They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that
in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge
were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were
forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco
during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal
fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours
and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their
health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is
perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism,
as much as the monastic rules. Men have overstrained themselves and
killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference
and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of
religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the
purchase in the other.
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