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
ends by getting men into a state of mind where they can no longer
weigh the proportions of evidence: they can no longer distinguish
between the certain, the probable, and the absurd. Thus, it was but
a little time ago that an Oxford don came out with a miracle. He
said he had discovered any number of classical passages containing
concealed anagrams, furnishing the most astonishing information; for
instance, that Euripides, when he was a little boy, wrote the plays of
Æschylus. A stopper was put on him, however, by a man who wrote to the
‘Spectator’ (of all papers), proving that the said don’s name was but
thinly concealed in an anagram of the opening lines of the ‘Iliad,’ so
that he must have written that excellent poem, not when he was a little
boy, but long before he was born. And so much for that.
Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling
contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over
against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore:
Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore
for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost
incomprehensible to the other. I have sometimes thought that whenever
the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore
will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin
channel) and storm and loot Instow. Pretty well every modern set of
human habitations has this contrast of rich and poor quarters, but when
there is water flowing in between them it is the more striking: with
hard work on one side of the stream and the fruits of it in leisure
upon the other.
My voyage was over. I had brought up in Bideford River before the long
bridge of Bideford, and I made all quiet for the night, and for a long
time to come. For there would I leave the Nona in charge, till I could
take her out again.
Swaying in the cabin that night also, I finished writing the Chanty of
the Nona, of which if any man say that it is a vile piece of verse, I
am ready to agree with him, but if another man say that it heartens
him, and fills him with the sea, why, I am ready to agree with him
also. It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a
place of rest. We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come
into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.
I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much,
after thirty, over literary fame: if it comes, let it come, but for
God’s sake let us have no publicity with it, for to be pointed at and
known is to live in a glass cage. And very much do I applaud those men
who do what in youth I myself desired to do, but was unable to do, that
is, to write consistently under a false name, and carefully cover one’s
tracks. I wanted to write verse under one name, history under another,
travel under another—but fate was too strong.
Of the men who have done this in my time the most successful was
Dodgson, the mathematical don at Christ Church—that is, of The House.
He had calculated well; and the immense fame of Lewis Carroll and of
‘Alice in Wonderland’ left him private and secure.
Mention of that book also makes me consider how false is nearly all
literary fame, or, rather, how great an element of falsity there is in
nearly all such fame. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a very remarkable book,
as are, indeed, other books of Dodgson’s, though not all. But a large
element in its vast diffusion was its consonance with a particular
‘drawing-room’ mood of a particular day. I shall be called blasphemous,
I know, but I am perfectly certain that ‘Alice’ will not long survive
the ease and unquestioned security of the England of her day. For every
implication in morals, and even in humour, with which Dodgson’s books
are crammed, sprang from that security and that ease. Nor is there a
stronger symptom of so abnormal a passage in human affairs as was the
English gentry’s generation of 1833-99 (abnormal, for normal men live
under a strain and a peril, and in active defence against the barbarian
or the menacing enemy) than the delight of Dodgson’s vast audience in
nonsense: in the humour which is founded upon folly as contrasted with
the wit that is founded upon wisdom. Even the facile composition of odd
childish words, which had a slightly reminiscent sound, was sufficient
to delight that generation. But when the terrors and the heroisms
permanently return, the sawdust will run out of such things.
And, after all, what is the possession of literary fame? Can dead men
use it? Does any man possessing it, unless he be asinine in his vanity,
think himself the true creator of some really high line his pen has
happened to set down? Is there any writing man with a true judgment of
great things in writing who does not doubt his own achievement? Or is
there any who, when some particular piece of verse or rhetoric which
he has written convinces him of its merit, does not admit to his own
soul that not _he_ was the true author, but rather some force working
through him?
Again, does not any writer who is also reasonably manly prefer any one
of man’s virtues to an accident of verse or prose? Who with stuff in
him would not rather be a brave boor than a cowardly poet?
So much for literary gents. Excluding my own self, I should like to see
them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea
and there scuttled. Their absurd little quarrels, their posings, their
insufficiency, the chaos of their minds—all these things are a burden,
and there is not one day’s riding upon a horse or sailing upon the sea
(let alone still better things which, for the honour I bear you, I will
not mention here) that is not worth the whole tonnage and shiploads of
their printed stuff, save here and there a piece of lyric verse, or
here and there a good run and rhythm in half a page of prose.
But, I say again, that’s all one. Here am I in Bideford River, at
anchor and come to the end of the seas, leaving her, the Nona, my
companion and my home, my very loyal boat, under the tutelage of the
long bridge of Bideford, which is notoriously the end of the world.
Now a day came when I had some freedom again. So I set out at once from
Devon with one companion, and, finding all on board as I had left it, I
set sail to leave Bideford River. I proposed to myself to explore the
outer sea beyond Hartland, which till then I had not seen, though now I
know its character and its harbours familiarly enough.
The tide so served that it was evening when I set out, nor was it easy
to shoot the channel at the bar of Appledore, in spite of the strong
ebb, because such slight wind as there was had too much north in it.
For the same reason we had to beat all that night, fetching up towards
Hartland Point in two long boards; helped at first by the tide, but
later, of course, finding it against us. It was daylight again before
we came to the headland, and opened the coast beyond.
The ancients made a solemn and special sanctity, it seems, of this
barrenness and strength and height of Hartland. The Romans called it
the Point of Hercules. They felt, I think, that when they rounded it,
they were coming into another sea; for they were much alive to the
mystery of things. If they thought this of Hartland, that it was a
boundary, they were right. Within Hartland, you are under the wing of
England, and in homely water; outside Hartland, you have all the West
before you, and the power of Ocean. And so with us that morning. Even
as the wind died down there came a mighty succession of slow heavings,
which grew more regular and defined until at last the smooth water,
just crisped here and there, by mere breaths of air, ran in giant
folds—parallel, regular, unceasing, enormous. All that sea, I say, is
odd, and I have felt spells upon it.
The long rollers came prodigious out of the southwest under almost
a calm. There was not wind enough to do more than give the boat
steerage-way—it was lucky we had that, for if it had been a dead
calm she would have rolled broadside on and shaken herself badly with
that too tall topmast of hers, as she had done on an earlier day in
the White Horse Race. The rollers came on and on; not the relic of a
gale (for there had been none anywhere), but raised by one of those
innumerable mysterious influences which between them make the sea. They
lifted one after the other, hiding the horizon; we topped them, we
sank into the trough; they heaved majestically on, to thunder upon the
savage grandeur of Hartland.
Our time has discovered so many things in the material world (and has
grown paralysed to so many other more important things) that we profess
to explain everything with perfect links of cause and effect. It is an
occasion to use the phrase ‘We miserable sinners.’ For we shall never
know anything at all compared with the unknown. What makes such waves?
For that matter, why is one sea so different from another? You measure
the amount of salt, the weight of the water, the strength of the wind.
Though you had all the factors we can measure, these three and a score
of others (the pressure of the air, its wetness, its heat, and so on),
yet you could never say why the difference between one sea and another
appears. All measurable factors might be the same, and yet the seas
quite different. You can, indeed, hardly describe that difference any
more than you can describe the difference between two instruments
of music, the flute and the trumpet; or the difference between two
materials in portraiture, marble and bronze. We only know that it is
there. But our stupidly proud time misses such essential categories.
Why is it that what they call ‘The New World’ is something utterly
different in quality, taste, intimate soul, from the old? We have here
not only the conflict between England and America, but between Spain
and the Argentine, and between England herself and the white colonies,
and between the French and the French Canadians. It is not newness; it
is not lack of tradition; it is difference of _timbre_—as violent as
the difference between a railway whistle and the note of a thrush, or
between wood and iron.
Modern men knowing a dozen out of a million causes reason downwards
from the rules they have, instead of trusting their perceptions as
their fathers did.
I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from
these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart
from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul. Meanwhile,
men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.
The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not
pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still
less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood
and, as it were, entered into it. That is government; that is Empire:
to get into the shoes of the governed.
In the strange, successful, perhaps ephemeral, adventure which has put
our high European culture in command over the lives of others in the
East and in Africa, not a few men have arisen tested by circumstance
and conforming to this idea. I have heard with respect the judgment of
others upon half a dozen Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen of the sort,
though I have not seen their work. Russians have told me of compatriots
of their own who have achieved such things beyond the Urals and the
Caspian. Of Germans I never heard that any were so much as capable of
beginning the great task. That the Spaniards changed half a continent
we know. But the only instance that ever came under my own eyes, and
that but for a few days, was the instance of Marshal Lyautey. Lyautey’s
Morocco is an astonishing affair.
It is true that there lay behind his great achievement more than