CHAPTER II THE SPORTSMAN

The Englishman who is not a sportsman dares not mention the circumstance. In the counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for ever damned. In the towns he must have daily dealings with a starting-price bookmaker and hourly news from the race-courses and the cricket-pitches, otherwise Englishmen decline to know him. "I am a sportsman, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is the English love of manly sports that has made the English paramount in every land and on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice of England rowed stroke for his college in Oxford v. Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he would not be Lord Chief Justice of England. At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was one of[Pg 14] the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he would never have dandled his little legs on the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is a keen shot, and was one of a party of seven who made the biggest bag on record in 1865, otherwise he would never have been Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Henry Labouchere is one of our most brilliant and daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he would never have owned Truth. Mrs. Ormiston Chant is a cricket enthusiast; so are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles. Lord Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the best young woman out of Girton, and Mr. John Morley understands a race-horse almost as well as he understands the Encyclop?dists. In fact, the English eminent are either sportsmen or nothing, and all the other English follow suit.

Now and again somebody gets up and points out that betting is a great evil; whereupon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye and says that he never had a shilling on[Pg 15] a horse in his life. Then everybody says that horse-racing is good for the breed of horses, employing large amounts of capital and large numbers of honest persons, and on the whole a manly and profitable pastime. Incidentally, too, it transpires that fox-hunting is an equally noble and English form of sport, and that when farmers cease from puppy-walking, Britain may very well drop the epithet "Great" from her name. Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the unpleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a distich or two as to flannelled fools and muddied oafs. In response there is an immediate and emphatic English howl. Why cannot the little man stick to his Recessionals? How dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott and Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much less the Tottenham Hotspurs and Sheffield United muddied oafs! Is it not true that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton? Were not flannelled fools and muddied oafs among the first to throw up their home ties and fling themselves into the[Pg 16] imminent breach when the war broke out? Are not cricket and football healthy and admirable old English sports, and pleasantly calculated to keep the youth of the country out of much worse mischief on Saturday afternoons? And so on right down the line. The English are sportsmen. Sport is bred in the bone of them. Less than a century ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting in the splendid English way. They would be doing it yet, if their own stupid laws did not prevent them. Instead they race horses and pursue the fox, watch cricket and football matches, and play tennis and croquet and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps England sweet. If it were not for sport, the English would cease to have red faces and husky voices and check suits. One presumes, too, that if it were not for sport they would entirely lose their sense of fair play, their love of honest dealing, and that spirit of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs all their actions. It is sport that has made the English the justest as well as the greatest of[Pg 17] the nations. It is sport which keeps her unspotted of the lower vices, such as drunkenness, indolence, and misspent Saturday afternoons. It is sport which gives her a standard of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform upon which prince and pauper, the highest and the lowest, meet as common men. Long live sport!

Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note that the only forms of sport which can be pronounced sane and devoid of offence came out of Scotland. The grand instance in point, of course, is the ancient and royal game of golf. Without attempting to say a word that would tend to exaggerate the value of a pastime which is beloved by all Scotsmen, and not without its appreciators even in England, it seems fitting to remark that in golf you have a game which, while every whit as healthy, as manly, and as invigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, and the rest of them, can never by any chance become the mere kill-time of the idle, unparticipating spectator or the prey of the[Pg 18] "professional", the ready-money bookmaker, and the halfpenny journal. As to other Scottish sports, one need not here particularise; but they are all healthy and honest in the broadest sense, and with the single exception of football, which has been corrupted by the English, they have not been allowed to deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of popular pastimes by covetous and unprincipled persons is an unmistakable sign of national decadence. In England that exploitation goes on without let or hindrance and in almost every department. Protest brings merely contempt and objurgation upon the head of the protester, and the national virility continues to be slowly but surely sapped away. That the English notion of sport should permit of the orgies of bloodshed, rowdyism, and partisanship which take place in the coverts and on football-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds serves to indicate that, in spite of all that has been said and sung in its praises, the English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad[Pg 19] and sorry one. It is natural that a people given over to display and the getting of money for the sake of the more unnecessary luxuries money can buy should in a great measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of the primal order. The English are losing that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt as to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Englishman as sportsman worth the name seems to be disappearing; and in his place England will have the adipose, plethoric, mechanical slayer of birds who goes to his shoot in a bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, Saturday-afternoon zealot, the chief joys of whose existence are the cracking of filberts and the kicking of umpires.