Cricket 1890

242 CEICKET: A WEEKLY KECOED OF THE GAME. JULY 10, 1890. ceivably your fortune. Oh, then, “ what a confounded game is cricket!—oh, how I wish I were playing golf! ” But no; let us hurry away from this nightmare, let us bring you through the innings with a score in the neigh­ bourhood of the century—oh, who so proud as paterfamilias when he announoes his suc­ cess to the expectant brood at home ? "What a sense of delicious weariness as he sinks back in his arm chair, a centre of admiration, see­ ing the balls, through clouds of smoke, speed­ ing to the boundary ! No, we believe it, the delight of golf scarcely equals it ! Yet—it is distasteful, but the obverse of the medal we must consider— “ If you bowl some wickets, make some runs, You’re thought a little king; If you make a duck, and miss a catch, It’s quite a different thing 1” And, unfortunately, it is sad to say it, but the obverse of the medal is more frequently up­ permost. Is it true happiness to sit in the pavilion the greater part of the day, or does it entirely compensate you for your own failure to make scathing comments on the short­ comings of others ? Are you quite sure that fielding is not a part of the game which is sometimes rather too large a feature in your day’s cricket, though you are far too true a cricketer to admit it ? And that.is j ust the trouble in the case of those whomwe have been considering, andwho only get an occasional day onwhich to play cricket. If fortune is adverse they are apt to feel that they have spent a little too much of the day in the longfield or the pavilion. It is quite differant in the case of men playing every day ; one day may then be trusted to make up for another, and a fair balance of enjoyment may be taken out of ithe whole. But the occasional crioketer must make up his mind to take his amusement very largely out of the much-vaunted pleasures of hope. But our golf-ball we have always with us. The difficulty is to get it to leave us —to over­ come what a golfing scribe calls its “ terrible inertia.” The more we play the more playing we get. It is a system of compensation which seems little short of providential. The more wretched and dwarfed our last drive, the sooner do we over­ take the offending “ gutty,” to again maltreat it with our next. It is not one mistake, then gloom and the pavilion!—but a constant series of efforts to retrieve past misadventure. Yes, in the game of Scotland there is more of certainty. You know better, when you under­ take it, on what you are embarking. Paterfamilias, who has made his century, comes home a little bit, though he will not confess it, overdone. It has been rather much for him, and Paterfamilias, when he has made a duck and spent much of the day admiring the innings of his side, has, it is not impossible, imbibed rather many little friendly solaces, smoked rather many little soothing pipes. The game and its chances may remind him, perchance, of his profession, should this profession happen to be the Bar—whereat the many are briefless, the few are overburdened. So, at cricket, the few make runs, the many watch them. But at the golf-ball, hit we never so unwisely, we may bit till we are weary and may return with our appetite and our humour worn to the keenest edge. But, to take our comparison from another aspect, in which shall we have found more fun, more cheery genial fellowship ? How can one ask ? How can one contemplate the two pastimes, as the outcome of national characteristics, and ask the question ? The oatmeal bannocks and the whisky of Calvinistic Scotland, and the beef and the ale of Merrie England ! Yes, yes—here, perhaps, our comparison is most of all instructive as we watch the silent, serious game of the Scot beside the swiftly-moving, cheery game of the Sassenach. Not, indeed, that the game of Scotland is without its humours, any more than the Scotsman is unappreciative, as goes the hackneyed charge against him, of its humour. '1here is no game in all the world which so lays bare in all their nakedness the humours of men and human nature, that philosophers may laugh or weep. The cricketer’s life is extinguished in one brief pang. A rattle at the bails and all is over—so at least with the majority, whose joy is batting. But to the golfer his way over the links is a long ordeal, with long minutes of meditation in which the anguish of his misfortune may sink into his soul and find expression in the form of “ things one would rather have left unsaid.” The bats­ man opposes his skill to the bowler’s on understood terms, and if the wicket be rough, at least he knows it, and may draw comfort from the thought that it will be no less so when the other side goes in. But fate may place a worm-heap, as practically insur­ mountable as a mountain, on the loveliest putting-green, and the adversary may have a groov into the hole ! Job might have been yet more shrewdly tested had his trials cluded golf. But golf is not a mirthful game. Loud l ught r and muoh sound of the human voice do not fit its spirit. If paterfamilias is to come home with a flood of boisterous fun, cricket is the better. But if with thoughts to solace his hours of solitude, give him the vision of the ball sweetly soaring over the horizon, neatly lofted over the bunker, van­ ishing over the near lip of the hole. And this remains true, although the Sas­ senach has imparted to the Scottish game an a ien flavour out of the native cricket that is in him. His impulse is to hit the ball and run, hat so he may the sooner hit it again— and he obeys that impulse. His impulse is to “ vi w halloo ” loudly as the ball goes away, and to loudly call upon his gods when disaster overtakes him, and both these impulses he noisily obeys. He decks himself in cricket cap and blazer. He calls the game, with an aggressively pronounced “ 1,” “ gollf.” Butyet, w en all these things are said and done, it still has more resemblance to the real old “ gowf ” than it has to cricket. The Scottish amateur plays “ goff,” the pro­ fessional plays “ gowf,” and the Englishman plays, phonetically, “ golf.” And there is a ifference, corresponding to the designations, in th games—a difference which the English­ man is last to see. Your pronunciation he openly contests. What is your authority? he sks yoa; and when you appeal to him by the memory of the great ancient epic styled “ The Goff,” he laughs at you. He reminds you of a classic derivation—from Greek kolaphos —from kolapto , of which the Lexicon gives the sense as tundendo excavo. Tundendo excav , I cut out by baffing—note it well, ye l udatores temporis acti , who wag heads of wise grief at iron skelps, and mourn the by­ gone days of the “ baffy.” Even in times of cla sic antiquity men cleft the turf. We can but hope that the high-souled ancients, under such censorship as Cato’s, were more zealous in replacing to kekolammenon — cespitem tundendo excavattim, or the “ divot”—than lat er-day sinners are apt to show themselves in th consulship of old Tom Morris. Thus the Englishman defends his pro­ nunciation; but now a learned friend, of high authority, has told us that this derivation, though with our own eyes we have read it in print, is “ utter rubbish,” so that this, our classic vision, the hope of the English “ gollfist,” is sent flying into chaos, along with to kekolammenon — tho “ divot ” — beyond prosp ct of replacement. Not that this will at all defeat the English­ ma . He will continue, as of old, to speak of “ gollf,” to show men that he knows it to contain an “ 1”—as a certain gamekeeper we have met would talk of the long-tailed birds as “ peasants” in ord^r to show his audience that ho knew “ pheasant” to begin with “ p.” Besides, however, this game of golf which the Englishman mispronounces, and plays with methods and manners of whose strange­ ness he is unconscious—he also recognises a variation which he names “ lawn golf.” It does not merit its special designation, for it diff rs not at all in kind from the real game, but o ly in its quality, which is worse. It is the ame which is played round flower-beds and puzzle-monkeys and rhododendrons, while the gardener looks on with unfavouring eye, and speculates on his chances of getting another place. It has been played for many years, but to the modern Englishman alone has it occurred to give it a distinctive title. After the names of lady golfers in the Field acc unts, we sometimes read such mystic letters as E.H.L.G.C. (East Hackney Lawn- Golf Club). Was it a member of this club whom we lately met at Oban, fondly hoping to find her luggage, of which her golfing ap­ paratus composed about one-half, and bitterly co plaining that they golfed in England all over her native county, but that since she had b en in Scotland she had not seen a golf-links? She h d expected the whole country to be one larg golf-links, this fair and ardent player of lawn-golf. With wholly unintentional humour players of lawn-tennis speak of the real game as “ the other tennis.” With humour not wh lly unintentional the Sporting Times speaks of its daily namesake as “ the other T i m e s How soon will the lawn-golfer learn to speak of the game of St. Andrews as “ the other golf ” ? Thus has the Englishman, on the links and parks and lawns of the South,gone far in modi­ fying the characteristics of the old Scottish game. Nevertheless, even there do its charac­ teristics stand out strongly enough, in contrast to e characteristics of the native cricket. For, twist it how you will, the one game is Scottish and the other English. You go home thoughtful from the one ; mirthful, if things h ve gone fairly happily, from the other. The one game demands a concentration of atten­ tion, a steady and difficult control of nerve ; the o her a joyous and boyish confidence. Why is it that the Scottish game taxes the nerv so severely? For not only at those crises when minutes are lifetimes, when we compete for the St. Andrews medal or the like high honours, does the trembling nerve and shaking muscle misdirect the putt, but, even in our more or less friendly hand-to-hand conflict, which none would trouble to witness, with our own familiar foe, in whom we trusted, sometimes much to our discomfiture, that we could without fail defeat him. We could play him a single-wicket match at cricket without a tremor. It is because at crick t we can use all our muscle and our strength, while at golf we need a more deli­ cat measurement ? Is it because at golf we are so utterly dependent on our individual efforts ? Or is it partly these causes, and partly—pardon us, oh cricketer—that we care more greatly whether we win or lose ? For— w speak not of a contest betwixt England and Australia, when the fate of kingdoms s ems balanced on the bails, but of the h mble little matches in which, for the most part, we disport ourselves, do we commonly feel an overpowering anxiety about the match ? Would we rather that we lost our atch and scored an individual hundred, or won our match while our personal contribution was a “ duck?” Let each answer according to the suggestion or the amenability of his conscience. But at golf we do not need to appeal to individuals for an answer. None questions there. The match— c’est moi. The interests are identical—or, even in foursomes, so far identical that virtually the quotation still holds true. Cricket finds us with ten men of straw on whom to lay our burdens—with whom to divide our glory. In golf, the glory and the burdens are on one. Athl tics resemble misfortune —they make us acquainted with strange companions. Heterogeneous elements are brought into close contact, occasionally with a result that is explosive. In golf the birds of many colour fal into flocks, according to their feather, by a proc ss of natural selection which is almost i voluntary. (In all classes, observe, high or low, mechanics or “ mashers,” scratch players or “ steady partners in a foursome,” w'ill be found birds of the regal purple plumage