CRICKET.*
IT has been said that when nations take to literature their period of decadence begins. What, then, happens when cricketers • (I) Cricket. Edited by Horace G. Hutchinson. " Country We Library of Sport." London: Country Life Office. [Us. 6& net.]—(2) The Cricket of Abel, Mire, and Shrewsbury. Edited by E. F. Benson and Eustace Miles. London: Hurst and Blackett. [4s.]
take to it ? A nation, being an agglomeration of types, must naturally comprise authors ; but a cricketer is a cricketer, and what has he to do with pens and paper ? By every dip into the ink so much the less cricketer he, and by every writing cricketer so much the less the integrity of the game : thus it might be argued were it not that circumstances are too strong for us, the most distinguished cricketer of the year, Mr. C. B. Fry (with his average of eighty runs), being also the most copious of cricket's historians and critics, and the gentleman who has been chosen by the M.C.C. as captain of the Club's team in Australia, Mr. P. F. Warner, being also a diligent commentator, and one of the contributors to this volume.
None the less, the friends of cricket do not look with too favourable an eye upon the present-day tendency to literature on the part of its players. It is true that the best of all writers on the game, John Nyren, was also an exponent; but he had retired from the field before he took to the pen. His was emotion recollected in tranquillity, whereas the modern Nyren seems to dash off his remarks between the innings. We say modern Nyren, but John Nyren's mantle has never as a matter of fact been lifted from the ground where it fell. There is no modern Nyren. That admirable observer of cricket and lover of men took pen in band, first, in the Guide—to describe how the great game should be played—. and secondly, in the Cricketera of My Time,—to set down the noble characteristics and quaint peculiarities of its best players, as much for their virtues as men and neighbours as for their eminence as bats or bowlers. The season for such writing has gone by.
Nyren is the ideal writer on cricket because he writes as a cricketer who has taken to the pen when the bat has fallen from his hand. He has all the simplicity and naivete that we feel rightly become a cricketer among such unfamiliar things as the implements of the desk, together with all the enthusiasm of one who loves his subject. Mr. Hutchinson's compilation, good as it is in its modern way, is without such simplicity, and it lacks the true enthusiasm. This is because even his cricketing associates write like literary men, while in the one or two cases where an amateurish note may be detected, as in the "Village Cricket" essay, instead of enthusiasm we find rather tolerance not altogether free (in that particular instance) from a suspicion of disdain. Again, although the volume is full of instruction, the circumstance that several hands supply it impairs its personal character.
Far more personal is the book entitled The Cricket of Abel, Hirst, and Shrewsbury, by Messrs. Eustace Miles and E. F. Benson, where new theories of the game, expressed with some of Nyren's interest, are enunciated ; but here, as it seems to us, cricket is taken from its true place. Cricket is a game that may well instil in its players some of the finer virtues,— patience, watchfulness, endurance, courage, and so forth ; but the process of instillation should be secret. We are abso- lutely opposed to Mr. Miles's public analysis of the game and recommendation of it as a national renovator. Knowledge of woof and texture is often a mistake ; certainly it is so here. Cricket's moral benefits must come like angels, unawares.
With cricket on its practical side we are not concerned. It is, we hold, a matter to occupy men and boys in the open air rather than readers in a study ; and a few minutes with a good professional are, we imagine, worth more than libraries of precept. But with cricket's best servants (who would in mwt cases have been notable men, whatever they had done) the reader may be very much concerned, and also with cricket in its essence,—the idea of cricket, why it is so much better a game than any other. On both these points John Nyren is strong and Mr. Hutchinson is weak,—Nyren strong because he had rapture and the epic gift, Mr. Hutchinson weak because his scheme has restricted him, and his asso- ciates have narrow views. Together they celebrate, not cricket as cricket, but a refined and elaborate development of the modern game, too much a matter of routine. They do not suggest that cricket's joys are new every morning; as they are to those who play but seldom and come to each game as to a battle. A man who is as accustomed to cricket as some of the contributors to this book is not the man to write about it in the finer way. He may make excellent journalism, but poor literature. • Familiarity is the worst foe to rapture; and rapture is necessary. There is a note in certain of these chapters that seems to reduce cricket to the level of some- . thing very like office work. We are aware that Mr. Hutchinson's scheme made his pre- occupation with modern first-class cricket (as it is called) a necessity, and it is perhaps not quite fair to blame him for what he has not done ; but it seems to us a pity that so much time and energy should have gone to the production of yet another work on familiar lines, when a book on the game, more in the manner of Nyren, and therefore in the best manner, might have been written ; particularly as the pictures to illustrate the human side of the subject were all to hand. Never has a volume on the game been illustrated so superbly and thoroughly as this ; but the pictures are left to tell their own stories, being dropped in at intervals opposite pages that speak in a wholly different spirit of alien matters. To take a case : here is Arthur Shrewsbury, just dead,—is there no one to tell us anything of himself, his sayings, his character ; or must we be put off with the endless photographs of the positions of the batsman as he makes imaginary hits (not even authentic records !) and the glorification of his hundreds? Tom Emmett, again, that rich "character,"—who will make him immortal ? The present multiplication of cricket volumes is beyond the dreams of the most voracious collector of statistics ; but when are we to have another cricket book
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