Nor is the pantomime of kicking more advanced: the melancholy air of grave concern at the state of scholarship in America; the tears in the voice lamenting the decay of our dear mother tongue; the placid large-eyed sorrow at the spectacle of corruption, of reckless automobiles, or of unkempt pavements; the firm and elevated chin and stretching neck of her who presses into the service of the Cause; the slow and silent tread, albeit in public places, of him who goes about in meditation on the misery of mankind (eheu miser!);—all these methods were the object for the satire of a Swift or the sweet rationality of a Montaigne; but they must be content with this sketchy cataloguing from a humbler pen.
One school of kickers only, so far as I am aware, has paid much attention to the technic of the great art. Their names will presently appear (for should they not be named with honor?), but the essence of their method is this, that they side-step every move in the game and, as the play goes rushing by, plant a skilful kick where they think it will be effective. In this game they do somewhat imitate the methods of the reactionary kicker, who as we have seen, retreats to the rear of the field, bidding the play come to him on the ground where it was played by St. Thomas, Samuel and Noah. That is to say, the method consists in assuming a point of view different from the current one. There the resemblance ceases, for these modern masters of technic rarely retreat to the rear, but keep alongside the game or even ahead of it, and even mingle in it with jest and laughter. And thus Mr. Shaw, from his coign of vantage just ahead of the player, is constantly thrusting things between his legs to trip him up if he run awkwardly; and Mr. Wells is making diagrams of how badly the game has been played in the past, and showing how it is bound to improve when we divest it of old and ragged toggery, which somehow holds together; and Mr. Chesterton is engaged in proving that nobody but himself knows anything about sport anyway; while Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Belloc, and a host of others are kicking away brilliantly, imagining that they also have discovered something quite new in the annals of the sport. Meanwhile hosts of good quiet people are lending a helping hand or are, like skilful guards or backs, actively but unostentatiously pushing the good cause through the opponents’ line and towards the goal.
If, by way of summary, one were asked to draw a brief sketch of the ideal kicker, much as Herbert Spencer drew the character of the ideal writer, the answer would be something like this. The ideal kicker is he who would improve his own condition or the condition of the town, community, age, and atmosphere in which he lives, mainly according to the light of his own generation. His attack is against the particular and the immediate; for he knows that for the purposes of his art, life is made up of an infinite number of small and specific acts. The larger abuse he recognizes to be assailable chiefly in its detail, and hence the pursuit of it, except in rare circumstances,—as when a whole community is like minded with himself,—is likely to be a sort of guerilla warfare and a kind of pot-hunting. But it is guerilla warfare and pot-hunting directed to as large ends as can be compassed by the limits of one’s imagination and practical common sense. The adroit kicker knows that many sad objects will in the usual course of events be left behind, by a sort of common consent, just as we discard certain clothes, less by deliberate pursuit of the ragman than by forgetting the old suit in the delightful possession of the new. He therefore spends his strength in calling attention to the new and beautiful attire of civilization. Nor is he likely to be seduced into the belief, that the armor of old days, or the stately shoe buckles and flowered waistcoats and well-curled wigs of the eighteenth century, are a better costume for our light running modern world and our warm climate than the flexible jersey and springy stockings of the contemporary athlete.
Do you ask if such an ideal kicker actually exists? I am forced to admit that I know no such one, any more than Spencer could have pointed to the actual embodiment of his deduction. And if it be further objected that the foregoing pages do by no means wholly exemplify the doctrine that they attempt to expound, in that they kick at what is essentially unkickable, the Stossenslust of humanity, I can merely register a mild and dainty kick to the effect that it is unreasonable to expect me, more than any other reformer or censor morum, to abide quite exactly by the doctrine that I would inculcate. Does it at all matter? Not very much one way or the other.
THE GENTLEMAN-SPORTSMAN
Here upon the opening of the shooting season, I am reminded of the impression made on me some time ago by an article on hunting lions in Africa written by a very well-known author. I remember being much struck by his admirably expressed and lucid explanation of his reason for engaging in that pursuit. Being a native of Vermont I had never devoted much thought to the ethics of lion-hunting and was interested to read that the author of the article felt justified in killing lions because there is really no place for them in the modern world; because they are anachronistic and objectionable survivals from another phase of the world’s history; because they are obstacles in the advancing tide of colonization. This very obvious line of reasoning had never chanced to occur to me before. I stopped a moment to savor the pleasure one always feels at having hazy ideas clarified and set in order, and before I went on with the article I reflected that the world owes a debt of gratitude to the highly educated men of trained minds who undertake out-of-the-way enterprises, because with their habit of searching and logical analysis they bring out the philosophy underlying any occupation they may set themselves.
Then I read on further through some most entertaining descriptions of African scenery till I came to an eloquently written paragraph denouncing in spirited terms those men who hunted lions in “an unsportsmanlike manner.” My curiosity was aroused. I wondered what this objectionable method could be—probably one which involved the escape of many of these undesirable lions, or possibly more suffering to them. My astonishment was great, therefore, when I read that this pernicious manner of hunting lions consisted in going after them with dogs and horses, and that the author objected to it because it is practically sure to secure every lion hunted. He put it with an evident distaste, that the lion became so worn out with running and so dazed with the barking of the dogs that the hunter could walk up to him and put the rifle-barrel in his ear. If you really want to kill a lion, my sportsman-author went on disdainfully, the thing to do is to shoot a zebra, cut holes in the carcass, put strychnine in the holes, and leave the carcass where the lions can get at it. The ringing accent of scorn in which this whole passage was written cast me into the greatest bewilderment. Had I not just read that the author considered it a laudable thing to put lions out of the world? I must have mistaken his meaning. Feeling greatly perplexed, I hastily turned back over the pages until I encountered that first passage again, and found that I had not in the least mistaken his meaning. He had said in so many words that lions ought to be killed because they were an anachronistic survival, etc., etc. Putting the two statements side by side I looked from one to the other in the first of the seizures of complete perplexity which marked my attempt to understand his ideal of sportsmanship. I read on into the article with the liveliest curiosity, hoping that the author would throw more light on the subject of what constituted a really sportsmanlike method of killing an objectionable animal, and from the sum total of his remarks I made out quite clearly why he objected to the zebra-strychnine method. It was not after all because it was sure, for his own avowed aim was to kill every lion he encountered, and to look up all he possibly could, whether they evidenced any desire to encounter him or not. It was because it “did not give the lion a chance.”
In varying forms he repeated this sportsman’s ideal of “giving the game a chance,” but from the context it was clear, even to my inexperienced eye, that he did not mean to be taken literally. It was not a real chance the lion had when the sportsman could arrange matters to his taste—it was a hypothetical, metaphysical chance. The aim was to give the animal the illusion of having a chance, and when, acting on that idea, he had furnished the hunter with sufficient excitement in frustrating his desperate attempts to escape, the sportsman was to kill him in the end, thus proving his own skill and ingenuity. Yes, it was all quite clearly set forth in the same lucid style which had aroused my admiration at first.