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
place in which to find anything remarkable. There I saw the Speaker of
my time (Mr. Lowther, as he then was) exercising the art through two
Parliaments with a perfection which I had thought impossible, and which
moved me, at the watching of it, as much as I am moved by great lines
of Milton or Racine, or the harmonies of certain musics.
Consider what the business was! He had before him in an ill-lit, dull,
hideous oblong room six hundred men, dully ranged in ten or a dozen
dull rows; half to his left, half to his right. In that dull air of
futile, vulgar, and unreal verbiage there could arise, in a moment,
absurdly acrid emotions. These had to be tamed and resolved whenever
they should bubble up like gas from a marsh. It was a necessity to the
dull life of the place, if it were to crawl along at all, that such
accidents should not wholly destroy its dull function.
This great body of men would dwindle in a moment to a dozen or less—a
dozen who only remained for the chance of speaking, and of whom each
individual would jump up like a jack-in-the-box the very instant the
last mouther had sat down. It would swell again to a full complement, a
crowded House, with equal rapidity.
The man managing that assembly had to remember each man by name. Those
faces, which would, for any of _us_, have become mere blobs of white
within half an hour of fatigued observation, had to be recognised as
individuals. The relations of each with all had to be remembered;
the nature of the matter under debate, the right of one man, through
experience of office or of personal work, to be remembered; the claim
of another man (suffering some unjust failure) to be recognised; the
danger of a third who was repetitive; of a fourth who was mad. At the
same time, the very subtle distinctions between the lesser and the
greater claim to speak, the length of the debate, even the excessive
tedium of each speaker had to be weighed. On the top of all that, it
had to be remembered of what importance was each discussion (in so far
as you can call any of them important—but they seem absurdly important
to the participants). On the top of all that, again, was the general
arrangement of the debate suggested by the Whips and in possession of
the Chair.
Now on all this incredibly complicated task, involving, I suppose,
some hundreds of interior decisions during the day, Mr. Lowther never
once failed. The House of his time was an instrument over which he had
complete mastery through a complete comprehension and a rapidity of
just decision which I have never seen equalled in any field of command.
We have a tendency to-day to use words too strong for the occasion, and
the word genius is a very strong word; but I have no more doubt that
Mr. Lowther, as I watched him day after day, displayed genius than I
have a doubt that Mozart in music, or Houdon in sculpture, had genius.
It was amazing, it was satisfactory, it was continuous.
There was an old squire with whom I often dined in those years, and who
had great knowledge of men and things in that club, still aristocratic,
which England then still was. Not long after my first election to the
august Assembly, I told him with enthusiasm at his own table what my
judgment was of this achievement. He answered me, wearily, ‘Oh! I have
heard that said of every Speaker since I can remember!’ To which I
re-answered, ‘Yes; but this time they are right.’
Which reminds me of how a modern poet, spared to middle age in spite of
the wrath of God, famous for that he could neither scan nor rhyme—let
alone think or feel—once made a speech in which he carefully set out
those things which had been said against Swinburne when first that
meteor flamed across the heaven of English verse. The modern poet next
read to this assembly the things that had been written against himself
when he first blurred into the murk of our evening. He triumphantly
concluded: ‘What was said against Swinburne they have said against me!’
Then there arose an aged writer of reviews, a man whose hair, whose
voice, and whose aura were all three of delicate silver. He said: ‘Yes!
But in what they said of him they were wrong; in what they said of you,
they were right.’
This was not an epigram, it was a paving-stone; and it reminded me of
that line in the epic of Roncesvalles, ‘Christians are right and pagans
are wrong.’
So in the matter of Speakers. I have seen the action of four; but of
none would I say even that they had talent, saving in this case alone,
where I have used another word....
So we drifted down the narrow entry and out into the open sea; and
all that afternoon, under a wind now slightly lifting, now falling
again, we crept eastward and a little south, making more way as the sun
declined, because the wind was shifting westward on to our quarter;
and of that I was glad, for I desired to look into Port Madoc, which
I had not seen since I was a child. I had vivid memories of it during
a wonderful journey overshadowed by that air wherewith the Creator
blesses childhood, lending to everything an active flavour of the
divine; which is in three things, Clarity, Magnitude, and Multiplicity
of strong emotion.
For the divine reveals itself in a special multiplicity, in an infinite
variety. All that there is in colour and in music, and in line and in
affection, and to these added other raptures innumerable, such as we
know not of nor can conceive—that is to be at last our beatitude: that
is the fullness of being. In childhood our innocence permits us some
little glimpse of such things; but with the passage of the years they
are lost altogether. The light in the lantern goes out, and the living
thing within us fails, and is stupefied, and dies.
So Musset and old Pythagoras and Mr. Tupper. If any man doubts the
Fall of Man (and I see from the papers that two belated bishops and
one dean are still shaky on it, through some Victorian influence upon
their minds, not only of bones but of chipped stones), let him consider
this decay of heaven within ourselves as the maturity of our manhood
develops. The more we are of this world and the more we know of it, the
further are we drifting from the shores of the Blessed. Which shores
also the poet had in mind when he wrote, sang, crooned, or what not:
‘Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, sing,
Sing to me of the West,
Sing to me of the girth loosened and the lax harpstring
And of rest.
‘Beyond the skerries and beyond the outer water,
There lies the land.
Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, oh, High
King’s Daughter,
And of the over-strand.
‘I desire to be with Brandan and his companions, in the quiet places
And to drink of their spring.
Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, and of the
blessed faces.
Daughter of Cahoolin, sing.’
But if you tell me that that is not the way to spell
‘Cuchulin,’ I have two answers, each of them stronger than Hercules.
The first is that the poet spelt it as he felt inclined—that is, by
ear; for poets excel not, as is commonly believed, in speech but in
ears; as you may see by their profiles or sidehead views; and as it is
his spelling your action lies against him, not me.
And the second answer is, that one ought never to be bothered with the
pedantry of quaint alphabets and the spelling tricks of outer men.
Cuchulin is, or was, or should be, pronounced ‘Cahoolin,’ and there is
an end of it. But as to whether he ever had a daughter, or if he had,
whether she could sing, or even whether that Irishman existed at all, I
hold all these things to be perfectly indifferent....
We cast anchor in the very midmost of that solemn bay with its
half-circle of huge mountains looking down upon an empty sea. The
giants were dim in the haze, but the more enormous, and I revered and
worshipped them.
We so cast anchor because I had to wait for the tide. I could not run
up the long, winding channel through the sands of Port Madoc until the
flood should be with me, and that would not be till the gloaming,
between eight and nine o’clock that night.
Therefore did we lie thus in Harlech Bay, gazing at the great hills of
Wales. There is no corner of Europe that I know, not even the splendid
amphitheatre standing in tiers of high Alpine wall around Udine, which
so moves me with the awe and majesty of great things as does this mass
of the northern Welsh mountains seen from this corner of their silent
sea.
Few can recall it, for few visit that corner of the salt. It leads
nowhere but to the harbour of Port Madoc. No man beaches a boat to-day
under Harlech; no man to-day sets out from that shore for Ireland
beyond. The halls are in ruin. There is no more harping. No flight of
sails comes up eastward out of the sea like birds. Even the sailors
have forgotten Gwynnedd. To-day the only sailors familiar with the
solemnity of which I speak are those who ply in the small boats of
the slate trade, or who, like myself, have employed a curious leisure
in searching out new things here in the seas of home. For all my life
I have made discoveries close at hand, and have found the Island of
Britain to be infinite. But who in our times knows where to look for
vision?
Indeed, this lack of fame applies to perhaps half the greater visions,
even of the modern over-frequented and travelled earth. Men know half
of them to satiety, but the other half they never see. Every one has
wearied of the Bay of Naples, repeated a thousand times, but what of
that lonely field by the flat Adriatic sand whence you may see the
dark eastern Fall of the Gran Sasso, tragic, with storms about it,
dominating a deserted shore? Everybody has his bellyful of Gavarnie,
but what of the valley of Araxas, which proclaims so terribly the glory
of God? Where are the pictures of that? Who has drawn it? Yet it is but
half a day from Gavarnie.
So it is with this awful parade of the great mountains standing on
guard over the northern corner of Cardigan Bay, seen from the silence
and the flat of ocean, towering above its glass; and all that late
afternoon and evening I adored them until, with the last of the light,
and a westerly air which was but the suggestion of a breeze, we groped
north anxiously for the opening to Port Madoc channel. How I should
make it, even upon the flood, in the darkness, I knew not; for the
sands there are miles wide, and this channel (which I had never yet
made) shifts continually. But God sent me a pilot.
He hailed us out of the half-darkness from a small boat, and asked us
in the dialect which I will call ‘Anglo-Welsh’ (after Anglo-Catholic,
Anglo-German, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-African, and the rest), ‘Whether we
would not have a pilot, ah?’
Nor was he a pilot, as the event shall show; but at any rate he
belonged to that shore, and would have more knowledge than I. So I gave
him the helm, and went up forward to look out over the bows, as the
Nona glided slowly along the flood into the channel which they call
‘The Water of the Smooth Lake’ (‘Afon Glaslyn’). For half an hour of
that very slow gliding all went well. The darkness had quite fallen.
There was no moon.
The gliding stopped; there was a slight thrill. She had hit Wales:
an under-water, advance guard of Wales. The man at the helm was not
apologetic, he was not humble, but he was at least subdued; and he
said, ‘Her will float soon, so her will!’ I forbore to reproach him,
not from kindness, but from cowardice.
The flood lifted her foot, she swung off, and we went on again up the
darkness, with the least of little airs to give steering-way.
So for a quarter of an hour, covering perhaps a third of a mile: