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AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
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ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
AN
APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
AND OTHER ESSAYS
[Illustration]
PORTLAND MAINE
THOMAS B MOSHER
MDCCCCXVI
FIRST EDITION, OCTOBER, 1905
SECOND EDITION, SEPTEMBER, 1908
THIRD EDITION, SEPTEMBER, 1916
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CONTENTS
PAGE
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 9
EL DORADO 35
THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 45
CHILD’S PLAY 77
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[Illustration]
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
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[Illustration]
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of _lèse_-respectability, to enter on some lucrative
profession, and labour therein with something not far short of
enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little
of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so
called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great
deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has
as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted
that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap
race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his
determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism,
“goes for” them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the
road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives
cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief
over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a
very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of
having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the
Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their
success? It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the
arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to
your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers
have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks;
literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits
combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry,
but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest
difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to
remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously
argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said
against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To
state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that
a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he
should never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school
honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is
educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been
a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these
words: “Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of
knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon
books will be but an irksome task.” The old gentleman seems to have been
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a
few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and
cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit,
like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned
on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard,
as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lacklustre periods between sleep and waking in the
class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time.
I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such
scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain
other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was
playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place
of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac,
and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the
Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the
streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant
always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened
suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a
burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the
stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a
vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if
this be not education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman
accosting such an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue:
“How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?”
“Truly, sir, I take mine ease.”
“Is not this the hour of the class? and should’st thou not be plying thy
Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?”
“Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave.”
“Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it mathematics?”
“No, to be sure.”
“Is it metaphysics?”
“Nor that.”
“Is it some language?”
“Nay, it is no language.”
“Is it a trade?”
“Nor a trade neither.”
“Why, then, what is’t?”
“Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am
desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where
are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner
of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to
learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call
Peace, or Contentment.”
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking
his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise:
“Learning, quotha!” said he; “I would have all such rogues scourged by
the Hangman!”
And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of
starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman’s, is the common opinion. A fact is not called
a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your
scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged
direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,
only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a
telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience
as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go
hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter
xx, which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix, which is
hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an
intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears,
with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than
many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill
and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious
science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking,
that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While
others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of
which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn
some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to
speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have
“plied their book diligently,” and know all about some one branch or
another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and
owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the
better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain
underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes
the idler, who began life along with them--by your leave, a different
picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he
has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all
things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book
in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to
excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and
the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler’s
knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has
another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who
has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their
hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He
will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool
allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no
out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning
falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to
the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if
no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the
Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning
hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily
and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity.
The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent
wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all
this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and
peaceful landscape; many fire-lit parlours; good people laughing,
drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring
these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will
see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;
they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and
unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand
still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they _cannot_ be idle, their
nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When
they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and
have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If
they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid
trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was
nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were
paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in
their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of
the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they
had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed
with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own
affairs. As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have
dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until
here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all
material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while
they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered
on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls;
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman
sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not
appeal to me as being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits,
but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the
very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual
devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by
perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means
certain that a man’s business is the most important thing he has to do.
To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest,
most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the
Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the
world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only
the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids and diligent fiddlers in the
orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches,
do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general
result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and
stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from
place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your
protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for
certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your
way, or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to
lose his friend’s money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing
shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes.
And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could
name one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have
done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation
to Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service,
than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good
companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people
in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done
them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish
disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with
the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly,
perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service
would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart’s blood,
like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more
beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while
for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because,
like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice
blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a
jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is
conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with
confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being
happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which
remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise
nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy
ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set
every one he passed into a good humour; one of these persons, who had
been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the
little fellow and gave him some money with this remark: “You see what
sometimes comes of looking pleased.” If he had looked pleased before, he
had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this
encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to
pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal
largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better
thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of
goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had
been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the
forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they
practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.
Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle
he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger
and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical
limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of
Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I
beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of
activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous
derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all
fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a
leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a
contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before
he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this
fellow is an evil feature in other people’s lives. They would be happier
if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the
Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He
poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand
by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.
And what, in God’s name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people’s lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall,
there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc
she should be at home minding women’s work, she answered there were
plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When
nature is “so careless of the single life,” why should we coddle
ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance?
Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir
Thomas Lucy’s preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse,
the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to
his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many
works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the
price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a
sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a
tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal
vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative,
the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious
in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a
gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go
and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the
bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles
until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though
Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid;
and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven
off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these
persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise
of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they
play their farces was the bull’s-eye and centrepoint of all the
universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their
priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the
glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them
indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable
that the mind freezes at the thought.
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[Illustration]
EL DORADO
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EL DORADO
It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are
so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain
hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of
victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And
it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as
possible was the one goal of man’s contentious life. And yet, as regards
the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when
we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we
dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring
beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes
are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until
the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and
not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An
aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a
fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a
revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be
spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre
unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have
neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or
a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in
virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to
exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and
people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for
work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which
he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make
women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his
estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is
still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one
meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any more;
suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of the world and
allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any
province of experience--would not that man be in a poor way for
amusement ever after?
One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads
with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book
down to contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for
he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left
companionless on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow recently
finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright,
with the ten notebooks upon Frederick the Great. “What!” cried the young
fellow, in consternation, “is there no more Carlyle? Am I left to the
daily papers?” A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept
bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had
finished the _Decline and Fall_, he had only a few moments of joy; and
it was with a “sober melancholy” that he parted from his labours.
Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are
set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below.
Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard.
You would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to
trouble; and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when
you have seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its
marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering
sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children’s
children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when
you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop,
and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended
courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often
difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in
love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife
must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the
altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest
of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an
unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very
fact that they are two instead of one.
“Of making books there is no end,” complained the Preacher; and did not
perceive how highly he was praising letters as an occupation. There is
no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel, or to
gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study forever,
and we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a statue
worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or
crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or
another plain upon the further side. In the infinite universe there is
room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works
of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a
private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for
a lifetime there will be always something new to startle and delight us.
There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can
be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we
have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining.
A strange picture we make on our way to our chimæras, ceaselessly
marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; indefatigable,
adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it
is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we lived
for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find
ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of
mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon,
it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and
but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of
El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to
labour.
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[Illustration]
THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS
[Illustration]
“Whether it be wise in men to
do such actions or no, I am sure it
is so in States to honour them.”
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
[Illustration]
THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS
There is one story of the wars of Rome which I have always very much
envied for England. Germanicus was going down at the head of the legions
into a dangerous river--on the opposite bank the woods were full of
Germans--when there flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal
the Romans on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared
into the forest where the enemy lay concealed. “Forward!” cried
Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, “Forward! and follow the
Roman birds.” It would be a very heavy spirit that did not give a leap
at such a signal, and a very timorous one that continued to have any
doubt of success. To appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to
make imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and its
military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of those
individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in Germany, looked
altogether greater and more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion easy to
produce. A particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a particular
star, the holiday of some particular saint, anything in short to remind
the combatants of patriotic legends or old successes, may be enough to
change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one party a
feeling that Right and the larger interests are with them.
If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must be about the
sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not been taken to the hearts of
the people, and naturalised as an English emblem. We know right well
that a lion would fall foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman
or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of
battle. But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene
of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical
strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of
foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to
English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who does not know one
end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers among
such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience. To suppose
yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you are the
countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just as unwarrantable
as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will
look well in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated beyond the
reach of argument. We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent
if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please
ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is
looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we regard it
as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers
take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation
has lost as many ships, or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.
There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble, terrifying,
and picturesque conditions of some of our sea fights. Hawke’s battle in
the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew up,
reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval
annals owe some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful
appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea and
everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a half-holiday at
the coast. Nay, and what we know of the misery between decks enhances
the bravery of what was done by giving it something for contrast. We
like to know that these bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and
to keep bold and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. No reader
can forget the description of the _Thunder_ in _Roderick Random_: the
disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; deck after
deck, each with some new object of offence; the hospital, where the
hammocks were huddled together with but fourteen inches space for each;
the cockpit, far under water, where, “in an intolerable stench,” the
spectacled steward kept the accounts of the different messes; and the
canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip and
salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer
Welsh imprecations. There are portions of this business on board the
_Thunder_ over which the reader passes lightly and hurriedly, like a
traveller in a malarious country. It is easy enough to understand the
opinion of Dr. Johnson: “Why, sir,” he said, “no man will be a sailor
who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.” You would fancy
any one’s spirit would die out under such an accumulation of darkness,
noisomeness, and injustice, above all when he had not come there of his
own free will, but under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press-gang.
But perhaps a watch on deck in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle
again; a battle must have been a capital relief; and prize-money,
bloodily earned and grossly squandered, opened the doors of the prison
for a twinkling. Somehow or other, at least, this worst of possible
lives could not overlie the spirit and gayety of our sailors; they did
their duty as though they had some interest in the fortune of that
country which so cruelly oppressed them, they served their guns merrily
when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest ear for a bold,
honourable sentiment, of any class of men the world ever produced.
Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names. Pym and Habakkuk
may do pretty well, but they must not think to cope with the Cromwells
and Isaiahs. And you could not find a better case in point than that of
the English Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men
of execution. Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, Foul-Weather, Jack Byron, are
all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval history. Cloudesley
Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding syllables. Benbow has a
bulldog quality that suits the man’s character, and it takes us back to
those English archers who were his true comrades for plainness,
tenacity, and pluck. Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an
act of bold conduct in the field. It is impossible to judge of Blake or
Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of such heroes. But
still it is odd enough, and very appropriate in this connection, that
the latter was greatly taken with his Sicilian title. “The
signification, perhaps, pleased him,” says Southey; “Duke of Thunder was
what in Dahomey would have been called a _strong name_; it was to a
sailor’s taste, and certainly to no man could it be more applicable.”
Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfactory of distinctions; it
has a noble sound and a very proud history; and Columbus thought so
highly of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves by that
title as long as the house should last.
But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, that I wish to
speak about in this paper. That spirit is truly English; they, and not
Tennyson’s cotton-spinners or Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s Abstract Bagman, are
the true and typical Englishmen. There may be more _head_ of bagmen in
the country, but human beings are reckoned by number only in political
constitutions. And the Admirals are typical in the full force of the
word. They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, but of a virtue in
which most Englishmen can claim a moderate share; and what we admire in
their lives is a sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost everybody in
our land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been
depressed by exceptionally æsthetic surroundings, can understand and
sympathise with an Admiral or a prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket
Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically
bracketed for admiration in the minds of many frequenters of ale-houses.
If you told them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus going back
to Carthage, they would very likely fall asleep; but tell them about
Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put
down their pipes to listen. I have by me a copy of _Boxiana_, on the
fly-leaves of which a youthful member of the fancy kept a chronicle of
remarkable events and an obituary of great men. Here we find piously
chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and pugilists--Johnny Moore,
of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; “Pierce Egan,
senior, writer of _Boxiana_ and other sporting works”--and among all
these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in the time of this
annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been added to the
glorious roll? In short, we do not all feel warmly towards Wesley or
Laud, we cannot all take pleasure in _Paradise Lost_; but there are
certain common sentiments and touches of nature by which the whole
nation is made to feel kinship. A little while ago everybody, from
Hazlitt and John Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his
register on the fly-leaves of _Boxiana_, felt a more or less shamefaced
satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters. And the exploits of the
Admirals are popular to the same degree, and tell in all ranks of
society. Their sayings and doings stir English blood like the sound of a
trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the
outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should
still leave behind us a durable monument of what we were in these
sayings and doings of the English Admirals.
Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the _Venerable_, and
only one other vessel, heard that the whole Dutch fleet was putting to
sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest
part of the channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. “I have taken
the depth of the water,” added he, “and when the _Venerable_ goes down,
my flag will still fly.” And you observe this is no naked Viking in a
prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, with a smattering
of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel
underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with six
colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not be
imagined he had struck. He too must needs wear his four stars outside
his Admiral’s frock, to be a butt for sharpshooters. “In honour I
gained them,” he said to objectors, adding with sublime illogicality,
“in honour I will die with them.” Captain Douglas of the _Royal Oak_,
when the Dutch fired his vessel in the Thames, sent his men ashore, but
was burned along with her himself rather than desert his post without
orders. Just then, perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round
the supper-table with the ladies of his court. When Raleigh sailed into
Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire on him at once, he
scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer with a flourish of insulting
trumpets. I like this bravado better than the wisest dispositions to
insure victory; it comes from the heart and goes to it. God has made
nobler heroes, but he never made a finer gentleman than Walter Raleigh.
And as our Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a
strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they discovered a
startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a mistress. When
the news came to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had been decided, he
threw his hat into the sea. It is in this way that a schoolboy hears of
a half-holiday; but this was a bearded man of great possessions who had
just been allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not lie still in his
bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on deck in a basket to direct
and animate the fight. I said they loved war like a mistress; yet I
think there are not many mistresses we should continue to woo under
similar circumstances. Trowbridge went ashore with the _Culloden_, and
was able to take no part in the battle of the Nile. “The merits of that
ship and her gallant captain,” wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, “are too
well known to benefit by anything I could say. Her misfortune was great
in getting aground, _while her more fortunate companions were in the
full tide of happiness_.” This is a notable expression, and depicts the
whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the English Admirals to a hair.
It was to be “in the full tide of happiness” for Nelson to destroy five
thousand five hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have
his own scalp torn open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at
Copenhagen: “A shot through the mainmast knocked the splinters about;
and he observed to one of his officers with a smile, ‘It is warm work,
and this may be the last to any of us at any moment’; and then, stopping
short at the gangway, added, with emotion, ‘_But, mark you--I would not
be elsewhere for thousands._’”
I must tell one more story, which has lately been made familiar to us
all, and that in one of the noblest ballads in the English language. I
had written my tame prose abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe,
when I had no notion that the sacred bard designed an immortality for
Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas
Howard, and lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He was
a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently; and it
is related of him that he would chew and swallow wineglasses, by way of
convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish
fleet of fifty sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the
_Revenge_, was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by
the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open--either to turn her
back upon the enemy or sail through one of his squadrons. The first
alternative Greenville dismissed as dishonourable to himself, his
country, and her Majesty’s ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and
steered into the Spanish armament. Several vessels he forced to luff and
fall under his lee; until, about three o’clock of the afternoon, a great
ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of his sails, and
immediately boarded. Thenceforward, and all night long, the _Revenge_
held her own single-handed against the Spaniards. As one ship was beaten
off, another took its place. She endured, according to Raleigh’s
computation, “eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many
assaults and entries.” By morning the powder was spent, the pikes all
broken, not a stick was standing, “nothing left overhead either for
flight or defence”; six feet of water in the hold; almost all the men
hurt; and Greenville himself in a dying condition. To bring them to this
pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them for fifteen hours, the
_Admiral of the Hulks_ and the _Ascension_ of Seville had both gone
down alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge on shore in a
sinking state. In Hawke’s words, they had “taken a great deal of
drubbing.” The captain and crew thought they had done about enough; but
Greenville was not of this opinion; he gave orders to the master gunner,
whom he knew to be a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle the
_Revenge_ where she lay. The others, who were not mortally wounded like
the Admiral, interfered with some decision, locked the master gunner in
his cabin, after having deprived him of his sword, for he manifested an
intention to kill himself if he were not to sink the ship; and sent to
the Spaniards to demand terms. These were granted. The second or third
day after, Greenville died of his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship,
leaving his contempt upon the “traitors and dogs” who had not chosen to
do as he did, and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully manned,
with six inferior craft ravaged by sickness and short of stores. He at
least, he said, had done his duty as he was bound to do, and looked for
everlasting fame.
Some one said to me the other day that they considered this story to be
of a pestilent example. I am not inclined to imagine we shall ever be
put into any practical difficulty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And
besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of such actions is not a
thing to be decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous
commonsense. The man who wished to make the ballads of his country,
coveted a small matter compared to what Richard Greenville accomplished.
I wonder how many people have been inspired by this mad story, and how
many battles have been actually won for England in the spirit thus
engendered. It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you
can be sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable
occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic fancies, will
not be led far by terror of the Provost Marshal. Even German warfare, in
addition to maps and telegraphs, is not above employing the _Wacht am
Rhein_. Nor is it only in the profession of arms that such stories may
do good to a man. In this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is
Greenville or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in the
ship, we see men brought to the test and giving proof of what we call
heroic feeling. Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club
smoking-room, that they are a prey to prodigious heroic feelings, and
that it costs them more nobility of soul to do nothing in particular,
than would carry on all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose
humanity. It may very well be so, and yet not touch the point in
question. For what I desire is to see some of this nobility brought face
to face with me in an inspiriting achievement. A man may talk smoothly
over a cigar in my club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment,
without adding anything to mankind’s treasury of illustrious
and encouraging examples. It is not over the virtues of a
curate-and-tea-party novel, that people are abashed into high
resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but to stir them
properly they must have men entering into glory with some pomp and
circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains,
printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence,
are more valuable to England than any material benefit in all the books
of political economy between Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville
chewing wineglasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more
than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the body, or met
in private life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an
eloquent performance; and I contend it ought not only to enliven men of
the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant clerks with
more heart and spirit to their bookkeeping by double entry.
There is another question which seems bound up in this; and that is
Temple’s problem: whether it was wise of Douglas to burn with the _Royal
Oak_? and, by implication, what it was that made him do so? Many will
tell you that it was the desire of fame.
“To what do Cæsar and Alexander owe the infinite grandeur of their
renown, but to fortune? How many men has she extinguished in the
beginning of their progress, of whom we have no knowledge; who brought
as much courage to the work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut
them off in the first sally of their arms? Amongst so many and so great
dangers, I do not remember to have anywhere read that Cæsar was ever
wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than the least of these
he went through. A great many brave actions must be expected to be
performed without witness, for one that comes to some notice. A man is
not always at the top of a breach, or at the head of an army in the
sight of his general, as upon a platform. He is often surprised between
the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life against a
henroost; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he
must prick out single from his party, as necessity arises, and meet
adventures alone.”