You are the most modest of men, but even at the risk of arousing
your displeasure we have it on our mind to say something about you.
We shall try not to be offensively personal, for indeed we are
thinking not merely of yourself but also of the many others of your
seafaring art who have always been such steadfast servants of the
public, the greatness of whose service has not always been well
enough understood. But perhaps it is only fair that the sea captain,
so unquestionable an autocrat in his own world, should be called
upon to submit to that purging and erratic discipline which is so
notable a feature of our American life--publicity!
It is not enough understood, we repeat, how valuable and charming
the sea captain is as an agent and private ambassador of
international friendship. Perhaps we do not know you until we have
seen you at sea (may the opportunity serve anon!). We have only
known you with your majesty laid aside, your severity relaxed. But
who else so completely and humorously understands both sides of the
water, and in his regular movements from side to side acts so shrewd
a commentator on Anglo-American affairs? Who takes more keen delight
in our American ways, in the beauty of this New York of which we are
so proud, who has done so much to endear each nation to the other?
Yours, true to your blood (for you are _Scot Scotorum_), is the
humorist's way: how many passengers you have warmed and tickled with
your genial chaff, hiding constant kindness under a jocose word,
perhaps teasing us Americans on our curious conduct of knives and
forks, or (for a change) taking the cisatlantic side of the jape,
esteeming no less highly a sound poke at British foibles.
All this is your personal gift: it is no necessary part of the
master's equipment to be so gracefully conversable. Of the graver
side of the sea captain's life, though you say little, we see it
unconsciously written in your bearing. Some of us, who know just a
little about it, can guess something of its burdens, its vigils, and
its courages. There is something significant in the obscure instinct
that some of your friends have to seize what opportunity they can of
seeing you in your own quarters when you are in port. For though a
ship in dock is a ship fettered and broken of much of her life and
meaning, yet in the captain's cabin the landsman feels something of
that fine, faithful, and rigorous way of life. It is a hard life, he
knows; a life of stringent seriousness, of heavy responsibilities:
and yet it is a life for which we are fool enough to speak the
fool's word of envy. It is a life spared the million frittering
interruptions and cheerful distractions that devil the journalist;
it is a life cut down to the essentials of discipline, simplicity,
and service; a life where you must, at necessity, be not merely
navigator but magistrate, employer, and priest. Birth, death, and
all the troubles that lie between, fall under your sway, and must
find you unperturbed. But, when you go out of that snug cabin for
your turn of duty, at any rate you have the dark happiness of
knowing that you go to a struggle worthy your powers, the struggle
with that old, immortal, unconquerable, and yet daily conquered
enemy, the Sea.
And so you go and come, you go and come, and we learn to count on
your regular appearance every four weeks as we would on any stated
gesture of the zodiac. You come eager to pick up the threads of what
has been happening in this our town, what books people are talking
about, what is the latest jape, and what (your tastes being so
catholic!) "Percy and Ferdie" are up to. And you, in turn, bring
news of what they are saying in Sauchiehall Street or Fleet Street,
and what books are making a stir on the other side. You take copies
of American books that catch your fancy and pass them on to British
reviewers, always at your quixotic task of trying to make each side
appreciate the other's humours. For, though we promised not to give
you away too personally, you are not only the sea captain but the
man of letters, too, eminent in that field in your own right.
There must be some valid reason why so many good writers, and
several who have some claim on the word "great," have been bred of
the sea. Great writing comes from great stress of mind--which even a
journalist may suffer--but it also requires strictness of seclusion
and isolation. Surely, on the small and decently regimented island
of a ship a man's mind must turn inward. Surrounded by all that
barren beauty of sky and sea, so lovely, and yet so meaningless to
the mind, the doomed business of humanity must seem all the more
precious and deserving of tenderness. Perhaps that is what old
George Herbert meant when he said, _He that will learn to pray, let
him go to sea_.