bear the name of the saint, and are called the East and the West.
I wondered to myself whether the appetite for hermitage would soon
return; for that it must return soon or late is certain; it is of
permanent recurrence in the history of mankind. All up and down Europe
you may mark the stage in the history of the islands, the small
islands, when they were thus hermitages or places of seclusion for
small communities of religious or for one holy man. There is Iona,
there is Holy Island, there are the islands of Lerins, and the Farne,
and Noirmoutier and Tombelaine, and a hundred others. The conditions
seem to have been a small space, water to drink, just enough land to
support life, and difficulty of access. So also Cuthbert found even
Lindisfarne too crowded, and went to the little rocks far out to sea.
When it was not an island, it was a hilltop like Monte Cassino. When
it was not a hilltop, it was a difficult cliff, like that of my strange
friend of one hour in Italy. But always the main condition was security
from interruption. And here extremes meet, for the very height of
luxury and selfishness which makes a modern man in the last corruption
of modern societies seek isolation, made the holiest of men seek it in
a better time. Rich men to-day are often at pains to avoid cities and
even the conversation of their kind, in order that their expression of
every appetite may be free, and that they may have no influence about
them save what is of their own choice. But those other holy men of our
beginnings chose the remote places in order that they might lose their
whole being in the contemplation of God, and that they might have no
temptation to follow any appetite at all.
One might make an interesting list of the parallels which are upon
this model. For instance, the men of those beginnings held fast to
the miraculous signs of divine action. Our moderns laugh at the bare
relation of such things, but hold fast to anything, however monstrous,
which purposes to have behind it a mysterious untested authority
dressed up in print, violent in affirmation, ceaselessly contradicting
itself, empty of thought, and called Science. And so much for Saint
Tudwal. I read about that saint once, and grew quite learned on his
legend (for what is known is little, save that he lived just after
Saint Martin of Tours, his exemplar) but I have forgotten every word
I read, and can tell you now only roughly when he lived, nor anything
else about him save that he was a Welshman.
The Welsh have a curious feeling about their past. They have been
taught to detest its religion, yet their patriotism inclines them to
a sort of awe of it. I never met a Welshman yet who ridiculed Saint
David, yet very few indeed who knew either what world Saint David
lived in or what mood he had towards the universe; and what about his
Masses?
There is no hole in the land along that coast between the point of
Carnarvonshire and Portmadoc, except a curious little bottle harbour
called Pwllheli, with an odd entry up a sort of canal-like entrance.
For that we beat up: we came to it by evening, but barely drifting
under the lightest of airs. A draft of tide took us in, and at the
mouth we passed a curious sight, which was a small model of a mountain
transformed by man: a solid dome of granite, half of it already cut off
like a cheese by industry; and men are still breaking it up and taking
it away in ships. What would be left of the Wrekin if it crushed a few
ounces to the ton? Eh, Rosenheim? Eh, Guilderstern?
As we watched that abuse of nature, a fine great rock of granite, half
murdered by man and looking like Sunday evening’s loaf, an aged mariner
came up to us in a boat of many years and chucked in his painter to us
without a word of permission, then nodded to me to make it fast.
I did as he desired, for it is a rule in this world always to do what
you are told if there is no apparent loss in doing it. What the old
man wanted was to be towed and to save himself the trouble of rowing.
But when we had done him this favour, and the Nona was taking him up
without fatigue to his dear home, he spoke not a word, but sat there
gloomily, smoking a pipe and considering, I suppose, the dim stories of
the ancients: the bards, and the chieftains of Wales.
Wearied with this insolent silence, I leant over the rail and asked
him what we should make for and where we had best lie in Pwllheli.
He pulled the pipe out of his mouth and cursed Pwllheli loudly, in
English, but in English so Welsh that it reminded me of the famous
story of the man who said, ‘There will be folk in London to-day: one
hundred and twenty are coming from Pwllheli.’ I said to him, therefore,
desiring to soften his mood, ‘I see that you are not from Pwllheli
yourself.’ ‘Ess, put I am!’ he answered simply, and then fell to
swearing again most abominably.
His grievance I found, after a little more questioning, was that a
financier had persuaded the people of Pwllheli to turn it into an
earthly paradise, with a band upon an island, and gondolas or what not,
and this just after he had bought a cottage to be his very own, so that
he was burdened with rates; that was his grievance.
More of this local father I could not make. I think he hated all
mankind as well as Pwllheli, and when we got into the broader water
at the end of the entry and were moving up to the wharf in stately
fashion, he gave me another surly sign to cast him off, which I did,
and then, without a ‘good-evening,’ he pulled for the shore. As for the
Nona, she slid alongside, and my companion and I moored, stowed, ate,
slept, and waited for the morning.
When morning came, and we woke late (for the fatigue of Bardsey passage
was still on us, even after two days), we found under a clear but hazy
sky no stir of wind. It was well past noon and the ebb beginning;
indeed, it was nearer two o’clock when there seemed to come just a
breath, still from the north, that would take us down that strange
entry and out to sea again. So we set sail, after casting off, and
drifted rather than steered for the corridor end. As we left the
stonework, I saw gathered there on the quay a group of men talking
angrily and excitedly, with words which I could not understand, for
they were Welsh; and, as they debated, or quarrelled (but perhaps
they had a common trouble, and were only doing what our papers and
the French police call ‘demonstrating’), many more ran up, until
they were quite a crowd. Whereupon one man of their number, a very
intense-looking, fierce fellow, jumped up on to a baulk of wood, so
as to stand above them, and in a shrill, singing, passionate voice
addressed them all. They fell silent, every face turned towards his,
some with their mouths open, all with their eyes staring. Then, after
he had spoken for a few minutes, he jumped down again and, behold, the
crowd dispersed, some few knots still talking low among themselves, but
the most of them remaining silent and slouching away.
Now what was it he had said in that strange tongue to achieve his
result so well?
... Certainly the management of men is an art; and there are in it two
factors which are nearly always set in conflict, although they ought
to be harmonised. Indeed, one of them is nearly always thrust forward
to the exclusion of the other: from which error in proportion civic
disasters are born. These two factors in government are the direction
of many and the interpretation of many. A number of men, a number too
large to be appealed to individually (and the number gets too large
after half a dozen or so), must be controlled and directed by him who
governs, otherwise there is chaos. But it is only so controlled and
directed by an interpretation of, and even a sort of subservience to,
the common mind. Now control without understanding breaks a community,
and sympathy without control dissolves it.
This man had succeeded, it seemed, with the mob at the wharf from which
I had just sailed. His success set me thinking upon the matter of the
management of men, the control of numbers: speakership, chairmanship,
captaincy, and all the rest.
There is one element in the affair which is all-important, and the
possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or ‘eye’ in a
sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is
granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have
in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of
good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general
appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined—the faculty
of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole—you have
the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is
among men.
A man can only talk of the things he himself has known, and I myself
have only seen one example of this inspiration in its perfection. It
was (I regret to say) an experience of the House of Commons, a nasty
place in which to find anything remarkable. There I saw the Speaker of
my time (Mr. Lowther, as he then was) exercising the art through two
Parliaments with a perfection which I had thought impossible, and which
moved me, at the watching of it, as much as I am moved by great lines
of Milton or Racine, or the harmonies of certain musics.
Consider what the business was! He had before him in an ill-lit, dull,
hideous oblong room six hundred men, dully ranged in ten or a dozen
dull rows; half to his left, half to his right. In that dull air of
futile, vulgar, and unreal verbiage there could arise, in a moment,
absurdly acrid emotions. These had to be tamed and resolved whenever
they should bubble up like gas from a marsh. It was a necessity to the
dull life of the place, if it were to crawl along at all, that such
accidents should not wholly destroy its dull function.
This great body of men would dwindle in a moment to a dozen or less—a
dozen who only remained for the chance of speaking, and of whom each
individual would jump up like a jack-in-the-box the very instant the
last mouther had sat down. It would swell again to a full complement, a
crowded House, with equal rapidity.
The man managing that assembly had to remember each man by name. Those
faces, which would, for any of _us_, have become mere blobs of white
within half an hour of fatigued observation, had to be recognised as
individuals. The relations of each with all had to be remembered;
the nature of the matter under debate, the right of one man, through
experience of office or of personal work, to be remembered; the claim
of another man (suffering some unjust failure) to be recognised; the
danger of a third who was repetitive; of a fourth who was mad. At the
same time, the very subtle distinctions between the lesser and the
greater claim to speak, the length of the debate, even the excessive
tedium of each speaker had to be weighed. On the top of all that, it
had to be remembered of what importance was each discussion (in so far
as you can call any of them important—but they seem absurdly important
to the participants). On the top of all that, again, was the general
arrangement of the debate suggested by the Whips and in possession of
the Chair.
Now on all this incredibly complicated task, involving, I suppose,
some hundreds of interior decisions during the day, Mr. Lowther never
once failed. The House of his time was an instrument over which he had
complete mastery through a complete comprehension and a rapidity of
just decision which I have never seen equalled in any field of command.
We have a tendency to-day to use words too strong for the occasion, and
the word genius is a very strong word; but I have no more doubt that
Mr. Lowther, as I watched him day after day, displayed genius than I
have a doubt that Mozart in music, or Houdon in sculpture, had genius.
It was amazing, it was satisfactory, it was continuous.
There was an old squire with whom I often dined in those years, and who
had great knowledge of men and things in that club, still aristocratic,
which England then still was. Not long after my first election to the
august Assembly, I told him with enthusiasm at his own table what my
judgment was of this achievement. He answered me, wearily, ‘Oh! I have
heard that said of every Speaker since I can remember!’ To which I
re-answered, ‘Yes; but this time they are right.’
Which reminds me of how a modern poet, spared to middle age in spite of
the wrath of God, famous for that he could neither scan nor rhyme—let
alone think or feel—once made a speech in which he carefully set out
those things which had been said against Swinburne when first that
meteor flamed across the heaven of English verse. The modern poet next
read to this assembly the things that had been written against himself
when he first blurred into the murk of our evening. He triumphantly
concluded: ‘What was said against Swinburne they have said against me!’
Then there arose an aged writer of reviews, a man whose hair, whose
voice, and whose aura were all three of delicate silver. He said: ‘Yes!
But in what they said of him they were wrong; in what they said of you,
they were right.’
This was not an epigram, it was a paving-stone; and it reminded me of
that line in the epic of Roncesvalles, ‘Christians are right and pagans
are wrong.’
So in the matter of Speakers. I have seen the action of four; but of
none would I say even that they had talent, saving in this case alone,
where I have used another word....
So we drifted down the narrow entry and out into the open sea; and
all that afternoon, under a wind now slightly lifting, now falling
again, we crept eastward and a little south, making more way as the sun
declined, because the wind was shifting westward on to our quarter;
and of that I was glad, for I desired to look into Port Madoc, which
I had not seen since I was a child. I had vivid memories of it during
a wonderful journey overshadowed by that air wherewith the Creator
blesses childhood, lending to everything an active flavour of the
divine; which is in three things, Clarity, Magnitude, and Multiplicity
of strong emotion.
For the divine reveals itself in a special multiplicity, in an infinite
variety. All that there is in colour and in music, and in line and in
affection, and to these added other raptures innumerable, such as we
know not of nor can conceive—that is to be at last our beatitude: that
is the fullness of being. In childhood our innocence permits us some
little glimpse of such things; but with the passage of the years they
are lost altogether. The light in the lantern goes out, and the living
thing within us fails, and is stupefied, and dies.
So Musset and old Pythagoras and Mr. Tupper. If any man doubts the
Fall of Man (and I see from the papers that two belated bishops and
one dean are still shaky on it, through some Victorian influence upon
their minds, not only of bones but of chipped stones), let him consider
this decay of heaven within ourselves as the maturity of our manhood
develops. The more we are of this world and the more we know of it, the
further are we drifting from the shores of the Blessed. Which shores
also the poet had in mind when he wrote, sang, crooned, or what not:
‘Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, sing,
Sing to me of the West,
Sing to me of the girth loosened and the lax harpstring
And of rest.
‘Beyond the skerries and beyond the outer water,
There lies the land.
Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, oh, High
King’s Daughter,
And of the over-strand.
‘I desire to be with Brandan and his companions, in the quiet places
And to drink of their spring.
Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, and of the
blessed faces.
Daughter of Cahoolin, sing.’
But if you tell me that that is not the way to spell
‘Cuchulin,’ I have two answers, each of them stronger than Hercules.
The first is that the poet spelt it as he felt inclined—that is, by
ear; for poets excel not, as is commonly believed, in speech but in
ears; as you may see by their profiles or sidehead views; and as it is
his spelling your action lies against him, not me.
And the second answer is, that one ought never to be bothered with the
pedantry of quaint alphabets and the spelling tricks of outer men.
Cuchulin is, or was, or should be, pronounced ‘Cahoolin,’ and there is
an end of it. But as to whether he ever had a daughter, or if he had,
whether she could sing, or even whether that Irishman existed at all, I
hold all these things to be perfectly indifferent....
We cast anchor in the very midmost of that solemn bay with its
half-circle of huge mountains looking down upon an empty sea. The
giants were dim in the haze, but the more enormous, and I revered and
worshipped them.
We so cast anchor because I had to wait for the tide. I could not run
up the long, winding channel through the sands of Port Madoc until the
flood should be with me, and that would not be till the gloaming,
between eight and nine o’clock that night.
Therefore did we lie thus in Harlech Bay, gazing at the great hills of
Wales. There is no corner of Europe that I know, not even the splendid
amphitheatre standing in tiers of high Alpine wall around Udine, which
so moves me with the awe and majesty of great things as does this mass
of the northern Welsh mountains seen from this corner of their silent
sea.
Few can recall it, for few visit that corner of the salt. It leads
nowhere but to the harbour of Port Madoc. No man beaches a boat to-day
under Harlech; no man to-day sets out from that shore for Ireland
beyond. The halls are in ruin. There is no more harping. No flight of
sails comes up eastward out of the sea like birds. Even the sailors
have forgotten Gwynnedd. To-day the only sailors familiar with the
solemnity of which I speak are those who ply in the small boats of
the slate trade, or who, like myself, have employed a curious leisure
in searching out new things here in the seas of home. For all my life
I have made discoveries close at hand, and have found the Island of
Britain to be infinite. But who in our times knows where to look for
vision?
Indeed, this lack of fame applies to perhaps half the greater visions,
even of the modern over-frequented and travelled earth. Men know half
of them to satiety, but the other half they never see. Every one has
wearied of the Bay of Naples, repeated a thousand times, but what of
that lonely field by the flat Adriatic sand whence you may see the
dark eastern Fall of the Gran Sasso, tragic, with storms about it,
dominating a deserted shore? Everybody has his bellyful of Gavarnie,
but what of the valley of Araxas, which proclaims so terribly the glory
of God? Where are the pictures of that? Who has drawn it? Yet it is but
half a day from Gavarnie.
So it is with this awful parade of the great mountains standing on
guard over the northern corner of Cardigan Bay, seen from the silence
and the flat of ocean, towering above its glass; and all that late
afternoon and evening I adored them until, with the last of the light,
and a westerly air which was but the suggestion of a breeze, we groped
north anxiously for the opening to Port Madoc channel. How I should
make it, even upon the flood, in the darkness, I knew not; for the
sands there are miles wide, and this channel (which I had never yet
made) shifts continually. But God sent me a pilot.
He hailed us out of the half-darkness from a small boat, and asked us
in the dialect which I will call ‘Anglo-Welsh’ (after Anglo-Catholic,
Anglo-German, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-African, and the rest), ‘Whether we
would not have a pilot, ah?’
Nor was he a pilot, as the event shall show; but at any rate he
belonged to that shore, and would have more knowledge than I. So I gave
him the helm, and went up forward to look out over the bows, as the
Nona glided slowly along the flood into the channel which they call
‘The Water of the Smooth Lake’ (‘Afon Glaslyn’). For half an hour of
that very slow gliding all went well. The darkness had quite fallen.
There was no moon.
The gliding stopped; there was a slight thrill. She had hit Wales:
an under-water, advance guard of Wales. The man at the helm was not
apologetic, he was not humble, but he was at least subdued; and he
said, ‘Her will float soon, so her will!’ I forbore to reproach him,
not from kindness, but from cowardice.
The flood lifted her foot, she swung off, and we went on again up the
darkness, with the least of little airs to give steering-way.
So for a quarter of an hour, covering perhaps a third of a mile:
then again, rather sharper this time, came the honest thrust into the
sand, and, what was more, she had run up against it so high this time
that she was careening a little; she was taking it very hard, as the
highbrows used to say of their beloved Prussia after the Armistice.
This time it was a good half-hour before she floated, and all that time
the culprit was silent, nor did I reproach him. He at least had some
vague memory of where the channel might be, and that I certainly had
not.
As we lay there, waiting for the rising water to lift us, a clear sound
of hammering rang from the black shore, far away, over the vast expanse
of sand. It meant something to the pseudo-pilot, for he called out in
loud, sing-song tones five or six words in the Welsh language, wherein
I distinguished the word ‘afon,’ which means ‘water’; and his very
distant Kymric fellow, there unperceived in the night, answered with a
distant cry. What they said I know not; perhaps the unjust man at the
helm was asking at what hour she would have water enough to lie higher
up.
She floated again (it was now deep into the night, and the dim stars,
through the haze overhead, watched our misery). The Nona glided on.
To be coming thus into a very shoal fairway, after dark, and to be in
the hands of a pilot who was quite clearly one of God’s Three Welsh
Fools—one of the Triad, one of the Three Great Fools of Britain—was
a strain to the temper, a strain to breaking point. It was no good my
taking the tiller, for I had no idea of the channel, and only saw now
and then, straining my eyes forward, a little blob on the darkness that
would be a drum-headed buoy slowly drifting past as we lifted on the
young flood.
I used to think that the irritation against fools was irrational and
purposeless. Where it is written in Holy Whit that one should tolerate
fools even with gladness, I thought that this was a general rule of
conduct. But now I know it to be a counsel of perfection and, indeed,
like so many things in the Old Testament, a counsel generally to
be avoided. For the strong exasperation against fools is, I am now
sure, an instinct implanted in us (or, as fools themselves would say,
‘evolved’) whereby we defend ourselves against such accidents as this
perpetual bumping which the Nona was undergoing on the sands of Port
Madoc. Our anger against fools is a natural faculty of conservation,
like the sensitiveness of the nerves of the skin; and in those
countries where fools are too much tolerated (of which England) many
little disasters proceeding from such tolerated fools combine to make a
great one at last and to break down the state.
It is high time that a new book were written on Fools, like those of
the sixteenth century, which are so excellent, and which you have in
Latin, in German, in French, and in English: ‘The Praise of Folly,’
‘The Ship of Fools,’ ‘The Fool’s Paradise,’ and others. If I had the
leisure, it is one of the many hundred books which I should like to
write myself: ‘The Fool, sociological, biological, and pathological,
with many portraits and an appendix on the newly discovered Giant Fool
of Aphasia.’ As I have not the leisure (and never had it) I bequeath
the idea to other and younger and wealthier men, just as some years ago
I bequeathed them the idea of a Cads’ Encyclopædia.
Among other chapters in this book I would have one on the Fool and the
Label. For I maintain that labels are the great support and sustenance
of the Human Fool.