Pleiades
Les sportifs laborieux
Is the growth of sport (or rather, shall we say, the growth of the vogue and riclame of sport, which is quite another thing) a result, or a concomitant of the growth of the great city and of urbanization in general ? The question is one to _which there is no real or certain answer ; but then—it is precisely questions of that sort which are most worth discussion. It is certainly true that games abounded in the green and rural times of our English forefathers ; and men would gather together in glades to see Robin Hood and his green-jackets hit "a woodsman's mark at woodsman's distance." It is true again that games were common in ancient Greece, and were regularly celebrated under the terraced heights on which the olive and vine and fig were cultivated by a people mainly engaged in agriculture. But it is also true that rural games are, in the main, intermittent : they come once a year, or even once in four : the rural activities of work are sufficiently varied, and sufficiently a tax on the pride of thews and sinews, to relegate rural sports to the rare times of high holiday. It is different with urban populations. They follow uniform occupations ; and those occupations leave no great room for any pride in bodily achievement and dexterity. (Two ploughmen may plough in a match : two spinners cannot vie in a game of spinning.) There is a routine which broods over urban work ; and the truant spirit of man will always be a rebel against routine. The fluctuating chances of organized games are the rebel's way of escape. He may only be a spectator ; but what does that matter ? He feels the thrill of hovering chance all the more because he is lifted above the strife. He sits like a watching Destiny on the stands ; and unlike Destiny, he can gamble on the result—he can have his "flutter," and with it the flutter of the heart that is worth more than the " flutter " itself. And beyond this escape into the romantic world of chance and flutter there is something else, which is perhaps even higher : there is a mounting up, as with wings, into an artistic world of deft teehnique and cunningly executed movements : there is an aesthetic appreciation of the " patterns " which the players weave as they move : in a word, there is an entering, however unexpected the door of entry may be, into a sort of kingdom of Beauty. Mr. Priestley, in The Good Companions, has discoursed admirably of these matters ; and nobody who has once sympathized with Jess Oakroyd's passion for "T' United" will ever willingly cast a stone against the "muddied oaf in the goal."
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Whatever the reasons, it seems tolerably certain that great organized games have often arisen among great organized urban groups. Rome had no sooner become a great city—a place of insulae, or great island blocks of tenements, with shops on the lower floors and crowded flats above—than she became a home of passionate chariot-racing and gladiatorial games. "Constantinople," says Gibbon, adopted the follies, though not the virtues, of ancient Rome ; and the same factions which had agitated the circus raged with redoubled fury in the hippodrome." The Greens and the Blues were the rival factions ; "and the Greens, who had treacherously concealed stones and daggers under, baskets of fruit, massacred, at a solemn festival, -three thousands of their Blue adversaries." We do not go to these lengths in our days —though even to-day one may read of revolvers. being fired after a football match in a hot-blooded Latin country at an annoying referee or an irritating rival crowd. But if we have no massacres, or only little massacres, we have the same passions, similar factions, and almost identical colours. Any- body who has seen a team (let us say the Arsenal) and its supporters going down from a London railway station for a cup-tie game in the provinces. may well have dreamed of ancient Constantinople. There were the fluttering colours of the Blues (the "caerulean blue," says Gibbon, supposed to represent the sea) ; there were the streamers, the rosettes, the hats ; there were, indeed, whole paper costumes in the colour, and for the glory, of the side. Coelum, non animum, mutant. The Constantinopolitan and the Londoner are brothers under the skin ; and the sixth century and the
twentieth can cry understandingly to one another across the gulf of time.
* * * The last few days have seen an orgy of sport. Year by year, just as the hawthorn of May is scenting the country- side and beginning to shed its tiny white petals, and just as the roses of June are beginning to bud—the orgy whirls its gay course. The Brasenose Eight, with the stern Mr. Graham rowing at Number Seven, has steadily refused to be bumped by the University College Eight, with his rival Mr. Tinne rowing, as the correspondents say, at the same "thwart." (There was, one dimly guessed, a great deal of human feeling in this matter.) Mr. R. T. Jones, in a gay but conclusive way, has overhauled Mr. VVethered ; an American is amateur champion of England in golf : the Union Jack trails sadly at half-mast, and the star-spangled banner flaps and whips happily in the breeze at the mast-head. The Australians have pursued their steady course : awfully arrayed, and boldly besieging our cricket champions, they deal destruction's devastating doom ; they scatter our wickets and conserve their own. There is just one consolation. Miss Amy Johnson has flown to Australia : an English girl has saved the honour of England. Not, by the way, that she is the only girl to save this honour, so often menaced, at so many points, by so many attacks, Another English girl has defeated an American " invasion " of. women golfers ; and if an Englishman cannot be open champion of England in golf, an Englishwoman may. Res redit ad triarios, as the Roman saying went : the issue of battle has run back to the reserves. Luckily the reserves, the Old Guard (or rather the Young Guard) of England, were its women ; and the Guard has neither died nor surrendered. * * * * * * * How curiously we seem to measure nations and their destiny, or at any rate their standing, in terms of these laborious sports ; and how grimly, when we think in these terms, does England seem to be ringed about, on every hand, in cricket, golf, and tennis, and in every other manner of game, by prowling hosts of Midian ! C est magnifique ; mais, enfin, ce n'cst pas la guerre. After all, these invasions and defeats and victories are only the metaphors of happy children. If you leave metaphors as metaphors, they do no harm. They are only dangerous if you let them twist round into realities in your mind, and if you begin to think that there has been a real victory and a real defeat. Metaphors should never be allowed to twist round ; but they are uneasy wriggling things, and they have a way of biting the hand that feeds them. Men are prone to those odious things called comparisons ; and whenever they get quantitative terms of measurement ready to hand, they set to work on a game of comparative equations. If an American is seven up, with six to play—why, here be quantities, and we may draw morals. But there is really no moral at all. The terms by which nations are measured are great spiritual imponderable terms. The ponderables—the quantities— are only bits of gossamer. It is fun to play with them, and make skeins from the gossamer. But it is only the fun of children "sporting on the shore." And behind them we may hear, though we can never measure, "the mighty waters rolling evermore." * * * * * * * The worst of laborious sports, especially when they are adorned by metaphors that are allowed to twist round into realities, is that they become so terribly serious. The Australians are apt to play cricket as if the wickets were the three fates, the ball a vast orb of fate," and the bat an Athanasius contra mundum. They stand up against the bowler as Beowulf stood up against Wyrd : they defy the Doom, and will not be beaten. But it is just a game ; the Fates are busy elsewhere, and Wyrd has other business on hand. Why not be merry, take the risk, hit the ball (which is only a ball, not an orb of fate), and accept the result with a laugh ? We are only children or a little larger growth, and we are only sporting on the shore. To adapt Catullus, Ludamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.
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