Faint though distinct, one begins to hear the new note of exuberance spreading through the arts. On canvas it registers the fact that the painters are migrating in hordes to live most of the year in the open country. It vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musical performer like Willeke, the 'cellist. Like a starter's pistol it sounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like John Masefield and Alfred Noyes. One has only to compare the overflowing life and sanity of workers like these with the condition of the ordinary "Out-of-the-way young man" to see what a gulf yawns between exuberance and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a state somewhere on the sunny side of mild insanity. And I believe that as yet we catch only a faint glimpse of the glories of the physical renaissance. Wait until this new religion of exuberance is a few generations older and eugenics has said her say!
Curiously enough, the decadent artists who pride themselves on their extreme modernity are the ones who now seem to cling with the most reactionary grip to the old-fashioned, invertebrate type of physique. The rest are in a fair way to undergo such a change as came to Queed, the sedentary hero of Mr. Harrison's novel, when he took up boxing. As sport and the artists come closer together, they should have a good effect on one another. The artists will doubtless make sport more formful, rhythmical, and beautiful. Sport, on the other hand, ought before long to influence the arts by making sportsmen of the artists.
Now good sportsmanship is composed of fairness, team-work, the grace of a good loser, the grace of a good winner, modesty, and gameness. The first two of these amount to an equitable passion for a fair field and no favor, and a willingness to subordinate star-play, or personal gain, to team-play, or communal gain. Together they imply a feeling for true democracy. To be converted to the religion of sportsmanship means to become more socially minded. I think it is more than a coincidence that at the moment when the artists are turning to sport, their work is taking on the brotherly tone of democracy. The call of brotherhood is to-day one of the chief preoccupations of poetry, the drama, ideal sculpture, and mural decoration. For this rapid change I should not wonder if the democracy of sportsmanship were in part responsible.
The third element of sportsmanship is the grace of a good loser. Artists to-day are better losers than were the "foot-in-the-grave young men." Among them one now finds less and less childish petulance, outspoken jealousy of others' success, and apology for their own failure. Some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering that the good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat. And they are importing these manly tactics into the game of art. It has not taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who hides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They are impressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading the less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair as chess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recent chess match between Lasker and Capablanca:
Illness shall not interfere with the playing of any game, on the ground that it is the business of the players so to train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect condition; and it is their duty, which by this rule is enforced, to study their health and live accordingly.
The fourth factor of sportsmanship is the grace of a good winner. It would seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep from gloating over his vanquished rival, but also to be generous and minimize his own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did all the apologizing. To-day less apologizing is done by the failure and more by the success. The master in art is learning modesty, and from whom but the master in sport? There are in the arts to-day fewer megalomaniacs and persons afflicted with delusions of grandeur than there were among the "Je-ne-sais-quoi young men." Sport has made them more normal spiritually, while making them more normal physically. It has kept them younger. Old age has been attacked and driven back all along the line. One reason why we no longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up with itself and becoming contemporaneous."
Gameness is the final factor of good sportsmanship. In the matter of gameness, I grant that sport has little to teach the successful artist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency—in short, the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts. It takes the Browning spirit of those who
"fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake."
It takes the typical Anglo-Saxon gameness of Johnny Armstrong of the old ballad:
"Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all.
I am a little hurt, but I am not slain;
I will lay me down for to bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight with you again.'"