Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

Having started so late, it grew nearly dark after tea, and the distant landscapes were not so easy to descry. We came presently, in the mist, to a place called Carmarthen, I think, where were great black stacks and flaming forges and lights burning wistfully in the dark; and then to another similar place, Swansea; and finally to a third, Cardiff, great centers of manufacture, for there were flaming lights from forges; great, golden gleams from open furnaces; and dark blue smoke, visible even at this hour, from tall stacks overhead; and gleaming electric lights, like bright, lucent diamonds.

“ONE OF THOSE REALLY INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN G. AND MISS X.”]

It has always seemed a great, sad, heroic thing,--plain day labor. Those common, ignorant men, working before flaming forges, stripped to the waist in some instances, fascinated my imagination. I have always marveled at the inequalities of nature--the way it will give one man a low brow and a narrow mind, a narrow round of thought, and make a slave or horse of him, and another a light, nimble mind, a quick wit, and air, and make a gentleman of him. No human being can solve either the question of ability or utility. Is your gentleman useful? Yes and no, perhaps. Is your laborer useful? Yes and no, perhaps. I should say obviously yes. But see the differences in the reward of labor, physical labor. One eats his hard-earned crust in the sweat of his face; the other picks at his surfeit of courses, and wonders why this or that doesn’t taste better. I did not make my mind. I did not make my art. I cannot choose my taste except by predestined instinct, and yet here I am sitting in a comfortable English home as I write, commiserating the poor working-man. I indict nature here and now, as I always do and always shall do, as being aimless, pointless, unfair, unjust. I see in the whole thing no scheme but an accidental one, no justice save accidental justice. Now and then, in a way, some justice is done, but it is accidental; no individual man seems to will it. He can’t. He doesn’t know how. He can’t think how. And there’s an end of it.

WINGÈD VICTORY

BY VICTOR WHITLOCK

O patient, wounded warrior of the range,
Braving the might of all the storms that blow,
Breasting the bandit winds that never change,
Fighting forever with an unseen foe.
How your brave spirit breathes of sturdy cheer--
You that the ranger deems a worthless tree.
Triumphant Nature, sculptor without peer,
Has moulded you her Wingèd Victory.

AMERICAN MAKERS OF THE NEW JAPAN

BY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

Author of “The Religions of Japan,” “The Japanese Nation in Evolution,” etc.

All the world knows that Commodore Matthew C. Perry “opened Japan,” very much as one opens an exposition. He touched the button that set in operation the waiting wheels of a century or more of interior, intellectual preparation. It is not so well known that to President Millard Fillmore belongs the credit of organizing the expedition sent out in 1852, although it was William Alexander Graham, Secretary of the Navy, who brought up the subject in cabinet meeting.

Other American makers of Japan lived before Perry. Our flag, covering Dutch ships, was mirrored in Nagasaki Bay in 1798. In 1837, S. Wells Williams, printer and diplomatist, who, in the American ship _Morrison_, fitted out by Mr. Charles W. King, sailed from Hong-Kong to return shipwrecked Japanese, was driven away from Uraga with cannon-fire and balls. From these waifs, by word of mouth, he learned the spoken language; he then translated the gospels into Japanese, and in 1852 acted as Perry’s interpreter and proposed “the favored nation” clause in the treaty.

Mastery of the language was the key with which to open Thornrose Castle. The futile visits in 1845 and 1846 of Commodores James Biddle and James Glynn, with battle-ships and brigs, appear smaller in perspective than the work of Ranald MacDonald, first teacher of English in Japan. In 1848, this educational zealot had himself put ashore from an American ship. In shutting out undesirable aliens the bigoted hermit Japanese of the nineteenth century were quite equal to the glorious Americans of the twentieth. Though MacDonald was promptly imprisoned and sent to Nagasaki, about his cage cell eager young men gathered in classes to learn English and become interpreters. The Yedo Government, thus enabled to meet Perry openly, had also, concealed in the after pavilion, Manjiro (“John Munn”), who had been educated at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and who likewise had been voluntarily put ashore from an American vessel which had carried him to Japan. “John,” though young, was white-haired, the capillary bleaching having resulted from translating into Japanese, by command of his Yedo superiors, Bowditch’s “The New American Practical Navigator,” when dictionaries were unknown.

In Perry’s fleet, a marine named Jonathan Goble had enlisted, hoping to Christianize the natives. Goble began with a waif picked up at sea, whose Japanese name emerged from the alembic of sailor lingo as “Sam Patch.” Later, in a land where horse traction was unknown, Goble, in order to give his sick wife outdoor air, invented the man-power carriage. By his drawing of a rough design, and showing a native mechanic the picture of a baby-carriage in Godey’s “Lady’s Book,” the result in 1871 was the jinrikisha, the wheel that rolled round the world.

Before 1860, Japanese time was valueless, a drug in the market. There was no word in common use for anything less than an hour. Railways, introduced in 1872, made minutes and seconds intelligible quantities. For the first train scheduled, the prime minister of the empire was late and was left behind. The simultaneous advent of the cheap American watch and the Yankee’s jinrikisha made ordinary people realize that an hour had sixty minutes. Some Japanese have since learned to split seconds.

In 1850 no English-speaking person could read correctly a Japanese book. Eugene Van Reed, an American, made a phrase-book in the katakana script, beginning the work which was continued by John Liggins, the two Browns, Samuel and Nathan, and William Imbrie--all Americans. James Curtis Hepburn, linguistic pioneer and translator of the Bible, made the initial dictionary, on which all subsequent lexicons are based. The first series of American books done into Japanese was Peter Parley’s histories, the style of which for a whole generation flavored “English as she was written” in Japan. It showed the Japanese islanders that they were as “frogs in a well, that know not the great ocean.” More than anything else, the reading of English turned Japan’s head away from China’s world of thought to that of the Occident. Not a few masterpieces of American literature done into Japanese have passed through many editions. The answer of one of our sailors, in 1847, to the question, “Who is the ruler of America?” “The people,” was then unfathomable. It is now quite plain. Prince Ito, who knew the Constitution of the United States almost by heart, read “The Federalist,” finding it more fascinating than a novel. Thus it was by Alexander Hamilton, quite as much as by Bismarck, that he was confirmed in his unionist and centralizing theories. On the other hand, none so well as Americans has mastered the psychology of the Japanese, opened their hearts, and read their souls. Despite its limitations, Percival Lowell’s work, “Occult Japan” (1894), is a masterpiece, Sidney L. Gulick’s “Evolution of the Japanese” (1903) is excellent, and Alice Bacon’s writings on Japan are superb.

Except that by Perry’s treaty two doors were set ajar for doling out food, fuel, and water to sailors, Japan through this alone might still be a hermit nation. Yet in 1913 we see a world power, wherein trade and labor are honored, population is doubled, wealth octupled, fifty millions of people are physically made over, and are actually taller by a half-inch than their ancestors, armed with the external forces of civilization, with social life and education, including music and law, changed and with ideals vastly modified. How did it come about?

Our first consul-general was Townsend Harris, merchant, and President of the Board of Education in New York City. In accepting President Pierce’s nomination, he changed his skies, but not his constant mind, and hardly his chair of instruction. This founder of the institution that became the College of the City of New York, during twenty-two months at Shimoda and in Yedo, taught Japan’s leading men the practical details of modern civilized intercourse. The hermits yielded, and opened five seaports and two cities to trade, residence, and the work of teachers, missionaries, and experts who made labor honorable. It was Harris who lifted the flood-gates of modernism, set the precedents, and fixed the limits of the later treaties with twenty nations. Even more, despite diplomatic limits, he discerned in the Japanese character a frankness and honesty that some of our newspapers have not yet discovered. Hence in Yedo, with a courage born of faith that fails not the true discerner, Harris, without a soldier, marine, or sailor, kept the stars and stripes flying over the American legation--the only one left in Yedo--when all the foreign envoys, despite big battalions and artillery, had struck their flags and fled to Yokohama, thus insulting a proud nation by their absence from its capital for nearly a decade. The popular Japanese title of Townsend Harris is “the nation’s friend.”

Having committed herself by treaty, Japan then had to make trade and toil honorable and develop the resources of the country, or else go the way of India, be prostrate like China, or fall into the maw of Russia.

Where look for wealth? The soil was already worked to its full capacity as then known. Despite artificial checks to population, which had stood stationary for a century, the land seemed to cast out its human occupants. Famines, often carrying off two millions of people a year, desolated the land with appalling regularity. They were obliged to look to the mines and the precious metals, despite the double danger of a social revolution sure to be wrought from honoring men of pick and tools rather than of swords, and of the wrath of the gods and dragons that guarded jealously the treasures of the underworld.

It was as Nicodemus by night that high-bred men, shuddering at the necessity of it, came to Mr. Harris to ask for American mining engineers to prospect for gold. In 1861, with appalling promptness, arrived Messrs. William Phipps Blake and Raphael Pumpelly. Then the frightful problem of etiquette at once upreared itself. Should they be received as mechanics in overalls or as subalterns in an embassy? The answer to the question referred to Mr. Harris was startling: “In America the President of the United States would receive them as his equals.”

That settled it. The monetary equilibrium of the world was not disturbed then or since by Japan’s output of gold. Social and economic conditions, as well as lack of lodes prevented, but Pumpelly taught blasting, and incidentally lighted the fuse that blew up feudalism. Later, Professor Benjamin Lyman, with Harry Smith Monroe and others from America, explored, surveyed, and mapped Japan’s treasure-lands, saving the waste of millions in wild delusions.

Pumpelly builded better than he knew, healing an age-long breach between honor and toil. Without knowing it, he ushered in a new industrial era. Townsend Harris was the glad sponsor of the missionaries, who for ten years were in effect the sole teachers of the nation in science, history, medicine, and statesmanship; for of Christianity, until 1872, the Japanese, knowing only the Portuguese and Spanish type, and refusing to jest at their scars, would have none.

Some unseen power must have presided over the choice of the four American pioneer missionaries--Channing Moore Williams, Samuel Robbins Brown, James Curtis Hepburn, and Guido Fridolin Verbeck--who arrived on the soil in 1859, each one to live through forty years of altruistic toil. They seeded Japan with new thoughts and raised a regiment of trained men, with faces set toward the Occident. These serve, or have served, as van-leaders of reform and progress, not a few being in the high councils of the nation. Of the four pioneers, three, having been in China, soon got a grip on the native script and literature, which, like most things Japanese, is based on the Chinese. Dr. Guido Fridolin Verbeck, master of seven languages, became later chief government translator, adviser of the emperor, and the star preacher in Japanese. This “Americanized Dutchman,” educated in technical science at Delft, had at once the mind of an engineer and of a statesman. At Nagasaki he took hold of the boys, taught them the New Testament and the Constitution of the United States, and, to feudal and divided Japan, Christopher Martin Wieland’s poem, “Where is the German Fatherland?” Verbeck dictated what should be the languages for medicine (German), law (French), and education (English). He hewed out the channels of progress by urging that while students should be sent abroad in large numbers, foreign experts in all departments should be brought to Japan; by proposing an imperial embassy to go around the world, and by elaborating a scheme of national elementary education. Dr. Samuel Robbins Brown, the schoolmaster, intellectual father of the first American woman’s college chartered as such, at Elmira, New York, who had in 1847 brought the first Chinese students to America, introduced photography and raised a body of intellectuals. To-day a hundred Japanese lawyers, doctors, editors, ministers, and public men revere his name.

In December, 1867, the older native statesmen, with long preparation, and the younger ones, with the new mind “brought from over the sea,” got possession of the imperial palace and person in Kioto, and began, in the boy mikado’s name, that series of far-reaching reforms that have made a new nation. In the new Government possibly half were pupils of Verbeck. His heart beat faster when in one of the five articles of the charter oath of the emperor in Kioto, the basis of the Constitution of 1889, it was sworn that “intellect and learning should be sought for throughout the world in order to restore the foundations of the empire.” Leaving Nagasaki and going at once to headquarters, Verbeck secured the turning of the stream of students to America, where soon hundreds, mostly at New Brunswick, New Jersey, were, from 1866 onward, pounding at the gates of knowledge. Verbeck was then called to Tokio to be president of the Imperial University of Tokio and incidentally to be factotum of a government then in novelty and isolation. When the embassy set out to go around the world in 1872, Verbeck, who had suggested the idea, found that more than one half of its personnel had been his pupils.

From 1868 to 1900, in response to the Mikado’s invitation, about five thousand experts or assistants in every line of human achievement went to Japan, from master or ordinary mechanics, boatswains, and corporals to superintendents and professors. Their salaries ranged from day’s wages to a salary then exceeding that of the President of the United States. Of these, about twelve hundred were American teachers. Of all these foreign helpers (_yatoi_), called out under the charter oath, I had the honor to be the first appointed and on the ground.

It was my good fortune to arrive in Fukui, Echizen, in 1871. I enjoyed the unique advantage of living in the far interior, in a daimio’s castle, of seeing feudalism in operation, and of being present. October 1871, at the solemn and impressive ceremonies at its fall and the transference of sovereignty to the emperor.

There was as yet no national department of education. Perhaps it is no accident that, out of the province of Echizen, where public schools were first organized, was raised the Ninth Division of the army that took Port Arthur. The chemical laboratory, training-class of teachers, lecture-and recitation-rooms, equipped with blackboards and modern furniture, were in the actual “palace” occupied for two centuries by the Baron of Echizen, one of the seventeen great feudatories of the empire. As I had been a soldier in the Civil War, I was asked my opinions as to the value of forts in miniature then being built with trowel and clay. Almost the first call to apply my knowledge of chemistry and physics was to show the Japanese how, by the use of electric wires and fulminates, to blow up ships by submarine wires and torpedoes. The introduction at that time of chairs in the schools, and changes in method and habits of sitting, have during a generation elongated the legs of a nation, adding half an inch to the Japanese stature.

Seeing the danger in a scheme of education of exclusive devotion to book-learning, and knowing the value of manual and technical training, I elaborated the plan of a technological school. The letter reached Tokio almost on the day that the first minister of education, Oki Takato, was appointed and the department was organized. Summoned by return messenger to the capital, I was about to begin with four professional chairs, but happily, with enlarged ideas, the Government organized a few months later on a larger scale the superb College of Engineering, in which such men as Dyer, Milne, Divers, and Ayrton taught, and such pupils as Takaminé, Shimosé, and Oda were graduated. Transferred to the Imperial University, I had the honor to serve during three years. I taught science by contract; but also ethics, philosophy, and literature voluntarily, in order to know the Japanese mind. Of my pupils, some entered the cabinet; others to-day occupy places among the highest in education, diplomacy, or the enterprises of the Government. One of these was the Marquis Komura, who, after winning laurels in London, Washington, and Peking, sat opposite Serjius De Witte, the Russian, at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. Remembering his daily work in the classroom, I was not unprepared for his brilliant success. Against the Russian, he scored all points on the Manchurian question, which to-day is the pivot of politics in the Far East. Komura and Takahira, both ambassadors, the latter to Washington in 1905, had been my pupils, Komura during nearly three years.

The missionaries were the pioneers of every good feature of civilization. In 1859, Hepburn opened the first dispensary in a land where there was no public hospital, or chimney, or newspaper, or milk-wagon, or stationary wash-stand, or any other than medieval devices of comfort. Public hygiene was scarcely known. The highways were full of sights of horror: a million outcasts, swarms of beggars, gamblers, lepers, smallpox patients moving freely abroad; eye-disorders, blindness, unmentionable diseases, and their victims; phallic shrines on the road, and phallic emblems freely exposed in the shops and at temple festivals; pilloried heads, gory execution-grounds, and blackened remains of judicial incineration. In the prisons, the apparatus of torture was elaborate and of infernal variety. Rotten humanity crowded the seats in Hepburn’s chapel, while about him were a dozen or so of the future physicians and surgeons now famous. To-day Japan has a thousand hospitals and a faculty of world-wide fame, while no nation excels her in public hygiene.

Long before the government hospitals or officially trained nurses were heard of, Dr. John Berry, a medical missionary, now of Worcester, Massachusetts, the father also of prison reform in Japan, had taught women nurses and begun the development of a noble army of white-robed ministering angels. Indeed, the first message of Christendom has been to womanhood, and gratefully have the Japanese made acknowledgment. As early as 1861, Mrs. James Curtis Hepburn opened at Yokohama a school for girls; she was followed by Miss Mary Kidder of Brooklyn. In 1871 was founded the Woman’s Union American Home, “on the Bluff,” in which hundreds of girls received the education that has made a multitude of homes in which the social equality of husband and wife is a reality. This home has now a hundred missionary duplicates. In 1872 Miss Margaret Clark Griffis began the first government school for girls, out of which have developed the Peeresses’ School and the Tokio Normal School, which have educated thousands of female teachers. It was an American woman missionary, Mrs. James Ballagh, who in 1863 first demonstrated, with two boys, the capacity of the Japanese voice to sing our scale. Since that time, besides Mr. Mason’s training of pupils in the public schools, pianos and brass bands have become common. Mr. Edward House, with a native orchestra in Tokio, gave an oratorio beautifully, and now in New York Mrs. Takaori is singing our airs.

How, in a brief article, can one recite what American women have done in education, from peasant hut to emperor’s palace, or tell of statesmen and diplomatists like E. Pershine Smith, John W. Foster, Henry Willard Denison, Durham White Stevens, John Hyde de Forest, the Rt. Rev. Merriman C. Harris; of Charles P. Bryan, who organized the national postal system; of men of finance, like George Burchell Williams; of art experts, like Ernest F. Fenollosa; of archæologists, like Edward S. Morse; of engineers, like William H. Jaques; of surgeons, like Duane B. Simmons and Albert Sydney Ashmead; of translators, like Daniel Crosby Greene or Nathan Brown, the latter by himself alone, after seven years’ study, making a superb version of the New Testament, and of a host of others of whose work it shames the writer not to speak? Lack of space forbids even mention in detail of the great missionary enterprise, with its university, colleges, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, and an army of high-souled and cultivated men and women. It has been possible to name scarcely any others than the pioneers. Yet without the direct influence of their foreign Christian teachers, and their practical training received in the sessions, debates, committee and public meetings of the church-congregations, the large measure of representative and self-government, already reached in constitutional Japan, would have been impossible. Only in this way can we explain the large proportion of active members of the Christian Church in the Imperial Diet and local assemblies.

Miss Griffis was the first American woman teacher in the government school for Samurai girls in Japan]

It was ours to be servants only, and joyful was the service. After forty-seven years’ close acquaintance with these people, I am unable to trace any inferiority in intellect, or any fundamental difference in human nature, character, or brain power in the Japanese, as compared with Occidentals. Being a student of history and nations, I believe in their honesty and morality. All that we did was to show the way. The capacity was already theirs. Nevertheless, as Verbeck said, “New Japan came from beyond the sea.” To an Englishman we leave the final verdict.--“New Japan is the creation of the foreign employé.” Japan’s true line of advance has really been less in exterior brilliancy than in interior reconstruction, in coöperation with her foreign helpers; and these, in overwhelming preponderance, whether of numbers or personality, have been Americans.

MIND VERSUS MUSCLE IN GOLF

BY MARSHALL WHITLATCH

Mr. Whitlatch was a national figure in golf two or three years ago.
Now he plays only once or twice a week. But his recent scores in the
Knickerbocker Cup contest at the Oakland course show the results of
applying his newly developed theory of play to his own game. His
gross scores for the four rounds, played a week apart, were 75, 72,
77, and 73, a triumph, he considers, for his new ideas. His 72, done
with a ball out of bounds, establishes the new competitive record for
the course.--~The Editor.~

Golf and brains do not seem to assimilate. That the brains of the country are at work on this problem is amply proved by the membership-lists of the various country clubs. The handicap-lists and scores turned in by these brainy men are further evidence that golf and brains do not assimilate. The scores seem to indicate that there is a direct relation between the amount of brains used and the amount of strokes used in making a round of the course. The more brains, the more strokes.

When I try to find the cause of this state of affairs, these intellectual giants with whom I talk modestly inform me that “Golf is mental,” and they admit that the subtle mystery has thus far eluded them; but I can tell from what they leave unsaid rather than from what they voice just how determined they are to master this wonderful mentality which permeates the game of golf, and I can almost imagine their speech of dedication as they consecrate themselves to this great end.

In my own case, I have recently made a very curious discovery and have imparted the secret to a number of my friends, who have urged me to pass the word along.

It is that good golf is played through the lower nerve-centers and motor channels, while poor golf is due to the direct interference of the brain, or consciousness.

In other words, the more I succeed in eliminating the mental or thinking part of golf, and the more I depend upon the muscular sense, the better my golf has become.

Shortly after the account of Maria Montessori’s work in the “children’s houses” in Rome was published, I obtained a copy of the book, and from it received a suggestion that led me to apply the idea to golf, with the result that my game has been revolutionized, and I have tried the idea upon others with considerable success.

To explain my application of the principle, I must call attention to the Montessori method of teaching handwriting. The usual method of schools has been to place before a child a written letter, give the child a pen, and tell him to copy the letter. Unaccustomed to holding a pen, and totally unfamiliar with the outlines of the letter he is directed to copy, the child holds the pen in a vise-like grip, and with unnecessary muscular exertion moves slowly through a series of mechanical strokes until at last he has produced a crude representation of the original. The Montessori method, on the other hand, is to give to the child a fairly large model of the letter cut out of sandpaper and pasted on a smooth surface. Over these outlines the child is made to pass his finger, at first slowly, but gradually with more lightness and speed until he has become thoroughly familiar with the movements necessary to reproduce the letter. With a pencil-like stick he is then taught to touch the outlines in the same manner, until his sense of touch has become so thoroughly educated to the “feel” of the letter that spontaneously he discovers that he can reproduce it without the model.

“Tracing the letter,” explains Dr. Montessori, “in the fashion of writing begins the muscular education which prepares for writing.... The child who looks, recognizes, and touches the letter in the manner of writing, prepares himself simultaneously for reading and writing. Touching the letters, and looking at them at the same time, fixes the image more quickly through the coöperation of the senses. Later, the two facts separate; looking becomes reading, and touching becomes writing.”

This suggested to me that the method most used for playing golf followed the method of the old-fashioned system of writing, wherein the child, seeing the letter A, for instance, has a preconceived idea of the motions necessary to make it, and his mind forces his muscles step by step in a cramped and painstaking way to go through certain predetermined movements. This was exactly my scheme in playing golf, and I know from observation that it is the scheme of many other golfers. There is neither freedom nor spontaneity, because the mind controls and dominates each muscular movement necessary in making the swing.

If I were to describe the reason why the majority of players do this, I should say that it is due to their placing more reliance in their sense of vision than on their sense of feeling. One cannot see the correct timing of a stroke, but he can feel it.

My former method was to figure out how everything should “look” when I addressed the ball, and my present method is absolutely to ignore what it looks like, and depend entirely upon what it “feels” like.

If I depend upon what things look like in the address, I “set” some of my muscles in such and such a way to accommodate this preconceived notion. If I depend upon how it feels, I have to relax more and more of my muscles, or I am aware of the resistance one set offers to another.

In the light of my new method, the matter of true balance and poise will assume the importance it deserves because in the preliminary “waggle” of the club, which is generally done with the hands and arms alone, the body being held rigid, the muscles of the body will have to be relaxed in order that one may feel out the correct positions. This has been my own experience, and I think that if consideration be given the fact that the actual stroke is delivered with all the muscles in action, the nearer the player reproduces the actual conditions in his preliminary waggle, the better chance he will have to bring off the shot. If the muscles are “set,” with the idea of “aiming,” so to speak, with everything in repose in the address, it can hardly be called a good preliminary of the actual effort.

In order to focus the attention on this phase, I should like to describe the two different plans used by the professional golfer and the amateur.

The professional represents good golf, and his scheme of play is to _feel_ out the correct position _in action_, while the average amateur represents poor golf, and his scheme is to reason out, in a preconceived way, the correct position, with most of his muscles in repose, or set.

To put it more plainly, I should say that the professional, through his sense of feeling, allows his muscles to talk to his mind; while the amateur, through his reason, makes his mind talk to his muscles, or control them. The sense of feeling being the medium the professional uses to arrive at the correct position to make the stroke, he develops free and spontaneous muscular reaction, while the amateur makes a mental plan or picture of what position he should assume for a correct address, and therefore is without freedom or spontaneity. It is death to any free and natural movement.

In addressing his ball the amateur stands rigidly facing it with muscles set, and with careful attention and painstaking deliberation shown in his entire attitude, concentration written on every feature. Gradually he begins a carefully guarded movement of his club away from his ball. Up to the top of his swing he makes this careful, deliberate movement, consciously controlling every change in position, and then when he reaches the top of his swing, he makes a wild, vicious attempt to whack that ball to “kingdom come.” There has not been a single spontaneous muscular act performed. Every movement or muscular reaction has been under his _conscious_ control.

Compare this elaborate, complex scheme with the professional method. He walks up to the ball, and never for an instant is in repose. He takes a glance at the point where he intends to send the ball; then back goes his glance to the ball, and away it goes. There is smooth, easy grace in every movement.

Because the professional has succeeded better is no evidence that he has a superior mind. If it were mind, or golf were a mental game, the amateur should succeed better because he has given more thought to his work.

There is really no mystery in the professional’s success: it is because he has hit his ball truer with no lost motion.

Now, if those golfers who have trouble will stop and consider for a moment the number of things they are thinking of in preparing to strike the ball, they will realize that their effort is decidedly mental; that is, they run over in their minds the things they deem necessary and the positions to be assumed in order to make a successful stroke, while the making of a successful stroke depends upon something they cannot think out at all. It is something they must _feel_ out, and that is the delicate balance and timing of the turn of the wrists, etc. It is in the feel of the correct poise of the body and the correct balance of the club while in motion that they should look for guidance.

When a player has the feel of the balance, he makes the stroke with confidence. When he has lost the touch or feel, all the will power in the world will not give him confidence. His next shot is bound to be an experiment. He is then likely to shift his grip, change his stance, alter his club, or make some other kind of experiment. This is going to focus his attention upon the detail he is trying out, and while he may and generally does make a very intelligent effort to accomplish what he at that moment considers the thing of paramount importance, the ball nevertheless fails to go oft as he desires.

Good golf comes from educating the muscles to the correct feel of the balance of the body and club while in _motion_. This is essentially physical because it is developed while the muscles are in free and spontaneous action. The average amateur spends most of his time educating himself to a stance with the muscles in _repose_ and the mind in _action_. His swing is then made without his getting the preliminary feel cultivated by the professional. This scheme is therefore decidedly mental.

In devoting the attention first to this detail and then to that, it is evident that the mind is giving an amount of conscious attention to the details out of all proportion to their importance, and a player is thus very apt to neglect the most vital point of all--the feel of the correct balance in the preliminary waggle.

The professional really generalizes, and leaves all the finer details of the swing to his subconsciousness to interpret correctly. The young lad just taking up the game does the same.

It has come home to me that many of the things in golf that I have been in the habit of accepting as gospel are in reality pure nonsense. From careful analysis of my own game and by observing other players, I know that more shots are missed from “stiffening up” than from “looking up.” Also, those players cannot help looking up who stiffen up, as the saying is. The stiffening up is an inhibition or restraint by the sense of feeling. The reason that this inhibition occurs is due to the fact that the player becomes aware through the sense of feeling, without reasoning it out, that he is not going to hit his ball. If it were not so, there would never be any slicing, because players would not pull in their hands in order to connect with the ball. This is a sense reaction pure and simple, and although I may not be able to show this clearly to all at the start, one may be sure that players can plan and calculate all they desire and stand rigidly facing the ball in their own way, yet when they get in action and are in the act of delivering the blow, the sense of feeling, hitherto neglected, is going to reign supreme and govern the accuracy of the effort.

William James says: “Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.... Habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate, and diminishes fatigue.” In another work he says, “The more we exercise ourselves at anything, the fewer muscles we employ.”

The habits which are formed in golf, as in everything else in life in which either the mind or muscles are exercised, tend to become fixed, and therefore are difficult to change. Dr. Carpenter very aptly says, “We find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been accustomed to think, feel, or do under like circumstances without any consciously formed purpose or anticipation of results.” The rigid, fixed address of the average amateur is the hardest thing to change but it is no benefit, indeed is a decided hindrance, because it results in the player setting his muscles to accommodate his position in the address to a preconceived attitude.

In working out this idea on a number of my friends, I have found that waggling the club and twisting the body in the address are of great help, because they accomplish one thing of vital importance, and that is the relaxing of the various muscles of the body, which all golfers admit is wise. This is one thing, then, which we can readily see is progress. This, as a habit, is a very desirable one to acquire. The next thing it accomplishes is to educate a greater number of the muscles to the feel of the balance and poise of the body while in _motion_, instead of in _repose_. This is one step in sense education. The next is that, as the player is bringing more and more of his muscles into play, he learns to use some of these muscles which have never before entered properly into the delivery of the blow. The point where I find those players upon whom I have tried out the idea drift away from the benefit derived from an address in motion instead of an address in repose is that they will drift back to setting themselves when they put the club down behind the ball. It looks to them like a careless way of playing. It would be a careless way if it were done without an object. The object is to get the feel. The feel is no mysterious force or formula which will put a great strain upon the intellect, and, as a matter of fact, the attention need not be focused upon it at all. It takes care of itself, without one’s giving thought to it. It is a simple thing to learn to keep one’s balance while in motion, with the club making any sort of pendulum motion. The only thing about it is to do it, and the only thing to think about is to keep the head still while doing it. The ability to keep the head still at such times will gradually improve, because the player is acquiring the habit while in motion. The hardest part of it all is to eradicate from one’s mind all preconceived ideas of what he has been in the habit of believing is necessary to bring off the stroke. In my own case, I think of nothing. I ignore all my former idea of angles, etc., and how everything should look, and just waggle my club to get things loosened up. I do not think of the line, I do not think of the distance, but just look at the ball in an easy, superficial way, and as soon as I feel all my muscles are free and working, I make the stroke. If I feel any muscles setting, I make another waggle to “loosen,” and then swing at the ball.

I have noticed in trying out this idea upon my friends that they learn to waggle fairly well, but do not seem to grasp the importance of getting the gentle play of the body into the preliminary waggle. Through habit they feel they must do the waggling with the club while the secret of the greatest benefit is to get the preliminary feel as well distributed over all the muscles of the body as possible. If this is done successfully, the player will use those muscles which he has just exercised, and will not have to make so great a conscious effort with one set of muscles which he has been keeping in action to overcome another set which he has been keeping in repose.

The point to remember is that skill is acquired gradually by any method, and the player can confidently hope to make progress every month through sense education. The majority of players fail to become as skilful as it is well within their ability to become because they kill off any chance of learning or make it extremely difficult to learn by making a mental process of golf instead of a physical exercise. The brains should be in the finger-tips and muscles.

T. TEMBAROM

BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

Author of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.

WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN