I read the other day an article by my colleague "Arcturus" which I thought
was a little boastful. It referred to a bull-dog. Now I cannot tell what
there is about a bull-dog that makes people haughty, but it is certain that
I have never known a case in which the companionship of that animal has not
had this effect. The man who keeps a bull-dog becomes after a time only fit
for the company of a bull-dog. He catches the august pride of the animal,
seems to think like a bulldog, to talk in the brief, scornful tones of a
bulldog, and even to look fat and formidable like a bull-dog. That,
however, is not an uncommon phenomenon among those who live with animals.
Go to a fat stock show and look at the men around the cattle pens. Or
recall the pork butchers you have known and tell me----. But possibly you,
sir, who read these lines, are a pork butcher and resent the implication.
Sir, your resentment is just. You are the exception, sir--a most notable
exception.
But my object here is not merely to warn "Arcturus" of the perilous company
he is keeping. I refer to his bull-dog panegyric also to justify me in
enlarging on my own private vanity. If he is permitted to write to the
extent of a column on a bull-dog, I can at least claim the same latitude in
regard to a sensible subject like golf. And I have this advantage over him,
that I have a real message. I have a hint to offer that will mean money in
pocket to you.
And first let me say that I have nothing to teach you in the way of play. I
am in that stage of the novitiate that seems sheer imbecility. When I get a
good stroke I stare after it as stout Cortez stared at the Pacific, "with a
wild surmise." But it is because I am a bad player that I feel I can be
useful to you. For most of my time on the links is spent in looking for
lost balls. Now, I do not object to looking for balls. I rather enjoy it.
It is a healthy, open-air occupation that keeps the body exercised and the
mind fallow. There are some people who think the spectacle of a grown-up
man (with a family) looking in an open field for a ball that isn't there is
ridiculous. They are mistaken. It is really, seen from the philosophic
angle, a very noble spectacle. It is the symbol of deathless hope. It is
part of the great discipline of the game. It is that part of the game at
which I do best. There is not a spinney over the whole course that I do not
know by heart. There is not a bit of gorse that I have not probed and been
probed by. I must have spent hours in the ditches, and I have upon me the
scars left by every hedgerow. And the result is that, while I am worthless
as a golfer, I think I may claim to be quite in the first class at finding
lost balls.
Now all discoveries hinge upon some sudden illumination. I had up to a
certain point been a sad failure in recovering balls. I watched them fall
with the utmost care and was so sure of them that I felt that I could walk
blindfold and pick them up. But when I came to the spot the ball was not
there. This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced
itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that
could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately
hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it,
it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let
the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its
guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works like a
charm.
The method is quite simple. You lose the ball, of course, to begin with.
That is easy enough. Then you search for it, and the longer you search the
deeper grows the mystery of its vanishing. Your companions come and help
you to poke the hedge and stir up the ditch, and you all agree that you
have never known such a perfectly ridiculous thing before. And having
clearly proved that the ball isn't anywhere in the neighbourhood, you take
another out of the bag, and proceed with the game.
So far everything is quite ordinary. The game is over, the ball is lost,
and you prepare to go. But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way
that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in vain. You are not
going to search for the ball. That would simply put the creature up to some
new artifice. No, you are just walking round that way accidentally. What so
natural as that you should have your eyes on the ground? And there, sure
enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware. It is so ridiculously
obvious that to say that it was lying there when you were looking for it so
industriously is absurd. It simply couldn't have been there. You suspect
that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden
behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out
from its hole.
I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence
accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the
"fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty
of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies
to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I
go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the
garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to
decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly
undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the
morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It
is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that
Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote:
Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the golf ball does enjoy
the game.