SOME DEFECTS IN SPORT.
THE subject of the supremacy of games and athletics in our modern centres of education having been for the nonce disposed of, a weekly contemporary went so far, only the other day, as to invite a discussion of the merits, and in particular the intellectuality, of the kindred class of recrea- tions comprehended generally under the term "Sport." By an altogether singular coincidence, we have recently received, through the kindness of an occasional contributor, an essay which purports to deal with certain aspects of this very sub- ject. The author, we are informed, is a Frenchman, obviously a gentleman of some culture and education, who appears, so- far as we can judge, to have spent some time in the country,- and to have studied our habits and recreations to some pur- pose. His English, moreover, is unexceptionable, not to say racy. At the same time, we confess we should have hesitated to publish even an extract from such a work without a word or two of explanation.
The temptation of the self-styled intellectual critic to fall foul of anything not actually intellectual in our usages and institutions, and in the most gratuitous manner to question the soundness even of the most popular and well-established ideas, for the sake of showing what he considers his own acuter subtlety or more elevated point of view, is, indeed, notorious enough ; and the danger is one which particularly besets the French critic of English life and habits. The singular conception, so cherished by a Frenchman, of the superiority of his own social ideals and his national civilisation, has, to all men's knowledge, led many of his most cultured and highly educated compatriots into the strangest and most preposterous reflec- tions upon the ways and manners of a people whom they would hardly deny to be the most successful yet known to history. It is not always easy to keep one's temper with this sort of factions hypercriticism, least of all when it approaches a subject upon which we all feel so strongly as that of our manly, healthy, courageous, and therefore characteristically English sports. To attack the Government or the Constitu- tion, to abuse the Army and the Navy, the Church and the House of Lords, all this comes so natural to the representa- tires of a great and free nation, that the average Briton would with reason feel a sense of insecurity should the chorus of political complaint show any serious signs of flagging. But to question the excellence of our amusements, that is to be on different and dangerous ground, to agitate for a cause already decided against the critic by the verdict of British common- sense. Yet it seems to be something of the kind to which this foreign OprrasvDs commits himself almost at starting. "Sport," he says, after a brief introduction to the subject, "sport is the life of the English. It is also, in a way, their bane." To the elucidation and proof of this proposition the little treatise is devoted. "But let no man," he adds, to guard against a prejudicial construction, "imagine that we mean too much by this. Sport,—hunting, shooting, &c., are but one set of things.
It is the glory of the Englishman to do everything. The professional man, collector of china or books perhaps, and apparently engrossed therein, is miserable if he may not surprise you by appearing a-top of the Alps, finding a new way up the Teufel Spitze, without a guide. The laborious, head- achy-looking mathematician is rabidest and straightest of
cross-country riders. This duplicity, then, or many-sidedness of existence and interests, is laboriously cultivated in England, though comparatively little known elsewhere. One must mind, therefore, what one says, and not assign too much to one element of the many which go to make the upper-class Englishman what he is." So much by way of preface merely. Our author then plunges boldly in medico res :— " Of the absolute necessity of sport," he says, "or of something else combining its best and most attractive elements, to the Englishman young and old, we Frenchmen have little conception. The Englishman, it should first be observed, is the true fighter. It is only by a ridiculous vanity or curious error that we have ever been called or called ourselves a fighting people. Soldat de Dieu, forsooth ! [M. — has clearly eliminated all patriotic prejudices.] It should be very often, in our history, soldier of some one else. But, in fact, if the truth must be said, we are a quarrelsome people, which is a very different thing. The French man is, in away, brave no doubt; but the hard work of fighting man or nature, chopping down trees and clearing jungles, lonely and arduous colonisation,—these are not for him. It is the man who is wretched unless he is always furiously building something up or pulling it down, who wants something to hit, or to grind at,—it is he who makes the true and lasting fighter. Such is the Briton, and the superfluous steam. the energy and animal spirits which have carried him through all his great and dangerous works all over the world, and which yet remain stored up in vast quantities in his island, imperiously demand these outlets. Sport, then, is the safety-valve of English youth and vigour. There arises the question, then, as to whether he directs his overflowing energies into wise channels with a view to his nature generally."
He then considers separately the merits of each branch of sport. Of fox-hunting we are told (the author avoids the common pitfall of calling it an inhumane amusement) that it
has great merits,—which will surprise few readers. Its greatest merit, however, in the eyes of this original critic, is that it
stops short of being odious and barbarous. This is accounted for by the fact that the element of inhumanity, although present, is not obtruded upon the senses of those who take part in it. This mysterious criticism is explained to mean that "only a small number of persons see very much of the fox" "In saying this," adds the critic," I am not judging
only from individual experience. What I mean is, that in a fox-hunt, those who enjoy the pastime are largely occupied in the task of acquiring or exhibiting a useful courage, or in the study and management of an animal which is often, owing to its peculiar and excitable nature, in a high state of sympa- thetic enjoyment, and seldom noticeably in pain. Indeed, the English feeling for horses, especially as the Ornament of high luxurious wealth,' has not been equalled in any country since the days of Aschylus. If we were asked to find a modern parallel for the 'horsey' element in the Olympian games, the public enthusiasm, the pride of the charioteer, the passionate keen- ness of a Pheidippides, we could only look for it in England,— and we should find it not so much in the racecourse of to-day as in the hunting-field. And the modern Alcibiades, in faultless- fitting leathers and draggled pink, pulling his chestnut mare together over the heavy furrows, as he discerns his second horse' waiting by the haystack, is enjoying what few could call an unhealthy pleasure. That this should be even as closely connected as it is with the phenomenon of a sobbing, dirty, dust-bedraggled fox, who, mischief and humour all forgotten, supported only by that undying 'pluck' which Englishmen respect so much in any two-footed friend or foe, and the hereditary acuteness derived from centuries of hunting, struggles on with frantic instinct towards his home, —this is indeed worthy of remark." After digesting with enthusiasm all the compliments to our national character, either expressed or implied in the above effusion, what are we to say of the strange tirade which follows on the subject of shooting ? But here again the author begins cautiously :—
" This," he says—i.e., what is understood in England under the name of shooting—" is a matter as to which the intelli- gent individual may well have some difficulty in drawing the line. If he cannot give the indiscriminate abuse that the warmest devotees of the sport would like, and ridicule, on the other hand he must see from any high point of view in- superable objections to adopting it in the way so many English do, as the chief amusement of his life. There are forms and limits within which it is natural and harmless. But, on the whole, to find so much pleasure in killing things as the English do is bad, very bad. The conclusion is unavoie- able. The majority of shooters are, of course, not what is called good shots;' they miss a good deal and wound a good deal. But whatever skill they acquire is not intended to be devoted to any other or nobler end. This is the pastime itself,— to knock over many things,' in extreme cases to put some hundred animals through acute agony to death ; in the course of an hour to surround Oneself at a hot corner' [would it were hotter!] with heaps of God's creatures, with all the beauty and brightness dulled and distorted out of their mutilated forms. The fact may be explained ; if cannot be denied. Nor has the necessity of killing certain animals anything really to do with the matter. The point is that the sense of preciousness and beauty of life is, by this sacrilegious enjoyment of slaughter, either lost in many an honest English breast, or confused by glaring inconsistencies of feeling. To watch a splendid red deer feeding amid the most lovely natural surroundings, to 'pot' it with a rifle for mere amusement [melancholy indeed, 0 Froissart !], to pursue it as it stumbles away wounded and bleeding, and finally to cut its throat; to do all this with exulting pleasure, and the next day to pour forth a torrent of passionate indignation upon some ignorant cabman or carter who has been caught working a sore or lame horse in the streets of London, and to accom- pany this outburst with a substantial subscription to the Royal Humane Society,—this is a thing which to any but the born and bred Briton would appear almost incredible,—nay, perhaps, which our French civilisation (though our sense of humanity is defective, and though we do not proclaim it in the streets) would make almost impossible. There is somethino, (in a subtle way) brutal about it. The English nobleman kiladeer, the old gentle- man kills pheasants, the young gentleman kills rats and rabbits, the schoolboy kills a squirrel (if it will let him), and the drunken East-Ender kills his wife, or any one who happens to come in the way. If in spite of all this the average superior Englishman is not cruel,—that is because what should be the sphere of humanity is for him queerly parcelled out and bounded as to one-half of it by the sacred limits of Sport. But let him not imagine that the truest refinement of soul can by any means coexist with this unprincipled indulgence : and the spirit of this cultivated callousness is, as I verily believe, that which among the lower orders becomes an indifference to human life itself. But at the best its effect is pernicious. The navvy—in a popular music-hall song—is portrayed solicitously feeding his bull-terrier with the chops purchased for his children's dinner. On the other hand, a brutal fight is to him fun.' The English youth whose circumstances allow him to, often spends the best years of his life in laboriously acquiring a false attitude towards Nature ; he catalogues the animal creation according to arbitrary and stupid distinctions, and distributes his humane sympathies accordingly,—the squealing of a rabbit or the scream of a hare falls coldly on his ear, the yapping of his own dog in a trap will bring him to the rescue at once with passionate tears in his eyes ; a wood is to him acover ' bad or good; a bird, either a 'poach- ing brute' to be trapped or slaughtered at once, or half a 'brace' of next September's or next Christmas's bag ; until at last a simple walk in the country, and the mere study of animal nature, can afford him no more enjoyment than a love-game of dominoes to the confirmed gambler. The whole thing is stale, poisoned. Bah ! He wants to go and kill something. That is the long and the short of it."
But we fancy the most patient reader will already have
had enough of this. That there is some point in some of the criticisms, one might be inclined to admit. But is not the whole picture too highly coloured ? Al Hiawatha says :—
"Really any one would take us,
Any one who didn't know us, For the most unpleasant people."
"In conclusion," says our critic (and here most of us will agree with him), "that the best class of English sporting young men have ever thought of the matter from this point of view, I hardly think. A few may have done so. Indeed, I have heard of one eminent University man giving up the most sumptuous form of sport for the lonely perils of Alpine-climbing, because he thought the former was, in his peculiar irony, not good enough.' He was right. It is not really good enough. That more others do not see this is their misfortune." Well, is it ?
That, of course, is just the question. We all know that there is no " Sport " worthy of the name in France. It is hardly likely, then, that if there were (we only say, if there were) defects in our own, we should need a prophet out of that country to point them out to us.
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