Chapter XIII: Part 13

There is one type of this false academic authority which has spread over historical work like a fungus, and particularly over the discussion of the early Church. It is the paying of deference to a man’s authority in things which have nothing whatever to do with his scholarship, and which are mere creatures of his imagination, of as much and as little value as similar creatures raised by any wholly illiterate layman. It is in the matter of the Gospel of Saint John that this rubbish has accumulated its most monstrous heap. A great scholar like Wernle (I suppose he was a great scholar; I am no judge, but I am assured by other scholars that he was so, and I must take it to be true) has authority when he says, ‘This or that passage is of the style and manner of this or that period.’ Even so, his authority is limited by the authority of other scholars, and even so, it is as well that he should put forward, even for the uninstructed reader, some grounds for his judgment. But when he ventured to affirm that the exaltation of spirit shining through the Fourth Gospel cannot be that of an eye-witness, his judgment is worth no more than that of a cook’s boy apprentice, or of a street scavenger. A man’s power of judging the psychology of his fellow men varies with capacities quite disconnected from scholarship in letters. My power to decide whether Boswell really knew Johnson (supposing there were no evidence besides the book itself) is based upon my knowledge of how men feel and act, and the difference between the way in which they talk when they are making things up, and the way in which they talk when they are bearing witness and recording a real experience. I may be right, or I may be wrong, in my conclusion: but my powers of arriving at it have nothing to do with my powers of judging a text. Yet Wernle’s empty guesswork, even when it is manifestly absurd, is treated with respect, and, what is exasperating, with special respect by the orthodox. The orthodox seem to feel, in approaching the sceptics, that they are dealing with superiors. It ought to be just the other way. The people who are in the tradition of Europe, who have behind them the whole momentum of civilisation, who have humour and common sense as the products of faith, ought to approach their contradictors as inferiors.

It is certainly so in the case of this Gospel of Saint John. A man who denies its apostolic authority, and who comes forward with a disconnected mass of guesswork, scrappy particularisms, and odd conjectures, should be regarded as the incongruous disturber of a judgment upon which millions of men through centuries had preserved a firm conclusion. It is true that even the widest tradition, the largest body of mature judgment, must listen to any objection and weigh it. To refuse that is to deny the rights of human reason. But it is monstrous that the sound, admitted, fixed, concluded thing, the heritage of the human race, should be put on its defence, and that any assault on it should be supported by a predisposition to accept any conclusion so long as it be novel.

We are accused of a bias in favour of accepted truth. We should reply that our opponents have a much worse bias against. They say we begin by desiring to find witnesses to Jesus Christ. It is true. But they begin with a fierce desire to destroy the evidence to Jesus Christ. Make them come out with their proofs: accuse them roundly of humbug. Laugh at their provincial rejection of the marvellous. Unmercifully ridicule their lack of proportion; their ignorance of the human mind; their failure to taste tradition. Rattle them. Believe me, in battle you must be fierce. The louder the victim’s cries the nearer you are to victory.

All that suggested by the mere name ‘Hastings’ and the charlatanry of ‘Senlac’; but really such a name might suggest whole cartloads of books.

Go to Battle and see the place where Harold fell. You can mark it to a yard. Look at the little tomb in which they say Odo lay; see the Malfosse still clearly there just westward of the tennis courts in the gardens of the Abbey; a trap for cavalry. Note how the Normans, Bretons, and all the rest of the foreigners could not deploy until they were at the very foot of the hill, and how they were handicapped by its steepness without the momentum of a gallop down hill to begin with; it was that which nearly lost them the battle. Mark the length of the ridge, and ask yourself how it could have been held against heavily armed horse with less than thirty or forty thousand men packed in a dense formation, for it is nearly a mile from flank to flank, and would need two thousand locked shields to cover it.

There never was, I suppose, one day spent in this island with greater consequence to Christendom.

It was but a drift past the Martello Towers during that morning, and I slept through it, having been at the helm all through the long night, till my companion relieved me. When I woke we were opposite that entry to Pevensey which is an entry no more, but which still holds, strongly challenging the sea, the Roman walls of the Andred Fort.

The place was a narrows, like those which give entry to the wide expanse of Portsmouth Harbour; and, as in that gulley between Portsmouth and Gosport to-day, there must then have raced through the gulley of Pevensey the gallop of the flood and of the ebb tides. Within was a vast expanse of level water that could hold as many score or hundred of ships as any captain might lead. To-day you can follow clearly enough the old level of the salt—but that great haven is now all dry land.

It is full of memories. The ditches in the marsh still bear the name of such poor branches and inlets of the once spacious harbour as struggled to live on into a later time. But no man will sail into Pevensey again. Thither the Mora sailed with William of Normandy aboard, ahead of his forest of a fleet, and at its bow a little cupid all in gold, and on its decks a great cask of wine broached for glory. He had made his land-fall by the white gleam of Beachy near at hand. He had outrun all his transports, and he lay there off this coast awaiting them, until a man sent up the mast cried that he saw the fleet approaching ‘like a wood.’ It was Saint Michael’s Day.

The place is full of memories. The people who wrote down the legends of England under Alfred preserved after four hundred years a dreadful memory of some pirate raid, in which all the garrison of Pevensey perished, on some day between the end of the Imperial rule and the landing of Saint Augustine.

Strangely enough, we have no record of the process whereby that vast and secure harbour lifted above the level of the sea and lost its usage. Hastings has lived on, but Pevensey died in some darkness, and has disappeared. There still stands the wall of the Roman fort, with its courses of small Roman tile-brick remaining to stamp its origin. The great town that must have stood outside has dwindled to a hamlet, and the vast stretch of flat, beyond which was once what Portsmouth is, lies utterly alone with the sea birds complaining over it.

Beyond Pevensey walls the wind rose somewhat and gave us a fair course round Beachy, coming further round, so that we could carry on without handling the headsail sheets. We ran on a wind all the miles into the Sussex bay. I stood in close to the lighthouse (for the shore is fairly steep there), not a quarter of a mile off shore. It was unwise, for I had experience, as you know, of the way the wind will spill over that height. But I wished to save mileage; I had sailed the seas enough, and was for home.

The wind from that quarter brings usually a clear air, but in the calm weather of those last few days it had blown from anywhere, for the summer’s end had upon it an anti-cyclone, which is a Mumbo-Jumbo for fine weather. In such weather winds behave unnaturally, the southwest brings no gale or rain, nor is the easterly wind dry, nor the northerly cold, nor the southerly warm; and this, I suppose, is because the winds of an anti-cyclone are but youngling winds; not great steady ancestored winds from far away with a weight behind them.

I did wish as I was rounding Beachy that day that I could see a sea serpent, which, many years ago (I had read it in print in an old magazine book which lay about in the parlour of a harbour inn), showed itself, for the conversion of the unbelieving, in these very seas.

It reared a great neck and shot at a prodigious pace through the salt with the movements of its long body, and, having been seen by a whole crew thereto adjacent, sneered contemptuously at the puny race of men, and disappeared.

I thought to myself: ‘How should I behave if I were to see some such Horrendum, and had to bear witness to it before my fellow men?’ I concluded that I would mix the truth with falsehood, like my good ancestor the wise Ulysses, and so shoe-horn a knowledge of reality into scornful men. For I have a rule in such matters given me long ago and since then by me always to be observed. I got it thus:

When I was a boy an older friend of mine said to me a thing that then seemed to me extravagant, but which I now see to have been very sound. It was, that if you wanted to be believed in any matter worth believing, you had to bring an admixture of falsity into your statement. And the reason for this is plain enough. Either a truth is something that everybody knows about, and which, therefore, is not worth telling, or else it is something unusual, and therefore improbable, and likely to be disbelieved. It is the latter kind of truth which people ordinarily tell when they desire to interest their fellow beings. But if they put that kind of truth straightforwardly, they are naturally taken for liars.

For instance, if you were to burst into a man’s room, and say, ‘Only last week I took the train in Paris after breakfast, and I was in London for dinner!’ he would believe you right enough, though he would not stand much of that sort of thing. But if you say, ‘Only last week I was in Paris for breakfast, and in Rome for dinner,’ he will think you are not telling the truth, although it can just be done by aeroplane; and if you say, ‘I was in London for breakfast, and in Calcutta for dinner’ (which may be perfectly true, supposing that the dinner and the breakfast were not on the same day), he will certainly set you down for a liar. Supposing, therefore, that you have really flown in an aeroplane from Paris to Rome, so that you left Paris comfortably after breakfast and got into Rome in plenty of time for dinner, you had far better put it differently, and say that the aeroplane has made a great difference, considering that you yourself had managed, by getting up at dawn on a summer’s day, to be in Rome just as it was falling dark, with only two slight mishaps on the way and a relay at Lyons. Then you will possibly be believed.

So do I advise those to speak who desire their fellow beings to be converted in the matter of the Great Sea Serpent.

Personally I believe in the Great Sea Serpent, and I believe in it for best of all reasons, to wit, that the proof is sufficient. A sufficient number of people have seen monsters of various kinds rising from the deep, usually monsters with great long necks, or, at any rate, a serpentine appearance. They have seen them, many men at a time, and under ordinary conditions of vision. To deny such evidence merely because it is unusual is something stupid. It is a piece of popular doubt, just as stupid as is the corresponding popular credulity.

The next time the Great Sea Serpent comes within two cables of one of His Majesty’s ships, and is familiarly seen by scores of men, I strongly advise the leader and more educated of them, whoever he may be, not to say that he and his men did, under such and such circumstances, clearly see the Great Sea Serpent. For if they do that, they are done. He had far better say that the weather being thick, and under conditions when they may have easily been deceived, he and one companion thought that they saw something like such and such an apparition; and he would do well to sketch it in a brumous fashion. Let him make it as like as possible to things with which his readers are familiar; then many idiots will write to the paper saying that it was sea-weed, or a flight of birds, or what not, but a few will believe. If he tells the plumb truth, no one will believe. For, just as it is important to mix truth with falsity, if falsity is to be accepted, so it is important to mix falsity with truth, if truth is to be accepted. All lawyers know this. Indeed, it may be called one of our Rules of Law.

But the lawyers can say this for themselves, at least, that their trade is advocacy, and that they do not so much as pretend to truth. There is no concealment. We are not deceived.

But the practice of advocacy in all those parts of the nation’s life where we used to have information and direct statement, is a very dangerous as well as an exasperating ill.

It was an evil growing before the war, but the war has increased it hugely; men have fallen into a habit of what was called during the war propaganda. They both give it and receive it. Upon every side what you hear (or what is concealed from you) is put forward or concealed with an object of advocacy, and, therefore, of distortion. It was, perhaps, during the war necessary; or, at least, necessary in those societies, such as our own, which had no national tradition of such a conflict. Men were made to swallow the most enormous camels. The unfortunate flabby German, with his silly dream of universal superiority, became a horrid fiend quite out of nature, and even those foreigners who are most hated instinctively and traditionally by the mass of the populace became gallant allies.

The most comic part of the affair was the attitude towards America. We dared not insult America, for we were naturally as keen on getting American help as is a drowning man on catching a deck chair (and, by the way, if by any chance, you of the rich want to save a drowning man from shipboard, don’t throw a life-buoy, throw a deck chair; it is always loose and always handy, and very apparent, and if it hits it stuns). In their ignorance many people came to believe that it was the duty of the Americans to come over and help, and, what was more astonishing still, it was represented to them as a matter of life and death, not to us, but to themselves. The Americans were told (Heaven knows whether any of them believed it!) that if the Germans, Austrians, Bohemians, Slovenes, Croats, Bulgarians, Turks, etc., won in their push against the English, French, and Italians, that if the half-baked won against the baked, the next thing would be a sailing of the conquerors over the sea for the rude domination of Scranton, Pa. Fiddlesticks-ends!

But people did really talk like that. They shook their fingers at the United States, and said: ‘It will be your turn next!’

Now at sea there is no advocacy. We are free from that most noisome form of falsehood, which corrupts the very inward of the soul. Truth is one of the great gifts of the sea. You cannot persuade yourself nor listen to the persuasion of another that the wind is not blowing when it is, or that a cabin with half a foot of water in it is dry, or that a dragging anchor holds. Everywhere the sea is a teacher of truth. I am not sure that the best thing I find in sailing is not this salt of reality.

Turning to the statement of any reality after a dose of advocacy is like getting out into the fresh air from an intolerable froust.

It would be a boon beyond expression to all of us if some rich man would found a little weekly newspaper (he would have to be prepared to lose three thousand a year), in which sheet the reader should be told things that had happened in Europe and at home, instead of being given a version designed to provoke from him a verdict, or to throw him into a particular mood desired by the writer’s master.

The most dangerous form of this advocacy to-day in England—and it is universal—the most dangerous gaps in the field of statement, are the advocacy put forward for a capitalist control of lives and the suppression of facts inimical to that control. They are dangerous because they provoke passions which lead to social decline, and add enormously to the sense of injustice under which the proletariat of the modern capitalist state increasingly suffers.

I cannot call to mind a single strike or lockout during the last twenty years, of all those strikes and lockouts which have become for us in England a sort of daily food—a permanent disturbance of the English world, and a threat to the English future—I cannot recollect one, I say, in which our millionaire newspaper-owners did so much as state the plain facts of the case in time; let alone present the elements on either side dispassionately and as news. I went in great detail into the conditions of one of the worst of our railway strikes some years ago. I discovered that the points of contention had been under debate for months. I further discovered that the definite conclusion not to accept such and such terms, but to stand out for such and such other terms under threat of a universal stoppage of the railways, had been made weeks before the catastrophe fell. The public had had no inkling of this. When the allotted term expired, and what all those rich men knew was bound to be the result of the quarrel came about, the public was at once deluged with advocacy which still concealed the elements of the debate, and which calmly took it for granted that the men possessed of the instruments of production had a natural right to the labour of the men not possessed of them. Every conceivable piece of pleading was put forward, even such as would appeal to intelligent men, let alone the flood of stuff designed for their more numerous inferiors. We were told, for instance, that the number of holders of railway stock was greater than the number of workers upon the railway, which was perfectly true, but had about as much to do with the issue as the great love song of Mozart. We were _not_ told in what proportions the stock was held.

We were told, all of us until we were tired, that the men, by refusing their labour, had thrown out a great public service, which was perfectly true. What was omitted was the counterpart of the same truth; that the owners of capital, by refusing to pay the sum demanded by those with whom they had to enter into contract, were equally throwing out a great public service.

What advantage it would be to the Commonwealth if some one paper would simply state, not only the obvious broad lines of the quarrel between concentrated capitalism and the proletarian majority to-day, but give us rapidly, in detail, and with the facts, the elements in each case. I myself know very well how it should be done, for I have presented it over and over again, and never been able to get these rich men to put it into print. For instance, in the case of a particular dispute one might say truthfully this: ‘It must be clearly understood that the inconvenience we are suffering from the stoppage of work in the air supply to the underground flats of which a modern city is composed, is a lockout and not a strike. The chief shareholders in the Imperial Air Company, whose names are Such-and-Such, whose holdings are of such-and-such an extent, and of whom the directing spirit is So-and-So, propose to cut down the men’s wages by a tenth. The men refuse to sell their labour for less than the old price. The better-paid grades, who receive such-and-such an average wage, are contented with the terms of the new proposed contract, but they are acting in solid support of the lower-paid grades, whose duties are such-and-such, and whose average pay is so much. The plea of the directors is that unless the wages are cut, their dividend, which is at present of such-and-such a value, will have to be lowered to such-and-such. It must be remembered that the stock is heavily watered. The real capital is only such-and-such a fraction of the nominal. The men object to negotiations with the permanent officials of the National Union, because the general secretary is well known to have betrayed the cause of his class for money on a previous occasion, and is generally mistrusted; but, as is common in the caucus of a large trades union, it is impossible to dislodge him.’

Such a statement as that cannot be printed, though every word be true and valuable for public information. Such things, valuable to the public, cannot be printed, partly because the machinery of printing is in the hands of our highly centralised capitalist controls, and partly because the courts of justice, which are also nowadays virtually under capitalist control, would heavily punish not only the writer, but the printer and publisher of the truth.

It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil.

This subservience to concentrated wealth, which is appearing in the courts of justice, and is universal in the writers of our day, is like the accumulation of debt, the process cannot continue forever; it is building up a higher and higher, and more and more unstable, tower of resentment and secret protest. The chances are that when the evil has wrought its own elimination by excess, it will be followed, not by the publication of the truth we need, still less by the enfranchisement of the proletariat, but rather by the publication of a new set of falsehoods under new controls.

And so much for that. We sailed along that well-known coast, which is turning into a sort of town; we aimed to get into the home water of Shoreham just on the last quarter of the flood before dark. We were disappointed. The wind fell with the approaching evening, and though a westerly stream was with us so late in the inshore tide, by the time we were outside the well-known twin piers, the wooden stanchions of the Nona’s home, the ebb was rushing out of that river, and there was no making port, though we were just outside.

There were others in the same plight under the warm summer sky of that evening: a London barge, a Norwegian ship with timber, and a little snorting steamer, which let go her anchor with a rush somewhat further out just at the moment when we also dropped anchor in that very shallow water, in not five fathoms deep. A great full moon rose up out of the east, out of the seas of England, and the night was warm. There was a sort of holiness about the air. I was even glad that we had thus to lie outside under such a calm and softly radiant sky, with its few stars paling before their queen.

We slept under such benedictions, and in the morning woke to find a little air coming up from the south like a gift, an introduction to the last harbour. We gave the flood full time (for they do not open the gates, and cannot, till high water); then, setting only mainsail and jib, we heaved our anchor up for the last time, and moved at our pleasure majestically between the piers, and turned the loyal and wearied Nona towards the place of her repose.

‘And now good-bye to thee,
Thou well-beloved sea,’

as John Phillimore very excellently translates the Greek of other landed sailors dead.

The sea is the consolation of this our day, as it has been the consolation of the centuries. It is the companion and the receiver of men. It has moods for them to fill the storehouse of the mind, perils for trial, or even for an ending, and calms for the good emblem of death. There, on the sea, is a man nearest to his own making, and in communion with that from which he came, and to which he shall return. For the wise men of very long ago have said, and it is true, that out of the salt water all things came. The sea is the matrix of creation, and we have the memory of it in our blood.

But far more than this is there in the sea. It presents, upon the greatest scale we mortals can bear, those not mortal powers which brought us into being. It is not only the symbol or the mirror, but especially is it the messenger of the Divine.

There, sailing the sea, we play every part of life: control, direction, effort, fate; and there can we test ourselves and know our state. All that which concerns the sea is profound and final. The sea provides visions, darknesses, revelations. The sea puts ever before us those twin faces of reality: greatness and certitude; greatness stretched almost to the edge of infinity (greatness in extent, greatness in changes not to be numbered), and the certitude of a level remaining forever and standing upon the deeps. The sea has taken me to itself whenever I sought it and has given me relief from men. It has rendered remote the cares and the wastes of the land; for of all creatures that move and breathe upon the earth, we of mankind are the fullest of sorrow. But the sea shall comfort us, and perpetually show us new things and assure us. It is the common sacrament of this world. May it be to others what it has been to me.

THE END

The Cruise of the Nona

HILAIRE BELLOC

A good many years ago, a unique book entitled “The Path to Rome,” by Hilaire Belloc, was published, which has taken an enduring place in our literature. On the thread of a narrative of a walking tour through France and Italy Mr. Belloc strung memories and reflections which made the book as stimulating as it was delightful.

In “The Cruise of the Nona” he employs much the same device as a vehicle for his riper thought and richer experience. “I propose to write a book,” says Mr. Belloc, “called ‘The Cruise of the Nona.’ The ‘Nona’ is the name of my boat, a nine-ton boat in which I have done a great deal of sailing during the last twenty years. The book would consist mainly in reminiscences, judgments, stories, and all the rest that comes into a man’s mind when he is thinking upon the past and upon his own acquired knowledge.”

On the surface, “The Cruise of the Nona” is a breezy record of an adventurous cruise; underneath the surface, it is one of the wisest and most pregnant studies of modern life in many phases, particularly in its War and post-War phases, that have seen the light in many years.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Transcriber’s Notes

1. Italic text in the original is delimited by underscores.

2. Blackletter text in the original is delimited by both underscores
and equals signs.

3. Hyphenated words were silently joined across lines and pages when
the intended word was clear.

4. The following table notes the other material changes made to
the printed text, in order to correct apparent printing errors
(punctuation, spelling, quotation marks, repeated words), and to
standardize spelling and hyphenation for identical words to the more
frequent usage across the text. Changes are denoted in [brackets].

=Page= =Text= =Operation=
9 believe it[.] Added.
34 see[’,/,’] Replaced.
36 warping[-/ ]ropes Replaced.
45 north[-]west Removed.
85 subject[s] Added.
188 north[-]eastern Removed.
192 off[-]shore Removed.
269 politic[i]an Added.
277 north[-]easterly Removed.
280 north[-]easterly Removed.
281 north[-]east Removed.
293 north[-]east Removed.
310 off[-]shore Removed.