Outdoor games are not only productive of a keener delight to
most people, they are extrinsically good as well, conducing to health,
quickness of wit, self-control, and other goods. They ARE, in their
time and place, as good as poetry. The reason for the greater reverence
we feel, or feel we ought to feel, for poetry lies in the fact that
it takes much more mental cultivation to acquire the taste for it;
the love of poetry is a sort of patrician distinction. It is also true
that poetry opens up to its lover a much wider range of enjoyments;
it opens his eyes to the beauty and significance and pathos in the
world; it is immensely educative, and inspiring to the spiritual life.
The love of broadening and inspiring things requires cultivation in
most of us; so that we praise and honor such things and urge people
toward them. Pushpin, or baseball, NEEDS no apotheosis. But if we ever
develop into a race of anaemic bookworms, we shall have to glorify
sport and learn to shrug our shoulders at the soft and easy enjoyments
of poetry. Nothing is more obvious than the utilitarian nature of such
habitual judgments and attitudes.
One of the Platonic illustrations, often brought up, is that of the
happy oyster. [Footnote: Philebus, 22. "Is such a life eligible?" asks
Socrates. Later (40), he agrees that "a man must be admitted to have
real pleasure who is pleased with anything or anyhow," but asks if
it is not true that some pleasures are "false.
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