THE CRUISE OF THE NONA
The Cruise of the Nona
The Story of a Cruise from Holyhead to
the Wash, with Reflections and Judgments
on Life and Letters, Men and Manners
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration]
Boston and New York
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
_=The Riverside Press Cambridge=_
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY HILAIRE BELLOC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_=The Riverside Press=_
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO THE MEMORY OF
PHILIP KERSHAW MY
BRAVE AND CONSTANT
COMPANION UPON THE
SEA: BUT NOW HE
WILL SAIL NO MORE
DEDICATION
TO MAURICE BARING
MY DEAR MAURICE,—
I have dedicated to you two books: one was a book ‘On Nothing.’ This
I dedicated to you because, being on nothing, it dealt with what is
better than the fullness of life.
Another book I dedicated to you was the ‘Green Overcoat,’ and this
I dedicated to you because you had written a play called the ‘Green
Elephant,’ and we thereby held communion in green things.
I now dedicate to you this book, because you also have written a
book upon Things That Come to Mind, and this book may well turn into
something of the same sort. Yours was called ‘The Puppet Show of
Memory,’ and dealt with the things and people you had seen and known.
What mine will be called I do not yet know, for I hold that a child
should be born before it is christened.
I have been led into this opinion by the action of an acquaintance,
who much disputed with his wife what name the child should bear, it
being not yet born. To this choice they attached great issues; for they
rightly thought that a name determines a lifetime much more than does
a horoscope, and for this reason they consulted no astrologer. First
they explored the grander sounds, names of dominion and power. They
considered Esmeralda, Ruhala, Semiramis, Darumdibaba, and Rimbomba,
as also Haulteclaire, following the noise of pomps and wars. Wearying
of this, the glamour of strangeness seized them, and they attempted
Pelagia, Sonia, Mehitabel, Oona, Célimène, Mamua and Berengarde,
Machuska, Gounor, and Zaire; but these seemed, upon a second reading,
affected: as indeed they were. So they fell into childishness, and
wallowed in gardening, reciting Pansy, Daisy, Rose, Violet, Pimpernel,
and even Forget-me-Not, which led them into the Furor Hebraicus, and
such terms as Miriam, Lilith, Deborah, Eve, Mizraim, Sheba, and the
rest—very unsuitable; from which they reacted to mere abstractions,
such as Mercy, Peace, Charity, Grace, and what not. But these seeming
insipid, they fell maundering after a donnish fashion and dared
consider Æthelburga, Fristhwith, Ealswitha, and other abominations,
till an angel compelled them to desist and they were driven to the
solid path of the queens, and advanced Maud, Adelaide, Matilda,
Elizabeth, Guinevere, Anne, and jibbed at Jezebel. Next they ran wild
and careered through Tosca, Faustine, Theodora, Athalie, Antigone,
Medea, Pasiphaë, and many others. Finally, they perched, she upon the
name Astarte, but he upon the, to my mind, lovelier word, Cytherea.
They both mean the same thing, only one was a well-modelled Greek, and
the other a horrible Hittite. It was the woman who wanted Astarte, and
the man who wanted Cytherea; so the child was to be called Astarte, and
she was not even allowed to have the second name of Cytherea.
All that was on Thursday, the 2d June. On the 13th, being a Monday, in
the early afternoon, the child was born, and was a boy.
There was no more discussion upon its name, because its uncle, a rich
man, was called James. So the boy was James, and there was an end of it.
I have been led on, as you see, but the essence of this book is that
it shall be a sailing through the seas of the years, that is, a flight
through the airs of time, or, again, a leading on and a passage through
the vales of life: now culling this sour fruit, now that poisonous
herb, and now again this stinging plant, which I had thought to be
innocuous.
For whether I should write, Maurice, a book of reminiscences or of
wandering, or of extravagances or of opinions, or of conclusions, or of
experiences, I could not make up my mind after a cogitation of three
weeks and four days, which occupied the whole of my remaining faculties
between the town of Blois, upon the Loire, and the town of Châlons,
upon the Marne, my journey from the one to the other being taken this
very year circuitously, in the company of a Bear, by way of Bayonne,
where the bayonet, Rosalie, was first made; Saint John at the foot of
the Pass, where they boil crayfish in white wine; Roncesvalles, where
Roland died, and I nearly did; Burguete, where they charge too much
and where the kitchen smoke goes out through the middle of the roof;
Pamplona, the only permanent thing Pompey ever did; Saragossa, which
never changes; Reus, where they spin cotton; Tarragona, which is biding
its time; Barcelona, which got there first; Puycerda, and, after that,
the Gorges of the Tet.
I was by this time a long way from Blois, but I had come to no
conclusion on the name of my book, and my mind was still like one of
those conferences to which the parliamentarians of various countries
travel at our expense from time to time, and are there delivered of
heavy speeches without meaning, which make one think of a corpulent
elderly man groaning across a ploughed clay field after a week’s rain
in the dark of the moon. At Nîmes I had not decided what to call the
book, nor down in a valley of the Cévennes, nor at Lyons, nor in the
Jura, nor in the Vosges, nor in Strasbourg; until at last I came to
Châlons, as I have said. And, sitting down there to a meal in the hotel
very finely called ‘The House of the High Mother of God,’ I still
remained undecided. And I am so, to this day.
I cannot make it a book of reminiscences, because I can remember
nothing for more than about two days, and also because I will not
write about my contemporaries for fear of offending them. They are
very good fellows, they have no particular characters or talents, they
do nothing lasting, they are a generation of saltless butter with too
much skim milk about it, there is little to say about them, and almost
anything one says gives the little fellows offence. I would not call
it ‘Opinions,’ because I have none either, only convictions; and if I
called it ‘Convictions’ I might be misunderstood. I tell you I do not
know what to call this book, but I am dedicating it to you because it
has at least this parallel with your work that it is all about things
that have passed through my mind.
Indeed, the naming of a book has always seemed to me a thing fastidious
in both senses; that is, both a thing wearisome and a thing of picking
and choosing. I am not quite sure that books ought to be named at all.
If they were numbered, like the streets in America, they would be very
much easier to catalogue and shelf (or shelve) and remember the places
of. Thus your next book or so might be ‘Baring 32,’ and this ‘Belloc
106.’ And why not? It would in no way diminish their souls, their
connotations. Cannot a man be head over ears in love with Number 15,
Parham Street, and sick of 30, Tupton Square? I can!
Numbers, I say, leave us free to give personality and emotions to
things. An anniversary is but a numbered day in a month, yet it shakes
a man more than any feast name.
So should it be with books. When they are named, they give a false
indication; moreover, the vast crowd of books that are poured out in
this our day like fugitives from a plague-stricken city is so immense
that the discovery of a new title is impossible. However, it will have
a title before I have done, stap me, and it is dedicated to you.
At this point I ought to end; but, as I have already told you, it
is in the very character of this book, of its essence, nature, and
personality, that it has only an accidental beginning, no real end,
and nothing in particular between the two. It is like those rivers of
the Middle West which trickle out of a marsh, and then wander aimless,
without banks or shape, mere wetnesses, following the lowest land until
they reach the shapeless Mississippi, and at last the flats and mud of
a steaming sea.
What a book!...
My mind now suggests to me (for my mind is separate from myself, and
may properly be regarded as no more than an inconsequent companion)
that I should do very well not to cut off the Dedication from the rest
of the Opus. The putting of a dedication separately from a book has
something about it of form; and form is just what I have to avoid. I am
to wander at large, setting down such things as pass before my eyes of
memory, leaving out pretty well all that is of importance (reserving
that for posthumous publication), and doing no more than present this,
that, or the other, of ephemeral things. For there comes a time in life
after which a man discovers no more, has lost through the effect of
the years the multitude of what he possessed both within and without,
can only repeat phrases or decisions already well worn. He is fixed,
sterilised, hardened, and has nothing left to say; that is the moment
in which he is expected to set down, for the benefit of others, the
full treasury of what was once his soul.
Some two to five years ago there was an outburst of books in England
which I myself labelled (and, I think, justly) ‘The Cads’ Concert.’
These were books in which men set down their connection with their
fellows, giving each by name familiarly, purported to publish diaries
which they had never kept, maligned the dead, insulted the living, and
lied impudently upon both. They had a great sale, had these books,
because they brought in rich or otherwise important men and women,
known already by newspapers vaguely to the readers of such books, so
that those readers had from ‘The Cads’ Concert’ a faint reflection of
High Life.
It was something quite new in the history of letters, and had, I am
glad to say, a very short life. I do not propose to add one more
vileness to that nasty little list.
How then should I approach this task which has been set me of writing
down, in the years between fifty and sixty, some poor scraps of
judgment and memory? I think I will give it the name of a Cruise;
for it is in the hours when he is alone at the helm, steering his
boat along the shores, that a man broods most upon the past, and most
deeply considers the nature of things. I think I will also call it
by the name of my boat, the Nona, and give the whole book the title
‘The Cruise of the Nona,’ for, in truth, the Nona has spent her years,
which are much the same as mine (we are nearly of an age, the darling,
but she a little younger, as is fitting), threading out of harbours,
taking the mud, trying to make further harbours, failing to do so,
getting in the way of more important vessels, giving way to them,
taking the mud again, waiting to be floated off by the tide, anchoring
in the fairway, getting cursed out of it, dragging anchor on shingle
and slime, mistaking one light for another, rounding the wrong buoy,
crashing into other people, and capsizing in dry harbours. It seemed to
me, as I considered the many adventures and misadventures of my boat,
that here was a good setting for the chance thoughts of one human life;
since all that she has done and all that a man does make up a string of
happenings and thinkings, disconnected and without shape, meaningless,
and yet full: which is Life.
Indeed, the cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens
to the soul of a man in a larger way. We set out for places which we
do not reach, or reach too late; and, on the way, there befall us all
manner of things which we could never have awaited. We are granted
great visions, we suffer intolerable tediums, we come to no end of the
business, we are lonely out of sight of England, we make astonishing
landfalls—and the whole rigmarole leads us along nowhither, and yet is
alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril, and repose.
On this account I have always thought that a man does well to take
every chance day he can at sea in the narrow seas. I mean, a landsman
like me should do so. For he will find at sea the full model of human
life: that is, if he sails on his own and in a little craft suitable
to the little stature of one man. If he goes to sea in a large boat,
run by other men and full of comforts, he can only do so being rich,
and his cruise will be the dull round of a rich man. But if he goes to
sea in a small boat, dependent upon his own energy and skill, never
achieving anything with that energy and skill save the perpetual
repetition of calm and storm, danger undesired and somehow overcome,
then he will be a poor man, and his voyage will be the parallel of
the life of a poor man—discomfort, dread, strong strain, a life all
moving. What parallel I shall find in the action of boats for a man
of the middle sort, neither rich nor poor, I cannot tell. Perhaps
the nearest would be the travel at a fixed price upon a steamer from
one port not of the passenger’s choosing to another not of his
choosing, but carried along, ignorant of the sea and of the handling
of the vessel, and having all the while no more from the sea than a
perpetual, but not very acute, discomfort, and with it a sort of slight
uncertainty, which are precisely the accompaniments throughout life of
your middle sort of man.
So I have given this book a name: ‘The Cruise of the Nona.’ Had I
called it ‘The Cargo,’ I might be nearer my intention. At any rate, I
am now off to sail the English seas again, and to pursue from thought
to thought and from memory to memory such things as have occupied one
human soul, and of these some will be of profit to one man and some to
another, and most, I suppose, to none at all.
THE CRUISE OF THE NONA
The Cruise of the Nona
It was late in May, near midnight, the air being very warm and still,
and the sky not covered but somewhat dim, with no moon, when I took
the Nona out from Holyhead Harbour, having on board one companion to
help me work the boat, and a local man who could speak Welsh for me in
whatever places I might make along the coast.
The very slight breeze, which had barely moved us through the water
after we had got up the anchor, died away long before we reached the
end of the breakwater, and it was necessary to pull her out with the
dinghy in order to fetch round the end of the stonework and get to sea.
There was at that time of the tide a little current running towards the
Stack, which would slightly help us on our way once we were outside,
and with this we drifted a full hour and more, aided now and then by
faint breaths of air, which rose and died again like memories. So came
we, with the turn of the night, under the glare of the lighthouse at
last, and then put the nose of the little ship round for the point of
Carnarvonshire and the strait between the mainland and Bardsey Island,
which is called Bardsey Sound.
It was a course of about thirty-three miles, with no chance,
apparently, of covering it in all that night, nor perhaps in all the
coming day as well; for we had struck, as it seemed, that hot, steady
summer weather in which one may play at a drifting match for days on
end.
While it was still dark the distant mountains could barely be seen
as something a little blacker than the sky. They looked astonishingly
low, as mountains always do on a moonless night, when there is nothing
to distinguish their details, and nothing against which to compare
them, or by which to tell their distance. Already—it being now nearer
two than one o’clock—a little wind had arisen, settling down, as it
seemed, into somewhat east of north, and blowing over the Anglesey
flats. It gave us perhaps no more than a couple of knots an hour, but
it was heartening after the long calm, and as we had all sail set she
pulled to it steadily enough. I was at the helm, my companion was still
awake, sitting in the cockpit and talking to me, and the hand who was
to be with us till we next landed smoked beside us on deck.
The wind had freshened somewhat, we were making perhaps four or five
knots, when the dawn began to show beyond Snowdon, and those great
hills at once looked higher against the glimmer of grey light. Soon
the whole coast was apparent, and the Yreifles with their triple peaks
(clearer than I had expected; indeed, too clear for fine weather) lay
right ahead and Bardsey Island beyond them and the narrow sound in
between. The wind seemed steady, as though it would hold. I reckoned
that the tide would turn against us anywhere between six and seven in
the morning, that it would turn back through the Sound about noon or
one o’clock, and I calculated that we should be running into Cardigan
Bay, past Bardsey, on the middle of the ebb, an hour or two later than
that time.
But what happened was something wholly unexpected; it is always so at
sea, and that is why it is said that the sea brings all adventures.
Indeed, I think that as we go on piling measurements upon measurements,
and making one instrument after another more and more perfect to extend
our knowledge of material things, the sea will always continue to
escape us. For there is a Living Spirit who rules the sea and many
attendant spirits about him.
But on that brightening morning there was nothing to warn us. The glass
was high and, if I remember right, still rising; the sky uncovered and
clearer than it had been by night; the wind slight, but holding steady;
and all was soldier’s weather, so that any one could have taken that
little ship through such weather where he would. It was weather, one
would say, made for the instruction of the young in the art of sailing.
By the time it was fully light, we were making between six and seven
knots, for the wind had sharply risen. As it was an offshore wind,
there was as yet no sea raised, but little tumbling whitecaps, very
pleasant to look at, and all the movement coming on our quarter from
over the land. With the rising of the sun it blew hard. We were
yielding to it too much; we had taken down the topsail an hour before,
and now I thought it wise to take in a reef as well, which we did in
the headsail and the mainsail, but leaving the jib as it was, for that
sail was not a large one.
I have sailed a great deal off and on in boats of this size (that is,
somewhat more than thirty feet over all, with eight or nine feet beam,
and drawing from five to six feet of water, cutter rigged), and I know
it is an illusion; yet I can never get over the idea that a reef makes
no difference. Two reefs—yes—but one reef I cannot ‘feel.’ It is an
obtuseness in me; but so it is.
However, it seemed wiser to take in a reef of some sort, and two reefs
would have reduced the sail quite unnecessarily, for it was not yet
blowing so hard as all that.
We slipped down the coast smartly, nearing it all the time upon our
slantwise course, and as we did so, the sun being now fully risen, it
blew harder and harder every minute. A sea rose, a good following sea,
but higher than one would have expected so nearly off the land from a
land wind; and, as this boat has very little freeboard (it is her only
defect, for she rises magnificently to the water, and bears herself
better the worse the weather may be), I watched the swirl of the foam
under her low counter as each wave slightly broke under the now fierce
wind.
We shortened down to three reefs, but even so the helm was pulling
hard, and when we changed jibs and put up the smallest we had, it
griped more than I liked, straining my arm after so long a spell at
the tiller. I handed it over to the man who was with us, and went
forward to see that everything was clear, for it was now blowing really
hard, and anything like a tangle if we got into difficulties would
be dangerous. The gale rose higher and the sea with it; but, tearing
through the water as we now were under three reefs, we should soon make
the Sound and get round the point of Carnarvonshire into easier water
right under the lee of the land.
There was only one thing that troubled me, which was this question:
should we make the Sound before the tide turned? It was an important
question, because, although I had never been in those parts before,
offshore, in a boat of my own, yet I could judge that in such a piece
of water, with all the bay pouring through a channel barely two miles
wide with a deep of barely one, the tide against such a gale would
raise an impossible sea. If we could just make it on the tail of the
tide, on the very last of the ebb, we should have nothing to bear but a
strong following sea, such as that before which we were running at the
moment: for the southerly stream was still strong under us. But if the
water turned before we got into the Sound, we should have a time to
remember; and so we did.
For I had done something or other to annoy the Earth-Shaker, and he
pursued me viciously, making the tide turn just before we reached the
mouth of the Sound. In a time much shorter than I had expected, with no
lull in between, the steady run of sea which had been combing behind
us, towering above the counter, but regular and normal to deal with,
turned into a confusion of huge tumbling pyramidical waves, leaping
up, twisting, turning, and boiling in such a confusion as I had never
seen, not even in Alderney Race, which I had gone through many years
before when I was a boy. The painter which held the dinghy to the stern
parted, and that boat, a good and serviceable one, was lost. There was
no question of turning in such a sea and under such a wind; the dinghy
had to be abandoned. The tide against us was so fierce that even under
that gale we hardly moved; and it was strange to see, from the leaping
and struggling of the Nona as the foam rushed by in a millrace, how
steady remained the points on the Carnarvonshire shore, and how slowly
we opened the Sound. The pace was irregular. There were moments when
we advanced at perhaps a knot or a knot and a half against that fierce
tide. There were others when we even slipped back. All the while the
wind howled and the sea continued to rise and to boil in a cauldron
more violent as the gale on the one hand and the tide against it on
the other grew in strength and in the fierceness of their struggle. In
seas like this one never knows when some great tumbling lump of water
may not break upon one’s decks, for there is no run and follow, it is
all confusion; and I remember thinking, as I took the helm again in the
midst of the turmoil, of something I had seen written once of Portland
Race: ‘The sea jumps up and glares at you’—a sound phrase.
We had thus (in some peril, but still able to keep a course, and, on
the whole, advancing) got at last between the point and the Island,
that is, to the heart of the Sound; and a very few more yards would
have brought us round out of the cauldron into smooth water and a run
for some quiet anchorage right under the protection of the coast, when
(since at sea bad luck always goes gathering impetus) the jib blew out
with a noise like a gun. A few rags hung on to its fastenings; the rest
of the canvas went away out to sea like a great wounded bird, and then
sailed down and flopped into the seething of the water.
You may guess what that did to a boat in our straits! It made the helm
almost impossible to hold with the violent gripe of the mainsail, half
our head canvas being gone; and at the same time it stopped our way.
We drifted back again into the worst of the water, and lost in five
minutes what it had taken us more than an hour to make. The danger was
real and serious. The man that was with us expressed his fears aloud;
my companion, though new to the sea, took it all with great calm. As
to what happened to myself, I will record it though it is a little
detailed and personal: I will record it for the sake of the experience,
of which others may make what they will.
I looked at the Carnarvonshire coast there close at hand, the sinking
lines of the mountains as they fell into the sea, and I discovered
myself to be for the first time in my life entirely indifferent to my
fate. It was a very odd sensation indeed, like the sensation I fancy
a man must have to find he is paralysed. Once, under the influence
of a drug during an illness, some such indifference had pervaded me,
but here it was in the broad daylight and the sun well up above the
mountains, with a clear sky, in the grip of a tremendous gale and of
an angry countering sea, ravening like a pack of hounds. Yet I could
only look with indifference on the sea and at the land. The sensation
was about as much like courage as lying in a hammock is like a hundred
yards race. It had no relation to courage, nor, oddly enough, had it
any relation to religion, or to a right depreciation of this detestable
little world which can be so beautiful when it likes.
Such as it was, there it was. I had always particularly disliked the
idea of death by drowning, and I had never believed a word of the
stories which say that at the end it is a pleasant death. Indeed, as a
boy I was once caught under the steps of a swimming-bath and held there
a little too long before I could get myself out, and pleasant it was
not at all. But here in Bardsey Sound, I was indifferent, even to death
by drowning. All I was really interested in was to watch what way we
lost and what chance we had of getting through.
Indeed, the whole question of fear is beyond analysis, and there is
only one rule, which is, that a man must try to be so much the master
of himself that he shall be able to compel himself to do whatever is
needful, fear or no fear. Whether there be merit or not in the absence
of fear, which sentiment we commonly call courage when it is allied to
action, may be, and has been, discussed without conclusion since men
were men. The absence of fear makes an admirable show, and excites our
respect in any man; but it is not dependent upon the will. Here was I
in very great peril indeed off Bardsey, and utterly careless whether
the boat should sink or swim; yet was I the same man who, in a little
freshness of breeze that arose off the Owers a year or two ago, was as
frightened as could well be—and with no cause. And if this be true of
change of mood in one man, it must be true of the differences of mood
in different men.
I had occasion during the war, when I had been sent to write upon the
Italian front, to be swung to the high isolated rock of a mountain
peak in the Dolomites by one of those dizzy wires which the Italian
engineers slung over the gulfs of the Alps for the manning and
provisioning of small high posts. It was an experience I shall ever
remember, a vivid, hardly tolerable nightmare; but the man I was
with, an Italian officer of great and deserved fame, earned during
that campaign, not only felt nothing, but could not understand what
my terror was. We sat, or rather lay, in one of those shallow trays
which travel slowly along these wires over infinite deeps of air; and
during the endless crawling through nothingness he told me, by way of
recreation, the story of a private soldier who had been coming down
from the isolated post some weeks before. The machinery had gone wrong,
and the tray remained suspended over the gulf, halfway across, for some
twenty minutes. When it worked again and they hauled it in they found
that the man had gone mad.
When the time came for the return journey, I very well remember
asking myself whether I had the control to face that second ordeal or
no. It was an obscure crisis, unknown to others, but as real and as
great within as any of those which stand out in fiction or history.
I would rather have gone down by the path which clung to the steep,
the precipitous mountainside. This was forbidden because it was under
direct Austrian fire; I knew that I should not be allowed. So I faced
the return—and it was worse than the going.
Also in my life I have known two men who have hunted lions, and each of
them has told me that fear in the presence of peril from the beast was
wholly capricious, and that sometimes when an exceedingly unpleasant
death seemed certain, the man who had just missed his shot felt
indifferent. I can believe it.
Anyhow, here I was in Bardsey Sound, with many deaths moving over the
howling fury of the sea, and not one of them affecting me so much as a
shadow passing over a field.
The end of that adventure was odd and unreasonable—as things will be
at sea. It was perhaps because we had been buffeted and pushed into
some edge of the conflict between wind and water where the tide runs
slacker; or it was perhaps because the wind had risen still higher.
But, at any rate, after three separate raids forward (in the second
of which we were very nearly out of our peril and into smooth water),
and as many set-backs (one of which got us into the worst violence
we had yet suffered), the Nona, in a fourth attempt (it was her own,
not ours—we could do nothing but keep her, as best we might, to her
course), slipped out and reached an eddy beyond the tide. For a moment
it was very difficult to keep her to it, she slewed round; but then
again she got her head southerly, and we found ourselves running past
the great Black Rock which stands there—the Carrig Dhu—and marks the
smooth water beyond the edge of the tide.
We breathed again; and as I took her on through an easy sea, close
under the land with not too much strain upon the helm (for the high
shore now broke the gale), I was free to look over my right shoulder
and watch, passing away behind us, further and further, the hell of
white water and noise through which we had barely come to safety.
Danger keeps men awake and makes them forget necessity, but with this
relief our fatigue came upon us. My friend and I had now been awake for
some twenty-five or twenty-six hours, and it was time for sleep.
We got the poor Nona, which had behaved so well, up into a lonely
little bay where was an old abandoned mine working, but no other sign
of man. The Welshman with us told us it was good holding-ground; we let
go the anchor and stowed sail. I remember how I fell half asleep as I
stretched the cover over the mainsail boom and yard and tied it down at
the after end. The gale still blew, yet, as it seemed, more steadily
and less fiercely. There was no danger of dragging. We were well under
the lee of the land. I gave one look, under the violent but clear
morning sky, to seaward before I went below; and there I saw how, at a
certain distance from the land, in a long line, the white water began.
It was like being in a lagoon, like being protected by a bank from the
sea outside; but really it was only the effect of the lee of the land
making a belt of smooth water along shore. Then we all lay down to
sleep and slept till evening.
When I awoke, the hurricane—for it had been no less—had died down to
a fresh gale, and it promised to fall still further before night. There
were a few hours of daylight left, but I thought it hardly worth while
to up-anchor and run further along the coast. We were snug as it was
and still fatigued after the struggle in Bardsey Sound, so I thought
we would still lie there through the night and start eastward the next
morning.
As I looked lazily over to Bardsey, with sunset on its streaming rocks,
from the shelter of this quiet bay, I considered the islands.
Bardsey, they say, has a little community on board which governs itself
and elects its own king. Whether it also pays tribute to some rich man
on land, I do not know. But all the islands around Britain tend to be
little kingdoms of their own: Lundy is like that, and over and over
again one finds similar islands owned by one man, living either alone
like a beast or companioned like a patriarch with his family and his
servants and tenants all round about him; and the truth is that man is
happier in small kingdoms than in great.
Except for the pride and honour of belonging to a great kingdom, to
be citizen of a small one seems to me to have all the advantages. In
a great kingdom you have to pay heavy taxes. You are made falsely
concerned with men whom you never see, and in doings far distant,
which you do not understand; you bear on your shoulders the burden of
millions, and you must suffer a capital city, which will be a sink of
crime. Your rulers will grow rich by deceit—for a very large community
can always be deceived; nothing about you will be real, and the mass
of your fellow citizens will be desperately poor. For it is the nature
of large communities to separate into strata and for the mass to grow
indigent.
But now I come to think of it, there is one advantage in belonging to a
large kingdom, which is, that you can enjoy differences and contrasts
such as a small kingdom does not give you. Some day, perhaps very soon,
the modern organisation of society into great communities will break
down, and then it would be amusing to come to life again and see the
little communities living their own independent lives as they did in
the Dark Ages, and also in the beginnings of pagan history.
How pleasant it is to consider the little kingdom of Ithaca, and
Cephalonia alongside, and the little territory of the Athenians! How
pleasant it is to remember that there were four kings in Kent, grouped
there under one dread emperor at Canterbury! and also how there was
a king with two princes, his heirs, governing the Isle of Wight; all
pagan when the rest of England had already gone Catholic. For though
you often hear it said that Sussex was the last piece of English soil
to remain pagan (and it is, indeed, the great boast of my county that
it resisted the Faith for one hundred years, and only capitulated under
duress and famine) it is not so. Sussex was not the last of England
to growl in a reluctant font. The Wight beat us by a head. At that
time our king of Sussex and part of Hants as well, by name Cædwalla, a
Welsh name, was still pagan; and, when he did get religion, he thought
himself too grand to be baptised by anybody except the Pope of Rome. To
Rome, therefore, he went, and reached the City, was baptised, and then
died out of hand of fever—a warning to Pride.
But he had something to show for it all, since the Pope, very much
impressed that a king of Sussex itself (and part of Hants by conquest)
should have visited him, wrote a fine epitaph for him in Latin verse
and had it engraved on a stone which he put upon his grave in Old Saint
Peter’s. But they pulled it up when New Saint Peter’s was built, and to
this sacrilege I set down the very bad luck that Rome had afterwards.
Anyhow, the truth is that not Sussex but the Isle of Wight was the last
pagan spot in these islands, and here we of Sussex must reluctantly
yield the palm. Yet can we in Sussex always boast that our king was the
last of the kings in Britain to worship the Devil twelve hundred years
ago. And so again for Bardsey.
Looking at Bardsey over an evening sea now less tumbled and under the
dying gale, I thought also how odd it was that such Scandinavian names
should have stuck to some places more than to others. These pirates of
the eighth and ninth centuries were not many in number. They had no
culture or traditions; no literature; no anything. It was not until
England had gradually civilised them and made them Christian that
they produced anything whatsoever. How then did little bits of their
language stick on to portions of our coast? They say that ‘Dublin’ is a
Scandinavian name. ‘Bardsey’ certainly is, and so is the word ‘sound,’
to mean a passage of the sea, and ‘Skomer’ is Scandinavian, and, right
high up in the estuary of the Severn, ‘Flatholm’ and ‘Steepholm’ are
both surely Scandinavian. People explain it sometimes by saying that
as the attack of the pirates was always necessarily from the sea, they
would give their names to the sea places. I could understand how this
would give them Scandinavian names in Scandinavia, but how did we come
to adopt such names? That is the puzzle. I should have thought that
the local Celtic name for Bardsey would have held out. It has not done
so, at least not in our speech; and there are even Scandinavian names
for inland places, such as the main hill of the Isle of Man, and many
places in the Lakes and beyond.
But the whole story of words is full of mystery, and the attempt to
reduce the process of words to a science has always seemed to me
ridiculous enough. It is true that certain habits get formed, and
you can, from them, build up certain vague rules. For instance, the
French noun derives from the Latin usually—nearly always through the
accusative—and a particular Latin form will produce a corresponding
French form; but the process is not invariable; and though one type
out of hundreds becomes the official type of each nation, human speech
is naturally not a set of a few official languages, but a mass of
innumerable dialects, all melting one into the other.
Watch carefully, and you will note that in the area covered by the
great official languages, most people are bilingual. They can speak
the official language, but they also speak among themselves a dialect
of their own, usually a dialect more or less cousin to the official
language. That is certainly true of the working people of my own county
of Sussex, and, indeed, of all rural England; but it is also true of
the industrial districts, and, of course, it is true of the North. You
find just the same thing through France, and Belgium, and the Valley
of the Rhine, and I am told you find the same thing in Italy. The real
spoken languages of Christendom are to be counted by the hundred, or
the thousand; and though they fall into great groups, yet each has a
life of its own. The official languages live a separate life above
the mass, forming the idiom of a small body of wealthy people. And
even that idiom has two forms, the written and the spoken form, which
are very different. It is odd how unnatural spoken English looks, for
instance, when it appears in a book; and I suppose the public are right
to prefer the wholly unreal written English put into the mouths of the
characters in novels.
I remember one good woman who made a very large income for many
years by writing books about lords and ladies in London, which books
she sold to an extensive and eager public in England, but to a much
more extensive, and far more eager public in the United States. In
these books, which were in their time very famous, the ladies and
gentlemen—the toffs—talked in the most astonishing manner: all in
linked phrases of some inches, and dependent clauses hanging on.
There was one character in one of her books which I was assured
was a friend of mine: a young hereditary politician. I know the
man’s conversation well enough: it is of the ordinary sort, chopped
sentences, grunts, continual repetitions and, in general, brief scraps:
such language as you and I and everybody talks. But in the book this
authoress, who knew the original well enough and lived all her life
among lords and ladies, made the poor fellow talk in his own house like
Hansard. She would make him spout great speeches at his own mother and
deliver sentences of prodigious length in the midst of them.
I myself once wrote a book about politicians, called ‘A Change in
the Cabinet.’ It was universally agreed in all that old world of
professional politicians who were still educated men that my book,
whether good or bad, was monstrously accurate to the way the people of
that world talk and go on. But the book will never be held by any large
public to be accurate; or, at any rate, will not satisfy the desire of
the large public for a particular kind of pompous convention, such as
never was by sea or land. And on the whole I think the large public are
right. Literature has no business to be a mirror of life. We can see
life for ourselves without literature. What literature ought to do,
I take it, is to make a type or expression of life, which is quite a
different thing from a mere reflection, and what is more, literature
is there for fun and not for copying. Hence the greatest of human
writings have very little relation to actual speech. The heroes of the
poet Homer say things as satisfactory as have ever been said, yet they
say them in a highly conventional and stilted way, using a very small
vocabulary and (what is really extraordinary!) talking all the time in
hexameters. Certainly no one ever did that in real life except an old
don whom I used to know at Oxford.
This man spoke with a dactylic stammer, thus: ‘Wúggă-gă, zúggă-gă,
úggĕr-gă Năggă-gă, Wúggă-ă, Húggĕr-gă.... In my ... wúgga ga ...
d-dúgga-g—opinion.’
He was the only living person I have ever heard who gave the effect of
speaking in ordinary life as the persons of the poets speak. It was
well worth hearing; but, of course, one could not understand a word of
it. Nor did he ever produce the great effects of the ancients.
One of the most delightful things about words is their habit of coming
up out of nothing, like the little particles of ice which float to the
surface of the Thames at the beginning of a frost, rising silently,
floating up from the bottom of the river, or like the little oak trees
that crop up everywhere like weeds in the fields of my home. ‘Boy’ is
a word of that kind; ‘girl’ is another; ‘leg’ is another; ‘donkey’ is
another; ‘plough,’ though a little earlier, is another. No one can tell
you where they came from; they are like our modern masters, they have
no ancestry. But, unlike our modern masters, they remain. Some one in
some clique started the expression and it spread. One can see examples
of the process going on all round one to-day. One sometimes even knows
the man who invented a new term and the medium through which it spread.
There are one or two Eton words of this sort, and one or two Balliol
words which are in the way of becoming regular English; for individual
men of large acquaintance and fertile mind started these new words,
some of which are beginning to take root.
But of all things that words do, what pleases me most is their habit
of adventure; the way they have of sitting tight and doing nothing but
their ordinary job for centuries, and then shooting out and taking
quite different work and travelling about, changing colour and shape as
they go.
I am very fond of the word ‘cad.’ It is the most useful missile in the
English language. It is very hard and knobby, and you can be certain
of your effect. And yet how brief its career! How singular its arrival
at its present exalted state! It is a shortened form of ‘cadet,’ the
younger son of a great family, which came by extension to apply to
the less fortunate. It wandered about in this vague form for about a
lifetime, and then settled down into two separate uses, applying to a
particular sort of domestic, I believe, in one of the universities, and
also to the people who used to hang on at the back of the old horse
omnibuses and take the money in those happy days of my youth when there
were no bell punches and no uniforms, and all Charing Cross resounded
to the cry of ‘Liverpool Street,’ towards which goal every omnibus cad
entreated you.
‘Cad,’ having settled down on these two honourable but ill-paid
occupations, slyly got in by a side door and established itself in
a totally different meaning, which it has now achieved, and which
it looks like keeping. For now it means: ‘A male deficient in one
particular small set of those many moral qualities which, when combined
with the national tradition of wealth, build up what is called in
England a “gentleman”.’ That is what the word ‘cad’ means to-day,
and that is what gives it its value. It is a very odd formation. The
‘gentleman’ is the ideal of our once aristocratic and now plutocratic
English state; it is the ideal which members of the wealthier governing
class must conform to or attempt to attain. That ideal (its worshippers
will be surprised to hear) has not a few vices, a number of virtues,
and a very great many habits or characters which are neither virtuous
nor vicious—such as the accent.
Now the cad is not at all a man who lacks all these; he is only a
man who lacks one particular set of the many virtues. He lacks the
particular kind of reticence and the particular kind of generosity
which go to the making of the character called ‘a gentleman.’ He may
have a reticence of another kind, and a generosity of another kind, and
still be a cad. On the whole, of the cads and gentlemen I have met, I
would give the cads a shade of odds in the matter of salvation; which
is not without its importance either.
It will be interesting to watch the process of the word and see
what happens to it. I do not think it will last long, for the whole
civilisation to which it applies and in which it has a meaning is
breaking up, like mist before a rising wind. It is not a word you could
translate into any other language, and the English society to which it
attaches is changing in a whirl. I wonder what posterity will make of
it? What will posterity make of this strange habit, suddenly arisen
within fifty years (and soon to die), of regarding a particular sort
of provincial wealthy man as a general ideal for all humanity, and
of regarding a man lacking somewhat of that ideal’s qualities as the
basest of mankind?
Probably posterity will do what we all do in dealing with the past,
shrug its shoulders and pass on. We, in dealing with any part of the
past which we cannot understand, treat it at once as ridiculous, or
only talk of the things in it which we do sympathise with. So will
posterity deal with us. We cannot understand at all, for instance, the
mood of a man who—like nearly everybody up to about two hundred years
ago—objected to being burnt alive not on account of the pain, but
because it was an indignity; because the body was consumed. We cannot
understand why he was not more concerned with the serious discomfort of
being burnt alive than with the ignominy.
In the eighteenth century, men could not understand the theological
discussions of the early Byzantine period. We are getting a little
more sympathetic with them now, but even to-day there are a great many
highly cultured men steeped in history who cannot reconstruct for
themselves at all the state of mind in which the populace lost its
temper over a theological point; and the usual attitude of those who
cannot understand a thing is to laugh at it. Yet the wise men will
notice how many intense quarrels have arisen in our own time on what
are really points of theology—though they are masked. The two views
of evidence in any hotly disputed point, such as the new position of
Poland, are essentially differences in theology. The long struggle
between England and Ireland is essentially a theological struggle. So
at bottom was the conflict between Prussia and Austria—in which both
have succumbed: Prussia happily for ever; but Austria, I hope, only for
a time. The only difference between ourselves and our fathers in this
affair is that our fathers went to the root of the matter and discussed
the essential, the opposing doctrines, instead of quarrelling upon
their products.
That night the last of the wind fell suddenly, and it was a still air
all through the darkness, but with the next morning there arose a
moderate fresh breeze, still from the north.
We brought up the anchor early and stood along the coast. The wind soon
fell, and at last it hardly held us up against the slight current of
the tide. We made to skirt Penkilan Head, right across the mouth of the
bay called Port Nigel, and also Hell’s Mouth (which is no praise for
Nigel), but it was evening before we had rounded it and saw the opening
beyond, the two islands which are called Saint Tudwal’s; for here (as
once on Bardsey for the matter of that) a holy man had taken up his
station in the old days when men thus hid themselves away from the
world.
It is in the youth of a society, when its emotions are at their
strongest, that men thus delight in isolation and the single
contemplation of divine things. We cannot understand it at all from
where we now stand, at the end of an old and decaying society. But when
Western Europe renewed its youth in the fourth and fifth centuries and
grew epic again, after the breakdown of strict society, the love of
hermitage also grew passionately.
A young man can live by himself as long as he will. It is later on that
one needs to be supported by the companionship of one’s fellows, and
to-day most men cannot live alone.
But I did once find such a man in modern times, full of delight in his
complete isolation. He was an Englishman by birth, but I never learnt
his name. He had built a habitation for himself on a high cliff in
Italy overlooking a plain. I came across him by accident; he received
me kindly. But I did not trouble him for long, for I saw that he loved
to be alone. He had no one to serve him, nor any one even to be an
occasional companion. His delight was to watch the world in the plain
below and to commune with his own soul. But I doubt his having had any
interest in divine things.