Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have loved it. A 48-hour, 120-man celebration of those most basic, elemental, primordial urges in man that civilization tries to contain or closet: physical violence, alimental satiation, orgiastic intoxication and boisterous, lustful fellowship.

Even more lovely to the Genevan's tastes, the celebrants were escapees from those guardians of civilization and cocktail conversation, the eight Ivy League colleges.

Most "love-a-ly" of all to devotees and onlookers of the British-born pastime, the sixth annual Ivy League Rugby Tournament at Providence over the weekend found itself a fitting, overflowingly generous sponsor--Tuborg Breweries. There were good quantities of blood and sweat, but mostly there was beer.

Beer is rugby's battle cry, social lubricant and anesthetic. It replaces the breakfast missed by hitting the road at 6:30 a.m., the Gatorade other athletes would gulp over halftime strategy sessions and, for Harvard's "A" ruggers, lunch.

When his American teammates proposed the normal noon-time nourishment for red-blooded Americans, McDonald's, Crimson center Adrian Tew, the sole Englishman in Harvard's fifteen, reminded them of their manners (quitting the field and the Princeton-Columbia game in progress in favor of the Big Mac constitutes the height of discourtesy) and their morals with a resounding an swer: "Eat beer!"

Cases of beer and coolers provide spectators with very-much missed grandstands, while pints of beer at a nearby pub provide participants the pain-killing elixir they need after eight hours of tourney play.

"I got killed out there, and should be moaning and groaning in some infirmary," said wing forward Doug Quimby, "but I can't feel a thing."

The contents of after-hour songs, banquets and parties that extend through the night and color the next day's play defy description and libel laws. And decency.

But it is safe to say you can color the weekend spectacular of the Noble Savage brown. Brown for turf, hops, scatology and other dominating themes. But brown mainly for the victor: Brown.

The Brown Rugby Club not only hosts (and it is something of a risk to open dining halls and sleeping quarters to rugby players) but usually dominates Ivy League action, handing over its hegemony only to Princeton, only on occasion. Rugby has become the most successful sports team in Brown history, with a 185-82-9 won-lost-tie record, for a .692 winning percentage.

The historical odds prevailed at Providence this weekend, as the Brunonians rolled by Penn and Yale Saturday before clinching the championship Sunday with a 28-4 deluge over the smooth-passing, well-practiced Princeton Tigers.

Harvard, after a slow and sleepy 9 a.m. Saturday start (a 9-0 loss to Cornell), swept past Columbia, 12-0, and Dartmouth, 19-10, to finish a strong fourth, the highest it could place after dropping its opener.

Crimson club president and flyhalf Mike Noble came home with 16 points to his credit (four tries), while kicker and fullback Gary Bond floated eleven points (three two-point conversions and a penalty kick) through the crossbars.

In the final game against the Big Green, Noble's three tries came after an up-and-under (downfield kick) by Tew, a blocked kick by Quimby and a 40-yard breakaway sprint.

Inevitably, if it was Noble's weekend, it was a savage weekend for Harvard as well. Against the Big Red, captain Tom McKinley received damages totaling six stitches in his mouth and 16 in his knee. Outside wing Charlie Spickert suffered severe tearing of knee ligaments when tackled by a Lion behemoth resembling Lumpy Rutherford.

Prop Bill "Moon" Mullin, in the tourney's worst injury, was stretchered off the field into an ambulance after wrenching his neck and upper back in a scrum against Dartmouth.

As the X-ray technician at UHS once told me, "Stay away from that rugby--it's euphoric, but it keeps me in business, too."