AN ARMCHAIR ESSAY

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 264, 3 August 1929, Page 29

AN ARMCHAIR ESSAY

SPORT IN FICTION

ROBERT SURTEES AND OTHERS

(For “The Dominion,” by CHARLES WILSON).

There are modes in fiction as in everything else. There was a time when the sporting novel was all the rage, just as, nowadays, in certain circles, the “detective story” seems to maintain a general popularity. When the present writer first began—sometimes, I grieve to say, despite a parental censorship—to read fiction the Dickens vogue was strong in certain quarters, being rivalled by the popularity of the sporting stories written by Robert Smith Surtees. Surtees died in 1864, lJut he had been writing a good many years, and although he had a special public of his own, a public Dickens rarely touched, he had many readers who never in their lives knew a fox hunt but who delighted in the fun which the creator of Jorrocks, the author of “Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities,” of “Handley Cross,” and other stories, never had any difficulty in provoking. When I was a youth my own knowledge of fox-hunting was limited to pedestrian trips to see the York and Ainsley or the Bramham Moore hounds “throw off” —both had their meets at “halls” and “manor houses” in the near neighbourhood of which it was my good fortune to live, and once I had made acquaintance with Jorrocks he seemed almost as good as Pickwick the Great. Thackeray, no mean judge of fiction, and, it is well known, very jealous of Dickens's success, once said he “envied Surtees’s gifts more than those of any other man,” and of late years Surtees’s earlier novels have been more and more treasured by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, men who never bestrode a hunter in their lives. Before Surtee’s time one Apperley, whose pen name was Nimrod, had a certain vogue. Apperley, “gentleman, scholar, sportsman,” who at one time edited a sporting magazine, ended, as, alas, did not a few sportsmen, boris vivants, and viveurs of his day, in voluntary

exile in Calais, whither he had retired to escape his English creditors. “Pickwick” appeared in 1837, but Nimrod’s “Life of John Mytton”—a first edition brought £95 in New York recently—came out two years previously, with coloured plates by H. Aiken and T. Rawlin. Mytton was a country gentleman of an old family, but he cared only for sport, although he was at one time M.P. for Shrewsbury. He inherited a fortune of £lO,OOO a year and £OO,OOO in ready money which had accumulated during his minority. As an example of how a rich man can dissipate a vast fortune in “playing the fool” Mytton’s story is unapproachable. A story is told of how a gentleman friend tried to dissaude the sportsman from selling part of an estate and reminded him that it had been in his family for over 500 years. “The devil it has,” said Mytton, “then it is high time it should go.” His was not a very admirable chaFactor. From four to six bottles of port—the “gentleman’s drink” of his day—was his daily allowance. He had two wives, whom he treated very badly, and at last had to fly to France. Returning to England, he was at. once arrested for debt and died soon afterwards. Aiken’s coloured pictures show what a reckless fellow he was. One in particular I remember shows Mytton driving a friend home and frightening his companion by his fast and furious driving. Ills friend, objecting to this, Mytton at once asked him whether he bad ever been thrown out of a gig. “No, thank God,” was the reply, “for I was never upset in one.” “What!” said Mytton, “never upset in a gig? What a d <1 slow fellow you must have been all your life.” And immediately running the near wheel up a bank, out they both went. One of Aiken’s plates, entitled, “D n This Hiccup!” shows Mytton when getting Into bed, being annoyed by the hiccups. “D n this hiccup,” said Mytton. “I’ll frighten it away." and taking a lighted candle, applied it to his shirt-tail, and was instantly enveloped in flames. When he was finally got to bed, he stayed there some considerable time. Apperley, who knew Mytton well, set him up as a bad example of a what an English sportsman should be, but the book had a great vogue, perhaps owing to the spirited illustrations drawn by Aiken who was to his generation the Leech of the day. You may meet a Mytton

—but a milder version—in the pages of Trollope, of Whyte Melville, and in Archibald Marshall. The book is in its eightieth birthday, and older, but is still going strong. But new to Surtees and his books. Of course, Jorrocks is a vulgar city tradesman, but he is a very amusing figure, especially if you study his character in John Leech’s coloured etchings. Leech was one of England’s greatest illustrators. “What would ‘Punch’ do without him?” said Thackeray, but I shall always think that Leech was at his best in his illustrations of hunting life and men in Surtees’s “Handley Cross” series, wherein John Jorrocks, of St. Bololphs Lane, E.C. and Great Coram Street, was ever the most prominent figure, together with “Pigg,” his huntsman, his servant Binjimin—almost as good a trencherman as Jorrocks himself — and his ’orses, and specially his master's favourite, Xerxes. When he drove tandem Xerxes was the leader, and “arter —Xerxes come arter him.” Jorrocks was a knowing “old bird” in ’orseflesh in particular, and was very well aware of his creature comforts. Once, when a sporting friend, who cherished a forlorn hope he could sell Jorrocks a troublesome nag, wrote to ask him to come and inspect the animal, he received a reply that he would come and bring his night-cap, for, said the city man, whose first and only hobby was “ ’unting,” “Where I dines I sleeps, and where I sleeps I eats my breakfast” Jorrocks ate a big breakfast, too—a brace of chops, three or four eggs, and so forth. The fat old man was no fool, for he becomes Master of the Foxhounds, and there is much homely wisdom when he says, “Arter all’s said and done, there are but two sorts of folks in the world, Peerage folks and Post Hoffice Directory folks, and it is the Post Hoffice Directory folks wot pay their bills,” and “ Uuting is the Sport of Kings, the himage of, war without its guilt,

and only five and twenty per cent, of Its damage.” Kipling made some lines on Jorrocks: Certes it is a noble sport. And men have quitted, sell, and swum for it. But I am of a meeker sort, And I prefer Surtees in comfort. Beach me down my Handley Cross again, Mv run, where never danger lurks, is With Jorrocks, and his deathless train, Pigg, Binjimin, and Arterxerxes. Leech drew hundreds of sporting pictures, but never—save perhaps in his “Comic History of England” and “Comic History of Rome”—did he limn a more amusing set of plates than in his drawings to Surtees’s novel. Perhaps one of the most humorous of English sporting novels is Surtees’ “Handley Cross,” which appeared in 1854, nearly twenty years after “Pickwick.” A little personal gossip about its author may be welcome. Surtees was a Durham man by birth, a solicitor by profession, who, not finding the law a very profitable line, took to sporting journalism, and became editor of the “New Sporting Magazine.” Most of the sporting heroes of the time were connected with the landed gentry, but Surtees invented a new type in John Jorrocks, a grocer, whose hobby was hunting. Surtees collected some of his articles under the title of “Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities,” which set forth the adventures and misadventures of the retired grocer with the Surrey stag hounds, at Newmarket, on the road, at Margate, and in Paris. A most amusing book, this, the first edition of which now brings well on to £lOO, but an excellent facsimile was published by Edwin Arnold in 1924. F. Aiken’s coloured plates wen* reproduced in facsimile. Later on Surtees became a sporting novelist, and reintroduced Jorrocks, this time in his “Handley Cross” of the “Spa Hunt” (with coloured etchings by John Leech.) “Handley Cross” is by this time a classic among hunting stories. Later on Trollope gave many picturesque descriptions of fox-hunting—in “Framley Parsonage.” “The Eustace Diamonds,” don’t miss Trollope’s story of "Nappie’s grey horse” in the latter novel—but for sheer fun give me Surtees and “Handley Cross.” “Ask Mamma,” “Plain or Ringlets,” and “Mr. Facy Romford’s Haunts," into all of which I h,»ve so often loved to dip. Of course Surges has been charged with vulgarly He himself admitted Mr. Jorrock-' -3 "vulgar,” but he aslKi the

reader to bear in mind “the distinction between describing vulgar people and describing vulgar people vulgarly.” Surtees says at least Jorrocks has “one recommendation —he does not pretend to be anything but what he is—he plays his part without affectation, which is what we wish some other people might do.” And, he adds, inconclusion, we beg to say this work (“Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities”) should be labelled “To be taken before ‘Handley Cross." Very good advice, for it gives one an all-round description of the hero of the second, and I may think greater novel. Jorrocks’s taste for fox-hunting did not come all at once. There was a time when, as he confesses in the “Jaunts and Jollities,” he remembered his poor old friend, “Will Softly of Friday Street, how Newmarket and racing had been the ruin of that hitherto prosperous fellow tradesman, whose father left him “a fine business in the tripe and cowsheel line”—it all went in two years and he had nothing to show at" the end of that time for upwards of twenty thousand golden sovereigns, but a hundredweight of children’s lambs’ wool socks, and warrants for thirteen hogsheads of damaged sherry in the Docks.” Jorrocks found no charm in racing and Newmarket, and racing but gave him his chestnut hunter and a good dinner at the end of the run —a table handsomely decorated with shrimps, lobsters, broiled bones, fried ham, poached eggs—with an imperial quart of Mr. Creed’s stoutest draught port, with the orthodox proportion of lemon, cloves, sugar, and cinnamon, and Mr. Jorrocks was perfectly happy. Another of Surtees’s most popular books was “Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour.” As a rule, his stories have no moral to speak of, but in Mr. Sponge's exploits he is glad if the story “serves to put the rising generation ou their guard against specious, promiscuous acquaintance, and trains them ou to the noble sport of fox-hunting, to the exclusion of its mercenary illegitimate offshoots.” Mr. Soapey Sponge, as his intimates called him, when the “hero” was not present, is a born parasite. But he is no mean judge of a horse, and though he does marry a sporting actress, Miss Lucy Gitters, ends up (in his story) as the keeper of .Sponge’s Cigar and Betting Lounge, where “noblemen, gentlemen, and officers in the household troops can be accommodated with loans on their personal security to any amount,” he is a very amusing rascal, and there are fimes especially when he stops a night or two with his sporting friend, the snobbish Mr. Jawleyford, of Jawleyford Court —he ought to have been in Thackeray’s “Book of Snobs”—when he will have the reader's sympathies. Just one word in conclusion: if you can afford a set of, say, the Jorrocks edition of Surtees’s stories—they may cost you £6 or £7—yon are sure of a fortnight’s good reading. Methuen's reprints of (lie stories, with facsimiles of John Leech’s illustrations will, if you can pick the volume up, cost you but five or six shillings each, but I warn the prospective buyer that they are all out of print and are not to be come across very easily. If you come across a copy of. say, “Handley Cross,” with its famous coloured etching by John Leech, depicting John Jorrocks shouting out to the jibbering Arterxerxes, “Come hup, I say, you hugly beast,” while the beast. 1 throws his master into the muddy ditch, then secure it at once, and if you don’t laugh over the woes of the city fox-hunter, well—l’ll give in. In these much later days Trollope and Whyte Melville—much neglected this latter—and Archibald Melville provide us with studies of sport—especially fox-hunting—and sportsmen; but the country gentleman, as a class, is slowly but surely being impoverished and the days when a master of hounds could keep a dozen or so hunters, and maintain, very largely, a pack; of hounds, are approaching their end. Still it is good to read of them, and personally I would not swap my set of Surtees for a good row of finely-bound histories and those books which “should be in every gentleman's library.” If you get tired of fox-hunting as described in the prose of these books, you have only t? turn to the coloured Dicta ros-