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
shore, or as the companion and regulator of human things, like the bell
on board ship. For Mr. Masefield is very just when he notes how the
clang of the ship’s bell by accident in the swoop of a ship down the
great waves of an Atlantic storm, has an unnatural call: being rung
without the aid of men’s hands.
Now this bell, as I heard it plainting away deeply, unable as yet to
see the thing on which it swung, mixed up its noise in my mind with
the great story of Saint Patrick: a story I had designed to write
many years ago in Arras, where I went to see the manuscript which
most vividly recalls him. But of that task I found myself incapable.
However, I did visit his staff in Rome.
For the bell thus swinging on its buoy far out to sea swings on the
western edge of that strange, long undersea road which they call the
‘Sarn Badrig’ (which means ‘The Causeway of Saint Patrick’) and cannot
but awake the great story of the coming of Europe to Ireland.
How right they were to call that sunken ridge pointing straight to
Ireland ‘The Roman Road of Patrick’! And how its sudden cessation
symbolises the break, the wound, the rupture, by which this island was
cut off from that: more than two hundred years ago! The ridge ends
suddenly in deep water and continues no more. But the bell tolls on,
appealing.
Saint Patrick is the second of those witnesses which remain to us of
the more than natural quality of Ireland. The first is the old pagan
story of the western harbours from which the dead were ferried over
by night to their felicity. The second is that undying phrase in the
‘Confessio,’ where Saint Patrick himself says that at night and in
dreams ‘he heard the voices of the Irish calling.’
It is gloom upon the mind to remember that the magnitude of the task
set to Britain (a Roman land) in the matter of Holy Ireland, has been
so missed: as though a man, having to encounter a mountain a little
before the day thought it no more than a slight hill against the dawn.
Here was the difficult land—but inspired—which Agricola said (and he
knew his business) he could have mastered for Rome and right order with
one legion. That legion was not given him, any more than the divisions
were given that might have made the break through before Cambrai. Would
that the officials at Rome had listened to him! Here was Ireland that
most difficult of subjects, most intriguing of friends, most tenacious
of enemies, set up against the western shores of Britain, of Roman
land; and through all those centuries nothing was done to enrich the
subject, to acquire the friend, to reconcile the enemy. But I am weak
enough to believe that this failure also was in the Providence of God.
The mountains look upon the mountains: the mountains of Britain to the
mountains of Ireland; from the east to the west, over a magic sea.
But they look in wrath and remain sullen giants. Nor is the battle
concluded.
As we sail past the bell very slowly (that Mark having come into sight)
we discovered it to be enclosed in a sort of great cage which swung
with slow dignity and bowed backwards and forwards upon the large
swell, unaffected by the light breeze which gave us our two knots
through sluggish water. My companion said to me, brutally enough, ‘How
would you like to be shut up in that cage, and left there to the night
and to the wind?’ I answered, ‘Not at all,’ and in this I told the
truth. But the bell did not repine, for it was fulfilling its function,
expiating its sins, pursuing its end, and consonant to the will that is
behind this world. It tolls there beyond the seaward end of the Sarn
Badrig to warn mariners of that long ledge submerged: barring the sea
ways.
My mind returned to that great Causeway, that shelf of rock and shingle
behind us, just hidden by the waves, pointing westward into the deep,
mile after mile, like some drowned giant’s pier: the beginning of a
bridge, as it were, between Britain and the Other Island; the marriage
of Britain with the older island, whence the dead are ferried over to
their repose.
But that Causeway was never completed: that bridge was never built; and
the weight, the future consequence, of such a failure lies not upon
Ireland, but (alas!) upon England.
For how many years did I not see the tragedy played out!
I knew its roots as well as any man. I knew that the gulf was a gulf
of religion. I knew that the riddle was without solution for men whose
eyes were cast downwards; who did not admit the unseen powers; who
could see nothing but the mud and wealth in which they stood—yet I
marvelled that the dreadful affair should drag on so long.
To the one set, to those sham ‘Liberals’ and ‘Unionists’ of the
wretched money game at Westminster, it was a lucrative jest. They cared
not for Ireland at all, and not too much for England. They treated the
martyrdom of Ireland as a counter in their play. To do them justice,
they thought that England could never suffer. To the others, to those
of Ireland, the struggle was (as they thought) a battle always lost.
In the beginning of their effort, the men who had organised a political
caucus for Ireland and had attempted, by what they called the
‘Nationalist’ Party, to get some settlement by way of the Parliamentary
morass, were sincere; yes, at first, flamingly sincere. Parnell I never
met; but Davitt I knew—and a man more heroically sincere I have never
had the fortune to meet and respect. To the very end the effort of the
Irishmen at Westminster retained some dwindling element of truth. And
this I say though I know that many Irishmen to-day may laugh at me for
saying it. But it is true. Down to the very end, sunk as they had grown
in the sodden Westminster habit, and conventional as had become the
repetition of their demand, some conception of a goal to be reached at
last still inhabited these men. I knew them and I can testify to it.
Right up to 1914—it sounds laughable, but it is true—the group at
Westminster which called itself ‘The Irish Party’ did, in some fading
way, still hold the idea of a ‘Parliamentary settlement.’ It was true
of John Redmond and his brother. I may fairly say that his brother died
for that idea.
They really did think (to me it was astonishing; to the younger Irish,
to many of them at least, incredible) that a solution was to be reached
through the working of those then undermined, moth-eaten, now crumbled
falsehoods of the professional politicians: that the farce of voting is
‘the voice of the people’; that the House of Commons is ‘a mirror of
England’; that ‘the nation rules through its representatives’—and all
the rest of the absurdities bred by the grafting of French democratic
attempts on to the decline of English aristocracy.
It sounds not possible that _any_ Irishman, even after a lifetime
at Westminster, could be so deceived. But, I say it again, I knew
these men. I can testify to the truth of what I have said. They did
right up to 1914 still faintly hope. I knew them as friends and as
opponents. They were my opponents when I took my share in defending the
Catholic schools in 1906, and they were angry at my going to see the
Pope in that year, to lay before him what I thought to be sufficient
amendments to Mr. Birrell’s Bill (for they regarded the Catholic
schools in England as their private domain). What is enormous, these
men, Redmond and his party, thought that their Westminster method could
still achieve something after the manifest betrayal of Ireland by the
politicians labelled ‘Liberal’ upon the outbreak of the Great War.
It is a process I have watched over and over again in the course of my
short but too long life; men not seeing what (one would imagine) should
be apparent to a child.
These men did not see that you cannot get strength out of rottenness;
nor justice, nor truth, nor generosity out of moribund institutions
(such as is now the House of Commons), which, after a certain stage in
decline, no longer live save for personal intrigue.
I say nothing, therefore, against them, in spite of their failure, and
I revere their memory. The Irish in good time will give to the last
protagonists in that futile attempt a due position in their annals; and
specially to William Redmond and his brother, John Redmond.
For writing this I may be assailed from either side; but it is true.
Anyhow, I saw the tragedy going on before my eyes, as a man on a shore
height may see a boat making straight for rocks under water, apparent
to him, but of which her steersman knows nothing. I saw it in the years
when I watched it as a young man from the gallery of the House of
Commons; I saw it during the two Parliaments in which I sat; I saw it
when I had left the place in disgust. I saw it in the last four years
before the Great War; England, still drifting hopelessly on to the
Irish reef: till she struck.
I saw, year after year, from my boyhood to my middle manhood and later,
the Parliamentary poison eating up the Irish effort and the English
face turned away from Ireland, failing to understand its own doom. For
England, a seat of vision, might have understood the opportunity and
the peril had the Irish themselves used pen and word directly. But the
wrong instrument was used: the broken and now useless instrument of the
Commons.
I saw the politicians whom the Irish sent over, or rather, who had the
machinery of the Irish protest in their hands, grow fonder and fonder
of the Westminster drug and degradation. I saw them half in doubt, at
last, whether it were not better to remain in London half enjoying
what had become second nature to them, the wretched pomposities of the
House of Commons. They should rather have nourished the flame of their
country. Yet they were honest men, and at heart and at root were Irish
to the end. But they thought that England was to be made to understand
by the use of a machine, the Parliamentary machine, which was already
worn out. It was their fundamental error. What man desiring to move men
would waste his time in Parliament?
If a man may boast of a small personal experience, I myself told
them what would come. But they would not believe me. They thought me
fanatical in this—and to the end. They put their trust in the slime of
the lobbies. It swallowed them up.
I saw the end; or rather the beginning of the end—for the true end
of the Irish quarrel is still hidden, and will be perhaps for us,
here in England, very terrible. I saw the professional politicians
carrying their silly labels of ‘Liberal’ and ‘Unionist,’ footling, on
the very edge of the war precipice in 1914, at a game for avoiding the
Irish issue, and (as they dined together) arranging tricks to put it
off on one side. I saw their vast relief when they were given their
chance to the threat of a mutiny against the salvation of England and
Ireland. And I saw—I lived to see—the contemptible capitulation: the
Parliamentary puppets (Lord Chancellors and the rest) shouting on a
Wednesday that ‘they would not rest until they had taken the last arm
from the hands of the last rebel,’ and on the following Friday, at the
bidding of their financial masters, surrendering to Ireland for ever:
Ireland that might have been the bulwark of England.... It is done.
So we sailed slowly on, past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, past
that mournful great tolling bell which hangs there in the middle sea;
imprisoned in its cage, expiating the too careless sins of its youth.
The lamentable sound of it, the unsatisfied appeal, followed us over
the deep. So we sailed on, with our nose for the Atlantic headlands of
the south, and for the corners of Wales, where they face the Cornish
and the Devon seas and Ireland also, beyond, with the great ocean
rolling in between.
High as are the mountains on this shore, yet by a trick of the air they