Notes on Life & Letters
by Joseph Conrad
Contents:
Author's note
PART I--Letters
BOOKS--1905.
HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905
ALPHONSE DAUDET--1898
GUY DE MAUPASSANT--1904
ANATOLE FRANCE--1904
TURGENEV--1917
STEPHEN CRANE--A NOTE WITHOUT DATES--1919
TALES OF THE SEA--1898
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA--1898
A HAPPY WANDERER--1910
THE LIFE BEYOND--1910
THE ASCENDING EFFORT--1910
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS--AN APPRECIATION--1907
PART II--Life
AUTOCRACY AND WAR--1905
THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM--1916
POLAND REVISITED--1915
FIRST NEWS--1918
WELL DONE--1918
TRADITION--1918
CONFIDENCE--1919
FLIGHT--1917
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC--1912
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF THE
TITANIC--1912
PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS--1914
A FRIENDLY PLACE
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I don't know whether I ought to offer an apology for this
collection which has more to do with life than with letters. Its
appeal is made to orderly minds. This, to be frank about it, is a
process of tidying up, which, from the nature of things, cannot be
regarded as premature. The fact is that I wanted to do it myself
because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the considerations
of worthiness or unworthiness of the small (but unbroken) pieces
collected within the covers of this volume. Of course it may be
said that I might have taken up a broom and used it without saying
anything about it. That, certainly, is one way of tidying up.
But it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all
this matter as removable rubbish. All those things had a place in
my life. Whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and
ranged on the shelf--this shelf--I cannot say, and, frankly, I have
not allowed my mind to dwell on the question. I was afraid of
thinking myself into a mood that would hurt my feelings; for those
pieces of writing, whatever may be the comment on their display,
appertain to the character of the man.
And so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do,
but in no way polished, extending from the year '98 to the year
'20, a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent
attitudes: Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent,
Conrad controversial. Well, yes! A one-man show--or is it merely
the show of one man?
The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and
Things that have passed away, will be Conrad EN PANTOUFLES. It is
a constitutional inability. SCHLAFROCK UND PANTOFFELN! Not that!
Never! . . . I don't know whether I dare boast like a certain South
American general who used to say that no emergency of war or peace
had ever found him "with his boots off"; but I may say that
whenever the various periodicals mentioned in this book called on
me to come out and blow the trumpet of personal opinions or strike
the pensive lute that speaks of the past, I always tried to pull on
my boots first. I didn't want to do it, God knows! Their Editors,
to whom I beg to offer my thanks here, made me perform mainly by
kindness but partly by bribery. Well, yes! Bribery? What can you
expect? I never pretended to be better than the people in the next
street, or even in the same street.
This volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is
as near as I shall ever come to DESHABILLE in public; and perhaps
it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if
it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a
little dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and
receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy but
for other reasons that cannot be helped: because the leaves fall,
the water flows, the clock ticks with that horrid pitiless
solemnity which you must have observed in the ticking of the hall
clock at home. For reasons like that. Yes! It recedes. And this
was the chance to afford one more view of it--even to my own eyes.
The section within this volume called Letters explains itself,
though I do not pretend to say that it justifies its own existence.
It claims nothing in its defence except the right of speech which I
believe belongs to everybody outside a Trappist monastery. The
part I have ventured, for shortness' sake, to call Life, may
perhaps justify itself by the emotional sincerity of the feelings
to which the various papers included under that head owe their
origin. And as they relate to events of which everyone has a date,
they are in the nature of sign-posts pointing out the direction my
thoughts were compelled to take at the various cross-roads. If
anybody detects any sort of consistency in the choice, this will be
only proof positive that wisdom had nothing to do with it. Whether
right or wrong, instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only
adds a deeper shade to its inherent mystery. The appearance of
intellectuality these pieces may present at first sight is merely
the result of the arrangement of words. The logic that may be
found there is only the logic of the language. But I need not
labour the point. There will be plenty of people sagacious enough
to perceive the absence of all wisdom from these pages. But I
believe sufficiently in human sympathies to imagine that very few
will question their sincerity. Whatever delusions I may have
suffered from I have had no delusions as to the nature of the facts
commented on here. I may have misjudged their import: but that is
the sort of error for which one may expect a certain amount of
toleration.
The only paper of this collection which has never been published
before is the Note on the Polish Problem. It was written at the
request of a friend to be shown privately, and its "Protectorate"
idea, sprung from a strong sense of the critical nature of the
situation, was shaped by the actual circumstances of the time. The
time was about a month before the entrance of Roumania into the
war, and though, honestly, I had seen already the shadow of coming
events I could not permit my misgivings to enter into and destroy
the structure of my plan. I still believe that there was some
sense in it. It may certainly be charged with the appearance of
lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing of many
stones; but my object was practical and I had to consider warily
the preconceived notions of the people to whom it was implicitly
addressed, and also their unjustifiable hopes. They were
unjustifiable, but who was to tell them that? I mean who was wise
enough and convincing enough to show them the inanity of their
mental attitude? The whole atmosphere was poisoned with visions
that were not so much false as simply impossible. They were also
the result of vague and unconfessed fears, and that made their
strength. For myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, I
was careful not to allude to their character because I did not want
the Note to be thrown away unread. And then I had to remember that
the impossible has sometimes the trick of coming to pass to the
confusion of minds and often to the crushing of hearts.
Of the other papers I have nothing special to say. They are what
they are, and I am by now too hardened a sinner to feel ashamed of
insignificant indiscretions. And as to their appearance in this
form I claim that indulgence to which all sinners against
themselves are entitled.
J. C.
1920.
PART I--LETTERS
BOOKS--1905.
I.
"I have not read this author's books, and if I have read them I
have forgotten what they were about."
These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a
hundred years ago, publicly, from the seat of justice, by a civic
magistrate. The words of our municipal rulers have a solemnity and
importance far above the words of other mortals, because our
municipal rulers more than any other variety of our governors and
masters represent the average wisdom, temperament, sense and virtue
of the community. This generalisation, it ought to be promptly
said in the interests of eternal justice (and recent friendship),
does not apply to the United States of America. There, if one may
believe the long and helpless indignations of their daily and
weekly Press, the majority of municipal rulers appear to be thieves
of a particularly irrepressible sort. But this by the way. My
concern is with a statement issuing from the average temperament
and the average wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and
uttered by a civic magistrate obviously without fear and without
reproach.
I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence.
"I have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, "and
if I have read them I have forgotten." This is excellent caution.
And I like his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of
manly sincerity. As a reported piece of prose this declaration is
easy to read and not difficult to believe. Many books have not
been read; still more have been forgotten. As a piece of civic
oratory this declaration is strikingly effective. Calculated to
fall in with the bent of the popular mind, so familiar with all
forms of forgetfulness, it has also the power to stir up a subtle
emotion while it starts a train of thought--and what greater force
can be expected from human speech? But it is in naturalness that
this declaration is perfectly delightful, for there is nothing more
natural than for a grave City Father to forget what the books he
has read once--long ago--in his giddy youth maybe--were about.
And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written
as novels. I proceed thus cautiously (following my illustrious
example) because being without fear and desiring to remain as far
as possible without reproach, I confess at once that I have not
read them.
I have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have
read them, I never met one yet with the talent of lucid exposition
sufficiently developed to give me a connected account of what they
are about. But they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as
such, in their ever increasing, jostling multitude, they are worthy
of regard, admiration, and compassion.
Especially of compassion. It has been said a long time ago that
books have their fate. They have, and it is very much like the
destiny of man. They share with us the great incertitude of
ignominy or glory--of severe justice and senseless persecution--of
calumny and misunderstanding--the shame of undeserved success. Of
all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the
nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions,
our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our
persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us
in their precarious hold on life. A bridge constructed according
to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long,
honourable and useful career. But a book as good in its way as the
bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art
of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment
of life. Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration,
and the vanity of human minds, those that the Muses would love best
lie more than all others under the menace of an early death.
Sometimes their defects will save them. Sometimes a book fair to
see may--to use a lofty expression--have no individual soul.
Obviously a book of that sort cannot die. It can only crumble into
dust. But the best of books drawing sustenance from the sympathy
and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men's
memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very
fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.
No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the
formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed
combination of drugs. This is not because some books are not
worthy of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are
dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human
sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of
virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs and theories that,
indestructible in themselves, always change their form--often in
the lifetime of one fleeting generation.
II.
Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious
claim on our compassion. The art of the novelist is simple. At
the same time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most
liable to be obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries,
the one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the
heart of the artist. After all, the creation of a world is not a
small undertaking except perhaps to the divinely gifted. In truth
every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or
little, in which he can honestly believe. This world cannot be
made otherwise than in his own image: it is fated to remain
individual and a little mysterious, and yet it must resemble
something already familiar to the experience, the thoughts and the
sensations of his readers. At the heart of fiction, even the least
worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if only the
truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in
the novels of Dumas the father. But the fair truth of human
delicacy can be found in Mr. Henry James's novels; and the comical,
appalling truth of human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of
existence lives in the monstrous world created by Balzac. The
pursuit of happiness by means lawful and unlawful, through
resignation or revolt, by the clever manipulation of conventions or
by solemn hanging on to the skirts of the latest scientific theory,
is the only theme that can be legitimately developed by the
novelist who is the chronicler of the adventures of mankind amongst
the dangers of the kingdom of the earth. And the kingdom of this
earth itself, the ground upon which his individualities stand,
stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful record. To
encompass all this in one harmonious conception is a great feat;
and even to attempt it deliberately with serious intention, not
from the senseless prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable
ambition. For it requires some courage to step in calmly where
fools may be eager to rush. As a distinguished and successful
French novelist once observed of fiction, "C'est un art TROP
difficile."
It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope
with his task. He imagines it more gigantic than it is. And yet
literary creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human
activity has no value but on the condition of not excluding the
fullest recognition of all the more distinct forms of action. This
condition is sometimes forgotten by the man of letters, who often,
especially in his youth, is inclined to lay a claim of exclusive
superiority for his own amongst all the other tasks of the human
mind. The mass of verse and prose may glimmer here and there with
the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of human effort it has
no special importance. There is no justificative formula for its
existence any more than for any other artistic achievement. With
the rest of them it is destined to be forgotten, without, perhaps,
leaving the faintest trace. Where a novelist has an advantage over
the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege of
freedom--the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing
his innermost beliefs--which should console him for the hard
slavery of the pen.
III.
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a
novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of
some romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of
its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness which,
after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree
of distinguished ancestors. It is a weakness of inferior minds
when it is not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their
talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a
school. Such, for instance, are the high priests who have
proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism. But Stendhal
himself would have accepted no limitation of his freedom.
Stendhal's mind was of the first order. His spirit above must be
raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation. For
the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice
hides behind the literary formulas. And Stendhal was pre-eminently
courageous. He wrote his two great novels, which so few people
have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty.
It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the
freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require from him many acts of
faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying
hope; and hope, it will not be contested, implies all the piety of
effort and renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the
magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.
We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the
intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one
feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its
arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at
various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of
proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That frame
of mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the
art of fiction. It gives an author--goodness only knows why--an
elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more
dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his
feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most
exalted moments of creation.
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think
that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no
impossibility of its being made so. If the flight of imaginative
thought may be allowed to rise superior to many moralities current
amongst mankind, a novelist who would think himself of a superior
essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling.
To have the gift of words is no such great matter. A man furnished
with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by
the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other qualities of
character and temperament are necessary to make him either one or
the other. Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred
thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I
would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of
giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not
have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of their
errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that
humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to
him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look
with a large forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are
by no means the outcome of malevolence, but depend on their
education, their social status, even their professions. The good
artist should expect no recognition of his toil and no admiration
of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be appraised
and his genius cannot possibly mean anything to the illiterate who,
even from the dreadful wisdom of their evoked dead, have, so far,
culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I would wish him to
enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he
grows in mental power. It is in the impartial practice of life, if
anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found,
rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that
particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature the
strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which
it is his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling
down his inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of
which he knows nothing. And I would not grudge him the proud
illusion that will come sometimes to a writer: the illusion that
his achievement has almost equalled the greatness of his dream.
For what else could give him the serenity and the force to hug to
his breast as a thing delightful and human, the virtue, the
rectitude and sagacity of his own City, declaring with simple
eloquence through the mouth of a Conscript Father: "I have not
read this author's books, and if I have read them I have forgotten
. . ."
HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905
The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry
James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose
accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not
all his books. There is no collected edition to date, such as some
of "our masters" have been provided with; no neat rows of volumes
in buckram or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to
completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of finality, of a
surrender to fate of that field in which all these victories have
been won. Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's
victories in England.
In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one
would not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings,
had not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact,
prominent in the case of other men whose writing counts, (for good
or evil)--had it not been, I say, expressive of a direct truth
spiritual and intellectual; an accident of--I suppose--the
publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative
nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry James's
work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of
surrender, or even of probability of surrender, to his own
victorious achievement in that field where he is a master.
Happily, he will never be able to claim completeness; and, were he
to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, he would not be
believed by the very minds for whom such a confession naturally
would be meant. It is impossible to think of Mr. Henry James
becoming "complete" otherwise than by the brutality of our common
fate whose finality is meaningless--in the sense of its logic being
of a material order, the logic of a falling stone.
I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen;
indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that
his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of
intellectual youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you
will--is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we
read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is
manifest. After some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with
Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into absolute conviction which,
all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's
artistic existence. If gratitude, as someone defined it, is a
lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be
grateful to the author of The Ambassadors--to name the latest of
his works. The favours are sure to come; the spring of that
benevolence will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows
brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of
drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of
letters, without languor or violence in its force, never running
back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course
through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created for
our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, in
fact, a magic spring.
With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the
inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry
James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the
body of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All
creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms
persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the
edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its
existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant
tides of reality.
Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may
be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross
gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is
rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence,
disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light
where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with
the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative
values--the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it
obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is,
in effect, the cry, "Take me out of myself!" meaning really, out of
my perishable activity into the light of imperishable
consciousness. But everything is relative, and the light of
consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the
things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived
work of our industrious hands.
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last
airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died
upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance
to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes
against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which
each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some
individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression
and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of
mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I do not
mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of
humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect--
from humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the
heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on
his part no heroism. The artist in his calling of interpreter
creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must. He
is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the
postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his
threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to
hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth.
It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative
man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-
morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my
kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will
formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly
inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its
assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the
battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won
a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And perhaps
it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps, so
barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian
point of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody
has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how
to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a
victor in a barren strife. And the honour is always well won; for
the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such subtle and
direct insight are, though only personal contests, desperate in
their silence, none the less heroic (in the modern sense) for the
absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound of trumpets.
Those are adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved.
And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and insistent
fidelity to the PERIPETIES of the contest, and the feelings of the
combatants.
The fiercest excitements of a romance DE CAPE ET D'EPEE, the
romance of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose
knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited,
are matched, for the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks
set, by the difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of
necessity--before all, of conduct--of Mr. Henry James's men and
women. His mankind is delightful. It is delightful in its
tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will sleep on the
battlefield. These warlike images come by themselves under the
pen; since from the duality of man's nature and the competition of
individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last
instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither
his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.
In virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious
dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this
relation in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial
or profound, and this relation alone, that is commented upon,
interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only
possible way in which the task can be performed: by the
independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved
against all the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative
effort finding its inspiration from the reality of forms and
sensations. That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to
be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the
fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction.
There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all
love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of
renunciation. It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the
most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the
labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been
built commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two
oceans. Like a natural force which is obscured as much as
illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of
renunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, vacillations,
secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the
sum of our activity. But no man or woman worthy of the name can
pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And Mr. Henry
James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his
art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities.
He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The
earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every
sphere of human perplexities and emotions, there are more
greatnesses than one--not counting here the greatness of the artist
himself. Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of
things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his
passions to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all
truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.
In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago,
Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the
historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his
audience. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the
position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it
is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer
ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of
social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the
reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus
fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an
artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the
keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As is meet for a man
of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of
fine consciences.
Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth
will be, or can be questioned. Its fault is that it leaves so much
out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be
put into the nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has
made his choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by
the success of his art. He has taken for himself the greater part.
The range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the
range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a
conscience, less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of
conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its
triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense.
There is, in short, more truth in its working for a historian to
detect and to show. It is a thing of infinite complication and
suggestion. None of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry James. He
has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of
romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. There are no
secrets left within his range. He has disclosed them as they
should be disclosed--that is, beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness
has but little place in this world of his creation. Yet, it is
always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is there, it
surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it. It is made visible,
tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine
consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their
mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What
is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the
intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible in their
ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an
energetic act of renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the
distinction is wide, enormous, like that between substance and
shadow.
Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance,
of what is worth having, of what is worth holding. The contrary
opinion has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least
implied, with some frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a
sort of intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of
truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and
women, stand out endowed with extraordinary value, with a value so
extraordinary that their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for
scrupulousness, those business-like instincts which a careful
Providence has implanted in our breasts. And, apart from that just
cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection
must always present a certain lack of finality, especially
startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by
rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken
leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public which, as a body,
has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist,
should demand from him this sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly
incomprehensible. But so it is; and these solutions are legitimate
inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our
hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves
and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind,
coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest.
One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James's novels. His books
end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the
life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is
felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the
last word has been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not
final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never
attempts the impossible.
ALPHONSE DAUDET--1898
It is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are part of our
past, our indisputable possession. One must admit regretfully that
to-day is but a scramble, that to-morrow may never come; it is only
the precious yesterday that cannot be taken away from us. A gift
from the dead, great and little, it makes life supportable, it
almost makes one believe in a benevolent scheme of creation. And
some kind of belief is very necessary. But the real knowledge of
matters infinitely more profound than any conceivable scheme of
creation is with the dead alone. That is why our talk about them
should be as decorous as their silence. Their generosity and their
discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and they, who belong
already to the unchangeable, would probably disdain to claim more
than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates about
every twenty-five years--at the coming of every new and wiser
generation.
One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, with a
prodigality approaching magnificence, gave himself up to us without
reserve in his work, with all his qualities and all his faults.
Neither his qualities nor his faults were great, though they were
by no means imperceptible. It is only his generosity that is out
of the common. What strikes one most in his work is the
disinterestedness of the toiler. With more talent than many bigger
men, he did not preach about himself, he did not attempt to
persuade mankind into a belief of his own greatness. He never
posed as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he
neglected his interests to the point of never propounding a theory
for the purpose of giving a tremendous significance to his art,
alone of all things, in a world that, by some strange oversight,
has not been supplied with an obvious meaning. Neither did he
affect a passive attitude before the spectacle of life, an attitude
which in gods--and in a rare mortal here and there--may appear
godlike, but assumed by some men, causes one, very unwillingly, to
think of the melancholy quietude of an ape. He was not the
wearisome expounder of this or that theory, here to-day and spurned
to-morrow. He was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all,
if you like--but he was Alphonse Daudet, a man as naively clear,
honest, and vibrating as the sunshine of his native land; that
regrettably undiscriminating sunshine which matures grapes and
pumpkins alike, and cannot, of course, obtain the commendation of
the very select who look at life from under a parasol.
Naturally, being a man from the South, he had a rather outspoken
belief in himself, but his small distinction, worth many a greater,
was in not being in bondage to some vanishing creed. He was a
worker who could not compel the admiration of the few, but who
deserved the affection of the many; and he may be spoken of with
tenderness and regret, for he is not immortal--he is only dead.
During his life the simple man whose business it ought to have been
to climb, in the name of Art, some elevation or other, was content
to remain below, on the plain, amongst his creations, and take an
eager part in those disasters, weaknesses, and joys which are
tragic enough in their droll way, but are by no means so momentous
and profound as some writers--probably for the sake of Art--would
like to make us believe. There is, when one thinks of it, a
considerable want of candour in the august view of life. Without
doubt a cautious reticence on the subject, or even a delicately
false suggestion thrown out in that direction is, in a way,
praiseworthy, since it helps to uphold the dignity of man--a matter
of great importance, as anyone can see; still one cannot help
feeling that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly
blamable. To state, then, with studied moderation a belief that in
unfortunate moments of lucidity is irresistibly borne in upon most
of us--the blind agitation caused mostly by hunger and complicated
by love and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, or its
morality, or its possible results, the artistic fuss made over it.
It may be consoling--for human folly is very BIZARRE--but it is
scarcely honest to shout at those who struggle drowning in an
insignificant pool: You are indeed admirable and great to be the
victims of such a profound, of such a terrible ocean!
And Daudet was honest; perhaps because he knew no better--but he
was very honest. If he saw only the surface of things it is for
the reason that most things have nothing but a surface. He did not
pretend--perhaps because he did not know how--he did not pretend to
see any depths in a life that is only a film of unsteady
appearances stretched over regions deep indeed, but which have
nothing to do with the half-truths, half-thoughts, and whole
illusions of existence. The road to these distant regions does not
lie through the domain of Art or the domain of Science where well-
known voices quarrel noisily in a misty emptiness; it is a path of
toilsome silence upon which travel men simple and unknown, with
closed lips, or, maybe, whispering their pain softly--only to
themselves.
But Daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with animation, with a
clear felicity of tone--as a bird sings. He saw life around him
with extreme clearness, and he felt it as it is--thinner than air
and more elusive than a flash of lightning. He hastened to offer
it his compassion, his indignation, his wonder, his sympathy,
without giving a moment of thought to the momentous issues that are
supposed to lurk in the logic of such sentiments. He tolerated the
little foibles, the small ruffianisms, the grave mistakes; the only
thing he distinctly would not forgive was hardness of heart. This
unpractical attitude would have been fatal to a better man, but his
readers have forgiven him. Withal he is chivalrous to exiled
queens and deformed sempstresses, he is pityingly tender to broken-
down actors, to ruined gentlemen, to stupid Academicians; he is
glad of the joys of the commonplace people in a commonplace way--
and he never makes a secret of all this. No, the man was not an
artist. What if his creations are illumined by the sunshine of his
temperament so vividly that they stand before us infinitely more
real than the dingy illusions surrounding our everyday existence?
The misguided man is for ever pottering amongst them, lifting up
his voice, dotting his i's in the wrong places. He takes Tartarin
by the arm, he does not conceal his interest in the Nabob's
cheques, his sympathy for an honest Academician PLUS BETE QUE
NATURE, his hate for an architect PLUS MAUVAIS QUE LA GALE; he is
in the thick of it all. He feels with the Duc de Mora and with
Felicia Ruys--and he lets you see it. He does not sit on a
pedestal in the hieratic and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose
greatness consists in being too stupid to care. He cares immensely
for his Nabobs, his kings, his book-keepers, his Colettes, and his
Saphos. He vibrates together with his universe, and with
lamentable simplicity follows M. de Montpavon on that last walk
along the Boulevards.
"Monsieur de Montpavon marche e la mort," and the creator of that
unlucky GENTILHOMME follows with stealthy footsteps, with wide
eyes, with an impressively pointing finger. And who wouldn't look?
But it is hard; it is sometimes very hard to forgive him the dotted
i's, the pointing finger, this making plain of obvious mysteries.
"Monsieur de Montpavon marche e la mort," and presently, on the
crowded pavement, takes off his hat with punctilious courtesy to
the doctor's wife, who, elegant and unhappy, is bound on the same
pilgrimage. This is too much! We feel we cannot forgive him such
meetings, the constant whisper of his presence. We feel we cannot,
till suddenly the very NAIVETE of it all touches us with the
revealed suggestion of a truth. Then we see that the man is not
false; all this is done in transparent good faith. The man is not
melodramatic; he is only picturesque. He may not be an artist, but
he comes as near the truth as some of the greatest. His creations
are seen; you can look into their very eyes, and these are as
thoughtless as the eyes of any wise generation that has in its
hands the fame of writers. Yes, they are SEEN, and the man who is
not an artist is seen also commiserating, indignant, joyous, human
and alive in their very midst. Inevitably they MARCHENT E LA MORT-
-and they are very near the truth of our common destiny: their
fate is poignant, it is intensely interesting, and of not the
slightest consequence.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT--1904 {1}
To introduce Maupassant to English readers with apologetic
explanations as though his art were recondite and the tendency of
his work immoral would be a gratuitous impertinence.
Maupassant's conception of his art is such as one would expect from
a practical and resolute mind; but in the consummate simplicity of
his technique it ceases to be perceptible. This is one of its
greatest qualities, and like all the great virtues it is based
primarily on self-denial.
To pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author is a
difficult task. One could not depend upon reason alone, nor yet
trust solely to one's emotions. Used together, they would in many
cases traverse each other, because emotions have their own
unanswerable logic. Our capacity for emotion is limited, and the
field of our intelligence is restricted. Responsiveness to every
feeling, combined with the penetration of every intellectual
subterfuge, would end, not in judgment, but in universal
absolution. TOUT COMPRENDRE C'EST TOUT PARDONNER. And in this
benevolent neutrality towards the warring errors of human nature
all light would go out from art and from life.
We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupassant's attitude
towards our world in which, like the rest of us, he has that share
which his senses are able to give him. But we need not quarrel
with him violently. If our feelings (which are tender) happen to
be hurt because his talent is not exercised for the praise and
consolation of mankind, our intelligence (which is great) should
let us see that he is a very splendid sinner, like all those who in
this valley of compromises err by over-devotion to the truth that
is in them. His determinism, barren of praise, blame and
consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art. The worth
of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with
which it is held.
Except for his philosophy, which in the case of so consummate an
artist does not matter (unless to the solemn and naive mind),
Maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from
his readers. He does not require forgiveness because he is never
dull.
The interest of a reader in a work of imagination is either ethical
or that of simple curiosity. Both are perfectly legitimate, since
there is both a moral and an excitement to be found in a faithful
rendering of life. And in Maupassant's work there is the interest
of curiosity and the moral of a point of view consistently
preserved and never obtruded for the end of personal gratification.
The spectacle of this immense talent served by exceptional
faculties and triumphing over the most thankless subjects by an
unswerving singleness of purpose is in itself an admirable lesson
in the power of artistic honesty, one may say of artistic virtue.
The inherent greatness of the man consists in this, that he will
let none of the fascinations that beset a writer working in
loneliness turn him away from the straight path, from the
vouchsafed vision of excellence. He will not be led into perdition
by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, of pathos;
of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer
and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering
cortege of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert
air of Thebaide. This is not to say that Maupassant's austerity
has never faltered; but the fact remains that no tempting demon has
ever succeeded in hurling him down from his high, if narrow,
pedestal.
It is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in question.
Let the discriminating reader, who at times may well spare a moment
or two to the consideration and enjoyment of artistic excellence,
be asked to reflect a little upon the texture of two stories
included in this volume: "A Piece of String," and "A Sale." How
many openings the last offers for the gratuitous display of the
author's wit or clever buffoonery, the first for an unmeasured
display of sentiment! And both sentiment and buffoonery could have
been made very good too, in a way accessible to the meanest
intelligence, at the cost of truth and honesty. Here it is where
Maupassant's austerity comes in. He refrains from setting his
cleverness against the eloquence of the facts. There is humour and
pathos in these stories; but such is the greatness of his talent,
the refinement of his artistic conscience, that all his high
qualities appear inherent in the very things of which he speaks, as
if they had been altogether independent of his presentation.
Facts, and again facts are his unique concern. That is why he is
not always properly understood. His facts are so perfectly
rendered that, like the actualities of life itself, they demand
from the reader the faculty of observation which is rare, the power
of appreciation which is generally wanting in most of us who are
guided mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding from
us no qualities except a vague susceptibility to emotion. Nobody
has ever gained the vast applause of a crowd by the simple and
clear exposition of vital facts. Words alone strung upon a
convention have fascinated us as worthless glass beads strung on a
thread have charmed at all times our brothers the unsophisticated
savages of the islands. Now, Maupassant, of whom it has been said
that he is the master of the MOT JUSTE, has never been a dealer in
words. His wares have been, not glass beads, but polished gems;
not the most rare and precious, perhaps, but of the very first
water of their kind.
That he took trouble with his gems, taking them up in the rough and
polishing each facet patiently, the publication of the two
posthumous volumes of short stories proves abundantly. I think it
proves also the assertion made here that he was by no means a
dealer in words. On looking at the first feeble drafts from which
so many perfect stories have been fashioned, one discovers that
what has been matured, improved, brought to perfection by unwearied
endeavour is not the diction of the tale, but the vision of its
true shape and detail. Those first attempts are not faltering or
uncertain in expression. It is the conception which is at fault.
The subjects have not yet been adequately seen. His proceeding was
not to group expressive words, that mean nothing, around misty and
mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither
to earth nor to heaven. His vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged
and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world
discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for
him upon the face of things and events. This was the particular
shape taken by his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly
in the light of his day, not on the tortuous, dark roads of
meditation. His realities came to him from a genuine source, from
this universe of vain appearances wherein we men have found
everything to make us proud, sorry, exalted, and humble.
Maupassant's renown is universal, but his popularity is restricted.
It is not difficult to perceive why. Maupassant is an intensely
national writer. He is so intensely national in his logic, in his
clearness, in his aesthetic and moral conceptions, that he has been
accepted by his countrymen without having had to pay the tribute of
flattery either to the nation as a whole, or to any class, sphere
or division of the nation. The truth of his art tells with an
irresistible force; and he stands excused from the duty of
patriotic posturing. He is a Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond
question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be
universally comprehensible. What is wanting to his universal
success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tenderness.
He neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness;
he forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs. The disregard of
these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty,
cynicism, hardness. And yet it can be safely affirmed that this
man wrote from the fulness of a compassionate heart. He is
merciless and yet gentle with his mankind; he does not rail at
their prudent fears and their small artifices; he does not despise
their labours. It seems to me that he looks with an eye of
profound pity upon their troubles, deceptions and misery. But he
looks at them all. He sees--and does not turn away his head. As a
matter of fact he is courageous.
Courage and justice are not popular virtues. The practice of
strict justice is shocking to the multitude who always (perhaps
from an obscure sense of guilt) attach to it the meaning of mercy.
In the majority of us, who want to be left alone with our
illusions, courage inspires a vague alarm. This is what is felt
about Maupassant. His qualities, to use the charming and popular
phrase, are not lovable. Courage being a force will not masquerade
in the robes of affected delicacy and restraint. But if his
courage is not of a chivalrous stamp, it cannot be denied that it
is never brutal for the sake of effect. The writer of these few
reflections, inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the
work of the man, has been struck by the appreciation of Maupassant
manifested by many women gifted with tenderness and intelligence.
Their more delicate and audacious souls are good judges of courage.
Their finer penetration has discovered his genuine masculinity
without display, his virility without a pose. They have discerned
in his faithful dealings with the world that enterprising and
fearless temperament, poor in ideas but rich in power, which
appeals most to the feminine mind.
It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme
energy of perception achieves great results, as in men of action
the energy of force and desire. His view of intellectual problems
is perhaps more simple than their nature warrants; still a man who
has written YVETTE cannot be accused of want of subtlety. But one
cannot insist enough upon this, that his subtlety, his humour, his
grimness, though no doubt they are his own, are never presented
otherwise but as belonging to our life, as found in nature, whose
beauties and cruelties alike breathe the spirit of serene
unconsciousness.
Maupassant's philosophy of life is more temperamental than
rational. He expects nothing from gods or men. He trusts his
senses for information and his instinct for deductions. It may
seem that he has made but little use of his mind. But let me be
clearly understood. His sensibility is really very great; and it
is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly, unless one
thinks correctly, starting from intelligible premises to an
unsophisticated conclusion.
This is literary honesty. It may be remarked that it does not
differ very greatly from the ideal honesty of the respectable
majority, from the honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of
bricklayers, of all those who express their fundamental sentiment
in the ordinary course of their activities, by the work of their
hands.
The work of Maupassant's hands is honest. He thinks sufficiently
to concrete his fearless conclusions in illuminative instances. He
renders them with that exact knowledge of the means and that
absolute devotion to the aim of creating a true effect--which is
art. He is the most accomplished of narrators.
It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his mankind in another
spirit than those writers who make haste to submerge the
difficulties of our holding-place in the universe under a flood of
false and sentimental assumptions. Maupassant was a true and
dutiful lover of our earth. He says himself in one of his
descriptive passages: "Nous autres que seduit la terre . . ." It
was true. The earth had for him a compelling charm. He looks upon
her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real
passion. His is the power of detecting the one immutable quality
that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever-
shifting surface of life. To say that he could not embrace in his
glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that
he was human. He lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision
has not made his own. This creative artist has the true
imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no
empty pretences. And he stoops to no littleness in his art--least
of all to the miserable vanity of a catching phrase.
ANATOLE FRANCE--1904
I.--"CRAINQUEBILLE"
The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, by the declaration
of its title-page, to contain several profitable narratives. The
story of Crainquebille's encounter with human justice stands at the
head of them; a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book
with the touch of playful irony characteristic of the writer on
whom the most distinguished amongst his literary countrymen have
conferred the rank of Prince of Prose.
Never has a dignity been better borne. M. Anatole France is a good
prince. He knows nothing of tyranny but much of compassion. The
detachment of his mind from common errors and current superstitions
befits the exalted rank he holds in the Commonwealth of Literature.
It is just to suppose that the clamour of the tribes in the forum
had little to do with his elevation. Their elect are of another
stamp. They are such as their need of precipitate action requires.
He is the Elect of the Senate--the Senate of Letters--whose
Conscript Fathers have recognised him as PRIMUS INTER PARES; a post
of pure honour and of no privilege.
It is a good choice. First, because it is just, and next, because
it is safe. The dignity will suffer no diminution in M. Anatole
France's hands. He is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the
lessons of the past, concerned with the present, and as earnest as
to the future as a good prince should be in his public action. It
is a Republican dignity. And M. Anatole France, with his sceptical
insight into an forms of government, is a good Republican. He is
indulgent to the weaknesses of the people, and perceives that
political institutions, whether contrived by the wisdom of the few
or the ignorance of the many, are incapable of securing the
happiness of mankind. He perceives this truth in the serenity of
his soul and in the elevation of his mind. He expresses his
convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed
princely qualities. He is a great analyst of illusions. He
searches and probes their innermost recesses as if they were
realities made of an eternal substance. And therein consists his
humanity; this is the expression of his profound and unalterable
compassion. He will flatter no tribe no section in the forum or in
the market-place. His lucid thought is not beguiled into false
pity or into the common weakness of affection. He feels that men
born in ignorance as in the house of an enemy, and condemned to
struggle with error and passions through endless centuries, should
be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever deferred. He
knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that it is the almost
incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege,
to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to
defeat their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity
which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed
before their irremediable littleness. He knows this well because
he is an artist and a master; but he knows, too, that only in the
continuity of effort there is a refuge from despair for minds less
clear-seeing and philosophic than his own. Therefore he wishes us
to believe and to hope, preserving in our activity the consoling
illusion of power and intelligent purpose. He is a good and
politic prince.
"The majesty of justice is contained entire in each sentence
pronounced by the judge in the name of the sovereign people.
Jerome Crainquebille, hawker of vegetables, became aware of the
august aspect of the law as he stood indicted before the tribunal
of the higher Police Court on a charge of insulting a constable of
the force." With this exposition begins the first tale of M.
Anatole France's latest volume.
The bust of the Republic and the image of the Crucified Christ
appear side by side above the bench occupied by the President
Bourriche and his two Assessors; all the laws divine and human are
suspended over the head of Crainquebille.
From the first visual impression of the accused and of the court
the author passes by a characteristic and natural turn to the
historical and moral significance of those two emblems of State and
Religion whose accord is only possible to the confused reasoning of
an average man. But the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never
confused. His reasoning is clear and informed by a profound
erudition. Such is not the case of Crainquebille, a street hawker,
charged with insulting the constituted power of society in the
person of a policeman. The charge is not true, nothing was further
from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his position, he
does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the memory
of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the Christian
peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. He
might well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of
sentence, if it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple
imprisonment, in the name of the Crucified Redeemer.
He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has lived pushing
every day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables
through the streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to
say he has nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly
speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful,
he had no existence till M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and
human sympathy have called him up from his nothingness for our
pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt for
our profit also.
Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical,
political or social considerations which can be brought to bear
upon his case. He remains lost in astonishment. Penetrated with
respect, overwhelmed with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon
the question of his transgression. In his conscience he does not
think himself culpable; but M. Anatole France's philosophical mind
discovers for us that he feels all the insignificance of such a
thing as the conscience of a mere street-hawker in the face of the
symbols of the law and before the ministers of social repression.
Crainquebille is innocent; but already the young advocate, his
defender, has half persuaded him of his guilt.
On this phrase practically ends the introductory chapter of the
story which, as the author's dedication states, has inspired an
admirable draughtsman and a skilful dramatist, each in his art, to
a vision of tragic grandeur. And this opening chapter without a
name--consisting of two and a half pages, some four hundred words
at most--is a masterpiece of insight and simplicity, resumed in M.
Anatole France's distinction of thought and in his princely command
of words.
It is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full,
delicate and complete like the petals of a flower, presenting to us
the Adventure of Crainquebille--Crainquebille before the justice--
An Apology for the President of the Tribunal--Of the Submission of
Crainquebille to the Laws of the Republic--Of his Attitude before
the Public Opinion, and so on to the chapter of the Last
Consequences. We see, created for us in his outward form and
innermost perplexity, the old man degraded from his high estate of
a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this time,
the majesty of the social order in the person of another police-
constable. It is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge.
Crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to
raise the black standard of insurrection. He is cold and homeless
and starving. He remembers the warmth and the food of the prison.
He perceives the means to get back there. Since he has been locked
up, he argues with himself, for uttering words which, as a matter
of fact he did not say, he will go forth now, and to the first
policeman he meets will say those very words in order to be
imprisoned again. Thus reasons Crainquebille with simplicity and
confidence. He accepts facts. Nothing surprises him. But all the
phenomena of social organisation and of his own life remain for him
mysterious to the end. The description of the policeman in his
short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under the light of a
street lamp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet of a
rainy autumn evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted
thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative precision. From
under the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crainquebille, who
has just uttered in an uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting
phrase of the popular slang--MORT AUX VACHES! They look upon him
shining in the deep shadow of the hood with an expression of
sadness, vigilance, and contempt.
He does not move. Crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice,
repeats once more the insulting words. But this policeman is full
of philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence. He refuses to
take in charge the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him
shivering and ragged in the drizzle. And the ruined Crainquebille,
victim of a ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this
magnanimity, passes on hopelessly down the street full of shadows
where the lamps gleam each in a ruddy halo of falling mist.
M. Anatole France can speak for the people. This prince of the
Senate is invested with the tribunitian power. M. Anatole France
is something of a Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart
from his sceptical philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman,
now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a literary
gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his public speeches:
"We are all Socialists now." And in the sense in which it may be
said that we all in Europe are Christians that is true enough. To
many of us Socialism is merely an emotion. An emotion is much and
is also less than nothing. It is the initial impulse. The real
Socialism of to-day is a religion. It has its dogmas. The value
of the dogma does not consist in its truthfulness, and M. Anatole
France, who loves truth, does not love dogma. Only, unlike
religion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in its dogmas
but in its ideal. It is perhaps a too materialistic ideal, and the
mind of M. Anatole France may not find in it either comfort or
consolation. It is not to be doubted that he suspects this
himself; but there is something reposeful in the finality of
popular conceptions. M. Anatole France, a good prince and a good
Republican, will succeed no doubt in being a good Socialist. He
will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of
the ideal. His art will find its own beauty in the imaginative
presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for
redress. M. Anatole France is humane. He is also human. He may
be able to discard his philosophy; to forget that the evils are
many and the remedies are few, that there is no universal panacea,
that fatality is invincible, that there is an implacable menace of
death in the triumph of the humanitarian idea. He may forget all
that because love is stronger than truth.
Besides "Crainquebille" this volume contains sixteen other stories
and sketches. To define them it is enough to say that they are
written in M. Anatole France's prose. One sketch entitled "Riquet"
may be found incorporated in the volume of MONSIEUR BERGERET E
PARIS. "Putois" is a remarkable little tale, significant,
humorous, amusing, and symbolic. It concerns the career of a man
born in the utterance of a hasty and untruthful excuse made by a
lady at a loss how to decline without offence a very pressing
invitation to dinner from a very tyrannical aunt. This happens in
a provincial town, and the lady says in effect: "Impossible, my
dear aunt. To-morrow I am expecting the gardener." And the garden
she glances at is a poor garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is
insignificant and its neglect seems beyond remedy. "A gardener!
What for?" asks the aunt. "To work in the garden." And the poor
lady is abashed at the transparence of her evasion. But the lie is
told, it is believed, and she sticks to it. When the masterful old
aunt inquires, "What is the man's name, my dear?" she answers
brazenly, "His name is Putois." "Where does he live?" "Oh, I
don't know; anywhere. He won't give his address. One leaves a
message for him here and there." "Oh! I see," says the other; "he
is a sort of ne'er do well, an idler, a vagabond. I advise you, my
dear, to be careful how you let such a creature into your grounds;
but I have a large garden, and when you do not want his services I
shall find him some work to do, and see he does it too. Tell your
Putois to come and see me." And thereupon Putois is born; he
stalks abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and crime,
stealing melons from gardens and tea-spoons from pantries,
indulging his licentious proclivities; becoming the talk of the
town and of the countryside; seen simultaneously in far-distant
places; pursued by gendarmes, whose brigadier assures the uneasy
householders that he "knows that scamp very well, and won't be long
in laying his hands upon him." A detailed description of his
person collected from the information furnished by various people
appears in the columns of a local newspaper. Putois lives in his
strength and malevolence. He lives after the manner of legendary
heroes, of the gods of Olympus. He is the creation of the popular
mind. There comes a time when even the innocent originator of that
mysterious and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment
that he may have a real and tangible presence. All this is told
with the wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to M.
Anatole France's readers and admirers. For it is difficult to read
M. Anatole France without admiring him. He has the princely gift
of arousing a spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that
the consent of our reason has its place by the side of our
enthusiasm. He is an artist. As an artist he awakens emotion.
The quality of his art remains, as an inspiration, fascinating and
inscrutable; but the proceedings of his thought compel our
intellectual admiration.
In this volume the trifle called "The Military Manoeuvres at
Montil," apart from its far-reaching irony, embodies incidentally
the very spirit of automobilism. Somehow or other, how you cannot
tell, the flight over the country in a motor-car, its sensations,
its fatigue, its vast topographical range, its incidents down to
the bursting of a tyre, are brought home to you with all the force
of high imaginative perception. It would be out of place to
analyse here the means by which the true impression is conveyed so
that the absurd rushing about of General Decuir, in a 30-horse-
power car, in search of his cavalry brigade, becomes to you a more
real experience than any day-and-night run you may ever have taken
yourself. Suffice it to say that M. Anatole France had thought the
thing worth doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art, a
distinct achievement. And there are other sketches in this book,
more or less slight, but all worthy of regard--the childhood's
recollections of Professor Bergeret and his sister Zoe; the
dialogue of the two upright judges and the conversation of their
horses; the dream of M. Jean Marteau, aimless, extravagant,
apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most
essentially dreamlike. The vision of M. Anatole France, the Prince
of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and
penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth
and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians. Contemplating the
exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the
freedom of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes
aware of the futility of literary watch-words and the vanity of all
the schools of fiction. Not that M. Anatole France is a wild and
untrammelled genius. He is not that. Issued legitimately from the
past, he is mindful of his high descent. He has a critical
temperament joined to creative power. He surveys his vast domain
in a spirit of princely moderation that knows nothing of excesses
but much of restraint.
II.--"L'ILE DES PINGOUINS"
M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many
profitable histories of saints and sinners, of Roman procurators
and of officials of the Third Republic, of GRANDES DAMES and of
dames not so very grand, of ornate Latinists and of inarticulate
street hawkers, of priests and generals--in fact, the history of
all humanity as it appears to his penetrating eye, serving a mind
marvellously incisive in its scepticism, and a heart that, of all
contemporary hearts gifted with a voice, contains the greatest
treasure of charitable irony. As to M. Anatole France's
adventures, these are well-known. They lie open to this prodigal
world in the four volumes of the VIE LITTERAIRE, describing the
adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. For such is the
romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary
critic. History and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields
for the magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France's prose; but no
material limits can stand in the way of a genius. The latest book
from his pen--which may be called golden, as the lips of an
eloquent saint once upon a time were acclaimed golden by the
faithful--this latest book is, up to a certain point, a book of
travel.
I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court. The book is
not a record of globe-trotting. I regret it. It would have been a
joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded
of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle
wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque
vessel. He would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence
towards his fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth
which is but a vain and transitory illusion. M. Anatole France is
a great magician, yet there seem to be tasks which he dare not
face. For he is also a sage.
It is a book of ocean travel--not, however, as understood by Herr
Ballin of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the Atlantic. It is a book of
exploration and discovery--not, however, as conceived by an
enterprising journal and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the
nineteenth century. It is nothing so recent as that. It dates
much further back; long, long before the dark age when Krupp of
Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German Emperor
condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' dining-
tables. The best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that
enterprise I can give you is by stating the nature of the
explorer's ship. It was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed
granite.
The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica. I had never heard
of him before, but I believe now in his arduous existence with a
faith which is a tribute to M. Anatole France's pious earnestness
and delicate irony. St. Mael existed. It is distinctly stated of
him that his life was a progress in virtue. Thus it seems that
there may be saints that are not progressively virtuous. St. Mael
was not of that kind. He was industrious. He evangelised the
heathen. He erected two hundred and eighteen chapels and seventy-
four abbeys. Indefatigable navigator of the faith, he drifted
casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast to coast and
from island to island along the northern seas. At the age of
eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his
sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost
nothing of its force.
A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting
out his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder
for swifter progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the
pride of Satan), the simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle
arguments of the progressive enemy of mankind.
The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at
once that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances
of human ingenuity. His punishment was adequate. A terrific
tempest snatched the rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and,
to be brief, the dazed St. Mael was stranded violently on the
Island of Penguins.
The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a flat, round
island whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with
clouds. The rain was falling incessantly--a gentle, soft rain
which caused the simple saint to exclaim in great delight: "This
is the island of tears, the island of contrition!"
Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to
an amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man,
rendered deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the
multitude of silly, erect, and self-important birds for a human
crowd. At once he began to preach to them the doctrine of
salvation. Having finished his discourse he lost no time in
administering to his interesting congregation the sacrament of
baptism.
If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean
adventure to happen to a well-meaning and zealous saint. Pray
reflect on the magnitude of the issues! It is easy to believe what
M. Anatole France says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins
became known in Paradise, it caused there neither joy nor sorrow,
but a profound sensation.
M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. He reports with
great casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council
assembled in Heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing
to the economy of religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptised
Penguins had to be turned into human beings; and together with the
privilege of sublime hopes these innocent birds received the curse
of original sin, with the labours, the miseries, the passions, and
the weaknesses attached to the fallen condition of humanity.
At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being
the Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely)
into the Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the development of
their civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of
their folly and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his
golden pen lightens by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the
austerity of a work devoted to a subject so grave as the Polity of
Penguins. It is a very admirable treatment, and I hasten to
congratulate all men of receptive mind on the feast of wisdom which
is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a shelf.
TURGENEV {2}--1917
Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of
Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for
us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice.
Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help
the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What
greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in
the English-speaking world a translator who has missed none of the
most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who
has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with
perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary
friendship too) I may well permit myself to make that statement,
while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from
time to time in the volumes of Turgenev's complete edition, the
last of which came into the light of public indifference in the
ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of
Turgenev had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so
independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs
as you point out in the Preface to SMOKE "to all time."
Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it
came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved
at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral
and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole
body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national
writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces
can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short
stories and of A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES--those marvellous landscapes
peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the
truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible
in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which
has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all
time" it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all
his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that
it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are
replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even
by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women
of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so
passionately--they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are
Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-
souledly national. But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia
is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays
his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of
the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and
stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages
would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed
lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept
them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.
In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev
sympathetic and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his
essential humanity. All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate,
oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a
menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the
stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings,
fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to
lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day
the ever-receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends
by having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade
and so fine without any tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any
man's influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don't want to appear as qualified to judge of things
Russian. It wouldn't be true. I know nothing of them. But I am
aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man,
whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his
motives and the peace of his conscience--no man, I say, likes to be
beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From
what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia
almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his
latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken-hearted
Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it
refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a
time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which
that impartial lover of ALL his countrymen had suffered so much in
his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his
writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in
the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not
the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev
who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped
on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the
clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating
insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite
perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the
significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the
clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy--and all
that in perfect measure. There's enough there to ruin the
prospects of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward,
that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world's fair,
and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as
his body, you wouldn't get one per cent. of the crowd struggling
next door for a sight of the Double-headed Nightingale or of some
weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.
J. C.
STEPHEN CRANE--A NOTE WITHOUT DATES--1919
My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr.
Pawling, partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.
One day Mr. Pawling said to me: "Stephen Crane has arrived in
England. I asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he
mentioned two names. One of them was yours." I had then just been
reading, like the rest of the world, Crane's RED BADGE OF COURAGE.
The subject of that story was war, from the point of view of an
individual soldier's emotions. That individual (he remains
nameless throughout) was interesting enough in himself, but on
turning over the pages of that little book which had for the moment
secured such a noisy recognition I had been even more interested in
the personality of the writer. The picture of a simple and untried
youth becoming through the needs of his country part of a great
fighting machine was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a
sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative force of expression
which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether worthy of
admiration.
Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from
the reading of the NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS, a book of mine which
had also been published lately. I was truly pleased to hear this.
On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a young man of
medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating
blue eyes, the eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can
brood over them to some purpose.
He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the
things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating
force that seemed to reach, within life's appearances and forms,
the very spirit of life's truth. His ignorance of the world at
large--he had seen very little of it--did not stand in the way of
his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight
interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some
people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But
not on me. Whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed
himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging. He
knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any
other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words whenever he
took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out--and it was seen
then to be much more than mere felicity of language. His
impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In
his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don't think he was
ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me
that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his
achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great
loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature. I
think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had
the time to write. Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was
great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not
the loss of any further possible revelation. As to himself, who
can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this world
of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of
his own artistic vision? Perhaps he did not lose a great deal.
The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him
grudgingly. The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this
country was from Mr. W. Henley in the NEW REVIEW and later, towards
the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his
magazine. For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in
England he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, MAL
ENTOURE. He was beset by people who understood not the quality of
his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his
nature. Some of them have died since, but dead or alive they are
not worth speaking about now. I don't think he had any illusions
about them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature and
perhaps of weakness in his character which prevented him from
shaking himself free from their worthless and patronising
attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation
whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes. My wife
and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of
the Park at Brede. Born master of his sincere impressions, he was
also a born horseman. He never appeared so happy or so much to
advantage as on the back of a horse. He had formed the project of
teaching my eldest boy to ride, and meantime, when the child was
about two years old, presented him with his first dog.
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London. I saw
him for the last time on his last day in England. It was in Dover,
in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the
sea. He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some
place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to
tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words
he breathed out to me were: "I am tired. Give my love to your
wife and child." When I stopped at the door for another look I saw
that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully
out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly
across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.
Those who have read his little tale, "Horses," and the story, "The
Open Boat," in the volume of that name, know with what fine
understanding he loved horses and the sea. And his passage on this
earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a
day fated to be short and without sunshine.
TALES OF THE SEA--1898
It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in
the character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that
Marryat is largely human. He is the enslaver of youth, not by the
literary artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of
his own temperament. To his young heroes the beginning of life is
a splendid and warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and
marriage. His novels are not the outcome of his art, but of his
character, like the deeds that make up his record of naval service.
To the artist his work is interesting as a completely successful
expression of an unartistic nature. It is absolutely amazing to
us, as the disclosure of the spirit animating the stirring time
when the nineteenth century was young. There is an air of fable
about it. Its loss would be irreparable, like the curtailment of
national story or the loss of an historical document. It is the
beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.
To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. It was a
stage, where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such
achievement as the world had never seen before. The greatness of
that achievement cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality
has affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its
grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal. History preserves
the skeleton of facts and, here and there, a figure or a name; but
it is in Marryat's novels that we find the mass of the nameless,
that we see them in the flesh, that we obtain a glimpse of the
everyday life and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd of
obscure men who knew how to build for their country such a shining
monument of memories.
Marryat is really a writer of the Service. What sets him apart is
his fidelity. His pen serves his country as well as did his
professional skill and his renowned courage. His figures move
about between water and sky, and the water and the sky are there
only to frame the deeds of the Service. His novels, like
amphibious creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore, where
they flounder deplorably. The loves and the hates of his boys are
as primitive as their virtues and their vices. His women, from the
beautiful Agnes to the witch-like mother of Lieutenant
Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors' wives, like
the shadows of what has never been. His Silvas, his Ribieras, his
Shriftens, his Delmars remind us of people we have heard of
somewhere, many times, without ever believing in their existence.
His morality is honourable and conventional. There is cruelty in
his fun and he can invent puns in the midst of carnage. His
naiveties are perpetrated in a lurid light. There is an endless
variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with memorable
eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in the
drawing. They do not belong to life; they belong exclusively to
the Service. And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the
truth of their time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy
with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of
vitality which only years of war and victories can give. His
adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates;
his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is
often factitious. His greatness is undeniable.
It is undeniable. To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is
Marryat's navy still. He has created a priceless legend. If he be
not immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest
ambition, because he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in
the history of that Service on which the life of his country
depends. The tradition of the great past he has fixed in his pages
will be cherished for ever as the guarantee of the future. He
loved his country first, the Service next, the sea perhaps not at
all. But the sea loved him without reserve. It gave him his
professional distinction and his author's fame--a fame such as not
often falls to the lot of a true artist.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man
wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct. He is not invincibly
young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the
stress of adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance
and marriage. For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame-
work, it was an essential part of existence. He could hear its
voice, he could understand its silence, and he could interpret both
for us in his prose with all that felicity and sureness of effect
that belong to a poetical conception alone. His fame, as wide but
less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a
novel which is not of the sea. But he loved the sea and looked at
it with consummate understanding. In his sea tales the sea inter-
penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem
of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch
with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its
immense solitudes. His descriptions have the magistral ampleness
of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. They embrace
the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm
and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of
watchful coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live
face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea.
He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often
faulty, but his art is genuine. The truth is within him. The road
to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses
that--only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He
has the knowledge of simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin is a
monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the
significance of a type. It is hard to believe that Manual and
Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head, Captain Tuck of the
packet-ship MONTAUK, or Daggett, the tenacious commander of the SEA
LION of Martha's Vineyard, must pass away some day and be utterly
forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine--
and as perfectly unaffected--as is his art. In certain passages he
reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.
He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote
as well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches upon episodes
redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely England has
glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the
patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is
convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady
vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding
generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite
sentiment.
Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave
to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful
career. Through the distances of space and time those two men of
another race have shaped also the life of the writer of this
appreciation. Life is life, and art is art--and truth is hard to
find in either. Yet in testimony to the achievement of both these
authors it may be said that, in the case of the writer at least,
the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the
profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other--to which he
had surrendered--have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the
wear of laborious years. He has never regretted his surrender.
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}--1898
In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the beginning of the
sketch entitled "At the Heels of the White Man," expresses his
anxiety as to the state of England's account in the Day-Book of the
Recording Angel "for the good and the bad we have done--both with
the most excellent intentions." The intentions will, no doubt,
count for something, though, of course, every nation's conquests
are paved with good intentions; or it may be that the Recording
Angel, looking compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain
to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a struggle which has
the reward of its righteousness even on this earth--in victory and
lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiliation.
And, also, love will count for much. If the opinion of a looker-on
from afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh Clifford's anxiety about his
country's record is needless. To the Malays whom he governs,
instructs, and guides he is the embodiment of the intentions, of
the conscience and might of his race. And of all the nations
conquering distant territories in the name of the most excellent
intentions, England alone sends out men who, with such a
transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh Clifford
does, of the place of toil and exile as "the land which is very
dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent"--and
where (I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced
with respect and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.
All these studies are on a high level of interest, though not all
on the same level. The descriptive chapters, results of personal
observation, seem to me the most interesting. And, indeed, in a
book of this kind it is the author's personality which awakens the
greatest interest; it shapes itself before one in the ring of
sentences, it is seen between the lines--like the progress of a
traveller in the jungle that may be traced by the sound of the
PARANG chopping the swaying creepers, while the man himself is
glimpsed, now and then, indistinct and passing between the trees.
Thus in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen through
the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating companion in a land of
fascination.
It is when dealing with the aspects of nature that Mr. Hugh
Clifford is most convincing. He looks upon them lovingly, for the
land is "very dear to him," and he records his cherished
impressions so that the forest, the great flood, the jungle, the
rapid river, and the menacing rock dwell in the memory of the
reader long after the book is closed. He does not say anything, in
so many words, of his affection for those who live amid the scenes
he describes so well, but his humanity is large enough to pardon us
if we suspect him of such a rare weakness. In his preface he
expresses the regret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be)
of the kailyard school, or--looking up to a very different plane--
the genius of Mr. Barrie. He has, however, gifts of his own, and
his genius has served his country and his fortunes in another
direction. Yet it is when attempting what he professes himself
unable to do, in telling us the simple story of Umat, the punkah-
puller, with unaffected simplicity and half-concealed tenderness,
that he comes nearest to artistic achievement.
Each study in this volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact
told without artifice, but with an elective sureness of knowledge.
The story of Tukang Burok's love, related in the old man's own
words, conveys the very breath of Malay thought and speech. In
"His Little Bill," the coolie, Lim Teng Wah, facing his debtor,
stands very distinct before us, an insignificant and tragic victim
of fate with whom he had quarrelled to the death over a matter of
seven dollars and sixty-eight cents. The story of "The Schooner
with a Past" may be heard, from the Straits eastward, with many
variations. Out in the Pacific the schooner becomes a cutter, and
the pearl-divers are replaced by the Black-birds of the Labour
Trade. But Mr. Hugh Clifford's variation is very good. There is a
passage in it--a trifle--just the diver as seen coming up from the
depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct artistic
value. And, scattered through the book, there are many other
passages of almost equal descriptive excellence.
Nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book would be a
fundamental error in appreciation. Like faith, enthusiasm, or
heroism, art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest
appear more splendid, inspiring, or sinister. And this book is
only truth, interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and
straightforward. The Resident of Pahang has the devoted friendship
of jmat, the punkah-puller, he has an individual faculty of vision,
a large sympathy, and the scrupulous consciousness of the good and
evil in his hands. He may as well rest content with such gifts.
One cannot expect to be, at the same time, a ruler of men and an
irreproachable player on the flute.
A HAPPY WANDERER--1910
Converts are interesting people. Most of us, if you will pardon me
for betraying the universal secret, have, at some time or other,
discovered in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on
the wrong road. And what did we do in our pride and our cowardice?
Casting fearful glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried
our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that
old, beaten track we have not had courage enough to leave, and
which we perceive now more clearly than before to be but the arid
way of the grave.
The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a
secular sense), is not discreet. His pride is of another kind; he
jumps gladly off the track--the touch of grace is mostly sudden--
and facing about in a new direction may even attain the illusion of
having turned his back on Death itself.
Some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by their exquisite
indiscretion. The most illustrious example of a convert, that
Flower of chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the
world the only genuine immortal hidalgo. The delectable Knight of
Spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of a small
country squire to an imperative faith in a tender and sublime
mission. Forthwith he was beaten with sticks and in due course
shut up in a wooden cage by the Barber and the Priest, the fit
ministers of a justly shocked social order. I do not know if it
has occurred to anybody yet to shut up Mr. Luffmann in a wooden
cage. {4} I do not raise the point because I wish him any harm.
Quite the contrary. I am a humane person. Let him take it as the
highest praise--but I must say that he richly deserves that sort of
attention.
On the other hand I would not have him unduly puffed up with the
pride of the exalted association. The grave wisdom, the admirable
amenity, the serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all
mortals converted to noble visions are not his. Mr. Luffmann has
no mission. He is no Knight sublimely Errant. But he is an
excellent Vagabond. He is full of merit. That peripatetic guide,
philosopher and friend of all nations, Mr. Roosevelt, would
promptly excommunicate him with a big stick. The truth is that the
ex-autocrat of all the States does not like rebels against the
sullen order of our universe. Make the best of it or perish--he
cries. A sane lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a
sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza (another
great Governor), that distinguished litterateur has no mercy for
dreamers. And our author happens to be a man of (you may trace
them in his books) some rather fine reveries.
Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not see myself how
any mercy can possibly be extended to Mr. Luffmann. He is a
convert from the creed of strenuous life. For this renegade the
body is of little account; to him work appears criminal when it
suppresses the demands of the inner life; while he was young he did
grind virtuously at the sacred handle, and now, he says, he has
fallen into disgrace with some people because he believes no longer
in toil without end. Certain respectable folk hate him--so he
says--because he dares to think that "poetry, beauty, and the broad
face of the world are the best things to be in love with." He
confesses to loving Spain on the ground that she is "the land of
to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind." The universal
striving to push ahead he considers mere vulgar folly. Didn't I
tell you he was a fit subject for the cage?
It is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to discover that
this desperate character is not altogether an outcast. Little
girls seem to like him. One of them, after listening to some of
his tales, remarked to her mother, "Wouldn't it be lovely if what
he says were true!" Here you have Woman! The charming creatures
will neither strain at a camel nor swallow a gnat. Not publicly.
These operations, without which the world they have such a large
share in could not go on for ten minutes, are left to us--men. And
then we are chided for being coarse. This is a refined objection
but does not seem fair. Another little girl--or perhaps the same
little girl--wrote to him in Cordova, "I hope Poste-Restante is a
nice place, and that you are very comfortable." Woman again! I
have in my time told some stories which are (I hate false modesty)
both true and lovely. Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in
kindly terms. And why? Simply because I am not enough of a
Vagabond. The dear despots of the fireside have a weakness for
lawless characters. This is amiable, but does not seem rational.
Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no Impressionist. He is far too
earnest in his heart, and not half sufficiently precise in his
style to be that. But he is an excellent narrator. More than any
Vagabond I have ever met, he knows what he is about. There is not
one of his quiet days which is dull. You will find in them a love-
story not made up, the COUP-DE-FOUDRE, the lightning-stroke of
Spanish love; and you will marvel how a spell so sudden and
vehement can be at the same time so tragically delicate. You will
find there landladies devoured with jealousy, astute housekeepers,
delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy shopkeepers, all the COSAS
DE ESPANA--and, in addition, the pale girl Rosario. I recommend
that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your benevolent
compassion. You will find in his pages the humours of starving
workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an exulting
mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of
attention. And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no
visionary. He is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a
grasp on real human affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs
concerned with bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs
which drive great crowds to prayer in the holy places of the earth.
But I like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like! His
quiet days require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine
provinces of Spain to take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I
presume, the seven--or is it nine?--crystal spheres of Alexandrian
cosmogony would afford, but a wretchedly straitened space. A most
unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. One would take it
as a joke; only that, perchance, to the author of QUIET DAYS IN
SPAIN all days may seem quiet, because, a courageous convert, he is
now at peace with himself.
How better can we take leave of this interesting Vagabond than with
the road salutation of passing wayfarers: "And on you be peace! .
. . You have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. There's
nothing like giving up one's life to an unselfish passion. Let the
rich and the powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of
palpable progress. The part of the ideal you embrace is the better
one, if only in its illusions. No great passion can be barren.
May a world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty
solitude of your renunciation!"
THE LIFE BEYOND--1910
You have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of
physical effect on one--mostly an audible effect. I am not
alluding here to Blue books or to books of statistics. The effect
of these is simply exasperating and no more. No! the books I have
in mind are just the common books of commerce you and I read when
we have five minutes to spare, the usual hired books published by
ordinary publishers, printed by ordinary printers, and censored
(when they happen to be novels) by the usual circulating libraries,
the guardians of our firesides, whose names are household words
within the four seas.
To see the fair and the brave of this free country surrendering
themselves with unbounded trust to the direction of the circulating
libraries is very touching. It is even, in a sense, a beautiful
spectacle, because, as you know, humility is a rare and fragrant
virtue; and what can be more humble than to surrender your morals
and your intellect to the judgment of one of your tradesmen? I
suppose that there are some very perfect people who allow the Army
and Navy Stores to censor their diet. So much merit, however, I
imagine, is not frequently met with here below. The flesh, alas!
is weak, and--from a certain point of view--so important!
A superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple
question: What would become of us if the circulating libraries
ceased to exist? It is a horrid and almost indelicate supposition,
but let us be brave and face the truth. On this earth of ours
nothing lasts. TOUT PASSE, TOUT CASSE, TOUT LASSE. Imagine the
utter wreck overtaking the morals of our beautiful country-houses
should the circulating libraries suddenly die! But pray do not
shudder. There is no occasion.
Their spirit shall survive. I declare this from inward conviction,
and also from scientific information received lately. For observe:
the circulating libraries are human institutions. I beg you to
follow me closely. They are human institutions, and being human,
they are not animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. Thus, any
man with enough money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay
for advertisements shall be able to evoke the pure and censorious
spectre of the circulating libraries whenever his own commercial
spirit moves him.
For, and this is the information alluded to above, Science, having
in its infinite wanderings run up against various wonders and
mysteries, is apparently willing now to allow a spiritual quality
to man and, I conclude, to all his works as well.
I do not know exactly what this "Science" may be; and I do not
think that anybody else knows; but that is the information stated
shortly. It is contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful
eyes. {5} I know it is not a censored book, because I can see for
myself that it is not a novel. The author, on his side, warns me
that it is not philosophy, that it is not metaphysics, that it is
not natural science. After this comprehensive warning, the
definition of the book becomes, you will admit, a pretty hard nut
to crack.
But meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about
the physical effect of some common, hired books. A few of them
(not necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some
others make for you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a
barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a
humorist) I only met once. But there is infinite variety in the
noises books do make. I have now on my shelves a book apparently
of the most valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen
lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw. I am inconsolable;
I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about, for the
buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced
to give it up ere the end of the page is reached.
The book, however, which I have found so difficult to define, is by
no means noisy. As a mere piece of writing it may be described as
being breathless itself and taking the reader's breath away, not by
the magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubility in
the delivery. The constantly elusive argument and the illustrative
quotations go on without a single reflective pause. For this
reason alone the reading of that work is a fatiguing process.
The author himself (I use his own words) "suspects" that what he
has written "may be theology after all." It may be. It is not my
place either to allay or to confirm the author's suspicion of his
own work. But I will state its main thesis: "That science
regarded in the gross dictates the spirituality of man and strongly
implies a spiritual destiny for individual human beings." This
means: Existence after Death--that is, Immortality.
To find out its value you must go to the book. But I will observe
here that an Immortality liable at any moment to betray itself
fatuously by the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor
Crookes is scarcely worth having. Can you imagine anything more
squalid than an Immortality at the beck and call of Eusapia
Palladino? That woman lives on the top floor of a Neapolitan
house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead, flesh of our flesh,
bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, suffered
and died, as we must love, suffer, and die--she gets them to beat
tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a
curtain. This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put
one's faith in these things one could not even die safely from
disgust, as one would long to do.
And to believe that these manifestations, which the author
evidently takes for modern miracles, will stay our tottering faith;
to believe that the new psychology has, only the other day,
discovered man to be a "spiritual mystery," is really carrying
humility towards that universal provider, Science, too far.
We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of
absurdity; our perplexities older than religion itself. It is not
for nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the
steps of the altar, murmurs, "Why art thou sad, my soul, and why
dost thou trouble me?" Since the day of Creation two veiled
figures, Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the sunshine
of the world. What humanity needs is not the promise of scientific
immortality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy
on the Day of Judgment.
And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we
may well be content to repeat the Invocation of Sar Peladan. Sar
Peladan was an occultist, a seer, a modern magician. He believed
in astrology, in the spirits of the air, in elves; he was
marvellously and deliciously absurd. Incidentally he wrote some
incomprehensible poems and a few pages of harmonious prose, for,
you must know, "a magician is nothing else but a great harmonist."
Here are some eight lines of the magnificent Invocation. Let me,
however, warn you, strictly between ourselves, that my translation
is execrable. I am sorry to say I am no magician.
"O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive! Open your arms to the son,
prodigal and weary.
"I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal
from us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery. .
. . OEdipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young
Faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I
come back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!"
THE ASCENDING EFFORT--1910
Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science
has destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy
poetry. Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the
guileless poets have gone on singing in a sweet strain. How they
dare do the impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a cause for
wonder but not for legislation. Not yet. We are at present too
busy reforming the silent burglar and planning concerts to soothe
the savage breast of the yelling hooligan. As somebody--perhaps a
publisher--said lately: "Poetry is of no account now-a-days."
But it is not totally neglected. Those persons with gold-rimmed
spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have
remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not
given to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished
position in the popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked down the
throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote THE LOVES OF THE
PLANTS and a scoffer THE LOVES OF THE TRIANGLES, poets have been
supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science. What
tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity? All I can
remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur Symons' line about
arc lamps: "Hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit."
Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but
inarticulate way the glories of science. Poetry does not play its
part. Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but
when he writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating
table. Here I am reminded, though, of a modern instance to the
contrary in prose. Mr. H. G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has
never written a line of verse, was inspired a few years ago to
write a short story, UNDER THE KNIFE. Out of a clock-dial, a brass
rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation
of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an
awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great
voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words:
"There shall be no more pain!" I advise you to look up that story,
so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose
whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his
most perverse moments of scorn for things as they are. His poetic
imagination is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am
not afraid to say. But, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any
man a poet--were he born without tongue for speech and without
hands to seize his fancy and fasten her down to a wretched piece of
paper.
The book {6} which in the course of the last few days I have opened
and shut several times is not imaginative. But, on the other hand,
it is not a dumb book, as some are. It has even a sort of sober
and serious eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at
fault in this matter. Mr. Bourne begins his ASCENDING EFFORT with
a remark by Sir Francis Galton upon Eugenics that "if the
principles he was advocating were to become effective they must be
introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion."
"Introduced" suggests compulsory vaccination. Mr. Bourne, who is
not a theologian, wishes to league together not science and
religion, but science and the arts. "The intoxicating power of
art," he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired
effect to the doctrines of science. In uninspired phrase he points
to the arts playing once upon a time a part in "popularising the
Christian tenets." With painstaking fervour as great as the
fervour of prophets, but not so persuasive, he foresees the arts
some day popularising science. Until that day dawns, science will
continue to be lame and poetry blind. He himself cannot smooth or
even point out the way, though he thinks that "a really prudent
people would be greedy of beauty," and their public authorities "as
careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation."
As the writer of those remarkable rustic notebooks, THE BETTESWORTH
BOOK and MEMOIRS OF A SURREY LABOURER, the author has a claim upon
our attention. But his seriousness, his patience, his almost
touching sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and
nothing more. He is obsessed by science, haunted and shadowed by
it, until he has been bewildered into awe. He knows, indeed, that
art owes its triumphs and its subtle influence to the fact that it
issues straight from our organic vitality, and is a movement of
life-cells with their matchless unintellectual knowledge. But the
fact that poetry does not seem obviously in love with science has
never made him doubt whether it may not be an argument against his
haste to see the marriage ceremony performed amid public
rejoicings.
Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round
the sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning
ridiculously with a waggling motion like a top about to fall. This
is the Copernican system, and the man believes in the system
without often knowing as much about it as its name. But while
watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small
and useful object, the servant of his needs and the witness of his
ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and
then he holds the system of Ptolemy. He holds it without knowing
it. In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand
undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will
do after reading Mr. Bourne's book; he writes, therefore, as if
neither truths nor book existed. Life and the arts follow dark
courses, and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of
science. Some day, without a doubt,--and it may be a consolation
to Mr. Bourne to know it--fully informed critics will point out
that Mr. Davies's poem on a dark woman combing her hair must have
been written after the invasion of appendicitis, and that Mr.
Yeats's "Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths" came before radium
was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity in
pitchblende to upset the venerable (and comparatively naive)
chemistry of our young days.
There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science
are alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining-
-and this is one of them. "Many a man prides himself" says Mr.
Bourne, "on his piety or his views of art, whose whole range of
ideas, could they be investigated, would be found ordinary, if not
base, because they have been adopted in compliance with some
external persuasion or to serve some timid purpose instead of
proceeding authoritatively from the living selection of his
hereditary taste." This extract is a fair sample of the book's
thought and of its style. But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that
"persuasion" is a vain thing. The appreciation of great art comes
from within.
It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of
Mr. Bourne's purpose is undeniable. But the whole book is simply
an earnest expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of
pious wishes, this one seems of little dynamic value--besides being
impracticable.
Yes, indeed. Art has served Religion; artists have found the most
exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the light of
Transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of
our sinful souls is not the light of the generating stations, which
exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is
permitted for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible
shadows.
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS--AN APPRECIATION--1907
A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play--and I
lived long enough to accomplish the task. We live and learn. When
the play was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for
performance. Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of
Plays. I may say without vanity that I am intelligent enough to
have been astonished by that piece of information: for facts must
stand in some relation to time and space, and I was aware of being
in England--in the twentieth-century England. The fact did not fit
the date and the place. That was my first thought. It was, in
short, an improper fact. I beg you to believe that I am writing in
all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.
Therefore I don't say inappropriate. I say improper--that is:
something to be ashamed of. And at first this impression was
confirmed by the obscurity in which the figure embodying this after
all considerable fact had its being. The Censor of Plays! His
name was not in the mouths of all men. Far from it. He seemed
stealthy and remote. There was about that figure the scent of the
far East, like the peculiar atmosphere of a Mandarin's back yard,
and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch when mankind tried
to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final certitude attained
in morals, intellect and conscience.
It was a disagreeable impression. But I reflected that probably
the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a
survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of
the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported
curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one's old
possessions apart from any intrinsic value; one more object of
exotic VIRTU, an Oriental POTICHE, a MAGOT CHINOIS conceived by a
childish and extravagant imagination, but allowed to stand in
stolid impotence in the twilight of the upper shelf.
Thus I quieted my uneasy mind. Its uneasiness had nothing to do
with the fate of my one-act play. The play was duly produced, and
an exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the
boards. It ceased to exist. It was a fair and open execution.
But having survived the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I
continued to exist, labouring under no sense of wrong. I was not
pleased, but I was content. I was content to accept the verdict of
a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the
work of its free, independent and conscientious servant--the
artist.
Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved--not
to speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect
of the man. I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public.
To the self-respect of the public the present appeal against the
censorship is being made and I join in it with all my heart.
For I have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and
outlandish figure, the MAGOT CHINOIS whom I believed to be but a
memorial of our forefathers' mental aberration, that grotesque
POTICHE, works! The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be
alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its
traditions. It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it
brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a Bravo
of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs its victim from
behind in the twilight of its upper shelf. Less picturesque than
the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that
the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no
countenance from the powers of the Republic, it stands more
malevolent, inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but
the body, whereas the grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may
in its absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of
an honest, of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.
This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western
Barbarian and provided by the State with the immortal Mr.
Stiggins's plug hat and umbrella, is with us. It is an office. An
office of trust. And from time to time there is found an official
to fill it. He is a public man. The least prominent of public
men, the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not the most modest.
But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only
once in his life. His office flourishes in the shade; not in the
rustic shade beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of
mind, where tyranny of every sort flourishes. Its holder need not
have either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not
even bowels of compassion. He needs not these things. He has
power. He can kill thought, and incidentally truth, and
incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live in a dramatic
form. He can do it, without seeing, without understanding, without
feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irresponsible
Roman Caesar could kill a senator. He can do that and there is no
one to say him nay. He may call his cook (Moliere used to do that)
from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a
matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned
destroyer of men's honest work. He may have a glass too much.
This accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable morality--to
gentlemen. He may suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius.
He may . . . what might he not do! I tell you he is the Caesar of
the dramatic world. There has been since the Roman Principate
nothing in the way of irresponsible power to compare with the
office of the Censor of Plays.
Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in
the odious and the absurd. This figure in whose power it is to
suppress an intellectual conception--to kill thought (a dream for a
mad brain, my masters!)--seems designed in a spirit of bitter
comedy to bring out the greatness of a Philistine's conceit and his
moral cowardice.
But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that
there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It
is a matter for meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come
to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my
conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an
utterly unconscious being.
He must be unconscious. It is one of the qualifications for his
magistracy. Other qualifications are equally easy. He must have
done nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing. He must be
obscure, insignificant and mediocre--in thought, act, speech and
sympathy. He must know nothing of art, of life--and of himself.
For if he did he would not dare to be what he is. Like that much
questioned and mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the
cold ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of
his kind in the sight of wondering generations.
And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact
words but the true spirit of a lofty conscience.
"Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially
when I felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my
convictions, I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame
might check the development of a great talent, my sincere judgment
condemn a worthy mind. With the pen poised in my hand I hesitated,
whispering to myself 'What if I were perchance doing my part in
killing a masterpiece.'"
Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaitre--dramatist and
dramatic critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the
Republic of Letters; a Censor of Plays exercising his august office
openly in the light of day, with the authority of a European
reputation. But then M. Jules Lemaitre is a man possessed of
wisdom, of great fame, of a fine conscience--not an obscure hollow
Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr. Stiggins's plug hat and
cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother--the State.
Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf?
It has stood too long there. Hatched in Pekin (I should say) by
some Board of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has
come to us by way of Moscow--I suppose. It is outlandish. It is
not venerable. It does not belong here. Is it not time to knock
it off its dark shelf with some implement appropriate to its worth
and status? With an old broom handle for instance.
PART II--LIFE
AUTOCRACY AND WAR--1905
From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the
fate of the great battle of the Russo-Japanese war hung in the
balance for more than a fortnight. The famous three-day battles,
for which history has reserved the recognition of special pages,
sink into insignificance before the struggles in Manchuria engaging
half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, struggles lasting for
weeks, flaming up fiercely and dying away from sheer exhaustion, to
flame up again in desperate persistence, and end--as we have seen
them end more than once--not from the victor obtaining a crushing
advantage, but through the mortal weariness of the combatants.
We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the
cold, silent, colourless print of books and newspapers. In
stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I
have no intention of putting a slight upon the fidelity and the
talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the
battles in Manchuria. I only wished to suggest that in the nature
of things, the war in the Far East has been made known to us, so
far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of
pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of
thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence,
through the veil of inadequate words. Inadequate, I say, because
what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war,
and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a
slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk
and the real progress of humanitarian ideas. Direct vision of the
fact, or the stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and
open its eyes heavy with blessed sleep; and even there, as against
the testimony of the senses and the stirring up of emotion, that
saving callousness which reconciles us to the conditions of our
existence, will assert itself under the guise of assent to fatal
necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a purely aesthetic admiration of
the rendering. In this age of knowledge our sympathetic
imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate triumph of
concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to information,
however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to the
vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the
futility of precision without force. It is the exploded
superstition of enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse
falling in front of our windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel
in the streets awaken more genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and
indignation than the stream of reports, appalling in their
monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air
of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of thousands of maimed
bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen ground, filling
the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of survivors no
less pathetic and even more tragic in being left alive by fate to
the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil.
An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist,
looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street--perhaps
Fleet Street itself--full of people, is reported, by an admiring
friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. These
arcadian tears, this facile emotion worthy of the golden age, comes
to us from the past, with solemn approval, after the close of the
Napoleonic wars and before the series of sanguinary surprises held
in reserve by the nineteenth century for our hopeful grandfathers.
We may well envy them their optimism of which this anecdote of an
amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme instance, but
still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the spontaneous
testimony to that trust in the life of the earth, triumphant at
last in the felicity of her children. Moreover, the psychology of
individuals, even in the most extreme instances, reflects the
general effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept for joy!
I should think that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be
of a sterner sort. One could not imagine anybody shedding tears of
joy at the sight of much life in a street, unless, perhaps, he were
an enthusiastic officer of a general staff or a popular politician,
with a career yet to make. And hardly even that. In the case of
the first tears would be unprofessional, and a stern repression of
all signs of joy at the provision of so much food for powder more
in accord with the rules of prudence; the joy of the second would
be checked before it found issue in weeping by anxious doubts as to
the soundness of these electors' views upon the question of the
hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of their votes.
No! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much
as ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back. The
end of the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of
dismal mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded like a
bomb-shell. In its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the
inferiority of minds, of military and administrative systems, stood
exposed with pitiless vividness. And there is but little courage
in saying at this time of the day that the glorified French
Revolution itself, except for its destructive force, was in
essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The parentage of that great
social and political upheaval was intellectual, the idea was
elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal
form and power, to lose its "virtue" the moment it descends from
its solitary throne to work its will among the people. It is a
king whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects
except at the cost of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of
freedom and justice at the root of the French Revolution is made
manifest in the person of its heir; a personality without law or
faith, whom it has been the fashion to represent as an eagle, but
who was, in truth, more like a sort of vulture preying upon the
body of a Europe which did, indeed, for some dozen of years, very
much resemble a corpse. The subtle and manifold influence for evil
of the Napoleonic episode as a school of violence, as a sower of
national hatreds, as the direct provocator of obscurantism and
reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot well be
exaggerated.
The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a
corrupted revolution. It may be said that the twentieth begins
with a war which is like the explosive ferment of a moral grave,
whence may yet emerge a new political organism to take the place of
a gigantic and dreaded phantom. For a hundred years the ghost of
Russian might, overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils
of Central and Western Europe, sat upon the gravestone of
autocracy, cutting off from air, from light, from all knowledge of
themselves and of the world, the buried millions of Russian people.
Not the most determined cockney sentimentalist could have had the
heart to weep for joy at the thought of its teeming numbers! And
yet they were living, they are alive yet, since, through the mist
of print, we have seen their blood freezing crimson upon the snow
of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; since their
generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the
ditches and cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn limbs; to
send up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans
calling for vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and
advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty
hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder--till
their ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of
Dante's Inferno, passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of
hopelessness, sinks into the night of crazy despair.
It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds
of sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery. Great
numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of
protest against the peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly
among the Russians, of course. The Japanese have in their favour
the tonic effect of success; and the innate gentleness of their
character stands them in good stead. But the Japanese grand army
has yet another advantage in this nerve-destroying contest, which
for endless, arduous toil of killing surpasses all the wars of
history. It has a base for its operations; a base of a nature
beyond the concern of the many books written upon the so-called art
of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an exercise of human
ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices.
The Japanese army has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has
behind it the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity
to be appeased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. And in
that belief, whether well or ill founded, that army stands on the
high ground of conscious assent, shouldering deliberately the
burden of a long-tried faithfulness. The other people (since each
people is an army nowadays), torn out from a miserable quietude
resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed, without
starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim, can feel nothing
but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mysteriously become
the plaything of a black and merciless fate.
The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the
memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the
one forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental
darkness into the red light of a conflagration, the other with a
full knowledge of its past and its future, "finding itself" as it
were at every step of the trying war before the eyes of an
astonished world. The greatness of the lesson has been dwarfed for
most of us by an often half-conscious prejudice of race-difference.
The West having managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of the
East, is prone to forget that it is from the East that the wonders
of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who set the
value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of
meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured
by a cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and
meditation had little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on
the military situation which (apart from geographical conditions)
is the same everlasting situation that has prevailed since the
times of Hannibal and Scipio, and further back yet, since the
beginning of historical record--since prehistoric times, for that
matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at the tale of
maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with guesses more or
less plausible as to its conditions. All this is made legitimate
by the consecrated custom of writers in such time as this--the time
of a great war. More legitimate in view of the situation created
in Europe are the speculations as to the course of events after the
war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the irresponsible
talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace that do
not matter.
And above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old,
hundred years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe
from across the teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and
strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains,
hung over with holy images; that something not of this world,
partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind Djinn grown up from a
cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still faces us with its old
stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its
shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked
beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama,
already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings
of a resurrection.
Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep
into the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing
as, and even believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from
the benighted, starved souls of its people. This is the real
object-lesson of this war, its unforgettable information. And this
war's true mission, disengaged from the economic origins of that
contest, from doors open or shut, from the fields of Korea for
Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the ownership of ice-free
ports and the command of the waters of the East--its true mission
was to lay a ghost. It has accomplished it. Whether Kuropatkin
was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next year,
or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses
will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations. The
task of Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of
Russia's might is laid. Only Europe, accustomed so long to the
presence of that portent, seems unable to comprehend that, as in
the fables of our childhood, the twelve strokes of the hour have
rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition has vanished--never to
haunt again this world which has been used to gaze at it with vague
dread and many misgivings.
It was a fascination. And the hallucination still lasts as
inexplicable in its persistence as in its duration. It seems so
unaccountable, that the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all
that talk as to what Russia will or will not do, whether it will
raise or not another army, whether it will bury the Japanese in
Manchuria under seventy millions of sacrificed peasants' caps (as
her Press boasted a little more than a year ago) or give up to
Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together with some other
things; whether, perchance, as an interesting alternative, it will
make peace on the Amur in order to make war beyond the Oxus.
All these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in
print; and if they have been gravely considered by only one reader
out of each hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the
human brain in the composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that
the large page, the columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt
the mind into a state of feverish credulity. The printed page of
the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the
power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them
only the artificially created need of having something exciting to
talk about.
The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of
our middle-age; the testamentary Russia of Peter the Great--who
imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of
Tsardom--can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not
exist. It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no
new Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation, which,
being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reality be nothing
else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument of
fear and oppression.
The true greatness of a State does not spring from such a
contemptible source. It is a matter of logical growth, of faith
and courage. Its inspiration springs from the constructive
instinct of the people, governed by the strong hand of a collective
conscience and voiced in the wisdom and counsel of men who seldom
reap the reward of gratitude. Many States have been powerful, but,
perhaps, none have been truly great--as yet. That the position of
a State in reference to the moral methods of its development can be
seen only historically, is true. Perhaps mankind has not lived
long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular case.
Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth
shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious
arrangements of statesmen will come to an end before we attain the
felicity of greeting with unanimous applause the perfect fruition
of a great State. It is even possible that we are destined for
another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which consists in
being perpetually duped by false appearances. But whatever
political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or our
admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the
magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now
driven out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none
that in its retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity
to more unworthy supports: to the moral corruption and mental
darkness of slavery, to the mere brute force of numbers.
This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's
feelings and reason that the downfall of Russia's might is
unavoidable. Spectral it lived and spectral it disappears without
leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a single service
rendered--even involuntarily--to the polity of nations. Other
despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly
fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so
gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its
irresistible strength which is dying so hard.
Considered historically, Russia's influence in Europe seems the
most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by
diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect,
if the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were
not the main characteristic of the management of international
relations. A glance back at the last hundred years shows the
invariable, one may say the logical, powerlessness of Russia. As a
military power it has never achieved by itself a single great
thing. It has been indeed able to repel an ill-considered
invasion, but only by having recourse to the extreme methods of
desperation. In its attacks upon its specially selected victim
this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand. All the
campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin's time to the
last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a
well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even the
half-armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or,
rather, of the Tsardom. It was victorious only against the
practically disarmed, as, in regard to its ideal of territorial
expansion, a glance at a map will prove sufficiently. As an ally,
Russia has been always unprofitable, taking her share in the
defeats rather than in the victories of her friends, but always
pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an arbiter of military
success. She has been unable to help to any purpose a single
principle to hold its own, not even the principle of authority and
legitimism which Nicholas the First had declared so haughtily to
rest under his special protection; just as Nicholas the Second has
tried to make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive
affair. And the first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the
belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an intensity of
faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. Rightly
envisaged, the Crimean war was the end of what remained of
absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the way open for the
liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of
absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock
behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts. In
the space of fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism
and the self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the
Augustulus of the REGIME that was wont to speak contemptuously to
European Foreign Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince
Gorchakov, have fallen victims, each after his kind, to their
shadowy and dreadful familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part
Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak and claws and a double
head, looking greedily both east and west on the confines of two
continents.
That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the
monster it is impossible to believe. But of the many who must have
seen, all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too
discreet, to speak; or else were too insignificant to be heard or
believed. Yet not all.
In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his
post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called--so the story
goes--upon another distinguished diplomatist. After some talk upon
the general situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire
remarked that it was his practice to resume the impressions he had
carried out of every country where he had made a long stay, in a
short sentence, which he caused to be engraved upon some trinket.
"I am leaving this country now, and this is what I bring away from
it," he continued, taking off his finger a new ring to show to his
colleague the inscription inside: "La Russie, c'est le neant."
Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too
modest nor too discreet to speak out. Certainly he was not afraid
of not being believed. Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the
house-tops. He meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an
enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for many a year.
He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact
for more than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy
left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.
It is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly,
astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which
the East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its
existence will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince
Bismarck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of sensational
paragraphs as to this NEANT making an armed descent upon the plains
of India. That sort of folly would be beneath notice if it did not
distract attention from the real problem created for Europe by a
war in the Far East.
For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound
to remain a NEANT for many long years, in a more even than a
Bismarckian sense. The very fear of this spectre being gone, it
behoves us to consider its legacy--the fact (no phantom that)
accomplished in Central Europe by its help and connivance.
The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice
always amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in
the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental
weakening of a possible obstacle to its instincts of territorial
expansion. There is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint
which the presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated with
you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to inspire. The common
guilt of the two Empires is defined precisely by their frontier
line running through the Polish provinces. Without indulging in
excessive feelings of indignation at that country's partition, or
going so far as to believe--with a late French politician--in the
"immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a material
situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction, contains
the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two
partners in iniquity--whatever the iniquity is. Germany has been
the evil counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her Polish
problem. Always urging the adoption of the most repressive
measures with a perfectly logical duplicity, Prince Bismarck's
Empire has taken care to couple the neighbourly offers of military
assistance with merciless advice. The thought of the Polish
provinces accepting a frank reconciliation with a humanised Russia
and bringing the weight of homogeneous loyalty within a few miles
of Berlin, has been always intensely distasteful to the arrogant
Germanising tendencies of the other partner in iniquity. And,
besides, the way to the Baltic provinces leads over the Niemen and
over the Vistula.
And now, when there is a possibility of serious internal
disturbances destroying the sort of order autocracy has kept in
Russia, the road over these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting
aspect. At any moment the pretext of armed intervention may be
found in a revolutionary outbreak provoked by Socialists, perhaps--
but at any rate by the political immaturity of the enlightened
classes and by the political barbarism of the Russian people. The
throes of Russian resurrection will be long and painful. This is
not the place to speculate upon the nature of these convulsions,
but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable
tradition, a shattering of the social, of the administrative--
certainly of the territorial--unity.
Voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in Russia
is already past. This is the superficial view of the more profound
truth that for Russia there has never been such a time within the
memory of mankind. It is impossible to initiate a rational scheme
of reform upon a phase of blind absolutism; and in Russia there has
never been anything else to which the faintest tradition could,
after ages of error, go back as to a parting of ways.
In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its
historical struggle with the growth of political liberty by the
evolution of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the
present time; by the inception of that wider solidarity grouping
together around the standard of monarchical power these larger,
agglomerations of mankind. This service of unification, creating
close-knit communities possessing the ability, the will, and the
power to pursue a common ideal, has prepared the ground for the
advent of a still larger understanding: for the solidarity of
Europeanism, which must be the next step towards the advent of
Concord and Justice; an advent that, however delayed by the fatal
worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been,
and remains, the only possible goal of our progress.
The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national
duties and aspirations have grown under the shadow of the old
monarchies of Europe, which were the creations of historical
necessity. There were seeds of wisdom in their very mistakes and
abuses. They had a past and a future; they were human. But under
the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could grow. Russian
autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no historical past, and it
cannot hope for a historical future. It can only end. By no
industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of benevolence,
can it be presented as a phase of development through which a
Society, a State, must pass on the way to the full consciousness of
its destiny. It lies outside the stream of progress. This
despotism has been utterly un-European. Neither has it been
Asiatic in its nature. Oriental despotisms belong to the history
of mankind; they have left their trace on our minds and our
imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by their art, by
the exploits of great conquerors. The record of their rise and
decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and
their course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of
racial temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism.
The Russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. It is
impossible to assign to it any rational origin in the vices, the
misfortunes, the necessities, or the aspirations of mankind. That
despotism has neither an European nor an Oriental parentage; more,
it seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies
of this earth. What strikes one with a sort of awe is just this
something inhuman in its character. It is like a visitation, like
a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the
immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of
two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the
East or of the West.
This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering
from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be
traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a
nation so difficult to understand by Europe. From the very first
ghastly dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the
atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the arbitrary will
of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her
organisation. Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true
in Western thought. Western thought, when it crosses her frontier,
falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody
of itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her national
life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of the
world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing
else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the
poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy
of a hopeless fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood,
tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical,
insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and holiness. The
Government of Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power
to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent
scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under
the shadow of its dispensation. The worst crime against humanity
of that system we behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of
mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds.
The greatest horror of the world--madness--walked faithfully in its
train. Some of the best intellects of Russia, after struggling in
vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet of
that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss. An
attentive survey of Russia's literature, of her Church, of her
administration and the cross-currents of her thought, must end in
the verdict that the Russia of to-day has not the right to give her
voice on a single question touching the future of humanity, because
from the very inception of her being the brutal destruction of
dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human
nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence.
The great governmental secret of that imperium which Prince
Bismarck had the insight and the courage to call LE NEANT, has been
the extirpation of every intellectual hope. To pronounce in the
face of such a past the word Evolution, which is precisely the
expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome
pleasantry. There can be no evolution out of a grave. Another
word of less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late
in connection with Russia's future, a word of more vague import, a
word of dread as much as of hope--Revolution.
In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has
sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard
with solemn forebodings. More or less consciously, Europe is
preparing herself for a spectacle of much violence and perhaps of
an inspiring nobility of greatness. And there will be nothing of
what she expects. She will see neither the anticipated character
of the violence, nor yet any signs of generous greatness. Her
expectations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of
her ignorance of that NEANT which for so many years had remained
hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.
NEANT! In a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let
himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use
of an inexact form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy,
striking, engraved within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he
erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the truth to serve,
and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly by a more severe
definition the prestige of the sham that could not deceive his
genius. Prince Bismarck has been really complimentary to the
useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an awe-inspiring
idea of infinity conveyed in the word NEANT--and in Russia there is
no idea. She is not a NEANT, she is and has been simply the
negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty void,
she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless
abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration
towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every
ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of
conscience. Those that have peered into that abyss, where the
dreams of Panslavism, of universal conquest, mingled with the hate
and contempt for Western ideas, drift impotently like shapes of
mist, know well that it is bottomless; that there is in it no
ground for anything that could in the remotest degree serve even
the lowest interests of mankind--and certainly no ground ready for
a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was not the
absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the
inability to alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and
oppressive with the march of time. Every form of legality is bound
to degenerate into oppression, and the legality in the forms of
monarchical institutions sooner, perhaps, than any other. It has
not been the business of monarchies to be adaptive from within.
With the mission of uniting and consolidating the particular
ambitions and interests of feudalism in favour of a larger
conception of a State, of giving self-consciousness, force and
nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action, they
were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set
in motion in a direction they could neither understand nor approve.
Yet, for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more
significant, perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have survived.
The revolutions of European States have never been in the nature of
absolute protests EN MASSE against the monarchical principle; they
were the uprising of the people against the oppressive degeneration
of legality. But there never has been any legality in Russia; she
is a negation of that as of everything else that has its root in
reason or conscience. The ground of every revolution had to be
intellectually prepared. A revolution is a short cut in the
rational development of national needs in response to the growth of
world-wide ideals. It is conceivably possible for a monarch of
genius to put himself at the head of a revolution without ceasing
to be the king of his people. For the autocracy of Holy Russia the
only conceivable self-reform is--suicide.
The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all-powerful ruler
and his helpless people. Wielders of a power purchased by an
unspeakable baseness of subjection to the Khans of the Tartar
horde, the Princes of Russia who, in their heart of hearts had come
in time to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of
Europe, have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. Their
authority has never been sanctioned by popular tradition, by ideas
of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of political necessity, of
simple expediency, or even by the power of the sword. In whatever
form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her end, it can never
be a revolution fruitful of moral consequences to mankind. It
cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a tragic
circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who
had never seen face to face either law, order, justice, right,
truth about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing
outside the capricious will of its irresponsible masters, is that
it should find in the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or
a law-giver, with the wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their
service, but at least the force of energy and desperation in some
as yet unknown Spartacus.
A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon
Russian achievements; and the coming events of her internal
changes, however appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be
nothing more impressive than the convulsions of a colossal body.
As her boasted military force that, corrupt in its origin, has ever
struck no other but faltering blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by
her temporal and spiritual master with the poison of tyranny and
superstition, will find itself on awakening possessed of no
language, a monstrous full-grown child having first to learn the
ways of living thought and articulate speech. It is safe to say
tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain clinging
to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes
succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their
millions of bare feet.
That would be the beginning. What is to come after? The conquest
of freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the
road to excellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two
further, have had the time to forget how little that freedom means.
To Russia it must seem everything. A prisoner shut up in a noisome
dungeon concentrates all his hope and desire on the moment of
stepping out beyond the gates. It appears to him pregnant with an
immense and final importance; whereas what is important is the
spirit in which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the
counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the endless
days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his
future with no other material but what he can find within himself.
It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of
collective wisdom. Since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the
old tradition disconsolately exclaimed) "il n'y a plus d'Europe!"
There is, indeed, no Europe. The idea of a Europe united in the
solidarity of her dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on
the horizon of the Vienna Congress through the subsiding dust of
Napoleonic alarums and excursions, has been extinguished by the
larger glamour of less restraining ideals. Instead of the
doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of nationalities much
more favourable to spoliations that came to the front, and since
its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe.
Meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers,
there are alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of
suspicion and mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes
with every year, almost with the event of every passing month.
This is the atmosphere Russia will find when the last rampart of
tyranny has been beaten down. But what hands, what voices will she
find on coming out into the light of day? An ally she has yet who
more than any other of Russia's allies has found that it had parted
with lots of solid substance in exchange for a shadow. It is true
that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest that the
modern world had ever known--and the most overbearing. But it is
fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take
its place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction,
and no doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even
in the moments of greatest aberration is seldom wanting in the
voice of the French people.
Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Austria,
traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled
by a dynasty of uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only
speak to her in an uncertain, bilingual phrase. Prussia, grown in
something like forty years from an almost pitiful dependant into a
bullying friend and evil counsellor of Russia's masters, may,
indeed, hasten to extend a strong hand to the weakness of her
exhausted body, but if so it will be only with the intention of
tearing away the long-coveted part of her substance.
Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is
anything but a NEANT where thought and effort are likely to lose
themselves without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious
organisation, full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite
for aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping
itself to the severed members of its friends and neighbours. The
era of wars so eloquently denounced by the old Republicans as the
peculiar blood guilt of dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet.
They will be fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an
increased bitterness and the savage tooth-and-claw obstinacy of a
struggle for existence. They will make us regret the time of
dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by
prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility
and the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. For,
if the monarchs of Europe have been derided for addressing each
other as "brother" in autograph communications, that relationship
was at least as effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be
established between the rival nations of this continent, which, we
are assured on all hands, is the heritage of democracy. In the
ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the reality of blood-ties, for
what little it is worth, acted often as a drag on unscrupulous
desires of glory or greed. Besides, there was always the common
danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other's
divine right. No leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but
the sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very condition
of his power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any
interest in calling brother the leader of another democracy--a
chief as fatherless and heirless as himself.
The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napoleon's half-
generous, half-selfish adoption of the principle of nationalities,
was the first war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by
a new note in the tune of an old song for which we may thank the
Teutonic thoroughness. Was it not that excellent bourgeoise,
Princess Bismarck (to keep only to great examples), who was so
righteously anxious to see men, women and children--emphatically
the children, too--of the abominable French nation massacred off
the face of the earth? This illustration of the new war-temper is
artlessly revealed in the prattle of the amiable Busch, the
Chancellor's pet "reptile" of the Press. And this was supposed to
be a war for an idea! Too much, however, should not be made of
that good wife's and mother's sentiments any more than of the good
First Emperor William's tears, shed so abundantly after every
battle, by letter, telegram, and otherwise, during the course of
the same war, before a dumb and shamefaced continent. These were
merely the expressions of the simplicity of a nation which more
than any other has a tendency to run into the grotesque. There is
worse to come.
To-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of different race, the
short era of national wars seems about to close. No war will be
waged for an idea. The "noxious idle aristocracies" of yesterday
fought without malice for an occupation, for the honour, for the
fun of the thing. The virtuous, industrious democratic States of
to-morrow may yet be reduced to fighting for a crust of dry bread,
with all the hate, ferocity, and fury that must attach to the vital
importance of such an issue. The dreams sanguine humanitarians
raised almost to ecstasy about the year fifty of the last century
by the moving sight of the Crystal Palace--crammed full with that
variegated rubbish which it seems to be the bizarre fate of
humanity to produce for the benefit of a few employers of labour--
have vanished as quickly as they had arisen. The golden hopes of
peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in every drawer
of every benevolent theorist's writing table. A swift
disenchantment overtook the incredible infatuation which could put
its trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial
competition.
Industrialism and commercialism--wearing high-sounding names in
many languages (WELT-POLITIK may serve for one instance) picking up
coins behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose
giant strides have widened for us the horizon of the universe by
some few inches--stand ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword
as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing
numbers by another ell or so. And democracy, which has elected to
pin its faith to the supremacy of material interests, will have to
fight their battles to the bitter end, on a mere pittance--unless,
indeed, some statesman of exceptional ability and overwhelming
prestige succeeds in carrying through an international
understanding for the delimitation of spheres of trade all over the
earth, on the model of the territorial spheres of influence marked
in Africa to keep the competitors for the privilege of improving
the nigger (as a buying machine) from flying prematurely at each
other's throats.
This seems the only expedient at hand for the temporary maintenance
of European peace, with its alliances based on mutual distrust,
preparedness for war as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily
stronger, so far, than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee.
The true peace of the world will be a place of refuge much less
like a beleaguered fortress and more, let us hope, in the nature of
an Inviolable Temple. It will be built on less perishable
foundations than those of material interests. But it must be
confessed that the architectural aspect of the universal city
remains as yet inconceivable--that the very ground for its erection
has not been cleared of the jungle.
Never before in history has the right of war been more fully
admitted in the rounded periods of public speeches, in books, in
public prints, in all the public works of peace, culminating in the
establishment of the Hague Tribunal--that solemnly official
recognition of the Earth as a House of Strife. To him whose
indignation is qualified by a measure of hope and affection, the
efforts of mankind to work its own salvation present a sight of
alarming comicality. After clinging for ages to the steps of the
heavenly throne, they are now, without much modifying their
attitude, trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the
thunderbolts of their Jupiter. They have removed war from the list
of Heaven-sent visitations that could only be prayed against; they
have erased its name from the supplication against the wrath of
war, pestilence, and famine, as it is found in the litanies of the
Roman Catholic Church; they have dragged the scourge down from the
skies and have made it into a calm and regulated institution. At
first sight the change does not seem for the better. Jove's
thunderbolt looks a most dangerous plaything in the hands of the
people. But a solemnly established institution begins to grow old
at once in the discussion, abuse, worship, and execration of men.
It grows obsolete, odious, and intolerable; it stands fatally
condemned to an unhonoured old age.
Therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and the best way to
help its prospects is to provide in the fullest, frankest way for
the conditions of the present day. War is one of its conditions;
it is its principal condition. It lies at the heart of every
question agitating the fears and hopes of a humanity divided
against itself. The succeeding ages have changed nothing except
the watchwords of the armies. The intellectual stage of mankind
being as yet in its infancy, and States, like most individuals,
having but a feeble and imperfect consciousness of the worth and
force of the inner life, the need of making their existence
manifest to themselves is determined in the direction of physical
activity. The idea of ceasing to grow in territory, in strength,
in wealth, in influence--in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge-
-is odious to them as the omen of the end. Action, in which is to
be found the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone satisfy our
uneasy vanity and lay to rest the haunting fear of the future--a
sentiment concealed, indeed, but proving its existence by the force
it has, when invoked, to stir the passions of a nation. It will be
long before we have learned that in the great darkness before us
there is nothing that we need fear. Let us act lest we perish--is
the cry. And the only form of action open to a State can be of no
other than aggressive nature.
There are many kinds of aggressions, though the sanction of them is
one and the same--the magazine rifle of the latest pattern. In
preparation for or against that form of action the States of Europe
are spending now such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch
from the labours of factory and counting-house.
Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men,
and reigned with less disputed sway in their minds. It has
harnessed science to its gun-carriages, it has enriched a few
respectable manufacturers, scattered doles of food and raiment
amongst a few thousand skilled workmen, devoured the first youth of
whole generations, and reaped its harvest of countless corpses. It
has perverted the intelligence of men, women, and children, and has
made the speeches of Emperors, Kings, Presidents, and Ministers
monotonous with ardent protestations of fidelity to peace. Indeed,
war has made peace altogether its own, it has modelled it on its
own image: a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of peace, with a
mailed fist, and turned-up moustaches, ringing with the din of
grand manoeuvres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of
arms; it has made peace so magnificent as to be almost as expensive
to keep up as itself. It has sent out apostles of its own, who at
one time went about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of
the mystic sanctity of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power
of spilt blood, to the poor in mind--whose name is legion.
It has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day
of culminating triumph is often paid for by a morrow of sudden
extinction. Let us hope it is so. Yet the dawn of that day of
retribution may be a long time breaking above a dark horizon. War
is with us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will
be with us again. And it is the way of true wisdom for men and
States to take account of things as they are.
Civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for
whose growth it is responsible. It has managed to remove the
sights and sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps. But it
cannot be expected to achieve the feat always and under every
variety of circumstance. Some day it must fail, and we shall have
then a wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to
us with painful intimacy. It is not absurd to suppose that
whatever war comes to us next it will NOT be a distant war waged by
Russia either beyond the Amur or beyond the Oxus.
The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the
Russia of the future will not, for the reasons explained above, be
the Russia of to-day. It will not have the same thoughts,
resentments and aims. It is even a question whether it will
preserve its gigantic frame unaltered and unbroken. All
speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the events made
possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title
to existence was the invincible power of military conquest. That
autocratic Russia will have a miserable end in harmony with its
base origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt. The
problem of the immediate future is posed not by the eventual manner
but by the approaching fact of its disappearance.
The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not only
accomplished what will be recognised historically as an important
mission in the world's struggle against all forms of evil, but have
also created a situation. They have created a situation in the
East which they are competent to manage by themselves; and in doing
this they have brought about a change in the condition of the West
with which Europe is not well prepared to deal. The common ground
of concord, good faith and justice is not sufficient to establish
an action upon; since the conscience of but very few men amongst
us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will brook the
restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a
material advantage. And eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the
lead of human action, which in its nature must for ever remain
short-sighted. The trouble of the civilised world is the want of a
common conservative principle abstract enough to give the impulse,
practical enough to form the rallying point of international action
tending towards the restraint of particular ambitions. Peace
tribunals instituted for the greater glory of war will not replace
it. Whether such a principle exists--who can say? If it does not,
then it ought to be invented. A sage with a sense of humour and a
heart of compassion should set about it without loss of time, and a
solemn prophet full of words and fire ought to be given the task of
preparing the minds. So far there is no trace of such a principle
anywhere in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very
effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine of
national aspirations. IL N'Y A PLUS D'EUROPE--there is only an
armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical
contests for life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide
ambitions. There are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply
rooted in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last corner
amongst the great Powers of the Continent, whose feet are not
exactly in the ocean--not yet--and whose head is very high up--in
Pomerania, the breeding place of such precious Grenadiers that
Prince Bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote) would not have
given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the old
Eastern Question. But times have changed, since, by way of keeping
up, I suppose, some old barbaric German rite, the faithful servant
of the Hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of
a new Emperor.
Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at
a possible re-grouping of European Powers. The alliance of the
three Empires is supposed possible. And it may be possible. The
myth of Russia's power is dying very hard--hard enough for that
combination to take place--such is the fascination that a
discredited show of numbers will still exercise upon the
imagination of a people trained to the worship of force. Germany
may be willing to lend its support to a tottering autocracy for the
sake of an undisputed first place, and of a preponderating voice in
the settlement of every question in that south-east of Europe which
merges into Asia. No principle being involved in such an alliance
of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand in the way
of Germany's other ambitions. The fall of autocracy would bring
its restraint automatically to an end. Thus it may be believed
that the support Russian despotism may get from its once humble
friend and client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which is
supposed to be the mark of German superiority. Russia weakened
down to the second place, or Russia eclipsed altogether during the
throes of her regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of
German policy--which are many and various and often incredible,
though the aim of them all is the same: aggrandisement of
territory and influence, with no regard to right and justice,
either in the East or in the West. For that and no other is the
true note of your WELT-POLITIK which desires to live.
The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon,
not so much for something to do that would count for good in the
records of the earth, as simply for something good to get. He
gazes upon the land and upon the sea with the same covetous
steadiness, for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and has
learned to box the compass. He gazes north and south, and east and
west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the waters of the
Mediterranean when they are blue. The disappearance of the Russian
phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the WELT-
POLITIK. According to the national tendency this assumption of
Imperial impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the
spikes of the PICKELHAUBES peeping out grimly from behind.
Germany's attitude proves that no peace for the earth can be found
in the expansion of material interests which she seems to have
adopted exclusively as her only aim, ideal, and watchword. For the
use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at the passing away of the
Russian phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea,
and wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation's soul in this age
which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor Gambetta,
tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the "immanent
justice of things"), may be adapted in the shape of a warning that,
so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned:
"Le Prussianisme--voile l'ennemi!"
THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919
At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland
had become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as
a crime. This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the
West of Europe; the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were
not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into the category of
acts morally reprehensible and carrying the taint of anti-social
guilt. As to Russia, the third party to the crime, and the
originator of the scheme, she had no national conscience at the
time. The will of its rulers was always accepted by the people as
the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God. As an
act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply
in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder
and there was the opportunity to get hold of it. Catherine the
Great looked upon this extension of her dominions with a cynical
satisfaction. Her political argument that the destruction of
Poland meant the repression of revolutionary ideas and the checking
of the spread of Jacobinism in Europe was a characteristically
impudent pretence. There may have been minds here and there
amongst the Russians that perceived, or perhaps only felt, that by
the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Republic, Russia
approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased, at
least territorially, to be an Asiatic Power.
It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play
a great part in Europe. To such statesmen as she had then that act
of brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political
wisdom. The King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of
his life, wished simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much
smaller cost and at much less risk than he could have done in any
other direction; for at that time Poland was perfectly defenceless
from a material point of view, and more than ever, perhaps,
inclined to put its faith in humanitarian illusions. Morally, the
Republic was in a state of ferment and consequent weakness, which
so often accompanies the period of social reform. The strength
arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; I mean the
comparatively honest (because open) strength of armed forces. But,
probably from innate inclination towards treachery, Frederick of
Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception.
Appearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered
deliberately into a treaty of alliance with the Republic, and then,
before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the
commonest decency, which must have been extremely gratifying to his
natural tastes.
As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction. They
cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch that they were in a
measure sincere. They arose from a vivid perception that Austria's
allotted share of the spoil could never compensate her for the
accession of strength and territory to the other two Powers.
Austria did not really want an extension of territory at the cost
of Poland. She could not hope to improve her frontier in that way,
and economically she had no need of Galicia, a province whose
natural resources were undeveloped and whose salt mines did not
arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her own. No
doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions was very
distasteful to the conservative monarchy; Austrian statesmen did
see at the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy
was in the West, in France, and that all the forces of Central
Europe would be needed for its suppression. But the movement
towards a PARTAGE on the part of Russia and Prussia was too
definite to be resisted, and Austria had to follow their lead in
the destruction of a State which she would have preferred to
preserve as a possible ally against Prussian and Russian ambitions.
It may be truly said that the destruction of Poland secured the
safety of the French Revolution. For when in 1795 the crime was
consummated, the Revolution had turned the corner and was in a
state to defend itself against the forces of reaction.
In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres
of liberal ideas on the continent of Europe: France and Poland.
On an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then
France was relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps,
more so. But France's geographical position made her much less
vulnerable. She had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a
decayed Spain in the south and a conglomeration of small German
Principalities on the east were her happy lot. The only States
which dreaded the contamination of the new principles and had
enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and
they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in
defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, and offering an
immediate satisfaction to their cupidity. They made their choice,
and the untold sufferings of a nation which would not die was the
price exacted by fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals.
Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and
the course of history. Progress leaves its dead by the way, for
progress is only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know
very well in their hearts. It is a march into an undiscovered
country; and in such an enterprise the victims do not count. As an
emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was convenient
enough to remember the Crime now and then: the Crime being the
murder of a State and the carving of its body into three pieces.
There was really nothing to do but to drop a few tears and a few
flowers of rhetoric upon the grave. But the spirit of the nation
refused to rest therein. It haunted the territories of the Old
Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion
where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated,
ridiculed, and pooh-pooh'd ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire
a sort of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful
possessors. Poland deprived of its independence, of its historical
continuity, with its religion and language persecuted and
repressed, became a mere geographical expression. And even that,
itself, seemed strangely vague, had lost its definite character,
was rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the
spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, while
strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction, were always
trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime. What was
most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation,
stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold. That
persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very
inconvenient to the rest of Europe also. It would intrude its
irresistible claim into every problem of European politics, into
the theory of European equilibrium, into the question of the Near
East, the Italian question, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and
into the doctrine of nationalities. That ghost, not content with
making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted
also the Cabinets of Europe, waved indecently its bloodstained
robes in the solemn atmosphere of Council-rooms, where congresses
and conferences sit with closed windows. It would not be exorcised
by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine railleries of
Gorchakov.
As a Polish friend observed to me some years ago: "Till the year
'48 the Polish problem has been to a certain extent a convenient
rallying-point for all manifestations of liberalism. Since that
time we have come to be regarded simply as a nuisance. It's very
disagreeable."
I agreed that it was, and he continued: "What are we to do? We
did not create the situation by any outside action of ours.
Through all the centuries of its existence Poland has never been a
menace to anybody, not even to the Turks, to whom it has been
merely an obstacle."
Nothing could be more true. The spirit of aggressiveness was
absolutely foreign to the Polish temperament, to which the
preservation of its institutions and its liberties was much more
precious than any ideas of conquest. Polish wars were defensive,
and they were mostly fought within Poland's own borders. And that
those territories were often invaded was but a misfortune arising
from its geographical position. Territorial expansion was never
the master-thought of Polish statesmen. The consolidation of the
territories of the SERENISSIME Republic, which made of it a Power
of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by force. It
was not the consequence of successful aggression, but of a long and
successful defence against the raiding neighbours from the East.
The lands of Lithuanian and Ruthenian speech were never conquered
by Poland. These peoples were not compelled by a series of
exhausting wars to seek safety in annexation. It was not the will
of a prince or a political intrigue that brought about the union.
Neither was it fear. The slowly-matured view of the economical and
social necessities and, before all, the ripening moral sense of the
masses were the motives that induced the forty three
representatives of Lithuanian and Ruthenian provinces, led by their
paramount prince, to enter into a political combination unique in
the history of the world, a spontaneous and complete union of
sovereign States choosing deliberately the way of peace. Never was
strict truth better expressed in a political instrument than in the
preamble of the first Union Treaty (1413). It begins with the
words: "This Union, being the outcome not of hatred, but of love"-
-words that Poles have not heard addressed to them politically by
any nation for the last hundred and fifty years.
This union being an organic, living thing capable of growth and
development was, later, modified and confirmed by two other
treaties, which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal
union all their rights, liberties, and respective institutions.
The Polish State offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal
administrative federalism which, in its Parliamentary life as well
as its international politics, presented a complete unity of
feeling and purpose. As an eminent French diplomatist remarked
many years ago: "It is a very remarkable fact in the history of
the Polish State, this invariable and unanimous consent of the
populations; the more so that, the King being looked upon simply as
the chief of the Republic, there was no monarchical bond, no
dynastic fidelity to control and guide the sentiment of the
nations, and their union remained as a pure affirmation of the
national will." The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Ruthenian
Provinces retained their statutes, their own administration, and
their own political institutions. That those institutions in the
course of time tended to assimilation with the Polish form was not
the result of any pressure, but simply of the superior character of
Polish civilisation.
Even after Poland lost its independence this alliance and this
union remained firm in spirit and fidelity. All the national
movements towards liberation were initiated in the name of the
whole mass of people inhabiting the limits of the old Republic, and
all the Provinces took part in them with complete devotion. It is
only in the last generation that efforts have been made to create a
tendency towards separation, which would indeed serve no one but
Poland's common enemies. And, strangely enough, it is the
internationalists, men who professedly care nothing for race or
country, who have set themselves this task of disruption, one can
easily see for what sinister purpose. The ways of the
internationalists may be dark, but they are not inscrutable.
From the same source no doubt there will flow in the future a
poisoned stream of hints of a reconstituted Poland being a danger
to the races once so closely associated within the territories of
the Old Republic. The old partners in "the Crime" are not likely
to forgive their victim its inconvenient and almost shocking
obstinacy in keeping alive. They had tried moral assassination
before and with some small measure of success, for, indeed, the
Polish question, like all living reproaches, had become a nuisance.
Given the wrong, and the apparent impossibility of righting it
without running risks of a serious nature, some moral alleviation
may be found in the belief that the victim had brought its
misfortunes on its own head by its own sins. That theory, too, had
been advanced about Poland (as if other nations had known nothing
of sin and folly), and it made some way in the world at different
times, simply because good care was taken by the interested parties
to stop the mouth of the accused. But it has never carried much
conviction to honest minds. Somehow, in defiance of the cynical
point of view as to the Force of Lies and against all the power of
falsified evidence, truth often turns out to be stronger than
calumny. With the course of years, however, another danger sprang
up, a danger arising naturally from the new political alliances
dividing Europe into two armed camps. It was the danger of
silence. Almost without exception the Press of Western Europe in
the twentieth century refused to touch the Polish question in any
shape or form whatever. Never was the fact of Polish vitality more
embarrassing to European diplomacy than on the eve of Poland's
resurrection.
When the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the
proclamations of emperors and archdukes appealing to that
invincible soul of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had
been so arrogantly denying for more than a century. Perhaps in the
whole record of human transactions there have never been
performances so brazen and so vile as the manifestoes of the German
Emperor and the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia; and, I imagine, no
more bitter insult has been offered to human heart and intelligence
than the way in which those proclamations were flung into the face
of historical truth. It was like a scene in a cynical and sinister
farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort unfathomable by
the reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be so
abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single moment. At that
time, and for the first two months of the war, I happened to be in
Poland, and I remember perfectly well that, when those precious
documents came out, the confidence in the moral turpitude of
mankind they implied did not even raise a scornful smile on the
lips of men whose most sacred feelings and dignity they outraged.
They did not deign to waste their contempt on them. In fact, the
situation was too poignant and too involved for either hot scorn or
a coldly rational discussion. For the Poles it was like being in a
burning house of which all the issues were locked. There was
nothing but sheer anguish under the strange, as if stony, calmness
which in the utter absence of all hope falls on minds that are not
constitutionally prone to despair. Yet in this time of dismay the
irrepressible vitality of the nation would not accept a neutral
attitude. I was told that even if there were no issue it was
absolutely necessary for the Poles to affirm their national
existence. Passivity, which could be regarded as a craven
acceptance of all the material and moral horrors ready to fall upon
the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment. Therefore, it
was explained to me, the Poles MUST act. Whether this was a
counsel of wisdom or not it is very difficult to say, but there are
crises of the soul which are beyond the reach of wisdom. When
there is apparently no issue visible to the eyes of reason,
sentiment may yet find a way out, either towards salvation or to
utter perdition, no one can tell--and the sentiment does not even
ask the question. Being there as a stranger in that tense
atmosphere, which was yet not unfamiliar to me, I was not very
anxious to parade my wisdom, especially after it had been pointed
out in answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its values
worth fighting for, death, too, has that in it which can make it
worthy or unworthy.
Out of the mental and moral trouble into which the grouping of the
Powers at the beginning of war had thrown the counsels of Poland
there emerged at last the decision that the Polish Legions, a peace
organisation in Galicia directed by Pilsudski (afterwards given the
rank of General, and now apparently the Chief of the Government in
Warsaw), should take the field against the Russians. In reality it
did not matter against which partner in the "Crime" Polish
resentment should be directed. There was little to choose between
the methods of Russian barbarism, which were both crude and rotten,
and the cultivated brutality tinged with contempt of Germany's
superficial, grinding civilisation. There was nothing to choose
between them. Both were hateful, and the direction of the Polish
effort was naturally governed by Austria's tolerant attitude, which
had connived for years at the semi-secret organisation of the
Polish Legions. Besides, the material possibility pointed out the
way. That Poland should have turned at first against the ally of
Western Powers, to whose moral support she had been looking for so
many years, is not a greater monstrosity than that alliance with
Russia which had been entered into by England and France with
rather less excuse and with a view to eventualities which could
perhaps have been avoided by a firmer policy and by a greater
resolution in the face of what plainly appeared unavoidable.
For let the truth be spoken. The action of Germany, however cruel,
sanguinary, and faithless, was nothing in the nature of a stab in
the dark. The Germanic Tribes had told the whole world in all
possible tones carrying conviction, the gently persuasive, the
coldly logical; in tones Hegelian, Nietzschean, war-like, pious,
cynical, inspired, what they were going to do to the inferior races
of the earth, so full of sin and all unworthiness. But with a
strange similarity to the prophets of old (who were also great
moralists and invokers of might) they seemed to be crying in a
desert. Whatever might have been the secret searching of hearts,
the Worthless Ones would not take heed. It must also be admitted
that the conduct of the menaced Governments carried with it no
suggestion of resistance. It was no doubt, the effect of neither
courage nor fear, but of that prudence which causes the average man
to stand very still in the presence of a savage dog. It was not a
very politic attitude, and the more reprehensible in so far that it
seemed to arise from the mistrust of their own people's fortitude.
On simple matters of life and death a people is always better than
its leaders, because a people cannot argue itself as a whole into a
sophisticated state of mind out of deference for a mere doctrine or
from an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness. I am speaking now
of democracies whose chiefs resemble the tyrant of Syracuse in
this, that their power is unlimited (for who can limit the will of
a voting people?) and who always see the domestic sword hanging by
a hair above their heads.
Perhaps a different attitude would have checked German self-
confidence, and her overgrown militarism would have died from the
excess of its own strength. What would have been then the moral
state of Europe it is difficult to say. Some other excess would
probably have taken its place, excess of theory, or excess of
sentiment, or an excess of the sense of security leading to some
other form of catastrophe; but it is certain that in that case the
Polish question would not have taken a concrete form for ages.
Perhaps it would never have taken form! In this world, where
everything is transient, even the most reproachful ghosts end by
vanishing out of old mansions, out of men's consciences. Progress
of enlightenment, or decay of faith? In the years before the war
the Polish ghost was becoming so thin that it was impossible to get
for it the slightest mention in the papers. A young Pole coming to
me from Paris was extremely indignant, but I, indulging in that
detachment which is the product of greater age, longer experience,
and a habit of meditation, refused to share that sentiment. He had
gone begging for a word on Poland to many influential people, and
they had one and all told him that they were going to do no such
thing. They were all men of ideas and therefore might have been
called idealists, but the notion most strongly anchored in their
minds was the folly of touching a question which certainly had no
merit of actuality and would have had the appalling effect of
provoking the wrath of their old enemies and at the same time
offending the sensibilities of their new friends. It was an
unanswerable argument. I couldn't share my young friend's surprise
and indignation. My practice of reflection had also convinced me
that there is nothing on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than
political idealism when touched by the breath of practical
politics.
It would be good to remember that Polish independence as embodied
in a Polish State is not the gift of any kind of journalism,
neither is it the outcome even of some particularly benevolent idea
or of any clearly apprehended sense of guilt. I am speaking of
what I know when I say that the original and only formative idea in
Europe was the idea of delivering the fate of Poland into the hands
of Russian Tsarism. And, let us remember, it was assumed then to
be a victorious Tsarism at that. It was an idea talked of openly,
entertained seriously, presented as a benevolence, with a curious
blindness to its grotesque and ghastly character. It was the idea
of delivering the victim with a kindly smile and the confident
assurance that "it would be all right" to a perfectly unrepentant
assassin, who, after sawing furiously at its throat for a hundred
years or so, was expected to make friends suddenly and kiss it on
both cheeks in the mystic Russian fashion. It was a singularly
nightmarish combination of international polity, and no whisper of
any other would have been officially tolerated. Indeed, I do not
think in the whole extent of Western Europe there was anybody who
had the slightest mind to whisper on that subject. Those were the
days of the dark future, when Benckendorf put down his name on the
Committee for the Relief of Polish Populations driven by the
Russian armies into the heart of Russia, when the Grand Duke
Nicholas (the gentleman who advocated a St. Bartholomew's Night for
the suppression of Russian liberalism) was displaying his "divine"
(I have read the very word in an English newspaper of standing)
strategy in the great retreat, where Mr. Iswolsky carried himself
haughtily on the banks of the Seine; and it was beginning to dawn
upon certain people there that he was a greater nuisance even than
the Polish question.
But there is no use in talking about all that. Some clever person
has said that it is always the unexpected that happens, and on a
calm and dispassionate survey the world does appear mainly to one
as a scene of miracles. Out of Germany's strength, in whose
purpose so many people refused to believe, came Poland's
opportunity, in which nobody could have been expected to believe.
Out of Russia's collapse emerged that forbidden thing, the Polish
independence, not as a vengeful figure, the retributive shadow of
the crime, but as something much more solid and more difficult to
get rid of--a political necessity and a moral solution. Directly
it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, and also
the fact that, for better or worse, it was impossible to get rid of
it again except by the unthinkable way of another carving, of
another partition, of another crime.
Therein lie the strength and the future of the thing so strictly
forbidden no farther back than two years or so, of the Polish
independence expressed in a Polish State. It comes into the world
morally free, not in virtue of its sufferings, but in virtue of its
miraculous rebirth and of its ancient claim for services rendered
to Europe. Not a single one of the combatants of all the fronts of
the world has died consciously for Poland's freedom. That supreme
opportunity was denied even to Poland's own children. And it is
just as well! Providence in its inscrutable way had been merciful,
for had it been otherwise the load of gratitude would have been too
great, the sense of obligation too crushing, the joy of deliverance
too fearful for mortals, common sinners with the rest of mankind
before the eye of the Most High. Those who died East and West,
leaving so much anguish and so much pride behind them, died neither
for the creation of States, nor for empty words, nor yet for the
salvation of general ideas. They died neither for democracy, nor
leagues, nor systems, nor yet for abstract justice, which is an
unfathomable mystery. They died for something too deep for words,
too mighty for the common standards by which reason measures the
advantages of life and death, too sacred for the vain discourses
that come and go on the lips of dreamers, fanatics, humanitarians,
and statesmen. They died . . . .
Poland's independence springs up from that great immolation, but
Poland's loyalty to Europe will not be rooted in anything so
trenchant and burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable
indebtedness, of that gratitude which in a worldly sense is
sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of
weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human
sentiments to end in negation. Polish loyalty will be rooted in
something much more solid and enduring, in something that could
never be called eternal, but which is, in fact, life-enduring. It
will be rooted in the national temperament, which is about the only
thing on earth that can be trusted. Men may deteriorate, they may
improve too, but they don't change. Misfortune is a hard school
which may either mature or spoil a national character, but it may
be reasonably advanced that the long course of adversity of the
most cruel kind has not injured the fundamental characteristics of
the Polish nation which has proved its vitality against the most
demoralising odds. The various phases of the Polish sense of self-
preservation struggling amongst the menacing forces and the no less
threatening chaos of the neighbouring Powers should be judged
impartially. I suggest impartiality and not indulgence simply
because, when appraising the Polish question, it is not necessary
to invoke the softer emotions. A little calm reflection on the
past and the present is all that is necessary on the part of the
Western world to judge the movements of a community whose ideals
are the same, but whose situation is unique. This situation was
brought vividly home to me in the course of an argument more than
eighteen months ago. "Don't forget," I was told, "that Poland has
got to live in contact with Germany and Russia to the end of time.
Do you understand the force of that expression: 'To the end of
time'? Facts must be taken into account, and especially appalling
facts, such as this, to which there is no possible remedy on earth.
For reasons which are, properly speaking, physiological, a prospect
of friendship with Germans or Russians even in the most distant
future is unthinkable. Any alliance of heart and mind would be a
monstrous thing, and monsters, as we all know, cannot live. You
can't base your conduct on a monstrous conception. We are either
worth or not worth preserving, but the horrible psychology of the
situation is enough to drive the national mind to distraction. Yet
under a destructive pressure, of which Western Europe can have no
notion, applied by forces that were not only crushing but
corrupting, we have preserved our sanity. Therefore there can be
no fear of our losing our minds simply because the pressure is
removed. We have neither lost our heads nor yet our moral sense.
Oppression, not merely political, but affecting social relations,
family life, the deepest affections of human nature, and the very
fount of natural emotions, has never made us vengeful. It is
worthy of notice that with every incentive present in our emotional
reactions we had no recourse to political assassination. Arms in
hand, hopeless or hopefully, and always against immeasurable odds,
we did affirm ourselves and the justice of our cause; but wild
justice has never been a part of our conception of national
manliness. In all the history of Polish oppression there was only
one shot fired which was not in battle. Only one! And the man who
fired it in Paris at the Emperor Alexander II. was but an
individual connected with no organisation, representing no shade of
Polish opinion. The only effect in Poland was that of profound
regret, not at the failure, but at the mere fact of the attempt.
The history of our captivity is free from that stain; and whatever
follies in the eyes of the world we may have perpetrated, we have
neither murdered our enemies nor acted treacherously against them,
nor yet have been reduced to the point of cursing each other."
I could not gainsay the truth of that discourse, I saw as clearly
as my interlocutor the impossibility of the faintest sympathetic
bond between Poland and her neighbours ever being formed in the
future. The only course that remains to a reconstituted Poland is
the elaboration, establishment, and preservation of the most
correct method of political relations with neighbours to whom
Poland's existence is bound to be a humiliation and an offence.
Calmly considered it is an appalling task, yet one may put one's
trust in that national temperament which is so completely free from
aggressiveness and revenge. Therein lie the foundations of all
hope. The success of renewed life for that nation whose fate is to
remain in exile, ever isolated from the West, amongst hostile
surroundings, depends on the sympathetic understanding of its
problems by its distant friends, the Western Powers, which in their
democratic development must recognise the moral and intellectual
kinship of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation,
which was the only basis of Polish culture.
Whatever may be the future of Russia and the final organisation of
Germany, the old hostility must remain unappeased, the fundamental
antagonism must endure for years to come. The Crime of the
Partition was committed by autocratic Governments which were the
Governments of their time; but those Governments were characterised
in the past, as they will be in the future, by their people's
national traits, which remain utterly incompatible with the Polish
mentality and Polish sentiment. Both the German submissiveness
(idealistic as it may be) and the Russian lawlessness (fed on the
corruption of all the virtues) are utterly foreign to the Polish
nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether of another kind,
tending to a certain exaggeration of individualism and, perhaps, to
an extreme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent: the one
invariably vital principle in the internal government of the Old
Republic. There was never a history more free from political
bloodshed than the history of the Polish State, which never knew
either feudal institutions or feudal quarrels. At the time when
heads were falling on the scaffolds all over Europe there was only
one political execution in Poland--only one; and as to that there
still exists a tradition that the great Chancellor who democratised
Polish institutions, and had to order it in pursuance of his
political purpose, could not settle that matter with his conscience
till the day of his death. Poland, too, had her civil wars, but
this can hardly be made a matter of reproach to her by the rest of
the world. Conducted with humanity, they left behind them no
animosities and no sense of repression, and certainly no legacy of
hatred. They were but a recognised argument in political
discussion and tended always towards conciliation.
I cannot imagine, whatever form of democratic government Poland
elaborates for itself, that either the nation or its leaders would
do anything but welcome the closest scrutiny of their renewed
political existence. The difficulty of the problem of that
existence will be so great that some errors will be unavoidable,
and one may be sure that they will be taken advantage of by its
neighbours to discredit that living witness to a great historical
crime. If not the actual frontiers, then the moral integrity of
the new State is sure to be assailed before the eyes of Europe.
Economical enmity will also come into play when the world's work is
resumed again and competition asserts its power. Charges of
aggression are certain to be made, especially as related to the
small States formed of the territories of the Old Republic. And
everybody knows the power of lies which go about clothed in coats
of many colours, whereas, as is well known, Truth has no such
advantage, and for that reason is often suppressed as not
altogether proper for everyday purposes. It is not often
recognised, because it is not always fit to be seen.
Already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown out, and even
awful instances fabricated out of inadequate materials, but it is
historically unthinkable that the Poland of the future, with its
sacred tradition of freedom and its hereditary sense of respect for
the rights of individuals and States, should seek its prosperity in
aggressive action or in moral violence against that part of its
once fellow-citizens who are Ruthenians or Lithuanians. The only
influence that cannot be restrained is simply the influence of
time, which disengages truth from all facts with a merciless logic
and prevails over the passing opinions, the changing impulses of
men. There can be no doubt that the moral impulses and the
material interests of the new nationalities, which seem to play now
the game of disintegration for the benefit of the world's enemies,
will in the end bring them nearer to the Poland of this war's
creation, will unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous movement
towards the State which had adopted and brought them up in the
development of its own humane culture--the offspring of the West.
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM--1916
We must start from the assumption that promises made by
proclamation at the beginning of this war may be binding on the
individuals who made them under the stress of coming events, but
cannot be regarded as binding the Governments after the end of the
war.
Poland has been presented with three proclamations. Two of them
were in such contrast with the avowed principles and the historic
action for the last hundred years (since the Congress of Vienna) of
the Powers concerned, that they were more like cynical insults to
the nation's deepest feelings, its memory and its intelligence,
than state papers of a conciliatory nature.
The German promises awoke nothing but indignant contempt; the
Russian a bitter incredulity of the most complete kind. The
Austrian proclamation, which made no promises and contented itself
with pointing out the Austro-Polish relations for the last forty-
five years, was received in silence. For it is a fact that in
Austrian Poland alone Polish nationality was recognised as an
element of the Empire, and individuals could breathe the air of
freedom, of civil life, if not of political independence.
But for Poles to be Germanophile is unthinkable. To be Russophile
or Austrophile is at best a counsel of despair in view of a
European situation which, because of the grouping of the powers,
seems to shut from them every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a
national future nursed through more than a hundred years of
suffering and oppression.
Through most of these years, and especially since 1830, Poland (I
use this expression since Poland exists as a spiritual entity today
as definitely as it ever existed in her past) has put her faith in
the Western Powers. Politically it may have been nothing more than
a consoling illusion, and the nation had a half-consciousness of
this. But what Poland was looking for from the Western Powers
without discouragement and with unbroken confidence was moral
support.
This is a fact of the sentimental order. But such facts have their
positive value, for their idealism derives from perhaps the highest
kind of reality. A sentiment asserts its claim by its force,
persistence and universality. In Poland that sentimental attitude
towards the Western Powers is universal. It extends to all
classes. The very children are affected by it as soon as they
begin to think.
The political value of such a sentiment consists in this, that it
is based on profound resemblances. Therefore one can build on it
as if it were a material fact. For the same reason it would be
unsafe to disregard it if one proposed to build solidly. The
Poles, whom superficial or ill-informed theorists are trying to
force into the social and psychological formula of Slavonism, are
in truth not Slavonic at all. In temperament, in feeling, in mind,
and even in unreason, they are Western, with an absolute
comprehension of all Western modes of thought, even of those which
are remote from their historical experience.
That element of racial unity which may be called Polonism, remained
compressed between Prussian Germanism on one side and the Russian
Slavonism on the other. For Germanism it feels nothing but hatred.
But between Polonism and Slavonism there is not so much hatred as a
complete and ineradicable incompatibility.
No political work of reconstructing Poland either as a matter of
justice or expediency could be sound which would leave the new
creation in dependence to Germanism or to Slavonism.
The first need not be considered. The second must be--unless the
Powers elect to drop the Polish question either under the cover of
vague assurances or without any disguise whatever.
But if it is considered it will be seen at once that the Slavonic
solution of the Polish Question can offer no guarantees of duration
or hold the promise of security for the peace of Europe.
The only basis for it would be the Grand Duke's Manifesto. But
that Manifesto, signed by a personage now removed from Europe to
Asia, and by a man, moreover, who if true to himself, to his
conception of patriotism and to his family tradition could not have
put his hand to it with any sincerity of purpose, is now divested
of all authority. The forcible vagueness of its promises, its
startling inconsistency with the hundred years of ruthlessly
denationalising oppression permit one to doubt whether it was ever
meant to have any authority.
But in any case it could have had no effect. The very nature of
things would have brought to nought its professed intentions.
It is impossible to suppose that a State of Russia's power and
antecedents would tolerate a privileged community (of, to Russia,
unnational complexion) within the body of the Empire. All history
shows that such an arrangement, however hedged in by the most
solemn treaties and declarations, cannot last. In this case it
would lead to a tragic issue. The absorption of Polonism is
unthinkable. The last hundred years of European History proves it
undeniably. There remains then extirpation, a process of blood and
iron; and the last act of the Polish drama would be played then
before a Europe too weary to interfere, and to the applause of
Germany.
It would not be just to say that the disappearance of Polonism
would add any strength to the Slavonic power of expansion. It
would add no strength, but it would remove a possibly effective
barrier against the surprises the future of Europe may hold in
store for the Western Powers.
Thus the question whether Polonism is worth saving presents itself
as a problem of politics with a practical bearing on the stability
of European peace--as a barrier or perhaps better (in view of its
detached position) as an outpost of the Western Powers placed
between the great might of Slavonism which has not yet made up its
mind to anything, and the organised Germanism which has spoken its
mind with no uncertain voice, before the world.
Looked at in that light alone Polonism seems worth saving. That it
has lived so long on its trust in the moral support of the Western
Powers may give it another and even stronger claim, based on a
truth of a more profound kind. Polonism had resisted the utmost
efforts of Germanism and Slavonism for more than a hundred years.
Why? Because of the strength of its ideals conscious of their
kinship with the West. Such a power of resistance creates a moral
obligation which it would be unsafe to neglect. There is always a
risk in throwing away a tool of proved temper.
In this profound conviction of the practical and ideal worth of
Polonism one approaches the problem of its preservation with a very
vivid sense of the practical difficulties derived from the grouping
of the Powers. The uncertainty of the extent and of the actual
form of victory for the Allies will increase the difficulty of
formulating a plan of Polish regeneration at the present moment.
Poland, to strike its roots again into the soil of political
Europe, will require a guarantee of security for the healthy
development and for the untrammelled play of such institutions as
she may be enabled to give to herself.
Those institutions will be animated by the spirit of Polonism,
which, having been a factor in the history of Europe and having
proved its vitality under oppression, has established its right to
live. That spirit, despised and hated by Germany and incompatible
with Slavonism because of moral differences, cannot avoid being (in
its renewed assertion) an object of dislike and mistrust.
As an unavoidable consequence of the past Poland will have to begin
its existence in an atmosphere of enmities and suspicions. That
advanced outpost of Western civilisation will have to hold its
ground in the midst of hostile camps: always its historical fate.
Against the menace of such a specially dangerous situation the
paper and ink of public Treaties cannot be an effective defence.
Nothing but the actual, living, active participation of the two
Western Powers in the establishment of the new Polish commonwealth,
and in the first twenty years of its existence, will give the Poles
a sufficient guarantee of security in the work of restoring their
national life.
An Anglo-French protectorate would be the ideal form of moral and
material support. But Russia, as an ally, must take her place in
it on such a footing as will allay to the fullest extent her
possible apprehensions and satisfy her national sentiment. That
necessity will have to be formally recognised.
In reality Russia has ceased to care much for her Polish
possessions. Public recognition of a mistake in political morality
and a voluntary surrender of territory in the cause of European
concord, cannot damage the prestige of a powerful State. The new
spheres of expansion in regions more easily assimilable, will more
than compensate Russia for the loss of territory on the Western
frontier of the Empire.
The experience of Dual Controls and similar combinations has been
so unfortunate in the past that the suggestion of a Triple
Protectorate may well appear at first sight monstrous even to
unprejudiced minds. But it must be remembered that this is a
unique case and a problem altogether exceptional, justifying the
employment of exceptional means for its solution. To those who
would doubt the possibility of even bringing such a scheme into
existence the answer may be made that there are psychological
moments when any measure tending towards the ends of concord and
justice may be brought into being. And it seems that the end of
the war would be the moment for bringing into being the political
scheme advocated in this note.
Its success must depend on the singleness of purpose in the
contracting Powers, and on the wisdom, the tact, the abilities, the
good-will of men entrusted with its initiation and its further
control. Finally it may be pointed out that this plan is the only
one offering serious guarantees to all the parties occupying their
respective positions within the scheme.
If her existence as a state is admitted as just, expedient and
necessary, Poland has the moral right to receive her constitution
not from the hand of an old enemy, but from the Western Powers
alone, though of course with the fullest concurrence of Russia.
This constitution, elaborated by a committee of Poles nominated by
the three Governments, will (after due discussion and amendment by
the High Commissioners of the Protecting Powers) be presented to
Poland as the initial document, the charter of her new life, freely
offered and unreservedly accepted.
It should be as simple and short as a written constitution can be--
establishing the Polish Commonwealth, settling the lines of
representative institutions, the form of judicature, and leaving
the greatest measure possible of self-government to the provinces
forming part of the re-created Poland.
This constitution will be promulgated immediately after the three
Powers had settled the frontiers of the new State, including the
town of Danzic (free port) and a proportion of seaboard. The
legislature will then be called together and a general treaty will
regulate Poland's international portion as a protected state, the
status of the High Commissioners and such-like matters. The
legislature will ratify, thus making Poland, as it were, a party in
the establishment of the protectorate. A point of importance.
Other general treaties will define Poland's position in the Anglo-
Franco-Russian alliance, fix the numbers of the army, and settle
the participation of the Powers in its organisation and training.
POLAND REVISITED--1915
I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an
end, and least of all in assassination of the dynastic order. I
don't know how far murder can ever approach the perfection of a
fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but
a crude expedient of impatient hope or hurried despair. There are
few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more
than on the surface. The deeper stream of causes depends not on
individuals who, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by a
destiny which no murder has ever been able to placate, divert, or
arrest.
In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange city in the
Midlands and particularly out of touch with the world's politics.
Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time
reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed
than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that
necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily
papers, which somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense,
robs them of all real interest. I don't think I had looked at a
daily for a month past.
But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to
a friend who had travelled there out of pure kindness to bear me
company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was
somewhat trying.
It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of
the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.
The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man
existed. I remembered only that not long before he had visited
London. The recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant
printed words his presence in this country provoked.
Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was
Archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world
of real men anything more shadowy than an Archduke? And now he was
no more; removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one
more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. I
connected that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations so little
that I had actually to ask where it had happened. My friend told
me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences
of that grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.
It was with perfect sincerity that I answered "Nothing," and having
a great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, I
dismissed the subject. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act
cruel and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of
a crowd of shadowy Archdukes in the background, out of which one
would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the light
of the European stage. And then, to speak the whole truth, there
was no man capable of forming a judgment who attended so little to
the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more
definite term I must call my mind was fixed upon my own affairs,
not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their
fascinating holiday-promising aspect. I had been obtaining my
information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough
to come down now and then to see us. They arrived with their
pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries
casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my
interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the
Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could
not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one's
attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had
just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world-
drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what
the future held in store for the Powers of the Old World? Here and
there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility,
while they watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by means of
notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting
fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns,
same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race,
liberation, justice--and the same mood of trivial demonstrations.
One could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg. "You mean
Petrograd," would say the booking clerk. Shortly after the fall of
Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some
CAFE TURC at the end of his lunch.
" Monsieur veut dire Cafe balkanique," the patriotic waiter
corrected him austerely.
I will not say that I had not observed something of that
instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and
in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that
vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of my alarmist
cynicism. As to alarm, I pointed out that fear is natural to man,
and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the
preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of
cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge
of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of
disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty
bearing--a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be
thought a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the
gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It was pointed out to me
that these Eastern nations were not far removed from a savage
state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the
earth and feeding the pigs. The highly-developed material
civilisation of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a
war. The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be
disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the
aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.
Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been
a book written on that theme--an attempt to put pacificism on a
material basis. Nothing more solid in the way of argument could
have been advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe. War
was "bad business!" This was final.
But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the
condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were
heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated
by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or
interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions will take
the edge off one's judgment. The desire which possessed me was
simply the desire to travel. And that being so it would have taken
something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple
trust in the stability of things on the Continent. My sentiment
and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were turned to the
past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and
mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the
darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.
In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to
spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood
of Cracow, but within the Russian frontier. The enterprise at
first seemed to me considerable. Since leaving the sea, to which I
have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there
is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are
made. I confess that my first impulse about a projected journey is
to leave it alone. But the invitation received at first with a
sort of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings.
Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen
months of his life. It was in that old royal and academical city
that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known the
friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of
that age. It was within those historical walls that I began to
understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and
a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by
throwing myself into an unrelated existence. It was like the
experience of another world. The wings of time made a great dusk
over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in
there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many
imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth. I
feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have
gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see
what would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in
sunshine. Neither would it be pursued alone. The invitation was
extended to us all. This journey would have something of a
migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all that
gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in
this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased with the idea
of showing my companions what Polish country life was like; to
visit the town where I was at school before the boys by my side
should grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own,
should lose their unsophisticated interest in mine. It is only in
the short instants of early youth that we have the faculty of
coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the
emotions of another soul. For youth all is reality in this world,
and with justice, since it apprehends so vividly its images behind
which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance.
I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom,
unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have been a fibre
which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories
of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received its
earliest independent impressions.
The first days of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires
hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue
books, yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of
mankind, passed for us in light-hearted preparations for the
journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany, to get
across as quickly as possible?
Germany is the part of the earth's solid surface of which I know
the least. In all my life I had been across it only twice. I may
well say of it VIDI TANTUM; and the very little I saw was through
the window of a railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys
of mine had been more like pilgrimages when one hurries on towards
the goal for the satisfaction of a deeper need than curiosity. In
this last instance, too, I was so incurious that I would have liked
to have fallen asleep on the shores of England and opened my eyes,
if it were possible, only on the other side of the Silesian
frontier. Yet, in truth, as many others have done, I had "sensed
it"--that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of
efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in
grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics
or barbarous niggers; and, with a consciousness of superiority
freeing their hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up, if I
may express myself so, the "perfect man's burden." Meantime, in a
clearing of the Teutonic forest, their sages were rearing a Tree of
Cynical Wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen now
lying over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that
they laboured openly enough, watering it with the most authentic
sources of all madness, and watching with their be-spectacled eyes
the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest
words of peace, words of menace, and I verily believe words of
abasement, even if there had been a voice vile enough to utter
them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when the fruit
ripens on a branch it must fall. There is nothing on earth that
can prevent it.
II.
For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one
of my companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels
should begin in an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea.
We should proceed from Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-
six times longer than the Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual
route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic
feeling of this Polish journey which for so many years had been
before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but
always retreating, elusive like an enticing mirage.
And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they
were excited. It's no mean experience to lay your hands on a
mirage. The day of departure had come, the very hour had struck.
The luggage was coming downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland
then, if erased from the map, yet existed in reality; it was not a
mere PAYS DU REVE, where you can travel only in imagination. For
no man, they argued, not even father, an habitual pursuer of
dreams, would push the love of the novelist's art of make-believe
to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voyage AU
PAYS DU REVE.
As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most
peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen
serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for
the refreshment of the parched fields. A pearly blur settled over
them, and a light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and
searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. All
unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, I carried off
in my eye, this tiny fragment of Great Britain; a few fields, a
wooded rise; a clump of trees or two, with a short stretch of road,
and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the
darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I felt
that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a
beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an
inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in
which a woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender.
These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter
in hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And
I am certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no
other trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable
anticipation. The forms and the spirit of the land before their
eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest--which is a thing
precarious, and, therefore, the most precious, possessing you if
only by the fear of unworthiness rather than possessed by you.
Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they
were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and
more plainly, that what I had started on was a journey in time,
into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent,
but to him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses
the order and continuity of his life--so that at times it presented
itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals--still more
dreadful.
I down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why
there was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a
European war. I don't mean to say that I ignored the possibility;
I simply did not think of it. And it made no difference; for if I
had thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and
inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and I am sure
that nothing short of intellectual certitude--obviously
unattainable by the man in the street--could have stayed me on that
journey which now that I had started on it seemed an irrevocable
thing, a necessity of my self-respect.
London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as
of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--with its best
Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets
lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the
great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty palaces,
above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway.
Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion
House went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead
commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable
activity of its millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow
of lighted vehicles.
In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a
continuous line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and
up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the
passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under
the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing
minutes of peace. It was the hour of the boat-trains to Holland,
to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless,
reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places. The
station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of
evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs of
extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was
nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it was
singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the
retraced way of my existence. For this was the station at which,
thirty-seven years before, I arrived on my first visit to London.
Not the same building, but the same spot. At nineteen years of
age, after a period of probation and training I had imposed upon
myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come
up from Lowestoft--my first long railway journey in England--to
"sign on" for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight
from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with
something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and
unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely. I
did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me
peopled the mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I
was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one's feelings
are simple. I was elated. I was pursuing a clear aim, I was
carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the
first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by
the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second
place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit
moral pledge. Both these aims were to be attained by the same
effort. How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy
day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for
the first time.
From that point of view--Youth and a straight-forward scheme of
conduct--it was certainly a year of grace. All the help I had to
get in touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not
much bigger than the palm of my hand--in which I held it--torn out
of a larger plan of London for the greater facility of reference.
It had been the object of careful study for some days past. The
fact that I could take a conveyance at the station never occurred
to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street, and stood,
taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty
thousand hansoms. A strange absence of mind or unconscious
conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one's
life by means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a
preposterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an Australian
voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.
Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the
address of an obscure shipping agent, was in my pocket. And I
needed not to take it out. That address was as if graven deep in
my brain. I muttered its words to myself as I walked on,
navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the palm of
my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from
anyone. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I taken a wrong
turning I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I
might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my
bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the
Whitechapel district, as it had happened to lonely travellers lost
in the bush. But I walked on to my destination without hesitation
or mistake, showing there, for the first time, some of that faculty
to absorb and make my own the imaged topography of a chart, which
in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to
keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground. The place I was
bound to was not easy to find. It was one of those courts hidden
away from the charted and navigable streets, lost among the thick
growth of houses like a dark pool in the depths of a forest,
approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by secret path; a
Dickensian nook of London, that wonder city, the growth of which
bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly
sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by
the magic of his understanding love. And the office I entered was
Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and
frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre
wainscoting.
It was one o'clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By
the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I
saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a
grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders. His curly
white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a
burly apostle in the BAROCCO style of Italian art. Standing up at
a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed
up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had
been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round
the corner.
Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, BAROCCO
apostle's face with an expression of inquiry.
I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have
borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech,
for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.--
"Oh, it's you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft
about getting a ship."
I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can't remember a single
word of that letter now. It was my very first composition in the
English language. And he had understood it, evidently, for he
spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly,
was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea
as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers.
But he gathered that this was not my object. I did not desire to
be apprenticed. Was that the case?
It was. He was good enough to say then, "Of course I see that you
are a gentleman. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast
as an Able Seaman if possible. Is that it?"
It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared
he could not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament
which made it penal to procure ships for sailors. "An Act-of -
Parliament. A law," he took pains to impress it again and again on
my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.
I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head
against an Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However,
the BAROCCO apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we
managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its
fine spirit. Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a
good citizen; and in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about
that early sin of mine. For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant
Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking
a father and mother to me. For many years it had regulated and
disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my
breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as
possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. It isn't
such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within
the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to
say that its seventies have never been applied to me.
In the year 1878, the year of "Peace with Honour," I had walked as
lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool
Street Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the
year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any
other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a man of
infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done,
of words written, of friendships secured. It was like the closing
of a thirty-six-year cycle.
All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at
his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that
this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear
very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images
and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of
retrospective musing.
I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound
to take me away from daily life's actualities at every step. I
felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North
Sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on
deck, alone of all the tale of the ship's passengers. That sea was
to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name. It
had been for some time the school-room of my trade. On it, I may
safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild
and stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow-water
academy of seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide
oceans. My teachers had been the sailors of the Norfolk shore;
coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of
very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning. Honest,
strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all, as far
as I can remember.
That is what years ago the North Sea I could hear growling in the
dark all round the ship had been for me. And I fancied that I must
have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing
could be more familiar than those short, angry sounds I was
listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition.
I could not guess that before many days my old schoolroom would be
desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking
its waves, hiding under its waters. Perhaps while I am writing
these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific
teachers are out in trawlers, under the Naval flag, dredging for
German submarine mines.
III.
I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of
seamanship before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined
as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt
globe, I did not know it in all its parts. My class-room was the
region of the English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with
Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its
maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, agricultural,
industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of its many
towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and
there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the land.
On many a night I have hauled at the braces under the shadow of
that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people on shore sleeping
quietly in their beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not
one head on those envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest
premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one
generation was to bring so close to their homes.
Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing
a part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply
conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy,
nasty day: and the aspects of Nature don't change, unless in the
course of thousands of years--or, perhaps, centuries. The
Phoenicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial
rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in
the wintry quality of the light, even on a July afternoon, from
anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean. For
myself, a very late comer into that sea, and its former pupil, I
accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well
remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey-
green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white
foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently
made of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine
rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant
fishing boats, very few, very scattered, and tossing restlessly on
an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.
Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for
the emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood. It
might have been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were
on this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be
seen. Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea I could have given
myself up to the illusion of a revised past, had it not been for
the periodical transit across my gaze of a German passenger. He
was marching round and round the boat deck with characteristic
determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress
like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He was
bringing them home, from their school in England, for their
holiday. What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust
his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt,
rotten and criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have
been from motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the
deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his
breast (and to a large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded
by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later I could observe
the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness,
in the men of the LANDWEHR corps, that passed through Cracow to
reinforce the Austrian army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the
haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an
officer of the LANDWEHR; and perhaps those two fine active boys are
orphans by now. Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of
time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of
six million fighting particles, an unconsidered trifle for the jaws
of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at
the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round
the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green
overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting
cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was but a shadowy
intrusion and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the West,
in the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking
their daily bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold
an experience of my own in the winter of '81, not of war, truly,
but of a fairly lively contest with the elements which were very
angry indeed.
There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful
night--or a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea
is also called the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its
heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than
float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and
altogether intolerable manner. There were on board, besides
myself, seventeen men all good and true, including a round enormous
Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to
lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated,
and thereafter for a good long time moved in our midst wrinkled and
slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering of
our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a
training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his
nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much
(before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky
young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the
gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind
and indeed to my senses than the green overcoat and the white cap
of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended
by his two gyrating children.
"That's a very nice gentleman." This information, together with
the fact that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year
by the ship, was communicated to me suddenly by our captain. At
intervals through the day he would pop out of the chart-room and
offer me short snatches of conversation. He owned a simple soul
and a not very entertaining mind, and he was without malice and, I
believe, quite unconsciously, a warm Germanophil. And no wonder!
As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that run, and
spent almost as much of his life in Hamburg as in Harwich.
"Wonderful people they are," he repeated from time to time, without
entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious
obstinacy. What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial
travellers and small merchants, most likely. But I had observed
long before that German genius has a hypnotising power over half-
baked souls and half-lighted minds. There is an immense force of
suggestion in highly organised mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised
half Europe? My man was very much under the spell of German
excellence. On the other hand, his contempt for France was equally
general and unbounded. I tried to advance some arguments against
this position, but I only succeeded in making him hostile. "I
believe you are a Frenchman yourself," he snarled at last, giving
me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off
communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.
Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish
smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any
change in their colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over
the North Sea. Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared,
dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the Eastern board:
tops of islands fringing the German shore. While I was looking at
their antics amongst the waves--and for all their solidity they
were very elusive things in the failing light--another passenger
came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap.
The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed his chest.
His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short
white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it
determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed nothing
else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. His
disposition, unlike the widower's, appeared to be mild and humane.
He offered me the loan of his glasses. He had a wife and some
small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought
they were very well where they were. His eldest son was about the
decks somewhere.
"We are Americans," he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar
tone. He spoke English with the accent of our captain's "wonderful
people," and proceeded to give me the history of the family's
crossing the Atlantic in a White Star liner. They remained in
England just the time necessary for a railway journey from
Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths of the ship)
were naturally a little tired.
At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to
us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. "Hurrah," he
cried under his breath. "The first German light! Hurrah!"
And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest
fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the
brilliant wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the
darkness. The shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.
I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights.
The great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me.
I had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of
steamers. They went on and on as if in chase of each other, the
Baltic trade, the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany,
pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the gateway of Dover
Straits. Singly, and in small companies of two and three, they
emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead as if
the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were
inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below the
grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam vessels have reached by this
time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that
it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into
one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port,
and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle
when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a
sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under
sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low
parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of
dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.
When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried
tame lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on
their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-
glitter, here, there, and everywhere, as of some High Street,
broken up and washed out to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the
overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out
of unfathomable night under the clouds.
I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so
overlighted amidships that one could not make out her complete
shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear
that the oar, as a working implement, will become presently as
obsolete as the sail. The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy.
More and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to
pulling levers and twirling little wheels. Progress! Yet the
older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too;
an equally fine readiness of wits. And readiness of wits working
in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete
man.
It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro
like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-
importance. Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe lightship
floated all dark and silent under its enormous round, service
lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of
lights.
Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of
peace ready for flight away from the luckless shores of Europe.
Our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find
it extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now
everything is dark over there, that the Elbe lightship has been
towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland
extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or turned to warlike uses
for lack of its proper work to do. And obviously it must be so.
Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be
creeping along cautiously with the unlighted, war-blighted black
coast close on one hand, and sudden death on the other. For all
the space we steamed through that Sunday evening must now be one
great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while
submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the
insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy
importance. Mines; Submarines. The last word in sea-warfare!
Progress--impressively disclosed by this war.
There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of
the stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings. During that one
which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the
English Fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps
Fulton himself, offered to the Maritime Prefect of the port and to
the French Admiral, an invention which would sink all the
unsuspecting English ships one after another--or, at any rate most
of them. The offer was not even taken into consideration; and the
Prefect ends his report to the Minister in Paris with a fine phrase
of indignation: "It is not the sort of death one would deal to
brave men."
And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the
like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the
greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the
manly sentiment of those self-denying words. Mankind has been
demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances. Its
spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has grown so
strong, that it will face any deadly horror of destruction and
cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous
contrivance. It has become the intoxicated slave of its own
detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic
time another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation,
and held out to the world.
IV
On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a
progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had
no beacons to look for in Germany. I had never lingered in that
land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable
manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An
ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings
to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet
very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a
threatening phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in
their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral
apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space,
without sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my
voluntary abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary after
all! Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had
to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it
were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the
condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for
giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of our
continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I
said to my eldest boy, "I can't go to bed. I am going out for a
look round. Coming?"
He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting
adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of
the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with
moonlight. I was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I
felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could remember
such material things as the right turn to take and the general
direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square
of the town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of
its life. We could see at the far end of the street a promising
widening of space. At the corner an unassuming (but armed)
policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves
which made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his head to
look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue to
a youth on whose arm he leaned.
The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of
moonlight. The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed
to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with infinite
satisfaction that the unnecessary trees the Municipality insisted
upon sticking between the stones had been steadily refusing to
grow. They were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I could
remember. Also, the paving operations seemed to be exactly at the
same point at which I left them forty years before. There were the
dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the piles of paving
material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery
sea. Who was it that said that Time works wonders? What an
exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving
stones were concerned, it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the
unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses
by our rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably
strengthened within me.
"We are now on the line A.B.," I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the
Square by the senior students of that town of classical learning
and historical relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it,
and, even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it
seriously. He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the
Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the
invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered it to my
boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation.
And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of
the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing
an inscription in raised black letters, thus: "Line A.B."
Heavens! The name had been adopted officially! Any town urchin,
any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any
wandering Boeotian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on
the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B. It
had become a mere name in a directory. I was stunned by the
extreme mutability of things. Time could work wonders, and no
mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent
fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast-iron.
I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using
the profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive
distaste. And this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a
bare minute had worked that change. There was at the end of the
line a certain street I wanted to look at, I explained to my
companion.
To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary's Church soared
aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their
shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the
others. In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under
its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of
the old city wall. In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish
flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood
out small and very distinct.
There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep
for our ears. Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness
there issued out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven,
wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-
pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the Florian
Gate. It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight o'clock of
every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian
Street. But of that, my first school, I remember very little. I
believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much
appreciated editor of historical documents. But I didn't suffer
much from the various imperfections of my first school. I was
rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a private gnawing
worm of my own. This was the time of my father's last illness.
Every evening at seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I
walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a
good distance beyond the Great Square. There, in a large drawing-
room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling,
in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk,
I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the
task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall
white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar
and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack,
glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of these
noiseless nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For,
indeed, what could they have had to say? When they did speak to me
it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral, clear
whisper. Our domestic matters were ordered by the elderly
housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the
Cathedral, lent for the emergency. She, too, spoke but seldom.
She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample
bosom. And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the
nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring
note. The air around me was all piety, resignation, and silence.
I don't know what would have become of me if I had not been a
reading boy. My prep. finished I would have had nothing to do but
sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through
the closed door and coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that
in a futile childish way I would have gone crazy. But I was a
reading boy. There were many books about, lying on consoles, on
tables, and even on the floor, for we had not had time to settle
down. I read! What did I not read! Sometimes the elder nun,
gliding up and casting a mistrustful look on the open pages, would
lay her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful whisper,
"Perhaps it is not very good for you to read these books." I would
raise my eyes to her face mutely, and with a vague gesture of
giving it up she would glide away.
Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tip-
toe into the sick room to say good-night to the figure prone on the
bed, which often could not acknowledge my presence but by a slow
movement of the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand
lying on the coverlet, and tip-toe out again. Then I would go to
bed, in a room at the end of the corridor, and often, not always,
cry myself into a good sound sleep.
I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. I
turned my eyes from it sometimes with success, and yet all the time
I had an awful sensation of the inevitable. I had also moments of
revolt which stripped off me some of my simple trust in the
government of the universe. But when the inevitable entered the
sick room and the white door was thrown wide open, I don't think I
found a single tear to shed. I have a suspicion that the Canon's
housekeeper looked on me as the most callous little wretch on
earth.
The day of the funeral came in due course and all the generous
"Youth of the Schools," the grave Senate of the University, the
delegations of the Trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they
cared) DE VISU evidence of the callousness of the little wretch.
There was nothing in my aching head but a few words, some such
stupid sentences as, "It's done," or, "It's accomplished" (in
Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, repeating
itself endlessly. The long procession moved out of the narrow
street, down a long street, past the Gothic front of St. Mary's
under its unequal towers, towards the Florian Gate.
In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs
and tragic memories, I could see again the small boy of that day
following a hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone,
conscious of an enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall
black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head,
the flames of tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the
rows of bared heads on the pavements with fixed, serious eyes.
Half the population had turned out on that fine May afternoon.
They had not come to honour a great achievement, or even some
splendid failure. The dead and they were victims alike of an
unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit and
glory. They had come only to render homage to the ardent fidelity
of the man whose life had been a fearless confession in word and
deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel
and understand.
It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow
street I should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had
called up. They were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent in
their clinging air of the grave that tasted of dust and of the
bitter vanity of old hopes.
"Let's go back to the hotel, my boy," I said. "It's getting late."
It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that
night of a possible war. For the next two days I went about
amongst my fellow men, who welcomed me with the utmost
consideration and friendliness, but unanimously derided my fears of
a war. They would not believe in it. It was impossible. On the
evening of the second day I was in the hotel's smoking room, an
irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few choice minds
of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more
hushed than any club reading-room I have ever been in. Gathered
into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued
tones suitable to the genius of the place.
A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an
impatient finger in my direction and apostrophised me.
"What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would
come in."
The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without
faltering.
"Most assuredly. I should think all Europe knows that by this
time."
He took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a slight jerk
for greater emphasis, said forcibly:
"Then, if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it,
there can be no war. Germany won't be so mad as that."
On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum. The day
after came the declaration of war, and the Austrian mobilisation
order. We were fairly caught. All that remained for me to do was
to get my party out of the way of eventual shells. The best move
which occurred to me was to snatch them up instantly into the
mountains to a Polish health resort of great repute--which I did
(at the rate of one hundred miles in eleven hours) by the last
civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks.
And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland,
not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain the permission
to travel by train, or road. It was a wonderful, a poignant two
months. This is not the time, and, perhaps, not the place, to
enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people
seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe,
unable to trust anyone, to appeal to anyone, to look for help from
any quarter; deprived of all hope and even of its last illusions,
and unable, in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences,
to take refuge in stoical acceptance. I have seen all this. And I
am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling
feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many
cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final
words: Ruin--and Extinction.
But enough of this. For our little band there was the awful
anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West.
It is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things
looked to us over there. Belgium knocked down and trampled out of
existence, France giving in under repeated blows, a military
collapse like that of 1870, and England involved in that disastrous
alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic! Polish
papers, of course, had no other but German sources of information.
Naturally, we did not believe all we read, but it was sometimes
excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness.
We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat
weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding
reasons for hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up. But
it was a beastly time. People used to come to me with very serious
news and ask, "What do you think of it?" And my invariable answer
was: "Whatever has happened, or is going to happen, whoever wants
to make peace, you may be certain that England will not make it,
not for ten years, if necessary."'
But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish
friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna.
Once there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our
uneasy heads. We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American
Ambassador (who, all along, interested himself in our fate) for his
exertions on our behalf, his invaluable assistance and the real
friendliness of his reception in Vienna. Owing to Mr. Penfield's
action we obtained the permission to leave Austria. And it was a
near thing, for his Excellency has informed my American publishers
since that a week later orders were issued to have us detained till
the end of the war. However, we effected our hair's-breadth escape
into Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail
steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of call.
On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if
the past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw
the signs of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect
of Gibraltar, the misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-
bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British submarines
in the Channel. Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag dotted
the narrow waters, and two Naval officers coming on board off the
South Foreland, piloted the ship through the Downs.
The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-
life. But what were to me now the futilities of an individual
past? As our ship's head swung into the estuary of the Thames, a
deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the air, a shock rather
than a sound, which missing my ear found its way straight into my
heart. Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to
meet my wife's eyes. She also had felt profoundly, coming from far
away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the
big guns at work on the coast of Flanders--shaping the future.
FIRST NEWS--1918
Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the town of Cracow,
Austrian Poland, nobody would believe that the war was coming. My
apprehensions were met by the words: "We have had these scares
before." This incredulity was so universal amongst people of
intelligence and information, that even I, who had accustomed
myself to look at the inevitable for years past, felt my conviction
shaken. At that time, it must be noted, the Austrian army was
already partly mobilised, and as we came through Austrian Silesia
we had noticed all the bridges being guarded by soldiers.
"Austria will back down," was the opinion of all the well-informed
men with whom I talked on the first of August. The session of the
University was ended and the students were either all gone or going
home to different parts of Poland, but the professors had not all
departed yet on their respective holidays, and amongst them the
tone of scepticism prevailed generally. Upon the whole there was
very little inclination to talk about the possibility of a war.
Nationally, the Poles felt that from their point of view there was
nothing to hope from it. "Whatever happens," said a very
distinguished man to me, "we may be certain that it's our skins
which will pay for it as usual." A well-known literary critic and
writer on economical subjects said to me: "War seems a material
impossibility, precisely because it would mean the complete ruin of
all material interests."
He was wrong, as we know; but those who said that Austria as usual
would back down were, as a matter of fact perfectly right. Austria
did back down. What these men did not foresee was the interference
of Germany. And one cannot blame them very well; for who could
guess that, when the balance stood even, the German sword would be
thrown into the scale with nothing in the open political situation
to justify that act, or rather that crime--if crime can ever be
justified? For, as the same intelligent man said to me: "As it
is, those people" (meaning Germans) "have very nearly the whole
world in their economic grip. Their prestige is even greater than
their actual strength. It can get for them practically everything
they want. Then why risk it?" And there was no apparent answer to
the question put in that way. I must also say that the Poles had
no illusions about the strength of Russia. Those illusions were
the monopoly of the Western world.
Next day the librarian of the University invited me to come and
have a look at the library which I had not seen since I was
fourteen years old. It was from him that I learned that the
greater part of my father's MSS. was preserved there. He confessed
that he had not looked them through thoroughly yet, but he told me
that there was a lot of very important letters bearing on the epoch
from '60 to '63, to and from many prominent Poles of that time:
and he added: "There is a bundle of correspondence that will
appeal to you personally. Those are letters written by your father
to an intimate friend in whose papers they were found. They
contain many references to yourself, though you couldn't have been
more than four years old at the time. Your father seems to have
been extremely interested in his son." That afternoon I went to
the University, taking with me MY eldest son. The attention of
that young Englishman was mainly attracted by some relics of
Copernicus in a glass case. I saw the bundle of letters and
accepted the kind proposal of the librarian that he should have
them copied for me during the holidays. In the range of the
deserted vaulted rooms lined with books, full of august memories,
and in the passionless silence of all this enshrined wisdom, we
walked here and there talking of the past, the great historical
past in which lived the inextinguishable spark of national life;
and all around us the centuries-old buildings lay still and empty,
composing themselves to rest after a year of work on the minds of
another generation.
No echo of the German ultimatum to Russia penetrated that
academical peace. But the news had come. When we stepped into the
street out of the deserted main quadrangle, we three, I imagine,
were the only people in the town who did not know of it. My boy
and I parted from the librarian (who hurried home to pack up for
his holiday) and walked on to the hotel, where we found my wife
actually in the car waiting for us to take a run of some ten miles
to the country house of an old school-friend of mine. He had been
my greatest chum. In my wanderings about the world I had heard
that his later career both at school and at the University had been
of extraordinary brilliance--in classics, I believe. But in this,
the iron-grey moustache period of his life, he informed me with
badly concealed pride that he had gained world fame as the
Inventor--no, Inventor is not the word--Producer, I believe would
be the right term--of a wonderful kind of beetroot seed. The beet
grown from this seed contained more sugar to the square inch--or
was it to the square root?--than any other kind of beet. He
exported this seed, not only with profit (and even to the United
States), but with a certain amount of glory which seemed to have
gone slightly to his head. There is a fundamental strain of
agriculturalist in a Pole which no amount of brilliance, even
classical, can destroy. While we were having tea outside, looking
down the lovely slope of the gardens at the view of the city in the
distance, the possibilities of the war faded from our minds.
Suddenly my friend's wife came to us with a telegram in her hand
and said calmly: "General mobilisation, do you know?" We looked
at her like men aroused from a dream. "Yes," she insisted, "they
are already taking the horses out of the ploughs and carts." I
said: "We had better go back to town as quick as we can," and my
friend assented with a troubled look: "Yes, you had better." As
we passed through villages on our way back we saw mobs of horses
assembled on the commons with soldiers guarding them, and groups of
villagers looking on silently at the officers with their note-books
checking deliveries and writing out receipts. Some old peasant
women were already weeping aloud.
When our car drew up at the door of the hotel, the manager himself
came to help my wife out. In the first moment I did not quite
recognise him. His luxuriant black locks were gone, his head was
closely cropped, and as I glanced at it he smiled and said: "I
shall sleep at the barracks to-night."
I cannot reproduce the atmosphere of that night, the first night
after mobilisation. The shops and the gateways of the houses were
of course closed, but all through the dark hours the town hummed
with voices; the echoes of distant shouts entered the open windows
of our bedroom. Groups of men talking noisily walked in the middle
of the road-way escorted by distressed women: men of all callings
and of all classes going to report themselves at the fortress. Now
and then a military car tooting furiously would whisk through the
streets empty of wheeled traffic, like an intensely black shadow
under the great flood of electric lights on the grey pavement.
But what produced the greatest impression on my mind was a
gathering at night in the coffee-room of my hotel of a few men of
mark whom I was asked to join. It was about one o'clock in the
morning. The shutters were up. For some reason or other the
electric light was not switched on, and the big room was lit up
only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's
faces by. I saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose
country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no
will of its own, and not even the power to assert itself at the
cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future,
whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral
annihilation. I remember one of those men addressing me after a
period of mournful silence compounded of mental exhaustion and
unexpressed forebodings.
"What do you think England will do? If there is a ray of hope
anywhere it is only there."
I said: "I believe I know what England will do" (this was before
the news of the violation of Belgian neutrality arrived), "though I
won't tell you, for I am not absolutely certain. But I can tell
you what I am absolutely certain of. It is this: If England comes
into the war, then, no matter who may want to make peace at the end
of six months at the cost of right and justice, England will keep
on fighting for years if necessary. You may reckon on that."
"What, even alone?" asked somebody across the room.
I said: "Yes, even alone. But if things go so far as that England
will not be alone."
I think that at that moment I must have been inspired.
WELL DONE--1918
I.
It can be safely said that for the last four years the seamen of
Great Britain have done well. I mean that every kind and sort of
human being classified as seaman, steward, fore-mast hand, fireman,
lamp-trimmer, mate, master, engineer, and also all through the
innumerable ratings of the Navy up to that of Admiral, has done
well. I don't say marvellously well or miraculously well or
wonderfully well or even very well, because these are simply over-
statements of undisciplined minds. I don't deny that a man may be
a marvellous being, but this is not likely to be discovered in his
lifetime, and not always even after he is dead. Man's
marvellousness is a hidden thing, because the secrets of his heart
are not to be read by his fellows. As to a man's work, if it is
done well it is the very utmost that can be said. You can do well,
and you can do no more for people to see. In the Navy, where human
values are thoroughly understood, the highest signal of
commendation complimenting a ship (that is, a ship's company) on
some achievements consists exactly of those two simple words "Well
done," followed by the name of the ship. Not marvellously done,
astonishingly done, wonderfully done--no, only just:
"Well done, so-and-so."
And to the men it is a matter of infinite pride that somebody
should judge it proper to mention aloud, as it were, that they have
done well. It is a memorable occurrence, for in the sea services
you are expected professionally and as a matter of course to do
well, because nothing less will do. And in sober speech no man can
be expected to do more than well. The superlatives are mere signs
of uninformed wonder. Thus the official signal which can express
nothing but a delicate share of appreciation becomes a great
honour.
Speaking now as a purely civil seaman (or, perhaps, I ought to say
civilian, because politeness is not what I have in my mind) I may
say that I have never expected the Merchant Service to do otherwise
than well during the war. There were people who obviously did not
feel the same confidence, nay, who even confidently expected to see
the collapse of merchant seamen's courage. I must admit that such
pronouncements did arrest my attention. In my time I have never
been able to detect any faint hearts in the ships' companies with
whom I have served in various capacities. But I reflected that I
had left the sea in '94, twenty years before the outbreak of the
war that was to apply its severe test to the quality of modern
seamen. Perhaps they had deteriorated, I said unwillingly to
myself. I remembered also the alarmist articles I had read about
the great number of foreigners in the British Merchant Service, and
I didn't know how far these lamentations were justified.
In my time the proportion of non-Britishers in the crews of the
ships flying the red ensign was rather under one-third, which, as a
matter of fact, was less than the proportion allowed under the very
strict French navigation laws for the crews of the ships of that
nation. For the strictest laws aiming at the preservation of
national seamen had to recognise the difficulties of manning
merchant ships all over the world. The one-third of the French law
seemed to be the irreducible minimum. But the British proportion
was even less. Thus it may be said that up to the date I have
mentioned the crews of British merchant ships engaged in deep water
voyages to Australia, to the East Indies and round the Horn were
essentially British. The small proportion of foreigners which I
remember were mostly Scandinavians, and my general impression
remains that those men were good stuff. They appeared always able
and ready to do their duty by the flag under which they served.
The majority were Norwegians, whose courage and straightness of
character are matters beyond doubt. I remember also a couple of
Finns, both carpenters, of course, and very good craftsmen; a
Swede, the most scientific sailmaker I ever met; another Swede, a
steward, who really might have been called a British seaman since
he had sailed out of London for over thirty years, a rather
superior person; one Italian, an everlastingly smiling but a
pugnacious character; one Frenchman, a most excellent sailor,
tireless and indomitable under very difficult circumstances; one
Hollander, whose placid manner of looking at the ship going to
pieces under our feet I shall never forget, and one young,
colourless, muscularly very strong German, of no particular
character. Of non-European crews, lascars and Kalashes, I have had
very little experience, and that was only in one steamship and for
something less than a year. It was on the same occasion that I had
my only sight of Chinese firemen. Sight is the exact word. One
didn't speak to them. One saw them going along the decks, to and
fro, characteristic figures with rolled-up pigtails, very dirty
when coming off duty and very clean-faced when going on duty. They
never looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them
directly. Their appearances in the light of day were very regular,
and yet somewhat ghostlike in their detachment and silence.
But of the white crews of British ships and almost exclusively
British in blood and descent, the immediate predecessors of the men
whose worth the nation has discovered for itself to-day, I have had
a thorough experience. At first amongst them, then with them, I
have shared all the conditions of their very special life. For it
was very special. In my early days, starting out on a voyage was
like being launched into Eternity. I say advisedly Eternity
instead of Space, because of the boundless silence which swallowed
up one for eighty days--for one hundred days--for even yet more
days of an existence without echoes and whispers. Like Eternity
itself! For one can't conceive a vocal Eternity. An enormous
silence, in which there was nothing to connect one with the
Universe but the incessant wheeling about of the sun and other
celestial bodies, the alternation of light and shadow, eternally
chasing each other over the sky. The time of the earth, though
most carefully recorded by the half-hourly bells, did not count in
reality.
It was a special life, and the men were a very special kind of men.
By this I don't mean to say they were more complex than the
generality of mankind. Neither were they very much simpler. I
have already admitted that man is a marvellous creature, and no
doubt those particular men were marvellous enough in their way.
But in their collective capacity they can be best defined as men
who lived under the command to do well, or perish utterly. I have
written of them with all the truth that was in me, and with an the
impartiality of which I was capable. Let me not be misunderstood
in this statement. Affection can be very exacting, and can easily
miss fairness on the critical side. I have looked upon them with a
jealous eye, expecting perhaps even more than it was strictly fair
to expect. And no wonder--since I had elected to be one of them
very deliberately, very completely, without any looking back or
looking elsewhere. The circumstances were such as to give me the
feeling of complete identification, a very vivid comprehension that
if I wasn't one of them I was nothing at all. But what was most
difficult to detect was the nature of the deep impulses which these
men obeyed. What spirit was it that inspired the unfailing
manifestations of their simple fidelity? No outward cohesive force
of compulsion or discipline was holding them together or had ever
shaped their unexpressed standards. It was very mysterious. At
last I came to the conclusion that it must be something in the
nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced
for the most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a
loose agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away
from the eyes of mankind. Who can tell how a tradition comes into
the world? We are children of the earth. It may be that the
noblest tradition is but the offspring of material conditions, of
the hard necessities besetting men's precarious lives. But once it
has been born it becomes a spirit. Nothing can extinguish its
force then. Clouds of greedy selfishness, the subtle dialectics of
revolt or fear, may obscure it for a time, but in very truth it
remains an immortal ruler invested with the power of honour and
shame.
II.
The mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft commands unity in a
body of workers engaged in an occupation in which men have to
depend upon each other. It raises them, so to speak, above the
frailties of their dead selves. I don't wish to be suspected of
lack of judgment and of blind enthusiasm. I don't claim special
morality or even special manliness for the men who in my time
really lived at sea, and at the present time live at any rate
mostly at sea. But in their qualities as well as in their defects,
in their weaknesses as well as in their "virtue," there was
indubitably something apart. They were never exactly of the earth
earthly. They couldn't be that. Chance or desire (mostly desire)
had set them apart, often in their very childhood; and what is to
be remarked is that from the very nature of things this early
appeal, this early desire, had to be of an imaginative kind. Thus
their simple minds had a sort of sweetness. They were in a way
preserved. I am not alluding here to the preserving qualities of
the salt in the sea. The salt of the sea is a very good thing in
its way; it preserves for instance one from catching a beastly cold
while one remains wet for weeks together in the "roaring forties."
But in sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets much further
than the seaman's skin, which in certain latitudes it takes the
opportunity to encrust very thoroughly. That and nothing more.
And then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in
verse and prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men
who had never penetrated either the one or the other? The sea is
uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent. Except when helped
by the varied majesty of the sky, there is something inane in its
serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless,
boundless, persistent, and futile--a grey, hoary thing raging like
an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very immensity is
wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries mankind
might have addressed it with the words: "What are you, after all?
Oh, yes, we know. The greatest scene of potential terror, a
devouring enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing
if not a continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may
hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky
cockleshells on and on beyond the successive provocations of your
unreadable horizons."
Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough. Or rather a
sort of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is
death, and a Medusa's head whose stare is terror. That sort of
charm is calculated to keep men morally in order. But as to sea-
salt, with its particular bitterness like nothing else on earth,
that, I am safe to say, penetrates no further than the seamen's
lips. With them the inner soundness is caused by another kind of
preservative of which (nobody will be surprised to hear) the main
ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing to do with
the futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea.
Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative. It has
also in it that strain of fantasy that is so often, nay almost
invariably, to be found in the temperament of a true seaman. But I
repeat that I claim no particular morality for seamen. I will
admit without difficulty that I have found amongst them the usual
defects of mankind, characters not quite straight, uncertain
tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness, small meannesses; all
this coming out mostly on the contact with the shore; and all
rather naive, peculiar, a little fantastic. I have even had a
downright thief in my experience. One.
This is indeed a minute proportion, but it might have been my luck;
and since I am writing in eulogy of seamen I feel irresistibly
tempted to talk about this unique specimen; not indeed to offer him
as an example of morality, but to bring out certain characteristics
and set out a certain point of view. He was a large, strong man
with a guileless countenance, not very communicative with his
shipmates, but when drawn into any sort of conversation displaying
a very painstaking earnestness. He was fair and candid-eyed, of a
very satisfactory smartness, and, from the officer-of-the-watch
point of view,--altogether dependable. Then, suddenly, he went and
stole. And he didn't go away from his honourable kind to do that
thing to somebody on shore; he stole right there on the spot, in
proximity to his shipmates, on board his own ship, with complete
disregard for old Brown, our night watchman (whose fame for
trustworthiness was utterly blasted for the rest of the voyage) and
in such a way as to bring the profoundest possible trouble to all
the blameless souls animating that ship. He stole eleven golden
sovereigns, and a gold pocket chronometer and chain. I am really
in doubt whether the crime should not be entered under the category
of sacrilege rather than theft. Those things belonged to the
captain! There was certainly something in the nature of the
violation of a sanctuary, and of a particularly impudent kind, too,
because he got his plunder out of the captain's state-room while
the captain was asleep there. But look, now, at the fantasy of the
man! After going through the pockets of the clothes, he did not
hasten to retreat. No. He went deliberately into the saloon and
removed from the sideboard two big heavy, silver-plated lamps,
which he carried to the fore-end of the ship and stood
symmetrically on the knight-heads. This, I must explain, means
that he took them away as far as possible from the place where they
belonged. These were the deeds of darkness. In the morning the
bo'sun came along dragging after him a hose to wash the foc'sle
head, and, beholding the shiny cabin lamps, resplendent in the
morning light, one on each side of the bowsprit, he was paralysed
with awe. He dropped the nozzle from his nerveless hands--and such
hands, too! I happened along, and he said to me in a distracted
whisper: "Look at that, sir, look." "Take them back aft at once
yourself," I said, very amazed, too. As we approached the
quarterdeck we perceived the steward, a prey to a sort of sacred
horror, holding up before us the captain's trousers.
Bronzed men with brooms and buckets in their hands stood about with
open mouths. "I have found them lying in the passage outside the
captain's door," the steward declared faintly. The additional
statement that the captain's watch was gone from its hook by the
bedside raised the painful sensation to the highest pitch. We knew
then we had a thief amongst us. Our thief! Behold the solidarity
of a ship's company. He couldn't be to us like any other thief.
We all had to live under the shadow of his crime for days; but the
police kept on investigating, and one morning a young woman
appeared on board swinging a parasol, attended by two policemen,
and identified the culprit. She was a barmaid of some bar near the
Circular Quay, and knew really nothing of our man except that he
looked like a respectable sailor. She had seen him only twice in
her life. On the second occasion he begged her nicely as a great
favour to take care for him of a small solidly tied-up paper parcel
for a day or two. But he never came near her again. At the end of
three weeks she opened it, and, of course, seeing the contents, was
much alarmed, and went to the nearest police-station for advice.
The police took her at once on board our ship, where all hands were
mustered on the quarterdeck. She stared wildly at all our faces,
pointed suddenly a finger with a shriek, "That's the man," and
incontinently went off into a fit of hysterics in front of thirty-
six seamen. I must say that never in my life did I see a ship's
company look so frightened. Yes, in this tale of guilt, there was
a curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of that fantasy
which is often a part of a seaman's character. It wasn't greed
that moved him, I think. It was something much less simple:
boredom, perhaps, or a bet, or the pleasure of defiance.
And now for the point of view. It was given to me by a short,
black-bearded A.B. of the crew, who on sea passages washed my
flannel shirts, mended my clothes and, generally, looked after my
room. He was an excellent needleman and washerman, and a very good
sailor. Standing in this peculiar relation to me, he considered
himself privileged to open his mind on the matter one evening when
he brought back to my cabin three clean and neatly folded shirts.
He was profoundly pained. He said: "What a ship's company! Never
seen such a crowd! Liars, cheats, thieves. . . "
It was a needlessly jaundiced view. There were in that ship's
company three or four fellows who dealt in tall yarns, and I knew
that on the passage out there had been a dispute over a game in the
foc'sle once or twice of a rather acute kind, so that all card-
playing had to be abandoned. In regard to thieves, as we know,
there was only one, and he, I am convinced, came out of his reserve
to perform an exploit rather than to commit a crime. But my black-
bearded friend's indignation had its special morality, for he
added, with a burst of passion: "And on board our ship, too--a
ship like this. . ."
Therein lies the secret of the seamen's special character as a
body. The ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we serve, is the
moral symbol of our life. A ship has to be respected, actually and
ideally; her merit, her innocence, are sacred things. Of all the
creations of man she is the closest partner of his toil and
courage. From every point of view it is imperative that you should
do well by her. And, as always in the case of true love, all you
can do for her adds only to the tale of her merits in your heart.
Mute and compelling, she claims not only your fidelity, but your
respect. And the supreme "Well done!" which you may earn is made
over to her.
III.
It is my deep conviction, or, perhaps, I ought to say my deep
feeling born from personal experience, that it is not the sea but
the ships of the sea that guide and command that spirit of
adventure which some say is the second nature of British men. I
don't want to provoke a controversy (for intellectually I am rather
a Quietist) but I venture to affirm that the main characteristic of
the British men spread all over the world, is not the spirit of
adventure so much as the spirit of service. I think that this
could be demonstrated from the history of great voyages and the
general activity of the race. That the British man has always
liked his service to be adventurous rather than otherwise cannot be
denied, for each British man began by being young in his time when
all risk has a glamour. Afterwards, with the course of years, risk
became a part of his daily work; he would have missed it from his
side as one misses a loved companion.
The mere love of adventure is no saving grace. It is no grace at
all. It lays a man under no obligation of faithfulness to an idea
and even to his own self. Roughly speaking, an adventurer may be
expected to have courage, or at any rate may be said to need it.
But courage in itself is not an ideal. A successful highwayman
showed courage of a sort, and pirate crews have been known to fight
with courage or perhaps only with reckless desperation in the
manner of cornered rats. There is nothing in the world to prevent
a mere lover or pursuer of adventure from running at any moment.
There is his own self, his mere taste for excitement, the prospect
of some sort of gain, but there is no sort of loyalty to bind him
in honour to consistent conduct. I have noticed that the majority
of mere lovers of adventure are mightily careful of their skins;
and the proof of it is that so many of them manage to keep it whole
to an advanced age. You find them in mysterious nooks of islands
and continents, mostly red-nosed and watery-eyed, and not even
amusingly boastful. There is nothing more futile under the sun
than a mere adventurer. He might have loved at one time--which
would have been a saving grace. I mean loved adventure for itself.
But if so, he was bound to lose this grace very soon. Adventure by
itself is but a phantom, a dubious shape without a heart. Yes,
there is nothing more futile than an adventurer; but nobody can say
that the adventurous activities of the British race are stamped
with the futility of a chase after mere emotions.
The successive generations that went out to sea from these Isles
went out to toil desperately in adventurous conditions. A man is a
worker. If he is not that he is nothing. Just nothing--like a
mere adventurer. Those men understood the nature of their work,
but more or less dimly, in various degrees of imperfection. The
best and greatest of their leaders even had never seen it clearly,
because of its magnitude and the remoteness of its end. This is
the common fate of mankind, whose most positive achievements are
born from dreams and visions followed loyally to an unknown
destination. And it doesn't matter. For the great mass of mankind
the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is
nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.
In other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of
immediate duty, and a feeling of impalpable constraint. Indeed,
seamen and duty are all the time inseparable companions. It has
been suggested to me that this sense of duty is not a patriotic
sense or a religious sense, or even a social sense in a seaman. I
don't know. It seems to me that a seaman's duty may be an
unconscious compound of these three, something perhaps smaller than
either, but something much more definite for the simple mind and
more adapted to the humbleness of the seaman's task. It has been
suggested also to me that the impalpable constraint is put upon the
nature of a seaman by the Spirit of the Sea, which he serves with a
dumb and dogged devotion.
Those are fine words conveying a fine idea. But this I do know,
that it is very difficult to display a dogged devotion to a mere
spirit, however great. In everyday life ordinary men require
something much more material, effective, definite and symbolic on
which to concentrate their love and their devotion. And then, what
is it, this Spirit of the Sea? It is too great and too elusive to
be embraced and taken to a human breast. All that a guileless or
guileful seaman knows of it is its hostility, its exaction of toil
as endless as its ever-renewed horizons. No. What awakens the
seaman's sense of duty, what lays that impalpable constraint upon
the strength of his manliness, what commands his not always dumb if
always dogged devotion, is not the spirit of the sea but something
that in his eyes has a body, a character, a fascination, and almost
a soul--it is his ship.
There is not a day that has passed for many centuries now without
the sun seeing scattered over all the seas groups of British men
whose material and moral existence is conditioned by their loyalty
to each other and their faithful devotion to a ship.
Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass
of seamen have always been a childless lot) but of loyal and
obscure successors taking up the modest but spiritual inheritance
of a hard life and simple duties; of duties so simple that nothing
ever could shake the traditional attitude born from the physical
conditions of the service. It was always the ship, bound on any
possible errand in the service of the nation, that has been the
stage for the exercise of seamen's primitive virtues. The dimness
of great distances and the obscurity of lives protected them from
the nation's admiring gaze. Those scattered distant ships'
companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed
(on the right side, I suppose) from the other strange monsters of
the deep. If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of
half-contemptuous indulgence. A good many years ago it was my lot
to write about one of those ships' companies on a certain sea,
under certain circumstances, in a book of no particular length.
That small group of men whom I tried to limn with loving care, but
sparing none of their weaknesses, was characterised by a friendly
reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians. This gave me some food for
thought. Was it, then, in that guise that they appeared through
the mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded? And
what on earth is an "engaging ruffian"? He must be a creature of
literary imagination, I thought, for the two words don't match in
my personal experience. It has happened to me to meet a few
ruffians here and there, but I never found one of them "engaging."
I consoled myself, however, by the reflection that the friendly
reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so often seems
to understand what it says.
Yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness from the rest
of the race, the shapes of those men appeared distorted, uncouth
and faint--so faint as to be almost invisible. It needed the lurid
light of the engines of war to bring them out into full view, very
simple, without worldly graces, organised now into a body of
workers by the genius of one of themselves, who gave them a place
and a voice in the social scheme; but in the main still apart in
their homeless, childless generations, scattered in loyal groups
over all the seas, giving faithful care to their ships and serving
the nation, which, since they are seamen, can give them no reward
but the supreme "Well Done."
TRADITION--1918
"Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a
mass of useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens
into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of
men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to
leave some trace of ourselves on this earth." The sense of the
above lines does not belong to me. It may be found in the note-
books of one of the greatest artists that ever lived, Leonardo da
Vinci. It has a simplicity and a truth which no amount of subtle
comment can destroy.
The Master who had meditated so deeply on the rebirth of arts and
sciences, on the inward beauty of all things,--ships' lines,
women's faces--and on the visible aspects of nature was profoundly
right in his pronouncement on the work that is done on the earth.
From the hard work of men are born the sympathetic consciousness of
a common destiny, the fidelity to right practice which makes great
craftsmen, the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the
devotion to our calling and the idealism which is not a misty,
winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of terrestrial
aspect with a clear glance and with its feet resting firmly on the
earth on which it was born.
And work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, which is the
condition of humanity and, like the ambient air, fills the space
between the various sorts and conditions of men, which breeds
hatred, fear, and contempt between the masses of mankind, and puts
on men's lips, on their innocent lips, words that are thoughtless
and vain.
Thoughtless, for instance, were the words that (in all innocence, I
believe) came on the lips of a prominent statesman making in the
House of Commons an eulogistic reference to the British Merchant
Service. In this name I include men of diverse status and origin,
who live on and by the sea, by it exclusively, outside all
professional pretensions and social formulas, men for whom not only
their daily bread but their collective character, their personal
achievement and their individual merit come from the sea. Those
words of the statesman were meant kindly; but, after all, this is
not a complete excuse. Rightly or wrongly, we expect from a man of
national importance a larger and at the same time a more scrupulous
precision of speech, for it is possible that it may go echoing down
the ages. His words were:
"It is right when thinking of the Navy not to forget the men of the
Merchant Service, who have shown--and it is more surprising because
they have had no traditions towards it--courage as great," etc.,
etc.
And then he went on talking of the execution of Captain Fryatt, an
event of undying memory, but less connected with the permanent,
unchangeable conditions of sea service than with the wrong view
German minds delight in taking of Englishmen's psychology. The
enemy, he said, meant by this atrocity to frighten our sailors away
from the sea.
"What has happened?" he goes on to ask. "Never at any time in
peace have sailors stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a
readiness to step again into a ship."
Which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. I
should like to know at what time of history the English Merchant
Service, the great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer
the call. Noticed or unnoticed, ignored or commanded, they have
answered invariably the call to do their work, the very conditions
of which made them what they are. They have always served the
nation's needs through their own invariable fidelity to the demands
of their special life; but with the development and complexity of
material civilisation they grew less prominent to the nation's eye
among all the vast schemes of national industry. Never was the
need greater and the call to the services more urgent than to-day.
And those inconspicuous workers on whose qualities depends so much
of the national welfare have answered it without dismay, facing
risk without glory, in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition
which the speech of the statesman denies to them at the very moment
when he thinks fit to praise their courage . . . and mention his
surprise!
The hour of opportunity has struck--not for the first time--for the
Merchant Service; and if I associate myself with all my heart in
the admiration and the praise which is the greatest reward of brave
men I must be excused from joining in any sentiment of surprise.
It is perhaps because I have not been born to the inheritance of
that tradition, which has yet fashioned the fundamental part of my
character in my young days, that I am so consciously aware of it
and venture to vindicate its existence in this outspoken manner.
Merchant seamen have always been what they are now, from their
earliest days, before the Royal Navy had been fashioned out of the
material they furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen.
Their work has made them, as work undertaken with single-minded
devotion makes men, giving to their achievements that vitality and
continuity in which their souls are expressed, tempered and matured
through the succeeding generations. In its simplest definition the
work of merchant seamen has been to take ships entrusted to their
care from port to port across the seas; and, from the highest to
the lowest, to watch and labour with devotion for the safety of the
property and the lives committed to their skill and fortitude
through the hazards of innumerable voyages.
That was always the clear task, the single aim, the simple ideal,
the only problem for an unselfish solution. The terms of it have
changed with the years, its risks have worn different aspects from
time to time. There are no longer any unexplored seas. Human
ingenuity has devised better means to meet the dangers of natural
forces. But it is always the same problem. The youngsters who
were growing up at sea at the end of my service are commanding
ships now. At least I have heard of some of them who do. And
whatever the shape and power of their ships the character of the
duty remains the same. A mine or a torpedo that strikes your ship
is not so very different from a sharp, uncharted rock tearing her
life out of her in another way. At a greater cost of vital energy,
under the well-nigh intolerable stress of vigilance and resolution,
they are doing steadily the work of their professional forefathers
in the midst of multiplied dangers. They go to and fro across the
oceans on their everlasting task: the same men, the same stout
hearts, the same fidelity to an exacting tradition created by
simple toilers who in their time knew how to live and die at sea.
Allowed to share in this work and in this tradition for something
like twenty years, I am bold enough to think that perhaps I am not
altogether unworthy to speak of it. It was the sphere not only of
my activity but, I may safely say, also of my affections; but after
such a close connection it is very difficult to avoid bringing in
one's own personality. Without looking at all at the aspects of
the Labour problem, I can safely affirm that I have never, never
seen British seamen refuse any risk, any exertion, any effort of
spirit or body up to the extremest demands of their calling. Years
ago--it seems ages ago--I have seen the crew of a British ship
fight the fire in the cargo for a whole sleepless week and then,
with her decks blown up, I have seen them still continue the fight
to save the floating shell. And at last I have seen them refuse to
be taken off by a vessel standing by, and this only in order "to
see the last of our ship," at the word, at the simple word, of a
man who commanded them, a worthy soul indeed, but of no heroic
aspect. I have seen that. I have shared their days in small
boats. Hard days. Ages ago. And now let me mention a story of
to-day.
I will try to relate it here mainly in the words of the chief
engineer of a certain steamship which, after bunkering, left
Lerwick, bound for Iceland. The weather was cold, the sea pretty
rough, with a stiff head wind. All went well till next day, about
1.30 p.m., then the captain sighted a suspicious object far away to
starboard. Speed was increased at once to close in with the Faroes
and good lookouts were set fore and aft. Nothing further was seen
of the suspicious object, but about half-past three without any
warning the ship was struck amidships by a torpedo which exploded
in the bunkers. None of the crew was injured by the explosion, and
all hands, without exception, behaved admirably.
The chief officer with his watch managed to lower the No. 3 boat.
Two other boats had been shattered by the explosion, and though
another lifeboat was cleared and ready, there was no time to lower
it, and "some of us jumped while others were washed overboard.
Meantime the captain had been busy handing lifebelts to the men and
cheering them up with words and smiles, with no thought of his own
safety." The ship went down in less than four minutes. The
captain was the last man on board, going down with her, and was
sucked under. On coming up he was caught under an upturned boat to
which five hands were clinging. "One lifeboat," says the chief
engineer, "which was floating empty in the distance was cleverly
manoeuvred to our assistance by the steward, who swam off to her
pluckily. Our next endeavour was to release the captain, who was
entangled under the boat. As it was impossible to right her, we
set-to to split her side open with the boat hook, because by awful
bad luck the head of the axe we had flew off at the first blow and
was lost. The rescue took thirty minutes, and the extricated
captain was in a pitiable condition, being badly bruised and having
swallowed a lot of salt water. He was unconscious. While at that
work the submarine came to the surface quite close and made a
complete circle round us, the seven men that we counted on the
conning tower laughing at our efforts.
"There were eighteen of us saved. I deeply regret the loss of the
chief officer, a fine fellow and a kind shipmate showing splendid
promise. The other men lost--one A.B., one greaser, and two
firemen--were quiet, conscientious, good fellows."
With no restoratives in the boat, they endeavoured to bring the
captain round by means of massage. Meantime the oars were got out
in order to reach the Faroes, which were about thirty miles dead to
windward, but after about nine hours' hard work they had to desist,
and, putting out a sea-anchor, they took shelter under the canvas
boat-cover from the cold wind and torrential rain. Says the
narrator: "We were all very wet and miserable, and decided to have
two biscuits all round. The effects of this and being under the
shelter of the canvas warmed us up and made us feel pretty well
contented. At about sunrise the captain showed signs of recovery,
and by the time the sun was up he was looking a lot better, much to
our relief."
After being informed of what had been done the revived captain
"dropped a bombshell in our midst," by proposing to make for the
Shetlands, which were ONLY one hundred and fifty miles off. "The
wind is in our favour," he said. "I promise to take you there.
Are you all willing?" This--comments the chief engineer--"from a
man who but a few hours previously had been hauled back from the
grave!" The captain's confident manner inspired the men, and they
all agreed. Under the best possible conditions a boat-run of one
hundred and fifty miles in the North Atlantic and in winter weather
would have been a feat of no mean merit, but in the circumstances
it required uncommon nerve and skill to carry out such a promise.
With an oar for a mast and the boat-cover cut down for a sail they
started on their dangerous journey, with the boat compass and the
stars for their guide. The captain's undaunted serenity buoyed
them all up against despondency. He told them what point he was
making for. It was Ronas Hill, "and we struck it as straight as a
die."
The chief engineer commends also the ship steward for the manner in
which he made the little food they had last, the cheery spirit he
manifested, and the great help he was to the captain by keeping the
men in good humour. That trusty man had "his hands cruelly chafed
with the rowing, but it never damped his spirits."
They made Ronas Hill (as straight as a die), and the chief engineer
cannot express their feelings of gratitude and relief when they set
their feet on the shore. He praises the unbounded kindness of the
people in Hillswick. "It seemed to us all like Paradise regained,"
he says, concluding his letter with the words:
"And there was our captain, just his usual self, as if nothing had
happened, as if bringing the boat that hazardous journey and being
the means of saving eighteen souls was to him an everyday
occurrence."
Such is the chief engineer's testimony to the continuity of the old
tradition of the sea, which made by the work of men has in its turn
created for them their simple ideal of conduct.
CONFIDENCE--1919
I.
The seamen hold up the Edifice. They have been holding it up in
the past and they will hold it up in the future, whatever this
future may contain of logical development, of unforeseen new
shapes, of great promises and of dangers still unknown.
It is not an unpardonable stretching of the truth to say that the
British Empire rests on transportation. I am speaking now
naturally of the sea, as a man who has lived on it for many years,
at a time, too, when on sighting a vessel on the horizon of any of
the great oceans it was perfectly safe to bet any reasonable odds
on her being a British ship--with the certitude of making a pretty
good thing of it at the end of the voyage.
I have tried to convey here in popular terms the strong impression
remembered from my young days. The Red Ensign prevailed on the
high seas to such an extent that one always experienced a slight
shock on seeing some other combination of colours blow out at the
peak or flag-pole of any chance encounter in deep water. In the
long run the persistence of the visual fact forced upon the mind a
half-unconscious sense of its inner significance. We have all
heard of the well-known view that trade follows the flag. And that
is not always true. There is also this truth that the flag, in
normal conditions, represents commerce to the eye and understanding
of the average man. This is a truth, but it is not the whole
truth. In its numbers and in its unfailing ubiquity, the British
Red Ensign, under which naval actions too have been fought,
adventures entered upon and sacrifices offered, represented in fact
something more than the prestige of a great trade.
The flutter of that piece of red bunting showered sentiment on the
nations of the earth. I will not venture to say that in every case
that sentiment was of a friendly nature. Of hatred, half concealed
or concealed not at all, this is not the place to speak; and indeed
the little I have seen of it about the world was tainted with
stupidity and seemed to confess in its very violence the extreme
poorness of its case. But generally it was more in the nature of
envious wonder qualified by a half-concealed admiration.
That flag, which but for the Union Jack in the corner might have
been adopted by the most radical of revolutions, affirmed in its
numbers the stability of purpose, the continuity of effort and the
greatness of Britain's opportunity pursued steadily in the order
and peace of the world: that world which for twenty-five years or
so after 1870 may be said to have been living in holy calm and
hushed silence with only now and then a slight clink of metal, as
if in some distant part of mankind's habitation some restless body
had stumbled over a heap of old armour.
II.
We who have learned by now what a world-war is like may be excused
for considering the disturbances of that period as insignificant
brawls, mere hole-and-corner scuffles. In the world, which memory
depicts as so wonderfully tranquil all over, it was the sea yet
that was the safest place. And the Red Ensign, commercial,
industrial, historic, pervaded the sea! Assertive only by its
numbers, highly significant, and, under its character of a trade--
emblem, nationally expressive, it was symbolic of old and new
ideas, of conservatism and progress, of routine and enterprise, of
drudgery and adventure--and of a certain easy-going optimism that
would have appeared the Father of Sloth itself if it had not been
so stubbornly, so everlastingly active.
The unimaginative, hard-working men, great and small, who served
this flag afloat and ashore, nursed dumbly a mysterious sense of
its greatness. It sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours
under the sleepless eye of the sun. It held up the Edifice. But
it crowned it too. This is not the extravagance of a mixed
metaphor. It is the sober expression of a not very complex truth.
Within that double function the national life that flag represented
so well went on in safety, assured of its daily crust of bread for
which we all pray and without which we would have to give up faith,
hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of our minds and the
sanctified strength of our labouring arms. I may permit myself to
speak of it in these terms because as a matter of fact it was on
that very symbol that I had founded my life and (as I have said
elsewhere in a moment of outspoken gratitude) had known for many
years no other roof above my head.
In those days that symbol was not particularly regarded.
Superficially and definitely it represented but one of the forms of
national activity rather remote from the close-knit organisations
of other industries, a kind of toil not immediately under the
public eye. It was of its Navy that the nation, looking out of the
windows of its world-wide Edifice, was proudly aware. And that was
but fair. The Navy is the armed man at the gate. An existence
depending upon the sea must be guarded with a jealous, sleepless
vigilance, for the sea is but a fickle friend.
It had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and had lured some
nations to destruction--as we know. He--man or people--who,
boasting of long years of familiarity with the sea, neglects the
strength and cunning of his right hand is a fool. The pride and
trust of the nation in its Navy so strangely mingled with moments
of neglect, caused by a particularly thick-headed idealism, is
perfectly justified. It is also very proper: for it is good for a
body of men conscious of a great responsibility to feel themselves
recognised, if only in that fallible, imperfect and often
irritating way in which recognition is sometimes offered to the
deserving.
But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from that sort of
irritation. No recognition was thrust on it offensively, and,
truth to say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the
claims of its own obscure merit. It had no consciousness. It had
no words. It had no time. To these busy men their work was but
the ordinary labour of earning a living; their duties in their
ever-recurring round had, like the sun itself, the commonness of
daily things; their individual fidelity was not so much united as
merely co-ordinated by an aim that shone with no spiritual lustre.
They were everyday men. They were that, eminently. When the great
opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a supreme call
they received it with characteristic simplicity, incorporating
self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and, as far
as emotion went, framing the horror of mankind's catastrophic time
within the rigid rules of their professional conscience. And who
can say that they could have done better than this?
Such was their past both remote and near. It has been stubbornly
consistent, and as this consistency was based upon the character of
men fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it
will endure. Such changes as came into the sea life have been for
the main part mechanical and affecting only the material conditions
of that inbred consistency. That men don't change is a profound
truth. They don't change because it is not necessary for them to
change even if they could accomplish that miracle. It is enough
for them to be infinitely adaptable--as the last four years have
abundantly proved.
III.
Thus one may await the future without undue excitement and with
unshaken confidence. Whether the hues of sunrise are angry or
benign, gorgeous or sinister, we shall always have the same sky
over our heads. Yet by a kindly dispensation of Providence the
human faculty of astonishment will never lack food. What could be
more surprising for instance, than the calm invitation to Great
Britain to discard the force and protection of its Navy? It has
been suggested, it has been proposed--I don't know whether it has
been pressed. Probably not much. For if the excursions of
audacious folly have no bounds that human eye can see, reason has
the habit of never straying very far away from its throne.
It is not the first time in history that excited voices have been
heard urging the warrior still panting from the fray to fling his
tried weapons on the altar of peace, for they would be needed no
more! And such voices have been, in undying hope or extreme
weariness, listened to sometimes. But not for long. After all
every sort of shouting is a transitory thing. It is the grim
silence of facts that remains.
The British Merchant Service has been challenged in its supremacy
before. It will be challenged again. It may be even asked
menacingly in the name of some humanitarian doctrine or some empty
ideal to step down voluntarily from that place which it has managed
to keep for so many years. But I imagine that it will take more
than words of brotherly love or brotherly anger (which, as is well
known, is the worst kind of anger) to drive British seamen, armed
or unarmed, from the seas. Firm in this indestructible if not
easily explained conviction, I can allow myself to think placidly
of that long, long future which I shall not see.
My confidence rests on the hearts of men who do not change, though
they may forget many things for a time and even forget to be
themselves in a moment of false enthusiasm. But of that I am not
afraid. It will not be for long. I know the men. Through the
kindness of the Admiralty (which, let me confess here in a white
sheet, I repaid by the basest ingratitude) I was permitted during
the war to renew my contact with the British seamen of the merchant
service. It is to their generosity in recognising me under the
shore rust of twenty-five years as one of themselves that I owe one
of the deepest emotions of my life. Never for a moment did I feel
among them like an idle, wandering ghost from a distant past. They
talked to me seriously, openly, and with professional precision, of
facts, of events, of implements, I had never heard of in my time;
but the hands I grasped were like the hands of the generation which
had trained my youth and is now no more. I recognised the
character of their glances, the accent of their voices. Their
moving tales of modern instances were presented to me with that
peculiar turn of mind flavoured by the inherited humour and
sagacity of the sea. I don't know what the seaman of the future
will be like. He may have to live all his days with a telephone
tied up to his head and bristle all over with scientific antennae
like a figure in a fantastic tale. But he will always be the man
revealed to us lately, immutable in his slight variations like the
closed path of this planet of ours on which he must find his exact
position once, at the very least, in every twenty-four hours.
The greatest desideratum of a sailor's life is to be "certain of
his position." It is a source of great worry at times, but I don't
think that it need be so at this time. Yet even the best position
has its dangers on account of the fickleness of the elements. But
I think that, left untrammelled to the individual effort of its
creators and to the collective spirit of its servants, the British
Merchant Service will manage to maintain its position on this
restless and watery globe.
FLIGHT--1917
To begin at the end, I will say that the "landing" surprised me by
a slight and very characteristically "dead" sort of shock.
I may fairly call myself an amphibious creature. A good half of my
active existence has been passed in familiar contact with salt
water, and I was aware, theoretically, that water is not an elastic
body: but it was only then that I acquired the absolute conviction
of the fact. I remember distinctly the thought flashing through my
head: "By Jove! it isn't elastic!" Such is the illuminating force
of a particular experience.
This landing (on the water of the North Sea) was effected in a
Short biplane after one hour and twenty minutes in the air. I
reckon every minute like a miser counting his hoard, for, if what
I've got is mine, I am not likely now to increase the tale. That
feeling is the effect of age. It strikes me as I write that, when
next time I leave the surface of this globe, it won't be to soar
bodily above it in the air. Quite the contrary. And I am not
thinking of a submarine either. . . .
But let us drop this dismal strain and go back logically to the
beginning. I must confess that I started on that flight in a
state--I won't say of fury, but of a most intense irritation. I
don't remember ever feeling so annoyed in my life.
It came about in this way. Two or three days before, I had been
invited to lunch at an R.N.A.S. station, and was made to feel very
much at home by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it
had ever been my good fortune to meet. Then I was taken into the
sheds. I walked respectfully round and round a lot of machines of
all kinds, and the more I looked at them the more I felt somehow
that for all the effect they produced on me they might have been so
many land-vehicles of an eccentric design. So I said to Commander
O., who very kindly was conducting me: "This is all very fine, but
to realise what one is looking at, one must have been up."
He said at once: "I'll give you a flight to-morrow if you like."
I postulated that it should be none of those "ten minutes in the
air" affairs. I wanted a real business flight. Commander O.
assured me that I would get "awfully bored," but I declared that I
was willing to take that risk. "Very well," he said. "Eleven
o'clock to-morrow. Don't be late."
I am sorry to say I was about two minutes late, which was enough,
however, for Commander O. to greet me with a shout from a great
distance: "Oh! You are coming, then!"
"Of course I am coming," I yelled indignantly.
He hurried up to me. "All right. There's your machine, and here's
your pilot. Come along."
A lot of officers closed round me, rushed me into a hut: two of
them began to button me into the coat, two more were ramming a cap
on my head, others stood around with goggles, with binoculars. . .
I couldn't understand the necessity of such haste. We weren't
going to chase Fritz. There was no sign of Fritz anywhere in the
blue. Those dear boys did not seem to notice my age--fifty-eight,
if a day--nor my infirmities--a gouty subject for years. This
disregard was very flattering, and I tried to live up to it, but
the pace seemed to me terrific. They galloped me across a vast
expanse of open ground to the water's edge.
The machine on its carriage seemed as big as a cottage, and much
more imposing. My young pilot went up like a bird. There was an
idle, able-bodied ladder loafing against a shed within fifteen feet
of me, but as nobody seemed to notice it, I recommended myself
mentally to Heaven and started climbing after the pilot. The close
view of the real fragility of that rigid structure startled me
considerably, while Commander O. discomposed me still more by
shouting repeatedly: "Don't put your foot there!" I didn't know
where to put my foot. There was a slight crack; I heard some
swear-words below me, and then with a supreme effort I rolled in
and dropped into a basket-chair, absolutely winded. A small crowd
of mechanics and officers were looking up at me from the ground,
and while I gasped visibly I thought to myself that they would be
sure to put it down to sheer nervousness. But I hadn't breath
enough in my body to stick my head out and shout down to them:
"You know, it isn't that at all!"
Generally I try not to think of my age and infirmities. They are
not a cheerful subject. But I was never so angry and disgusted
with them as during that minute or so before the machine took the
water. As to my feelings in the air, those who will read these
lines will know their own, which are so much nearer the mind and
the heart than any writings of an unprofessional can be. At first
all my faculties were absorbed and as if neutralised by the sheer
novelty of the situation. The first to emerge was the sense of
security so much more perfect than in any small boat I've ever been
in; the, as it were, material, stillness, and immobility (though it
was a bumpy day). I very soon ceased to hear the roar of the wind
and engines--unless, indeed, some cylinders missed, when I became
acutely aware of that. Within the rigid spread of the powerful
planes, so strangely motionless I had sometimes the illusion of
sitting as if by enchantment in a block of suspended marble. Even
while looking over at the aeroplane's shadow running prettily over
land and sea, I had the impression of extreme slowness. I imagine
that had she suddenly nose-dived out of control, I would have gone
to the final smash without a single additional heartbeat. I am
sure I would not have known. It is doubtless otherwise with the
man in control.
But there was no dive, and I returned to earth (after an hour and
twenty minutes) without having felt "bored" for a single second. I
descended (by the ladder) thinking that I would never go flying
again. No, never any more--lest its mysterious fascination, whose
invisible wing had brushed my heart up there, should change to
unavailing regret in a man too old for its glory.
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC--1912
It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that
the late S.S. Titanic had a "good press." It is perhaps because I
have no great practice of daily newspapers (I have never seen so
many of them together lying about my room) that the white spaces
and the big lettering of the headlines have an incongruously
festive air to my eyes, a disagreeable effect of a feverish
exploitation of a sensational God-send. And if ever a loss at sea
fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act
of God, this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness and severity;
and in the chastening influence it should have on the self-
confidence of mankind.
I say this with all the seriousness the occasion demands, though I
have neither the competence nor the wish to take a theological view
of this great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last
account. It is but a natural REFLECTION. Another one flowing also
from the phraseology of bills of lading (a bill of lading is a
shipping document limiting in certain of its clauses the liability
of the carrier) is that the "King's Enemies" of a more or less
overt sort are not altogether sorry that this fatal mishap should
strike the prestige of the greatest Merchant Service of the world.
I believe that not a thousand miles from these shores certain
public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction--
to speak plainly--by rather ill-natured comments.
In what light one is to look at the action of the American Senate
is more difficult to say. From a certain point of view the sight
of the august senators of a great Power rushing to New York and
beginning to bully and badger the luckless "Yamsi"--on the very
quay-side so to speak--seems to furnish the Shakespearian touch of
the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these
people who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in
the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians
and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these
ships! Yes, a grim touch of comedy. One asks oneself what these
men are after, with this very provincial display of authority. I
beg my friends in the United States pardon for calling these
zealous senators men. I don't wish to be disrespectful. They may
be of the stature of demi-gods for all I know, but at that great
distance from the shores of effete Europe and in the presence of so
many guileless dead, their size seems diminished from this side.
What are they after? What is there for them to find out? We know
what had happened. The ship scraped her side against a piece of
ice, and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot
of people down with her. What more can they find out from the
unfair badgering of the unhappy "Yamsi," or the ruffianly abuse of
the same.
"Yamsi," I should explain, is a mere code address, and I use it
here symbolically. I have seen commerce pretty close. I know what
it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial
magnates, but one must protest against these Bumble-like
proceedings. Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which
is at work here? Well, the American railroads kill very many
people during one single year, I dare say. Then why don't these
dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of
which one can't say whether they are mere means of transportation
or a sort of gambling game for the use of American plutocrats. Is
it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praiseworthy desire for
information? But the reports of the inquiry tell us that the
august senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to
the complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are
unable to understand what the second officer is saying to them. We
are so informed by the press from the other side. Even such a
simple expression as that one of the look-out men was stationed in
the "eyes of the ship" was too much for the senators of the land of
graphic expression. What it must have been in the more recondite
matters I won't even try to think, because I have no mind for
smiles just now. They were greatly exercised about the sound of
explosions heard when half the ship was under water already. Was
there one? Were there two? They seemed to be smelling a rat
there! Has not some charitable soul told them (what even
schoolboys who read sea stories know) that when a ship sinks from a
leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up; and that when a
steamship goes down by the head, the boilers may, and often do
break adrift with a sound which resembles the sound of an
explosion? And they may, indeed, explode, for all I know. In the
only case I have seen of a steamship sinking there was such a
sound, but I didn't dive down after her to investigate. She was
not of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was
impressive enough. I shall never forget the muffled, mysterious
detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea round the slowly raised
stern, and to this day I have in my eye the propeller, seen
perfectly still in its frame against a clear evening sky.
But perhaps the second officer has explained to them by this time
this and a few other little facts. Though why an officer of the
British merchant service should answer the questions of any king,
emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event
in which a British ship alone was concerned, and which did not even
take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my
understanding. The only authority he is bound to answer is the
Board of Trade. But with what face the Board of Trade, which,
having made the regulations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old
bald head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to shelve
an important report, and with a dreary murmur, "Unsinkable," put it
back again, in the hope of not being disturbed for another ten
years, with what face it will be putting questions to that man who
has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his
professional conduct in it--well, I don't know! I have the
greatest respect for our established authorities. I am a
disciplined man, and I have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses
of human institutions; but I will own that at times I have
regretted their--how shall I say it?--their imponderability. A
Board of Trade--what is it? A Board of . . . I believe the Speaker
of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it. A ghost.
Less than that; as yet a mere memory. An office with adequate and
no doubt comfortable furniture and a lot of perfectly irresponsible
gentlemen who exist packed in its equable atmosphere softly, as if
in a lot of cotton-wool, and with no care in the world; for there
can be no care without personal responsibility--such, for instance,
as the seamen have--those seamen from whose mouths this
irresponsible institution can take away the bread--as a
disciplinary measure. Yes--it's all that. And what more? The
name of a politician--a party man! Less than nothing; a mere void
without as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from
that light in which move the masses of men who work, who deal in
things and face the realities--not the words--of this life.
Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old
type commenting on a ship's officer, who, if not exactly
incompetent, did not commend himself to their severe judgment of
accomplished sailor-men. Said one, resuming and concluding the
discussion in a funnily judicial tone:
"The Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his
certificate."
I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity
having a brain which could be overcome by the fumes of strong
liquor charmed me exceedingly. For then it would have been unlike
the limited companies of which some exasperated wit has once said
that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and
thus were free in this world and the next from all the effective
sanctions of conscientious conduct. But, unfortunately, the
picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a characteristic
sally of an annoyed sailor. The Board of Trade is composed of
bloodless departments. It has no limbs and no physiognomy, or else
at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of the
Titanic disaster the small tribute of a blush. I ask myself
whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really
believe, when they decided to shelve the report on equipment for a
time, that a ship of 45,000 tons, that ANY ship, could be made
practically indestructible by means of watertight bulkheads? It
seems incredible to anybody who had ever reflected upon the
properties of material, such as wood or steel. You can't, let
builders say what they like, make a ship of such dimensions as
strong proportionately as a much smaller one. The shocks our old
whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin's Bay were
perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skilful handling,
and yet they lasted for years. The Titanic, if one may believe the
last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I
suspect, was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen
berg, but the low edge of a floe--and sank. Leisurely enough, God
knows--and here the advantage of bulkheads comes in--for time is a
great friend, a good helper--though in this lamentable case these
bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the passengers who
could not be saved. But she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow
and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort of surprised
consternation that such a thing should have happened at all. Why?
You build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the
patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people (for if it had
been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no such
exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the
Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style--I don't know which--and to
please the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more
money than they know what to do with, and to the applause of two
continents, you launch that mass with two thousand people on board
at twenty-one knots across the sea--a perfect exhibition of the
modern blind trust in mere material and appliances. And then this
happens. General uproar. The blind trust in material and
appliances has received a terrible shock. I will say nothing of
the credulity which accepts any statement which specialists,
technicians and office-people are pleased to make, whether for
purposes of gain or glory. You stand there astonished and hurt in
your profoundest sensibilities. But what else under the
circumstances could you expect?
For my part I could much sooner believe in an unsinkable ship of
3,000 tons than in one of 40,000 tons. It is one of those things
that stand to reason. You can't increase the thickness of
scantling and plates indefinitely. And the mere weight of this
bigness is an added disadvantage. In reading the reports, the
first reflection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless ship
had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she would have probably
gone clear of the danger. But then, perhaps, she could not have
had a swimming bath and a French cafe. That, of course, is a
serious consideration. I am well aware that those responsible for
her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe
that if she had hit end on she would have survived. Which, by a
sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of
the officer of the watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the
obstacle. We shall have presently, in deference to commercial and
industrial interests, a new kind of seamanship. A very new and
"progressive" kind. If you see anything in the way, by no means
try to avoid it; smash at it full tilt. And then--and then only
you shall see the triumph of material, of clever contrivances, of
the whole box of engineering tricks in fact, and cover with glory a
commercial concern of the most unmitigated sort, a great Trust, and
a great ship-building yard, justly famed for the super-excellence
of its material and workmanship. Unsinkable! See? I told you she
was unsinkable, if only handled in accordance with the new
seamanship. Everything's in that. And, doubtless, the Board of
Trade, if properly approached, would consent to give the needed
instructions to its examiners of Masters and Mates. Behold the
examination-room of the future. Enter to the grizzled examiner a
young man of modest aspect: "Are you well up in modern
seamanship?" "I hope so, sir." "H'm, let's see. You are at night
on the bridge in charge of a 150,000 tons ship, with a motor track,
organ-loft, etc., etc., with a full cargo of passengers, a full
crew of 1,500 cafe waiters, two sailors and a boy, three
collapsible boats as per Board of Trade regulations, and going at
your three-quarter speed of, say, about forty knots. You perceive
suddenly right ahead, and close to, something that looks like a
large ice-floe. What would you do?" "Put the helm amidships."
"Very well. Why?" "In order to hit end on." "On what grounds
should you endeavour to hit end on?" "Because we are taught by our
builders and masters that the heavier the smash, the smaller the
damage, and because the requirements of material should be attended
to."
And so on and so on. The new seamanship: when in doubt try to ram
fairly--whatever's before you. Very simple. If only the Titanic
had rammed that piece of ice (which was not a monstrous berg)
fairly, every puffing paragraph would have been vindicated in the
eyes of the credulous public which pays. But would it have been?
Well, I doubt it. I am well aware that in the eighties the
steamship Arizona, one of the "greyhounds of the ocean" in the
jargon of that day, did run bows on against a very unmistakable
iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision bulkhead.
But the Arizona was not, if I remember rightly, 5,000 tons
register, let alone 45,000, and she was not going at twenty knots
per hour. I can't be perfectly certain at this distance of time,
but her sea-speed could not have been more than fourteen at the
outside. Both these facts made for safety. And, even if she had
been engined to go twenty knots, there would not have been behind
that speed the enormous mass, so difficult to check in its impetus,
the terrific weight of which is bound to do damage to itself or
others at the slightest contact.
I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my
own poor experiences, but only to illustrate my point, that I will
relate here a very unsensational little incident I witnessed now
rather more than twenty years ago in Sydney, N.S.W. Ships were
beginning then to grow bigger year after year, though, of course,
the present dimensions were not even dreamt of. I was standing on
the Circular Quay with a Sydney pilot watching a big mail steamship
of one of our best-known companies being brought alongside. We
admired her lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her
size as well, though her length, I imagine, was hardly half that of
the Titanic.
She came into the Cove (as that part of the harbour is called), of
course very slowly, and at some hundred feet or so short of the
quay she lost her way. That quay was then a wooden one, a fine
structure of mighty piles and stringers bearing a roadway--a thing
of great strength. The ship, as I have said before, stopped moving
when some hundred feet from it. Then her engines were rung on slow
ahead, and immediately rung off again. The propeller made just
about five turns, I should say. She began to move, stealing on, so
to speak, without a ripple; coming alongside with the utmost
gentleness. I went on looking her over, very much interested, but
the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath: "Too much,
too much." His exercised judgment had warned him of what I did not
even suspect. But I believe that neither of us was exactly
prepared for what happened. There was a faint concussion of the
ground under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great
iron bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, as when a
tree is blown down by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a
baulk of squared timber, was displaced several feet as if by
enchantment. I looked at my companion in amazement. "I could not
have believed it," I declared. "No," he said. "You would not have
thought she would have cracked an egg--eh?"
I certainly wouldn't have thought that. He shook his head, and
added: "Ah! These great, big things, they want some handling."
Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney. The same pilot
brought me in from sea. And I found the same steamship, or else
another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us.
The pilot told me she had arrived the day before, and that he was
to take her alongside to-morrow. I reminded him jocularly of the
damage to the quay. "Oh!" he said, "we are not allowed now to
bring them in under their own steam. We are using tugs."
A very wise regulation. And this is my point--that size is to a
certain extent an element of weakness. The bigger the ship, the
more delicately she must be handled. Here is a contact which, in
the pilot's own words, you wouldn't think could have cracked an
egg; with the astonishing result of something like eighty feet of
good strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a baulk
of stout timber splintered. Now, suppose that quay had been of
granite (as surely it is now)--or, instead of the quay, if there
had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, with a full-grown
iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way
along blindfold? Something would have been hurt, but it would not
have been the iceberg.
Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a
true progress--in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of
men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the
moral and mental kind. There is a point when progress, to remain a
real advance, must change slightly the direction of its line. But
this is a wide question. What I wanted to point out here is--that
the old Arizona, the marvel of her day, was proportionately
stronger, handier, better equipped, than this triumph of modern
naval architecture, the loss of which, in common parlance, will
remain the sensation of this year. The clatter of the presses has
been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary paeans of triumph
round that vanished hull, of the reckless statements, and elaborate
descriptions of its ornate splendour. A great babble of news (and
what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen
around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident
note would have been more becoming in the presence of so many
victims left struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away
for nothing, or worse than nothing: for false standards of
achievement, to satisfy a vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for
a banal hotel luxury--the only one they can understand--and because
the big ship pays, in one way or another: in money or in
advertising value.
It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape
along the ship's side, so slight that, if reports are to be
believed, it did not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously
fitted (but in chaste style) smoking-room--or was it in the
delightful French cafe?--is enough to bring on the exposure. All
the people on board existed under a sense of false security. How
false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. And the fact which
seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant to enter
the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that falsehood.
Incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board these
ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the
unforgiving sea. These people seemed to imagine it an optional
matter: whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of
the sternest character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly
by every one on board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry
it out methodically and swiftly. And it is no use to say it cannot
be done, for it can. It has been done. The only requisite is
manageableness of the ship herself and of the numbers she carries
on board. That is the great thing which makes for safety. A
commander should be able to hold his ship and everything on board
of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But with the modern
foolish trust in material, and with those floating hotels, this has
become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot succeed in
a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity, has
been made too great for anybody's strength.
The readers of THE ENGLISH REVIEW, who cast a friendly eye nearly
six years ago on my Reminiscences, and know how much the merchant
service, ships and men, has been to me, will understand my
indignation that those men of whom (speaking in no sentimental
phrase, but in the very truth of feeling) I can't even now think
otherwise than as brothers, have been put by their commercial
employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently their plain
duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here, but
whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness,
the miserable greatness, of that disaster. Some of them have
perished. To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that
sea we have been trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the
supreme duty of one's calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they
are gone, and the responsibility remains with the living who will
have no difficulty in replacing them by others, just as good, at
the same wages. It was their bitter fate. But I, who can look at
some arduous years when their duty was my duty too, and their
feelings were my feelings, can remember some of us who once upon a
time were more fortunate.
It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort
partly, and also because I am sticking all the time to my subject
to illustrate my point, the point of manageableness which I have
raised just now. Since the memory of the lucky Arizona has been
evoked by others than myself, and made use of by me for my own
purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that distant
day whose less lucky destiny inculcates another lesson making for
my argument. The Douro, a ship belonging to the Royal Mail Steam
Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of
the Titanic. Yet, strange as it may appear to the ineffable hotel
exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-Atlantic
Passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not
consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the
way from South America; this being the service she was engaged
upon. Of her speed I know nothing, but it must have been the
average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons were, I
dare say, quite up to the mark; but I doubt if her birth had been
boastfully paragraphed all round the Press, because that was not
the fashion of the time. She was not a mass of material gorgeously
furnished and upholstered. She was a ship. And she was not, in
the apt words of an article by Commander C. Crutchley, R.N.R.,
which I have just read, "run by a sort of hotel syndicate composed
of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain," as these
monstrous Atlantic ferries are. She was really commanded, manned,
and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and
last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to
relate will show.
She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full,
just like the Titanic; and further, the proportion of her crew to
her passengers, I remember quite well, was very much the same. The
exact number of souls on board I have forgotten. It might have
been nearly three hundred, certainly not more. The night was
moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine with a heavy swell running from
the westward, which means that she must have been rolling a great
deal, and in that respect the conditions for her were worse than in
the case of the Titanic. Some time either just before or just
after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run into
amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the
blow backed out, and, herself apparently damaged, remained
motionless at some distance.
My recollection is that the Douro remained afloat after the
collision for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. It might have been
twenty, but certainly something under the half-hour. In that time
the boats were lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the
lot shoved off. There was no time to do anything more. All the
crew of the Douro went down with her, literally without a murmur.
When she went she plunged bodily down like a stone. The only
members of the ship's company who survived were the third officer,
who was from the first ordered to take charge of the boats, and the
seamen told off to man them, two in each. Nobody else was picked
up. A quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty, with
whom I talked a month or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up
to the spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest
cry.
But I have forgotten. A passenger was drowned. She was a lady's
maid who, frenzied with terror, refused to leave the ship. One of
the boats waited near by till the chief officer, finding himself
absolutely unable to tear the girl away from the rail to which she
dung with a frantic grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger. My
quartermaster told me that he spoke over to them in his ordinary
voice, and this was the last sound heard before the ship sank.
The rest is silence. I daresay there was the usual official
inquiry, but who cared for it? That sort of thing speaks for
itself with no uncertain voice; though the papers, I remember, gave
the event no space to speak of: no large headlines--no headlines
at all. You see it was not the fashion at the time. A seaman-like
piece of work, of which one cherishes the old memory at this
juncture more than ever before. She was a ship commanded, manned,
equipped--not a sort of marine Ritz, proclaimed unsinkable and sent
adrift with its casual population upon the sea, without enough
boats, without enough seamen (but with a Parisian cafe and four
hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers which, let the
engineers say what they like, lurk always amongst the waves; sent
with a blind trust in mere material, light-heartedly, to a most
miserable, most fatuous disaster.
And there are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy. The
rush of the senatorial inquiry before the poor wretches escaped
from the jaws of death had time to draw breath, the vituperative
abuse of a man no more guilty than others in this matter, and the
suspicion of this aimless fuss being a political move to get home
on the M.T. Company, into which, in common parlance, the United
States Government has got its knife, I don't pretend to understand
why, though with the rest of the world I am aware of the fact.
Perhaps there may be an excellent and worthy reason for it; but I
venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many pitiful
corpses, is not pretty. And the exploiting of the mere sensation
on the other side is not pretty in its wealth of heartless
inventions. Neither is the welter of Marconi lies which has not
been sent vibrating without some reason, for which it would be
nauseous to inquire too closely. And the calumnious, baseless,
gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor Captain Smith with
desertion of his post by means of suicide is the vilest and most
ugly thing of all in this outburst of journalistic enterprise,
without feeling, without honour, without decency.
But all this has its moral. And that other sinking which I have
related here and to the memory of which a seaman turns with relief
and thankfulness has its moral too. Yes, material may fail, and
men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are
given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that
wonderful thin steel from which the sides and the bulkheads of our
modern sea-leviathans are made.
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF THE
TITANIC--1912
I have been taken to task by a friend of mine on the "other side"
for my strictures on Senator Smith's investigation into the loss of
the Titanic, in the number of THE ENGLISH REVIEW for May, 1912. I
will admit that the motives of the investigation may have been
excellent, and probably were; my criticism bore mainly on matters
of form and also on the point of efficiency. In that respect I
have nothing to retract. The Senators of the Commission had
absolutely no knowledge and no practice to guide them in the
conduct of such an investigation; and this fact gave an air of
unreality to their zealous exertions. I think that even in the
United States there is some regret that this zeal of theirs was not
tempered by a large dose of wisdom. It is fitting that people who
rush with such ardour to the work of putting questions to men yet
gasping from a narrow escape should have, I wouldn't say a tincture
of technical information, but enough knowledge of the subject to
direct the trend of their inquiry. The newspapers of two
continents have noted the remarks of the President of the
Senatorial Commission with comments which I will not reproduce
here, having a scant respect for the "organs of public opinion," as
they fondly believe themselves to be. The absolute value of their
remarks was about as great as the value of the investigation they
either mocked at or extolled. To the United States Senate I did
not intend to be disrespectful. I have for that body, of which one
hears mostly in connection with tariffs, as much reverence as the
best of Americans. To manifest more or less would be an
impertinence in a stranger. I have expressed myself with less
reserve on our Board of Trade. That was done under the influence
of warm feelings. We were all feeling warmly on the matter at that
time. But, at any rate, our Board of Trade Inquiry, conducted by
an experienced President, discovered a very interesting fact on the
very second day of its sitting: the fact that the water-tight
doors in the bulkheads of that wonder of naval architecture could
be opened down below by any irresponsible person. Thus the famous
closing apparatus on the bridge, paraded as a device of greater
safety, with its attachments of warning bells, coloured lights, and
all these pretty-pretties, was, in the case of this ship, little
better than a technical farce.
It is amusing, if anything connected with this stupid catastrophe
can be amusing, to see the secretly crestfallen attitude of
technicians. They are the high priests of the modern cult of
perfected material and of mechanical appliances, and would fain
forbid the profane from inquiring into its mysteries. We are the
masters of progress, they say, and you should remain respectfully
silent. And they take refuge behind their mathematics. I have the
greatest regard for mathematics as an exercise of mind. It is the
only manner of thinking which approaches the Divine. But mere
calculations, of which these men make so much, when unassisted by
imagination and when they have gained mastery over common sense,
are the most deceptive exercises of intellect. Two and two are
four, and two are six. That is immutable; you may trust your soul
to that; but you must be certain first of your quantities. I know
how the strength of materials can be calculated away, and also the
evidence of one's senses. For it is by some sort of calculation
involving weights and levels that the technicians responsible for
the Titanic persuaded themselves that a ship NOT DIVIDED by water-
tight compartments could be "unsinkable." Because, you know, she
was not divided. You and I, and our little boys, when we want to
divide, say, a box, take care to procure a piece of wood which will
reach from the bottom to the lid. We know that if it does not
reach all the way up, the box will not be divided into two
compartments. It will be only partly divided. The Titanic was
only partly divided. She was just sufficiently divided to drown
some poor devils like rats in a trap. It is probable that they
would have perished in any case, but it is a particularly horrible
fate to die boxed up like this. Yes, she was sufficiently divided
for that, but not sufficiently divided to prevent the water flowing
over.
Therefore to a plain man who knows something of mathematics but is
not bemused by calculations, she was, from the point of view of
"unsinkability," not divided at all. What would you say of people
who would boast of a fireproof building, an hotel, for instance,
saying, "Oh, we have it divided by fireproof bulkheads which would
localise any outbreak," and if you were to discover on closer
inspection that these bulkheads closed no more than two-thirds of
the openings they were meant to close, leaving above an open space
through which draught, smoke, and fire could rush from one end of
the building to the other? And, furthermore, that those
partitions, being too high to climb over, the people confined in
each menaced compartment had to stay there and become asphyxiated
or roasted, because no exits to the outside, say to the roof, had
been provided! What would you think of the intelligence or candour
of these advertising people? What would you think of them? And
yet, apart from the obvious difference in the action of fire and
water, the cases are essentially the same.
It would strike you and me and our little boys (who are not
engineers yet) that to approach--I won't say attain--somewhere near
absolute safety, the divisions to keep out water should extend from
the bottom right up to the uppermost deck of THE HULL. I repeat,
the HULL, because there are above the hull the decks of the
superstructures of which we need not take account. And further, as
a provision of the commonest humanity, that each of these
compartments should have a perfectly independent and free access to
that uppermost deck: that is, into the open. Nothing less will
do. Division by bulkheads that really divide, and free access to
the deck from every water-tight compartment. Then the responsible
man in the moment of danger and in the exercise of his judgment
could close all the doors of these water-tight bulkheads by
whatever clever contrivance has been invented for the purpose,
without a qualm at the awful thought that he may be shutting up
some of his fellow creatures in a death-trap; that he may be
sacrificing the lives of men who, down there, are sticking to the
posts of duty as the engine-room staffs of the Merchant Service
have never failed to do. I know very well that the engineers of a
ship in a moment of emergency are not quaking for their lives, but,
as far as I have known them, attend calmly to their duty. We all
must die; but, hang it all, a man ought to be given a chance, if
not for his life, then at least to die decently. It's bad enough
to have to stick down there when something disastrous is going on
and any moment may be your last; but to be drowned shut up under
deck is too bad. Some men of the Titanic died like that, it is to
be feared. Compartmented, so to speak. Just think what it means!
Nothing can approach the horror of that fate except being buried
alive in a cave, or in a mine, or in your family vault.
So, once more: continuous bulkheads--a clear way of escape to the
deck out of each water-tight compartment. Nothing less. And if
specialists, the precious specialists of the sort that builds
"unsinkable ships," tell you that it cannot be done, don't you
believe them. It can be done, and they are quite clever enough to
do it too. The objections they will raise, however disguised in
the solemn mystery of technical phrases, will not be technical, but
commercial. I assure you that there is not much mystery about a
ship of that sort. She is a tank. She is a tank ribbed, joisted,
stayed, but she is no greater mystery than a tank. The Titanic was
a tank eight hundred feet long, fitted as an hotel, with corridors,
bed-rooms, halls, and so on (not a very mysterious arrangement
truly), and for the hazards of her existence I should think about
as strong as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin. I make this
comparison because Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tins, being almost a
national institution, are probably known to all my readers. Well,
about that strong, and perhaps not quite so strong. Just look at
the side of such a tin, and then think of a 50,000 ton ship, and
try to imagine what the thickness of her plates should be to
approach anywhere the relative solidity of that biscuit-tin. In my
varied and adventurous career I have been thrilled by the sight of
a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin kicked by a mule sky-high, as the
saying is. It came back to earth smiling, with only a sort of
dimple on one of its cheeks. A proportionately severe blow would
have burst the side of the Titanic or any other "triumph of modern
naval architecture" like brown paper--I am willing to bet.
I am not saying this by way of disparagement. There is reason in
things. You can't make a 50,000 ton ship as strong as a Huntley
and Palmer biscuit-tin. But there is also reason in the way one
accepts facts, and I refuse to be awed by the size of a tank bigger
than any other tank that ever went afloat to its doom. The people
responsible for her, though disconcerted in their hearts by the
exposure of that disaster, are giving themselves airs of
superiority--priests of an Oracle which has failed, but still must
remain the Oracle. The assumption is that they are ministers of
progress. But the mere increase of size is not progress. If it
were, elephantiasis, which causes a man's legs to become as large
as tree-trunks, would be a sort of progress, whereas it is nothing
but a very ugly disease. Yet directly this very disconcerting
catastrophe happened, the servants of the silly Oracle began to
cry: "It's no use! You can't resist progress. The big ship has
come to stay." Well, let her stay on, then, in God's name! But
she isn't a servant of progress in any sense. She is the servant
of commercialism. For progress, if dealing with the problems of a
material world, has some sort of moral aspect--if only, say, that
of conquest, which has its distinct value since man is a conquering
animal. But bigness is mere exaggeration. The men responsible for
these big ships have been moved by considerations of profit to be
made by the questionable means of pandering to an absurd and vulgar
demand for banal luxury--the seaside hotel luxury. One even asks
oneself whether there was such a demand? It is inconceivable to
think that there are people who can't spend five days of their life
without a suite of apartments, cafes, bands, and such-like refined
delights. I suspect that the public is not so very guilty in this
matter. These things were pushed on to it in the usual course of
trade competition. If to-morrow you were to take all these
luxuries away, the public would still travel. I don't despair of
mankind. I believe that if, by some catastrophic miracle all ships
of every kind were to disappear off the face of the waters,
together with the means of replacing them, there would be found,
before the end of the week, men (millionaires, perhaps) cheerfully
putting out to sea in bath-tubs for a fresh start. We are all like
that. This sort of spirit lives in mankind still uncorrupted by
the so-called refinements, the ingenuity of tradesmen, who look
always for something new to sell, offers to the public.
Let her stay,--I mean the big ship--since she has come to stay. I
only object to the attitude of the people, who, having called her
into being and having romanced (to speak politely) about her,
assume a detached sort of superiority, goodness only knows why, and
raise difficulties in the way of every suggestion--difficulties
about boats, about bulkheads, about discipline, about davits, all
sorts of difficulties. To most of them the only answer would be:
"Where there's a will there's a way"--the most wise of proverbs.
But some of these objections are really too stupid for anything. I
shall try to give an instance of what I mean.
This Inquiry is admirably conducted. I am not alluding to the
lawyers representing "various interests," who are trying to earn
their fees by casting all sorts of mean aspersions on the
characters of all sorts of people not a bit worse than themselves.
It is honest to give value for your wages; and the "bravos" of
ancient Venice who kept their stilettos in good order and never
failed to deliver the stab bargained for with their employers,
considered themselves an honest body of professional men, no doubt.
But they don't compel my admiration, whereas the conduct of this
Inquiry does. And as it is pretty certain to be attacked, I take
this opportunity to deposit here my nickel of appreciation. Well,
lately, there came before it witnesses responsible for the
designing of the ship. One of them was asked whether it would not
be advisable to make each coal-bunker of the ship a water-tight
compartment by means of a suitable door.
The answer to such a question should have been, "Certainly," for it
is obvious to the simplest intelligence that the more water-tight
spaces you provide in a ship (consistently with having her
workable) the nearer you approach safety. But instead of admitting
the expediency of the suggestion, this witness at once raised an
objection as to the possibility of closing tightly the door of a
bunker on account of the slope of coal. This with the true
expert's attitude of "My dear man, you don't know what you are
talking about."
Now would you believe that the objection put forward was absolutely
futile? I don't know whether the distinguished President of the
Court perceived this. Very likely he did, though I don't suppose
he was ever on terms of familiarity with a ship's bunker. But I
have. I have been inside; and you may take it that what I say of
them is correct. I don't wish to be wearisome to the benevolent
reader, but I want to put his finger, so to speak, on the inanity
of the objection raised by the expert. A bunker is an enclosed
space for holding coals, generally located against the ship's side,
and having an opening, a doorway in fact, into the stokehold. Men
called trimmers go in there, and by means of implements called
slices make the coal run through that opening on to the floor of
the stokehold, where it is within reach of the stokers' (firemen's)
shovels. This being so, you will easily understand that there is
constantly a more or less thick layer of coal generally shaped in a
slope lying in that doorway. And the objection of the expert was:
that because of this obstruction it would be impossible to close
the water-tight door, and therefore that the thing could not be
done. And that objection was inane. A water-tight door in a
bulkhead may be defined as a metal plate which is made to close a
given opening by some mechanical means. And if there were a law of
Medes and Persians that a water-tight door should always slide
downwards and never otherwise, the objection would be to a great
extent valid. But what is there to prevent those doors to be
fitted so as to move upwards, or horizontally, or slantwise? In
which case they would go through the obstructing layer of coal as
easily as a knife goes through butter. Anyone may convince himself
of it by experimenting with a light piece of board and a heap of
stones anywhere along our roads. Probably the joint of such a door
would weep a little--and there is no necessity for its being
hermetically tight--but the object of converting bunkers into
spaces of safety would be attained. You may take my word for it
that this could be done without any great effort of ingenuity. And
that is why I have qualified the expert's objection as inane.
Of course, these doors must not be operated from the bridge because
of the risk of trapping the coal-trimmers inside the bunker; but on
the signal of all other water-tight doors in the ship being closed
(as would be done in case of a collision) they too could be closed
on the order of the engineer of the watch, who would see to the
safety of the trimmers. If the rent in the ship's side were within
the bunker itself, that would become manifest enough without any
signal, and the rush of water into the stokehold could be cut off
directly the doorplate came into its place. Say a minute at the
very outside. Naturally, if the blow of a right-angled collision,
for instance, were heavy enough to smash through the inner bulkhead
of the bunker, why, there would be then nothing to do but for the
stokers and trimmers and everybody in there to clear out of the
stoke-room. But that does not mean that the precaution of having
water-tight doors to the bunkers is useless, superfluous, or
impossible. {7}
And talking of stokeholds, firemen, and trimmers, men whose heavy
labour has not a single redeeming feature; which is unhealthy,
uninspiring, arduous, without the reward of personal pride in it;
sheer, hard, brutalising toil, belonging neither to earth nor sea,
I greet with joy the advent for marine purposes of the internal
combustion engine. The disappearance of the marine boiler will be
a real progress, which anybody in sympathy with his kind must
welcome. Instead of the unthrifty, unruly, nondescript crowd the
boilers require, a crowd of men IN the ship but not OF her, we
shall have comparatively small crews of disciplined, intelligent
workers, able to steer the ship, handle anchors, man boats, and at
the same time competent to take their place at a bench as fitters
and repairers; the resourceful and skilled seamen--mechanics of the
future, the legitimate successors of these seamen--sailors of the
past, who had their own kind of skill, hardihood, and tradition,
and whose last days it has been my lot to share.
One lives and learns and hears very surprising things--things that
one hardly knows how to take, whether seriously or jocularly, how
to meet--with indignation or with contempt? Things said by solemn
experts, by exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by
officials of all sorts. I suppose that one of the uses of such an
inquiry is to give such people enough rope to hang themselves with.
And I hope that some of them won't neglect to do so. One of them
declared two days ago that there was "nothing to learn from the
catastrophe of the Titanic." That he had been "giving his best
consideration" to certain rules for ten years, and had come to the
conclusion that nothing ever happened at sea, and that rules and
regulations, boats and sailors, were unnecessary; that what was
really wrong with the Titanic was that she carried too many boats.
No; I am not joking. If you don't believe me, pray look back
through the reports and you will find it all there. I don't
recollect the official's name, but it ought to have been Pooh-Bah.
Well, Pooh-Bah said all these things, and when asked whether he
really meant it, intimated his readiness to give the subject more
of "his best consideration"--for another ten years or so
apparently--but he believed, oh yes! he was certain, that had there
been fewer boats there would have been more people saved. Really,
when reading the report of this admirably conducted inquiry one
isn't certain at times whether it is an Admirable Inquiry or a
felicitous OPERA-BOUFFE of the Gilbertian type--with a rather grim
subject, to be sure.
Yes, rather grim--but the comic treatment never fails. My readers
will remember that in the number of THE ENGLISH REVIEW for May,
1912, I quoted the old case of the Arizona, and went on from that
to prophesy the coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony
far removed from fun) at the call of the sublime builders of
unsinkable ships. I thought that, as a small boy of my
acquaintance says, I was "doing a sarcasm," and regarded it as a
rather wild sort of sarcasm at that. Well, I am blessed (excuse
the vulgarism) if a witness has not turned up who seems to have
been inspired by the same thought, and evidently longs in his heart
for the advent of the new seamanship. He is an expert, of course,
and I rather believe he's the same gentleman who did not see his
way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers. With ludicrous
earnestness he assured the Commission of his intense belief that
had only the Titanic struck end-on she would have come into port
all right. And in the whole tone of his insistent statement there
was suggested the regret that the officer in charge (who is dead
now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of this inquiry) was so
ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the ice. Thus my sarcastic
prophecy, that such a suggestion was sure to turn up, receives an
unexpected fulfilment. You will see yet that in deference to the
demands of "progress" the theory of the new seamanship will become
established: "Whatever you see in front of you--ram it fair. . ."
The new seamanship! Looks simple, doesn't it? But it will be a
very exact art indeed. The proper handling of an unsinkable ship,
you see, will demand that she should be made to hit the iceberg
very accurately with her nose, because should you perchance scrape
the bluff of the bow instead, she may, without ceasing to be as
unsinkable as before, find her way to the bottom. I congratulate
the future Transatlantic passengers on the new and vigorous
sensations in store for them. They shall go bounding across from
iceberg to iceberg at twenty-five knots with precision and safety,
and a "cheerful bumpy sound"--as the immortal poem has it. It will
be a teeth-loosening, exhilarating experience. The decorations
will be Louis-Quinze, of course, and the cafe shall remain open all
night. But what about the priceless Sevres porcelain and the
Venetian glass provided for the service of Transatlantic
passengers? Well, I am afraid all that will have to be replaced by
silver goblets and plates. Nasty, common, cheap silver. But those
who WILL go to sea must be prepared to put up with a certain amount
of hardship.
And there shall be no boats. Why should there be no boats?
Because Pooh-Bah has said that the fewer the boats, the more people
can be saved; and therefore with no boats at all, no one need be
lost. But even if there was a flaw in this argument, pray look at
the other advantages the absence of boats gives you. There can't
be the annoyance of having to go into them in the middle of the
night, and the unpleasantness, after saving your life by the skin
of your teeth, of being hauled over the coals by irreproachable
members of the Bar with hints that you are no better than a
cowardly scoundrel and your wife a heartless monster. Less Boats.
No boats! Great should be the gratitude of passage-selling
Combines to Pooh-Bah; and they ought to cherish his memory when he
dies. But no fear of that. His kind never dies. All you have to
do, O Combine, is to knock at the door of the Marine Department,
look in, and beckon to the first man you see. That will be he,
very much at your service--prepared to affirm after "ten years of
my best consideration" and a bundle of statistics in hand, that:
"There's no lesson to be learned, and that there is nothing to be
done!"
On an earlier day there was another witness before the Court of
Inquiry. A mighty official of the White Star Line. The impression
of his testimony which the Report gave is of an almost scornful
impatience with all this fuss and pother. Boats! Of course we
have crowded our decks with them in answer to this ignorant
clamour. Mere lumber! How can we handle so many boats with our
davits? Your people don't know the conditions of the problem. We
have given these matters our best consideration, and we have done
what we thought reasonable. We have done more than our duty. We
are wise, and good, and impeccable. And whoever says otherwise is
either ignorant or wicked.
This is the gist of these scornful answers which disclose the
psychology of commercial undertakings. It is the same psychology
which fifty or so years ago, before Samuel Plimsoll uplifted his
voice, sent overloaded ships to sea. "Why shouldn't we cram in as
much cargo as our ships will hold? Look how few, how very few of
them get lost, after all."
Men don't change. Not very much. And the only answer to be given
to this manager who came out, impatient and indignant, from behind
the plate-glass windows of his shop to be discovered by this
inquiry, and to tell us that he, they, the whole three million (or
thirty million, for all I know) capital Organisation for selling
passages has considered the problem of boats--the only answer to
give him is: that this is not a problem of boats at all. It is
the problem of decent behaviour. If you can't carry or handle so
many boats, then don't cram quite so many people on board. It is
as simple as that--this problem of right feeling and right conduct,
the real nature of which seems beyond the comprehension of ticket-
providers. Don't sell so many tickets, my virtuous dignitary.
After all, men and women (unless considered from a purely
commercial point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the
Western-ocean trade, that used some twenty years ago to be thrown
overboard on an emergency and left to swim round and round before
they sank. If you can't get more boats, then sell less tickets.
Don't drown so many people on the finest, calmest night that was
ever known in the North Atlantic--even if you have provided them
with a little music to get drowned by. Sell less tickets! That's
the solution of the problem, your Mercantile Highness.
But there would be a cry, "Oh! This requires consideration!" (Ten
years of it--eh?) Well, no! This does not require consideration.
This is the very first thing to do. At once. Limit the number of
people by the boats you can handle. That's honesty. And then you
may go on fumbling for years about these precious davits which are
such a stumbling-block to your humanity. These fascinating patent
davits. These davits that refuse to do three times as much work as
they were meant to do. Oh! The wickedness of these davits!
One of the great discoveries of this admirable Inquiry is the
fascination of the davits. All these people positively can't get
away from them. They shuffle about and groan around their davits.
Whereas the obvious thing to do is to eliminate the man-handled
davits altogether. Don't you think that with all the mechanical
contrivances, with all the generated power on board these ships, it
is about time to get rid of the hundred-years-old, man-power
appliances? Cranes are what is wanted; low, compact cranes with
adjustable heads, one to each set of six or nine boats. And if
people tell you of insuperable difficulties, if they tell you of
the swing and spin of spanned boats, don't you believe them. The
heads of the cranes need not be any higher than the heads of the
davits. The lift required would be only a couple of inches. As to
the spin, there is a way to prevent that if you have in each boat
two men who know what they are about. I have taken up on board a
heavy ship's boat, in the open sea (the ship rolling heavily), with
a common cargo derrick. And a cargo derrick is very much like a
crane; but a crane devised AD HOC would be infinitely easier to
work. We must remember that the loss of this ship has altered the
moral atmosphere. As long as the Titanic is remembered, an ugly
rush for the boats may be feared in case of some accident. You
can't hope to drill into perfect discipline a casual mob of six
hundred firemen and waiters, but in a ship like the Titanic you can
keep on a permanent trustworthy crew of one hundred intelligent
seamen and mechanics who would know their stations for abandoning
ship and would do the work efficiently. The boats could be lowered
with sufficient dispatch. One does not want to let rip one's boats
by the run all at the same time. With six boat-cranes, six boats
would be simultaneously swung, filled, and got away from the side;
and if any sort of order is kept, the ship could be cleared of the
passengers in a quite short time. For there must be boats enough
for the passengers and crew, whether you increase the number of
boats or limit the number of passengers, irrespective of the size
of the ship. That is the only honest course. Any other would be
rather worse than putting sand in the sugar, for which a tradesman
gets fined or imprisoned. Do not let us take a romantic view of
the so-called progress. A company selling passages is a tradesman;
though from the way these people talk and behave you would think
they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way, engaged in
some lofty and amazing enterprise.
All these boats should have a motor-engine in them. And, of
course, the glorified tradesman, the mummified official, the
technicians, and all these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the
enormous ticket-selling enterprise, will raise objections to it
with every air of superiority. But don't believe them. Doesn't it
strike you as absurd that in this age of mechanical propulsion, of
generated power, the boats of such ultra-modern ships are fitted
with oars and sails, implements more than three thousand years old?
Old as the siege of Troy. Older! . . . And I know what I am
talking about. Only six weeks ago I was on the river in an
ancient, rough, ship's boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-
engine of 7.5 h.p. Just a common ship's boat, which the man who
owns her uses for taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the
ships loading at the buoys off Greenhithe. She would have carried
some thirty people. No doubt has carried as many daily for many
months. And she can tow a twenty-five ton water barge--which is
also part of that man's business.
It was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against the flood
tide. Two fellows managed her. A youngster of seventeen was cox
(and a first-rate cox he was too); a fellow in a torn blue jersey,
not much older, of the usual riverside type, looked after the
engine. I spent an hour and a half in her, running up and down and
across that reach. She handled perfectly. With eight or twelve
oars out she could not have done anything like as well. These two
youngsters at my request kept her stationary for ten minutes, with
a touch of engine and helm now and then, within three feet of a
big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke and the spray
flew in sheets, and which would have holed her if she had bumped
against it. But she kept her position, it seemed to me, to an
inch, without apparently any trouble to these boys. You could not
have done it with oars. And her engine did not take up the space
of three men, even on the assumption that you would pack people as
tight as sardines in a box.
Not the room of three people, I tell you! But no one would want to
pack a boat like a sardine-box. There must be room enough to
handle the oars. But in that old ship's boat, even if she had been
desperately overcrowded, there was power (manageable by two
riverside youngsters) to get away quickly from a ship's side (very
important for your safety and to make room for other boats), the
power to keep her easily head to sea, the power to move at five to
seven knots towards a rescuing ship, the power to come safely
alongside. And all that in an engine which did not take up the
room of three people.
A poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully the few
sovereigns of the price had the idea of putting that engine into
his boat. But all these designers, directors, managers,
constructors, and others whom we may include in the generic name of
Yamsi, never thought of it for the boats of the biggest tank on
earth, or rather on sea. And therefore they assume an air of
impatient superiority and make objections--however sick at heart
they may be. And I hope they are; at least, as much as a grocer
who has sold a tin of imperfect salmon which destroyed only half a
dozen people. And you know, the tinning of salmon was "progress"
as much at least as the building of the Titanic. More, in fact. I
am not attacking shipowners. I care neither more nor less for
Lines, Companies, Combines, and generally for Trade arrayed in
purple and fine linen than the Trade cares for me. But I am
attacking foolish arrogance, which is fair game; the offensive
posture of superiority by which they hide the sense of their guilt,
while the echoes of the miserably hypocritical cries along the
alley-ways of that ship: "Any more women? Any more women?" linger
yet in our ears.
I have been expecting from one or the other of them all bearing the
generic name of Yamsi, something, a sign of some sort, some sincere
utterance, in the course of this Admirable Inquiry, of manly, of
genuine compunction. In vain. All trade talk. Not a whisper--
except for the conventional expression of regret at the beginning
of the yearly report--which otherwise is a cheerful document.
Dividends, you know. The shop is doing well.
And the Admirable Inquiry goes on, punctuated by idiotic laughter,
by paid-for cries of indignation from under legal wigs, bringing to
light the psychology of various commercial characters too stupid to
know that they are giving themselves away--an admirably laborious
inquiry into facts that speak, nay shout, for themselves.
I am not a soft-headed, humanitarian faddist. I have been ordered
in my time to do dangerous work; I have ordered, others to do
dangerous work; I have never ordered a man to do any work I was not
prepared to do myself. I attach no exaggerated value to human
life. But I know it has a value for which the most generous
contributions to the Mansion House and "Heroes" funds cannot pay.
And they cannot pay for it, because people, even of the third class
(excuse my plain speaking), are not cattle. Death has its sting.
If Yamsi's manager's head were forcibly held under the water of his
bath for some little time, he would soon discover that it has.
Some people can only learn from that sort of experience which comes
home to their own dear selves.
I am not a sentimentalist; therefore it is not a great consolation
to me to see all these people breveted as "Heroes" by the penny and
halfpenny Press. It is no consolation at all. In extremity, in
the worst extremity, the majority of people, even of common people,
will behave decently. It's a fact of which only the journalists
don't seem aware. Hence their enthusiasm, I suppose. But I, who
am not a sentimentalist, think it would have been finer if the band
of the Titanic had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned
while playing--whatever tune they were playing, the poor devils. I
would rather they had been saved to support their families than to
see their families supported by the magnificent generosity of the
subscribers. I am not consoled by the false, written-up, Drury
Lane aspects of that event, which is neither drama, nor melodrama,
nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly. There is nothing
more heroic in being drowned very much against your will, off a
holed, helpless, big tank in which you bought your passage, than in
dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought
from your grocer.
And that's the truth. The unsentimental truth stripped of the
romantic garment the Press has wrapped around this most unnecessary
disaster.
PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}--1914
The loss of the Empress of Ireland awakens feelings somewhat
different from those the sinking of the Titanic had called up on
two continents. The grief for the lost and the sympathy for the
survivors and the bereaved are the same; but there is not, and
there cannot be, the same undercurrent of indignation. The good
ship that is gone (I remember reading of her launch something like
eight years ago) had not been ushered in with beat of drum as the
chief wonder of the world of waters. The company who owned her had
no agents, authorised or unauthorised, giving boastful interviews
about her unsinkability to newspaper reporters ready to swallow any
sort of trade statement if only sensational enough for their
readers--readers as ignorant as themselves of the nature of all
things outside the commonest experience of the man in the street.
No; there was nothing of that in her case. The company was content
to have as fine, staunch, seaworthy a ship as the technical
knowledge of that time could make her. In fact, she was as safe a
ship as nine hundred and ninety-nine ships out of any thousand now
afloat upon the sea. No; whatever sorrow one can feel, one does
not feel indignation. This was not an accident of a very boastful
marine transportation; this was a real casualty of the sea. The
indignation of the New South Wales Premier flashed telegraphically
to Canada is perfectly uncalled-for. That statesman, whose
sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so suspect to me that I
wouldn't take it at fifty per cent. discount, does not seem to know
that a British Court of Marine Inquiry, ordinary or extraordinary,
is not a contrivance for catching scapegoats. I, who have been
seaman, mate and master for twenty years, holding my certificate
under the Board of Trade, may safely say that none of us ever felt
in danger of unfair treatment from a Court of Inquiry. It is a
perfectly impartial tribunal which has never punished seamen for
the faults of shipowners--as, indeed, it could not do even if it
wanted to. And there is another thing the angry Premier of New
South Wales does not know. It is this: that for a ship to float
for fifteen minutes after receiving such a blow by a bare stem on
her bare side is not so bad.
She took a tremendous list which made the minutes of grace
vouchsafed her of not much use for the saving of lives. But for
that neither her owners nor her officers are responsible. It would
have been wonderful if she had not listed with such a hole in her
side. Even the Aquitania with such an opening in her outer hull
would be bound to take a list. I don't say this with the intention
of disparaging this latest "triumph of marine architecture"--to use
the consecrated phrase. The Aquitania is a magnificent ship. I
believe she would bear her people unscathed through ninety-nine per
cent. of all possible accidents of the sea. But suppose a
collision out on the ocean involving damage as extensive as this
one was, and suppose then a gale of wind coming on. Even the
Aquitania would not be quite seaworthy, for she would not be
manageable.
We have been accustoming ourselves to put our trust in material,
technical skill, invention, and scientific contrivances to such an
extent that we have come at last to believe that with these things
we can overcome the immortal gods themselves. Hence when a
disaster like this happens, there arises, besides the shock to our
humane sentiments, a feeling of irritation, such as the hon.
gentleman at the head of the New South Wales Government has
discharged in a telegraphic flash upon the world.
But it is no use being angry and trying to hang a threat of penal
servitude over the heads of the directors of shipping companies.
You can't get the better of the immortal gods by the mere power of
material contrivances. There will be neither scapegoats in this
matter nor yet penal servitude for anyone. The Directors of the
Canadian Pacific Railway Company did not sell "safety at sea" to
the people on board the Empress of Ireland. They never in the
slightest degree pretended to do so. What they did was to sell
them a sea-passage, giving very good value for the money. Nothing
more. As long as men will travel on the water, the sea-gods will
take their toll. They will catch good seamen napping, or confuse
their judgment by arts well known to those who go to sea, or
overcome them by the sheer brutality of elemental forces. It seems
to me that the resentful sea-gods never do sleep, and are never
weary; wherein the seamen who are mere mortals condemned to
unending vigilance are no match for them.
And yet it is right that the responsibility should be fixed. It is
the fate of men that even in their contests with the immortal gods
they must render an account of their conduct. Life at sea is the
life in which, simple as it is, you can't afford to make mistakes.
With whom the mistake lies here, is not for me to say. I see that
Sir Thomas Shaughnessy has expressed his opinion of Captain
Kendall's absolute innocence. This statement, premature as it is,
does him honour, for I don't suppose for a moment that the thought
of the material issue involved in the verdict of the Court of
Inquiry influenced him in the least. I don't suppose that he is
more impressed by the writ of two million dollars nailed (or more
likely pasted) to the foremast of the Norwegian than I am, who
don't believe that the Storstad is worth two million shillings.
This is merely a move of commercial law, and even the whole majesty
of the British Empire (so finely invoked by the Sheriff) cannot
squeeze more than a very moderate quantity of blood out of a stone.
Sir Thomas, in his confident pronouncement, stands loyally by a
loyal and distinguished servant of his company.
This thing has to be investigated yet, and it is not proper for me
to express my opinion, though I have one, in this place and at this
time. But I need not conceal my sympathy with the vehement
protestations of Captain Andersen. A charge of neglect and
indifference in the matter of saving lives is the cruellest blow
that can be aimed at the character of a seaman worthy of the name.
On the face of the facts as known up to now the charge does not
seem to be true. If upwards of three hundred people have been, as
stated in the last reports, saved by the Storstad, then that ship
must have been at hand and rendering all the assistance in her
power.
As to the point which must come up for the decision of the Court of
Inquiry, it is as fine as a hair. The two ships saw each other
plainly enough before the fog closed on them. No one can question
Captain Kendall's prudence. He has been as prudent as ever he
could be. There is not a shadow of doubt as to that.
But there is this question: Accepting the position of the two
ships when they saw each other as correctly described in the very
latest newspaper reports, it seems clear that it was the Empress of
Ireland's duty to keep clear of the collier, and what the Court
will have to decide is whether the stopping of the liner was, under
the circumstances, the best way of keeping her clear of the other
ship, which had the right to proceed cautiously on an unchanged
course.
This, reduced to its simplest expression, is the question which the
Court will have to decide.
And now, apart from all problems of manoeuvring, of rules of the
road, of the judgment of the men in command, away from their
possible errors and from the points the Court will have to decide,
if we ask ourselves what it was that was needed to avert this
disaster costing so many lives, spreading so much sorrow, and to a
certain point shocking the public conscience--if we ask that
question, what is the answer to be?
I hardly dare set it down. Yes; what was it that was needed, what
ingenious combinations of shipbuilding, what transverse bulkheads,
what skill, what genius--how much expense in money and trained
thinking, what learned contriving, to avert that disaster?
To save that ship, all these lives, so much anguish for the dying,
and so much grief for the bereaved, all that was needed in this
particular case in the way of science, money, ingenuity, and
seamanship was a man, and a cork-fender.
Yes; a man, a quartermaster, an able seaman that would know how to
jump to an order and was not an excitable fool. In my time at sea
there was no lack of men in British ships who could jump to an
order and were not excitable fools. As to the so-called cork-
fender, it is a sort of soft balloon made from a net of thick rope
rather more than a foot in diameter. It is such a long time since
I have indented for cork-fenders that I don't remember how much
these things cost apiece. One of them, hung judiciously over the
side at the end of its lanyard by a man who knew what he was about,
might perhaps have saved from destruction the ship and upwards of a
thousand lives.
Two men with a heavy rope-fender would have been better, but even
the other one might have made all the difference between a very
damaging accident and downright disaster. By the time the cork-
fender had been squeezed between the liner's side and the bluff of
the Storstad's bow, the effect of the latter's reversed propeller
would have been produced, and the ships would have come apart with
no more damage than bulged and started plates. Wasn't there lying
about on that liner's bridge, fitted with all sorts of scientific
contrivances, a couple of simple and effective cork-fenders--or on
board of that Norwegian either? There must have been, since one
ship was just out of a dock or harbour and the other just arriving.
That is the time, if ever, when cork-fenders are lying about a
ship's decks. And there was plenty of time to use them, and
exactly in the conditions in which such fenders are effectively
used. The water was as smooth as in any dock; one ship was
motionless, the other just moving at what may be called dock-speed
when entering, leaving, or shifting berths; and from the moment the
collision was seen to be unavoidable till the actual contact a
whole minute elapsed. A minute,--an age under the circumstances.
And no one thought of the homely expedient of dropping a simple,
unpretending rope-fender between the destructive stern and the
defenceless side!
I appeal confidently to all the seamen in the still United Kingdom,
from his Majesty the King (who has been really at sea) to the
youngest intelligent A.B. in any ship that will dock next tide in
the ports of this realm, whether there was not a chance there. I
have followed the sea for more than twenty years; I have seen
collisions; I have been involved in a collision myself; and I do
believe that in the case under consideration this little thing
would have made all that enormous difference--the difference
between considerable damage and an appalling disaster.
Many letters have been written to the Press on the subject of
collisions. I have seen some. They contain many suggestions,
valuable and otherwise; but there is only one which hits the nail
on the head. It is a letter to the TIMES from a retired Captain of
the Royal Navy. It is printed in small type, but it deserved to be
printed in letters of gold and crimson. The writer suggests that
all steamers should be obliged by law to carry hung over their
stern what we at sea call a "pudding."
This solution of the problem is as wonderful in its simplicity as
the celebrated trick of Columbus's egg, and infinitely more useful
to mankind. A "pudding" is a thing something like a bolster of
stout rope-net stuffed with old junk, but thicker in the middle
than at the ends. It can be seen on almost every tug working in
our docks. It is, in fact, a fixed rope-fender always in a
position where presumably it would do most good. Had the Storstad
carried such a "pudding" proportionate to her size (say, two feet
diameter in the thickest part) across her stern, and hung above the
level of her hawse-pipes, there would have been an accident
certainly, and some repair-work for the nearest ship-yard, but
there would have been no loss of life to deplore.
It seems almost too simple to be true, but I assure you that the
statement is as true as anything can be. We shall see whether the
lesson will be taken to heart. We shall see. There is a
Commission of learned men sitting to consider the subject of saving
life at sea. They are discussing bulkheads, boats, davits,
manning, navigation, but I am willing to bet that not one of them
has thought of the humble "pudding." They can make what rules they
like. We shall see if, with that disaster calling aloud to them,
they will make the rule that every steam-ship should carry a
permanent fender across her stern, from two to four feet in
diameter in its thickest part in proportion to the size of the
ship. But perhaps they may think the thing too rough and unsightly
for this scientific and aesthetic age. It certainly won't look
very pretty but I make bold to say it will save more lives at sea
than any amount of the Marconi installations which are being forced
on the shipowners on that very ground--the safety of lives at sea.
We shall see!
To the Editor of the DAILY EXPRESS.
SIR,
As I fully expected, this morning's post brought me not a few
letters on the subject of that article of mine in the ILLUSTRATED
LONDON NEWS. And they are very much what I expected them to be.
I shall address my reply to Captain Littlehales, since obviously he
can speak with authority, and speaks in his own name, not under a
pseudonym. And also for the reason that it is no use talking to
men who tell you to shut your head for a confounded fool. They are
not likely to listen to you.
But if there be in Liverpool anybody not too angry to listen, I
want to assure him or them that my exclamatory line, "Was there no
one on board either of these ships to think of dropping a fender--
etc.," was not uttered in the spirit of blame for anyone. I would
not dream of blaming a seaman for doing or omitting to do anything
a person sitting in a perfectly safe and unsinkable study may think
of. All my sympathy goes to the two captains; much the greater
share of it to Captain Kendall, who has lost his ship and whose
load of responsibility was so much heavier! I may not know a great
deal, but I know how anxious and perplexing are those nearly end-on
approaches, so infinitely more trying to the men in charge than a
frank right-angle crossing.
I may begin by reminding Captain Littlehales that I, as well as
himself, have had to form my opinion, or rather my vision, of the
accident, from printed statements, of which many must have been
loose and inexact and none could have been minutely circumstantial.
I have read the reports of the TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and
no others. What stands in the columns of these papers is
responsible for my conclusion--or perhaps for the state of my
feelings when I wrote the ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS article.
From these sober and unsensational reports, I derived the
impression that this collision was a collision of the slowest sort.
I take it, of course, that both the men in charge speak the
strictest truth as to preliminary facts. We know that the Empress
of Ireland was for a time lying motionless. And if the captain of
the Storstad stopped his engines directly the fog came on (as he
says he did), then taking into account the adverse current of the
river, the Storstad, by the time the two ships sighted each other
again, must have been barely moving OVER THE GROUND. The "over the
ground" speed is the only one that matters in this discussion. In
fact, I represented her to myself as just creeping on ahead--no
more. This, I contend, is an imaginative view (and we can form no
other) not utterly absurd for a seaman to adopt.
So much for the imaginative view of the sad occurrence which caused
me to speak of the fender, and be chided for it in unmeasured
terms. Not by Captain Littlehales, however, and I wish to reply to
what he says with all possible deference. His illustration
borrowed from boxing is very apt, and in a certain sense makes for
my contention. Yes. A blow delivered with a boxing-glove will
draw blood or knock a man out; but it would not crush in his nose
flat or break his jaw for him--at least, not always. And this is
exactly my point.
Twice in my sea life I have had occasion to be impressed by the
preserving effect of a fender. Once I was myself the man who
dropped it over. Not because I was so very clever or smart, but
simply because I happened to be at hand. And I agree with Captain
Littlehales that to see a steamer's stern coming at you at the rate
of only two knots is a staggering experience. The thing seems to
have power enough behind it to cut half through the terrestrial
globe.
And perhaps Captain Littlehales is right? It may be that I am
mistaken in my appreciation of circumstances and possibilities in
this case--or in any such case. Perhaps what was really wanted
there was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary fender. I care
nothing if possibly my deep feeling has betrayed me into something
which some people call absurdity.
Absurd was the word applied to the proposal for carrying "enough
boats for all" on board the big liners. And my absurdity can
affect no lives, break no bones--need make no one angry. Why
should I care, then, as long as out of the discussion of my
absurdity there will emerge the acceptance of the suggestion of
Captain F. Papillon, R.N., for the universal and compulsory fitting
of very heavy collision fenders on the stems of all mechanically
propelled ships?
An extraordinary man we cannot always get from heaven on order, but
an extraordinary fender that will do its work is well within the
power of a committee of old boatswains to plan out, make, and place
in position. I beg to ask, not in a provocative spirit, but simply
as to a matter of fact which he is better qualified to judge than I
am--Will Captain Littlehales affirm that if the Storstad had
carried, slung securely across the stem, even nothing thicker than
a single bale of wool (an ordinary, hand-pressed, Australian wool-
bale), it would have made no difference?
If scientific men can invent an air cushion, a gas cushion, or even
an electricity cushion (with wires or without), to fit neatly round
the stems and bows of ships, then let them go to work, in God's
name and produce another "marvel of science" without loss of time.
For something like this has long been due--too long for the credit
of that part of mankind which is not absurd, and in which I
include, among others, such people as marine underwriters, for
instance.
Meanwhile, turning to materials I am familiar with, I would put my
trust in canvas, lots of big rope, and in large, very large
quantities of old junk.
It sounds awfully primitive, but if it will mitigate the mischief
in only fifty per cent. of cases, is it not well worth trying?
Most collisions occur at slow speeds, and it ought to be remembered
that in case of a big liner's loss, involving many lives, she is
generally sunk by a ship much smaller than herself.
JOSEPH CONRAD.
A FRIENDLY PLACE
Eighteen years have passed since I last set foot in the London
Sailors' Home. I was not staying there then; I had gone in to try
to find a man I wanted to see. He was one of those able seamen
who, in a watch, are a perfect blessing to a young officer. I
could perhaps remember here and there among the shadows of my sea-
life a more daring man, or a more agile man, or a man more expert
in some special branch of his calling--such as wire splicing, for
instance; but for all-round competence, he was unequalled. As
character he was sterling stuff. His name was Anderson. He had a
fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice which matched that
something attractive in the whole man. Though he looked yet in the
prime of life, shoulders, chest, limbs untouched by decay, and
though his hair and moustache were only iron-grey, he was on board
ship generally called Old Andy by his fellows. He accepted the
name with some complacency.
I made my enquiry at the highly-glazed entry office. The clerk on
duty opened an enormous ledger, and after running his finger down a
page, informed me that Anderson had gone to sea a week before, in a
ship bound round the Horn. Then, smiling at me, he added: "Old
Andy. We know him well, here. What a nice fellow!"
I, who knew what a "good man," in a sailor sense, he was, assented
without reserve. Heaven only knows when, if ever, he came back
from that voyage, to the Sailors' Home of which he was a faithful
client.
I went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but sorry not to have
seen him; though, indeed, if I had, we would not have exchanged
more than a score of words, perhaps. He was not a talkative man,
Old Andy, whose affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that
Sailors' Home, where the staff understood and liked the sailors
(those men without a home) and did its duty by them with an
unobtrusive tact, with a patient and humorous sense of their
idiosyncrasies, to which I hasten to testify now, when the very
existence of that institution is menaced after so many years of
most useful work.
Walking away from it on that day eighteen years ago, I was far from
thinking it was for the last time. Great changes have come since,
over land and sea; and if I were to seek somebody who knew Old Andy
it would be (of all people in the world) Mr. John Galsworthy. For
Mr. John Galsworthy, Andy, and myself have been shipmates together
in our different stations, for some forty days in the Indian Ocean
in the early nineties. And, but for us two, Old Andy's very memory
would be gone from this changing earth.
Yes, things have changed--the very sky, the atmosphere, the light
of judgment which falls on the labours of men, either splendid or
obscure. Having been asked to say a word to the public on behalf
of the Sailors' Home, I felt immensely flattered--and troubled.
Flattered to have been thought of in that connection; troubled to
find myself in touch again with that past so deeply rooted in my
heart. And the illusion of nearness is so great while I trace
these lines that I feel as if I were speaking in the name of that
worthy Sailor-Shade of Old Andy, whose faithfully hard life seems
to my vision a thing of yesterday.
But though the past keeps firm hold on one, yet one feels with the
same warmth that the men and the institutions of to-day have their
merit and their claims. Others will know how to set forth before
the public the merit of the Sailors' Home in the eloquent terms of
hard facts and some few figures. For myself, I can only bring a
personal note, give a glimpse of the human side of the good work
for sailors ashore, carried on through so many decades with a
perfect understanding of the end in view. I have been in touch
with the Sailors' Home for sixteen years of my life, off and on; I
have seen the changes in the staff and I have observed the subtle
alterations in the physiognomy of that stream of sailors passing
through it, in from the sea and out again to sea, between the years
1878 and 1894. I have listened to the talk on the decks of ships
in all latitudes, when its name would turn up frequently, and if I
had to characterise its good work in one sentence, I would say
that, for seamen, the Well Street Home was a friendly place.
It was essentially just that; quietly, unobtrusively, with a regard
for the independence of the men who sought its shelter ashore, and
with no ulterior aims behind that effective friendliness. No small
merit this. And its claim on the generosity of the public is
derived from a long record of valuable public service. Since we
are all agreed that the men of the merchant service are a national
asset worthy of care and sympathy, the public could express this
sympathy no better than by enabling the Sailors' Home, so useful in
the past, to continue its friendly offices to the seamen of future
generations.
Footnotes:
{1} Yvette and Other Stories. Translated by Ada Galsworthy.
{2} TURGENEV: A Study. By Edward Garnett.
{3} STUDIES IN BROWN HUMANITY. By Hugh Clifford.
{4} QUIET DAYS IN SPAIN. By C. Bogue Luffmann.
{5} Existence after Death Implied by Science. By Jasper B. Hunt,
M.A.
{6} THE ASCENDING EFFORT. By George Bourne.
{7} Since writing the above, I am told that such doors are fitted
in the bunkers of more than one ship in the Atlantic trade.
{8} The loss of the Empress of Ireland.