A note has just reached me from a friend in the Dominion saying that out on the Gulf of Georgia, on the coast of Vancouver, they are reaching forward to a golf ideal. They have planned and started there a new town, which they have called Qualicum, of which the golf course is the central feature. They have laid out a fine one along the shore, one that has splendid natural qualities, and they are doing their best to make it understood that here is a golf city if ever there was one, for they have christened the streets and roads by such names as St. Andrews Road, Berwick Road, Portrush Road, Rye Road, Sandwich Road, and Dollymount Road; and there are others with the names of Hoylake, Sunningdale, and all the rest of our British best.
Friends whom I consulted in the matter declared there was no golf in Quebec, little but French people, French talk, and French games of two generations back, the Canadian French not yet having adopted the sport to which so many of the Parisians have attached themselves with great earnestness. I was barely satisfied with such denials, and when, after another night on the C. P. R., I found myself on a glorious Sunday morning on those famous heights of Quebec, whence the view is one of the most magnificent in the world, I set about investigating the matter all alone. I can hardly say why, but somehow I strongly suspected the Plains of Abraham, the big, bare piece of land on the heights overlooking the St. Lawrence, on which Wolfe and Montcalm, more than a century and a half ago, fought that great fight, and died. I have always found it as a most remarkable thing that where great battles have been waged, and big encampments made, golf courses in a great number of cases have been laid out there later. Sure enough, then, the game was here on the Plains of Abraham. I had just been looking upon the pillar with the simple inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," and had walked for the length of two or three good drives towards the citadel end of the plain, called, I think, the Cove Fields, when putting greens came to view, with sticks not two feet long and bits of red rag attached to them in the holes. The greens and the teeing grounds were rough as could be, and there were no proper bunkers on the course, but plenty of trouble for all that, the ground being coarse and stony. The public could roam about the place just as it pleased, and did so, and there did not seem to be anything to prevent any one from playing the game on this course. It looked just like public golf on common land, and though it is a far cry from Blackheath to Quebec, there is something in the nature and character of this golfing ground at the historic Canadian port to remind one of England's oldest and crudest course. I discovered afterwards that the Quebec Golf Club, a club without a club-house, had acquired the rights to play on it; that this club is one of comparatively early origin; that its members are clearly primitive in their tastes, but sincere and earnest; and I am led to the belief that the course has another point of similarity with Blackheath, being the oldest now in existence on the American continent. It is said that a daughter of old Tom Morris, who married a Mr. Hunter and went to America, was largely responsible for the beginning of golf at Quebec. Men and boys were playing on it on this beautiful Sunday morning when the bells in countless steeples of Quebec and at St. Levis on the other side of the St. Lawrence were ringing their music through the stillest air. I sat down on the edge of the course overlooking the precipitous depths to the river, far down below, where the smoke from a warship at anchor came lazily from the funnels, and looked for long enough to gain an undying impression of one of the grandest panoramas in the world, seen at its most peaceful and its best. Nature had a grand inspiration when she made Quebec as now we find her.
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This marvellous country is a rare place for making the new beginning. Everything is so raw, so suggestive, so encouraging to earnest failures who would, like Omar, if they could, conspire with fate, shatter the existing scheme of things and "remould it nearer to the heart's desire." Canada is indeed a fine place for hope for the future. I met several men in the country who told me, that on leaving England and Scotland, they had perforce, with all the hard work before them, to give up the game for a long period; while another reason was, that those having been much earlier days, there were fewer courses there. So years after, when the fortunes had been made, they came back to golf again, and they were making another new beginning, and felt a certain gladness as they remembered some of the faults and the torments of the old game with all its vast imperfections. In everything they would start over again as if it were all quite new, and they knew nothing about it. Generally they have made successes of their second golfing lives on earth in this way, but yet they have found that they needed to act warily and be on their guard always against old enemies, for golf poisons are marvellously subtle and enduring things; and it has been found that when once a man contracts a habit that is bad it will last for ever, whether he plays the game continually or not, and the worse the habit the more incurable it is. The best that can be done is the application of a system of subjection, by which the disease is kept under, and does not pain or hinder. But men who have fallen into bad and hopeless complications with their golf, and found that it never could be improved any more, have tried to begin it all over again as left handers—the most drastic change—and even that has failed. They have then realised that the only way to die happy is to give up the game for a matter of half a generation and start again, with the determination to keep the head still, to begin the back-swing with the wrists, and not to start pivoting on the left toe as soon as the driving is begun, as if it were necessary to do this thing, as so many of the teachers have suggested, to the ruin of their pupils, for the unsteadiness it has produced. One learns to do this pivoting after an hour's practice at the game, and can pivot well when nothing else can be done at golf. But it takes years and years sometimes to get rid of such a stupid custom. The left heel must rise, but let it rise as little as may be, and of its own accord. Its rising should be always a result of something, and not a cause of something else.
What is needed at a beginning, or a fresh start in any golfing life, is a thorough grasp of essential principles. Considering the subject the whole way through, we may feel that there are really only two essential and compulsory principles applicable to all cases, instead of two hundred or more as the bewildered player is often led to imagine. These two are, first, that the eye must be kept upon the ball until it has left the club; and, second, that in addition to the still head there must be one fixed and practically motionless centre in the human system while the stroke is being made. It is neglect, generally accidental, of one or both of these principles that causes most of the bad shots that are made. Let us remember that. Never, or hardly ever, should we neglect these principles, and if we do not our handicap is almost sure to come down, not only because so many bad shots will be avoided, but because the exactness, certainty, and quality of all the strokes will be steadily improved as they cannot be when hampered by neglect of the principles. The eye makes the connection between the captain in the brain and the engineers of the physical system. It is the speaking-tube or the telegraph apparatus. There can be no union without it. But, as we all know, it is not such an easy thing to keep the eye on the ball as it ought to be kept on it, and the more anxious the player the more liable is he to err in this matter. As to the fixed centre—somewhere in the interior of the waist—we should reflect that the golfing swings, when carried out properly, consist of the action and movements of thousands of different muscles, operating in different ways, different directions, and at different times. Perfect harmony and correlation among them all is necessary if the general result is to be smooth and exact. Make no mistake about it, the golfing swing, with all its complications and the acute precision that is necessary for its good and proper effect, is one of the most wonderful things of which the physical system is capable. When I reflect upon it I think it is marvellous that the human man can make it as he does. To obtain harmony among all these thousands of movements there must be one centre from which they are all regulated. If we think it out we see that this is so, and then we appreciate the importance of what is too baldly described as keeping the body still, as we have perhaps never done before. As a point of truth, the body as a whole cannot be kept still, but there must be one centre that must be fixed from the moment that the club addresses the ball until the latter has left its place after impact. The captain in the brain, the eye, and the fixed head and centre are the great trinity who manage the whole concern. Only one man who has neglected this law has ever raised himself to eminence in golf, and that man is Edward Ray, who has done it by mere physical strength. When the fixed centre is held secure a great host of evils which constantly cause failure are avoided—swaying of the body, collapse of the legs, improper foot work, dropping of the right shoulder, falling forward, and more of such a kind of fatal faults.
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In the biggest dictionary that I can find neither the word "futurism" nor "cubist" is given a place, and yet these words, meaning certain movements, are probably on the tongues of art folks with much frequency in these times. In the same way the word "subconsciousism" and "subconsciousist" are not in this or any other dictionary; but they may yet be coined and made legitimate to fill certain vacancies, and they represent definite golfing systems. The principle of subconsciousism in essence, then, is that of showing a visionary picture to the mind for a moment, banishing it, and, in a certain measure, forgetting all about it, and then going on with the game as if the incident had been closed. But the mind retains its record more or less vaguely always; and the picture thrown on the mental screen makes an impression there which stays; and that impression is an influence upon the succeeding physical actions. Subconsciously the player does something—it may be little or much—to imitate the movements in the mental picture that he saw. He cannot avoid it; the influence upon him cannot be wholly resisted. If, as it were, he saturates his mind with impressions of this kind, of the strokes he would like to play, of the way he would like to play them, he will gradually and almost surely begin to play them just like that. It has been recognised for ages that the best golf is that which is played entirely subconsciously, that is to say without conscious effort, and without thinking in detail of the stroke that has to be played. When a man is "on his game" he has none of this thinking to do, and does none. There seems to be only one way of playing the shot, and that way is unavoidable to him and quite natural. He does not need to shuffle about to find his proper stance, and he is not anxious about any part of his swing. The moment a clear consciousness of detailed action asserts itself, and the man does think about the movements of his swing, and does shuffle about for his stance, he goes off his game, and the stronger the consciousness the more he goes off. These points are disputed by nobody. A little while since a new writer on the game declared that the golfer at the beginning of his swing thought of the advice of one professional; half way up he thought of the suggestion of another; at the top he remembered the recommendation of a third man; and coming down, the hint of a fourth flung itself into a mind that must have been working with amazing rapidity in the most difficult circumstances. What the result of such strokes is was not suggested; but if any number of golfers carried out their scheme of swinging in this way we should know exactly why it is that so much bad golf is played. As a matter of truth nobody has ever been able to mix up his plans in such a manner; but the statement suggests the extreme of consciousness, and fear with it also. With subconsciousness there is no fear, no hesitation, and no doubt.
Now we can show how our subconsciousism, when unaided and not encouraged (there is nearly but not quite a contradiction in terms here), has had its effect upon the player hitherto. If a man watches the play of any golfer much better than himself, say a first-class professional, very closely for some time he takes a little of that man's style into his own system without knowing it, and, it may be, without making any conscious effort to imitate it. He is much more likely to succeed in this way than by making any deliberate attempt to copy. Again, you will often find players telling you, that after a week of watching a championship meeting, and without having paid attention to any player in particular, certainly without attempting to imitate any one, they find on resuming their own game that a new influence is upon it; that in particular they address the ball in a more businesslike way, with more confidence; that their swing is less flabby, and that they play their iron shots with much greater sense of wrist, and with more firmness. This has been noticed over and over again, and it is a most interesting result of the influence of impressions involuntarily recorded on the mind. Consider another way in which the impression acts. A player may be removed from the game through illness or some other reason for a time, and during that period he works some of the problems of golf out in his mind, and constantly pictures a new and particular way of playing a stroke that has troubled him. When he returns to the links he plays the stroke like that without any effort to do so, or perhaps without even thinking of it. Another remarkable example of subconsciousism was afforded to me recently by a good golfer, who said that to develop a certain stroke which he had found beyond his best efforts—conscious efforts—he had three enlarged photographs made of that stroke as executed properly by a first-class man, one showing the beginning, the other the top of the swing, and the third the finish. He had these pictures placed alongside each other on one of the walls of his room, and there they were all the time, not to be avoided. He made no effort to study them, but his mind simply absorbed them, and then subconsciously he found the stroke coming to him until in the end he played it just like that. In these matters subconsciousism is shown to be at work without being understood or at all suspected.
Having this valuable agency at command the next thing is to apply it, and make it of more thorough practical effect without permitting it to change to interfering and dangerous consciousness. In the cases that have already been cited certain methods are plainly suggested. Here is another which has, as I know, proved amazingly effective at times. The player, we may say, is not driving as well as he should, or in the way he would like to do. At the moment of taking his place on the teeing-ground he runs through his mind, as it were, a cinematographic picture of his favourite model player doing the drive. He sees, in imagination, the man taking his stance, swinging the club back, down on to the ball again, and finishing. He just sees it once, and bothers about it no more. Then he sets about his own drive without any further reference to the mental picture that his mind has absorbed. The mind does the rest. The drive may not be made in the ideal way that was imagined. It may be done in the old way. It may even be foozled. But there has been an influence at work, and if that influence is always employed in the same way the good result will come in time, always provided—and this is important—that the model is one that is suitable to the player, and can be copied by him. It would be useless for a man who is far past forty, very fat and very short, with no athletic quality in him at all, to take Harry Vardon and his graceful lithesome swing for his mental cinema show.
Another way in which practical subconsciousism may be made exceedingly valuable is by imagining a place to which the ball has to be delivered without looking at it when it ought not to be looked at, as when a very short running or pitching approach has to be made. The very best of men often find it impossible to keep the eye fixed on the ball until the stroke is done. A little while since there was the case of one of the finest amateur golfers of the time flopping his ball into the bunker guarding the green of the first hole at Sandwich from the bank thereof, when, if he had played an easy shot and kept his eye at rest, he would almost certainly have avoided this trouble, and then won the St. George's Cup for which he was playing. I remember an exactly similar case in the final of the Amateur Championship of 1908, at Sandwich, when Mr. Lassen, who did win, knocked his ball into the big bunker in front of the old tenth green there from the top of the cliff overlooking it. What is needed in such cases, or in like cases when presented to inferior players, is something to keep the mind's eye contented, and it has been found to serve if a picture of the hole is flashed into the mind just before the stroke is made. This is what is certainly done, though unintentionally, when putting. The man does keep his eye on the ball when making his stroke this time; but yet it is most desirable that his mind should retain a very clear and exact impression of the place where the hole is, the distance of it, and the features of the green in between. In other games that may be compared with golf, the player has his eye on the object at the moment of striking; in billiards the very last glance is given at the object ball, and the eye is on it at the moment the stroke is made. That is because the player is sure of his way of striking, as in putting he is not. If you try a method of putting which was once attempted by some players, but was severely and properly discountenanced by the authorities, of lying down on the green and putting with the end of the club, billiard fashion, you will find that then the eye is on the hole when the stroke is made. In golf, the player's eye being wanted for the ball, a last look is given at the hole, and the picture of it is kept on the mind when the stroke is being made, and it influences the application of strength more than the player often realises.