British novelist, journalist, and essayist George Slythe Street (1867-1936) is best known for his satirical novel The Autobiography of a Boy (1894), in which the main character, Tubby, is based on the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde.
In the preface to his essay collection Some Notes of a Struggling Genius (1898), Street wrote that "there is a cheerful vulgarity about [these trifles] which I am glad to have achieved; I have even a faint hope that they may be called 'breezy.'" One of the breeziest essays in that collection is "On Healthy Exercise," developed with a series of comic examples.
On Healthy Exercise
by George S. Street
Personally I regard it as an anachronism, and would rather do without it. Our bodies will ultimately conform to changed conditions of civilisation, and then nobody will need it. I am inclined to think my own body is all right, thank you, even now, and that if I kept the matches where I could not reach them without standing up, and walked round the room while I fastened my collar, it would be exercise enough. My doctor suggests that after a few years of this regimen it would be enough exercise for anybody else to walk round me. It sounds as if it might be an old joke. I give it for what it is worth; in any case, scientific truth was sacrificed to it. However, I comply with the times, which insist we should all be fine athletic Englishmen.
I am therefore (please understand) a fine athletic Englishman. But every man has a right to be fine and athletic in his own way, and I draw the line at certain pastimes. Football, for instance, is a horrid game. To look on is all very well; to see one's fellow-creatures coated with mud and bumping against one another gives one a pleasant sense of superiority; but if you don't mind, I'd rather not play it. Cricket compels you to hurry over lunch and makes you too hot to have a glass of port with your cheese--one of those ancient customs against the disuse of which I in my humble way like to protest.
However, the matter is a relative one: it is exercise in London. Everybody knows the difficulties. Many people surmount them by taking the train to somewhere else; but that is, I think, more than can be reasonably demanded of me. I did not invent London; if my fellow-countrymen chose to make it, they have no right to object that I choose to live in it. I will not leave town except comfortably to take my ease. I refuse, therefore, to join a rowing club or to play golf on Wimbledon Common, or go for any purpose whatever to Wormwood Scrubs. The matter is reduced to exercise possible in town. What is there? There is the ride before breakfast, which people who know I breakfast in bed assure me they take. For that matter, there is the ride after breakfast. But unless some philanthropic plutocrat removes a certain difficulty, it means for me neither breakfast nor dinner: that is, if I were to ride a horse; of course there is bicycling, but bicycling--well, I don't bicycle. I have tried boxing. If by boxing you mean putting on flannels, strolling round a gymnasium, and then having a bath, I agree it is an agreeable amusement. But to be shown that my head is too far forward by a blow on the nose, or too far back by a blow on the stomach, does not amuse me at all. Fencing is a muddling sort of thing; it seems to mix up intellect with exercise, and I like to keep them distinct. There are places where you can play lawn tennis, but they are chiefly a sort of communistic gardens in South Kensington, where people you don't know look on and seem to think they can play better. Besides, lawn tennis is impossible in winter, "habebis frigora febrem." When I was a young fellow I used to play croquet; there is little opportunity for that now. It always seems absurd to me to take so violent an exercise as dancing in a stiff white shirt; and it is to be taken only at unwholesome hours. In London, where one's friends live leagues apart, and are as difficult to reach, save in expensive cabs, as if they lived in Wales, there are certainly opportunities for walking. But walking in London clothes is impossible on a wet day, and on a fine day one is too much exhilarated to do anything so stupid. A Turkish bath is excellent in theory: to sit or lie down while somebody else does the exercise is quite my idea; but he pommels and hurts.
My claims to being considered an athlete? Some time ago somebody put forward the theory that yawning is a wholesome and invigorating exercise. I go into intellectual society and the gallery at the House of Commons and yawn. It is a high price, but I pay it to comply with the times. I laugh when I can, but melodramas at the Adelphi run for so long, and I don't laugh after the third visit. I can do nothing more robust than smile at pathetic stories, and it takes so many smiles to tire me out. Still, I do what I can, take these and a few other forms of exercise, and play my part in the national ideal. But I sometimes wish I belonged to another nation. I am proud to be an athlete, but it bores me.
Originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette, "On Healthy Exercise" by G.S. Street was reprinted in the collection Some Notes of a Struggling Genius (John Lane, 1898).
