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
sight, and having given evidence of enjoying that strange faculty, goes
on to pretend a knowledge of things of which he is in fact ignorant,
then he is a charlatan presuming upon his merited reputation to
acquire a greater and unmerited one. But it is a worse offence when
a man pretends to repose his statements on common reason and actual
experience in matters where these were absent.
There is one type of this false academic authority which has spread
over historical work like a fungus, and particularly over the
discussion of the early Church. It is the paying of deference to a
man’s authority in things which have nothing whatever to do with his
scholarship, and which are mere creatures of his imagination, of as
much and as little value as similar creatures raised by any wholly
illiterate layman. It is in the matter of the Gospel of Saint John
that this rubbish has accumulated its most monstrous heap. A great
scholar like Wernle (I suppose he was a great scholar; I am no judge,
but I am assured by other scholars that he was so, and I must take it
to be true) has authority when he says, ‘This or that passage is of
the style and manner of this or that period.’ Even so, his authority
is limited by the authority of other scholars, and even so, it is as
well that he should put forward, even for the uninstructed reader,
some grounds for his judgment. But when he ventured to affirm that the
exaltation of spirit shining through the Fourth Gospel cannot be that
of an eye-witness, his judgment is worth no more than that of a cook’s
boy apprentice, or of a street scavenger. A man’s power of judging the
psychology of his fellow men varies with capacities quite disconnected
from scholarship in letters. My power to decide whether Boswell really
knew Johnson (supposing there were no evidence besides the book itself)
is based upon my knowledge of how men feel and act, and the difference
between the way in which they talk when they are making things up,
and the way in which they talk when they are bearing witness and
recording a real experience. I may be right, or I may be wrong, in my
conclusion: but my powers of arriving at it have nothing to do with my
powers of judging a text. Yet Wernle’s empty guesswork, even when it is
manifestly absurd, is treated with respect, and, what is exasperating,
with special respect by the orthodox. The orthodox seem to feel, in
approaching the sceptics, that they are dealing with superiors. It
ought to be just the other way. The people who are in the tradition
of Europe, who have behind them the whole momentum of civilisation,
who have humour and common sense as the products of faith, ought to
approach their contradictors as inferiors.
It is certainly so in the case of this Gospel of Saint John. A man
who denies its apostolic authority, and who comes forward with a
disconnected mass of guesswork, scrappy particularisms, and odd
conjectures, should be regarded as the incongruous disturber of a
judgment upon which millions of men through centuries had preserved a
firm conclusion. It is true that even the widest tradition, the largest
body of mature judgment, must listen to any objection and weigh it. To
refuse that is to deny the rights of human reason. But it is monstrous
that the sound, admitted, fixed, concluded thing, the heritage of the
human race, should be put on its defence, and that any assault on it
should be supported by a predisposition to accept any conclusion so
long as it be novel.
We are accused of a bias in favour of accepted truth. We should reply
that our opponents have a much worse bias against. They say we begin by
desiring to find witnesses to Jesus Christ. It is true. But they begin
with a fierce desire to destroy the evidence to Jesus Christ. Make
them come out with their proofs: accuse them roundly of humbug. Laugh
at their provincial rejection of the marvellous. Unmercifully ridicule
their lack of proportion; their ignorance of the human mind; their
failure to taste tradition. Rattle them. Believe me, in battle you must
be fierce. The louder the victim’s cries the nearer you are to victory.
All that suggested by the mere name ‘Hastings’ and the charlatanry of
‘Senlac’; but really such a name might suggest whole cartloads of books.
Go to Battle and see the place where Harold fell. You can mark it to
a yard. Look at the little tomb in which they say Odo lay; see the
Malfosse still clearly there just westward of the tennis courts in
the gardens of the Abbey; a trap for cavalry. Note how the Normans,
Bretons, and all the rest of the foreigners could not deploy until they
were at the very foot of the hill, and how they were handicapped by its
steepness without the momentum of a gallop down hill to begin with;
it was that which nearly lost them the battle. Mark the length of the
ridge, and ask yourself how it could have been held against heavily
armed horse with less than thirty or forty thousand men packed in a
dense formation, for it is nearly a mile from flank to flank, and would
need two thousand locked shields to cover it.
There never was, I suppose, one day spent in this island with greater
consequence to Christendom.
It was but a drift past the Martello Towers during that morning, and I
slept through it, having been at the helm all through the long night,
till my companion relieved me. When I woke we were opposite that entry
to Pevensey which is an entry no more, but which still holds, strongly
challenging the sea, the Roman walls of the Andred Fort.
The place was a narrows, like those which give entry to the wide
expanse of Portsmouth Harbour; and, as in that gulley between
Portsmouth and Gosport to-day, there must then have raced through
the gulley of Pevensey the gallop of the flood and of the ebb tides.
Within was a vast expanse of level water that could hold as many score
or hundred of ships as any captain might lead. To-day you can follow
clearly enough the old level of the salt—but that great haven is now
all dry land.
It is full of memories. The ditches in the marsh still bear the name of
such poor branches and inlets of the once spacious harbour as struggled
to live on into a later time. But no man will sail into Pevensey again.
Thither the Mora sailed with William of Normandy aboard, ahead of his
forest of a fleet, and at its bow a little cupid all in gold, and on
its decks a great cask of wine broached for glory. He had made his
land-fall by the white gleam of Beachy near at hand. He had outrun all
his transports, and he lay there off this coast awaiting them, until a
man sent up the mast cried that he saw the fleet approaching ‘like a
wood.’ It was Saint Michael’s Day.
The place is full of memories. The people who wrote down the legends
of England under Alfred preserved after four hundred years a dreadful
memory of some pirate raid, in which all the garrison of Pevensey
perished, on some day between the end of the Imperial rule and the
landing of Saint Augustine.
Strangely enough, we have no record of the process whereby that vast
and secure harbour lifted above the level of the sea and lost its
usage. Hastings has lived on, but Pevensey died in some darkness, and
has disappeared. There still stands the wall of the Roman fort, with
its courses of small Roman tile-brick remaining to stamp its origin.
The great town that must have stood outside has dwindled to a hamlet,
and the vast stretch of flat, beyond which was once what Portsmouth is,
lies utterly alone with the sea birds complaining over it.
Beyond Pevensey walls the wind rose somewhat and gave us a fair course
round Beachy, coming further round, so that we could carry on without
handling the headsail sheets. We ran on a wind all the miles into the
Sussex bay. I stood in close to the lighthouse (for the shore is fairly
steep there), not a quarter of a mile off shore. It was unwise, for I
had experience, as you know, of the way the wind will spill over that
height. But I wished to save mileage; I had sailed the seas enough, and
was for home.
The wind from that quarter brings usually a clear air, but in the calm
weather of those last few days it had blown from anywhere, for the
summer’s end had upon it an anti-cyclone, which is a Mumbo-Jumbo for
fine weather. In such weather winds behave unnaturally, the southwest
brings no gale or rain, nor is the easterly wind dry, nor the northerly
cold, nor the southerly warm; and this, I suppose, is because the winds
of an anti-cyclone are but youngling winds; not great steady ancestored
winds from far away with a weight behind them.
I did wish as I was rounding Beachy that day that I could see a sea
serpent, which, many years ago (I had read it in print in an old
magazine book which lay about in the parlour of a harbour inn), showed
itself, for the conversion of the unbelieving, in these very seas.
It reared a great neck and shot at a prodigious pace through the salt
with the movements of its long body, and, having been seen by a whole
crew thereto adjacent, sneered contemptuously at the puny race of men,
and disappeared.
I thought to myself: ‘How should I behave if I were to see some such
Horrendum, and had to bear witness to it before my fellow men?’ I
concluded that I would mix the truth with falsehood, like my good
ancestor the wise Ulysses, and so shoe-horn a knowledge of reality into
scornful men. For I have a rule in such matters given me long ago and
since then by me always to be observed. I got it thus:
When I was a boy an older friend of mine said to me a thing that
then seemed to me extravagant, but which I now see to have been
very sound. It was, that if you wanted to be believed in any matter
worth believing, you had to bring an admixture of falsity into your
statement. And the reason for this is plain enough. Either a truth
is something that everybody knows about, and which, therefore, is
not worth telling, or else it is something unusual, and therefore
improbable, and likely to be disbelieved. It is the latter kind of
truth which people ordinarily tell when they desire to interest their
fellow beings. But if they put that kind of truth straightforwardly,
they are naturally taken for liars.
For instance, if you were to burst into a man’s room, and say, ‘Only
last week I took the train in Paris after breakfast, and I was in
London for dinner!’ he would believe you right enough, though he would
not stand much of that sort of thing. But if you say, ‘Only last week I
was in Paris for breakfast, and in Rome for dinner,’ he will think you
are not telling the truth, although it can just be done by aeroplane;
and if you say, ‘I was in London for breakfast, and in Calcutta for
dinner’ (which may be perfectly true, supposing that the dinner and the
breakfast were not on the same day), he will certainly set you down
for a liar. Supposing, therefore, that you have really flown in an
aeroplane from Paris to Rome, so that you left Paris comfortably after
breakfast and got into Rome in plenty of time for dinner, you had far
better put it differently, and say that the aeroplane has made a great
difference, considering that you yourself had managed, by getting up at
dawn on a summer’s day, to be in Rome just as it was falling dark, with
only two slight mishaps on the way and a relay at Lyons. Then you will
possibly be believed.
So do I advise those to speak who desire their fellow beings to be
converted in the matter of the Great Sea Serpent.
Personally I believe in the Great Sea Serpent, and I believe in it for
best of all reasons, to wit, that the proof is sufficient. A sufficient
number of people have seen monsters of various kinds rising from the
deep, usually monsters with great long necks, or, at any rate, a
serpentine appearance. They have seen them, many men at a time, and