Chapter XIV

THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES.

"When we were in Madrid----" I have sometimes begun in conversation, and then invariably from one or more in the company there has been a quick interruption with--"But there can be no golf in Madrid! You do not go to Spain for golf!" But one who knows may answer that there is as good reason to go there for it as to most other places out of Britain, that in different parts of Spain there is fair golf to be had, that in Madrid there is a new course which is excellent and embraces some of the prettiest holes we would ever wish to play after passing by the Pyrenees, and that I have found there Spanish gentlemen to play with who have been among the happiest and most agreeable companions and opponents I have encountered. In a reflection upon my own experiences I dare to say that I would recommend a doubtful stranger to go to Spain only if he is a golfer, for by the agency of the game will the life and facts of the country be best presented to him, and mysteries be explained. The magic passport of golf is indispensable in all such circumstances. The truth is that it was golf that led me to Spain on my second visit to the country, and I had then one of the most interesting and instructive holidays I have had in my travelling life, during which I had the opportunity of seeing something of the inside of Spanish life and government, of discovering truth about the forces that work in the regeneration of this old country, for really an awakening is taking place, and one dares to say the firm establishment of golf is a symbol of it. I had some interesting conversations with the Count Romanones, who was then the Prime Minister, with his brother, who is the Duke of Tovar, a man of broad sympathies who takes a leading part in many social movements of high importance in Madrid, and with other persons of much importance. These talks, with the open sight of all that was passing in Madrid, made a deep impression.

"You are a golfer, and we of Spain may give you some good golf to play!" said the Prime Minister cordially when by invitation I called upon him at his palace in the Paseo de la Castellana. He is a man of forcible appearance and manner. The face is thin, and its lines of character are strong--cold and strong. The aquiline features have something of Spanish--no Italian--fierceness about them, and the Count makes a piercing look which is considered discomforting to nervous strangers. But he is a very attractive companion in talk; his verve, his vivacity are wonderful. When discussing a subject in which he is interested his whole being becomes aflame; eyes sparkle and features quiver; he beats his fingers in the palms of his hands; he leans over towards you and gesticulates like an artist in enthusiasm. A man of hot nervous energy, one of keen purpose and determination is this statesman of Spain. He suggested that the new sports of his country were symbolic of her great awakening, of which he said he would talk to me that I might tell others what Spain is now and what she would be. "Europe does not understand my country," he remarked, "True, there has been little occasion to understand her. But a change occurs. Spain at this moment is passing through a most remarkable process of transition. You are right in a suggestion you have made to me; unsuccessful wars do not cause interminable loss and disasters. The war with the United States was not all bad for Spain. We may have lost Cuba, but the development that has taken place since then in our country at home, in its agriculture and its mining, and again in its healthy natural feeling, has been enormous, and is a good substitute for many islands." And then he went on in a deeply interesting conversation to tell me of the great awakening of Spain indicated in many different ways, and of all her political, social, and other ambitions.

The Duke of Tovar, who is also coming to take an interest in the golf of Spain, smoked his cigar on a divan in his palace, and a Moorish boy brought coffee to us. The Duke travels much, and brings things and people back with him. I see that he has been an ambassador-extraordinary to the Pope of Rome and has received the most gracious papal thanks. A little of a statesman, he is much of an artist, and a marble bust of Alfonso _rex_, his own sculpture, casts a shadow beside us. In innumerable ways this Spanish nobleman associates himself with the life of the people, goes among them, attends their meetings, and he began telling me that one of the secrets of the new Spain was the important fact of the nobles taking to business, becoming the promoters and managers of industrial companies, as they were. He told me of dukes who were doing things. One of the new movements, in which he has assisted to his utmost and thoroughly believes in, is the boy scout movement, which has caught on like wildfire in Madrid. Three thousand Spanish boys were enrolled within a few weeks of the establishment of the system in the city, and the Duke became a president of a section. All class distinctions are avoided in this matter. "My son is going with the son of the porter," said the Duke of Tovar. And he most certainly believed in golf for the people, and would tell me stories of its beginning and its development.

As to Madrid, never was such a quick transformation accomplished in any city of the world, save when 'Frisco perished and was made again, as is being done here in the city on the plateau of Castile. The Spaniards having decided on the regeneration of their country and on persuading foreigners to come to it, have determined they must have a capital befitting a first-class power. The result is that Madrid is being torn to pieces and rebuilt. Everywhere there is a fever of building raging. Think of it: but three years ago and there was not a single first-class hotel in Madrid; now there are two fine ones. The Alcala, where the Madrilenos stroll and mount up the hill to the Puerta del Sol, the great bare square where the idlers lounge, where the bull-fighting papers are sold, where there are many offices for the sale of lottery tickets, where there are cafes and yellow tramcars (run by Belgian companies, if you please!) and much life but no gaiety until very late at night, is soon to be deposed from being chief street of Madrid, for they are making a new ideal street, very wide and one mile long, which is cut straight through the heart of the city and is to be called the Gran Via when it is done. Millions and millions of pesetas' worth of property have been demolished to allow for the straightness of this street, which is to ask for comparison with a part of the Fifth Avenue across the water. Thirty-seven millions of pesetas were lately voted by the Municipal Council for the removal of the cobble stones of Madrid, their places to be taken by asphalte and wood. The cobbles of Madrid are picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London, walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of Providence. But the cobbles are not convenient. They are seldom repaired, and even in such a spacious public place as the Prado, which is a kind of Hyde Park Corner, there are sometimes deep holes which fill with water when it rains and make such pools as ducks might like and dogs would drink, but which take a leg of mine some way upwards to the knee when the night is dark. There was an old Madrid of which trills of love and passion have been sung. Fevered lovers sang to ladies whose lips were red, and whose skin was dark, as their hearts were gay--voluptuous women. Guitars and flowers; blood and life. That Madrid has nearly passed away. A few steep and narrow streets and some dirty open spaces, with little of the delicate charm of age to recommend them, are most of what is left of it in a quarter near to the royal palace. The city of later times, the Madrid of to-day, is already and quickly giving way to a third Madrid which will soon be made.

In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour, all dirt and laziness, it was no place for games like this. Bicycles were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second Madrids, athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement. There are many football clubs; there is a national cup competition and the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination for strong, healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the Madrilenos to see this one in the working. Already they have courses, nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the municipal authorities assured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving their attention to the establishment of a municipal golf course. It will be the first municipal golf course on the continent of Europe.

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Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile, land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid comes now to be possessed of such a first-class course as might be the envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city Senor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home, while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was waiting. Senor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado, and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born. Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a seven enough to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf, and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa Cruz, and there was the Senor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch, and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that is not because it is fashionable, and it is not only because the King has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of a Spanish nobleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top in one (the gods may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was--"the thing of all others that we needed," so they say.

This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it now, marks the transition period of Spanish golf. It is not the primeval course of the hippodrome, but one which was made in 1907 at a place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it. And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well for the early Spanish golfers.

One of the curiosities of the course is the putting green at the eleventh hole, which is quite round and is surrounded by an evenly shaped earthen rampart. On seeing it for the first time the average Englishman observes to the Spaniard who is with him, "How like a bull-ring!" The remark is justifiable and it seems appropriate; but the Spanish gentleman has heard it many times. Playing the bull-ring hole is a satisfying experience, most exceedingly contenting. We play what we shall consider a perfect approach shot to our Plaza de Toros hole. The ball is pitched into the ring just over the near side of the barricade. A big bound and it is by the hole side, a smaller skip and it is away to the other side of the circle, and then there is one nervous little jump up towards that enclosing height. The perplexed ball seems in our fancy to claw up the steep slope, which is about four or five feet high; it nearly reaches the top. We, the player, feel a little pitter-patter in the heart. Is that little white bull of a ball of ours going to get over the fence and spoil the thing? It should not; we pitched him as nicely as human skill could ever pitch. He is vicious; but he is spent. The gay life which he had at the beginning of the stroke is flickering out. He cannot escape. Our cuadrilla of one, the little Spanish lad with the bag of clubs, advances and hands the putter, taking back the mashie which has done its business. The ball comes trickling back from the bank--back and back, and it comes on to within some seven or eight feet of the side of the hole. Then it falters and stops, done for. Meanwhile there is another white bull of a ball only four feet away; this also had come back from the bank, but a little more. I, as an espada, take my steel putter for the finishing touch. I see the line, I have the momentary hesitation, the nerves are tightened, and then I make the stroke, and happily it is a good one. The ball has gone down. In truth both balls go down, and "Four, senor!" and "Four--a half, _amigo_!" and the play to the eleventh hole of old Madrid is done. Even if there is a slope to the hole and there is the bull-ring rampart round it, we say that a four at this piece of golf is good. We also argue out that bull-ring with our consciences. I have seen nothing like it. It was clearly the object of those who made it to pen the ball up towards the hole, to make the golf a little easier, for it was found to be hard enough (as you and I have found it hard enough at home) to catch the ball and keep it and lead it to its hole. This hole, the rampart, seems to be a concession to the frail humanity of man. Conscience murmurs chidingly, "You know, you English golfer, that you should never have been so near to that Spanish pin! You should have been bunkered, my friend, perhaps badly bunkered, beyond the green!" But being in Spain, and doing as Spaniards do, we are a little independent, have a freedom of idea, and with some peevishness of manner, an arrogance, a way as of telling conscience to attend its other business and get back to London--where in some places they do place bunkers and hills upon the greens to keep the golfer, as it seems, from holing out at all--I retort, "I played a good shot anyhow; I only just pitched over the bull-ring fence; I pitched the ball up high and let it drop straight down, and cut every leg from it that it ever had. No man could do better with the ground so hard. It was right that the ball should come back."

I shall hope that with their attachment to a new love that is so beautiful and good, the Spaniards will not give up their old course here that has served them faithfully and brought on their game. Besides, it is a course that is pretty in its situation. Away beyond, many miles away, are those snow-topped Guadarrama Mountains, fine rough things. Though it was March, and untruths are told about the wickedness of the Spanish climate, we lunched with Senora Elena de Potestad in the open outside the club-house in warm sunshine glistening on a pretty scene. Senora Elena is quite the best lady golfer of Spain; but writing the truth as she told it, the charming wife of my friend is not Spanish, but is a Russian lady from Khieff. I suspect her of being the best Russian lady golfer and the best Spanish too; it is curious. She has done the first nine holes here at Madrid in something less than bogey. Next to her on the championship list is the Marquesa de Alamoncid de los Oteros, six strokes behind. Queen Victoria sometimes plays, and I have seen that extremely popular lady of Spain, the Infanta Isabella, golfing here with the professional and a maid of honour. The game is doing well with the ladies of the peninsula; they like it. I had a gentle argument with the Senora Elena, who seemed a little doubtful whether golf were quite a ladies' game, for all her own skill and love for it. She pleaded the other feminine occupations and interests, even the distractions, and the difficulty of surrendering to the tyranny of golf. In her view it seemed to be of the ladies' life a thing apart, while we have known it to be a man's complete existence.

As our speedy car skimmed the road on the way back to Madrid that night, Senor Fabricio would talk of the good influence of the game, and the special benefits that it might and did confer upon his hopeful countrymen. "Twelve years ago," he reflected, "I might meet all my friends at the corrida. All were for the bull fight--and the ladies too. But now--if I went myself, as I do not--I should see none. They are all for golf. At my club in Madrid we say one to another about the time of lunch, 'Do you go to golf this afternoon?' It used to be, 'I suppose you go to the corrida, eh?'" One thinks and wonders.

I took tea in the lounge at the Ritz, and gossiped with a man who had just come along from Portugal and told me of some exciting times they had been having there. They had decided on having more golf, and were about to make a municipal matter of it near Lisbon. Hitherto, as I knew, they had had only one golf course in the whole country, and that was at a place called Espinho, some eleven miles out from Oporto, and it was said that bulls intended for the fights were fed up there and did their roaming exercise on this course. It is not a comfortable idea. The new course is out at Belem on the banks of the Tagus near to Lisbon, and this is the exact place at which Vasco de Gama landed on returning from his greatest voyage of discovery. It is an eighteen-holes course; it has been well planned; and much money is being spent on it. The Portuguese having started a new form of government and begun a new national life--as they hope--have come quickly to the conclusion that they need golf and much of it, for already a second course for Lisbon is being arranged, and there are to be others in different parts of the country. If King Manoel goes back, he will be prepared for them, for he has cultivated a fair game at Richmond.

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In the evening we went to stroll among the cafes of Madrid, and presently peered into the old parts of the city, where life is simple and strong, where the humbler Madrilenos resort, and there are dancing entertainments of a strange kind. On a little stage there is some jingling music worked out from a bad piano, and a troupe of girls with some gypsies among them will make a dance that, for all its art and all its naivete, is somewhat coarse. Other girls will sit round them in a semicircle and keep up a kind of barbarous wail, occasionally bursting into a mock shout of approval. A song will follow, and a chorus with it, and by and by the entertainers will descend and drink wine with the people in the cafe, and all this will continue until the night is very late. But out in the Puerta del Sol the lights are bright and there is more gaiety than there has ever been. So we wandering golfers, reckless of the game of the day that follows (after all we are to give a bagful of strokes to these Spaniards and can beat them yet--but not always, one remembers), turn in to one of the music halls which have three shows a night, the third beginning at midnight, and we see La Argentinita dance, see the rumba done. Then down the Alcala and over the Prado home. We shall insist that this is a part of our golf in old Madrid; it is not the conventional golfing holiday, as I try to show. Another day we will run out for many miles to El Escorial (thanking the Duke of Tovar for the offer of his car) and ruminate in this most sombre architectural creation of the great Philip--palace, monastery and tomb in one--and another day out to Toledo, a grand dead city of a long past of many phases and eras, a mummified city it seems to be, with halls and places that look sometimes as if they had but just been left by the rich grand caballeros of the time when Spain was great. You can nearly see their ghosts, gay in satins and crimson silks, leaning over flowered balconies, singing, kissing, laughing, and always living.

I dislike the corrida. It is horrible. Its time has gone. I had enough of it once when south at Algeciras. But a Spanish golfing companion said that it was a very special day, and for the experience, and as a matter of being guest, I should go. There were eight bulls done instead of six, and horses in proportion, and a county councillor of Madrid took us behind all the scenes, into the hospital, into the matador's chapel, and explained everything. He was a courteous gentleman. He said they would have golf in Madrid, that the corrida would leave in time, but for the present the people must have the corrida. It takes time to make great changes, he said, even in Madrid--where it does take more time for movements than anywhere else. But the point of this reference is the harsh contrast that is indicated--our peaceful game of golf in which nothing is killed, no blood spilled, nobody hurt, and yet, as we think, the greatest, fullest sport of all, stirring the emotions better than any corrida in Madrid or Barcelona, and this awful feast of blood and death. I have seen golf in many places, but never in one where its setting seemed so utterly impossible as here. And yet golf in Madrid is strengthening, and by ever so little the corrida, so they tell me, is weakening. That the game can begin and can hold and grow in such a place is surely the utmost testimony of its power. Games like golf have some work to do in Spain. It is because of such considerations, because of the extraordinary environment in which this peaceful, excellent sport is set, that I have found golf in Madrid such a remarkable and interesting study, and have dwelt upon it and provoked the contrasts when I might.

See contrast now again, yet more wonderful. The next morning broke bright and blue, and Senor Fabricio was round betimes in the Prado with his car. We were to go to the new course that day. We sped away on the Corunna road for some four or five miles from Madrid, and then turned up towards the higher land. All this was King's land; El Pardo it is called. Here is the new golf course of Madrid, which takes the place in the Spanish golfers' hearts and plans of the other one of which I have already written, that with the bull-ring hole. This of El Pardo is part of a great new sporting establishment, embracing a magnificent polo ground, tennis courts, and all the advantages and appurtenances of a thorough country club in the manner of those which began in America and have since been copied in England, and more recently at Saint-Cloud near Paris.

Considered in some ways 1 am a little disposed to count this new golf course of Madrid as the eighth or ninth wonder of the whole golfing world, just as the Spaniards themselves set up a claim for El Escorial to be ranked as the eighth of the world at large. There are sound reasons for the nomination. I have shown that it might well have been held that the Spanish people's character and dispositions were a soil in which no good game might grow, and yet that it was being urged and proved that there was a great process of regeneration going on and that golf indeed had been given a very good start. Now we come to the astonishing climax for the time being in this little story of contrasts. Here, if you please, at El Pardo on the estates of Don Alfonso is just one of the nicest, best, and most interesting courses for golf on which the excellent game might ever be played. It is quite new and it is most thoroughly up to date. It is a course of which good clubs in Britain might be exceedingly proud. You and I would be glad to play there nearly always, and we should have little fault to find. When I was there it was only just being finished. Its history is a nice romance. The golfers of Spain had risen to that state when they felt they needed something better for the improvement and the enjoyment of their play than the rough primitive course with the bull-ring hole which had ceased to satisfy their needs and tastes. They were restive. Came Don Alfonso to their comfort and their happiness. At El Pardo was the ideal golfing land--wide undulating sweeps of lovely country, majestic undulations, grand environment, with the splendid Guadarramas in full view. It was a scene sublime. The land was wooded, trees would have to be felled, the ploughshare would have heavy work to do; but that is how courses are made to-day. Not in Don Alfonso's power was it to give the ground outright, but he passed it to the golfers for a nominal rent of a thousand pesetas a year, which, being converted to English reckoning, would be some L37. There was land for the polo and the tennis hard by. Estimates were procured, and it was discovered that to do the work of felling and ploughing, sowing and construction, building and finishing, a sum of just about twenty-two thousand pounds in English money would be needed, and most of the money would go to England too. Then with zest the golfers and other sportsmen of Madrid came forward, each one subscribed according to his means and ability, and in a very little while all that great fund of money was obtained, and it was in the bank before the work was started. That was a splendid achievement; the golf of Madrid deserves to prosper now.

It was determined that with such a beginning everything should be done most thoroughly afterwards. Thousands of trees had to be cut down, the ground cleared, ploughed, and raked, and the putting greens sown. On hardly any course in any country has the work of construction been done more thoroughly. Then Mr. Harry Colt was brought from England to design the holes, and he gave of some of his most cunning, most artistic work, having a fine field for his quick imagination. The result is eighteen holes as good and rich as Spanish holes need be. Some of the short ones are as good short holes as I have seen. One with the green on a hog's back, the seventh, is a most appetising thing. At the third there is a quick slope on the left of the green and the approach is one of those twisty things that are a strong feature of the Coltian style of architecture, demanding a skill and calculation from the player that many bunkers would not exact. There is a dog-leg hole for the fifth that leads to a green partly framed in a corner of trees. Parts of Spain are treeless, the great plain above which Madrid is placed, the long lone sweep of land that you look down upon from the palace, down to the Manzanares and beyond to a far horizon, is one of the most desolate countries that my eyes have seen. But here at El Pardo there are trees enough. Chestnuts and cork are everywhere, and the course has a look of our sweet Sunningdale at home. Harrows, rakes, and spades have done their work most wondrous well, and the nicest gradients have been given to the putting greens. But there is something even more remarkable still that has been done. Make it as you would, tend it as you might, but if Nature were to be depended upon the loveliest course in all Spain would have to perish, for the climate forbids. So the climate had to be foiled. Water was needed, water everywhere, water always, always. The Madrid golfers, wise beyond all British example, determined they would have their water at the very beginning of things. Some way distant there was a river or canal, and it was tapped for their supply. Great cemented aqueducts were built to carry it across valleys; it was piped through hills. The water in abundance was brought up here to the course; and it was laid on to every teeing ground and putting green and to the entire fairway so that everywhere, always, the water should be poured on, the fine grass that grows should be kept always green, and the turf, which is of full sandy kind, should be always golf-like and moist. That was a splendid achievement. I enjoyed the round of the new course, delighted in a pretty valley hole towards the end, and admired the enterprise of the Spanish golfers exceedingly. They have golf in Madrid. As the express climbed with me upwards back to France I reflected again on these wild contrasts, and the struggle for light by Spain.

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As a pursuit golf differs from all others in that there is no exclusively right way and no utterly wrong way of doing anything connected with it. Those engaged with it are constantly, to use their own expression, finding out what they are "doing wrong," and then with great eagerness and activity and newly revived hope are setting forth to repair their errors and place their game upon a new foundation. Yet despite this eternal discovery of faults and remedies, only a little is ever found out of the full truth that is hidden somewhere, by even the very best of players, and herein lies the consolation of the humbler people in that, if they know little, their superiors, being champions, know only a little more compared with all that there is to be known. Thus upon every disappointment an encouragement ensues. If these points are considered it will appear that there are deep truths in them, while at the same time they convey morals and point the way to a betterment of one's game. And the most important point is that there is no one exclusively correct way of doing anything, and this, with all the circumstances surrounding the proposition, leads us inevitably to the conclusion that this is no game for narrow-minded and conventional people, who would always do as others do, and have not the will to exercise their own convictions which, along with their admiration for some of the tenets of the political party to which they do not belong, are stifled in their consciences and put away. Golf is indeed a game for extensive individualism, for the free exercise of convictions and for continual groping along unknown channels of investigation in search of the truth. Those who do not investigate and explore in this way miss a full three-fourths of the intellectual joy of this pastime. And the investigators must have the courage to reject things of information that are offered to them, even when conveyed with the very highest testimonials for their efficacy from the best champions of home and foreign countries, while at the same time they should have the will to put into exercise even the most fantastic scheme of their own imagination.

All dogmatic teaching in golf is wrong. There are two or three essential principles as we have called them--the keeping of the still head, the fixed centre in the body, the eye on the ball, and such like--which must be obeyed under the certain penalty of failure, because these might be said to be the laws of Nature as applied to golf, and have nothing to do with the eccentricities of human method. But, these being properly respected, there are innumerable ways of building upon them structures of golf which, in the goodness of results in the matter of getting threes and fours and winning the holes, are much the same at the finish. One of the structures may be precise, another may be plain, a third may be ornate, and a fourth may be rough and vulgar. Yet in efficiency and in results they may be just the same, and in most cases the man is led to his style of golf building largely by his own temperamental case. So long as the essential principles are observed in each case, being the same always but kept hidden in the recesses of the building, many things may be done that the books do not teach. The books are valuable to the utmost for their suggestions and for bringing the player back to his base, as it were, when he has wandered too far in his explorations, piled theory on theory and got his game into the most hopeless tangle. For corrective purposes they are in this way quite essential. They stand for the conventions and for the middle ways; they enable us to make a fresh start. And the golfer is always making fresh starts. What is the cherished belief of to-day is abandoned next week, the discovery just made and looked upon as solving the last problem that keeps the handicap man away from scratch, is found later to be a temporary convenience only and to be dependent on something else in the system of a highly fleeting and uncertain kind. These beginnings, this starting over again with increased hope, add always to the pleasure.

What players need to remember above all things is that the games of no two men are quite alike, any more than the men themselves are quite alike, and that among the very best the widest dissimilarities exist, that the best game that any man can possibly play is not one copied from others, but that game which is his very own, the one built up on his physical, intellectual, and mental peculiarities. Every man has a game of his own somewhere which is quite different from any other, and that game, when he can play it, will be more effective than any other that he could play. What he has to do, therefore, is to find out that game in all its peculiarities, and this is what the explorer and investigator is constantly trying to achieve. He is finding out the mysteries not of the game in general, as he sometimes imagines, but of his own game, and the more he discovers the better is he as a golfer. Surely there is proof enough of the absolute soundness of this proposition in the fact that the discoveries as they are made, meaning not those which are found later to be worthless, but those which become established in the permanent system and are invaluable, are often absolutely opposite to those made in another case and which become permanent in the same way. Why, even the champions differ more widely than any others--yet one remembers that this should not be a matter of surprise, but something that by this argument is quite inevitable. The champions have been marvellously successful in the mining of their own golfing seams, and that is the chief reason why they are champions. And all this helps to make golf the game it is--the eternal finding out, the progress, with its occasional set-backs, towards the discovery, the completion of the golfing self. I have only met one man in my life who has golfed and never found anything out, and that was Mr. John Burns, the Minister of State, who assured me that once in the old days of the Tooting Bec course he was persuaded by a number of political persons to go with them to play the game there one day. He had never handled a golf club in his life, but having some practical knowledge of cricket, felt that golf could not offer any serious hindrance to him. Consequently he agreed to take his part in a foursome, and in the progress of this match usually drove the best ball, with the result that his side was well victorious. There seemed nothing in his game that needed improvement. Herein we observe Mr. Burns displayed many of the qualities of the highest statesmanship, but he rose majestically in his determination that from that day he would never play golf again, much as he liked it, and he never has. He has these three distinctions--that he has played golf once and once only in his life; that being a golfer, as all are who are once initiated, he has never lost a match; and that he has never found anything out. I shall hope to be present at the second game he plays, the resolution having broken down, and then we shall see discoveries made.

But once again, "Golfer, know thyself" is the supreme moral drawn from the experiences of the players who have golfed and studied most. Every golfer worth the name has found out hundreds of things and hopes to find many more; some of them are quite different from any of the other things that have been found out; he has his own private collection, and in it almost any person might find something that might with a little alteration be added to his own. So I remember that when we came up out of Spain, where the golfers are in that happy state that they have at this present stage almost more to discover than any other golfers in the world, a new spring season was beginning in the homeland of the game and all players were looking over their stock of knowledge and seeing what they had found out in the most recent times. It occurred to me then to send out a demand to a number of good players whom I knew for their enthusiasm, for their individualism and their strength of mind, and for their conscientious investigations, and ask them what they had lately discovered in an original kind of way which had beyond question materially improved their game. The answers were enlightening, and some of them, which I may quote, are worth pondering upon. One of the best players of my acquaintance sent to say that he had made a discovery, which, applied as a resolution, had done him more good than any other half-dozen he had ever thought of. The essence of the new idea was that on the teeing ground especially, and when approaching his ball through the green, he would see to it that the stepping of the feet, the movements of the arms, hands--everything involving action--should be as slow and deliberate as possible, even the very speech itself, for the reason that this slow sureness created an irresistible tendency in the golfing action that was to follow, the back-swing was then slow and deliberate, and the whole movement was harmonious and precise. The probable value of this idea is suggested by the fact that the man who is slow and deliberate in his waggling--not meaning one who prolongs it unduly or does it in a hesitating way--generally does his swinging better. Another player said the best discovery he had ever made was the idea of imagining his weight during upswinging to be on his left foot without really throwing it there, at the same time holding his legs a little more stiffly than had been his wont and keeping his heels on the ground as long as he could. By these things, which could all be grasped in the one general idea of making himself conscious of his legs all the time, he has come by a firmness and steadiness of system that have added enormously to his driving capacity; in fact, it has converted him from being a man who could not drive at all to a very good driver indeed.

I remember that once I was watching Taylor teaching a scratch man and giving him hints for curing some considerable cutting and slicing to which he was addicted. The champion turned round to us and said that one of them was the best tip he had ever suggested in his life. It is the simplest thing. In addressing the ball he would have the patient turn over the face of the driver until that face is positively hanging over from the top, pointing to the turf, at such a fearsome angle--no limit to it--as to make it seem impossible to do anything but smother the ball when coming down on to it. The back-swing has to be begun with the face in this threatening situation. The truth is that the nervous fear that it inspires is the secret of the success of the method. The man believes that if he comes down on to the ball like that there will be a horrible disaster, and all the time in the down-swing he is subconsciously (another to that long list of most important subconscious movements) making corrections and allowances, and his wrists are doing a twist to get the club right by the time of impact. It is this wrist action, with the left hand managing it, that is wanted, and the arm action that it induces. The club reaches the ball properly, and the ball goes off without a slice. If sometimes it is smothered it does not matter; the cure will take effect in time. But, you say, you do not want to go on for ever addressing the ball in this seemingly grotesque way. No; but, again subconsciously, when the ball is being hit and driven properly and the arm and wrist action become natural, there is a sure tendency towards a settling down to normal ways, and without the man bothering about it any more the club will gradually get itself straight.