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
cannot understand a thing is to laugh at it. Yet the wise men will
notice how many intense quarrels have arisen in our own time on what
are really points of theology—though they are masked. The two views
of evidence in any hotly disputed point, such as the new position of
Poland, are essentially differences in theology. The long struggle
between England and Ireland is essentially a theological struggle. So
at bottom was the conflict between Prussia and Austria—in which both
have succumbed: Prussia happily for ever; but Austria, I hope, only for
a time. The only difference between ourselves and our fathers in this
affair is that our fathers went to the root of the matter and discussed
the essential, the opposing doctrines, instead of quarrelling upon
their products.
That night the last of the wind fell suddenly, and it was a still air
all through the darkness, but with the next morning there arose a
moderate fresh breeze, still from the north.
We brought up the anchor early and stood along the coast. The wind soon
fell, and at last it hardly held us up against the slight current of
the tide. We made to skirt Penkilan Head, right across the mouth of the
bay called Port Nigel, and also Hell’s Mouth (which is no praise for
Nigel), but it was evening before we had rounded it and saw the opening
beyond, the two islands which are called Saint Tudwal’s; for here (as
once on Bardsey for the matter of that) a holy man had taken up his
station in the old days when men thus hid themselves away from the
world.
It is in the youth of a society, when its emotions are at their
strongest, that men thus delight in isolation and the single
contemplation of divine things. We cannot understand it at all from
where we now stand, at the end of an old and decaying society. But when
Western Europe renewed its youth in the fourth and fifth centuries and
grew epic again, after the breakdown of strict society, the love of
hermitage also grew passionately.
A young man can live by himself as long as he will. It is later on that
one needs to be supported by the companionship of one’s fellows, and
to-day most men cannot live alone.
But I did once find such a man in modern times, full of delight in his
complete isolation. He was an Englishman by birth, but I never learnt
his name. He had built a habitation for himself on a high cliff in
Italy overlooking a plain. I came across him by accident; he received
me kindly. But I did not trouble him for long, for I saw that he loved
to be alone. He had no one to serve him, nor any one even to be an
occasional companion. His delight was to watch the world in the plain
below and to commune with his own soul. But I doubt his having had any
interest in divine things.
I looked curiously at those two islands as I passed them. They both
bear the name of the saint, and are called the East and the West.
I wondered to myself whether the appetite for hermitage would soon
return; for that it must return soon or late is certain; it is of
permanent recurrence in the history of mankind. All up and down Europe
you may mark the stage in the history of the islands, the small
islands, when they were thus hermitages or places of seclusion for
small communities of religious or for one holy man. There is Iona,
there is Holy Island, there are the islands of Lerins, and the Farne,
and Noirmoutier and Tombelaine, and a hundred others. The conditions
seem to have been a small space, water to drink, just enough land to
support life, and difficulty of access. So also Cuthbert found even
Lindisfarne too crowded, and went to the little rocks far out to sea.
When it was not an island, it was a hilltop like Monte Cassino. When
it was not a hilltop, it was a difficult cliff, like that of my strange
friend of one hour in Italy. But always the main condition was security
from interruption. And here extremes meet, for the very height of
luxury and selfishness which makes a modern man in the last corruption
of modern societies seek isolation, made the holiest of men seek it in
a better time. Rich men to-day are often at pains to avoid cities and
even the conversation of their kind, in order that their expression of
every appetite may be free, and that they may have no influence about
them save what is of their own choice. But those other holy men of our
beginnings chose the remote places in order that they might lose their
whole being in the contemplation of God, and that they might have no
temptation to follow any appetite at all.
One might make an interesting list of the parallels which are upon
this model. For instance, the men of those beginnings held fast to
the miraculous signs of divine action. Our moderns laugh at the bare
relation of such things, but hold fast to anything, however monstrous,
which purposes to have behind it a mysterious untested authority
dressed up in print, violent in affirmation, ceaselessly contradicting
itself, empty of thought, and called Science. And so much for Saint
Tudwal. I read about that saint once, and grew quite learned on his
legend (for what is known is little, save that he lived just after
Saint Martin of Tours, his exemplar) but I have forgotten every word
I read, and can tell you now only roughly when he lived, nor anything
else about him save that he was a Welshman.
The Welsh have a curious feeling about their past. They have been
taught to detest its religion, yet their patriotism inclines them to
a sort of awe of it. I never met a Welshman yet who ridiculed Saint
David, yet very few indeed who knew either what world Saint David
lived in or what mood he had towards the universe; and what about his
Masses?
There is no hole in the land along that coast between the point of
Carnarvonshire and Portmadoc, except a curious little bottle harbour
called Pwllheli, with an odd entry up a sort of canal-like entrance.
For that we beat up: we came to it by evening, but barely drifting
under the lightest of airs. A draft of tide took us in, and at the
mouth we passed a curious sight, which was a small model of a mountain
transformed by man: a solid dome of granite, half of it already cut off
like a cheese by industry; and men are still breaking it up and taking
it away in ships. What would be left of the Wrekin if it crushed a few
ounces to the ton? Eh, Rosenheim? Eh, Guilderstern?
As we watched that abuse of nature, a fine great rock of granite, half
murdered by man and looking like Sunday evening’s loaf, an aged mariner
came up to us in a boat of many years and chucked in his painter to us
without a word of permission, then nodded to me to make it fast.
I did as he desired, for it is a rule in this world always to do what
you are told if there is no apparent loss in doing it. What the old
man wanted was to be towed and to save himself the trouble of rowing.
But when we had done him this favour, and the Nona was taking him up
without fatigue to his dear home, he spoke not a word, but sat there
gloomily, smoking a pipe and considering, I suppose, the dim stories of
the ancients: the bards, and the chieftains of Wales.
Wearied with this insolent silence, I leant over the rail and asked
him what we should make for and where we had best lie in Pwllheli.
He pulled the pipe out of his mouth and cursed Pwllheli loudly, in
English, but in English so Welsh that it reminded me of the famous
story of the man who said, ‘There will be folk in London to-day: one
hundred and twenty are coming from Pwllheli.’ I said to him, therefore,
desiring to soften his mood, ‘I see that you are not from Pwllheli
yourself.’ ‘Ess, put I am!’ he answered simply, and then fell to
swearing again most abominably.
His grievance I found, after a little more questioning, was that a
financier had persuaded the people of Pwllheli to turn it into an
earthly paradise, with a band upon an island, and gondolas or what not,
and this just after he had bought a cottage to be his very own, so that
he was burdened with rates; that was his grievance.
More of this local father I could not make. I think he hated all
mankind as well as Pwllheli, and when we got into the broader water
at the end of the entry and were moving up to the wharf in stately
fashion, he gave me another surly sign to cast him off, which I did,
and then, without a ‘good-evening,’ he pulled for the shore. As for the
Nona, she slid alongside, and my companion and I moored, stowed, ate,
slept, and waited for the morning.
When morning came, and we woke late (for the fatigue of Bardsey passage
was still on us, even after two days), we found under a clear but hazy
sky no stir of wind. It was well past noon and the ebb beginning;
indeed, it was nearer two o’clock when there seemed to come just a
breath, still from the north, that would take us down that strange
entry and out to sea again. So we set sail, after casting off, and
drifted rather than steered for the corridor end. As we left the
stonework, I saw gathered there on the quay a group of men talking
angrily and excitedly, with words which I could not understand, for
they were Welsh; and, as they debated, or quarrelled (but perhaps
they had a common trouble, and were only doing what our papers and
the French police call ‘demonstrating’), many more ran up, until
they were quite a crowd. Whereupon one man of their number, a very
intense-looking, fierce fellow, jumped up on to a baulk of wood, so
as to stand above them, and in a shrill, singing, passionate voice
addressed them all. They fell silent, every face turned towards his,
some with their mouths open, all with their eyes staring. Then, after
he had spoken for a few minutes, he jumped down again and, behold, the
crowd dispersed, some few knots still talking low among themselves, but
the most of them remaining silent and slouching away.
Now what was it he had said in that strange tongue to achieve his
result so well?
... Certainly the management of men is an art; and there are in it two
factors which are nearly always set in conflict, although they ought
to be harmonised. Indeed, one of them is nearly always thrust forward
to the exclusion of the other: from which error in proportion civic
disasters are born. These two factors in government are the direction
of many and the interpretation of many. A number of men, a number too
large to be appealed to individually (and the number gets too large
after half a dozen or so), must be controlled and directed by him who
governs, otherwise there is chaos. But it is only so controlled and
directed by an interpretation of, and even a sort of subservience to,
the common mind. Now control without understanding breaks a community,
and sympathy without control dissolves it.
This man had succeeded, it seemed, with the mob at the wharf from which
I had just sailed. His success set me thinking upon the matter of the
management of men, the control of numbers: speakership, chairmanship,
captaincy, and all the rest.
There is one element in the affair which is all-important, and the
possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or ‘eye’ in a
sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is
granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have
in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of
good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general
appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined—the faculty
of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole—you have
the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is
among men.
A man can only talk of the things he himself has known, and I myself
have only seen one example of this inspiration in its perfection. It
was (I regret to say) an experience of the House of Commons, a nasty