The Cruise of the Nona quotes

… 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.

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 anyone 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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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!

… 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.

… 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 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.

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. …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 candlelight, 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 …

I tumbled up on deck quickly, and I found him pointing at a light which shone brilliantly upon the horizon, dead on our bow. He said to me: “Look, look, there is a light dead ahead!”

I said to him: “Of course!”

and that it was the light of Strumble Head, outside Fishguard; and I asked him what he would have expected. I had given him his course, and, naturally, he had lifted the light in good time.

The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this:

All human conflict is ultimately theological.

It was my custom during my first days in London, as a very young man, before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he would receive me;

It was, “Under what form of government is the state of man at its best?” I answered as all young men should answer, “A republic,” to which he answered gently in his turn, “

You cannot have a republic without republicans.

” Now that, for terseness and truth and a certain quality of revelation, was worthy of Aristotle.

So much for the Master’s excellent platitude.

It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things, should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came.

To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic state;

hours and hours during which nothing is done, hours which on shore would exasperate every nerve, but which here, on the soft movement of the sea, go past as easily as sleep.

For time on the water is quite different from time on land. It is more continuous; it is more part of the breathing of the world; less mechanical and divided.

There was not a breath of air, so there was no question of starting again during all those hours.

There we lay, sleeping and waking, smoking, talking a little, vacuous, ready to put up sail with the first hint of a wind and to get outside. But all that night until morning again, the calm continued.

How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man!

How admirable are the great works of man! But greater is God.

How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man!

How admirable are the great works of man! But greater is God.

In the profound night and the silence I considered that wide space of shelter and the dyke man had made against the Atlantic Power.

I have never been through it; neither have you been through death, you who read this. Yet, as we all know that death is a perilous passage and in accordance dread it, so I with the Wild Goose Race, well so named.

My book told me that little ships like mine getting into that water were often dismasted and “even foundered.” I like that word “even.”

It seems that in Wild Goose Race a boat is taken up and pitched to heaven and let drop again, twirled round like a teetotum, thrown over on her side, banged off sideways with great stunning blows upon the cheekbone, and blinded all the time …

Do not believe it when you read it in books that a race is made by anything so simple as a tide against a wind or a sudden precipice in the depths of the sea.

It is made by the anger of those that rule the sea.

And yet of races there is one that has always treated me kindly, and that is the race off the Start. I have been through it I know not how many times and always was the sea there either quite smooth, gentle, purring, and domestic;

Truly, indeed, did the immortal trio—Swift, Arbuthnot, and Pope—exclaim in chorus: “What is mortal man but a broomstick!”

Never are we in half a gale of wind but we pray crapulously for calm. Never are we in a calm but we whine peevishly for wind.

What, Dog, would you have the weather cut out for you like a suit of clothes? Is all the universe to arrange itself simply to your convenience, as it does for the very rich—so long as they keep off the sea?

Truly, indeed, did the immortal trio—Swift, Arbuthnot, and Pope—exclaim in chorus: “What is mortal man but a broomstick!” Never are we in half a gale of wind but we pray crapulously for calm. Never are we in a calm but we whine peevishly for wind.

What, Dog, would you have the weather cut out for you like a suit of clothes?

Is all the universe to arrange itself simply to your convenience, as it does for the very rich—so long as they keep off the sea?

Of these the one nearest to the shore was still discharging in its boats further human beings, who were fighting to land on whatever little strip of foothold could be found, while the two other ships stood by ready to reinforce the attack.

So true is it that men desire beauty before all things and that great beauty draws all men to it.

The atheists, of whom some few stalwarts remain, strong against the pantheist flood; those who despise mankind when they are healthy and when they are unhealthy despair of it;

Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore:

Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost incomprehensible to the other.

I have sometimes thought that whenever the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin channel) and storm and loot Instow.

It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a place of rest.

We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.

I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much, after thirty, over literary fame:

Again, does not any writer who is also reasonably manly prefer any one of man’s virtues to an accident of verse or prose?

Who with stuff in him would not rather be a brave boor than a cowardly poet?

So much for literary gents. Excluding my own self, I should like to see them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea and there scuttled.

So much for literary gents.

Excluding my own self, I should like to see them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea and there scuttled.

Their absurd little quarrels, their posings, their insufficiency, the chaos of their minds—all these things are a burden, and there is not one day’s riding upon a horse or sailing upon the sea (let alone still better things which, for the honour I bear you, …

It is not newness; it is not lack of tradition; it is difference of timbre—as violent as the difference between a railway whistle and the note of a thrush, or between wood and iron.

Modern men knowing a dozen out of a million causes reason downwards from the rules they have, instead of trusting their perceptions as their fathers did.

I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul. Meanwhile, men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.

I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul.

Meanwhile, men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.

The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood and, as it were, entered into it. That is government;

The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood and, as it were, entered into it.

That is government; that is Empire: to get into the shoes of the governed.

In the strange, successful, perhaps ephemeral, adventure which has put our high European culture in command over the lives of others in the East and in Africa, not a few men have arisen tested by circumstance and conforming to this idea.

and he was right.

No man living can understand the tides.

And the mystery of the tides is as good a corrective as one could find to our deadening pride in exact measurements, and to the folly of attempting to base real knowledge upon mere calculation:

But how will you account for the prodigious heave at Saint Malo?

Why does the flood come up Arun River like a racehorse recently invigorated with a bucket of beer, and at Newhaven hardly move at all up the Ouse?

I have stood outside the old piers at Newhaven in a little boat, with a northerly wind, expecting the first of the flood to help me to beat up, and waited for the quarter flood, and the half flood, and, later than that, and still …

The explanation is given in some simile like this: “If you shake a basin slightly, the water will begin to swing with a regular movement back and forth.” So it will.

But who shakes the Lake of Geneva?

Or who catches the Adriatic at either end, and gives it a regular balance up and down, exactly so often, every so many hours?

The sea teaches one the vastness and the number of things, and, therefore, the necessary presence of incalculable elements, perpetually defeating all our calculations.

The sea, which teaches all wisdom, certainly does not teach any man to despise human reason.

I suppose there was never yet any Kantian fool or worser pragmatist who would not have been cured of his folly by half a week of moderate weather off the Onion.

But the sea does teach one that the human reason, working from a number of known premises, must always be on its guard, lest the conclusion be upset in practice by the irruption of other premises, unknown or not considered.

In plain words, the sea makes a man practical; and the practical man is, I suppose, as much the contrary of the pragmatist as the sociable man is the contrary of the socialist, or the peaceable man the contrary of the pacifist.

And, talking of pacifists, there is nothing more pleasing to note than the excellent unconscious patriotism of the men and women who solemnly propose that patriotism is the ruin of the world.

And, talking of pacifists, there is nothing more pleasing to note than the excellent unconscious patriotism of the men and women who solemnly propose that patriotism is the ruin of the world.

There is a delightful irony in observing how intensely national these anti-nationalists are!

It is a profound and satisfying thing to watch. Anyone can get a good laugh out of the patriotism of men with no nation, or, at any rate, with a nationality very different from that which they profess.

A French or Italian internationalist and pacifist will not only sympathise with the enemies of his country, not only give them actively all the help he can, but he will particularly attack the soul whereby his country lives, its traditions and character.

If he is French he will hate wine, if Italian, macaroni. But does the English pacifist hate tea?

The unrooted man is a very dangerous type, and in England happily unknown. To read anything said or written by such men as Mr. Wells or Mr.

and in that cheap passage, also, I learnt from a stoker two songs: one called “The Corn Beef Can,” and the other called “The Tom Cat.” They are of the great songs of this world.

A man should learn all the songs he can. Songs are a possession, and all men who write good songs are benefactors.

No people have so many songs as the English, yet no people sing less in these last sad days of ours. One cannot sing in a book.

I bobbed up my head again and found that even in that short moment she had almost swung into irons. I put her round just in time, and we raced and flew, breasting the seas for that farther little misty harbour town.

The Nona is like those women who are peevish and intolerable under all conditions of reasonable happiness, but come out magnificently in distress.

I lie; for the Nona is never peevish and intolerable. What I mean is that in easy weather she is a little sluggish on the helm, and has one or two other small faults, excusable after the fortieth, the fiftieth, year:

… upon the water, she takes the sea as though she belonged to it, and so she went that day, riding in highbred fashion, worthy of all praise, and praise she received from me as she leant over and took the combers one after the other.

I gave her perpetual encouragement: for no boat will do her best unless she is sufficiently flattered.

Thanks to that increasing wind, the passage was short enough, and what we had said would at most take three days was accomplished between a morning and an evening, for it was still broad daylight when we passed outside the group of rocks of which …

Beyond that he did nothing; but I think he was proud of keeping his legs so long as he could grasp that forestay.

It is no use to argue nor much use to command in the face of imbecility.

I shouted to my companion to let go the chain when I thought the right moment come, and at the same instant brought her up sharp.

I asked him whether he had any fault to find with the boat. He said no, she was a very good boat so far as he could see, but he did not pretend to understand these things. He went over the side into the darkness.

He was and he remains a mystery.

Was he a Charon man who pulled a ferry from shore to shore? Or was he a man who lounged about on the quay, dressed as his companions were dressed, but timid of tumbling water? Or was he a vision? Or a detective?

I have never thought the evidence against the “Johannine Comma” so strong as that in its favour: but, though it were proved unauthentic tomorrow, what possible effect could that discovery have on the reality of the Trinity?

The Faith is an attitude of acceptance towards an external reality: it is not a mood.

Now, of all this the men who elbow the Catholic Church on all sides in non-Catholic communities, such as England, remain as ignorant as they are of Sanskrit—with those few exceptions of which I have spoken.

It was at last destroyed in the very beginnings of the new Paris under Napoleon. Its memory has almost disappeared.

The Templars’ centre in London passed gradually to the lawyers, and now fulfils, among other functions, the very useful one of preventing cabs from getting too quickly from the Embankment to Fleet Street.

As for the two round churches, the mysterious symbols of that great, now dead, freemasonry (which for a moment threatened all our lives), that one in which the Mass was preserved has disappeared from that capital of Europe where the Mass has perhaps most power, …

But a man cannot always be bothered to time these things, and in a little boat under a strain he may not be able to do so.

But the very commonest form of error in this, as in everything else, comes from an absolute and false certitude.

You say to yourself, “There is no doubt at all that that light is such-and-such a light.”

It was not till I came within a hail of it that I knew it for what it was—the Varne Buoy, not a hundredth the size of a lightship.

I suppose that the regularity and certitude of modern mechanical life on land tend to make men exaggerate the fixity of evidence.

When men dealt more with the caprice of Nature, they were more ready to admit two things which modern men underestimate: the possibility of marvel and the fallibility of the senses.

And Fowey is a thing by itself. One may say of it what Mr. Barry Pain said in his review of that ought-to-be-most-famous book called Delina Delaney: “This is a thing which only happens once in a thousand years.”

Fowey is the harbour of harbours, and the last port town left without any admixture of the modern evil.

It ought to be a kingdom of its own. In Fowey all is courtesy, and good reason for the chance sailing-man.

for it blew steadily for the best part of an hour and then ceased. But, like its younger brother off Beachy, it was peculiar to the high land; for it came due northerly, whereas the main wind had east in it.

I was watching the morning star burning like a sacred furnace on the edges of the black hills when Satan sent that wind and tried to drown three men.

But we reefed in time—there were three of us, one for the helm and two to the reef;

… and content, as I sailed northward, I chanced to look, after an hour’s steering or so, eastward again towards the open sea—and then it was that there passed me the vision I shall remember forever, or for so long as the longest life may last.

Like ghosts, like things themselves made of mist, there passed between me and the newly risen sun a procession of great forms, all in line, hastening eastward. It was the Fleet recalled.

The slight haze along that distant water had thickened, perhaps, imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them too quickly in the distance. But, from whatever cause, this marvel was of short duration.

or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them too quickly in the distance. But, from whatever cause, this marvel was of short duration. It was seen for a moment, and in a moment it was gone.

Then I knew that war would come, and my mind was changed.

The bright air was the same around me and the heartening morning wind, the happy course of the Nona, making for a known port with all in her favour and something of youth in her and all round.

It was a chief quality always looked for by our fathers in those who rose high, and were worthy so to rise; nor were they disappointed.

Ambition of old was a mark of greatness. But today it is the mark of the capable man that ambition disgusts him.

That mark is most notable in Mussolini. It is most notable in Foch. It was notable in most of the commanders of armies; in the admirals of fleets. It was most notable, of course, in the saintly eminence of Mercier.

and once, a draught to last forever, I came up under such a dawn and with so tender a dying crescent in the sky that I spent an hour in Paradise.

What are those days of glory? They are not memories: are they premonitions, or, are they visions?

They are not memories, though perhaps Plato thought them so, and our modern pantheists, with Wordsworth for their spokesman here, called and believed them so.

Neglect them, but ask yourself, as I do when such rare moods are granted, whether they be visions or premonitions, and hope that premonitions they may be.

For certainly they are the supports of this life, and we creep from one to another like travellers from inn to inn, and when they fail us, the world will be no more endurable.

Such thoughts I had—and have had repeatedly—in this run of water under a morning sky. It is inhabited, is all that air and sea, by something beneficent—at least, I have always found it so.

though it is true that anchoring-ground has to be carefully picked in that corner by Chesil Cove.

But I am not bold; and when I leave Torbay, I run to Lyme Regis.

The mouth of the Exe puzzles me with an unanswered question, which recurs in one river-mouth after another all over the West. It is this: How were they used by antiquity?

There is here, to use a mathematical metaphor, integration.

Certitude comes from the integration of an indefinitely great number of differentials.

It is in this way that we have certitude of a personality, of a voice, of a type.

The great Ferrero quarrels with that famous phrase. Yet he himself has written one more damning; for he writes: “

The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, and they knew nothing.

”

men who could be hired for any adventure: who had nothing to lose. They seem to have been pretty well the only material available, and, of course, they were worthless as soldiers. They must have been quite untrained.

Sedgemoor was not a battle.

There is also in this coast an entry called Charmouth, where the Danish pirates of the Dark Ages fought hard against the King of Winchester, but I know it only as a slight mark caught far off from the sea.

What produced Lyme Regis? How came there to be a harbour there?

Men need harbours almost as much as they need the gods.

Men so much need harbours that in any long stretch of harbourless coast they will catch at any small advantage of reef, or projecting headland, and make shift with that.

So had I always done, whether coming or going, whether easting or westing, leaving aside all that long coast of Dorset hither of the Isle of Portland, and watching afar off the endless unbroken patch called the Chesil Beach quite empty of men.

What a gift of compensation it is that the horror of our great towns and the ease of our new communications has produced deserts between!

No one knows those deserts as well as the man who sails along the sea, following the coasts of England. The foulness of the great towns is discharged by the trainload upon beaches of sand;

Those cliffs of Dorset coming down on to the sea are less known to travelling Englishmen than much of foreign land. That Chesil Beach along which I have so often run is utterly bare and silent except for the noise of the sea.

There never was such loneliness!

One big house, built there I suppose for the sake of the isolation, inland, under the cliff, where some old landslide has oddly disfigured the face of the earth: then, for miles and miles, nothing.

and at last, that forbidding Chesil Cove where a few houses of fishermen, huddled together, look out upon the most inhospitable mass of threatening waters I know.

There are few corners of the English seas which give the effect of a curse; but this is one of them.

The terrible Race of Portland lies three miles out, at the end of the Bill. The prison with its abominable memories stands above. The main traffic of the Channel lies far out.

… smooth patch, you must calculate exactly, so as to catch the other tide up the eastern face under the old prison, and at last make Portland Harbour after ten long miles—and as many hours, and as much peril as God sees fit to send you.

Portland Harbour is one of the very, very rare successes of man in his coaxing of the sea.

I will not be sure, for I have not the knowledge, but, at any rate, I know of no other in my narrow experience except Cherbourg; and Cherbourg is not thoroughly closed. Dover is a failure—they say it ought never to have been built.

Oh, long before his last assaults begin The enemy’s on; the stronghold is betrayed; And the one lonely watchman, half-dismayed, Beyond the covering dark he hears them come: The distant hosts of Death that march with muffled drum.”

And, indeed, it is very ridiculous the way in which men try to withstand this influence of their enemy, Time.

They had far better accept the condition of mortality and remember a truth which was plainly painted in large black letters upon a large white placard in Eden, which was restated by Dante, and then repeated by Malherbe, that our only peace lies in the …

I have seen Charybdis—piffling little thing; I have not seen the Maelstrom, but I have talked to men who told me they had seen it.

But Portland Race could eat either of them and not know it had had breakfast.

I have nearly always been successful in catching the smooth, narrow belt near the point: but I also once found that smooth belt fail me, and so have gone through the tail-end of Portland Race; only the very tail-end.

It is greater or smaller, according to whether the wind be offshore or on, but it is immense always, for it is two miles or more across.

It lumps, hops, seethes, and bubbles, just like water boiling over the fire, but the jumps are here in feet, and the drops are tons.

There is no set of the sea in Portland Race: no run and sway: no regular assault. It is a chaos of pyramidical waters leaping up suddenly without calculation, or rule of advance. It is not a charge, but a scrimmage; a wrestling bout;

There is no set of the sea in Portland Race: no run and sway: no regular assault. It is a chaos of pyramidical waters leaping up suddenly without calculation, or rule of advance.

It is not a charge, but a scrimmage; a wrestling bout; but a wrestling bout of a thousand against one.

It purposely raises a clamour to shake its adversary’s soul, wherein it most resembles a gigantic pack of fighting dogs, for it snarls, howls, yells, and all this most terrifically. Its purpose is to kill, and to kill with a savage pride.

a wrestling bout; but a wrestling bout of a thousand against one. It purposely raises a clamour to shake its adversary’s soul, wherein it most resembles a gigantic pack of fighting dogs, for it snarls, howls, yells, and all this most terrifically.

Its purpose is to kill, and to kill with a savage pride.

And all these things you find out if you get mixed up in it on a very small boat.

Even these have been taught respect. During the war Portland Race sank a ship of fourteen thousand tons, loaded with machinery, and if you were to make a list of all the things which Portland Race has swallowed up, it would rival Orcus.

Portland Race is the master terror of the world.

And here I can imagine any man who had sailed saying to me that there are many other races abominable in their various degrees. I have not been through Alderney Race since the nineties, but I suppose it is still going strong.

But I cannot. Let me end with this piece of advice.

Never trust any man unless he has gone round Portland Bill in something under ten tons.

Never allow any man to occupy any position of import to the state until he has gone round Portland Bill under his own sail in something under ten tons.

Even as we were looking landward, and laughing to see the tumble of water between us and the cliff, which tumble we thought to have thus escaped, even as we thought we had passed it, the thing ran at us.

It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up to play.

It was abominably conscious and alive.

It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up to play.

It was abominably conscious and alive.

It had said, “Here is a boat which thinks that, because it has gone outside, it can escape me,” so it galloped up in a rush, and swarmed all around us, and we were in for an hour of it before we got to the …

At any rate, there he was, asking poignantly whether, indeed, those were the Needles.

For a moment I hesitated whether I should not tell him it was the Old Man of Hoy or the Giant’s Causeway, but the spirit of truth entered into me, and I answered, “Yes.”

He remains a problem, and to me, therefore, fascinating; for there is nothing so holds the mind—my mind at least—as a problem connected with reality. I know that many men get an equal pleasure out of problems set them in fiction;

… just at the very top of the flood and have the good fortune to get round and open Swanage Bay, you are out of this main stream just before the ebb begins, and another, younger flood takes you up past Old Harry and towards Poole.

Old Harry is an isolated chimney of chalk rock which still stands, expecting doom.

He had a wife standing by him for centuries—a lesser (but no doubt nobler) pillar. She crashed some years ago and now he is alone. He cannot wish to remain so much longer, staring out to sea without companionship.

Yet Poole, thus easy to the ancients, could never be entered without local knowledge.

It is a trap, baited and set.

As you look from overseas, there stands clear before you the entry to a great harbour. You see plainly a narrow gate, an obvious door into a wide sheet of sheltered water within. But if you steer for that entry, you strike.

Whereas where you know nothing, you go on from your first discovery to one or two more, and then to ten or a hundred all in a chain.

So that the exploration of the known is like multiplication, and the exploration of the unknown is like addition.

Or again, the survey of the known is like the sowing of a field with a manifold harvest; whereas the surveying of the unknown is but the lengthening out of a trail.

But the other kind of man disassociates those two ideas, and is contemptuous of anyone who confuses such different things.

In Picardy they keep out cows with chance thorns, in England with a three-pound gate. Both keep out cows.

I have had sharp personal experience of the matter in one definite instance, and that is a battery of field artillery. In the ideas of the English service, a French field battery is extremely slack.

No; it is a scribbling proletariat, insecure and exigent, which regularly turns out column by column daily to explain how right and just it is that he should himself remain insecure and exigent.

It is as though the torture were applied to some poor prisoner to compel him to proclaim the beauty of torture.

That old socialist fervour of the great Dock Strike of ’89 and its time is dead: I regret it, for there was something very noble in its folly.

That was a date for you, if you like! That was a year to remember! In history perhaps, many a generation hence, it will be made a dividing point between the old and the new relations of the peoples of Europe.

It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.

It is absorbing to watch change coming upon a whole civilisation.

They carried the feeling of scientific certitude which physical research had given them into the field of ideas. They came to imagine their metaphysical dogmas to be not transcendental but demonstrable by experiment, or, at least, by the common sense of mankind.

Here was a curious and, perhaps, unique incident in human history: a faith which did not know it was a faith.

The rationalists had not any doubts at all, because everything exterior to their faith seemed to them insignificant save in so far as it combated their faith.

It is not secure. It has no moral basis or custom behind it.

The stability of a society depends upon an acceptation of its laws.

If their enforcement is thought right, and the institutions which they defend are accepted by the conscience of men, the laws and society stand; if not, both fall.

But two things are probable—not certain: (1) that compulsory labour will come; (2) that it will be given some name not even remotely connected with the idea of slavery or compulsion.

Probable, not certain; for who can tell, in the millioned complexity of affairs, what new factor may not arise? A man may go round on a mule calling himself a prophet, and change the whole world tomorrow.

Yet men prophesy today, when all is mist and fog. They prophesy as never did they prophesy before: with an assurance and a conviction born of physical science misapplied.

Worse things have given way to better in their eyes. To others it is a despair; they are of that temperament which can only repose in fixed sanctities. For my part, it is to me a regret.

Because the change is unhappy, and happiness is the end of man.

The older England I knew (the spirit of which has almost disappeared) was a happier place; happier not only in the immediate elements of personal happiness, but in the more distant elements of corporate happiness, such as national pride and security.

Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government.

Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption.

So long as men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, forever—so long you will have corruption present among those who …

For they could put an end to the system if they preferred justice to their own little careers and the general good of England to their personal ease or notoriety.

Sometimes they try to salve their consciences by substituting a general for a particular condemnation⁠—the oldest device known to governing man for shirking the duties of government.

I remember an excellent comedy of this sort in which I myself took part.

Then begins quite another set of actions. The politician as a private individual accepts a highly salaried post in the pay of the said company promoter and lives on the profits of the monopoly.

Only insane suspicion could connect the two acts.

It was a startling theory to hear: it was also completely new to me. But it had this advantage: it made him a contented supporter of that which others either laughed at cynically or held their tongues about.

I do not think that we shall have much of that argument. It is exotic.

No man of our blood is really comfortable in the presence of financial corruption.

He may tolerate it: he may practise it; but it does not fit in with his conscience, still less excite his enthusiasm.

but, unless he does something of the sort, his name will only be one of a hundred names, half comic and all wearisome.

For the trade has lost its dignity. It is found out.

I have delayed on this subject too long.

… to suit the wind is a model of the virtue which the theologians called temperance, and which has nothing to do with the historical dread of wine bred in those who have themselves suffered from, or have seen in their families, the disease called dipsomania.

For temperance does not mean doing things half-heartedly, still less does it mean doing or not doing things extremely.

It means suiting your implements to your motive power, and not carrying on at a risk. It is not unconnected with dignity, and there is something profound about it; I will call it the contralto among the virtues, and leave it at that.

For temperance does not mean doing things half-heartedly, still less does it mean doing or not doing things extremely.

It means suiting your implements to your motive power, and not carrying on at a risk.

It is not unconnected with dignity, and there is something profound about it; I will call it the contralto among the virtues, and leave it at that.

It means suiting your implements to your motive power, and not carrying on at a risk. It is not unconnected with dignity, and there is something profound about it;

I will call it the contralto among the virtues, and leave it at that.

We sped on (the stream against us, very slight now that we were inside the Ness);

and that if, or when, she strikes, it will not be his fault. There is no man living that can ever tell you the deep into Rye Harbour, for it shifts with every wind, and at the best it is of the narrowest.

As for me, I have made it four times in my life, each time I have touched and never have I struck, and how the thing was done no one knows.

Nevertheless, they still build ships in Rye, and the tradition of the sea is all about it, though what used to be the old haven is now a field.

but I never heard that any such pains were taken to prevent its destruction by increase or rebuilding, or by any of those courses which bring death to beauty, such as a good train service, clubs, large and torturing hotels.

Rye manages to live on. I suppose there is a spell.

At any moment it may be broken, and the flood will pour in.

… a trade (and to this I have been condemned all my life since my twenty-fifth year) it certainly is the hardest and the most capricious, and, indeed, the most abominable of trades, for the simple reason that it was never meant to be a trade.

A man is no more meant to live by writing than he is meant to live by conversation, or by dressing, or by walking about and seeing the world.

For there is no relation between the function of letters and the economic effect of letters;

Conversely, what the French powerfully call the “bitter taste of reality” has very little chance with the crowd of the North. It is a spur and a relish to the crowd of the South.

You could not sell Barrie in Arles nor Baudelaire in Pudsey.

The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the canon, the attempt to achieve a standard.

This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense.

It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and no more.

You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, “except when euphony demands it.” I would go further;

But in so far as they indulge in the fantasy, they are not walking; and if they do it the least bit too much, they are playing the fool.

A wise man said to me once, “Don’t go and get your words from the artist colourman’s.”

Would that I had remembered his words in youth as I now humbly acknowledge them in age.

For it is with poetry as with love and with singing in tune. It is with poetry as with the sense of reality.

It is with poetry as with the toothache. Either you have it, or you have it not.

There is no getting near poetry; and though there are degrees in it, the boundary between its being and its not being is as sharp as a razor: on the one side is It, and on the other is nothingness.

I had almost forgot I was sailing. What! Of two such occupations, the benediction of dealing with the sea and the degradation of scribbling, can you forget the better for the worse? I can.

I am of a fallen race. I follow downwards.

But I am aboard the Nona again, and must put her out down-channel.

… two o’clock in the morning with the waning moon just rising, the sky clear, two reefs in my mainsail, the second jib, and a reef in my foresail, knowing well that I must watch all night, and that I shall get no sleep till morning.

For it is one of the glories of sailing that you are under the authority of the heavens, and must submit to the whole world of water and of air, of which you are a part, not making laws to yourself capriciously, but acting as servant or brother of universal things.

It would be no bad thing if someone (I am not competent) were to draw up a list of advices for the brutish man who is too poor to sail a big boat, or is not such a fool as to desire one:

I mean a list of advices for a man who sails such a boat as the Nona: say, boats from seven tons to twenty.

The first article in such a list would be this: Cruising is not racing.

But on this one could write a whole volume, with digressions upon the general evils and corruptions of these our latter times when the Beast has most certainly been let loose out of the Pit, and is going about the world breathing smoke out of …

but in racing you can.

Boat A gets in front of Boat B. Any fool can test that, and today was made for fools.

Well, then, whatever the root of the evil, evil it is, and it has corrupted our way of living in happy little boats. Remember, and write it down: “Cruising is not racing.”

… very nearly all the way back, but even that did not persuade me to a motor, for, of all things abominable to God and His Saints, I know of nothing more abominable than machinery and petrol and the rest on board a little cruising boat.

I would rather die of thirst, ten miles off the headlands in a brazen calm, having lost my dinghy in the previous storm, than have on board what is monstrously called today an “auxiliary.”

The name is worthy of the thing. By auxiliaries the Roman army perished. Further, it is a nasty foreign sort of term. Call it the machine and tell the truth.

I would rather die of thirst, ten miles off the headlands in a brazen calm, having lost my dinghy in the previous storm, than have on board what is monstrously called today an “auxiliary.” The name is worthy of the thing.

By auxiliaries the Roman army perished.

Further, it is a nasty foreign sort of term. Call it the machine and tell the truth.

that you know where everything is to be got at in any emergency; that you have to look for nothing; that you make the most of every space—and the rest of it.

All this I say knowing full well that I myself am incapable of it; but I am giving advice, I am not practising.

I am expending myself for the good of others, and what I myself do is no affair of yours. The best known and the most tragic tag descended to us from antiquity is, “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.”

… little familiar touches will make whatever landsman is passing his time gazing out to sea from the pier-head recognise from far off the Nona, as the Arabs recognised the great ship of Richard the Lionhearted, saying, “There comes the red sail of the Frankish king.”

There never was such a boat as the Nona for coming in hugger-mugger.

But do as I preach, not as I practise.

There never was such a boat as the Nona for coming in hugger-mugger.

But do as I preach, not as I practise.

Have everything in its place and a place for everything, so that, in a flash, you can shorten sail, let go the anchor, get to your warping ropes, or do any of those many things required by sailing-men.

Now the putting on of these little markings is of value, also, to prevent you letting out too little chain.

The rule of thumb is: Three times as much chain as there is depth of water.

This, in my youth (and for my youth I must be forgiven), I neglected in the port of Harwich, thinking it was nearer high tide than it was, so the little ship got adrift, and was rescued, or, as the man preferred to call it, …

Do not wish for too long a life, for too large a fortune, or for too much honour. Eat your peck of dirt before you die; take the rough with the smooth; consider that it is all in a day’s work; expect rain and fine.

In general, write out a list of all the commandment-proverbs and learn that list by heart. Then break them.

They that sail too close to the wind have great difficulty in bringing their boat round, especially in a seaway, and there is nearly always some of their canvas (if it is an honest boat, and not one of your millionaires’ models) not doing all …

This attempt to be always pointing up is one of the curses brought in by racing.

Your own hearty middle-class boat can never point close to the wind. If she can, it is a bad sign, for she will be putting on airs.

Be content if she will lie and sail at an angle of forty-five degrees from the direction in which the wind is blowing. If she cannot do that she is a bad boat, but if she can do that, she is well enough.

One paragraph I have put to memory, and often recite to myself with delight. It runs thus (after praising a particularly difficult passage or shortcut behind a great reef of our coasts):

“But the mariner will do well to avoid this passage at the approach of the turn of the tide; or if the wind be rising, or darkness falling upon the sea.”

I like that!

… man of the small boat should bear in mind, and they are singularly like the things which the poor man must bear in mind in the company of the rich, or the ruler of a weak nation when he is dealing with a strong neighbour.

For instance, rules or no rules, no large craft will ever make room for you; you must make room for it.

That is especially true of mechanical craft.

so that I had the pleasure of half-shaking my spars out in the tumble of her greasy wake.

When, therefore, you are in a crowded fairway at night, always give way; it is the only rule. And have the sense to behave as the lawyers do: forget that there is such a thing as justice, let alone honour or pride.

Then there is another rule to be remembered, which is serviceable enough, and that is, when you have plenty of room and the larger thing coming at you is still at some distance, keep your course for some little time, in order to give your …

… that is, when you have plenty of room and the larger thing coming at you is still at some distance, keep your course for some little time, in order to give your enemy (as I will call him) the chance to do the right thing.

There is nothing so baffling as to have to deal with another craft that does not know its own mind.

If the hostile fellow sees you on a definite course, he has at least an opportunity for making his calculations and avoiding trouble.

… Vengeur, of the Hood, and of the two beautiful enamelled motorboats which are (I hope) to be purchased out of our pockets for the Salaried League of Nations at Geneva, and there moored along the wharf of its private garden, well called Tom Tiddler’s Ground.

But none of all these ships is to be mentioned in the same breath as the Nona.

The wind dropped quite suddenly while it was yet dark before we had passed Fairlight, that is, within an hour’s running.

… very real pleasure, none the less, which a man takes in that which should, if he were honest and charitable, provoke him rather to indignation, and the abominable follies of the academic fool do give me that pleasure, which I suppose I ought to fly.

When a don shows his great learning by spelling Clovis “Hclodhovech,” I feel not pain, as I should, but pleasure: it makes me think of “Clodhopper.”

When the official historian, hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that the great officials of fifth-century Rome knew no Greek, or when his fellow, similarly hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that Homer’s poems were composed by a committee, I, who ought to be pained, laugh.

Scholarship has authority when it possesses data which those who accept that authority have not had the leisure or the industry or perhaps the power to examine.

It possesses no authority whatever against the common sense of the most ignorant man.

I come across a document in which there is used strong language against Richard III. The manuscript, which denounces him as the murderer of his nephews, qualifies the advent of the Tudor, and draws up arguments in favour of his claim.