Chapter I: Part 1

THE CRUISE OF THE NONA

The Cruise of the Nona

The Story of a Cruise from Holyhead to
the Wash, with Reflections and Judgments
on Life and Letters, Men and Manners

BY

HILAIRE BELLOC

Boston and New York

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

_=The Riverside Press Cambridge=_

1925

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY HILAIRE BELLOC

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_=The Riverside Press=_

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO THE MEMORY OF
PHILIP KERSHAW MY
BRAVE AND CONSTANT
COMPANION UPON THE
SEA: BUT NOW HE
WILL SAIL NO MORE

DEDICATION

TO MAURICE BARING

MY DEAR MAURICE,—

I have dedicated to you two books: one was a book ‘On Nothing.’ This I dedicated to you because, being on nothing, it dealt with what is better than the fullness of life.

Another book I dedicated to you was the ‘Green Overcoat,’ and this I dedicated to you because you had written a play called the ‘Green Elephant,’ and we thereby held communion in green things.

I now dedicate to you this book, because you also have written a book upon Things That Come to Mind, and this book may well turn into something of the same sort. Yours was called ‘The Puppet Show of Memory,’ and dealt with the things and people you had seen and known. What mine will be called I do not yet know, for I hold that a child should be born before it is christened.

I have been led into this opinion by the action of an acquaintance, who much disputed with his wife what name the child should bear, it being not yet born. To this choice they attached great issues; for they rightly thought that a name determines a lifetime much more than does a horoscope, and for this reason they consulted no astrologer. First they explored the grander sounds, names of dominion and power. They considered Esmeralda, Ruhala, Semiramis, Darumdibaba, and Rimbomba, as also Haulteclaire, following the noise of pomps and wars. Wearying of this, the glamour of strangeness seized them, and they attempted Pelagia, Sonia, Mehitabel, Oona, Célimène, Mamua and Berengarde, Machuska, Gounor, and Zaire; but these seemed, upon a second reading, affected: as indeed they were. So they fell into childishness, and wallowed in gardening, reciting Pansy, Daisy, Rose, Violet, Pimpernel, and even Forget-me-Not, which led them into the Furor Hebraicus, and such terms as Miriam, Lilith, Deborah, Eve, Mizraim, Sheba, and the rest—very unsuitable; from which they reacted to mere abstractions, such as Mercy, Peace, Charity, Grace, and what not. But these seeming insipid, they fell maundering after a donnish fashion and dared consider Æthelburga, Fristhwith, Ealswitha, and other abominations, till an angel compelled them to desist and they were driven to the solid path of the queens, and advanced Maud, Adelaide, Matilda, Elizabeth, Guinevere, Anne, and jibbed at Jezebel. Next they ran wild and careered through Tosca, Faustine, Theodora, Athalie, Antigone, Medea, Pasiphaë, and many others. Finally, they perched, she upon the name Astarte, but he upon the, to my mind, lovelier word, Cytherea. They both mean the same thing, only one was a well-modelled Greek, and the other a horrible Hittite. It was the woman who wanted Astarte, and the man who wanted Cytherea; so the child was to be called Astarte, and she was not even allowed to have the second name of Cytherea.

All that was on Thursday, the 2d June. On the 13th, being a Monday, in the early afternoon, the child was born, and was a boy.

There was no more discussion upon its name, because its uncle, a rich man, was called James. So the boy was James, and there was an end of it.

I have been led on, as you see, but the essence of this book is that it shall be a sailing through the seas of the years, that is, a flight through the airs of time, or, again, a leading on and a passage through the vales of life: now culling this sour fruit, now that poisonous herb, and now again this stinging plant, which I had thought to be innocuous.

For whether I should write, Maurice, a book of reminiscences or of wandering, or of extravagances or of opinions, or of conclusions, or of experiences, I could not make up my mind after a cogitation of three weeks and four days, which occupied the whole of my remaining faculties between the town of Blois, upon the Loire, and the town of Châlons, upon the Marne, my journey from the one to the other being taken this very year circuitously, in the company of a Bear, by way of Bayonne, where the bayonet, Rosalie, was first made; Saint John at the foot of the Pass, where they boil crayfish in white wine; Roncesvalles, where Roland died, and I nearly did; Burguete, where they charge too much and where the kitchen smoke goes out through the middle of the roof; Pamplona, the only permanent thing Pompey ever did; Saragossa, which never changes; Reus, where they spin cotton; Tarragona, which is biding its time; Barcelona, which got there first; Puycerda, and, after that, the Gorges of the Tet.

I was by this time a long way from Blois, but I had come to no conclusion on the name of my book, and my mind was still like one of those conferences to which the parliamentarians of various countries travel at our expense from time to time, and are there delivered of heavy speeches without meaning, which make one think of a corpulent elderly man groaning across a ploughed clay field after a week’s rain in the dark of the moon. At Nîmes I had not decided what to call the book, nor down in a valley of the Cévennes, nor at Lyons, nor in the Jura, nor in the Vosges, nor in Strasbourg; until at last I came to Châlons, as I have said. And, sitting down there to a meal in the hotel very finely called ‘The House of the High Mother of God,’ I still remained undecided. And I am so, to this day.

I cannot make it a book of reminiscences, because I can remember nothing for more than about two days, and also because I will not write about my contemporaries for fear of offending them. They are very good fellows, they have no particular characters or talents, they do nothing lasting, they are a generation of saltless butter with too much skim milk about it, there is little to say about them, and almost anything one says gives the little fellows offence. I would not call it ‘Opinions,’ because I have none either, only convictions; and if I called it ‘Convictions’ I might be misunderstood. I tell you I do not know what to call this book, but I am dedicating it to you because it has at least this parallel with your work that it is all about things that have passed through my mind.

Indeed, the naming of a book has always seemed to me a thing fastidious in both senses; that is, both a thing wearisome and a thing of picking and choosing. I am not quite sure that books ought to be named at all. If they were numbered, like the streets in America, they would be very much easier to catalogue and shelf (or shelve) and remember the places of. Thus your next book or so might be ‘Baring 32,’ and this ‘Belloc 106.’ And why not? It would in no way diminish their souls, their connotations. Cannot a man be head over ears in love with Number 15, Parham Street, and sick of 30, Tupton Square? I can!

Numbers, I say, leave us free to give personality and emotions to things. An anniversary is but a numbered day in a month, yet it shakes a man more than any feast name.

So should it be with books. When they are named, they give a false indication; moreover, the vast crowd of books that are poured out in this our day like fugitives from a plague-stricken city is so immense that the discovery of a new title is impossible. However, it will have a title before I have done, stap me, and it is dedicated to you.

At this point I ought to end; but, as I have already told you, it is in the very character of this book, of its essence, nature, and personality, that it has only an accidental beginning, no real end, and nothing in particular between the two. It is like those rivers of the Middle West which trickle out of a marsh, and then wander aimless, without banks or shape, mere wetnesses, following the lowest land until they reach the shapeless Mississippi, and at last the flats and mud of a steaming sea.

What a book!...

My mind now suggests to me (for my mind is separate from myself, and may properly be regarded as no more than an inconsequent companion) that I should do very well not to cut off the Dedication from the rest of the Opus. The putting of a dedication separately from a book has something about it of form; and form is just what I have to avoid. I am to wander at large, setting down such things as pass before my eyes of memory, leaving out pretty well all that is of importance (reserving that for posthumous publication), and doing no more than present this, that, or the other, of ephemeral things. For there comes a time in life after which a man discovers no more, has lost through the effect of the years the multitude of what he possessed both within and without, can only repeat phrases or decisions already well worn. He is fixed, sterilised, hardened, and has nothing left to say; that is the moment in which he is expected to set down, for the benefit of others, the full treasury of what was once his soul.

Some two to five years ago there was an outburst of books in England which I myself labelled (and, I think, justly) ‘The Cads’ Concert.’ These were books in which men set down their connection with their fellows, giving each by name familiarly, purported to publish diaries which they had never kept, maligned the dead, insulted the living, and lied impudently upon both. They had a great sale, had these books, because they brought in rich or otherwise important men and women, known already by newspapers vaguely to the readers of such books, so that those readers had from ‘The Cads’ Concert’ a faint reflection of High Life.

It was something quite new in the history of letters, and had, I am glad to say, a very short life. I do not propose to add one more vileness to that nasty little list.

How then should I approach this task which has been set me of writing down, in the years between fifty and sixty, some poor scraps of judgment and memory? I think I will give it the name of a Cruise; for it is in the hours when he is alone at the helm, steering his boat along the shores, that a man broods most upon the past, and most deeply considers the nature of things. I think I will also call it by the name of my boat, the Nona, and give the whole book the title ‘The Cruise of the Nona,’ for, in truth, the Nona has spent her years, which are much the same as mine (we are nearly of an age, the darling, but she a little younger, as is fitting), threading out of harbours, taking the mud, trying to make further harbours, failing to do so, getting in the way of more important vessels, giving way to them, taking the mud again, waiting to be floated off by the tide, anchoring in the fairway, getting cursed out of it, dragging anchor on shingle and slime, mistaking one light for another, rounding the wrong buoy, crashing into other people, and capsizing in dry harbours. It seemed to me, as I considered the many adventures and misadventures of my boat, that here was a good setting for the chance thoughts of one human life; since all that she has done and all that a man does make up a string of happenings and thinkings, disconnected and without shape, meaningless, and yet full: which is Life.

Indeed, the cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens to the soul of a man in a larger way. We set out for places which we do not reach, or reach too late; and, on the way, there befall us all manner of things which we could never have awaited. We are granted great visions, we suffer intolerable tediums, we come to no end of the business, we are lonely out of sight of England, we make astonishing landfalls—and the whole rigmarole leads us along nowhither, and yet is alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril, and repose.

On this account I have always thought that a man does well to take every chance day he can at sea in the narrow seas. I mean, a landsman like me should do so. For he will find at sea the full model of human life: that is, if he sails on his own and in a little craft suitable to the little stature of one man. If he goes to sea in a large boat, run by other men and full of comforts, he can only do so being rich, and his cruise will be the dull round of a rich man. But if he goes to sea in a small boat, dependent upon his own energy and skill, never achieving anything with that energy and skill save the perpetual repetition of calm and storm, danger undesired and somehow overcome, then he will be a poor man, and his voyage will be the parallel of the life of a poor man—discomfort, dread, strong strain, a life all moving. What parallel I shall find in the action of boats for a man of the middle sort, neither rich nor poor, I cannot tell. Perhaps the nearest would be the travel at a fixed price upon a steamer from one port not of the passenger’s choosing to another not of his choosing, but carried along, ignorant of the sea and of the handling of the vessel, and having all the while no more from the sea than a perpetual, but not very acute, discomfort, and with it a sort of slight uncertainty, which are precisely the accompaniments throughout life of your middle sort of man.

So I have given this book a name: ‘The Cruise of the Nona.’ Had I called it ‘The Cargo,’ I might be nearer my intention. At any rate, I am now off to sail the English seas again, and to pursue from thought to thought and from memory to memory such things as have occupied one human soul, and of these some will be of profit to one man and some to another, and most, I suppose, to none at all.

THE CRUISE OF THE NONA

The Cruise of the Nona

It was late in May, near midnight, the air being very warm and still, and the sky not covered but somewhat dim, with no moon, when I took the Nona out from Holyhead Harbour, having on board one companion to help me work the boat, and a local man who could speak Welsh for me in whatever places I might make along the coast.

The very slight breeze, which had barely moved us through the water after we had got up the anchor, died away long before we reached the end of the breakwater, and it was necessary to pull her out with the dinghy in order to fetch round the end of the stonework and get to sea. There was at that time of the tide a little current running towards the Stack, which would slightly help us on our way once we were outside, and with this we drifted a full hour and more, aided now and then by faint breaths of air, which rose and died again like memories. So came we, with the turn of the night, under the glare of the lighthouse at last, and then put the nose of the little ship round for the point of Carnarvonshire and the strait between the mainland and Bardsey Island, which is called Bardsey Sound.

It was a course of about thirty-three miles, with no chance, apparently, of covering it in all that night, nor perhaps in all the coming day as well; for we had struck, as it seemed, that hot, steady summer weather in which one may play at a drifting match for days on end.

While it was still dark the distant mountains could barely be seen as something a little blacker than the sky. They looked astonishingly low, as mountains always do on a moonless night, when there is nothing to distinguish their details, and nothing against which to compare them, or by which to tell their distance. Already—it being now nearer two than one o’clock—a little wind had arisen, settling down, as it seemed, into somewhat east of north, and blowing over the Anglesey flats. It gave us perhaps no more than a couple of knots an hour, but it was heartening after the long calm, and as we had all sail set she pulled to it steadily enough. I was at the helm, my companion was still awake, sitting in the cockpit and talking to me, and the hand who was to be with us till we next landed smoked beside us on deck.

The wind had freshened somewhat, we were making perhaps four or five knots, when the dawn began to show beyond Snowdon, and those great hills at once looked higher against the glimmer of grey light. Soon the whole coast was apparent, and the Yreifles with their triple peaks (clearer than I had expected; indeed, too clear for fine weather) lay right ahead and Bardsey Island beyond them and the narrow sound in between. The wind seemed steady, as though it would hold. I reckoned that the tide would turn against us anywhere between six and seven in the morning, that it would turn back through the Sound about noon or one o’clock, and I calculated that we should be running into Cardigan Bay, past Bardsey, on the middle of the ebb, an hour or two later than that time.

But what happened was something wholly unexpected; it is always so at sea, and that is why it is said that the sea brings all adventures. Indeed, I think that as we go on piling measurements upon measurements, and making one instrument after another more and more perfect to extend our knowledge of material things, the sea will always continue to escape us. For there is a Living Spirit who rules the sea and many attendant spirits about him.

But on that brightening morning there was nothing to warn us. The glass was high and, if I remember right, still rising; the sky uncovered and clearer than it had been by night; the wind slight, but holding steady; and all was soldier’s weather, so that any one could have taken that little ship through such weather where he would. It was weather, one would say, made for the instruction of the young in the art of sailing.

By the time it was fully light, we were making between six and seven knots, for the wind had sharply risen. As it was an offshore wind, there was as yet no sea raised, but little tumbling whitecaps, very pleasant to look at, and all the movement coming on our quarter from over the land. With the rising of the sun it blew hard. We were yielding to it too much; we had taken down the topsail an hour before, and now I thought it wise to take in a reef as well, which we did in the headsail and the mainsail, but leaving the jib as it was, for that sail was not a large one.

I have sailed a great deal off and on in boats of this size (that is, somewhat more than thirty feet over all, with eight or nine feet beam, and drawing from five to six feet of water, cutter rigged), and I know it is an illusion; yet I can never get over the idea that a reef makes no difference. Two reefs—yes—but one reef I cannot ‘feel.’ It is an obtuseness in me; but so it is.

However, it seemed wiser to take in a reef of some sort, and two reefs would have reduced the sail quite unnecessarily, for it was not yet blowing so hard as all that.

We slipped down the coast smartly, nearing it all the time upon our slantwise course, and as we did so, the sun being now fully risen, it blew harder and harder every minute. A sea rose, a good following sea, but higher than one would have expected so nearly off the land from a land wind; and, as this boat has very little freeboard (it is her only defect, for she rises magnificently to the water, and bears herself better the worse the weather may be), I watched the swirl of the foam under her low counter as each wave slightly broke under the now fierce wind.

We shortened down to three reefs, but even so the helm was pulling hard, and when we changed jibs and put up the smallest we had, it griped more than I liked, straining my arm after so long a spell at the tiller. I handed it over to the man who was with us, and went forward to see that everything was clear, for it was now blowing really hard, and anything like a tangle if we got into difficulties would be dangerous. The gale rose higher and the sea with it; but, tearing through the water as we now were under three reefs, we should soon make the Sound and get round the point of Carnarvonshire into easier water right under the lee of the land.

There was only one thing that troubled me, which was this question: should we make the Sound before the tide turned? It was an important question, because, although I had never been in those parts before, offshore, in a boat of my own, yet I could judge that in such a piece of water, with all the bay pouring through a channel barely two miles wide with a deep of barely one, the tide against such a gale would raise an impossible sea. If we could just make it on the tail of the tide, on the very last of the ebb, we should have nothing to bear but a strong following sea, such as that before which we were running at the moment: for the southerly stream was still strong under us. But if the water turned before we got into the Sound, we should have a time to remember; and so we did.

For I had done something or other to annoy the Earth-Shaker, and he pursued me viciously, making the tide turn just before we reached the mouth of the Sound. In a time much shorter than I had expected, with no lull in between, the steady run of sea which had been combing behind us, towering above the counter, but regular and normal to deal with, turned into a confusion of huge tumbling pyramidical waves, leaping up, twisting, turning, and boiling in such a confusion as I had never seen, not even in Alderney Race, which I had gone through many years before when I was a boy. The painter which held the dinghy to the stern parted, and that boat, a good and serviceable one, was lost. There was no question of turning in such a sea and under such a wind; the dinghy had to be abandoned. The tide against us was so fierce that even under that gale we hardly moved; and it was strange to see, from the leaping and struggling of the Nona as the foam rushed by in a millrace, how steady remained the points on the Carnarvonshire shore, and how slowly we opened the Sound. The pace was irregular. There were moments when we advanced at perhaps a knot or a knot and a half against that fierce tide. There were others when we even slipped back. All the while the wind howled and the sea continued to rise and to boil in a cauldron more violent as the gale on the one hand and the tide against it on the other grew in strength and in the fierceness of their struggle. In seas like this one never knows when some great tumbling lump of water may not break upon one’s decks, for there is no run and follow, it is all confusion; and I remember thinking, as I took the helm again in the midst of the turmoil, of something I had seen written once of Portland Race: ‘The sea jumps up and glares at you’—a sound phrase.

We had thus (in some peril, but still able to keep a course, and, on the whole, advancing) got at last between the point and the Island, that is, to the heart of the Sound; and a very few more yards would have brought us round out of the cauldron into smooth water and a run for some quiet anchorage right under the protection of the coast, when (since at sea bad luck always goes gathering impetus) the jib blew out with a noise like a gun. A few rags hung on to its fastenings; the rest of the canvas went away out to sea like a great wounded bird, and then sailed down and flopped into the seething of the water.

You may guess what that did to a boat in our straits! It made the helm almost impossible to hold with the violent gripe of the mainsail, half our head canvas being gone; and at the same time it stopped our way. We drifted back again into the worst of the water, and lost in five minutes what it had taken us more than an hour to make. The danger was real and serious. The man that was with us expressed his fears aloud; my companion, though new to the sea, took it all with great calm. As to what happened to myself, I will record it though it is a little detailed and personal: I will record it for the sake of the experience, of which others may make what they will.

I looked at the Carnarvonshire coast there close at hand, the sinking lines of the mountains as they fell into the sea, and I discovered myself to be for the first time in my life entirely indifferent to my fate. It was a very odd sensation indeed, like the sensation I fancy a man must have to find he is paralysed. Once, under the influence of a drug during an illness, some such indifference had pervaded me, but here it was in the broad daylight and the sun well up above the mountains, with a clear sky, in the grip of a tremendous gale and of an angry countering sea, ravening like a pack of hounds. Yet I could only look with indifference on the sea and at the land. The sensation was about as much like courage as lying in a hammock is like a hundred yards race. It had no relation to courage, nor, oddly enough, had it any relation to religion, or to a right depreciation of this detestable little world which can be so beautiful when it likes.

Such as it was, there it was. I had always particularly disliked the idea of death by drowning, and I had never believed a word of the stories which say that at the end it is a pleasant death. Indeed, as a boy I was once caught under the steps of a swimming-bath and held there a little too long before I could get myself out, and pleasant it was not at all. But here in Bardsey Sound, I was indifferent, even to death by drowning. All I was really interested in was to watch what way we lost and what chance we had of getting through.

Indeed, the whole question of fear is beyond analysis, and there is only one rule, which is, that a man must try to be so much the master of himself that he shall be able to compel himself to do whatever is needful, fear or no fear. Whether there be merit or not in the absence of fear, which sentiment we commonly call courage when it is allied to action, may be, and has been, discussed without conclusion since men were men. The absence of fear makes an admirable show, and excites our respect in any man; but it is not dependent upon the will. Here was I in very great peril indeed off Bardsey, and utterly careless whether the boat should sink or swim; yet was I the same man who, in a little freshness of breeze that arose off the Owers a year or two ago, was as frightened as could well be—and with no cause. And if this be true of change of mood in one man, it must be true of the differences of mood in different men.

I had occasion during the war, when I had been sent to write upon the Italian front, to be swung to the high isolated rock of a mountain peak in the Dolomites by one of those dizzy wires which the Italian engineers slung over the gulfs of the Alps for the manning and provisioning of small high posts. It was an experience I shall ever remember, a vivid, hardly tolerable nightmare; but the man I was with, an Italian officer of great and deserved fame, earned during that campaign, not only felt nothing, but could not understand what my terror was. We sat, or rather lay, in one of those shallow trays which travel slowly along these wires over infinite deeps of air; and during the endless crawling through nothingness he told me, by way of recreation, the story of a private soldier who had been coming down from the isolated post some weeks before. The machinery had gone wrong, and the tray remained suspended over the gulf, halfway across, for some twenty minutes. When it worked again and they hauled it in they found that the man had gone mad.

When the time came for the return journey, I very well remember asking myself whether I had the control to face that second ordeal or no. It was an obscure crisis, unknown to others, but as real and as great within as any of those which stand out in fiction or history. I would rather have gone down by the path which clung to the steep, the precipitous mountainside. This was forbidden because it was under direct Austrian fire; I knew that I should not be allowed. So I faced the return—and it was worse than the going.

Also in my life I have known two men who have hunted lions, and each of them has told me that fear in the presence of peril from the beast was wholly capricious, and that sometimes when an exceedingly unpleasant death seemed certain, the man who had just missed his shot felt indifferent. I can believe it.

Anyhow, here I was in Bardsey Sound, with many deaths moving over the howling fury of the sea, and not one of them affecting me so much as a shadow passing over a field.

The end of that adventure was odd and unreasonable—as things will be at sea. It was perhaps because we had been buffeted and pushed into some edge of the conflict between wind and water where the tide runs slacker; or it was perhaps because the wind had risen still higher. But, at any rate, after three separate raids forward (in the second of which we were very nearly out of our peril and into smooth water), and as many set-backs (one of which got us into the worst violence we had yet suffered), the Nona, in a fourth attempt (it was her own, not ours—we could do nothing but keep her, as best we might, to her course), slipped out and reached an eddy beyond the tide. For a moment it was very difficult to keep her to it, she slewed round; but then again she got her head southerly, and we found ourselves running past the great Black Rock which stands there—the Carrig Dhu—and marks the smooth water beyond the edge of the tide.

We breathed again; and as I took her on through an easy sea, close under the land with not too much strain upon the helm (for the high shore now broke the gale), I was free to look over my right shoulder and watch, passing away behind us, further and further, the hell of white water and noise through which we had barely come to safety.

Danger keeps men awake and makes them forget necessity, but with this relief our fatigue came upon us. My friend and I had now been awake for some twenty-five or twenty-six hours, and it was time for sleep.

We got the poor Nona, which had behaved so well, up into a lonely little bay where was an old abandoned mine working, but no other sign of man. The Welshman with us told us it was good holding-ground; we let go the anchor and stowed sail. I remember how I fell half asleep as I stretched the cover over the mainsail boom and yard and tied it down at the after end. The gale still blew, yet, as it seemed, more steadily and less fiercely. There was no danger of dragging. We were well under the lee of the land. I gave one look, under the violent but clear morning sky, to seaward before I went below; and there I saw how, at a certain distance from the land, in a long line, the white water began. It was like being in a lagoon, like being protected by a bank from the sea outside; but really it was only the effect of the lee of the land making a belt of smooth water along shore. Then we all lay down to sleep and slept till evening.

When I awoke, the hurricane—for it had been no less—had died down to a fresh gale, and it promised to fall still further before night. There were a few hours of daylight left, but I thought it hardly worth while to up-anchor and run further along the coast. We were snug as it was and still fatigued after the struggle in Bardsey Sound, so I thought we would still lie there through the night and start eastward the next morning.

As I looked lazily over to Bardsey, with sunset on its streaming rocks, from the shelter of this quiet bay, I considered the islands.

Bardsey, they say, has a little community on board which governs itself and elects its own king. Whether it also pays tribute to some rich man on land, I do not know. But all the islands around Britain tend to be little kingdoms of their own: Lundy is like that, and over and over again one finds similar islands owned by one man, living either alone like a beast or companioned like a patriarch with his family and his servants and tenants all round about him; and the truth is that man is happier in small kingdoms than in great.

Except for the pride and honour of belonging to a great kingdom, to be citizen of a small one seems to me to have all the advantages. In a great kingdom you have to pay heavy taxes. You are made falsely concerned with men whom you never see, and in doings far distant, which you do not understand; you bear on your shoulders the burden of millions, and you must suffer a capital city, which will be a sink of crime. Your rulers will grow rich by deceit—for a very large community can always be deceived; nothing about you will be real, and the mass of your fellow citizens will be desperately poor. For it is the nature of large communities to separate into strata and for the mass to grow indigent.

But now I come to think of it, there is one advantage in belonging to a large kingdom, which is, that you can enjoy differences and contrasts such as a small kingdom does not give you. Some day, perhaps very soon, the modern organisation of society into great communities will break down, and then it would be amusing to come to life again and see the little communities living their own independent lives as they did in the Dark Ages, and also in the beginnings of pagan history.

How pleasant it is to consider the little kingdom of Ithaca, and Cephalonia alongside, and the little territory of the Athenians! How pleasant it is to remember that there were four kings in Kent, grouped there under one dread emperor at Canterbury! and also how there was a king with two princes, his heirs, governing the Isle of Wight; all pagan when the rest of England had already gone Catholic. For though you often hear it said that Sussex was the last piece of English soil to remain pagan (and it is, indeed, the great boast of my county that it resisted the Faith for one hundred years, and only capitulated under duress and famine) it is not so. Sussex was not the last of England to growl in a reluctant font. The Wight beat us by a head. At that time our king of Sussex and part of Hants as well, by name Cædwalla, a Welsh name, was still pagan; and, when he did get religion, he thought himself too grand to be baptised by anybody except the Pope of Rome. To Rome, therefore, he went, and reached the City, was baptised, and then died out of hand of fever—a warning to Pride.

But he had something to show for it all, since the Pope, very much impressed that a king of Sussex itself (and part of Hants by conquest) should have visited him, wrote a fine epitaph for him in Latin verse and had it engraved on a stone which he put upon his grave in Old Saint Peter’s. But they pulled it up when New Saint Peter’s was built, and to this sacrilege I set down the very bad luck that Rome had afterwards.

Anyhow, the truth is that not Sussex but the Isle of Wight was the last pagan spot in these islands, and here we of Sussex must reluctantly yield the palm. Yet can we in Sussex always boast that our king was the last of the kings in Britain to worship the Devil twelve hundred years ago. And so again for Bardsey.

Looking at Bardsey over an evening sea now less tumbled and under the dying gale, I thought also how odd it was that such Scandinavian names should have stuck to some places more than to others. These pirates of the eighth and ninth centuries were not many in number. They had no culture or traditions; no literature; no anything. It was not until England had gradually civilised them and made them Christian that they produced anything whatsoever. How then did little bits of their language stick on to portions of our coast? They say that ‘Dublin’ is a Scandinavian name. ‘Bardsey’ certainly is, and so is the word ‘sound,’ to mean a passage of the sea, and ‘Skomer’ is Scandinavian, and, right high up in the estuary of the Severn, ‘Flatholm’ and ‘Steepholm’ are both surely Scandinavian. People explain it sometimes by saying that as the attack of the pirates was always necessarily from the sea, they would give their names to the sea places. I could understand how this would give them Scandinavian names in Scandinavia, but how did we come to adopt such names? That is the puzzle. I should have thought that the local Celtic name for Bardsey would have held out. It has not done so, at least not in our speech; and there are even Scandinavian names for inland places, such as the main hill of the Isle of Man, and many places in the Lakes and beyond.

But the whole story of words is full of mystery, and the attempt to reduce the process of words to a science has always seemed to me ridiculous enough. It is true that certain habits get formed, and you can, from them, build up certain vague rules. For instance, the French noun derives from the Latin usually—nearly always through the accusative—and a particular Latin form will produce a corresponding French form; but the process is not invariable; and though one type out of hundreds becomes the official type of each nation, human speech is naturally not a set of a few official languages, but a mass of innumerable dialects, all melting one into the other.

Watch carefully, and you will note that in the area covered by the great official languages, most people are bilingual. They can speak the official language, but they also speak among themselves a dialect of their own, usually a dialect more or less cousin to the official language. That is certainly true of the working people of my own county of Sussex, and, indeed, of all rural England; but it is also true of the industrial districts, and, of course, it is true of the North. You find just the same thing through France, and Belgium, and the Valley of the Rhine, and I am told you find the same thing in Italy. The real spoken languages of Christendom are to be counted by the hundred, or the thousand; and though they fall into great groups, yet each has a life of its own. The official languages live a separate life above the mass, forming the idiom of a small body of wealthy people. And even that idiom has two forms, the written and the spoken form, which are very different. It is odd how unnatural spoken English looks, for instance, when it appears in a book; and I suppose the public are right to prefer the wholly unreal written English put into the mouths of the characters in novels.

I remember one good woman who made a very large income for many years by writing books about lords and ladies in London, which books she sold to an extensive and eager public in England, but to a much more extensive, and far more eager public in the United States. In these books, which were in their time very famous, the ladies and gentlemen—the toffs—talked in the most astonishing manner: all in linked phrases of some inches, and dependent clauses hanging on.

There was one character in one of her books which I was assured was a friend of mine: a young hereditary politician. I know the man’s conversation well enough: it is of the ordinary sort, chopped sentences, grunts, continual repetitions and, in general, brief scraps: such language as you and I and everybody talks. But in the book this authoress, who knew the original well enough and lived all her life among lords and ladies, made the poor fellow talk in his own house like Hansard. She would make him spout great speeches at his own mother and deliver sentences of prodigious length in the midst of them.

I myself once wrote a book about politicians, called ‘A Change in the Cabinet.’ It was universally agreed in all that old world of professional politicians who were still educated men that my book, whether good or bad, was monstrously accurate to the way the people of that world talk and go on. But the book will never be held by any large public to be accurate; or, at any rate, will not satisfy the desire of the large public for a particular kind of pompous convention, such as never was by sea or land. And on the whole I think the large public are right. Literature has no business to be a mirror of life. We can see life for ourselves without literature. What literature ought to do, I take it, is to make a type or expression of life, which is quite a different thing from a mere reflection, and what is more, literature is there for fun and not for copying. Hence the greatest of human writings have very little relation to actual speech. The heroes of the poet Homer say things as satisfactory as have ever been said, yet they say them in a highly conventional and stilted way, using a very small vocabulary and (what is really extraordinary!) talking all the time in hexameters. Certainly no one ever did that in real life except an old don whom I used to know at Oxford.

This man spoke with a dactylic stammer, thus: ‘Wúggă-gă, zúggă-gă, úggĕr-gă Năggă-gă, Wúggă-ă, Húggĕr-gă.... In my ... wúgga ga ... d-dúgga-g—opinion.’

He was the only living person I have ever heard who gave the effect of speaking in ordinary life as the persons of the poets speak. It was well worth hearing; but, of course, one could not understand a word of it. Nor did he ever produce the great effects of the ancients.

One of the most delightful things about words is their habit of coming up out of nothing, like the little particles of ice which float to the surface of the Thames at the beginning of a frost, rising silently, floating up from the bottom of the river, or like the little oak trees that crop up everywhere like weeds in the fields of my home. ‘Boy’ is a word of that kind; ‘girl’ is another; ‘leg’ is another; ‘donkey’ is another; ‘plough,’ though a little earlier, is another. No one can tell you where they came from; they are like our modern masters, they have no ancestry. But, unlike our modern masters, they remain. Some one in some clique started the expression and it spread. One can see examples of the process going on all round one to-day. One sometimes even knows the man who invented a new term and the medium through which it spread. There are one or two Eton words of this sort, and one or two Balliol words which are in the way of becoming regular English; for individual men of large acquaintance and fertile mind started these new words, some of which are beginning to take root.

But of all things that words do, what pleases me most is their habit of adventure; the way they have of sitting tight and doing nothing but their ordinary job for centuries, and then shooting out and taking quite different work and travelling about, changing colour and shape as they go.

I am very fond of the word ‘cad.’ It is the most useful missile in the English language. It is very hard and knobby, and you can be certain of your effect. And yet how brief its career! How singular its arrival at its present exalted state! It is a shortened form of ‘cadet,’ the younger son of a great family, which came by extension to apply to the less fortunate. It wandered about in this vague form for about a lifetime, and then settled down into two separate uses, applying to a particular sort of domestic, I believe, in one of the universities, and also to the people who used to hang on at the back of the old horse omnibuses and take the money in those happy days of my youth when there were no bell punches and no uniforms, and all Charing Cross resounded to the cry of ‘Liverpool Street,’ towards which goal every omnibus cad entreated you.

‘Cad,’ having settled down on these two honourable but ill-paid occupations, slyly got in by a side door and established itself in a totally different meaning, which it has now achieved, and which it looks like keeping. For now it means: ‘A male deficient in one particular small set of those many moral qualities which, when combined with the national tradition of wealth, build up what is called in England a “gentleman”.’ That is what the word ‘cad’ means to-day, and that is what gives it its value. It is a very odd formation. The ‘gentleman’ is the ideal of our once aristocratic and now plutocratic English state; it is the ideal which members of the wealthier governing class must conform to or attempt to attain. That ideal (its worshippers will be surprised to hear) has not a few vices, a number of virtues, and a very great many habits or characters which are neither virtuous nor vicious—such as the accent.

Now the cad is not at all a man who lacks all these; he is only a man who lacks one particular set of the many virtues. He lacks the particular kind of reticence and the particular kind of generosity which go to the making of the character called ‘a gentleman.’ He may have a reticence of another kind, and a generosity of another kind, and still be a cad. On the whole, of the cads and gentlemen I have met, I would give the cads a shade of odds in the matter of salvation; which is not without its importance either.

It will be interesting to watch the process of the word and see what happens to it. I do not think it will last long, for the whole civilisation to which it applies and in which it has a meaning is breaking up, like mist before a rising wind. It is not a word you could translate into any other language, and the English society to which it attaches is changing in a whirl. I wonder what posterity will make of it? What will posterity make of this strange habit, suddenly arisen within fifty years (and soon to die), of regarding a particular sort of provincial wealthy man as a general ideal for all humanity, and of regarding a man lacking somewhat of that ideal’s qualities as the basest of mankind?

Probably posterity will do what we all do in dealing with the past, shrug its shoulders and pass on. We, in dealing with any part of the past which we cannot understand, treat it at once as ridiculous, or only talk of the things in it which we do sympathise with. So will posterity deal with us. We cannot understand at all, for instance, the mood of a man who—like nearly everybody up to about two hundred years ago—objected to being burnt alive not on account of the pain, but because it was an indignity; because the body was consumed. We cannot understand why he was not more concerned with the serious discomfort of being burnt alive than with the ignominy.

In the eighteenth century, men could not understand the theological discussions of the early Byzantine period. We are getting a little more sympathetic with them now, but even to-day there are a great many highly cultured men steeped in history who cannot reconstruct for themselves at all the state of mind in which the populace lost its temper over a theological point; and the usual attitude of those who cannot understand a thing is to laugh at it. Yet the wise men will notice how many intense quarrels have arisen in our own time on what are really points of theology—though they are masked. The two views of evidence in any hotly disputed point, such as the new position of Poland, are essentially differences in theology. The long struggle between England and Ireland is essentially a theological struggle. So at bottom was the conflict between Prussia and Austria—in which both have succumbed: Prussia happily for ever; but Austria, I hope, only for a time. The only difference between ourselves and our fathers in this affair is that our fathers went to the root of the matter and discussed the essential, the opposing doctrines, instead of quarrelling upon their products.

That night the last of the wind fell suddenly, and it was a still air all through the darkness, but with the next morning there arose a moderate fresh breeze, still from the north.

We brought up the anchor early and stood along the coast. The wind soon fell, and at last it hardly held us up against the slight current of the tide. We made to skirt Penkilan Head, right across the mouth of the bay called Port Nigel, and also Hell’s Mouth (which is no praise for Nigel), but it was evening before we had rounded it and saw the opening beyond, the two islands which are called Saint Tudwal’s; for here (as once on Bardsey for the matter of that) a holy man had taken up his station in the old days when men thus hid themselves away from the world.

It is in the youth of a society, when its emotions are at their strongest, that men thus delight in isolation and the single contemplation of divine things. We cannot understand it at all from where we now stand, at the end of an old and decaying society. But when Western Europe renewed its youth in the fourth and fifth centuries and grew epic again, after the breakdown of strict society, the love of hermitage also grew passionately.