These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed
under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and unreflected
expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities
deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess.
Sports of all kinds are of the same general character, including
prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting, angling, yachting,
and games of skill, even where the element of destructive physical
efficiency is not an obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis
of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its
being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction
to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--the possession of the
predatory emulative propensity in a relatively high potency, a strong
proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is
especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage
specifically called sportsmanship.
It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of,
that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish
temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree
marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent
when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that
is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of
make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially
boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not enter in the same
proportion into all sports, but it is present in a very appreciable
degree in all. It is apparently present in a larger measure in
sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests than in set games of skill
of a more sedentary character; although this rule may not be found to
apply with any great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that
even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are
apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to
an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or of
onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in athletic
sports there is almost invariably present a good share of rant and
swagger and ostensible mystification--features which mark the histrionic
nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of
boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way,
is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from
the terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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