THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A SHORT
CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE.
The other day, when we sat on the deck of a little steamer plying on the
lake of Como, contented in warm spring sunshine with a sublime panorama
of blue water and white-topped Alps, I was led to recall some of the few
remarks which a shrewd and pungent commentator on life and men, the late
Henry Labouchere, had made about our game, and, as he was not himself a
golfer, and not the most tolerant of men despite his certain breadth of
mind, it may be guessed that they were not complimentary to the game. We
had left Varenna, and the little ship was paying its dutiful respects to
Bellagio and Menaggio and such like places of an Italian fairyland.
Hereabouts, as I remembered, Mr. Labouchere had lived in the proper
season, and it came about some seven years back that a golf course--and
a nice course too--was established near by, and the local hotel-keeper,
in proper enterprise, ran a conveyance each day regularly at a certain
time from his door to the club-house. Radical as he was--if he really
was--Mr. Labouchere disliked this disturbance of the old peace and
harmony of his lakeland retreat, and affected to see something vulgar in
it. This wit and cynic, who once, answering an inquiry, said that he
liked a certain lady of his acquaintance well enough but would not mind
if she dropped down dead in front of him on the carpet, certainly wished
that golf had never grown into the human scheme of things, and he
complained loudly of its invasion here. He suggested that Italy was now
passing to the dogs. Had he lived a little longer he would surely have
played at Menaggio, and we could have assured him then that golf in
Italy was long before his time, and would certainly be of good help to
the country for long after. It is one of the curious facts of golfing
history that the game was played in Italy before any golf club, except
one, was definitely established in Scotland, the only exception being
the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, and lo! it was played there by a
Scot, and a Scot so good as the bonnie Prince Charlie himself. When I
first went to the Villa Borghese in Rome, I remembered, on approaching
it through the park, that when Lord Elcho went there in 1738 he found
the Prince playing in the gardens. Many courses now exist in different
parts of this beautiful Italy, and the country has begun to take its
place in the great forward movement in European golf. It has begun
slowly; but now, as I have seen it, does really advance.
* * * * *
A little fable is quickly told. A wise father had sent his son, for the
good of his mind, to Rome, and when the boy returned he asked him what
he thought of the city that is called eternal. Harold then answered, "I
think, sir, that the lies at Rome are very good." Do not judge Harold
harshly upon this answer, as you may be inclined to do. He might have
come to know less of Rome had he not discovered that the lies on the
Campagna were so good, and that the legions of mighty Caesar which were
exercised there had left no enduring marks of their galloping behind
them. He might not have gained so many good Roman friends to tell him
helpfully of the wonders of the city. And if golf is a little thing, and
the contemplation of Rome is so enthralling, yet, be it murmured, the
golf of Rome is one of the wonders of the golfing world. I have found it
so. As it was to me, so it will prove a revelation to all golfers who go
to Rome and have as yet no knowledge of the course that is there. For
the full-bodied character of the holes, caused by natural land
formations, and for their variety and interest, I do not hesitate to say
that there is no course on the continent of Europe which is better, and
I support this statement with another, that while I can hardly recall
any hole where a bad shot will go unpunished or a good one without
reward, yet in the whole round there is not a single artificial bunker.
Nature has seen to all the tests and difficulties. Of what other course
can this be said? Golf at Rome was begun in 1898, and ever since then
there have been some fine golfing men working to what they were sure
would be a successful end, chief among them being Mr. R. C. R. Young,
who in the capacity of honorary secretary has been largely responsible
for the general management of the club. Lately the round has been
extended from nine holes to eighteen, Mr. Young and Doig, the
professional, having done the planning of the new holes, and with this
the golf of Rome enters upon a new era. The club flourishes, the golfing
community, partly Roman, partly British, and partly American, is
zealous, and the people there have come to believe that even the most
serious, studious, and high-minded folk who go to Rome to steep
themselves in living history of the past need for their refreshment some
antidote to ruins. "St. Peter's, and the Colosseum, the Forum and the
baths of Caracalla," said one of them to me, "will bring the foreigners
to Rome, but only golf will keep them there!" Count this for weakness
in man, and for his utter modernity if you like; but it is the truth.
Consequently the golf of Rome is entering upon a new forward movement. I
think that when the public in distant places comes to realise that the
golf of Rome is half as good as it really is, thousands and thousands
more will go to Rome than do so now, to play upon the Campagna, and
during the time to gather to their souls a scent of the glory of the
ancient mistress of the world. I have a vision of Rome becoming a
headquarters of continental golf in the near future.
On a morning after some days among the ruins--such a glorious morning,
with the Italian sun burning gold amid a heavenly blue--two noble Romans
came in their chariot for a barbarian wanderer at his hotel at half-past
nine. They were not real Romans, but Augustus could have played their
part of host no better, and a forty-horse-power car moved us towards the
Campagna more speedily than the best of chariots. Away we went by the
foot of the Equilinus, down the Via Emanuele Filiberto, through the gate
of St. John Lateran in the Aurelian wall, and then straight on. In a few
minutes we were at Acqua Santa and inside the club-house. Of all the
club-houses in the world, this is surely one of the most curious and
interesting. It is an old farm-house, skilfully adapted to its purpose,
and we shall be sorry if in the course of time and a grand extension of
the golf at Rome it is given up for anything more palatial and
conventional. Here in an upper room we take the necessary nourishment in
a simple way, and among other liquid refreshments there is the real
_acqua santa_ itself, a pleasantly bitter and quite delicious water that
is drawn from a spring by a farm-house at a corner of the course. In
days gone by the water was considered, perhaps not without good reason,
to have splendid curative properties, and popes of Rome came to it and
blessed it accordingly. I believe that one of them derived some healing
benefit from it. And now, as we think of popes and cardinals, we recall
that one of the latter, Cardinal Merry del Val, had some kind of a
course in his private grounds, and so far he has been the only cardinal
golfer. Once before he died a scheme was afoot for a visit by him to the
course at Acqua Santa. In a good and sensible and honest way the golf
club of Rome is already a considerable social centre. Perhaps some day
the King of Italy--already patron of the club--will join himself to the
majority of kings and become a golfer too. A leading member of the
famous historical family of Colonna, Don Prospero Colonna, is president,
and a number of the most eminent people of Rome are among the members.
Princes and princesses, counts and countesses, ambassadors of nearly all
countries, and American millionaires may be found playing the game
regularly at Acqua Santa. The keenest golfer of them all is Dr. Wayman
Cushman, who is handicapped at plus 4, an American who spends half his
year in Maine and the other half in Rome, where he plays golf nearly
every day. The Americans are strong in the golf of Rome, and some of the
young Italians are showing excellent form. There is one of them, Don
Francesca Ruspoli, educated in England and son of a Roman father and
American mother, of whom great golfing things are expected.
Really this is an excellent course; but the full merit of it will hardly
be appreciated in the first round or the second, for the wonderful views
and the special points of interest in them will constantly interfere
with concentration on the strokes and thought upon the scheme for
reaching the putting green. Standing upon the first teeing ground and
pondering for a moment upon the carry to be made across the little
valley in front, the panorama begins at once to suggest its superior
claims. Leftwards are the Apennines, opalescent in the morning mist,
capped with snow upon their peaks. There are the Alban Hills, where the
shepherds were born who followed Romulus on the Palatine, and at the end
of the range is Monte Cavo, on the top of which are the ruins of the
temple of the god of the Latin races, living in the Latium, the ground
between the mountains and the sea. On the wine-yielding bosom of these
shining hills there lies sparkling white in the morning sun the village
of Frascati. There are the Sabine Hills with Tivoli, and away in another
direction there is Mount Soracte, well said to look out there like a
wave in a stormy sea. Up into our middle distance on the left-hand side,
on the fringe of the course, are the splendid ruins of the Claudian
aqueduct which stretch right across the Campagna, one lonely pile coming
close up to our sixteenth green alongside which the Via Appia Nuova
stretches, with two famous umbrella pines helping on the scene.
There is so much for a beginning, and more views press upon us as we
advance along the course. The play is opened with a good hole of drive
and iron length, the second brings us back again with a drive and a
pitch, and then away we go to the left with one of the cunningest
seconds to be played across twin streams, making this third hole of Rome
one of the most exacting in the way of approach that is to be found in
Italy or even in the whole of Europe. When we come to the sixth we play
up to the summit of a high tableland, and as we ascend the hill we pluck
from the turf some of the freshest, prettiest crocuses that have ever
grown, the course being as nearly thick with them in March as North
Berwick is with daisies in the month of May. And from these heights what
a view again over towards the city of Rome! Out along that way there is
the tomb of Cecilia Metella, Crassus' wife, and away on the boundary
there is the church of St. John Lateran and the great dome of St.
Peter's. If golf is a royal and ancient game, here is a setting for it.
Near to the eighth hole we turned aside to the ruins of an ancient Roman
villa, and Santino, my little Italian caddie, with finger excavation,
gathered some morsels of polished marble which may have touched the feet
of Roman ladies in those great days of old. The line of the tenth comes
close to one of those deep-cut streams that flow to feed the hungry
Tiber, and in some ways this hole reminds us of the fourth at Prestwick
where the Pow Burn insinuates itself close to the golfer's way. At our
backs when we stand on the eleventh tee is a cave that might serve for
robbers but which really makes an excellent shelter, and it was related
that a few weeks before my time in Rome three ambassadors, being the
British, the American, and the Austrian, were seen to sit in there and
shelter. And who then shall say that, if "only a game," golf has no
possibilities and powers in such high crafts as diplomacy? The twelfth
is an excellent hole, and so are they all. The sixteenth takes us
winding round a big bend between a hill and a stream and then faces us
full to the putting green, which has the Claudian ruins for a
background. The play concludes with a seventeenth which has a putting
green very shrewdly placed, and an eighteenth where the second shot is
played through a little valley, these ending holes abounding in golfing
beauty and character.
There is to be said of this course, and in the most sober and
well-considered judgment by one who has seen golf in many lands, that
there is scarcely an inland course anywhere that seems more naturally
adapted to the game. Each hole has strong character of its own; I could
remember them all after but a single round. Some time soon they will
make an attempt at Acqua Santa to carry their putting greens on from one
season to the next, and then they will get a thickness and trueness and
quality that greens can gain in no other way. The golfers of Rome are
keen, and they have energy and enterprise. A great future awaits this
club and course, and I believe that when more money is spent on it, as
will be soon, it will be in nearly every thinkable way the most
attractive course on the Continent. The mood that gathers about one when
in Rome tends to taking the game rather more seriously and thoughtfully
than at the Mediterranean resorts; it becomes a real recreation, the
refreshing change. The club's nearness and convenience to the city are
very good. It is but a few minutes' journey by either train or tram from
the heart of Rome to the club-house, near which there is a special
golfers' railway station.
* * * * *
A Franciscan friar was the first to point out to me the situation of the
nine holes of Florence--nine plain fair holes, though they have nothing
of architectural beauty in them, not a trace of feeling, nothing of the
mediaeval glow of spirit that separates this city from all others in the
world, hardly a touch of imagination in their two or three thousand
yards. Yet they serve their modern purpose well. For six days and six
nights the rain had poured down upon the dripping Firenze from
inexhaustible clouds; the saucer in which the city is laid emptied its
floods into the Arno until, dirtier and more turbulent than usual, the
big stream tumbled itself violently through the bridges. We wandered
through the Uffizi Galleries and the Pitti Palace and the Bargello of
courtyard fame. There is nothing in the world like sweet Florence, and
it is a hopeless soul that feels no spark of artistic fire crackle for
at least one inspiring moment when the glories of this city that was
born and lived to the human expression of beauty are contemplated. But
an incessant rain provokes a bold defiance; there almost seemed to be a
weakness in such constant shelter, and I remembered a suggestion that
was sent to me from a far distance--"Go up to Fiesole if you can." So in
the car I went to Fiesole. We went out of the town and by San Gervasio,
and wound past San Domenico, and twisted our way up the hill until, with
five miles done, or it may have been a little more, the old Etruscan
town, with the fragment of an ancient wall, was reached. At the very
summit, where once a Roman castle stood, there is the Franciscan
monastery. A brother in his umbrian gown looked meditatively outwards
from the porch, and he was gracious and friendly when I told him I would
like to go inside. From a loggia within we looked out upon one of the
finest panoramic views of its kind. The rain had ceased. Grass was seen
upon the Etruscan hills, tentacles of the Apennines came clear again
through dissolving mists, and a golden light flamed up in the western
sky. And in its peaceful hollow there lay Florence, the palace of art, a
mediaeval jewel glistening there like a mosaic in white and terra cotta,
with its great duomo in many-coloured marbles lording it over the
lowlier piles. Florence! Sweeping the valley with a glance, the monk
turned towards the north-east and, leaning upon a wall, he pointed with
his right hand and said, "Pisa!" Over there was the city of the leaning
tower and the baptistery with the amazing echo. But in the nearer
distance there was a square patch of vivid green, and I traced its
situation along there by the course of the Arno, by the Cascine, and
other landmarks, and made nearly sure of what it was. The thought was
incongruous at the time, nearly inexcusable, but yet there is little in
golf that is vulgar after all, and it could not be denied that there was
the golf course out that way. By some careful questions I gained
confirmation from the friar. I told him I looked for a place, a special
place, whose locality I described precisely. And he held out his hand
again. The golf course was nearly in the line of Pisa.
While so many things in Florence are four or five hundred years old at
least, the golf course is only fifteen. Still, fifteen years makes a
good maturity in these times, and Italy, if its courses are few, has
some distinctions among them. Many continental courses depend for their
attraction on their setting. Those of Florence and Rome have the most
perfect setting conceivable, but while the course of Rome could live on
its merits had there been no Rome, the course of Florence never could.
Yet the city helps it out, and, though poor be the holes, here we have
indeed one of the most enthusiastic little golf communities one might
ever wish to mix among. The club is captained by Mr. J. W. Spalding,
head of the great athletic business firm, who has ceased to live in
America and lives now wholly in Florence, which he would hardly do were
it not for this golf course, on which he plays nearly every day. Mr.
Spalding is a fine example of the keen and determined golfer. A few
years ago, in a terrible motor-car smash in Italy, he lost completely
the sight of one eye. As soon as the surgeons and the doctors let him
loose again he hurried to his favourite course at Florence and--think of
it!--at once he won the scratch gold medal. He is a scratch man now, and
plays as well as ever.
These and many other things I learned on the day after the monk had
pointed out to me the direction of the nine holes of Florence, when I
went along to San Donato to make a closer view of them, to drive and
putt at them. The golfers of Florence are a good company, managed with
zeal by Signor Mavrogordato, in the capacity of honorary secretary. They
are as keen and interested in their game as if they were at Sandwich,
and they have a miniature club-house situated on a spot of land that has
a cemented water-filled moat all round it, those who would enter having
to pass over a little rustic bridge. The holes are plain with artificial
cross bunkers, and the architecture is of what might be called the low
Victorian school. One of the features of the course is a couple of tall
trees that stand up in the middle with thin straight trunks parallel to
each other, looking for all the world like Rugby football goal-posts.
One great advantage that this course has is that it is splendidly
convenient to the city. Take a tram-car No. 17 labelled "Cascine" from
one particular corner of the cathedral square, say "Golf" to the
conductor, pay him a penny for the fare, and the rest is inevitable. In
a quarter of an hour you will be deposited at a junction in the roads by
the barrier of Ponte alle Mosse, and two minutes' walk from there takes
you to the iron gates which give admission to the course.
* * * * *
There is the beautiful bay at Naples, and Pompeii, and a short voyage on
the steamboat to the sweet isle of Capri; but golf has not yet come to
Naples, though it will do so soon. When we travelled down there from
Rome we were aboard a train that was taken by many of the Naples members
of the Italian Parliament who were going home for the week-end--the
"deputies' train" they often call that six o'clock from Rome. They had
been having a fearful week of it, wrangling about their recent Libyan
war and the cost of it, and their nerves were in rather a jagged state.
I fell into conversation with one of them, and he said that he wished
he were a golfer, as from all that he had heard and understood it was
the real and only thing for the soothing of a deputy after such
scrimmaging and scratching as they had been having in the Chamber that
weary week. He asked questions about our Parliamentary golfers, and was
informed about Mr. Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and all the
others. I told this honourable member for Naples that nearly all our
Parliamentarians played the greatest game of all, and that the Mother of
Parliaments was all the better for it. He was impressed. He said there
should be golf at Naples by the time I went there again--even if it was
set there for the benefit of the tired members only!
Above all things, Venice is a place for reflection, and when we are
there we think of all things we have seen and done in Italy, and shape
exactly the impressions that have been made. One time there were two or
three of us in a gondola. The crescent of a seven days' moon hung among
the stars in the Venetian night. The gentle regular plash that was made
by Giovanni Cerchieri, our gondolier (and be it said that his gondola is
the blackest and smartest and most finely dignified of all that glide on
the Grand Canal), as he swung backwards and forwards to his work behind
us, with a sigh or a murmur that might have swollen to a real boat-song
had we encouraged it, was nearly the only sound on the still waters. And
in this Venetian night, an hour after the coffee, we were in the mood of
men who feel that they are soon to return to the cold hard facts of
life. The rest of Venice might go to glory; we, soothed amid such ease
and comfort as might have satisfied a doge, turned our thoughts to the
links of home. There was nothing incongruous in the association of ideas
and facts. Venice we found to be splendid for meditation, and any place
with such a quality, like the top of a mountain, or the side of a
purling stream, is a fine one for golfing consideration and conjecture.
One man would talk of art, of pictures, and of sculpture; another would
stupidly keep to golf. And then a compromise was suggested, when it was
said that a question had once been asked as to whether there was such a
thing as style in golf!
Any thoughtful player who ever had any doubt upon this matter--but, of
course, no thoughtful player ever could--would have it dispelled if he
went to Italy even though he never played a game, did not take his
clubs, and never saw a golf course there. It were indeed better for his
education in this matter that he should not play when on Italian ground,
for one would not expect to find on the courses there the best examples
of golfing style. The fact of style in golf would come home to him when
he wandered through the galleries and looked upon all the magnificent
sculptures that are among the matchless treasures of the country, though
there is no study of a golfing swing among them. I do not see how any
player of the game who is thoughtful and contemplative can go to Italy
and fail to be enormously impressed with the lessons that are silently
delivered from the sculpture in the galleries and museums of Rome,
Florence, and other cities. In hundreds of pieces here we see the
suggestion of beauty put forward in every movement and exercise of the
human body, and particularly when the frame is being brought to some
considerable physical effort, when the limbs are being placed upon the
strain, are grace and rhythm and style exhibited to us, and with them
there is the suggestion always of the extreme of power. There is
indicated the close relationship between exact and graceful poise,
perfect balance, and supreme controlled and concentrated force. The very
utmost efficiency is always suggested in all this artistic balance. As
the art is better and more appealing, so the suggestion of power is
increased and the marble almost seems to break with life.
Considered in this way, what a fine thing is the "David" of Bernini in
the Borghese Gallery! But for our golfing suggestion some of the
discobolus models serve us better. Without ever having attempted to
throw a discus, one may very well understand that success at such an
exercise depends almost wholly upon perfect balance and accurate
concentration of force and true rhythmical movement, and in the models
in the Vatican and the National Museums in Rome and elsewhere we see how
it might be done. The discobolus of Myron, reconstructed as it has been,
and with the head made to face in the wrong direction, so they say, is a
magnificent thing. In the National Gallery of Rome they have made a
reconstruction from a fragment of another, and they have made the figure
to look sideways and half upwards to the discus held at arm's length
behind him ready for the throw, whereas in the Myron the face is to the
front and the eyes are down. (Though one may know nothing at all about
the ways in which the discs were really thrown, or what is the best way
to throw them, one is hardly convinced of the desirability of disturbing
the head in the back-swing of the arm and letting the eyes follow the
object in the hand. Surely concentration would be impeded and balance
suffer.) But in these images we see the intensity of the relation
between style and power, and we realise that if there were no style in
golf there ought to be, and the next moment, that of all modern games
golf is a game of style and nothing else. Perhaps you may play it
without style, but then it is not the same thing, and it can never be so
thoroughly effective and precise. Unconsciously, perhaps, James Braid
had style in his mind when he said that at the top of the swing the
golfer should feel like a spring coiled up to its fullest tension,
straining for the release. That is just what the discobolus suggests,
and the golfer gets the fullest enjoyment from the game, the supreme
physical thrills, when he feels this high tension for a moment and then
its even, smooth, and quick escape, and he cannot feel it so when he has
no style and all his movements and positions have not been made in
perfect harmony. Some may say that the actions of the discobolus were
probably not so very fine as the sculptors have made them out to be, and
that much of the shape is merely artist's fancy, but probably they are
fairly true to life. If they are not, one cannot contemplate them for
more than a few moments without feeling that life ought to be true to
them. The golfer in the suggestion of grace and power, as in the models
that have been cut of Harry Vardon at the top and end of his driving
swing, reaches some way towards the discobolus.