The Pursuit, the Chase

Some verses and pictures on fox hunting

Forty Fine Ladies by Patrick R. Chalmers, illustrated by Cecil Aldin

This is a collection of poems about hunting. The hunting of foxes by hounds. And the riding to hounds by the man of the country. Of the excitement and cheer this surrounds.

There is not much writing about the turf and field sports in Britain these days. It exists in magazines and online, but the subject keeps within its domain. The hunting ban has largely done its work and the country has turned into a handful of big cities in which the majority of the people live, around which the rural life orbits. Parts of the country now are very much like a kind of low-rent London, with no rural habits. This is what a lot of urban and suburban Essex is, in essence. There is not much place in our new world for the country pursuits which were so culturally significant a century or so ago, when writers across the planet knew and read Surtees and Jorrocks, when Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin (writing as Martin Ross) were famous and news and merited hardback biographies, posthumous.

This collection of poems, verse on the field and the hunt, is very slight as poetry. Patrick R. Chalmers is a fine poet. He has dash and colours; it’s readable and straightforward enough while maintaining a sense of difference and mystery, putting his observations a little beyond the ordinary. The poems were first published in popular magazines; they were likely widely read. But this book is really an art book, and its chief benefit is showing off the talents of Cecil Aldin, whose work — taking what is, to the uninitiated, a series of scenes of the same thing over and over — and making them new and distinct.

How many scenes are there really to draw in fox hunting? There are the very obvious shots — to borrow the language of photogprahy — of the chase. Lithe fox racing ahead, tail trailing behind and fluttering. Pack on its heels, scrambling, screaming and salivating. Men in red on horses not far behind. Great sense of motion, great sense of chaos. The implied smell of blood and perspiration and the awful product of punctured internal organs. This is one way to draw, and it has been done. We’ve seen it all before. It is what painters who wished to adorn country houses found themselves reduced to. It’s false; it’s immodest as decoration.

What does Aldin do, though he is still bound by convention to use precisely the same elements to make up his work?

First, he inserts some fine line-drawings on the reverse of the more richly illustrated pages. These are minimalist but not without detail. The very fine head of a small but beautiful fox. A beagle, tail upright, almost quivering. The pack streaming forward, mouths open, tongues out, past tufts of grass pushed almost sideways by the speed of their going. A long trail, down which a fine young fox (in the foreground) has just disappeared, with the outline of skeletal trees in winter gently marking the side of the path. A hillside, another hound, a stand-off between predator and prey.

The brighter, fully-illustrated pages are more panoramic and, in a sense, more obvious. They have grandeur and scale — vast packs of dogs, great uneven terrain, interesting use of colour and shading to give the impression of a hunt at night, with shrouded crescent moons. Some of the pictures are tableau in combination: a vivid fox, red and bright, lies dead near a fallen tree bough. Two round-faced, middle aged men reminisce before a great fireplace, one sat in a rocking chair, his pipe in his hand, some work boots thrown carelessly to the floor.

Aldin’s horses are not as worked and there’s reason to think he found drawing them less absorbing. Many of the animals he has in his foreground are well-enough proportioned but they seem almost torn from the books of equine anatomy. The horses in the background — unlike their riders — approach an afterthought, so foreshortened and indistinct are they in appearance. Aldin is a romantic. His view is aesthetic, sensational.

The book is about the hunt and is therefore filled with life and energy; but I would prefer, if I had my way, to see Aldin draw landscapes. Some of his pictures of the country — of a pack of dogs, noses to the ground, going this way and that as they investigate a lane cut into some tall grass, for example — are pleasant enough without all the drama, the implied approval of the chase. Great scenes of rural desolation — of tree limbs with robins on them in the foreground, of straggling, scraggy brambles and unmanaged forestry in the back.

I am a stuffed shirt and a schoolmarm and a baby; and I can’t say I really approve of hunting. I was well under ten when the Hunting Act was passed and so it could rouse no ire in me. The world of before seems as remote as the world before the smoking ban — nigh incomprehensible.

But we were made, those of us who read history and social sciences when I did, to study the Balinese cockfight as analysed by Clifford Geertz, and we were made to draw all manner of conclusions about the resonances of these forms of entertainment and the killing of time. About masculinity and an attitude to violence, the shortness of life, how people assimilated and made comments on the randomness of all sports. Its analogies to life at large. And so on and so on.

That one, as so many a lecturer (or, conversely, someone wearing Joker make-up) has intoned of a sport in question, tells us a lot about society.

This book tells us a lot about the society that was beginning to disappear, but was still popular and romanticised, in 1929. Like the bridge column in the papers today, though few readers play bridge; it’s considered a reasonable thing to read about, an admirable thing to know.

Hunt sociology. That’s enough for readers of Chalmers to be getting along with, don’t you think?