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
were soon out of sight.
That is a thing I have never understood. High land which ought to be
plainly visible, and even overhanging one, disappears like this at
sea magically on a clear day. When the weather is thick, one expects
that; but the curious thing is that one may see clear air all around
and a sharp horizon, nothing but sky and sea, and yet know perfectly
well that the empty heaven at which one is gazing is really full
of great hills close at hand. I do not know whether this happens
in the clearer parts of the world. I have never seen it off North
Africa or California. But upon the coasts of these islands it happens
continually, and it is one of the hundred things which, I think, has
made their inhabitants familiar with mystery and amenable to the
unseen. For those of these islands, British and Irish, have always
been remarkable for the sense of mystery; and among them none feel the
effect of mystery more strongly than such as sail upon the sea.
It was an astonishing thing to sit there, at the end of the afternoon,
just past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, heading for Strumbles
light below the horizon, with a slight air, now from the northwest,
giving the boat steering-way and no more, with the tiller lazily pushed
a little up to keep her course, and looking over the rail to the left,
eastward, and seeing nothing there but an horizon of empty sky; yet
knowing very well that the sky was not empty, but that the enormous
mass of Cader Idris and the enormous mass of Plinlimmon stood guarding
the sea. It was like the continual experience of this life wherein
the wise firmly admit vast Presences to stand in what is an apparent
emptiness, unperceived by any sense.
As I thus looked over the rail musing upon the strangeness of such
things, I remembered how, many years ago, in this same boat and holding
this same tiller, I had wondered, after a too rapid passage across the
Channel from France, under too much canvas and with too much wind, how
near I might be to England. For one could not see the coast at all.
The wind had dropped suddenly, it had grown dead calm, and the Nona
lolloped on the big lump which the breeze had left. I had no idea,
within ten miles, where I might be; it is a ridiculous confession to
make, but true. It was the height of the spring tides, and I only
roughly knew the set of them in mid-Channel. While I was so wondering,
I thought I saw some difference between the lower and the upper sky, as
though the lower grey were faintly darker than the upper. In a moment
the line was defined, and I found myself looking at the turn of the
high land east of Folkestone, where it runs away inland towards the old
Roman harbour of Lympne. I was not more than three miles from shore.
And as there is a concealment of reality at sea, corresponding to the
concealment of reality from our experience in human life, so also at
sea there is occasionally vision, corresponding to that occasional
vision which you also have in human life: but vision is much rarer than
the concealment of reality.
Once out near the Looe with an ugly thunderstorm glowering and
lumbering down from the north, full of zigzags of lightning, I, in this
same boat, was shortening sail rapidly to meet the gust when it should
come. Even as I did so, I saw a fierce red light beating upon the Seven
Sisters and Beachy Head, more than forty miles away. You could see
every detail of those chalk cliffs. You could have touched them with
your hand; yet the sea in between was vague: and that was a vision of
the unseen. I say that the sea is in all things the teacher of men.
With the afternoon the wind freshened, and, as it freshened, went right
round by north to a little east of north, whence it blew steadily
enough, and gave us about four knots at the fall of darkness.
My companion had never held a tiller, but he was very expert at all
sports, and I thought to myself, ‘I will see whether so simple a thing
as steering a boat cannot be easily accomplished by a man at the first
trial. Then shall I be able to get what I badly need, which is a little
sleep.’ So I lighted the binnacle lamp, I explained to him the function
of the lubber’s mark, and gave him the point on the card which he was
to keep on the lubber’s mark. I said to him: ‘If it comes on to blow a
little harder and the card swings, and the boat tends to yaw a little,
don’t mind that, but keep the lubber’s mark on the average at the point
I have given and that will be enough.’ He said that he understood all
these things, and for the first time in his life set himself to steer
a ship. But I, for my part, went down to sleep, confident that if it
should come on to blow at all hard it would awaken me there and then,
so no great harm could come. I slept for many hours, when suddenly
I was awakened by my companion giving a loud cry of astonishment. I
tumbled up on deck quickly, and I found him pointing at a light which
shone brilliantly upon the horizon, dead on our bow. He said to me:
‘Look, look, there is a light dead ahead!’ I said to him: ‘Of course!’
and that it was the light of Strumble Head, outside Fishguard; and I
asked him what he would have expected. I had given him his course,
and, naturally, he had lifted the light in good time. But he, for
his part, could not get over it; he thought it a sort of miracle. He
kept on repeating his amazement that so clumsy a thing as a tiller
and a rudder, and so coarse an instrument as an old battered binnacle
compass, should thread the eye of a needle like that; it was out of
all his experience. It is true that he had not been disturbed by any
current or strong tide, but even had he been so, he was bound on a
clear night to make that light not much off either bow.
That things should turn out so gave him quite a new conception of the
sea and the sailing of it, and he talked henceforward as though it were
his home.
This corroboration by experience of a truth emphatically told, but at
first not believed, has a powerful effect upon the mind.
I suppose that of all the instruments of conviction it is the most
powerful. It is an example of the fundamental doctrine that truth
confirms truth. If you say to a man a thing which _he_ thinks
nonsensical, impossible, a mere jingle of words, although you yourself
know it very well by experience to be true; when later he finds this
thing by his own experience to be actual and living, then is truth
confirmed in his mind: it stands out much more strongly than it would
had he never doubted. On this account, it is always worth while, I
think, to hammer at truths which one knows to be important, even those
which seem, to others, at their first statement mere nonsense. For
though you may die under the imputation of being a man without a sense
of proportion, or even a madman, yet reality will in time confirm your
effort. And even though that confirmation of your effort, the triumph
of the truth, should never be associated with your own name, yet it is
worth making, for the sake of the truth, to which I am sure we owe
a sort of allegiance: not because it is the truth—one can have no
allegiance to an abstraction—but because whenever we insist upon a
truth we are witnessing to Almighty God.
A man who knows that the earth is round but lives among men who believe
it to be flat ought to hammer in his doctrine of the earth’s roundness
up to the point of arrest, imprisonment, or even death. Reality will
confirm him, and he is not so much testifying to the world as it
is—which is worth nothing—as to Him who made the world, and Who is
worth more than all things. And, as it seems to me, a man ought to do
this even about the truths not so very important, but he should observe
some proportion between them and truths of vital importance. For
instance, it is a truth of no very apparent immediate importance to-day
that any great poem of the past must have been written by a poet,
and that those who think a great poem can be written by a committee
or pieced together out of traditional ballads, think nonsense. It is
also a truth that Great Britain is no longer secured by sea power. It
is also a truth that the interests of this country were till lately
identical with the interests of international banking and finance—and
are so no longer.
All these three truths are true, but the first truth touches no vital
matter, while the last two truths are of immediate importance; and a
man aware of them should hammer away at them, and not neglect them in
order to pursue too constantly that other much less important truth
about old poems.
It is not often that one comes across men in a modern lifetime intent
upon the proclamation of unaccepted, or of ill-accepted or unknown
truths; for such men must suffer. And few will suffer to-day save
for some reward. Very few modern men value any reward that is not
immediate and material. Huxley, who sacrificed himself entirely, both
to false things which he believed to be true and to real things that
were true, I never knew. But I knew Déroulède well, and Déroulède
hammered away all his life at the expense of ceaseless insult and
contempt, paying for the preservation of his honour the heavy price of
an unbroken isolation, and dying without seeing any apparent fruit of
his effort. It was his mission to proclaim to his French compatriots
the elementary truth that, until they had secured the defeat of
Prussia in a war, they themselves were doomed to increasing decay, and
Europe to increasing ills. I visited his grave just after the Battle
of the Marne. It is in a little, somewhat neglected churchyard, some
three miles from the house he had inherited: a place windswept and
overlooking from beyond its walls a great horizon to the north. The
season being late summer, and the war having left the little place
untended, the grass was rank and high around the mound and the slab
which marked the place where he lay. There, leaning against the wall,
some one had put casually, as though by chance, in high dedication to
his memory, the first of the frontier posts which the army had pulled
up from the summits of the Vosges during the first ill-fated charge
into Alsace.
I knew also one other man (whom, for the honour I bear him and because
he is still alive, I shall not name), an Englishman; at the outbreak of
war in South Africa he said to all who would hear him, and printed in a
journal to which he had admission, the simple truth that this adventure
would be the beginning of a decline in the financial credit of England.
To discover whether he was right or wrong, look at any curve of that
credit and mark the dates. He said to all who would hear him that
from this adventure onwards we should find ourselves increasingly
embarrassed, with increasing taxation, with an increasing uncertainty
in our foreign policy, and in our hold upon the markets we desired to
control abroad. His action was not that of the prophet, but of the
reasoner. His unpopularity was extreme. He was the only public man who
talked conscientiously and rationally in this affair of the Boer War,
and who did not confuse his conclusions with that disgusting antipathy
to their own country which marked the most of those who protested
against the war. As for the enemy, the South African Dutch, he knew
them and heartily despised them. The Outlanders he also knew, and
thought them the scum of the earth. But he acted on no mood of like or
dislike. He was concerned with the future of England and he reasoned.
He talked a sort of mathematical sense, and all his words were true;
but he shall know no reward. Only, this remains true also; that all who
heard him or read his writing have secretly returned to those words in
their own minds, and have said: ‘He was right and we were wrong.’