MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT is salutary, I suppose, to abandon at moments all pretence of being rational and to surrender ourselves without reproach to the delights of infantilism. I spent a morning last week following the boat-race between Oxford and Cambridge. In principle this contest should have left me unmoved ; in practice I developed during those twenty minutes a savage sense of identification with one side and a savage desire that the other side should lose. In the after vacancy, when all was over and my side had won, I sub- jected to cold scrutiny the state of almost girlish emotion through which I had just passed. It was surely disgraceful that a man who prides himself on his detachment should for the space of twenty minutes have been swept by gusts of wholly unwarranted partisan- ship. What did it matter to me one way or another whether eight young men whom I had never known, and whom I was unlikely ever to know, could propel a boat from Putney to Mortlake with greater speed than that achieved by eight other young men, equally remote and equally unknown? It was not as if I myself had ever been a neat practitioner of aquatic sports. My own rowing days were brutish and short. There was a time, during my first year at Balliol, when I formed part of what was known as " the Morrison Fours." The memory of that experience does not fill me with gratification or pride. There was the training period when with knees blue with cold I would run round the parks before breakfast ; there were the chill afternoons when one walked down to the barge past Merton and Christ Church meadows ; there was the soap-sud congestion of the changing-room, when my dislike of nudity merged with my dislike of stuffy cold. Then the boat was wet and heavy, the loofah on which I sat was wet and light, the oars were dripping and enormous, and I myself incompetent and damp. A man on the bank would jump off his bicycle and say things to me through a megaphone which were sharp and rude. And when the race eventually took place, I felt bound to attribute the truly disgraceful performance of my own boat to the fact that Nature had never, even in her wildest moments, intended me to be an oar.
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I have been assured by those who practise the art of rowing that, if and when one rises above the standard of the Morrison Fours, if and when one reaches the stage of a college eight, this impression of wet clumsiness tends to disappear. One acquires instead a sense of unity in diversity, a sense of beautifully pro- portioned rhythm, which is symphonic in character and which gives some meaning to that silly expression " the poetry of motion." I am prepared to believe this assertion and to regard oarsmen as artists who combine physical dexterity with a definite, if unrealised, aesthetic purpose. My respect for them is not untinged with sympathy. For of all athletes they have the shortest flowering season ; all too soon will come the day when they hang up their varnished oars above the mantelpiece, when they drape their pink or blue caps across the photographs of dispersed or forgotten eights, when they become anxious lest their fine chest muscles turn to fat, and when wistfully they don their Leander scarfs and watch other men, not so much younger than they are, performing the very same evolutions as they, but four years before, performed them- selves. Yet this respect and sympathy does not imply any con- tinuous interest on my part in the art of rowing, nor can it account for the fact that in this year 1946 I found myself startled by my partisanship. There must be some other reason to explain why, on the morning of March 3oth, I should suddenly have become excited.
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Is it that, slumbering like some old toad within me, I have an Oxford feel? My affection for my old university is undying, my loyalty to her is beyond question, my gratitude for all she did for me is deep and strong. But I trust that these respectable emotions are by now freed from all boyish partisanship, from every competi- tive tinge. I am wholly unaware of any feeling of hostility, even of rivalry, towards Cambridge. I consider her architecture much superior to that of Oxford; I admit that her intelligence is more precise and perhaps even more alert; and I regard each of our older universities as an equal champion of a long tradition of humanism and amenity. Yet even if some infantile emotions of rivalry still persisted, I doubt whether they would find expression in a race between two boats. My excitement last Saturday must have been due to other causes. I regret to confess that it was due to mass emotion. A boat race in the first place is one of the most concentrated of all human competitions. It is concentrated in time, since it lasts for no more than twenty minutes and its result is final; it is concentrated in space, since it is rowed over a prescribed course which can be followed on the map. It is also concentrated numerically; of the eighteen participants, nine are bound to win and nine are bound to lose. This sense of concentration is en- hanced by the contrast between the rowers and the crowds; on the one hand you have several hundred thousand men, women and children lining the banks, multiform in appearance, intense in expectation, and quite unable to affect the issue one way or the other; on the other hand you have two slim boats containing eigh- teen men, uniform in appearance, extremely mobile, and deciding the issue by the conjoint movements of their arms and backs and thighs. This contrast between the many and the few, between the static and the dynamic, heightens the sense of concentration; it is only human that one should seek, even artificially, to exaggerate the contrast by identifying oneself, not with the whole eighteen, but with nine. One thus, even if all other emotions are absent, expouses the cause of one of the two sides and desires it to win.
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One's reason is numbed, one's emotions are heightened, by the actual beauty of the scene. The sun on that March morning peered through the early mist, turning breweries into palaces and gas- works into mosques and minarets. Expectation was enhanced by the long pause which preceded the start ; the river steamer on which I was a passenger attached herself in mid-stream to two other little steamers ; the hawsers which connected them creaked gently in the silence, making a marine noise. Suddenly all became animation ; a distant roar arose from the river banks ; the throb of our own engines shook the deck ; and everything at the same moment started to move forward, tugs and police launches, pleasure steamers and picket boats, all dashing towards Hammersmith in a sudden wave. There ahead of us were the two eights, slim and scintillating, frail and powerful ; the sun flashed upon their oars and upon the water circles that they left behind them ; the coxswain in the dark blue blazer seemed to my inexpert eye to be ahead of the coxswain in the light blue blazer ; from the banks came shouts of encouragement among which I detected a shout of "Cambridge!" It was at that moment that I was assailed by my Ouida mood. " Oxford!" I replied, at first in a reserved undertone, but subsequently quite loud. The senior burgess of my university, a calm and scholarly man, came up to me and took me by the arm. " We are leading," he whispered, not wishing to betray exultation ; "we are leading by two lengths." We? We? What were we? A helicopter at that moment passed close overhead ; the shadow of its large propeller flickered upon the backs of my fellow-passengers massed in front. In the roar of its engines I raised my voice again. " Oxford! " I shouted at the Repository of Messrs. Harrods.
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" It is pleasant," remarked Horace, " to be idiotic when circum- stances are suitable." But it was something more than that. It was agreeable on that beautiful spring morning to recover for a moment the atmosphere of pre-war days. It was agreeable to feel that all those people on the banks were united in a common excitement. It was comforting to believe that our sporting instinct, which is so closely allied to tolerance, was as active and as corporate as ever. It was consoling, after those twenty minutes of excitement, to recover one's outward calm without losing one's inner satisfaction. And it was a delight—I'll be blowed if it wasn't—to know that Oxford had won.
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