"The very soul of golf shrieks."
This is a well known and much quoted remark from C.B. Macdonald. I'm starting a thread on it because in the last month or so I've come to realize I have always believed he actually said this perhaps twenty years or more before he apparently did. How about the rest of you?
Because I thought he said it around 1906 or perhaps up to ten years earlier I always believed he may've been referring to the type and style of architecture that some of us refer to as "19th century" or "Dark Age" or "Geometric" or "Victorian" or even "Steeplechase"-----a lot of the architecture that preceded Macdonald's NGLA (1906-1910). Most of that earlier MAN_MADE architecture was basically rectilinear.
But it seems to me that Macdonald may've first made this remark and criticism around 1926 to 1928 (because he mentions it in his book "Scotland's Gift Golf" with no quotes from any previous account (including some of his own earlier quoted writing)).
If his remark is just used alone (as it generally is) and taken out of its context it appears the much earlier rectilinear architecture of the late 19th century and early 20th century was not at all what he was referring to as what he felt made "The very soul of golf shriek." It appears the evolving attempts in architecture to depart from that earlier rectilinear architecture, apparently in the teens and '20s was what he was referring to.
Look at the context of his entire remark in his book published in 1928:
"Viewing the monstrosities created on many modern golf courses which are a travesty on Nature, no golfer can but shudder for the soul of golf. It would seem that in this striving after "novelty and innovation," many builders of golf courses believe they are elevating the game. But what a sad contemplation.
Motoring to Southampton, I pass a goodly number of new courses. As I view the putting greens it appears to me they are all built entirely similarly, more or less of a bowl or saucer type, then built up toward the back of the green, and then scalloped with an irregular line of low, waving mounds or hillocks, the putting green for all the world resembling a pie-faced woman with a macel wave. I do not believe any one ever saw in nature anything approaching these home-made putting-greens. Then scattered on the side of the fairway are mounds modeled after haycocks or chocolate-drops. The very soul of golf shrieks."
It appears Macdonald was reacting to the new and modern primarily curvilinear lines of the architecture of the teens and 1920s and not the earlier rectilinear lines of the older 19th century and early 20th century MAN-MADE architecture.
Who, like me, thought he was referring to an architectural type and style that was much earlier, apparently the type and style that was prevalent BEFORE his NGLA and not afterwards?