Peter:
In discussing or even attemtping to compare Haultain and Behr and particularly the style, subject and intent of their writing about golf and architeture I have basically the same sense I do about the likes of us on here discussing and comparing the time spectrum of architecture or even golf itself----that it should be done (the discussing or comparing of Haultain and Behr) in somewhat the same way and perhaps in the total context of both how and why golf and architecture evolved as it did over a period of time.
So, it's probably so much more important than we today realize to closely analyze how and why golf and architecture evolved from say the time it first left the linksland in mid 19th century to how it evolved around the time the first good courses were built inland and outside Scotland to if or how that event may've affected golf and architecture that was just beginning to take root in America, for instance. These may be only examples of a free flowing but nevertheless interconnected evolution but I think they are very important examples, maybe even watershed examples.
To me it's so important to try to analyze accurately how and why golf and architecture EVOLVED as it did at various times and in various places. What was inspired by what in other words?
If we don't or can't look at it that way it becomes something of a series of seemingly disconnected events in various places in time that seem odd, random or just happenstance to us today so many decades later.
I guess I would never be able to prove it but I have a strong sense that it may've been Haultain's writing just after the turn of the century that inspired Behr to follow Haultain's basic thread and theme about delving into something like the mystery or soul of golf or architecture. Behr went deeper, I think, and apparently much deeper perhaps simply because he wrote app two decades later and by then things had evolved (more like exploded) in all kinds of interesting and perhaps troublesome ways in golf and in architecture.
In some ways Behr seemed to sense that an important age or state of innocence was becoming seriously threatened and perhaps passing into obscurity and that this was a very bad thing---a lose of innocence followed by the corruption of its essence, in fact.
Behr and his compatriots who favored the far more naturalized type of golf and architecture, a more innocent construction, a recreation with a much greater component of the unaduterated natural playing field, appeared to have become very worried about certain things while Haultain at least two decades earlier seemed merely content to sing the praises of what golf (and perhaps golf architect) had come to mean to him and various others during a time of its remarkable mid-evolution out of a place and time wherein it had been locked from outside influences for so many centuries.
Personally, I think we will someday find that the embarkation of golf (and architecture) into INLAND sites around the world was the most important demarcation in the entire evolution of golf and golf architecture. The many at first unknown problems confronted and how they came to be unraveled is really watershed, in my opinion. And not just how but why. I think the very word INLAND will some day become much more important to the understanding of the evolution of golf and architecture than it has ever been before.
When golf (and architecture) first emigrated out of the linksland, the defensive cry of the old linksmen was clearly "Nae links, nae golf" and I think we need to understand better what that meant not only to those old Scot linksmen but even more to those attempting to take it elsewhere in the world and how that pretty startling damnation of golf and architecture elsewhere may've affected and then influenced those elsewhere who strove and eventually succeeded in various ways in doing something about it that was finally deemed to be admirable.
If Haultain and Behr happened to write about golf and golf architecture in the same time and simultaneously, comparing them and their writing would be an entirely different matter but they didn't do that.
The two decades between the writing of Haultain and the writing of Behr and the evolution of various things in golf and architecture in those two decades is essential to know and fully understand, I think, to understand their writing and certianly to attempt to compare and contrast it, and them.