THE SCIENCE AND ART OF GOLF.* THE positive passion for
the game of Golf which during the past few years has seized all, but especially the sedentary, classes of the community, has naturally led to a production of a whole literature on the subject, consisting mainly of enthu- siastic prose, but including also some very execrable verse. The prose has been written mainly by experts who lay down rules, and by devotees who tell and laugh immoderately over more or less good stories. When a book on the game happens to be written by a man who is at once an expert and a devotee, it is sure to be good : such is Sir Walter Simpson's treatise on the Art of Golf, which, as Burns said of De Lolme's work on the British Constitution, will serve as a manual to whoever may stumble on it till he find a better. But even since Sir Walter Simpson published his treatise, the mania for the game has spread, more particularly in England. It was natural, or rather it was inevitable, that a book on the subject should be included in that Badminton Library, edited by the Duke of Beaufort and Mr. Alfred Watson, of which every sportsman—in the true, and not the shady sense of this much-defamed word—speaks well. To judge from the Duke of Beaufort's preface and dedication (to the Prince of Wales), the series has now come to an end. Its editor has very considerately kept his best wine to the last.
This stout and handsome volume of nearly five hundred pages will be found quite as authoritative as any of its predecessors, and a good deal more entertaining. The lion's share of the work in connection with it—the description of the theory, the practice, and the etiquette of golf—has fallen to Mr. Horace G. Hutchinson, who has been amateur champion golfer in the past, and may be so again, and who has written innumerable papers on the game, and at least one book, Hints on Golf. So it is Mr. Hutchinson who supplies the nervous beginner with his elementary instruction, gives him all needful hints about clubs and balls, professionals and caddies, style and behaviour, nerve and training, and who lays bare the nowise profound mysteries of match and medal play, odds and handicapping. But Mr. Hutchinson has enlisted the services of other writers on the game besides himself. Thus, Sir Walter Simpson in one chapter prescribes to adepts who are "out of form ;" 'in another, Lord Wellwood, who is a judge of the Court of Session and a keen golfer, offers "General Remarks on the Game." In these, however, he does not quite sink the lawyer in the player, for he tells us :—" To those who look below the surface of things, the scene on the teeing-ground represents the land question in miniature. The order of playing off depends on priority of seisin duly taken with a pinch of sand; the player whose ball is teed first being entitled to play first, and so on. The balls, as they are teed in succession, represent first, second, and third bonds (mortgages). The prior bondholders regard the postponed bondholders as squatters, and the latter retort by denouncing the others as land-grabbers." Mr. Andrew Lang, the acknowledged laureate of outdoor sport, although even he has not produced a more than passable poem on golf, writes with characteristic agreeableness on the history of the game. Mr. Arthur Balfour, who finds in it a relief from the work and worry of politics, contributes a chapter on "The Humours of Golf ;" and "Some Celebrated Golfers " is written upon with the authority that comes of obviously intimate knowledge by Mr. H. S. C. Everard.
It is the three last-mentioned chapters in the volume which will have most interest for the ordinary reader, who, though uninitiated, can see at a glance that Scotchmen take to golf precisely as they take to heresy-hunting, and that the object of the player is to persecute an inoffensive globe of gutta- percha in the smallest number of strokes from a tee into a hole. Mr. Lang, in his "History of the Game," disposes of a popular belief which confounds golf with the game of " kolf," as played in the Low Countries. Golf-balls seem to have come in the first place from Holland, but golf itself, he says, is no more kolf than cricket is poker. Golf used to be known in Scotland as the Royal game, and Queen Mary played it at St. Andrews after Darnley's death. Yet almost from the
* Golf. The Badminton Library. By Horace G. Hutchinson. With Contribu- tions by Lord Wellwood, Sir Walter Simpson, Bart., Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, M.P., Andrew Lang, H. S. Cl. liverard, and others. London; Longmatui and Co. MO.
first it seems to have been a popular game as well, for Mr. Lang tells us that "in 1592 and 1593 the Town Council of Edinburgh contributed to the pious gloom of the country by forbidding this harmless and healthy amusement on Sundays.
John Henrie and Pat Bogie, early martyrs of the club, were prosecuted for playing of the Gowff on the Links of Leith every Sabbath the time of the sermonses.' " Among the more illustrious (or unfortunate) of golfers were Montrose, Charles I. —who is said to have broken off a match at Leith because news came of the Irish Rebellion (" he might," Mr. Lang says, "have remembered how Drake finished his game of bowls, with the Armada signalled ")—and James II. Of the history of the game generally, Mr. Lang writes :—" The historic evolutions of golf have few of the changes which we trace in cricket. Clubs and balls and rules were always pretty much what they still are. In the reliquaire at St.
Andrews are weapons of the last century; they are like ours, but heavier." Probably, indeed, no game in the world has changed less than golf. We must confess that Mr. Balfour's chapter on "The Humours of Golf" is rather disappointing. It is full of high spirits, but, whether or not he has been inspired by Mr. Harry Furniss, who illustrates his letterpress, he tries to be too elaborately funny. We read, for example, that "it is narrated of one intending golfer that he wrote home to a friend saying that all his arrangements for playing were nearly completed; he had purchased the necessary imple- ments; he had been elected at the club, and he had hired a bunker for his own exclusive use!" This is but screaming farce, and not very good even as farce. Mr. Balfour, however, tells a number of good stories—certain of which are none the worse for being old—of dishonest players, professionals, and those attendant genii of golfers known all over the world as "caddies." Here is one which is, or seems, fresh :—
" An English player at Pau who knew no French made a fine approach shot with his iron, and succeeded in laying his ball dead_ He turned round to his French attendant for applause. The latter saw what was expected of him, and did his best to rise to the occasion. He described the shot in the only English words which he had heard habitually associated with any remarkably success- ful stroke in the game. Looking full in his employer's face, and with his most winning and sympathetic smile, he uttered the words, 'Beastly fluke ! "
Mr. Everard's chapter on "Some Celebrated Golfers" is very exhaustive, and very interesting, at all events to men who
know something of the game. There is hardly a leading player, alive or dead, professional or amateur, whose achieve- ments are not told, and whose style is not described. There seems to have been only one golfer whose name stands on the links as high as that of Mr. W. G. Grace on the cricket-field- This was "Tommy," or "Young Tom" Morris—so designated to distinguish him from his father, also an eminent professional golfer, and still living and playing at St. Andrews—who died when little over twenty years of age, but who during his short career beat all rivals. Perhaps the most notable fact in connection with amateur golfers whose feats are chronicled by Mr. Everard, is that two of the best of them, Mr. John Ball, jun., and Mr. Hutchinson himself, are Englishmen, the one playing chiefly at Hoylake, near Liverpool, and the other at Eastbourne.
Upon the science and practice of the game—the "full swing" in driving, the secret of "approach shots," refinements in putting, and all the rest of it—Mr. Hutchinson discourses in the body of this volume at great length and with almost perfect lucidity. This portion of his book, however, is obviously not for the ignoramus and hardly even for the beginner, but for the adept, who is, as regards knowledge of the game, on almost equal terms with the author. Mr. Hutchinson's instructions are almost embarrassing in their fullness; the too earnest student of them may on the golf-course become self-conscious, and self- consciousness is injurious, if not fatal, to good play. As a. rule, a healthy man—a man who eats, drinks, and works moderately—makes the best golfer, as, indeed, he invariably makes the best sportsman. Practice alone, however, leads to perfection in golf : Mr. Hutchinson even recommends an intending player to swing his club carefully after his morning bath. Coolness, good-humour, ease,—these in Mr. Hutchinson's eyes go a long way, if not the whole way, to make a successful golfer. Even as regards the supreme shot in the game, the drive off the tee, his advice is : "Swing gently, let the club (not the body) follow the ball, and hope for the best." Altogether, a more enjoyable book on a most enjoyable gamelhas never been published.
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