A French View of Sports
Bates, Ernest Sutherland
5O5 A FRENCH VIEW OF SPORTS By ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES M HENRI de MONTHERLANT, a young man who • a few years ago had the unusual fortune to find his first work, La Releve du Matin, crowned by...
...Everything here is in part bound up with nature...
...He admires Catholicism, which essentially claims to be the true voice of Christianity, yet ascribes it to a principle opposed to Christianity...
...for strength instead of weakness...
...He puts upon the same level a world event such as Christianity, and a parochial matter like Byzantianism...
...Like other writers before him, he reduces the course of European history to the working-out of two principles, a feminine Asiatic principle and a strictly European, or masculine principle...
...Sport sets up an ideal of power serving an ideal of quality...
...And so on through the list...
...Like the worshippers of Mithra, M. de Montherlant finds a mystic virtue in the shedding of blood...
...the soil, the wind, the sun, are players on our side or against us, and you see that we were just now brothers of the rain as in the old war I was brother of the roots and of the starry night...
...This is not accidental...
...A violent naturalism appears again and again in this votary of reason...
...It is much as if we should discover that all the while, unknowing, we had been reading a sacred scripture in our morning paper...
...From the masculine principle which asserts a union of nature and reason, the body and the soul, have come "the Roman Empire, Roman Catholicism, the renaissance, the concepts of tradition and authority, classicism, the various nationalisms, material and moral conservatism"—and, of course, sport...
...striving to surpass herself—and perhaps never again—she ran in a divine horror as if age and sad time were running savagely behind her...
...It glorifies the body as distinguished from the flesh...
...A failure is to them a tragedy...
...Why, one may ask, is the principle of authority and tradition masculine, the principle of rebellion feminine, and what has pacifism to do with neglect of the body or with dualism...
...5O5 A FRENCH VIEW OF SPORTS By ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES M HENRI de MONTHERLANT, a young man who • a few years ago had the unusual fortune to find his first work, La Releve du Matin, crowned by the French Academy, has dedicated to the subject of sport, two remarkable works, Le Paradis a l'Ombre des Epees, and L'Adieu aux Jeux, and has promised a third on the same theme, to appear in 1928...
...In this list, one is more impressed with what is omitted than with what is included...
...As when he thus describes his own defeat by his young friend, Jacques Peyrony, a lad of fifteen— "The space between us increased and seemed a monstrous distance equal to all the distances upon earth, something which must be overcome and which cannot be overcome...
...The arbitrary impulsiveness which sport was to have corrected here makes the apostle of sport its mouthpiece...
...But there is nothing of the amateur in these French athletes...
...And this space was an image of the gulf which widens between the stronger and the weaker, and my wounded heart made my course heavy and I ran after the fugitive as one runs after happiness...
...While regarding themselves as a select group at war with bourgeois ideals, they worship with a deadly earnestness, the bourgeois ideal of outward success...
...They take themselves with terrible seriousness...
...not that might makes right, but that might makes right prevail—the two really merging into one, as courage, austerity, the nobility that accepts discipline and its own, perhaps lowly, place in a hierarchy—these are both intrinsic virtues and also the means of victory...
...In a sufficiently amazing section, M. de Montherlant traces to the feminine influence, which is mystical, dualistic, and neglectful of the body, such historical phenomena as "Alexandrianism, Messiahism, Christianity, Byzantianism, the Reformation, the concepts of liberty and progress, the French Revolution, romanticism, humanitarianism and its by-products (liberalism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism) and finally Bolshevism...
...In all ways it is the foe of anarchy, disorganization, dissolution...
...He entirely omits mediaevalism from his scheme of history...
...Alban de Bricoule, the hero of his novel, Le Songe, is miserable until he has killed his first German (unarmed, by the way, and pleading for quarter...
...He is enamored of the primitive...
...Or, in the description of the last race of Mademoiselle de Plemeur, a former champion who has been beaten and who now, out of condition and desperate, is trying in a practice race to lower her old record...
...In a section on the morality of sport, M. de Montherlant outlines the ethical principles which he believes to be involved...
...The boldness of such a simplification of historical fact is only equalled by its recklessness...
...Professionalism, the last and lowest stage of AngloSaxon sport seems to be the first stage of "le sport...
...One is amazed, somewhat self-ashamed, and not a little disconcerted to find a subject that is treated so lightly by us suddenly raised to the dignity of a philosophy...
...They were the amateurs par excellence of history...
...She ran, with a grace which no one saw, for a goal which interested no one...
...There is no light-heartedness, no sense of relaxation or free exercise in the athletes of M. de Montherlant...
...Often he succeeds in making his reader share, for a moment, the intensity of this passion...
...in logic, either the ascription or the admiration is misplaced...
...Anon the beauty will fade out in a passage of sheer absurdity, where his trackmen and trackwomen will discuss for hours their likeness to Castor and Pollux, Hercules, or the Amazons...
...This is, of course, merely a new version of Nietzsche's conflict between slave morality and master morality...
...Himself an athlete as well as a poet, in these volumes of essays he writes of the charm of track and football with a personal feeling sometimes rising to almost Pindaric ecstasy, and a moral earnestness that is often almost priestly...
...The Greeks carried the amateur spirit into athletics just as they carried it into war or philosophy...
...Sport teaches a respect for that which is, instead of that which appears...
...Not only is M. de Montherlant's reading of events highly doctrinaire, but his categories are confused and unconvincing...
...M. de Montherlant's attempts to generalize further the philosophy of sport and link it up with a philosophy of history are even less happy...
...The value of play as play is not mentioned...
...Every night they go over their bodies to see that no precious muscle or tendon has been injured, much as a grocer or hardwaredealer might go over his stock...
...after that happy event, he sits for a long time gloating over the body of his victim...
...for reason instead of sentiment...
...He loves sport and war in the same way...
...Unfortunately, tfhey persuade each other more easily than they do us...
...It recognizes talent as an end in itself...
...Whether paid or not, they are highly respectable professionals or rather tradesmen, conscious of the dignity of their calling...
...Ordered and calm violence, courage, simplicity, salubrity, something virginal and hard, which does not examine itself: that is what I loved in the war . . . and that is what I have rediscovered here...
...His extravagance sometimes becomes ridiculous, as when he gravely tells us that this same heroic Alban has the habit of becoming so angry that his nose bleeds, and that in such cases the blood is of "a pure and...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 21
