It is rather difficult for our modern conventional citizen to appreciate the gentle art of running. The limbs of our young men too rarely leap to the call of the chase, and our senses are fed on too complex foods to taste the simple joys of mere rhythmic muscular motion. No more does Atalanta lose her heart to the youth who can outrun her, and our bored Hippomenes stares languidly from the window of his club. Perhaps he fears that Atalanta—our new-made golfing Atalanta—would outstrip him in the race; perhaps he has lost interest even in Atalanta, and prefers to keep his golden apples for himself.
Sport we enjoy, indeed,—if it is fashionable, or violent enough, or somebody is going to win,—and it is true that we are beginning to know and love the out-of-doors. No one with a drop of blood in his body can miss the music of an eight-oared crew; the splendid stress and shock as the elevens battle back and forth across the gridiron strikes fire in the tamest mind. Nor is it that people miss entirely the excitement of the sprints, and the long-drawn-out struggle of the distance runs. We have in mind running for running's sake, freed from theatric settings, and without the stimulus of fighting for victory—the mere striding down the cinder path, or roughing it 'cross country. This is the sort of thing that too few understand,—and failing to understand, must fail to enjoy. The golden age is not gone, and there is just as much poetry in the world now as there once was, but we have lost a good deal of our boyishness and simplicity. There is a poetry of straight limbs and sunshine that we hear too little of nowadays, and the clothes with which we have so laboriously covered ourselves have shut our eyes to the beauty of our bodies.
Really to love so simple a pleasure as running, one must have, of course, a healthy body and a mind at ease. He must have in him something of the savage and a sort of pagan delight in physical grace and happy strength. Unless the spirit of the chase runs in his blood, he will not see anything in toiling mile after mile through brushwood and meadow, and if civilization has too completely house-broken him he will not feel the thrill that comes from merely denying for the moment the tyranny of clothes and of streets, and striding out into the open country, except for his shoes and a few wisps of clothing, free and as God made him. The runner, more perhaps than almost any other athlete, realizes an ideal of unity and the elimination of details. The eight-oared shell, when the crew have caught the "beat," is a superbly beautiful thing. But the individual oarsman sits on a sliding seat, his feet are strapped into shoes, he is bound, so to speak, to an oar, which is hung in a lock smeared with grease, and the slightest slip in technique spoils everything. In other words, your individual oarsman is, artistically speaking, merely a part of the general mechanism, and there are very few moments when a crew is rowing so supremely well that each member of the eight forgets completely the mechanical difficulties and details of his work. The runner, on the other hand, is completely sufficient unto himself. Standing alone on the good earth with woodland and meadow spread out before him he can laugh aside, for the moment, trolley cars and trains and those foolish grooves called streets. When hill-top beckons to hill-top across the valley, he can follow, and when the purple horizon calls he can answer.
The runner who has learned these things, who can, even vaguely, feel what Euphranor called this "subliming of beefsteak into poetry," has added to himself a sixth sense, which gives to the simplest physical exercise a new spirit and significance, which makes his body not a mere machine of convenience, but a thing in itself fair and fit consciously to express beauty. By such magic are his mute limbs given leave to speak; and he may, so to speak, run his Parthenon friezes and his Praxiteles marbles, his Apollos and windblown Nikes, if he cannot paint or chisel them. Even though a man consciously feels none of this, and but enjoys his running for running's sake, he yet has within himself a simple pleasure that none can take away. The level beach in summer and the glory of its gold and azure, the open country in autumn, with frost in the air and the smell of burning leaves—these are the runner's sporting machinery, his yacht and hunter and motor car and coach. He can climb Jungfraus enough in a ten-mile chase across the rolling hills of his own home country, and he can answer the call of the wild while yet within sight of the spires and chimneys of the town. All that he asks to be happy is a pair of comfortable shoes and a wisp of something to cover him, only God's out-of-doors and the open country.
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