The customary classification of our golf courses into the inland and
seaside groups is crude and inadequate. Apart from that there are many
inland courses, and still more seaside courses, that differ from each
other more than some in the one class differ from the others in the
second one. The golfer of experience comes subconsciously to put all the
courses that he knows well into different groups, those in each group
having some distinguishing characteristic that specially appeals to his
fancy or his style of play. The student of golfing architecture has no
difficulty in separating the links that we know best into four or five
clearly distinguished classes, or schools as we might call them. The
contour and peculiarities of the country over which the course is laid
are largely instrumental in determining the class to which each one
belongs, but the hand of man makes the final decision, and so it is that
on many good courses we have the quality exposed and the temperaments
suggested of the great golfing architects of dying and dead generations.
It may be that they had very unpliable materials with which to work; but
after all in the planning of most holes there are two or three
alternatives. One designer would determine that the golfers on his
course should play over a high sand hill, while another would have
inclined to avoiding it or fashioning another hole from another tee
which would take the player round it.
One of the foremost of these schools of golf architecture is the Heroic.
The name has only to be given, and every golfer of experience knows at
once what links he would select as belonging to it--links with a fine
length and needing a strong arm and a brave heart for successful play
upon them, links which are broad and bold in their characteristics,
never easy, and terribly difficult when Nature is in a tantrum mood.
There are not so many drive and pitch holes on such courses, and when
one is encountered the pitch calls for the most thoughtful golf. There
are long, bare, bunkered holes that chill the blood of the nervous
golfer as he goes forth from the tee with a glance at the brasseys in
his bag. It seems as if he wanders into a vast space, a wilderness
where the littleness of man is emphasised. As a leading example of
golfing architecture of the Heroic school, I would select the fine
course at Deal, and another noble specimen is Prestwick. There is a
disposition in these times to make some new inland courses on such
models so far as limited natural opportunities permit, and much the best
of those that have been created so far is Walton Heath, where it is
really Heroic golf all the way from the first tee to the home green.
A school which has yielded many fine courses is the Romantic. The lights
and shades of such courses are in high contrast, and their colouring is
rich. Hazards, big and full of character of their own, abound at almost
every hole; there are rocks or sandhills everywhere, and likely enough
the course is set in a frame of rich scenery surrounding. Some people
would describe such courses as being “very sporting.” When one thinks of
the Romantic school, and of the great days of adventure that one has
spent when paying homage to its dead masters, one thinks of Troon and of
North Berwick; and if of this type one must select one that is away from
the sea, there is Sunningdale which clearly belongs to it, though its
features are not so highly developed. The Braid Hills course is
certainly attached to the Romantic school. The architects who were of
this school, and the men who most admire their work, are warm-blooded,
human players, who like risks and the overcoming of them, and who would
have their pulses throb with the joy of life when they play on the
links. They like, as it is said, to be called upon to take their lives
in their hands at every stroke of their play. This is great golf.
As to which of all the schools provides the truest golf it is hard to
say, since few men would agree on what is the truest golf. But quite
likely the links of the Æsthetic school would be most frequently
mentioned in this connection. There has been a subtle art at work in the
planning of every hole. The architects have taken their patch of land,
and, scorning all convention, have been inspired by great impulses in
the selection and arrangement of the line of play. They have had moods
and caprices, but they have been men of great genius, born and bred in a
high atmosphere of the game. Like all other men of great independence of
thought and action, they court and receive severe criticism; but at the
end of it all the greatness, the superbness of the work is admitted, and
its fame will for ever endure. There is character in it at every glance,
but it is not such as is obtrusive, as at Troon. Here there is the
perfect art that conceals art, and it is a testimony to its perfection
that men go on discussing it for ever and ever, just as they still think
and worry over the emotions that passed through the mind of Hamlet, and
are not all agreed upon them. How many different readings, as it were,
can one not give to a hole at St. Andrews--almost any hole on the old
course. St. Andrews is the masterpiece of the Æsthetic school--profound,
ingenious, intricate. Here and there we see a little of the influence of
the Heroic school; the Romantic has had less. But always the Æsthetic
school is a law unto itself, and its finished work is not to be likened
to that of any other. Hoylake is of this school, though the example is
not so pure and unaffected by the two great rival branches of
architectural art as St. Andrews. Nevertheless it is distinctly
Æsthetic, and there is no other course that is worthy of inclusion in
this particular class.
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.