Now, it is, of course, absurd to represent the ethical objections to sport as “based upon theory, hearsay, or conjecture,” for the methods of sportsmen are well known and beyond dispute, and many of those who most strongly condemn such practices have been sportsmen themselves and are thoroughly conversant with the facts. But what I wish to point out is that Lord Ribblesdale’s description of the sportsman’s defence of sport as “a conclusion founded on practice” might be just as logically applied to the criminal’s defence of crime. To invoke the judgment of an expert on the morality of a practice in which he is professionally interested is an error similar to that of setting the cat to watch the cream.
On the whole, it is not surprising that the sportsman who can devise no cleverer modes of escape from his humanitarian pursuers than the sophisms above mentioned is already being brought to bay, and stands in imminent danger of being, controversially, “broken up.” Indeed, considering the nature of the arguments adduced in its favour, one is inclined to think that sport must be not only cruel to the victims of the chase, but ruinous to the mental capacity of the gentlemen who indulge in it. It can hardly be doubted that the ludicrous aspect of modern sport will more and more present itself to those who possess the sense of humour; and we may even hope that the poverty-stricken caricaturists of our comic papers will some day relinquish their threadbare jokes over the blunders of the hunting-field and the shooting-box, to discover that the subject of sport is rich in another kind of comedy—the essential silliness of the habit itself, and the crass absurdity of the arguments put forward by its apologists.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Some of these fallacies have been incidentally referred to in preceding chapters, but it is convenient, at the expense of a little overlapping, that they should here be treated together.
[25] Blackwood’s Magazine, August, 1899.
[26] Both these lines of argument were followed by Dr. Lang, Archbishop of York, when on a recent occasion (November 16, 1913) he pronounced what may be called the Foxology at the dedication of a stained window to the memory of an aged blood-sportsman who was killed in the hunting-field. That a Christian minister should have been “launched into eternity,” as the phrase is, while engaged in hunting a fox, might have been expected to cause a sense of very deep pain, and even of shame, to his co-religionists. What actually happened was that an Archbishop was found willing to eulogise, in a consecrated place of worship, not only the reverend gentleman whose life was thus thrown away, but the sport of fox-hunting itself!
[27] “My Sporting Holidays,” by Sir H. Seton-Karr, 1904.
[28] But let us not forget the delightful remark of the Archbishop of York, that “even the labourer, when he felt the stir of the Meet, got just one of those fresh events, excitements, and interests that he needed in what otherwise was often a very monotonous life.”
[29] This humane aspect of sport may be aptly illustrated by a passage in De Quincey’s essay on “Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts”:
“The subject chosen ought to be in good health, for it is absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite unable to bear it. And here, in this benign attention to the comfort of sick people, you will observe the usual effect of a fine art to soften and refine the feelings. From our art, as from all the other liberal arts, when thoroughly mastered, the result is to humanise the heart.”