TWO SPORTSMEN
Hold Hard I Hounds, Please : A Discourse on the Foxhound in Field, Covert and Kennel : with Hunting Yarns, Character Sketches from Life, and some Notes on Breeding and Kennel Treatment. By " Yoi-Over." (Witherby. 10s. 6d.) tVERYBODY who has been a cricketer or has even followed cricket on paper will have a guess what Lord Hawke's Recol- lections will be like, for his personality somehow seemed to convey itself. Perhaps it was the odd incongruity that a peer should have captained the most superbly professional county team of which there is record that fixed him in the imagination. They were Yorkshire professionals, to whom nobody ever attributed any subservient meekness, and Lord Hawke's book makes plain what they were in the intimate relations of cricketing existence—not soft objects to handle. But the brief sketches of them are the best things in a very pleasant book, and it is good to be told, first, that in the superior interests of discipline he dismissed two of the best bowlers that ever played for Yorkshire, and secondly, that neither man bore him ill-will for it. His object, as a sportsman playing this national game where amateur and professional are so closely associated, was to improve the status of the professional—and as a means to that end to improve his personal standards. That is good to read about. Also it is good to hear Lord Hawke on the great men of the past, especially on the " Old Man "—whose equal he believes has never existed nor will exist. There is a capital story of old Emmett's subjugation by W. G., the new Southern star, somewhere away in the 'sixties. Also there is happy, charac- terization of later lights—" Ranji," notably, and Sir " Tim" O'Brien. But what there is not is the length and breadth of Lord Hawke's mind about cricket as it is to-day. In- directly we get glimpses of it : he liked a free hitting game and had no use for playing for draws ; he is also of Ulyett's opinion that the best matches were those in which neither less than 100 nor more than 200 was scored in any innings. ,What does he think about the seven-day monstrosity over which two continents have palpitated ? A hard fight, no
doubt, but desperately tedious. The only abstract opinion he utters is against the proposal of a fourth stump : but one would like to know his opinion of the leg-before-wicket rule in view of the modern skill in using the lcgto defend the wicket. Lord Hawke seems to think that legs were given a batsman to go
out to a ball with, but he knows that the modern performer knows better. Is first-class cricket really as sportsmanlike as in the days when Lord Hawke was captaining Yorkshire ? If the national and international value of the game be as
high as it is often rated, that is a matter for full parliament or convocation of M.C.C.
Lord Hawke is to be congratulated on one thing in his new capacity : he writes without the smallest suggestion that he is writing for print. His pages have no literary quality ; they will never offend a reader who has literary taste. Matters are different when we pass to the second of these two books which deals with the other consecrated and peculiar national pastime. Mr. Fox (one gathers from Lord Valentia's foreword that this is " Yoi-Over's " name) claims to be the first professional huntsman who has written a book on the chase since the day of Edward II. There is no mistaking in him the genuine literary vocation. Anybody who compiles an Anthology of Foxhunting (a jolly thing to do) will un- doubtedly select certain passages from this volume, for there is not only in it the feeling for the craft of handling hounds, and for all that pertains to it, but there is also a feeling for the fit words. Yoi-Over " is a beginner at this new game (which is not so easy as it looks) and there arc lapses. He is trying to use speech as a musical instrument and at times he plays badly. But sometimes he brings it off :-
" A bitch, a cross from an American slut-hound by an English foxhound, jumped a gate close by where a stone breaker was breaking stones. He swore the fox had not passed him on the road. But it had. The bitch was in her first season. She was solitary. I was watching her. She put her nose down. The weather was bleak but dry. For a full six or seven minutes she stood and, so to say, nose-searched in a straight line no longer than six feet, with her stern going all the time, and her long pendulous ears touching the ground. At last, out rang a note, then another and another, and on she went for about fifty yards. Up came her head, she charged another gate, topping it like a red deer ; on the other side she galloped off in full cry and I halloa'd on the pack. In twenty minutes this fox was pulled down."
That is illustration to a very interesting contention that the hound has to adjust his nerves to each day and that this bitch at first " was tuning her nose as the fiddler does his strings until at last she got the right tension and was able to feel the pad scent of that fox," and so led on till she " struck the scent wave that moved her to give from bosom and throat the clarion call."
Who doubts that this is writing ? Over and above this rare and special charm there is a mass of hound-lore, good to read for all who have to handle dogs. There is much else ; but perhaps enough has been said to show that this book is in a rare class, being a technical treatise by an expert which is also literature. And in every line of it there is sports- manship—the sportsmanship which wants to keep hunting not a hustle to show off riding, but—" Yoi-Over" lets you know it—a craft of skill, in which man and hound work together, but the hound really does the work.
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