IX
No class of man looks forward to the spring with keener anticipation than the golfer. Overburdened with his winter’s discontent, he fancies it as a time of sunshine, of dry courses, of sprouting young grass that holds up the ball on the suburban links and gives us the first good brassey lies that we have had for some months, of the frequent retirement of the energetic worm, of the quickening of the greens, of the leafing of the trees and the hedgerows, and the brightening of the face of Nature. The golfer is generally a strongly human man, who is not careless of natural beauties as are too many in these increasingly prosaic and strenuous days. Perhaps he likes the coming of the springtime best of all, because he is then enabled to play his game in the best degree of comfort. He is less hampered with heavy clothing, and his hands and wrists keep warm without any cumbersome artificial assistance. And then also he is persuaded, and he is evidently right, that the balls fly very much better in the spring sunshine than they ever did through the heavy and often murky atmosphere of the winter days. Even the golf ball welcomes the coming of spring, and given that it is properly struck it gets a better and longer flight through the air when it is dry and light, and it runs better on the dry turf when it comes down, so that the player finds himself being given encouragement that helps him wonderfully on to his game. And so the man who usually goes by the name of the Average Golfer believes all through every autumn and winter that he comes on to his game best of all in the spring, and that that is the only time of the year when he really does play his best, his real game. The only time when he does not believe that he plays his best game in the spring is in the spring.
The fact is that the conditions of springtime are rather made up of a set of contradictions of a very aggravating character, and they often play the devil with the game of this Average Golfer, the system of which is not too firmly consolidated. This person, one takes it, is a man of medium young to middle age, a great enthusiast, of good means, one more or less constantly engaged in business, having a fair number of social obligations to attend to in evenings, and a golfing handicap of somewhere between six and twelve. This man is possibly afflicted with a troublesome liver, and this organ has a peculiar and most aggravating way of asserting itself in the springtime as it has at no other season. Then it is up to all kinds of tricks, the entire physical system of the man is disarranged and thrown out of gear, and the result is that when all Nature is smiling and the larks are piping as though their little throats would burst with the fulness of their melody, the erstwhile hopeful golfer is in a wretched state of mind, trying new stances for his drive, new ways of gripping, a swing much longer or much shorter than usual, and manœuvring with his strokes in all other kinds of ways, in the vain hope that he might be permitted to drive at least as well as he did in January, instead of foundering one ball in three and lifting up one of the others high towards the heavens. But there is compensation in the increased hopefulness of spring. The game may be poor, weaker than it was hoped to be. But it will mend; it will surely mend.
[MEN AND THINGS]
I
For one reason, if not for more, a Liberal Government is popular with golfers of true feeling—because it gives Mr. Arthur Balfour, the ex-Prime Minister, more to the links than when he is burdened with the care of Ministerial office. In the days of the sweet idleness of Opposition we find him at play on a golf links here and on another one there; now opening a new course and delighting the assembled players with a little speech, which is rich in the spirit of the game; and at some other time enjoying a foursome with some old political friend, or with J. H. Taylor or James Braid as his partner. As Mr. Balfour is the better, as he will tell you, for being a golfer, so is golf the happier for his intimate association with it; and some people who do not know and cannot understand, not being of golf, think we make over-much of a statesman’s interest in our pastime, as if the great of the land were not bound closely up with other sports. Good and earnest-minded golfers feel that they are kin to this player, because he is himself a pattern of the man imbued with the best sense of the honour and glory of the game. He is loyal to it, he has the sentiment of it, and he has seen through to the inner recesses of its charm. Thus he is not ashamed, as no good golfer ever is, of abandoning himself entirely to its delights, of setting all his emotions and his thoughts free to race and frolic in the joy of the links, and of allowing the high dignity of the great statesman to sink away into the simple naturalness of the earnest golfer. So we like this late Prime Minister not because of his political rank, but because he loves his game and does his best by it, and is at all times an example to the acolytes who come forward in nervous ignorance of the great meaning of golf.
Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr. Balfour is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the surface for all to see. Here, then, we see the real Mr. Balfour as he is never seen on the Front Bench at Westminster. There are no mashie shots to foozle, and no drives to top into the bunker in the House of Commons, to make a man feel that life is yet a feeble, disappointing thing. To the Parliamentarian, the nearest thing in pleasure to laying a long approach shot “dead” against the hole is a successful speech, or the engineering of a majority on a division which is something above par, and these are dull things in comparison. Mr. Balfour, then, as we have studied him many times at this testing game, is a man of many and quickly changing emotions, of a temperament somewhat highly strung and nervous, and capable of enormous enthusiasms and alternative depressions. There is nothing that is phlegmatic about this Ministerial golfer. There is something of the schoolboy left in him. One day I saw him driving from the tee and getting a beauty, so that his ball was cleanly flicked for the best part of two hundred yards in a straight line to the hole. It is not in human nature to wait for tardy praise in such ecstatic moments, and he, his face aglow with pleasure, turned about to his opponent, exclaiming, “I do push them away, don’t I?”