Chapter II: Part 2

A young man can live by himself as long as he will. It is later on that one needs to be supported by the companionship of one’s fellows, and to-day most men cannot live alone.

But I did once find such a man in modern times, full of delight in his complete isolation. He was an Englishman by birth, but I never learnt his name. He had built a habitation for himself on a high cliff in Italy overlooking a plain. I came across him by accident; he received me kindly. But I did not trouble him for long, for I saw that he loved to be alone. He had no one to serve him, nor any one even to be an occasional companion. His delight was to watch the world in the plain below and to commune with his own soul. But I doubt his having had any interest in divine things.

I looked curiously at those two islands as I passed them. They both bear the name of the saint, and are called the East and the West. I wondered to myself whether the appetite for hermitage would soon return; for that it must return soon or late is certain; it is of permanent recurrence in the history of mankind. All up and down Europe you may mark the stage in the history of the islands, the small islands, when they were thus hermitages or places of seclusion for small communities of religious or for one holy man. There is Iona, there is Holy Island, there are the islands of Lerins, and the Farne, and Noirmoutier and Tombelaine, and a hundred others. The conditions seem to have been a small space, water to drink, just enough land to support life, and difficulty of access. So also Cuthbert found even Lindisfarne too crowded, and went to the little rocks far out to sea. When it was not an island, it was a hilltop like Monte Cassino. When it was not a hilltop, it was a difficult cliff, like that of my strange friend of one hour in Italy. But always the main condition was security from interruption. And here extremes meet, for the very height of luxury and selfishness which makes a modern man in the last corruption of modern societies seek isolation, made the holiest of men seek it in a better time. Rich men to-day are often at pains to avoid cities and even the conversation of their kind, in order that their expression of every appetite may be free, and that they may have no influence about them save what is of their own choice. But those other holy men of our beginnings chose the remote places in order that they might lose their whole being in the contemplation of God, and that they might have no temptation to follow any appetite at all.

One might make an interesting list of the parallels which are upon this model. For instance, the men of those beginnings held fast to the miraculous signs of divine action. Our moderns laugh at the bare relation of such things, but hold fast to anything, however monstrous, which purposes to have behind it a mysterious untested authority dressed up in print, violent in affirmation, ceaselessly contradicting itself, empty of thought, and called Science. And so much for Saint Tudwal. I read about that saint once, and grew quite learned on his legend (for what is known is little, save that he lived just after Saint Martin of Tours, his exemplar) but I have forgotten every word I read, and can tell you now only roughly when he lived, nor anything else about him save that he was a Welshman.

The Welsh have a curious feeling about their past. They have been taught to detest its religion, yet their patriotism inclines them to a sort of awe of it. I never met a Welshman yet who ridiculed Saint David, yet very few indeed who knew either what world Saint David lived in or what mood he had towards the universe; and what about his Masses?

There is no hole in the land along that coast between the point of Carnarvonshire and Portmadoc, except a curious little bottle harbour called Pwllheli, with an odd entry up a sort of canal-like entrance. For that we beat up: we came to it by evening, but barely drifting under the lightest of airs. A draft of tide took us in, and at the mouth we passed a curious sight, which was a small model of a mountain transformed by man: a solid dome of granite, half of it already cut off like a cheese by industry; and men are still breaking it up and taking it away in ships. What would be left of the Wrekin if it crushed a few ounces to the ton? Eh, Rosenheim? Eh, Guilderstern?

As we watched that abuse of nature, a fine great rock of granite, half murdered by man and looking like Sunday evening’s loaf, an aged mariner came up to us in a boat of many years and chucked in his painter to us without a word of permission, then nodded to me to make it fast.

I did as he desired, for it is a rule in this world always to do what you are told if there is no apparent loss in doing it. What the old man wanted was to be towed and to save himself the trouble of rowing. But when we had done him this favour, and the Nona was taking him up without fatigue to his dear home, he spoke not a word, but sat there gloomily, smoking a pipe and considering, I suppose, the dim stories of the ancients: the bards, and the chieftains of Wales.

Wearied with this insolent silence, I leant over the rail and asked him what we should make for and where we had best lie in Pwllheli. He pulled the pipe out of his mouth and cursed Pwllheli loudly, in English, but in English so Welsh that it reminded me of the famous story of the man who said, ‘There will be folk in London to-day: one hundred and twenty are coming from Pwllheli.’ I said to him, therefore, desiring to soften his mood, ‘I see that you are not from Pwllheli yourself.’ ‘Ess, put I am!’ he answered simply, and then fell to swearing again most abominably.

His grievance I found, after a little more questioning, was that a financier had persuaded the people of Pwllheli to turn it into an earthly paradise, with a band upon an island, and gondolas or what not, and this just after he had bought a cottage to be his very own, so that he was burdened with rates; that was his grievance.

More of this local father I could not make. I think he hated all mankind as well as Pwllheli, and when we got into the broader water at the end of the entry and were moving up to the wharf in stately fashion, he gave me another surly sign to cast him off, which I did, and then, without a ‘good-evening,’ he pulled for the shore. As for the Nona, she slid alongside, and my companion and I moored, stowed, ate, slept, and waited for the morning.

When morning came, and we woke late (for the fatigue of Bardsey passage was still on us, even after two days), we found under a clear but hazy sky no stir of wind. It was well past noon and the ebb beginning; indeed, it was nearer two o’clock when there seemed to come just a breath, still from the north, that would take us down that strange entry and out to sea again. So we set sail, after casting off, and drifted rather than steered for the corridor end. As we left the stonework, I saw gathered there on the quay a group of men talking angrily and excitedly, with words which I could not understand, for they were Welsh; and, as they debated, or quarrelled (but perhaps they had a common trouble, and were only doing what our papers and the French police call ‘demonstrating’), many more ran up, until they were quite a crowd. Whereupon one man of their number, a very intense-looking, fierce fellow, jumped up on to a baulk of wood, so as to stand above them, and in a shrill, singing, passionate voice addressed them all. They fell silent, every face turned towards his, some with their mouths open, all with their eyes staring. Then, after he had spoken for a few minutes, he jumped down again and, behold, the crowd dispersed, some few knots still talking low among themselves, but the most of them remaining silent and slouching away.

Now what was it he had said in that strange tongue to achieve his result so well?

... Certainly the management of men is an art; and there are in it two factors which are nearly always set in conflict, although they ought to be harmonised. Indeed, one of them is nearly always thrust forward to the exclusion of the other: from which error in proportion civic disasters are born. These two factors in government are the direction of many and the interpretation of many. A number of men, a number too large to be appealed to individually (and the number gets too large after half a dozen or so), must be controlled and directed by him who governs, otherwise there is chaos. But it is only so controlled and directed by an interpretation of, and even a sort of subservience to, the common mind. Now control without understanding breaks a community, and sympathy without control dissolves it.

This man had succeeded, it seemed, with the mob at the wharf from which I had just sailed. His success set me thinking upon the matter of the management of men, the control of numbers: speakership, chairmanship, captaincy, and all the rest.

There is one element in the affair which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or ‘eye’ in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined—the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole—you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.

A man can only talk of the things he himself has known, and I myself have only seen one example of this inspiration in its perfection. It was (I regret to say) an experience of the House of Commons, a nasty place in which to find anything remarkable. There I saw the Speaker of my time (Mr. Lowther, as he then was) exercising the art through two Parliaments with a perfection which I had thought impossible, and which moved me, at the watching of it, as much as I am moved by great lines of Milton or Racine, or the harmonies of certain musics.

Consider what the business was! He had before him in an ill-lit, dull, hideous oblong room six hundred men, dully ranged in ten or a dozen dull rows; half to his left, half to his right. In that dull air of futile, vulgar, and unreal verbiage there could arise, in a moment, absurdly acrid emotions. These had to be tamed and resolved whenever they should bubble up like gas from a marsh. It was a necessity to the dull life of the place, if it were to crawl along at all, that such accidents should not wholly destroy its dull function.

This great body of men would dwindle in a moment to a dozen or less—a dozen who only remained for the chance of speaking, and of whom each individual would jump up like a jack-in-the-box the very instant the last mouther had sat down. It would swell again to a full complement, a crowded House, with equal rapidity.

The man managing that assembly had to remember each man by name. Those faces, which would, for any of _us_, have become mere blobs of white within half an hour of fatigued observation, had to be recognised as individuals. The relations of each with all had to be remembered; the nature of the matter under debate, the right of one man, through experience of office or of personal work, to be remembered; the claim of another man (suffering some unjust failure) to be recognised; the danger of a third who was repetitive; of a fourth who was mad. At the same time, the very subtle distinctions between the lesser and the greater claim to speak, the length of the debate, even the excessive tedium of each speaker had to be weighed. On the top of all that, it had to be remembered of what importance was each discussion (in so far as you can call any of them important—but they seem absurdly important to the participants). On the top of all that, again, was the general arrangement of the debate suggested by the Whips and in possession of the Chair.

Now on all this incredibly complicated task, involving, I suppose, some hundreds of interior decisions during the day, Mr. Lowther never once failed. The House of his time was an instrument over which he had complete mastery through a complete comprehension and a rapidity of just decision which I have never seen equalled in any field of command.

We have a tendency to-day to use words too strong for the occasion, and the word genius is a very strong word; but I have no more doubt that Mr. Lowther, as I watched him day after day, displayed genius than I have a doubt that Mozart in music, or Houdon in sculpture, had genius. It was amazing, it was satisfactory, it was continuous.

There was an old squire with whom I often dined in those years, and who had great knowledge of men and things in that club, still aristocratic, which England then still was. Not long after my first election to the august Assembly, I told him with enthusiasm at his own table what my judgment was of this achievement. He answered me, wearily, ‘Oh! I have heard that said of every Speaker since I can remember!’ To which I re-answered, ‘Yes; but this time they are right.’

Which reminds me of how a modern poet, spared to middle age in spite of the wrath of God, famous for that he could neither scan nor rhyme—let alone think or feel—once made a speech in which he carefully set out those things which had been said against Swinburne when first that meteor flamed across the heaven of English verse. The modern poet next read to this assembly the things that had been written against himself when he first blurred into the murk of our evening. He triumphantly concluded: ‘What was said against Swinburne they have said against me!’ Then there arose an aged writer of reviews, a man whose hair, whose voice, and whose aura were all three of delicate silver. He said: ‘Yes! But in what they said of him they were wrong; in what they said of you, they were right.’

This was not an epigram, it was a paving-stone; and it reminded me of that line in the epic of Roncesvalles, ‘Christians are right and pagans are wrong.’

So in the matter of Speakers. I have seen the action of four; but of none would I say even that they had talent, saving in this case alone, where I have used another word....

So we drifted down the narrow entry and out into the open sea; and all that afternoon, under a wind now slightly lifting, now falling again, we crept eastward and a little south, making more way as the sun declined, because the wind was shifting westward on to our quarter; and of that I was glad, for I desired to look into Port Madoc, which I had not seen since I was a child. I had vivid memories of it during a wonderful journey overshadowed by that air wherewith the Creator blesses childhood, lending to everything an active flavour of the divine; which is in three things, Clarity, Magnitude, and Multiplicity of strong emotion.

For the divine reveals itself in a special multiplicity, in an infinite variety. All that there is in colour and in music, and in line and in affection, and to these added other raptures innumerable, such as we know not of nor can conceive—that is to be at last our beatitude: that is the fullness of being. In childhood our innocence permits us some little glimpse of such things; but with the passage of the years they are lost altogether. The light in the lantern goes out, and the living thing within us fails, and is stupefied, and dies.

So Musset and old Pythagoras and Mr. Tupper. If any man doubts the Fall of Man (and I see from the papers that two belated bishops and one dean are still shaky on it, through some Victorian influence upon their minds, not only of bones but of chipped stones), let him consider this decay of heaven within ourselves as the maturity of our manhood develops. The more we are of this world and the more we know of it, the further are we drifting from the shores of the Blessed. Which shores also the poet had in mind when he wrote, sang, crooned, or what not:

‘Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, sing,
Sing to me of the West,
Sing to me of the girth loosened and the lax harpstring
And of rest.

‘Beyond the skerries and beyond the outer water,
There lies the land.
Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, oh, High
King’s Daughter,
And of the over-strand.

‘I desire to be with Brandan and his companions, in the quiet places
And to drink of their spring.
Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, and of the
blessed faces.
Daughter of Cahoolin, sing.’

But if you tell me that that is not the way to spell ‘Cuchulin,’ I have two answers, each of them stronger than Hercules.

The first is that the poet spelt it as he felt inclined—that is, by ear; for poets excel not, as is commonly believed, in speech but in ears; as you may see by their profiles or sidehead views; and as it is his spelling your action lies against him, not me.

And the second answer is, that one ought never to be bothered with the pedantry of quaint alphabets and the spelling tricks of outer men. Cuchulin is, or was, or should be, pronounced ‘Cahoolin,’ and there is an end of it. But as to whether he ever had a daughter, or if he had, whether she could sing, or even whether that Irishman existed at all, I hold all these things to be perfectly indifferent....

We cast anchor in the very midmost of that solemn bay with its half-circle of huge mountains looking down upon an empty sea. The giants were dim in the haze, but the more enormous, and I revered and worshipped them.

We so cast anchor because I had to wait for the tide. I could not run up the long, winding channel through the sands of Port Madoc until the flood should be with me, and that would not be till the gloaming, between eight and nine o’clock that night.

Therefore did we lie thus in Harlech Bay, gazing at the great hills of Wales. There is no corner of Europe that I know, not even the splendid amphitheatre standing in tiers of high Alpine wall around Udine, which so moves me with the awe and majesty of great things as does this mass of the northern Welsh mountains seen from this corner of their silent sea.

Few can recall it, for few visit that corner of the salt. It leads nowhere but to the harbour of Port Madoc. No man beaches a boat to-day under Harlech; no man to-day sets out from that shore for Ireland beyond. The halls are in ruin. There is no more harping. No flight of sails comes up eastward out of the sea like birds. Even the sailors have forgotten Gwynnedd. To-day the only sailors familiar with the solemnity of which I speak are those who ply in the small boats of the slate trade, or who, like myself, have employed a curious leisure in searching out new things here in the seas of home. For all my life I have made discoveries close at hand, and have found the Island of Britain to be infinite. But who in our times knows where to look for vision?

Indeed, this lack of fame applies to perhaps half the greater visions, even of the modern over-frequented and travelled earth. Men know half of them to satiety, but the other half they never see. Every one has wearied of the Bay of Naples, repeated a thousand times, but what of that lonely field by the flat Adriatic sand whence you may see the dark eastern Fall of the Gran Sasso, tragic, with storms about it, dominating a deserted shore? Everybody has his bellyful of Gavarnie, but what of the valley of Araxas, which proclaims so terribly the glory of God? Where are the pictures of that? Who has drawn it? Yet it is but half a day from Gavarnie.

So it is with this awful parade of the great mountains standing on guard over the northern corner of Cardigan Bay, seen from the silence and the flat of ocean, towering above its glass; and all that late afternoon and evening I adored them until, with the last of the light, and a westerly air which was but the suggestion of a breeze, we groped north anxiously for the opening to Port Madoc channel. How I should make it, even upon the flood, in the darkness, I knew not; for the sands there are miles wide, and this channel (which I had never yet made) shifts continually. But God sent me a pilot.

He hailed us out of the half-darkness from a small boat, and asked us in the dialect which I will call ‘Anglo-Welsh’ (after Anglo-Catholic, Anglo-German, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-African, and the rest), ‘Whether we would not have a pilot, ah?’

Nor was he a pilot, as the event shall show; but at any rate he belonged to that shore, and would have more knowledge than I. So I gave him the helm, and went up forward to look out over the bows, as the Nona glided slowly along the flood into the channel which they call ‘The Water of the Smooth Lake’ (‘Afon Glaslyn’). For half an hour of that very slow gliding all went well. The darkness had quite fallen. There was no moon.

The gliding stopped; there was a slight thrill. She had hit Wales: an under-water, advance guard of Wales. The man at the helm was not apologetic, he was not humble, but he was at least subdued; and he said, ‘Her will float soon, so her will!’ I forbore to reproach him, not from kindness, but from cowardice.

The flood lifted her foot, she swung off, and we went on again up the darkness, with the least of little airs to give steering-way.

So for a quarter of an hour, covering perhaps a third of a mile: then again, rather sharper this time, came the honest thrust into the sand, and, what was more, she had run up against it so high this time that she was careening a little; she was taking it very hard, as the highbrows used to say of their beloved Prussia after the Armistice.

This time it was a good half-hour before she floated, and all that time the culprit was silent, nor did I reproach him. He at least had some vague memory of where the channel might be, and that I certainly had not.

As we lay there, waiting for the rising water to lift us, a clear sound of hammering rang from the black shore, far away, over the vast expanse of sand. It meant something to the pseudo-pilot, for he called out in loud, sing-song tones five or six words in the Welsh language, wherein I distinguished the word ‘afon,’ which means ‘water’; and his very distant Kymric fellow, there unperceived in the night, answered with a distant cry. What they said I know not; perhaps the unjust man at the helm was asking at what hour she would have water enough to lie higher up.

She floated again (it was now deep into the night, and the dim stars, through the haze overhead, watched our misery). The Nona glided on.

To be coming thus into a very shoal fairway, after dark, and to be in the hands of a pilot who was quite clearly one of God’s Three Welsh Fools—one of the Triad, one of the Three Great Fools of Britain—was a strain to the temper, a strain to breaking point. It was no good my taking the tiller, for I had no idea of the channel, and only saw now and then, straining my eyes forward, a little blob on the darkness that would be a drum-headed buoy slowly drifting past as we lifted on the young flood.

I used to think that the irritation against fools was irrational and purposeless. Where it is written in Holy Whit that one should tolerate fools even with gladness, I thought that this was a general rule of conduct. But now I know it to be a counsel of perfection and, indeed, like so many things in the Old Testament, a counsel generally to be avoided. For the strong exasperation against fools is, I am now sure, an instinct implanted in us (or, as fools themselves would say, ‘evolved’) whereby we defend ourselves against such accidents as this perpetual bumping which the Nona was undergoing on the sands of Port Madoc. Our anger against fools is a natural faculty of conservation, like the sensitiveness of the nerves of the skin; and in those countries where fools are too much tolerated (of which England) many little disasters proceeding from such tolerated fools combine to make a great one at last and to break down the state.

It is high time that a new book were written on Fools, like those of the sixteenth century, which are so excellent, and which you have in Latin, in German, in French, and in English: ‘The Praise of Folly,’ ‘The Ship of Fools,’ ‘The Fool’s Paradise,’ and others. If I had the leisure, it is one of the many hundred books which I should like to write myself: ‘The Fool, sociological, biological, and pathological, with many portraits and an appendix on the newly discovered Giant Fool of Aphasia.’ As I have not the leisure (and never had it) I bequeath the idea to other and younger and wealthier men, just as some years ago I bequeathed them the idea of a Cads’ Encyclopædia.

Among other chapters in this book I would have one on the Fool and the Label. For I maintain that labels are the great support and sustenance of the Human Fool.

Labels help the fool to do what little dull thinking he manages to get through. He knows whom to respect and whom to despise and what wine to choose, and so on—all by the label. And then again, labels are very useful to the fool by getting him taken for more than he is worth. Any number of my friends have said to me at one time or another, when I was having my laugh at the politicians: ‘A man does not get to a position like that (Secretary of State for Drainage, or Prime Minister, or what not) without abilities.’ Now this error shows how useful the label is to the fool. For a matter of fact I can testify, if any living man can, that the politicians who get their share of the swag are of all degrees in the matter of intelligence. Some have first-rate abilities, especially among the lawyers; many are of the ordinary second-rate, fifty-eight per cent, β _minus_ or Wandsworth intelligence; and quite a large proportion are Plumb Stuffed Fools, true Fools Absolute and of the Nadir; Rooted Fools. I knew one Fool Secretary of State who, in his Whitehall office, used to look at his official documents with a sort of tragic stare, as men look on the dead, and slowly wag them up and down in front of his face with a hopeless gesture. Then he would call upon his permanent official, who would explain to him what they meant, whereupon he would use one after another of the great Fool Phrases which are the furniture of the Fool’s Mind, such as, ‘Yes,’ ‘I see,’ ‘Quite,’ ‘Precisely,’ and then again ‘Yes.’ Having done this, he would sign his name to a number of papers which meant no more to him than so many Chinese tracts, and with a groan he would go off to spend his hundred pounds a week at Brighton.

Even in those trades where you would think there must be activity of brain for a man to advance at all, your fool drifts forward somehow. You find him quite high up in armies, and as for his number in the great cheating professions, notably share-shuffling, it is prodigious. Half the wealthy share-shufflers I have known have been fools animal, fools crass, fools to be driven blindfold or led about on a halter; but to do that great modern profession justice, there is a minority of share-shufflers as keen as needles and as wide-awake as ferrets. They have no more luck, however, than their duller brethren, for Fate rules them all, and alternate wealth and poverty is as much the rule with them as with the stupidest men. I will bargain that if you were to take samples of share-shufflers out of three sacks, the House of Lords, Monte Carlo, and the gaols, you would find the same percentage of fools in each sample.

Which leads me on to say that never was an old proverb of less accurate modern application than the proverb about the fool and his money. You will have heard it said that the fool and his money are soon parted. That was true enough for the yokel at the fair, but in this modern city life of ours it is just the other way. The Fool of Inherited Money (not the Gambling Fool) holds on to it with fish-hooks. It is the intelligent man, with many interests and (by some freak of nature) a generous heart, who squanders his hoard. But your fool gets his legs round the money-bag and crosses his ankles on the other side, clasps it higher up with both arms right round it and fingers tightly interlocked beyond; digs his teeth into the mouth of the same and, screwing up his eyes, clutches it all over desperately with the rigour of death, making himself wholly one with the beloved object. From this attitude nothing can move him save the lure of a plausible fellow promising to increase his wealth. I have seen a clot of fools thus hanging on to money-bags, all pressed up together like bats in a steeple, when a repulsive, overdressed young adventurer would slither by singing a light song of great wealth to be made in some scheme of his devising; and, behold, the fools would turn their round heads ungummed from their money-bags and listen in rapture to that song, and many of them would even hand over their bags to the young adventurer, never to see their gold again. But I say that, save when they are thus tempted by their blind avarice, fools are not easily parted from their money.

However, this harbour or pilot fool of mine was not, I think, troubled in this regard, for had he been a Fool of Wealth he would not have been blundering to get the Nona up-channel in the dark.

Five separate times did we touch and wait with increasing anger each time till the flood released us, but at last we came to the pool, and to reasonable deep water, and to a quay.

There did we put out our warping ropes, and springs, and the fenders alongside, and there did we give money to the fool as a reward for all the pain his folly had given us.

For also this is the rule in human life; that when you suffer anything you must pay a good price for the entertainment.

It is true of bad cooking, and of bad wine, and of a painful illness, started or continued by doctors, and of all the intolerable noisy hotels, full of insolence and maddening bells. It is true of all the bad things of the world. Nor does it follow that all cheap things are good. Far from it! But all good things are cheap (except caviare), and the way to get good things is to look for them as you would look for a penny which you had dropped in the straw of the (once again!) dear old omnibuses of my youth which were pulled by horses, and had standing at their door a guardian of the poorest of the people, foul in speech, grimy of skin, unshaven, bloodshot, from the gutter—but (oh, believe me!) a better citizen of a better time than ours.

Nona, cruising and voyaging Nona, wanderer over the seas of Britain, how in the solitude of your companionship my mind does lead me from one thing to another!

But that’s all one. It is time for sleep.

The new day having come, we got the half-ebb a little before six o’clock, and threaded away down the Channel for the open sea.

I ought, I suppose, to have stopped in Port Madoc, and renewed the memories of my childhood. But a fig for the memories of my childhood, at six o’clock in the morning: at six o’clock of a May morning, and a nice little leading breeze, all cold and merry! The memories of childhood and the contemplation of the divine are for the evening; they go with candle-light, and with a wine I know, and with friends of twenty years. But, so help me He that made me, when I find the morning wind blowing well for the salt and myself freshly roused from a good sleep, I am full of nothing but the coming of the course and an eagerness for the line of the sea against the sky and the making of a further shore.

It ought to be more dangerous to float down on the ebb without a local trickster, than to come up upon the flood. But fortune served, and the swirl of the ebb plainly marked the channel under that heartening light, with the glory of the new day shooting over the tops of the great and solemn mountains eastward, by the land.

Therefore, without misadventure, we came to the last marking buoy and took the sea; running easily with the wind nearly aft, but a little on the port quarter, so that all was well.

The great field or marsh before Harlech stretched there to landward; and, on its splendid defiant height, the old castle watched us as we went; the place where they hid poor Henry the Saint when the true Plantagenet was pacing for his blood.

Here is a landscape inhabited everywhere by things not of this world; by the gods of these hills whom our God has ousted; by the memory of great men dead and their wraiths, I suppose; and by the troops of the Empire, marching up the inland road, and by the chieftains, and by the very saintly men who cast their spell fifteen hundred years ago over the islands and the rocks of Lyonesse.

So we sailed on and on, heading over to the Atlantic southern corner of Wales. Then, far away in the midst of the sea, we heard the tolling of a bell....

The tolling of the bell was not only mournful (and at the same time terrible), but had in it an odd quality of message; as though it were not of the world through which we moved. For a bell is a land thing, and even in salt water we think of it as sounding upon a buoy near shore, or as the companion and regulator of human things, like the bell on board ship. For Mr. Masefield is very just when he notes how the clang of the ship’s bell by accident in the swoop of a ship down the great waves of an Atlantic storm, has an unnatural call: being rung without the aid of men’s hands.

Now this bell, as I heard it plainting away deeply, unable as yet to see the thing on which it swung, mixed up its noise in my mind with the great story of Saint Patrick: a story I had designed to write many years ago in Arras, where I went to see the manuscript which most vividly recalls him. But of that task I found myself incapable. However, I did visit his staff in Rome.

For the bell thus swinging on its buoy far out to sea swings on the western edge of that strange, long undersea road which they call the ‘Sarn Badrig’ (which means ‘The Causeway of Saint Patrick’) and cannot but awake the great story of the coming of Europe to Ireland.

How right they were to call that sunken ridge pointing straight to Ireland ‘The Roman Road of Patrick’! And how its sudden cessation symbolises the break, the wound, the rupture, by which this island was cut off from that: more than two hundred years ago! The ridge ends suddenly in deep water and continues no more. But the bell tolls on, appealing.

Saint Patrick is the second of those witnesses which remain to us of the more than natural quality of Ireland. The first is the old pagan story of the western harbours from which the dead were ferried over by night to their felicity. The second is that undying phrase in the ‘Confessio,’ where Saint Patrick himself says that at night and in dreams ‘he heard the voices of the Irish calling.’

It is gloom upon the mind to remember that the magnitude of the task set to Britain (a Roman land) in the matter of Holy Ireland, has been so missed: as though a man, having to encounter a mountain a little before the day thought it no more than a slight hill against the dawn. Here was the difficult land—but inspired—which Agricola said (and he knew his business) he could have mastered for Rome and right order with one legion. That legion was not given him, any more than the divisions were given that might have made the break through before Cambrai. Would that the officials at Rome had listened to him! Here was Ireland that most difficult of subjects, most intriguing of friends, most tenacious of enemies, set up against the western shores of Britain, of Roman land; and through all those centuries nothing was done to enrich the subject, to acquire the friend, to reconcile the enemy. But I am weak enough to believe that this failure also was in the Providence of God.

The mountains look upon the mountains: the mountains of Britain to the mountains of Ireland; from the east to the west, over a magic sea. But they look in wrath and remain sullen giants. Nor is the battle concluded.

As we sail past the bell very slowly (that Mark having come into sight) we discovered it to be enclosed in a sort of great cage which swung with slow dignity and bowed backwards and forwards upon the large swell, unaffected by the light breeze which gave us our two knots through sluggish water. My companion said to me, brutally enough, ‘How would you like to be shut up in that cage, and left there to the night and to the wind?’ I answered, ‘Not at all,’ and in this I told the truth. But the bell did not repine, for it was fulfilling its function, expiating its sins, pursuing its end, and consonant to the will that is behind this world. It tolls there beyond the seaward end of the Sarn Badrig to warn mariners of that long ledge submerged: barring the sea ways.

My mind returned to that great Causeway, that shelf of rock and shingle behind us, just hidden by the waves, pointing westward into the deep, mile after mile, like some drowned giant’s pier: the beginning of a bridge, as it were, between Britain and the Other Island; the marriage of Britain with the older island, whence the dead are ferried over to their repose.

But that Causeway was never completed: that bridge was never built; and the weight, the future consequence, of such a failure lies not upon Ireland, but (alas!) upon England.

For how many years did I not see the tragedy played out!

I knew its roots as well as any man. I knew that the gulf was a gulf of religion. I knew that the riddle was without solution for men whose eyes were cast downwards; who did not admit the unseen powers; who could see nothing but the mud and wealth in which they stood—yet I marvelled that the dreadful affair should drag on so long.

To the one set, to those sham ‘Liberals’ and ‘Unionists’ of the wretched money game at Westminster, it was a lucrative jest. They cared not for Ireland at all, and not too much for England. They treated the martyrdom of Ireland as a counter in their play. To do them justice, they thought that England could never suffer. To the others, to those of Ireland, the struggle was (as they thought) a battle always lost.

In the beginning of their effort, the men who had organised a political caucus for Ireland and had attempted, by what they called the ‘Nationalist’ Party, to get some settlement by way of the Parliamentary morass, were sincere; yes, at first, flamingly sincere. Parnell I never met; but Davitt I knew—and a man more heroically sincere I have never had the fortune to meet and respect. To the very end the effort of the Irishmen at Westminster retained some dwindling element of truth. And this I say though I know that many Irishmen to-day may laugh at me for saying it. But it is true. Down to the very end, sunk as they had grown in the sodden Westminster habit, and conventional as had become the repetition of their demand, some conception of a goal to be reached at last still inhabited these men. I knew them and I can testify to it. Right up to 1914—it sounds laughable, but it is true—the group at Westminster which called itself ‘The Irish Party’ did, in some fading way, still hold the idea of a ‘Parliamentary settlement.’ It was true of John Redmond and his brother. I may fairly say that his brother died for that idea.

They really did think (to me it was astonishing; to the younger Irish, to many of them at least, incredible) that a solution was to be reached through the working of those then undermined, moth-eaten, now crumbled falsehoods of the professional politicians: that the farce of voting is ‘the voice of the people’; that the House of Commons is ‘a mirror of England’; that ‘the nation rules through its representatives’—and all the rest of the absurdities bred by the grafting of French democratic attempts on to the decline of English aristocracy.

It sounds not possible that _any_ Irishman, even after a lifetime at Westminster, could be so deceived. But, I say it again, I knew these men. I can testify to the truth of what I have said. They did right up to 1914 still faintly hope. I knew them as friends and as opponents. They were my opponents when I took my share in defending the Catholic schools in 1906, and they were angry at my going to see the Pope in that year, to lay before him what I thought to be sufficient amendments to Mr. Birrell’s Bill (for they regarded the Catholic schools in England as their private domain). What is enormous, these men, Redmond and his party, thought that their Westminster method could still achieve something after the manifest betrayal of Ireland by the politicians labelled ‘Liberal’ upon the outbreak of the Great War.

It is a process I have watched over and over again in the course of my short but too long life; men not seeing what (one would imagine) should be apparent to a child.

These men did not see that you cannot get strength out of rottenness; nor justice, nor truth, nor generosity out of moribund institutions (such as is now the House of Commons), which, after a certain stage in decline, no longer live save for personal intrigue.

I say nothing, therefore, against them, in spite of their failure, and I revere their memory. The Irish in good time will give to the last protagonists in that futile attempt a due position in their annals; and specially to William Redmond and his brother, John Redmond.

For writing this I may be assailed from either side; but it is true.

Anyhow, I saw the tragedy going on before my eyes, as a man on a shore height may see a boat making straight for rocks under water, apparent to him, but of which her steersman knows nothing. I saw it in the years when I watched it as a young man from the gallery of the House of Commons; I saw it during the two Parliaments in which I sat; I saw it when I had left the place in disgust. I saw it in the last four years before the Great War; England, still drifting hopelessly on to the Irish reef: till she struck.

I saw, year after year, from my boyhood to my middle manhood and later, the Parliamentary poison eating up the Irish effort and the English face turned away from Ireland, failing to understand its own doom. For England, a seat of vision, might have understood the opportunity and the peril had the Irish themselves used pen and word directly. But the wrong instrument was used: the broken and now useless instrument of the Commons.

I saw the politicians whom the Irish sent over, or rather, who had the machinery of the Irish protest in their hands, grow fonder and fonder of the Westminster drug and degradation. I saw them half in doubt, at last, whether it were not better to remain in London half enjoying what had become second nature to them, the wretched pomposities of the House of Commons. They should rather have nourished the flame of their country. Yet they were honest men, and at heart and at root were Irish to the end. But they thought that England was to be made to understand by the use of a machine, the Parliamentary machine, which was already worn out. It was their fundamental error. What man desiring to move men would waste his time in Parliament?

If a man may boast of a small personal experience, I myself told them what would come. But they would not believe me. They thought me fanatical in this—and to the end. They put their trust in the slime of the lobbies. It swallowed them up.

I saw the end; or rather the beginning of the end—for the true end of the Irish quarrel is still hidden, and will be perhaps for us, here in England, very terrible. I saw the professional politicians carrying their silly labels of ‘Liberal’ and ‘Unionist,’ footling, on the very edge of the war precipice in 1914, at a game for avoiding the Irish issue, and (as they dined together) arranging tricks to put it off on one side. I saw their vast relief when they were given their chance to the threat of a mutiny against the salvation of England and Ireland. And I saw—I lived to see—the contemptible capitulation: the Parliamentary puppets (Lord Chancellors and the rest) shouting on a Wednesday that ‘they would not rest until they had taken the last arm from the hands of the last rebel,’ and on the following Friday, at the bidding of their financial masters, surrendering to Ireland for ever: Ireland that might have been the bulwark of England.... It is done.

So we sailed slowly on, past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, past that mournful great tolling bell which hangs there in the middle sea; imprisoned in its cage, expiating the too careless sins of its youth. The lamentable sound of it, the unsatisfied appeal, followed us over the deep. So we sailed on, with our nose for the Atlantic headlands of the south, and for the corners of Wales, where they face the Cornish and the Devon seas and Ireland also, beyond, with the great ocean rolling in between.

High as are the mountains on this shore, yet by a trick of the air they were soon out of sight.

That is a thing I have never understood. High land which ought to be plainly visible, and even overhanging one, disappears like this at sea magically on a clear day. When the weather is thick, one expects that; but the curious thing is that one may see clear air all around and a sharp horizon, nothing but sky and sea, and yet know perfectly well that the empty heaven at which one is gazing is really full of great hills close at hand. I do not know whether this happens in the clearer parts of the world. I have never seen it off North Africa or California. But upon the coasts of these islands it happens continually, and it is one of the hundred things which, I think, has made their inhabitants familiar with mystery and amenable to the unseen. For those of these islands, British and Irish, have always been remarkable for the sense of mystery; and among them none feel the effect of mystery more strongly than such as sail upon the sea.

It was an astonishing thing to sit there, at the end of the afternoon, just past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, heading for Strumbles light below the horizon, with a slight air, now from the northwest, giving the boat steering-way and no more, with the tiller lazily pushed a little up to keep her course, and looking over the rail to the left, eastward, and seeing nothing there but an horizon of empty sky; yet knowing very well that the sky was not empty, but that the enormous mass of Cader Idris and the enormous mass of Plinlimmon stood guarding the sea. It was like the continual experience of this life wherein the wise firmly admit vast Presences to stand in what is an apparent emptiness, unperceived by any sense.

As I thus looked over the rail musing upon the strangeness of such things, I remembered how, many years ago, in this same boat and holding this same tiller, I had wondered, after a too rapid passage across the Channel from France, under too much canvas and with too much wind, how near I might be to England. For one could not see the coast at all. The wind had dropped suddenly, it had grown dead calm, and the Nona lolloped on the big lump which the breeze had left. I had no idea, within ten miles, where I might be; it is a ridiculous confession to make, but true. It was the height of the spring tides, and I only roughly knew the set of them in mid-Channel. While I was so wondering, I thought I saw some difference between the lower and the upper sky, as though the lower grey were faintly darker than the upper. In a moment the line was defined, and I found myself looking at the turn of the high land east of Folkestone, where it runs away inland towards the old Roman harbour of Lympne. I was not more than three miles from shore.

And as there is a concealment of reality at sea, corresponding to the concealment of reality from our experience in human life, so also at sea there is occasionally vision, corresponding to that occasional vision which you also have in human life: but vision is much rarer than the concealment of reality.

Once out near the Looe with an ugly thunderstorm glowering and lumbering down from the north, full of zigzags of lightning, I, in this same boat, was shortening sail rapidly to meet the gust when it should come. Even as I did so, I saw a fierce red light beating upon the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head, more than forty miles away. You could see every detail of those chalk cliffs. You could have touched them with your hand; yet the sea in between was vague: and that was a vision of the unseen. I say that the sea is in all things the teacher of men.