§1.It is no mere chance that makes sport the special field for the attainment and display of personal prestige among the well-to-do classes.
Primitive man in his early struggle for life had to put all his powers of body and mind, all his strength and cunning, into the quick, sure, and distant discovery of beasts or other men who would destroy him.He must pursue and kill them, or successfully avoid them.He must seek out animal or vegetable foods, tracking them by signs and snares, rapid of foot, keen of eye and scent, quick, strong, and accurate of grasp.To run and spring, to climb and swim and strike and throw were necessary human accomplishments.
They had a high survival value.Nature had to evolve and maintain a man who had the capacity to do these things well, and who was willing to undergo the necessary toil and pain of acquiring and exercising these arts and crafts.To ride, to shoot, to manage boats, were occupations of prime utility.
Successful mating was also necessary for survival, and so the arts of courtship, dancing, music, decoration, and various displays of grace and vigour were evolved.The simple activities that were elaborated into these arts of hunting, fighting, mating, were instinctive, and strong feelings of pleasure were attached to them, as Nature's lure.When reason, or conscious cunning, came to cooperate with instinct, complicating and refining the useful arts, the specific pleasures of instinctive satisfaction were accompanied by a general sense of personal elation or pride.Now, in man, as in other animals, practice was needed for the successful performance of these useful activities.This practice takes the form of play, a more or less realistic simulation of the practices of fighting, hunting, courtship, in which, however, considerable scope exists for variations and surprises, the survival value of which is real, though indirect.Since these forms of play appeal to and exercise the same activities as are involved in the serious affairs of life, the same sorts of satisfaction are attached to them.The natural meaning of play is that it is a preparation for work, i.e., for the arduous, painful, and often dangerous tasks involved in 'the struggle of life,'
and the pleasure of play is the inducement to the acquisition of this useful skill.
§2.If this be so, it may be possible for some men to suck the pleasure from the play without performing the useful work for which it is a preparation.The play instincts can be made to yield a desirable life of interest and pleasure to any class of men who are enabled to get others to perform their share of useful work, and thus to provide them with the time, energy and material means for the elaboration of the play side of life.Such is the physical explanation of the sportsman.The play which Nature designed as means to life, he takes as an end, and lives 'a sporting life'.Some of his sports bear on the surface few signs of biological play about them.The manual and mental dexterity of such indoor games as bridge and billiards, appear quite unrelated to the arduous pursuits of mountaineering or big-game hunting.Between these two lie the great majority of active sports, such as shooting, racing, and the various games of ball.No one who analyses carefully the feelings of pleasure got from a boundary hit, a run with the ball, a neck-to-neck race, or any other athletic achievement, can doubt their nature.
Fighting, hunting, fishing, climbing, exploring, reduced to sports, contain just as much 'realism' as is needed to evoke the pleasurable excitement which sustained these skilful efforts when they belonged to the struggle for life.Some of the imitations may be so close to reality as to recall in almost its full intensity the primal thrill, as in tiger-stalking, in boxing, or rock climbing.In ball-games the fictitious circumstances call for more imagination, though the pleasure of the actual stroke is chiefly a race memory of a blow struck at an enemy or of a blow warded off.No one can doubt the nature of the fierce pleasure of the football scrimmage with its mortal make-believe.
Although in many sports some element of physical risk is needed to sustain the realism, it is usually reduced to trifling dimensions.This is also true of the painful endurance incidental to the primitive struggle.
The modern sportsman or explorer commonly devises ways of economising both his personal risk and his personal effort.Beaters find the animal or bird for him to shoot; native porters and guides carry food for him, and ease his path.His object is to secure the maximum pleasure of achievement with the minimum risk and effort.Perhaps the most highly-elaborated example is the playful revival of the migratory and exploring instincts, from the picnic to the world-tour, with the complex apparatus of pleasure-travel which occupies so large a part in the life of the well-to-do classes.The luxurious life of travel in which the motor-car, the train de luxe, or the yacht carries men and women from the gorgeous hotel of one beauty spot to that of another, is made pleasurable or tolerable by waking up the dim shadow of some wandering ancestor, whose hunting or pastoral habits required some satisfaction to evoke the life-preserving effort.Camping-out and caravanning are somewhat more realistic reproductions, bringing in more of the gregarious or corporate instinct of the tribe.
