The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
There is another form of impressing the truth, and testifying to it,
and doing good by it, which is the dogmatic assertion of truth by the
old and the experienced and the revered, to the young. It is out of
fashion; it is invaluable. I can myself testify to two such experiences
which stand out supreme among many hundreds in my own early life. I am
afraid they may seem trivial to my readers; I can only say that for
myself they were as strong experiences as any great joy or pain could
be. One was a sentence which Cardinal Manning said to me when I was but
twenty years old. The other was one which the Master of my College, Dr.
Jowett, of Balliol, said to me when I was twenty-two years old.
The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: _All
human conflict is ultimately theological._
It was my custom during my first days in London, as a very young man,
before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he
would receive me; and during those brief interviews I heard from him
many things which I have had later occasion to test by the experience
of human life. I was, it may be said, too young to judge things so
deep as sanctity and wisdom; but, on the other hand, youth has vision,
especially upon elemental things; and Manning did seem to me (and still
seems to me) much the greatest Englishman of his time. He was certainly
the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who,
in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, preëminent in
will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept
the Faith. Not only did his powerful mind discover, but his powerful
will also insisted upon all the difficult consequences of such an
acceptation. He never admitted the possibility of compromise between
Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict,
and gloried in it.
This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered)
_that all human conflict was ultimately theological_, that is that all
wars and revolutions and all decisive struggles between parties of
men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was
utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I
would have almost said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the
idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight:
with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of
history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that
it reached to the very roots of political action, so extended that it
covered the whole.
It is, indeed, a truth which explains and coördinates all one reads of
human action in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. Men
talk of universal peace: it is only obtainable by one common religion.
Men say that all tragedy is the conflict of equal rights. They lie.
All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or of
a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false
rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the
habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that
doctrine is but a private, individual affair, creating a mere opinion.
Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the state; and every
state is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens
is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should
be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine
he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar
foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.
The truth Dr. Jowett gave me came thus. He asked me the political
question which was always uppermost in his mind, and which he believed
all young men should consider. It was, ‘Under what form of government
is the state of man at its best?’ I answered as all young men should
answer, ‘A republic,’ to which he answered gently in his turn, ‘You
cannot have a republic without republicans.’ Now that, for terseness
and truth and a certain quality of _revelation_, was worthy of
Aristotle. It is the full answer, historical and moral, to every honest
man who desires, as most honest men do, democracy, and who wonders why
it is so hard to attain. But I had never considered that answer; and
I think if I had not heard these half-dozen words I might never have
considered it.
Democracy—that is, the government of the community by the community:
a state wherein a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to
suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power:
a state in which office alone commands, and not the being clothed with
office—that is the ideal at the back of every man’s mind who cares
for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left
of private honour. It is simplest put by saying that democracy is the
noblest form of government. But the moment you begin to deal with men,
you find in varying degree, according to the human material handled,
a difficulty in the direction of such an affair. You have experience
of the wickedness and folly of men, and if you add to such growing
experience the vast experience of history, you will find that, save in
some few, and those small, communities, the ideal of democracy must
break down in practice; and that so far from enjoying the noblest of
social conditions, men attempting democracy in great states are soon
suffering the basest forms of control by the rich. That is because most
men, though intimately desiring a republic, are not republicans: when
you have great numbers, those worthy of democracy are few. In the same
way most men, though individually desiring peace within, have not the
control of themselves which makes such peace possible.
So much for the Master’s excellent platitude.
It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things,
should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they
are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came.
To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to
honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well
knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic state;
that even in small states it needs a peculiarly admirable and rare
temper in the human material of them. But this conviction came slowly,
and all started from those few words.
And what has all this to do with the sailing of the sea? Nothing, save
that it is during the sailing of the lonely sea that men most consider
the nature of things.
The day broke long before we were anywhere near Fishguard breakwater.
We must have done, I suppose, ten or twelve miles by the time it was
broad light. Strumble Head kept on flashing, white and inept, under
the daylight, and then went out. When it ceased there was no sign of
land where it had been. Also the wind had fallen sluggish and we were
not making three knots. But such as it was, it was steady; and by
mid-morning we saw all the coast quite plain, and, shortly after, the
low black line of the breakwater which they have built out here to make
their great artificial harbour of Fishguard.
With the wind still falling we drifted rather than ran for the point of
it and crawled in out of the wide sea. Even in that last hour, as we
came in, we began to note a long heave gradually sweeping up out of the
Atlantic through Saint George’s Channel, as though it had wind behind
it; but since it set northeastward it did not affect the calm of the
broad roads within the breakwater. We very slowly crawled to that inner
southern part where boats of our sort could lie without interfering
with the steam monsters, and there, after just twenty-four hours of the
passage across Cardigan Bay, a run of seventy-odd miles, we let go the
anchor, and, tying up our canvas in a very slovenly fashion, we hailed
the shore and got a boat to come out, seeing that I had lost my own
dinghy during the tempest in Bardsey Sound.
The man who came out to us in the boat hailed us as he approached
in the most beautiful English, either because we were now in that
so-called ‘Little England beyond Wales,’ or else because he was indeed
an Englishman, exiled to these parts; or perhaps again he was bilingual
and had acquired this perfect English as a classical and foreign
tongue. It was a privilege and an honour to be rowed ashore by such
a man, for he was free of his conversation and all that he said was
interesting, true, and well put. He warned us against the people of
the place—why I do not know. He told us that where we lay was good
holding-ground, and he gave us in that little trip quite a lot of
useful information about the difficult passages between the islands and
the mainland on the Points of Pembroke which we had to pass on our way
southward. He asked us as we landed an astonishingly small payment for
his services and then he promised to meet us again at a fixed hour to
take us aboard. In all things this man was worthy and a friend, for I
could see in his eyes that he suffered exile.
We came back to him after we had provisioned, clambered aboard, and
made ready for one of those empty days which pass so quickly on board
a boat: hours and hours during which nothing is done, hours which
on shore would exasperate every nerve, but which here, on the soft
movement of the sea, go past as easily as sleep. For time on the water
is quite different from time on land. It is more continuous; it is
more part of the breathing of the world; less mechanical and divided.
There was not a breath of air, so there was no question of starting
again during all those hours. The great rollers outside were now at
last beginning to affect the harbour a little, and the Nona, with her
too high topmast, swung rather heavily to the slight movement; but of
wind not a stir. The falling of the gradual darkness brought on a night
brilliant with stars and no moon. There we lay, sleeping and waking,
smoking, talking a little, vacuous, ready to put up sail with the first
hint of a wind and to get outside. But all that night until morning
again, the calm continued.
How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding
the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man! How admirable
are the great works of man! But greater is God.
In the profound night and the silence I considered that wide space of
shelter and the dyke man had made against the Atlantic Power.
For two hours I so pondered upon our strength and our nothingness,
worshipping also the night until the stars had changed. Then I went
down below and slept. But even with the dawn there came no breeze.
It was about half-past nine in the morning when there did come a
draught from the northwards. There was very little of it; it hardly
crisped the oily, lumping water of the great haven, but such as it was,
we, weary of all this indolence, determined to take advantage of it
and to set sail. So we took up the anchor and very slowly lay close to
that breath of wind until we came to the breakwater ahead, and there we
found the rollers outside large as though they were in the main ocean:
so large that when we sank into their troughs there was no headway on
the boat and the light air only caught her insufficiently upon the
crests. Even as we thus attempted to make some way—lifted hugely up
and down in a solemn sport of the sea, now seeing nothing but water
astern and ahead and then, immediately after, the whole coast and its
heights, and then down into the trough again—the little wind there was
entirely failed us. We drifted aimlessly and in all the futility of
such motion, up and down over the great swells and there even seemed to
be a sort of slight drift. It was, perhaps, only the set of the swell