I
For one reason, if not for more, a Liberal Government is popular with golfers of true feeling—because it gives Mr. Arthur Balfour, the ex-Prime Minister, more to the links than when he is burdened with the care of Ministerial office. In the days of the sweet idleness of Opposition we find him at play on a golf links here and on another one there; now opening a new course and delighting the assembled players with a little speech, which is rich in the spirit of the game; and at some other time enjoying a foursome with some old political friend, or with J. H. Taylor or James Braid as his partner. As Mr. Balfour is the better, as he will tell you, for being a golfer, so is golf the happier for his intimate association with it; and some people who do not know and cannot understand, not being of golf, think we make over-much of a statesman’s interest in our pastime, as if the great of the land were not bound closely up with other sports. Good and earnest-minded golfers feel that they are kin to this player, because he is himself a pattern of the man imbued with the best sense of the honour and glory of the game. He is loyal to it, he has the sentiment of it, and he has seen through to the inner recesses of its charm. Thus he is not ashamed, as no good golfer ever is, of abandoning himself entirely to its delights, of setting all his emotions and his thoughts free to race and frolic in the joy of the links, and of allowing the high dignity of the great statesman to sink away into the simple naturalness of the earnest golfer. So we like this late Prime Minister not because of his political rank, but because he loves his game and does his best by it, and is at all times an example to the acolytes who come forward in nervous ignorance of the great meaning of golf.
Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr. Balfour is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the surface for all to see. Here, then, we see the real Mr. Balfour as he is never seen on the Front Bench at Westminster. There are no mashie shots to foozle, and no drives to top into the bunker in the House of Commons, to make a man feel that life is yet a feeble, disappointing thing. To the Parliamentarian, the nearest thing in pleasure to laying a long approach shot “dead” against the hole is a successful speech, or the engineering of a majority on a division which is something above par, and these are dull things in comparison. Mr. Balfour, then, as we have studied him many times at this testing game, is a man of many and quickly changing emotions, of a temperament somewhat highly strung and nervous, and capable of enormous enthusiasms and alternative depressions. There is nothing that is phlegmatic about this Ministerial golfer. There is something of the schoolboy left in him. One day I saw him driving from the tee and getting a beauty, so that his ball was cleanly flicked for the best part of two hundred yards in a straight line to the hole. It is not in human nature to wait for tardy praise in such ecstatic moments, and he, his face aglow with pleasure, turned about to his opponent, exclaiming, “I do push them away, don’t I?”
On the other hand, there are times when he is sadly mindful of failure, and he is much too serious a golfer ever to forget the most evil things he has done. One time we saw him playing in a foursome—his favourite form of golf—with Mr. Eric Hambro as his partner, and after foozling his approach in a deplorable manner, he called out wearily to his partner, “Do you know, Hambro, I once did that kind of thing for a whole fortnight!” It must have been the blackest fortnight in the right honourable gentleman’s career. He is something of a philosopher on the links, and when he makes a bad stroke he sometimes explains how it came about to those who are near him, or to the course and the sky, if he is momentarily isolated. This, indeed, is one of the very few respects in which the Prime Minister falls from what we may regard as the standard of the ideal golfer. He is inclined to reach too hastily at a conclusion, and some say to speak too much. Some masters have held that the perfect golfer plays in absolute silence, and Mr. Balfour is not an absolutely silent golfer, though in his case he is none the less earnest. It has been stated that never on the links does he make use of any other ejaculation than “Dear me!” but this statement, besides being untrue, is absurd, and is not complimentary to him as a golfer. Let him miss a shot or do anything which he ought not to have done, and the human man comes out above the statesman, though, of course, nobody has ever heard Mr. Balfour commit himself to any unbecoming remark. But in the production of effect from the minor expletives he is most skilful. “Botheration!” is the commonest of his ejaculations, and as he says it whilst witnessing the descent of his little white ball into a yawning bunker, one, as an old golfer, sometimes realises that the most satisfactory results in this respect are not always produced from the use of the strongest materials. “Oh, this is indeed shocking!” is another favourite form of expression, which, as he says it, speaks a volume upon the agony of the mind.
For the rest he is just a good, determined golfer, who is a first-class sportsman, never giving any quarter on the links, and never expecting any. You never see Mr. Balfour pick up his ball whilst there is still the remotest chance left of his dividing the hole with his opponent, and he would reject with scorn, like every other true golfer, the suggestion that he takes his golf for the sake of the exercise only. It is because he is thus keen that other and better players find it a constant pleasure to match themselves against him, or to become his partner in a foursome. They know then that they are out for golf.
“Big” Crawford, his old-time favourite caddie, who keeps a ginger-beer tent alongside the eighth green at North Berwick, flies the Scottish standard from the top of it when Mr. Balfour is on his most beloved course. A Russian grand duke, who did not know the truth, once naïvely suggested to Crawford that the flag was flying as a compliment to him, the Russian. “Na, na, sir,” said Crawford, “begging your pardon and with great respect, but it’s for one greater than you.”
“Who is looking after Mr. Balfour?” they whispered one time at St. Andrews, when the right hon. gentleman was playing himself into the captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Club, and was then Chief Secretary for Ireland, and regularly attended by plain-clothes detectives in case of accident. “I am looking after Mr. Balfour!” Crawford said when he overheard. “I’m enough.” And he would have been.