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.
_H. Belloc._