“THE MOON SWAYS OCEANS AND PROVOKES THE HOUND.”
The hound keeps baying at the moon but gets no answer from her, and she
continues silently her mighty influence in causing the tides of the
earth, such a mighty influence as I have seen in the Bay of Fundy, and
on the coast of Arcadia where the tide rises some 40 feet--you see it
like a high wall rolling in towards you on the beach! It exalts one,
and the base things of earth vanish from one’s thoughts. So also may
the contents of this book be like-minded by a mighty silence against
baying hounds! I hope to name no living name except for praise, and
even against envy I hope I may be silent. Envy caused the first murder.
It was the biggest and nastiest of all Cæsar’s wounds:
“See what a rent the _envious_ Casca made.”
My impenetrable armour is Contempt and Fortitude.
Well, yesterday September 7th, 1919, we completed our conversations for
the six articles in _The Times_, and to-day we begin this book with
similar talks.
My reluctance to this book being published before my death is
increasingly definite; but I have put my hand to the plough, because
of the overbearing argument that I cannot resist, that I shall be
helping to
(_a_) Avoid national bankruptcy.
(_b_) Avert the insanity and wickedness of building a Navy against the
United States.
(_c_) Establish a union with America, as advocated by John Bright and
Mr. Roosevelt.
(_d_) Enable the United States and British Navies to say to all other
Navies “If you build more, we will fight you, here and now. We’ll
‘Copenhagen’ you, without remorse.”
This is why I have consented, with such extreme reluctance, to write
letters to _The Times_ and dictate six articles; and having thus
entered into the fight, I follow the advice of Polonius--_Vestigia
nulla retrorsum_. And so, to-day, I will begin this book--not an
autobiography, but a collection of memories of a life-long war against
limpets, parasites, sycophants, and jellyfish--at one time there were
19½ millions sterling of ’em. At times they stung; but that only made
me more relentless, ruthless and remorseless.
Why I so hate a book, and those articles in _The Times_, and even the
letters, is that the printed word never can convey the virtue of the
soul. The _aroma_ is not there--it evaporates when printed--a scentless
product, flat and stale like a bad bottle of champagne. It is like
an embalmed corpse. Personality, which is the soul of man, is absent
from the reader. It is a man’s personality that is the living thing,
and in the other world that is the thing you will meet. I have often
asked ecclesiastics--“What period of life will the resurrected body
represent?” It has always been a poser for them! There will not be any
bodies, thank God! we have had quite enough trouble with them down
below here. St. Paul distinctly says that it is a spiritual body in the
Resurrection. It is our Personalities that will talk to each other in
Heaven. I don’t care at what age of a man’s life, even when toothless
and decrepit and indistinguishable as he may then be, yet like another
Rip Van Winkle, when he speaks you know him. However, that’s a
digression.
What I want to rub in is this: The man who reads this in his armchair
in the Athenæum Club would take it all quite differently if I could
walk up and down in front of him and shake my fist in his face.
(It was a lovely episode this recalls to my mind. King Edward--God
bless him!--said to me once in one of my moments of wild enthusiasm:
“Would you kindly leave off shaking your fist in my face?”)
I tried once, so as to make the dead print more lifelike,
using different kinds of type--big Roman block letters for the
“fist-shaking,” large italics for the cajoling, small italics for
the facts, and ordinary print for the fool. The printer’s price was
ruinous, and the effect ludicrous. But I made this compromise and he
agreed to it--whenever the following words occurred they were to be
printed in large capitals: “Fool,” “Ass,” “Congenital Idiot.” Myself,
I don’t know that I am singular, but I seldom read a book. I look at
the pages as you look at a picture, and grasp it that way. Of course,
I know what the skunks will say when they read this--“Didn’t I tell
you he was superficial? and here he is judged out of his own mouth.”
I do confess to having only one idea at a time, and King Edward found
fault with me and said it would be my ruin; so I replied: “Anyhow, I am
stopping a fortnight with you at Balmoral, and I never expected that
when I entered the Navy, penniless, friendless, and forlorn!” Besides,
didn’t Solomon and Mr. Disraeli both say that whatever you did you were
to do it with all your might? You can’t do more than one thing at a
time with all your might--that’s Euclid. Mr. Disraeli added something
to Solomon--he said “there was nothing you couldn’t have if only you
wanted it enough.” And such is my only excuse for whatever success
I have had. I have only had one idea at a time. _Longo intervallo_,
I have been a humble, and I endeavoured to be an unostentatious,
follower of our Immortal Hero. Some venomous reptile (his name has
disappeared--I tried in vain to get hold of it at Mr. Maggs’s bookshop
only the other day) called Nelson “vain and egotistical.” Good God!
if he seemed so, how could he help it? Some nip-cheese clerk at the
Admiralty wrote to him for a statement of his services, to justify his
being given a pension for his wounds. His arm off, his eye out, his
scalp torn off at the Nile--that clerk must have known that quite well
but it elicited a gem. Let us thank God for that clerk! How this shows
one the wonderful working of the Almighty Providence, and no doubt
whatever that fools are an essential feature in the great scheme of
creation. Why!--didn’t some geese cackling save Rome? Nelson told this
clerk he had been in a hundred fights and he enumerated his wounds; and
his letter lives to illumine his fame.
The Almighty has a place for nip-cheese clerks as much as for the
sweetest wild flower that perishes in a day.
It is really astounding that Nelson’s life has not yet been properly
written. All that has been written is utterly unrepresentative of him.
The key-notes of his being were imagination, audacity, tenderness.
He never flogged a man. (One of my first Captains flogged every man
in the ship and was tried for cruelty, but being the scion of a noble
house he was promoted to a bigger ship instead of being shot.) It
oozed out of Nelson that he felt in himself the certainty of effecting
what to other men seemed rash and even maniacal rashness; and this
involved his seeming vain and egotistical. Like Napoleon’s presence on
the field of battle that meant 40,000 men, so did the advent of Nelson
in a fleet (this is a fact) make every common sailor in that fleet as
sure of victory as he was breathing. I have somewhere a conversation
of two sailors that was overheard and taken down after the battle
of Trafalgar, which illustrates what I have been saying. Great odds
against ’em--but going into action the odds were not even thought of,
they were not dreamt of, by these common men. Nelson’s presence was
victory. However, I must add here that he hated the word Victory. What
he wanted was Annihilation. That Crowning Mercy (as Cromwell would have
called it), the battle of the Nile, deserves the wonderful pen of Lord
Rosebery, but he won’t do it. Warburton in “The Crescent and the Cross”
gives a faint inkling of what the glorious chronicle should be. For
two years, that frail body of his daily tormented with pain (he was a
martyr to what they now call neuritis--I believe they called it then
“_tic douloureux_”), he never put his foot outside his ship, watching
off Toulon. The Lord Mayor and Citizens of London sent him a gold
casket for keeping the hostile fleet locked up in Toulon. He wrote back
to say he would take the casket, but he never wanted to keep the French
Fleet in harbour; he wanted them to come out. But he did keep close in
to Toulon for fear of missing them coming out in darkness or in a fog.
In his two years off Toulon Nelson only made £6,000 of prize money,
while it was a common thing for the Captain of a single man-of-war off
the Straits of Gibraltar to make a haul of £20,000, and Prize-Money
Admirals in crowds basked in Bath enriched beyond the dreams of
avarice. Nelson practically died a pauper.
Now this is another big digression which I must apologise for, but
that’s the damnable part of a book. If one could walk up and down
and talk to someone, it never strikes them as incongruous having a
digression.
I wind up this chapter, as I began it, with the fervent intention of
avoiding any reference to those who have assailed me. I will only print
their affectionate letters to me, for which I still retain the most
affectionate feelings towards them. I regret now that on one occasion
I did so far lose my self-control as to tell a specific Judas to take
back his thirty pieces of silver and go and hang himself. However,
eventually he did get hanged, so it was all right.