From the consideration of this busy world of golf in general it is an easy move in thought to the one wee spot of it from which it has to a large extent developed, upon which the great scheme continually hangs, being the fourth of our seven wonders of golf—ancient St. Andrews. In a measure I developed this idea at the beginning of the consideration of golf as the world game; but now for a moment regard the capital of golf, not as the parliament place where the high statesmen do ponderously deliberate and with stern visage that befits their lofty authority most solemnly severally and jointly promulgate various laws and ordinances, but as the wonder city of the golfing world where one gathers emotions from a ghostly past, a city where golf is everything and nothing else is anything, where golf is life. This is the aspect of St. Andrews, and the only one, in which it is really great. We have much respect for our rulers. They are wise men, and we believe that they maintain the spirit of the game better than any other body of men could or would. They are well born and trained in golf, and the atmosphere of St. Andrews keeps them straight in the true golfing way. One who lived in an inland manufacturing town or spent his days in the office of a colliery would lose his golfing perspective early in middle age. But these excellents of Fifeshire play a little, read a little, talk much and deliberate, and the social and intellectual atmosphere keeps them strong in their golfing sense always. The government of St. Andrews is really one to respect and have faith in, but it is not the existing wonder of St. Andrews. When you visit the place, such of these rulers as live there do not impress you for anything save their good golf, their excellent and pleasant manners, their keen wit, their fine sense in matters of intellect, their tolerable aestheticism, their shrewd judgment in political affairs, their sound advice on financial questions, their fine epicurean taste, their kingly cellars, their magnificent hospitality, and their charming women. In nothing else that I can think of do they excel, and as minor deities, or as a college of cardinals with a captain for pope, endowed with powers transmitted from a golfers' heaven, they are failures. They are merely human, very good, and excellently conservative.
No sort of people make St. Andrews. Only in two circumstances are the living humans of the place specially interesting. One is on the occasion of the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, when the cannon on the hill is fired, when the new captain plays himself in with ceremony, and when all the ancient rites are properly observed until far on in the night. The other is in the attitude of the people generally towards this game as a thing of life, their seeming feeling that it is nearly the beginning and end of all things in this world. This may not be a proper view, and it is for something of the kind, but yet long distant from it, that the golfers of the south are chided and ridiculed for their enthusiasm. That, again, is why the real golfer, heart and soul for the game, who, if he would confess it, does let it take a larger part of his life sometimes than is very good for him (but who knows what this fellow would be doing if not golfing?), feels happy when at St. Andrews, feels that at last he has come to his real home. For here the people look upon him just as merely right and normal because he is a golfer and nothing but a golfer—and a man with a little money to spare. His chief peculiarity is not that he stammers or is deaf or is a total abstainer, that he is a peer of the realm or mayor of his town or a professor of Greek, but that he addresses his ball with the heel of his club or pulls a little always. The place is attuned to his feeling of life; it is in sympathy with him. It is either a fine day for the game—as most days are—or it is no day at all. If we lose our match it does not matter what the papers say of politics or Germany; if we win it, the papers matter less. The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and your quarrel with an iron. They know what it is; they are kindly, worldly-wise doctors, who are the constant recipients of the confidences of poor sufferers. They will try to put you right. All the advertisements on the walls are of golf; the notices in the shop windows are of golf matches and competitions. The streets are called after golf, the taverns have golf names. Yes! golf is in all the air and all the earth and all the people of this ancient city with its far-seen spires.
But yet even these things do not give to St. Andrews its ineffable charm; if they are all that the wanderer notices he is not the real man of the game after all, nor is the splendid quality of the holes on the old course and on the new enough either, great as is that quality. The wanderer missed St. Andrews if these things were all that were discovered. He should understand that here we feel that the Swilcan Burn is greater than the Dardanelles; Asia is a trifle when we survey the vast extent of the fifth putting green, and little enough do we worry of hell when with a fine long shot with the brassey we can carry "the devil's kitchen" on the way to the fourteenth green. Here the game is in the air; we breathe it, feel it. And the reason why is because the spirits are in the air, the spirits of the ancients who at St. Andrews laid the foundations of this game, served for its traditions, set it up and shaped it to the good service of men, and gave their stamp to every inch of this great old course. Do not misunderstand. These men, I do believe, were often very ordinary simple human beings; they may have been no better than we are. There is a possibility that they were worse. They may not have been worthy to be canonised as they have been; but let us not inquire upon these matters, for we should not peer too closely at the gods. What matters is that in the first place undoubtedly they were in at the game before we were, in at it the first of all, were evidently uncommonly shrewd people, and for their discovery of golf and their presentation of it to us their perpetual dignity was well won. It matters also that we have many volumes of good stories about them, and none that is in any serious sense against them. On legend and anecdote they win well. And, third, whatever they were, we believe them to have been these great men, we set them up in our imagination as such, we recreate them to our fancies and desires, and they seem somehow to respond.
So we imagine, believe, and are well satisfied, and therefore the spirits of golf take advantage and seem always to hover in the air of the old grey city, brooding upon the links, contented that things are moving as well as they are, and that what they began prospers so finely, though they wail a little, one would imagine, about what the rubber-cored ball has done, and the wraith of old Allan Robertson turns round to the ghost of the elder Morris, murmuring, "D'ye mind, Tammas, the awfu' trouble that we bodies had wi' ane anither when the gutty ba' kem hither to St. Andrews, and I caught ye, ma servin' man, ye ken, playin' gowff, as ye wad say, wi' Campbell of Saddell and wi' the gutty, and me a maker o' the featheries tae!"
"Aye, I ken weel eno'," croons the shade of Old Tom, "and I'm telling ye, Allan, man, that I was fower up on Mr. Campbell at the eleventh hole, and I was playin' ma very best, and wi' ma second shot at the fourteenth, eh mon alive——"
"Na, na, Tammas, nane o' yer rantin' aboot the shots as ye played at St. Andrews, when ye spent the best pairt o' yer time ower theer at Prestwick, and ye never could mak' up a scoor from a' yer ither scoors as wad come to 56 like mine. Ye ken that, Tom! And dinna forget, ma laddie, as I was goin' to tell ye, that when I saw ye wi' that awfu' new ba' as wad ruin every bit body o' us I tell't ye straight, ma man, as ye must go, and never a bit o' wark did ye do in ma shop again."
And then Tom, good-natured old ghost as he is, and loving his Allan still, just answers, "Puir Allan, ye always were a cunnin' body o' a man, and a guid man tae, and fun aboot ye a' the time!"
And all this about ghosts and the times they have in the air over St. Andrews old links may look like nonsense, but those who do not believe it, or do not feel that they believe it by mental adoption, have not been to St. Andrews properly, and do not understand her.
§
The most utterly non-golfing and sceptical person may be convinced in another way, by matters not of ghosts and fancies but of laws and prisons, that St. Andrews is all golf and is not as other places are. There are laws of the town approved by Act of Parliament, by which it is made illegal to practise putting on the eighteenth green or to play on the course with iron clubs only, the penalty for offences in these matters being a fine or imprisonment. Where else is there a place where a golfer may get fourteen days for depending for all his long shots on his driving iron or his cleek? Clearly, the law is made for the good of the precious turf and the teeing grounds of the old course, and that it is not law made to be looked and laughed at is proved by the fact that a Prime Minister himself was once warned for infringing it. One time when at St. Andrews I made an examination of the complete bye-laws in which these prohibitions are included. They are embraced in the St. Andrews Links Act, which was passed in 1894, and in the Burgh Police Act of Scotland, which was made law two years earlier. The regulations for the use of the old and new golf courses make up these bye-laws, and they are twenty-one in number. Following them are four "general regulations for the whole links as defined by Schedule I. of the Links Act," and at the finish there is a clause about penalties, wherein it is said that "any person who shall contravene any of the foregoing bye-laws shall be liable, on conviction, in a penalty not exceeding one pound for each offence, and, failing payment, to imprisonment for any period not exceeding fourteen days." There it is, the law, and it is that last clause with its sting that gives the point to the whole story.