Playing the game

morality versus leisure

Tom Winnifrith

pp. 149-159

in: Tom Winnifrith, Cyril Barrett (eds), The philosophy of leisure, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

What game? The game in the first stanza of Henry Newbolt's poem "Vitai Lampada" is, of course, cricket, although not the kind of cricket first-class cricketers play now when there are light meters to prevent the light from being too blinding and helmets to prevent the pitch from bumping the batsman too hard. The second game is war, presumably, since there is a reference to the desert and Newbolt was writing before the First World War, one of those messy colonial wars of which we are now ashamed. It is easy to pour scorn on Newbolt, a man who wrote a poem in which he called Clifton the best of schools and sent his son to Winchester. His praise of patriotism, of imperialism, of foreign wars and heroes of the Empire seems as outdated as his philosophy on games as part of his grand scheme is confused.