THE POSITION OF CROQUET.
APROPOS of the "fashion" in games, to the vagaries of which we referred some weeks ago, it is clear that these mostly affect what may be called minor and private pastimes, and not our great national and " public " games. Cricket never goes out of fashion, and football, though the rage for it of late in certain places has become almost a disease, does not seem ever to lose its hold on the young and active. But both these games require organisation and numbers. Domestic recreation demands something at which three or four average individuals, at most, can passably entertain and exercise themselves and each other. Such pastimes no one would compare to the great national institu- tion of cricket, and they may be all assumed to be subject to particular limitations as compared with so universal a game. Hence the fashions in tennis, golf, bowls, "purple-monkey," badminton, &c. For five or ten years, say, people compare themselves—according to the size and scope of their gardens, their means and abilities—in respect of a certain kind of strength or skill, till they know, perhaps to satiety, their personal equations by those standards. By that time a new game, which brings different qualities and different individuals to the fore, has attractions which— for the moment, at any rate—add a new zest to leisure, if not to life.
The experiment may be a failure, the result of a mere craving for novelty and distraction. We take it that the peculiar novelty of golf is certainly one of the reasons for its triumphant invasion, even of our most railway-ridden suburbs. And it would certainly seem that golf, on the whole a slow and gentle pastime, has rather assisted the revival of croquet. This game, of course, has never—since its genesis in the late fifties—been actually extinct. The four- inch, nay, the three-and-three-quarter inch (and some say the three-and-a-half inch) hoop, and the " boundary" were in use thirty years ago. Experts, in fact, made the game—the ortho- dox and official game, that is—so difficult chat, at a later date in the sixties and seventies, it passed out of fashion amid a less energetic, and—shall we venture to say P—more "footling " public than that of the present day, a provincial public who went astray into the wilderness after strange hoops resembling triumphal arches, and " sides" so numerous that each player had time to lose all interest in the game between his turns.
In our own day, not only are there in existence many more people—in proportion to the acreage of Great Britain under grass—but of these a much larger number are anxious to play some game, and to play it well according to the higher standards of the nineties. Hence, it is not unnatural that a good many of them should now be giving croquet a second trial. The thing, in fact, has during the last four or five years passed far beyond that stage. Croquet has triumphantly re-established itself at Wimbledon,—where, presumably, the best lawns in England are to be found. Tournaments are becoming more frequent every season all over the country, and one can go nowhere without hearing, at any rate, of popular curiosity concerning the " new" game, which, however, as we have explained, is no newer than any other pastime "under the sun." It is a game for hot weather, and the experts have not succeeded in making of it a violent exercise, in the sense in which tennis is so describable. But the establishment of the "full-size court," the reduction in size and in number of the hoops (the six-hoop setting being almost universally adopted), and the increase in their solidity as obstacles and dilemmas, have established (speaking again from the popular modern point of view) a serious and respect- able game that may very well hold its own against golf, as it -seems to hold its own against tennis. Indeed, to the purely abstract view of the ignorant outsider there are more obvious artificialities, if not absurdities, about golf, except where played under the most favourable native conditions, than about any pastime previously imported into England. Only a serious nation (to whom a joke is a difficulty and a difficulty a joke) could have evolved this singular occupation, with its multiplicity of implements and train of " cawdies," whose enforced idleness (now that they have ceased to perform the "other functions of mercury" assigned to them by Humphrey Clinker *) must interfere with the enjoyment of a great many players.
• Vide first edition of the work, IL, 67. But golf—deducting from it the borrowed attractions of a walk in bracing air by the seaside—certainly involves, or may
involve, a good deal of genuine exercise, of a kind possible, as Fielding observed, for a good many men of " over four- score," and quite incomparable, it may be added, to the exertion of tennis or fives ; whereas this can scarcely be said of croquet, with all its tactics, and "corner play" and " counter-finessing."
But the latter game—it may be unhesitatingly asserted—is both more exciting and more intellectual. Croquet as now played at Wimbledon has, in fact, been fairly described as "the most scientific of outdoor games." This is not here urged as a supreme virtue—on which point more anon—but merely as an indisputable fact. As to the first point, the game is, perhaps, too exciting ; it involves the very maximum of pressure on the nerves and temper allowable by the regula- tions of civilised society. Cricket has its periods of suspense, its "exciting finishes." Lawn tennis and such games have their moments of white-hot tension (which, however, pass like
a flash), but this sort of thing is the normal condition of a good croquet match. No wonder, then, if players have on rare occasions been known to give way to a positively Greek emotion even in public.
Whereas golf, we have heard the croquettist argue, is not a game at all! Why not? Obviously because nothing that one player does can directly affect the success of his antagonist, which surely is the essence of a mock contest of any kind. In fact, so far as any physical contest is concerned, golfers might as well go round on different days and on different links. We have actually heard a golfer reply to this criticism, that the moral effect of one player upon another is considerable. Doubtless; but that is so in all games. Croquet, it might be urged with more point, represents the very opposite extreme, or " defect."
The successful player for the time absolutely dominates the game. The one who is "out" has not even any fielding to do. He is absolutely unoccupied (where the golfer in parallel case would be both exercised and enter- tained), and when the generosity of his nature has been ex. hausted in admiration of his opponent's play, 'tis marvel if he be not considerably bored! Indeed, it might well be argued generally that there is a superior and more spiritual sociability about golf, that compares favourably with the barbaric directness of ordinary " games." To be mildly depressed by a good stroke of another man's, which does not prevent you making a better one the next minute, is nothing, for instance, to the sensation of being constantly "under fire" in croquet.
Perhaps, indeed, there is no game into which the purely offen. sive element of " shooting " enters so largely. A croquet ball offers, of course, a largeish mark—something under eleven inches in width—yet the majority of people miss it at any respectable distance, more often than not. And a " brilliant shot "—a player, we mean—who can never be relied on to per.
form this simple feat, besides causing a vast amount of pleasure to the spectators, must be a serious embarrassment even to a much more scientific opponent. To have the "next player," so to speak, " on your mind," to feel that if he is not " wired " at the close of your break, then nothing on the table can be considered safe, that the accidental exposure of a single ball may undo the results of all your labour and con- trivance,—this is very destructive to the iron steadiness of nerve necessary to long-break play.
And what a really satisfying and interesting spectacle—to. come to the scientific qualities of the game—the "four-ball break " presents ! The player goes all round the court, with an apparently unnecessary amount of deliberation, finding, oddly enough, a ball at every hoop, and encountering no serious difficulty at any point. He goes through this simple ceremony once or twice if he be a Willis or an Evelegh, and lo ! the game is over. And when the spectator understands the process, what a game it is! The forethought and observation of whist, the mastery of angles and forces, the delicacy and precision of billiards, the " eye " of the rifleman, the judgment and nerve of the golfer " approaching " and "putting,"—all these elements, though we do not pretend that they are anything like the sum of man's capacities, find plenty of scope in croquet.
And nothing could more clearly exhibit the " trying" nature of the game than the way in which the best players
" break down " in the moral effort—for so it must be called— to combine them all. The perhaps excessive " strain upon the system" caused by the tremendous importance of "having command of the balls," with the alternative bien entendu of compulsory inaction, may be reckoned a draw- back. But for those who like to take their excitement "neat" and can " stand pounding," as the Iron Duke had it, without going to pieces, the boredom and strain must be balanced against the delirious joy of " getting in " with a " Sunday " shot at half a ball, let us say from five-and-twenty yards off.
Still, the fact remains that, poorly played, the game is not much fun to player or spectator, while if it is well played one performer engrosses the whole apparatus. The same, no doubt, is the case with billiards and certain other indoor games, where the defect is less material and exercise not in question, and here perhaps we stumble upon the real weakness of croquet. In the somewhat obscure philosophy of games, difficulty is not the main problem, for it is easy for the least ingenious person to invent "difficulties." Every game has to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of an excessive and trivial facility on the one hand, and a tricky and specialistic abstruseness on the other. [t has to rouse man's ambitious energies without defying chem. A more abstruse essential, illustrated surely by the immense success of cricket, is the combination of skill with violent exercise. The skill that is exhibited without this belongs rather to the " indoors " sphere of man as an over- -civilised reasoning being. Out of doors, upon the grass, under the trees and the sky, he is an animal, and feels that he should exert himself as such. If he does not, a slight sense of indignity will attach to his occupation or pastime, whatever it may be called. Hence the reduction of the standard croquet- lawn from 40 yards to 35 yards, and the admission of the rubber-end," which so vastly facilitates the long "roll "—a stroke of considerable difficulty—are perhaps to be regretted. Both these are concessions, it would seem, to feminine weakness, made on a principle which one hopes may be carried no further. Rather may it be necessary to draw a more rigid line between the practical game as played in first-class " singles," and the more conventional and social partner-competitions. Croquet, if it is to flourish among us, must assert a high standard of its awn, and not be too eager to conciliate the suffrages of pro- vincial lady players. The present writer says this, well aware that there are one or two of the gentler sex capable of "giving beans," as the sporting papers say, to many a male ex- champion. The above points are of coarse details, as to which practical experience will feel the way. Meanwhile, a new game—new, that is, to the present generation—is to be welcomed and given a fair trial upon its merits. What these may be we may rely upon "the sublime instincts of an ancient people" to determine, in the course of a few more years.
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