Title:  Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890

Author:  Various

Release Date:  May 9, 2004 [EBook #12305]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK Punch ***

Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Punch, or the London Charivari, William
Flis, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

PUNCH,

Or the London charivari.

Vol. 99.

August 16, 1890.

MODERN TYPES.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S OWN TYPE WRITER.)

No.  XVII.—­The spurious sportsman.

There is in sport, as in Society, a class of men who aspire perpetually towards something as perpetually elusive, which appears to them, rightly or wrongly, to be higher and nobler than their actual selves.  But whereas a man may be of and in Society, without effort, by the mere accident of birth or wealth, in sport, properly understood, achievement of some kind is necessary before admission can be had to the sacred circle of the elect.  What the snob is to Society, the Spurious Sportsman is to sport; and thus where the former seeks to persuade the world that he is familiar with the manners, and accustomed to the intimate friendship of the great and highly placed, the latter will hold himself out as one who, in every branch of sport has achieved many notable feats on innumerable occasions.

Such a man, of course, is not without knowledge on the matters of which he speaks.  He has probably hunted several times without pleasure, or fished or shot here and there without success.  But upon these slender foundations he could not rear the stupendous fabric of his deeds unless he had read much, and listened carefully to the narrations of others.  By the aid of a lively and unscrupulous imagination, he gradually transmutes their experiences into his own.  What he has read becomes, in the end, what he has done, and thus, in time, the Spurious Sportsman is sent forth into the world equipped in a dazzling armour of sporting mendacity.  And yet mendacity is, perhaps, too harsh a word; for it is of the essence of true falsehood that it should hope to be believed, in order that it may deceive.  But, in the Spurious Sportsman’s ventures into the marvellous, there is generally something that gives ground for the exercise of charity, and the appalled listener may hope that even the narrator is not so thoroughly convinced of the reality of his exploits as he would, apparently, desire others to be.  And there is this also to be said in excuse, that sport, which calls for the exercise of some of the noblest attributes of man’s nature, not infrequently leads him into mean traps