“... how shall the world be servèd?
Let Austyn have his swynk to his reservèd.”
Golf is an ancient game, no doubt, but not so old as gardening, though golf’s primordial club and vocabulary seem like things long left over, bits of that Missing-Link Period between our arboreal and cave-day past. Except for calling the cows from the meadow, or fighting in war, there is nothing we do that requires words and weapons, tools, instruments, implements, utensils, apparatus, machinery, or mechanisms so lacking in character and comeliness as the words and clubs of golf. The gurglings of infants seem articulate, even to unparental ears, compared with the jargon of golf; and as for billiard-cues, baseball-bats, pikes, spades, shillalahs, and teething-rings, they have the touch of poetry on them; whereas the golf-club was conceived and shaped in utter unimaginativeness.
Golf is not an ancient game: it has the mark of the Machine upon it; the Preadamites could not have figured the game out. Gardening, on the other hand, if we trust Holy Writ, was an institution founded before the Fall, incorporated with the social order from the start—an inherent, essential element in the constitution of human things:
“Great nature’s primal course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,”
—which civilization doth murder as Macbeth murdered sleep.
Golf belongs to civilization strictly, not to the human race, being one of life’s post-Edenic precautions, like psychopathic hospitals, jails, and homes for the feeble-minded. A golf course is a little-wanderers’ home; and if we must have golf courses, let their hazards be carefully constructed on worthless land, and let the Civil Service Board examine the caddies, whether they be fit guards for the golfers, lest some small boy be wasted who might have tended real sheep on Norfolk Downs or have weeded in a garden.
It is a duty to dig, to nail the Stars and Stripes to a lima-bean pole, and plant the banner square in the middle of the garden. Profits? pleasures? Both sorts will grow, especially the pleasures, which really are part of the profits, till they fairly smother the weeds; not the least of these being your sense of living and your right to live, which comes out of actually hoeing your own row—a literal row of beans or corn or tomatoes.
Somebody must feed the soldiers; but nobody must needs feed me. It is not necessary that I live, however necessary I find it to eat; eating, like sleeping and breathing and keeping warm, being strictly a private enterprise that nobody but I need see as necessary or be responsible for.