All peoples that dwell by the sea sometimes venture out upon it.
The boys are eager to swim and sail, and the men may be turned into
habitual navigators by the spirit of enterprise or by necessity. But
some races take to the water more kindly than others, either because
they love the waves more or the furrow less. We may imagine that
sheer distress drove the Norse fishermen and pirates into their open
boats. The ocean they explored was rough and desolate; the fish and the
pillaged foreigner had to compensate them for their privations. They
quitted their fiords and brackish islands dreaming of happier lands.
But with the Greeks and the English the case was somewhat different.
There are no happier lands than theirs; and they set forth for the most
part on summer seas, towards wilder and less populous regions. They
went armed, of course, and ready to give battle: they had no scruples
about carrying home anything they might purloin or obtain by enormously
advantageous barter, but they were not in quest of softer climes or
foreign models; their home remained their ideal. They were scarcely
willing to settle in foreign parts unless they could live their home
life there.
This love of home merged in their minds with the love of liberty; it
was a loyalty inwardly grounded and not a mere tribute to habit or
external influences. They could consequently retain their manners
wherever they went, and could found free colonies, almost as Greek or
as English as the mother country; for it was not Greece that originally
formed the Greeks nor England the English, but the other way round; the
Greeks and the English, wherever they might be, spun their institutions
about them like a cocoon. Certainly the geographical environment was
favourable; the skies and waters that embosomed them--when in their
migrations they had reached those climes--simply met their native
genius half-way and allowed it to bloom as it had not elsewhere. But
the winds could carry that same seed to fructify in other soils; and
as there were many Greek cities sprung from one, so there are several
local Englands in Great Britain, and others all over the world. Even
people who are not heirs of these nations according to the flesh may
assimilate their spirit in some measure. All men are Greek in the best
sense in so far as they are rational, and live and think on the human
scale; and all are English in so far as their souls are individual,
each the imperturbably dominant cell in its own organism, each faithful
to its inner oracle.
Life at sea is very favourable to this empire of personal liberty.
The inner man, the hereditary Psyche that breeds the body and its
discursive thoughts, craves to exercise ascendancy; it is essentially a
formative principle, an organ of government. Mere solitude and monastic
reverie, such as a hermit or satirist may enjoy even in great cities,
weary and oppress the Englishman. He wants to do something or else to
play at something. His thoughts are not vivid and substantial enough
for company; his passions are too nebulous to define their innate
objects, until accident offers something that perhaps may serve. At sea
there is always something doing: you must mind the helm, the sails, or
the engines; you must keep things shipshape; brasses must be always
bright and eyes sharp; decorum is essential, since discipline is so;
you may even dress for dinner and read prayers on Sunday. This routine
does not trespass on the liberty and reserve of your inner man. You can
exchange a few hearty commonplaces with the other officers and sailors,
or even with a casual passenger; now and then you may indulge in a long
talk, pacing the deck beneath the stars. There is space, there is the
constant shadow of danger, the chance of some adventure at sea or on
a strange shore. There is a continual test and tension of character.
There are degrees of authority and of competence, but the sailor's art
is finite; his ship, however complicated and delicate a creature, has
a known structure and known organs; she will not do anything without
a reason; she is not too wayward (as is the course of things on terra
firma) for a clear-headed man to understand nor for a firm hand to
steer. Maritime fortune in its uncertainty has after all not many forms
of caprice; its worst tricks are familiar; your life-belt is hanging
over your bunk, and you are ready.
Every one grumbles at his lot and at his profession; but what is man
that he should ask for more? These buffeting winds, these long hours of
deep breathing, these habits of quick decision and sharp movement whet
your appetite; you relish your solid plain food, whilst your accustomed
drink smooths over the petty worries of the day, and liberates your
private musings; and what a companionable thing your pipe is! The
women--dear, dogmatic, fussy angels--are not here; that is a relief;
and yet you are counting the weeks before you can return to them at
home. And all those tender episodes of a more fugitive sort, how
merrily you think them over now! more merrily perhaps than you enacted
them, since you need not call to mind the little shabby accompaniments
and false notes that may have marred them in reality. Your remoter
future, too, is smiling enough for an honest man who believes in God
and is not a snob in the things of the spirit. You see in your mind's
eye a cottage on some sunny hillside over-looking the sea; near it,
from a signal-post that is a ship's mast, the flags are flapping in
the breeze; your children are playing on the beach--except the eldest,
perhaps, already a sailor. There is a blessed simplicity about the sea,
with its vast inhumanity islanding and freeing the humanity of man.
12