But we have almost forgotten our foreign exile’s travelling acquaintance, Mr Norris, the hearty and genial English clergyman at whose invitation he first set himself to study English life. Before finally taking up his quarters at Lynmere, he has paid the promised visit to his friend in his parsonage at Kingsford; “a pretty Gothic chateau,” furnished with the taste of a gentleman and a scholar; a residence whose somewhat luxurious belongings, its ample library, and the well-chosen prints which grace its walls, when contrasted in the writer’s mind with the humble abode of the French village curé, give rise to reflections “not wholly to the disadvantage of the latter.” We, on the other hand, must warn any foreign reader who may draw the contrast for himself, that Kingsford Parsonage is a very exceptional case indeed. Mr Norris is discovered, somewhat to his French visitor’s surprise, clad in “a strange costume of white flannel,” not altogether sacerdotal; “Je suis habillé en cricketer,” is the parson’s explanation. The fact is, he has just been playing cricket with his pupils, half-a-dozen young men in preparation for the Universities. The simple and orderly habits of the household, the breakfast at eight, the dinner at one, the kindly intercourse between the tutor and his pupils, and the prosperity of a well-ordered village under an energetic pastor, are well described, and will give our French neighbours a very fair idea of such a life. A little, a very little “triste,” our visitor finds it, this English rural life, with its rich green meadows and grey sky, and slowly-winding river, half hidden by its banks. One needs, he considers, in order to find happiness in such scenes, a hearty love for simple nature, and a heart “warmed with the sentiment of duty fulfilled;” in short, he is of Dr Johnson’s opinion, though he puts it into much more complimentary language—that “those who are fond of the country are fit to live in the country.”
But if we cannot allow our French friends to imagine that all English country clergymen have their lot cast in the pleasant places of Kingsford and Lynmere, still less, we fear, must they consider them (or their wives) such wonderful economists as, like Mr Norris, to maintain all the quiet elegancies of a gentleman’s establishment in a handsome Gothic chateau (and to travel in Switzerland besides), upon an ecclesiastical income scarcely exceeding, after all necessary deductions, two hundred pounds a-year. True, Mr Norris takes pupils and writes for reviews—highly respectable vocations, and profitable enough in some hands, but scarcely open to the majority of his brethren, and not safe to be depended upon, as a supplementary income, by young clergymen on small preferments who may feel no vocation for celibacy. Mr Norris, indeed, is peculiarly favoured in many respects as regards money matters; for he has been fortunate enough to have enjoyed an exhibition at Oxford in days when the word “exhibition” (as we are informed in a note) meant “a gratuitous admission to the University.” Here we are certainly stepping out of the ground of real English life, where the writer has so pleasantly guided us, into a highly imaginative state of things. It would have been a noble boast, indeed, for us to have made to foreigners, if it could have been made truly, that Oxford, out of her splendid endowments, offered, even occasionally, “gratuitous admissions” to poor and deserving scholars. It was what the best of her founders and benefactors intended and desired—what they thought they had secured for ever by the most stringent and solemn enactments; but what, unhappily, the calm wisdom of the University itself has been as far from carrying out as the busy sweeping of a Reform Commission.
The foreign visitor is naturally very much impressed by an English cricket-match. The puzzled admiration which possesses him on the occasion of his “assisting” at a “fête du cricket” is very amusingly expressed. Throughout all his honest admiration of the English character, there peeps out a confession that this one peculiar habit of the animal is what he has failed to account for or comprehend. He tries to philosophise on the thing; and, like other philosophical inquirers when they get hold of facts which puzzle them, he feels bound to present his readers with a theory of cause and effect which is evidently as unsatisfactory to himself as to them. He falls back for an explanation on that tendency to “solidarity” in the English temperament which he has admired before.
“The explanation of the great popularity of the game of cricket is that, being always a challenge between two rival bodies, it produces emulation and excites that spirit of party which, say what we will, is one of the essential stimulants of public life, since in order to identify one’s self with one’s party one must make a sacrifice to a certain extent of one’s individuality. The game of cricket requires eleven persons on each side, and each of the players feels that he is consolidated (solidaire) with his comrades, in defeat as well as in victory.... That which makes the charm of the game is, above all, the solidarity which exists between the players.”
This is a very pretty theory, but scarcely the true one. In the public-school matches, no doubt, and in some matches between neighbouring villages, the esprit de corps goes for much; but, as a rule, we fear the cricketer is a much more selfish animal. His ambition is above all things to make a good score, and to appear in ‘Bell’s Life’ with a double figure to his name. Just as the hunting man, so that he himself can get “a good place,” cares exceedingly little for the general result of the day’s sport; so the batsman at Lord’s, so long as he makes a good innings, or the bowler so long as he “takes wickets” enough to make a respectable figure on the score, thinks extremely little, we are sorry to say, of “solidarity.” Whether the match is won or lost is of as little comparative importance as whether the fox is killed or gets away. We notice the difference, because it is a great pity it should be so. The Frenchman’s principle is by far the finer one; and the gradual increase of this intense self-interest in the cricket-field is going far to nullify the other good effects of the game as a national amusement. One reason why the matches between the public schools are watched with such interest by all spectators is, that the boys do really feel and show that identification of one’s self with one’s party which the author so much respects; the Harrow captain is really much more anxious that Harrow should beat Eton, than that he himself should get a higher score than Jones or Thompson of his own eleven; and the enthusiastic chairing of the hero of the day is not, as he knows, a personal ovation to the player, as to a mere exhibition of personal skill, but to his having maintained the honour of the school.
Our national ardour for this game seems always incomprehensible to a Frenchman. There is a little trashy, conceited book now before us, in which a French writer, professing to enlighten his countrymen upon English life, dismisses this mysterious amusement in a definition, the point and elegance of which it would be a pity to spoil by translation—“un exercice consistant à se fatiguer et à donner d’autant plus de plaisir qu’il avait fait répandre d’autant plus de sueur.”[[2]] He is careful, at the same time, to suggest that even cricket is probably borrowed from his own nation—the “jeu de paume” of the days of the Grand Monarque. But the inability of so shrewd and intelligent an observer, as the foreign spectator with whom we have to do at present, to comprehend the real points of the game, is an additional testimony to its entirely English character. The Etonian’s mamma, who, as he relates with a sort of quiet wonder, sat for five hours on two days successively on a bench under a hot sun, to watch the match between her son’s eleven and Harrow, would have given a much better account of the game. The admiring visitor does not pretend, as he observes, to go into the details of a game which has thirty-eight rules; but he endeavours to give his French readers some general idea of the thing, which may suffice for unprofessional lookers-on. It is unnecessary to say that the idea is very general indeed. The “consecrated” ground on which the “barrières” are erected, and where the “courses” take place, are a thoroughly French version of the affair. The “ten fieldsmen precipitating themselves in pursuit of the ball when struck” would be ludicrous enough to a cricketer’s imagination, if the thought of the probable consequences were not too horrible. Even such headlong zeal on the part of two fieldsmen only, with their eye on the same ball, has resulted, before now, in a collision entailing the loss of half-a-dozen front teeth and other disfigurements. It was unnecessary to exaggerate the perils of a game which, as our author observes, has its dangers; and if the fieldsmen at Lynmere conducted themselves after this headlong fashion when he was watching them, we can quite understand his surprise that, when the day concludes with the inevitable English dinner, men who had spent the whole day “in running, striking, and receiving blows from the ball to the bruising of their limbs” (and precipitating themselves against each other) should still show themselves disposed to drink toasts and make speeches for the rest of the evening. The conversation which he has with the parish schoolmaster, an enthusiastic cricketer, is good in its way:—
“‘I hope you have enjoyed the day?’ said he to me. ‘You have had an opportunity of seeing what cricket is. It’s a noble game, is it not?’
“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘it is a fine exercise; and I think highly of those amusements which bring all classes together under the influence of a common feeling.’
“‘It is not only that,’ replied the excellent man: ‘but nothing moralises men like cricket.’
“‘How?’ said I, rather astonished to hear him take such high ground.