come of itself. But this matter of prose has to-day been nearly
forgotten. For most of us perhaps the phrase ‘good prose,’ or ‘fine
prose,’ really means rhetoric. It means a passage in which the soul is
stirred by a choice of rhythm and sound, and a mystical connotation
of words in some passage not definitely reduced to versification.
Thus, all the great passages from the Jacobean translation of the
Hebrew Scriptures which are familiar as examples to our generation are
essentially rhetoric; so are the excerpts quoted from Bunyan, such
as the fine closing passage of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; so is every
single passage quoted from Carlyle; so are even those quoted from
Newman and (I am sorry to say) those quoted from the greatest of our
modern prose writers, Huxley.
But prose is rightly to be distinguished from anything of that kind.
The excellence of prose lies in its adaptation to the function of
intelligent expression or of narration. It is a statement; the end of
it is not the exciting of emotion but the clear presentation, whether
of a record (in fiction or fact) or of an idea, which the writer
desires to communicate to his fellows.
He that succeeds in presenting the idea lucidly, so that no
modification or subsidiary idea confuses the process; he that succeeds
in presenting vividly to the reader an image of particular fact, or of
imagined fiction, vividly arisen in his own mind, is a writer of good
prose; and the better he succeeds in this faculty of mere exposition,
the more he excels in the supreme character of lucidity, the better his
prose. Prose which is redundant is worse than prose which is economic
in the use of words, simply because economic prose is the better
statement. Exactitude of word and idea makes better prose than the use
of many synonyms and of vague terms, simply because it ministers to
lucidity. A mass of adjectives or adverbs is usually (not always) ill
in prose, because usually (not always) the idea which the writer has to
express does not involve all these modifications; they only slip from
his pen through laziness or through his having heard them before. It is
obviously better prose to say, ‘I was tired out,’ than to say, ‘I was
wholly tired out,’ unless for any particular reason you wish to express
complete exhaustion. It is obviously better prose to say ‘the sky’ than
‘the blue sky,’ unless for any particular reason you are concerned in
your description with the colour of the sky.
But the worst enemy of prose to-day is the snobbishness of rules and
forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these
is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas
Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for
the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it
did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that
it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible.
That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you
need, and _no more_. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment,
never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master
of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, ‘except when euphony
demands it.’ I would go further; I would say that when the spoken
language has arrived, as ours has to-day, at the universal use of
the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little
distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or
excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose
must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited
when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the
character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to
the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the
distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric
and in verse the end is the emotion you desire, non-rationally, to
excite; but in prose the end is rational presentation, narration, or
statement of thesis: nothing more.
Judged by such standards, the two best prose writers in English are,
I think, Dean Inge and Mr. Gosse; for they, each of them, write on
subjects where they have much to say, with the use of no words other
than those needed for such expression, and they put those words
invariably in the right order. Cecil Chesterton is dead.
I had almost written that there is no such thing as ‘great’ prose, in
the sense in which there is ‘great’ rhetoric or ‘great’ verse. The very
best prose may be dull if the subject expressed is dull to the reader.
You will get no better prose, for instance, than Newman’s ‘Arians of
the Fourth Century.’ It is not dull to me, because I happen to be
interested in that bit of history, but it would be fiercely dull to
any reader who was not. Nevertheless it is first-rate prose. Newman,
having to write about a particular thing upon which he had made himself
immensely learned, having to tell a certain number of facts, and to
express a certain number of ideas, does so with the best choice of
words in the best order—and that is prose.
The very fact that any sound definition of prose involves many negative
and only one positive (to wit, the positive need for lucid expression)
makes it true that good prose is a common art. Excellence in prose is
not common to all: far from it; but the faculties whereby excellence
is reached are common to all. A man who is a first-rate walker, who
carries his body with an exact poise, who can walk far without fatigue,
and at a good pace, is a rare man; but we can all walk, and we all
approach in various degrees the standard that man has reached. So it
is with prose. Those who think that good prose must have something odd
about it—a few archaic words, little eighteenth-century tricks here
and there, subjunctives popped in, like currants into a cake—these
resemble men who in walking every now and then in high spirits do a
little dance for fun. They are free to do so; we are not displeased.
We cannot help noticing them (which is, perhaps, their object), and no
one is the worse for the _gambado_. But in so far as they indulge in
the fantasy, they are not walking; and if they do it the least bit too
much, they are playing the fool. A wise man said to me once, ‘Don’t
go and get your words from the artist colourman’s.’ Would that I had
remembered his words in youth as I now humbly acknowledge them in age.
But the rhetorician wisely indulges in extravagance, and as for the
poet, he may use what words he likes, and go to any extreme, or to any
excess, so long only as he hits the mark. For it is with poetry as with
love and with singing in tune. It is with poetry as with the sense of
reality. It is with poetry as with the toothache. Either you have it,
or you have it not.
There is no getting near poetry; and though there are degrees in it,
the boundary between its being and its not being is as sharp as a
razor: on the one side is It, and on the other is nothingness. By which
I do not mean to say that poetry is only found in certain violent
stabs of emotion such as Shakespeare and Keats can launch, for it often
inhabits page upon page, as throughout (I will maintain) all the Fourth
Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and countless other great achievements of the
past in every tongue. But I mean that, in a long flight or a short one,
immediate or continuous, poetry is poetry, and not to be mistaken for
anything else. Charles Kingsley (I ought to have dragged this in at
Appledore, and not have waited for Rye) said to a woman, ‘Madam, there
is poetry and there is verse; and verse is divided into two kinds—good
verse and bad verse. What you have here shown me is not poetry, it is
verse. It is not good verse, it is bad verse.’
But, really, if I go on in this endless way of discussing the difficult
trade of letters, I shall never get her nose round for the sea again.
I had almost forgot I was sailing. What! Of two such occupations, the
benediction of dealing with the sea and the degradation of scribbling,
can you forget the better for the worse? I can. I am of a fallen race.
I follow downwards.
But I am aboard the Nona again, and must put her out down-channel. This
will I now do, and sail out of Rye by the first of the ebb under too
strong a northeast wind at two o’clock in the morning with the waning
moon just rising, the sky clear, two reefs in my mainsail, the second
jib, and a reef in my foresail, knowing well that I must watch all
night, and that I shall get no sleep till morning. For it is one of the
glories of sailing that you are under the authority of the heavens, and
must submit to the whole world of water and of air, of which you are a
part, not making laws to yourself capriciously, but acting as servant
or brother of universal things.
It would be no bad thing if some one (I am not competent) were to draw
up a list of advices for the brutish man who is too poor to sail a big
boat, or is not such a fool as to desire one: I mean a list of advices
for a man who sails such a boat as the Nona: say, boats from seven tons
to twenty.
The first article in such a list would be this: _Cruising is not
racing._
But on this one could write a whole volume, with digressions upon the
general evils and corruptions of these our latter times when the Beast
has most certainly been let loose out of the Pit, and is going about
the world breathing smoke out of seven mouths, and stamping 666, with
his hoof, on the foreheads of all his elect.
For no one can doubt that the practice of sailing, which renews in us
all the past of our blood, has been abominably corrupted by racing.
I do not know whence the evil came, but I suppose it came like most
evils, from a love of money. The love of money made men admire the
possessors of it, and so they came to think of sailing as they do of
riding horses, or of any other sport—as something to be tested by what
the rich man could do. And clearly, when it came to making machines for
going fast through the water by the aid of the wind alone, the rich
man had his advantage. Then I suppose there came in also that craze
for measurable things which has done us all so much harm in the last
lifetime and a half. When I say of the Nona, ‘She is a good boat,’ when
I stroke her and she purrs, there is nothing here measurable. When I
say of that really abominable boat [_name censored_] (well worthy of
her name)—that I had rather she had been sunk at birth than continue
to sail the seas, you cannot apply a single measurable test to prove
that the solid, noble Nona is good and the flimsy, whimsy [_name
censored_] is bad; but in racing you can. Boat A gets in front of Boat
B. Any fool can test that, and to-day was made for fools.
Well, then, whatever the root of the evil, evil it is, and it has
corrupted our way of living in happy little boats. Remember, and
write it down: ‘_Cruising is not racing._’ If your boat is a home
and a companion, and at the same time a genius that takes you from
place to place and, what is much more, a good angel, revealing
unexpected things, and a comforter and an introducer to the Infinite
Verities,—and my boat is all these things,—then you must put away
from yourself altogether the idea of racing, as much as, when you
consider a wife, you must put away the intellectual woman and the
waxwork girl—both of whom may have their place for all I know. The
cruiser, the strong little, deep little boat, is all I have called it.
It is a complete satisfaction for man; but if you let in racing you are
letting in the serpent.
Here you will say, ‘Have you then never raced?’ Never, sweetheart,
except to get away from danger, which I loathe. I have never raced
another boat in my life, although I have been on other men’s boats
when they were racing, and admired their special talent, just as I
would admire the talent of a man who successfully climbed the greasy
pole. You must expect of your boat—your companion boat—a rational
behaviour. You must say to yourself that when she is doing seven knots,
she is doing well, and when she is doing nine, she is excited, and will
be the better for a night’s rest.
When you are on a long passage, even with steady weather, you had
better bank on three to four knots and no more. For what with beating,
fishing perhaps, the falling of wind, over-reefing in terror, and the
rest of it, you will not do more. I have always thought to myself,
knocking up and down the coasts of dear England, that if I did a
hundred miles in my twenty-four hours, I was doing very well indeed.
Once I spent a whole day drifting with the tide from the two Etaples
Lights to the Dune, and very nearly all the way back, but even that did
not persuade me to a motor, for, of all things abominable to God and
His Saints, I know of nothing more abominable than machinery and petrol
and the rest on board a little cruising boat.
I would rather die of thirst, ten miles off the headlands in a brazen
calm, having lost my dinghy in the previous storm, than have on board
what is monstrously called to-day an ‘auxiliary.’ The name is worthy
of the thing. By auxiliaries the Roman army perished. Further, it is
a nasty foreign sort of term. Call it the machine and tell the truth.
I am told by those who use the abomination that it is ashamed of
itself, and often will not start, as though to say, ‘You came out to
sail the seas, and I am reluctant to cheat wind, weather, and tide in
your favour.’ I will not deny that mechanism is valuable to those who
conduct huge hordes, the rich and the poor, from Europe to the New
World, but in a little cruising boat I will have none of it. It would
be foolish to be rid of it in armament, for there it does give one’s
country a great advantage, but in a little cruising boat it is as much
out of place as is electric light where one should use candles, or as
are motor-cars in the hunting of wild beasts. But I must return to
things more practical.
My next rule would be: _Get everything shipshape and, so far as you
can, keep it shipshape._
That is, see that the falls are clear, that everything is properly
stowed away; that you know where everything is to be got at in any
emergency; that you have to look for nothing; that you make the most of
every space—and the rest of it.
All this I say knowing full well that I myself am incapable of it;
but I am giving advice, I am not practising. I am expending myself
for the good of others, and what I myself do is no affair of yours.
The best known and the most tragic tag descended to us from antiquity
is, ‘_Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor._’ Some would say that
they are not only the most tragic words the great pagans bequeathed to
us—the pagans upon whom we all repose—but would add that they are
also the most ironic; for if you stop a little after the _proboque_,
and add in another voice the following two words, you will appreciate
the sardonic accent.
My own boat has usually come into port more like the disturbed nest of
a dormouse than like the spick and span arrangement which I advise.
Half the blocks will be jammed, the anchor will be caught under the
bows, and, as like as not, the fluke of it hooked over one of the
whiskers. The falls will be all tangled up together. The warping ropes
will be mixed up with the anchor chain in the fo’c’sle, so that there
is no getting at the one, or paying out the other. She will perhaps
be coming in under three reefs with hardly enough wind to move her,
because it has been blowing a few hours ago, and I have been too lazy
to shake them out. Her jib will be slack, her cabin light broken where
I have put my heel through it. A hundred other little familiar touches
will make whatever landsman is passing his time gazing out to sea from
the pier-head recognise from far off the Nona, as the Arabs recognised
the great ship of Richard the Lion-hearted, saying, ‘There comes the
red sail of the Frankish king.’ There never was such a boat as the Nona
for coming in hugger-mugger. But do as I preach, not as I practise.
Have everything in its place and a place for everything, so that, in
a flash, you can shorten sail, let go the anchor, get to your warping
ropes, or do any of those many things required by sailing-men. Even
Plato was moved to discover the way in which the horrible Phœnicians
used space aboard their ships, and had everything in order, though
Heaven knows he could have had little sympathy with the sailing of the
seas. Indeed, very few men who have written in the sentimental and
rhetorical fashion (of which he was a master) have had also a call for
the outside. But even he, I say, admired the order of shipboard. So be
it with you.
Go into all the least details, think of how any object you have aboard
will be treated by the weather. Use no ornament which the salt air can
spoil, and put not one ounce aboard beyond what you need.
My third rule is this: _Keep tight decks._
I speak with feeling here, for most of my life the rain and the salt
sea have come through upon my face as I slept, as coffee does through
those abominable new contraptions which they call ‘filters,’ and which
they put above your cup instead of boiling the coffee honestly apart
as our fathers did. Most of my life, half the days at least that I
have sailed the sea, water both salt and fresh, and always tasting
of varnish and of tar, has trickled through also upon my provisions,
notably upon bread, which it quite astonishingly spoils. Therefore I
say from experience, keep tight decks. It is very simple. You have but
to go along the seams carefully on a hot, windless day, with a spike or
a screw driver and a mallet, prodding in shredded rope, and treating it
afterwards with any one of the compositions they sell.
My fourth rule (I am giving them in no order of importance) is: _Have
an anchor heavy enough for your craft._
It is a temptation to have too light a one for the easier handling.
It is always a mistake. An anchor drags mainly through lack of head.
Holding-ground always makes a difference but, with little craft, lack
of head is the trouble. You must pay the price of heavy work for the
sake of security, and it is better to have an old-fashioned anchor than
the stockless anchors they sell now. These are all very well for large
boats, but I do not believe in them for small ones. Be at the pains
of getting your anchor up properly, and unstocking it, and also, when
you let it down, of mousing the catch. Nothing will get you into more
trouble than not being able to let go your anchor quickly, when there
is necessity; and, in that connection also, mind you keep your chain
clear. It is a good plan to tie small but conspicuous shreds of bunting
or coloured string at every two or three fathoms of the chain in the
first part of it; thus you will know how much you have let out, for
although it is always better to let out too much than too little, it is
annoying to have a great length of chain dragging about in shoal water,
and the noise of it moving may confuse you into believing that you
are dragging. I spent an abominable night once off a shingle bank in
heaving water, where the tide ran strong, from having let out too much
chain in the dark. The metal lay all along the bottom like the great
sea serpent, and the movement of the boat sent a violent wrangling of
iron up the chain all night long, so that I was perpetually running
upon deck, between poor intervals of sleep, to judge by the distant
light whether she were dragging or no. And I had good occasion for
anxiety, seeing that not far upon my lee the shoal came right up out of
the sea, with the water breaking upon it. You might think that however
much chain you had let out, your boat would lie to the end of it; but
it is not so. If you have a great deal too much chain let out in shoal
water, the weight of it holds the boat like a kind of second anchor,
and it grumbles and shifts and moves all the time.
Now the putting on of these little markings is of value, also, to
prevent you letting out too little chain. The rule of thumb is: Three
times as much chain as there is depth of water. This, in my youth
(and for my youth I must be forgiven), I neglected in the port of
Harwich, thinking it was nearer high tide than it was, so the little
ship got adrift, and was rescued, or, as the man preferred to call it,
‘salvaged,’ by a barge called the Lily. The barge had no right to be
called the Lily, for it was foully dirty, and as black as soot. The
owner of the Lily claimed one third of the value of my boat, ‘Because,’
said he, ‘it was salvaged below London Bridge.’ He attached to this
formula a magical importance. I offered him two pounds. He wanted much
more. I appealed for help to a ship that was lying in that harbour, and
they sent off a boat’s crew for me to convince the man. He took the
offer I made him, but said that he had been bullied. I do not think he
had. I think two pounds is a fair price to pay for the trouble a man
may have been at to put a boat out, and tie a rope on to a drifting
craft of that size. But still he complained that he had ‘salvaged her
below London Bridge,’ and had a right to one third of her value. But
there again, what was the value of any boat in which I had already
sailed?
My fifth rule would be: _Don’t keep too close to the wind; let her
sail; keep her full._
This attempt to be always pointing up is one of the curses brought in
by racing. Your own hearty middle-class boat can never point close to
the wind. If she can, it is a bad sign, for she will be putting on
airs. Be content if she will lie and sail at an angle of forty-five
degrees from the direction in which the wind is blowing. If she cannot
do that she is a bad boat, but if she can do that, she is well enough.
Now this is called ‘within four points of the wind,’ being one eighth
of the thirty-two points that make up the whole round of the compass.
There are all sorts of smart craft which will point much closer than
that, and there are particular kinds of rigs, used honestly and not for
racing at all, which will keep much closer, I am told. Certainly the
London barge seems to keep closer, that marvellous rig, that perfection
of rigs for its purpose; and the Norfolk wherries, shooting up the
rivers, seem to keep quite miraculously close, though I think in this
their great momentum and the flood of the water helps them. But as for
you, sailing ordinarily upon the sea, be quite content if she does her
duty with the wind halfway between beam and bow. It is here as it is
with most things in life, be content with the sound average, keeping
the limits which God has set all around. Do not wish for too long a
life, for too large a fortune, or for too much honour. Eat your peck of
dirt before you die; take the rough with the smooth; consider that it
is all in a day’s work; expect rain and fine. In general, write out a
list of all the commandment-proverbs and learn that list by heart. Then
break them.
They that sail too close to the wind have great difficulty in bringing
their boat round, especially in a seaway, and there is nearly always
some of their canvas (if it is an honest boat, and not one of your
millionaires’ models) not doing all it should when you lie too close.
In connection with this, I would add (without making it a separate
rule): _Take care never to pin the boat—that is, never get your
mainsheet too taut_; give the boom plenty of angle. Let your mainsail
take the full wind. If you look at the pictures of the old boats in the
time when men were men, you will see that they sailed with easy sails
bellying, and were not concerned to look smart with stiff, boardlike
sails. Of course, in the racing-machines, you get more speed by these
tricks, but it is no way to treat a good boat of stock and sound
ancestry. It is driving her and playing tricks with her. Be content to
feel the power of the wind.