It is an old dispute among men, or rather a dispute as old as mankind,
whether Will be a cause of things or no; nor is there anything novel in
those moderns who affirm that Will is nothing to the matter, save their
ignorant belief that their affirmation is new.
The intelligent process whereby I know that Will not seems but is, and
can alone be truly and ultimately a cause, is fed with stuff and
strengthens sacramentally as it were, whenever I meet, and am made the
companion of, a great wind.
It is not that this lively creature of God is indeed perfected with a
soul; this it would be superstition to believe. It has no more a person
than any other of its material fellows, but in its vagary of way, in
the largeness of its apparent freedom, in its rush of purpose, it seems
to mirror the action of mighty spirit. When a great wind comes roaring
over the eastern flats towards the North Sea, driving over the Fens and
the Wringland, it is like something of this island that must go out and
wrestle with the water, or play with it in a game or a battle; and
when, upon the western shores, the clouds come bowling up from the
horizon, messengers, outriders, or comrades of a gale, it is something
of the sea determined to possess the land. The rising and falling of
such power, its hesitations, its renewed violence, its fatigue and
final repose—all these are symbols of a mind; but more than all the
rest, its exultation! It is the shouting and the hurrahing of the wind
that suits a man.
Note you, we have not many friends. The older we grow and the better we
can sift mankind, the fewer friends we count, although man lives by
friendship. But a great wind is every man’s friend, and its strength is
the strength of good-fellowship; and even doing battle with it is
something worthy and well chosen. If there is cruelty in the sea, and
terror in high places, and malice lurking in profound darkness, there
is no one of these qualities in the wind, but only power. Here is
strength too full for such negations as cruelty, as malice, or as fear;
and that strength in a solemn manner proves and tests health in our own
souls. For with terror (of the sort I mean—terror of the abyss or panic
at remembered pain, and in general, a losing grip of the succours of
the mind), and with malice, and with cruelty, and with all the forms of
that Evil which lies in wait for men, there is the savour of disease.
It is an error to think of such things as power set up in equality
against justice and right living. We were not made for them, but rather
for influences large and soundly poised; we are not subject to them but
to other powers that can always enliven and relieve. It is health in
us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of
whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test
indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out,
riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at
the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is
as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of
innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity,
playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of
high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and
we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens
us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just
pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.
It is pretended sometimes (less often perhaps now than a dozen years
ago) that certain ancient pursuits congenial to man will be lost to him
under his new necessities; thus men sometimes talk foolishly of horses
being no longer ridden, houses no longer built of wholesome wood and
stone, but of metal; meat no more roasted, but only baked; and even of
stomachs grown too weak for wine. There is a fashion of saying these
things, and much other nastiness. Such talk is (thank God!) mere folly;
for man will always at last tend to his end, which is happiness, and he
will remember again to do all those things which serve that end. So it
is with the uses of the wind, and especially the using of the wind with
sails.
No man has known the wind by any of its names who has not sailed his
own boat and felt life in the tiller. Then it is that a man has most to
do with the wind, plays with it, coaxes or refuses it, is wary of it
all along; yields when he must yield, but comes up and pits himself
again against its violence; trains it, harnesses it, calls it if it
fails him, denounces it if it will try to be too strong, and in every
manner conceivable handles this glorious playmate.
As for those who say that men did but use the wind as an instrument for
crossing the sea, and that sails were mere machines to them, either
they have never sailed or they were quite unworthy of sailing. It is
not an accident that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so
arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into
their creation, and they expressed him very well; his cunning, and his
mastery, and his adventurous heart. For the wind is in nothing more
capitally our friend than in this, that it has been, since men were
men, their ally in the seeking of the unknown and in their divine
thirst for travel which, in its several aspects—pilgrimage, conquest,
discovery, and, in general, enlargement—is one prime way whereby man
fills himself with being.
I love to think of those Norwegian men who set out eagerly before the
north-east wind when it came down from their mountains in the month of
March like a god of great stature to impel them to the West. They
pushed their Long Keels out upon the rollers, grinding the shingle of
the beach at the fjord-head. They ran down the calm narrows, they
breasted and they met the open sea. Then for days and days they drove
under this master of theirs and high friend, having the wind for a sort
of captain, and looking always out to the sea line to find what they
could find. It was the springtime; and men feel the spring upon the sea
even more surely than they feel it upon the land. They were men whose
eyes, pale with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable
good sight which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change
and that comes after the long emptiness of sea days like a vision after
the sameness of our common lives. To them the land they so discovered
was wholly new.
We have no cause to regret the youth of the world, if indeed the world
were ever young. When we imagine in our cities that the wind no longer
calls us to such things, it is only our reading that blinds us, and the
picture of satiety which our reading breeds is wholly false. Any man
to-day may go out and take his pleasure with the wind upon the high
seas. He also will make his landfalls to-day, or in a thousand years;
and the sight is always the same, and the appetite for such discoveries
is wholly satisfied even though he be only sailing, as I have sailed,
over seas that he has known from childhood, and come upon an island far
away, mapped and well known, and visited for the hundredth time.