Sport and Spoil-Sports

CLIVE BELL

The Approaching Abolishment of the Pleasures of Sport, Art, Love and the Table

THAT moral regeneration which the war was confidently expected to provoke seems at last to be setting in. The London Times has ordered that pigeon-shooting shall cease in the Principality of Monaco and hopes that "this cruel sport" may also be checked in Great Britain. In America the movement to suppress pigeon-shooting is well under way. The lower middle class, after a prolonged struggle, is about to pay out our fine ladies by depriving them of their feathers. Rabbit coursing is also threatened: and the public performance of tricks by animals may presently be made illegal. If we have not succeeded yet in suppressing war, famine, tyranny or murder, we have at any rate got a "strangle-hold" on "cruel sports".

And what sports are cruel ? What sports are not? To me it seems there is one case against blood sports in general, and in the London Times Of all places, I, not long ago, saw it stated with admirable precision and frankness. Need I say that sport was not the nominal subject of discussion? The writer was arguing in favour of the so-called "Tricks" Bill. He pointed out that what is really bad in a show of performing animals is not so much the sufferings of the performers as the state of mind of the onlookers. Philosophically, the only things that can be considered good or bad in themselves are states of mind; and, in fact, what most disgusts every sensitive person at an animal "trick" show is the state of mind of those who enjoy it.

Deplorable Pleasures

THE sight of hundreds of one's fellow-creatures complacently relishing the clumsy, would-be human antics of dogs dressed up in caps and trousers is a cure for excessive philanthropy. Go to the circus if you suffer from pride of species. And stay there to learn another lesson. When the young lady with her whip and satin slippers leads into the ring her well educated poodles and sets them climbing ladders and shouldering arms, you and I and the writers in the papers are disgusted by the stupid insensibility of people who can take pleasure in such things. We need no philosopher to confirm our certainty that the state of their minds is deplorable.

But remember if, suddenly, the scene could be changed, if for that beastly exhibition could be substituted a first rate performance of a great Russian ballet, such as the Sacre du Printemps, it would then be the rows of outraged dog-fanciers who, like the musical critics, would exclaim against the state of mind of the decadent perverts who pretended to take pleasure in an insult to common sense.

Nothing will change my conviction that a performance by two elephants of what, with the aid of the program, we can suppose to be a polka, is a humiliating spectacle; no one will persuade me that the state of mind of those who enjoy it is good; but 'when it comes to claim that I have on this account a right to deprive the circus-goers of their nasty pleasures, I sorrowfully part company with my fellow prigs.

For let us see whither this claim would lead us. The offence of "trick shows" is not the pain of the brutes but the pleasure of the human beings. What is wrong with pigeonshooting is not the killing of pigeons in England and America but the pleasure taken in it by the gunmen, and in watching it by the spectators. The pains of non-human beings cannot fairly be brought into the account, since in his search for good and evil no moral philosopher can with impunity stray beyond the bounds of the human mind. It is in states of mind, and in them alone, that we must look for ethical values.

Also, a pigeon that is brought down just over the trap or within the enclosure—and that is how the vast majority are brought down (if you don't believe me look at the scores, and remember that the competitor who fails to grass his bird within the enclosure is out)—a pigeon so brought down, I say, probably suffers no more at the hands of the sportsman than does a lamb at the hands of its butcher. Now no one would dream of calling bad names a butcher who took his duties in a purely professional spirit, only if he took pleasure in killing, if he approached his task in the spirit of a sportsman, would he be execrated as a bloodthirsty wretch; which proves that it is not the deed but the state of mind that matters. And let any sportsman, before he protests that he, at any rate, takes no pleasure in killing, ask himself this question and answer it honestly: would it be precisely the same to him if, at the most baffling angles, clay pigeons instead of grouse w'ere driven over his butt; does he take the same pleasure in galloping after a drag that he takes in pursuing a fox; would it be as thrilling to play a mechanical salmon for an hour as it is to play a live one? Before thanking God that he is not as pigeon-shooters and rabbit-coursers are, let him answer this question with sportsmanlike honesty. What does he say? I, at any rate, who, in my time, have taken a ferocious delight in hunting, shooting and fishing dare not cast the first stone at my unfashionable brothers in sin.

When Macauley said that the Puritans forbade bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators, he paid the sect a well-merited compliment. Like the philosophers they recognized that evil must be looked for in states of mind; like the anti-pigeon-shooters they sought to abolish it by making its cause illegal. The pleasure taken in bear-baiting was bad; and bad pleasures were to be eradicated by act of Parliament Puritanism is not dead: Zeal-of-the-land is as busy as ever. He is putting down pigeon-shooting and rabbit coursing and "tricks" and the wearing of feathers; which done, presumably he will go on to deal with those other blood sports which, I think we must admit, owe their ultimate attractiveness to the pleasure men take in killing. Nor do his activities end there: having got us to agree that the means to bad states of mind—pigeon-shooting for instance—ought to be made illegal. Busy goes on to explain that in his opinion the drinking of beer, smoking of tobacco and wearing of pretty frocks are also means to bad. Already in England we have policewomen to arrest us should we chance to fall a-kissing in the parks or in hired boats on the Thames "Enormities" must be put down. And what pleasures are not enormous ?

The fact is, secretly we all dislike those pleasures which are not our own; and we can prevent ourselves actively disapproving of them only by the deliberate exercise of that unfashionable, pre-war virtue, Tolerance. So let those who have no taste for sport, beer or tobacco, and can no longer reasonably hope to be kissed, remember that there are other pleasures and other puritans. There is, for instance, aesthetic pleasure than which none is more disliked by the multitude. Art, until it has been desiccated by time, and sterilized by being taken for granted, the expression in unfamiliar forms of genuine and passionate conviction, is perhaps more hateful to the normal man than anything else in the world. Also, nothing irritates him more than the state of mind of those who can appreciate it. Though seldom dare he admit it, the man in the street regards art as a very evil kind of pleasure. And competent judges have assured me that those infamous attacks made during the war on Mr. Asquith obtained some measure of support, not because people in the third-class railway carriages believed for one instant the lies put in circulation, but because they believed, quite unjustly, that the Prime Minister and his friends cared seriously for the fine arts.

Beauty and the Righteous

BEAUTY was ever proclaimed anathema by the righteous, and art is secretly detested by all who cannot understand it. Had Oscar Wilde been a jockey, be sure the British public would never have kicked with such hearty and unabashed caddishness the man who was down. So, once admit that those pleasures which by the majority are reckoned bad are to be made illegal, and about the first thing to go will be art. Beer and tobacco are likely to follow wherever the puritans can capture the machine as effectually as they seem to have captured it in the United States. Blood sports and kiss-inthe-ring survive them.

And then, I suppose, may dawn that bland and beehive-like civilization for which the great Edwardian vegetarians and their actively virtuous disciples have prepared us. To these one valedictory word of warning: what if, when the pleasures of sport, art, love and the table have all been declared unlawful, an austerer school of spoil-sports should arise to assert that the exquisite pleasure derived by the good from the contemplation of their own virtue is also demoralizing and ought to be abolished?