IV

I have this, at any rate, to say of sea-life: a man is pre-eminently

conscious of a Soul. I feel, remembering the blithe positivism of my

early note, that I am here scarcely consistent. As I stood by the rail

this morning at four o'clock--the icy fingers of the wind ruffled my

hair so that the roots tingled deliciously, and a low, greenish

cloud-bank, which was Ireland, lay nebulously against our port bow--I

felt a change take place. It was almost physical, organic. The dawn

grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the coming sun reached out

across the grey wastes of the St. George's Channel. I am loth to use

the trite metaphor of "a spiritual dawn." By a strange twist of

things, my barest hint of a soul within me, that is to say, the

faintest glimmer of the ever-increasing purpose of my being--the

moment it showed through, the outer world, including my own self, had

always greeted it with inextinguishable laughter. Perhaps because the

purpose was always so very immature, so very uncertain. I wanted--I

hardly knew what. My ideas of morality were so terrible that I left it

alone, on one side, for a time, and charged full tilt at art. I

shouted that I thought music a disease, and musicians crushed me. I

did not mean that; but I could get no nearer to what I did mean in

any other phrase. I told hard, practical business men that they were

dreamers and visionaries; and they are still dreaming.

But the Angel of the Spirit does not move in any prescribed path, or

make his visits to any time-table. I think I heard the far-off beating

of his wings this morning, as we swept up-channel towards the Clyde,

and I think I was promised deeper knowledge of Love and Life than

heretofore. I know that with the dawn came a sense of infinite power

and vision, as though the cool wind were the rushing music of the

spheres, and the rosy cloudland the outer portals of the Kingdom of

God.

And, indeed, I have had my reward. I had come from Italy, where I had

wandered through churches and galleries, and had seen the supreme

excellence of a generation whose like we shall not see again, and as

we came up that stately firth and discovered a generation as supreme

in their art as the Italians of the sixteenth century were in theirs,

I held my breath.

From Greenock to Glasgow resounded the clangour of hammers and the

thunder of mechanism. Plate by plate, rivet by rivet, and beam by

beam, there grew before my very eyes the shapes of half a hundred

ships. I see more clearly still, now, what I meant by insisting on the

conservation of intellectual energy. My friend points piteously to

past periods, and says, "They can't do it now, old man." And I smile

and point to those steel steamships, growing in grace and beauty as I

watch, and I say, "They couldn't do _that_ then, old man!" Just as the

physical energy in this universe is a definite totality, so is the

intellectual or spiritual energy. The Da Vinci of to-day leaves his

Last Supper undepicted; but he drives a Tube through the London clay.

Cellini no longer casts a Perseus and alternates a murder with a

_Trattato_; he builds engines and railroads and ships. Michael Angelo

smites no sibyls from the living stone, but he has carved the face of

the very earth to his design. And though no fair youth steps forth to

paint the unearthly nimbus-light around the brows of his beloved

madonna, I count it fair exchange that from every reef and point of

this our sea-girt isle there shines a radiance none can watch without

a catching of the breath.

V

It is a far call from such musings to the Skipper, whom I encountered

as I was in the midst of them. It is only the bald truth to say that

I had not then considered him to be a human being. Even now I am

uncertain how to describe him, for we do not meet often. He is a tall,

powerfully built, slow-moving man, strong with the strength of those

who live continually at sea. Something apart from temporary bias made

me look distastefully upon his personality. I resolved to fasten it

upon my dissecting board, and analyse it, relegating it if possible to

its order, genus, and species. Let me try.

A single glance at the specimen before us, gentlemen, tells us that we

have to deal with a remarkable case of arrested development. Although

inexperienced observers might imagine traces of the British colonel,

as found in Pall Mall, in the bristling white moustache, swollen

neck, and red gills, we find neither public school education nor

inefficiency much in evidence anywhere. On the contrary, education

is in a rudimentary condition, though with slightly protuberent

mathematical and fictional glands. Inefficiency, too, is quite absent,

the organ having had but small opportunity to perform its functions.

The subject, we may conclude, gentlemen, has been accustomed to a sort

of mathematical progression and having to ascertain its whereabouts in

the water by "taking the sun." It has been fed chiefly on novels, food

which requires no digestive organs. It has a horror of land generally,

and should never be looked for "on the rocks." You observe this

accumulation of yellow tissue round the heart. The subject is

particularly fond of gold, which metal eventually strangles the heart

and renders its action ineffective and unreliable.

Longfellow, if I remember rightly, drew a very spirited comparison

between the building and launching of a ship and the building and

launching of a state. The state, said he, is a ship. M-yes, in a

poetical way. But no poetry is needed to say that a ship is a state. I

maintain that it is the most perfect state yet conceived; and it is

almost startling to think that so perfect an institution as a ship can

be run successfully without morality, without honesty, without

religion, without even ceremonial--without, in fact, any of those

props usually considered by Tories and Nonconformists to be so vital

to the body-politic.

For, observe, here on this ship we have some forty human beings, each

of whom has certain clearly defined duties to perform, each of whom

owes instant and absolute obedience to his superior officer; each of

whom receives a definite amount of food, drink, tobacco, and sleep

per day; each of whom is bound for a certain period to remain in the

state, but is free to go or stay when that period terminates; each of

whom is at liberty to be of any persuasion he please, of any political

party he please, to be of any nationality he please, provided he speak

the language of the state; each of whom is medically attended by the

state; and, finally, each of whom can snap his fingers at every

Utopia-monger since Plato, and call him a fool who makes paradises for

other fools to dwell in. So, I say, the ship is a perfect state, its

very perfection being attested by the desire of its inhabitants to end

their days elsewhere.

Joking aside, though, I fear my notions of sailor-men have been sadly

jarred since I began to study them. Writing with one eye on this

master-mariner of ours, I call to mind certain conceptions of the

sailor-man which my youthful mind gathered from books and relations.

He was an honest, God-fearing man; slightly superstitious certainly,

slightly forcible in his language at times, slightly garrulous when

telling you about the _Sarah Sands_; but all these were as spots on

the sun. He was just and upright towards all men, never dreamed of

making money "on his own," and read prayers aloud on Sunday morning to

the assembled seamen.

Humph! I own I cannot imagine this skipper reading anything aloud

to his crew except the Riot Act, and he would not get more than

half-way through that if his cartridges were dry. There is a brutal,

edge-of-civilization look in his cold blue eye which harmonizes ill

with the Brixton address on the letters he sends to his wife.

Ah, well! Sometimes, when I think of this man and his like, when I

think of my puny attempts to creep into their skins, I must need

laugh, lest, like Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I

know of him? What is there in my armoury to pierce this impenetrable

outer-man? Once, when I was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an

epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping over an immense

and beautiful mountain, crushing, destroying, manufacturing, and the

burden of their cry was a scornful text of Ruskin's--"We do not come

here to look at the mountain"; and they shouted, "Stand aside." And

then, when the mountain lay blackened, and dead, and disembowelled,

out of the hordes of slaves came a youth who would not work and

thereby lose his soul; so he set out on a pilgrimage. And the burden

of _his_ song was "the hearts of men."

"_And the cry went up to the roofs again,

Show me the way to the hearts of men._"

But, alas! by the time I had got back into blank verse again, he had

fallen in love, and as far as I know he lived happy ever after. But I

often think of his clear, boyish voice singing, "Show me the way to

the hearts of men."

Gilbert Chesterton, whose genius I hope my friend will some day

appreciate, once wrote a strange "crazy tale," in which he meets a

madman who had stood in a field; and this seemingly silent pasture had

presented to his ears an unspeakable uproar. And he says, "I could

hear the daisies grow!" Well, I have sometimes thought of that when in

some roaring street of London. Could I but hear men and women think as

they pass along! To what a tiny hum would the traffic fall when that

titanic clangour met my ears! I imagine Walter Pater had this thought

in mind when he says, so finely, of young Gaston de Latour: "He became

aware, suddenly, of the great stream of human tears, falling always

through the shadows of the world."

How good that is! But, alas! So few read Pater. It is true men cannot

possibly read everything. To quote another exquisite thinker, who I

fear drops more and more into oblivion: "A man would die in the first

cloisters" if he tried to read all the books of the world. But it

is strange so few read those eight or nine volumes, so beautifully

printed, which are Pater's legacy to us. How they would be repaid by

the delicate dexterity of his art, the wonderful music of his style!

But I digress.

I have no doubt that many monarchs would envy the life of a steamship

captain at sea. Indeed, his duties are non-existent, his XXXX

responsibility enormous. He bears the same relation to his company

that a Viceroy of India bears to the Home Government. So extended were

his powers that he could take the steamer into a port, sell her cargo,

sell the vessel herself, discharge her crew, and disappear for ever.

It is a sad pill for us sentimentalists that those who live by and on

the sea have less sentiment than any others. These masters are wholly

intent on the things of which money is the exchange. They have

never yet seen "the light that never was, on sea or land." Their

utmost flight above "pickings" and "store commissions" is a morose

evangelicalism, a sort of ill-breeding illumined by the smoky light of

the Apocalypse. But they never relax their iron grasp on this world.

Perhaps because they feel the supernal tugging at them so persistently

they hold the tighter to the tangible. They are ashamed, I think, to

let any divinity show through. "And ye shall be as gods" was not

uttered of them. The _romance_--that is the word!--the _romance_ of

their lives is never mirrored in their souls. And the realisation of

this has sometimes led me to imagine that--it was always so! I mean

that there was nothing poetic to Hercules about the Augean task, when

the pungent smell of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he bent a

sweat-dewed face to that mighty scavenging once more: that there was

nothing poetic to Caesar about the Rubicon: nothing poetic to Clive

about India. The world seems to have an invincible prejudice against

men who see the romance in the work they are doing. The footballing,

cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works

in an office in Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons's, and plays

football at Shepherd's Bush, sees no romance in his own life, which is

in reality thrilling with adventure, but thinks Captain Kettle the

hero of an ideal existence. Captain Kettle, bringing coal from Dunston

Staiths to Genoa, suffers day after day of boredom, and reads Marie

Corelli and Hall Caine with a relish only equalled by the girl

typewriters in the second-class carriages of the eight-fifteen up from

Croydon or Hampstead Heath. These people cannot see the sunlight of

romance shining on their own faces! I observe in myself a frantic

resentment when I fail to convince the other officers that they are

heroes. They regard such crazy notions as dangerous and scarcely

decent. You can now perceive why religion occasionally gains such a

hold upon these men. To be uplifted about work, or nature, or love,

is derogatory to their dignity as bond-slaves of the industrial world;

but in the realms of the infinite future, in the Kingdom of God, where

"there shall be no more sea," their souls break away from the

harbour-mud, and they put out on the illimitable ocean of belief.