Games in a Better World
IHAVE been trying to imagine what games would be like in a better world and I find it extraordinarily difficult. Surely there would be some allowed if only on those grounds on which Mr. Scullin, the new Australian Premier, has been upholding the noble game of bowls ; he says that all the bending involved is very good for a prime minister's inside. It can hardly be that the world would ever become so much better that the competitive instinct would wholly disappear and that we should no longer want to beat anyone. I have one friend who has almost arrived at this point. When we play a game of golf together we do not fight against one another, but enter into an alliance with a suitable start against that imaginary enemy whom the Americans call " Old Man Par." Yet it seems to me rather a bloodless and pusillanimous business and I am so little advanced on the road to better things that I would rather we flew at one another's throats.
I refuse to contemplate a world in which there were no games. Rather would I have one in which there were more, in the sense that everyone who wanted to play them should have room to do so. The small boys who play cricket in a back yard with a wicket chalked on the wall would play in green fields. So should the football "players who have only coats for goalposts and yet manage to extract so much romantic satisfaction from having but one striped jersey among half a dozen and pretending to be Villas and Spurs and Albions.
There are those who would go further, who would insist on everybody playing and would make watching a criminal offence. Yet watching games is for many people the best fun in the world and gives them all manner of pleasant and innocent sensations. In that admirable scene at the beginning of The Good Companions, when the great river of cloth caps is pouring away from the Yorkshire football ground, Mr. Priestley has stated the case for the watcher. " For a shilling the Bruddersford United A.F.C. offered you Conflict and Art ; it turned you into a critic happy in your judgment of fine points . . . ; it turned you into a partisan . . . watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you ; and what is more it turned you into a member of a new Community, all brothers together for an hour and a half." In a better world, no doubt, that band of brothers would not boo the referee quite so freely, and the artist in them might be more conspicuous than the partisan, but the essential splendour and romance of that fresh existence to which the turnstile admitted them would remain the same. " Do you prefer reading to cards ?" said Mr. Hurst, to Elizabeth Bennett ; " that is rather singular," and the point of view of those who like watching games will always appear rather singular to those who do not, but the wickedness of it I have never been able to discover.
A harder question would arise when some reformers desired, as they certainly would, to abolish the professional game-player off the face of the earth. It is a question on which every devotee of a game is apt to think that there is some particular reason why his own game should be exempt from any such ordinance. The tennis player clings to his marker, without which the court is inconceivable, the cricketer to his ground bowler for the nets, and so on. They will probably be at one in denouncing the Association football professional on the grounds that he is a " gladiator," and they will agree about nothing else. I do not claim to be free from such weakness. I have a feeling that the football gladiator would disappear from a better world, but never my friend who can turn my brassey from an unresponsive broomstick into a magic wand by letting just a little drop of lead into the head, who can answer my piteous question as to what on earth I am doing wrong with my iron shots.
I cannot in my heart believe that professionals could or should wholly disappear from games as long as games exist, just because I think that games give more happiness when they are to a reasonable extent organized than when they are not. Did boys enjoy cricket more than they do now, when it was only an alternative amusement to whipping a top, a purely casual game to be played on the spur of the moment ? I do not believe it for an instant. Because games can be too solemn, as they can, it does not follow that they cannot be much too casual and slack. Which do we enjoy the most— the impromptu foursome made at lunch or the one which has been thought out beforehand with perhaps-- and why not ?—a modest bet upon it ? The impromptu game may be entirely delightful, but, my goodness ! how flat' it can be, especially when the first joviality of lunch has worn off. If, as Michael Finsbury remarked, " there is nothing like a -little judicious levity," there is also, as regards games; nothing like a little judicious solemnity, and the happiest game player is the man ivho can try like the devil unchained and then not mind goo much afterwards. In this last respect I suppose we should all in a better world be much, much better than we are now, though I trust we should never get to the pitch of wishing " the best man to win " except on the understanding that the " best man " was ourselves. 'We should never throw our clubs about, of course, not say that it was our partner's fault, nor call gods and men to witness our ill luck. I am inclined faintly to hope that we should not talk about games quite so much as we do now, or that, at any rate, we should talk about them more impersonally. I am sure that, when we wrote about them, we should not call a ball a " sphere," nor a club an " implement " ; neither should we call people whom we do not know by their Christian names nor describe them as " the young guardsman " or " the forty-five-year-old-stockbroker," and we should never say of a lady player that she looked dainty and petite in a blue bandeau. Perhaps, having attained to a proper sense of proportion about games, we should not write about them at all. Or perhaps, on the other hand—hut this is a private and unworthy dream of my own—the news of the Test Matches would come on the wireless before the League of Nations and I should never again have to go through so much to learn so little, as the charity boy said when he got to the end of the alphabet.
BERNARD DARWIN.
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