MUSCULAR HEATHENISM.

Colonist, Volume III, Issue 293, 10 August 1860, Page 3

MUSCULAR HEATHENISM.

This is certainly an age of revivals. Whether the-inventive faculties of the race have been exhausted, or whether the theory of Pythagorus and Boatswain Chucks, that all things come round continually in cycles, be correct, we may leave it to the philosophers to decide. If they fall into the fashion of the moment, they will get at the truth by a neat little " set-to" in the grounds of Columbia College; and may " the best man win " the faith of his fellows. But we are certainly going through a course of apings of the past. A few years since all the prosperous shopkeepers of the New World and the Old filled their homes with furniture ala Louis XV.; sat in the fanteils of marchionesses, who had seen no great difference between a tradesman and a toadstool, and ate from the ormula tables of abbes, whose religion recognised only the higher classes as human. In like manner the pompous ceremonials of the mediseval church, the intonings of Latin litanies by priests in gorgeous robes; the embroidery of altar-cloths for early English churches, and of glittering copes for young persons "pale with vigil and with fast,!' became the rage. Everybody went mad about the romantic t?ages of faith." These backward aspirations have not commonly borne very satisfactory fruit. To wafer the customs of a by-gone time upon an uncongenial generation is apt to make those customs rather ridiculous than venerable. Lord Eglinton's attempt to poke chivalry out of its grave by a tournament in his castle-yard, between knight's armed with lances warranted not to hurt, ended in an immediate shower of rain on the spot, and a lasting reverberation of quipsand jokes and squibs. And the glory of Puseyism is dying out to-day in a vulgar quarrel between a pig-headed clergyman at St. George's-in-the-East, in London, and his equally pig-headed congregation, about a few roses and spangles and candles more or less, introduced into the service of a church which nobody ever used to attend till it became the scene of a series of refreshing Sabbathday scrimmages.. We are now in the brief throes of still anothor gush of popular antiquarianism. The old Greek, worship of muscle has been suddenly shouted and written and gambled in the two freest of the world, which also pretend to be the leadnrs of civilisation and the great depositories of pure Christianity. The leading English and American journals of March and April, 1860, will be a curious study for the historian in the year 2000. He will find the names of Heenan and Sayers jostling those oi Palmerston and Buchanan in their columns, and the most elaborate correspondence devoted to the story of what he will naturally suppose to have been a grand international Olympic Game. Of course, he will understand that the prominence given to these heroes and to their encounter represents the interests Ifaken by the public of each country in the matter; and as he will also observe in the British journals of these times, innumerable exercitations and homilies upon, the licence of American life the brutality of American manners, and the decay of American institutions, he will reasonably infer that the true gleam of national manhood and dignity which our English cousins owned as worthy of themselves in our degenerate American character, was the equal zeal with which we followed them, to; the solemnities of the sublime gymnastic art. In ancient days the poets of Greece did not disdain to sing the praises of those who won the boxer's parsley-wreath, ancl the picturesque enthusiasm wish whjch the London Times records, the prowess of the champions who pounded each other black and blue at Farnborougb, pales before the

brilliant sketch which Virgil has -left us 6? the much more tremendous fight, between Dares and Entellus. England and America, therefore, will be fairly enough supposed a century hence to have been possessed, in this year of our Lord, 1860, with a sudden fever of the good old Muscular Heathenism. Every circumstance of the story will favor the supposition. The Pic wickian good nature of the English magistracy, who pretended to keep.the belligerents asunder; the complaisance of the English railway directors, all " honorable men," who consented to invest as equal partners with the pugilisitic pietists in the performance of ! their sacred rites aod in the tributes of the worshippers; the amiable obtuseness of the English police, who watched every station in London but the one selected for the great exodus; the presence on the ground of dukes and earls, peers and members of Parliament, authors and clergymen, the flower of English station and culture and wealth, surely, if these things do not show that England .believes prize-fighting as firmly as ever did Nero himself (as capital a judge, by the way, as ever decided a " draw" or a defeat), what in the world do they shew. And, of course, the interests and*clamour with which the tidings of the fight have been received in America, the tens of thousands of "extras" snatched up by the impatient public almost before the ship that brought them was fast at her moorings; the Pindaric passion of our people in the conviction that a great triumph was really won for the American name on the 17th of April (why couldn't they have waited two days for the anniversary of Lexington ?), and that our young Samson having fallen among Philistines, has been robbed of his due prize—of course, we say all these American echoes of England's excitement will be hereafter interpreted to prove that we, too, share this great apostasy from faith in the soul back to faith in the fists— from respect to humanity back to delight in aimless suffering and prostituted strength. But there is another side to the picture. The Muscular Heathenism is, after all, rather a cheap article; no more like the Spartan original than Dr. Pusey was like Pope Gregory VII., or Lord Althorp at Eglinton Castle like Richard the Lion Heart at Ascalon. In the first place, whoever^ won the " great fight," or failed to win it—whether Heenan, blinded but victorious, was choused of his glory by some base slave who " cut the ropes " on which Sayers was strangling at the yery moment when another squeeze or two would have brought Britain's champion to the " sponge" of shame or no—the fight itself was but a poor and pale imitation of the good old Greek spliceromachia, and of those cestusbattles on which the Cretan boxer's staked their Muscular lives. A few days of repose and a bottle of arnica will mend the modern maulers of God's visage. The Grecian and Roman giants gave and took blows compared with which the thumps of Farnborough would, seem but friendly taps. The truth is, our Christianity is in our way. We can be muscular, but we can't be comfortably and thoroughly heathenish. This concience doth mace milksops of us all. We may try our b3st to revive what even pagan Galen called the " vicious gymnastics "of the ancients; but we shall only parody them. Then, again we are a money-seeking generation, and our " manly art of self-de-fence " degenerates so rapidly into a close family connection with " poker" and " brag,'' and all the other schemes whereby the over-witty contrive to conjure spare cash out of the pockets of the witless into their own, that we shall not see the popular enthusiasm long maintained about " champions" who really represent nothing more " national " or ««international " than would be represented by a Mississipi planter and an English baronet betting over the green cloth at Baden-Baden. We are madly given, here in America especially, to the love of sensations. What the sensation may be does not much matter. To be sure if you can spice it with a dash of patriotism, however cheap, it will be for the moment all the more welcome. But it has its hour, and no more. How we shouted when George Steers|built us a yacht to beat all England on her own waters! How much would we give to-day to build George Steers a monument! How glad we were to burn our City Hall in honor of Cyrus W. Field and the Atlantic i Telegraph! No; the fashion of Muscular Heathenism,' like all the fashions, of this world, passeth away, and the chances are that it will have a longer life in Conservative England than in Radical America \ among the Peers who patronise pugilism, than among the pugilists who aspire to a seat at the Aldermanic Board and a voice in the Congress-making caucuses of New Yox\.-~New York Times.