Holiday Journal

The Amusements of the Rich.

True amusement is of two kinds, viz.: active and passive. The active and weary man and woman—those who exhaust every day their vital energies in work—take naturally to passive amusement. A lady of our acquaintance engaged daily in severe intellectual tasks, says that nothing rests her like seeing other people work. For this she goes to the theatre, and the play upon her emotions there rests and recreates her. Indeed, it is the emotional side of the nature, and not the active, which furnishes play to those who are weary with the use of their faculties. This fact covers the secret of the popular success of what is called emotional preaching. People who have been engaged all the week in exhausting labor of any kind do not take kindly to a high intellectual feast on Sunday. They want to be moved and played upon. This rests and interests them, while the profound discussion of great problems in life and religion wearies and bores them. They are not up to it. They are weary and jaded in that part of their nature which such a discussion engages. The emotions which have been blunted and suppressed by their pursuits are hungry. So every form of amusement that truly meets their wants must be emotive, and must leave them free to rest in those faculties which are weary.

On the other hand, the young, who are brimming with animal life and who fail to exhaust it in study, call for active amusements, and they must have them. And here the parent is in danger of making a great mistake. Unless a boy is a milk-sop, he must do something or die. If he cannot do something in his home, or in the homes of his companions, he will do something elsewhere. It is only within a few years that parents have begun to be sensible upon this matter. The billiard-table, which only a few years ago was associated with dissipation, now has an honorable place and the largest room in every rich man's house. The card-table that once was a synonym of wickedness, is a part of the rich man's furniture, which his children may use at will, in the pursuit of a harmless game. A good many manufactured sins have been dethroned from their fictitious life and eminence, and put to beneficent family service on behalf of the young. Athletic sports, such as skating, boating, shooting, ball-playing, running and leaping, have sprung into great prominence within the past few years—amusements of just the character for working off the excessive vitality of young men, and developing their physical power. This is all well—a reform in the right direction. Much of this is done before the public eye, and in the presence of young women, which helps to restrain all tendencies to excesses and to dissipation.

The activities of young women take another direction, and nothing seems to us more hopeful than the pursuits in which they engage. The rich young woman in these days, who does not marry, busies herself in tasteful and intellectual pursuits. The reading-club, the Shakespeare-club, the drawing-class, and kindred associations, employ her spare time; and now there is hardly a more busy person living than the rich young woman who is through with her boarding-school. The poor, who suppose that the rich young woman leads an idle life, are very much mistaken. The habits of voluntary industry now adopted and practiced by the young women of America, in good circumstances, are most gratefully surprising. One of them who is not so busy during the winter that she really needs a recuperating summer, is an exception. Our old ideas of the lazy, fashionable girl must be set aside. They are all at work at something. It may not bring them money, but it brings what is much better to them—the content that comes of an earnest and fruitful pursuit. It may take the form of amusement, but it results in a training for self-helpfulness and industry.

So, while not much can be done for the adult in this matter of amusement, much is done for the young, and much that will help to give us a generation of older men and women who will not be content with the poor business of killing time. For it must be remembered that while the young women "assist" at the athletic games of the young men, the young men are indispensable to the intellectual associations of the young women. They meet together, and stimulate and help each other; and it does not seem possible that either party should ever subside into those time-killers who haunt the clubs established for men, or those jaded women who drag themselves around to dinners and lunches and thronged assemblies.