From a Cornish Window Part 18

"To be sure," said I. "We discussed cricket, and a number of reputations then well known, about which the public troubles itself no longer.

Let us try their names upon The Infant here, and discover with how many of them he is acquainted."

"We discussed," said Verinder, "the vulgarisation of cricket. You made me say some hard things about it, but be hanged to me if anything I prophesied then came near to _this_! Listen--

"'I suppose I may say that, after some luck at starting, I played a pretty good innings: but a total of 240 is poor enough for first knock on such a wicket as Hove, and, as things stand, the omens are against us. However, as I write this wire the clouds are gathering, and there's no denying that a downfall during the night may help our chances.'"

"What on earth are you reading?" I asked.

"Stay a moment. Here's another--

"'With Jones's wicket down, the opposition declared, somewhat to the annoyance of the crowd: and indeed, with Robinson set and playing the prettiest strokes all around the wicket, I must admit that they voiced a natural disappointment. They had paid their money, and, after the long period of stonewalling which preceded the tea interval, a crowded hour of glorious life would have been exhilarating, and perhaps was no more than their due.

d.i.c.kson, however, took his barracking good-humouredly. Towards the end Jones had twice appealed against the light.'"

"I suppose," said I, "that is how cricket strikes the Yellow Press.

Who are the reporters?"

"The reporters are the captains of two county teams--two first-cla.s.s county teams; and they are writing of a match actually in progress at this moment. Observe A.'s fine sense of loyalty to a captain's duty in his published opinion that his side is in a bad way. Remark his chivalrous hope for a sodden wicket to-morrow."

"It is pretty dirty," I agreed.

Verinder snorted. "I once tried to kill a man at mid-on for wearing a pink shirt. But these fellows! They ought to wear yellow flannels."

"What, by the way, is the tea interval?" I asked.

"It is an interval," answered Verinder seriously, "in which the opposing captains adjourn to the post office and send telegrams about themselves and one another."

"Excuse me," put in Sir John Crang, looking up from his _Times_ and addressing me, "but I quite agree with what you and your friend are saying. Interest in the Australian tour, for instance, I can understand; it promotes good feeling, and anything that draws closer the bonds of interest between ourselves and the colonies is an imperial a.s.set."

"Good Lord!" murmured Verinder.

Sir John fortunately did not hear him. "But I agree with you," he continued, "in condemning this popular craze for cricket _per se_, which is after all but a game with a ball and some sticks. I will not go the length of our imperial poet and dub its votaries 'flannelled fools.'

That was poetical license, eh? though pardonable under the circ.u.mstances.

But, as he has said elsewhere, 'How little they know of England who only England know.'" (At this point I reached out a foot and trod hard on Verinder's toe.) "And to the broader outlook--I speak as a pretty wide traveller--this insular absorption in a mere game is bewildering."

"Infant!" said Verinder suddenly, still under repression of my foot, "What are you reading?"

The Infant looked up sweetly, withdrawing himself from his paper, however, by an effort.

"There's a Johnny here who tells you how Bosanquet bowls with what he calls his 'over-spin.' He has a whole column about it with figures, just like Euclid; and the funny thing is, Bosanquet writes just after to say that the Johnny knows nothing about it."

"Abandoned child," commanded Verinder, "pa.s.s me the paper. You are within measurable distance of studying cricket for its own sake, and will come to a bad end."

Within twenty seconds he and The Infant were intently studying the diagrams, which Verinder demonstrated to be absurd, while Sir John, a little huffed by his manner, favoured me with a vision of England as she should be, with her ploughshares beaten into Morris Tubes.

In the midst of this discourse Verinder looked up.

"Let us not despair of cricket," says he. "She has her victories, but as yet no prizes to be presented with public speeches."

"Curious fellow that friend of yours," said Sir John, as he took leave of me on Windsor platform. "Yes, yes, I saw how you humoured him: but why should he object to a man's playing cricket in a pink shirt?"

He went on his way toward the Castle, while we turned our faces for Agar's Plough and the best game in the world.

JULY.

Our Parliamentary Candidate--or Prospective Candidate, as we cautiously call him--has been visiting us, and invited me to sit on the platform and give the speeches my moral support. I like our candidate, who is young, ardent, good-natured, and keeps his temper when he is heckled; seems, indeed, to enjoy being heckled, and conciliates his opponents by that bright pugnacity which a true Briton loves better than anything else in politics. I appreciate, too, the compliment he pays me. But I wish he would not choose to put his ardour in compet.i.tion with Sirius and the dog-days; and I heartily wish he had not brought down Mr. Blank, M.P., to address us in his support.

Mr. Blank and I have political opinions which pa.s.s, for convenience, under a common label. Yet there are few men in England whose att.i.tude of mind towards his alleged principles I more cordially loathe. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I think him a hypocrite. But he has chosen the side which is mine, and I cannot prevent his saying a hundred things which I believe.

We will suppose that Mr. Blank is a far honester fellow than I am able to think him. Still, and at the best, he is a sort of composite photograph of your average Member of Parliament--the type of man to whom Great Britain commits the direction of her affairs and, by consequence, her well-doing and her well-being and her honour. Liberal or Conservative, are not the features pretty much the same? a solid man, well past fifty, who has spent the prime of his life in business and withdrawn from it with a good reputation and a credit balance equally satisfactory to himself and his bankers. Or it may be that he has not actually retired but has turned to politics to fill up those leisure hours which are the reward or vexation (as he chooses to look at them) of a prosperous man of business; for, as Bagehot pointed out, the life of a man of business who employs his own capital, and employs it nearly always in the same way, is by no means fully employed. "If such a man is very busy, it is a sign of something wrong. Either he is working at detail, which subordinates would do better, or he is engaged in too many speculations." In consequence our commerce abounds with men of great business ability and experience who, being short of occupation, are glad enough to fill up their time with work in Parliament, as well as proud to write M.P. after their names.

For my part I can think of nothing better calculated to rea.s.sure anyone whose dreams are haunted by apprehensions of wild-cat legislative schemes, or the imminence of a Radical millennium, than five minutes' contemplation of our champions of progress as they recline together, dignified and whiskered and bland, upon the benches of St. Stephen's.

But let us proceed with our portrait, which I vow is a most pleasing one.

Our typical legislator is of decent birth, or at least hopeful of acquiring what he rightly protests to be but 'the guinea stamp' by judiciously munificent contributions to his party's purse; honest and scrupulous in dealing; neither so honest nor so scrupulous in thinking; addicted to phrases and a trifle too impatient of their meaning, yet of proved carefulness in drawing the line between phrase and practice; a first-rate committeeman (and only those who have sat long in committee can sound the depths of this praise); locally admired; with much _bonhomie_ of manner, backed by a reputation for standing no nonsense; good-tempered, honestly anxious to reconcile conflicting interests and do the best for the unconflicting ones of himself and his country; but above all a man who knows where to stop. I vow (I repeat) he makes a dignified and amiable figure. One can easily understand why people like to be represented by such a man. It gives a feeling of security--a somewhat illusory one, I believe; and security is the first instinct of a state. One can understand, why the exhortations, dehortations, precepts, and instructions of parents, preachers, schoolmasters tend explicitly and implicitly to the reproduction of this admired bloom.

Yet one may whisper that it has--shall we say?--its failings; and its failings are just those which are least to be commended to the emulation of youth. It is, for instance, const.i.tutionally timid. Violent action of any kind will stampede it in a panic, and, like the Countess in _Evan Harrington_, it "does not ruffle well." It betrays (I think) ill-breeding in its disproportionate terror whenever an anarchist bomb explodes, and in the ferocity of its terror it can be crueller than the a.s.sailant.

"My good people," it provokes one to say, "by all means stamp out these dangers, but composedly, as becomes men conscious of their strength.

Even allowing for the unscrupulousness of your a.s.sailant, you have still nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the odds in your favour; and so long as you answer the explosions of weak anarchy by cries suggestive of the rage of the sheep, you merely raise the uncomfortable suspicion that, after all, there must be something amiss with a civilisation which counts you among its most expensive products."

But in the untroubled hour of prosperity this weakness of breeding is scarcely less apparent. Our admired bloom is admired rather for not doing certain things than for doing others. His precepts are cautious and mainly negative. He does not get drunk (in public at any rate), and he expends much time and energy in preventing men from getting drunk. But he does not lead or heartily incite to n.o.ble actions, although at times-- when he has been badly frightened--he is ready to pay men handsomely to do them. He wins and loses elections on questions of veto. He had rather inculcate the pa.s.sive than the active virtues. He prefers temperance and restraint to energy and resolve. He thinks more of the organisation than the practice of charity, esteems a penny saved as three halfpence gained, had liefer detect an impostor than help a deserving man. He is apt to label all generous emotions as hysterical, and in this he errs; for when a man calls the generous emotions hysterical he usually means that he would confuse them with hysterics if they happened to him.

Now the pa.s.sive virtues--continence, frugality, and the like--are desirable, but shade off into mere want of pluck; while the active virtues--courage, charity, clemency, cheerfulness, helpfulness--are ever those upon which the elect and n.o.ble souls in history have laid the greater stress. I frankly detest Blank, M.P., because I believe him to be a venal person, a colourable (and no doubt self-deceiving) imitation of the type. But, supposing him to be the real thing, I still think that, if you want a model for your son, you will do better with Sir Philip Sidney.

If ever a man ill.u.s.trated the beauty of the active virtues in his life and in his death, that man was Sidney; but he also gave utterance in n.o.ble speech to his belief in them. In the _Apologie for Poetrie_ you will find none of your art-for-art's-sake chatter: Sidney boldly takes the line that poetry helps men, and helps them not to well-being only, but to well-doing, and again helps them to well-doing not merely by teaching (as moral philosophy does) but by inciting. For an instance--

"Who readeth AEneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so-excellent an act?"

There speaks, antic.i.p.ating Zutphen, the most perfect knight in our history. Again--

"Truly I have known men that even with reading _Amadis de Gaule_ (which, G.o.d knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect poesy) have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage."--

All active virtues be it noted. "We are not d.a.m.ned for doing wrong,"

writes Stevenson, "but for not doing right. Christ will never hear of negative morality: _Thou shalt_ was ever His word, with which He superseded _Thou shalt not_. To make our morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. . . . In order that a man may be kind and honest it may be needful that he should become a total abstainer: let him become so then, and the next day let him forget the circ.u.mstance.

Trying to be kind and honest will require all his thoughts." Yet how many times a day will we say 'don't' to our children for once that we say 'do'?

But here I seem to be within reasonable distance of discussing original sin, and so I return to Mr. Blank.

I do not like Mr. Blank; and I disliked his speech the other night so heartily that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven help the creature!

CHANT ROYAL OF HIGH VIRTUE.

Who lives in suit of armour pent, And hides himself behind a wall, For him is not the great event, The garland, nor the Capitol.

And is G.o.d's guerdon less than they?

Nay, moral man, I tell thee Nay: Nor shall the flaming forts be won By sneaking negatives alone, By Lenten fast or Ramazan, But by the challenge proudly thrown-- _Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

G.o.d, in His Palace resident Of Bliss, beheld our sinful ball, And charged His own Son innocent Us to redeem from Adam's fall.