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
way he chose. But when you are dealing with reality, the evidence upon
either side of the problem is not made to fit any end. You have to
reconcile as best you can two opposite sets of equally certain things,
which seem the one set to contradict the other. If the problem as to
who that Needles man was, and where he had come from, had involved
great issues, racial hatreds, the fate of a fortune, or the destiny of
a realm, it would have become an historical problem; and historical
problems are the most fascinating of all.
There come first in order those involving human motive, and the known
probabilities of human action. Take three of them. The affair of the
Diamond Necklace, the Tichborne case, and the Dreyfus case. In each
of these the difficulty of finding the solution lies in the discovery
of motive, and in the estimate of truth proceeding from a group of
witnesses, or sometimes from only one witness, and in each of these
there is an opposing set of accounts, and of depositions contradictory
the one to the other.
In the affair of the Diamond Necklace, you have either to believe that
a man, living in the heart of the court life of Versailles, accepted a
ludicrous signature as that of the Queen; or else you have to believe
that about twenty people, who had no connection one with the other,
and were separated by every conceivable kind of social circumstance,
place and time, conspired to tell unshaken the same lie. If you ask
whether a man living in the heart of the rich society of London would
accept as normal the signature ‘The Hon. Henry Hound, Esq.’ at the end
of a letter (he having known for many years the said Henry Hound, let
alone the fantastic nature of such a signature) you would certainly say
that the thing was morally impossible. But what if you had to decide
between such a moral impossibility and the necessity of believing that
a railway porter at North Berwick, a small farmer in County Clare, a
dilettante friend of the said Henry Hound, and Henry Hound himself,
and a chance taxi-man who had once driven him, and a policeman who
had noted the taxi go by, and about a dozen others equally separate,
did all swear and remain unshaken under examination, and after a long
process of time, to testimonies which, combined, made the conclusion
inevitable that this man, accustomed to all our social usages, and
living in the heart of our rich society, did regard such an absurd
signature as normal?
The Tichborne case depends upon contradictions in which I have little
reading; but, if I remember right, the main contrast in it lay between
two sets of undoubted facts. On the one hand, a man’s mother recognised
him; his distinguished advocate preferred ruin to the concealment of
his own passionate conviction of the man’s identity—and, after seeing
all the evidence, and hearing everything in confidence, deliberately
broke the most sacred rules of his lawyers’ trade union, inviting
certain disaster in order to leave conviction to posterity. As against
a set of things like that you had the unaccountable ignorance of a
man of middle age upon habits and words, and the rest, in which his
youth must have been steeped, and many other contradictory points as
well. There has been formed a comfortable legend upon this particular
problem: a legend which affirms the certain justice of the verdict.
Personally, I mistrust such legends. The tendency of men to believe
what it makes them happier to believe is so strong that one should lean
with all one’s weight against it in public as in personal affairs.
But that does not mean that the verdict was not just: it only means
that the accepted legend has no authority in itself. During my boyhood
the opinion of men amply qualified to judge, men eminent in the legal
profession, men of the Tichbornes’ social standing and religion, was as
violently divided as were later men of the same capacity for judgment
in the matter of the Dreyfus affair.
Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I
always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between
my elders, especially those which regularly took place in one of
the Sussex houses, the squire of which had no doubt at all of the
claimant’s right; and my reason for such interest in a matter to
me remote is this: that the Tichborne verdict is the first thing I
remember. We were living in a house in Westminster, and my nurse, who
was excited in the matter, as all folk then were, rich and poor, took
me into the press of people at Westminster Hall to hear the result. Of
course, very early memories like this (I was but three years old) are
falsified by the continual repetition of the subject by one’s elders,
but I am as certain as any one can be of such a memory, and I believe
it is the earliest thing of which I have any clear memory left.
Upon a similar very early memory depends one of the longest links with
history with which I am acquainted. Mademoiselle de Montgolfier, the
daughter of the man who made the first balloons, lived as a life-long
companion of my Irish grandmother in France, and died well after her
ninetieth year, when I was a boy of ten or eleven. That woman as a
child of four was present in Paris when the mob poured up the Faubourg
of Saint Antoine to the capture of the Bastille in 1789, and I, as a
child of seven, eight, and onwards, was brought to her time and again
to hear her tell the story. I am now in my fifty-fifth year, and the
stretch of time is already remarkable. Were I in extreme old age, and
told a child of this incident, that child himself, living to a similar
old age, would be able to say that he had spoken to one who had heard
of the fall of the Bastille from an eye-witness; and that would be as
though some very old person to-day were to tell one that he had spoken
to one who had known a page at Charles II’s Court, and had seen as a
child the funeral of General Monk; or, again, it is as though some very
old person to-day were to remember having met in childhood a person who
had talked to one who had seen John Milton.
The Dreyfus case, after all these years, still rouses such passions
that I tremble even to mention it. I have myself (so many years after!)
been subject to mournful rebuke in public from the excellent pen of
Dean Inge, who has reproached me in well-knit prose for being the only
man in England who did not take the side of the accused. He is wrong
there; for I could cite the names of half a dozen prominent Englishmen
who had the right to judge through a knowledge of European affairs, and
who remained in doubt of Dreyfus’ innocence, notably Lord Russell of
Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Labouchère—and there were
many others.
Here also the difficulty lay in weighing opposing sets of undisputable
facts. The nearer men were to a position where they could fully judge
all the technical details of that highly technical evidence, and the
probable motives of the clashing witnesses, the more were they divided;
they remain divided to-day upon the issue after more than thirty
years. On the one hand was present an overwhelming motive to secure
the conviction of a man against whom there was strong _prima facie_
evidence. That motive was the desire to preserve the Intelligence
Department of the French Army intact, though rival powers were bent on
its destruction. On the other side was another motive: the overwhelming
motive of freeing a man who was believed innocent, and the lesser,
but still very strong, motive of defending the immunity of that small
immensely wealthy, very powerful clique of international financiers,
one member of which—the first and the last in our time—had been
challenged by the authority of a modern state. Such men regard
themselves, and are, in practice, usually treated, as though they were
above the law.
I, for my part, pretend to no certain conclusion in the matter, for I
doubt whether any man could do that who was not on the bench in court,
and physically confronted with the witnesses, and acquainted with all
the documents, and able to weigh them all—even the use of the most
technical terms in gunnery. But it is to be remembered that there
was division upon that bench itself, and that a minority of the five
judges—two out of three—were (I am told) for acquittal.
Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot and competent to
judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully
competent also, were, and are, convinced of his guilt.
There are in England to-day two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of
Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society,
enable them to judge. They are both close friends of mine. One is for,
the other against.
I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will
remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained,
or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend,
intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of
criticising that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.
The historian will have one point to make in connection with it, and
that a point of capital importance. It is to the Dreyfus case that
we owe the four years of war, 1914-18: for it destroyed the French
Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and
Charleroi.
Perhaps problems depending upon human psychology can never be finally
determined. But there are others equally absorbing which involve no
such heats, and no such moral doubts: only physical and mathematical
oppositions.
It would be a worthy task to draw up a list of such essentially
historical problems not involving guesswork upon human motives, but
dealing with plain, physical facts; problems which have remained
unsolved, and which do not seem to be in the way of being solved
either. Your academic writer shirks them nearly always; he writes as
though they had been solved, and as though he knew the solution; so
that his readers go on imagining they have been given an explanation
which as a fact has been carefully avoided.
For instance, when you read of a fleet in antiquity ‘drawn up’ upon
a shore, how was it done? The fleets of antiquity preferred to use,
but did not depend upon, harbours; they were able to use a beach.
Their large armies—for instance, a Carthaginian army of one hundred
and fifty thousand men—were landed in this fashion. Cæsar landed at
Deal his small but respectable force in this fashion, not through a
harbour, but on a beach; and civilian sailing and piracy all used the
same method. The ship of antiquity could ride, and also be moored in
harbour, but was also beached. It came up to a shelving shore _and
was pulled up on to the land_. It was pulled up out of reach of the
waves; and it will be remembered how Cæsar got into trouble during
his first expedition (and second!) because he had not allowed for an
exceptionally high tide accompanied by a storm. He got his ships on
shore all right, but he had not pulled them up far enough.
How was it done? You cannot say it was done by capstans, because that
could only apply to beaches already prepared. If you say it was done
by hauling upon ropes over rollers the answer is not sufficient. How
was the boat kept upright while this was going on, and what numbers
would not be required to beach thus even a single ship of three or
four hundred tons, and, having so beached it, by what means could one
rapidly float it again?
The ancients had some method which they took for granted, for they
knew the difficulty of it, and which landsmen had seen practised a
thousand times, and yet of which no description has come down to us in
our fragmentary records of the past. The poets tell us that the ships
stand upon the shore, and they leave it at that. They seem to tell us