Cricket: A Game or an Art?

The Summer Game. A Cricketer's Journal. By Neville Cardus, (Grant Richards and Humphrey Touhnin. 6s. net.)

The Turn of the Wheel. The M.C.C. Team, Australia, 1928-29. by P. G. H. Fender. (Faber and Faber. 12s. 6d.

OF the three books before us The Summer Game, by Mr. Neville Cardus, is the only one which has either literary pretensions or literary merit. Mr. Cardus has been described as the. " Sainte-Beuve of the cricket field," and the papers contained in the present volume are as delightful and as graceful as ever.

Some of them were written in the heat of the Press box—

accounts of County Matches as they were taking place. Others are more studied efforts—reflections about the game in general or about a particular player. Of the latter category is the charming little elegy written on poor Roy Kilner, the Yorkshire International cricketer.

" He was not ashamed of his Yorkshire speech, and what a rich, friendly flavour it had in his mouth ! To hear Roy speak of a Lancashire and Yorkshire match was indeed to be warmed with his own county's humour. Ay,' he would say, it's a might match, Lancasheer and Yorkaheer. - Tha knows, t' two teams turns up On

Bank Holiday, and we all meets in t' dressin' room, and we all says " Good mornin' ! " to one another. And then we never speaks agean for three days ! ' "

In his final paper, Artists and Cricketers, he passionately pleads for the view that the somewhat latent aesthetic in- stincts of the British fmd a vent in cricket.

" Go-among the shilling crowd any fine day at the Oval and what do your hear ? Little technical jargon, little talk of off-breaks and the position of the left funny-bone in the late cut. Instead, you will hear many delighted cries of, Beautiful stroke—beautiful ' Now that same word beautiful' is one which average Englishmen are not in the habit of using ; it is, indeed, a word they commonly distrust quite as much as they distrust the word art.' The truth is we are as a people prone to be ashamed of living the life aesthetic ; we see and feel beauty even in our games, but we rarely confess to it Yet that Beautiful ! ' which a glorious cover drive by Hobbs will bring warmly from our tongues tells the truth ; Hobbs is for us an artist."

On the whole, Mr. Cardus is very hard on modern bat- ting as compared with that of twenty years ago and seems to find in Hammond alone a worthy peer of the Titans of old.

It remains to be seen whether the recent and revolutionary change in the rules will do anything to alter this and restore enterprise to our crack batsmen ; but certainly Mr. Cardus gives support to the view that something is amiss and that the M.C.C. were right to experiment.

In the last resort Mr. Cardus likes cricket because it gives the fullest expression to the versatility, character, and talent of the man behind the bat or behind the ball. We recommend the paper on " Ranji,' Fry and Sussex " for exemplification of this theme. He reports how Ted Wainwright, the old Yorkshire bowler, used to speak bitterly of having to face the dreadful combination of Fry and Ranji playing for Sussex at Brighton on a plumb wicket.

" ' Aye, we told oursel's, every blessed year, we're doin' might well, Yorkshire ! Sussex 43 for 2 ! But, bless your soul—we knowed there were newt in it ! ' At the fall of the second wicket Ranji came to the middle, swishing his bat like a cane. At close of play the score was, more often than not, Sussex 392 for 2."

Honest Wainwright was not only disturbed—he was shocked by the magic of the Maharajah.

" Ranji,' said Ted Wainwright once, "e never made a Christian stroke in his life.' The light that shone on our cricket-fields when Ranji batted was a light out of his own land, a dusky, inscrutable light. His was the cricket of black magic indeed. A sudden sinuous turn of the wrist and, lo ! the ball had vanished—where ? The bowler,- knowing he had aimed on the middle stump, saw, as in a vision, the form of Ranji, all fluttering curves. The bat made its beautiful pass, a wizard's wand. From the very middle -stump the ball was spirited away to the leg-side boundary. And the bowler, a good believer in the true faith, crossed himself at the sight of it all."

The other two books are by professional cricketers instead of by a professional writer, and they are both accounts of last winter's great tour by Chapman's Eleven in Australia. Mr. Noble gives a generous account of the tour, for he begins

his book with these words :-

" English cricket is again on top. That fact is indisputable ; Chapman's men proved it over and over again in the 1928-29 series of Tests in Australia. In almost every department of the game they showed their superiority."

He gives a general account of the English team and then gives an account of each match individually. The action photo-

graphs are fascinating and give a wonderful impression of the play. We specially notice the extraordinary picture on page 268 of Hammond caught by Fairfax off Wall in the fifth match.

Mr. P. G. H. Fender has written a companion volume telling the same story from the English point of view. Mr. Fender did not see every match, and only describes in detail those which he attended. He adds some chapters of reflection on " Australia in the Field," on " Batting in the Tests," and then some general reflections and conclusions.

Perhaps only a serious student of the game would read through the detailed account of every Test Match in Mr, Noble's and Mr. Fender's books, but every cricket en- thusiast will like to possess these volumes as books of reference and as reliable and well-written accounts of the historic tour in which English cricket once again vindicated itself.