Pastime was not only being organized, systematized, commercialized. It was beginning to be the subject of serious literary and scientific study. The Badminton Library series dates from 1885, when the first three volumes were published. Punch made excellent fun of the Duke of Beaufort's preface, repeated in each volume, with its glowing account of the Prince of Wales's accomplishments as a sportsman, and of the literary lapses of the Duke and his editors. The volume on Golf, by Horace Hutchinson, with contributions by Mr. Balfour and Andrew Lang, certainly did not lay itself open to this rebuke. It was a delightful tribute to the charm of a pastime which had invaded England seriously in the 'eighties. Golf had been played sporadically in the south ever since the days of James I. But until the 'eighties, the golfer was looked upon as a species of lunatic. Punch's first notable acknowledgment of the fascinations of the Royal and Ancient Game dates from 1885, when Du Maurier in "The Golf Stream" shows the stream of all ages and both sexes that "flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn."
THE GOLF STREAM
Flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn.
(Vide Report of British Association—Section V.)
The jealousy of the votaries of other pastimes is made vocal in Keene's lawn-tennis player, who sees no fun in a game which consists in "knockin' a ball into a bush and then 'untin' about for it." Even in 1890 Du Maurier represents the newcomer in an invidious light when he makes a weedy little man say to an Amazonian lady lawn-tennis player that "golf is the only game for men nowadays. Lawn tennis is only for girls." Punch prophesied more truly in the verses, "Golf Victor!" at the close of the same year. There it is the ladies who say, "Golf is the game for the girls":—
THE PILLION-BICYCLE
Henceforward, then, Golf is the game for the fair—
At home, and abroad, or in pastures Colonial,