Chapter 22
Diversion and amusement: games, sport, play and entertainment; why men seek distraction; the use and abuse of pastimes.
760 passages · 267 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Diversion is the name these books give to everything men do when they are not at their serious work. It covers games and sports, the hunt and the gaming table, the theatre and the circus, the feast and the dance, light reading, hobbies, and travel for pleasure. It is a great idea because it raises a question older than any of its examples: what is a human being, that he cannot always be in earnest? Some of these authors answer that man is a bow which must be unstrung. Others answer that man is a creature in flight from himself. Between those two answers lie long disputes about whether pastimes are lawful, who may regulate them, how they ruin men, and how they might educate children.
The oldest and most persistent answer treats recreation as a natural necessity. Herodotus has the Egyptian king Amasis say that a bow kept always bent would break, and that a man always earnest, never relaxing for sport, would go mad. So Amasis divides his day between business and play1. Cervantes’s canon repeats the figure two thousand years later. Frail human nature cannot stay always bent, he says, and so a commonwealth must provide lawful recreation, even plays improved by censorship2. The moderns state the point as plainly as the ancients. Locke calls recreation as necessary as labour or food3, and says that minds and bodies both need unbending4. Hume holds that a mixed life of company, entertainment and study suits human nature5. Adam Smith gives the argument an economic edge: workers denied ease and diversion fall ill, and moderate work produces more in the end6. The Bhagavad-Gita asks only that sport, like eating and rest, be measured7. Walton shows the doctrine at work in Donne, who spent his Saturdays diverting his thoughts so that he could labour cheerfully the next day8.
A refinement runs through these texts: true recreation is a change of business, not idleness. Confucius allows that even playing chequers is better than an idle mind on a full belly9. Locke turns the idea into a doctrine. Recreation is relief by change of occupation, so labour and hunting may refresh, while cards tire more than serious work10. A young gentleman should therefore take up useful hobbies rather than dice11. Penn recommends gardens, laboratories and workhouses to the idle and ingenious12. Pliny carried his writing tablets to the boar nets and found that the open air stimulated his mind13,14. Ruskin, writing in an age of mass amusement, completes the line. A nation that only wishes to be amused has caught a feverish disease, he says, and true amusement must grow out of work15.
If recreation restores the tired, can it console the grieving? Here the testimony divides. Augustine found no repose in games, music or banquets while he mourned his friend16. The sorrowing brother in the Thousand and One Nights refuses the hunt offered to cheer him17. Hamlet has lost all mirth and his custom of exercise, yet the arrival of the players lifts him for a moment18,19. Cellini, on the other hand, cured his plague-time melancholy by shooting pigeons among the ruins, though he admits the sport risked drawing him from his art20. Webster’s duke stages a show of madmen to amuse the Duchess, citing a physician who cured a pope’s melancholy by laughter21. Milton’s fallen angels race and debate philosophy to ease their restless thoughts, which is diversion as the consolation of the damned22.
That image prepares Pascal, whose analysis is the centre of this idea. For Pascal, diversion does not answer a need of the healthy organism. It answers the misery of a creature who cannot bear to think of his condition. A truly happy man would not need it23. All men’s unhappiness comes from not being able to sit quietly in a room24. The hunter does not want the hare, which he would refuse as a gift. He wants the chase, because it turns his thoughts from death25,26. The gambler bored by play for nothing proves the same point: amusement needs passion and a stake27. A bereaved man forgets his grief chasing a boar28, and man is so frivolous that a billiard ball suffices to ward off his weariness29. Kings prove the rule best. A king left without diversion is more wretched than the humblest subject who plays, and so he is surrounded by people whose office is to keep him from thinking of himself30,31.
Pascal is careful not to call diversion simply wicked. Seeking excitement is blameless; the error lies in thinking its objects bring happiness32. Diversion is our only consolation and our greatest misery, because it leads us unawares to death33. True happiness is in God, not in amusement34. Montaigne had seen the same flight, people trotting and dancing so as not to think of death, though he would sooner meet death openly35. Bacon, more worldly, explains princes who take up harp-playing and chariot-driving by their many fears and few desires36. Rousseau makes the flight a matter of conscience: the wicked man hunts everywhere for amusement, while the just man is cheerful alone37. Emerson adds a nineteenth-century variation. Drink, opium, gaming, theatres and travel are counterfeits of enthusiasm, spurious substitutes for inspiration that end in dissipation38,39.
The question of lawfulness follows naturally. If amusement turns the soul from God, religion may forbid it. The Koran rebukes those who leave the preacher for merchandise or sport40, and it forbids wine and games of chance as Satan’s snares41. Voltaire reports that the Quakers shun all diversions as levities filling a heart meant for God42, and that the Presbyterian Sabbath forbade even the king his cards43. Woolman recalls his youthful vanities as the road to destruction44. There is also a counter-tradition within piety. Walton’s Herbert held that religion does not banish mirth but moderates it and sets rules to it45. Montaigne pictures philosophy itself as gamesome and joyous, against the sad pedants46, and Milton’s L’Allegro invokes Jest and Jollity as innocent goods47. Emerson’s parable of the king makes the ascetic case and its limit together: a man who truly broods on death, the king shows, cannot enjoy healthful diversions48.
The moderns move this dispute from theology to politics. Milton argues that to license books one would have to license music, dancing and every fiddler, which shows that pastimes cannot be policed49. Mill takes the argument further. Puritans tried to suppress music, dancing and theatre, he observes, but a majority has no right to regulate others’ amusements by its religious notions50. Sunday restrictions are illegitimate51. Mill does leave one question open: the gambler may be free, yet the interested keeper of a gambling-house might still be suppressed52. Elizabethan law, by contrast, simply classed wandering players and users of unlawful games as vagabonds53.
The abuse of pastime is a theme on which ancients and moderns agree almost without exception. Plutarch’s Antony is its great exemplar. He surrenders to harpers and buffoons in Asia54, keeps holiday like a boy in Alexandria while war looms55,56, and is amused by Cleopatra with dice and fishing jests, though she reminds him that his true game is kingdoms57. Machiavelli warns that princes who prefer pleasure to arms lose their states58. Franklin sees rivals ruined by diversion abroad59, and Kant refuses a life of amusement as a universal law60. The prodigal is another type. Nur-ed-Din squanders his inheritance on entertainments, and when he is ruined his companions of the banquet desert him61,62. The idle rich are a third. Burns’s gentry waste estates on operas and masquerades and would do better at country sports63,64. Emerson’s English nobles become jockeys and fops65. Goldsmith sets simple rustic mirth against fashionable pleasure that sickens into pain66. Most dramatic of all is diversion at the moment of danger. Caesar’s cavalry are routed while watching a dance67, and Milton’s Philistines, set on sport and play, pull their own temple down on their heads68.
Gaming draws the sharpest condemnation. More blames dice and taverns for turning idle men to theft69. Locke calls cards and dice pastimes born of custom and vanity that give little satisfaction70. Tacitus records Germans staking their very liberty on a last throw71. Jonson shows gaming as the sharper’s snare for young heirs72, and Dante’s simile captures the loser replaying his throws while the winner is besieged by hangers-on73. Burke raises the vice to a political image: revolutionary France has been made one great play-table, a nation of gamesters in which the many are the dupes of the few74,75.
Hunting shows the same division between pastime and its critics. Virgil’s royal hunt is courtly festivity76. Harrison ranks the noble game77, and Emerson finds English devotion to the field almost national religion78. Smith notes that what was once necessity becomes the most agreeable amusement of advanced society79. Yet More’s Utopians reject hunting as a cruel pleasure unworthy of free men, a perverse custom rather than true delight80,81. Harrison thinks it fitter for ladies than for men of courage82. Sport also turns readily to slaughter, in Chevy Chase83,84 and in the Volsung who murders the thrall who outhunted him85.
Athletic contests carry heroic honour in the epics. Odysseus, taunted as no athlete, throws the discus beyond all marks86,87. Aeneas’s funeral games for Anchises unfold through boat race, boxing and archery88,89. Herodotus and Plutarch show games as civic festival and as a stage for rivalry90,91. Critics weigh the athlete’s glory against virtue. Sidney calls Greek victories matters of sport rather than virtue92, and Epictetus mocks the fickle who play at being wrestlers like children93.
Spectacles provoke the fiercest moral judgments of all. Cicero finds gladiators and elephant shows joyless to a refined man94. Pliny scorns crowds who follow the colours of tunics rather than skill95. Marcus Aurelius learned to take no side among the circus factions96. Augustine’s account of Alypius, seized by the crowd’s bloody pleasure and made an addict, is the deepest analysis of the circus in these texts97. The theatre has its defenders: Montaigne thinks shows unite citizens and divert them from worse mischief98; Cervantes’s canon, Voltaire and Fielding defend honest comedy as wholesome physic99,100,101. Pascal, against them, calls the theatre the most dangerous amusement because it excites the passions it represents102. Rulers, meanwhile, use spectacle to manage subjects. Hobbes and Macaulay note that rulers kept the populace content with festivals and shows103,104, and Emerson names the tyrant’s maxim, keep the world amused105. A darker strain is the sport taken at another’s cost: the wooers’ laughter at the beggars’ fight106, Sancho tossed in a blanket and feeling the jest still in his shoulders107,108, Samson paraded as a blind jester109. Augustine sees that his boyhood theft was done for company, out of shared mirth110.
The gentler pastimes of company and of the mind are rarely condemned. Homer’s Phaeacians love the banquet, the harp and the dance111. Rousseau, however, finds in singing under the tree the first seeds of vanity and inequality112. More’s Utopians play instructive games of numbers and of virtue against vice instead of dice113. Pliny defends light verse as innocent refreshment that makes prose more pleasant afterward114,115. Montaigne reads only for pastime116, and Cervantes’s curate compares romances to chess and tennis, tolerated for people without occupation117. The moderns grow uneasy with literature as amusement. Wordsworth refuses to rank poetry with a taste for rope-dancing118, and Carlyle judges Scott’s novels perfect only if literature’s task were to amuse indolent men on a sofa119,120. Franklin goes furthest in renunciation, permitting himself reading alone and shunning every other diversion for the sake of industry121.
Education offers the most constructive line of thought. Montaigne would have schools joyful and Greek taught as a table game122,123. Locke builds a system on the principle that play differs from lessons only in liberty124. Children may “play themselves into” letters with dice125, their playthings should be few and home-made126,127, and a favourite sport is cured by imposing it as a task128. Mill’s boyhood without games is the cautionary counter-instance129. Schiller lifts play from method to philosophy. The play-instinct reconciles sense and form and frees man physically and morally130, and the savage’s love of games marks his entry into humanity131.
Travel, finally, gathers the whole controversy into one figure. Sindbad, sated with merriment at home, repeatedly seeks diversion abroad and meets disaster132,133. Emerson draws the moral that travelling to be amused is a fool’s paradise, because the traveller carries his own ruins with him134. That judgment is Pascal’s in another key. The question these books leave open is whether diversion is the healthy unbending of a bow, as Amasis and Locke believed, or the restless evasion of a self that Pascal thought only God could quiet. Schiller’s claim that man is most free when he plays sharpens that disagreement rather than settling it.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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See also: Education 5c · Desire 5b · Liberty 6e · Punishment 6a
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See also: Education, Pleasure and Pain, Custom and Convention, Poetry, Hospitality, Temperance