I T is not a pleasure for any Englishman to come
to the conclusion that there is a noticeable decadence in the spirit in which the great English games and open-air sports are carried on. But to what other conclusion can a fair- minded man come, looking at the signs which he may observe in almost any daily paper he picks up ? What would be the contrast which he would be compelled to draw between the conditions under which what are called English national sports are carried on to-day, and the conditions under which they were carried on fifty or a hundred years ago ? If he began, for instance, with cricket—the greatest of all open-air games—would he be elated or depressed by the signs of the times ? Fifty or sixty years ago what is now called " first- class " cricket was a pastime. Matches were got up and played much in the same casual, happy spirit as that in which a game of billiards is played in a country house after dinner. It did not matter very much, so far at all events as money was concerned, which side won ; the thing was to get a game and to play the game hard. To-day all first- class cricket is pure business. County cricket is a compe- tition between purses. The county which is stifficienkly fortunately placed in the matter of a long purse to be able to command the services of the best professionals and the best so-called amateurs is able to attract to its matches be largest number of sightseers, each of whom pays sixpence or a shilling at the gate for the privilege of watching the game. It is the same with " first-class " football. Years ago there were numbers of amateur football clubs, mostly "old-boy" teams, who represented the different public schools, and played matches with one another without a thought of Asso- ciation cups and so forth. To-day the amateur clubs—those which have survived, for most of them have practically dia. appeared—find difficulty in arranging any fixtures at all. The playing of football, or at all events Association football, is confined almost entirely to professional elevens, the members of which are bought to play for this or that club with respect solely to their physical capabilities. Nobody cares whether the men who play for a Northern football club were born Or live in the North'; nobody minds whether the professionals who represent a South of England club are natives of Scotland, or Wales, or Ireland. The great thing is to provide a spectacle which men will pay money to see. Nothing else mattters not, at all events, to the promoters of the football club or to the sightseers. But does nothing else matter in reality P Is not the spirit in which these tens of thousands of men flock to see a great football match something worth taking into account,—for any one, that is, anxious to get at a right estimate of the attitude of the crowd towards these physical contests. That attitude must, after all, mean 'much when huge national questions such as war are involved; especially if there is a suspicion that the desire of the multitude is to be thrilled merely by looking on.
We.have lately witnessed a rather queer revival of interest in the sport—or perhaps we should say whit may be the sport—of wrestling. The interest in this revival has been the growth of only a few weeks; it has been confined practically to London; probably the wrestlers of Lancashire and Cornwall have heard very little about it. There has been a sudden craze to see one man pitted against another, weapon- less, forbidden to strike with the fist, bidden meridy to strain, to pull, to crush ; in short, to see a combat of animals. Now, no man in his senses is going to protest against wrestling considered aa a manly sport; that is, against the struggle. of one man with another to test whose muscles are the more elastic or the more compelling, whose physique can stand the greater strain, or whose joints can bear the greater weight or pressure. All that is part and parcel of any manly sport; but the pride of possession of strong muscles belongs, after all, only to those who put their muscles to the test of another man. What of those who look on? There comes in another test,—the test of the strength of character of the spectators, the question why they love to see these exhibitions of animal strength, the query whether they themselves realise what is meant by manliness, or whether they are not yielding to a passion for sightseeing as unmanly as that which allowed the nobles of Rome to regard hired gladiators—men whose profession it was to kill or to die for show—much in the same light as racing men to-day regard horses.
Take the reports of the wrestling match at Olympia last Saturday between the Russian, Georges Hackenschmidt, and
the Turk, Ahmed Madrali. Ten thousand people drawn to the West of London to see the thing ; tense silence when the two men, monstrously strong, came to handgrips ; a frantic hubbub when the Russian threw the Turk and dislocated his elbow; and then a rush of frenzied, yelling creatures over the barriers into the arena,—it is all very unpleasant reading. For who and what were these thousands of men and women who went to this great circus to see two of their fellow-creatures engage in a struggle which it was certain from the first must involve an enormous physical strain on the combatants, and possibly (actually, as it has turned out) terrible pain to one of them ? Were the men drawn from the ranks of those who themselves play games, who know what it means to come to the grip of another man ? How many of them could box or wrestle ? How many of them were soldiers ? Those questions must arise, because it is impossible for any man who has had any kind of an education in the playing of English games to believe that the swaying impulses and the hoarse shouts of the huge crowd which was drawn to this wrestling match could represent the mind—as evident in the mass—of the real player of games. What, indeed, is any game-player to think when he reads that after one of the wrestlers was thrown there was a chorus of shouts adjuring the Russian to "throttle" the Turk, or to "break his ugly neck " ? Un- English,—would that be his comment? But is it un-English? and if it is, how does it happen in England ?
It is a curious fact that, although there still exists a Lord Chamberlain to exercise an occasionally rather ridiculous censorship over theatrical plays presented in public, there is no operative censorship of exhibitions of physical skill and daring,—of which the spectacle may be just as demoralising as the presentment of an ugly drama. For what is the frame of mind of those who are excited and pleased by such exhi- bitions as "looping the loop" or "flying the flume," or the dive from an enormous height into a tiny tank, or, to go back many years, the walking of a tightrope stretched over Niagara? There is only one motive force which is at the bottom of all the interest which is taken ; and that has to do with the amount of risk to limb and life which is run by the performer. Would crowds be drawn to a public place to watch a wheel swung round a circle—merely a demonstration of the law of centrifugal tendency—if no risk of human life were involved ? Would twenty people gather together to see a ten-stone doll thrown out from a balloon attached to a parachute ? „Would Blondin have attracted thousands to watch him walk on a rope stretched six feet above a floor of pillows ? To each question there is only one answer ; but of all the exhibitions of human endurance and skill, involving the possibility of physical pain inflicted on one of the exhibitors, perhaps the wrestling match of last Saturday, attracting its ten thousand frenzied spectators, is the most striking sign of the growing "cult of the arena" which is noticeable in the evolution of English sport.
There ought to be a remedy, and there is a remedy. It ought to be considered "bad form" to look on at these exhi- bitions; there ought to be just the same kind of public ostracism of men and women who openly go to see human beings risk their lives for money as there is for those who break other social conventions, such as those, for instance, which involve decency of behaviour in public. For after all, an exhibition in public of delight in a spectacle which depends for its success on the amount of human suffering risked, is no more decent than an exhibition of pleasure in other things which are forbidden by the sane code of a civilised community. Uwe were to believe that the tendency of the national mind was towards the outside rather than the inside of the arena —if, for instance, such exhibitions as this wrestling match afforded could be supposed to represent the frame of mind of a people which will watch navies and armies go to war, careless itself of anything but the great spectacle—then nobody could quarrel with the pessimist. But it is, we believe, the truer creed that the crowd which loves these exhibitions is not representative of the nation. There was a certain class of Englishmen which was untouched by the last war ; it is that class which will be untouched by the next war, and which patronises these exhibitions.
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