On the common
The Royal Wimbledon Club was founded some two hundred and sixty years after the Royal Blackheath, and yet golf is still so young a game in England that the two appear of almost equally hoary antiquity. There is an old-fashioned air about the golf at Wimbledon—an atmosphere of red coats and friendly foursomes made up at luncheon, which is exceedingly pleasant—nor is the actual golf on Wimbledon Common by any means to be despised. It has at least one supreme virtue—that of naturalness; those great clumps of gorse and the deep ravines where the birches grow were put there by the hand of Nature herself, who, if she be not so cunning, is at any rate infinitely more artistic than any golfing architect. When Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote the Badminton volume he wrote of the golf at Wimbledon that it was almost “an insult to the game to dignify it by the name of golf,” adding that he would rather call it a “wonderful substitute for the game within so short a distance of Charing Cross.” It is perhaps a just criticism, but what would Mr. Hutchinson say of the hundred ‘mud-heaps’ that have sprung up within a short distance of Charing Cross since these days? He would probably keep silence lest he should fall a victim to the law of libel and an unsympathetic jury.
Certainly the lies at Wimbledon are not good; they are hard and flinty, and at certain places, in particular the long second hole, they have seemed to me at times almost the worst in the world. But there is this measure of compensation in hard turf, that it always bears some resemblance, however dim and remote, to the ‘real thing’; it is infinitely more inspiriting than the soft and spongy lawns, which may be truer and smoother, but are removed by a far wider gulf from the golf that is golf.
If the Royal Wimbledon golfer dislikes a crowd or a red coat, or if, being a very wicked man or a very busy one, he wishes to play on Sunday, he need nowadays only walk out of the back door of his club-house instead of his front door, and he is on his own private course at Cæsar’s Camp. A wonderful place is this new Wimbledon course, for as soon as we are on it all signs of men, houses and omnibuses, and the other symptoms of a busy suburb disappear as if by magic, and a prospect of glorious solitary woods stretches away into the distance in every direction. Only at one place, where the new course verges on the Common, do we see such a thing as a house, and our friend Charing Cross might be a hundred miles away. Like the egg, the course is good in parts: very good as long as we are among the whins on the hard ground which is the ground of the Common: rather soft and muddy when we are on the meadows lower down. Taking the two courses together, the men of Wimbledon have much to be thankful for.
There is still one London course that assuredly deserves mention, that of Prince’s Golf Club on Mitcham Common. Roads and lamp-posts and, ugliest of all, tramways have not added to its loveliness. But it is still a delightful place, with a good deal of solitary beauty left. There is abundance of gorse here too, but the impression produced is quite different from that at Wimbledon. The ground is flatter, and one can take in a greater stretch at one glance; it is not broken up, as it were, into districts by gullies and ravines, and one misses the pretty birch trees of Wimbledon.