Spirit of the links

THE AESTHETIC
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As to which of all the schools provides the truest
golf it is hard to say, since few men would agree on
what is the truest golf. But quite likely the links of
the ./Esthetic school would be most frequently men-
tioned in this connection. There has been a subtle
art at work in the planning of every hole. The
architects have taken their patch of land, and,
scorning all convention, have been inspired by great
impulses in the selection and arrangement of the line
of play. They have had moods and caprices, but they
have been men of great genius, born and bred in a
high atmosphere of the game. Like all other men of
great independence of thought and action, they court
and receive severe criticism; but at the end of it all
the greatness, the superbness of the work is admitted,
and its fame will for ever endure. There is character
in it at every glance, but it is not such as is obtrusive,
as at Troon. Here there is the perfect art that
conceals art, and it is a testimony to its perfection
that men go 'on discussing it for ever and ever, just as
they still think and worry over the emotions that
passed through the mind of Hamlet, and are not
all agreed upon them. How many different readings,
as it were, can one not give to a hole at St. Andrews
—almost any hole on the old course. St. Andrews is
the masterpiece of the -
,
Esthetic school—profound,
ingenious, intricate. Here and there we see a little
of the influence of the Heroic school; the Romantic
has had less. But always the AEsthetic school is a
law unto itself, and its finished work is not to be
likened to that of any other. Hoylake is of this
school, though the example is not so pure and
unaffected by the two great rival branches of
architectural art as St. Andrews. Nevertheless it is