There was an island, which must have evaporated with the morning
mists like other promising things, called Bragman. It is recorded
by Maundeville, and he had positive knowledge that on Bragman was
“no Thief, nor Murderer, nor common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever
was Man slain in that Country. And because they be so true and so
righteous, and so full of good conditions, they were never grieved
with Tempests, nor with Thunder, nor with Lightning, nor with Hail,
nor with Pestilence, nor with War, nor with Hunger, nor with any other
Tribulation, as we be, many Times, amongst us, for our Sins.”
The fascination of islands is felt by all of us, but Bragman might
not be to everybody’s taste. Some people might say it would have no
taste. They would prefer an infested attic in Rotherhithe or Ostend,
or any mean refuge with sufficient sin about it to prove they were
alive and in danger of hell fire. Yet for others it would certainly
give a sense of rest from the many advantages of Europe. They might
feel that for the sake of peace they could endure it. What is more, we
know that the pleasures of sin can be ridiculously overrated. The most
doleful places in the world, where youth seeking joy in bright-eyed
recklessness is sure to be soused in ancient and unexpected gloom, are
what are known to the feeble-minded and to writers of moral tracts as
“haunts of pleasure.” Nobody points out to the eager and guileless,
who have been misled by the glamour which literature can cast over
even a bath-room, and by the lush reminiscences of dodderers, that for
gaiety of atmosphere the red lights of the places of pleasure are quite
extinguished by the attractions of a temperance hotel on a wet night.
The haunts of pleasure take their place in the museum of mankind’s
mistakes alongside the glories of war.
That island of Maundeville’s, which is called Bragman, is only a
curious name for one of the Hesperides, or the Fortunate Isles, or the
Isles of the Blessed. Some name it Eden or Elysium. We place it where
we will, and give it the name of our choice. But naturally it must be
an island, uncontaminated by the proximity of a mainland. Every man
has his dream of such a sanctuary, and every community its legend,
because in our hearts we are sure the world is not good enough for us.
Even the South Sea Islanders have word of a better place, the asylum
they have never reached in all their thousand years of wandering from
east to west about the Pacific. Perhaps man goes to war, or seeks
pleasure with abandonment, merely because at intervals he becomes
desperately disappointed in his search for what is not of this earth.
What does that suggest? But we will leave the suggestion to the
metaphysicians, who are as interesting when at such speculations as
the fourteenth century cartographers were at geography. It may mean
something highly important, but what that is we are never likely to see
as we see daylight when the generalization of a mathematical genius
illuminates and relates the apparently irrelevant speculations of his
arduous but unimaginative fellows. If we would see the turrets of the
Holy City, then a stroll round the corner to the Dog and Duck before
closing-time may do as well as a longer journey. We only know that
all the supreme artists appear to have been privileged, as was Moses,
with a sight of a coast, glorious but remote, and that the memory of
that unattainable vision gives to their music and verse the melancholy
and the golden sonority which to us, and we do not know why, are the
indisputable sigil of their greatness.
[Illustration: _Some name it Eden or Elysium._]
“To reach felicity,” says Mr. Firestone in his _Coasts of Illusion_,
“we must cross the water.” There is no reason for this, but we know
it is true, for felicity is where we are not. We must cross it to an
island, and a small one. A large island would be useless. It ought
to be uninhabited, too, or at the worst it should be very rarely
boarded by other wanderers. What account could the company of the
_Hispaniola_ have rendered of the pirates’ hoard if they had sought it
on a mainland? Where would Robinson Crusoe be now if his island had
been Australia? Lost among the dry records of geographical discovery.
A large island could not hold the treasure we are after. I remember
a shape on the horizon, which often was visible from a Devonshire
vantage, though sometimes it had gone. Its nature depended, I thought,
on the way of the sun and wind. It was a cloud. It was very distant.
It was a whale. It was my imagination. But one morning at sunrise I
put my head out of the scuttle of a little cutter, and the material
universe had broken loose. The tiny ship was heaving on a groundswell,
vast undulations of glass, and over us titanic masonry was toppling
in ruin--I feared the explosions of surf would give a last touch to a
collapsing island, and Lundy would fall on us. We landed on a beach no
larger than a few bushels of shingle. It was enclosed by green slopes
and high walls of rock; and we climbed a track from the beach that
mounted amid sunlight and shadow. The heat of the upper shimmering
platform of granite and heath above the smooth sea, and its smell and
look of antiquity, suggested that it had been abandoned and forgotten,
and had remained apart from the affairs of a greater and more
important world since the creation. We were sundered from everybody.
That was my first island, and I still think its one disadvantage is
that it is only twelve miles offshore.
For perhaps an island landfall should come only after a long and
uncertain voyage. Its coast must appear in a way which suggests as an
absurdity that the captain could have performed a miracle with such
casual exactitude. This landfall is a virgin gift to us by chance.
Indeed most small islands, when lifted by a ship, have that suggestion
about them. That is why they are the origin of the better legends of
man, and the promise of earthly felicity. They are the dream surprised
in daylight on the ocean by the voyager, caught napping in the sun, and
we know that a foot set on those impalpable colours would wake the gods
to their forgetfulness, and away the spectre would go. Not for us. That
is why the ship always sails past.