sports, and I thought to myself, ‘I will see whether so simple a thing
as steering a boat cannot be easily accomplished by a man at the first
trial. Then shall I be able to get what I badly need, which is a little
sleep.’ So I lighted the binnacle lamp, I explained to him the function
of the lubber’s mark, and gave him the point on the card which he was
to keep on the lubber’s mark. I said to him: ‘If it comes on to blow a
little harder and the card swings, and the boat tends to yaw a little,
don’t mind that, but keep the lubber’s mark on the average at the point
I have given and that will be enough.’ He said that he understood all
these things, and for the first time in his life set himself to steer
a ship. But I, for my part, went down to sleep, confident that if it
should come on to blow at all hard it would awaken me there and then,
so no great harm could come. I slept for many hours, when suddenly
I was awakened by my companion giving a loud cry of astonishment. I
tumbled up on deck quickly, and I found him pointing at a light which
shone brilliantly upon the horizon, dead on our bow. He said to me:
‘Look, look, there is a light dead ahead!’ I said to him: ‘Of course!’
and that it was the light of Strumble Head, outside Fishguard; and I
asked him what he would have expected. I had given him his course,
and, naturally, he had lifted the light in good time. But he, for
his part, could not get over it; he thought it a sort of miracle. He
kept on repeating his amazement that so clumsy a thing as a tiller
and a rudder, and so coarse an instrument as an old battered binnacle
compass, should thread the eye of a needle like that; it was out of
all his experience. It is true that he had not been disturbed by any
current or strong tide, but even had he been so, he was bound on a
clear night to make that light not much off either bow.
That things should turn out so gave him quite a new conception of the
sea and the sailing of it, and he talked henceforward as though it were
his home.
This corroboration by experience of a truth emphatically told, but at
first not believed, has a powerful effect upon the mind.
I suppose that of all the instruments of conviction it is the most
powerful. It is an example of the fundamental doctrine that truth
confirms truth. If you say to a man a thing which _he_ thinks
nonsensical, impossible, a mere jingle of words, although you yourself
know it very well by experience to be true; when later he finds this
thing by his own experience to be actual and living, then is truth
confirmed in his mind: it stands out much more strongly than it would
had he never doubted. On this account, it is always worth while, I
think, to hammer at truths which one knows to be important, even those
which seem, to others, at their first statement mere nonsense. For
though you may die under the imputation of being a man without a sense
of proportion, or even a madman, yet reality will in time confirm your
effort. And even though that confirmation of your effort, the triumph
of the truth, should never be associated with your own name, yet it is
worth making, for the sake of the truth, to which I am sure we owe
a sort of allegiance: not because it is the truth—one can have no
allegiance to an abstraction—but because whenever we insist upon a
truth we are witnessing to Almighty God.
A man who knows that the earth is round but lives among men who believe
it to be flat ought to hammer in his doctrine of the earth’s roundness
up to the point of arrest, imprisonment, or even death. Reality will
confirm him, and he is not so much testifying to the world as it
is—which is worth nothing—as to Him who made the world, and Who is
worth more than all things. And, as it seems to me, a man ought to do
this even about the truths not so very important, but he should observe
some proportion between them and truths of vital importance. For
instance, it is a truth of no very apparent immediate importance to-day
that any great poem of the past must have been written by a poet,
and that those who think a great poem can be written by a committee
or pieced together out of traditional ballads, think nonsense. It is
also a truth that Great Britain is no longer secured by sea power. It
is also a truth that the interests of this country were till lately
identical with the interests of international banking and finance—and
are so no longer.
All these three truths are true, but the first truth touches no vital
matter, while the last two truths are of immediate importance; and a
man aware of them should hammer away at them, and not neglect them in
order to pursue too constantly that other much less important truth
about old poems.
It is not often that one comes across men in a modern lifetime intent
upon the proclamation of unaccepted, or of ill-accepted or unknown
truths; for such men must suffer. And few will suffer to-day save
for some reward. Very few modern men value any reward that is not
immediate and material. Huxley, who sacrificed himself entirely, both
to false things which he believed to be true and to real things that
were true, I never knew. But I knew Déroulède well, and Déroulède
hammered away all his life at the expense of ceaseless insult and
contempt, paying for the preservation of his honour the heavy price of
an unbroken isolation, and dying without seeing any apparent fruit of
his effort. It was his mission to proclaim to his French compatriots
the elementary truth that, until they had secured the defeat of
Prussia in a war, they themselves were doomed to increasing decay, and
Europe to increasing ills. I visited his grave just after the Battle
of the Marne. It is in a little, somewhat neglected churchyard, some
three miles from the house he had inherited: a place windswept and
overlooking from beyond its walls a great horizon to the north. The
season being late summer, and the war having left the little place
untended, the grass was rank and high around the mound and the slab
which marked the place where he lay. There, leaning against the wall,
some one had put casually, as though by chance, in high dedication to
his memory, the first of the frontier posts which the army had pulled
up from the summits of the Vosges during the first ill-fated charge
into Alsace.
I knew also one other man (whom, for the honour I bear him and because
he is still alive, I shall not name), an Englishman; at the outbreak of
war in South Africa he said to all who would hear him, and printed in a
journal to which he had admission, the simple truth that this adventure
would be the beginning of a decline in the financial credit of England.
To discover whether he was right or wrong, look at any curve of that
credit and mark the dates. He said to all who would hear him that
from this adventure onwards we should find ourselves increasingly
embarrassed, with increasing taxation, with an increasing uncertainty
in our foreign policy, and in our hold upon the markets we desired to
control abroad. His action was not that of the prophet, but of the
reasoner. His unpopularity was extreme. He was the only public man who
talked conscientiously and rationally in this affair of the Boer War,
and who did not confuse his conclusions with that disgusting antipathy
to their own country which marked the most of those who protested
against the war. As for the enemy, the South African Dutch, he knew
them and heartily despised them. The Outlanders he also knew, and
thought them the scum of the earth. But he acted on no mood of like or
dislike. He was concerned with the future of England and he reasoned.
He talked a sort of mathematical sense, and all his words were true;
but he shall know no reward. Only, this remains true also; that all who
heard him or read his writing have secretly returned to those words in
their own minds, and have said: ‘He was right and we were wrong.’
There is another form of impressing the truth, and testifying to it,
and doing good by it, which is the dogmatic assertion of truth by the
old and the experienced and the revered, to the young. It is out of
fashion; it is invaluable. I can myself testify to two such experiences
which stand out supreme among many hundreds in my own early life. I am
afraid they may seem trivial to my readers; I can only say that for
myself they were as strong experiences as any great joy or pain could
be. One was a sentence which Cardinal Manning said to me when I was but
twenty years old. The other was one which the Master of my College, Dr.
Jowett, of Balliol, said to me when I was twenty-two years old.
The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: _All
human conflict is ultimately theological._
It was my custom during my first days in London, as a very young man,
before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he
would receive me; and during those brief interviews I heard from him
many things which I have had later occasion to test by the experience
of human life. I was, it may be said, too young to judge things so
deep as sanctity and wisdom; but, on the other hand, youth has vision,
especially upon elemental things; and Manning did seem to me (and still
seems to me) much the greatest Englishman of his time. He was certainly
the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who,
in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, preëminent in
will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept
the Faith. Not only did his powerful mind discover, but his powerful
will also insisted upon all the difficult consequences of such an
acceptation. He never admitted the possibility of compromise between
Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict,
and gloried in it.
This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered)
_that all human conflict was ultimately theological_, that is that all
wars and revolutions and all decisive struggles between parties of
men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was
utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I
would have almost said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the
idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight:
with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of
history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that
it reached to the very roots of political action, so extended that it
covered the whole.
It is, indeed, a truth which explains and coördinates all one reads of
human action in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. Men
talk of universal peace: it is only obtainable by one common religion.
Men say that all tragedy is the conflict of equal rights. They lie.
All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or of
a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false
rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the
habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that
doctrine is but a private, individual affair, creating a mere opinion.
Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the state; and every
state is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens
is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should
be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine
he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar
foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.
The truth Dr. Jowett gave me came thus. He asked me the political
question which was always uppermost in his mind, and which he believed
all young men should consider. It was, ‘Under what form of government
is the state of man at its best?’ I answered as all young men should
answer, ‘A republic,’ to which he answered gently in his turn, ‘You
cannot have a republic without republicans.’ Now that, for terseness
and truth and a certain quality of _revelation_, was worthy of
Aristotle. It is the full answer, historical and moral, to every honest
man who desires, as most honest men do, democracy, and who wonders why
it is so hard to attain. But I had never considered that answer; and
I think if I had not heard these half-dozen words I might never have
considered it.
Democracy—that is, the government of the community by the community:
a state wherein a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to
suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power:
a state in which office alone commands, and not the being clothed with
office—that is the ideal at the back of every man’s mind who cares
for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left
of private honour. It is simplest put by saying that democracy is the
noblest form of government. But the moment you begin to deal with men,
you find in varying degree, according to the human material handled,
a difficulty in the direction of such an affair. You have experience
of the wickedness and folly of men, and if you add to such growing
experience the vast experience of history, you will find that, save in
some few, and those small, communities, the ideal of democracy must
break down in practice; and that so far from enjoying the noblest of
social conditions, men attempting democracy in great states are soon
suffering the basest forms of control by the rich. That is because most
men, though intimately desiring a republic, are not republicans: when
you have great numbers, those worthy of democracy are few. In the same
way most men, though individually desiring peace within, have not the
control of themselves which makes such peace possible.
So much for the Master’s excellent platitude.
It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things,
should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they
are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came.
To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to
honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well
knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic state;
that even in small states it needs a peculiarly admirable and rare
temper in the human material of them. But this conviction came slowly,
and all started from those few words.
And what has all this to do with the sailing of the sea? Nothing, save
that it is during the sailing of the lonely sea that men most consider
the nature of things.
The day broke long before we were anywhere near Fishguard breakwater.
We must have done, I suppose, ten or twelve miles by the time it was
broad light. Strumble Head kept on flashing, white and inept, under
the daylight, and then went out. When it ceased there was no sign of
land where it had been. Also the wind had fallen sluggish and we were
not making three knots. But such as it was, it was steady; and by
mid-morning we saw all the coast quite plain, and, shortly after, the
low black line of the breakwater which they have built out here to make
their great artificial harbour of Fishguard.
With the wind still falling we drifted rather than ran for the point of
it and crawled in out of the wide sea. Even in that last hour, as we
came in, we began to note a long heave gradually sweeping up out of the
Atlantic through Saint George’s Channel, as though it had wind behind
it; but since it set northeastward it did not affect the calm of the
broad roads within the breakwater. We very slowly crawled to that inner
southern part where boats of our sort could lie without interfering
with the steam monsters, and there, after just twenty-four hours of the
passage across Cardigan Bay, a run of seventy-odd miles, we let go the
anchor, and, tying up our canvas in a very slovenly fashion, we hailed
the shore and got a boat to come out, seeing that I had lost my own
dinghy during the tempest in Bardsey Sound.
The man who came out to us in the boat hailed us as he approached
in the most beautiful English, either because we were now in that
so-called ‘Little England beyond Wales,’ or else because he was indeed
an Englishman, exiled to these parts; or perhaps again he was bilingual
and had acquired this perfect English as a classical and foreign
tongue. It was a privilege and an honour to be rowed ashore by such
a man, for he was free of his conversation and all that he said was
interesting, true, and well put. He warned us against the people of
the place—why I do not know. He told us that where we lay was good
holding-ground, and he gave us in that little trip quite a lot of
useful information about the difficult passages between the islands and
the mainland on the Points of Pembroke which we had to pass on our way
southward. He asked us as we landed an astonishingly small payment for
his services and then he promised to meet us again at a fixed hour to
take us aboard. In all things this man was worthy and a friend, for I
could see in his eyes that he suffered exile.
We came back to him after we had provisioned, clambered aboard, and
made ready for one of those empty days which pass so quickly on board
a boat: hours and hours during which nothing is done, hours which
on shore would exasperate every nerve, but which here, on the soft
movement of the sea, go past as easily as sleep. For time on the water
is quite different from time on land. It is more continuous; it is
more part of the breathing of the world; less mechanical and divided.
There was not a breath of air, so there was no question of starting
again during all those hours. The great rollers outside were now at
last beginning to affect the harbour a little, and the Nona, with her
too high topmast, swung rather heavily to the slight movement; but of
wind not a stir. The falling of the gradual darkness brought on a night
brilliant with stars and no moon. There we lay, sleeping and waking,
smoking, talking a little, vacuous, ready to put up sail with the first
hint of a wind and to get outside. But all that night until morning
again, the calm continued.
How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding
the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man! How admirable
are the great works of man! But greater is God.
In the profound night and the silence I considered that wide space of
shelter and the dyke man had made against the Atlantic Power.
For two hours I so pondered upon our strength and our nothingness,
worshipping also the night until the stars had changed. Then I went
down below and slept. But even with the dawn there came no breeze.
It was about half-past nine in the morning when there did come a
draught from the northwards. There was very little of it; it hardly
crisped the oily, lumping water of the great haven, but such as it was,
we, weary of all this indolence, determined to take advantage of it
and to set sail. So we took up the anchor and very slowly lay close to
that breath of wind until we came to the breakwater ahead, and there we
found the rollers outside large as though they were in the main ocean:
so large that when we sank into their troughs there was no headway on
the boat and the light air only caught her insufficiently upon the
crests. Even as we thus attempted to make some way—lifted hugely up
and down in a solemn sport of the sea, now seeing nothing but water
astern and ahead and then, immediately after, the whole coast and its
heights, and then down into the trough again—the little wind there was
entirely failed us. We drifted aimlessly and in all the futility of
such motion, up and down over the great swells and there even seemed to
be a sort of slight drift. It was, perhaps, only the set of the swell
taking us against our course back eastward and northward.
We took council together and determined that with the very first breath
of air we could find we would run back to anchor and wait for a wind
worth having. So we did, and a second day passed in Fishguard harbour,
as empty as the first, and a second night; and then it was I completed
the tune and first verse of a song called the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’
The whole of that time the calm was broken by but few hints of very
uncertain airs.
But just as dawn was beginning upon the third day, when it was already
so light that the sea looked white against the black land, and before
the first touch of colour had made living the edges of the inland
hills, a heartening wind from those hills, cool with morning, fresh
and heavy, not too strong, a friendly wind, a wind just suited to our
course—for it was a point or two north of east—blew down from old
Wales upon the sea.
Of this we took an immediate advantage and were out at once, my
companion steering for the breakwater head at a good pace, while I made
the anchor secure forward and then came back and joined him. We rounded
the breakwater, took her well out and then gybed over with something
of a clatter and a shock and ran down for Strumble, under the growing
day. The great light was still flashing from its tower, standing on
an island off the head, and the name of that island is Michael. Once
we were round that headland, the wind was fairly on our port quarter
and it was a merry race with a happy offshore wind all the way down to
Saint David’s, so that not only the day but also the old land and the
much older sea and the old boat, that was launched so long ago, and we
ourselves, were for the moment young. So ran we down for Saint David’s
and there, putting her nose due south, I, holding the tiller, headed
her for that exceedingly dangerous millrace of a strait between Ramsey
Island and the mainland, called Ramsey Sound.
It was full ebb. The water roared and thundered over the rocks inshore
for all the world as though we were not upon the sea at all but upon
the lower reaches of a tidal river. Though we were running under the
lee of the land we were not too much blanketed, and it was a comfort to
feel the strength of the wind on the boat and to know that one had full
way in such a pass, for these narrow sounds of the Pembrokeshire coast
are perilous to ships and men. Here, in this very passage, lay two sets
of rocks to the right and to the left, called by the name of the two
perils attendant upon the wealthy young. For the first set of rocks is
called ‘The Horses’ and the other ‘The Bitches.’ These are rocks over
which, I say, the rush of the ebb made a noise like a weir. We were
through it in no time, at a pace which, had she touched anything, would
have been the end of herself and of all aboard; but there was no danger
of that because, as I have said, she had full way upon her and was
lively to the helm. Nevertheless was it a relief to come tearing out of
this perilous corridor into the wholesome width of Saint Bride’s Bay
beyond.
Now, as I was coming through this ticklish management of Ramsey Sound,
I was too much taken up with creening below the boom to make out the
water at the rush of the bows and to steer with precision, I was too
much taken up with the business of exactitude under the strain, to
turn to a thing which, from the land long ago, had puzzled me. That is
the way in which one of the most ancient roads in Britain comes down
here to an open beach just above the rush and the roar of Ramsey Sound
and stops dead upon the sands. That open beach is to this day called
_Porth Mawr_—‘The Great Port.’ The ancient road here comes along the
southern coast of Wales as far as Carmarthen and then branches, one
branch coming up Cardigan Bay, which is called, I think, after Saint
Helena, the mother of Constantine, and the other coming straight along
by Saint David’s. They call these old roads ‘Roman roads,’ and so I
suppose they were, but still many of them were there in some form
before this island entered the comity of Europe, before the Roman unity
and order were finally imposed so that England became England.
Anyhow, there was a very old road of the first importance running down
that way, and near it stands the see of Saint David. Now the interest
is this: it comes down to that beach above the narrow roaring river
of Ramsey Sound. Why on earth does it strike the sea there? It is
true that antiquity pulled up boats on to the shore and might use the
beach as we to-day use a harbour—though in our tidal seas a harbour
was always better, I should have thought. But even if they thought
the beach better than a harbour (which it manifestly could not be for
commerce), why should they call it ‘The Great Port’? There it lies
on a most impossible bit of coast, leading nowhere and as valueless
a landing-place as you could get—granted a beach—anywhere in the
island. Did the ancients throw out great breakwaters and thus form a
harbour? That could not be, for surely, had that been done, there would
be remains of such mighty work.
I leave it unsolved, as I and all other men must do this and all other
problems, with the possible exception of the trisection of the plane
angle, which I once all but caught hold of by the tips of my fingers
during a long crossing of the Atlantic in a miserable lame steamer,
too old for her job, in the year 1897, before the gods had left this
broken world.
The Nona came therefore grandly out of Ramsey Sound with a sweep and
dignified nod into the calm of Saint Bride’s Bay, but I knew very well
that there was before me another trial, more difficult still, called
Jack Sound, between Skomer and the mainland, seven miles to the south.
Lord, what a tangle of dangers are here for the wretched mariner! Rocks
and eddies and overfalls and shooting tides; currents and (as you shall
shortly hear) horrible great mists, fogs, vapours, malignant humours of
the deep, mirages, false ground, where the anchor will not hold, and
foul ground, where the anchor holds for ever, spills of wind off the
irregular coast and monstrous gales coming out of the main west sea;
and, most terrible of all, Wild Goose Race.