Wilde is an author who must be read in the right edition, and that I possessed only a cheap reprint of "An Ideal Husband," I tried to get hold of one of the old, tall, wide, slender volumes, with bent gold blades on the cloth binding, colored something that is now neither lilac nor old rose. While hunting for this book I looked back a little more than twenty years, and tried to recall first seeing and hearing of an Oscar Wilde play. In the Middle West it was, and the play was "Lady Windermere's Fan." Nothing was left in memory but the impression made by the fine high manner of all the men and women in the play, by the wit of many, by an occasional passage where the beauty implicit in their speech became explicit, by an economy in the use of words. Even characters the most designedly voluble spoke with an effect of economy. I remembered too, and smiled at the recollection, that twenty odd years ago I thought "Lady Windermere's Fan" rather daring. These impressions were not effaced while I was reading "An Ideal Husband," but their outlines were blurred by other impressions. Oscar Wilde, I told myself, was a man who had mastered the art of giving talk a high style with out losing on the heights the tone of the levels. Yet it was Oscar Wilde who made Lady Chiltern say this to her husband: "All your life you have stood apart from others. You have never let the world soil you. To the world, as to myself, you have been an ideal always. Oh! be that ideal still. That great inheritance throw not away-that ivory tower do not destroy." It is Yeats, I think, who says rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the imagination. From the same play, from Sir Robert Chiltern's story of his fall, a story told to his most intimate friend, I pick this queer little artificial flower: "With that wonderfully fascinating quiet voice of his he expounded to us the most terrible of all philosophies, the philosophy of power, preached to us the most marvelous of all gospels, the gospel of gold." Here the lover of pattern is more clearly heard than the nice idealiser of everyday speech. The words are words that anybody might use, but the sentence's artful structure is bookish. Such a passage is worth comparing with a piece spoken in "A Woman of No Importance" by Miss Hester Worsley, a young American Puritan who is talking to her English hostess and her hostess's English guests: "You have lost life's secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold." Here the structure of the sentences is simple enough, but Miss Worsley's purple and gold sound as if she had first got her similes by heart and then coldly let them loose upon a defenseless drawing-room. Of the details in "An Ideal Husband" it was, however, a very little one that most amazed me. Sir Robert Chiltern, seeking egress from a friend's room, says: "Let me pass, sir." Is it really by Oscar Wilde, this phrase the most unheard in life, even at the poker table? Not less amazing, if you have forgotten your Oscar Wilde, is the content of "An Ideal Husband." What in the world is it all about? Sir Robert Chiltern, who laid the foundation of his fortune, when he was a cabinet minister's private secretary years ago, by selling a cabinet secret to an Austrian speculator in Suez Canal shares, sud denly finds himself face to face with public exposure. If he is exposed goodbye to his career as a statesman. If his wife finds out what he did she will leave him. He is right -she does find out she will put an end to their marriage. No, he is wrong. She forgives. His avoidance of exposure is wrought by a stolen bracelet, by the discovery that his accuser, who has the letter he wrote the Austrian speculator, is a thief. What could be older-fashioned, unless it is the vicissitudes of a letter written by Lady Chiltern to her husband's most intimate friend, and mistakenly regarded by her, in her unreal stupidity, as one of those letters that compromise the writer? To one who has not forgotten "Lady Windermere's Fan," however, or "A Woman of No Importance," the story of "An Ideal Husband" is not amazing at all. The formula is the same for each of these plays: Take a melodramatic plot, the most artificial you can find, and scatter it through scenes of comedy, of wit that cannot be imitated, of pictures of the brightest and best manners deliberately and consummately stylisiert. Miraculous, considering the frequency with which rhetoric does duty for passion, in scenes supposed to be felt, miraculous how little these naïve scenes interrupt the mockery which tinkles through each play so precisely. The true criticism of these three plays is the fourth play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," which has all their virtues and lacks all their defects. Before writing it Oscar Wilde must have been aware, or as good as aware, that when he was serious on the stage he was usually naïve and often badly purple. He must have made up his mind that what was shopworn in his technique was there to be laughed at. He succeeded in being himself on the stage, in attaining complete freedom and complete sincerity, by writing a play in which the only feeling is love of form. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is not only the best of these four plays, and the one which has hardly aged at all. It is also the easiest to act. In "Lady Windermere's Fan" and "A Woman of No Importance" nearly all players are beaten by the difficulties of representing witty men and women, belonging to the highest world, astray in melodrama; of keeping Oscar Wilde's good women inside that picture of triviality and wilfulness which was Oscar Wilde's idea of charm; of keeping the Aubrey Beardsley parts of the plays alive through the bored-Sardou parts. "An Ideal Husband" is quite outside the range of the players at the Irving Place. Mrs. Cheveley is thus described in the stage directions: "Lips very thin and highly-colored, a line of scarlet on a pallid face. She looks rather like an orchid, and makes great demands on one's curiosity. In all her movements she is extremely graceful. A work of art on the whole, but showing the influence of too many schools." Miss Jennie Valliere's acting as Mrs. Cheveley, especially in the third act, made me wish to see her in some part written by a hand as heavy as hers. As Sir Robert Chiltern, the note of whose manner is "that of perfect distinction, with a slight touch of pride," Mr. Feist was monotonously woebegone. I could not understand why Mr. Korff, who began in the right tone as Lord Goring, chose to make him, as the play went on, rather malicious and rather contemptuous. And never, I am certain, could Lord Goring have kicked Lord Caversham's coat into a chair. But even as a Lord Goring who forgot his manners Mr. Korff's craftsmanship was eminent. He would be superb, I should think, in a Wedekind play. Q. K. |