HOW many hours during the year, I wonder, must we spend over our Wisden? A great many surely, so many, indeed, that we cannot help thinking how small is the literature of cricket. Only two shelves out of thirty. There are one or two novels, Willow the King, A. A. Milne’s The Day’s Play, a few of Mr Lucas’s Essays, the complete works of P. F. Warner, W. J. Ford’s Middlesex Cricket, Lord Harris’s Lord’s and the M.C.C., a few volumes of reminiscence, one or two textbooks, P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful Mike, The Hambleden Men, and Neville Cardus.
Poor stuff, too, for the most part. The literature of cricket can be divided into two categories. There are the books by men who understand cricket but do not know how to write, and the books by the men who know how to write but do not understand cricket. In the course of a year many books and stories dealing with the game are published, but only rarely in a generation comes combined the sportsman and the man of letters. Whom have we to-day: P. G. Wodehouse; but he prefers to write of golf. A. A. Milne; but he is dabbling in grease paint. E. V. Lucas; but so rarely nowadays. Neville Cardus; yes, the only one, the only genuine one, perhaps. The first man to make literature out of cricket. His essay on Tom Richardson; his description of Maclaren leaving the field for the last time at Eastbourne; his “Greatest Test Match.” They were written for the columns of a daily paper, but there is literature in them, real prose, real melody, real emotion. He is alone, though, Neville Cardus.
Hardly any poetry has been written about the game. There is Thompson’s “Oh, my Hornby and my Barlow Long Ago,” and there is a quantity of verse, pleasant jingly stuff of the drinking-song variety, the best of it valedictory, such as Andrew Lang’s “Beneath the Daisies Now They Lie.” But the few attempts that have been made at serious poetry have not been fortunate. Edward Cracroft Lefroy, for example, to whom cricket appealed chiefly as an æsthetic spectacle, included in his catalogue of the physical attributes of a bowler the
Elbows apt to make the leather spin
Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,
which is not only poor verse but proves on the part of the author an inadequate knowledge of the no-ball rule.
But perhaps verse is not a happy medium through which to express an enjoyment of cricket. Phrases like “unwary shin” will intrude themselves, and, although Pindar used to celebrate with equally appropriate ardour the feats of generals and of athletes, the very idea of commemorating in heroic couplets Woolley’s two great test-match innings at Lord’s seems ridiculous. We have grown so accustomed to reading accounts of cricket matches in the prose style of the sporting press that any other treatment is impossible. Perhaps Mr Masefield will one day attempt an epic of the fifth test match at the Oval, but I doubt if it would be a success. It would be a quaint performance, as though one were to walk down the Strand in court dress of Jacobean cut. The jargon of a cricket report is unsuited to heroic verse, but it is indispensable. If, for instance, we were informed that Hendren,
Snared into over-confidence, stept back,
Swinging his bat as though he would eclipse
The thundered violence of Albert Trott.
Yet had he not correctly judged the flight
Of the quick spinning ball.
Aghast he heard
Behind his back the rattle of the stumps,
we should not be very much the wiser. We should prefer to learn of such a tragedy in straightforward narrative: “Hendren hooked Mailey to the on-boundary twice in succession; but, in an attempt to repeat the stroke to a ball that was pitched farther up to him and that went away with the arm, he was clean bowled.”
Indeed, A. E. Housman’s “On an Athlete Dying Young” is the best serious poem that can be said to interpret any side of cricket, and that poem is written to a runner. But it is universal, for it contains the tragedy of all professional sport:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran,
And the name died before the man.