England is a nation of sportsmen still. We take sport as seriously, we pursue it as keenly as ever did the Greeks themselves. But we are allowing this danger and reproach of drink to be mingled with some of our national pastimes. There is no doubt whatever about it, and, as I see it, the reason is this.
We are forgetting to idealize sport, to realize what it means no less than what it is.
I feel sure that if we can once get back to that attitude, the drink trouble will cease automatically. No man can be a thorough sportsman without a latent sense of the inherent fineness and dignity of sport. We want an organized campaign to wake up that latent sense!
Historical analogies may be out of fashion in some departments of life with which I am not here concerned. In sporting matters they are, and ought to be, very valuable in helping to keep the ideal of sport at a high level.
For example, among the finest sportsmen of all time, the ancient Greeks, who were the finest athletes? History tells us they were the Hellenes. They were mostly townsmen living in a country of dense cultivation and beholden to the gymnasium and the palæstra for their recreation, the noblest outcome of which was the Olympian meeting.
The greatest historian of Greek life and thought points out that the Hellenes “were always abstemious,” and they were the leading athletes of the world.
The Macedonian ideal was quite different. The Macedonians despised bodily training in the way of abstinence, and drank to excess. They were hunters and open-air people, they reproduced the life of the savage or natural man with artificial improvements, but when they came into the palæstra they were nowhere at all. A century ago in England many a rollicking county squire would spend a day in the saddle and a night under the table, but he could not have run a mile in five minutes to save his life.
Alexander the Great himself despised the abstemiousness of the Greek athletes, and though he thought in continents, he drank in oceans, and died in a drinking bout. He was a mighty hunter and fighter, but he was not a true sportsman, because he despised the control and self-denial which a man must practise if he would earn that dignity and title.
These last paragraphs may savour a little of the don, and possibly suggest an emanation from the shrunk skull of the pedant. I hope not, but believe me, they are proper to my purpose. After the brief summary I have given of the actual position, it is helpful to survey the whole question from a wider point of view than that of the immediate present.