The Cruise of the Nona (part 1)

It was late in May, near midnight, the air being very warm and still, and the sky not covered but somewhat dim, with no moon, when I took the Nona out from Holyhead Harbour, having on board one companion to help me work the boat, and a local man who could speak Welsh for me in whatever places I might make along the coast.

The very slight breeze, which had barely moved us through the water after we had got up the anchor, died away long before we reached the end of the breakwater, and it was necessary to pull her out with the dinghy in order to fetch round the end of the stonework and get to sea. There was at that time of the tide a little current running towards the Stack, which would slightly help us on our way once we were outside, and with this we drifted a full hour and more, aided now and then by faint breaths of air, which rose and died again like memories. So came we, with the turn of the night, under the glare of the lighthouse at last, and then put the nose of the little ship round for the point of Carnarvonshire and the strait between the mainland and Bardsey Island, which is called Bardsey Sound.

It was a course of about thirty-three miles, with no chance, apparently, of covering it in all that night, nor perhaps in all the coming day as well; for we had struck, as it seemed, that hot, steady summer weather in which one may play at a drifting match for days on end.

While it was still dark the distant mountains could barely be seen as something a little blacker than the sky. They looked astonishingly low, as mountains always do on a moonless night, when there is nothing to distinguish their details, and nothing against which to compare them, or by which to tell their distance. Already—it being now nearer two than one o’clock—a little wind had arisen, settling down, as it seemed, into somewhat east of north, and blowing over the Anglesey flats. It gave us perhaps no more than a couple of knots an hour, but it was heartening after the long calm, and as we had all sail set she pulled to it steadily enough. I was at the helm, my companion was still awake, sitting in the cockpit and talking to me, and the hand who was to be with us till we next landed smoked beside us on deck.

The wind had freshened somewhat, we were making perhaps four or five knots, when the dawn began to show beyond Snowdon, and those great hills at once looked higher against the glimmer of grey light. Soon the whole coast was apparent, and the Yreifles with their triple peaks (clearer than I had expected; indeed, too clear for fine weather) lay right ahead and Bardsey Island beyond them and the narrow sound in between. The wind seemed steady, as though it would hold. I reckoned that the tide would turn against us anywhere between six and seven in the morning, that it would turn back through the Sound about noon or one o’clock, and I calculated that we should be running into Cardigan Bay, past Bardsey, on the middle of the ebb, an hour or two later than that time.

But what happened was something wholly unexpected; it is always so at sea, and that is why it is said that the sea brings all adventures. Indeed, I think that as we go on piling measurements upon measurements, and making one instrument after another more and more perfect to extend our knowledge of material things, the sea will always continue to escape us. For there is a Living Spirit who rules the sea and many attendant spirits about him.

But on that brightening morning there was nothing to warn us. The glass was high and, if I remember right, still rising; the sky uncovered and clearer than it had been by night; the wind slight, but holding steady; and all was soldier’s weather, so that any one could have taken that little ship through such weather where he would. It was weather, one would say, made for the instruction of the young in the art of sailing.

By the time it was fully light, we were making between six and seven knots, for the wind had sharply risen. As it was an offshore wind, there was as yet no sea raised, but little tumbling whitecaps, very pleasant to look at, and all the movement coming on our quarter from over the land. With the rising of the sun it blew hard. We were yielding to it too much; we had taken down the topsail an hour before, and now I thought it wise to take in a reef as well, which we did in the headsail and the mainsail, but leaving the jib as it was, for that sail was not a large one.

I have sailed a great deal off and on in boats of this size (that is, somewhat more than thirty feet over all, with eight or nine feet beam, and drawing from five to six feet of water, cutter rigged), and I know it is an illusion; yet I can never get over the idea that a reef makes no difference. Two reefs—yes—but one reef I cannot ‘feel.’ It is an obtuseness in me; but so it is.

However, it seemed wiser to take in a reef of some sort, and two reefs would have reduced the sail quite unnecessarily, for it was not yet blowing so hard as all that.

We slipped down the coast smartly, nearing it all the time upon our slantwise course, and as we did so, the sun being now fully risen, it blew harder and harder every minute. A sea rose, a good following sea, but higher than one would have expected so nearly off the land from a land wind; and, as this boat has very little freeboard (it is her only defect, for she rises magnificently to the water, and bears herself better the worse the weather may be), I watched the swirl of the foam under her low counter as each wave slightly broke under the now fierce wind.

We shortened down to three reefs, but even so the helm was pulling hard, and when we changed jibs and put up the smallest we had, it griped more than I liked, straining my arm after so long a spell at the tiller. I handed it over to the man who was with us, and went forward to see that everything was clear, for it was now blowing really hard, and anything like a tangle if we got into difficulties would be dangerous. The gale rose higher and the sea with it; but, tearing through the water as we now were under three reefs, we should soon make the Sound and get round the point of Carnarvonshire into easier water right under the lee of the land.

There was only one thing that troubled me, which was this question: should we make the Sound before the tide turned? It was an important question, because, although I had never been in those parts before, offshore, in a boat of my own, yet I could judge that in such a piece of water, with all the bay pouring through a channel barely two miles wide with a deep of barely one, the tide against such a gale would raise an impossible sea. If we could just make it on the tail of the tide, on the very last of the ebb, we should have nothing to bear but a strong following sea, such as that before which we were running at the moment: for the southerly stream was still strong under us. But if the water turned before we got into the Sound, we should have a time to remember; and so we did.

For I had done something or other to annoy the Earth-Shaker, and he pursued me viciously, making the tide turn just before we reached the mouth of the Sound. In a time much shorter than I had expected, with no lull in between, the steady run of sea which had been combing behind us, towering above the counter, but regular and normal to deal with, turned into a confusion of huge tumbling pyramidical waves, leaping up, twisting, turning, and boiling in such a confusion as I had never seen, not even in Alderney Race, which I had gone through many years before when I was a boy. The painter which held the dinghy to the stern parted, and that boat, a good and serviceable one, was lost. There was no question of turning in such a sea and under such a wind; the dinghy had to be abandoned. The tide against us was so fierce that even under that gale we hardly moved; and it was strange to see, from the leaping and struggling of the Nona as the foam rushed by in a millrace, how steady remained the points on the Carnarvonshire shore, and how slowly we opened the Sound. The pace was irregular. There were moments when we advanced at perhaps a knot or a knot and a half against that fierce tide. There were others when we even slipped back. All the while the wind howled and the sea continued to rise and to boil in a cauldron more violent as the gale on the one hand and the tide against it on the other grew in strength and in the fierceness of their struggle. In seas like this one never knows when some great tumbling lump of water may not break upon one’s decks, for there is no run and follow, it is all confusion; and I remember thinking, as I took the helm again in the midst of the turmoil, of something I had seen written once of Portland Race: ‘The sea jumps up and glares at you’—a sound phrase.

We had thus (in some peril, but still able to keep a course, and, on the whole, advancing) got at last between the point and the Island, that is, to the heart of the Sound; and a very few more yards would have brought us round out of the cauldron into smooth water and a run for some quiet anchorage right under the protection of the coast, when (since at sea bad luck always goes gathering impetus) the jib blew out with a noise like a gun. A few rags hung on to its fastenings; the rest of the canvas went away out to sea like a great wounded bird, and then sailed down and flopped into the seething of the water.

You may guess what that did to a boat in our straits! It made the helm almost impossible to hold with the violent gripe of the mainsail, half our head canvas being gone; and at the same time it stopped our way. We drifted back again into the worst of the water, and lost in five minutes what it had taken us more than an hour to make. The danger was real and serious. The man that was with us expressed his fears aloud; my companion, though new to the sea, took it all with great calm. As to what happened to myself, I will record it though it is a little detailed and personal: I will record it for the sake of the experience, of which others may make what they will.

I looked at the Carnarvonshire coast there close at hand, the sinking lines of the mountains as they fell into the sea, and I discovered myself to be for the first time in my life entirely indifferent to my fate. It was a very odd sensation indeed, like the sensation I fancy a man must have to find he is paralysed. Once, under the influence of a drug during an illness, some such indifference had pervaded me, but here it was in the broad daylight and the sun well up above the mountains, with a clear sky, in the grip of a tremendous gale and of an angry countering sea, ravening like a pack of hounds. Yet I could only look with indifference on the sea and at the land. The sensation was about as much like courage as lying in a hammock is like a hundred yards race. It had no relation to courage, nor, oddly enough, had it any relation to religion, or to a right depreciation of this detestable little world which can be so beautiful when it likes.

Such as it was, there it was. I had always particularly disliked the idea of death by drowning, and I had never believed a word of the stories which say that at the end it is a pleasant death. Indeed, as a boy I was once caught under the steps of a swimming-bath and held there a little too long before I could get myself out, and pleasant it was not at all. But here in Bardsey Sound, I was indifferent, even to death by drowning. All I was really interested in was to watch what way we lost and what chance we had of getting through.

Indeed, the whole question of fear is beyond analysis, and there is only one rule, which is, that a man must try to be so much the master of himself that he shall be able to compel himself to do whatever is needful, fear or no fear. Whether there be merit or not in the absence of fear, which sentiment we commonly call courage when it is allied to action, may be, and has been, discussed without conclusion since men were men. The absence of fear makes an admirable show, and excites our respect in any man; but it is not dependent upon the will. Here was I in very great peril indeed off Bardsey, and utterly careless whether the boat should sink or swim; yet was I the same man who, in a little freshness of breeze that arose off the Owers a year or two ago, was as frightened as could well be—and with no cause. And if this be true of change of mood in one man, it must be true of the differences of mood in different men.

I had occasion during the war, when I had been sent to write upon the Italian front, to be swung to the high isolated rock of a mountain peak in the Dolomites by one of those dizzy wires which the Italian engineers slung over the gulfs of the Alps for the manning and provisioning of small high posts. It was an experience I shall ever remember, a vivid, hardly tolerable nightmare; but the man I was with, an Italian officer of great and deserved fame, earned during that campaign, not only felt nothing, but could not understand what my terror was. We sat, or rather lay, in one of those shallow trays which travel slowly along these wires over infinite deeps of air; and during the endless crawling through nothingness he told me, by way of recreation, the story of a private soldier who had been coming down from the isolated post some weeks before. The machinery had gone wrong, and the tray remained suspended over the gulf, halfway across, for some twenty minutes. When it worked again and they hauled it in they found that the man had gone mad.

When the time came for the return journey, I very well remember asking myself whether I had the control to face that second ordeal or no. It was an obscure crisis, unknown to others, but as real and as great within as any of those which stand out in fiction or history. I would rather have gone down by the path which clung to the steep, the precipitous mountainside. This was forbidden because it was under direct Austrian fire; I knew that I should not be allowed. So I faced the return—and it was worse than the going.

Also in my life I have known two men who have hunted lions, and each of them has told me that fear in the presence of peril from the beast was wholly capricious, and that sometimes when an exceedingly unpleasant death seemed certain, the man who had just missed his shot felt indifferent. I can believe it.

Anyhow, here I was in Bardsey Sound, with many deaths moving over the howling fury of the sea, and not one of them affecting me so much as a shadow passing over a field.

The end of that adventure was odd and unreasonable—as things will be at sea. It was perhaps because we had been buffeted and pushed into some edge of the conflict between wind and water where the tide runs slacker; or it was perhaps because the wind had risen still higher. But, at any rate, after three separate raids forward (in the second of which we were very nearly out of our peril and into smooth water), and as many set-backs (one of which got us into the worst violence we had yet suffered), the Nona, in a fourth attempt (it was her own, not ours—we could do nothing but keep her, as best we might, to her course), slipped out and reached an eddy beyond the tide. For a moment it was very difficult to keep her to it, she slewed round; but then again she got her head southerly, and we found ourselves running past the great Black Rock which stands there—the Carrig Dhu—and marks the smooth water beyond the edge of the tide.

We breathed again; and as I took her on through an easy sea, close under the land with not too much strain upon the helm (for the high shore now broke the gale), I was free to look over my right shoulder and watch, passing away behind us, further and further, the hell of white water and noise through which we had barely come to safety.

Danger keeps men awake and makes them forget necessity, but with this relief our fatigue came upon us. My friend and I had now been awake for some twenty-five or twenty-six hours, and it was time for sleep.

We got the poor Nona, which had behaved so well, up into a lonely little bay where was an old abandoned mine working, but no other sign of man. The Welshman with us told us it was good holding-ground; we let go the anchor and stowed sail. I remember how I fell half asleep as I stretched the cover over the mainsail boom and yard and tied it down at the after end. The gale still blew, yet, as it seemed, more steadily and less fiercely. There was no danger of dragging. We were well under the lee of the land. I gave one look, under the violent but clear morning sky, to seaward before I went below; and there I saw how, at a certain distance from the land, in a long line, the white water began. It was like being in a lagoon, like being protected by a bank from the sea outside; but really it was only the effect of the lee of the land making a belt of smooth water along shore. Then we all lay down to sleep and slept till evening.

When I awoke, the hurricane—for it had been no less—had died down to a fresh gale, and it promised to fall still further before night. There were a few hours of daylight left, but I thought it hardly worth while to up-anchor and run further along the coast. We were snug as it was and still fatigued after the struggle in Bardsey Sound, so I thought we would still lie there through the night and start eastward the next morning.

As I looked lazily over to Bardsey, with sunset on its streaming rocks, from the shelter of this quiet bay, I considered the islands.

Bardsey, they say, has a little community on board which governs itself and elects its own king. Whether it also pays tribute to some rich man on land, I do not know. But all the islands around Britain tend to be little kingdoms of their own: Lundy is like that, and over and over again one finds similar islands owned by one man, living either alone like a beast or companioned like a patriarch with his family and his servants and tenants all round about him; and the truth is that man is happier in small kingdoms than in great.

Except for the pride and honour of belonging to a great kingdom, to be citizen of a small one seems to me to have all the advantages. In a great kingdom you have to pay heavy taxes. You are made falsely concerned with men whom you never see, and in doings far distant, which you do not understand; you bear on your shoulders the burden of millions, and you must suffer a capital city, which will be a sink of crime. Your rulers will grow rich by deceit—for a very large community can always be deceived; nothing about you will be real, and the mass of your fellow citizens will be desperately poor. For it is the nature of large communities to separate into strata and for the mass to grow indigent.

But now I come to think of it, there is one advantage in belonging to a large kingdom, which is, that you can enjoy differences and contrasts such as a small kingdom does not give you. Some day, perhaps very soon, the modern organisation of society into great communities will break down, and then it would be amusing to come to life again and see the little communities living their own independent lives as they did in the Dark Ages, and also in the beginnings of pagan history.

How pleasant it is to consider the little kingdom of Ithaca, and Cephalonia alongside, and the little territory of the Athenians! How pleasant it is to remember that there were four kings in Kent, grouped there under one dread emperor at Canterbury! and also how there was a king with two princes, his heirs, governing the Isle of Wight; all pagan when the rest of England had already gone Catholic. For though you often hear it said that Sussex was the last piece of English soil to remain pagan (and it is, indeed, the great boast of my county that it resisted the Faith for one hundred years, and only capitulated under duress and famine) it is not so. Sussex was not the last of England to growl in a reluctant font. The Wight beat us by a head. At that time our king of Sussex and part of Hants as well, by name Cædwalla, a Welsh name, was still pagan; and, when he did get religion, he thought himself too grand to be baptised by anybody except the Pope of Rome. To Rome, therefore, he went, and reached the City, was baptised, and then died out of hand of fever—a warning to Pride.

But he had something to show for it all, since the Pope, very much impressed that a king of Sussex itself (and part of Hants by conquest) should have visited him, wrote a fine epitaph for him in Latin verse and had it engraved on a stone which he put upon his grave in Old Saint Peter’s. But they pulled it up when New Saint Peter’s was built, and to this sacrilege I set down the very bad luck that Rome had afterwards.

Anyhow, the truth is that not Sussex but the Isle of Wight was the last pagan spot in these islands, and here we of Sussex must reluctantly yield the palm. Yet can we in Sussex always boast that our king was the last of the kings in Britain to worship the Devil twelve hundred years ago. And so again for Bardsey.

Looking at Bardsey over an evening sea now less tumbled and under the dying gale, I thought also how odd it was that such Scandinavian names should have stuck to some places more than to others. These pirates of the eighth and ninth centuries were not many in number. They had no culture or traditions; no literature; no anything. It was not until England had gradually civilised them and made them Christian that they produced anything whatsoever. How then did little bits of their language stick on to portions of our coast? They say that ‘Dublin’ is a Scandinavian name. ‘Bardsey’ certainly is, and so is the word ‘sound,’ to mean a passage of the sea, and ‘Skomer’ is Scandinavian, and, right high up in the estuary of the Severn, ‘Flatholm’ and ‘Steepholm’ are both surely Scandinavian. People explain it sometimes by saying that as the attack of the pirates was always necessarily from the sea, they would give their names to the sea places. I could understand how this would give them Scandinavian names in Scandinavia, but how did we come to adopt such names? That is the puzzle. I should have thought that the local Celtic name for Bardsey would have held out. It has not done so, at least not in our speech; and there are even Scandinavian names for inland places, such as the main hill of the Isle of Man, and many places in the Lakes and beyond.

But the whole story of words is full of mystery, and the attempt to reduce the process of words to a science has always seemed to me ridiculous enough. It is true that certain habits get formed, and you can, from them, build up certain vague rules. For instance, the French noun derives from the Latin usually—nearly always through the accusative—and a particular Latin form will produce a corresponding French form; but the process is not invariable; and though one type out of hundreds becomes the official type of each nation, human speech is naturally not a set of a few official languages, but a mass of innumerable dialects, all melting one into the other.

Watch carefully, and you will note that in the area covered by the great official languages, most people are bilingual. They can speak the official language, but they also speak among themselves a dialect of their own, usually a dialect more or less cousin to the official language. That is certainly true of the working people of my own county of Sussex, and, indeed, of all rural England; but it is also true of the industrial districts, and, of course, it is true of the North. You find just the same thing through France, and Belgium, and the Valley of the Rhine, and I am told you find the same thing in Italy. The real spoken languages of Christendom are to be counted by the hundred, or the thousand; and though they fall into great groups, yet each has a life of its own. The official languages live a separate life above the mass, forming the idiom of a small body of wealthy people. And even that idiom has two forms, the written and the spoken form, which are very different. It is odd how unnatural spoken English looks, for instance, when it appears in a book; and I suppose the public are right to prefer the wholly unreal written English put into the mouths of the characters in novels.

I remember one good woman who made a very large income for many years by writing books about lords and ladies in London, which books she sold to an extensive and eager public in England, but to a much more extensive, and far more eager public in the United States. In these books, which were in their time very famous, the ladies and gentlemen—the toffs—talked in the most astonishing manner: all in linked phrases of some inches, and dependent clauses hanging on.

There was one character in one of her books which I was assured was a friend of mine: a young hereditary politician. I know the man’s conversation well enough: it is of the ordinary sort, chopped sentences, grunts, continual repetitions and, in general, brief scraps: such language as you and I and everybody talks. But in the book this authoress, who knew the original well enough and lived all her life among lords and ladies, made the poor fellow talk in his own house like Hansard. She would make him spout great speeches at his own mother and deliver sentences of prodigious length in the midst of them.

I myself once wrote a book about politicians, called ‘A Change in the Cabinet.’ It was universally agreed in all that old world of professional politicians who were still educated men that my book, whether good or bad, was monstrously accurate to the way the people of that world talk and go on. But the book will never be held by any large public to be accurate; or, at any rate, will not satisfy the desire of the large public for a particular kind of pompous convention, such as never was by sea or land. And on the whole I think the large public are right. Literature has no business to be a mirror of life. We can see life for ourselves without literature. What literature ought to do, I take it, is to make a type or expression of life, which is quite a different thing from a mere reflection, and what is more, literature is there for fun and not for copying. Hence the greatest of human writings have very little relation to actual speech. The heroes of the poet Homer say things as satisfactory as have ever been said, yet they say them in a highly conventional and stilted way, using a very small vocabulary and (what is really extraordinary!) talking all the time in hexameters. Certainly no one ever did that in real life except an old don whom I used to know at Oxford.

This man spoke with a dactylic stammer, thus: ‘Wúggă-gă, zúggă-gă, úggĕr-gă Năggă-gă, Wúggă-ă, Húggĕr-gă.... In my ... wúgga ga ... d-dúgga-g—opinion.’

He was the only living person I have ever heard who gave the effect of speaking in ordinary life as the persons of the poets speak. It was well worth hearing; but, of course, one could not understand a word of it. Nor did he ever produce the great effects of the ancients.

One of the most delightful things about words is their habit of coming up out of nothing, like the little particles of ice which float to the surface of the Thames at the beginning of a frost, rising silently, floating up from the bottom of the river, or like the little oak trees that crop up everywhere like weeds in the fields of my home. ‘Boy’ is a word of that kind; ‘girl’ is another; ‘leg’ is another; ‘donkey’ is another; ‘plough,’ though a little earlier, is another. No one can tell you where they came from; they are like our modern masters, they have no ancestry. But, unlike our modern masters, they remain. Some one in some clique started the expression and it spread. One can see examples of the process going on all round one to-day. One sometimes even knows the man who invented a new term and the medium through which it spread. There are one or two Eton words of this sort, and one or two Balliol words which are in the way of becoming regular English; for individual men of large acquaintance and fertile mind started these new words, some of which are beginning to take root.

But of all things that words do, what pleases me most is their habit of adventure; the way they have of sitting tight and doing nothing but their ordinary job for centuries, and then shooting out and taking quite different work and travelling about, changing colour and shape as they go.

I am very fond of the word ‘cad.’ It is the most useful missile in the English language. It is very hard and knobby, and you can be certain of your effect. And yet how brief its career! How singular its arrival at its present exalted state! It is a shortened form of ‘cadet,’ the younger son of a great family, which came by extension to apply to the less fortunate. It wandered about in this vague form for about a lifetime, and then settled down into two separate uses, applying to a particular sort of domestic, I believe, in one of the universities, and also to the people who used to hang on at the back of the old horse omnibuses and take the money in those happy days of my youth when there were no bell punches and no uniforms, and all Charing Cross resounded to the cry of ‘Liverpool Street,’ towards which goal every omnibus cad entreated you.

‘Cad,’ having settled down on these two honourable but ill-paid occupations, slyly got in by a side door and established itself in a totally different meaning, which it has now achieved, and which it looks like keeping. For now it means: ‘A male deficient in one particular small set of those many moral qualities which, when combined with the national tradition of wealth, build up what is called in England a “gentleman”.’ That is what the word ‘cad’ means to-day, and that is what gives it its value. It is a very odd formation. The ‘gentleman’ is the ideal of our once aristocratic and now plutocratic English state; it is the ideal which members of the wealthier governing class must conform to or attempt to attain. That ideal (its worshippers will be surprised to hear) has not a few vices, a number of virtues, and a very great many habits or characters which are neither virtuous nor vicious—such as the accent.

Now the cad is not at all a man who lacks all these; he is only a man who lacks one particular set of the many virtues. He lacks the particular kind of reticence and the particular kind of generosity which go to the making of the character called ‘a gentleman.’ He may have a reticence of another kind, and a generosity of another kind, and still be a cad. On the whole, of the cads and gentlemen I have met, I would give the cads a shade of odds in the matter of salvation; which is not without its importance either.

It will be interesting to watch the process of the word and see what happens to it. I do not think it will last long, for the whole civilisation to which it applies and in which it has a meaning is breaking up, like mist before a rising wind. It is not a word you could translate into any other language, and the English society to which it attaches is changing in a whirl. I wonder what posterity will make of it? What will posterity make of this strange habit, suddenly arisen within fifty years (and soon to die), of regarding a particular sort of provincial wealthy man as a general ideal for all humanity, and of regarding a man lacking somewhat of that ideal’s qualities as the basest of mankind?

Probably posterity will do what we all do in dealing with the past, shrug its shoulders and pass on. We, in dealing with any part of the past which we cannot understand, treat it at once as ridiculous, or only talk of the things in it which we do sympathise with. So will posterity deal with us. We cannot understand at all, for instance, the mood of a man who—like nearly everybody up to about two hundred years ago—objected to being burnt alive not on account of the pain, but because it was an indignity; because the body was consumed. We cannot understand why he was not more concerned with the serious discomfort of being burnt alive than with the ignominy.

In the eighteenth century, men could not understand the theological discussions of the early Byzantine period. We are getting a little more sympathetic with them now, but even to-day there are a great many highly cultured men steeped in history who cannot reconstruct for themselves at all the state of mind in which the populace lost its temper over a theological point; and the usual attitude of those who 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 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: then again, rather sharper this time, came the honest thrust into the sand, and, what was more, she had run up against it so high this time that she was careening a little; she was taking it very hard, as the highbrows used to say of their beloved Prussia after the Armistice.

This time it was a good half-hour before she floated, and all that time the culprit was silent, nor did I reproach him. He at least had some vague memory of where the channel might be, and that I certainly had not.

As we lay there, waiting for the rising water to lift us, a clear sound of hammering rang from the black shore, far away, over the vast expanse of sand. It meant something to the pseudo-pilot, for he called out in loud, sing-song tones five or six words in the Welsh language, wherein I distinguished the word ‘afon,’ which means ‘water’; and his very distant Kymric fellow, there unperceived in the night, answered with a distant cry. What they said I know not; perhaps the unjust man at the helm was asking at what hour she would have water enough to lie higher up.

She floated again (it was now deep into the night, and the dim stars, through the haze overhead, watched our misery). The Nona glided on.

To be coming thus into a very shoal fairway, after dark, and to be in the hands of a pilot who was quite clearly one of God’s Three Welsh Fools—one of the Triad, one of the Three Great Fools of Britain—was a strain to the temper, a strain to breaking point. It was no good my taking the tiller, for I had no idea of the channel, and only saw now and then, straining my eyes forward, a little blob on the darkness that would be a drum-headed buoy slowly drifting past as we lifted on the young flood.

I used to think that the irritation against fools was irrational and purposeless. Where it is written in Holy Whit that one should tolerate fools even with gladness, I thought that this was a general rule of conduct. But now I know it to be a counsel of perfection and, indeed, like so many things in the Old Testament, a counsel generally to be avoided. For the strong exasperation against fools is, I am now sure, an instinct implanted in us (or, as fools themselves would say, ‘evolved’) whereby we defend ourselves against such accidents as this perpetual bumping which the Nona was undergoing on the sands of Port Madoc. Our anger against fools is a natural faculty of conservation, like the sensitiveness of the nerves of the skin; and in those countries where fools are too much tolerated (of which England) many little disasters proceeding from such tolerated fools combine to make a great one at last and to break down the state.

It is high time that a new book were written on Fools, like those of the sixteenth century, which are so excellent, and which you have in Latin, in German, in French, and in English: ‘The Praise of Folly,’ ‘The Ship of Fools,’ ‘The Fool’s Paradise,’ and others. If I had the leisure, it is one of the many hundred books which I should like to write myself: ‘The Fool, sociological, biological, and pathological, with many portraits and an appendix on the newly discovered Giant Fool of Aphasia.’ As I have not the leisure (and never had it) I bequeath the idea to other and younger and wealthier men, just as some years ago I bequeathed them the idea of a Cads’ Encyclopædia.

Among other chapters in this book I would have one on the Fool and the Label. For I maintain that labels are the great support and sustenance of the Human Fool.

Labels help the fool to do what little dull thinking he manages to get through. He knows whom to respect and whom to despise and what wine to choose, and so on—all by the label. And then again, labels are very useful to the fool by getting him taken for more than he is worth. Any number of my friends have said to me at one time or another, when I was having my laugh at the politicians: ‘A man does not get to a position like that (Secretary of State for Drainage, or Prime Minister, or what not) without abilities.’ Now this error shows how useful the label is to the fool. For a matter of fact I can testify, if any living man can, that the politicians who get their share of the swag are of all degrees in the matter of intelligence. Some have first-rate abilities, especially among the lawyers; many are of the ordinary second-rate, fifty-eight per cent, β minus or Wandsworth intelligence; and quite a large proportion are Plumb Stuffed Fools, true Fools Absolute and of the Nadir; Rooted Fools. I knew one Fool Secretary of State who, in his Whitehall office, used to look at his official documents with a sort of tragic stare, as men look on the dead, and slowly wag them up and down in front of his face with a hopeless gesture. Then he would call upon his permanent official, who would explain to him what they meant, whereupon he would use one after another of the great Fool Phrases which are the furniture of the Fool’s Mind, such as, ‘Yes,’ ‘I see,’ ‘Quite,’ ‘Precisely,’ and then again ‘Yes.’ Having done this, he would sign his name to a number of papers which meant no more to him than so many Chinese tracts, and with a groan he would go off to spend his hundred pounds a week at Brighton.

Even in those trades where you would think there must be activity of brain for a man to advance at all, your fool drifts forward somehow. You find him quite high up in armies, and as for his number in the great cheating professions, notably share-shuffling, it is prodigious. Half the wealthy share-shufflers I have known have been fools animal, fools crass, fools to be driven blindfold or led about on a halter; but to do that great modern profession justice, there is a minority of share-shufflers as keen as needles and as wide-awake as ferrets. They have no more luck, however, than their duller brethren, for Fate rules them all, and alternate wealth and poverty is as much the rule with them as with the stupidest men. I will bargain that if you were to take samples of share-shufflers out of three sacks, the House of Lords, Monte Carlo, and the gaols, you would find the same percentage of fools in each sample.

Which leads me on to say that never was an old proverb of less accurate modern application than the proverb about the fool and his money. You will have heard it said that the fool and his money are soon parted. That was true enough for the yokel at the fair, but in this modern city life of ours it is just the other way. The Fool of Inherited Money (not the Gambling Fool) holds on to it with fish-hooks. It is the intelligent man, with many interests and (by some freak of nature) a generous heart, who squanders his hoard. But your fool gets his legs round the money-bag and crosses his ankles on the other side, clasps it higher up with both arms right round it and fingers tightly interlocked beyond; digs his teeth into the mouth of the same and, screwing up his eyes, clutches it all over desperately with the rigour of death, making himself wholly one with the beloved object. From this attitude nothing can move him save the lure of a plausible fellow promising to increase his wealth. I have seen a clot of fools thus hanging on to money-bags, all pressed up together like bats in a steeple, when a repulsive, overdressed young adventurer would slither by singing a light song of great wealth to be made in some scheme of his devising; and, behold, the fools would turn their round heads ungummed from their money-bags and listen in rapture to that song, and many of them would even hand over their bags to the young adventurer, never to see their gold again. But I say that, save when they are thus tempted by their blind avarice, fools are not easily parted from their money.

However, this harbour or pilot fool of mine was not, I think, troubled in this regard, for had he been a Fool of Wealth he would not have been blundering to get the Nona up-channel in the dark.

Five separate times did we touch and wait with increasing anger each time till the flood released us, but at last we came to the pool, and to reasonable deep water, and to a quay.

There did we put out our warping ropes, and springs, and the fenders alongside, and there did we give money to the fool as a reward for all the pain his folly had given us.

For also this is the rule in human life; that when you suffer anything you must pay a good price for the entertainment.

It is true of bad cooking, and of bad wine, and of a painful illness, started or continued by doctors, and of all the intolerable noisy hotels, full of insolence and maddening bells. It is true of all the bad things of the world. Nor does it follow that all cheap things are good. Far from it! But all good things are cheap (except caviare), and the way to get good things is to look for them as you would look for a penny which you had dropped in the straw of the (once again!) dear old omnibuses of my youth which were pulled by horses, and had standing at their door a guardian of the poorest of the people, foul in speech, grimy of skin, unshaven, bloodshot, from the gutter—but (oh, believe me!) a better citizen of a better time than ours.

Nona, cruising and voyaging Nona, wanderer over the seas of Britain, how in the solitude of your companionship my mind does lead me from one thing to another!

But that’s all one. It is time for sleep.

The new day having come, we got the half-ebb a little before six o’clock, and threaded away down the Channel for the open sea.

I ought, I suppose, to have stopped in Port Madoc, and renewed the memories of my childhood. But a fig for the memories of my childhood, at six o’clock in the morning: at six o’clock of a May morning, and a nice little leading breeze, all cold and merry! The memories of childhood and the contemplation of the divine are for the evening; they go with candle-light, and with a wine I know, and with friends of twenty years. But, so help me He that made me, when I find the morning wind blowing well for the salt and myself freshly roused from a good sleep, I am full of nothing but the coming of the course and an eagerness for the line of the sea against the sky and the making of a further shore.

It ought to be more dangerous to float down on the ebb without a local trickster, than to come up upon the flood. But fortune served, and the swirl of the ebb plainly marked the channel under that heartening light, with the glory of the new day shooting over the tops of the great and solemn mountains eastward, by the land.

Therefore, without misadventure, we came to the last marking buoy and took the sea; running easily with the wind nearly aft, but a little on the port quarter, so that all was well.

The great field or marsh before Harlech stretched there to landward; and, on its splendid defiant height, the old castle watched us as we went; the place where they hid poor Henry the Saint when the true Plantagenet was pacing for his blood.

Here is a landscape inhabited everywhere by things not of this world; by the gods of these hills whom our God has ousted; by the memory of great men dead and their wraiths, I suppose; and by the troops of the Empire, marching up the inland road, and by the chieftains, and by the very saintly men who cast their spell fifteen hundred years ago over the islands and the rocks of Lyonesse.

So we sailed on and on, heading over to the Atlantic southern corner of Wales. Then, far away in the midst of the sea, we heard the tolling of a bell....

The tolling of the bell was not only mournful (and at the same time terrible), but had in it an odd quality of message; as though it were not of the world through which we moved. For a bell is a land thing, and even in salt water we think of it as sounding upon a buoy near 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 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.’

There is another form of impressing the truth, and testifying to it, and doing good by it, which is the dogmatic assertion of truth by the old and the experienced and the revered, to the young. It is out of fashion; it is invaluable. I can myself testify to two such experiences which stand out supreme among many hundreds in my own early life. I am afraid they may seem trivial to my readers; I can only say that for myself they were as strong experiences as any great joy or pain could be. One was a sentence which Cardinal Manning said to me when I was but twenty years old. The other was one which the Master of my College, Dr. Jowett, of Balliol, said to me when I was twenty-two years old.

The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: All human conflict is ultimately theological.

It was my custom during my first days in London, as a very young man, before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he would receive me; and during those brief interviews I heard from him many things which I have had later occasion to test by the experience of human life. I was, it may be said, too young to judge things so deep as sanctity and wisdom; but, on the other hand, youth has vision, especially upon elemental things; and Manning did seem to me (and still seems to me) much the greatest Englishman of his time. He was certainly the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who, in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, preëminent in will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept the Faith. Not only did his powerful mind discover, but his powerful will also insisted upon all the difficult consequences of such an acceptation. He never admitted the possibility of compromise between Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict, and gloried in it.

This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered) that all human conflict was ultimately theological, that is that all wars and revolutions and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I would have almost said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight: with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action, so extended that it covered the whole.

It is, indeed, a truth which explains and coördinates all one reads of human action in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. Men talk of universal peace: it is only obtainable by one common religion. Men say that all tragedy is the conflict of equal rights. They lie. All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or of a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that doctrine is but a private, individual affair, creating a mere opinion. Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the state; and every state is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.

The truth Dr. Jowett gave me came thus. He asked me the political question which was always uppermost in his mind, and which he believed all young men should consider. It was, ‘Under what form of government is the state of man at its best?’ I answered as all young men should answer, ‘A republic,’ to which he answered gently in his turn, ‘You cannot have a republic without republicans.’ Now that, for terseness and truth and a certain quality of revelation, was worthy of Aristotle. It is the full answer, historical and moral, to every honest man who desires, as most honest men do, democracy, and who wonders why it is so hard to attain. But I had never considered that answer; and I think if I had not heard these half-dozen words I might never have considered it.

Democracy—that is, the government of the community by the community: a state wherein a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power: a state in which office alone commands, and not the being clothed with office—that is the ideal at the back of every man’s mind who cares for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left of private honour. It is simplest put by saying that democracy is the noblest form of government. But the moment you begin to deal with men, you find in varying degree, according to the human material handled, a difficulty in the direction of such an affair. You have experience of the wickedness and folly of men, and if you add to such growing experience the vast experience of history, you will find that, save in some few, and those small, communities, the ideal of democracy must break down in practice; and that so far from enjoying the noblest of social conditions, men attempting democracy in great states are soon suffering the basest forms of control by the rich. That is because most men, though intimately desiring a republic, are not republicans: when you have great numbers, those worthy of democracy are few. In the same way most men, though individually desiring peace within, have not the control of themselves which makes such peace possible.

So much for the Master’s excellent platitude.

It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things, should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came. To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic state; that even in small states it needs a peculiarly admirable and rare temper in the human material of them. But this conviction came slowly, and all started from those few words.

And what has all this to do with the sailing of the sea? Nothing, save that it is during the sailing of the lonely sea that men most consider the nature of things.

The day broke long before we were anywhere near Fishguard breakwater. We must have done, I suppose, ten or twelve miles by the time it was broad light. Strumble Head kept on flashing, white and inept, under the daylight, and then went out. When it ceased there was no sign of land where it had been. Also the wind had fallen sluggish and we were not making three knots. But such as it was, it was steady; and by mid-morning we saw all the coast quite plain, and, shortly after, the low black line of the breakwater which they have built out here to make their great artificial harbour of Fishguard.

With the wind still falling we drifted rather than ran for the point of it and crawled in out of the wide sea. Even in that last hour, as we came in, we began to note a long heave gradually sweeping up out of the Atlantic through Saint George’s Channel, as though it had wind behind it; but since it set northeastward it did not affect the calm of the broad roads within the breakwater. We very slowly crawled to that inner southern part where boats of our sort could lie without interfering with the steam monsters, and there, after just twenty-four hours of the passage across Cardigan Bay, a run of seventy-odd miles, we let go the anchor, and, tying up our canvas in a very slovenly fashion, we hailed the shore and got a boat to come out, seeing that I had lost my own dinghy during the tempest in Bardsey Sound.

The man who came out to us in the boat hailed us as he approached in the most beautiful English, either because we were now in that so-called ‘Little England beyond Wales,’ or else because he was indeed an Englishman, exiled to these parts; or perhaps again he was bilingual and had acquired this perfect English as a classical and foreign tongue. It was a privilege and an honour to be rowed ashore by such a man, for he was free of his conversation and all that he said was interesting, true, and well put. He warned us against the people of the place—why I do not know. He told us that where we lay was good holding-ground, and he gave us in that little trip quite a lot of useful information about the difficult passages between the islands and the mainland on the Points of Pembroke which we had to pass on our way southward. He asked us as we landed an astonishingly small payment for his services and then he promised to meet us again at a fixed hour to take us aboard. In all things this man was worthy and a friend, for I could see in his eyes that he suffered exile.

We came back to him after we had provisioned, clambered aboard, and made ready for one of those empty days which pass so quickly on board a boat: hours and hours during which nothing is done, hours which on shore would exasperate every nerve, but which here, on the soft movement of the sea, go past as easily as sleep. For time on the water is quite different from time on land. It is more continuous; it is more part of the breathing of the world; less mechanical and divided. There was not a breath of air, so there was no question of starting again during all those hours. The great rollers outside were now at last beginning to affect the harbour a little, and the Nona, with her too high topmast, swung rather heavily to the slight movement; but of wind not a stir. The falling of the gradual darkness brought on a night brilliant with stars and no moon. There we lay, sleeping and waking, smoking, talking a little, vacuous, ready to put up sail with the first hint of a wind and to get outside. But all that night until morning again, the calm continued.

How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man! How admirable are the great works of man! But greater is God.

In the profound night and the silence I considered that wide space of shelter and the dyke man had made against the Atlantic Power.

For two hours I so pondered upon our strength and our nothingness, worshipping also the night until the stars had changed. Then I went down below and slept. But even with the dawn there came no breeze.

It was about half-past nine in the morning when there did come a draught from the northwards. There was very little of it; it hardly crisped the oily, lumping water of the great haven, but such as it was, we, weary of all this indolence, determined to take advantage of it and to set sail. So we took up the anchor and very slowly lay close to that breath of wind until we came to the breakwater ahead, and there we found the rollers outside large as though they were in the main ocean: so large that when we sank into their troughs there was no headway on the boat and the light air only caught her insufficiently upon the crests. Even as we thus attempted to make some way—lifted hugely up and down in a solemn sport of the sea, now seeing nothing but water astern and ahead and then, immediately after, the whole coast and its heights, and then down into the trough again—the little wind there was entirely failed us. We drifted aimlessly and in all the futility of such motion, up and down over the great swells and there even seemed to be a sort of slight drift. It was, perhaps, only the set of the swell taking us against our course back eastward and northward.

We took council together and determined that with the very first breath of air we could find we would run back to anchor and wait for a wind worth having. So we did, and a second day passed in Fishguard harbour, as empty as the first, and a second night; and then it was I completed the tune and first verse of a song called the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’ The whole of that time the calm was broken by but few hints of very uncertain airs.

But just as dawn was beginning upon the third day, when it was already so light that the sea looked white against the black land, and before the first touch of colour had made living the edges of the inland hills, a heartening wind from those hills, cool with morning, fresh and heavy, not too strong, a friendly wind, a wind just suited to our course—for it was a point or two north of east—blew down from old Wales upon the sea.

Of this we took an immediate advantage and were out at once, my companion steering for the breakwater head at a good pace, while I made the anchor secure forward and then came back and joined him. We rounded the breakwater, took her well out and then gybed over with something of a clatter and a shock and ran down for Strumble, under the growing day. The great light was still flashing from its tower, standing on an island off the head, and the name of that island is Michael. Once we were round that headland, the wind was fairly on our port quarter and it was a merry race with a happy offshore wind all the way down to Saint David’s, so that not only the day but also the old land and the much older sea and the old boat, that was launched so long ago, and we ourselves, were for the moment young. So ran we down for Saint David’s and there, putting her nose due south, I, holding the tiller, headed her for that exceedingly dangerous millrace of a strait between Ramsey Island and the mainland, called Ramsey Sound.

It was full ebb. The water roared and thundered over the rocks inshore for all the world as though we were not upon the sea at all but upon the lower reaches of a tidal river. Though we were running under the lee of the land we were not too much blanketed, and it was a comfort to feel the strength of the wind on the boat and to know that one had full way in such a pass, for these narrow sounds of the Pembrokeshire coast are perilous to ships and men. Here, in this very passage, lay two sets of rocks to the right and to the left, called by the name of the two perils attendant upon the wealthy young. For the first set of rocks is called ‘The Horses’ and the other ‘The Bitches.’ These are rocks over which, I say, the rush of the ebb made a noise like a weir. We were through it in no time, at a pace which, had she touched anything, would have been the end of herself and of all aboard; but there was no danger of that because, as I have said, she had full way upon her and was lively to the helm. Nevertheless was it a relief to come tearing out of this perilous corridor into the wholesome width of Saint Bride’s Bay beyond.

Now, as I was coming through this ticklish management of Ramsey Sound, I was too much taken up with creening below the boom to make out the water at the rush of the bows and to steer with precision, I was too much taken up with the business of exactitude under the strain, to turn to a thing which, from the land long ago, had puzzled me. That is the way in which one of the most ancient roads in Britain comes down here to an open beach just above the rush and the roar of Ramsey Sound and stops dead upon the sands. That open beach is to this day called Porth Mawr—‘The Great Port.’ The ancient road here comes along the southern coast of Wales as far as Carmarthen and then branches, one branch coming up Cardigan Bay, which is called, I think, after Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, and the other coming straight along by Saint David’s. They call these old roads ‘Roman roads,’ and so I suppose they were, but still many of them were there in some form before this island entered the comity of Europe, before the Roman unity and order were finally imposed so that England became England.

Anyhow, there was a very old road of the first importance running down that way, and near it stands the see of Saint David. Now the interest is this: it comes down to that beach above the narrow roaring river of Ramsey Sound. Why on earth does it strike the sea there? It is true that antiquity pulled up boats on to the shore and might use the beach as we to-day use a harbour—though in our tidal seas a harbour was always better, I should have thought. But even if they thought the beach better than a harbour (which it manifestly could not be for commerce), why should they call it ‘The Great Port’? There it lies on a most impossible bit of coast, leading nowhere and as valueless a landing-place as you could get—granted a beach—anywhere in the island. Did the ancients throw out great breakwaters and thus form a harbour? That could not be, for surely, had that been done, there would be remains of such mighty work.

I leave it unsolved, as I and all other men must do this and all other problems, with the possible exception of the trisection of the plane angle, which I once all but caught hold of by the tips of my fingers during a long crossing of the Atlantic in a miserable lame steamer, too old for her job, in the year 1897, before the gods had left this broken world.

The Nona came therefore grandly out of Ramsey Sound with a sweep and dignified nod into the calm of Saint Bride’s Bay, but I knew very well that there was before me another trial, more difficult still, called Jack Sound, between Skomer and the mainland, seven miles to the south.

Lord, what a tangle of dangers are here for the wretched mariner! Rocks and eddies and overfalls and shooting tides; currents and (as you shall shortly hear) horrible great mists, fogs, vapours, malignant humours of the deep, mirages, false ground, where the anchor will not hold, and foul ground, where the anchor holds for ever, spills of wind off the irregular coast and monstrous gales coming out of the main west sea; and, most terrible of all, Wild Goose Race.

I will maintain with the ancients that there are some parts of the sea upon which a god has determined that there shall be peril: that these parts are of their inward nature perilous and that their various particular perils are but portions of one general evil character imposed by the Powers. For you will notice that wherever there is one danger of the seas there are many. If it is an overfall or a race, then in that neighbourhood you will also have reefs, unaccountable thick weather, shifting soundings, bad holding, and all the rest of it. Witness the western approach to the Isle of Portland, or the Bight of Saint Malo, with the Channel Islands and their innumerable teeth; the entry to the Straits of Messina and other places recorded in histories and in pilot books. Our moderns will have it that such things are chance and an accumulation of them a blind accident, but I hold with those greater men, our fathers. Some one here in these places, some early captain, first sailing offended the gods of the sea. Hence all the tangle of the southern corner of Wales, Jack Sound and Ramsey Sound and the Bishop and his clerks, and, worst of all, Wild Goose Race.

I write without knowledge of the Wild Goose Race. I have never been through it; neither have you been through death, you who read this. Yet, as we all know that death is a perilous passage and in accordance dread it, so I with the Wild Goose Race, well so named. My book told me that little ships like mine getting into that water were often dismasted and ‘even foundered.’ I like that word ‘even.’

It seems that in Wild Goose Race a boat is taken up and pitched to heaven and let drop again, twirled round like a teetotum, thrown over on her side, banged off sideways with great stunning blows upon the cheek-bone, and blinded all the time with cataracts of spray, the while the air is filled with a huge mocking laughter. Many races do I know, Portland Race and Alderney Race and Little Saint Alban’s Race, of which you shall later hear, and the Race round the Skerries of Anglesey, if you may call that a race, and the Race in Bardsey Sound. But there are many races, which, thank heaven, I do not know and which I do not propose to know, such as the Race of Ushant, and the very damnable races of the northern headlands, including that Great Maelstrom of which we hear so much and see so little, and which puts on great airs: but none of these, I am told, is comparable to Wild Goose Race, therefore did I let it alone upon this passage. Do not believe it when you read it in books that a race is made by anything so simple as a tide against a wind or a sudden precipice in the depths of the sea. It is made by the anger of those that rule the sea. And yet of races there is one that has always treated me kindly, and that is the race off the Start. I have been through it I know not how many times and always was the sea there either quite smooth, gentle, purring, and domestic; or an honest running sea, parallel and ordered. But, perhaps, whatever governs the Start Race had received from me without my knowing it, some courtesy. I take this opportunity to thank whatever Powers govern that little corner of the watery world for their kindness.

I have often seen pictures of these Powers, horses and men and women with fishes’ tails and scales, and gods without scales that ride in chariots over the sea. I suppose in that world, or in those circles, the scales are a badge of service, making the link between the immortals and the dumb fishes of the sea; just as our highbrows make a link between the rich masters who rob the modern world and the millions who work. Only there is this difference, that our highbrows have no scales; they have nothing in common with the dumb millions who work. But I will not pursue this metaphor lest I should offend Mr. and Mrs. Able, who themselves indeed live in western suburbs but, upon the other hand, are perpetually in the houses of the great.

Where then was I? Why, coming into the quiet and amplitude of Saint Bride’s Bay, but having before me the terrors of Jack Sound. For it is true of the sea here as everywhere, that it is the symbol of life, and of our ceaseless duties, and of death. We must never expect long quiet in the business of our living, nor any long security in any passage of the sea. But I must say that this run across Saint Bride’s Bay was very genial upon that summer noon, only there came with the early afternoon those ominous patches of an oily look to windward, the falling of the breeze, the sea still running, and yet the canvas not always over well filled: briefly, the renewed menace of a deadly calm. That calm fell upon us suddenly enough, just at the moment when we might, with the last of the ebb, have run through Jack Sound. It came upon us at the mouth of that forbidden passage, and left us idle and foolish, pointing anyhow and seeing, to our despair, the marks upon the distant shore slowly moving backward as (alas!) we drifted north.

Truly, indeed, did the immortal trio—Swift, Arbuthnot, and Pope—exclaim in chorus: ‘What is mortal man but a broomstick!’ Never are we in half a gale of wind but we pray crapulously for calm. Never are we in a calm but we whine peevishly for wind. What, Dog, would you have the weather cut out for you like a suit of clothes? Is all the universe to arrange itself simply to your convenience, as it does for the very rich—so long as they keep off the sea? Will you not be content with sailing unless just that wind plays which is exactly trimmed for your miserable barque, neither too strong nor too light nor too far forward so that you have to beat, nor so far aft that you fear a gybe, or pooping from a running sea? Will you never repose in the will of your Maker and take things as they come? Why, then, drift round Skomer like a fool!

Which, indeed, was what the Nona did, for as it fell dead calm, the set of the sea took her in the most amusing unaccountable way on a jolly little voyage of exploration. The sea took charge. The tiller was not worth holding, the helm swung idle, and the canvas hung like the flabby muscles on the face of an Opposition leader towards the end of the third hour of a speech from the Front Bench to which he has had to listen, sorely against his will. It hung loose and inept, like the hands of a poor man waiting orders in the presence of a rich man, or like the mind of a sceptic when he considers the ultimate nature of good and evil—let alone beauty. The sea took charge and trolled the little boat along, keeping her just so far from the shore, as who should say, ‘See, my child, how remarkable is the Island of Skomer! Come with me, I will show you every cranny of its outer shore.’ So were we taken off round Skomer by the tide in that calm, further and further from Jack Sound.

When they had played this farce with us long enough, the Powers halted the sea, as is their fashion every six hours, and we found ourselves close aboard a large ketch which lay at anchor off that Skomer shore. There was one man upon the deck, smoking a pipe and keeping his mind empty, as is the duty of all mortals in such few intervals of leisure as heaven affords us. He bade us not knock into him, and we called out to him (but not very loud, for we were at a familiar cast of but few yards) that if we came too close aboard we would shove off and do him no harm. We asked him who he was and where he was going. He did not tell us who he was, but he told us where he was going, which was to Cork, and what he had on board, which was a cargo of coal.

The lazy sun, halfway down the sky, looked indifferently upon us; the quite smooth sea turned again in its perpetual come and go, and took us slowly back in so many hours, till we found ourselves again by evening where we had started, at the mouth of Jack Sound. What this current or tide movement was which had thus taken us nearly round Skomer and back again, I know not, but it was a journey that cost nothing, and, tedious as it was, we had at least learned another few miles of shore. It seemed, however, all of a set purpose, for the wind now blew again lightly but steadily from the northeast. The ebb was well on its way, and we could point through Jack Sound, and hope to be in Milford Haven, round Saint Anne’s Head, before the late darkness of this day in early June.

So did we enter that passage.

Jack Sound in that evening light was a repetition of Ramsey, only more violent, for we were more in the full roar of the ebb. There was the same rush as of a millrace, the same cataracts of falling water over the landward rocks. We came out of it with the setting sun glorious upon our starboard quarter, and ran quickly for the end of Skokholm—another Scandinavian name—sure (in that steady breeze) of rounding Saint Anne’s Head easily before darkness, and dropping anchor in some cove of Milford Haven.

But nothing is ever certain at sea. We were, perhaps, a mile from the Head when there rolled up with astonishing rapidity from out the main ocean a solid bank of cloud, sweeping the level of the sea. I say cloud rather than fog, because it was so solid and so dark. It caught us like a cloak thrown over a man’s head; and, before we knew where we were, we found ourselves steering hopelessly by the card, not daring to keep too much out, lest we should lose the mouth of the haven; not daring to keep too much in, lest we should strike: and nothing to prevent that but listening anxiously to the great fog-blast, which was now hooting regularly in its panic from the height of the headland.

What followed for nearly two hours was such an adventure as only wretched amateurs would indulge in, and amateurs in a craft which did not draw more than six feet of water. The wind, such as it was, had dropped, of course, with the fog. It gave us only enough way to creep eastward before it; and what we proposed to do was so to feel our way in the fading light through that dense mist until we should hear the slight surge of water upon the rocks of the haven mouth to port, that is, on the north side of the haven entry. I had a large plan aboard, and I knew that there was water close up to the shore, and that it was plain enough going, with nothing hidden beneath the surface. So we gingerly put her head slightly round, when we made out the mournful menace of the fog-horn to have come just aft of the beam; my companion took the helm, and I went forward with the lead, and also to call out to him to put the helm up whenever that might be made necessary by our getting too close. We faintly heard already the slight wash of the gently heaving water, and I saw, some few yards off the bow, little gleams of white through the mist, which were the foam sliding from the rock surfaces, as we slipped by. The Nona’s movement was so very slight that even if she had struck a glancing blow, nothing that was not jagged would have harmed her greatly; but we were preserved and did not touch.

We had this further good fortune, that, just as it grew quite dark, the sound of the slight surge to leeward receded and disappeared so that we knew we had turned the headland and opened the first bay of that long inland arm of the sea. Our chart showed us good depth and good holding-ground, and a good berth for the night, granted that there should be no other craft about. We heard none such through the fog; no voices, no swinging spars, no movement at all. So when we had got well into the bight, we dropped anchor; trusting to luck that, as she swung to her chain, she would not strike shoal ground nor anything near. Had we still had the dinghy, I would have gone out and explored and made certain, and risked my chance of getting back aboard through the mist, but, having no dinghy, we had to take things as they were, and these seemed secure enough, for we were well out of the fairway. The first of the night was interrupted by that perpetual call of the great horn upon the headland, but before midnight the fog lifted, the sound ceased, and a profound silence fell upon the sea and the land. We had also the comfort of seeing that we had plenty of room to swing, with the shore perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

That night as I fell asleep I designed the second and third verses of the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’

The next morning we found, following the flood up the Haven, a very slight breeze from the west and north, not enough to allow us to beat up against the current; so we passed the time till the beginning of the ebb, or rather till the flood should slacken, sailing slowly up that long fiord, Milford Haven, of which one reads so much in history, but which to-day, having no industrial hinterland, has half dropped out of men’s memories. Two evils of the past are rooted in its landscape, for it was here that the first Tudor claimant, ‘the foul usurper, Henry Tydder,’ landed with his French mercenaries to try for the crown, which he grasped in two weeks on Bosworth Field. And it was hence that the transports sailed for the Puritan orgy of lust, loot, and massacre in Ireland under Cromwell’s leadership. I wondered as I cruised about, watching the shores and the little town near by, what further fate Milford Haven might hold for England. Things go by threes—especially evils—what will the third curse arising from this inlet be?

The wind freshened just as the flood was slackening, so we turned to beat out. It was well into the afternoon when we took the open sea, with the wind a trifle north of west, so that our last board out of harbour was a free run. We took her well outside so as to be able to set a straight course for Lundy and beyond, intending a passage to Bideford River, and the ending of this voyage.

The wind dropping somewhat, it was evening before we had well passed Saint Goven’s lightship, and all that night we went quietly over the seas with a gentle following wind until, before morning, we raised Lundy Light full and clear. But the wind failed us at dawn, falling first to irregular puffs, and at last, when we were about a mile and a half northeast of the island and pointing right for Appledore Bar, it fell off altogether. Little patches of slightly ruffled water, here and there, fewer and more distant one from the other, at last faded out to nothingness; and we lay helpless, hardly moving, until the set of some slight current drew us half a mile further on into that strange piece of water called the Great White Horse Race.

What this may be in heavy weather or even in a strong breeze I cannot tell, for I have never been through it before or since. As things were, in that dead calm, it was a perpetual succession of fairly even, long, smooth, watery hills, with troughs astonishingly deep and rounded crests astonishingly high for a morning without wind. There was no way at all on the Nona; she lay buoyant enough, but like a log; broadside on and rolling damnably for hour after hour; shaking her spars with every lie-over, as though to so many hammer-blows; throwing the boom with a bang, although I had made it as fast as I could, and giving a violent jerk at the mainsheet each time she ended a swing. It was a miserable ten hours or so that we endured, gazing at Lundy from the top of each passing heave, and drifting there paralysed under the useless sky.

Lundy is one of those neat things which you get now and then in Nature, and which look as though they had been specially designed on a rather careful plan with one simple object. One would think Lundy could do no harm—yet I always remember the Montague.

It is so placed that it gives shelter in any weather. It is a sort of little breakwater set up in the midst of the Bristol Channel, offering security to all craft, coming up or down; for there is good holding-ground everywhere about, and you can lie under the lee of the land whichever way it may be blowing. The only drawback of the neighbourhood for small craft is this same White Horse Race, in which we had been caught by the calm. Even in that oily weather, its great swells passed us half way to the height of our jaws, and our topmast, excessive for the little craft, made her roll all the worse, while the motion was so jerky that at times I feared for the fastenings of the shrouds at the sides. But a larger craft would think nothing of this patch of sea and, save for it, all the water round Lundy is exactly made for security.

I have never landed on the island. I have heard many legends about it, none of which I repeat for fear that they are false. But what I should most like to know (only I have never met any one who could tell me) is whether the pleasure of isolation which these places afford increases with the years, or at last becomes intolerable? I knew a man once who, during all the latter part of his life, was torn between the desire of possessing an island, and his fear lest, once he had bought it, he should find that he had purchased misfortune. All his friends told him that islands were like those legendary objects of bad luck which one man has to pass on to another and which each new holder soon finds unendurable. To be king of one’s own land, to be quite cut off from the complexity and futilities of the world, to have a little country all of one’s own, neatly bounded, inaccessible if one chooses to make it so—that is enough to tempt any one who has lived among men. But I am assured by many who have not themselves tried it, that after a very short experience in such things one has no desire but to be rid of them. A community might find it endurable enough and, indeed, religious communities have often found it so; but not individuals, nor one family. Lundy, however, is larger than most, and perhaps the sense of isolation is less.

When we had lain tossing in the White Horse Race all through that morning and on to well past noon, there came, to our great joy, about half-past one, a little breath, a little slant of wind, from off Hartland Point. For all those hours we had had no steering-way at all, merely drifting and tossing to the loud clapping of empty canvas. But now the sails filled and, weary of the sea, we put her nose round for Bideford River, with this pleasant little breeze slightly blowing and coming right from the starboard quarter, so that she sailed at her best. The tide was at the neaps, there was little current, we had a straight course to steer.

The wind rose, the sun was clear and shining, and all the sea sparkled and was alive. It was a weather in which to remember the little sacred places of the shore; the little towns with their own gods of the sea, and springs tumbling through them from the cliffs above: the little places that preserve their own happenings. And one such place of which I had very often heard was there, far off upon the starboard quarter, and I knew it by the chart for Clovelly.

There are places holy to Apollo, Delian places, protected tiny townships of the sea.

So from the tumbling water between Bideford River and Lundy, that wooded coast, so isolated, remote, sacred, appeared the touch of white in the green which marked Clovelly. Looked on thus over the water that rushed by, and in the swirl of the ship’s way, Clovelly seemed what I had read in books as a boy it was, and what I suppose it once may have been, when England was England.

But England to-day from the land is a very different thing to England forever from the sea. Some years later I had again to seek Clovelly from the land, and I shall no more forget it than did that Northumbrian man whom God raised from the dead, and whose experience is told us by the Venerable Bede, could forget his glimpse of hell.

I had come with friends in a motor-car, because I had been told a man should see Clovelly before he died. I had come from the noble isolation of Hartland, where the great seas were running in upon the rocks after a gale and thundering at the doors of that good inn which faces ocean there. Our road ran high above the sea, and as we came near to the turning beyond which the cleft of Clovelly would open below us, and its vision of peace, we heard a murmur like that of bees swarming. As we came nearer it was a confused clamour of human beings, and as we came nearer still we saw the dreadful thing in its entirety.

A great mass of chars-à-bancs were parked on the road itself, on the steep edge of the hill and cleft whence one looked down on the village and the sea below. There, blocking the ridge road, an immense mass of lost souls struggled and fought for the most part, or stood squeezed in a sullen despair. Their function was—not their intention, but the use to which the irony of Divine Vengeance had put them—their function was to form a solid wall by which all access from the village below, all further opportunity of climbing, should be forbidden. Meanwhile up that cleft swirled, surged, pushed, strenuously and unfailingly, one mass of packed, dark-clothed mortality, closely hemmed in by the cottages (I wondered that their walls stood the strain!), and looking from where we stood very much like black pressed German caviare, the acid stuff which is sold for the destruction of the race. This wedge had its base upon the seashore and was filled with a communal desire, with a mass mind, impelling it to attempt the height—a hopeless task! For the char-à-banc crowd above could not have been pierced by cavalry, let alone by an untrained infantry such as was this mob working hopelessly uphill.

So far so bad; but worse remained behind. For on the calm sea of that bay were to be discovered three steamers, each of them looking like a piece of cigar-shaped board on which innumerable black ants had swarmed. Of these the one nearest to the shore was still discharging in its boats further human beings, who were fighting to land on whatever little strip of foothold could be found, while the two other ships stood by ready to reënforce the attack.

So true is it that men desire beauty before all things and that great beauty draws all men to it.

The atheists, of whom some few stalwarts remain, strong against the pantheist flood; those who despise mankind when they are healthy and when they are unhealthy despair of it; the men who make nothing of life and think it immaterial whether man be or no—these are, in my judgment, of a clumsy habit in argument. For they talk in mere negations. But if they would breed (as is their intention) a proper contempt for the supposed Divine in man, a proper negligence of our fellow beings and a right view of the whole insignificant human affair, they ought not to confine themselves to negatives, they ought to present vivid images, concrete and striking, and say: ‘Look there and judge mankind!’ I suggest to them Clovelly on a holiday; also the sands of Weston-super-Mare; also Saint Lazare Station in Paris, the Frederick Street Station in Berlin, or Liverpool Street in London, just after office hours on a week-day; or again, a crowd in Catalonia, outside the ring, when by some accident the bull gets loose.

There are other brilliant images all ready to the atheist’s hand: a dining-table of the rich, with some thirty guests, men and women, exactly alternate, like the red and the black cards in a patience, the wretched couples turning ten minutes to the left and ten minutes to the right, like jacks; the wine of only one kind—yellow and acid with bubbles in it. Or again, they might give the same effect with the vision of any public vehicle, designed to hold twenty-four but packed with forty. Or again, they might do no more than distribute snapshots, judiciously snapped, of the men who are most talked about in this our day.

The truth is the atheists do not know their job; for it has been clearly proved upon the thumb and the four fingers of the left hand that men cut off from the Divine are also cut off from reason.

So we sailed on, leaving that tiny white point of Clovelly far behind in its combe, dark against the afternoon sun, and ran straight for Bideford River, till we came to the fairway.

We had also a mark to steer by which was unmistakable; it was a gate of dark smooth water in a mass of white surge. For rollers, though there was but a hearty breeze, through some mysterious process of the sea, were bursting with violence upon the bar of the river as though it blew a gale. The bar looked like one tumbling wall of angry white, even from a long way off, and, between that wall and the east side of the harbour-mouth, was this one narrow gateway of smooth water. We passed through it safely enough, steering by the leading marks, which are here quite clear, and brought up in the deep pool off Appledore, waiting for the tide to take us up to Bideford.

All that bit of coast is Charles Kingsley, with his violent fanatical genius (for it was no less) and his power of imprinting himself upon the place. Fanatical men are not usually happy; but I think Kingsley must have been happy, because he had the tide under him all the time. Everything in his own lifetime was going his way. The cause to which he was attached, the destruction of the Faith, appeared to be triumphing more and more; though the slightest accident the other way (such as Newman’s conversion) was an intolerable irritant to him. He lived in that part of the earth which he most loved, he enjoyed all its habits, he was supported by everything around. You could get no better and, at the same time, no more comic criticism of that Kingsleian mood than what has happed to the name ‘Westward Ho,’ which Kingsley rendered famous. ‘Westward Ho’ simply means the westerly of two landing-places. ‘Ho,’ or ‘Hoe,’ is a wharf: but that ‘Ho’ has been spread broadcast throughout the world of English as a sort of ‘Halloa,’ or ‘Yoicks,’ to call the adventurous overseas; and not one man in a thousand, I suppose, but thinks of those two little letters as a hoot (perhaps he gives them a nobler name); as a call, resonant of the Elizabethan sailings.

One of the saddest things I know about the beach near Bideford River is the deadly hatred with which the dons have persecuted poor, dear Kenwith. Kenwith is a place where a few boatloads of Danes landed in the Dark Ages, and were defeated by the English. The name is quite clear, the tradition is equally clear, and the description of the position is unmistakable. Therefore have the learned, as is their wont, insisted with the utmost virulence that the tradition, the name, the description, are all a popular error, and that the place where the little scrimmage really came off was miles away.

It is interesting to analyse the motives of this sort of thing. We are all familiar with it. The universities of all countries, but especially of our own, are a regular hothouse for breeding it; but when one first comes across it, one is puzzled why it should come into being at all. Whence springs this lust for saying that the Gospel of Saint John was not written by Saint John? that Homer was not written by Homer? that the Battle of Hastings was not called the Battle of Hastings—although all the people who fought there called it the Battle of Hastings? that William the Conqueror had only a handful of men there—though his secretary, who saw them, and read all the documents connected with them, gives us fifty thousand? that Julius Cæsar’s Gallic War was written by his tutor—and all the rest of the nonsense?

The powerful force urging dons to make fools of themselves in this way seems to me to come from a convergence of three currents. First of all there is the vanity of the learned man, who has all the better opportunities for action because few have any knowledge at all of the matter, and he is fairly safe from criticism—or thinks himself so. His fellows will not give him away. It is clearly a flattering thing to think that one is right where all the world has been wrong, and, in a time like ours, when there has been accumulated such a mass of special technical knowledge, people are ready to swallow almost any assertion, because they know not what new evidence may have appeared.

The second source is that very human thing, the love of the marvellous—though it is the love of the marvellous appearing in a very degraded form. Your pedant says: ‘All the apparent evidence, all tradition, all that you would call common sense, would make out Little Muddipool to be that same Little Muddipool where the treaty of Little Muddipool was signed. It is called in plain words “The Treaty of Little Muddipool,” and its last words are “Made by us at Little Muddipool.” But I tell you that it was not Little Muddipool at all, but a place a hundred miles away with a different name.’ The spirit at work there is exactly the same spirit as that which says: ‘Common sense and your own experience will tell you that the bishop must have crossed the river either by a bridge or by a boat. I tell you that the holy man sailed across it on his coat. What do you think of that?’

And the third cause is a negative one. The perpetual substitution of hypothesis for fact (which is the great mark of dons to-day) ends by getting men into a state of mind where they can no longer weigh the proportions of evidence: they can no longer distinguish between the certain, the probable, and the absurd. Thus, it was but a little time ago that an Oxford don came out with a miracle. He said he had discovered any number of classical passages containing concealed anagrams, furnishing the most astonishing information; for instance, that Euripides, when he was a little boy, wrote the plays of Æschylus. A stopper was put on him, however, by a man who wrote to the ‘Spectator’ (of all papers), proving that the said don’s name was but thinly concealed in an anagram of the opening lines of the ‘Iliad,’ so that he must have written that excellent poem, not when he was a little boy, but long before he was born. And so much for that.

Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore: Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost incomprehensible to the other. I have sometimes thought that whenever the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin channel) and storm and loot Instow. Pretty well every modern set of human habitations has this contrast of rich and poor quarters, but when there is water flowing in between them it is the more striking: with hard work on one side of the stream and the fruits of it in leisure upon the other.

My voyage was over. I had brought up in Bideford River before the long bridge of Bideford, and I made all quiet for the night, and for a long time to come. For there would I leave the Nona in charge, till I could take her out again.

Swaying in the cabin that night also, I finished writing the Chanty of the Nona, of which if any man say that it is a vile piece of verse, I am ready to agree with him, but if another man say that it heartens him, and fills him with the sea, why, I am ready to agree with him also. It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a place of rest. We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.

I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much, after thirty, over literary fame: if it comes, let it come, but for God’s sake let us have no publicity with it, for to be pointed at and known is to live in a glass cage. And very much do I applaud those men who do what in youth I myself desired to do, but was unable to do, that is, to write consistently under a false name, and carefully cover one’s tracks. I wanted to write verse under one name, history under another, travel under another—but fate was too strong.

Of the men who have done this in my time the most successful was Dodgson, the mathematical don at Christ Church—that is, of The House. He had calculated well; and the immense fame of Lewis Carroll and of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ left him private and secure.

Mention of that book also makes me consider how false is nearly all literary fame, or, rather, how great an element of falsity there is in nearly all such fame. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a very remarkable book, as are, indeed, other books of Dodgson’s, though not all. But a large element in its vast diffusion was its consonance with a particular ‘drawing-room’ mood of a particular day. I shall be called blasphemous, I know, but I am perfectly certain that ‘Alice’ will not long survive the ease and unquestioned security of the England of her day. For every implication in morals, and even in humour, with which Dodgson’s books are crammed, sprang from that security and that ease. Nor is there a stronger symptom of so abnormal a passage in human affairs as was the English gentry’s generation of 1833-99 (abnormal, for normal men live under a strain and a peril, and in active defence against the barbarian or the menacing enemy) than the delight of Dodgson’s vast audience in nonsense: in the humour which is founded upon folly as contrasted with the wit that is founded upon wisdom. Even the facile composition of odd childish words, which had a slightly reminiscent sound, was sufficient to delight that generation. But when the terrors and the heroisms permanently return, the sawdust will run out of such things.

And, after all, what is the possession of literary fame? Can dead men use it? Does any man possessing it, unless he be asinine in his vanity, think himself the true creator of some really high line his pen has happened to set down? Is there any writing man with a true judgment of great things in writing who does not doubt his own achievement? Or is there any who, when some particular piece of verse or rhetoric which he has written convinces him of its merit, does not admit to his own soul that not he was the true author, but rather some force working through him?

Again, does not any writer who is also reasonably manly prefer any one of man’s virtues to an accident of verse or prose? Who with stuff in him would not rather be a brave boor than a cowardly poet?

So much for literary gents. Excluding my own self, I should like to see them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea and there scuttled. Their absurd little quarrels, their posings, their insufficiency, the chaos of their minds—all these things are a burden, and there is not one day’s riding upon a horse or sailing upon the sea (let alone still better things which, for the honour I bear you, I will not mention here) that is not worth the whole tonnage and shiploads of their printed stuff, save here and there a piece of lyric verse, or here and there a good run and rhythm in half a page of prose.

But, I say again, that’s all one. Here am I in Bideford River, at anchor and come to the end of the seas, leaving her, the Nona, my companion and my home, my very loyal boat, under the tutelage of the long bridge of Bideford, which is notoriously the end of the world.

Now a day came when I had some freedom again. So I set out at once from Devon with one companion, and, finding all on board as I had left it, I set sail to leave Bideford River. I proposed to myself to explore the outer sea beyond Hartland, which till then I had not seen, though now I know its character and its harbours familiarly enough.

The tide so served that it was evening when I set out, nor was it easy to shoot the channel at the bar of Appledore, in spite of the strong ebb, because such slight wind as there was had too much north in it. For the same reason we had to beat all that night, fetching up towards Hartland Point in two long boards; helped at first by the tide, but later, of course, finding it against us. It was daylight again before we came to the headland, and opened the coast beyond.

The ancients made a solemn and special sanctity, it seems, of this barrenness and strength and height of Hartland. The Romans called it the Point of Hercules. They felt, I think, that when they rounded it, they were coming into another sea; for they were much alive to the mystery of things. If they thought this of Hartland, that it was a boundary, they were right. Within Hartland, you are under the wing of England, and in homely water; outside Hartland, you have all the West before you, and the power of Ocean. And so with us that morning. Even as the wind died down there came a mighty succession of slow heavings, which grew more regular and defined until at last the smooth water, just crisped here and there, by mere breaths of air, ran in giant folds—parallel, regular, unceasing, enormous. All that sea, I say, is odd, and I have felt spells upon it.

The long rollers came prodigious out of the southwest under almost a calm. There was not wind enough to do more than give the boat steerage-way—it was lucky we had that, for if it had been a dead calm she would have rolled broadside on and shaken herself badly with that too tall topmast of hers, as she had done on an earlier day in the White Horse Race. The rollers came on and on; not the relic of a gale (for there had been none anywhere), but raised by one of those innumerable mysterious influences which between them make the sea. They lifted one after the other, hiding the horizon; we topped them, we sank into the trough; they heaved majestically on, to thunder upon the savage grandeur of Hartland.

Our time has discovered so many things in the material world (and has grown paralysed to so many other more important things) that we profess to explain everything with perfect links of cause and effect. It is an occasion to use the phrase ‘We miserable sinners.’ For we shall never know anything at all compared with the unknown. What makes such waves?

For that matter, why is one sea so different from another? You measure the amount of salt, the weight of the water, the strength of the wind. Though you had all the factors we can measure, these three and a score of others (the pressure of the air, its wetness, its heat, and so on), yet you could never say why the difference between one sea and another appears. All measurable factors might be the same, and yet the seas quite different. You can, indeed, hardly describe that difference any more than you can describe the difference between two instruments of music, the flute and the trumpet; or the difference between two materials in portraiture, marble and bronze. We only know that it is there. But our stupidly proud time misses such essential categories.

Why is it that what they call ‘The New World’ is something utterly different in quality, taste, intimate soul, from the old? We have here not only the conflict between England and America, but between Spain and the Argentine, and between England herself and the white colonies, and between the French and the French Canadians. It is not newness; it is not lack of tradition; it is difference of timbre—as violent as the difference between a railway whistle and the note of a thrush, or between wood and iron.

Modern men knowing a dozen out of a million causes reason downwards from the rules they have, instead of trusting their perceptions as their fathers did.

I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul. Meanwhile, men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.

The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood and, as it were, entered into it. That is government; that is Empire: to get into the shoes of the governed.

In the strange, successful, perhaps ephemeral, adventure which has put our high European culture in command over the lives of others in the East and in Africa, not a few men have arisen tested by circumstance and conforming to this idea. I have heard with respect the judgment of others upon half a dozen Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen of the sort, though I have not seen their work. Russians have told me of compatriots of their own who have achieved such things beyond the Urals and the Caspian. Of Germans I never heard that any were so much as capable of beginning the great task. That the Spaniards changed half a continent we know. But the only instance that ever came under my own eyes, and that but for a few days, was the instance of Marshal Lyautey. Lyautey’s Morocco is an astonishing affair.

It is true that there lay behind his great achievement more than a lifetime of foundation—the steady French transformation of North Africa. It is like a coral reef, solid, detailed, infinitely particular: the work of innumerable units, sacrificed, obscure, tenacious, creative, permanent. None the less, what Lyautey has done is a building by itself. It is like the new Gothic of Brazenose or Magdalen at Oxford: one may say that there lay behind this also the multitudinous, patient work of a lifetime or more since Pugin began: or it is like Parsons’ turbine, which came after so much experiment, but stands by itself all the same.

It is not belittling Lyautey’s great work in Morocco to say that these things are only possible when there is frankly recognised the essential principle of personal responsibility in governing; or (to put it in Colonial phrasing), ‘one-man control,’ or, to put it in Aristotelian terms, ‘Monarchy.’

There is no other working form of administration over multitudes of men, except the aristocratic; and the aristocratic form of administration—which ruled for nearly three hundred years over Protestant England after the Reformation had destroyed popular monarchy and made wealth supreme—is only possible in those rare communities where men enjoy being governed by a clique and look up to, and revere, a special class whom they think of as their natural masters.

What Marshal Lyautey has done in the organisation of French Morocco has been based upon two foundations which, when they are absent from the effort to govern aliens—as one or both commonly are—make such government increasingly difficult; until, at last, it has to be abandoned. The first of these foundations is working with the alien people whom one administrates, not against them, nor even above them. The second foundation is the deliberate investment of one’s own capital and energy for the benefit of the alien governed rather than for one’s own benefit: that is, the development of communications and of building, the extension of instruction, the improvement of waterways, afforestation—all manner of expensive functions which you can only get from a government directly concerned for the good of all the people and which will never be undertaken by the private home trader working for his pocket alone.

It is the absence of this sympathy with, and eager help of, the governed which prevents a trading community from ever biting into alien soil. For, in a trading community, the administration of a foreign dependency is directed to helping the home merchant or settler. The road is driven, the river is bridged, not primarily for the benefit of the governed, but primarily for the immediate profit of the governors. With this there goes a contempt of the governed, which is a dangerous sign, and later, that more dangerous sign, a hatred of them.

The foreign rule, therefore, gets more and more distasteful to the governed. For half a lifetime they wonder at it: then they grow restive, finding themselves despised to no purpose. Then they permanently rebel. At last the unnatural tyranny breaks down. When it breaks down the governors gradually depart and little impress of their foreign rule remains.

It was so apparently between Carthage and her dependencies.

But when the governors expend themselves for the good of the governed, an amalgamation takes place between the national spirit of the one and of the other, and the superior trains and shepherds his subjects into a common civilisation. One of the tests of success in alien government is to note whether the governors despise or admire the governed. If they despise them it is proof that they are unfit to govern. If they admire in them what is to be admired, all goes well. I found in Morocco that a contempt for Islam (I do not say a difference from Islam, but a contempt for it, a contempt which would regard the Moor as a ‘native’ and the French as in some way a ‘superior race’) was only to be discovered here and there among the worst of the colonists. It was your half-educated, lower-middle-class immigrant who took this attitude and gave all the trouble. The higher you went in the scale, the greater was the liking for the Moor and for his civilisation, the greater the desire to understand him and to know his past, the greater the admiration of his art, his dignity, his faith. When one got to the head of things, in the Residency-General and in the Marshal’s own household, there was an understanding of the whole Moorish past and present like the understanding which a scholar has of his beloved text; it was an intimate and all-pervading familiarity.

I carried away with me from that glimpse of the Atlas and of the treeless run of burnt land beyond (for I travelled while the heat was still upon us) vivid pictures in the mind: first of a vast tract of dead upland, utterly bare, between Oudja and the Moulouya (I had come from Oran); this tract had about it the accursed inhuman effect of the great American deserts in the West of the United States; then, next in order, of Taza on the edge of the hill fighting, and of the story I was told there of two Moorish brothers. One of these would fight under the French for six months and then desert. Thereupon the other brother would enlist in his place. So much was the object of each the pleasure of fighting and the advantage of pay, and so little the political idea of independence.

Nor could any one forget who has seen it (and it is now become or will soon become, a commonplace of travel) that great new road which I saw in its last making, but which was already nearly completed. It is driven right through Barbary like a stay, like a back-bone, from the Bay of Carthage to the river-mouth of Rabat on the Atlantic tide; near one thousand miles in its actual trace, and following the great ride which the first Mohammedans took when they overwhelmed the West—when that horseman rode into the sea surf on the sands by the bar of Rabat River and cried out: ‘Had you not set bounds, O God, to the earth, with this your sea, I would ride for ever westward and continue to conquer in Your Name.’ A man may take his motor-car on the boat to-day from Marseilles to Tunis and follow that strict and graded broad way uninterruptedly till he comes to the Atlantic and, turning south to Casablanca, ship it again for Europe.

The surprise of that Moroccan feat was the way in which it was handled during the Great War. When war was already certain in the last days of July, 1914, the Government in Paris, the politicians, sent orders to the Resident-General that all troops should be withdrawn to the coast, the interior to be abandoned, and reconquest (if possible!) to be achieved after the Peace. We who know what those words ‘after the Peace’ have come to mean, know also that it would have been the end of the French in Morocco. It would have been the return to the old pressure upon the Algerian frontier and evidence to all Islam that Europe had failed.

What the soldier did was to maintain his garrisons in spite of the politicians. What was astonishing, he continued the development of Morocco during all those four years of mortal strain, as though the peace had not been broken. Still was the railway laid, and still the new road completed, and still were the buildings set up, and still was the wild hill country contained by its ring of troops; until, when the curtain lifted in ’19, Europe saw, not the Morocco there had been when the Occident entered on its great struggle, but another Morocco, wealthier, stronger and more settled, with great new European towns side by side with the Moslem, and with the whole territory organised.

These new great towns are planned and are built under a military rule—and that is very wise, for the anarchy of individual mercantile effort would have made the experiment break down. No house may be built in the European fashion to jar against the spirit of the place. Everywhere the roofs must be flat and the outline preserved. Also the European town is kept wholly distinct from the Mohammedan. Thus in Meknes you may hear Mass in a chapel which lies within the very thickness of the city wall—it is the old chapel of the Portuguese prisoners during the past of the great Sultans—but you may not enter that chapel from within the city; the door faces outward, upon the country side of the wall. Upon the day before I left Morocco, a soldier who was driving me upon the heights above one of the new cities in his car said to me musingly, as we had halted to look down upon the view of mixed Europe and Africa and of all that vast new wealth: ‘It is just ten years ago that the Sultan of the day, annoyed with his brother, had him devoured by lions.’ Those who love contrast will not find it stronger anywhere than in this strange land.

But these distant memories of Morocco go ill with the presence of a Devon sea under the breaking of a chill dawn. Those African pictures in my mind, hot sand and palm, painted by memory in the night, grew pale and disappeared in the northern daylight, as do the coloured flashes of the headland lights with the coming of the day.

There was still no more wind than would just make the Nona feel her helm. My companion slept below. The heave of the sea grew less; and then, to my disgust and dread, over the sea, already too hazy (so that the high land some three miles away was like a ghost), a fog came drifting up and enveloped us altogether.

I put her up a point more westerly, so as to be on the safe side, for I did not know what current there might be here, and I had to give the land a good offing. I did not want to come up through the fog in such calm weather to hear, close at hand, the treacherous murmur of slightly moving water upon rocks.

Of all experiences at sea in a small boat, under sail, there is none in these days of steam and petrol more trying (after a certain length of it) than being thus half-becalmed with barely steering-way in a part of the sea where the great ships ply up and down, they themselves independent of the stillness that holds you fast. You can hear (as I did on that morning) the beat of the propellers, miles away or close at hand. You hear the hooting from time to time of a ship’s siren—but there is nothing to tell you where your danger may be, nor upon what line it may be approaching you. Some with more experience could, perhaps, have judged that these occasional sounds were at such and such a distance, each or none of them threatening; but to me it seemed as though every steamer in the Bristol Channel was atop of us. I have no doubt that had the fog lifted I should have had nothing in sight but a couple of outward bound tramps halfway to the horizon, and perhaps one small steamer in from the Atlantic seas, and going up to Avonmouth, rather nearer to our shore so as to save the strength of the tide. Indeed, when the fog did lift towards noon, the sea was of that appearance, with not half a dozen craft to be seen, and none near. But in the white, cold blankness of the mist (with nothing whereby to judge save the ear), the rhythmic beating of the blades seemed anywhere close at hand; and if the hooting of the steam whistles was dull and dim, that seemed due not to distance, but to the blanketing of the dense cloud. It rose at last, first in patches and wreaths, then altogether, and a pale sun showed over distant land.

There is one thing that has always puzzled me about the Devon and Cornwall peninsula, and that is why the entry into it, up to quite late in history, seems to have been from the north.

The deep harbours and secure anchorages are to-day on the south. There is a whole string of them; and it is the south that faces towards the main civilisation of the continent. You have the profound inlet of Falmouth, you have Fowey, you have the miles of inland water at Plymouth, you have the Yealm and Salcombe, and the Dart and Teignmouth. Yet the legends, and even the history of Dumnonia are more concerned with such shallow, small, and difficult places as Saint Ives, Padstow, and Bideford River. The wealth seems to have been more on the north than upon the south, for you will note that the pirate raids principally struck there, and the shrines also, the ancient shrines, are rather on the north than on the south; and on the north also is Tintagel, of which it was said by Tristram: ‘Blessed be Tintagel and all that dwell therein.’ The relics of the saints were established in the northern harbours. The seats of government were on the north: there, in the north, is the story of Arthur; and when Cornwall communicates with Brittany in the early Dark Ages, men seem to sail round the end of the land—though the southern harbours are there, pointing right at the further shore.

Did that peninsula swing as on a pivot axis? Did it deepen to the south during the long, hardly-recorded ages?

I knew nothing of these harbours of North Devon and Cornwall, not even by hearsay. I read up diligently in my ‘West Coast Pilot’ that river which seemed the best for entry along these coasts, and hoped to make it before evening. But the wind died down altogether, and we drifted aimlessly enough back upon the flood, then down again on the ebb, through the night, and all through the morning and the noon, and on into the afternoon again of the second day.

It was full evening, and the sun within an hour of its setting, the air much warmer now and the light mellow with a powdery gold, when a strong breeze came up out of the very sun, as it were; out of the glory. The Nona heeled to it, and was now to be handled at will, making a good run a little north of west, with the opportunity for beating as we chose. We beat up towards the river-mouth, sure, as we thought, that the wind would hold, and that we could easily run up the stream and so to the town beyond before darkness. What we had not reckoned with was a sheer cliff lying along the river-mouth to the west, overhanging it and cutting off the wind. On the eastern shore was an immense stretch of half-covered sand, bearing a name of disaster, and famous for wreckage. Having lost the wind, we could no longer manœuvre, and, what was worse in that narrow passage, we found that the tide did not run true to the sea-tide outside.

We had counted upon the flood making; but, whether because there was more water than usual in the river, or from some odd effect of the wind, or because locally it is always so (though the ‘West Coast Pilot’ told us nothing about it, nor the chart either), the river was still running out violently, and there seemed no sign of an upward-going stream before darkness.

I had almost determined to let her drift out again, catch the sea wind when I got beyond the wall of the cliff, find anchoring-ground well offshore, and wait there for the day, when there appeared, coming down the river at great speed, a white motor-boat, large and exquisitely apparelled, splendid with burning bronze, regally accoutred in unspotted gleaming mantle of the foam-colour, of the cloud-colour, of the snow-colour, and a line of gold all around. It was indeed a boat apparelled, not only as to itself, but as to its two humans; and shameful did the Nona appear, homely, draggle-tail, sordid, even after so very calm a passage, when contrasted with that dandy of the inland waters. Alas! That dead wealth should dig such gulfs between mortals and that poverty should lessen virtue!

But, to be just, it is not only wealth that breeds these fine sights, it is also a certain temper in the owner. And I knew very well that though I had three million pounds and some odd pence over I should never have a tidy boat. I could not sleep in such a thing.

Anyhow, there she came, thundering down the tide. I had thought she would pass me in her rush of speed, and I held up until she should have done so, for it would have been dangerous to have tried to go about with such a weight of movement coming on us, and our own course half out of control, dependent only upon occasional slight splashes of wind from over the cliff. But the motor-boat slowed down, and its owner asked us if we wanted a tow up to the town. We met him with gratitude: he was of that very considerable class known as the Good Rich, with whom are the Penitent Thieves, the Reformed Drunkards, the Sane Professors, the Womanly Furies, and all other candidates for heaven. We threw a line aboard him and made fast, and so went up just as the darkness came, and dropped anchor in the pool under a neat little city, which lived by the traffic of that difficult waterway with its strange tide. But, then, all tides are strange.

My companion and I sat in the hatch that evening under quiet stars, smoking pipes, watching that most pleasant of sights, the home lights of a little harbour town, and their trembling reflections in the water, the slight swaying of the masts of fishing-boats moored by the quay. We wondered together at the way the tide had behaved when it tried to baulk us of our entry, and we decided before we slept that it was better never to reason upon tides, nor even to accept print upon them, but to take them blindly as they came, for ‘No man living can understand the tides,’ said my companion, and, as he said it, he sighed; and he was right.

No man living can understand the tides. And the mystery of the tides is as good a corrective as one could find to our deadening pride in exact measurements, and to the folly of attempting to base real knowledge upon mere calculation: our pretence to a universal science, and to a modern omniscience upon the Nature of Things.

The bungling of landsmen in the matter of tides begins with Galileo. That worthy had a talent for getting off the rails and he bungled on the tides as he did on comets. Then came Newton. Why does the tide flow every twelve hours on the average, instead of every twenty-four? If it be true, as I suppose it roughly is, that the moon is the main puller of the tides (helped and hindered a little by the sun, and certainly by other forces of which we know nothing), then there ought to be a tide every twenty-four hours. Put a lot of fluid round a solid sphere, and set a pull, working from some point well outside the fluid. It looks as though the fluid would heap up towards the pull. It being discovered that the fluid heaped up not only towards the pull, but also on the other side of the solid sphere, away from the pull, the mind of man could not rest without proclaiming an explanatory dogma, and we were told (by Newton among others) that the pull not only heaped up the fluid towards itself, but also dragged away the earth from the water on the far side. Indeed, Newton worked it out and proved that it was so.

If the phenomenon had been the other way about, if the fluid had behaved as one would expect it to behave, and had heaped up only on the side towards the pull—oh! believe me! a formula would have been discovered to explain that with just as much ease as the formula which has been drawn up to explain the real state of affairs.

But this original false dogma is not of very much interest compared with the immense complexity of the tides, and the inability to follow them with any sort of completeness by reason of that complexity.

For the tides behave in the most inexplicable fashion. They follow, of course, certain habits, which we know (from the observation of liquids everywhere) to be in the nature of a liquid in movement. They pile up higher as they rush up funnels. They are checked by ridges, they form eddies—and all the rest of it. But they are continually playing anomalous tricks; and any one who tries to work up a theory of the tides makes a fool of himself: still more does any poor sailing-man do so who uses science to discover what the tide may be doing in a place he has not yet tried. He makes not only a fool of himself, but also, very probably, shipwreck.

Why should a tide run three hours late inshore along the Bight of Sussex? We are told it is an eddy. Of course it is. But why an eddy of such extraordinary retardation? The main Channel tide runs from headland to headland. It is ‘true,’ as the phrase goes, at Saint Catharine’s, and again at Beachy and so on to Dungeness; and if you are going up-Channel outside, you carry it with you ‘true’ all the way. That it should be a little retarded in the Bight of Sussex one might understand, but that Bight is very shallow (it is only fifteen miles from the deepest point by Shoreham to the outer line), and yet you have this three hours’ difference! The tide still runs hard to the west alongshore, three—anyhow, two and three quarters—hours after it has turned eastward outside.

Who can explain why there is nine hours’ ebb on the easterly shore of Portland and only three hours’ flow? It is a monkey trick, designed to prevent the poor sailorman from sneaking in just under the Bill: it gives him only three hours out of the twelve in which to do it, with Scylla on his left, and that most abominable howling Charybdis called Portland Race on his right. And if he comes up to the Bill at the end of his three hours’ limit, he has his heart in his mouth for fear that he should find the ebb stream catching his bows the moment he is round the Bill, and driving him headlong into the heart of the Race.

And what about the double tide of the Wight and Poole, the gulder, as they call it—the mystery of the Dorset and the Hampshire seas? In the days of my innocence I used to believe what I was told: that the double tide in Southampton Water was due to the water coming in first through the Needles channel and then around by Spithead later. It sounded reasonable for Southampton Water. But when I first made Poole, and found that they had a double tide there as well—and even out beyond Saint Alban’s Head—my philosophy was shaken, and my scheme of things fell heavily to the ground. Why on earth should there be a double tide on that coast? Who could explain it?

The enormous tide at the end of the funnel of the Bristol Channel is reasonable enough, though it is a little odd that it should be so very much bigger at Chepstow than at Gloucester. But how will you account for the prodigious heave at Saint Malo? Why does the flood come up Arun River like a racehorse recently invigorated with a bucket of beer, and at Newhaven hardly move at all up the Ouse?

I have stood outside the old piers at Newhaven in a little boat, with a northerly wind, expecting the first of the flood to help me to beat up, and waited for the quarter flood, and the half flood, and, later than that, and still have seen the sluggish surface water running out to sea against all the tidal laws that were ever written down: running out to sea, though the level of it steadily rose.

But there is no end to the mystery of the tides. Why is there a tide at Venice? It is not much of a thing, but it is there. And, for that matter, there is a tide in the Lake of Geneva. Here, again, the learned come barging in and tell us all about it. Closed basins (they say) like the Adriatic, even quite small ones, like the Lake of Geneva, have their little tides after the fashion of water swung in a basin. The explanation is given in some simile like this: ‘If you shake a basin slightly, the water will begin to swing with a regular movement back and forth.’ So it will. But who shakes the Lake of Geneva? Or who catches the Adriatic at either end, and gives it a regular balance up and down, exactly so often, every so many hours?

All this questioning sounds like the Book of Job; but, note you, that I, for my part, am with Job, and against the scientists. For Job, or God, or whoever it was who set the catechism, put the questions and was careful to avoid the answers, and for my part I will do the same, not only in the matter of the tides, but for the whole basketful of things on which the scientists have been pontificating with increasing uppishness for the last two hundred years, until at last they have led us to the morass wherein we are sinking. When they pontificate on tides it does no great harm, for the sailorman cares nothing for their theories, but goes by real knowledge, and I by my sworn authority, the Admiralty texts, the like of which for excellence the world has not: ‘High water, full and change, six hours, thirteen minutes after Dover. The stream is barely perceptible in the first three hours of the flood, but runs very strongly in the third, and through three quarters of the fourth hour; after which it slackens. There is no perceptible stream in the last two hours of the flood.’ Or again: ‘On rounding the Devil’s Point the tide is lost.’ There is no theorising, no mumbo-jumbo. The thing itself, reality, is stated; and it is true. There is not even a passing wonderment as to where the tide goes to when it is lost. The ‘Channel Pilot’ tells you the truth. You stick blindly to its text and you are saved.

There are many parts of the sea where the tide goes round like a clock, and no one can tell you why. Instead of the stream setting first east, let us say, with the flood and then west with the ebb, it goes all round the compass. It sets northwest with the beginning of the flood, then north, then northeast, then east, and so on, looking all round about itself like a performing dog, and slowly and ceaselessly revolving. It behaves not like an eddy, but like spokes. It is perfectly incomprehensible.

There is also this about the tides, which we all know to be true, and which we can see at work any day, but which I defy any man to rationalize: when the tide runs up a narrow river—or, indeed, any river—it will be still running up, say, ten miles from the mouth, when it is running down again, say, five miles from the mouth. What happens in between? Slack water, of course. But how is there slack water? How can the running down be going on at one point and, immediately beyond, the running up, without a division? How can the water go on running up from a reservoir below which it is running down? It does so, and it is all in God’s Providence, and I accept it as I do teeth, or any other oddity. But I will not pretend to explain it.

The sea teaches one the vastness and the number of things, and, therefore, the necessary presence of incalculable elements, perpetually defeating all our calculations. The sea, which teaches all wisdom, certainly does not teach any man to despise human reason. I suppose there was never yet any Kantian fool or worser pragmatist who would not have been cured of his folly by half a week of moderate weather off the Onion. No one can at sea forego the human reason or doubt that things are things, or that true ideas are true. But the sea does teach one that the human reason, working from a number of known premises, must always be on its guard, lest the conclusion be upset in practice by the irruption of other premises, unknown or not considered. In plain words, the sea makes a man practical; and the practical man is, I suppose, as much the contrary of the pragmatist as the sociable man is the contrary of the socialist, or the peaceable man the contrary of the pacifist.

And, talking of pacifists, there is nothing more pleasing to note than the excellent unconscious patriotism of the men and women who solemnly propose that patriotism is the ruin of the world.

There is a delightful irony in observing how intensely national these anti-nationalists are! It is a profound and satisfying thing to watch. Any one can get a good laugh out of the patriotism of men with no nation, or, at any rate, with a nationality very different from that which they profess. It is a common jest, the sham patriotism of the nomads. But far more subtle and penetrating is the fun of watching your genuine pacifist, who believes the divisions between nations to be evil artifices, soon to be conjured away.

Nowhere are these international pacifists more national than in England. They have all the English spontaneity and love of adventure. They carry to extreme that English love of individual action which we nearly always find associated with their odd political blindness. They nearly all display some trick of clothing or food. They will drink lime-juice instead of wine, or wear elastic-sided boots, or think it wrong to smoke tobacco, or go about without hats. If they are men, they will have hair coming down to their shoulders, which is a very greasy habit. If they are women they will go about barefoot, save for the most absurd sandals; and while they practise all these provincial follies they will be consumed with a passion for the general of mankind.

If you wanted to get a specimen—I do not say of the average Englishman, for he is certainly not that—but of a being in whom the English characteristics are to be found most deeply marked, this pacifist is the very man whom you should choose. All the English conceptions of right and wrong, all the English habits of thought, all the sheltered English attitude towards the great outer world, all the local errors, and much of the local generosity are there present to the full.

I cannot help thinking it a strength to England that the pacifist or internationalist in England should be so intensely English. It prevents any disruptive effect, and it therefore prevents the rivals of this country taking such folk seriously.

The French and Italians are far less happily circumstanced in this regard. In those two countries—and, I suppose, in Spain also, although there I have less knowledge on which to speak—the internationalist is an internationalist, bearing but weakly the common marks of his own people, and willing to act not only against his country politically, but also in all his being, morally and spiritually. A French or Italian internationalist and pacifist will not only sympathise with the enemies of his country, not only give them actively all the help he can, but he will particularly attack the soul whereby his country lives, its traditions and character. If he is French he will hate wine, if Italian, macaroni. But does the English pacifist hate tea? The unrooted man is a very dangerous type, and in England happily unknown. To read anything said or written by such men as Mr. Wells or Mr. Snowden is to read something by people who evidently think of international peace as something closely connected with cricket, teetotalism, and the use of Bible language—coupled, of course, with a reverent agnosticism, which means a wearied puritanism.

I have spoken of their courage, and certainly the courage of the typical conscientious objectors during the War was an arresting thing.

One of the most famous had been a fairly close acquaintance of mine many years ago. I had known him to be a man of eccentric nature, hardly mad. But I could not have believed he would have stood up as he did to the martyrdom which he was made to suffer. The violence of his protest against all violence was an admirable thing.

A lesser form of the paradox in these people is their hatred of the French, and their passion for Prussia. This love of Berlin would seem to be compounded of two elements, partly a natural desire to support the losing side, but much more the strong religious sympathy they have with the Northern German in Europe, and the hatred they feel (very naturally!) for the Catholic culture, of which the French are the chief representatives.

They preached a universal similarity. Yet there were very few of them who would not have joyfully watched the most bloody war against the French at any time after the Armistice, and none of them would have doubted one moment of the issue: for they had prepared for war in the best of all possible fashions by refusing to arm. Such men are confident that their country must be victorious, for, in their childish minds, anything strange and foreign seems naturally weak, and doomed to extinction.

You see, I plead for the fools. But although I like these eccentrics for their sincerity and for their spontaneous virtue under persecution, yet I cannot associate with any of them long. They make me nervous—and I think this effect is due to something insane about them.... Anyhow, they are national, and that is always to the good.

I have noticed that this kind of fanatic, like every other kind, is in two species; the species which too clearly thinks out its own insane theory, and the species which remains perfectly muddle-headed.

I had a long talk lately in the ruins of the town of Rheims with one of these people. He was drinking a sort of special fizzy coloured water, which he had imported, and which he worshipped because no man could become drunk thereon. He was doing very noble work in helping people who had lost their homes. He was a ‘Helper’—and all the rest of it. He was also occupied in spreading the Gospel, under the reservation, of course, that it was not true; at least, as he was careful to explain to me, he ‘was not emphasising the miraculous element.’ This person had a great deal of money, but could none the less reason closely, and he had evidently thought out his subject completely.

He said to me that, by his principles, if he were attacked he ought not to defend himself; and he had a well-constructed answer ready for the obvious objection that people with so strange a creed would soon be destroyed, and that, therefore, all their predication would have been in vain.

He told me that, upon the contrary, the example of non-resistance would spread; and he pointed out that, in fact, throughout history, sacrifice was fruitful, and particularly self-sacrifice. When the body of those who had refused to resist had grown to a respectable size, all European society would be changed; the possibility of attack would be dissolved in an ambient medium opposed to it, and would disappear. He was also ready with an answer to the general objection that his philosophy applied to only one form of human conflict, and left untouched all the other and really more serious forms.

I pointed out to him, for instance, how, in societies like that of modern England, where recourse to physical combat between private citizens had been crushed out by an all-powerful police, there was the more opportunity for injustice and oppression and unredeemed insult. His answer to this I thought curious and worth noting. He said that men did not resent insult very much, and that as for such oppressions as swindling them out of their goods, or cutting them off from all useful information through a control of the press by a few adventurers, these evils were superficial, and soon corrected themselves. He said they did little permanent harm to the human beings who suffered them, but that physical violence on a large scale, as in war, was quite another matter.

I asked him whether he approved of the holding down of subject peoples for produce—as, for instance, for copra or cocoa. He said that he did not; but I found him very wobbly on that point. He took refuge, for a moment, in hypocrisy, and said it was for the good of the oppressed; but he was disturbed.

The man who takes up the cause of subject peoples against his own country is usually of a very different type from the internationalist or pacifist. He is usually a man with a particular romantic interest in that one particular part of the world, and he is usually either a man of independent position through birth and wealth (who feels himself, therefore, fairly immune from the law courts), or a hanger-on of such. And I have noticed that these cranks begin by what is no more than an affectation; but, like all humbug, this affectation brings its own punishment in the shape of a sort of ingrowing false sincerity. Such men almost get to believe in themselves. It never quite comes off. I have never known one of these men, even in his latest days, to be really, fully, and homogeneously sincere. For instance, I have never known one who would hesitate to make money out of the English rule in some part of the Orient while denouncing that rule with fervour, and (no doubt) heartfelt indignation.

There is another curious little point about this sort of people: they are always very proud of being mixed up with the British administration of the dependency in question. They love to point out in conversation how their very opposition has brought them into contact with this, that, and the other important administrator and his class. Usually their birth has made them familiar with that class; for, until lately, the controllers of dependencies were drawn in the main from people of family or from their dependents, and your pro-native crank must be himself of consequence to survive. Were they poor and weak they would be broken.

Upon the whole, I think these anti-Englishmen are an advantage to the State. You may be perfectly certain that they will never go to the length of doing anything active to the hurt of England, and they lend variety and criticism to the external action of England. They make the rivals of England admire a social structure in which such internal strains (which foreigners always exaggerate) are rendered innocuous. If they do any harm, it is by inflating, through reaction, that growing and very dangerous vanity which the public schools and universities have so much encouraged in our generation, and through which most men have come to feel that Fate is necessarily upon the side of their country, that no national disasters need be feared in the future, nor any precautions taken to forestall national decline. The Englishman who says that he wants England out of India, inflames, by reaction, the fatuity of the Englishman who thinks himself in India as one of a Chosen Race.

These pacifists or internationalists of Britain have strongly in them the English hatred of cruelty, and they have in high development the national habit of short cuts in thought; as, for instance, when you may hear them say that war is wrong, which is as much as to say that a house on fire is wrong.

This habit of taking short cuts in thought is often called, not only by foreigners who are unused to the English habit of mind, but by Englishmen themselves, an incapacity for clear thinking. I do not quite agree. As it seems to me, the essential characteristic of this way of speaking and thinking is not its lack of lucidity—for, though that is evident enough, it is not the essential. The essential is the taking for granted of a great many things which are not expressed. This habit of taking short cuts in speech is in some way a habit common to all this group of islands; for the Scotch have it, too, though not so strongly marked as the English; and the Irish have it very pronouncedly indeed: it is far more marked in them than in the English, and is the root of the ‘bull.’

For instance, when a man says that war is wrong, he is saying something which, as it stands, is manifestly nonsense. But if we expand the phrase, it has full and definite meaning. He means ‘for one organised community to attempt destruction and physical pain upon the organisation of another such community, with the object of gain or increase of power, is wrong.’ And so it undoubtedly is. Or, when he says that war is silly and not worth while, he again means (when we fully expand his phrase for him) that such action is commonly so expensive and hurtful, even to those who successfully use it, that it is a bad speculation. In this, indeed, he is not so certainly right as in his first proposition, for most victorious wars in history have handsomely paid the victors; but my point is that this kind of talk, whether about war or anything else, is not due to muddle-headedness; though it goes with muddle-headedness. It is due to a clotting of thought through compression.

One phrase which I very often hear (and which, as it stands, is apparently a piece of bestial unintelligence) may further my point. It is the phrase: ‘Some religion ought to be taught in the schools.’

It is obvious that this phrase as it stands is a contradiction in terms; for the word ‘ought’ can only apply to a moral good; and if such and such a religious system is of good effect, then an opposite and contradictory religious system will be of evil effect. If I think it wrong to murder, if my religion teaches me that murder is a great moral evil, then I teach children in schools that this is so. But if my religion is that of an Oriental body I have heard of, called Thugs, with whom murder is a high religious act, then I teach an opposite set of morals. Both religions cannot be good. One must be good and the other evil. But when you hear people say, ‘Some religion should be taught in the schools,’ what they mean is that ‘the general Protestant ethics of the English people should, on their broader lines, be taught in the English schools.’ They take for granted that every one using the word ‘religion’ means English Protestantism. Having taken that for granted, they shorten their speech in the fashion I have just quoted.

And really such wandering of the mind over this, that, and the other, as I have thus indulged before sleep, in the pleasant little cabin of the Nona (pleasant to me, odious to the pernickety, for it is a hugger-mugger home), watching between the open skylight and the combing a little belt of nightly sky with stars, is a poor adjunct to the scent of the sea, and to the Devon air. To the devil with all reasonings and counter-reasonings and abstractions and argufying: I am for sleep.

We woke early next morning to the noise of the loud clapping of water upon the bows, and I put my head out of the skylight to see little dusty clouds going too quickly across the heavens, and a freshening breeze blowing up from a little south of west, so that all the harbour water was dancing and alive. But the glass was high, and there was no reason why we should not take the sea again, only we must wait for the ebb (which would come in about three hours’ time, nearer nine than eight o’clock). For, in that blanketed part of the river down below, we should never get the Nona out against the flood. Nevertheless, I asked my companion whether it might not be wise to take another man, for we were going down the coast, where the rare harbours were shoal, and not easy to enter, and also small, and lay so that, with such a wind, one would have to beat up to them. An extra hand, such as we had with us during the never-to-be-forgotten business of Bardsey, would be an advantage. Such a hand, therefore, after minute enquiry and searching questions, did we ship; then, all things having been done in their order, and sail set with the second jib and two reefs in the mainsail and one reef forward, we got up the anchor and let her down for the sea.

The hand we had shipped (promising him his journey home by rail within three days at the most) was very well got up in sailor fashion, with his jersey and his peaked cap, the latter worn a trifle to one side, after the fashion of those who are daring, and challenge Æolus. His trousers, it was true, did not spread out at the bottom, like elephants’ feet or the mouths of bells, as do the trousers of sailors upon the stage. On the other hand, he would give them a hitch from time to time—a gesture symbolic of the Main in Drury Lane. He had nothing to do as we dropped down river, for all was trim. He sat and smoked, and watched the water before him with wistful eyes. I think he was by nature a man sad or saddened; and he was very silent.

On the bar there was no end of a lump, and, as we were blanketed by that high cliff, the Nona took it uneasily, chucking up and down with flapping sails and rolling damnably, but in a few moments the strength of the ebb had swept us far enough out to catch the wind again, and we set a course full-and-by; right out for the open, for the large. For we designed to beat in again after a few miles, and so make our way down-Channel towards the Cornishmen.

There was certainly quite enough wind: ‘All the wind there is,’ as an old Irish sailor said to me once during an Atlantic gale so abominable that he and I could not walk against its icy, sleeting December fury, but had to crawl forward tugging along the rail by main force, all up the windward side.... That was a passage worthy of remembrance, for we took three weeks between Europe and the Delaware, the engines and the old frame quite unfit for their task; and in that cheap passage, also, I learnt from a stoker two songs: one called ‘The Corn Beef Can,’ and the other called ‘The Tom Cat.’ They are of the great songs of this world.

A man should learn all the songs he can. Songs are a possession, and all men who write good songs are benefactors. No people have so many songs as the English, yet no people sing less in these last sad days of ours. One cannot sing in a book. Could a man sing in a book, willingly would I sing to you here and now in a loud voice ‘The Corn Beef Can’ and ‘The Tom Cat,’ those admirable songs which I learnt in early manhood upon the Atlantic seas.

There was more wind, indeed, than I liked. We took in the third reef, and went about to the starboard tack, after we had run out so far that we thought we could fetch, upon this tack, the next harbour. As we came near to that town, and saw its roofs far away appear and disappear again behind the crests of unpleasant seas, the Nona heeled suddenly to a much too angry gust. I heard a crash coming from below, and with it the voice of my companion crying, ‘Come down quick and help!’

The Crew (if I may call him so) was sitting forward, hunched up, clutching the weather shrouds, and not happy. I called him to come and hold the tiller, while I should go below to help, and I warned him that she was pulling hard, although she was under three reefs, for we had nothing forward now but the third jib. He looked over his shoulder in a very ghastly way, and shook his head from side to side, as though despairing to be heard in such a wind. I was within a few feet of him, and I bawled, ‘Come and take the tiller! QUICK!’ but again he miserably shook his head, and clung to the shroud. Then did I, commending myself to Saint Elmo (which is a false name, for his real name was Peter, and even Gonzales, and he was the man who was so shocked to find all the Galicians lapsed into a pagan darkness and living in open fun), struggle to make some shift of keeping the tiller up with my right arm stretched back, while I craned my head down below the cabin door to see what was going on downstairs.

The stove had got adrift in the lurch. There was oil all over the place, and a mass of crockery, and everything on the weather side had leapt to leeward, and some little of it trailed in the oil of the floor-boards. It was not more serious than that; for, luckily, the stove was not alight. I shouted to my companion that I could not leave the tiller. I bobbed up my head again and found that even in that short moment she had almost swung into irons. I put her round just in time, and we raced and flew, breasting the seas for that farther little misty harbour town.

The Nona is like those women who are peevish and intolerable under all conditions of reasonable happiness, but come out magnificently in distress. I lie; for the Nona is never peevish and intolerable. What I mean is that in easy weather she is a little sluggish on the helm, and has one or two other small faults, excusable after the fortieth, the fiftieth, year: for she was launched before Plevna, though, it is true, a year or two after Sedan. She has her mortalities; but in a seaway she is magnificent. With her few inches of freeboard, her old-fashioned straight stem, her solid grip upon the water, she takes the sea as though she belonged to it, and so she went that day, riding in highbred fashion, worthy of all praise, and praise she received from me as she leant over and took the combers one after the other. I gave her perpetual encouragement: for no boat will do her best unless she is sufficiently flattered.

Thanks to that increasing wind, the passage was short enough, and what we had said would at most take three days was accomplished between a morning and an evening, for it was still broad daylight when we passed outside the group of rocks of which the chart warned us, and stood within a mile or two of the now distinct houses of that little harbour town, all full of Cornish men.

But the wind still rose, and for the wind to rise when day is falling is a very bad sign. I had no desire to ride it out in the open, and I proposed to get in under the lee of the land (for there was a sort of point there), and not to drop anchor till I could be sure of plenty of water in the harbour later on, when I should make for it on the flood.

My companion came up on deck, from settling things below, and we cast about anxiously for a place where the anchor might be let go.

It was not an easy calculation. She was driving pretty fast. One had to get well under the shelter of the low point, and yet to leave plenty of water beneath one in which to swing. I asked him to go forward and get all ready, and the Crew would help him. But the Crew did not do so.

The sea being now calmer (though the wind was still rising) because we had come under the lee of the point, the Crew did, indeed, stagger forward; but he still held on manfully by the forestay, and looked curiously on my companion’s activity with the anchor as at a novel and a pleasant sight. Beyond that he did nothing; but I think he was proud of keeping his legs so long as he could grasp that forestay. It is no use to argue nor much use to command in the face of imbecility.

I shouted to my companion to let go the chain when I thought the right moment come, and at the same instant brought her up sharp.

The anchor took the ground. We were in, perhaps, five fathom of flood water; for it was full evening, though still light. When we had so lain for a quarter of an hour or so, taking stock of everything around, I asked my companion whether we could not, with the last of the light and the last of the flood, make harbour. The wind was still rising, but we should be running before it towards the not distant pier. Rounding that stonework, we should shoot right into the wind’s eye, when it probably would be broken by the hillside of houses beyond, and, even though we did not know how far the harbour might still be dried out, we should be in safety, with plenty of water beneath our keel for an hour or two more, while we enquired where we should berth. So we decided to risk it, though perhaps wiser men would have ridden out the night where we lay.

She certainly took a great deal of water aboard during that short mile or two, with more and more breakers as we got farther and farther from the protection of the point. Once, when she buried badly, I was afraid the sprit might snap, for I had not housed it. But she carried through all right (though the sprit bent like a willow wand), and we rounded in the gloaming, shot past the pier-end, and dropped anchor immediately inside.

A man hailed us from the shore; we threw him a rope, and he showed us where to berth in water that would just or nearly float us, even at the lowest of the tide.

The Crew was no longer indolent, now that he had left behind him the pitiless waste of the seas and felt once more beneath his feet the solid strength of England. He did what he was told in fastening warps and putting out fenders. Then came the moment for payment: wage and the railway fare home. Before he went over the side I asked him gently whether he had ever been to sea before. He said: ‘Oh, yes, in a manner of speaking.’ I asked him whether he had ever handled a tiller. ‘Not by rights,’ he said. ‘Not in such a boat as this.’ I asked him whether he had any fault to find with the boat. He said no, she was a very good boat so far as he could see, but he did not pretend to understand these things. He went over the side into the darkness. He was and he remains a mystery.

Was he a Charon man who pulled a ferry from shore to shore? Or was he a man who lounged about on the quay, dressed as his companions were dressed, but timid of tumbling water? Or was he a vision? Or a detective? Or an actor? Or one of those writing men who pretend to go to sea in boats, but never do? I cannot tell. I never saw him again.

This episode of the man in sailor clothes with the hitch, who knew nothing of the sea, started my mind upon two ways, which, as they diverged, I could not both follow.

For first it made me think of how we judge by immediate indications—and the taking-in of people through this method is at the basis of most commercial successes; even this poor fellow had made some shillings by it. But also it led me to consider how astonishingly in the modern world we live side by side and know nothing of one another.

There was certainly never a time in the history of Christendom, nor of the paganism that went before it, never a time in the history of our race, when we Europeans (I cannot answer for the Asiatics or the niggers) were so split up, one small set of men knowing nothing about another small set of men at their elbows.

The worst form it takes, of course, is the division between rich and poor, which is quite a modern thing, and an abominable one—the product, I suppose, of what people call ‘democracy.’

Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and I would often talk of this in connection with my own dear county of Sussex. He was much older than I, between twenty-five and thirty years older, and he could, therefore, remember a simpler and a better time than that into which we have descended; yet he confirmed me in my judgment that, no matter how fond a man might be of his country, or how long he might live in it, he would never, if he were of the wealthier, cultivated sort, know the lives of the poor people about him. I had lived among them on and off all my life, and so had he; and I certainly loved them with all my heart, and so did he; but as for knowing how they live or what they really think, there is a gulf dug between us. It ought not to be so.

Apart from this modern separation of the rich from the poor, there are any number of side separations. It is only by an accident that the writing or teaching man knows anything of business, though the commercial man more often knows something of writing. But the greatest anomaly of all, the one that has puzzled me most of a hundred such, is the complete ignorance of what the Catholic Church is and means—the ignorance even of what its doctrines may be. One would think it should be a mere matter of encyclopædias and textbooks—easy for any one to look up. In nations of Catholic culture, of course, the Church is thoroughly well known, even by its worst enemies; but in nations not of Catholic culture the absence of all contact with, and of even elementary information upon, this essential thing, is stupefying.

Here is the corporate tradition which made Europe: the Thing which is the core and soul of all our history for fifteen hundred years, and on into the present time: the continuator of all our pagan origins, transformed, baptised, illumined; the matrix of such culture as we still retain. For any European not to know the elements of that affair is to be in a blind ignorance of all his making, and, therefore, of his self. Yet it is perfectly true that the Englishman or Scotsman, cultivated to excess, saturated with the knowledge of all he thinks there is to know, fatigued and cynical after too much sounding of the world, says things with regard to that great affair which show him to be as little acquainted with its essentials as he might be with another planet. He has many Catholic acquaintances; he probably has some reading of his own country before the death of Elizabeth; he is certain to have read Shakespeare—a writer who wrote for and in a Catholic England, and a writer whose whole atmosphere is Catholic. He may justly pride himself upon his knowledge of the architecture, or even the institutions of the Occident before the great sundering of three hundred years ago. Yet, when he is dealing with this mighty business, he says things more grotesque than anything said by any Colonial about that very governing class to which he himself belongs. He produces an effect, when he touches upon the Faith, which—I say it honestly—is as startling and as comic as the effect produced by those ingenuous millionaires from the backwoods who come barging in among the London subtleties of ancient wealth.

And if this is true—as it is true—of the old governing class, who have some few of them direct family traditions connected with the Faith, nearly all of them relatives and every one of them friends and acquaintances who are Catholic, it is, of course, still more true of the average writing and speaking man of lower birth upon whom general opinion depends.

Now and then one comes across a man who talks or writes with some knowledge, if not of what lies beyond the boundary, at least of the boundary itself; but it is exceedingly rare. The latest example I know of the thing is the preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, written for his play ‘Saint Joan.’ Here there is a clear recognition of the boundary between the Faith and what lies outside: between the garden and the heath, or marsh.

He is writing there of the voices which Saint Joan of Arc heard, and which determined her mission. He points out that people often hear voices through a morbid faculty of projecting what they have themselves imagined. It is well known that that may happen to any one; and most people recognise that such a phenomenon is within themselves, and has no value of reality. Indeed, pretty well every one has at one time or another vividly heard not-present sounds, whether through the recollection of a loved voice or through some other emotion of fear or violence; and it is only a question of degree whether you call the impression ‘hearing’ or no. He also points out that in the case of diseased people this imaginary stuff takes on a false reality, and that many lunatics, criminal and other, imagine themselves to have heard voices commanding them to do this or that—usually something very unpleasant, nothing half so fine or sane as conducting a triumphant war.

All that is perfectly true. Then he comes to the specific point of Saint Joan’s voices, and he says that, having been brought up a strong Protestant (and, indeed, a strong Protestantism is the note of all his writings), he cannot accept the idea that these voices were real.

Now, there you have a perfectly clear and lucid statement of the boundary between the Catholic world and what lies outside it. The specific difference between the Catholic and the non-Catholic—so far as Europe is concerned—lies in what is roughly called (it is a conversational term, and I do not accept it as accurate) the ‘acceptation of the supernatural.’ The Catholic does not believe that every one who hears voices hears real voices. He does believe that it is possible for such voices to be real; and he, therefore, believes that this thing, philosophically possible, has also had, now and then, a real historical existence.

In the same way, he does not believe nine tenths, or ninety-nine hundredths, of the miraculous stories which have grown up out of distortion or mere wantonness, or (for the greater part) out of the gradual substitution of direct statement for allegorical or fictional statement, turning fairy tales into fact; but he believes that the miraculous—that is, an irregular suspension of the order of nature—is philosophically possible. He, therefore, believes, when the evidence is sufficient, that it has historical existence in certain examples. For instance, I certainly believe that the blinded man of York had his sight restored to him by Saint Thomas of Canterbury; but I don’t believe that Mahommed went to the moon on donkey-back—if, indeed, that mysterious mount of his was a donkey, which the best authorities deny. The Catholic not only believes that certain historical examples, which are of faith, were real and took place (as, for instance, our Lord’s walking on the water—and Saint Peter’s less successful effort), but he also believes in general that the phenomena called miracles continue actually to happen throughout history: that they go on to-day.

The same principle of division runs through the whole of thought. In the matter of the development of religion, everybody outside the Catholic body talks as though the development of the Catholic religion were a human process. They answer the famous question, ‘Is religion of God or of man?’ with a hearty affirmation of the second hypothesis. In this mood they examine such a story as that of the Mass, the Papacy, or the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity. They take it for granted that all was man-made. In this mood they interpret (usually with guesses of the wildest sort, which the much stricter and more rational Catholic scholarship soon disproves) the origin of the Scriptures, and in particular of the Gospels. Now the Catholic admits all evidence in these matters: that is a matter of course, for if you exclude any evidence your conclusion is vitiated. But the difference between him and the others is that he regards the action at work as divine, willed, and, to repeat a word I have used, ‘illumined.’ That is why the Catholic thinks of the modernist as a man of warm heart, but of poor intelligence.

Here is an example. The man of warm heart, with a strong sentimental attachment to his Scriptures, to familiar views, has his mind shaken by the discovery or even the suggestion, that his document is not wholly authentic. His intelligence must tell him—if he would use it—that a document cannot be an authority superior to the body which gave it its claim. But his intelligence falters. Now the Catholic, accustomed to the theory of authority and having decided, let us say, upon evidence sufficient for his judgment, that such and such a text was not part of an original manuscript, could never on that account abandon the doctrine consonant with that text. He believes a doctrine to be a divine, a supernatural thing, communicated, revealed to the world by an authority which still lives, and to and of which he is at once a subject and a part. He says, upon an accepted authority, ‘This is so.’ The presence or absence of one piece of documentary evidence does not affect reality. I have never thought the evidence against the ‘Johannine Comma’ so strong as that in its favour: but, though it were proved unauthentic to-morrow, what possible effect could that discovery have on the reality of the Trinity?

The Faith is an attitude of acceptance towards an external reality: it is not a mood.

Now, of all this the men who elbow the Catholic Church on all sides in non-Catholic communities, such as England, remain as ignorant as they are of Sanskrit—with those few exceptions of which I have spoken. They seem to think that they have in their midst a body of men who go on strangely, either because they refuse to listen to common reason, or because they have a sentimental attachment to some old-fashioned tradition, and will not openly admit its absurdity. In this they resemble the simpler type of bucolic republican, who does not know that there are any arguments for a monarchy; or the still simpler mind which believes that the earth is flat, and thinks that those who call it round are finicky people playing a subtle game in which they do not at heart believe.

Perhaps the best test of the difference is to be found in the doctrine of the Fall. The Catholic, with his acceptation of the supernatural (I again apologise for the term), accepts, upon an authority which he has discovered sufficient (on the statement of a Person, the Church, whose voice he has recognised to be divine), a doctrine that man, as man, was created superior to his present natural state; that he was created to be supernaturally happy. Where, when, and especially how—in what mode—he cannot say. It is a mystery. He, therefore, accepts the doctrine that man, by a rebellion against the will of God, did at some time lose the supernatural powers, the supernatural life, the supernatural happiness, and fell into his natural state, as we see him to-day: of this world, and yet the only exile therein. What that process was whereby he existed with beatitude inhabiting him, we are not told, nor in what place, nor at what date. But we are told, and we accept it, that a certain process, a certain sequence, due to the human will, took place; a rebellion of that will, and a consequent loss of the supernatural life which was our inheritance. That doctrine no more clashes with any proved historical, or probable prehistorical, process than the discovery that William Wordsworth grew up from childhood to manhood proves that he was never a poet, or that he never ceased to be a poet. But the man who rejects the supernatural ignorantly distorts (many popular preachers of heretical theory to-day distort) the doctrine of the Fall of Man into something very different. He thinks it means that man was once in a particular place and time—Mesopotamia about 4004 years ago—behaving like a gentleman, and then, following the advice of his wife, sank to be a perfectly horrible creature, tainting everything he touched. Naturally, a person informed by this childish idea—born, without reason, of a book—on finding what seem to him proofs of development from a simpler to a more complex society, and on waking up to what everybody might know by the use of plain common sense, that men progress from one stage of art to another more intricate (until they crash, and begin all over again), is thrown off his basis. He begins to make a new religion and a new mythology for himself, to talk of an ‘Ascent of Man’; he thinks himself a summit and a glory—and at the same time he rids himself of morals. It will be interesting to watch the end of the process.

In connection with all this—though the connection is strained—I have often wondered to myself, and especially at night-time upon the sea, how long the mystic Catholic doctrine of human equality would survive in the non-Catholic world. It has survived so far because it is flattering to the many. Only a very small number of men are conspicuously rich or talented, or (for those who love publicity) public; it is naturally an attractive doctrine for the obscure, untalented, poor mass, that—not in the sight of their Creator, for they no longer accept one, but in some incomprehensible way—we are all equal, and that in some odd fashion which they cannot discover, but which they have felt in their bones, the rich or talented or advertised man is really no better than themselves. You find the doctrine lingering most tenaciously in the popular conception of justice. Men would still be shocked, even during the present decline of morals, at the open admission that a man, important for wealth or public position, should be admittedly and overtly immune from the criminal law. In practice, of course, he is so. But so much of the old Catholic dogma of human equality survives as forbids—so far—the open admission of privilege.

But flattering as the old Catholic doctrine of equality is, I do not think it can survive much longer outside the Catholic body. It is in a high degree mysterious, and I am amused to find one man after another suddenly making the discovery that it is not a patent truth, apparent upon the surface of things.

I remember once sitting next a very worthy man at a banquet in the United States: it is now nearly thirty years ago. This man explained to me laboriously enough, but very privately, that the statement in the Declaration of Independence, ‘Men are created equal,’ seemed to him great nonsense. For he had come to observe that they were of different stature, muscular strength, and even intelligence—in which last conclusion I supported him.

There is another Catholic mystery to which the non-Catholic world still uncertainly clings (I do not think its tenure is at all secure), and that is the mystery of immortality.

That also is consoling, and to some even flattering. It can be used as a soothing drug on condition that you do not work out the full theology of it, and admit the double doom of beatitude and damnation. But the repetition of this old Catholic doctrine as a dope, by which may be evaded the menace and reality of death, does not seem to me to have enough stuff in it to endure. Yet there are many men and women still living who can remember the time when the non-Catholic world did still accept the full doctrine.

Indeed, a living friend of mine has recited to me a verse learnt in her childhood, which ran somewhat as follows:

‘There is a dreadful Hell
A place of aches and pains,
Where sinners must with Devils dwell,
In fires and shrieks and chains.’

But that is all over. All that is left of the doctrine of a life to come is a very vague mood of comfortable assurance, dissipated at once on the approach of peril. It will not last, apart from the great and only true philosophy of which it is the last poor relic.

I wonder, indeed, how much of Catholic doctrine will survive, and what part of it—if any—in whatever of Europe continues to reject the present advance of the Faith. That some great section of Europe will lose the last savour of Christian culture, and that soon, is probable; for already the half-educated are abandoning it all over the North. That the rest will return to full doctrine is probable. For already the thirst for it is apparent, and the stronger minds are so returning. But what will follow where it is wholly abandoned? We know what heavy weather property is making to-day, and, as for marriage, it has nearly gone by the board. The doctrine of justice is cloudily remembered, but mixed up in some muddled way with the idea of playing a lawyer’s game, and so sodden with sentimental frailties, and rough-edged with cruelties and sale and purchase, that one can make nothing of it. For instance, outside the Catholic world, it is an accepted idea that if a man accused of murder be under grave suspicion, but not definitely proved guilty, he must, indeed, be condemned to some horrible punishment, such as imprisonment for life, but not to the punishment for murder. And it is an approved idea that punishment should not be vindictive, but only deterrent, save where the vindictive side of it is the vengeance of the great against the weak. And it is an approved idea that the witness in a legal case may justly be confused and harried in order that the truth shall be concealed; and that capacity of so confusing and harrying a witness is the great test of a man’s moral aptitude to administer Justice. And it is an approved idea that a lawyer may do his utmost to have an innocent man condemned, if only he be paid highly enough. But the breakdown of the idea of justice is only one department of the great change. There are a score of others to be surveyed; notably the novel doctrine that a man’s wealth is the test of his value in the State.

Well, what will come out of that welter, that corruption into which the decomposition of the Christian culture is now dissolving?

What I think will spring out of the filth is a new religion.

I think there will arise in whatever parts of Christendom remain, say, two hundred years hence, cut off from the advancing restoration of the Faith, some simplified, odd, strong code of new habit, comparable to the sudden code of habit which Arabia constructed on the ruins of Christian doctrine in the East. Whatever refuses to accept the Catholic restoration will sooner or later develop a new religion, because human society cannot live on air, and to men of our strong Western blood the substance of a doctrine and a ritual are especially needful. This conception of a new religion (and, therefore, an evil one) arising out of the rottenness of the grave of truth, seems to-day at once fantastic and unpleasant. Unpleasant I admit it is; fantastic I do not believe it to be.

From that Cornish town I had the next morning to make my way back to London; and Stephen Reynolds, whom I met, got her round the land safely to the ports upon the southern side, whence later I resumed this cruise: Stephen Reynolds, that strongest-souled and most sincere of men, who desired and did good all his life. It is the meeting with such men, and the comparison of their public label with their true function, of their false renown or lack of renown with their certain standing in the eyes of their Maker, which lead all wise men to a perfect contempt for the modern world.

Does any one remember him now of those who are reading this? Perhaps one or two, perhaps no one. He loved the poor: he understood the sea. He was a brother and a support to sailing-men, and he had charity, humility, and justice in equal poise. But the truth is, I take it, that our world is no longer fitted for governance by, nor even for advice from, its rare great men. It is fitted for governance by those who boast so exact an admixture of folly and of vice as makes them reasonably consonant with the stuff they have to govern. As for those who are too good for us, or too wise for us, why, the sooner they are out of it the better for them. And so it is the better with Reynolds....

But I wish that I could come across him again in this world, somewhere at the meeting of sea and land, and talk with him again about the schools of fishes, and the labours of those who seek them along our shores, and the souls of sailormen.

I confess to a complete ignorance of going round the land, that is, of turning the point of Cornwall, and of passing from the northern to the southern coast. Three times have I set out from Saint Ives with the firm intention of passing the Longships, and putting her round up-Channel. Never have I done so. For the Seven Gods, or one or another of them, forbade it. Had I ever fallen so low as to put a motor into the Nona, she would have gone round like a bus or a taxi; but under sail alone it was forbidden me. Each of those three times I started with a light wind and was becalmed; and at the end of the each of those calms I drifted back so far upon the flood that I sickened of the attempt. Saint Ives is a very long way from London, and a still longer way from Sussex, and a man cannot spend his life indefinitely taking that immense journey back and forth for nothing. And that is why I sent the Nona round the land.

I have never made Newlyn. I have never gone into Falmouth, so there is still something left for me to do. I have, indeed, seen all that coast from within, and walked back and forth across the last peninsula of England, and compared Mounts Bay and its rock with the towering brother island upon the further shore: for every such sea-girt height is dedicated to Saint Michael, being a natural perching place for winged things. The two Mounts are little models of the two national histories: each begins as a monastery; but one becomes a king’s prison, then derelict, then a sort of national showplace; the other becomes a country house.

You may trace a parallel in the fate of the Templars in the two capitals. The secret society of the Templars, with its gigantic wealth and universal conspiracy, was suppressed (to the salvation of Europe) six hundred years ago. Their centre in Paris fell to the King, became in its last stages an appanage for younger sons and cousins of the Crown, then a prison. It was at last destroyed in the very beginnings of the new Paris under Napoleon. Its memory has almost disappeared.

The Templars’ centre in London passed gradually to the lawyers, and now fulfils, among other functions, the very useful one of preventing cabs from getting too quickly from the Embankment to Fleet Street.

As for the two round churches, the mysterious symbols of that great, now dead, freemasonry (which for a moment threatened all our lives), that one in which the Mass was preserved has disappeared from that capital of Europe where the Mass has perhaps most power, but that from which the Mass was driven out is still carefully maintained in its externals, and stands there still in the midst of London—dead.

It was upon this coast of Cornwall that I once, to my shame, wholly misread the outline of a headland, not from sea but from land.

Standing upon the shoulder of the Lizard peninsula, and looking eastward upon a clear summer’s day, I misread the Dodman. Now from land this is unpardonable, because one has on land points of reference, and, indeed, had I been careful, and with a map before me, I could not have made such an error. But from the sea it is a thing that happens very much oftener than sailing-men are willing to admit.

I remember once, many years ago, coming in from far outside, and making sure of a point of French land, which I thought I knew by heart. I saw a characteristic dip, and, in front of it, the nearer lump of land which I knew for an island, and then there was a gap, or ‘V,’ which I could have sworn to be the harbour town I knew. It is true that I was surprised to find it lying so far over my starboard bow. I had thought it to be right before me, but I trusted my eyes rather than my reckoning. As we drew nearer I found all that inference in error. I had, indeed, failed in my reckoning somewhat, but it was the other way about, and the place I was looking for lay more than twenty miles to the eastward, and, when I first saw land, my harbour was hidden below the last horizon, over the port bow.

One would think that the outline of a headland, once one had known it from a particular side, was an unmistakable thing, and one would think that the same would be true of a characteristic range of hills seen lengthwise, or even of the entrance to a valley harbour.

After all, the same sort of thing is at once recognisable by land: a man does not mistake the Wrekin, or the Malvern Hills.

But at sea, for some mysterious reason, you never can be sure; and that is why such pains are taken in the elaborate descriptions and plans of sailing directions, and in the little pictures which they make in the official books. It is not only a matter of what is called to-day ‘visibility,’ though it is true that the thickness of the air makes a great difference to one’s judgment of distance. No matter what the conditions, the most absurd mistakes can be made, and are made continually, and that by practised men. It was only the other day that I mistook Grisnez for the end of the cliff some miles to the east of it above the flat of Calais. You would think that Beachy Head, seen from up-Channel looking westward, was unmistakable; for it has the exact outline of a hippopotamus, with its little ear and fat forehead and snout, and there is a long flat before it, so that anything rising up, one would think, was bound to be Beachy Head, but it is not so. A man who has been knocking about the Channel at night, and does not quite know where he is, except that he is somewhere off the Sussex coast, may (it sounds absurd, but it is true) take Fairlight in a haze for Beachy Head, or (coming eastwards) he may catch in a dull dawn the low cliffs beyond Newhaven, and, if the thick air hides Beachy from him, he may take these for that headland.

Much more excusable, and yet much more common than mistaking the outline of hills, or a headland, is the mistaking of a light. All of them have carefully marked spaces of time, a flash for so many seconds, or a change of colour, or what not. But a man cannot always be bothered to time these things, and in a little boat under a strain he may not be able to do so. But the very commonest form of error in this, as in everything else, comes from an absolute and false certitude. You say to yourself, ‘There is no doubt at all that that light is such-and-such a light.’ You have been waiting to pick it up, and when you pick up a light you are certain it is that light, unless the timing of it is quite grossly different from what you expected. But you may be quite wildly wrong. I suppose no one will believe me when I tell them that I have known Saint Catherine’s mistaken for the Hogue.

But there are more absurd cases still. Many years ago, a ship called the Mohegan struck the rocks called the Manacles, which are inside Black Head, in Cornwall. She was going down the Channel, and there would seem to be no question of danger in the matter. The Lizard Light is there, staring plain enough; one only has to keep it well on the starboard bow going down-Channel, and one is sure to miss England. One cannot hit the Manacles so long as the light is well off one’s starboard bow, for they lie inside the Point. Therefore, when the Mohegan struck, she must have had the Lizard Light on her port bow, and the lookout man, and the man steering, and the man setting the course, and the man in command on the bridge must have known perfectly well (one would think) that the situation was impossible. Yet strike she did, and no one has ever really explained how it happened.

There are some of these mistakes which cannot be avoided, and which are explainable, not by any failure of the human reason, but by a very natural confusion between similar things. Thus, any one runs a risk at Dungeness on account of the two lighthouses there; I mean any one going up-Channel, and aiming at giving that point a very close shave.

Dungeness grows out to sea at a certain rate, so that, at long intervals, a new lighthouse has to be built to mark its extremity. Though it grows outwards thus into the Channel, the end is steep-to, and there is plenty of water right up alongside the land. Therefore, any one going up-Channel makes for the lighthouse direct, intending to pass within a few yards of the shore, for this shortens an up-Channel course. Also, if you have the tide with you, you have a strong stream there to help you.

Now, about one hundred years ago, they built the old lighthouse where Dungeness then was. That old lighthouse is now about one mile inland. It does happen, and I am witness to it with hundreds of others, that the modern lighthouse on the extreme end of the point may be obscured by day, when the old lighthouse is visible. In that case a man tends to steer for the old lighthouse, thinking it to be the new one, and he is aiming, of course, right on-shore when he thinks he is just going to miss the point.

The worst mistake of this sort I myself ever made was mistaking the Varne Buoy for the South Goodwin Lightship. It is not so impossible as it sounds. The weather was thick; I had been drifting for many hours without much wind, and with no certitude of where I was except that I was somewhere in the Straits. I looked up-weather, to the northeast, and saw in the brume what looked like a hull and a pole. I could not be quite certain whether there was a ball on the pole or not, but I certainly took it for a lightship; and, judging from the time that I had left the French harbour, and the sort of pace I thought I had made in my little boat, and tricked by the weather (which was much thicker than it looked), I made sure that this apparently distant object was the Goodwin. It was not till I came within a hail of it that I knew it for what it was—the Varne Buoy, not a hundredth the size of a lightship.

I suppose that the regularity and certitude of modern mechanical life on land tend to make men exaggerate the fixity of evidence. When men dealt more with the caprice of Nature, they were more ready to admit two things which modern men underestimate: the possibility of marvel and the fallibility of the senses.

Different periods take quite different standards in such affairs. Our own time prides itself on a specially clear vision of reality, and ridicules the credulity of the past. Yet I notice a hundred things in which I could imagine posterity stupefied at our inane credulity. We accept, in everything which does not immediately concern us, a bare newspaper statement made anonymously. We accept it as we accept the evidence of our own senses, or more; we accept it although it is unvouched for, unproved, untested. We accept it—to be brutal—because it is printed, and because it is printed on a large scale.

There is a whole mythology of ‘prehistory,’ which has grown up, mushroom-like, in less than a lifetime, which pretends to explain the unknown past of man, and which has already become more fixed and sacred to the multitude than any mythology accepted by our fathers. Not one of the millions who accept that mythology could give you even the briefest account of the supposed steps of evidence upon which it reposes. In this process the strange mechanical, universal, influence of what is called ‘popular education’ plays a very great part, and whereas the half-educated man was always a danger, to-day he is a catastrophe.

Or, take not prehistory—which is a mere imposture—but recent recorded real history. Millions of children are told that the American Colonies revolted because they were unjustly taxed by England; that after a long struggle they won, and that they won because they were right; because they had the same qualities as our own sacred selves, being of our own sacred blood; that the trouble ought never to have arisen, and was only due to the folly of a few misguided and pigheaded English gentlemen who happened then to hold political power. I will bargain that—above the labouring mass—this is the attitude taken by nine men out of ten in England to-day towards the American War of Independence. On the top of that all are told—or given the impression, at any rate—that England soon repented of her error, and came to regard the United States as the noblest of her children.

They are not told that an expensive war had been waged by the Mother Country in defence of the Colonies; that long and difficult negotiations had been undertaken to see how that expense could be shared; that certainly a majority of the colonists—and probably a large majority—were on the side of England, and against the rebels, and that the final defeat of England was mainly due to the intervention of the French, and especially to the more close concentration of the French fleet. They are not told that the English people regarded themselves as perfectly right, that they continued to detest the Americans with the most vivid hatred for a hundred years afterwards, or that the policy of pretending a friendship with America is quite recent, and only grew up after the strength of the new country was apparent, when the long agony of the Civil War had turned in favour of the North. Worst of all, they are not told that this pretence of identifying the United States with England is being carried on against increasing odds, as the United States becomes less and less English in tradition, in blood, in morals, and everything else.

The false legend is swallowed whole, and it is a very good example of how mythology can have a direct practical effect for ill. Our general opinion is only now beginning to be shocked by the foreignness of America, and is still bewildered by the refusal of Americans to regard themselves as English. You can always be certain of middle-class and lower middle-class support in England (I do not say popular support, for the populace are quite indifferent to the whole affair) for any foreign policy which takes for granted that America is but another England overseas.

I saw a very good example of this at the beginning of the last year, 1924, when I was watching opinion at home and abroad upon what were then called the ‘Expert Committees,’ and later, the ‘Dawes’—that is, the two committees sitting in Paris to decide whether the Germans had concealed large assets abroad, and also to decide what the Germans could pay by way of reparations.

For three solid years the international financial powers which directed our policy in the matter of German reparations had denied the accumulation of German wealth abroad, and had persistently clamoured that the Germans could never pay more than a small fraction of the sums claimed of them, if that. From the same sources there had been in England a persistent clamour for ‘expert’ examination of the question under American direction, and the basis of this last demand was the certitude that America would only act in the matter as the willing helpmate of England. The committees met, but the initiative for calling them together was American; the American delegates, and behind them the American Government, were the deciding forces. When the reports came out, there was a stupefaction, gallantly concealed; for those reports, insisted upon by the American delegates, completely contradicted in every point the propaganda of the past three years. They insisted that the Germans had accumulated vast sums abroad, especially in the United States, and that Germany could soon pay indefinitely, at the rate of £125,000,000 a year. The result of having nourished these illusions upon American relations to England was that the foreign policy adopted officially by the British Government was thrown out of gear. The English Governments (acting in this respect differently from the way in which the English public as a whole would have acted) had supported Germany to the fullest of their ability. They had postponed all efforts of reparations, they had insisted that all demands to obtain payments by force were illegal; they had refused to help their Allies to obtain such payments; their Treasury spokesman had told everybody that Germany had nothing concealed abroad to speak of, and certainly could not pay on any considerable scale. They then asked for a Committee of Experts, took it for granted that American pressure on this Committee would be in their favour, openly pledged themselves beforehand to accept the report, and were bewildered, when the report came out, to find it opposed to them.

Those who govern us have been compelled to accept the Dawes Report—even to set it working—and they watch anxiously its coming effect upon that balance whereby England lives. They are caught in a trap. Had they known a plain, modern historical truth, that America is a foreign country, they could have preserved an independent national policy. It is now too late. America has mastered us.

The next port from which I have taken the Nona after the turn of the land is Fowey, for, though I have gone into Mevagissey once in my life, it was but in an open boat, sailing across Saint Austell’s Bay; and there, in Mevagissey, I did not learn what I had always desired to learn, and what to this day remains a mystery to me, and that is, the history, nature, and fate of the busy little buzzer the Mevagissey Bee. It was in the port of Boston, in Lincolnshire, that I first heard of this animal, having then not yet arrived at my thirtieth year. Perhaps I had heard its name before, and had not noticed it; but it was there that I was first struck by the account of its strange demeanour.

There lay in the narrow river a very large, hideous, and dirty steamer, and I could not see how she would have room to turn, for she was pointing upstream, under the distant benediction of that marvellous great tower. I said to a sailorman who was leaning on a post, and looking moodily at this steamer (which may have been his ship for all I know): ‘How will she get out of this?’ To which he answered: ‘Starn foremost, like the Mevagissey Bee.’ I asked him what that Bee was, and by way of answer he lurched away. I have asked many men since, and no one has been able to tell me.

Fowey, then, I say, is the most western port to which, or from which, I ever took the Nona. And Fowey is a thing by itself. One may say of it what Mr. Barry Pain said in his review of that ought-to-be-most-famous book called ‘Delina Delaney’: ‘This is a thing which only happens once in a thousand years.’

Fowey is the harbour of harbours, and the last port town left without any admixture of the modern evil. It ought to be a kingdom of its own. In Fowey all is courtesy, and good reason for the chance sailing-man. For your provision, or your transport, or your mooring, you pay no more than you should, and whatever you may need in gear is to be had at once; and in Fowey have I had a sail made for me in, perhaps, one sixth of the time it would have taken anywhere else along the coast eastward. It was a jib, and it fitted. In Fowey, also, there is security from all winds, good holding-ground, and, what is best of all, an air in which all other places may be forgotten, and in which the cares of this crowded island melt away. I suppose when the crash comes, and the ruins have been more or less cleaned up, Fowey will remain to carry on the traditions of a better England. I hope so. There is no fault to be found with it. Now, can this be said of any other town except Leominster? I think not. I have never sailed into Fowey or out of Fowey without good luck attending me. I have never had to beat in or out of Fowey; I have always had a leading wind. I have had light airs, of course, outside, but I have never been becalmed. The last time I left that blessed land—to which, perhaps, I never shall return—it was under so gallant a northwest breeze, so clear a light in the first of the midday tide, that the career along the coast to Plymouth Sound was like a song.

It is unreasonable, but those stretches of coast-wise sea in which one has had good fortune remain in the mind exceptional, and carry with them a sort of false air of security, as though they were always so. Men must have had the terror of their lives time and again off that coast; but to me it always seems, when it returns as a picture in my mind, sunlit, and framed in vigorous small seas, with the attendance of a noble and a sufficient breeze. With what pleasure have I not noted the speed she made as she passed the measured mile by Polperro, and how pleasant to see Rame Head growing perpetually before one, until the Nona opened the majestic breadth of Plymouth Sound.

As for Plymouth, I fear there is some evil of perversion about that mood which makes so many men (and I am one of them) disgruntled with exaggerated fame. Modern legend has got a way of selecting a few abiding places of its own, and there trampling down the grass and all around with such a multitude of repetition and exaggeration and ready-made phrase as corresponds, in the things of the mind, to the most intolerable mud in the things of the soil. Is it print which has done this, and steam—newspapers and the railway? No! So much evil could not have come from material things: its real source was in the degraded modern mind. What with Drake and the Armada, and the Bowls, and the Rock upon the other side of the sea which failed to land upon the Puritans, and the perpetual reiteration of all these things, I would rather see Plymouth breakwater from the Sound, and so sail past, than look on the Sound from the Hoe. But I admit that this mood is evil, and that it is something of a perversion to feel such irritation against mere wearisome repetitions. One has only to leave them alone.

It is a heavenly piece of coast, all this southern bulge of Devon, with its little secret rivers and untainted towns. The people are good and the land. So, with reservations, is its sea even beyond the Sound. Though once, indeed, I did suffer off Bolt Head one of the two most abominable spills of wind I ever suffered—and the first was off Beachy Head by Birdling Gap on Whit-Tuesday, 1902, a day ever to be remembered.

For the air fell off Birdling Gap just like water out of a bucket, and nearly blew the Nona flat upon her beam. I let go the sheet with a run, but as it was she dipped, perhaps, a third of her mainsail, and nearly broke her lover’s heart with fear. It is so sometimes with these high lands. The wind does not run true. It blows over them, and curls through a depression upon their edges, and curves, splashing down solid, in a bolt, on to the deep below. For, on that day by Beachy, all those years ago, the true wind was but just enough northerly to let me keep a course for Newhaven, hauled very close and saving every inch. But that gust came suddenly right on the weather beam, from far east of north, and nearly settled my then young craft and him that cherished and still cherishes her.

As for the spill off Bolt Head, it fell after a clear midnight, since the War, and it was more than a spill; for it blew steadily for the best part of an hour and then ceased. But, like its younger brother off Beachy, it was peculiar to the high land; for it came due northerly, whereas the main wind had east in it. I was watching the morning star burning like a sacred furnace on the edges of the black hills when Satan sent that wind and tried to drown three men. But we reefed in time—there were three of us, one for the helm and two to the reef; and when dawn broke, and the blessed colours of the east renewed the day, strange!—one end of the boom had three reefs down, and the other only two!

A coast of good memories: may it stand for ever in spite of petrol and every other evil thing. There might be no London at all, so kindly and so well guarded are all the men and women of its little harbour towns, and so uncrowded its hills. The Erne and the Avon I have never entered, but the Yealm I know: a difficult river in which to anchor, on account of innumerable moorings, a winding water in a wooded gorge, difficult also for wind. And Salcombe I have sailed in and out of—I suppose the happiest harbour in the world. It has many little beaches of its own, the homes of men standing separate upon them, far inland creeks, not too strong a tide, a bar somewhat shoal but always deep enough for the Nona, and a clear fairway to be fetched from within and from without, I take it, upon any wind; for the harbour opens well inside the narrows, and the seaward shores open well outside them.

Upon this piece of coast, setting out once from Plymouth, there came to me an experience of no particular moment as history, but of powerful effect upon my mind. It marked, in a sort of mysterious omen way, or, perhaps, I should say in a sort of visionary way, the unleashing of the Great War.

It so happened that in that summer of 1914 I had had occasion to go from Hampshire to one of the western ports, where I was to pick up my boat, and take her ultimately into Plymouth Sound, and thence, when I should have the leisure, I proposed to take her out again, and stand eastward up the coast.

I was staying in Hampshire with a friend who had a house in the New Forest. It was on a Sunday I set out thence. He sent me in his motor to Salisbury, where I wished to get Mass before going on by train. During the Mass, the priest, after his announcements, asked the congregation to pray for the soul of the Archduke heir-apparent of Austria, who had been murdered at a place called Sarajevo. I had never heard the name, and I had but a vague idea of who this archduke was, of his relationship to the Emperor, and of his heirship to the throne of Hapsburg-Lorraine. I came to the Nona, where she lay, and sailed out with her into the sea for some days. I had no conception that anything could be brewing.

When I came to land again, and went up to London, I found the air to be filled with all the possibilities of that time. The Austrian Government had sent to the Servian Government a note, the like of which had not been heard in the history of Christendom. It made demands which no government claiming to sovereignty could accept. For my part, when I read the terms of the note, I was in no doubt that it was of Prussian dictation. I am in no doubt to this day that it was of Prussian dictation.

There are two ways of ascertaining the origin of such a thing. One is the material way, the consultation of the only available documents, and the only certified direct human evidence. The other is the moral way, when one says: ‘This can only have been written by So-and-So, or, at the very least, can only have been inspired by So-and-So.’ Thus, if I find upon the table of a doubtful, weak kind of a man—and a courteous one at that—a letter framed in the very terms and manner of a bully, constantly his associate, then, though the letter be in the handwriting of the former, and on his own paper, even if there were convincing proof that when the actual writing was done the man was alone, I should yet say that the real author was the bully, and not the gentleman. He may have learnt it by heart at dictation. He may have copied it from the other’s draft. At any rate, it is morally certain that the one man, and not the other, is the true author of the thing launched—is the one responsible.

Now, in the case of this note to Servia, the whole thing is Prussian from beginning to end: the extreme arrogance, the deliberate provocation, the exactitude, the aridity, and, above all, the unintelligence. And as for proof upon the other side, we have none, except what the various culprits chose themselves to give us.

As I went about London getting all men’s views, as is my custom when grave things threaten, I heard many judgments passed upon the probable consequences of the note. The man whose judgment in European affairs I trusted most, one who had been largely employed in the foreign business of this country, and who also had a deep and solid knowledge of history, told me that there would not be war, even between Austria and Servia, let alone an extension of the peril.

The reason he gave for this was curious. He said that a document of that extreme violence would not have been issued if war were the object. The object was to make bargaining acutely necessary, and to get a further hold over Balkan land as a result of a long haggling. For very violent actions—of which this was the most extreme case yet known to Europe—the excess of offensive and inhuman brutality could only, he said, be used as a blind.

Though I then knew very much less of the European situation, I hesitated to agree with him as to the motive; but, on the other hand, I certainly did not think there would be war. I thought Servia would yield in all save the very worst and most humiliating points, and that these would at last be waived.

Many other opinions of various colours did I gather in that interval, but only one foreseeing a war; and to that one I paid no attention, because it was very foolishly expressed, and for the wrong reason. It was given me by a man who had travelled widely, and who was an expert in many languages, as well as a man of great knowledge in certain forms of mechanical construction. He had also a high scientific training. He had no public post. This man said to me there would be war, because Austria was known to be in a rotten condition, because upon the outbreak of war the various sections of her tessellated dominion would break apart, and the Servians, knowing this, and having the Russians behind them, would take up the challenge. The Prussian power, or ‘Reich,’ would be so alarmed at the prospect that it would attempt to stave off hostilities, or, failing that, to leave the Austrian Crown to its fate. Such was the folly and ill-judgment of the only man who thought that war was coming, among all those whom I consulted. It was a good example of hitting a mark by firing wide: like the duellist in the dark room who in mercy shot up the chimney, yet brought down his opponent.

For note you that though a great many men up and down Europe had said that Prussia was making for war, and that a conflict must come about in some near future, and though I myself had written it over my own signature (if I remember rightly), when, in 1911, Prussia raised her special war tax, and the French were compelled to reintroduce the three years’ service; yet this did not seem to be the occasion—for it was too abrupt. There seemed to be no plot or plan; and the season was already late.

I did not know what we know now, that Prussia firmly calculated on two things: first, the neutrality of England, and, secondly, a very complete and very rapid victory over the French, a decisive victory, destroying the whole of the French army within a month of the frontier crossing; a battle beginning as did Charleroi, but ending very differently from the Marne.

When I next had occasion to leave London, in order to find again my boat at Plymouth, and to take her out, nothing was decided. One might almost say that the suspense, such as it was, seemed less burdensome, and the sense of peril less acute. I came down by night; I saw no morning papers; I got aboard with my companion, and spent the whole forenoon before the slight tide would serve in putting things to right for the cruise.

We dropped out under a soft air, which soon died away. We spent the whole mortal day drifting down to the Mewstone, and then, in that exasperating calm, the turn of the tide took us up again towards the breakwater. It was not till the fall of day that a breeze arose; I cannot remember from what quarter, but I think it was off the land—that is, from the northeast—but, at any rate, it served us; we could go eastward without having to beat, and we made out down the Sound. It was still light when we passed the Mewstone again. Through the last of evening and through all the darkness we ran along the coast to Devon for the Start.

I knew that the times were perilous, but I knew no more than any other man, in that odd week’s lull before the storm, exactly how perilous they were. It was nearly a month, I think, since I had heard the priest read out, from those altar steps of Salisbury, prayers for the Archduke who had been murdered at Sarajevo.

When I had set out from Plymouth there was nothing but rumour, nothing certain. The Fleet had dispersed already some days past from the great review at Spithead, and was, as we were told, in the Atlantic at manœuvres. A night, a day, and now another night had passed; I had heard no news.

Nothing was further from my mind than war and armament as the sun rose on that glorious July morning, right out of a clean horizon, towards which the wind blew fresh and cool. It was a light but steady wind of morning that filled my sails as I sat at the tiller with a blanket about me, and laying her head to the north.

We had just rounded the Start at dawn. My companion went below to sleep. I watched, over the quarter, the Start Light flashing pale and white in the broadening day, and at last extinguished. Then the sun rose, as I have said. Immediately after its rising a sort of light haze filled the air to eastward. It was denser than it seemed to be, for it did not obscure the low disc of the sun, nor redden it, but, as you will read in a moment, it performed a mystery. The little ship slipped on, up past the Skerries Bank, and I could see far off the headland which bounds Dart Bay. There was no sail in sight. I was alone upon the sea; and the breeze, neither freshening nor lowering, but giving a hearty line of course (along which we slipped, perhaps, five knots or six), made the water speak merrily upon the bows and along the run of our low sides. In this loneliness and content, as I sailed northward, I chanced to look, after an hour’s steering or so, eastward again towards the open sea—and then it was that there passed me the vision I shall remember forever, or for so long as the longest life may last.

Like ghosts, like things themselves made of mist, there passed between me and the newly risen sun a procession of great forms, all in line, hastening eastward. It was the Fleet recalled.

The slight haze along that distant water had thickened, perhaps, imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them too quickly in the distance. But, from whatever cause, this marvel was of short duration. It was seen for a moment, and in a moment it was gone.

Then I knew that war would come, and my mind was changed.

The bright air was the same around me and the heartening morning wind, the happy course of the Nona, making for a known port with all in her favour and something of youth in her and all round. What that war would bring, its magnitude, its character, was veiled from us all; but the advent of it, the mass of it coming, put a new face on everything I saw and felt and heard; on the steady breeze, on the little lapping of the salt sea-water, on the strong headlands of England. So went I northward alone as the day grew, until by mid-morning, the breeze having dropped somewhat and the boat running more sluggishly, we lay abeam of the rock called the Druid’s Mare, and began to run up the coast for Torbay. My companion wakened and came on deck. I told him what I had seen.

These strong emotions, though they colour all the mind, soon lose their edge, and we fell to talking of the coast we passed, and of the chance of holding the wind, which declined a little and was not so steady as we rounded the last headland. My mind turned nothing over of the possibilities of what was to come. It was later, when I had come ashore again, and had reached London, that I learnt of the prolonged hesitation among the politicians, men by their petty trade unused to and unfit for tasks of magnitude; of the French President’s letter and the ambiguous reply to it, drafted and published; of the final voting when, by a majority of one, the Cabinet decided upon war. Had the virility of such a decision been known even four brief days earlier, war would not have come. But it was too late.

Among the nine who gave their votes in favour of the neutrality of Britain, some were actuated, as we know, by base, one, as we know too well, by the basest of motives: mere trivial personal ambition for success in the wretched tawdry game of professional politics, which was the only craft he knew. But some also acted from the noblest motives and rise for the moment above the fetid marsh-mist of Westminster. These I shall always respect for the strength of their wills and the clarity of their convictions in so awful a moment.

Still more did I then, and do I still, respect them for the deliberate choice they made to accept what was certain to be a vivid, and might be a very dangerous unpopularity, when the first shots should be fired. These men were convinced that it would be to the advantage of their country if the Continental forces should be left to thrash out their own decisions. They were opposed, perhaps, to the majority of their countrymen at the time (it is not so sure; for the mass of their countrymen had hardly had time to decide, so swift was the last rush of events). They would certainly be opposed, as they knew, to the vast majority of their countrymen in a few days. They were the more English, the more characteristic of the blood which they boasted, in that they took such a decision fearlessly. I can believe that to this day the best of them still thinks that his judgment was sound and that great evils now passed, and other evils dreadfully threatening us now, more than ten years after, would have been saved us altogether, if England had refused war. But the best-instructed opinion, the opinion with the widest view, was opposed to them. War followed; with what full fruits only men now young can live to discover.

There is not perhaps in all history (of the sort which has full records behind it) any group of days on which men will debate more and will find it less easy to establish a permanent conclusion than those last days of July and first days of August, 1914. But there are certain structural lines supporting even the most confused and the most debated of records. Thus, men will never be exactly certain what Harold did at the Court of William, nor of how the first directive events of that great quarrel lay. Men will never arrive at a fixed and general conclusion upon the initiative responsible for the revolutionary wars, nor even, perhaps, for the renewed attack upon Napoleon, or by Napoleon, after Elba. But these debates are, for all that, built round a solid skeleton of certain conclusions, and in this great matter of the Great War I do not think that posterity will depart from the general conclusion of our own times (which is certainly mine) that an early declaration of the British attitude would have prevented war.

It is a question easily confused with a totally different one, and the two must be kept carefully apart. The right of Great Britain to remain neutral should surely be admitted, not only in law but in common sense. In law there was no definite agreement with the French. There was no accepted obligation to support the French in the West or elsewhere. A great number of acts had been accomplished which could have had only such a support for their object; the military situation had been studied, contingent military dispositions had been carefully planned in detail. The general policy of the preceding years, especially after Agadir, had pointed to the same end; but the Government of this country had always, in the most insistent manner, affirmed and provided for its freedom of choice when the crisis should come. And the very fact that it had thus so continuously maintained that freedom of choice, and specifically asserted it, is proof that every other step, however obviously designed for common action in arms, was not to be given the interpretation of a binding alliance.

Since this great point in history involves a moral judgment quite as much as the mere interpretation of texts, it should also, I think, be laid down that, in matters of life and death, a nation, like an individual, has the right to stretch even a formal text to the very limits of interpretation.

I would say that even if a formal and solemn alliance had existed, any one holding authority in England at that moment and conceiving that participation in the Continental war would ultimately ruin Great Britain, had a right to seek for any phrase in the written pact which could save his country from disaster—and such phrases can always be found. I will go further: I will say that the certitude of disaster on such a scale would excuse even a breach of faith: but I know that this is passing the bounds ordinarily allowed; and I say it only because there seems to me an implied distinction between war for a local object which could do no more than advantage or hurt a country somewhat, and war of a sort which this war turned out to be, wherein the whole structure of human society was imperilled. In the same way, if I have promised to help a man and support him in various details of his domestic life, even though I have taken good consideration for my services, I have the right to fly from his house if it catches fire in order to save my child from being burnt to death. A vast difference in the scale between the reasonably expected effects of a compact and the suddenly discovered real effects would seem to release a man from the obligation of that compact.

But in this case there was not even a definite compact. Therefore, no one could advance a moral plea against the hesitation which our politicians showed in that grave moment. No, what is to be advanced against the politicians who so lamentably bungled that affair is a charge drawn from the intellectual, not from the moral side of our nature. They acted stupidly, as indeed their trade leads men to act: for professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise. It was bad judgment to leave the matter in doubt to the last; and the decision was deferred and deferred again, simply because your professional politician, always absorbed in a wretched personal intrigue, blinked and was bewildered by a great issue suddenly thrust upon him.

You will often hear it said war could not but come when once the three great Continental Powers had mobilised. It has been repeated that the act of mobilisation—of full mobilisation—renders war necessary. The statement is untrue. Certainly the French mobilisation did not, even up to the very last moment, render war necessary; and the same is true of the German.

Again, it is still said by fanatics that the Russian Government intended and provoked the war. And many men not fanatics, but ignorant of Europe, or at issue with Christendom, repeat the myth. Those who plead in favour of Prussia and of the German General Staff (they are numerous in England to-day) still pretend, as do all the German writers, that the mobilisation ordered from Berlin was but a reply to the earlier orders issued from Saint Petersburg.

History will not accept that. There is altogether too much against it. There is the connection between the ‘Lokal Anzeiger’ and the German General Staff. Still more there is the nature of German mobilisation, which was so designed that preliminary orders were, to its general scheme, what final orders were in any other country. The Prussian scheme of mobilisation may be compared to a loaded gun. If I know that a man has his gun loaded and he aims it at me, my then loading mine is not a provocation.

Much more is there, against so strained and distorted a piece of special pleading, the truth obvious to any one, even the most superficial, who had seen Germany since 1911: the whole mass of that population supported its government in a determination for what was believed would prove a short and highly lucrative campaign, and one not only highly lucrative, but settling forever the security of that great experiment which Prussia had not quite consolidated by her series of rapid victories a lifetime before.

But though the German mobilisation was indeed proof of the truth that Prussia and her subjects desired war, that war so eagerly desired was a Continental war only. The Continental war envisaged at Berlin excluded the factor of English intervention. Not that it was believed such intervention would make any great difference in what was assumed would be an immediate and crushing victory in the West, but that sea power continuously exercised could not but have given pause upon what Berlin thought would be the probable result of the struggle in the East. Granted an immediate and certain German victory in the West (as a fact it failed), there would still be an Eastern campaign which the German General Staff believed to be necessarily prolonged and which they dreaded; blockade during that trial they dared not face.

Two men, I think, deserved well of their country at that moment, granted that an entry into the war sooner or later was inevitable. One was Mr. Winston Churchill, who upon his own initiative mobilised the Fleet; and the other was Lord Haldane, who convinced his colleagues of the nature of the peril and who, it should be remembered, had made possible the coöperation of Britain in the war by his scheme for mobilisation. All that followed was based upon the work originally done by him at the War Office at a time when, to the great bulk of his countrymen, the idea of such a conflict was still quite unfamiliar and its enormous implications incredible.

For the rest, it is neither generous nor wise to pick out any particular set of misjudgments; for the whole of Europe, all its culture and all its intelligence, was at fault in estimates of the war. You may say of all the mass of stuff that has been written since the Armistice that it can be graded in degrees of intelligence according to its admission of the unexpected and the fortuitous throughout those terrible years. The less intelligent the writer the more he ascribes this or that development to a plan; the more intelligent he is the more he admits factors independent of our wills and our intelligences: factors proceeding, as our fathers would have said, and as I believe, consciously from a Will above humanity or (as it is the modern fashion to affirm) coming into human affairs from no god, but blindly—at any rate, factors external to human direction. In the individual actions can be traced clearly enough what measure of conclusion their success involved, or what lack of it their failure was due to. But, in the general lines of the turmoil, it is not so. Here and there a chance guess proved right, but it was no more than a guess, unless we except Lord Kitchener’s warning that the war would last at least three years: he gave it when most men thought it might not last three months.

It is with regard to the Great War as it is with regard to every set of campaigns in history; if you omit that which was not subject to any human will and intelligence, you omit nine tenths of the factors that make for the final result—and that is why every great captain has put his trust in Fortune and in a star, a destiny of his own. For great captains know what part Fortune plays in their trade.

I remember Boulanger saying, when I was a boy of nineteen: ‘La guerre est une chose aléatoire.’ It was one of those enormous truisms which make one shake with laughter, and, coming from the lips of such a man, it was particularly comic; he, with the short stature which he owed to his Welsh blood, with his middle-aged hesitations, and his ludicrous incapacity for the rôle into which the popular anger against politicians had unnaturally thrust him, and his very natural disinclination, being what he was, to accept risk. I saw him in Portland Place, and it was there that I heard him discourse in such fashion. Young as I was, I hugely enjoyed the unconscious meiosis of such a phrase. Yes, indeed: la guerre est une chose aléatoire! Would that this fortuitous character in it were confined to its immediate operations! But they stretch outward over a lifetime at least and, in some great effects, for much longer.

As I write this, it is more than ten years since the dice of that ‘chose aléatoire’ were thrown, and no one can even yet determine what interests in Europe have, upon the whole, most suffered; though (alas!) the larger lines of the result are already apparent.

Some day, I suppose—but a good time hence—one of the mob of witnesses to what went on in Paris between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles will write us an amusing book full of truths, made up of anecdote without much comment. Or perhaps, better still, we shall have a highly readable book from the pen of a man who was not there. We had a glimpse of such possibilities from a witness in a few sentences of Mr. Keynes’, which were very illuminating; but Mr. Keynes’ book had not for its object an historical relation, but rather financial propaganda, so that the part dealing with the comedy of small men in big places was too short. If he had confined himself to the words and gestures of parliamentarians suddenly confronted with the task of diplomats, I think he would have produced something memorable. One or two other pens have dealt with that comic affair, but none sufficiently, nor at any length.

I was not myself present. I was continually between Paris and London, I had many friends and a few relations engaged, and I heard a mass of stories from many who were witnesses. Of that mass of stories, not a few sounded probable, and quite a reasonable number were vouched for by witnesses whom I could trust. I have had quoted to me, for instance, the excellent story of a Prime Minister pettishly complaining that he would not be bothered about the Dalmatian coast because they had not yet come to consider the Baltic. And the same man curiously moved a squat forefinger along the river Save upon the map, saying with a would-be-important smile, ‘Now here is the Upper Danube.’ Really in this I have some sympathy with the little fellow; for when I first went to school I always thought it a shame that the Save, running in a straight line with the lower Danube, should not carry the same name. I thought there was something irregular about the Danube taking its great bend past Budapest.

Then there was that other story of the indignant politician who, upon reading the French word ‘demander’ in a memorandum, indignantly protested against this insolent use of the word ‘demand.’

Poland was a subject of ceaseless blunders. One politician vaguely thought it a province of Russia; another was surprised to hear that Danzig had ever been a Polish town; and the same man was contented to express his simple conviction that it was no use setting up Poland again, seeing that such a state could never last.

That they should get mixed up about their figures is pardonable; there were more naughts than a man could count. Still, there is all the difference between one hundred and twenty-five milliard francs and one hundred and twenty-five million francs: but I am assured it was not always easy for every member of the august group to carry the distinction clearly in his head, especially in the morning. Would that some more than human power had suddenly descended—or lacking such a Being, a corporal and four men—and taken the politicians forcibly into three rooms, put paper and pen before them and bade them write down, under heavy penalties, all they could remember of Europe! It would have been a pretty examination!

Now parliamentarians such as these are ridiculous, not only by the absurd disproportion between their nominal powers and their capacities, but more by their ambition—which swells out to bursting the little vessel containing it. They have not talent, save for intrigue against fellow politicians: they cannot speak or write, let alone do, anything worth hearing. None the less would you find, if you could take the tin lid off their hollow minds and look in, a froth of insane vanity, bred of years of speech-making; a more than kingly assurance bred of knowing no control and of immunity; and (what is astonishing in men of such calibre) ambition itself. A paltry ambition, to be sure: an ambition to fill the newspapers: but still, ambition.

Yet, if there is one thing I have noted more than another in the few men worthy of admiration in this our time (men worthy of admiration through their capacities as well as through their characters), it is the absence of ambition.

There could be no better commentary upon the days in which we live. For it is reasonable and normal that men of great capacity should have ambition to exercise it in government, in the ordering of their fellow men. It was a chief quality always looked for by our fathers in those who rose high, and were worthy so to rise; nor were they disappointed. Ambition of old was a mark of greatness. But to-day it is the mark of the capable man that ambition disgusts him. That mark is most notable in Mussolini. It is most notable in Foch. It was notable in most of the commanders of armies; in the admirals of fleets. It was most notable, of course, in the saintly eminence of Mercier. It was notable in almost every one I had the privilege to meet and watch during and after the struggle who had been capable of doing something great in that time.

It is not difficult to discover when you speak with Mussolini that his interest is in his job, not in his name. It is apparent to all that the great work of the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines is remote from all personal motive—and ambition is essentially personal. As for Foch, it is manifest, not only in his every gesture and expression, but in the life he has lived after saving Europe. But this novel feature, the absence of ambition in our greatest men to-day, goes further. It has been notable in our chief discoverers in physical science—all can bear witness to that; it is even becoming apparent in the best writers, though writers are among the vainest of mankind.

All men of real capacity in this our time seem to be agreed that the peculiar odour of modern success is a thing for a decent man to avoid. It is becoming a sort of habit of the mind throughout the West—that is, throughout civilised Europe to-day—in such few men as can do some great work, to do it silently and apart, and to disconnect it wholly from immediate renown.

Conversely, you will have monstrous advertisement surrounding the mere name of a man incompetent, and usually thoroughly dishonest as well, because he is athirst for publicity of the modern sort, and loves it, and because he is quite content to serve those lumps of wealth and vulgarity who, through their possession of the mob newspapers, can grant or withhold publicity.

Here is a situation thoroughly diseased: the spur of ambition withdrawn from those who can do. It cannot last. How it will be resolved I do not know, nor does any other man; but that it cannot last is apparent. The mere force of competition, the mere mathematics of the world will see to it that blaring incompetence shall not permanently wield even nominal power; and it holds more than nominal power to-day.

I was interested, among the many things I heard from the more advertised civilians of the Great War, to note two things: the first was a rooted conviction in the most advertised Parliament men that things and people foreign to their experience were inferior to them. We know, of course, that that is the natural instinct of the schoolboy, and of the very simple good person without experience; but the astonishing thing was to find it in men whom one would expect, in spite of their origins, to have become a little polished by long conversation with their fellows, a little trained by responsibility. Before the end of the conflict one would have thought that even your politician must acquire some judgment from so much vivid and informing experience. Not a bit of it! It went off him like so much water off a duck’s back, and you may hear him to-day, six years after the Armistice, peddling the same inanities as he peddled in 1913.

The second thing I noticed was the alarming difference between politicians and the soldiers in the sense of reality. I say alarming because, after the war, Europe, instead of continuing the rule of soldiers as it should have done, returned to its vomit; and the miserable parliamentary figures of the old degraded day put on again costume and grease-paint, filed back upon the stage, and began to play their old antics as though nothing had happened. The French, who ought to know better (for they have found parliaments out), behaved disgracefully in this matter. You may take up any French newspaper to-day, and find yourself appalled with the recurrence of such names as Caillaux, Briand, Herriot, Loucheur, who ought never to have been mentioned again after such an experience as the Great War.

Italy has done better: but only under the stress of a threatened dissolution. Society in Italy had to reach the point of acute peril before that reaction took place which saved the country; but what a fine reaction it was, not only in its virtues, but, what is more important, in its spirit! What a strong critical sense Italy has shown! What intelligence in rejection of sophistry, and what virility in execution! May it last! But will it last? Even in Italy?

Everything good in this world is doomed to perish, and I cannot tell how long this excellent experiment will stand, or whether it will take firm root, and make Italy all that it desires to be, and all that Italy should be—seeing the strength of the blood, the industry, the intelligence, and the warmth of all that people. But, at any rate, it is good to visit a society still under such an impulse, and to feel that, in one section of Europe at least, things are going well.

I made a sort of pilgrimage to see Mussolini, the head of the movement, and I wrote about him for the Americans. I had the honour of a long conversation with him alone, discovering and receiving his judgments. What a contrast with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian! What a sense of decision, of sincerity, of serving the nation, and of serving it towards a known end with a definite will! Meeting this man after talking to the parliamentarians in other countries was like meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean village after compulsory draughts of marsh water in the mosses of the moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.

One thing, however, struck me in his comments which was, as I thought, extreme and ill-founded; and that was his complete contempt for all majorities. Mussolini laid it down to me that the conception of majority government is as ridiculous as it is immoral, and should be fiercely combated as a lie and an evil in itself. I do not agree; it seems to me that the rational basis of majority government stands firm upon certain conditions.

The right of a majority to rule is, indeed, an absurd doctrine as we hear it commonly stated. I do not mean the doctrine of majority government under what is called ‘the representative system,’ for that is not majority government at all: it is mere oligarchy in the hands of an intriguing caucus, and perhaps as base a form of oligarchy as mankind has ever tolerated. I mean real majority government; the reference of a question to the body of the governed, and the taking of a decision according to the superior number of votes recorded on the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ side. Such a test used as a universal decider is ridiculous. What would a majority vote do with bimetallism, or the appointment of admirals? But there are conditions in which a decision by majority is just, and they are surely these:

(1) When the question arises from a homogeneous community; (2) when there is an active popular demand for its settlement; (3) when the matter under discussion is reasonably familiar to all; (4) when it concerns all, or nearly all, directly, and in much the same degree; (5) when the majority is substantial.

You must be dealing with a homogeneous community—for in one made up of various races, or fundamentally different religions, a majority means nothing towards a decision. It is a mere affirmation of discord. You must have a real and popular demand for a decision, and it must proceed from the people themselves: not from a body claiming the right to frame the question: a vote on matters of no popular interest—as a vote on Welsh disestablishment in North London, or on mining regulations in Brighton—is a manifest abuse. Even on a burning matter, discussed by, known to, and affecting all, no small majority can possibly be decisive, or make an accord—for a half is not the general will. But when a community of one stuff votes by a large majority in favour of something they both understand and desire, and that something close to their own lives, then that majority is of true effect.

Under those conditions the moral argument for majority government seems to me unanswerable, for under those conditions you have the will of the community really expressed by the majority. Now the community is ultimately sovereign; for if the community be not sovereign, what else can claim sovereignty? It is the old dilemma of Suarez, the great Jesuit doctrine, as absolutely secure as a mathematical conclusion; ultimately, the community is sovereign. But unless these conditions are present, and unless all of them are present, the majority is not the community, and to call it so is either a delusion or a trick. It is always immoral, usually fatuous, and occasionally disastrous.

By what right shall fifty-one men out of a hundred, who have no particular taste for the drinking of tea, who, upon the whole, dislike it, but not earnestly, forbid the other forty-nine to drink tea, when those forty-nine feel tea-drinking to be a very necessity of their lives? For what reason shall fifty-one men—of whom perhaps only one knows anything upon the subject—outvote forty-nine—of whom perhaps five know something of the subject? decide (for instance) upon the annexation of an Asian islet? How can you trust fifty-one white men to legislate for forty-nine black men, or, to put it more strongly, fifty-one black men to legislate for forty-nine white? Who does not know that in such a case only organised force could decide?

Mussolini’s reaction (as the Americans would call it) was, I think, against the ludicrous abuse of the doctrine of majority, which has brought Europe to its present pass; for there is nothing so wicked or so senseless or so degrading but a majority (to the honour of our race it is generally a sham majority) can be quoted in its favour.

There is a very deplorable instance of this to-day in French politics. A small but active caucus in France hates the Christian religion. Its members are afraid to make a frontal attack on that religion, because such action would endanger their skins, but they will take any measures which will, they think, indirectly weaken its influence. Particularly do they desire to restrain the activity of the religious orders, and, so far as they can, to prevent those orders from having any corporate existence at all. The mass of the people are, in varying degrees, attached both to their traditional religion and to the more popular and active forms of the monastic institution: that is, the teaching and nursing religious orders. The contemplative orders they do not come in touch with. Most men and women in the nation would leave things alone, and that with a bias towards religion. Very many are almost indifferent. More, though preferring to go on as their forefathers went on, do not put it—religion—in the forefront of their lives. Many more think it of some importance, but are far more actively concerned with their material interests. A small body, quite as small, perhaps, as the anti-Christian caucus on the other side, are active in defence of religion. After a wearisome, meaningless rite of making marks on bits of paper, the said rite (confused by a hundred legal and personal interests, and conducted by the wire-pulling inherent in all such performances) throws up some five or six hundred members of a parliament, nearly all of them intriguers moved by a petty appetite for money or for notoriety, or both. Of these it may be that fifty-five out of the hundred follow the anti-Christian caucus, and look to it for salaries and jobs, forty-five are organised on the other side. Or the numbers may be the other way. When the fifty-five turn up on one side, the whole vast organisation of the religious orders in France (most of which are beneficent, the rest certainly doing no harm) is suddenly imperilled and shaken; its members are exiled, its goods are stolen and spent riotously by the lowest sort of politicians and their hangers-on, its accumulation of wealth dissipated and destroyed. Then another chance majority comes along in four years, and offers a restoration which can but only be most precarious: a restoration of their natural rights to these infamously (and ridiculously) harassed men and women, but a restoration liable to be ruined in another four years.

After the war there happened to be in the French Parliament a vague uncertain majority more or less pledged to traditional things. The politicians most prominent in that gang approached the Carthusians who had been exiled, and had taken up a new home in Tarragona, and offered them a chance of returning to the Grande Chartreuse. These exiles very wisely refused, for they said: ‘How do we know that after all the expenditure of reëstablishing ourselves in our ancient foundation—venerable for centuries, peaceable, remote—we may not at your next “elections,” as you call them, find ourselves turned out?’ They were very wise: but what a commentary upon a system of government! Think of it! Here is a great House with its roots right back in the beginnings of the Middle Ages, with its oaken traditions, its reserves of strength available for itself and all men; doing nothing which could be construed as perilous under any system of common morals, either to the State or to any individual. Merely because a clique of anti-Christians hates them, this doctrine of artificial majorities can turn the whole community out of doors at a moment’s notice, exile its members, loot its fortune.

Nor let it be said that these things happen only in countries like France, to which the disease of parliaments is unnatural and of alien importation; they happen in one form or another wherever the parliamentary fraud is at work. In countries which have lost dogmatic religion and have only vague opinion left, the parliamentary evil takes another form, that of a perpetual restriction against common liberties; or it takes the form of putting finance secretly within the power of inferior men, who fill their pockets at the expense of the commonwealth; or it takes the form of treason in time of war—attempting to make peace with the enemy behind the back of the people and their allies. Or it takes the form of saving the enemy after his defeat. There is no form of parliamentary activity which is not deplorable, save in aristocracies.

For, in aristocracies, which are, of their nature, governments by a clique, a parliament—which is a clique—can be normal and natural. In communities based on the idea of equality and of action by the public will they are cancers, under which such nations always sicken and may die.

I can bear the thought of them no more. I must get back to realities and to things loved.

I must return to my Nona.

We came to Berry Head and opened Torbay.

It is with Torbay as with the Fowey coast. I have known it only under such weathers as leave a hint of heaven: never have I opened Torbay in passing Berry Head but it was morning, with the young sea delighting in a leading breeze; and once, a draught to last forever, I came up under such a dawn and with so tender a dying crescent in the sky that I spent an hour in Paradise.

What are those days of glory? They are not memories: are they premonitions, or, are they visions?

They are not memories, though perhaps Plato thought them so, and our modern pantheists, with Wordsworth for their spokesman here, called and believed them so.

I will hope that they are premonitions, hints granted beforehand of a state to be attained. At the worst they are visions of such a state lying all about us, the home of the Blessed, which we are permitted to glimpse at for a moment, even those of us sad ones who may never reach that place.

As for those who call such joy illusion, they are of that great Schola Stultorum, that new herd of fools peculiar to our day; they who have made the discovery that Something comes out of Nothing, who pour quarts out of pint-pots and give emptiness creative power.

Neglect them, but ask yourself, as I do when such rare moods are granted, whether they be visions or premonitions, and hope that premonitions they may be. For certainly they are the supports of this life, and we creep from one to another like travellers from inn to inn, and when they fail us, the world will be no more endurable.

Such thoughts I had—and have had repeatedly—in this run of water under a morning sky. It is inhabited, is all that air and sea, by something beneficent—at least, I have always found it so.

But there are pictures more definite and of the hard past which come into my mind every time I round Berry Head and see Torbay before me. And of all such thoughts that crowd upon me when I pass the point, and open that deep recess of water, two stand out most vividly. It was here on the southern shore of the Bay that the Dutch, and other mercenaries of William of Orange, landed for the destruction of the last poor remnants of English kingship; it was here that a Catholic priest discovered the first ancient human relics, and thus started our modern controversies.

This last is a most interesting story and little known. Here is what would seem to have happened:

There is a cave near Torquay in which the water, passing, I think, through limestone, leaves a deposit. Under this deposit a Catholic priest in the place, a certain Dr. McEnery (I suppose, an Irishman, but I have not read sufficiently about him) found a number of human bones; associated with them were barbaric implements and the remains of animals, some of such tropical kinds as can no longer live in our climate, others wholly extinct.

He came to the very just conclusion that he had here evidence of an antiquity for man far removed beyond the bounds which had been set by the idolators of the written word of Scripture. He started that ball rolling which has bounded down so devious a course through our time, until to-day the grossly ignorant talk of an imaginary being, whom they call a ‘cave man,’ and the half-learned can bamboozle the public at will with the pretence that they know all about what they call the ‘prehistory’ of our race.

That man, as man—I mean man as we know him (not imperfect man)—has lived upon this earth for very much more than ten thousand years, we are now pretty sure; and we owe the first step to this same Dr. McEnery—whose name no one hears. The later discoveries in the Somme Valley we also owe to another priest, and that is as it should be.

What a turmoil so simple a discovery aroused in Biblical countries, to be sure!

But that turmoil was but the forerunner of something prodigious: nothing less than the shaking, splitting, and at last the collapse of all the foundations upon which had been erected half the modern culture of the West.

For one may say that the modern culture of the West lay after 1600 in two halves, increasingly different one from the other: the Catholic culture and the Protestant.