Notes On Life and Letters by Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924

NOTES ON LIFE & LETTERS
Contents:
Author’s note
PART I—Letters
BOOKS—1905.
HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905
ALPHONSE DAUDET—1898
GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904
ANATOLE FRANCE—1904
TURGENEV—1917
STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919
TALES OF THE SEA—1898
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA—1898
A HAPPY WANDERER—1910
THE LIFE BEYOND—1910
THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907
PART II—Life
AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916
POLAND REVISITED—1915
FIRST NEWS—1918
WELL DONE—1918
TRADITION—1918
CONFIDENCE—1919
FLIGHT—1917
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912
PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS—1914
A FRIENDLY PLACE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I don’t know whether I ought to offer an apology for this collection which has more to do with life
than with letters. Its appeal is made to orderly minds. This, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up,
which, from the nature of things, cannot be regarded as premature. The fact is that I wanted to do it myself
because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the considerations of worthiness or unworthiness of the small
(but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this volume. Of course it may be said that I might have
taken up a broom and used it without saying anything about it. That, certainly, is one way of tidying up.
But it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all this matter as removable rubbish. All those
things had a place in my life. Whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on the
NOTES ON LIFE & LETTERS 1

Notes on Life and Letters
shelf—this shelf—I cannot say, and, frankly, I have not allowed my mind to dwell on the
question. I was afraid of thinking myself into a mood that would hurt my feelings; for those pieces of writing,
whatever may be the comment on their display, appertain to the character of the man.
And so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do, but in no way polished, extending from the
year ’98 to the year ’20, a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes:
Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial. Well, yes! A one-man
show—or is it merely the show of one man?
The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things that have passed away, will be
Conrad en pantoufles. It is a constitutional inability. Schlafrock und pantoffeln! Not that! Never! . . . I
don’t know whether I dare boast like a certain South American general who used to say that no
emergency of war or peace had ever found him “with his boots off”; but I may say that
whenever the various periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the trumpet of
personal opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of the past, I always tried to pull on my boots first. I
didn’t want to do it, God knows! Their Editors, to whom I beg to offer my thanks here, made me
perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. Well, yes! Bribery? What can you expect? I never
pretended to be better than the people in the next street, or even in the same street.
This volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is as near as I shall ever come to dêshabillé
in public; and perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than
a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and receding
from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy but for other reasons that cannot be helped: because
the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have
observed in the ticking of the hall clock at home. For reasons like that. Yes! It recedes. And this was the
chance to afford one more view of it—even to my own eyes.
The section within this volume called Letters explains itself, though I do not pretend to say that it justifies its
own existence. It claims nothing in its defence except the right of speech which I believe belongs to
everybody outside a Trappist monastery. The part I have ventured, for shortness’ sake, to call Life,
may perhaps justify itself by the emotional sincerity of the feelings to which the various papers included under
that head owe their origin. And as they relate to events of which everyone has a date, they are in the nature of
sign-posts pointing out the direction my thoughts were compelled to take at the various cross-roads. If
anybody detects any sort of consistency in the choice, this will be only proof positive that wisdom had nothing
to do with it. Whether right or wrong, instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only adds a deeper shade to its
inherent mystery. The appearance of intellectuality these pieces may present at first sight is merely the result
of the arrangement of words. The logic that may be found there is only the logic of the language. But I need
not labour the point. There will be plenty of people sagacious enough to perceive the absence of all wisdom
from these pages. But I believe sufficiently in human sympathies to imagine that very few will question their
sincerity. Whatever delusions I may have suffered from I have had no delusions as to the nature of the facts
commented on here. I may have misjudged their import: but that is the sort of error for which one may expect
a certain amount of toleration.
The only paper of this collection which has never been published before is the Note on the Polish Problem. It
was written at the request of a friend to be shown privately, and its “Protectorate” idea, sprung
from a strong sense of the critical nature of the situation, was shaped by the actual circumstances of the time.
The time was about a month before the entrance of Roumania into the war, and though, honestly, I had seen
already the shadow of coming events I could not permit my misgivings to enter into and destroy the structure
of my plan. I still believe that there was some sense in it. It may certainly be charged with the appearance of
lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing of many stones; but my object was practical and I had to
consider warily the preconceived notions of the people to whom it was implicitly addressed, and also their
AUTHOR’S NOTE 2
unjustifiable hopes. They were unjustifiable, but who was to tell them that? I mean who was wise enough
and convincing enough to show them the inanity of their mental attitude? The whole atmosphere was
poisoned with visions that were not so much false as simply impossible. They were also the result of vague
and unconfessed fears, and that made their strength. For myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, I was
careful not to allude to their character because I did not want the Note to be thrown away unread. And then I
had to remember that the impossible has sometimes the trick of coming to pass to the confusion of minds and
often to the crushing of hearts.
Of the other papers I have nothing special to say. They are what they are, and I am by now too hardened a
sinner to feel ashamed of insignificant indiscretions. And as to their appearance in this form I claim that
indulgence to which all sinners against themselves are entitled.
J. C.
1920.
PART I—LETTERS
BOOKS—1905.
I.
“I have not read this author’s books, and if I have read them I have forgotten what they were
about.”
These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a hundred years ago, publicly, from the seat
of justice, by a civic magistrate. The words of our municipal rulers have a solemnity and importance far
above the words of other mortals, because our municipal rulers more than any other variety of our governors
and masters represent the average wisdom, temperament, sense and virtue of the community. This
generalisation, it ought to be promptly said in the interests of eternal justice (and recent friendship), does not
apply to the United States of America. There, if one may believe the long and helpless indignations of their
daily and weekly Press, the majority of municipal rulers appear to be thieves of a particularly irrepressible
sort. But this by the way. My concern is with a statement issuing from the average temperament and the
average wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and uttered by a civic magistrate obviously without fear
and without reproach.
I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence. “I have not read the books,”
he says, and immediately he adds, “and if I have read them I have forgotten.” This is excellent
caution. And I like his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity. As a reported piece of
prose this declaration is easy to read and not difficult to believe. Many books have not been read; still more
have been forgotten. As a piece of civic oratory this declaration is strikingly effective. Calculated to fall in
with the bent of the popular mind, so familiar with all forms of forgetfulness, it has also the power to stir up a
subtle emotion while it starts a train of thought—and what greater force can be expected from human
speech? But it is in naturalness that this declaration is perfectly delightful, for there is nothing more natural
than for a grave City Father to forget what the books he has read once—long ago—in his giddy
youth maybe—were about.
And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written as novels. I proceed thus cautiously
(following my illustrious example) because being without fear and desiring to remain as far as possible
without reproach, I confess at once that I have not read them.
PART I—LETTERS 3
I have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have read them, I never met one yet with the
talent of lucid exposition sufficiently developed to give me a connected account of what they are about. But
they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in their ever increasing, jostling multitude, they are
worthy of regard, admiration, and compassion.
Especially of compassion. It has been said a long time ago that books have their fate. They have, and it is
very much like the destiny of man. They share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory—of
severe justice and senseless persecution—of calumny and misunderstanding—the shame of
undeserved success. Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us,
for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our
persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. A bridge
constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful
career. But a book as good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art
of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life. Of the books born from the
restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity of human minds, those that the Muses would love best lie more
than all others under the menace of an early death. Sometimes their defects will save them. Sometimes a
book fair to see may—to use a lofty expression—have no individual soul. Obviously a book of
that sort cannot die. It can only crumble into dust. But the best of books drawing sustenance from the
sympathy and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men’s memories are short,
and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.
No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies
in a prescribed combination of drugs. This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, but
because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human
sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs
and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form—often in the lifetime of one
fleeting generation.
II.
Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious claim on our compassion. The art of the
novelist is simple. At the same time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be obscured by
the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the
heart of the artist. After all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking except perhaps to the divinely
gifted. In truth every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can
honestly believe. This world cannot be made otherwise than in his own image: it is fated to remain individual
and a little mysterious, and yet it must resemble something already familiar to the experience, the thoughts
and the sensations of his readers. At the heart of fiction, even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth
can be found—if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of
Dumas the father. But the fair truth of human delicacy can be found in Mr. Henry James’s novels; and
the comical, appalling truth of human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the monstrous
world created by Balzac. The pursuit of happiness by means lawful and unlawful, through resignation or
revolt, by the clever manipulation of conventions or by solemn hanging on to the skirts of the latest scientific
theory, is the only theme that can be legitimately developed by the novelist who is the chronicler of the
adventures of mankind amongst the dangers of the kingdom of the earth. And the kingdom of this earth itself,
the ground upon which his individualities stand, stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful record.
To encompass all this in one harmonious conception is a great feat; and even to attempt it deliberately with
serious intention, not from the senseless prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable ambition. For it
requires some courage to step in calmly where fools may be eager to rush. As a distinguished and successful
French novelist once observed of fiction, “C’est un art trop difficile.”
I. 4
It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task. He imagines it more gigantic than
it is. And yet literary creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no value but on
the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of all the more distinct forms of action. This condition is
sometimes forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is inclined to lay a claim of
exclusive superiority for his own amongst all the other tasks of the human mind. The mass of verse and prose
may glimmer here and there with the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of human effort it has no special
importance. There is no justificative formula for its existence any more than for any other artistic
achievement. With the rest of them it is destined to be forgotten, without, perhaps, leaving the faintest trace.
Where a novelist has an advantage over the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege of
freedom—the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing his innermost
beliefs—which should console him for the hard slavery of the pen.
III.
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the
fettering dogmas of some romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own inspiration, is a
trick worthy of human perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of
distinguished ancestors. It is a weakness of inferior minds when it is not the cunning device of those who,
uncertain of their talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. Such, for instance, are the
high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism. But Stendhal himself would have
accepted no limitation of his freedom. Stendhal’s mind was of the first order. His spirit above must be
raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation. For the truth is that more than one kind of
intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas. And Stendhal was pre-eminently courageous. He
wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty.
It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require
from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will
not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic
force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is
in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared
pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is
much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That frame of
mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction. It gives an
author—goodness only knows why—an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is
nothing more dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations an
author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation.
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe
that there is no impossibility of its being made so. If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed to rise
superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist who would think himself of a superior
essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such great
matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the mere
possession of a fire-arm; many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either
one or the other. Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the
far-distant and elusive mark of art I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of
giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him impatient with their small failings
and scornful of their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate,
as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with
a large forgiveness at men’s ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence,
but depend on their education, their social status, even their professions. The good artist should expect no
II. 5
recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be appraised and his
genius cannot possibly mean anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their evoked
dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by
patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial practice of life, if
anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to
prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature the strength of his
imagination amongst the things of this earth, which it is his business to cherish and know, and refrain from
calling down his inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he knows nothing. And I
would not grudge him the proud illusion that will come sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his
achievement has almost equalled the greatness of his dream. For what else could give him the serenity and
the force to hug to his breast as a thing delightful and human, the virtue, the rectitude and sagacity of his own
City, declaring with simple eloquence through the mouth of a Conscript Father: “I have not read this
author’s books, and if I have read them I have forgotten . . .”
HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905

The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James’s work. His books stand on my
shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all his books.
There is no collected edition to date, such as some of “our masters” have been provided with;
no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying
to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these victories have been won.
Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James’s victories in England.
In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would not exhaust oneself in barren
marvelling over mere bindings, had not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the
case of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)—had it not been, I say, expressive of a
direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident of—I suppose—the publishing business
acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry
James’s work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even of probability of
surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that field where he is a master. Happily, he will never be able
to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, he would not be believed
by the very minds for whom such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to think of Mr.
Henry James becoming “complete” otherwise than by the brutality of our common fate whose
finality is meaningless—in the sense of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone.
I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he had been
dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth.
The thing—a privilege—a miracle—what you will—is not quite hidden from the
meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some
twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James’s work, it grows into absolute conviction
which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one’s artistic existence. If gratitude,
as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of
The Ambassadors—to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure to come; the spring of that
benevolence will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction,
unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without
languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course
through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our
exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring.
III. 6
With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as
applied to Mr. Henry James’s inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body of his
work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in
forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the
conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.
Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in
darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching
of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the
struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world
of relative values—the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the
demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, “Take me out of myself!” meaning
really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness. But everything is relative,
and the light of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of this earth,
imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our industrious hands.
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of
grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set
this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us
has a minute grain, may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression
and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms
of art. I do not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of humanity by an ingenious
tale. It would be too much to expect—from humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the
heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism. The artist in his calling
of interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for
him, silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch
the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is
safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that
day without to-morrow—whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can
guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last
utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is
delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own
dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And perhaps
it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical,
utilitarian point of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered better, perhaps,
the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor
in a barren strife. And the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such
subtle and direct insight are, though only personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in
the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound of trumpets. Those are
adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless
and insistent fidelity to the péripéties of the contest, and the feelings of the combatants.
The fiercest excitements of a romance de cape et d’épée, the romance of yard-arm and boarding pike
so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the
quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of
necessity—before all, of conduct—of Mr. Henry James’s men and women. His mankind
is delightful. It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield.
These warlike images come by themselves under the pen; since from the duality of man’s nature and
the competition of individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really
HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905 7

very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone. In virtue of
these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this
relation in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that is
commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only possible way in which the
task can be performed: by the independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all the
difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its inspiration from the reality of forms and
sensations. That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the
innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other
secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of
renunciation. It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective force at our disposal on
which rest the labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths
whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like a natural force which is obscured as much as
illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of
weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the sum of our
activity. But no man or woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And
Mr. Henry James’s men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure
of itself, has drawn round their activities. He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The
earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions,
there are more greatnesses than one—not counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever
he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his passions
to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and
knowledge.
In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the
standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that the
claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is
nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the
observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and
handwriting—on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian
may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human
experience. As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine
consciences.
Of course, this is a general statement; but I don’t think its truth will be, or can be questioned. Its fault
is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put into the
nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt
by the success of his art. He has taken for himself the greater part. The range of a fine conscience covers
more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less
troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned with
essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. There is, in short, more truth in
its working for a historian to detect and to show. It is a thing of infinite complication and suggestion. None
of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry James. He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but
full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. There are no secrets left within his range. He
has disclosed them as they should be disclosed—that is, beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness has but little
place in this world of his creation. Yet, it is always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds
the scene, it presses close upon it. It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine
consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a
virtuous one. What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present,
right. It is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of
renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that between substance and
shadow.
HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905 8

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of what is worth having, of what is worth
holding. The contrary opinion has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some
frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of
truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James’s men and women, stand out endowed
with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for
scrupulousness, those business-like instincts which a careful Providence has implanted in our breasts. And,
apart from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain
lack of finality, especially startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards and
punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public which,
as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham
of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. But so it is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch
as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the
loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of
leisure, is to be set at rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James’s novels. His books end as an
episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the
dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read. It is
eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the
impossible.
ALPHONSE DAUDET—1898
It is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are part of our past, our indisputable possession. One must
admit regretfully that to-day is but a scramble, that to-morrow may never come; it is only the precious
yesterday that cannot be taken away from us. A gift from the dead, great and little, it makes life supportable,
it almost makes one believe in a benevolent scheme of creation. And some kind of belief is very necessary.
But the real knowledge of matters infinitely more profound than any conceivable scheme of creation is with
the dead alone. That is why our talk about them should be as decorous as their silence. Their generosity and
their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and they, who belong already to the unchangeable, would
probably disdain to claim more than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates about every
twenty-five years—at the coming of every new and wiser generation.
One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, with a prodigality approaching magnificence, gave
himself up to us without reserve in his work, with all his qualities and all his faults. Neither his qualities nor
his faults were great, though they were by no means imperceptible. It is only his generosity that is out of the
common. What strikes one most in his work is the disinterestedness of the toiler. With more talent than many
bigger men, he did not preach about himself, he did not attempt to persuade mankind into a belief of his own
greatness. He never posed as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his interests to
the point of never propounding a theory for the purpose of giving a tremendous significance to his art, alone
of all things, in a world that, by some strange oversight, has not been supplied with an obvious meaning.
Neither did he affect a passive attitude before the spectacle of life, an attitude which in gods—and in a
rare mortal here and there—may appear godlike, but assumed by some men, causes one, very
unwillingly, to think of the melancholy quietude of an ape. He was not the wearisome expounder of this or
that theory, here to-day and spurned to-morrow. He was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all, if you
like—but he was Alphonse Daudet, a man as naively clear, honest, and vibrating as the sunshine of his
native land; that regrettably undiscriminating sunshine which matures grapes and pumpkins alike, and cannot,
of course, obtain the commendation of the very select who look at life from under a parasol.
Naturally, being a man from the South, he had a rather outspoken belief in himself, but his small distinction,
worth many a greater, was in not being in bondage to some vanishing creed. He was a worker who could not
compel the admiration of the few, but who deserved the affection of the many; and he may be spoken of with
ALPHONSE DAUDET—1898 9
tenderness and regret, for he is not immortal—he is only dead. During his life the simple man whose
business it ought to have been to climb, in the name of Art, some elevation or other, was content to remain
below, on the plain, amongst his creations, and take an eager part in those disasters, weaknesses, and joys
which are tragic enough in their droll way, but are by no means so momentous and profound as some
writers—probably for the sake of Art—would like to make us believe. There is, when one thinks
of it, a considerable want of candour in the august view of life. Without doubt a cautious reticence on the
subject, or even a delicately false suggestion thrown out in that direction is, in a way, praiseworthy, since it
helps to uphold the dignity of man—a matter of great importance, as anyone can see; still one cannot
help feeling that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly blamable. To state, then, with studied
moderation a belief that in unfortunate moments of lucidity is irresistibly borne in upon most of
us—the blind agitation caused mostly by hunger and complicated by love and ferocity does not deserve
either by its beauty, or its morality, or its possible results, the artistic fuss made over it. It may be
consoling—for human folly is very bizarre—but it is scarcely honest to shout at those who
struggle drowning in an insignificant pool: You are indeed admirable and great to be the victims of such a
profound, of such a terrible ocean!
And Daudet was honest; perhaps because he knew no better—but he was very honest. If he saw only
the surface of things it is for the reason that most things have nothing but a surface. He did not
pretend—perhaps because he did not know how—he did not pretend to see any depths in a life
that is only a film of unsteady appearances stretched over regions deep indeed, but which have nothing to do
with the half-truths, half-thoughts, and whole illusions of existence. The road to these distant regions does not
lie through the domain of Art or the domain of Science where well-known voices quarrel noisily in a misty
emptiness; it is a path of toilsome silence upon which travel men simple and unknown, with closed lips, or,
maybe, whispering their pain softly—only to themselves.
But Daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with animation, with a clear felicity of tone—as a bird
sings. He saw life around him with extreme clearness, and he felt it as it is—thinner than air and more
elusive than a flash of lightning. He hastened to offer it his compassion, his indignation, his wonder, his
sympathy, without giving a moment of thought to the momentous issues that are supposed to lurk in the logic
of such sentiments. He tolerated the little foibles, the small ruffianisms, the grave mistakes; the only thing he
distinctly would not forgive was hardness of heart. This unpractical attitude would have been fatal to a better
man, but his readers have forgiven him. Withal he is chivalrous to exiled queens and deformed sempstresses,
he is pityingly tender to broken-down actors, to ruined gentlemen, to stupid Academicians; he is glad of the
joys of the commonplace people in a commonplace way—and he never makes a secret of all this. No,
the man was not an artist. What if his creations are illumined by the sunshine of his temperament so vividly
that they stand before us infinitely more real than the dingy illusions surrounding our everyday existence?
The misguided man is for ever pottering amongst them, lifting up his voice, dotting his i’s in the
wrong places. He takes Tartarin by the arm, he does not conceal his interest in the Nabob’s cheques,
his sympathy for an honest Academician plus bête que nature, his hate for an architect plus mauvais que la
gale; he is in the thick of it all. He feels with the Duc de Mora and with Felicia Ruys—and he lets you
see it. He does not sit on a pedestal in the hieratic and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose greatness
consists in being too stupid to care. He cares immensely for his Nabobs, his kings, his book-keepers, his
Colettes, and his Saphos. He vibrates together with his universe, and with lamentable simplicity follows M.
de Montpavon on that last walk along the Boulevards.
“Monsieur de Montpavon marche à la mort,” and the creator of that unlucky gentilhomme
follows with stealthy footsteps, with wide eyes, with an impressively pointing finger. And who
wouldn’t look? But it is hard; it is sometimes very hard to forgive him the dotted i’s, the
pointing finger, this making plain of obvious mysteries. “Monsieur de Montpavon marche à la
mort,” and presently, on the crowded pavement, takes off his hat with punctilious courtesy to the
doctor’s wife, who, elegant and unhappy, is bound on the same pilgrimage. This is too much! We feel
ALPHONSE DAUDET—1898 10
we cannot forgive him such meetings, the constant whisper of his presence. We feel we cannot, till suddenly
the very naïveté of it all touches us with the revealed suggestion of a truth. Then we see that the man is not
false; all this is done in transparent good faith. The man is not melodramatic; he is only picturesque. He may
not be an artist, but he comes as near the truth as some of the greatest. His creations are seen; you can look
into their very eyes, and these are as thoughtless as the eyes of any wise generation that has in its hands the
fame of writers. Yes, they are seen, and the man who is not an artist is seen also commiserating, indignant,
joyous, human and alive in their very midst. Inevitably they marchent à la mort—and they are very
near the truth of our common destiny: their fate is poignant, it is intensely interesting, and of not the slightest
consequence.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904 {1}

To introduce Maupassant to English readers with apologetic explanations as though his art were recondite and
the tendency of his work immoral would be a gratuitous impertinence.
Maupassant’s conception of his art is such as one would expect from a practical and resolute mind; but
in the consummate simplicity of his technique it ceases to be perceptible. This is one of its greatest qualities,
and like all the great virtues it is based primarily on self-denial.
To pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author is a difficult task. One could not depend
upon reason alone, nor yet trust solely to one’s emotions. Used together, they would in many cases
traverse each other, because emotions have their own unanswerable logic. Our capacity for emotion is
limited, and the field of our intelligence is restricted. Responsiveness to every feeling, combined with the
penetration of every intellectual subterfuge, would end, not in judgment, but in universal absolution. Tout
comprendre c’est tout pardonner. And in this benevolent neutrality towards the warring errors of
human nature all light would go out from art and from life.
We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupassant’s attitude towards our world in which, like the rest
of us, he has that share which his senses are able to give him. But we need not quarrel with him violently. If
our feelings (which are tender) happen to be hurt because his talent is not exercised for the praise and
consolation of mankind, our intelligence (which is great) should let us see that he is a very splendid sinner,
like all those who in this valley of compromises err by over-devotion to the truth that is in them. His
determinism, barren of praise, blame and consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art. The worth of
every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.
Except for his philosophy, which in the case of so consummate an artist does not matter (unless to the solemn
and naive mind), Maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. He does not
require forgiveness because he is never dull.
The interest of a reader in a work of imagination is either ethical or that of simple curiosity. Both are
perfectly legitimate, since there is both a moral and an excitement to be found in a faithful rendering of life.
And in Maupassant’s work there is the interest of curiosity and the moral of a point of view
consistently preserved and never obtruded for the end of personal gratification. The spectacle of this immense
talent served by exceptional faculties and triumphing over the most thankless subjects by an unswerving
singleness of purpose is in itself an admirable lesson in the power of artistic honesty, one may say of artistic
virtue. The inherent greatness of the man consists in this, that he will let none of the fascinations that beset a
writer working in loneliness turn him away from the straight path, from the vouchsafed vision of excellence.
He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, of pathos; of all that
splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the
glittering cortège of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert air of Thebaïde. This is not to say
GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904 {1} 11

that Maupassant’s austerity has never faltered; but the fact remains that no tempting demon has ever
succeeded in hurling him down from his high, if narrow, pedestal.
It is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in question. Let the discriminating reader, who at times may
well spare a moment or two to the consideration and enjoyment of artistic excellence, be asked to reflect a
little upon the texture of two stories included in this volume: “A Piece of String,” and
“A Sale.” How many openings the last offers for the gratuitous display of the author’s
wit or clever buffoonery, the first for an unmeasured display of sentiment! And both sentiment and
buffoonery could have been made very good too, in a way accessible to the meanest intelligence, at the cost of
truth and honesty. Here it is where Maupassant’s austerity comes in. He refrains from setting his
cleverness against the eloquence of the facts. There is humour and pathos in these stories; but such is the
greatness of his talent, the refinement of his artistic conscience, that all his high qualities appear inherent in
the very things of which he speaks, as if they had been altogether independent of his presentation. Facts, and
again facts are his unique concern. That is why he is not always properly understood. His facts are so
perfectly rendered that, like the actualities of life itself, they demand from the reader the faculty of
observation which is rare, the power of appreciation which is generally wanting in most of us who are guided
mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding from us no qualities except a vague susceptibility to
emotion. Nobody has ever gained the vast applause of a crowd by the simple and clear exposition of vital
facts. Words alone strung upon a convention have fascinated us as worthless glass beads strung on a thread
have charmed at all times our brothers the unsophisticated savages of the islands. Now, Maupassant, of whom
it has been said that he is the master of the mot juste, has never been a dealer in words. His wares have been,
not glass beads, but polished gems; not the most rare and precious, perhaps, but of the very first water of their
kind.
That he took trouble with his gems, taking them up in the rough and polishing each facet patiently, the
publication of the two posthumous volumes of short stories proves abundantly. I think it proves also the
assertion made here that he was by no means a dealer in words. On looking at the first feeble drafts from
which so many perfect stories have been fashioned, one discovers that what has been matured, improved,
brought to perfection by unwearied endeavour is not the diction of the tale, but the vision of its true shape and
detail. Those first attempts are not faltering or uncertain in expression. It is the conception which is at fault.
The subjects have not yet been adequately seen. His proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean
nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to
heaven. His vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world
discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events.
This was the particular shape taken by his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly in the light of his day,
not on the tortuous, dark roads of meditation. His realities came to him from a genuine source, from this
universe of vain appearances wherein we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, exalted, and
humble.
Maupassant’s renown is universal, but his popularity is restricted. It is not difficult to perceive why.
Maupassant is an intensely national writer. He is so intensely national in his logic, in his clearness, in his
æsthetic and moral conceptions, that he has been accepted by his countrymen without having had to pay the
tribute of flattery either to the nation as a whole, or to any class, sphere or division of the nation. The truth of
his art tells with an irresistible force; and he stands excused from the duty of patriotic posturing. He is a
Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally
comprehensible. What is wanting to his universal success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing
tenderness. He neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses
over the tombs. The disregard of these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism,
hardness. And yet it can be safely affirmed that this man wrote from the fulness of a compassionate heart. He
is merciless and yet gentle with his mankind; he does not rail at their prudent fears and their small artifices; he
does not despise their labours. It seems to me that he looks with an eye of profound pity upon their troubles,

deceptions and misery. But he looks at them all. He sees—and does not turn away his head. As a
matter of fact he is courageous.
Courage and justice are not popular virtues. The practice of strict justice is shocking to the multitude who
always (perhaps from an obscure sense of guilt) attach to it the meaning of mercy. In the majority of us, who
want to be left alone with our illusions, courage inspires a vague alarm. This is what is felt about
Maupassant. His qualities, to use the charming and popular phrase, are not lovable. Courage being a force
will not masquerade in the robes of affected delicacy and restraint. But if his courage is not of a chivalrous
stamp, it cannot be denied that it is never brutal for the sake of effect. The writer of these few reflections,
inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the work of the man, has been struck by the appreciation of
Maupassant manifested by many women gifted with tenderness and intelligence. Their more delicate and
audacious souls are good judges of courage. Their finer penetration has discovered his genuine masculinity
without display, his virility without a pose. They have discerned in his faithful dealings with the world that
enterprising and fearless temperament, poor in ideas but rich in power, which appeals most to the feminine
mind.
It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy of perception achieves great results, as in
men of action the energy of force and desire. His view of intellectual problems is perhaps more simple than
their nature warrants; still a man who has written Yvette cannot be accused of want of subtlety. But one
cannot insist enough upon this, that his subtlety, his humour, his grimness, though no doubt they are his own,
are never presented otherwise but as belonging to our life, as found in nature, whose beauties and cruelties
alike breathe the spirit of serene unconsciousness.
Maupassant’s philosophy of life is more temperamental than rational. He expects nothing from gods
or men. He trusts his senses for information and his instinct for deductions. It may seem that he has made but
little use of his mind. But let me be clearly understood. His sensibility is really very great; and it is
impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly, unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible
premises to an unsophisticated conclusion.
This is literary honesty. It may be remarked that it does not differ very greatly from the ideal honesty of the
respectable majority, from the honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all those who
express their fundamental sentiment in the ordinary course of their activities, by the work of their hands.
The work of Maupassant’s hands is honest. He thinks sufficiently to concrete his fearless conclusions
in illuminative instances. He renders them with that exact knowledge of the means and that absolute devotion
to the aim of creating a true effect—which is art. He is the most accomplished of narrators.
It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his mankind in another spirit than those writers who make haste to
submerge the difficulties of our holding-place in the universe under a flood of false and sentimental
assumptions. Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth. He says himself in one of his descriptive
passages: “Nous autres que séduit la terre . . .” It was true. The earth had for him a compelling
charm. He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion. His is the power
of detecting the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the
ever-shifting surface of life. To say that he could not embrace in his glance all its magnificence and all its
misery is only to say that he was human. He lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made his
own. This creative artist has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no
empty pretences. And he stoops to no littleness in his art—least of all to the miserable vanity of a
catching phrase.

ANATOLE FRANCE—1904
I.—“CRAINQUEBILLE”
The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, by the declaration of its title-page, to contain several
profitable narratives. The story of Crainquebille’s encounter with human justice stands at the head of
them; a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book with the touch of playful irony characteristic of the
writer on whom the most distinguished amongst his literary countrymen have conferred the rank of Prince of
Prose.
Never has a dignity been better borne. M. Anatole France is a good prince. He knows nothing of tyranny but
much of compassion. The detachment of his mind from common errors and current superstitions befits the
exalted rank he holds in the Commonwealth of Literature. It is just to suppose that the clamour of the tribes in
the forum had little to do with his elevation. Their elect are of another stamp. They are such as their need of
precipitate action requires. He is the Elect of the Senate—the Senate of Letters—whose
Conscript Fathers have recognised him as primus inter pares; a post of pure honour and of no privilege.
It is a good choice. First, because it is just, and next, because it is safe. The dignity will suffer no diminution
in M. Anatole France’s hands. He is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the lessons of the past,
concerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future as a good prince should be in his public action. It is
a Republican dignity. And M. Anatole France, with his sceptical insight into an forms of government, is a
good Republican. He is indulgent to the weaknesses of the people, and perceives that political institutions,
whether contrived by the wisdom of the few or the ignorance of the many, are incapable of securing the
happiness of mankind. He perceives this truth in the serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind. He
expresses his convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed princely qualities. He is a
great analyst of illusions. He searches and probes their innermost recesses as if they were realities made of an
eternal substance. And therein consists his humanity; this is the expression of his profound and unalterable
compassion. He will flatter no tribe no section in the forum or in the market-place. His lucid thought is not
beguiled into false pity or into the common weakness of affection. He feels that men born in ignorance as in
the house of an enemy, and condemned to struggle with error and passions through endless centuries, should
be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever deferred. He knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that
it is the almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege, to aspire towards the
impossible; that men have never failed to defeat their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity
which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their irremediable littleness. He
knows this well because he is an artist and a master; but he knows, too, that only in the continuity of effort
there is a refuge from despair for minds less clear-seeing and philosophic than his own. Therefore he wishes
us to believe and to hope, preserving in our activity the consoling illusion of power and intelligent purpose.
He is a good and politic prince.
“The majesty of justice is contained entire in each sentence pronounced by the judge in the name of the
sovereign people. Jérome Crainquebille, hawker of vegetables, became aware of the august aspect of the law
as he stood indicted before the tribunal of the higher Police Court on a charge of insulting a constable of the
force.” With this exposition begins the first tale of M. Anatole France’s latest volume.
The bust of the Republic and the image of the Crucified Christ appear side by side above the bench occupied
by the President Bourriche and his two Assessors; all the laws divine and human are suspended over the head
of Crainquebille.
From the first visual impression of the accused and of the court the author passes by a characteristic and
natural turn to the historical and moral significance of those two emblems of State and Religion whose accord
ANATOLE FRANCE—1904 14
is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average man. But the reasoning of M. Anatole France is
never confused. His reasoning is clear and informed by a profound erudition. Such is not the case of
Crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the constituted power of society in the person of a
policeman. The charge is not true, nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his
position, he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the memory of a sentence which for
nineteen hundred years all the Christian peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. He might
well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of sentence, if it were merely to forty-eight hours of
simple imprisonment, in the name of the Crucified Redeemer.
He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has lived pushing every day for half a century his
hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he
has nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly
truthful, he had no existence till M. Anatole France’s philosophic mind and human sympathy have
called him up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt for our
profit also.
Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical, political or social considerations which can
be brought to bear upon his case. He remains lost in astonishment. Penetrated with respect, overwhelmed
with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the question of his transgression. In his conscience he does not
think himself culpable; but M. Anatole France’s philosophical mind discovers for us that he feels all
the insignificance of such a thing as the conscience of a mere street-hawker in the face of the symbols of the
law and before the ministers of social repression. Crainquebille is innocent; but already the young advocate,
his defender, has half persuaded him of his guilt.
On this phrase practically ends the introductory chapter of the story which, as the author’s dedication
states, has inspired an admirable draughtsman and a skilful dramatist, each in his art, to a vision of tragic
grandeur. And this opening chapter without a name—consisting of two and a half pages, some four
hundred words at most—is a masterpiece of insight and simplicity, resumed in M. Anatole
France’s distinction of thought and in his princely command of words.
It is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full, delicate and complete like the petals of a flower,
presenting to us the Adventure of Crainquebille—Crainquebille before the justice—An Apology
for the President of the Tribunal—Of the Submission of Crainquebille to the Laws of the
Republic—Of his Attitude before the Public Opinion, and so on to the chapter of the Last
Consequences. We see, created for us in his outward form and innermost perplexity, the old man degraded
from his high estate of a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this time, the majesty of the
social order in the person of another police-constable. It is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge.
Crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise the black standard of insurrection. He
is cold and homeless and starving. He remembers the warmth and the food of the prison. He perceives the
means to get back there. Since he has been locked up, he argues with himself, for uttering words which, as a
matter of fact he did not say, he will go forth now, and to the first policeman he meets will say those very
words in order to be imprisoned again. Thus reasons Crainquebille with simplicity and confidence. He
accepts facts. Nothing surprises him. But all the phenomena of social organisation and of his own life remain
for him mysterious to the end. The description of the policeman in his short cape and hood, who stands quite
still, under the light of a street lamp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet of a rainy autumn
evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative
precision. From under the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crainquebille, who has just uttered in an
uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting phrase of the popular slang—Mort aux vaches! They look
upon him shining in the deep shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, vigilance, and contempt.
I.—“CRAINQUEBILLE” 15
He does not move. Crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice, repeats once more the insulting words. But
this policeman is full of philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence. He refuses to take in charge the old
and miserable vagabond who stands before him shivering and ragged in the drizzle. And the ruined
Crainquebille, victim of a ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes on hopelessly
down the street full of shadows where the lamps gleam each in a ruddy halo of falling mist.
M. Anatole France can speak for the people. This prince of the Senate is invested with the tribunitian power.
M. Anatole France is something of a Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical
philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a
literary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his public speeches: “We are all Socialists
now.” And in the sense in which it may be said that we all in Europe are Christians that is true
enough. To many of us Socialism is merely an emotion. An emotion is much and is also less than nothing. It
is the initial impulse. The real Socialism of to-day is a religion. It has its dogmas. The value of the dogma
does not consist in its truthfulness, and M. Anatole France, who loves truth, does not love dogma. Only,
unlike religion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in its dogmas but in its ideal. It is perhaps a too
materialistic ideal, and the mind of M. Anatole France may not find in it either comfort or consolation. It is
not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but there is something reposeful in the finality of popular
conceptions. M. Anatole France, a good prince and a good Republican, will succeed no doubt in being a good
Socialist. He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art will find its
own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress. M.
Anatole France is humane. He is also human. He may be able to discard his philosophy; to forget that the
evils are many and the remedies are few, that there is no universal panacea, that fatality is invincible, that
there is an implacable menace of death in the triumph of the humanitarian idea. He may forget all that
because love is stronger than truth.
Besides “Crainquebille” this volume contains sixteen other stories and sketches. To define
them it is enough to say that they are written in M. Anatole France’s prose. One sketch entitled
“Riquet” may be found incorporated in the volume of Monsieur Bergeret à Paris.
“Putois” is a remarkable little tale, significant, humorous, amusing, and symbolic. It concerns
the career of a man born in the utterance of a hasty and untruthful excuse made by a lady at a loss how to
decline without offence a very pressing invitation to dinner from a very tyrannical aunt. This happens in a
provincial town, and the lady says in effect: “Impossible, my dear aunt. To-morrow I am expecting the
gardener.” And the garden she glances at is a poor garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is
insignificant and its neglect seems beyond remedy. “A gardener! What for?” asks the aunt.
“To work in the garden.” And the poor lady is abashed at the transparence of her evasion. But
the lie is told, it is believed, and she sticks to it. When the masterful old aunt inquires, “What is the
man’s name, my dear?” she answers brazenly, “His name is Putois.”
“Where does he live?” “Oh, I don’t know; anywhere. He won’t give his
address. One leaves a message for him here and there.” “Oh! I see,” says the other;
“he is a sort of ne’er do well, an idler, a vagabond. I advise you, my dear, to be careful how
you let such a creature into your grounds; but I have a large garden, and when you do not want his services I
shall find him some work to do, and see he does it too. Tell your Putois to come and see me.” And
thereupon Putois is born; he stalks abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and crime, stealing
melons from gardens and tea-spoons from pantries, indulging his licentious proclivities; becoming the talk of
the town and of the countryside; seen simultaneously in far-distant places; pursued by gendarmes, whose
brigadier assures the uneasy householders that he “knows that scamp very well, and won’t be
long in laying his hands upon him.” A detailed description of his person collected from the
information furnished by various people appears in the columns of a local newspaper. Putois lives in his
strength and malevolence. He lives after the manner of legendary heroes, of the gods of Olympus. He is the
creation of the popular mind. There comes a time when even the innocent originator of that mysterious and
potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment that he may have a real and tangible presence. All this is
I.—“CRAINQUEBILLE” 16
told with the wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to M. Anatole France’s readers and
admirers. For it is difficult to read M. Anatole France without admiring him. He has the princely gift of
arousing a spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that the consent of our reason has its place by the side
of our enthusiasm. He is an artist. As an artist he awakens emotion. The quality of his art remains, as an
inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the proceedings of his thought compel our intellectual admiration.
In this volume the trifle called “The Military Manoeuvres at Montil,” apart from its
far-reaching irony, embodies incidentally the very spirit of automobilism. Somehow or other, how you cannot
tell, the flight over the country in a motor-car, its sensations, its fatigue, its vast topographical range, its
incidents down to the bursting of a tyre, are brought home to you with all the force of high imaginative
perception. It would be out of place to analyse here the means by which the true impression is conveyed so
that the absurd rushing about of General Decuir, in a 30-horse-power car, in search of his cavalry brigade,
becomes to you a more real experience than any day-and-night run you may ever have taken yourself. Suffice
it to say that M. Anatole France had thought the thing worth doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art, a
distinct achievement. And there are other sketches in this book, more or less slight, but all worthy of
regard—the childhood’s recollections of Professor Bergeret and his sister Zoé; the dialogue of
the two upright judges and the conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean Marteau, aimless,
extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike. The vision of
M. Anatole France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and penetrating,
disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians.
Contemplating the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom of his fancy and the
fidelity of his purpose, one becomes aware of the futility of literary watchwords and the vanity of all the
schools of fiction. Not that M. Anatole France is a wild and untrammelled genius. He is not that. Issued
legitimately from the past, he is mindful of his high descent. He has a critical temperament joined to creative
power. He surveys his vast domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows nothing of excesses but
much of restraint.
II.—“L’ÎLE DES PINGOUINS”
M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable histories of saints and sinners, of
Roman procurators and of officials of the Third Republic, of grandes dames and of dames not so very grand,
of ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and generals—in fact, the history of all
humanity as it appears to his penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism, and a
heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice, contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony. As
to M. Anatole France’s adventures, these are well-known. They lie open to this prodigal world in the
four volumes of the Vie Littéraire, describing the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. For such
is the romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary critic. History and adventure, then, seem
to be the chosen fields for the magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France’s prose; but no material
limits can stand in the way of a genius. The latest book from his pen—which may be called golden, as
the lips of an eloquent saint once upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful—this latest book
is, up to a certain point, a book of travel.
I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court. The book is not a record of globe-trotting. I regret it.
It would have been a joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his Pyrrhonic
philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and
opaque vessel. He would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of
compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory illusion. M. Anatole France is a great
magician, yet there seem to be tasks which he dare not face. For he is also a sage.
II.—“L’ÎLE DES PINGOUINS” 17

It is a book of ocean travel—not, however, as understood by Herr Ballin of Hamburg, the Machiavel of
the Atlantic. It is a book of exploration and discovery—not, however, as conceived by an enterprising
journal and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century. It is nothing so recent as that. It dates
much further back; long, long before the dark age when Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a
German Emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships’ dining-tables. The best
idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise I can give you is by stating the nature of the
explorer’s ship. It was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite.
The explorer was St. Maël, a saint of Armorica. I had never heard of him before, but I believe now in his
arduous existence with a faith which is a tribute to M. Anatole France’s pious earnestness and delicate
irony. St. Maël existed. It is distinctly stated of him that his life was a progress in virtue. Thus it seems that
there may be saints that are not progressively virtuous. St. Maël was not of that kind. He was industrious.
He evangelised the heathen. He erected two hundred and eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys.
Indefatigable navigator of the faith, he drifted casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast to coast
and from island to island along the northern seas. At the age of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his
long labours, but his sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost nothing of its force.
A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out his desultory, miraculous trough with
mast, sail, and rudder for swifter progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the simple
old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive enemy of mankind.
The venerable St. Maël fell away from grace by not perceiving at once that a gift of heaven cannot be
improved by the contrivances of human ingenuity. His punishment was adequate. A terrific tempest snatched
the rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and, to be brief, the dazed St. Maël was stranded violently on the
Island of Penguins.
The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a flat, round island whence rose in the centre a conical
mountain capped with clouds. The rain was falling incessantly—a gentle, soft rain which caused the
simple saint to exclaim in great delight: “This is the island of tears, the island of contrition!”
Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to an amphitheatre of rocks; they were
penguins; but the holy man, rendered deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly,
erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. At once he began to preach to them the doctrine of
salvation. Having finished his discourse he lost no time in administering to his interesting congregation the
sacrament of baptism.
If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean adventure to happen to a well-meaning and
zealous saint. Pray reflect on the magnitude of the issues! It is easy to believe what M. Anatole France says,
that, when the baptism of the Penguins became known in Paradise, it caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but
a profound sensation.
M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. He reports with great casuistical erudition the debates in
the saintly council assembled in Heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of
religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned into human beings; and together with
the privilege of sublime hopes these innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the
miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen condition of humanity.
At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns
(but more concisely) into the Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the development of their civilisation, the
absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen
lightens by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted to a subject so grave as the
II.—“L’ÎLE DES PINGOUINS” 18

Polity of Penguins. It is a very admirable treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on
the feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a shelf.
TURGENEV {2}—1917
Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so
much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to
him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater
luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the English-speaking world a translator who has
missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to
analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) I may well permit myself to make
that statement, while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes
of Turgenev’s complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference in the
ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; yet work so
simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in
the Preface to Smoke “to all time.”
Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political
events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual
unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national
writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels,
of the short stories and of A Sportsman’s Sketches—those marvellous landscapes peopled by
unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever,
unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, which has
captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for “all time” it is hard to say. Since, as
you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure
at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even
by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so
tenderly, so reverently and so passionately—they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so
profoundly, so whole-souledly national. But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is but a
canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the
free air of the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in
which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed lives. They
are his own and also universal. Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians
of Shakespeare.
In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the
English-speaking world, is his essential humanity. All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and
oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to
pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to
TURGENEV {2}—1917 19
struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding
future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great
without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of “cleverness” must be fatal to any
man’s influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don’t want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian. It wouldn’t be true. I
know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever
may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience—no
man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his
history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter
years. When he died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope
into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his
shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his
lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of
callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but
the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute
sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and
unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the
significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest
sympathy—and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any
writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the
world’s fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you
wouldn’t get one per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double-headed
Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.
J. C.
STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919

My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr. Pawling, partner in the publishing firm of Mr.
William Heinemann.
One day Mr. Pawling said to me: “Stephen Crane has arrived in England. I asked him if there was
anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two names. One of them was yours.” I had then just
been reading, like the rest of the world, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. The subject of that story was
war, from the point of view of an individual soldier’s emotions. That individual (he remains nameless
throughout) was interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that little book which had for
the moment secured such a noisy recognition I had been even more interested in the personality of the writer.
The picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of his country part of a great fighting
machine was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative force of
expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether worthy of admiration.
Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from the reading of the Nigger of the
Narcissus, a book of mine which had also been published lately. I was truly pleased to hear this.
STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919 20

On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a young man of medium stature and slender build, with
very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to
some purpose.
He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things of this earth and of our mortal
humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, within life’s appearances and forms, the very
spirit of life’s truth. His ignorance of the world at large—he had seen very little of
it—did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation
which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever he said
had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging. He
knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in
words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out—and it was seen then to be much
more than mere felicity of language. His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his
writing he was very sure of his effects. I don’t think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet
it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much
to literature. I think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write. Let me not
be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any
further possible revelation. As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this
world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision? Perhaps he
did not lose a great deal. The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him grudgingly. The
worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the New Review and
later, towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his magazine. For the rest I must
say that during his sojourn in England he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, mal entouré. He was
beset by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of
his nature. Some of them have died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now. I
don’t think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature and perhaps
of weakness in his character which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and
patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation whenever I stayed with him in
either of his English homes. My wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the Park
at Brede. Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a born horseman. He never appeared so happy
or so much to advantage as on the back of a horse. He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy to
ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented him with his first dog.
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London. I saw him for the last time on his last day in
England. It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea. He had
been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face
was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were:
“I am tired. Give my love to your wife and child.” When I stopped at the door for another look
I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a
cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.
Those who have read his little tale, “Horses,” and the story, “The Open Boat,” in
the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he loved horses and the sea. And his passage on
this earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and without
sunshine.
STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919 21

TALES OF THE SEA—1898

It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in the character, not only of his own, but of all
nations, that Marryat is largely human. He is the enslaver of youth, not by the literary artifices of
presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own temperament. To his young heroes the beginning of life is
a splendid and warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage. His novels are not the outcome of his
art, but of his character, like the deeds that make up his record of naval service. To the artist his work is
interesting as a completely successful expression of an unartistic nature. It is absolutely amazing to us, as the
disclosure of the spirit animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young. There is an air of
fable about it. Its loss would be irreparable, like the curtailment of national story or the loss of an historical
document. It is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.
To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. It was a stage, where was displayed an exhibition of
valour, and of such achievement as the world had never seen before. The greatness of that achievement
cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its
grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal. History preserves the skeleton of facts and, here and there, a
figure or a name; but it is in Marryat’s novels that we find the mass of the nameless, that we see them
in the flesh, that we obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd of
obscure men who knew how to build for their country such a shining monument of memories.
Marryat is really a writer of the Service. What sets him apart is his fidelity. His pen serves his country as
well as did his professional skill and his renowned courage. His figures move about between water and sky,
and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the Service. His novels, like amphibious
creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably. The loves and the hates of
his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices. His women, from the beautiful Agnes to the
witch-like mother of Lieutenant Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors’ wives, like the
shadows of what has never been. His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens, his Delmars remind us of people we
have heard of somewhere, many times, without ever believing in their existence. His morality is honourable
and conventional. There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in the midst of carnage. His naïveties are
perpetrated in a lurid light. There is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with memorable
eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in the drawing. They do not belong to life; they
belong exclusively to the Service. And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their time; a
headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of
vitality which only years of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his
action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious. His
greatness is undeniable.
It is undeniable. To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is Marryat’s navy still. He has created a
priceless legend. If he be not immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because he has
dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that Service on which the life of his country depends.
The tradition of the great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the guarantee of the
future. He loved his country first, the Service next, the sea perhaps not at all. But the sea loved him without
reserve. It gave him his professional distinction and his author’s fame—a fame such as not
often falls to the lot of a true artist.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct. He
is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of adventure and
endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the
frame-work, it was an essential part of existence. He could hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and
he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical
TALES OF THE SEA—1898 22

conception alone. His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel
which is not of the sea. But he loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding. In his sea tales
the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its
greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense
solitudes. His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon.
They embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness
of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live face to face
with the promise and the menace of the sea.
He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine. The truth is
within him. The road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that—only it is
expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He has the knowledge of simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin is a
monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type. It is hard to believe that
Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head, Captain Tuck of the packet-ship Montauk, or
Daggett, the tenacious commander of the Sea Lion of Martha’s Vineyard, must pass away some day
and be utterly forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine—and as perfectly
unaffected—as is his art. In certain passages he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.
He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. If he
pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to
forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is
convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country
which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.
Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a
glorious or a useful career. Through the distances of space and time those two men of another race have
shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation. Life is life, and art is art—and truth is hard to
find in either. Yet in testimony to the achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the
writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the artistic
insight of the other—to which he had surrendered—have withstood the brutal shock of facts and
the wear of laborious years. He has never regretted his surrender.
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}—1898

In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the beginning of the sketch entitled “At the Heels of the
White Man,” expresses his anxiety as to the state of England’s account in the Day-Book of the
Recording Angel “for the good and the bad we have done—both with the most excellent
intentions.” The intentions will, no doubt, count for something, though, of course, every
nation’s conquests are paved with good intentions; or it may be that the Recording Angel, looking
compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a struggle which
has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth—in victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and
humiliation.
And, also, love will count for much. If the opinion of a looker-on from afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh
Clifford’s anxiety about his country’s record is needless. To the Malays whom he governs,
instructs, and guides he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the conscience and might of his race. And of
all the nations conquering distant territories in the name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends
out men who, with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh Clifford does, of the place
of toil and exile as “the land which is very dear to me, where the best years of my life have been
spent”—and where (I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect and
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}—1898 23

affection by those brown men about whom he writes.
All these studies are on a high level of interest, though not all on the same level. The descriptive chapters,
results of personal observation, seem to me the most interesting. And, indeed, in a book of this kind it is the
author’s personality which awakens the greatest interest; it shapes itself before one in the ring of
sentences, it is seen between the lines—like the progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced
by the sound of the parang chopping the swaying creepers, while the man himself is glimpsed, now and then,
indistinct and passing between the trees. Thus in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen through
the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating companion in a land of fascination.
It is when dealing with the aspects of nature that Mr. Hugh Clifford is most convincing. He looks upon them
lovingly, for the land is “very dear to him,” and he records his cherished impressions so that the
forest, the great flood, the jungle, the rapid river, and the menacing rock dwell in the memory of the reader
long after the book is closed. He does not say anything, in so many words, of his affection for those who live
amid the scenes he describes so well, but his humanity is large enough to pardon us if we suspect him of such
a rare weakness. In his preface he expresses the regret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be) of the
kailyard school, or—looking up to a very different plane—the genius of Mr. Barrie. He has,
however, gifts of his own, and his genius has served his country and his fortunes in another direction. Yet it is
when attempting what he professes himself unable to do, in telling us the simple story of Ûmat, the
punkah-puller, with unaffected simplicity and half-concealed tenderness, that he comes nearest to artistic
achievement.
Each study in this volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact told without artifice, but with an elective
sureness of knowledge. The story of Tukang Burok’s love, related in the old man’s own words,
conveys the very breath of Malay thought and speech. In “His Little Bill,” the coolie, Lim
Teng Wah, facing his debtor, stands very distinct before us, an insignificant and tragic victim of fate with
whom he had quarrelled to the death over a matter of seven dollars and sixty-eight cents. The story of
“The Schooner with a Past” may be heard, from the Straits eastward, with many variations.
Out in the Pacific the schooner becomes a cutter, and the pearl-divers are replaced by the Black-birds of the
Labour Trade. But Mr. Hugh Clifford’s variation is very good. There is a passage in it—a
trifle—just the diver as seen coming up from the depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct
artistic value. And, scattered through the book, there are many other passages of almost equal descriptive
excellence.
Nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book would be a fundamental error in appreciation. Like faith,
enthusiasm, or heroism, art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest appear more splendid, inspiring, or
sinister. And this book is only truth, interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward. The
Resident of Pahang has the devoted friendship of Ûmat, the punkah-puller, he has an individual faculty of
vision, a large sympathy, and the scrupulous consciousness of the good and evil in his hands. He may as well
rest content with such gifts. One cannot expect to be, at the same time, a ruler of men and an irreproachable
player on the flute.
A HAPPY WANDERER—1910
Converts are interesting people. Most of us, if you will pardon me for betraying the universal secret, have, at
some time or other, discovered in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road. And what
did we do in our pride and our cowardice? Casting fearful glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried
our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that old, beaten track we have not had courage
enough to leave, and which we perceive now more clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave.
A HAPPY WANDERER—1910 24
The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a secular sense), is not discreet. His pride is of
another kind; he jumps gladly off the track—the touch of grace is mostly sudden—and facing
about in a new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on Death itself.
Some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by their exquisite indiscretion. The most illustrious example
of a convert, that Flower of chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only genuine
immortal hidalgo. The delectable Knight of Spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of a small
country squire to an imperative faith in a tender and sublime mission. Forthwith he was beaten with sticks
and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked
social order. I do not know if it has occurred to anybody yet to shut up Mr. Luffmann in a wooden cage. {4}
I do not raise the point because I wish him any harm. Quite the contrary. I am a humane person. Let him
take it as the highest praise—but I must say that he richly deserves that sort of attention.
On the other hand I would not have him unduly puffed up with the pride of the exalted association. The grave
wisdom, the admirable amenity, the serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted to noble
visions are not his. Mr. Luffmann has no mission. He is no Knight sublimely Errant. But he is an excellent
Vagabond. He is full of merit. That peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, Mr. Roosevelt,
would promptly excommunicate him with a big stick. The truth is that the ex-autocrat of all the States does
not like rebels against the sullen order of our universe. Make the best of it or perish—he cries. A sane
lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza
(another great Governor), that distinguished littérateur has no mercy for dreamers. And our author happens to
be a man of (you may trace them in his books) some rather fine reveries.
Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not see myself how any mercy can possibly be extended to
Mr. Luffmann. He is a convert from the creed of strenuous life. For this renegade the body is of little
account; to him work appears criminal when it suppresses the demands of the inner life; while he was young
he did grind virtuously at the sacred handle, and now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some people
because he believes no longer in toil without end. Certain respectable folk hate him—so he
says—because he dares to think that “poetry, beauty, and the broad face of the world are the
best things to be in love with.” He confesses to loving Spain on the ground that she is “the land
of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind.” The universal striving to push ahead he considers
mere vulgar folly. Didn’t I tell you he was a fit subject for the cage?
It is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to discover that this desperate character is not altogether an
outcast. Little girls seem to like him. One of them, after listening to some of his tales, remarked to her
mother, “Wouldn’t it be lovely if what he says were true!” Here you have Woman! The
charming creatures will neither strain at a camel nor swallow a gnat. Not publicly. These operations, without
which the world they have such a large share in could not go on for ten minutes, are left to us—men.
And then we are chided for being coarse. This is a refined objection but does not seem fair. Another little
girl—or perhaps the same little girl—wrote to him in Cordova, “I hope Poste-Restante is
a nice place, and that you are very comfortable.” Woman again! I have in my time told some stories
which are (I hate false modesty) both true and lovely. Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms. And
why? Simply because I am not enough of a Vagabond. The dear despots of the fireside have a weakness for
lawless characters. This is amiable, but does not seem rational.
Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no Impressionist. He is far too earnest in his heart, and not half sufficiently
precise in his style to be that. But he is an excellent narrator. More than any Vagabond I have ever met, he
knows what he is about. There is not one of his quiet days which is dull. You will find in them a love-story
not made up, the coup-de-foudre, the lightning-stroke of Spanish love; and you will marvel how a spell so
sudden and vehement can be at the same time so tragically delicate. You will find there landladies devoured
with jealousy, astute housekeepers, delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy shopkeepers, all the cosas de
A HAPPY WANDERER—1910 25
España—and, in addition, the pale girl Rosario. I recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to
your benevolent compassion. You will find in his pages the humours of starving workers of the soil, the
vision among the mountains of an exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of
attention. And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no visionary. He is in sympathy with suffering
mankind, and has a grasp on real human affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with bread,
love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds to prayer in the holy places of the earth.
But I like his conception of what a “quiet” life is like! His quiet days require no fewer than
forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the
seven—or is it nine?—crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a wretchedly
straitened space. A most unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. One would take it as a joke; only
that, perchance, to the author of Quiet Days in Spain all days may seem quiet, because, a courageous convert,
he is now at peace with himself.
How better can we take leave of this interesting Vagabond than with the road salutation of passing wayfarers:
“And on you be peace! . . . You have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. There’s
nothing like giving up one’s life to an unselfish passion. Let the rich and the powerful of this globe
preach their sound gospel of palpable progress. The part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in
its illusions. No great passion can be barren. May a world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty
solitude of your renunciation!”
THE LIFE BEYOND—1910

You have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of physical effect on one—mostly an
audible effect. I am not alluding here to Blue books or to books of statistics. The effect of these is simply
exasperating and no more. No! the books I have in mind are just the common books of commerce you and I
read when we have five minutes to spare, the usual hired books published by ordinary publishers, printed by
ordinary printers, and censored (when they happen to be novels) by the usual circulating libraries, the
guardians of our firesides, whose names are household words within the four seas.
To see the fair and the brave of this free country surrendering themselves with unbounded trust to the
direction of the circulating libraries is very touching. It is even, in a sense, a beautiful spectacle, because, as
you know, humility is a rare and fragrant virtue; and what can be more humble than to surrender your morals
and your intellect to the judgment of one of your tradesmen? I suppose that there are some very perfect
people who allow the Army and Navy Stores to censor their diet. So much merit, however, I imagine, is not
frequently met with here below. The flesh, alas! is weak, and—from a certain point of view—so
important!
A superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple question: What would become of us if the
circulating libraries ceased to exist? It is a horrid and almost indelicate supposition, but let us be brave and
face the truth. On this earth of ours nothing lasts. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Imagine the utter wreck
overtaking the morals of our beautiful country-houses should the circulating libraries suddenly die! But pray
do not shudder. There is no occasion.
Their spirit shall survive. I declare this from inward conviction, and also from scientific information received
lately. For observe: the circulating libraries are human institutions. I beg you to follow me closely. They are
human institutions, and being human, they are not animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. Thus, any man
with enough money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall be able to evoke the
pure and censorious spectre of the circulating libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves him.
THE LIFE BEYOND—1910 26

For, and this is the information alluded to above, Science, having in its infinite wanderings run up against
various wonders and mysteries, is apparently willing now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, I conclude,
to all his works as well.
I do not know exactly what this “Science” may be; and I do not think that anybody else knows;
but that is the information stated shortly. It is contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes. {5} I
know it is not a censored book, because I can see for myself that it is not a novel. The author, on his side,
warns me that it is not philosophy, that it is not metaphysics, that it is not natural science. After this
comprehensive warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will admit, a pretty hard nut to crack.
But meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about the physical effect of some common,
hired books. A few of them (not necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for
you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written
by a humorist) I only met once. But there is infinite variety in the noises books do make. I have now on my
shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to
make a noise like a buzz-saw. I am inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about, for the
buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced to give it up ere the end of the page is
reached.
The book, however, which I have found so difficult to define, is by no means noisy. As a mere piece of
writing it may be described as being breathless itself and taking the reader’s breath away, not by the
magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubility in the delivery. The constantly elusive argument
and the illustrative quotations go on without a single reflective pause. For this reason alone the reading of that
work is a fatiguing process.
The author himself (I use his own words) “suspects” that what he has written “may be
theology after all.” It may be. It is not my place either to allay or to confirm the author’s
suspicion of his own work. But I will state its main thesis: “That science regarded in the gross dictates
the spirituality of man and strongly implies a spiritual destiny for individual human beings.” This
means: Existence after Death—that is, Immortality.
To find out its value you must go to the book. But I will observe here that an Immortality liable at any
moment to betray itself fatuously by the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is scarcely
worth having. Can you imagine anything more squalid than an Immortality at the beck and call of Eusapia
Palladino? That woman lives on the top floor of a Neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead,
flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, suffered and died, as we must love,
suffer, and die—she gets them to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a
curtain. This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one’s faith in these things one could
not even die safely from disgust, as one would long to do.
And to believe that these manifestations, which the author evidently takes for modern miracles, will stay our
tottering faith; to believe that the new psychology has, only the other day, discovered man to be a
“spiritual mystery,” is really carrying humility towards that universal provider, Science, too far.
*****
We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of absurdity; our perplexities older than
religion itself. It is not for nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the altar,
murmurs, “Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?” Since the day of
Creation two veiled figures, Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world. What
humanity needs is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite
THE LIFE BEYOND—1910 27

mercy on the Day of Judgment.
And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we may well be content to repeat the Invocation
of Sar Peladan. Sar Peladan was an occultist, a seer, a modern magician. He believed in astrology, in the
spirits of the air, in elves; he was marvellously and deliciously absurd. Incidentally he wrote some
incomprehensible poems and a few pages of harmonious prose, for, you must know, “a magician is
nothing else but a great harmonist.” Here are some eight lines of the magnificent Invocation. Let me,
however, warn you, strictly between ourselves, that my translation is execrable. I am sorry to say I am no
magician.
“O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive! Open your arms to the son, prodigal and weary.
“I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have
been wounded by the mystery. . . . &OElig;dipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust,
regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle
deceiver!”
THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910

Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has destroyed, that it is destroying, or,
some day, may destroy poetry. Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have
gone on singing in a sweet strain. How they dare do the impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a cause
for wonder but not for legislation. Not yet. We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and
planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan. As somebody—perhaps a
publisher—said lately: “Poetry is of no account now-a-days.”
But it is not totally neglected. Those persons with gold-rimmed spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy
upon the obvious have remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given to science any
acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked
down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants and a scoffer The Loves of
the Triangles, poets have been supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science. What tribute, for
instance, has poetry paid to electricity? All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur
Symons’ line about arc lamps: “Hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit.”
Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but inarticulate way the glories of
science. Poetry does not play its part. Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon’s knife; but when
he writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table. Here I am reminded, though, of a modern
instance to the contrary in prose. Mr. H. G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse,
was inspired a few years ago to write a short story, Under the Knife. Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a
whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the
Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the
voice of science itself, uttering the words: “There shall be no more pain!” I advise you to look
up that story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose whose amazing inventiveness
we all know, remains a poet even in his most perverse moments of scorn for things as they are. His poetic
imagination is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say. But, indeed, imaginative
faculty would make any man a poet—were he born without tongue for speech and without hands to
seize his fancy and fasten her down to a wretched piece of paper.
*****
THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910 28

The book {6} which in the course of the last few days I have opened and shut several times is not
imaginative. But, on the other hand, it is not a dumb book, as some are. It has even a sort of sober and
serious eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this matter. Mr. Bourne begins his
Ascending Effort with a remark by Sir Francis Galton upon Eugenics that “if the principles he was
advocating were to become effective they must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new
religion.” “Introduced” suggests compulsory vaccination. Mr. Bourne, who is not a
theologian, wishes to league together not science and religion, but science and the arts. “The
intoxicating power of art,” he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired effect to the doctrines
of science. In uninspired phrase he points to the arts playing once upon a time a part in “popularising
the Christian tenets.” With painstaking fervour as great as the fervour of prophets, but not so
persuasive, he foresees the arts some day popularising science. Until that day dawns, science will continue to
be lame and poetry blind. He himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, though he thinks that
“a really prudent people would be greedy of beauty,” and their public authorities “as
careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation.”
As the writer of those remarkable rustic note-books, The Bettesworth Book and Memoirs of a Surrey
Labourer, the author has a claim upon our attention. But his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching
sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and nothing more. He is obsessed by science, haunted
and shadowed by it, until he has been bewildered into awe. He knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs and
its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight from our organic vitality, and is a movement of life-cells
with their matchless unintellectual knowledge. But the fact that poetry does not seem obviously in love with
science has never made him doubt whether it may not be an argument against his haste to see the marriage
ceremony performed amid public rejoicings.
Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among
several others, spinning ridiculously with a waggling motion like a top about to fall. This is the Copernican
system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much about it as its name. But while
watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs and
the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the system
of Ptolemy. He holds it without knowing it. In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand
undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will do after reading Mr. Bourne’s book;
he writes, therefore, as if neither truths nor book existed. Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will not
turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science. Some day, without a doubt,—and it may be a
consolation to Mr. Bourne to know it—fully informed critics will point out that Mr. Davies’s
poem on a dark woman combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of appendicitis, and that
Mr. Yeats’s “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths” came before radium was
quite unnecessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and
comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days.
There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are alarming, but there are other times
when they are entertaining—and this is one of them. “Many a man prides himself” says
Mr. Bourne, “on his piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be investigated,
would be found ordinary, if not base, because they have been adopted in compliance with some external
persuasion or to serve some timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively from the living selection of
his hereditary taste.” This extract is a fair sample of the book’s thought and of its style. But
Mr. Bourne seems to forget that “persuasion” is a vain thing. The appreciation of great art
comes from within.
It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of Mr. Bourne’s purpose is undeniable.
But the whole book is simply an earnest expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes,
this one seems of little dynamic value—besides being impracticable.
THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910 29

Yes, indeed. Art has served Religion; artists have found the most exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the
light of Transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the light of
the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted
for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible shadows.
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907

A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play—and I lived long enough to accomplish the
task. We live and learn. When the play was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for
performance. Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays. I may say without vanity that I am
intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation
to time and space, and I was aware of being in England—in the twentieth-century England. The fact
did not fit the date and the place. That was my first thought. It was, in short, an improper fact. I beg you to
believe that I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.
Therefore I don’t say inappropriate. I say improper—that is: something to be ashamed of. And
at first this impression was confirmed by the obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all
considerable fact had its being. The Censor of Plays! His name was not in the mouths of all men. Far from
it. He seemed stealthy and remote. There was about that figure the scent of the far East, like the peculiar
atmosphere of a Mandarin’s back yard, and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch when
mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final certitude attained in morals, intellect and
conscience.
It was a disagreeable impression. But I reflected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive
monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an
heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for
one’s old possessions apart from any intrinsic value; one more object of exotic virtù, an Oriental
potiche, a magot chinois conceived by a childish and extravagant imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid
impotence in the twilight of the upper shelf.
Thus I quieted my uneasy mind. Its uneasiness had nothing to do with the fate of my one-act play. The play
was duly produced, and an exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards. It ceased to
exist. It was a fair and open execution. But having survived the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I
continued to exist, labouring under no sense of wrong. I was not pleased, but I was content. I was content to
accept the verdict of a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the work of its free,
independent and conscientious servant—the artist.
Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved—not to speak of the bare existence of the
artist and the self-respect of the man. I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public. To the self-respect
of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being made and I join in it with all my heart.
For I have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I
believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers’ mental aberration, that grotesque potiche, works!
The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its
traditions. It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like
a Bravo of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs its victim from behind in the twilight of its upper
shelf. Less picturesque than the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that the assassin plied
his moral trade at his own risk deriving no countenance from the powers of the Republic, it stands more
malevolent, inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas the grotesque thing
nodding its mandarin head may in its absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest,
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907 30

of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.
This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western Barbarian and provided by the State with
the immortal Mr. Stiggins’s plug hat and umbrella, is with us. It is an office. An office of trust. And
from time to time there is found an official to fill it. He is a public man. The least prominent of public men,
the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not the most modest.
But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in his life. His office flourishes in the
shade; not in the rustic shade beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of mind, where tyranny of
every sort flourishes. Its holder need not have either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not
even bowels of compassion. He needs not these things. He has power. He can kill thought, and incidentally
truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live in a dramatic form. He can do it, without seeing,
without understanding, without feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irresponsible Roman
Cæsar could kill a senator. He can do that and there is no one to say him nay. He may call his cook (Molière
used to do that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a matter of constant practice and
still remain the unquestioned destroyer of men’s honest work. He may have a glass too much. This
accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable morality—to gentlemen. He may suffer from
spells of imbecility like Clodius. He may . . . what might he not do! I tell you he is the Cæsar of the dramatic
world. There has been since the Roman Principate nothing in the way of irresponsible power to compare with
the office of the Censor of Plays.
Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the odious and the absurd. This figure in
whose power it is to suppress an intellectual conception—to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my
masters!)—seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the greatness of a
Philistine’s conceit and his moral cowardice.
But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there can be found a man courageous
enough to occupy the post. It is a matter for meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the
conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme
megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.
He must be unconscious. It is one of the qualifications for his magistracy. Other qualifications are equally
easy. He must have done nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing. He must be obscure, insignificant
and mediocre—in thought, act, speech and sympathy. He must know nothing of art, of life—and
of himself. For if he did he would not dare to be what he is. Like that much questioned and mysterious bird,
the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in
the sight of wondering generations.
And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words but the true spirit of a lofty
conscience.
“Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when I felt it antagonistic to my
canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions, I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check
the development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind. With the pen poised in my
hand I hesitated, whispering to myself ‘What if I were perchance doing my part in killing a
masterpiece.’”
Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaître—dramatist and dramatic critic, a great citizen and a
high magistrate in the Republic of Letters; a Censor of Plays exercising his august office openly in the light of
day, with the authority of a European reputation. But then M. Jules Lemaître is a man possessed of wisdom,
of great fame, of a fine conscience—not an obscure hollow Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr.
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907 31

Stiggins’s plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother—the State.
Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf? It has stood too long there. Hatched in Pekin
(I should say) by some Board of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of
Moscow—I suppose. It is outlandish. It is not venerable. It does not belong here. Is it not time to
knock it off its dark shelf with some implement appropriate to its worth and status? With an old broom
handle for instance.
PART II—LIFE
AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905

From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the fate of the great battle of the Russo-Japanese
war hung in the balance for more than a fortnight. The famous three-day battles, for which history has
reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance before the struggles in Manchuria engaging
half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and dying away
from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate persistence, and end—as we have seen them end
more than once—not from the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal weariness
of the combatants.
We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold, silent, colourless print of books and
newspapers. In stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I have no intention of putting a
slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the battles in
Manchuria. I only wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East has been made known
to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection
seen in the perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence, through the veil of
inadequate words. Inadequate, I say, because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of
war, and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a slumbering faculty, notwithstanding
the din of humanitarian talk and the real progress of humanitarian ideas. Direct vision of the fact, or the
stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy with blessed sleep; and even there, as
against the testimony of the senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callousness which reconciles us
to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the
enthusiasm of a purely æsthetic admiration of the rendering. In this age of knowledge our sympathetic
imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely
impervious to information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to the vaunted eloquence
of a serried array of figures, it has all the futility of precision without force. It is the exploded superstition of
enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse falling in front of our windows, a man writhing under a
cart-wheel in the streets awaken more genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of
reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air of the
Manchurian plains, of other tens of thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen
ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of survivors no less pathetic and even more
tragic in being left alive by fate to the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil.
An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist, looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, at
a street—perhaps Fleet Street itself—full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have
wept for joy at seeing so much life. These arcadian tears, this facile emotion worthy of the golden age, comes
to us from the past, with solemn approval, after the close of the Napoleonic wars and before the series of
sanguinary surprises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for our hopeful grandfathers. We may well
envy them their optimism of which this anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme
PART II—LIFE 32
instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of
the earth, triumphant at last in the felicity of her children. Moreover, the psychology of individuals, even in
the most extreme instances, reflects the general effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept for joy! I
should think that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be of a sterner sort. One could not imagine
anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic
officer of a general staff or a popular politician, with a career yet to make. And hardly even that. In the case
of the first tears would be unprofessional, and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the provision of so much
food for powder more in accord with the rules of prudence; the joy of the second would be checked before it
found issue in weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors’ views upon the
question of the hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of their votes.
No! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much as ever during the last hundred years, to
go no further back. The end of the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of dismal mediocrity
in which the French Revolution exploded like a bombshell. In its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the
inferiority of minds, of military and administrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless vividness. And there
is but little courage in saying at this time of the day that the glorified French Revolution itself, except for its
destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The parentage of that great social and political
upheaval was intellectual, the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal form and
power, to lose its “virtue” the moment it descends from its solitary throne to work its will
among the people. It is a king whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects except at the cost
of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of freedom and justice at the root of the French Revolution is
made manifest in the person of its heir; a personality without law or faith, whom it has been the fashion to
represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more like a sort of vulture preying upon the body of a Europe
which did, indeed, for some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse. The subtle and manifold influence
for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct
provocator of obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot well be exaggerated.
The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a corrupted revolution. It may be said that
the twentieth begins with a war which is like the explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet emerge
a new political organism to take the place of a gigantic and dreaded phantom. For a hundred years the ghost
of Russian might, overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western Europe, sat upon
the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the
world, the buried millions of Russian people. Not the most determined cockney sentimentalist could have had
the heart to weep for joy at the thought of its teeming numbers! And yet they were living, they are alive yet,
since, through the mist of print, we have seen their blood freezing crimson upon the snow of the squares and
streets of St. Petersburg; since their generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the ditches and
cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn limbs; to send up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus
of groans calling for vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and advance, without intermission or
rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder—till their
ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of Dante’s Inferno, passing through the
stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the night of crazy despair.
It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and
physical misery. Great numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against the
peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly among the Russians, of course. The Japanese have in their favour the
tonic effect of success; and the innate gentleness of their character stands them in good stead. But the
Japanese grand army has yet another advantage in this nerve-destroying contest, which for endless, arduous
toil of killing surpasses all the wars of history. It has a base for its operations; a base of a nature beyond the
concern of the many books written upon the so-called art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an
exercise of human ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices. The Japanese army has for
its base a reasoned conviction; it has behind it the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity to be
AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 33

appeased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. And in that belief, whether well or ill founded, that army
stands on the high ground of conscious assent, shouldering deliberately the burden of a long-tried
faithfulness. The other people (since each people is an army nowadays), torn out from a miserable quietude
resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed, without starting-point of its own or knowledge of the
aim, can feel nothing but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mysteriously become the plaything of a
black and merciless fate.
The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the memorable difference in the spiritual state
of the two armies; the one forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness into the red
light of a conflagration, the other with a full knowledge of its past and its future, “finding itself”
as it were at every step of the trying war before the eyes of an astonished world. The greatness of the lesson
has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half-conscious prejudice of race-difference. The West having
managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of the East, is prone to forget that it is from the East that the
wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who set the value of life in the power to act
rather than in the faculty of meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a cloud of
considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes
on the military situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same everlasting situation that has
prevailed since the times of Hannibal and Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical
record—since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at the tale of
maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. All this
is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time as this—the time of a great war.
More legitimate in view of the situation created in Europe are the speculations as to the course of events after
the war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and
of terms of peace that do not matter.
And above it all—unaccountably persistent—the decrepit, old, hundred years old, spectre of
Russia’s might still faces Europe from across the teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and
strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something
not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man
of the Sea, still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its shadowy feet
upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of
Oyama, already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a resurrection.
Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep into the black abyss which separates a
soulless autocracy posing as, and even believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted, starved
souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this war, its unforgettable information. And this
war’s true mission, disengaged from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut,
from the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the ownership of ice-free ports and the
command of the waters of the East—its true mission was to lay a ghost. It has accomplished it.
Whether Kuropatkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next year, or the year after next,
from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations. The
task of Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia’s might is laid. Only Europe,
accustomed so long to the presence of that portent, seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our
childhood, the twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition has
vanished—never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze at it with vague dread and
many misgivings.
It was a fascination. And the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable in its persistence as in its duration. It
seems so unaccountable, that the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all that talk as to what Russia will or will
not do, whether it will raise or not another army, whether it will bury the Japanese in Manchuria under
seventy millions of sacrificed peasants’ caps (as her Press boasted a little more than a year ago) or give

up to Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together with some other things; whether, perchance, as an
interesting alternative, it will make peace on the Amur in order to make war beyond the Oxus.
All these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in print; and if they have been gravely
considered by only one reader out of each hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human
brain in the composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that the large page, the columns of words, the leaded
headings, exalt the mind into a state of feverish credulity. The printed page of the Press makes a sort of still
uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the
artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about.
The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our middle-age; the testamentary Russia of
Peter the Great—who imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of
Tsardom—can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at last,
and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a
madman’s brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a
monument of fear and oppression.
The true greatness of a State does not spring from such a contemptible source. It is a matter of logical growth,
of faith and courage. Its inspiration springs from the constructive instinct of the people, governed by the
strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced in the wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the
reward of gratitude. Many States have been powerful, but, perhaps, none have been truly great—as
yet. That the position of a State in reference to the moral methods of its development can be seen only
historically, is true. Perhaps mankind has not lived long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular
case. Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth shared out amongst our clashing
ambitions by the anxious arrangements of statesmen will come to an end before we attain the felicity of
greeting with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great State. It is even possible that we are destined
for another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances.
But whatever political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or our admiration, there will be none, it is
safe to say, which in the magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven out of the
world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its retreat will cling with an equally shameless
sincerity to more unworthy supports: to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the mere brute
force of numbers.
This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men’s feelings and reason that the downfall of
Russia’s might is unavoidable. Spectral it lived and spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of
a single generous deed, of a single service rendered—even involuntarily—to the polity of
nations. Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and
the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible
strength which is dying so hard.
*****
Considered historically, Russia’s influence in Europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a
sort of convention invented by diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack
of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the main characteristic of the management of
international relations. A glance back at the last hundred years shows the invariable, one may say the logical,
powerlessness of Russia. As a military power it has never achieved by itself a single great thing. It has been
indeed able to repel an ill-considered invasion, but only by having recourse to the extreme methods of
desperation. In its attacks upon its specially selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right
hand. All the campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin’s time to the last Eastern war in
1878, entered upon with every advantage of a well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even

the half-armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or, rather, of the Tsardom. It was victorious
only against the practically disarmed, as, in regard to its ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will
prove sufficiently. As an ally, Russia has been always unprofitable, taking her share in the defeats rather than
in the victories of her friends, but always pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an arbiter of military
success. She has been unable to help to any purpose a single principle to hold its own, not even the principle
of authority and legitimism which Nicholas the First had declared so haughtily to rest under his special
protection; just as Nicholas the Second has tried to make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive
affair. And the first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the belief in the sacredness of his realm with such
an intensity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war
was the end of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the way open for the
liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish
from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts. In the space of fifty years the
self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the
Augustulus of the régime that was wont to speak contemptuously to European Foreign Offices in the beautiful
French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have fallen victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful
familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak and claws and a double
head, looking greedily both east and west on the confines of two continents.
That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the monster it is impossible to believe. But of
the many who must have seen, all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak; or else
were too insignificant to be heard or believed. Yet not all.
In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg,
called—so the story goes—upon another distinguished diplomatist. After some talk upon the
general situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire remarked that it was his practice to resume the
impressions he had carried out of every country where he had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he
caused to be engraved upon some trinket. “I am leaving this country now, and this is what I bring
away from it,” he continued, taking off his finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription
inside: “La Russie, c’est le néant.”
Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest nor too discreet to speak out.
Certainly he was not afraid of not being believed. Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops.
He meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for
many a year.
He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more than a third of a
century—a great and dreadful legacy left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of Russia’s
might.
It is that phantom which is disappearing now—unexpectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that

wonderful magic for which the East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its existence will no
longer answer anybody’s purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of
sensational paragraphs as to this Néant making an armed descent upon the plains of India. That sort of folly
would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the real problem created for Europe by a war in
the Far East.
For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound to remain a Néant for many long years, in
a more even than a Bismarckian sense. The very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to consider its
legacy—the fact (no phantom that) accomplished in Central Europe by its help and connivance.

The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always amenable to the confidential
whispers of a bargain; but in the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible
obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. There is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint which the
presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to
inspire. The common guilt of the two Empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the
Polish provinces. Without indulging in excessive feelings of indignation at that country’s partition, or
going so far as to believe—with a late French politician—in the “immanente justice des
choses,” it is clear that a material situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction, contains the
germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two partners in iniquity—whatever the iniquity is.
Germany has been the evil counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her Polish problem. Always urging the
adoption of the most repressive measures with a perfectly logical duplicity, Prince Bismarck’s Empire
has taken care to couple the neighbourly offers of military assistance with merciless advice. The thought of
the Polish provinces accepting a frank reconciliation with a humanised Russia and bringing the weight of
homogeneous loyalty within a few miles of Berlin, has been always intensely distasteful to the arrogant
Germanising tendencies of the other partner in iniquity. And, besides, the way to the Baltic provinces leads
over the Niemen and over the Vistula.
And now, when there is a possibility of serious internal disturbances destroying the sort of order autocracy has
kept in Russia, the road over these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting aspect. At any moment the pretext
of armed intervention may be found in a revolutionary outbreak provoked by Socialists, perhaps—but
at any rate by the political immaturity of the enlightened classes and by the political barbarism of the Russian
people. The throes of Russian resurrection will be long and painful. This is not the place to speculate upon
the nature of these convulsions, but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable tradition, a
shattering of the social, of the administrative—certainly of the territorial—unity.
Voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in Russia is already past. This is the superficial view
of the more profound truth that for Russia there has never been such a time within the memory of mankind. It
is impossible to initiate a rational scheme of reform upon a phase of blind absolutism; and in Russia there has
never been anything else to which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, go back as to a parting of
ways.
In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its historical struggle with the growth of political
liberty by the evolution of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time; by the inception of
that wider solidarity grouping together around the standard of monarchical power these larger, agglomerations
of mankind. This service of unification, creating close-knit communities possessing the ability, the will, and
the power to pursue a common ideal, has prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger understanding: for
the solidarity of Europeanism, which must be the next step towards the advent of Concord and Justice; an
advent that, however delayed by the fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been, and
remains, the only possible goal of our progress.
The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national duties and aspirations have grown under the
shadow of the old monarchies of Europe, which were the creations of historical necessity. There were seeds
of wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses. They had a past and a future; they were human. But under the
shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could grow. Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no
historical past, and it cannot hope for a historical future. It can only end. By no industry of investigation, by
no fantastic stretch of benevolence, can it be presented as a phase of development through which a Society, a
State, must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny. It lies outside the stream of progress.
This despotism has been utterly un-European. Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature. Oriental despotisms
belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace on our minds and our imagination by their
splendour, by their culture, by their art, by the exploits of great conquerors. The record of their rise and decay
has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their course the manifestations of human needs, the

instruments of racial temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism. The Russian autocracy as
we see it now is a thing apart. It is impossible to assign to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfortunes,
the necessities, or the aspirations of mankind. That despotism has neither an European nor an Oriental
parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one
with a sort of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a visitation, like a curse from
Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the
confines of two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or of the West.
This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an awful visitation for which the
responsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to
understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the
atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and
end of her organisation. Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought. Western
thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of
itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by
the rest of the world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in the world, has
moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a
hopeless fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a
half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and holiness. The Government of Holy Russia,
arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent
scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. The
worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of mangled
corpses is the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds. The greatest horror of the
world—madness—walked faithfully in its train. Some of the best intellects of Russia, after
struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet of that hopeless despotism as a
giddy man leaps into an abyss. An attentive survey of Russia’s literature, of her Church, of her
administration and the cross-currents of her thought, must end in the verdict that the Russia of to-day has not
the right to give her voice on a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very
inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human
nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence. The great governmental secret of that
imperium which Prince Bismarck had the insight and the courage to call Le Néant, has been the extirpation of
every intellectual hope. To pronounce in the face of such a past the word Evolution, which is precisely the
expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome pleasantry. There can be no evolution out of a
grave. Another word of less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection with
Russia’s future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as much as of hope—Revolution.
In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips,
and has been heard with solemn forebodings. More or less consciously, Europe is preparing herself for a
spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of greatness. And there will be nothing of
what she expects. She will see neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of generous
greatness. Her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of her ignorance of that Néant
which for so many years had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.
Néant! In a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction of a
good phrase into the use of an inexact form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved
within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the truth to
serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that
could not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has been really complimentary to the useful phantom of the
autocratic might. There is an awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word Néant—and in Russia
there is no idea. She is not a Néant, she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for.
She is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss that has

swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards
knowledge, every ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that have
peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal conquest, mingled with the hate and
contempt for Western ideas, drift impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that there is
in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree serve even the lowest interests of
mankind—and certainly no ground ready for a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was
not the absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to alter the forms of their
legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the march of time. Every form of legality is bound to degenerate
into oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions sooner, perhaps, than any other. It
has not been the business of monarchies to be adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting and
consolidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in favour of a larger conception of a State, of
giving self-consciousness, force and nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action, they were
fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set in motion in a direction they could neither
understand nor approve. Yet, for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more significant, perhaps, some
of the dynasties, too, have survived. The revolutions of European States have never been in the nature of
absolute protests en masse against the monarchical principle; they were the uprising of the people against the
oppressive degeneration of legality. But there never has been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that
as of everything else that has its root in reason or conscience. The ground of every revolution had to be
intellectually prepared. A revolution is a short cut in the rational development of national needs in response to
the growth of world-wide ideals. It is conceivably possible for a monarch of genius to put himself at the head
of a revolution without ceasing to be the king of his people. For the autocracy of Holy Russia the only
conceivable self-reform is—suicide.
The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all-powerful ruler and his helpless people. Wielders of a power
purchased by an unspeakable baseness of subjection to the Khans of the Tartar horde, the Princes of Russia
who, in their heart of hearts had come in time to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe,
have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. Their authority has never been sanctioned by popular tradition,
by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of political necessity, of simple expediency, or even by the power
of the sword. In whatever form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her end, it can never be a revolution
fruitful of moral consequences to mankind. It cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a tragic
circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who had never seen face to face either law, order,
justice, right, truth about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing outside the capricious will of
its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver,
with the wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their service, but at least the force of energy and desperation in
some as yet unknown Spartacus.
A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon Russian achievements; and the coming events of
her internal changes, however appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive than
the convulsions of a colossal body. As her boasted military force that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck no
other but faltering blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master with the poison of
tyranny and superstition, will find itself on awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child
having first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech. It is safe to say tyranny, assuming a
thousand protean shapes, will remain clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes
succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of bare feet.
That would be the beginning. What is to come after? The conquest of freedom to call your soul your own is
only the first step on the road to excellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the
time to forget how little that freedom means. To Russia it must seem everything. A prisoner shut up in a
noisome dungeon concentrates all his hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. It
appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas what is important is the spirit in
which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the

endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his future with no other material but what
he can find within himself.
It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of collective wisdom. Since 1870 (as a
distinguished statesman of the old tradition disconsolately exclaimed) “il n’y a plus
d’Europe!” There is, indeed, no Europe. The idea of a Europe united in the solidarity of her
dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna Congress through the subsiding
dust of Napoleonic alarums and excursions, has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining
ideals. Instead of the doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of nationalities much more favourable to
spoliations that came to the front, and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe.
Meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are alliances so shamelessly based upon
the exigencies of suspicion and mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year, almost
with the event of every passing month. This is the atmosphere Russia will find when the last rampart of
tyranny has been beaten down. But what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of
day? An ally she has yet who more than any other of Russia’s allies has found that it had parted with
lots of solid substance in exchange for a shadow. It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the
darkest that the modern world had ever known—and the most overbearing. But it is fading now, and
the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction,
and no doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even in the moments of greatest aberration is
seldom wanting in the voice of the French people.
Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Austria, traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not
forced, ruled by a dynasty of uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an uncertain,
bilingual phrase. Prussia, grown in something like forty years from an almost pitiful dependant into a
bullying friend and evil counsellor of Russia’s masters, may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong hand to
the weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only with the intention of tearing away the
long-coveted part of her substance.
Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything but a Néant where thought and
effort are likely to lose themselves without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation, full of
unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping
itself to the severed members of its friends and neighbours. The era of wars so eloquently denounced by the
old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet. They will be
fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth-and-claw
obstinacy of a struggle for existence. They will make us regret the time of dynastic ambitions, with their
human absurdity moderated by prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and the
regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. For, if the monarchs of Europe have been derided for
addressing each other as “brother” in autograph communications, that relationship was at least
as effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be established between the rival nations of this continent,
which, we are assured on all hands, is the heritage of democracy. In the ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs
the reality of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as a drag on unscrupulous desires of glory or
greed. Besides, there was always the common danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each
other’s divine right. No leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but the sudden shout of a
multitude, and debarred by the very condition of his power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any
interest in calling brother the leader of another democracy—a chief as fatherless and heirless as
himself.
The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napoleon’s half-generous, half-selfish adoption of the
principle of nationalities, was the first war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the
tune of an old song for which we may thank the Teutonic thoroughness. Was it not that excellent bourgeoise,
Princess Bismarck (to keep only to great examples), who was so righteously anxious to see men, women and

children—emphatically the children, too—of the abominable French nation massacred off the
face of the earth? This illustration of the new war-temper is artlessly revealed in the prattle of the amiable
Busch, the Chancellor’s pet “reptile” of the Press. And this was supposed to be a war
for an idea! Too much, however, should not be made of that good wife’s and mother’s
sentiments any more than of the good First Emperor William’s tears, shed so abundantly after every
battle, by letter, telegram, and otherwise, during the course of the same war, before a dumb and shamefaced
continent. These were merely the expressions of the simplicity of a nation which more than any other has a
tendency to run into the grotesque. There is worse to come.
To-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of different race, the short era of national wars seems about to
close. No war will be waged for an idea. The “noxious idle aristocracies” of yesterday fought
without malice for an occupation, for the honour, for the fun of the thing. The virtuous, industrious
democratic States of to-morrow may yet be reduced to fighting for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate,
ferocity, and fury that must attach to the vital importance of such an issue. The dreams sanguine
humanitarians raised almost to ecstasy about the year fifty of the last century by the moving sight of the
Crystal Palace—crammed full with that variegated rubbish which it seems to be the bizarre fate of
humanity to produce for the benefit of a few employers of labour—have vanished as quickly as they
had arisen. The golden hopes of peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in every drawer of every
benevolent theorist’s writing table. A swift disenchantment overtook the incredible infatuation which
could put its trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition.
Industrialism and commercialism—wearing high-sounding names in many languages (Welt-politik may

serve for one instance) picking up coins behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides
have widened for us the horizon of the universe by some few inches—stand ready, almost eager, to
appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell
or so. And democracy, which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of material interests, will have to
fight their battles to the bitter end, on a mere pittance—unless, indeed, some statesman of exceptional
ability and overwhelming prestige succeeds in carrying through an international understanding for the
delimitation of spheres of trade all over the earth, on the model of the territorial spheres of influence marked
in Africa to keep the competitors for the privilege of improving the nigger (as a buying machine) from flying
prematurely at each other’s throats.
This seems the only expedient at hand for the temporary maintenance of European peace, with its alliances
based on mutual distrust, preparedness for war as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily stronger, so far,
than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee. The true peace of the world will be a place of refuge much less
like a beleaguered fortress and more, let us hope, in the nature of an Inviolable Temple. It will be built on less
perishable foundations than those of material interests. But it must be confessed that the architectural aspect
of the universal city remains as yet inconceivable—that the very ground for its erection has not been
cleared of the jungle.
Never before in history has the right of war been more fully admitted in the rounded periods of public
speeches, in books, in public prints, in all the public works of peace, culminating in the establishment of the
Hague Tribunal—that solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a House of Strife. To him whose
indignation is qualified by a measure of hope and affection, the efforts of mankind to work its own salvation
present a sight of alarming comicality. After clinging for ages to the steps of the heavenly throne, they are
now, without much modifying their attitude, trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the
thunderbolts of their Jupiter. They have removed war from the list of Heaven-sent visitations that could only
be prayed against; they have erased its name from the supplication against the wrath of war, pestilence, and
famine, as it is found in the litanies of the Roman Catholic Church; they have dragged the scourge down from
the skies and have made it into a calm and regulated institution. At first sight the change does not seem for
the better. Jove’s thunderbolt looks a most dangerous plaything in the hands of the people. But a

solemnly established institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion, abuse, worship, and execration
of men. It grows obsolete, odious, and intolerable; it stands fatally condemned to an unhonoured old age.
Therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and the best way to help its prospects is to provide in the
fullest, frankest way for the conditions of the present day. War is one of its conditions; it is its principal
condition. It lies at the heart of every question agitating the fears and hopes of a humanity divided against
itself. The succeeding ages have changed nothing except the watchwords of the armies. The intellectual stage
of mankind being as yet in its infancy, and States, like most individuals, having but a feeble and imperfect
consciousness of the worth and force of the inner life, the need of making their existence manifest to
themselves is determined in the direction of physical activity. The idea of ceasing to grow in territory, in
strength, in wealth, in influence—in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge—is odious to
them as the omen of the end. Action, in which is to be found the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone
satisfy our uneasy vanity and lay to rest the haunting fear of the future—a sentiment concealed, indeed,
but proving its existence by the force it has, when invoked, to stir the passions of a nation. It will be long
before we have learned that in the great darkness before us there is nothing that we need fear. Let us act lest
we perish—is the cry. And the only form of action open to a State can be of no other than aggressive
nature.
There are many kinds of aggressions, though the sanction of them is one and the same—the magazine
rifle of the latest pattern. In preparation for or against that form of action the States of Europe are spending
now such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch from the labours of factory and counting-house.
Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men, and reigned with less disputed sway in
their minds. It has harnessed science to its gun-carriages, it has enriched a few respectable manufacturers,
scattered doles of food and raiment amongst a few thousand skilled workmen, devoured the first youth of
whole generations, and reaped its harvest of countless corpses. It has perverted the intelligence of men,
women, and children, and has made the speeches of Emperors, Kings, Presidents, and Ministers monotonous
with ardent protestations of fidelity to peace. Indeed, war has made peace altogether its own, it has modelled
it on its own image: a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of peace, with a mailed fist, and turned-up
moustaches, ringing with the din of grand manoeuvres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of arms; it has
made peace so magnificent as to be almost as expensive to keep up as itself. It has sent out apostles of its
own, who at one time went about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanctity of its
sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood, to the poor in mind—whose name is legion.
It has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day of culminating triumph is often paid for by a
morrow of sudden extinction. Let us hope it is so. Yet the dawn of that day of retribution may be a long time
breaking above a dark horizon. War is with us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with
us again. And it is the way of true wisdom for men and States to take account of things as they are.
Civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for whose growth it is responsible. It has managed to
remove the sights and sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps. But it cannot be expected to achieve
the feat always and under every variety of circumstance. Some day it must fail, and we shall have then a
wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy. It is not absurd to
suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will not be a distant war waged by Russia either beyond the
Amur or beyond the Oxus.
The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the Russia of the future will not, for the reasons
explained above, be the Russia of to-day. It will not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims. It is even
a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame unaltered and unbroken. All speculation loses itself in
the magnitude of the events made possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title to
existence was the invincible power of military conquest. That autocratic Russia will have a miserable end in

harmony with its base origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt. The problem of the immediate
future is posed not by the eventual manner but by the approaching fact of its disappearance.
The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not only accomplished what will be recognised
historically as an important mission in the world’s struggle against all forms of evil, but have also
created a situation. They have created a situation in the East which they are competent to manage by
themselves; and in doing this they have brought about a change in the condition of the West with which
Europe is not well prepared to deal. The common ground of concord, good faith and justice is not sufficient
to establish an action upon; since the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western
nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a material advantage. And
eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of human action, which in its nature must for ever remain
short-sighted. The trouble of the civilised world is the want of a common conservative principle abstract
enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of international action tending towards
the restraint of particular ambitions. Peace tribunals instituted for the greater glory of war will not replace it.
Whether such a principle exists—who can say? If it does not, then it ought to be invented. A sage with
a sense of humour and a heart of compassion should set about it without loss of time, and a solemn prophet
full of words and fire ought to be given the task of preparing the minds. So far there is no trace of such a
principle anywhere in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very effective) have disappeared long ago
before the doctrine of national aspirations. Il n’y a plus d’Europe—there is only an
armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death and of
loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions. There are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the
envious acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great Powers of the Continent, whose feet are
not exactly in the ocean—not yet—and whose head is very high up—in Pomerania, the
breeding place of such precious Grenadiers that Prince Bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote) would not
have given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the old Eastern Question. But times have changed,
since, by way of keeping up, I suppose, some old barbaric German rite, the faithful servant of the
Hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new Emperor.
Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a possible re-grouping of European
Powers. The alliance of the three Empires is supposed possible. And it may be possible. The myth of
Russia’s power is dying very hard—hard enough for that combination to take
place—such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers will still exercise upon the
imagination of a people trained to the worship of force. Germany may be willing to lend its support to a
tottering autocracy for the sake of an undisputed first place, and of a preponderating voice in the settlement of
every question in that south-east of Europe which merges into Asia. No principle being involved in such an
alliance of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand in the way of Germany’s other
ambitions. The fall of autocracy would bring its restraint automatically to an end. Thus it may be believed
that the support Russian despotism may get from its once humble friend and client will not be stamped by that
thoroughness which is supposed to be the mark of German superiority. Russia weakened down to the second
place, or Russia eclipsed altogether during the throes of her regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of
German policy—which are many and various and often incredible, though the aim of them all is the
same: aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no regard to right and justice, either in the East or in the
West. For that and no other is the true note of your Welt-politik which desires to live.
The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so much for something to do that
would count for good in the records of the earth, as simply for something good to get. He gazes upon the land
and upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and has
learned to box the compass. He gazes north and south, and east and west, and is inclined to look
intemperately upon the waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue. The disappearance of the Russian
phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the Welt-politik. According to the national tendency
this assumption of Imperial impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the

pickelhaubes peeping out grimly from behind. Germany’s attitude proves that no peace for the earth
can be found in the expansion of material interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only
aim, ideal, and watchword. For the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at the passing away of the Russian
phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, and wait half-doubting for the birth of a
nation’s soul in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor Gambetta, tribune
of the people (who was simple and believed in the “immanent justice of things”), may be
adapted in the shape of a warning that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned:
“Le Prussianisme—voilà l’ennemi!”
THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919

At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had become an accomplished fact, the
world qualified it at once as a crime. This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of
Europe; the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into the
category of acts morally reprehensible and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt. As to Russia, the third party
to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national conscience at the time. The will of its
rulers was always accepted by the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God. As
an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply in the fact that it happened to be possible;
there was the plunder and there was the opportunity to get hold of it. Catherine the Great looked upon this
extension of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction. Her political argument that the destruction of Poland
meant the repression of revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism in Europe was a
characteristically impudent pretence. There may have been minds here and there amongst the Russians that
perceived, or perhaps only felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Republic, Russia
approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased, at least territorially, to be an Asiatic Power.
It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play a great part in Europe. To such statesmen as
she had then that act of brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom. The King of
Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much
smaller cost and at much less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that time Poland was
perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in
humanitarian illusions. Morally, the Republic was in a state of ferment and consequent weakness, which so
often accompanies the period of social reform. The strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming;
I mean the comparatively honest (because open) strength of armed forces. But, probably from innate
inclination towards treachery, Frederick of Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception.
Appearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered deliberately into a treaty of alliance with the
Republic, and then, before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the commonest decency, which
must have been extremely gratifying to his natural tastes.
As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction. They cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch
that they were in a measure sincere. They arose from a vivid perception that Austria’s allotted share of
the spoil could never compensate her for the accession of strength and territory to the other two Powers.
Austria did not really want an extension of territory at the cost of Poland. She could not hope to improve her
frontier in that way, and economically she had no need of Galicia, a province whose natural resources were
undeveloped and whose salt mines did not arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her own. No
doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions was very distasteful to the conservative monarchy;
Austrian statesmen did see at the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy was in the West, in
France, and that all the forces of Central Europe would be needed for its suppression. But the movement
towards a partage on the part of Russia and Prussia was too definite to be resisted, and Austria had to follow
their lead in the destruction of a State which she would have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against
Prussian and Russian ambitions. It may be truly said that the destruction of Poland secured the safety of the
THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 44

French Revolution. For when in 1795 the crime was consummated, the Revolution had turned the corner and
was in a state to defend itself against the forces of reaction.
In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of Europe:
France and Poland. On an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was relatively
every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so. But France’s geographical position made her
much less vulnerable. She had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a
conglomeration of small German Principalities on the east were her happy lot. The only States which dreaded
the contamination of the new principles and had enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and Russia,
and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, and
offering an immediate satisfaction to their cupidity. They made their choice, and the untold sufferings of a
nation which would not die was the price exacted by fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals.
Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the course of history. Progress leaves
its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their
hearts. It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise the victims do not count. As an
emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and then:
the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body into three pieces. There was really nothing
to do but to drop a few tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave. But the spirit of the nation refused
to rest therein. It haunted the territories of the Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral
mansion where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed, and pooh-pooh’d
ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful
possessors. Poland deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its religion and language
persecuted and repressed, became a mere geographical expression. And even that, itself, seemed strangely
vague, had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the spoliators
who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction,
were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime. What was most annoying to their
righteousness was the fact that the nation, stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold. That
persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to the rest of Europe also. It would
intrude its irresistible claim into every problem of European politics, into the theory of European equilibrium,
into the question of the Near East, the Italian question, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into the
doctrine of nationalities. That ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the thieves,
haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of
Council-rooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows. It would not be exorcised by the
brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine railleries of Gorchakov.
As a Polish friend observed to me some years ago: “Till the year ’48 the Polish problem has
been to a certain extent a convenient rallying-point for all manifestations of liberalism. Since that time we
have come to be regarded simply as a nuisance. It’s very disagreeable.”
I agreed that it was, and he continued: “What are we to do? We did not create the situation by any
outside action of ours. Through all the centuries of its existence Poland has never been a menace to anybody,
not even to the Turks, to whom it has been merely an obstacle.”
Nothing could be more true. The spirit of aggressiveness was absolutely foreign to the Polish temperament, to
which the preservation of its institutions and its liberties was much more precious than any ideas of conquest.
Polish wars were defensive, and they were mostly fought within Poland’s own borders. And that those
territories were often invaded was but a misfortune arising from its geographical position. Territorial
expansion was never the master-thought of Polish statesmen. The consolidation of the territories of the
sérénissime Republic, which made of it a Power of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by force. It
was not the consequence of successful aggression, but of a long and successful defence against the raiding

neighbours from the East. The lands of Lithuanian and Ruthenian speech were never conquered by Poland.
These peoples were not compelled by a series of exhausting wars to seek safety in annexation. It was not the
will of a prince or a political intrigue that brought about the union. Neither was it fear. The slowly-matured
view of the economical and social necessities and, before all, the ripening moral sense of the masses were the
motives that induced the forty three representatives of Lithuanian and Ruthenian provinces, led by their
paramount prince, to enter into a political combination unique in the history of the world, a spontaneous and
complete union of sovereign States choosing deliberately the way of peace. Never was strict truth better
expressed in a political instrument than in the preamble of the first Union Treaty (1413). It begins with the
words: “This Union, being the outcome not of hatred, but of love”—words that Poles
have not heard addressed to them politically by any nation for the last hundred and fifty years.
This union being an organic, living thing capable of growth and development was, later, modified and
confirmed by two other treaties, which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal union all their rights,
liberties, and respective institutions. The Polish State offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal
administrative federalism which, in its Parliamentary life as well as its international politics, presented a
complete unity of feeling and purpose. As an eminent French diplomatist remarked many years ago:
“It is a very remarkable fact in the history of the Polish State, this invariable and unanimous consent of
the populations; the more so that, the King being looked upon simply as the chief of the Republic, there was
no monarchical bond, no dynastic fidelity to control and guide the sentiment of the nations, and their union
remained as a pure affirmation of the national will.” The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Ruthenian
Provinces retained their statutes, their own administration, and their own political institutions. That those
institutions in the course of time tended to assimilation with the Polish form was not the result of any
pressure, but simply of the superior character of Polish civilisation.
Even after Poland lost its independence this alliance and this union remained firm in spirit and fidelity. All
the national movements towards liberation were initiated in the name of the whole mass of people inhabiting
the limits of the old Republic, and all the Provinces took part in them with complete devotion. It is only in the
last generation that efforts have been made to create a tendency towards separation, which would indeed serve
no one but Poland’s common enemies. And, strangely enough, it is the internationalists, men who
professedly care nothing for race or country, who have set themselves this task of disruption, one can easily
see for what sinister purpose. The ways of the internationalists may be dark, but they are not inscrutable.
From the same source no doubt there will flow in the future a poisoned stream of hints of a reconstituted
Poland being a danger to the races once so closely associated within the territories of the Old Republic. The
old partners in “the Crime” are not likely to forgive their victim its inconvenient and almost
shocking obstinacy in keeping alive. They had tried moral assassination before and with some small measure
of success, for, indeed, the Polish question, like all living reproaches, had become a nuisance. Given the
wrong, and the apparent impossibility of righting it without running risks of a serious nature, some moral
alleviation may be found in the belief that the victim had brought its misfortunes on its own head by its own
sins. That theory, too, had been advanced about Poland (as if other nations had known nothing of sin and
folly), and it made some way in the world at different times, simply because good care was taken by the
interested parties to stop the mouth of the accused. But it has never carried much conviction to honest minds.
Somehow, in defiance of the cynical point of view as to the Force of Lies and against all the power of falsified
evidence, truth often turns out to be stronger than calumny. With the course of years, however, another
danger sprang up, a danger arising naturally from the new political alliances dividing Europe into two armed
camps. It was the danger of silence. Almost without exception the Press of Western Europe in the twentieth
century refused to touch the Polish question in any shape or form whatever. Never was the fact of Polish
vitality more embarrassing to European diplomacy than on the eve of Poland’s resurrection.
When the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the proclamations of emperors and
archdukes appealing to that invincible soul of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had been so

arrogantly denying for more than a century. Perhaps in the whole record of human transactions there have
never been performances so brazen and so vile as the manifestoes of the German Emperor and the Grand
Duke Nicholas of Russia; and, I imagine, no more bitter insult has been offered to human heart and
intelligence than the way in which those proclamations were flung into the face of historical truth. It was like
a scene in a cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort unfathomable by the
reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be so abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single
moment. At that time, and for the first two months of the war, I happened to be in Poland, and I remember
perfectly well that, when those precious documents came out, the confidence in the moral turpitude of
mankind they implied did not even raise a scornful smile on the lips of men whose most sacred feelings and
dignity they outraged. They did not deign to waste their contempt on them. In fact, the situation was too
poignant and too involved for either hot scorn or a coldly rational discussion. For the Poles it was like being
in a burning house of which all the issues were locked. There was nothing but sheer anguish under the
strange, as if stony, calmness which in the utter absence of all hope falls on minds that are not constitutionally
prone to despair. Yet in this time of dismay the irrepressible vitality of the nation would not accept a neutral
attitude. I was told that even if there were no issue it was absolutely necessary for the Poles to affirm their
national existence. Passivity, which could be regarded as a craven acceptance of all the material and moral
horrors ready to fall upon the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment. Therefore, it was explained to
me, the Poles must act. Whether this was a counsel of wisdom or not it is very difficult to say, but there are
crises of the soul which are beyond the reach of wisdom. When there is apparently no issue visible to the eyes
of reason, sentiment may yet find a way out, either towards salvation or to utter perdition, no one can
tell—and the sentiment does not even ask the question. Being there as a stranger in that tense
atmosphere, which was yet not unfamiliar to me, I was not very anxious to parade my wisdom, especially
after it had been pointed out in answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its values worth fighting for,
death, too, has that in it which can make it worthy or unworthy.
Out of the mental and moral trouble into which the grouping of the Powers at the beginning of war had thrown
the counsels of Poland there emerged at last the decision that the Polish Legions, a peace organisation in
Galicia directed by Pilsudski (afterwards given the rank of General, and now apparently the Chief of the
Government in Warsaw), should take the field against the Russians. In reality it did not matter against which
partner in the “Crime” Polish resentment should be directed. There was little to choose
between the methods of Russian barbarism, which were both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality
tinged with contempt of Germany’s superficial, grinding civilisation. There was nothing to choose
between them. Both were hateful, and the direction of the Polish effort was naturally governed by
Austria’s tolerant attitude, which had connived for years at the semi-secret organisation of the Polish
Legions. Besides, the material possibility pointed out the way. That Poland should have turned at first
against the ally of Western Powers, to whose moral support she had been looking for so many years, is not a
greater monstrosity than that alliance with Russia which had been entered into by England and France with
rather less excuse and with a view to eventualities which could perhaps have been avoided by a firmer policy
and by a greater resolution in the face of what plainly appeared unavoidable.
For let the truth be spoken. The action of Germany, however cruel, sanguinary, and faithless, was nothing in
the nature of a stab in the dark. The Germanic Tribes had told the whole world in all possible tones carrying
conviction, the gently persuasive, the coldly logical; in tones Hegelian, Nietzschean, warlike, pious, cynical,
inspired, what they were going to do to the inferior races of the earth, so full of sin and all unworthiness. But
with a strange similarity to the prophets of old (who were also great moralists and invokers of might) they
seemed to be crying in a desert. Whatever might have been the secret searching of hearts, the Worthless Ones
would not take heed. It must also be admitted that the conduct of the menaced Governments carried with it no
suggestion of resistance. It was no doubt, the effect of neither courage nor fear, but of that prudence which
causes the average man to stand very still in the presence of a savage dog. It was not a very politic attitude,
and the more reprehensible in so far that it seemed to arise from the mistrust of their own people’s
fortitude. On simple matters of life and death a people is always better than its leaders, because a people

cannot argue itself as a whole into a sophisticated state of mind out of deference for a mere doctrine or from
an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness. I am speaking now of democracies whose chiefs resemble the
tyrant of Syracuse in this, that their power is unlimited (for who can limit the will of a voting people?) and
who always see the domestic sword hanging by a hair above their heads.
Perhaps a different attitude would have checked German self-confidence, and her overgrown militarism would
have died from the excess of its own strength. What would have been then the moral state of Europe it is
difficult to say. Some other excess would probably have taken its place, excess of theory, or excess of
sentiment, or an excess of the sense of security leading to some other form of catastrophe; but it is certain that
in that case the Polish question would not have taken a concrete form for ages. Perhaps it would never have
taken form! In this world, where everything is transient, even the most reproachful ghosts end by vanishing
out of old mansions, out of men’s consciences. Progress of enlightenment, or decay of faith? In the
years before the war the Polish ghost was becoming so thin that it was impossible to get for it the slightest
mention in the papers. A young Pole coming to me from Paris was extremely indignant, but I, indulging in
that detachment which is the product of greater age, longer experience, and a habit of meditation, refused to
share that sentiment. He had gone begging for a word on Poland to many influential people, and they had one
and all told him that they were going to do no such thing. They were all men of ideas and therefore might
have been called idealists, but the notion most strongly anchored in their minds was the folly of touching a
question which certainly had no merit of actuality and would have had the appalling effect of provoking the
wrath of their old enemies and at the same time offending the sensibilities of their new friends. It was an
unanswerable argument. I couldn’t share my young friend’s surprise and indignation. My
practice of reflection had also convinced me that there is nothing on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than
political idealism when touched by the breath of practical politics.
It would be good to remember that Polish independence as embodied in a Polish State is not the gift of any
kind of journalism, neither is it the outcome even of some particularly benevolent idea or of any clearly
apprehended sense of guilt. I am speaking of what I know when I say that the original and only formative
idea in Europe was the idea of delivering the fate of Poland into the hands of Russian Tsarism. And, let us
remember, it was assumed then to be a victorious Tsarism at that. It was an idea talked of openly, entertained
seriously, presented as a benevolence, with a curious blindness to its grotesque and ghastly character. It was
the idea of delivering the victim with a kindly smile and the confident assurance that “it would be all
right” to a perfectly unrepentant assassin, who, after sawing furiously at its throat for a hundred years
or so, was expected to make friends suddenly and kiss it on both cheeks in the mystic Russian fashion. It was
a singularly nightmarish combination of international polity, and no whisper of any other would have been
officially tolerated. Indeed, I do not think in the whole extent of Western Europe there was anybody who had
the slightest mind to whisper on that subject. Those were the days of the dark future, when Benckendorf put
down his name on the Committee for the Relief of Polish Populations driven by the Russian armies into the
heart of Russia, when the Grand Duke Nicholas (the gentleman who advocated a St. Bartholomew’s
Night for the suppression of Russian liberalism) was displaying his “divine” (I have read the
very word in an English newspaper of standing) strategy in the great retreat, where Mr. Iswolsky carried
himself haughtily on the banks of the Seine; and it was beginning to dawn upon certain people there that he
was a greater nuisance even than the Polish question.
But there is no use in talking about all that. Some clever person has said that it is always the unexpected that
happens, and on a calm and dispassionate survey the world does appear mainly to one as a scene of miracles.
Out of Germany’s strength, in whose purpose so many people refused to believe, came
Poland’s opportunity, in which nobody could have been expected to believe. Out of Russia’s
collapse emerged that forbidden thing, the Polish independence, not as a vengeful figure, the retributive
shadow of the crime, but as something much more solid and more difficult to get rid of—a political
necessity and a moral solution. Directly it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, and also the
fact that, for better or worse, it was impossible to get rid of it again except by the unthinkable way of another

carving, of another partition, of another crime.
Therein lie the strength and the future of the thing so strictly forbidden no farther back than two years or so, of
the Polish independence expressed in a Polish State. It comes into the world morally free, not in virtue of its
sufferings, but in virtue of its miraculous rebirth and of its ancient claim for services rendered to Europe. Not
a single one of the combatants of all the fronts of the world has died consciously for Poland’s
freedom. That supreme opportunity was denied even to Poland’s own children. And it is just as well!
Providence in its inscrutable way had been merciful, for had it been otherwise the load of gratitude would
have been too great, the sense of obligation too crushing, the joy of deliverance too fearful for mortals,
common sinners with the rest of mankind before the eye of the Most High. Those who died East and West,
leaving so much anguish and so much pride behind them, died neither for the creation of States, nor for empty
words, nor yet for the salvation of general ideas. They died neither for democracy, nor leagues, nor systems,
nor yet for abstract justice, which is an unfathomable mystery. They died for something too deep for words,
too mighty for the common standards by which reason measures the advantages of life and death, too sacred
for the vain discourses that come and go on the lips of dreamers, fanatics, humanitarians, and statesmen. They
died . . . .
Poland’s independence springs up from that great immolation, but Poland’s loyalty to Europe
will not be rooted in anything so trenchant and burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of
that gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of
weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human sentiments to end in negation. Polish loyalty
will be rooted in something much more solid and enduring, in something that could never be called eternal,
but which is, in fact, life-enduring. It will be rooted in the national temperament, which is about the only
thing on earth that can be trusted. Men may deteriorate, they may improve too, but they don’t change.
Misfortune is a hard school which may either mature or spoil a national character, but it may be reasonably
advanced that the long course of adversity of the most cruel kind has not injured the fundamental
characteristics of the Polish nation which has proved its vitality against the most demoralising odds. The
various phases of the Polish sense of self-preservation struggling amongst the menacing forces and the no less
threatening chaos of the neighbouring Powers should be judged impartially. I suggest impartiality and not
indulgence simply because, when appraising the Polish question, it is not necessary to invoke the softer
emotions. A little calm reflection on the past and the present is all that is necessary on the part of the Western
world to judge the movements of a community whose ideals are the same, but whose situation is unique. This
situation was brought vividly home to me in the course of an argument more than eighteen months ago.
“Don’t forget,” I was told, “that Poland has got to live in contact with Germany
and Russia to the end of time. Do you understand the force of that expression: ‘To the end of
time’? Facts must be taken into account, and especially appalling facts, such as this, to which there is
no possible remedy on earth. For reasons which are, properly speaking, physiological, a prospect of
friendship with Germans or Russians even in the most distant future is unthinkable. Any alliance of heart and
mind would be a monstrous thing, and monsters, as we all know, cannot live. You can’t base your
conduct on a monstrous conception. We are either worth or not worth preserving, but the horrible psychology
of the situation is enough to drive the national mind to distraction. Yet under a destructive pressure, of which
Western Europe can have no notion, applied by forces that were not only crushing but corrupting, we have
preserved our sanity. Therefore there can be no fear of our losing our minds simply because the pressure is
removed. We have neither lost our heads nor yet our moral sense. Oppression, not merely political, but
affecting social relations, family life, the deepest affections of human nature, and the very fount of natural
emotions, has never made us vengeful. It is worthy of notice that with every incentive present in our
emotional reactions we had no recourse to political assassination. Arms in hand, hopeless or hopefully, and
always against immeasurable odds, we did affirm ourselves and the justice of our cause; but wild justice has
never been a part of our conception of national manliness. In all the history of Polish oppression there was
only one shot fired which was not in battle. Only one! And the man who fired it in Paris at the Emperor
Alexander II. was but an individual connected with no organisation, representing no shade of Polish opinion.

The only effect in Poland was that of profound regret, not at the failure, but at the mere fact of the attempt.
The history of our captivity is free from that stain; and whatever follies in the eyes of the world we may have
perpetrated, we have neither murdered our enemies nor acted treacherously against them, nor yet have been
reduced to the point of cursing each other.”
I could not gainsay the truth of that discourse, I saw as clearly as my interlocutor the impossibility of the
faintest sympathetic bond between Poland and her neighbours ever being formed in the future. The only
course that remains to a reconstituted Poland is the elaboration, establishment, and preservation of the most
correct method of political relations with neighbours to whom Poland’s existence is bound to be a
humiliation and an offence. Calmly considered it is an appalling task, yet one may put one’s trust in
that national temperament which is so completely free from aggressiveness and revenge. Therein lie the
foundations of all hope. The success of renewed life for that nation whose fate is to remain in exile, ever
isolated from the West, amongst hostile surroundings, depends on the sympathetic understanding of its
problems by its distant friends, the Western Powers, which in their democratic development must recognise
the moral and intellectual kinship of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation, which was the only
basis of Polish culture.
Whatever may be the future of Russia and the final organisation of Germany, the old hostility must remain
unappeased, the fundamental antagonism must endure for years to come. The Crime of the Partition was
committed by autocratic Governments which were the Governments of their time; but those Governments
were characterised in the past, as they will be in the future, by their people’s national traits, which
remain utterly incompatible with the Polish mentality and Polish sentiment. Both the German submissiveness
(idealistic as it may be) and the Russian lawlessness (fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly
foreign to the Polish nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether of another kind, tending to a certain
exaggeration of individualism and, perhaps, to an extreme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent: the
one invariably vital principle in the internal government of the Old Republic. There was never a history more
free from political bloodshed than the history of the Polish State, which never knew either feudal institutions
or feudal quarrels. At the time when heads were falling on the scaffolds all over Europe there was only one
political execution in Poland—only one; and as to that there still exists a tradition that the great
Chancellor who democratised Polish institutions, and had to order it in pursuance of his political purpose,
could not settle that matter with his conscience till the day of his death. Poland, too, had her civil wars, but
this can hardly be made a matter of reproach to her by the rest of the world. Conducted with humanity, they
left behind them no animosities and no sense of repression, and certainly no legacy of hatred. They were but a
recognised argument in political discussion and tended always towards conciliation.
I cannot imagine, whatever form of democratic government Poland elaborates for itself, that either the nation
or its leaders would do anything but welcome the closest scrutiny of their renewed political existence. The
difficulty of the problem of that existence will be so great that some errors will be unavoidable, and one may
be sure that they will be taken advantage of by its neighbours to discredit that living witness to a great
historical crime. If not the actual frontiers, then the moral integrity of the new State is sure to be assailed
before the eyes of Europe. Economical enmity will also come into play when the world’s work is
resumed again and competition asserts its power. Charges of aggression are certain to be made, especially as
related to the small States formed of the territories of the Old Republic. And everybody knows the power of
lies which go about clothed in coats of many colours, whereas, as is well known, Truth has no such advantage,
and for that reason is often suppressed as not altogether proper for everyday purposes. It is not often
recognised, because it is not always fit to be seen.
Already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown out, and even awful instances fabricated out of inadequate
materials, but it is historically unthinkable that the Poland of the future, with its sacred tradition of freedom
and its hereditary sense of respect for the rights of individuals and States, should seek its prosperity in
aggressive action or in moral violence against that part of its once fellow-citizens who are Ruthenians or

Lithuanians. The only influence that cannot be restrained is simply the influence of time, which disengages
truth from all facts with a merciless logic and prevails over the passing opinions, the changing impulses of
men. There can be no doubt that the moral impulses and the material interests of the new nationalities, which
seem to play now the game of disintegration for the benefit of the world’s enemies, will in the end
bring them nearer to the Poland of this war’s creation, will unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous
movement towards the State which had adopted and brought them up in the development of its own humane
culture—the offspring of the West.
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916

We must start from the assumption that promises made by proclamation at the beginning of this war may be
binding on the individuals who made them under the stress of coming events, but cannot be regarded as
binding the Governments after the end of the war.
Poland has been presented with three proclamations. Two of them were in such contrast with the avowed
principles and the historic action for the last hundred years (since the Congress of Vienna) of the Powers
concerned, that they were more like cynical insults to the nation’s deepest feelings, its memory and its
intelligence, than state papers of a conciliatory nature.
The German promises awoke nothing but indignant contempt; the Russian a bitter incredulity of the most
complete kind. The Austrian proclamation, which made no promises and contented itself with pointing out
the Austro-Polish relations for the last forty-five years, was received in silence. For it is a fact that in Austrian
Poland alone Polish nationality was recognised as an element of the Empire, and individuals could breathe the
air of freedom, of civil life, if not of political independence.
But for Poles to be Germanophile is unthinkable. To be Russophile or Austrophile is at best a counsel of

despair in view of a European situation which, because of the grouping of the powers, seems to shut from
them every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a national future nursed through more than a hundred years of
suffering and oppression.
Through most of these years, and especially since 1830, Poland (I use this expression since Poland exists as a
spiritual entity to-day as definitely as it ever existed in her past) has put her faith in the Western Powers.
Politically it may have been nothing more than a consoling illusion, and the nation had a half-consciousness
of this. But what Poland was looking for from the Western Powers without discouragement and with
unbroken confidence was moral support.
This is a fact of the sentimental order. But such facts have their positive value, for their idealism derives from
perhaps the highest kind of reality. A sentiment asserts its claim by its force, persistence and universality. In
Poland that sentimental attitude towards the Western Powers is universal. It extends to all classes. The very
children are affected by it as soon as they begin to think.
The political value of such a sentiment consists in this, that it is based on profound resemblances. Therefore
one can build on it as if it were a material fact. For the same reason it would be unsafe to disregard it if one
proposed to build solidly. The Poles, whom superficial or ill-informed theorists are trying to force into the
social and psychological formula of Slavonism, are in truth not Slavonic at all. In temperament, in feeling, in
mind, and even in unreason, they are Western, with an absolute comprehension of all Western modes of
thought, even of those which are remote from their historical experience.
That element of racial unity which may be called Polonism, remained compressed between Prussian
Germanism on one side and the Russian Slavonism on the other. For Germanism it feels nothing but hatred.
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916 51

But between Polonism and Slavonism there is not so much hatred as a complete and ineradicable
incompatibility.
No political work of reconstructing Poland either as a matter of justice or expediency could be sound which
would leave the new creation in dependence to Germanism or to Slavonism.
The first need not be considered. The second must be—unless the Powers elect to drop the Polish
question either under the cover of vague assurances or without any disguise whatever.
But if it is considered it will be seen at once that the Slavonic solution of the Polish Question can offer no
guarantees of duration or hold the promise of security for the peace of Europe.
The only basis for it would be the Grand Duke’s Manifesto. But that Manifesto, signed by a personage
now removed from Europe to Asia, and by a man, moreover, who if true to himself, to his conception of
patriotism and to his family tradition could not have put his hand to it with any sincerity of purpose, is now
divested of all authority. The forcible vagueness of its promises, its startling inconsistency with the hundred
years of ruthlessly denationalising oppression permit one to doubt whether it was ever meant to have any
authority.
But in any case it could have had no effect. The very nature of things would have brought to nought its
professed intentions.
It is impossible to suppose that a State of Russia’s power and antecedents would tolerate a privileged
community (of, to Russia, unnational complexion) within the body of the Empire. All history shows that such
an arrangement, however hedged in by the most solemn treaties and declarations, cannot last. In this case it
would lead to a tragic issue. The absorption of Polonism is unthinkable. The last hundred years of European
History proves it undeniably. There remains then extirpation, a process of blood and iron; and the last act of
the Polish drama would be played then before a Europe too weary to interfere, and to the applause of
Germany.
It would not be just to say that the disappearance of Polonism would add any strength to the Slavonic power
of expansion. It would add no strength, but it would remove a possibly effective barrier against the surprises
the future of Europe may hold in store for the Western Powers.
Thus the question whether Polonism is worth saving presents itself as a problem of politics with a practical
bearing on the stability of European peace—as a barrier or perhaps better (in view of its detached
position) as an outpost of the Western Powers placed between the great might of Slavonism which has not yet
made up its mind to anything, and the organised Germanism which has spoken its mind with no uncertain
voice, before the world.
Looked at in that light alone Polonism seems worth saving. That it has lived so long on its trust in the moral
support of the Western Powers may give it another and even stronger claim, based on a truth of a more
profound kind. Polonism had resisted the utmost efforts of Germanism and Slavonism for more than a
hundred years. Why? Because of the strength of its ideals conscious of their kinship with the West. Such a
power of resistance creates a moral obligation which it would be unsafe to neglect. There is always a risk in
throwing away a tool of proved temper.
In this profound conviction of the practical and ideal worth of Polonism one approaches the problem of its
preservation with a very vivid sense of the practical difficulties derived from the grouping of the Powers. The
uncertainty of the extent and of the actual form of victory for the Allies will increase the difficulty of
formulating a plan of Polish regeneration at the present moment.

Poland, to strike its roots again into the soil of political Europe, will require a guarantee of security for the
healthy development and for the untrammelled play of such institutions as she may be enabled to give to
herself.
Those institutions will be animated by the spirit of Polonism, which, having been a factor in the history of
Europe and having proved its vitality under oppression, has established its right to live. That spirit, despised
and hated by Germany and incompatible with Slavonism because of moral differences, cannot avoid being (in
its renewed assertion) an object of dislike and mistrust.
As an unavoidable consequence of the past Poland will have to begin its existence in an atmosphere of
enmities and suspicions. That advanced outpost of Western civilisation will have to hold its ground in the
midst of hostile camps: always its historical fate.
Against the menace of such a specially dangerous situation the paper and ink of public Treaties cannot be an
effective defence. Nothing but the actual, living, active participation of the two Western Powers in the
establishment of the new Polish commonwealth, and in the first twenty years of its existence, will give the
Poles a sufficient guarantee of security in the work of restoring their national life.
An Anglo-French protectorate would be the ideal form of moral and material support. But Russia, as an ally,
must take her place in it on such a footing as will allay to the fullest extent her possible apprehensions and
satisfy her national sentiment. That necessity will have to be formally recognised.
In reality Russia has ceased to care much for her Polish possessions. Public recognition of a mistake in
political morality and a voluntary surrender of territory in the cause of European concord, cannot damage the
prestige of a powerful State. The new spheres of expansion in regions more easily assimilable, will more than
compensate Russia for the loss of territory on the Western frontier of the Empire.
The experience of Dual Controls and similar combinations has been so unfortunate in the past that the
suggestion of a Triple Protectorate may well appear at first sight monstrous even to unprejudiced minds. But
it must be remembered that this is a unique case and a problem altogether exceptional, justifying the
employment of exceptional means for its solution. To those who would doubt the possibility of even bringing
such a scheme into existence the answer may be made that there are psychological moments when any
measure tending towards the ends of concord and justice may be brought into being. And it seems that the
end of the war would be the moment for bringing into being the political scheme advocated in this note.
Its success must depend on the singleness of purpose in the contracting Powers, and on the wisdom, the tact,
the abilities, the good-will of men entrusted with its initiation and its further control. Finally it may be
pointed out that this plan is the only one offering serious guarantees to all the parties occupying their
respective positions within the scheme.
If her existence as a state is admitted as just, expedient and necessary, Poland has the moral right to receive
her constitution not from the hand of an old enemy, but from the Western Powers alone, though of course with
the fullest concurrence of Russia.
This constitution, elaborated by a committee of Poles nominated by the three Governments, will (after due
discussion and amendment by the High Commissioners of the Protecting Powers) be presented to Poland as
the initial document, the charter of her new life, freely offered and unreservedly accepted.
It should be as simple and short as a written constitution can be—establishing the Polish
Commonwealth, settling the lines of representative institutions, the form of judicature, and leaving the
greatest measure possible of self-government to the provinces forming part of the re-created Poland.

This constitution will be promulgated immediately after the three Powers had settled the frontiers of the new
State, including the town of Danzic (free port) and a proportion of seaboard. The legislature will then be
called together and a general treaty will regulate Poland’s international portion as a protected state, the
status of the High Commissioners and such-like matters. The legislature will ratify, thus making Poland, as it
were, a party in the establishment of the protectorate. A point of importance.
Other general treaties will define Poland’s position in the Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance, fix the
numbers of the army, and settle the participation of the Powers in its organisation and training.
POLAND REVISITED—1915
I.
I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all in assassination of the
dynastic order. I don’t know how far murder can ever approach the perfection of a fine art, but looked
upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient of impatient hope or hurried despair. There
are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper
stream of causes depends not on individuals who, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by a destiny which
no murder has ever been able to placate, divert, or arrest.
In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange city in the Midlands and particularly out of touch with the
world’s politics. Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a
private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to
day in that necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which somehow, for a man
possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all real interest. I don’t think I had looked at a daily for
a month past.
But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there out of pure
kindness to bear me company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.
It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.
The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed. I remembered only that not long
before he had visited London. The recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant printed words his
presence in this country provoked.
Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was Archducal, dynastic, purely accidental.
Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an Archduke? And now he was no more;
removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was
in life. I connected that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations so little that I had actually to ask where it
had happened. My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences of that
grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.
It was with perfect sincerity that I answered “Nothing,” and having a great repugnance to
consider murder as a factor of politics, I dismissed the subject. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel
and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy Archdukes in the background,
out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the light of the European stage.
And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgment who attended so little to
the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was fixed
upon my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating
POLAND REVISITED—1915 54
holiday-promising aspect. I had been obtaining my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends
good enough to come down now and then to see us. They arrived with their pockets full of crumpled
newspapers, and answered my queries casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my
interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute
crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one’s attention. Who
could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great
world-drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the
Powers of the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility, while they
watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of
its awaiting fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority,
same words in the air; race, liberation, justice—and the same mood of trivial demonstrations. One
could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg. “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking
clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some café turc at
the end of his lunch.
“Monsieur veut dire Café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.
I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its
first and in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the
evidence of my alarmist cynicism. As to alarm, I pointed out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary. It
has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of cynicism I
have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of
disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing—a sort of thing I am not capable of.
Rather than be thought a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the
usual arguments. It was pointed out to me that these Eastern nations were not far removed from a savage
state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding the pigs. The
highly-developed material civilisation of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a war. The industry
and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the
aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.
Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been a book written on that theme—an
attempt to put pacificism on a material basis. Nothing more solid in the way of argument could have been
advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was “bad business!” This was final.
But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world. Whatever
sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and
innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions will
take the edge off one’s judgment. The desire which possessed me was simply the desire to travel.
And that being so it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust
in the stability of things on the Continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes
were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and
unquestionable moral possession the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.
In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country
house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but within the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first seemed to me
considerable. Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that
there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess that my first impulse
about a projected journey is to leave it alone. But the invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended
by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last
eighteen months of his life. It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a
boy, had known the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of that age. It was within
I. 55
those historical walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund
of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence. It was like
the experience of another world. The wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that if
I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many imaginary lives have
been embracing mere shadows in my youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have
gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight—just to see what would happen. And this
adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to
us all. This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all
that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was
pleased with the idea of showing my companions what Polish country life was like; to visit the town where I
was at school before the boys by my side should grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own,
should lose their unsophisticated interest in mine. It is only in the short instants of early youth that we have
the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the emotions of another soul. For
youth all is reality in this world, and with justice, since it apprehends so vividly its images behind which a
longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young
beings in whom, unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have been a fibre which would answer to the
sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received its
earliest independent impressions.
The first days of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import
which were to fill blue books, yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of mankind, passed for us
in light-hearted preparations for the journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany, to get across as
quickly as possible?
Germany is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least. In all my life I had been
across it only twice. I may well say of it vidi tantum; and the very little I saw was through the window of a
railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys of mine had been more like pilgrimages when one hurries
on towards the goal for the satisfaction of a deeper need than curiosity. In this last instance, too, I was so
incurious that I would have liked to have fallen asleep on the shores of England and opened my eyes, if it
were possible, only on the other side of the Silesian frontier. Yet, in truth, as many others have done, I had
“sensed it”—that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that
race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete
Asiatics or barbarous niggers; and, with a consciousness of superiority freeing their hands from all moral
bonds, anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s burden.”
Meantime, in a clearing of the Teutonic forest, their sages were rearing a Tree of Cynical Wisdom, a sort of
Upas tree, whose shade may be seen now lying over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they
laboured openly enough, watering it with the most authentic sources of all madness, and watching with their
be-spectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace, words of
menace, and I verily believe words of abasement, even if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them,
would have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when the fruit ripens on a branch it must fall. There is nothing
on earth that can prevent it.
II.
For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my companions whose wishes are law
decided that our travels should begin in an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should proceed
from Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-six times longer than the Dover-Calais passage this rather
unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey which
for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating,
elusive like an enticing mirage.
II. 56
And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were excited. It’s no mean
experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day of departure had come, the very hour had struck. The
luggage was coming downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the map, yet existed in
reality; it was not a mere pays du rêve, where you can travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued,
not even father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the novelist’s art of
make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voyage au pays du rêve.
As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of
perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the
parched fields. A pearly blur settled over them, and a light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and
searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going towards the very scenes of
war, I carried off in my eye, this tiny fragment of Great Britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees
or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening
hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the
embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an inheritance, but as an
acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a woman is conquered—by love, which is a sort of
surrender.
These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in hand, which was the simplest sort of a
Continental holiday. And I am certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble but
the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes
were their inheritance, not their conquest—which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the most
precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness rather than possessed by you. Moreover, as we
sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more
and more plainly, that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough prospect for
the most consistent, but to him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and
continuity of his life—so that at times it presented itself to his conscience as a series of
betrayals—still more dreadful.
I down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why there was no room in my consciousness
for the apprehension of a European war. I don’t mean to say that I ignored the possibility; I simply did
not think of it. And it made no difference; for if I had thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and
inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual
certitude—obviously unattainable by the man in the street—could have stayed me on that
journey which now that I had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.
London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into the
black sky—with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the
sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty
palaces, above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway.
Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion House went on normally with its
fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its
millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.
In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous line of taxi-cabs glided down the
inclined approach and up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and
dipping them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the
diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour of the boat-trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to
be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places. The station was
normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no
II. 57
signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing in them to distract me from the
thought that it was singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of my
existence. For this was the station at which, thirty-seven years before, I arrived on my first visit to London.
Not the same building, but the same spot. At nineteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I
had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from
Lowestoft—my first long railway journey in England—to “sign on” for an
Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city
with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer
could have been more lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the
mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age
one’s feelings are simple. I was elated. I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a deliberate
plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the
side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to
redeem a tacit moral pledge. Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort. How simple seemed the
problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first
time.
From that point of view—Youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct—it was certainly a
year of grace. All the help I had to get in touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much
bigger than the palm of my hand—in which I held it—torn out of a larger plan of London for the
greater facility of reference. It had been the object of careful study for some days past. The fact that I could
take a conveyance at the station never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street, and
stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand hansoms. A strange absence
of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one’s life by
means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an
Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.
Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of an obscure shipping agent, was in
my pocket. And I needed not to take it out. That address was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its
words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand;
for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from anyone. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I taken
a wrong turning I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I might have remained lost for days, for
weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel district,
as it had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush. But I walked on to my destination without hesitation
or mistake, showing there, for the first time, some of that faculty to absorb and make my own the imaged
topography of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships
entrusted to me off the ground. The place I was bound to was not easy to find. It was one of those courts
hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost among the thick growth of houses like a dark pool in
the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by secret path; a Dickensian nook of
London, that wonder city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of
freakishly sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the magic of his understanding
love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames
of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the light of a single gas-jet depending
from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a big
nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders. His curly white hair and the general character of his head recalled
vaguely a burly apostle in the barocco style of Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his
silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been just
brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.
II. 58
Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, barocco apostle’s face with an expression of inquiry.
I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics
of English speech, for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.—“Oh,
it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”
I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can’t remember a single word of that letter now. It was my
very first composition in the English language. And he had understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point
at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to
sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers. But he gathered that this was not my
object. I did not desire to be apprenticed. Was that the case?
It was. He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a gentleman. But your wish is
to get a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible. Is that it?”
It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this. There was
an Act of Parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors. “An Act-of-Parliament. A
law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him
in consternation.
I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament! What a
hopeless adventure! However, the barocco apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to
get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of
a good citizen; and in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine. For this Act of
Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and
mother to me. For many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of
my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in
a risky calling. It isn’t such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners
of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say that its seventies have never been applied to me.
In the year 1878, the year of “Peace with Honour,” I had walked as lone as any human being in
the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of
the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no longer alone,
but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of
friendships secured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle.
All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat
there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful,
entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of
retrospective musing.
I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound to take me away from daily life’s
actualities at every step. I felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark
night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship’s passengers.
That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name. It had been for some time
the schoolroom of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and
stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow-water academy of seamanship from which I launched
myself on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady
eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning.
Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all, as far as I can remember.
II. 59
That is what years ago the North Sea I could hear growling in the dark all round the ship had been for me.
And I fancied that I must have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar
than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition.
I could not guess that before many days my old schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with
wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under its waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words the
children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in trawlers, under the Naval flag,
dredging for German submarine mines.
III.
I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship before I launched myself on the wider
oceans. Confined as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know it in all its
parts. My class-room was the region of the English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with Honour, had
long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, agricultural,
industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear
weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the land. On many a night I
have hauled at the braces under the shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people on shore sleeping
quietly in their beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not one head on those envied pillows was made
uneasy by the slightest premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to
bring so close to their homes.
Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part of the North Sea much less known
to me, I was deeply conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day: and the
aspects of Nature don’t change, unless in the course of thousands of years—or, perhaps,
centuries. The Phoenicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had
experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even on a July afternoon, from
anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean. For myself, a very late comer into that sea, and
its former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days
of training. The same old thing. A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white
foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting-paper. From time
to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few,
very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.
Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the emptiness of the decks, favouring my
reminiscent mood. It might have been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were on this and every
other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea I could have given
myself up to the illusion of a revised past, had it not been for the periodical transit across my gaze of a
German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat deck with characteristic determination. Two
sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He
was bringing them home, from their school in England, for their holiday. What could have induced such a
sound Teuton to entrust his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and criminal
country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He
trod the deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a large extent his
stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later I could observe the same
truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, that passed
through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very
well have been, most probably was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine active boys are
orphans by now. Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote
in the dust-cloud of six million fighting particles, an unconsidered trifle for the jaws of war, his humanity was
III. 60
not consciously impressed on my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round the
corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and
the shifting cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one,
for, far away there to the West, in the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily
bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in the winter of ’81,
not of war, truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements which were very angry indeed.
There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night—or a night of hate (it isn’t
for nothing that the North Sea is also called the German Ocean)—when all the fury stored in its heart
seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable,
precarious, and altogether intolerable manner. There were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good
and true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to
lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time
moved in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering of our
deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender
immaturity of his nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out
he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the
gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses than the green
overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two
gyrating children.
“That’s a very nice gentleman.” This information, together with the fact that he was a
widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship, was communicated to me suddenly by our captain.
At intervals through the day he would pop out of the chart-room and offer me short snatches of conversation.
He owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind, and he was without malice and, I believe, quite
unconsciously, a warm Germanophil. And no wonder! As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on
that run, and spent almost as much of his life in Hamburg as in Harwich.
“Wonderful people they are,” he repeated from time to time, without entering into particulars,
but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy. What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial
travellers and small merchants, most likely. But I had observed long before that German genius has a
hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted minds. There is an immense force of suggestion in
highly organised mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised half Europe? My man was very much under the spell of
German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt for France was equally general and unbounded. I tried
to advance some arguments against this position, but I only succeeded in making him hostile. “I
believe you are a Frenchman yourself,” he snarled at last, giving me an intensely suspicious look; and
forthwith broke off communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.
Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker
tone, without any change in their colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black
uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the Eastern board:
tops of islands fringing the German shore. While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves—and
for all their solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light—another passenger came out on
deck. This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap. The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed
his chest. His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short white hairs, and the end of his nose
was so perfectly round that it determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed nothing else in it
had the slightest chance to assert itself. His disposition, unlike the widower’s, appeared to be mild and
humane. He offered me the loan of his glasses. He had a wife and some small children concealed in the
depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were. His eldest son was about the decks
somewhere.
III. 61
“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone. He spoke English
with the accent of our captain’s “wonderful people,” and proceeded to give me the
history of the family’s crossing the Atlantic in a White Star liner. They remained in England just the
time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths of the ship)
were naturally a little tired.
At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense
elation. “Hurrah,” he cried under his breath. “The first German light! Hurrah!”
And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest fervour, while I turned away and
received full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The
shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.
I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The great change of sea life since my time was
brought home to me. I had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They went on
and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany,
pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits. Singly, and in small companies
of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather
roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below the
grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which,
when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal
creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle
when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing
of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble
predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.
When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body),
when they switched on their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there,
and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the
overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds.
I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so overlighted amidships that one could not make
out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar, as a working
implement, will become presently as obsolete as the sail. The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy. More and
more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. Progress! Yet the
older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And
readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man.
It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there
with immense self-importance. Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe lightship floated all dark and silent
under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights.
Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace ready for flight away from the
luckless shores of Europe. Our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely
difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over there, that the Elbe lightship has
been towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat
laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do. And obviously it must be so.
Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping along cautiously with the unlighted,
war-blighted black coast close on one hand, and sudden death on the other. For all the space we steamed
through that Sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while
III. 62
submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with
so much fussy importance. Mines; Submarines. The last word in sea-warfare! Progress—impressively
disclosed by this war.
There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of the stake and in the fierce animosity of
feelings. During that one which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the English Fleet
was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself, offered to the Maritime Prefect of the port
and to the French Admiral, an invention which would sink all the unsuspecting English ships one after
another—or, at any rate most of them. The offer was not even taken into consideration; and the Prefect
ends his report to the Minister in Paris with a fine phrase of indignation: “It is not the sort of death one
would deal to brave men.”
And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused
passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those
self-denying words. Mankind has been demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances. Its
spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of
destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance. It has become the
intoxicated slave of its own detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic time another sort of
war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and held out to the world.
IV.
On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the road
of life, I had no beacons to look for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so
singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An
ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy
garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening
phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as
spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without sights, without sounds. No whispers
of the war reached my voluntary abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary after all! Each of us is a
fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it
were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so
much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can
only capture it in that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to my eldest boy, “I can’t
go to bed. I am going out for a look round. Coming?”
He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting adventure of the whole journey. We
stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I was,
indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could
remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a
moment of wistful surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square of the town, the centre of its affairs and of the
lighter side of its life. We could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. At the corner
an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves which made
his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange
IV. 63
tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.
The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight. The garland of lights at the foot of the
houses seemed to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with infinite satisfaction that the unnecessary
trees the Municipality insisted upon sticking between the stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They
were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I could remember. Also, the paving operations seemed to be
exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on that
bright expanse, the piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery sea.
Who was it that said that Time works wonders? What an exploded superstition! As far as these trees and
these paving stones were concerned, it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the unchangeableness of things
already vaguely suggested to my senses by our rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably
strengthened within me.
“We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by the senior students of that town of
classical learning and historical relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had, would
not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the Schools. We
youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered it to
my boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation. And then, happening to look up at the wall,
I saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an inscription in raised
black letters, thus: “Line A.B.” Heavens! The name had been adopted officially! Any town
urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free to
talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B. It had become a
mere name in a directory. I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time could work wonders, and
no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid
piece of cast-iron.
I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the profaned name, not only without gusto,
but with positive distaste. And this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked that
change. There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted to look at, I explained to my companion.
To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of
the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the
distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of
the old city wall. In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its
black archway stood out small and very distinct.
There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for our ears. Into this coldly illuminated and
dumb emptiness there issued out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very
fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the Florian Gate.
It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight o’clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine,
I walked up Florian Street. But of that, my first school, I remember very little. I believe that one of my
co-sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of historical documents. But I didn’t suffer
much from the various imperfections of my first school. I was rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a
private gnawing worm of my own. This was the time of my father’s last illness. Every evening at
seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a
good distance beyond the Great Square. There, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy
cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little
table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a
tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would
IV. 64
squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of these noiseless
nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For, indeed, what could they have had to say? When they did
speak to me it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral, clear whisper. Our domestic matters were
ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the Cathedral, lent for
the emergency. She, too, spoke but seldom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her
ample bosom. And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never let her voice
rise above a peacefully murmuring note. The air around me was all piety, resignation, and silence.
I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading boy. My prep. finished I
would have had nothing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through the
closed door and coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile childish way I would have gone
crazy. But I was a reading boy. There were many books about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the
floor, for we had not had time to settle down. I read! What did I not read! Sometimes the elder nun, gliding
up and casting a mistrustful look on the open pages, would lay her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a
doubtful whisper, “Perhaps it is not very good for you to read these books.” I would raise my
eyes to her face mutely, and with a vague gesture of giving it up she would glide away.
Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tip-toe into the sick room to say good-night to
the figure prone on the bed, which often could not acknowledge my presence but by a slow movement of the
eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the coverlet, and tip-toe out again. Then I would go
to bed, in a room at the end of the corridor, and often, not always, cry myself into a good sound sleep.
I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. I turned my eyes from it sometimes with
success, and yet all the time I had an awful sensation of the inevitable. I had also moments of revolt which
stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the universe. But when the inevitable entered
the sick room and the white door was thrown wide open, I don’t think I found a single tear to shed. I
have a suspicion that the Canon’s housekeeper looked on me as the most callous little wretch on earth.
The day of the funeral came in due course and all the generous “Youth of the Schools,” the
grave Senate of the University, the delegations of the Trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared) de visu
evidence of the callousness of the little wretch. There was nothing in my aching head but a few words, some
such stupid sentences as, “It’s done,” or, “It’s accomplished” (in
Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved out
of the narrow street, down a long street, past the Gothic front of St. Mary’s under its unequal towers,
towards the Florian Gate.
In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memories, I could see again the
small boy of that day following a hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an
enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the
head, the flames of tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the
pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the population had turned out on that fine May afternoon. They had
not come to honour a great achievement, or even some splendid failure. The dead and they were victims alike
of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit and glory. They had come only to
render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been a fearless confession in word and deed of
a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand.
It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I should become the helpless prey of the
Shadows I had called up. They were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent in their clinging air of the
grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity of old hopes.
“Let’s go back to the hotel, my boy,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
IV. 65
It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that night of a possible war. For the next two
days I went about amongst my fellow men, who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness,
but unanimously derided my fears of a war. They would not believe in it. It was impossible. On the evening
of the second day I was in the hotel’s smoking room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for
a few choice minds of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more hushed than any club
reading-room I have ever been in. Gathered into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued
tones suitable to the genius of the place.
A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an impatient finger in my direction and
apostrophised me.
“What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would come in.”
The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without faltering.
“Most assuredly. I should think all Europe knows that by this time.”
He took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a slight jerk for greater emphasis, said forcibly:
“Then, if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can be no war. Germany
won’t be so mad as that.”
On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum. The day after came the declaration of war, and the
Austrian mobilisation order. We were fairly caught. All that remained for me to do was to get my party out
of the way of eventual shells. The best move which occurred to me was to snatch them up instantly into the
mountains to a Polish health resort of great repute—which I did (at the rate of one hundred miles in
eleven hours) by the last civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks.
And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland, not officially interned, but simply unable
to obtain the permission to travel by train, or road. It was a wonderful, a poignant two months. This is not the
time, and, perhaps, not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing
the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust anyone, to appeal to anyone, to look
for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope and even of its last illusions, and unable, in the trouble of
minds and the unrest of consciences, to take refuge in stoical acceptance. I have seen all this. And I am glad I
have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come
after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: Ruin—and
Extinction.
But enough of this. For our little band there was the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of
events in the West. It is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there.
Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, France giving in under repeated blows, a military
collapse like that of 1870, and England involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in
a panic! Polish papers, of course, had no other but German sources of information. Naturally, we did not
believe all we read, but it was sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness.
We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up
discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up. But it was
a beastly time. People used to come to me with very serious news and ask, “What do you think of
it?” And my invariable answer was: “Whatever has happened, or is going to happen, whoever
wants to make peace, you may be certain that England will not make it, not for ten years, if
necessary.”’
IV. 66
But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish friends we obtained at last the permission
to travel to Vienna. Once there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads. We
cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who, all along, interested himself in our fate) for
his exertions on our behalf, his invaluable assistance and the real friendliness of his reception in Vienna.
Owing to Mr. Penfield’s action we obtained the permission to leave Austria. And it was a near thing,
for his Excellency has informed my American publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have us
detained till the end of the war. However, we effected our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy; and,
reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of
call.
On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the
tremendous actuality. We saw the signs of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar,
the misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British
submarines in the Channel. Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two
Naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland, piloted the ship through the Downs.
The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life. But what were to me now the futilities
of an individual past? As our ship’s head swung into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint,
concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear found its way straight
into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my wife’s eyes. She also
had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns
at work on the coast of Flanders—shaping the future.
FIRST NEWS—1918
Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the town of Cracow, Austrian Poland, nobody would believe that
the war was coming. My apprehensions were met by the words: “We have had these scares
before.” This incredulity was so universal amongst people of intelligence and information, that even I,
who had accustomed myself to look at the inevitable for years past, felt my conviction shaken. At that time, it
must be noted, the Austrian army was already partly mobilised, and as we came through Austrian Silesia we
had noticed all the bridges being guarded by soldiers.
“Austria will back down,” was the opinion of all the well-informed men with whom I talked on
the first of August. The session of the University was ended and the students were either all gone or going
home to different parts of Poland, but the professors had not all departed yet on their respective holidays, and
amongst them the tone of scepticism prevailed generally. Upon the whole there was very little inclination to
talk about the possibility of a war. Nationally, the Poles felt that from their point of view there was nothing to
hope from it. “Whatever happens,” said a very distinguished man to me, “we may be
certain that it’s our skins which will pay for it as usual.” A well-known literary critic and
writer on economical subjects said to me: “War seems a material impossibility, precisely because it
would mean the complete ruin of all material interests.”
He was wrong, as we know; but those who said that Austria as usual would back down were, as a matter of
fact perfectly right. Austria did back down. What these men did not foresee was the interference of
Germany. And one cannot blame them very well; for who could guess that, when the balance stood even, the
German sword would be thrown into the scale with nothing in the open political situation to justify that act, or
rather that crime—if crime can ever be justified? For, as the same intelligent man said to me:
“As it is, those people” (meaning Germans) “have very nearly the whole world in their
economic grip. Their prestige is even greater than their actual strength. It can get for them practically
everything they want. Then why risk it?” And there was no apparent answer to the question put in
FIRST NEWS—1918 67
that way. I must also say that the Poles had no illusions about the strength of Russia. Those illusions were
the monopoly of the Western world.
Next day the librarian of the University invited me to come and have a look at the library which I had not seen
since I was fourteen years old. It was from him that I learned that the greater part of my father’s MSS.
was preserved there. He confessed that he had not looked them through thoroughly yet, but he told me that
there was a lot of very important letters bearing on the epoch from ’60 to ’63, to and from many
prominent Poles of that time: and he added: “There is a bundle of correspondence that will appeal to
you personally. Those are letters written by your father to an intimate friend in whose papers they were
found. They contain many references to yourself, though you couldn’t have been more than four years
old at the time. Your father seems to have been extremely interested in his son.” That afternoon I
went to the University, taking with me my eldest son. The attention of that young Englishman was mainly
attracted by some relics of Copernicus in a glass case. I saw the bundle of letters and accepted the kind
proposal of the librarian that he should have them copied for me during the holidays. In the range of the
deserted vaulted rooms lined with books, full of august memories, and in the passionless silence of all this
enshrined wisdom, we walked here and there talking of the past, the great historical past in which lived the
inextinguishable spark of national life; and all around us the centuries-old buildings lay still and empty,
composing themselves to rest after a year of work on the minds of another generation.
No echo of the German ultimatum to Russia penetrated that academical peace. But the news had come.
When we stepped into the street out of the deserted main quadrangle, we three, I imagine, were the only
people in the town who did not know of it. My boy and I parted from the librarian (who hurried home to pack
up for his holiday) and walked on to the hotel, where we found my wife actually in the car waiting for us to
take a run of some ten miles to the country house of an old school-friend of mine. He had been my greatest
chum. In my wanderings about the world I had heard that his later career both at school and at the University
had been of extraordinary brilliance—in classics, I believe. But in this, the iron-grey moustache period
of his life, he informed me with badly concealed pride that he had gained world fame as the
Inventor—no, Inventor is not the word—Producer, I believe would be the right term—of a
wonderful kind of beetroot seed. The beet grown from this seed contained more sugar to the square
inch—or was it to the square root?—than any other kind of beet. He exported this seed, not only
with profit (and even to the United States), but with a certain amount of glory which seemed to have gone
slightly to his head. There is a fundamental strain of agriculturalist in a Pole which no amount of brilliance,
even classical, can destroy. While we were having tea outside, looking down the lovely slope of the gardens
at the view of the city in the distance, the possibilities of the war faded from our minds. Suddenly my
friend’s wife came to us with a telegram in her hand and said calmly: “General mobilisation, do
you know?” We looked at her like men aroused from a dream. “Yes,” she insisted,
“they are already taking the horses out of the ploughs and carts.” I said: “We had better
go back to town as quick as we can,” and my friend assented with a troubled look: “Yes, you
had better.” As we passed through villages on our way back we saw mobs of horses assembled on the
commons with soldiers guarding them, and groups of villagers looking on silently at the officers with their
note-books checking deliveries and writing out receipts. Some old peasant women were already weeping
aloud.
When our car drew up at the door of the hotel, the manager himself came to help my wife out. In the first
moment I did not quite recognise him. His luxuriant black locks were gone, his head was closely cropped,
and as I glanced at it he smiled and said: “I shall sleep at the barracks to-night.”
I cannot reproduce the atmosphere of that night, the first night after mobilisation. The shops and the gateways
of the houses were of course closed, but all through the dark hours the town hummed with voices; the echoes
of distant shouts entered the open windows of our bedroom. Groups of men talking noisily walked in the
middle of the roadway escorted by distressed women: men of all callings and of all classes going to report
FIRST NEWS—1918 68
themselves at the fortress. Now and then a military car tooting furiously would whisk through the streets
empty of wheeled traffic, like an intensely black shadow under the great flood of electric lights on the grey
pavement.
But what produced the greatest impression on my mind was a gathering at night in the coffee-room of my
hotel of a few men of mark whom I was asked to join. It was about one o’clock in the morning. The
shutters were up. For some reason or other the electric light was not switched on, and the big room was lit up
only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other’s faces by. I saw in those faces the
awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its
own, and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future,
whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral annihilation. I remember one of those men
addressing me after a period of mournful silence compounded of mental exhaustion and unexpressed
forebodings.
“What do you think England will do? If there is a ray of hope anywhere it is only there.”
I said: “I believe I know what England will do” (this was before the news of the violation of
Belgian neutrality arrived), “though I won’t tell you, for I am not absolutely certain. But I can
tell you what I am absolutely certain of. It is this: If England comes into the war, then, no matter who may
want to make peace at the end of six months at the cost of right and justice, England will keep on fighting for
years if necessary. You may reckon on that.”
“What, even alone?” asked somebody across the room.
I said: “Yes, even alone. But if things go so far as that England will not be alone.”
I think that at that moment I must have been inspired.
WELL DONE—1918
I.
It can be safely said that for the last four years the seamen of Great Britain have done well. I mean that every
kind and sort of human being classified as seaman, steward, foremast hand, fireman, lamp-trimmer, mate,
master, engineer, and also all through the innumerable ratings of the Navy up to that of Admiral, has done
well. I don’t say marvellously well or miraculously well or wonderfully well or even very well,
because these are simply over-statements of undisciplined minds. I don’t deny that a man may be a
marvellous being, but this is not likely to be discovered in his lifetime, and not always even after he is dead.
Man’s marvellousness is a hidden thing, because the secrets of his heart are not to be read by his
fellows. As to a man’s work, if it is done well it is the very utmost that can be said. You can do well,
and you can do no more for people to see. In the Navy, where human values are thoroughly understood, the
highest signal of commendation complimenting a ship (that is, a ship’s company) on some
achievements consists exactly of those two simple words “Well done,” followed by the name of
the ship. Not marvellously done, astonishingly done, wonderfully done—no, only just:
“Well done, so-and-so.”
And to the men it is a matter of infinite pride that somebody should judge it proper to mention aloud, as it
were, that they have done well. It is a memorable occurrence, for in the sea services you are expected
professionally and as a matter of course to do well, because nothing less will do. And in sober speech no man
WELL DONE—1918 69
can be expected to do more than well. The superlatives are mere signs of uninformed wonder. Thus the
official signal which can express nothing but a delicate share of appreciation becomes a great honour.
Speaking now as a purely civil seaman (or, perhaps, I ought to say civilian, because politeness is not what I
have in my mind) I may say that I have never expected the Merchant Service to do otherwise than well during
the war. There were people who obviously did not feel the same confidence, nay, who even confidently
expected to see the collapse of merchant seamen’s courage. I must admit that such pronouncements
did arrest my attention. In my time I have never been able to detect any faint hearts in the ships’
companies with whom I have served in various capacities. But I reflected that I had left the sea in ’94,
twenty years before the outbreak of the war that was to apply its severe test to the quality of modern seamen.
Perhaps they had deteriorated, I said unwillingly to myself. I remembered also the alarmist articles I had read
about the great number of foreigners in the British Merchant Service, and I didn’t know how far these
lamentations were justified.
In my time the proportion of non-Britishers in the crews of the ships flying the red ensign was rather under
one-third, which, as a matter of fact, was less than the proportion allowed under the very strict French
navigation laws for the crews of the ships of that nation. For the strictest laws aiming at the preservation of
national seamen had to recognise the difficulties of manning merchant ships all over the world. The one-third
of the French law seemed to be the irreducible minimum. But the British proportion was even less. Thus it
may be said that up to the date I have mentioned the crews of British merchant ships engaged in deep water
voyages to Australia, to the East Indies and round the Horn were essentially British. The small proportion of
foreigners which I remember were mostly Scandinavians, and my general impression remains that those men
were good stuff. They appeared always able and ready to do their duty by the flag under which they served.
The majority were Norwegians, whose courage and straightness of character are matters beyond doubt. I
remember also a couple of Finns, both carpenters, of course, and very good craftsmen; a Swede, the most
scientific sailmaker I ever met; another Swede, a steward, who really might have been called a British seaman
since he had sailed out of London for over thirty years, a rather superior person; one Italian, an everlastingly
smiling but a pugnacious character; one Frenchman, a most excellent sailor, tireless and indomitable under
very difficult circumstances; one Hollander, whose placid manner of looking at the ship going to pieces under
our feet I shall never forget, and one young, colourless, muscularly very strong German, of no particular
character. Of non-European crews, lascars and Kalashes, I have had very little experience, and that was only
in one steamship and for something less than a year. It was on the same occasion that I had my only sight of
Chinese firemen. Sight is the exact word. One didn’t speak to them. One saw them going along the
decks, to and fro, characteristic figures with rolled-up pigtails, very dirty when coming off duty and very
clean-faced when going on duty. They never looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them
directly. Their appearances in the light of day were very regular, and yet somewhat ghostlike in their
detachment and silence.
But of the white crews of British ships and almost exclusively British in blood and descent, the immediate
predecessors of the men whose worth the nation has discovered for itself to-day, I have had a thorough
experience. At first amongst them, then with them, I have shared all the conditions of their very special life.
For it was very special. In my early days, starting out on a voyage was like being launched into Eternity. I
say advisedly Eternity instead of Space, because of the boundless silence which swallowed up one for eighty
days—for one hundred days—for even yet more days of an existence without echoes and
whispers. Like Eternity itself! For one can’t conceive a vocal Eternity. An enormous silence, in
which there was nothing to connect one with the Universe but the incessant wheeling about of the sun and
other celestial bodies, the alternation of light and shadow, eternally chasing each other over the sky. The time
of the earth, though most carefully recorded by the half-hourly bells, did not count in reality.
It was a special life, and the men were a very special kind of men. By this I don’t mean to say they
were more complex than the generality of mankind. Neither were they very much simpler. I have already
I. 70
admitted that man is a marvellous creature, and no doubt those particular men were marvellous enough in
their way. But in their collective capacity they can be best defined as men who lived under the command to
do well, or perish utterly. I have written of them with all the truth that was in me, and with an the impartiality
of which I was capable. Let me not be misunderstood in this statement. Affection can be very exacting, and
can easily miss fairness on the critical side. I have looked upon them with a jealous eye, expecting perhaps
even more than it was strictly fair to expect. And no wonder—since I had elected to be one of them
very deliberately, very completely, without any looking back or looking elsewhere. The circumstances were
such as to give me the feeling of complete identification, a very vivid comprehension that if I wasn’t
one of them I was nothing at all. But what was most difficult to detect was the nature of the deep impulses
which these men obeyed. What spirit was it that inspired the unfailing manifestations of their simple fidelity?
No outward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was holding them together or had ever shaped their
unexpressed standards. It was very mysterious. At last I came to the conclusion that it must be something in
the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced for the most part accidentally by those men
who appeared but a loose agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away from the eyes of
mankind. Who can tell how a tradition comes into the world? We are children of the earth. It may be that the
noblest tradition is but the offspring of material conditions, of the hard necessities besetting men’s
precarious lives. But once it has been born it becomes a spirit. Nothing can extinguish its force then. Clouds
of greedy selfishness, the subtle dialectics of revolt or fear, may obscure it for a time, but in very truth it
remains an immortal ruler invested with the power of honour and shame.
II.
The mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft commands unity in a body of workers engaged in an occupation
in which men have to depend upon each other. It raises them, so to speak, above the frailties of their dead
selves. I don’t wish to be suspected of lack of judgment and of blind enthusiasm. I don’t claim
special morality or even special manliness for the men who in my time really lived at sea, and at the present
time live at any rate mostly at sea. But in their qualities as well as in their defects, in their weaknesses as well
as in their “virtue,” there was indubitably something apart. They were never exactly of the
earth earthly. They couldn’t be that. Chance or desire (mostly desire) had set them apart, often in their
very childhood; and what is to be remarked is that from the very nature of things this early appeal, this early
desire, had to be of an imaginative kind. Thus their simple minds had a sort of sweetness. They were in a
way preserved. I am not alluding here to the preserving qualities of the salt in the sea. The salt of the sea is a
very good thing in its way; it preserves for instance one from catching a beastly cold while one remains wet
for weeks together in the “roaring forties.” But in sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets
much further than the seaman’s skin, which in certain latitudes it takes the opportunity to encrust very
thoroughly. That and nothing more. And then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in verse
and prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never penetrated either the one or the
other? The sea is uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent. Except when helped by the varied majesty of
the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless, boundless,
persistent, and futile—a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very
immensity is wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries mankind might have addressed it with
the words: “What are you, after all? Oh, yes, we know. The greatest scene of potential terror, a
devouring enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a continuous defiance of what you
can do and what you may hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and
on beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons.”
Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough. Or rather a sort of unholy fascination as of an elusive
nymph whose embrace is death, and a Medusa’s head whose stare is terror. That sort of charm is
calculated to keep men morally in order. But as to sea-salt, with its particular bitterness like nothing else on
earth, that, I am safe to say, penetrates no further than the seamen’s lips. With them the inner
II. 71
soundness is caused by another kind of preservative of which (nobody will be surprised to hear) the main
ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing to do with the futile smiles and the futile passions of the
sea.
Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative. It has also in it that strain of fantasy that is so
often, nay almost invariably, to be found in the temperament of a true seaman. But I repeat that I claim no
particular morality for seamen. I will admit without difficulty that I have found amongst them the usual
defects of mankind, characters not quite straight, uncertain tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness, small
meannesses; all this coming out mostly on the contact with the shore; and all rather naive, peculiar, a little
fantastic. I have even had a downright thief in my experience. One.
This is indeed a minute proportion, but it might have been my luck; and since I am writing in eulogy of
seamen I feel irresistibly tempted to talk about this unique specimen; not indeed to offer him as an example of
morality, but to bring out certain characteristics and set out a certain point of view. He was a large, strong
man with a guileless countenance, not very communicative with his shipmates, but when drawn into any sort
of conversation displaying a very painstaking earnestness. He was fair and candid-eyed, of a very satisfactory
smartness, and, from the officer-of-the-watch point of view,—altogether dependable. Then, suddenly,
he went and stole. And he didn’t go away from his honourable kind to do that thing to somebody on
shore; he stole right there on the spot, in proximity to his shipmates, on board his own ship, with complete
disregard for old Brown, our night watchman (whose fame for trustworthiness was utterly blasted for the rest
of the voyage) and in such a way as to bring the profoundest possible trouble to all the blameless souls
animating that ship. He stole eleven golden sovereigns, and a gold pocket chronometer and chain. I am really
in doubt whether the crime should not be entered under the category of sacrilege rather than theft. Those
things belonged to the captain! There was certainly something in the nature of the violation of a sanctuary,
and of a particularly impudent kind, too, because he got his plunder out of the captain’s state-room
while the captain was asleep there. But look, now, at the fantasy of the man! After going through the pockets
of the clothes, he did not hasten to retreat. No. He went deliberately into the saloon and removed from the
sideboard two big heavy, silver-plated lamps, which he carried to the fore-end of the ship and stood
symmetrically on the knight-heads. This, I must explain, means that he took them away as far as possible
from the place where they belonged. These were the deeds of darkness. In the morning the bo’sun
came along dragging after him a hose to wash the foc’sle head, and, beholding the shiny cabin lamps,
resplendent in the morning light, one on each side of the bowsprit, he was paralysed with awe. He dropped
the nozzle from his nerveless hands—and such hands, too! I happened along, and he said to me in a
distracted whisper: “Look at that, sir, look.” “Take them back aft at once
yourself,” I said, very amazed, too. As we approached the quarterdeck we perceived the steward, a
prey to a sort of sacred horror, holding up before us the captain’s trousers.
Bronzed men with brooms and buckets in their hands stood about with open mouths. “I have found
them lying in the passage outside the captain’s door,” the steward declared faintly. The
additional statement that the captain’s watch was gone from its hook by the bedside raised the painful
sensation to the highest pitch. We knew then we had a thief amongst us. Our thief! Behold the solidarity of a
ship’s company. He couldn’t be to us like any other thief. We all had to live under the shadow
of his crime for days; but the police kept on investigating, and one morning a young woman appeared on
board swinging a parasol, attended by two policemen, and identified the culprit. She was a barmaid of some
bar near the Circular Quay, and knew really nothing of our man except that he looked like a respectable
sailor. She had seen him only twice in her life. On the second occasion he begged her nicely as a great favour
to take care for him of a small solidly tied-up paper parcel for a day or two. But he never came near her
again. At the end of three weeks she opened it, and, of course, seeing the contents, was much alarmed, and
went to the nearest police-station for advice. The police took her at once on board our ship, where all hands
were mustered on the quarterdeck. She stared wildly at all our faces, pointed suddenly a finger with a shriek,
“That’s the man,” and incontinently went off into a fit of hysterics in front of thirty-six
II. 72
seamen. I must say that never in my life did I see a ship’s company look so frightened. Yes, in this
tale of guilt, there was a curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of that fantasy which is often a part
of a seaman’s character. It wasn’t greed that moved him, I think. It was something much less
simple: boredom, perhaps, or a bet, or the pleasure of defiance.
And now for the point of view. It was given to me by a short, black-bearded A.B. of the crew, who on sea
passages washed my flannel shirts, mended my clothes and, generally, looked after my room. He was an
excellent needleman and washerman, and a very good sailor. Standing in this peculiar relation to me, he
considered himself privileged to open his mind on the matter one evening when he brought back to my cabin
three clean and neatly folded shirts. He was profoundly pained. He said: “What a ship’s
company! Never seen such a crowd! Liars, cheats, thieves. . . ”
It was a needlessly jaundiced view. There were in that ship’s company three or four fellows who dealt
in tall yarns, and I knew that on the passage out there had been a dispute over a game in the foc’sle
once or twice of a rather acute kind, so that all card-playing had to be abandoned. In regard to thieves, as we
know, there was only one, and he, I am convinced, came out of his reserve to perform an exploit rather than to
commit a crime. But my black-bearded friend’s indignation had its special morality, for he added,
with a burst of passion: “And on board our ship, too—a ship like this. . .”
Therein lies the secret of the seamen’s special character as a body. The ship, this ship, our ship, the
ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life. A ship has to be respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her
innocence, are sacred things. Of all the creations of man she is the closest partner of his toil and courage.
From every point of view it is imperative that you should do well by her. And, as always in the case of true
love, all you can do for her adds only to the tale of her merits in your heart. Mute and compelling, she claims
not only your fidelity, but your respect. And the supreme “Well done!” which you may earn is
made over to her.
III.
It is my deep conviction, or, perhaps, I ought to say my deep feeling born from personal experience, that it is
not the sea but the ships of the sea that guide and command that spirit of adventure which some say is the
second nature of British men. I don’t want to provoke a controversy (for intellectually I am rather a
Quietist) but I venture to affirm that the main characteristic of the British men spread all over the world, is not
the spirit of adventure so much as the spirit of service. I think that this could be demonstrated from the
history of great voyages and the general activity of the race. That the British man has always liked his service
to be adventurous rather than otherwise cannot be denied, for each British man began by being young in his
time when all risk has a glamour. Afterwards, with the course of years, risk became a part of his daily work;
he would have missed it from his side as one misses a loved companion.
The mere love of adventure is no saving grace. It is no grace at all. It lays a man under no obligation of
faithfulness to an idea and even to his own self. Roughly speaking, an adventurer may be expected to have
courage, or at any rate may be said to need it. But courage in itself is not an ideal. A successful highwayman
showed courage of a sort, and pirate crews have been known to fight with courage or perhaps only with
reckless desperation in the manner of cornered rats. There is nothing in the world to prevent a mere lover or
pursuer of adventure from running at any moment. There is his own self, his mere taste for excitement, the
prospect of some sort of gain, but there is no sort of loyalty to bind him in honour to consistent conduct. I
have noticed that the majority of mere lovers of adventure are mightily careful of their skins; and the proof of
it is that so many of them manage to keep it whole to an advanced age. You find them in mysterious nooks of
islands and continents, mostly red-nosed and watery-eyed, and not even amusingly boastful. There is nothing
more futile under the sun than a mere adventurer. He might have loved at one time—which would
III. 73
have been a saving grace. I mean loved adventure for itself. But if so, he was bound to lose this grace very
soon. Adventure by itself is but a phantom, a dubious shape without a heart. Yes, there is nothing more futile
than an adventurer; but nobody can say that the adventurous activities of the British race are stamped with the
futility of a chase after mere emotions.
The successive generations that went out to sea from these Isles went out to toil desperately in adventurous
conditions. A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. Just nothing—like a mere adventurer.
Those men understood the nature of their work, but more or less dimly, in various degrees of imperfection.
The best and greatest of their leaders even had never seen it clearly, because of its magnitude and the
remoteness of its end. This is the common fate of mankind, whose most positive achievements are born from
dreams and visions followed loyally to an unknown destination. And it doesn’t matter. For the great
mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in
the short moment of each human effort. In other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of immediate
duty, and a feeling of impalpable constraint. Indeed, seamen and duty are all the time inseparable
companions. It has been suggested to me that this sense of duty is not a patriotic sense or a religious sense, or
even a social sense in a seaman. I don’t know. It seems to me that a seaman’s duty may be an
unconscious compound of these three, something perhaps smaller than either, but something much more
definite for the simple mind and more adapted to the humbleness of the seaman’s task. It has been
suggested also to me that the impalpable constraint is put upon the nature of a seaman by the Spirit of the Sea,
which he serves with a dumb and dogged devotion.
Those are fine words conveying a fine idea. But this I do know, that it is very difficult to display a dogged
devotion to a mere spirit, however great. In everyday life ordinary men require something much more
material, effective, definite and symbolic on which to concentrate their love and their devotion. And then,
what is it, this Spirit of the Sea? It is too great and too elusive to be embraced and taken to a human breast.
All that a guileless or guileful seaman knows of it is its hostility, its exaction of toil as endless as its
ever-renewed horizons. No. What awakens the seaman’s sense of duty, what lays that impalpable
constraint upon the strength of his manliness, what commands his not always dumb if always dogged
devotion, is not the spirit of the sea but something that in his eyes has a body, a character, a fascination, and
almost a soul—it is his ship.
There is not a day that has passed for many centuries now without the sun seeing scattered over all the seas
groups of British men whose material and moral existence is conditioned by their loyalty to each other and
their faithful devotion to a ship.
Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass of seamen have always been a childless lot)
but of loyal and obscure successors taking up the modest but spiritual inheritance of a hard life and simple
duties; of duties so simple that nothing ever could shake the traditional attitude born from the physical
conditions of the service. It was always the ship, bound on any possible errand in the service of the nation,
that has been the stage for the exercise of seamen’s primitive virtues. The dimness of great distances
and the obscurity of lives protected them from the nation’s admiring gaze. Those scattered distant
ships’ companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed (on the right side, I
suppose) from the other strange monsters of the deep. If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of
half-contemptuous indulgence. A good many years ago it was my lot to write about one of those
ships’ companies on a certain sea, under certain circumstances, in a book of no particular length.
That small group of men whom I tried to limn with loving care, but sparing none of their weaknesses, was
characterised by a friendly reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians. This gave me some food for thought. Was
it, then, in that guise that they appeared through the mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded?
And what on earth is an “engaging ruffian”? He must be a creature of literary imagination, I
thought, for the two words don’t match in my personal experience. It has happened to me to meet a
III. 74
few ruffians here and there, but I never found one of them “engaging.” I consoled myself,
however, by the reflection that the friendly reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so often
seems to understand what it says.
Yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness from the rest of the race, the shapes of those men
appeared distorted, uncouth and faint—so faint as to be almost invisible. It needed the lurid light of the
engines of war to bring them out into full view, very simple, without worldly graces, organised now into a
body of workers by the genius of one of themselves, who gave them a place and a voice in the social scheme;
but in the main still apart in their homeless, childless generations, scattered in loyal groups over all the seas,
giving faithful care to their ships and serving the nation, which, since they are seamen, can give them no
reward but the supreme “Well Done.”
TRADITION—1918
“Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of useless rust, like water that in an
unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead
thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some trace of ourselves on this earth.” The sense of
the above lines does not belong to me. It may be found in the note-books of one of the greatest artists that
ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci. It has a simplicity and a truth which no amount of subtle comment can
destroy.
The Master who had meditated so deeply on the rebirth of arts and sciences, on the inward beauty of all
things,—ships’ lines, women’s faces—and on the visible aspects of nature was
profoundly right in his pronouncement on the work that is done on the earth. From the hard work of men are
born the sympathetic consciousness of a common destiny, the fidelity to right practice which makes great
craftsmen, the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the devotion to our calling and the idealism
which is not a misty, winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of terrestrial aspect with a clear glance
and with its feet resting firmly on the earth on which it was born.
And work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, which is the condition of humanity and, like the ambient
air, fills the space between the various sorts and conditions of men, which breeds hatred, fear, and contempt
between the masses of mankind, and puts on men’s lips, on their innocent lips, words that are
thoughtless and vain.
Thoughtless, for instance, were the words that (in all innocence, I believe) came on the lips of a prominent
statesman making in the House of Commons an eulogistic reference to the British Merchant Service. In this
name I include men of diverse status and origin, who live on and by the sea, by it exclusively, outside all
professional pretensions and social formulas, men for whom not only their daily bread but their collective
character, their personal achievement and their individual merit come from the sea. Those words of the
statesman were meant kindly; but, after all, this is not a complete excuse. Rightly or wrongly, we expect from
a man of national importance a larger and at the same time a more scrupulous precision of speech, for it is
possible that it may go echoing down the ages. His words were:
“It is right when thinking of the Navy not to forget the men of the Merchant Service, who have
shown—and it is more surprising because they have had no traditions towards it—courage as
great,” etc., etc.
And then he went on talking of the execution of Captain Fryatt, an event of undying memory, but less
connected with the permanent, unchangeable conditions of sea service than with the wrong view German
minds delight in taking of Englishmen’s psychology. The enemy, he said, meant by this atrocity to
TRADITION—1918 75
frighten our sailors away from the sea.
“What has happened?” he goes on to ask. “Never at any time in peace have sailors
stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a readiness to step again into a ship.”
Which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. I should like to know at what time of history the
English Merchant Service, the great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer the call. Noticed or
unnoticed, ignored or commanded, they have answered invariably the call to do their work, the very
conditions of which made them what they are. They have always served the nation’s needs through
their own invariable fidelity to the demands of their special life; but with the development and complexity of
material civilisation they grew less prominent to the nation’s eye among all the vast schemes of
national industry. Never was the need greater and the call to the services more urgent than to-day. And those
inconspicuous workers on whose qualities depends so much of the national welfare have answered it without
dismay, facing risk without glory, in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition which the speech of the
statesman denies to them at the very moment when he thinks fit to praise their courage . . . and mention his
surprise!
The hour of opportunity has struck—not for the first time—for the Merchant Service; and if I
associate myself with all my heart in the admiration and the praise which is the greatest reward of brave men I
must be excused from joining in any sentiment of surprise. It is perhaps because I have not been born to the
inheritance of that tradition, which has yet fashioned the fundamental part of my character in my young days,
that I am so consciously aware of it and venture to vindicate its existence in this outspoken manner.
Merchant seamen have always been what they are now, from their earliest days, before the Royal Navy had
been fashioned out of the material they furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen. Their work has made
them, as work undertaken with single-minded devotion makes men, giving to their achievements that vitality
and continuity in which their souls are expressed, tempered and matured through the succeeding generations.
In its simplest definition the work of merchant seamen has been to take ships entrusted to their care from port
to port across the seas; and, from the highest to the lowest, to watch and labour with devotion for the safety of
the property and the lives committed to their skill and fortitude through the hazards of innumerable voyages.
That was always the clear task, the single aim, the simple ideal, the only problem for an unselfish solution.
The terms of it have changed with the years, its risks have worn different aspects from time to time. There are
no longer any unexplored seas. Human ingenuity has devised better means to meet the dangers of natural
forces. But it is always the same problem. The youngsters who were growing up at sea at the end of my
service are commanding ships now. At least I have heard of some of them who do. And whatever the shape
and power of their ships the character of the duty remains the same. A mine or a torpedo that strikes your ship
is not so very different from a sharp, uncharted rock tearing her life out of her in another way. At a greater
cost of vital energy, under the well-nigh intolerable stress of vigilance and resolution, they are doing steadily
the work of their professional forefathers in the midst of multiplied dangers. They go to and fro across the
oceans on their everlasting task: the same men, the same stout hearts, the same fidelity to an exacting tradition
created by simple toilers who in their time knew how to live and die at sea.
Allowed to share in this work and in this tradition for something like twenty years, I am bold enough to think
that perhaps I am not altogether unworthy to speak of it. It was the sphere not only of my activity but, I may
safely say, also of my affections; but after such a close connection it is very difficult to avoid bringing in
one’s own personality. Without looking at all at the aspects of the Labour problem, I can safely affirm
that I have never, never seen British seamen refuse any risk, any exertion, any effort of spirit or body up to the
extremest demands of their calling. Years ago—it seems ages ago—I have seen the crew of a
British ship fight the fire in the cargo for a whole sleepless week and then, with her decks blown up, I have
seen them still continue the fight to save the floating shell. And at last I have seen them refuse to be taken off
TRADITION—1918 76
by a vessel standing by, and this only in order “to see the last of our ship,” at the word, at the
simple word, of a man who commanded them, a worthy soul indeed, but of no heroic aspect. I have seen
that. I have shared their days in small boats. Hard days. Ages ago. And now let me mention a story of
to-day.
I will try to relate it here mainly in the words of the chief engineer of a certain steamship which, after
bunkering, left Lerwick, bound for Iceland. The weather was cold, the sea pretty rough, with a stiff head
wind. All went well till next day, about 1.30 p.m., then the captain sighted a suspicious object far away to
starboard. Speed was increased at once to close in with the Faroes and good lookouts were set fore and aft.
Nothing further was seen of the suspicious object, but about half-past three without any warning the ship was
struck amidships by a torpedo which exploded in the bunkers. None of the crew was injured by the explosion,
and all hands, without exception, behaved admirably.
The chief officer with his watch managed to lower the No. 3 boat. Two other boats had been shattered by the
explosion, and though another lifeboat was cleared and ready, there was no time to lower it, and “some
of us jumped while others were washed overboard. Meantime the captain had been busy handing lifebelts to
the men and cheering them up with words and smiles, with no thought of his own safety.” The ship
went down in less than four minutes. The captain was the last man on board, going down with her, and was
sucked under. On coming up he was caught under an upturned boat to which five hands were clinging.
“One lifeboat,” says the chief engineer, “which was floating empty in the distance was
cleverly manoeuvred to our assistance by the steward, who swam off to her pluckily. Our next endeavour was
to release the captain, who was entangled under the boat. As it was impossible to right her, we set-to to split
her side open with the boat hook, because by awful bad luck the head of the axe we had flew off at the first
blow and was lost. The rescue took thirty minutes, and the extricated captain was in a pitiable condition,
being badly bruised and having swallowed a lot of salt water. He was unconscious. While at that work the
submarine came to the surface quite close and made a complete circle round us, the seven men that we
counted on the conning tower laughing at our efforts.
“There were eighteen of us saved. I deeply regret the loss of the chief officer, a fine fellow and a kind
shipmate showing splendid promise. The other men lost—one A.B., one greaser, and two
firemen—were quiet, conscientious, good fellows.”
With no restoratives in the boat, they endeavoured to bring the captain round by means of massage.
Meantime the oars were got out in order to reach the Faroes, which were about thirty miles dead to windward,
but after about nine hours’ hard work they had to desist, and, putting out a sea-anchor, they took
shelter under the canvas boat-cover from the cold wind and torrential rain. Says the narrator: “We
were all very wet and miserable, and decided to have two biscuits all round. The effects of this and being
under the shelter of the canvas warmed us up and made us feel pretty well contented. At about sunrise the
captain showed signs of recovery, and by the time the sun was up he was looking a lot better, much to our
relief.”
After being informed of what had been done the revived captain “dropped a bombshell in our
midst,” by proposing to make for the Shetlands, which were only one hundred and fifty miles off.
“The wind is in our favour,” he said. “I promise to take you there. Are you all
willing?” This—comments the chief engineer—“from a man who but a few hours
previously had been hauled back from the grave!” The captain’s confident manner inspired the
men, and they all agreed. Under the best possible conditions a boat-run of one hundred and fifty miles in the
North Atlantic and in winter weather would have been a feat of no mean merit, but in the circumstances it
required uncommon nerve and skill to carry out such a promise. With an oar for a mast and the boat-cover cut
down for a sail they started on their dangerous journey, with the boat compass and the stars for their guide.
The captain’s undaunted serenity buoyed them all up against despondency. He told them what point
TRADITION—1918 77
he was making for. It was Ronas Hill, “and we struck it as straight as a die.”
The chief engineer commends also the ship steward for the manner in which he made the little food they had
last, the cheery spirit he manifested, and the great help he was to the captain by keeping the men in good
humour. That trusty man had “his hands cruelly chafed with the rowing, but it never damped his
spirits.”
They made Ronas Hill (as straight as a die), and the chief engineer cannot express their feelings of gratitude
and relief when they set their feet on the shore. He praises the unbounded kindness of the people in
Hillswick. “It seemed to us all like Paradise regained,” he says, concluding his letter with the
words:
“And there was our captain, just his usual self, as if nothing had happened, as if bringing the boat that
hazardous journey and being the means of saving eighteen souls was to him an everyday occurrence.”
Such is the chief engineer’s testimony to the continuity of the old tradition of the sea, which made by
the work of men has in its turn created for them their simple ideal of conduct.
CONFIDENCE—1919
I.
The seamen hold up the Edifice. They have been holding it up in the past and they will hold it up in the
future, whatever this future may contain of logical development, of unforeseen new shapes, of great promises
and of dangers still unknown.
It is not an unpardonable stretching of the truth to say that the British Empire rests on transportation. I am
speaking now naturally of the sea, as a man who has lived on it for many years, at a time, too, when on
sighting a vessel on the horizon of any of the great oceans it was perfectly safe to bet any reasonable odds on
her being a British ship—with the certitude of making a pretty good thing of it at the end of the voyage.
I have tried to convey here in popular terms the strong impression remembered from my young days. The
Red Ensign prevailed on the high seas to such an extent that one always experienced a slight shock on seeing
some other combination of colours blow out at the peak or flag-pole of any chance encounter in deep water.
In the long run the persistence of the visual fact forced upon the mind a half-unconscious sense of its inner
significance. We have all heard of the well-known view that trade follows the flag. And that is not always
true. There is also this truth that the flag, in normal conditions, represents commerce to the eye and
understanding of the average man. This is a truth, but it is not the whole truth. In its numbers and in its
unfailing ubiquity, the British Red Ensign, under which naval actions too have been fought, adventures
entered upon and sacrifices offered, represented in fact something more than the prestige of a great trade.
The flutter of that piece of red bunting showered sentiment on the nations of the earth. I will not venture to
say that in every case that sentiment was of a friendly nature. Of hatred, half concealed or concealed not at
all, this is not the place to speak; and indeed the little I have seen of it about the world was tainted with
stupidity and seemed to confess in its very violence the extreme poorness of its case. But generally it was
more in the nature of envious wonder qualified by a half-concealed admiration.
That flag, which but for the Union Jack in the corner might have been adopted by the most radical of
revolutions, affirmed in its numbers the stability of purpose, the continuity of effort and the greatness of
Britain’s opportunity pursued steadily in the order and peace of the world: that world which for
CONFIDENCE—1919 78
twenty-five years or so after 1870 may be said to have been living in holy calm and hushed silence with only
now and then a slight clink of metal, as if in some distant part of mankind’s habitation some restless
body had stumbled over a heap of old armour.
II.
We who have learned by now what a world-war is like may be excused for considering the disturbances of
that period as insignificant brawls, mere hole-and-corner scuffles. In the world, which memory depicts as so
wonderfully tranquil all over, it was the sea yet that was the safest place. And the Red Ensign, commercial,
industrial, historic, pervaded the sea! Assertive only by its numbers, highly significant, and, under its
character of a trade—emblem, nationally expressive, it was symbolic of old and new ideas, of
conservatism and progress, of routine and enterprise, of drudgery and adventure—and of a certain
easy-going optimism that would have appeared the Father of Sloth itself if it had not been so stubbornly, so
everlastingly active.
The unimaginative, hard-working men, great and small, who served this flag afloat and ashore, nursed dumbly
a mysterious sense of its greatness. It sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours under the sleepless eye
of the sun. It held up the Edifice. But it crowned it too. This is not the extravagance of a mixed metaphor. It
is the sober expression of a not very complex truth. Within that double function the national life that flag
represented so well went on in safety, assured of its daily crust of bread for which we all pray and without
which we would have to give up faith, hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of our minds and the
sanctified strength of our labouring arms. I may permit myself to speak of it in these terms because as a
matter of fact it was on that very symbol that I had founded my life and (as I have said elsewhere in a moment
of outspoken gratitude) had known for many years no other roof above my head.
In those days that symbol was not particularly regarded. Superficially and definitely it represented but one of
the forms of national activity rather remote from the close-knit organisations of other industries, a kind of toil
not immediately under the public eye. It was of its Navy that the nation, looking out of the windows of its
world-wide Edifice, was proudly aware. And that was but fair. The Navy is the armed man at the gate. An
existence depending upon the sea must be guarded with a jealous, sleepless vigilance, for the sea is but a
fickle friend.
It had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and had lured some nations to destruction—as we
know. He—man or people—who, boasting of long years of familiarity with the sea, neglects the
strength and cunning of his right hand is a fool. The pride and trust of the nation in its Navy so strangely
mingled with moments of neglect, caused by a particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. It is
also very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great responsibility to feel themselves
recognised, if only in that fallible, imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes
offered to the deserving.
But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from that sort of irritation. No recognition was thrust on it
offensively, and, truth to say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the claims of its own obscure
merit. It had no consciousness. It had no words. It had no time. To these busy men their work was but the
ordinary labour of earning a living; their duties in their ever-recurring round had, like the sun itself, the
commonness of daily things; their individual fidelity was not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an
aim that shone with no spiritual lustre. They were everyday men. They were that, eminently. When the great
opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a supreme call they received it with characteristic
simplicity, incorporating self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and, as far as emotion went,
framing the horror of mankind’s catastrophic time within the rigid rules of their professional
conscience. And who can say that they could have done better than this?
I. 79
Such was their past both remote and near. It has been stubbornly consistent, and as this consistency was
based upon the character of men fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure. Such
changes as came into the sea life have been for the main part mechanical and affecting only the material
conditions of that inbred consistency. That men don’t change is a profound truth. They don’t
change because it is not necessary for them to change even if they could accomplish that miracle. It is enough
for them to be infinitely adaptable—as the last four years have abundantly proved.
III.
Thus one may await the future without undue excitement and with unshaken confidence. Whether the hues of
sunrise are angry or benign, gorgeous or sinister, we shall always have the same sky over our heads. Yet by a
kindly dispensation of Providence the human faculty of astonishment will never lack food. What could be
more surprising for instance, than the calm invitation to Great Britain to discard the force and protection of its
Navy? It has been suggested, it has been proposed—I don’t know whether it has been pressed.
Probably not much. For if the excursions of audacious folly have no bounds that human eye can see, reason
has the habit of never straying very far away from its throne.
It is not the first time in history that excited voices have been heard urging the warrior still panting from the
fray to fling his tried weapons on the altar of peace, for they would be needed no more! And such voices have
been, in undying hope or extreme weariness, listened to sometimes. But not for long. After all every sort of
shouting is a transitory thing. It is the grim silence of facts that remains.
The British Merchant Service has been challenged in its supremacy before. It will be challenged again. It
may be even asked menacingly in the name of some humanitarian doctrine or some empty ideal to step down
voluntarily from that place which it has managed to keep for so many years. But I imagine that it will take
more than words of brotherly love or brotherly anger (which, as is well known, is the worst kind of anger) to
drive British seamen, armed or unarmed, from the seas. Firm in this indestructible if not easily explained
conviction, I can allow myself to think placidly of that long, long future which I shall not see.
My confidence rests on the hearts of men who do not change, though they may forget many things for a time
and even forget to be themselves in a moment of false enthusiasm. But of that I am not afraid. It will not be
for long. I know the men. Through the kindness of the Admiralty (which, let me confess here in a white
sheet, I repaid by the basest ingratitude) I was permitted during the war to renew my contact with the British
seamen of the merchant service. It is to their generosity in recognising me under the shore rust of twenty-five
years as one of themselves that I owe one of the deepest emotions of my life. Never for a moment did I feel
among them like an idle, wandering ghost from a distant past. They talked to me seriously, openly, and with
professional precision, of facts, of events, of implements, I had never heard of in my time; but the hands I
grasped were like the hands of the generation which had trained my youth and is now no more. I recognised
the character of their glances, the accent of their voices. Their moving tales of modern instances were
presented to me with that peculiar turn of mind flavoured by the inherited humour and sagacity of the sea. I
don’t know what the seaman of the future will be like. He may have to live all his days with a
telephone tied up to his head and bristle all over with scientific antennæ like a figure in a fantastic tale. But he
will always be the man revealed to us lately, immutable in his slight variations like the closed path of this
planet of ours on which he must find his exact position once, at the very least, in every twenty-four hours.
The greatest desideratum of a sailor’s life is to be “certain of his position.” It is a source

of great worry at times, but I don’t think that it need be so at this time. Yet even the best position has
its dangers on account of the fickleness of the elements. But I think that, left untrammelled to the individual
effort of its creators and to the collective spirit of its servants, the British Merchant Service will manage to
maintain its position on this restless and watery globe.
II. 80
FLIGHT—1917
To begin at the end, I will say that the “landing” surprised me by a slight and very
characteristically “dead” sort of shock.
I may fairly call myself an amphibious creature. A good half of my active existence has been passed in
familiar contact with salt water, and I was aware, theoretically, that water is not an elastic body: but it was
only then that I acquired the absolute conviction of the fact. I remember distinctly the thought flashing
through my head: “By Jove! it isn’t elastic!” Such is the illuminating force of a
particular experience.
This landing (on the water of the North Sea) was effected in a Short biplane after one hour and twenty minutes
in the air. I reckon every minute like a miser counting his hoard, for, if what I’ve got is mine, I am not
likely now to increase the tale. That feeling is the effect of age. It strikes me as I write that, when next time I
leave the surface of this globe, it won’t be to soar bodily above it in the air. Quite the contrary. And I
am not thinking of a submarine either. . . .
But let us drop this dismal strain and go back logically to the beginning. I must confess that I started on that
flight in a state—I won’t say of fury, but of a most intense irritation. I don’t remember
ever feeling so annoyed in my life.
It came about in this way. Two or three days before, I had been invited to lunch at an R.N.A.S. station, and
was made to feel very much at home by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it had ever been my
good fortune to meet. Then I was taken into the sheds. I walked respectfully round and round a lot of
machines of all kinds, and the more I looked at them the more I felt somehow that for all the effect they
produced on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an eccentric design. So I said to Commander
O., who very kindly was conducting me: “This is all very fine, but to realise what one is looking at,
one must have been up.”
He said at once: “I’ll give you a flight to-morrow if you like.”
I postulated that it should be none of those “ten minutes in the air” affairs. I wanted a real
business flight. Commander O. assured me that I would get “awfully bored,” but I declared
that I was willing to take that risk. “Very well,” he said. “Eleven o’clock
to-morrow. Don’t be late.”
I am sorry to say I was about two minutes late, which was enough, however, for Commander O. to greet me
with a shout from a great distance: “Oh! You are coming, then!”
“Of course I am coming,” I yelled indignantly.
He hurried up to me. “All right. There’s your machine, and here’s your pilot. Come
along.”
A lot of officers closed round me, rushed me into a hut: two of them began to button me into the coat, two
more were ramming a cap on my head, others stood around with goggles, with binoculars. . . I couldn’t
understand the necessity of such haste. We weren’t going to chase Fritz. There was no sign of Fritz
anywhere in the blue. Those dear boys did not seem to notice my age—fifty-eight, if a day—nor
my infirmities—a gouty subject for years. This disregard was very flattering, and I tried to live up to it,
but the pace seemed to me terrific. They galloped me across a vast expanse of open ground to the
FLIGHT—1917 81
water’s edge.
The machine on its carriage seemed as big as a cottage, and much more imposing. My young pilot went up
like a bird. There was an idle, able-bodied ladder loafing against a shed within fifteen feet of me, but as
nobody seemed to notice it, I recommended myself mentally to Heaven and started climbing after the pilot.
The close view of the real fragility of that rigid structure startled me considerably, while Commander O.
discomposed me still more by shouting repeatedly: “Don’t put your foot there!” I
didn’t know where to put my foot. There was a slight crack; I heard some swear-words below me, and
then with a supreme effort I rolled in and dropped into a basket-chair, absolutely winded. A small crowd of
mechanics and officers were looking up at me from the ground, and while I gasped visibly I thought to myself
that they would be sure to put it down to sheer nervousness. But I hadn’t breath enough in my body to
stick my head out and shout down to them:
“You know, it isn’t that at all!”
Generally I try not to think of my age and infirmities. They are not a cheerful subject. But I was never so
angry and disgusted with them as during that minute or so before the machine took the water. As to my
feelings in the air, those who will read these lines will know their own, which are so much nearer the mind
and the heart than any writings of an unprofessional can be. At first all my faculties were absorbed and as if
neutralised by the sheer novelty of the situation. The first to emerge was the sense of security so much more
perfect than in any small boat I’ve ever been in; the, as it were, material, stillness, and immobility
(though it was a bumpy day). I very soon ceased to hear the roar of the wind and engines—unless,
indeed, some cylinders missed, when I became acutely aware of that. Within the rigid spread of the powerful
planes, so strangely motionless I had sometimes the illusion of sitting as if by enchantment in a block of
suspended marble. Even while looking over at the aeroplane’s shadow running prettily over land and
sea, I had the impression of extreme slowness. I imagine that had she suddenly nose-dived out of control, I
would have gone to the final smash without a single additional heartbeat. I am sure I would not have known.
It is doubtless otherwise with the man in control.
But there was no dive, and I returned to earth (after an hour and twenty minutes) without having felt
“bored” for a single second. I descended (by the ladder) thinking that I would never go flying
again. No, never any more—lest its mysterious fascination, whose invisible wing had brushed my
heart up there, should change to unavailing regret in a man too old for its glory.
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912

It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that the late S.S. Titanic had a “good
press.” It is perhaps because I have no great practice of daily newspapers (I have never seen so many
of them together lying about my room) that the white spaces and the big lettering of the headlines have an
incongruously festive air to my eyes, a disagreeable effect of a feverish exploitation of a sensational
God-send. And if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act of God,
this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the
self-confidence of mankind.
I say this with all the seriousness the occasion demands, though I have neither the competence nor the wish to
take a theological view of this great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last account. It is but a natural
reflection. Another one flowing also from the phraseology of bills of lading (a bill of lading is a shipping
document limiting in certain of its clauses the liability of the carrier) is that the “King’s
Enemies” of a more or less overt sort are not altogether sorry that this fatal mishap should strike the
prestige of the greatest Merchant Service of the world. I believe that not a thousand miles from these shores
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 82

certain public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction—to speak plainly—by
rather ill-natured comments.
In what light one is to look at the action of the American Senate is more difficult to say. From a certain point
of view the sight of the august senators of a great Power rushing to New York and beginning to bully and
badger the luckless “Yamsi”—on the very quay-side so to speak—seems to
furnish the Shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people
who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and
mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these ships! Yes, a grim
touch of comedy. One asks oneself what these men are after, with this very provincial display of authority. I
beg my friends in the United States pardon for calling these zealous senators men. I don’t wish to be
disrespectful. They may be of the stature of demi-gods for all I know, but at that great distance from the
shores of effete Europe and in the presence of so many guileless dead, their size seems diminished from this
side. What are they after? What is there for them to find out? We know what had happened. The ship
scraped her side against a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot of people
down with her. What more can they find out from the unfair badgering of the unhappy
“Yamsi,” or the ruffianly abuse of the same.
“Yamsi,” I should explain, is a mere code address, and I use it here symbolically. I have seen
commerce pretty close. I know what it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but
one must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings. Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is
at work here? Well, the American railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say. Then
why don’t these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of which one
can’t say whether they are mere means of transportation or a sort of gambling game for the use of
American plutocrats. Is it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praiseworthy desire for information? But the
reports of the inquiry tell us that the august senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to the
complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are unable to understand what the second officer is
saying to them. We are so informed by the press from the other side. Even such a simple expression as that
one of the look-out men was stationed in the “eyes of the ship” was too much for the senators
of the land of graphic expression. What it must have been in the more recondite matters I won’t even
try to think, because I have no mind for smiles just now. They were greatly exercised about the sound of
explosions heard when half the ship was under water already. Was there one? Were there two? They seemed
to be smelling a rat there! Has not some charitable soul told them (what even schoolboys who read sea stories
know) that when a ship sinks from a leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up; and that when a
steamship goes down by the head, the boilers may, and often do break adrift with a sound which resembles the
sound of an explosion? And they may, indeed, explode, for all I know. In the only case I have seen of a
steamship sinking there was such a sound, but I didn’t dive down after her to investigate. She was not
of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was impressive enough. I shall never forget the muffled,
mysterious detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea round the slowly raised stern, and to this day I have in
my eye the propeller, seen perfectly still in its frame against a clear evening sky.
But perhaps the second officer has explained to them by this time this and a few other little facts. Though
why an officer of the British merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or
senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a British ship alone was concerned, and which did not
even take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding. The only authority he is
bound to answer is the Board of Trade. But with what face the Board of Trade, which, having made the
regulations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old bald head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to
shelve an important report, and with a dreary murmur, “Unsinkable,” put it back again, in the
hope of not being disturbed for another ten years, with what face it will be putting questions to that man who
has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his professional conduct in it—well, I
don’t know! I have the greatest respect for our established authorities. I am a disciplined man, and I

have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses of human institutions; but I will own that at times I have
regretted their—how shall I say it?—their imponderability. A Board of Trade—what is
it? A Board of . . . I believe the Speaker of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it. A ghost. Less
than that; as yet a mere memory. An office with adequate and no doubt comfortable furniture and a lot of
perfectly irresponsible gentlemen who exist packed in its equable atmosphere softly, as if in a lot of
cotton-wool, and with no care in the world; for there can be no care without personal
responsibility—such, for instance, as the seamen have—those seamen from whose mouths this
irresponsible institution can take away the bread—as a disciplinary measure. Yes—it’s
all that. And what more? The name of a politician—a party man! Less than nothing; a mere void
without as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from that light in which move the masses of men
who work, who deal in things and face the realities—not the words—of this life.
Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old type commenting on a ship’s
officer, who, if not exactly incompetent, did not commend himself to their severe judgment of accomplished
sailor-men. Said one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone:
“The Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his certificate.”
I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity having a brain which could be overcome by the
fumes of strong liquor charmed me exceedingly. For then it would have been unlike the limited companies of
which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and
thus were free in this world and the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct. But,
unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a characteristic sally of an annoyed
sailor. The Board of Trade is composed of bloodless departments. It has no limbs and no physiognomy, or
else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of the Titanic disaster the small tribute of a
blush. I ask myself whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really believe, when they
decided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that a ship of 45,000 tons, that any ship, could be made
practically indestructible by means of water-tight bulkheads? It seems incredible to anybody who had ever
reflected upon the properties of material, such as wood or steel. You can’t, let builders say what they
like, make a ship of such dimensions as strong proportionately as a much smaller one. The shocks our old
whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin’s Bay were perfectly staggering,
notwithstanding the most skilful handling, and yet they lasted for years. The Titanic, if one may believe the
last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect, was not an enormously bulky and
comparatively easily seen berg, but the low edge of a floe—and sank. Leisurely enough, God
knows—and here the advantage of bulkheads comes in—for time is a great friend, a good
helper—though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the
passengers who could not be saved. But she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so
many lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have happened at all. Why? You build a
45,000 tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people (for if it
had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no such exaggeration of mere size), you
decorate it in the style of the Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style—I don’t know
which—and to please the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than they
know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you launch that mass with two thousand people
on board at twenty-one knots across the sea—a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere
material and appliances. And then this happens. General uproar. The blind trust in material and appliances
has received a terrible shock. I will say nothing of the credulity which accepts any statement which
specialists, technicians and office-people are pleased to make, whether for purposes of gain or glory. You
stand there astonished and hurt in your profoundest sensibilities. But what else under the circumstances could
you expect?

For my part I could much sooner believe in an unsinkable ship of 3,000 tons than in one of 40,000 tons. It is
one of those things that stand to reason. You can’t increase the thickness of scantling and plates
indefinitely. And the mere weight of this bigness is an added disadvantage. In reading the reports, the first
reflection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she
would have probably gone clear of the danger. But then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath
and a French café. That, of course, is a serious consideration. I am well aware that those responsible for her
short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe that if she had hit end on she would have
survived. Which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the
watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle. We shall have presently, in deference to commercial
and industrial interests, a new kind of seamanship. A very new and “progressive” kind. If you
see anything in the way, by no means try to avoid it; smash at it full tilt. And then—and then only you
shall see the triumph of material, of clever contrivances, of the whole box of engineering tricks in fact, and
cover with glory a commercial concern of the most unmitigated sort, a great Trust, and a great ship-building
yard, justly famed for the super-excellence of its material and workmanship. Unsinkable! See? I told you
she was unsinkable, if only handled in accordance with the new seamanship. Everything’s in that.
And, doubtless, the Board of Trade, if properly approached, would consent to give the needed instructions to
its examiners of Masters and Mates. Behold the examination-room of the future. Enter to the grizzled
examiner a young man of modest aspect: “Are you well up in modern seamanship?” “I
hope so, sir.” “H’m, let’s see. You are at night on the bridge in charge of a
150,000 tons ship, with a motor track, organ-loft, etc., etc., with a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of
1,500 café waiters, two sailors and a boy, three collapsible boats as per Board of Trade regulations, and going
at your three-quarter speed of, say, about forty knots. You perceive suddenly right ahead, and close to,
something that looks like a large ice-floe. What would you do?” “Put the helm
amidships.” “Very well. Why?” “In order to hit end on.” “On
what grounds should you endeavour to hit end on?” “Because we are taught by our builders
and masters that the heavier the smash, the smaller the damage, and because the requirements of material
should be attended to.”
And so on and so on. The new seamanship: when in doubt try to ram fairly—whatever’s before
you. Very simple. If only the Titanic had rammed that piece of ice (which was not a monstrous berg) fairly,
every puffing paragraph would have been vindicated in the eyes of the credulous public which pays. But
would it have been? Well, I doubt it. I am well aware that in the eighties the steamship Arizona, one of the
“greyhounds of the ocean” in the jargon of that day, did run bows on against a very
unmistakable iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision bulkhead. But the Arizona was not, if I
remember rightly, 5,000 tons register, let alone 45,000, and she was not going at twenty knots per hour. I
can’t be perfectly certain at this distance of time, but her sea-speed could not have been more than
fourteen at the outside. Both these facts made for safety. And, even if she had been engined to go twenty
knots, there would not have been behind that speed the enormous mass, so difficult to check in its impetus, the
terrific weight of which is bound to do damage to itself or others at the slightest contact.
I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my own poor experiences, but only to illustrate my
point, that I will relate here a very unsensational little incident I witnessed now rather more than twenty years
ago in Sydney, N.S.W. Ships were beginning then to grow bigger year after year, though, of course, the
present dimensions were not even dreamt of. I was standing on the Circular Quay with a Sydney pilot
watching a big mail steamship of one of our best-known companies being brought alongside. We admired her
lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her size as well, though her length, I imagine, was hardly
half that of the Titanic.
She came into the Cove (as that part of the harbour is called), of course very slowly, and at some hundred feet
or so short of the quay she lost her way. That quay was then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty piles
and stringers bearing a roadway—a thing of great strength. The ship, as I have said before, stopped

moving when some hundred feet from it. Then her engines were rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung
off again. The propeller made just about five turns, I should say. She began to move, stealing on, so to speak,
without a ripple; coming alongside with the utmost gentleness. I went on looking her over, very much
interested, but the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath: “Too much, too much.”
His exercised judgment had warned him of what I did not even suspect. But I believe that neither of us was
exactly prepared for what happened. There was a faint concussion of the ground under our feet, a groaning of
piles, a snapping of great iron bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, as when a tree is blown down
by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a baulk of squared timber, was displaced several feet as if by
enchantment. I looked at my companion in amazement. “I could not have believed it,” I
declared. “No,” he said. “You would not have thought she would have cracked an
egg—eh?”
I certainly wouldn’t have thought that. He shook his head, and added: “Ah! These great, big
things, they want some handling.”
Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney. The same pilot brought me in from sea. And I found the
same steamship, or else another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us. The pilot told me she
had arrived the day before, and that he was to take her alongside to-morrow. I reminded him jocularly of the
damage to the quay. “Oh!” he said, “we are not allowed now to bring them in under
their own steam. We are using tugs.”
A very wise regulation. And this is my point—that size is to a certain extent an element of weakness.
The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled. Here is a contact which, in the pilot’s
own words, you wouldn’t think could have cracked an egg; with the astonishing result of something
like eighty feet of good strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a baulk of stout timber
splintered. Now, suppose that quay had been of granite (as surely it is now)—or, instead of the quay, if
there had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, with a full-grown iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a
ship groping its way along blindfold? Something would have been hurt, but it would not have been the
iceberg.
Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true progress—in trade, in games, in
the marvellous handiwork of men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and
mental kind. There is a point when progress, to remain a real advance, must change slightly the direction of
its line. But this is a wide question. What I wanted to point out here is—that the old Arizona, the
marvel of her day, was proportionately stronger, handier, better equipped, than this triumph of modern naval
architecture, the loss of which, in common parlance, will remain the sensation of this year. The clatter of the
presses has been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary pæans of triumph round that vanished hull, of the
reckless statements, and elaborate descriptions of its ornate splendour. A great babble of news (and what sort
of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that
a less strident note would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left struggling on the
sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or worse than nothing: for false standards of achievement, to
satisfy a vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury—the only one they can
understand—and because the big ship pays, in one way or another: in money or in advertising value.
It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape along the ship’s side, so slight that,
if reports are to be believed, it did not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style)
smoking-room—or was it in the delightful French café?—is enough to bring on the exposure.
All the people on board existed under a sense of false security. How false, it has been sufficiently
demonstrated. And the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant to enter the
boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that falsehood. Incidentally, it shows also the sort of
discipline on board these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the unforgiving sea.

These people seemed to imagine it an optional matter: whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order
of the sternest character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on board, with men to
enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically and swiftly. And it is no use to say it cannot be done, for it
can. It has been done. The only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself and of the numbers she carries
on board. That is the great thing which makes for safety. A commander should be able to hold his ship and
everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But with the modern foolish trust in material,
and with those floating hotels, this has become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot succeed in
a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity, has been made too great for anybody’s
strength.
The readers of The English Review, who cast a friendly eye nearly six years ago on my Reminiscences, and
know how much the merchant service, ships and men, has been to me, will understand my indignation that
those men of whom (speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of feeling) I can’t even
now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put by their commercial employers in the impossibility to
perform efficiently their plain duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here, but whose
intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness, the miserable greatness, of that disaster. Some of
them have perished. To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been trained to
combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one’s calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they
are gone, and the responsibility remains with the living who will have no difficulty in replacing them by
others, just as good, at the same wages. It was their bitter fate. But I, who can look at some arduous years
when their duty was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some of us who once
upon a time were more fortunate.
It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and also because I am sticking all the time to
my subject to illustrate my point, the point of manageableness which I have raised just now. Since the
memory of the lucky Arizona has been evoked by others than myself, and made use of by me for my own
purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates
another lesson making for my argument. The Douro, a ship belonging to the Royal Mail Steam Packet
Company, was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of the Titanic. Yet, strange as it may appear to the
ineffable hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-Atlantic Passengers, people of position
and wealth and refinement did not consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way from
South America; this being the service she was engaged upon. Of her speed I know nothing, but it must have
been the average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons were, I dare say, quite up to the mark; but I
doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round the Press, because that was not the fashion of the
time. She was not a mass of material gorgeously furnished and upholstered. She was a ship. And she was
not, in the apt words of an article by Commander C. Crutchley, R.N.R., which I have just read, “run by
a sort of hotel syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain,” as these
monstrous Atlantic ferries are. She was really commanded, manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the
sea: a ship first and last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to relate will show.
She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full, just like the Titanic; and further, the
proportion of her crew to her passengers, I remember quite well, was very much the same. The exact number
of souls on board I have forgotten. It might have been nearly three hundred, certainly not more. The night
was moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine with a heavy swell running from the westward, which means that she
must have been rolling a great deal, and in that respect the conditions for her were worse than in the case of
the Titanic. Some time either just before or just after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run
into amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the blow backed out, and, herself apparently
damaged, remained motionless at some distance.
My recollection is that the Douro remained afloat after the collision for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. It
might have been twenty, but certainly something under the half-hour. In that time the boats were lowered, all

the passengers put into them, and the lot shoved off. There was no time to do anything more. All the crew of
the Douro went down with her, literally without a murmur. When she went she plunged bodily down like a
stone. The only members of the ship’s company who survived were the third officer, who was from
the first ordered to take charge of the boats, and the seamen told off to man them, two in each. Nobody else
was picked up. A quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty, with whom I talked a month or so
afterwards, told me that they pulled up to the spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest cry.
But I have forgotten. A passenger was drowned. She was a lady’s maid who, frenzied with terror,
refused to leave the ship. One of the boats waited near by till the chief officer, finding himself absolutely
unable to tear the girl away from the rail to which she dung with a frantic grasp, ordered the boat away out of
danger. My quartermaster told me that he spoke over to them in his ordinary voice, and this was the last
sound heard before the ship sank.
The rest is silence. I daresay there was the usual official inquiry, but who cared for it? That sort of thing
speaks for itself with no uncertain voice; though the papers, I remember, gave the event no space to speak of:
no large headlines—no headlines at all. You see it was not the fashion at the time. A seaman-like
piece of work, of which one cherishes the old memory at this juncture more than ever before. She was a ship
commanded, manned, equipped—not a sort of marine Ritz, proclaimed unsinkable and sent adrift with
its casual population upon the sea, without enough boats, without enough seamen (but with a Parisian café and
four hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers which, let the engineers say what they like, lurk
always amongst the waves; sent with a blind trust in mere material, light-heartedly, to a most miserable, most
fatuous disaster.
And there are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy. The rush of the senatorial inquiry before the
poor wretches escaped from the jaws of death had time to draw breath, the vituperative abuse of a man no
more guilty than others in this matter, and the suspicion of this aimless fuss being a political move to get
home on the M.T. Company, into which, in common parlance, the United States Government has got its knife,
I don’t pretend to understand why, though with the rest of the world I am aware of the fact. Perhaps
there may be an excellent and worthy reason for it; but I venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many
pitiful corpses, is not pretty. And the exploiting of the mere sensation on the other side is not pretty in its
wealth of heartless inventions. Neither is the welter of Marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating without
some reason, for which it would be nauseous to inquire too closely. And the calumnious, baseless, gratuitous,
circumstantial lie charging poor Captain Smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide is the vilest and
most ugly thing of all in this outburst of journalistic enterprise, without feeling, without honour, without
decency.
But all this has its moral. And that other sinking which I have related here and to the memory of which a
seaman turns with relief and thankfulness has its moral too. Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail
sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that
wonderful thin steel from which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF

THE TITANIC—1912
I have been taken to task by a friend of mine on the “other side” for my strictures on Senator
Smith’s investigation into the loss of the Titanic, in the number of The English Review for May, 1912.
I will admit that the motives of the investigation may have been excellent, and probably were; my criticism
bore mainly on matters of form and also on the point of efficiency. In that respect I have nothing to retract.
The Senators of the Commission had absolutely no knowledge and no practice to guide them in the conduct of
such an investigation; and this fact gave an air of unreality to their zealous exertions. I think that even in the
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United States there is some regret that this zeal of theirs was not tempered by a large dose of wisdom. It is
fitting that people who rush with such ardour to the work of putting questions to men yet gasping from a
narrow escape should have, I wouldn’t say a tincture of technical information, but enough knowledge
of the subject to direct the trend of their inquiry. The newspapers of two continents have noted the remarks of
the President of the Senatorial Commission with comments which I will not reproduce here, having a scant
respect for the “organs of public opinion,” as they fondly believe themselves to be. The
absolute value of their remarks was about as great as the value of the investigation they either mocked at or
extolled. To the United States Senate I did not intend to be disrespectful. I have for that body, of which one
hears mostly in connection with tariffs, as much reverence as the best of Americans. To manifest more or less
would be an impertinence in a stranger. I have expressed myself with less reserve on our Board of Trade.
That was done under the influence of warm feelings. We were all feeling warmly on the matter at that time.
But, at any rate, our Board of Trade Inquiry, conducted by an experienced President, discovered a very
interesting fact on the very second day of its sitting: the fact that the water-tight doors in the bulkheads of that
wonder of naval architecture could be opened down below by any irresponsible person. Thus the famous
closing apparatus on the bridge, paraded as a device of greater safety, with its attachments of warning bells,
coloured lights, and all these pretty-pretties, was, in the case of this ship, little better than a technical farce.
It is amusing, if anything connected with this stupid catastrophe can be amusing, to see the secretly crestfallen
attitude of technicians. They are the high priests of the modern cult of perfected material and of mechanical
appliances, and would fain forbid the profane from inquiring into its mysteries. We are the masters of
progress, they say, and you should remain respectfully silent. And they take refuge behind their mathematics.
I have the greatest regard for mathematics as an exercise of mind. It is the only manner of thinking which
approaches the Divine. But mere calculations, of which these men make so much, when unassisted by
imagination and when they have gained mastery over common sense, are the most deceptive exercises of
intellect. Two and two are four, and two are six. That is immutable; you may trust your soul to that; but you
must be certain first of your quantities. I know how the strength of materials can be calculated away, and also
the evidence of one’s senses. For it is by some sort of calculation involving weights and levels that the
technicians responsible for the Titanic persuaded themselves that a ship not divided by water-tight
compartments could be “unsinkable.” Because, you know, she was not divided. You and I,
and our little boys, when we want to divide, say, a box, take care to procure a piece of wood which will reach
from the bottom to the lid. We know that if it does not reach all the way up, the box will not be divided into
two compartments. It will be only partly divided. The Titanic was only partly divided. She was just
sufficiently divided to drown some poor devils like rats in a trap. It is probable that they would have perished
in any case, but it is a particularly horrible fate to die boxed up like this. Yes, she was sufficiently divided for
that, but not sufficiently divided to prevent the water flowing over.
Therefore to a plain man who knows something of mathematics but is not bemused by calculations, she was,
from the point of view of “unsinkability,” not divided at all. What would you say of people
who would boast of a fireproof building, an hotel, for instance, saying, “Oh, we have it divided by
fireproof bulkheads which would localise any outbreak,” and if you were to discover on closer
inspection that these bulkheads closed no more than two-thirds of the openings they were meant to close,
leaving above an open space through which draught, smoke, and fire could rush from one end of the building
to the other? And, furthermore, that those partitions, being too high to climb over, the people confined in each
menaced compartment had to stay there and become asphyxiated or roasted, because no exits to the outside,
say to the roof, had been provided! What would you think of the intelligence or candour of these advertising
people? What would you think of them? And yet, apart from the obvious difference in the action of fire and
water, the cases are essentially the same.
It would strike you and me and our little boys (who are not engineers yet) that to approach—I
won’t say attain—somewhere near absolute safety, the divisions to keep out water should
extend from the bottom right up to the uppermost deck of the hull. I repeat, the hull, because there are above
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the hull the decks of the superstructures of which we need not take account. And further, as a provision of the
commonest humanity, that each of these compartments should have a perfectly independent and free access to
that uppermost deck: that is, into the open. Nothing less will do. Division by bulkheads that really divide,
and free access to the deck from every water-tight compartment. Then the responsible man in the moment of
danger and in the exercise of his judgment could close all the doors of these water-tight bulkheads by
whatever clever contrivance has been invented for the purpose, without a qualm at the awful thought that he
may be shutting up some of his fellow creatures in a death-trap; that he may be sacrificing the lives of men
who, down there, are sticking to the posts of duty as the engine-room staffs of the Merchant Service have
never failed to do. I know very well that the engineers of a ship in a moment of emergency are not quaking
for their lives, but, as far as I have known them, attend calmly to their duty. We all must die; but, hang it all, a
man ought to be given a chance, if not for his life, then at least to die decently. It’s bad enough to have
to stick down there when something disastrous is going on and any moment may be your last; but to be
drowned shut up under deck is too bad. Some men of the Titanic died like that, it is to be feared.
Compartmented, so to speak. Just think what it means! Nothing can approach the horror of that fate except
being buried alive in a cave, or in a mine, or in your family vault.
So, once more: continuous bulkheads—a clear way of escape to the deck out of each water-tight
compartment. Nothing less. And if specialists, the precious specialists of the sort that builds
“unsinkable ships,” tell you that it cannot be done, don’t you believe them. It can be
done, and they are quite clever enough to do it too. The objections they will raise, however disguised in the
solemn mystery of technical phrases, will not be technical, but commercial. I assure you that there is not
much mystery about a ship of that sort. She is a tank. She is a tank ribbed, joisted, stayed, but she is no
greater mystery than a tank. The Titanic was a tank eight hundred feet long, fitted as an hotel, with corridors,
bed-rooms, halls, and so on (not a very mysterious arrangement truly), and for the hazards of her existence I
should think about as strong as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin. I make this comparison because Huntley
and Palmer biscuit-tins, being almost a national institution, are probably known to all my readers. Well, about
that strong, and perhaps not quite so strong. Just look at the side of such a tin, and then think of a 50,000 ton
ship, and try to imagine what the thickness of her plates should be to approach anywhere the relative solidity
of that biscuit-tin. In my varied and adventurous career I have been thrilled by the sight of a Huntley and
Palmer biscuit-tin kicked by a mule sky-high, as the saying is. It came back to earth smiling, with only a sort
of dimple on one of its cheeks. A proportionately severe blow would have burst the side of the Titanic or any
other “triumph of modern naval architecture” like brown paper—I am willing to bet.
I am not saying this by way of disparagement. There is reason in things. You can’t make a 50,000 ton
ship as strong as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin. But there is also reason in the way one accepts facts, and I
refuse to be awed by the size of a tank bigger than any other tank that ever went afloat to its doom. The
people responsible for her, though disconcerted in their hearts by the exposure of that disaster, are giving
themselves airs of superiority—priests of an Oracle which has failed, but still must remain the Oracle.
The assumption is that they are ministers of progress. But the mere increase of size is not progress. If it were,
elephantiasis, which causes a man’s legs to become as large as tree-trunks, would be a sort of progress,
whereas it is nothing but a very ugly disease. Yet directly this very disconcerting catastrophe happened, the
servants of the silly Oracle began to cry: “It’s no use! You can’t resist progress. The
big ship has come to stay.” Well, let her stay on, then, in God’s name! But she isn’t a
servant of progress in any sense. She is the servant of commercialism. For progress, if dealing with the
problems of a material world, has some sort of moral aspect—if only, say, that of conquest, which has
its distinct value since man is a conquering animal. But bigness is mere exaggeration. The men responsible
for these big ships have been moved by considerations of profit to be made by the questionable means of
pandering to an absurd and vulgar demand for banal luxury—the seaside hotel luxury. One even asks
oneself whether there was such a demand? It is inconceivable to think that there are people who can’t
spend five days of their life without a suite of apartments, cafés, bands, and such-like refined delights. I
suspect that the public is not so very guilty in this matter. These things were pushed on to it in the usual
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course of trade competition. If to-morrow you were to take all these luxuries away, the public would still
travel. I don’t despair of mankind. I believe that if, by some catastrophic miracle all ships of every
kind were to disappear off the face of the waters, together with the means of replacing them, there would be
found, before the end of the week, men (millionaires, perhaps) cheerfully putting out to sea in bath-tubs for a
fresh start. We are all like that. This sort of spirit lives in mankind still uncorrupted by the so-called
refinements, the ingenuity of tradesmen, who look always for something new to sell, offers to the public.
Let her stay,—I mean the big ship—since she has come to stay. I only object to the attitude of
the people, who, having called her into being and having romanced (to speak politely) about her, assume a
detached sort of superiority, goodness only knows why, and raise difficulties in the way of every
suggestion—difficulties about boats, about bulkheads, about discipline, about davits, all sorts of
difficulties. To most of them the only answer would be: “Where there’s a will there’s a
way”—the most wise of proverbs. But some of these objections are really too stupid for
anything. I shall try to give an instance of what I mean.
This Inquiry is admirably conducted. I am not alluding to the lawyers representing “various
interests,” who are trying to earn their fees by casting all sorts of mean aspersions on the characters of
all sorts of people not a bit worse than themselves. It is honest to give value for your wages; and the
“bravos” of ancient Venice who kept their stilettos in good order and never failed to deliver the
stab bargained for with their employers, considered themselves an honest body of professional men, no
doubt. But they don’t compel my admiration, whereas the conduct of this Inquiry does. And as it is
pretty certain to be attacked, I take this opportunity to deposit here my nickel of appreciation. Well, lately,
there came before it witnesses responsible for the designing of the ship. One of them was asked whether it
would not be advisable to make each coal-bunker of the ship a water-tight compartment by means of a
suitable door.
The answer to such a question should have been, “Certainly,” for it is obvious to the simplest
intelligence that the more water-tight spaces you provide in a ship (consistently with having her workable) the
nearer you approach safety. But instead of admitting the expediency of the suggestion, this witness at once
raised an objection as to the possibility of closing tightly the door of a bunker on account of the slope of coal.
This with the true expert’s attitude of “My dear man, you don’t know what you are
talking about.”
Now would you believe that the objection put forward was absolutely futile? I don’t know whether the
distinguished President of the Court perceived this. Very likely he did, though I don’t suppose he was
ever on terms of familiarity with a ship’s bunker. But I have. I have been inside; and you may take it
that what I say of them is correct. I don’t wish to be wearisome to the benevolent reader, but I want to
put his finger, so to speak, on the inanity of the objection raised by the expert. A bunker is an enclosed space
for holding coals, generally located against the ship’s side, and having an opening, a doorway in fact,
into the stokehold. Men called trimmers go in there, and by means of implements called slices make the coal
run through that opening on to the floor of the stokehold, where it is within reach of the stokers’
(firemen’s) shovels. This being so, you will easily understand that there is constantly a more or less
thick layer of coal generally shaped in a slope lying in that doorway. And the objection of the expert was: that
because of this obstruction it would be impossible to close the water-tight door, and therefore that the thing
could not be done. And that objection was inane. A water-tight door in a bulkhead may be defined as a metal
plate which is made to close a given opening by some mechanical means. And if there were a law of Medes
and Persians that a water-tight door should always slide downwards and never otherwise, the objection would
be to a great extent valid. But what is there to prevent those doors to be fitted so as to move upwards, or
horizontally, or slantwise? In which case they would go through the obstructing layer of coal as easily as a
knife goes through butter. Anyone may convince himself of it by experimenting with a light piece of board
and a heap of stones anywhere along our roads. Probably the joint of such a door would weep a
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little—and there is no necessity for its being hermetically tight—but the object of converting
bunkers into spaces of safety would be attained. You may take my word for it that this could be done without
any great effort of ingenuity. And that is why I have qualified the expert’s objection as inane.
Of course, these doors must not be operated from the bridge because of the risk of trapping the coal-trimmers
inside the bunker; but on the signal of all other water-tight doors in the ship being closed (as would be done in
case of a collision) they too could be closed on the order of the engineer of the watch, who would see to the
safety of the trimmers. If the rent in the ship’s side were within the bunker itself, that would become
manifest enough without any signal, and the rush of water into the stokehold could be cut off directly the
doorplate came into its place. Say a minute at the very outside. Naturally, if the blow of a right-angled
collision, for instance, were heavy enough to smash through the inner bulkhead of the bunker, why, there
would be then nothing to do but for the stokers and trimmers and everybody in there to clear out of the
stoke-room. But that does not mean that the precaution of having water-tight doors to the bunkers is useless,
superfluous, or impossible. {7}
And talking of stokeholds, firemen, and trimmers, men whose heavy labour has not a single redeeming
feature; which is unhealthy, uninspiring, arduous, without the reward of personal pride in it; sheer, hard,
brutalising toil, belonging neither to earth nor sea, I greet with joy the advent for marine purposes of the
internal combustion engine. The disappearance of the marine boiler will be a real progress, which anybody in
sympathy with his kind must welcome. Instead of the unthrifty, unruly, nondescript crowd the boilers require,
a crowd of men in the ship but not of her, we shall have comparatively small crews of disciplined, intelligent
workers, able to steer the ship, handle anchors, man boats, and at the same time competent to take their place
at a bench as fitters and repairers; the resourceful and skilled seamen—mechanics of the future, the
legitimate successors of these seamen—sailors of the past, who had their own kind of skill, hardihood,
and tradition, and whose last days it has been my lot to share.
One lives and learns and hears very surprising things—things that one hardly knows how to take,
whether seriously or jocularly, how to meet—with indignation or with contempt? Things said by
solemn experts, by exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by officials of all sorts. I suppose that one of
the uses of such an inquiry is to give such people enough rope to hang themselves with. And I hope that some
of them won’t neglect to do so. One of them declared two days ago that there was “nothing to
learn from the catastrophe of the Titanic.” That he had been “giving his best
consideration” to certain rules for ten years, and had come to the conclusion that nothing ever
happened at sea, and that rules and regulations, boats and sailors, were unnecessary; that what was really
wrong with the Titanic was that she carried too many boats.
No; I am not joking. If you don’t believe me, pray look back through the reports and you will find it
all there. I don’t recollect the official’s name, but it ought to have been Pooh-Bah. Well,
Pooh-Bah said all these things, and when asked whether he really meant it, intimated his readiness to give the
subject more of “his best consideration”—for another ten years or so
apparently—but he believed, oh yes! he was certain, that had there been fewer boats there would have
been more people saved. Really, when reading the report of this admirably conducted inquiry one isn’t
certain at times whether it is an Admirable Inquiry or a felicitous opéra-bouffe of the Gilbertian
type—with a rather grim subject, to be sure.
Yes, rather grim—but the comic treatment never fails. My readers will remember that in the number of
The English Review for May, 1912, I quoted the old case of the Arizona, and went on from that to prophesy
the coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony far removed from fun) at the call of the sublime builders
of unsinkable ships. I thought that, as a small boy of my acquaintance says, I was “doing a
sarcasm,” and regarded it as a rather wild sort of sarcasm at that. Well, I am blessed (excuse the
vulgarism) if a witness has not turned up who seems to have been inspired by the same thought, and evidently
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longs in his heart for the advent of the new seamanship. He is an expert, of course, and I rather believe
he’s the same gentleman who did not see his way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers. With ludicrous
earnestness he assured the Commission of his intense belief that had only the Titanic struck end-on she would
have come into port all right. And in the whole tone of his insistent statement there was suggested the regret
that the officer in charge (who is dead now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of this inquiry) was so
ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the ice. Thus my sarcastic prophecy, that such a suggestion was sure to
turn up, receives an unexpected fulfilment. You will see yet that in deference to the demands of
“progress” the theory of the new seamanship will become established: “Whatever you
see in front of you—ram it fair. . .” The new seamanship! Looks simple, doesn’t it?
But it will be a very exact art indeed. The proper handling of an unsinkable ship, you see, will demand that
she should be made to hit the iceberg very accurately with her nose, because should you perchance scrape the
bluff of the bow instead, she may, without ceasing to be as unsinkable as before, find her way to the bottom. I
congratulate the future Transatlantic passengers on the new and vigorous sensations in store for them. They
shall go bounding across from iceberg to iceberg at twenty-five knots with precision and safety, and a
“cheerful bumpy sound”—as the immortal poem has it. It will be a teeth-loosening,
exhilarating experience. The decorations will be Louis-Quinze, of course, and the café shall remain open all
night. But what about the priceless Sèvres porcelain and the Venetian glass provided for the service of
Transatlantic passengers? Well, I am afraid all that will have to be replaced by silver goblets and plates.
Nasty, common, cheap silver. But those who will go to sea must be prepared to put up with a certain amount
of hardship.
And there shall be no boats. Why should there be no boats? Because Pooh-Bah has said that the fewer the
boats, the more people can be saved; and therefore with no boats at all, no one need be lost. But even if there
was a flaw in this argument, pray look at the other advantages the absence of boats gives you. There
can’t be the annoyance of having to go into them in the middle of the night, and the unpleasantness,
after saving your life by the skin of your teeth, of being hauled over the coals by irreproachable members of
the Bar with hints that you are no better than a cowardly scoundrel and your wife a heartless monster. Less
Boats. No boats! Great should be the gratitude of passage-selling Combines to Pooh-Bah; and they ought to
cherish his memory when he dies. But no fear of that. His kind never dies. All you have to do, O Combine,
is to knock at the door of the Marine Department, look in, and beckon to the first man you see. That will be
he, very much at your service—prepared to affirm after “ten years of my best
consideration” and a bundle of statistics in hand, that: “There’s no lesson to be learned,
and that there is nothing to be done!”
On an earlier day there was another witness before the Court of Inquiry. A mighty official of the White Star
Line. The impression of his testimony which the Report gave is of an almost scornful impatience with all this
fuss and pother. Boats! Of course we have crowded our decks with them in answer to this ignorant clamour.
Mere lumber! How can we handle so many boats with our davits? Your people don’t know the
conditions of the problem. We have given these matters our best consideration, and we have done what we
thought reasonable. We have done more than our duty. We are wise, and good, and impeccable. And
whoever says otherwise is either ignorant or wicked.
This is the gist of these scornful answers which disclose the psychology of commercial undertakings. It is the
same psychology which fifty or so years ago, before Samuel Plimsoll uplifted his voice, sent overloaded ships
to sea. “Why shouldn’t we cram in as much cargo as our ships will hold? Look how few, how
very few of them get lost, after all.”
Men don’t change. Not very much. And the only answer to be given to this manager who came out,
impatient and indignant, from behind the plate-glass windows of his shop to be discovered by this inquiry, and
to tell us that he, they, the whole three million (or thirty million, for all I know) capital Organisation for
selling passages has considered the problem of boats—the only answer to give him is: that this is not a
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problem of boats at all. It is the problem of decent behaviour. If you can’t carry or handle so many
boats, then don’t cram quite so many people on board. It is as simple as that—this problem of
right feeling and right conduct, the real nature of which seems beyond the comprehension of ticket-providers.
Don’t sell so many tickets, my virtuous dignitary. After all, men and women (unless considered from
a purely commercial point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the Western-ocean trade, that used some
twenty years ago to be thrown overboard on an emergency and left to swim round and round before they
sank. If you can’t get more boats, then sell less tickets. Don’t drown so many people on the
finest, calmest night that was ever known in the North Atlantic—even if you have provided them with a
little music to get drowned by. Sell less tickets! That’s the solution of the problem, your Mercantile
Highness.
But there would be a cry, “Oh! This requires consideration!” (Ten years of it—eh?)
Well, no! This does not require consideration. This is the very first thing to do. At once. Limit the number
of people by the boats you can handle. That’s honesty. And then you may go on fumbling for years
about these precious davits which are such a stumbling-block to your humanity. These fascinating patent
davits. These davits that refuse to do three times as much work as they were meant to do. Oh! The
wickedness of these davits!
One of the great discoveries of this admirable Inquiry is the fascination of the davits. All these people
positively can’t get away from them. They shuffle about and groan around their davits. Whereas the
obvious thing to do is to eliminate the man-handled davits altogether. Don’t you think that with all the
mechanical contrivances, with all the generated power on board these ships, it is about time to get rid of the
hundred-years-old, man-power appliances? Cranes are what is wanted; low, compact cranes with adjustable
heads, one to each set of six or nine boats. And if people tell you of insuperable difficulties, if they tell you of
the swing and spin of spanned boats, don’t you believe them. The heads of the cranes need not be any
higher than the heads of the davits. The lift required would be only a couple of inches. As to the spin, there is
a way to prevent that if you have in each boat two men who know what they are about. I have taken up on
board a heavy ship’s boat, in the open sea (the ship rolling heavily), with a common cargo derrick.
And a cargo derrick is very much like a crane; but a crane devised ad hoc would be infinitely easier to work.
We must remember that the loss of this ship has altered the moral atmosphere. As long as the Titanic is
remembered, an ugly rush for the boats may be feared in case of some accident. You can’t hope to
drill into perfect discipline a casual mob of six hundred firemen and waiters, but in a ship like the Titanic you
can keep on a permanent trustworthy crew of one hundred intelligent seamen and mechanics who would know
their stations for abandoning ship and would do the work efficiently. The boats could be lowered with
sufficient dispatch. One does not want to let rip one’s boats by the run all at the same time. With six
boat-cranes, six boats would be simultaneously swung, filled, and got away from the side; and if any sort of
order is kept, the ship could be cleared of the passengers in a quite short time. For there must be boats enough
for the passengers and crew, whether you increase the number of boats or limit the number of passengers,
irrespective of the size of the ship. That is the only honest course. Any other would be rather worse than
putting sand in the sugar, for which a tradesman gets fined or imprisoned. Do not let us take a romantic view
of the so-called progress. A company selling passages is a tradesman; though from the way these people talk
and behave you would think they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way, engaged in some lofty
and amazing enterprise.
All these boats should have a motor-engine in them. And, of course, the glorified tradesman, the mummified
official, the technicians, and all these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling
enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of superiority. But don’t believe them.
Doesn’t it strike you as absurd that in this age of mechanical propulsion, of generated power, the boats
of such ultra-modern ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more than three thousand years old? Old
as the siege of Troy. Older! . . . And I know what I am talking about. Only six weeks ago I was on the river
in an ancient, rough, ship’s boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-engine of 7.5 h.p. Just a common
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ship’s boat, which the man who owns her uses for taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the
ships loading at the buoys off Greenhithe. She would have carried some thirty people. No doubt has carried
as many daily for many months. And she can tow a twenty-five ton water barge—which is also part of
that man’s business.
It was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against the flood tide. Two fellows managed her. A youngster of
seventeen was cox (and a first-rate cox he was too); a fellow in a torn blue jersey, not much older, of the usual
riverside type, looked after the engine. I spent an hour and a half in her, running up and down and across that
reach. She handled perfectly. With eight or twelve oars out she could not have done anything like as well.
These two youngsters at my request kept her stationary for ten minutes, with a touch of engine and helm now
and then, within three feet of a big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke and the spray flew in
sheets, and which would have holed her if she had bumped against it. But she kept her position, it seemed to
me, to an inch, without apparently any trouble to these boys. You could not have done it with oars. And her
engine did not take up the space of three men, even on the assumption that you would pack people as tight as
sardines in a box.
Not the room of three people, I tell you! But no one would want to pack a boat like a sardine-box. There
must be room enough to handle the oars. But in that old ship’s boat, even if she had been desperately
overcrowded, there was power (manageable by two riverside youngsters) to get away quickly from a
ship’s side (very important for your safety and to make room for other boats), the power to keep her
easily head to sea, the power to move at five to seven knots towards a rescuing ship, the power to come safely
alongside. And all that in an engine which did not take up the room of three people.
A poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully the few sovereigns of the price had the idea of putting
that engine into his boat. But all these designers, directors, managers, constructors, and others whom we may
include in the generic name of Yamsi, never thought of it for the boats of the biggest tank on earth, or rather
on sea. And therefore they assume an air of impatient superiority and make objections—however sick
at heart they may be. And I hope they are; at least, as much as a grocer who has sold a tin of imperfect
salmon which destroyed only half a dozen people. And you know, the tinning of salmon was
“progress” as much at least as the building of the Titanic. More, in fact. I am not attacking
shipowners. I care neither more nor less for Lines, Companies, Combines, and generally for Trade arrayed in
purple and fine linen than the Trade cares for me. But I am attacking foolish arrogance, which is fair game;
the offensive posture of superiority by which they hide the sense of their guilt, while the echoes of the
miserably hypocritical cries along the alley-ways of that ship: “Any more women? Any more
women?” linger yet in our ears.
I have been expecting from one or the other of them all bearing the generic name of Yamsi, something, a sign
of some sort, some sincere utterance, in the course of this Admirable Inquiry, of manly, of genuine
compunction. In vain. All trade talk. Not a whisper—except for the conventional expression of regret
at the beginning of the yearly report—which otherwise is a cheerful document. Dividends, you know.
The shop is doing well.
And the Admirable Inquiry goes on, punctuated by idiotic laughter, by paid-for cries of indignation from
under legal wigs, bringing to light the psychology of various commercial characters too stupid to know that
they are giving themselves away—an admirably laborious inquiry into facts that speak, nay shout, for
themselves.
I am not a soft-headed, humanitarian faddist. I have been ordered in my time to do dangerous work; I have
ordered, others to do dangerous work; I have never ordered a man to do any work I was not prepared to do
myself. I attach no exaggerated value to human life. But I know it has a value for which the most generous
contributions to the Mansion House and “Heroes” funds cannot pay. And they cannot pay for
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it, because people, even of the third class (excuse my plain speaking), are not cattle. Death has its sting. If
Yamsi’s manager’s head were forcibly held under the water of his bath for some little time, he
would soon discover that it has. Some people can only learn from that sort of experience which comes home
to their own dear selves.
I am not a sentimentalist; therefore it is not a great consolation to me to see all these people breveted as
“Heroes” by the penny and halfpenny Press. It is no consolation at all. In extremity, in the
worst extremity, the majority of people, even of common people, will behave decently. It’s a fact of
which only the journalists don’t seem aware. Hence their enthusiasm, I suppose. But I, who am not a
sentimentalist, think it would have been finer if the band of the Titanic had been quietly saved, instead of
being drowned while playing—whatever tune they were playing, the poor devils. I would rather they
had been saved to support their families than to see their families supported by the magnificent generosity of
the subscribers. I am not consoled by the false, written-up, Drury Lane aspects of that event, which is neither
drama, nor melodrama, nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly. There is nothing more heroic in being
drowned very much against your will, off a holed, helpless, big tank in which you bought your passage, than
in dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought from your grocer.
And that’s the truth. The unsentimental truth stripped of the romantic garment the Press has wrapped
around this most unnecessary disaster.
PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914

The loss of the Empress of Ireland awakens feelings somewhat different from those the sinking of the Titanic
had called up on two continents. The grief for the lost and the sympathy for the survivors and the bereaved
are the same; but there is not, and there cannot be, the same undercurrent of indignation. The good ship that is
gone (I remember reading of her launch something like eight years ago) had not been ushered in with beat of
drum as the chief wonder of the world of waters. The company who owned her had no agents, authorised or
unauthorised, giving boastful interviews about her unsinkability to newspaper reporters ready to swallow any
sort of trade statement if only sensational enough for their readers—readers as ignorant as themselves
of the nature of all things outside the commonest experience of the man in the street.
No; there was nothing of that in her case. The company was content to have as fine, staunch, seaworthy a ship
as the technical knowledge of that time could make her. In fact, she was as safe a ship as nine hundred and
ninety-nine ships out of any thousand now afloat upon the sea. No; whatever sorrow one can feel, one does
not feel indignation. This was not an accident of a very boastful marine transportation; this was a real
casualty of the sea. The indignation of the New South Wales Premier flashed telegraphically to Canada is
perfectly uncalled-for. That statesman, whose sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so suspect to me that I
wouldn’t take it at fifty per cent. discount, does not seem to know that a British Court of Marine
Inquiry, ordinary or extraordinary, is not a contrivance for catching scapegoats. I, who have been seaman,
mate and master for twenty years, holding my certificate under the Board of Trade, may safely say that none
of us ever felt in danger of unfair treatment from a Court of Inquiry. It is a perfectly impartial tribunal which
has never punished seamen for the faults of shipowners—as, indeed, it could not do even if it wanted
to. And there is another thing the angry Premier of New South Wales does not know. It is this: that for a ship
to float for fifteen minutes after receiving such a blow by a bare stem on her bare side is not so bad.
She took a tremendous list which made the minutes of grace vouchsafed her of not much use for the saving of
lives. But for that neither her owners nor her officers are responsible. It would have been wonderful if she
had not listed with such a hole in her side. Even the Aquitania with such an opening in her outer hull would
be bound to take a list. I don’t say this with the intention of disparaging this latest “triumph of
marine architecture”—to use the consecrated phrase. The Aquitania is a magnificent ship. I
PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914 96

believe she would bear her people unscathed through ninety-nine per cent. of all possible accidents of the sea.
But suppose a collision out on the ocean involving damage as extensive as this one was, and suppose then a
gale of wind coming on. Even the Aquitania would not be quite seaworthy, for she would not be manageable.
We have been accustoming ourselves to put our trust in material, technical skill, invention, and scientific
contrivances to such an extent that we have come at last to believe that with these things we can overcome the
immortal gods themselves. Hence when a disaster like this happens, there arises, besides the shock to our
humane sentiments, a feeling of irritation, such as the hon. gentleman at the head of the New South Wales
Government has discharged in a telegraphic flash upon the world.
But it is no use being angry and trying to hang a threat of penal servitude over the heads of the directors of
shipping companies. You can’t get the better of the immortal gods by the mere power of material
contrivances. There will be neither scapegoats in this matter nor yet penal servitude for anyone. The
Directors of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company did not sell “safety at sea” to the people
on board the Empress of Ireland. They never in the slightest degree pretended to do so. What they did was to
sell them a sea-passage, giving very good value for the money. Nothing more. As long as men will travel on
the water, the sea-gods will take their toll. They will catch good seamen napping, or confuse their judgment
by arts well known to those who go to sea, or overcome them by the sheer brutality of elemental forces. It
seems to me that the resentful sea-gods never do sleep, and are never weary; wherein the seamen who are
mere mortals condemned to unending vigilance are no match for them.
And yet it is right that the responsibility should be fixed. It is the fate of men that even in their contests with
the immortal gods they must render an account of their conduct. Life at sea is the life in which, simple as it is,
you can’t afford to make mistakes.
With whom the mistake lies here, is not for me to say. I see that Sir Thomas Shaughnessy has expressed his
opinion of Captain Kendall’s absolute innocence. This statement, premature as it is, does him honour,
for I don’t suppose for a moment that the thought of the material issue involved in the verdict of the
Court of Inquiry influenced him in the least. I don’t suppose that he is more impressed by the writ of
two million dollars nailed (or more likely pasted) to the foremast of the Norwegian than I am, who
don’t believe that the Storstad is worth two million shillings. This is merely a move of commercial
law, and even the whole majesty of the British Empire (so finely invoked by the Sheriff) cannot squeeze more
than a very moderate quantity of blood out of a stone. Sir Thomas, in his confident pronouncement, stands
loyally by a loyal and distinguished servant of his company.
This thing has to be investigated yet, and it is not proper for me to express my opinion, though I have one, in
this place and at this time. But I need not conceal my sympathy with the vehement protestations of Captain
Andersen. A charge of neglect and indifference in the matter of saving lives is the cruellest blow that can be
aimed at the character of a seaman worthy of the name. On the face of the facts as known up to now the
charge does not seem to be true. If upwards of three hundred people have been, as stated in the last reports,
saved by the Storstad, then that ship must have been at hand and rendering all the assistance in her power.
As to the point which must come up for the decision of the Court of Inquiry, it is as fine as a hair. The two
ships saw each other plainly enough before the fog closed on them. No one can question Captain
Kendall’s prudence. He has been as prudent as ever he could be. There is not a shadow of doubt as to
that.
But there is this question: Accepting the position of the two ships when they saw each other as correctly
described in the very latest newspaper reports, it seems clear that it was the Empress of Ireland’s duty
to keep clear of the collier, and what the Court will have to decide is whether the stopping of the liner was,
under the circumstances, the best way of keeping her clear of the other ship, which had the right to proceed

cautiously on an unchanged course.
This, reduced to its simplest expression, is the question which the Court will have to decide.
And now, apart from all problems of manoeuvring, of rules of the road, of the judgment of the men in
command, away from their possible errors and from the points the Court will have to decide, if we ask
ourselves what it was that was needed to avert this disaster costing so many lives, spreading so much sorrow,
and to a certain point shocking the public conscience—if we ask that question, what is the answer to
be?
I hardly dare set it down. Yes; what was it that was needed, what ingenious combinations of ship-building,
what transverse bulkheads, what skill, what genius—how much expense in money and trained thinking,
what learned contriving, to avert that disaster?
To save that ship, all these lives, so much anguish for the dying, and so much grief for the bereaved, all that
was needed in this particular case in the way of science, money, ingenuity, and seamanship was a man, and a
cork-fender.
Yes; a man, a quartermaster, an able seaman that would know how to jump to an order and was not an
excitable fool. In my time at sea there was no lack of men in British ships who could jump to an order and
were not excitable fools. As to the so-called cork-fender, it is a sort of soft balloon made from a net of thick
rope rather more than a foot in diameter. It is such a long time since I have indented for cork-fenders that I
don’t remember how much these things cost apiece. One of them, hung judiciously over the side at the
end of its lanyard by a man who knew what he was about, might perhaps have saved from destruction the ship
and upwards of a thousand lives.
Two men with a heavy rope-fender would have been better, but even the other one might have made all the
difference between a very damaging accident and downright disaster. By the time the cork-fender had been
squeezed between the liner’s side and the bluff of the Storstad’s bow, the effect of the
latter’s reversed propeller would have been produced, and the ships would have come apart with no
more damage than bulged and started plates. Wasn’t there lying about on that liner’s bridge,
fitted with all sorts of scientific contrivances, a couple of simple and effective cork-fenders—or on
board of that Norwegian either? There must have been, since one ship was just out of a dock or harbour and
the other just arriving. That is the time, if ever, when cork-fenders are lying about a ship’s decks. And
there was plenty of time to use them, and exactly in the conditions in which such fenders are effectively used.
The water was as smooth as in any dock; one ship was motionless, the other just moving at what may be
called dock-speed when entering, leaving, or shifting berths; and from the moment the collision was seen to
be unavoidable till the actual contact a whole minute elapsed. A minute,—an age under the
circumstances. And no one thought of the homely expedient of dropping a simple, unpretending rope-fender
between the destructive stern and the defenceless side!
I appeal confidently to all the seamen in the still United Kingdom, from his Majesty the King (who has been
really at sea) to the youngest intelligent A.B. in any ship that will dock next tide in the ports of this realm,
whether there was not a chance there. I have followed the sea for more than twenty years; I have seen
collisions; I have been involved in a collision myself; and I do believe that in the case under consideration this
little thing would have made all that enormous difference—the difference between considerable
damage and an appalling disaster.
Many letters have been written to the Press on the subject of collisions. I have seen some. They contain
many suggestions, valuable and otherwise; but there is only one which hits the nail on the head. It is a letter
to the Times from a retired Captain of the Royal Navy. It is printed in small type, but it deserved to be printed

in letters of gold and crimson. The writer suggests that all steamers should be obliged by law to carry hung
over their stern what we at sea call a “pudding.”
This solution of the problem is as wonderful in its simplicity as the celebrated trick of Columbus’s
egg, and infinitely more useful to mankind. A “pudding” is a thing something like a bolster of
stout rope-net stuffed with old junk, but thicker in the middle than at the ends. It can be seen on almost every
tug working in our docks. It is, in fact, a fixed rope-fender always in a position where presumably it would do
most good. Had the Storstad carried such a “pudding” proportionate to her size (say, two feet
diameter in the thickest part) across her stern, and hung above the level of her hawse-pipes, there would have
been an accident certainly, and some repair-work for the nearest ship-yard, but there would have been no loss
of life to deplore.
It seems almost too simple to be true, but I assure you that the statement is as true as anything can be. We
shall see whether the lesson will be taken to heart. We shall see. There is a Commission of learned men
sitting to consider the subject of saving life at sea. They are discussing bulkheads, boats, davits, manning,
navigation, but I am willing to bet that not one of them has thought of the humble “pudding.”
They can make what rules they like. We shall see if, with that disaster calling aloud to them, they will make
the rule that every steamship should carry a permanent fender across her stern, from two to four feet in
diameter in its thickest part in proportion to the size of the ship. But perhaps they may think the thing too
rough and unsightly for this scientific and æsthetic age. It certainly won’t look very pretty but I make
bold to say it will save more lives at sea than any amount of the Marconi installations which are being forced
on the shipowners on that very ground—the safety of lives at sea.
We shall see!
*****
To the Editor of the Daily Express.
SIR,
As I fully expected, this morning’s post brought me not a few letters on the subject of that article of
mine in the Illustrated London News. And they are very much what I expected them to be.
I shall address my reply to Captain Littlehales, since obviously he can speak with authority, and speaks in his
own name, not under a pseudonym. And also for the reason that it is no use talking to men who tell you to
shut your head for a confounded fool. They are not likely to listen to you.
But if there be in Liverpool anybody not too angry to listen, I want to assure him or them that my exclamatory
line, “Was there no one on board either of these ships to think of dropping a
fender—etc.,” was not uttered in the spirit of blame for anyone. I would not dream of blaming a
seaman for doing or omitting to do anything a person sitting in a perfectly safe and unsinkable study may
think of. All my sympathy goes to the two captains; much the greater share of it to Captain Kendall, who has
lost his ship and whose load of responsibility was so much heavier! I may not know a great deal, but I know
how anxious and perplexing are those nearly end-on approaches, so infinitely more trying to the men in
charge than a frank right-angle crossing.
I may begin by reminding Captain Littlehales that I, as well as himself, have had to form my opinion, or rather
my vision, of the accident, from printed statements, of which many must have been loose and inexact and
none could have been minutely circumstantial. I have read the reports of the Times and the Daily Telegraph,
and no others. What stands in the columns of these papers is responsible for my conclusion—or

perhaps for the state of my feelings when I wrote the Illustrated London News article.
From these sober and unsensational reports, I derived the impression that this collision was a collision of the
slowest sort. I take it, of course, that both the men in charge speak the strictest truth as to preliminary facts.
We know that the Empress of Ireland was for a time lying motionless. And if the captain of the Storstad
stopped his engines directly the fog came on (as he says he did), then taking into account the adverse current
of the river, the Storstad, by the time the two ships sighted each other again, must have been barely moving
over the ground. The “over the ground” speed is the only one that matters in this discussion.
In fact, I represented her to myself as just creeping on ahead—no more. This, I contend, is an
imaginative view (and we can form no other) not utterly absurd for a seaman to adopt.
So much for the imaginative view of the sad occurrence which caused me to speak of the fender, and be
chided for it in unmeasured terms. Not by Captain Littlehales, however, and I wish to reply to what he says
with all possible deference. His illustration borrowed from boxing is very apt, and in a certain sense makes
for my contention. Yes. A blow delivered with a boxing-glove will draw blood or knock a man out; but it
would not crush in his nose flat or break his jaw for him—at least, not always. And this is exactly my
point.
Twice in my sea life I have had occasion to be impressed by the preserving effect of a fender. Once I was
myself the man who dropped it over. Not because I was so very clever or smart, but simply because I
happened to be at hand. And I agree with Captain Littlehales that to see a steamer’s stern coming at
you at the rate of only two knots is a staggering experience. The thing seems to have power enough behind it
to cut half through the terrestrial globe.
And perhaps Captain Littlehales is right? It may be that I am mistaken in my appreciation of circumstances
and possibilities in this case—or in any such case. Perhaps what was really wanted there was an
extraordinary man and an extraordinary fender. I care nothing if possibly my deep feeling has betrayed me
into something which some people call absurdity.
Absurd was the word applied to the proposal for carrying “enough boats for all” on board the
big liners. And my absurdity can affect no lives, break no bones—need make no one angry. Why
should I care, then, as long as out of the discussion of my absurdity there will emerge the acceptance of the
suggestion of Captain F. Papillon, R.N., for the universal and compulsory fitting of very heavy collision
fenders on the stems of all mechanically propelled ships?
An extraordinary man we cannot always get from heaven on order, but an extraordinary fender that will do its
work is well within the power of a committee of old boatswains to plan out, make, and place in position. I
beg to ask, not in a provocative spirit, but simply as to a matter of fact which he is better qualified to judge
than I am—Will Captain Littlehales affirm that if the Storstad had carried, slung securely across the
stem, even nothing thicker than a single bale of wool (an ordinary, hand-pressed, Australian wool-bale), it
would have made no difference?
If scientific men can invent an air cushion, a gas cushion, or even an electricity cushion (with wires or
without), to fit neatly round the stems and bows of ships, then let them go to work, in God’s name and
produce another “marvel of science” without loss of time. For something like this has long
been due—too long for the credit of that part of mankind which is not absurd, and in which I include,
among others, such people as marine underwriters, for instance.
Meanwhile, turning to materials I am familiar with, I would put my trust in canvas, lots of big rope, and in
large, very large quantities of old junk.

It sounds awfully primitive, but if it will mitigate the mischief in only fifty per cent. of cases, is it not well
worth trying? Most collisions occur at slow speeds, and it ought to be remembered that in case of a big
liner’s loss, involving many lives, she is generally sunk by a ship much smaller than herself.
JOSEPH CONRAD.
A FRIENDLY PLACE
Eighteen years have passed since I last set foot in the London Sailors’ Home. I was not staying there
then; I had gone in to try to find a man I wanted to see. He was one of those able seamen who, in a watch, are
a perfect blessing to a young officer. I could perhaps remember here and there among the shadows of my
sea-life a more daring man, or a more agile man, or a man more expert in some special branch of his
calling—such as wire splicing, for instance; but for all-round competence, he was unequalled. As
character he was sterling stuff. His name was Anderson. He had a fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice
which matched that something attractive in the whole man. Though he looked yet in the prime of life,
shoulders, chest, limbs untouched by decay, and though his hair and moustache were only iron-grey, he was
on board ship generally called Old Andy by his fellows. He accepted the name with some complacency.
I made my enquiry at the highly-glazed entry office. The clerk on duty opened an enormous ledger, and after
running his finger down a page, informed me that Anderson had gone to sea a week before, in a ship bound
round the Horn. Then, smiling at me, he added: “Old Andy. We know him well, here. What a nice
fellow!”
I, who knew what a “good man,” in a sailor sense, he was, assented without reserve. Heaven
only knows when, if ever, he came back from that voyage, to the Sailors’ Home of which he was a
faithful client.
I went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but sorry not to have seen him; though, indeed, if I had, we
would not have exchanged more than a score of words, perhaps. He was not a talkative man, Old Andy,
whose affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that Sailors’ Home, where the staff understood and
liked the sailors (those men without a home) and did its duty by them with an unobtrusive tact, with a patient
and humorous sense of their idiosyncrasies, to which I hasten to testify now, when the very existence of that
institution is menaced after so many years of most useful work.
Walking away from it on that day eighteen years ago, I was far from thinking it was for the last time. Great
changes have come since, over land and sea; and if I were to seek somebody who knew Old Andy it would be
(of all people in the world) Mr. John Galsworthy. For Mr. John Galsworthy, Andy, and myself have been
shipmates together in our different stations, for some forty days in the Indian Ocean in the early nineties.
And, but for us two, Old Andy’s very memory would be gone from this changing earth.
Yes, things have changed—the very sky, the atmosphere, the light of judgment which falls on the
labours of men, either splendid or obscure. Having been asked to say a word to the public on behalf of the
Sailors’ Home, I felt immensely flattered—and troubled. Flattered to have been thought of in
that connection; troubled to find myself in touch again with that past so deeply rooted in my heart. And the
illusion of nearness is so great while I trace these lines that I feel as if I were speaking in the name of that
worthy Sailor-Shade of Old Andy, whose faithfully hard life seems to my vision a thing of yesterday.
*****
A FRIENDLY PLACE 101

But though the past keeps firm hold on one, yet one feels with the same warmth that the men and the
institutions of to-day have their merit and their claims. Others will know how to set forth before the public
the merit of the Sailors’ Home in the eloquent terms of hard facts and some few figures. For myself, I
can only bring a personal note, give a glimpse of the human side of the good work for sailors ashore, carried
on through so many decades with a perfect understanding of the end in view. I have been in touch with the
Sailors’ Home for sixteen years of my life, off and on; I have seen the changes in the staff and I have
observed the subtle alterations in the physiognomy of that stream of sailors passing through it, in from the sea
and out again to sea, between the years 1878 and 1894. I have listened to the talk on the decks of ships in all
latitudes, when its name would turn up frequently, and if I had to characterise its good work in one sentence, I
would say that, for seamen, the Well Street Home was a friendly place.
It was essentially just that; quietly, unobtrusively, with a regard for the independence of the men who sought
its shelter ashore, and with no ulterior aims behind that effective friendliness. No small merit this. And its
claim on the generosity of the public is derived from a long record of valuable public service. Since we are all
agreed that the men of the merchant service are a national asset worthy of care and sympathy, the public could
express this sympathy no better than by enabling the Sailors’ Home, so useful in the past, to continue
its friendly offices to the seamen of future generations.
Footnotes
{1} Yvette and Other Stories. Translated by Ada Galsworthy.
{2} Turgenev: A Study. By Edward Garnett.
{3} Studies in Brown Humanity. By Hugh Clifford.
{4} Quiet Days in Spain. By C. Bogue Luffmann.
{5} Existence after Death Implied by Science. By Jasper B. Hunt, M.A.
{6} The Ascending Effort. By George Bourne.
{7} Since writing the above, I am told that such doors are fitted in the bunkers of more than one ship in the
Atlantic trade.
{8} The loss of the Empress of Ireland.
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Notes On Life and Letters by Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924

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NOTES ON LIFE & LETTERS

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905

NOTES ON LIFE & LETTERS 1

HENRY JAMES&mdash;AN APPRECIATION&mdash;1905

HENRY JAMES&mdash;AN APPRECIATION&mdash;1905 7

HENRY JAMES&mdash;AN APPRECIATION&mdash;1905 8

GUY DE MAUPASSANT&mdash;1904 {1}

GUY DE MAUPASSANT&mdash;1904 {1} 11

GUY DE MAUPASSANT&mdash;1904 {1} 12

GUY DE MAUPASSANT&mdash;1904 {1} 13

II.&mdash;&ldquo;L&rsquo;ÎLE DES PINGOUINS&rdquo;

II.&mdash;&ldquo;L&rsquo;ÎLE DES PINGOUINS&rdquo; 17

II.&mdash;&ldquo;L&rsquo;ÎLE DES PINGOUINS&rdquo; 18

STEPHEN CRANE&mdash;A NOTE WITHOUT DATES&mdash;1919

STEPHEN CRANE&mdash;A NOTE WITHOUT DATES&mdash;1919 20

STEPHEN CRANE&mdash;A NOTE WITHOUT DATES&mdash;1919 21

TALES OF THE SEA&mdash;1898

TALES OF THE SEA&mdash;1898 22

AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}&mdash;1898

AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}&mdash;1898 23

THE LIFE BEYOND&mdash;1910

THE LIFE BEYOND&mdash;1910 26

THE LIFE BEYOND&mdash;1910 27

THE ASCENDING EFFORT&mdash;1910

THE ASCENDING EFFORT&mdash;1910 28

THE ASCENDING EFFORT&mdash;1910 29

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS&mdash;AN APPRECIATION&mdash;1907

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS&mdash;AN APPRECIATION&mdash;1907 30

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS&mdash;AN APPRECIATION&mdash;1907 31

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 33

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 34

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 35

It is that phantom which is disappearing now&mdash;unexpectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 36

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 37

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 38

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 39

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 40

Industrialism and commercialism&mdash;wearing high-sounding names in many languages (Welt-politik may

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 41

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 42

AUTOCRACY AND WAR&mdash;1905 43

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 44

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 45

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 46

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 47

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 48

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 49

THE CRIME OF PARTITION&mdash;1919 50

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM&mdash;1916

But for Poles to be Germanophile is unthinkable. To be Russophile or Austrophile is at best a counsel of

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM&mdash;1916 51

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM&mdash;1916 52

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM&mdash;1916 53

&ldquo;We are now on the line A.B.,&rdquo; I said to my companion, importantly.

&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go back to the hotel, my boy,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s getting late.&rdquo;

&ldquo;What, even alone?&rdquo; asked somebody across the room.

HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905

HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905 7

HENRY JAMES—AN APPRECIATION—1905 8

GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904 {1}

GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904 {1} 11

GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904 {1} 12

GUY DE MAUPASSANT—1904 {1} 13

II.—“L’ÎLE DES PINGOUINS”

II.—“L’ÎLE DES PINGOUINS” 17

II.—“L’ÎLE DES PINGOUINS” 18

STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919

STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919 20

STEPHEN CRANE—A NOTE WITHOUT DATES—1919 21

TALES OF THE SEA—1898

TALES OF THE SEA—1898 22

AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}—1898

AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}—1898 23

THE LIFE BEYOND—1910

THE LIFE BEYOND—1910 26

THE LIFE BEYOND—1910 27

THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910

THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910 28

THE ASCENDING EFFORT—1910 29

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907 30

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—AN APPRECIATION—1907 31

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 33

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 34

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 35

It is that phantom which is disappearing now—unexpectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 36

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 37

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 38

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 39

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 40

Industrialism and commercialism—wearing high-sounding names in many languages (Welt-politik may

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 41

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 42

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—1905 43

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 44

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 45

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 46

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 47

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 48

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 49

THE CRIME OF PARTITION—1919 50

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916 51

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916 52

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM—1916 53

“We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.

“Let’s go back to the hotel, my boy,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

“What, even alone?” asked somebody across the room.

“Well done, so-and-so.”

The greatest desideratum of a sailor’s life is to be “certain of his position.” It is a source

He said at once: “I’ll give you a flight to-morrow if you like.”

“Of course I am coming,” I yelled indignantly.

“You know, it isn’t that at all!”

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 82

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 83

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 84

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 85

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 86

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC—1912 87

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914 96

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914 97

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914 98

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914 99

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—1914 100

END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS

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