through. He knows whom to respect and whom to despise and what wine to
choose, and so on—all by the label. And then again, labels are very
useful to the fool by getting him taken for more than he is worth. Any
number of my friends have said to me at one time or another, when I was
having my laugh at the politicians: ‘A man does not get to a position
like that (Secretary of State for Drainage, or Prime Minister, or what
not) without abilities.’ Now this error shows how useful the label is
to the fool. For a matter of fact I can testify, if any living man
can, that the politicians who get their share of the swag are of all
degrees in the matter of intelligence. Some have first-rate abilities,
especially among the lawyers; many are of the ordinary second-rate,
fifty-eight per cent, β _minus_ or Wandsworth intelligence; and quite
a large proportion are Plumb Stuffed Fools, true Fools Absolute and of
the Nadir; Rooted Fools. I knew one Fool Secretary of State who, in his
Whitehall office, used to look at his official documents with a sort
of tragic stare, as men look on the dead, and slowly wag them up and
down in front of his face with a hopeless gesture. Then he would call
upon his permanent official, who would explain to him what they meant,
whereupon he would use one after another of the great Fool Phrases
which are the furniture of the Fool’s Mind, such as, ‘Yes,’ ‘I see,’
‘Quite,’ ‘Precisely,’ and then again ‘Yes.’ Having done this, he would
sign his name to a number of papers which meant no more to him than
so many Chinese tracts, and with a groan he would go off to spend his
hundred pounds a week at Brighton.
Even in those trades where you would think there must be activity of
brain for a man to advance at all, your fool drifts forward somehow.
You find him quite high up in armies, and as for his number in the
great cheating professions, notably share-shuffling, it is prodigious.
Half the wealthy share-shufflers I have known have been fools animal,
fools crass, fools to be driven blindfold or led about on a halter;
but to do that great modern profession justice, there is a minority
of share-shufflers as keen as needles and as wide-awake as ferrets.
They have no more luck, however, than their duller brethren, for Fate
rules them all, and alternate wealth and poverty is as much the rule
with them as with the stupidest men. I will bargain that if you were to
take samples of share-shufflers out of three sacks, the House of Lords,
Monte Carlo, and the gaols, you would find the same percentage of fools
in each sample.
Which leads me on to say that never was an old proverb of less accurate
modern application than the proverb about the fool and his money. You
will have heard it said that the fool and his money are soon parted.
That was true enough for the yokel at the fair, but in this modern city
life of ours it is just the other way. The Fool of Inherited Money
(not the Gambling Fool) holds on to it with fish-hooks. It is the
intelligent man, with many interests and (by some freak of nature) a
generous heart, who squanders his hoard. But your fool gets his legs
round the money-bag and crosses his ankles on the other side, clasps it
higher up with both arms right round it and fingers tightly interlocked
beyond; digs his teeth into the mouth of the same and, screwing up his
eyes, clutches it all over desperately with the rigour of death, making
himself wholly one with the beloved object. From this attitude nothing
can move him save the lure of a plausible fellow promising to increase
his wealth. I have seen a clot of fools thus hanging on to money-bags,
all pressed up together like bats in a steeple, when a repulsive,
overdressed young adventurer would slither by singing a light song of
great wealth to be made in some scheme of his devising; and, behold,
the fools would turn their round heads ungummed from their money-bags
and listen in rapture to that song, and many of them would even hand
over their bags to the young adventurer, never to see their gold again.
But I say that, save when they are thus tempted by their blind avarice,
fools are not easily parted from their money.
However, this harbour or pilot fool of mine was not, I think, troubled
in this regard, for had he been a Fool of Wealth he would not have been
blundering to get the Nona up-channel in the dark.
Five separate times did we touch and wait with increasing anger each
time till the flood released us, but at last we came to the pool, and
to reasonable deep water, and to a quay.
There did we put out our warping ropes, and springs, and the fenders
alongside, and there did we give money to the fool as a reward for all
the pain his folly had given us.
For also this is the rule in human life; that when you suffer anything
you must pay a good price for the entertainment.
It is true of bad cooking, and of bad wine, and of a painful illness,
started or continued by doctors, and of all the intolerable noisy
hotels, full of insolence and maddening bells. It is true of all the
bad things of the world. Nor does it follow that all cheap things are
good. Far from it! But all good things are cheap (except caviare), and
the way to get good things is to look for them as you would look for a
penny which you had dropped in the straw of the (once again!) dear old
omnibuses of my youth which were pulled by horses, and had standing at
their door a guardian of the poorest of the people, foul in speech,
grimy of skin, unshaven, bloodshot, from the gutter—but (oh, believe
me!) a better citizen of a better time than ours.
Nona, cruising and voyaging Nona, wanderer over the seas of Britain,
how in the solitude of your companionship my mind does lead me from one
thing to another!
But that’s all one. It is time for sleep.
The new day having come, we got the half-ebb a little before six
o’clock, and threaded away down the Channel for the open sea.
I ought, I suppose, to have stopped in Port Madoc, and renewed the
memories of my childhood. But a fig for the memories of my childhood,
at six o’clock in the morning: at six o’clock of a May morning, and
a nice little leading breeze, all cold and merry! The memories of
childhood and the contemplation of the divine are for the evening;
they go with candle-light, and with a wine I know, and with friends
of twenty years. But, so help me He that made me, when I find the
morning wind blowing well for the salt and myself freshly roused from
a good sleep, I am full of nothing but the coming of the course and an
eagerness for the line of the sea against the sky and the making of a
further shore.
It ought to be more dangerous to float down on the ebb without a local
trickster, than to come up upon the flood. But fortune served, and
the swirl of the ebb plainly marked the channel under that heartening
light, with the glory of the new day shooting over the tops of the
great and solemn mountains eastward, by the land.
Therefore, without misadventure, we came to the last marking buoy and
took the sea; running easily with the wind nearly aft, but a little on
the port quarter, so that all was well.
The great field or marsh before Harlech stretched there to landward;
and, on its splendid defiant height, the old castle watched us as we
went; the place where they hid poor Henry the Saint when the true
Plantagenet was pacing for his blood.
Here is a landscape inhabited everywhere by things not of this world;
by the gods of these hills whom our God has ousted; by the memory of
great men dead and their wraiths, I suppose; and by the troops of the
Empire, marching up the inland road, and by the chieftains, and by the
very saintly men who cast their spell fifteen hundred years ago over
the islands and the rocks of Lyonesse.
So we sailed on and on, heading over to the Atlantic southern corner of
Wales. Then, far away in the midst of the sea, we heard the tolling of
a bell....
The tolling of the bell was not only mournful (and at the same time
terrible), but had in it an odd quality of message; as though it were
not of the world through which we moved. For a bell is a land thing,
and even in salt water we think of it as sounding upon a buoy near
shore, or as the companion and regulator of human things, like the bell
on board ship. For Mr. Masefield is very just when he notes how the
clang of the ship’s bell by accident in the swoop of a ship down the
great waves of an Atlantic storm, has an unnatural call: being rung
without the aid of men’s hands.
Now this bell, as I heard it plainting away deeply, unable as yet to
see the thing on which it swung, mixed up its noise in my mind with
the great story of Saint Patrick: a story I had designed to write
many years ago in Arras, where I went to see the manuscript which
most vividly recalls him. But of that task I found myself incapable.
However, I did visit his staff in Rome.
For the bell thus swinging on its buoy far out to sea swings on the
western edge of that strange, long undersea road which they call the
‘Sarn Badrig’ (which means ‘The Causeway of Saint Patrick’) and cannot
but awake the great story of the coming of Europe to Ireland.
How right they were to call that sunken ridge pointing straight to
Ireland ‘The Roman Road of Patrick’! And how its sudden cessation
symbolises the break, the wound, the rupture, by which this island was
cut off from that: more than two hundred years ago! The ridge ends
suddenly in deep water and continues no more. But the bell tolls on,
appealing.
Saint Patrick is the second of those witnesses which remain to us of
the more than natural quality of Ireland. The first is the old pagan
story of the western harbours from which the dead were ferried over
by night to their felicity. The second is that undying phrase in the
‘Confessio,’ where Saint Patrick himself says that at night and in
dreams ‘he heard the voices of the Irish calling.’
It is gloom upon the mind to remember that the magnitude of the task
set to Britain (a Roman land) in the matter of Holy Ireland, has been
so missed: as though a man, having to encounter a mountain a little
before the day thought it no more than a slight hill against the dawn.
Here was the difficult land—but inspired—which Agricola said (and he
knew his business) he could have mastered for Rome and right order with
one legion. That legion was not given him, any more than the divisions
were given that might have made the break through before Cambrai. Would
that the officials at Rome had listened to him! Here was Ireland that
most difficult of subjects, most intriguing of friends, most tenacious
of enemies, set up against the western shores of Britain, of Roman
land; and through all those centuries nothing was done to enrich the
subject, to acquire the friend, to reconcile the enemy. But I am weak
enough to believe that this failure also was in the Providence of God.
The mountains look upon the mountains: the mountains of Britain to the
mountains of Ireland; from the east to the west, over a magic sea.
But they look in wrath and remain sullen giants. Nor is the battle
concluded.
As we sail past the bell very slowly (that Mark having come into sight)
we discovered it to be enclosed in a sort of great cage which swung
with slow dignity and bowed backwards and forwards upon the large
swell, unaffected by the light breeze which gave us our two knots
through sluggish water. My companion said to me, brutally enough, ‘How
would you like to be shut up in that cage, and left there to the night
and to the wind?’ I answered, ‘Not at all,’ and in this I told the
truth. But the bell did not repine, for it was fulfilling its function,
expiating its sins, pursuing its end, and consonant to the will that is
behind this world. It tolls there beyond the seaward end of the Sarn
Badrig to warn mariners of that long ledge submerged: barring the sea
ways.
My mind returned to that great Causeway, that shelf of rock and shingle
behind us, just hidden by the waves, pointing westward into the deep,
mile after mile, like some drowned giant’s pier: the beginning of a
bridge, as it were, between Britain and the Other Island; the marriage
of Britain with the older island, whence the dead are ferried over to
their repose.
But that Causeway was never completed: that bridge was never built; and
the weight, the future consequence, of such a failure lies not upon
Ireland, but (alas!) upon England.
For how many years did I not see the tragedy played out!
I knew its roots as well as any man. I knew that the gulf was a gulf
of religion. I knew that the riddle was without solution for men whose
eyes were cast downwards; who did not admit the unseen powers; who
could see nothing but the mud and wealth in which they stood—yet I
marvelled that the dreadful affair should drag on so long.
To the one set, to those sham ‘Liberals’ and ‘Unionists’ of the
wretched money game at Westminster, it was a lucrative jest. They cared
not for Ireland at all, and not too much for England. They treated the
martyrdom of Ireland as a counter in their play. To do them justice,
they thought that England could never suffer. To the others, to those
of Ireland, the struggle was (as they thought) a battle always lost.
In the beginning of their effort, the men who had organised a political
caucus for Ireland and had attempted, by what they called the
‘Nationalist’ Party, to get some settlement by way of the Parliamentary
morass, were sincere; yes, at first, flamingly sincere. Parnell I never
met; but Davitt I knew—and a man more heroically sincere I have never
had the fortune to meet and respect. To the very end the effort of the
Irishmen at Westminster retained some dwindling element of truth. And
this I say though I know that many Irishmen to-day may laugh at me for
saying it. But it is true. Down to the very end, sunk as they had grown
in the sodden Westminster habit, and conventional as had become the
repetition of their demand, some conception of a goal to be reached at
last still inhabited these men. I knew them and I can testify to it.
Right up to 1914—it sounds laughable, but it is true—the group at
Westminster which called itself ‘The Irish Party’ did, in some fading
way, still hold the idea of a ‘Parliamentary settlement.’ It was true
of John Redmond and his brother. I may fairly say that his brother died
for that idea.
They really did think (to me it was astonishing; to the younger Irish,
to many of them at least, incredible) that a solution was to be reached
through the working of those then undermined, moth-eaten, now crumbled
falsehoods of the professional politicians: that the farce of voting is
‘the voice of the people’; that the House of Commons is ‘a mirror of
England’; that ‘the nation rules through its representatives’—and all
the rest of the absurdities bred by the grafting of French democratic
attempts on to the decline of English aristocracy.
It sounds not possible that _any_ Irishman, even after a lifetime
at Westminster, could be so deceived. But, I say it again, I knew
these men. I can testify to the truth of what I have said. They did
right up to 1914 still faintly hope. I knew them as friends and as
opponents. They were my opponents when I took my share in defending the
Catholic schools in 1906, and they were angry at my going to see the
Pope in that year, to lay before him what I thought to be sufficient
amendments to Mr. Birrell’s Bill (for they regarded the Catholic
schools in England as their private domain). What is enormous, these
men, Redmond and his party, thought that their Westminster method could
still achieve something after the manifest betrayal of Ireland by the
politicians labelled ‘Liberal’ upon the outbreak of the Great War.
It is a process I have watched over and over again in the course of my
short but too long life; men not seeing what (one would imagine) should
be apparent to a child.
These men did not see that you cannot get strength out of rottenness;
nor justice, nor truth, nor generosity out of moribund institutions
(such as is now the House of Commons), which, after a certain stage in
decline, no longer live save for personal intrigue.
I say nothing, therefore, against them, in spite of their failure, and
I revere their memory. The Irish in good time will give to the last
protagonists in that futile attempt a due position in their annals; and
specially to William Redmond and his brother, John Redmond.
For writing this I may be assailed from either side; but it is true.
Anyhow, I saw the tragedy going on before my eyes, as a man on a shore
height may see a boat making straight for rocks under water, apparent
to him, but of which her steersman knows nothing. I saw it in the years
when I watched it as a young man from the gallery of the House of
Commons; I saw it during the two Parliaments in which I sat; I saw it
when I had left the place in disgust. I saw it in the last four years
before the Great War; England, still drifting hopelessly on to the
Irish reef: till she struck.
I saw, year after year, from my boyhood to my middle manhood and later,
the Parliamentary poison eating up the Irish effort and the English
face turned away from Ireland, failing to understand its own doom. For
England, a seat of vision, might have understood the opportunity and
the peril had the Irish themselves used pen and word directly. But the
wrong instrument was used: the broken and now useless instrument of the
Commons.
I saw the politicians whom the Irish sent over, or rather, who had the
machinery of the Irish protest in their hands, grow fonder and fonder
of the Westminster drug and degradation. I saw them half in doubt, at
last, whether it were not better to remain in London half enjoying
what had become second nature to them, the wretched pomposities of the
House of Commons. They should rather have nourished the flame of their
country. Yet they were honest men, and at heart and at root were Irish
to the end. But they thought that England was to be made to understand
by the use of a machine, the Parliamentary machine, which was already
worn out. It was their fundamental error. What man desiring to move men
would waste his time in Parliament?
If a man may boast of a small personal experience, I myself told
them what would come. But they would not believe me. They thought me
fanatical in this—and to the end. They put their trust in the slime of
the lobbies. It swallowed them up.
I saw the end; or rather the beginning of the end—for the true end
of the Irish quarrel is still hidden, and will be perhaps for us,
here in England, very terrible. I saw the professional politicians
carrying their silly labels of ‘Liberal’ and ‘Unionist,’ footling, on
the very edge of the war precipice in 1914, at a game for avoiding the
Irish issue, and (as they dined together) arranging tricks to put it
off on one side. I saw their vast relief when they were given their
chance to the threat of a mutiny against the salvation of England and
Ireland. And I saw—I lived to see—the contemptible capitulation: the
Parliamentary puppets (Lord Chancellors and the rest) shouting on a
Wednesday that ‘they would not rest until they had taken the last arm
from the hands of the last rebel,’ and on the following Friday, at the
bidding of their financial masters, surrendering to Ireland for ever:
Ireland that might have been the bulwark of England.... It is done.
So we sailed slowly on, past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, past
that mournful great tolling bell which hangs there in the middle sea;
imprisoned in its cage, expiating the too careless sins of its youth.
The lamentable sound of it, the unsatisfied appeal, followed us over
the deep. So we sailed on, with our nose for the Atlantic headlands of
the south, and for the corners of Wales, where they face the Cornish
and the Devon seas and Ireland also, beyond, with the great ocean
rolling in between.
High as are the mountains on this shore, yet by a trick of the air they
were soon out of sight.
That is a thing I have never understood. High land which ought to be
plainly visible, and even overhanging one, disappears like this at
sea magically on a clear day. When the weather is thick, one expects
that; but the curious thing is that one may see clear air all around
and a sharp horizon, nothing but sky and sea, and yet know perfectly
well that the empty heaven at which one is gazing is really full
of great hills close at hand. I do not know whether this happens
in the clearer parts of the world. I have never seen it off North
Africa or California. But upon the coasts of these islands it happens
continually, and it is one of the hundred things which, I think, has
made their inhabitants familiar with mystery and amenable to the
unseen. For those of these islands, British and Irish, have always
been remarkable for the sense of mystery; and among them none feel the
effect of mystery more strongly than such as sail upon the sea.
It was an astonishing thing to sit there, at the end of the afternoon,
just past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, heading for Strumbles
light below the horizon, with a slight air, now from the northwest,
giving the boat steering-way and no more, with the tiller lazily pushed
a little up to keep her course, and looking over the rail to the left,
eastward, and seeing nothing there but an horizon of empty sky; yet
knowing very well that the sky was not empty, but that the enormous
mass of Cader Idris and the enormous mass of Plinlimmon stood guarding
the sea. It was like the continual experience of this life wherein
the wise firmly admit vast Presences to stand in what is an apparent
emptiness, unperceived by any sense.
As I thus looked over the rail musing upon the strangeness of such
things, I remembered how, many years ago, in this same boat and holding
this same tiller, I had wondered, after a too rapid passage across the
Channel from France, under too much canvas and with too much wind, how
near I might be to England. For one could not see the coast at all.
The wind had dropped suddenly, it had grown dead calm, and the Nona
lolloped on the big lump which the breeze had left. I had no idea,
within ten miles, where I might be; it is a ridiculous confession to
make, but true. It was the height of the spring tides, and I only
roughly knew the set of them in mid-Channel. While I was so wondering,
I thought I saw some difference between the lower and the upper sky, as
though the lower grey were faintly darker than the upper. In a moment
the line was defined, and I found myself looking at the turn of the
high land east of Folkestone, where it runs away inland towards the old
Roman harbour of Lympne. I was not more than three miles from shore.
And as there is a concealment of reality at sea, corresponding to the
concealment of reality from our experience in human life, so also at
sea there is occasionally vision, corresponding to that occasional
vision which you also have in human life: but vision is much rarer than
the concealment of reality.
Once out near the Looe with an ugly thunderstorm glowering and
lumbering down from the north, full of zigzags of lightning, I, in this
same boat, was shortening sail rapidly to meet the gust when it should
come. Even as I did so, I saw a fierce red light beating upon the Seven
Sisters and Beachy Head, more than forty miles away. You could see
every detail of those chalk cliffs. You could have touched them with
your hand; yet the sea in between was vague: and that was a vision of
the unseen. I say that the sea is in all things the teacher of men.
With the afternoon the wind freshened, and, as it freshened, went right
round by north to a little east of north, whence it blew steadily
enough, and gave us about four knots at the fall of darkness.