Another very good fight in Mr. Lynch’s book (and I have never read a better analysis of the technical “knock-out” than the one he gives on page 126) is that between Peter Jackson and Frank Slavin. I saw it, so I can correct a slight verbal error (foreseen in his own footnote) in Mr. Lynch’s pages. Mr. Angle (I have his letter before me) did not say “Fight on” at that dreadful moment when the packed house could scarcely breathe; when Slavin was tottering blindly to and fro, refusing to give in; when Peter looked out at us appealingly, with the native chivalry that shone through his black skin, and evidently hated to continue. The referee’s quiet syllables, “Box on,” sounded like a minute-gun at sea, and in a few moments it was all over. When Slavin was brought round in his dressing-room, and told he had been knocked out, he muttered, “They’ll never believe that in Melbourne.”
There must have been something about the old prize-ring which we have lost to-day, or it would never have inspired such good literature or attracted such brilliant men in its support. Byron’s screen in Mr. John Murray’s drawing-room is far from the only testimony to that dazzling poet’s love of fighting. Hazlitt was almost equally attracted. Perhaps the most grisly passage even in the pages of De Quincy is that episode in the first part of “Murder as One of the Fine Arts,” where the fight between the amateur and the baker of Mannheim (with its result) is vividly described. The best pages of Borrow, too, gain their best inspiration from the same source. I often seem to recall that pair of dark eyes flashing in a fair face shaded by hair that was prematurely touched with grey; lips full and mobile, as quick with Castilian phrases to a Spanish landlord as with Romany to Jasper Petulengro, or with English to the fruit-woman on London Bridge; the queer, fascinating, mystical, honest mixture of a man, with something of the Wandering Jew, a good deal of Don Quixote, a touch of Melmoth, a sound flavouring of Cribb and Belcher, who was George Borrow. Under his magic guidance you step into the air which fanned the elf-locks of the Flaming Tinman. He loved the heroes of the Ring like brothers. “He strikes his foe on the forehead, and the report of the blow is like the sound of a hammer against a rock.” The sentence stands unmatched in all the annals of pugilism. The battle of his father with Big Ben Brain in Hyde Park was an abiding memory to him; and, apart from the famous encounter in the Dingle, the son did almost as well; and all his life nothing moved him to such instant eloquence as boxing, except horses.
Mr. Lynch, with all his knowledge of the art, and all his sympathy with the best qualities in the men whose combats he portrays, cannot conceal from us that on the whole the old prize-ring was brutal and the modern “pugilistic contest” between professionals has very little that is attractive. Yet he is right both to put them on record and to tell the truth about them without fear or favour. For at the very heart of their foundations is an ineradicable and a noble instinct of the human race. Even a Dempsey, earning several thousand pounds a minute, may be dimly conscious that he is building better than he knows. Professionals in any game who attain a height of skill which gives them a practically unlimited market for what they have to sell, can scarcely be blamed by stockbrokers who gamble on a falling market, or by profiteers who battened on the war. Even the modern professional boxer cannot do permanent harm to the true atmosphere of the great game in which he shines briefly like a passing meteor. It is pages like these from Mr. Lynch that should inspire the professional to give us his best and leave aside the worst in what is, after all, only an epitome of life, a show in which the blows are seen instead of hidden, in which rewards or losses are known to all the world instead of silently concealed. There is a spirit in Boxing which nothing can destroy, and while we cherish it among amateurs, the professional will never be able to defile it.
Mr. E. B. Michell, an old pupil of my father’s, and the only boxer who ever held three of the amateur championships at different weights, is still with us; and I should still do my best to prevent any friend from wantonly attacking him. Like all real fighters, he has always been the kindliest of men, the most difficult to provoke to extremes. But any one who has managed to extract from his diffidence those few occasions when he had to use his fists, because no other course was possible, will realise that boxing is not merely a splendid form of recreation, but one of the finest systems of self-defence ever developed by persistent effort.
Julian Grenfell’s famous poem, “Into Battle,” was written in the Trenches the day after he had fought the champion of his division in France; and there were few who read it who did not recall that previous victory of his over Tye, the fireman, which will never be forgotten in Johannesburg. Three times he was laid on his back. In the third round he knocked the fireman out, “and he never moved for twenty seconds.... I was 11 st. 4 lb., and he was 11 st. 3 lb. I think it was the best fight I shall ever have.” He found a better in the Ypres Salient, and again he wrote:—“I cannot tell you how wonderful our men were, going straight for the first time into a fierce fire. They surpassed my utmost expectations. I have never been so fit or nearly so happy in my life before.” For such men it is impossible to sorrow. These brothers and their comrades were taken from us in the full noon of their splendid sunlight; and on its fiercest throb of high endeavour the brave heart of each one of them stopped beating. Their memories stand, to me, for all that may be meant, achieved, or promised in such courage, such endurance, aye, such instantaneous cataclysm as Mr. Bohun Lynch’s chapters at their best recall. His tale has obviously a sordid side, yet more evidently a brutal one. But the red thread of honourable resolution runs through the warp and woof of it; and these are not days when we may dare to minimise the value of the pluck that conquers pain.
THEODORE A. COOK.
June, 1922.
NOTE
Certain passages in this book, notably in the Introduction, and in the second part, dealing with recent contests, are substantially based, and in some instances literally culled, from articles which I wrote for The Daily Chronicle, The Field, Land and Water, The Outlook, and The London Mercury, and to the editors of these journals I owe my best thanks for much kindness and consideration.