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?”
On the other hand, there are times when he is sadly mindful of failure,
and he is much too serious a golfer ever to forget the most evil things
he has done. One time we saw him playing in a foursome--his favourite
form of golf--with Mr. Eric Hambro as his partner, and after foozling
his approach in a deplorable manner, he called out wearily to his
partner, “Do you know, Hambro, I once did that kind of thing for a whole
fortnight!” It must have been the blackest fortnight in the right
honourable gentleman’s career. He is something of a philosopher on the
links, and when he makes a bad stroke he sometimes explains how it came
about to those who are near him, or to the course and the sky, if he is
momentarily isolated. This, indeed, is one of the very few respects in
which the Prime Minister falls from what we may regard as the standard
of the ideal golfer. He is inclined to reach too hastily at a
conclusion, and some say to speak too much. Some masters have held that
the perfect golfer plays in absolute silence, and Mr. Balfour is not an
absolutely silent golfer, though in his case he is none the less
earnest. It has been stated that never on the links does he make use of
any other ejaculation than “Dear me!” but this statement, besides being
untrue, is absurd, and is not complimentary to him as a golfer. Let him
miss a shot or do anything which he ought not to have done, and the
human man comes out above the statesman, though, of course, nobody has
ever heard Mr. Balfour commit himself to any unbecoming remark. But in
the production of effect from the minor expletives he is most skilful.
“Botheration!” is the commonest of his ejaculations, and as he says it
whilst witnessing the descent of his little white ball into a yawning
bunker, one, as an old golfer, sometimes realises that the most
satisfactory results in this respect are not always produced from the
use of the strongest materials. “Oh, this is indeed shocking!” is
another favourite form of expression, which, as he says it, speaks a
volume upon the agony of the mind.
For the rest he is just a good, determined golfer, who is a first-class
sportsman, never giving any quarter on the links, and never expecting
any. You never see Mr. Balfour pick up his ball whilst there is still
the remotest chance left of his dividing the hole with his opponent, and
he would reject with scorn, like every other true golfer, the suggestion
that he takes his golf for the sake of the exercise only. It is because
he is thus keen that other and better players find it a constant
pleasure to match themselves against him, or to become his partner in a
foursome. They know then that they are out for golf.
“Big” Crawford, his old-time favourite caddie, who keeps a ginger-beer
tent alongside the eighth green at North Berwick, flies the Scottish
standard from the top of it when Mr. Balfour is on his most beloved
course. A Russian grand duke, who did not know the truth, once naïvely
suggested to Crawford that the flag was flying as a compliment to him,
the Russian. “Na, na, sir,” said Crawford, “begging your pardon and
with great respect, but it’s for one greater than you.”
“Who is looking after Mr. Balfour?” they whispered one time at
St. Andrews, when the right hon. gentleman was playing himself into the
captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Club, and was then Chief Secretary
for Ireland, and regularly attended by plain-clothes detectives in case
of accident. “I am looking after Mr. Balfour!” Crawford said when he
overheard. “I’m enough.” And he would have been.