We have another school, which should be called the Victorian. It has
many merits, and it is very prolific. It represents a sober and
industrious kind of golf, but it is utterly lacking in any inspiration.
It is as business like and exact as you please, a six-o’clock-sharp
morning-dress kind of golf. It conduces to good habits, and will make
some good golfers. But on the whole it is rather prim and dull, and one
never feels the blood running in the veins when contemplating it.
Muirfield is one of the Victorian school, and there are one or two of
the satellites of Hoylake, on its own seaboard, that are of it also.
Sandwich has much of the Victorian element in it; but it is redeemed by
the strong influence of other schools, as by the extreme romanticism of
the Maiden. The suburbs in their own small way went over to Victorianism
entirely at the outset, partly because their circumstances exerted such
an irresistible tendency in that direction. A drive over one bunker and
a pitch over the next one is Victorianism in its crudest form; but
perhaps after all the suburbs are lucky in being able to attach
themselves to any school. I am told that the Victorian school has had
paramount influence in America.
VII
Of the links we know, those by the sea, to which do we return for the
tenth or the twentieth time joyously as to a delightful friend in a
charming home? Instantly we murmur the name of dear North Berwick. The
old player has conviction in this immediate choice by instinct, though
the question is not one which he answers lightly. In his heart he has
corners for many old loves, and as he brings each one up for
contemplation and counts her many charms, he thinks that surely she is
the fairest of them all. But inevitably when they have all been passed
in review his fancy brings him back to one, and he clings to the
remembrance of her, confessing that she is not like the others. There is
a subtlety in her charm, a fascination in her manners, an “altogether”
which cannot be resisted. She is gentler than St. Andrews, a sweet
innocent maiden wading with bare feet among the rocks of the Haddington
coast, whom you love to tease and toy with; while my lady of Fifeshire
is colder and of great dignity and compelling attractions. It is a fine
sea at North Berwick, and though in the play one may think little enough
of the sea, it is good to have the wavelets kissing the pebbles hard by
an occasional green, and to hear their soothing lapping. The sound is
grateful to the hard-tried nerves. There are few parts of the North
Berwick course where one cannot see a little of the ocean, while here
and there, such as at Point Garry and Perfection, the greens are placed
in enchanting spots. Then the air is like wine. At North Berwick one is
in East Lothian, in the centre of the finest golfing country in the
world. In two or three weeks one may tire of the same links, the
monotony of the same round, the same bunkers, the same greens. Here
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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