SPORTING NOVELS.*
THE sporting novel, as a distinct type of literature, has attained a permanent popularity not easily to be accounted for, even in England, the land, par excellence, of horses and dogs. Narratives of the chase of the most ferocious animals, in which the strangest adventures and hairbreadth escapes attend the path of the daring explorer, excite only a transient interest in the public mind. After Jules Gerard and Gordon Cumming people would skip a lion-hunting incident in a sensation story ; trapping in the "far west" has been exhausted by a few good novels ; and now that people have found that gorillas really do exist, that they are not ten feet high, not invulnerable, and that a monkey seen through a magnifying glass gives a perfect idea of the animal, the expenses of a trip to the Gaboon would scarcely prove a pay- ing investment. But it is far otherwise with regard to fox-hunt- ing, coursing, and partridge-shooting. In none of these sports is there the fascination which attaches to a life or death struggle with a dangerous wild beast, in which man's skill and coolness are pitted against brute force and ferocity. There is little real danger attendant even upon fox-hunting, and certainly not enough to sustain the interest of a general reader by appealing to the instinctive sympathy felt for a favourite hero in the face of great and unknown perils. The incidents and adventures are too monotonous and too common-place. As the hero of a sporting novel nears a " rasper" or " bullfineber" of more than ordinary dimensions, one feels quite confident that one of two things only will happen—either he will be pitched over his horse's bead and break his collar bone, or his horse will roll on him and crush in one or two of his ribs. In either case the worst result is that be is detained for a week or two in a country house of the old English school, with half a dozen charming young ladies, some of them fox-hunters themselves, all anxious to beguile the tedium of his imprisonment. If the rider happens to be the comic cha- racter of the story, one may be equally certain that the humorous element will appear in the shape of a couple of feet of water and as many of mud on the other side the hedge. Perhaps, indeed, if the story draws near He denouement, and the feelings of the heroine, though manifest enough to the reader, are not equally so to their object, he is even carried home insensible, and an affecting burst of emotion on her part brings the book to a conclusion much as any other love story. Still, the never-ending demand for a supply of this class of literature is a most striking fact. 'Volume after volume is issued from the press, leading one, within certainlitnits, through the same scenes, introducing us to the same old charac-
• Vie Master of the Hound& By " Scrutator." London: Chapman and HalL
ters under the slightest of disguises, and with more or less of a family likeness in the whole scope and design of each work. Sometimes the prominent personage is a fool, who makes himself ridiculous in every capacity, and who is victimized by all his more acute companions ; and sometimes he is a knave, who does his best to victimize his friends ; but generally he is an athletic- Englishman, with a faultless digestion, no particular brains, a good deal of genuine British obstinacy, together with a con- siderable thickness of skull, and the sporting mind is not often equal to a more original or more daring creation. It is true that " Guy Livingston" was a cross between an Admirable Crichton and one of Byron's heroes ; but then as he really does break his neck, his adventures can scarcely be included in the class to which we refer. Fox-hunters themselves, as a class, are not given to much reading, and it is difficult to suppose that if they were, they would read badly written descriptions of fabulous runs and impossible jumps. The mass of readers who create the demand for sporting novels belong, we suspect, to the very classes who are least acquainted, practically, with their subjects. The genuine Cockney, of course, reads them in order to improve the " horsey" slang, of which he is so proud. But, happily for humanity, Tom Noddy and Mr. Briggs are but a small minority after all, and a vast number of those who make up the public to whom writers of these stories appeal must be of a totally different class. And that class consists to a large extent of men who very probably never went hunting in their lives, who have no ambi- tion to be thought sportsmen, and of whom no small number have not mixed enough in the classes of society of which they read to detect the ludicrous misrepresentations of the man- ners and customs of English country gentlemen which an ordinary sporting novel contains. The majority of men in London and in our great towns work hard with their brains, have little money to spare on pleasure, weak diges- tions, and no nerves. Such men, occupied in sedentary pursuits from year's end to year's end, read books in which the dramatis persona are all people with large incomes and nothing to do, who pass the day in violent exercise in the roughest weather, and then return home to eat dinners the very description of which gives them a fit of indigestion, with the same sort of pleasurable excitement as that with which a child reads a fairy tale. And if, as is too seldom the case, the tale is well written, and possesses some slight feature of originality, the interest felt by such readers is real and intelligible. The whole tenor of the life of which they read is so utterly opposed to their own, that the whole thing seems like a mental gallop in a foreign country, amidst scenes, incidents, characters, and life of an absolutely different kind from those to which they are accustomed.
The tale before us, however, must not, on the author's own show- ing, be confounded too hastily with the ruck of sporting novels. That gentleman, who is known to the general public only by the impressive nom de plume of " Scrutator," and who nails on his title- page several literary brushes in the shape of the tides of his former productions, assures us in a dedicatory preface addressed to the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, that his great object in writing is to show " that fox-hunters are not men of one idea only, as of one pursuit ; and that masters of foxhounds do not, as they have been grossly misrepresented (sic), live for fox- hunting alone." Carried away, however, by the warmth of bis feelings, " Scrutator " not only becomes confused with regard to the grammatical object of his sentence, but the great social object of his volumes, for he roundly asserts that the very existence of his noble patron is amply sufficient testi- mony to the falsehood of all such charges as those to which he had referred. We may remark, by the way, that if this were really the case, there would have been no need of the four hundred and odd closely printed pages which follow, and, par consequent, no need of any dedication to Lord Stamford and Warrington. However, taking the apparent anomaly as merely the result of a complimentary fagon de parler, we notice that " Scrutator" announces his intention to show that fox- hunters are " distinguished for their chivalrous devotion to the fair sex, fully appreciating the agrements of polished society, with due attention to the other duties of social life," and proceed to examine " Scrutator's" exposition of his views on the whole duty of man. We are not long detained by any forms of subscription or articles of belief, but are at once plunged into the very arcana of the foxhunting canes by being presented to a large party at a hunting breakfast, on the opening day of the season at the house of the " master of the hounds" in a midland county. We are introduced with bewildering rapidity to a score or so of those present, but the author manages his plot much after the fashion
of a stiff run 'cross country; and, before long, the majority tail off, leaving the hero and his immediate friends in the first flight of the story, as well as in the field. The regular stock description of a "capital run with the -- hounds " follows, an elderly baronet gets six falls, and dislocates his shoulder ; but scorning such trifles, plays a prominent part at the dinner with which the day closes. The story goes on for the next few chapters through a constant succession of " fixtures," " meets," " bursts," and dinners, until it develops itself into a broadly marked and intel- ligible situation. All the vast crowd of characters are ranged on one or the other side of an immoveable line. On one side are the foxhunters, the salt of the earth, brave, honourable, vir- tuous, athletic, hearty eaters and drinkers, with consciences as good as their digestions; while, on the other side, are the profanina aulgus, game-preservers, politicians, dissipated peers, and design- ing villains, without the nerve or pluck to hunt, and, in fact, every- body who is not a foxhunter. The prominent figure of the plot is a fair young creature, Whose charms and good qualities are frequently expatiated upon in glowing language, but are scarcely presented to the reader with any very vivid individuality of por- traiture, and who is also a wealthy heiress. As soon as the story has been so far developed through fox-hunting scenes as to thoroughly identify every character with one or other of the two great parties, it resolves itself into an ordinary romance, with the above-mentioned young lady as heroine, and after complications innumerable, with intrigues, designs of ambitions relatives, plots of game-preserving peers, and such like devices of the enemy, she is married to the sporting hero.
Now, it is just because we believe fox-hunting to be a national sport of which we may beproud, both in its physical and social tendencies, and because we believe that among its warmest votaries are many who acquit themselves well and honourably in every relation of life, that we protest most energetically against men like " Scrutator" arrogating to themselves the position of champions of so deserving a cause, and doing their best to transfer to a large class of country gentlemen the con- tempt which, in reality, attaches only to the distorted caricatures of character in which their own narrow-minded notions develop themselves. Not long ago, when a mighty Nimrod, who was also a large landed proprietor, died, there was a disposition in certain quarters to reflect rather uncharitably on his career and discharge of the duties of life. The discussion which ensued, however, proved that scarcely one of our landed gentry had ever so thoroughly employed his vast means for the benefit of all connected with his property. Not so " Scrutator's" heroes—or at least lie has not thought such matters worth recording. Beyond hospitality and good-nature to all foxhunters, we find no trace in his beau ideal of a country gentleman of any one of the really solid qualities of the class. Again, his attempt to set class against class, and to bring into contempt not only everybody who interferes in the slightest with fox-hunting, but who does not actually devote himself to it, is utterly unworthy of a sportsman. Not only are poachers openly encouraged as enemies to game preserving, but the habit—a fortunate one for England—among our great families of throwing themselves into political life, is obnoxious to " Scrutator," as tending to distract their full attention from their higher duties ; and one of the principal villains of the tale is a political peer who preserves, and who originates a most diabolical plot in order to prevent the heiress carrying her money to the support of the hunt. The author's pet scoundrel, however, who is rolled in the mud over and over again, in the vain hope of making him appear blacker than before, manifestly owes his descent into the abyss of crime to an unlucky sneer at a fox in the first chapter. As we pointed out, a very large class of those who read sporting novels have no practical experience of their subjects, but we think few of- them will mistake the animus of " Scrutator," cropping out in every page, for that of a true English sportman, or the characters whom he pourtrays for types of English country gentlemen. With regard to the " agrements of polished society," of which lie speaks in his preface, we can only say that when " Scrutator " represents peers and baronets coming nearly to blows after dinner, fast young ladies swearing and bandying coarse jokes at the dinner table, and indulging in such practical
• jests as spilling boiling tea over obnoxious gentlemen, lie affords decisive proof, if any were further needed, of his ignorance of the habits of the class whose defence he has undertaken.
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