to defend himself; and he had a well-constructed answer ready for the
obvious objection that people with so strange a creed would soon be
destroyed, and that, therefore, all their predication would have been
in vain.
He told me that, upon the contrary, the example of non-resistance
would spread; and he pointed out that, in fact, throughout history,
sacrifice was fruitful, and particularly self-sacrifice. When the body
of those who had refused to resist had grown to a respectable size,
all European society would be changed; the possibility of attack would
be dissolved in an ambient medium opposed to it, and would disappear.
He was also ready with an answer to the general objection that his
philosophy applied to only one form of human conflict, and left
untouched all the other and really more serious forms.
I pointed out to him, for instance, how, in societies like that of
modern England, where recourse to physical combat between private
citizens had been crushed out by an all-powerful police, there was the
more opportunity for injustice and oppression and unredeemed insult.
His answer to this I thought curious and worth noting. He said that men
did not resent insult very much, and that as for such oppressions as
swindling them out of their goods, or cutting them off from all useful
information through a control of the press by a few adventurers, these
evils were superficial, and soon corrected themselves. He said they did
little permanent harm to the human beings who suffered them, but that
physical violence on a large scale, as in war, was quite another matter.
I asked him whether he approved of the holding down of subject peoples
for produce—as, for instance, for copra or cocoa. He said that he did
not; but I found him very wobbly on that point. He took refuge, for a
moment, in hypocrisy, and said it was for the good of the oppressed;
but he was disturbed.
The man who takes up the cause of subject peoples against his own
country is usually of a very different type from the internationalist
or pacifist. He is usually a man with a particular romantic interest in
that one particular part of the world, and he is usually either a man
of independent position through birth and wealth (who feels himself,
therefore, fairly immune from the law courts), or a hanger-on of such.
And I have noticed that these cranks begin by what is no more than an
affectation; but, like all humbug, this affectation brings its own
punishment in the shape of a sort of ingrowing false sincerity. Such
men _almost_ get to believe in themselves. It never quite comes off.
I have never known one of these men, even in his latest days, to be
really, fully, and homogeneously sincere. For instance, I have never
known one who would hesitate to make money out of the English rule in
some part of the Orient while denouncing that rule with fervour, and
(no doubt) heartfelt indignation.
There is another curious little point about this sort of people: they
are always very proud of being mixed up with the British administration
of the dependency in question. They love to point out in conversation
how their very opposition has brought them into contact with this,
that, and the other important administrator and his class. Usually
their birth has made them familiar with that class; for, until lately,
the controllers of dependencies were drawn in the main from people of
family or from their dependents, and your pro-native crank must be
himself of consequence to survive. Were they poor and weak they would
be broken.
Upon the whole, I think these anti-Englishmen are an advantage to the
State. You may be perfectly certain that they will never go to the
length of doing anything active to the hurt of England, and they lend
variety and criticism to the external action of England. They make the
rivals of England admire a social structure in which such internal
strains (which foreigners always exaggerate) are rendered innocuous. If
they do any harm, it is by inflating, through reaction, that growing
and very dangerous vanity which the public schools and universities
have so much encouraged in our generation, and through which most
men have come to feel that Fate is necessarily upon the side of their
country, that no national disasters need be feared in the future, nor
any precautions taken to forestall national decline. The Englishman
who says that he wants England out of India, inflames, by reaction,
the fatuity of the Englishman who thinks himself in India as one of a
Chosen Race.
These pacifists or internationalists of Britain have strongly in them
the English hatred of cruelty, and they have in high development the
national habit of short cuts in thought; as, for instance, when you
may hear them say that war is wrong, which is as much as to say that a
house on fire is wrong.
This habit of taking short cuts in thought is often called, not only
by foreigners who are unused to the English habit of mind, but by
Englishmen themselves, an incapacity for clear thinking. I do not
quite agree. As it seems to me, the essential characteristic of this
way of speaking and thinking is not its lack of lucidity—for, though
that is evident enough, it is not the essential. The essential is the
taking for granted of a great many things which are not expressed. This
habit of taking short cuts in speech is in some way a habit common to
all this group of islands; for the Scotch have it, too, though not so
strongly marked as the English; and the Irish have it very pronouncedly
indeed: it is far more marked in them than in the English, and is the
root of the ‘bull.’
For instance, when a man says that war is wrong, he is saying
something which, as it stands, is manifestly nonsense. But if we
expand the phrase, it has full and definite meaning. He means ‘for
one organised community to attempt destruction and physical pain upon
the organisation of another such community, with the object of gain
or increase of power, is wrong.’ And so it undoubtedly is. Or, when
he says that war is silly and not worth while, he again means (when
we fully expand his phrase for him) that such action is commonly so
expensive and hurtful, even to those who successfully use it, that it
is a bad speculation. In this, indeed, he is not so certainly right
as in his first proposition, for most victorious wars in history have
handsomely paid the victors; but my point is that this kind of talk,
whether about war or anything else, is not _due_ to muddle-headedness;
though it goes with muddle-headedness. It is due to a clotting of
thought through compression.
One phrase which I very often hear (and which, as it stands, is
apparently a piece of bestial unintelligence) may further my point. It
is the phrase: ‘Some religion ought to be taught in the schools.’
It is obvious that this phrase as it stands is a contradiction in
terms; for the word ‘ought’ can only apply to a moral good; and if
such and such a religious system is of good effect, then an opposite
and contradictory religious system will be of evil effect. If I think
it wrong to murder, if my religion teaches me that murder is a great
moral evil, then I teach children in schools that this is so. But if
my religion is that of an Oriental body I have heard of, called Thugs,
with whom murder is a high religious act, then I teach an opposite set
of morals. Both religions cannot be good. One must be good and the
other evil. But when you hear people say, ‘Some religion should be
taught in the schools,’ what they mean is that ‘the general Protestant
ethics of the English people should, on their broader lines, be taught
in the English schools.’ They take for granted that every one using
the word ‘religion’ means English Protestantism. Having taken that for
granted, they shorten their speech in the fashion I have just quoted.
And really such wandering of the mind over this, that, and the other,
as I have thus indulged before sleep, in the pleasant little cabin
of the Nona (pleasant to me, odious to the pernickety, for it is a
hugger-mugger home), watching between the open skylight and the combing
a little belt of nightly sky with stars, is a poor adjunct to the scent
of the sea, and to the Devon air. To the devil with all reasonings and
counter-reasonings and abstractions and argufying: I am for sleep.
We woke early next morning to the noise of the loud clapping of water
upon the bows, and I put my head out of the skylight to see little
dusty clouds going too quickly across the heavens, and a freshening
breeze blowing up from a little south of west, so that all the harbour
water was dancing and alive. But the glass was high, and there was no
reason why we should not take the sea again, only we must wait for the
ebb (which would come in about three hours’ time, nearer nine than
eight o’clock). For, in that blanketed part of the river down below, we
should never get the Nona out against the flood. Nevertheless, I asked
my companion whether it might not be wise to take another man, for we
were going down the coast, where the rare harbours were shoal, and
not easy to enter, and also small, and lay so that, with such a wind,
one would have to beat up to them. An extra hand, such as we had with
us during the never-to-be-forgotten business of Bardsey, would be an
advantage. Such a hand, therefore, after minute enquiry and searching
questions, did we ship; then, all things having been done in their
order, and sail set with the second jib and two reefs in the mainsail
and one reef forward, we got up the anchor and let her down for the sea.
The hand we had shipped (promising him his journey home by rail
within three days at the most) was very well got up in sailor fashion,
with his jersey and his peaked cap, the latter worn a trifle to one
side, after the fashion of those who are daring, and challenge Æolus.
His trousers, it was true, did not spread out at the bottom, like
elephants’ feet or the mouths of bells, as do the trousers of sailors
upon the stage. On the other hand, he would give them a hitch from time
to time—a gesture symbolic of the Main in Drury Lane. He had nothing
to do as we dropped down river, for all was trim. He sat and smoked,
and watched the water before him with wistful eyes. I think he was by
nature a man sad or saddened; and he was very silent.
On the bar there was no end of a lump, and, as we were blanketed by
that high cliff, the Nona took it uneasily, chucking up and down with
flapping sails and rolling damnably, but in a few moments the strength
of the ebb had swept us far enough out to catch the wind again, and we
set a course full-and-by; right out for the open, for the large. For
we designed to beat in again after a few miles, and so make our way
down-Channel towards the Cornishmen.
There was certainly quite enough wind: ‘All the wind there is,’ as an
old Irish sailor said to me once during an Atlantic gale so abominable
that he and I could not walk against its icy, sleeting December fury,
but had to crawl forward tugging along the rail by main force, all up
the windward side.... That was a passage worthy of remembrance, for we
took three weeks between Europe and the Delaware, the engines and the
old frame quite unfit for their task; and in that cheap passage, also,
I learnt from a stoker two songs: one called ‘The Corn Beef Can,’ and
the other called ‘The Tom Cat.’ They are of the great songs of this
world.
A man should learn all the songs he can. Songs are a possession, and
all men who write good songs are benefactors. No people have so many
songs as the English, yet no people sing less in these last sad days of
ours. One cannot sing in a book. Could a man sing in a book, willingly
would I sing to you here and now in a loud voice ‘The Corn Beef Can’
and ‘The Tom Cat,’ those admirable songs which I learnt in early
manhood upon the Atlantic seas.
There was more wind, indeed, than I liked. We took in the third reef,
and went about to the starboard tack, after we had run out so far that
we thought we could fetch, upon this tack, the next harbour. As we came
near to that town, and saw its roofs far away appear and disappear
again behind the crests of unpleasant seas, the Nona heeled suddenly to
a much too angry gust. I heard a crash coming from below, and with it
the voice of my companion crying, ‘Come down quick and help!’
The Crew (if I may call him so) was sitting forward, hunched up,
clutching the weather shrouds, and not happy. I called him to come and
hold the tiller, while I should go below to help, and I warned him that
she was pulling hard, although she was under three reefs, for we had
nothing forward now but the third jib. He looked over his shoulder in
a very ghastly way, and shook his head from side to side, as though
despairing to be heard in such a wind. I was within a few feet of him,
and I bawled, ‘COME AND TAKE THE TILLER! QUICK!’ but again he miserably
shook his head, and clung to the shroud. Then did I, commending myself
to Saint Elmo (which is a false name, for his real name was Peter,
and even Gonzales, and he was the man who was so shocked to find all
the Galicians lapsed into a pagan darkness and living in open fun),
struggle to make some shift of keeping the tiller up with my right arm
stretched back, while I craned my head down below the cabin door to
see what was going on downstairs.
The stove had got adrift in the lurch. There was oil all over the
place, and a mass of crockery, and everything on the weather side had
leapt to leeward, and some little of it trailed in the oil of the
floor-boards. It was not more serious than that; for, luckily, the
stove was not alight. I shouted to my companion that I could not leave
the tiller. I bobbed up my head again and found that even in that short
moment she had almost swung into irons. I put her round just in time,
and we raced and flew, breasting the seas for that farther little misty
harbour town.
The Nona is like those women who are peevish and intolerable under
all conditions of reasonable happiness, but come out magnificently in
distress. I lie; for the Nona is never peevish and intolerable. What
I mean is that in easy weather she is a little sluggish on the helm,
and has one or two other small faults, excusable after the fortieth,
the fiftieth, year: for she was launched before Plevna, though, it
is true, a year or two after Sedan. She has her mortalities; but in
a seaway she is magnificent. With her few inches of freeboard, her
old-fashioned straight stem, her solid grip upon the water, she takes
the sea as though she belonged to it, and so she went that day, riding
in highbred fashion, worthy of all praise, and praise she received from
me as she leant over and took the combers one after the other. I gave
her perpetual encouragement: for no boat will do her best unless she is
sufficiently flattered.
Thanks to that increasing wind, the passage was short enough, and what
we had said would at most take three days was accomplished between a
morning and an evening, for it was still broad daylight when we passed
outside the group of rocks of which the chart warned us, and stood
within a mile or two of the now distinct houses of that little harbour
town, all full of Cornish men.
But the wind still rose, and for the wind to rise when day is falling
is a very bad sign. I had no desire to ride it out in the open, and I
proposed to get in under the lee of the land (for there was a sort of
point there), and not to drop anchor till I could be sure of plenty of
water in the harbour later on, when I should make for it on the flood.
My companion came up on deck, from settling things below, and we cast
about anxiously for a place where the anchor might be let go.
It was not an easy calculation. She was driving pretty fast. One had to
get well under the shelter of the low point, and yet to leave plenty of
water beneath one in which to swing. I asked him to go forward and get
all ready, and the Crew would help him. But the Crew did not do so.
The sea being now calmer (though the wind was still rising) because
we had come under the lee of the point, the Crew did, indeed, stagger
forward; but he still held on manfully by the forestay, and looked
curiously on my companion’s activity with the anchor as at a novel and
a pleasant sight. Beyond that he did nothing; but I think he was proud
of keeping his legs so long as he could grasp that forestay. It is no
use to argue nor much use to command in the face of imbecility.
I shouted to my companion to let go the chain when I thought the right
moment come, and at the same instant brought her up sharp.
The anchor took the ground. We were in, perhaps, five fathom of flood
water; for it was full evening, though still light. When we had so lain
for a quarter of an hour or so, taking stock of everything around, I
asked my companion whether we could not, with the last of the light
and the last of the flood, make harbour. The wind was still rising, but
we should be running before it towards the not distant pier. Rounding
that stonework, we should shoot right into the wind’s eye, when it
probably would be broken by the hillside of houses beyond, and, even
though we did not know how far the harbour might still be dried out, we
should be in safety, with plenty of water beneath our keel for an hour
or two more, while we enquired where we should berth. So we decided to
risk it, though perhaps wiser men would have ridden out the night where
we lay.
She certainly took a great deal of water aboard during that short mile
or two, with more and more breakers as we got farther and farther from
the protection of the point. Once, when she buried badly, I was afraid
the sprit might snap, for I had not housed it. But she carried through
all right (though the sprit bent like a willow wand), and we rounded in
the gloaming, shot past the pier-end, and dropped anchor immediately
inside.
A man hailed us from the shore; we threw him a rope, and he showed us
where to berth in water that would just or nearly float us, even at the
lowest of the tide.
The Crew was no longer indolent, now that he had left behind him the
pitiless waste of the seas and felt once more beneath his feet the
solid strength of England. He did what he was told in fastening warps
and putting out fenders. Then came the moment for payment: wage and
the railway fare home. Before he went over the side I asked him gently
whether he had ever been to sea before. He said: ‘Oh, yes, in a manner
of speaking.’ I asked him whether he had ever handled a tiller. ‘Not by
rights,’ he said. ‘Not in such a boat as this.’ I asked him whether he
had any fault to find with the boat. He said no, she was a very good
boat so far as he could see, but he did not pretend to understand
these things. He went over the side into the darkness. He was and he
remains a mystery.
Was he a Charon man who pulled a ferry from shore to shore? Or was
he a man who lounged about on the quay, dressed as his companions
were dressed, but timid of tumbling water? Or was he a vision? Or a
detective? Or an actor? Or one of those writing men who pretend to go
to sea in boats, but never do? I cannot tell. I never saw him again.
This episode of the man in sailor clothes with the hitch, who knew
nothing of the sea, started my mind upon two ways, which, as they
diverged, I could not both follow.
For first it made me think of how we judge by immediate
indications—and the taking-in of people through this method is at the
basis of most commercial successes; even this poor fellow had made some
shillings by it. But also it led me to consider how astonishingly in
the modern world we live side by side and know nothing of one another.
There was certainly never a time in the history of Christendom, nor
of the paganism that went before it, never a time in the history of
our race, when we Europeans (I cannot answer for the Asiatics or the
niggers) were so split up, one small set of men knowing nothing about
another small set of men at their elbows.
The worst form it takes, of course, is the division between rich
and poor, which is quite a modern thing, and an abominable one—the
product, I suppose, of what people call ‘democracy.’
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and I would often talk of this in connection with
my own dear county of Sussex. He was much older than I, between
twenty-five and thirty years older, and he could, therefore, remember
a simpler and a better time than that into which we have descended;
yet he confirmed me in my judgment that, no matter how fond a man might
be of his country, or how long he might live in it, he would never, if
he were of the wealthier, cultivated sort, know the lives of the poor
people about him. I had lived among them on and off all my life, and so
had he; and I certainly loved them with all my heart, and so did he;
but as for knowing how they live or what they really think, there is a
gulf dug between us. It ought not to be so.
Apart from this modern separation of the rich from the poor, there
are any number of side separations. It is only by an accident that
the writing or teaching man knows anything of business, though the
commercial man more often knows something of writing. But the greatest
anomaly of all, the one that has puzzled me most of a hundred such, is
the complete ignorance of what the Catholic Church is and means—the
ignorance even of what its doctrines may be. One would think it should
be a mere matter of encyclopædias and textbooks—easy for any one
to look up. In nations of Catholic culture, of course, the Church
is thoroughly well known, even by its worst enemies; but in nations
not of Catholic culture the absence of all contact with, and of even
elementary information upon, this essential thing, is stupefying.
Here is the corporate tradition which made Europe: the Thing which is
the core and soul of all our history for fifteen hundred years, and
on into the present time: the continuator of all our pagan origins,
transformed, baptised, illumined; the matrix of such culture as we
still retain. For any European not to know the elements of that affair
is to be in a blind ignorance of all his making, and, therefore, of
his self. Yet it is perfectly true that the Englishman or Scotsman,
cultivated to excess, saturated with the knowledge of all he thinks
there is to know, fatigued and cynical after too much sounding of the
world, says things with regard to that great affair which show him to
be as little acquainted with its essentials as he might be with another
planet. He has many Catholic acquaintances; he probably has some
reading of his own country before the death of Elizabeth; he is certain
to have read Shakespeare—a writer who wrote for and in a Catholic
England, and a writer whose whole atmosphere is Catholic. He may
justly pride himself upon his knowledge of the architecture, or even
the institutions of the Occident before the great sundering of three
hundred years ago. Yet, when he is dealing with this mighty business,
he says things more grotesque than anything said by any Colonial about
that very governing class to which he himself belongs. He produces an
effect, when he touches upon the Faith, which—I say it honestly—is
as startling and as comic as the effect produced by those ingenuous
millionaires from the backwoods who come barging in among the London
subtleties of ancient wealth.
And if this is true—as it is true—of the old governing class, who
have some few of them direct family traditions connected with the
Faith, nearly all of them relatives and every one of them friends and
acquaintances who are Catholic, it is, of course, still more true of
the average writing and speaking man of lower birth upon whom general
opinion depends.
Now and then one comes across a man who talks or writes with some
knowledge, if not of what lies beyond the boundary, at least of the
boundary itself; but it is exceedingly rare. The latest example I know
of the thing is the preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, written for his play
‘Saint Joan.’ Here there is a clear recognition of the boundary between
the Faith and what lies outside: between the garden and the heath, or
marsh.