“Much of the world’s big mischief is due to the avoidance of a bigger one.

For instance, all this naïvely insisted on masculine inability to obtain the poet’s or naturalist’s joys without shooting a bird or hooking a fish, this inability to love wild life, early hours and wholesome fatigue unless accompanied by a waste of life and of money;

in short, all this incapacity for being manly without being destructive, is largely due among us Anglo-Saxons to the bringing up of boys as mere playground dunces, for fear (as we are told by parents and schoolmasters) that the future citizens of England should take to evil communications and worse manners if they did not play and talk cricket and football at every available moment.

For what can you expect but that manly innocence which has been preserved at the expense of every higher taste should grow up into manly virtue unable to maintain itself save by hunting and fishing, shooting and horse-racing;

expensive amusements requiring, in their turn, a further sacrifice of all capacities for innocent, noble and inexpensive interests,

in the absorbing, sometimes stultifying, often debasing processes of making money?“

Vernon Lee
Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life, 1909, p. 309