For Wisden is the cricketer’s bible, though the unbaptized make mock of it. “What is it,” they say, “but a record? We can understand your wanting to look at the scores of matches that you have seen, that will recall to you pleasant hours in pleasant company. But what possible enjoyment can you derive from the bare figures and accounts of games you have never watched, on grounds you have never been to? It is no doubt an admirable work of reference for the statistician, but as literature, as a thing that is read for pleasure! why, it reminds us of the half-pay major who spent his evenings reading the Army List of 1860!”
It is hard to explain. In the same way that the letters x and y possess a significance for the mathematician, so for the cricketer these bare figures are a symbol and a story. We can clothe the skeleton with flesh. We can picture the scene. We know what the score-board looked like when that seventh wicket fell; we can gauge the value of Strudwick’s 5 not out. When we read, “Ducat, l.b.w. b. Woolley 12”; we can imagine the emotion of the man sitting at the end of the free seats below the telegraph. “If only Ducat can stay in,” he had thought, “Surrey may win yet. There are several people who might stop at the other end while he gets the runs.” But the umpire’s finger rose, and we know the depression with which he wrote on the thumb-marked score-card “l.b.w. b. Woolley 12,” and then pulled himself together, prepared to watch “in a dream untroubled of hope” the inevitable end delayed for a few minutes by Smith and Rushby.
That for the games one has not seen. But for those that one has seen,—for them, Wisden indeed becomes almost an autobiography. Our cricket life, or rather the passive, the contemplative side of it, is written there; and I am not sure that the receptive side is not the more important. We only write, I sometimes think, to bring ourselves closer to great writing; so that through our own fumblings after self-expression we shall come to an understanding of the difficulties that great writers have had to face, and a consequent appreciation of their triumphs. Certainly had we not spent hours of scratching at a net, learning to get our left shoulder over to the line of ball, we should not feel so intensely the thrill of pleasure that Spooner’s off-drive brings to us. It may well be that the hours of spent energy are an apprenticeship for the intellectual calm of an afternoon at Lord’s.
Not always calm, though. Cricket, for all its leisure, is in its long-drawn expectation the most emotional of games. It has not, doubtless, any equivalent for the delirium of a try at Twickenham. But then cricket does not aim at that particular sensation. It is drama, not melodrama. Its atmosphere is heavily charged, one’s nerves are geared high, one fidgets awkwardly in one’s seat. The effect is one of continuously suspended action. One is always wondering. As often as not the tension passes. The climax is never reached. I have watched a good deal of cricket, but I have seen only four, five, at the most six, big finishes.
There was that Middlesex and Essex game in 1910. On the whole, I am inclined to think the most remarkable match I have ever seen. From the very start it was remarkable. I arrived at lunch-time to find Essex batting, with 93 runs on the board for the loss of two wickets. Half an hour later they were all out for 110. J. W. Hearne, an unknown bowler then, took seven wickets for no runs. And I shall not easily forget the excitement and the pride of that last afternoon, when Middlesex, with 242 to win, lost eight wickets for 142. The pitch was bad. Buchenham was bowling, as at that time Buchenham alone could bowl. Warner was still in; but there was only Mignon to come, a bad bat even among fast bowlers, and a newcomer to county cricket, who had made a duck in the first innings and batted quite indifferently against Surrey in the previous week. But in an hour Warner and S. H. Saville had won the match.
A memorable evening. We had resigned ourselves to defeat. “They can’t do it,” we had said; “it’s no use worrying. Let’s buy an evening paper and see how Somerset are doing against Kent.” And we had smiled indulgently when the boundaries began to come. “Fireworks,” we had said, and remarked that it was rather stupid to have a tea interval. “They might just as well,” we said, “have finished the thing off first.” But something warned us not to leave the ground.
And they came in forty minutes, the last seventy-three runs; a glorious forty minutes. Our indifference turning to a wondering hope: “Can they; is it possible?” And then the recurring certainty they would. Forty such minutes as come rarely in a lifetime.
Then there was the Kent match in ’21, when Middlesex, with the championship to win, made over three hundred runs in four hours, to win the match; then the great battle four days later against Surrey. And as I correct these proofs I feel that, in spite of the printer’s bill, it would be ungenerous in me to pay no tribute to the second day of this year’s Sussex game at Lord’s. It began dingily enough, with a dull sky and a cold wind, and H. L. Dales taking ninety minutes to make sixteen. But fortunately I spent that first hour or so in the warm comfort of a tube. And after lunch the sun came out; the cricket became exciting, and the afternoon grew into one of the happiest that I have ever spent at Lord’s. The excitement, curiously enough, was focussed on a battle for a first innings lead. Usually one does not enthuse about points on the first innings. But one is out to enjoy oneself on a Whit Monday. There is in the presence of a big crowd the contagion of a herd emotion. And certainly the cricket was very good. Sussex is the best fielding side in England; I am not certain that J. W. Hearne is not to-day the finest batsman in the world. And the afternoon was a long struggle between Hearne and Sussex.
I have not the exact figures by me, but Middlesex wanted some 311 runs for their two points, and seven wickets were down with the follow-on still unsaved, when Twining came in to partner Hearne. On some of his partners Hearne must, I think, exert a magnetic influence. Certainly Twining, when he is in with him, looks and is a fifty per cent. better player than when Lee or Hendren is at the other end. He has never done anything comparable with the great partnership with Hearne that won Middlesex the championship in 1921. Indeed, I rather think that his fifty-seven not out that Whit Monday afternoon is his second highest score in a county match. A useful rather than a good innings, perhaps, but he stayed there; and I doubt if I ever saw a finer innings than Hearne’s 140.
Some people find Hearne dull, as some people find Tolstoy dull. He has not the volcanic, the eruptive vigour of Hendren and Dostoieffsky. He is moving with a complete economy of effort towards a very distant point. Where other batsmen think in fifties, he thinks in double centuries. He knows exactly what he is doing all the time. Batsmen like Holmes and Mead and Ducat get there somehow in the end; but they have not all the time the end in view, or rather, perhaps, the spectator as he watches them, has not the end in view. Holmes, whether he makes a cypher or a century, never looks anything but an ordinary player. Hearne is a great batsman the moment he walks on to the field. No one who knows anything about cricket could see him play one stroke and have any doubts as to his quality.