It is when one comes to survey with a fresh eye the amusements of the
English race that one realises the incomprehensibility of existence.
Here is the most serious people on earth--the only people, assuredly,
with a genuine grasp of the principles of political wisdom--amusing
itself untiringly with a play-ball. The ball may be large and soft, as
in football, or small and hard, as in golf, or small and very hard, as
in billiards, or neither one thing nor the other, as in cricket--it is
always a ball.. Abolish the sphere, and the flower of English manhood
would perish from ennui.
The fact is, speaking broadly, there is only one amusement worth
mentioning in England. Football dwarfs all the others. It has outrun
cricket. This is a hard saying, but a true one. Football arouses more
interest, passion, heat; it attracts far vaster crowds; it sheds more
blood. Having beheld England, after absence, in the North and in the
South, I seem to see my native country as an immense football ground,
with a net across the Isle of Wight and another in the neighbourhood of
John o’ Groat’s, and the entire population stamping their feet on the
cold, cold ground and hoarsely roaring at the bounces of a gigantic
football. It is a great game, but watching it is a mysterious and
peculiar amusement, full of contradictions. The physical conditions of
getting into a football ground, of keeping life in one’s veins while
there, and of getting away from it, appear at first sight to preclude
the possibility of amusement. They remind one of the Crimean War or the
passage of the Beresina. A man will freeze to within half a degree of
death on a football ground, and the same man will haughtily refuse
to sit on anything less soft than plush at a music-hall. Such is the
inexplicable virtue of football.
*****
Further, a man will safely carry his sense of fair play past the gate
of a cricket field, but he will leave it outside the turnstiles of a
football ground. I refer to the relentless refusal of the man amusing
himself at a football match to see any virtue in the other side. I refer
to the howl of execration which can only be heard on a football ground.
English public life is a series of pretences. And the greatest pretence
of all is that football matches are eleven a side. Football matches are
usually a battle between eleven men and ten thousand and eleven; that is
why the home team so seldom loses.
The football crowd is religious, stern, grim, terrible, magnificent. It
is prepared to sacrifice everything to an ideal. And even when its ideal
gets tumbled out of the First League into the Second, it will not part
with a single illusion. There are greater things than justice (which,
after all, is a human invention, and unknown to nature), and this
ferocious idealism is greater than justice. The explanation is that
football is the oldest English game--far older than cricket, and it
“throws back” to the true, deep sources of the English character. It
is a weekly return to the beneficent and heroic simplicity of nature’s
methods.
Another phenomenon of the chief English amusement goes to show the
religious sentiment that underlies it. A leading Spanish toreador will
earn twenty thousand pounds a year. A leading English jockey will make
as much. A music-hall star can lay hands on several hundreds a week. A
good tea-taster receives a thousand a year, and a cloakroom attendant at
a fashionable hotel can always retire at the age of forty. Now, on
the same scale, a great half-back, or a miraculous goalkeeper with the
indispensable gift of being in two places at once, ought to earn about
half a million a year. He is the idol of innumerable multitudes of
enthusiasts; he can rouse them into heavenly ecstasy, or render them
homicidal, with a turn of his foot. He is the theme of hundreds of
newspapers. One town will cheerfully pay another a thousand pounds for
the mere privilege of his citizenship. But his total personal income
would not keep a stockbroker’s wife in hats! His uniform is the
shabbiest uniform ever donned by a military genius, and he is taught
to look forward to the tenancy of a tied public-house as an ultimate
paradise!
To the unimpassioned observer, nothing in English national life seems
more anomalous than this. It can be explained solely by stern religious
sentiment. Call it pagan if you will, but even pagan religions were
religious. The truth is that so foul a thing as money does not enter
into the question. A footballer is treated like a sort of priest. “You
have this rare and incommunicable gift,” says the public to him in
effect. “You can, for instance, do things with your head that the
profane cannot do with their hands. It is no credit to you. You were
born so. Yet a few years, and the gift will leave you I Then we shall
cast you aside and forget you. But, in the meantime, you are like unto a
precious vase. Keep yourself, therefore, holy and uncracked. There is no
money in the career, no luxury, no soft cushions, nothing but sprained
ankles, broken legs, abstinence, suspensions, and a pittance, followed
by ingratitude and neglect. But you have the rare and incommunicable
gift I And that is your exceeding reward.”
In view of such an attitude, to offer the salary of a County Court judge
to a footballer would be an insult.
*****
After indulging in the spectacle and the vocal gymnastics of a football
match, the British public goes home to its wife, hurries her out, and
they stand in the open street at a closed door for an hour, or it may be
two hours, stolidly, grimly, fiercely, with obstinate chins, on pleasure
bent. They are determined to see that door open, no matter what the
weather. Let it rain, let it freeze, they will stand there till the door
opens. At last it does open, and they are so superbly eager to see what
they shall see that they tumble over each other in order to arrive
at the seats of delight. That which they long to witness with such an
ardent longing is usually a scene of destruction. Let an artiste come
forward and simply guarantee to smash a thousand plates in a quarter of
an hour, and he will fill with enraptured souls the largest music-hall
in England. Next to splendid destruction the British public is most
amused by knockabout comedians, so called because they knock each other
about in a manner which would be fatally tragic to any ordinary persons.
Though this freshly-obtained impression of the amusements of the folk
is perfectly sincere and fair, it is fair also to assert that the folk
shine far more brightly at work and at propaganda than at play.
The island folk, being utterly serious, have not yet given adequate
attention to the amusement of the better part of themselves. But far
up in the empyrean, where culture floats, the directors of the Stage
Society and Miss Horniman are devoting their lives to the question.