Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 27 - CHI-ELD.pdf/329

 CROSS body, the front-player will face due north and look along the head of his mallet in taking aim. When Mr Henry Jones wrote his article side-play was the only play. Indeed a law in the code called “ The Field ” Laws absolutely forbids the use of front-play at all. The side-player usually stoops down and slopes his mallet, and delivers a stroke rather like a hockey stroke; he drives the ball, often very accurately, by a pure and unadulterated blow. But this stroke is uncertain. It depends entirely on eye and hand, and one bad stroke in a game may lose a match. The advantages of front-play are twofold. It allows the player to “ look along the barrel,” to use a phrase which fairly conveys the right idea. This is a great advantage, especially in strokes that require much accuracy, as with a hoop played at from a slanting direction. The second advantage of front-play is that the pendulum stroke can be used The player must have his mallet perfectly upright, his eye, his two hands, the line along the mallet head, the line through the centre of his ball, and the line through the centre of the ball aimed at must all be in the same vertical plane. His left hand will act as a pivot, the centre of the curve described by the mallet head in the stroke. The right hand will guide this mallet head, and it is essential to accuracy that it should be drawn up rather than back to preserve as much as possible the pendulum’s curve. Much depends on the left hand, which clutches the mallet handle and acts as a pivot. The great difficulty of all is keeping this pivot during the stroke rigidly in the same vertical plane as the moving head. The tactics of croquet have undergone a change since the days of Mr Henry Jones. The hoops for match play then were very difficult. They were of ^-inch steel, and Sf-inch span, and were fixed in a block of solid oak under the soil. This block was about the size and shape of a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The diameter of a ball was only |th of an inch less than the span of the hoop, and when the ball touched the steel upright it was at once arrested. From this resulted very timid and cautious play. A tricky stroke was invented to put on what billiard players call “follow” in running a hoop. A player was afraid to attempt such a feat if any but a friendly ball was near. There was a great deal of what is called finesse, which means shooting into a corner to prevent your ball from helping the antagonist. Games were excessively long. Moderate players, and experts, who were not able to practise with the socketed hoops, soon gave up the game altogether. New croquet, by reverting to the 4-inch hoop and encouraging large handicaps, is giving to the scientific game a rapid and vast extension quite out of all precedent in the past. Excellent players are springing up everywhere, and with them a stronger and bolder game. A brief statement will show all that this means. Croquet is a unique game. If it is to be compared to any other it may be said that from the point of view of accurate striking and nice judgment of strength it approaches billiards, and from the intellectual side it approaches whist. Four balls, blue, red, black, and yellow, roll along the ground, and each of these balls affects the others at every stage of the game as much as the units of the little armies of spades and diamonds in whist. Red, we will say, hits blue. From that moment red dominates not only his own balls but those of his adversary, often for a considerable time. This is at once the weakness of croquet, and also its exceptional fascination. This command of the balls is called the attack, and the crucial strategy of the game is centred on two problems, namely, how to win when you have the attack, and how to get it when it is in the hands of the adversary. The object of the game being to pass both balls through the prescribed circuit of hoops, the player who possesses the attack will try to do this as fast as he can, passing not one hoop alone, but several, if practicable, in a turn. This sequence of hoops is called a break, and if it is effected with the aid of all the balls it is called a four-ball break, but if only three are available it is a three-ball break. The fourball break is naturally the easiest. The principle of all breaks is to arrange to have a ball at your hoop the next in order as you come up to it, and another ball always at your next hoop but one in order. Thus if you are going up to hoop 5 (see plan) you should have a ball there to help you, and another at hoop 6. Let us say that with the aid of the first you run hoop 5 ; at once you send the ball that has assisted you on the turning peg itself, and you stop your ball in the croquet stroke close to the ball at hoop 6. The difficult feature of the setting is the four corner hoops, but these are run by the aid of what is called a centre ball, i.e., you leave one

295

of the balls in the centre of the ground as you run up to the stick. As you do so, you split the ball that has helped you to run hoop 6 away to hoop 8 and make the peg with the ball sent there to help you. Now comes in the work of the centre ball. You drive the ball that has helped you at the stick to the distant corner, hoop 9, and stop by the centre ball. You then hit it and take off to the ball left at hoop 8. In this way the'centre ball will help you to do the four corner hoops 8, 9, 10, 11. Plainly the main object of the adversary must be to keep this fourth ball from you. His chief chance is coming in with a long shot, but he must send this as much as possible out of your game. (a. Li. ) Cross, Mary Ann (or, as she usually signed herself, Marian) (1819-1880), the famous English writer who is more generally known as GeorgO Eliot, was born at Arbury Farm, in Warwickshire, on 22nd November 1819. Her father, Robert Evans, was the agent of Mr Francis Newdigate, and the first twenty-one years of the great novelist’s life were spent on the Arbury estate. She received an ordinary education at respectable schools till the age of seventeen, when her mother’s death, and the marriage of her elder sister, called her home in the character of housekeeper. This, though it must have sharpened her sense, already too acute, of responsibility, was an immense advantage to her mind, and, later, to her career, for, delivered from the tiresome routine of lessons and class-work, she was able to work without pedantic interruptions at German, Italian, and music, and to follow her unusually good taste in reading. The life, inasmuch as she was a girl still in her teens, was no doubt monotonous, even unhappy. Just as Cardinal Newman felt, with such different results, the sadness and chain of evangelical influences from his boyhood till the end of his days, so Marian Evans was subdued all through her youth by a severe religious training which, while it pinched her mind and crushed her spirit, attracted her idealism by the very hardness of its perfect counsels. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that when Mr Evans moved to Coventry in 1841, and so enlarged the circle of their acquaintance, she became much interested in some new friends, Mr and Mrs Charles Bray and Mr Charles Hennell. Mr Bray had literary taste and wrote works on the Education of the Feelings, the Philosophy of Necessity, and the like. Mr Hennell had published An Enquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. Miss Evans, then twenty-two, absorbed immediately these unexpected, and, at that time, daring habits of thought. So compelling was the atmosphere that it led to a complete change in her opinions. Kind in her affection, she was relentless in argument. She refused to go to church (for some time, at least), wrote painful letters to a former governess,—the pious Miss Lewis,— and barely avoided an irremediable quarrel with her father, a churchman of the old school. Here was rebellion indeed. But rebels come, for the most part, from the provinces where petty tyranny, exercised by small souls, show the scheme of the universe on the meanest possible scale. George Eliot was never orthodox again: she abandoned, with fierce determination, every creed, and although she passed, later, through various phases, she remained incessantly a rationalist in matters of faith and in all other matters. It is nevertheless true that she wrote admirably about religion and religious persons. She had learnt the evangelical point of view: she knew—none better—the strength of religious motives: vulgar doubts of this fact were as distasteful to her as they were to another eminent writer, to whom she refers in one of her letters (dated 1853) as “a Mr Huxley, who was the centre of interest” at some “ agreeable evening.” Her books abound in tributes to Christian virtue, and one of her own favourite characters was Dinah, the Quakeress, in Adam Bede. She undertook, about the beginning of 1844, the translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu. This work, published in