A Cricketer’s World
Leigh Hunt reflects on the civilising effect of the game of cricket.
1834
King William IV 1830-1837
Leigh Hunt reflects on the civilising effect of the game of cricket.
1834
King William IV 1830-1837
Essayist Leigh Hunt was a cricket-lover, and panegyrics on the game and its health-giving properties pepper his writing. He was also of the opinion that those whose got out to play the game gained an appreciation for the countryside and a perspective on the world denied to many others.
IT is a melancholy thing to say for England, with her beautiful country, that we have not even a word to express an entertainment amidst scenery out of doors, but must recur for one to the French, — Fête Champêtre;* that is to say, a festival in the fields, or the country, — a rural entertainment. “Rural Entertainment” would sound affected in English! — But we shall grow wiser as real knowledge of the world extends, and when it is no longer confined to the signification of above a nine-hundredth million part of it.
“The world!” The man of fashion means St James’s by it; the mere man of trade means the Exchange, and a good, prudent mistrust. But cricketers, and men of sense and imagination, who use all the eyes and faculties God has given them, mean His beautiful planet, gorgeous with sunset, lovely with green fields, magnificent with mountains — a great rolling energy, full of health, love, and hope, and fortitude, and endeavour. Compare this world with the others — no better than a billiard ball or a musty plum.
In 1788, Robert Burns published some verses on the ‘Fête Champêtre’ in a similar vein, in which he imagined that Love and Beauty vowed (and sealed it with a kiss) to deny entry to the North Wind, and in particular to Politics. Burns’s song was set to the rollicking Jacobite tune ‘Killiecrankie’ (YouTube), which might just be letting Politics in by a side-gate.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.