When the curse of incapacity is upon me I scorn my mistress, and with self-complacent air avoid her charms, It is a month since I handled a cue, and more since I did myself credit. As a true amateur, when I realize that it would require a hydraulic press to raise my breaks to respectable figures, I retire from the billiard room, and seek companionship in the lounge. Here I meet the professor of logic, of whom I have much joy. For by a process of reasoning, which I have not space to repeat, the professor can convince you that the revelations of imagination are propositions of experience, He can prove that imaginary breaks are real breaks. That your presence at the table with a two hundred break on in imagination takes the place there of an actual presence. Thai, for instance, my presence, in imagination, at the recent Amateur Championship Final as Major Fleming, can be affirmed as positively as it could have been by my actual presence in the character of the Major. Sweet are the uses of logic. I hereby affirm that I, as Major Fleming, ran out in my last innings at the Final, and that I. and not Mr. Lonsdale, am the Amateur Champion. Let anyone who disputes my right to the title dispute with the professor of logic.
For me I am out of love with the game. The trail of the professional and his mannerisms is over it all. Machine billiards may be— nay, is, I admit very excellent. But its very excellence palls upon me for its lack of individual charm. The pro. is too much with us. Little do we see in the average amateur of ability that is his. He has given his style away, and borrowed the negative, unimpassioned, blase air of a professional, and this spoils the taste in one's mouth at an amateur match. When the best of our amateurs shed for ever their personal idiosyncrasies, and barter their natural graces for the unemotional expression of a machine, let me be led to a Lanarkshire mining village to end my days where piquant. Stimulating, and "live" play may always be witnessed.
Now one of the most charming features of our present best Scottish amateur's style is his abandonment. I should like to have an opportunity of analysing the emotions excited by the gallant Major as he stalks his balls. The passion he puts into his play, the evident love he has for the game, the keen feeling conveyed by every movement of his body will dominate the spectators until they are possessed of the same way of emotional excitement that washes over and thrills the player. And when the Major's lips open and close with a snap as he fails to bring off a shot, all of us in thorough sympathy with him murmur a gentle "damn" in our hearts as though it had been our own shot that had failed.
This is as it should be. Colour and feeling are as much to be desired at a billiard match as at an opera. If the players make no appeal to our emotions as they move round the table, by that much do they fail in their work, even if they score like Stevenson or Gray. Their play may be careful, accurate, and true as truth itself. I care not so they be devoid of everything that rouses the emotional part of me. A deadly dull commonplace truth is a disgrace to civilized conversation. To give colour and warmth and brightness and wit to intercourse that dainty maiden Fancy is ever necessary. In like manner the machine-modelled cueist who cultivates the expressionless face becomes a weariness of the flesh; and one longs for the player who is not ashamed to show us how he feels and what he feels as the game goes for and against him. L. K.
There can be no questioning the supremacy of billiards as an indoor game above all others. Furthermore, it claims more active votaries than any other sport or pastime, in or out of doors, over all the civilized world.- Liverpool Evening Express.