My journeys have all been the fault of books, though Lamb would never
have called them that. They were volumes which were a substitute for
literature when the season was dry. A reader once complained to me,
and with justice, that as a literary feuilletonist I betrayed no
pure literary predilections. “You never devote your page,” he said
fretfully, “to the influence of the Pleiades. You never refer to 18th
century literature. You never look back on names familiar to all who
read Latin. What is interesting to truly curious and bookish people
might not exist for you. I wonder, for example, if Nahum Tate were
mentioned in a conversation, whether you would be able to say what it
meant.”
Well, not exactly that. I fear my readiness for the challenge would not
pass the test. All that would happen to me would be a recollection of
white walls, bright but severe, on which are scattered black memorial
tablets, one of them with a ship over it carved in alabaster. An
interior as cool and quiet as a mausoleum. There are shadows moving on
the luminous white; June trees are murmuring outside. There is a smell
of clothes preserved till Sunday in camphor and in sandalwood boxes. A
big venerable man is perched high in a rich and glowing mahogany box,
whose lifted chin, jutting saliently from white sideboard whiskers,
has a dent in its centre; he is talking, with his eyes shut, to one
he calls Gard, and I listen to him with deep interest, for once that
old man served with John Company, which to a minor figure in his
congregation seems miraculous. Then we all stand, and sing the words
of a poet strangely named Tate & Brady. Would anyone wish me to quote
the words, in proof? Certainly not. There is no need. When we come
out of that building there is a stone awry on the grass by the door,
commemorating one who was a “Master-Mariner, of Plymouth,” and a verse
can be just deciphered on it, which reads:
Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion’s coast,
The storms all weathered and the ocean crost,
Sinks into port in some well-favoured isle,
Where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.
The learned literary critics may be as wise as they please, but there
is no undoing the early circumstances which have made some names in
literature of significance to us, and have put other names, perhaps
even greater, forever in the dark. Our literary predilections were cast
at our birth. So much depends, too, on where we heard a name first,
and what was about the book when we read it. That is the reason why my
correspondent’s letter is not irrelevant here, for it caught me out.
It gave away the game. It showed me that I could never be a critic of
letters. When his complaint came to me, some books for review were
beside me. But what was I doing? Sitting in the shade, looking absently
at a dazzling summer afternoon just beyond the chair, for I had just
read with close attention this fragment in English:
From three to nine miles north-eastward of the northern part of
Sangi is a group of islands named Nipa, Bukit, Poa, and Liang,
respectively, and about nine miles farther eastward is a chain of
six islets and two detached reefs, which extend about nine miles
in a north-northeast and opposite directions. From Inis islet, the
southernmost of this chain, a reef of rocks extends some distance
southward, and it should be given a good berth. All the above islets
are covered with coconut trees, but very little is known about them.
Then there followed, for over three hundred closely printed pages,
references to many outlandish names, probably occult, such as Busu
Busu (“good drinking water may be obtained from a spring at the foot
of the hill behind the missionary’s house”), Berri Berri Road, Rau
Strait (“it has not been surveyed and is dangerous”), Tanjong Salawai,
Pulo Gunong Api (I know enough to say that that means the island
of the mountain of fire), Gisi and Pakal, Ceram Laut (“is high and
hilly, and had on it, in 1898, a remarkable tree, 428 feet over the
sea, which makes a good mark”), Suruake of the Goram Islands (“the
inhabitants are quarrelsome and warlike ... anchorage off Wiseleat
village, on the north side, in 24 fathoms, at over one mile from the
shore and 130 yards from the steep to reef, with a hawser to the
latter to prevent driving”). I had been idling with that book, with
the work of the latest enterprising novelists waiting beside me for
my immediate attention, all the morning, and still could not let it
go. Then came the querulous letter pointing out my indifference to
the English literature of the 18th century; which in one respect was
unjust, for if once I got going on Gulliver I might soon be in prison
for sedition. Yet the rebuke was well merited. I would sooner read any
volume of Directions for Pilots than the Latin poets. (And I should
like to ask whether Ceram Laut has not been sighted since 1898). On
the whole, I would much rather sit in a cabin of a ship which had just
made fast again, and listen to the men who had brought her home, than
read the best modern fiction. I should feel nearer to the centre of
life. Never mind the name of the book which had made that a finer day
for me. You will not find it in the circulating libraries; but it has
an official rote, initialled, and is guaranteed by the Hydrographic
Office, Admiralty; so there must be something in it. The volume, in
fact, is mysterious only in the queer effect it has upon me. I dare not
commend it for general reading, but I myself would sooner peruse it
than the essays of Addison because I get more out of it. I should like
to describe, in some detail, the place where I bought it, the man who
sold it to me, what he said about it, and the seclusions of the Java
and Arafura Seas where, far from all contact with English literature,
I afterwards examined it. One sunrise, by the aid of this very book, I
knew what I saw ahead on the horizon was Pulo Gunong Api.