And the second answer is, that one ought never to be bothered with the pedantry of quaint alphabets and the spelling tricks of outer men. Cuchulin is, or was, or should be, pronounced ‘Cahoolin,’ and there is an end of it. But as to whether he ever had a daughter, or if he had, whether she could sing, or even whether that Irishman existed at all, I hold all these things to be perfectly indifferent....
We cast anchor in the very midmost of that solemn bay with its half-circle of huge mountains looking down upon an empty sea. The giants were dim in the haze, but the more enormous, and I revered and worshipped them.
We so cast anchor because I had to wait for the tide. I could not run up the long, winding channel through the sands of Port Madoc until the flood should be with me, and that would not be till the gloaming, between eight and nine o’clock that night.
Therefore did we lie thus in Harlech Bay, gazing at the great hills of Wales. There is no corner of Europe that I know, not even the splendid amphitheatre standing in tiers of high Alpine wall around Udine, which so moves me with the awe and majesty of great things as does this mass of the northern Welsh mountains seen from this corner of their silent sea.
Few can recall it, for few visit that corner of the salt. It leads nowhere but to the harbour of Port Madoc. No man beaches a boat to-day under Harlech; no man to-day sets out from that shore for Ireland beyond. The halls are in ruin. There is no more harping. No flight of sails comes up eastward out of the sea like birds. Even the sailors have forgotten Gwynnedd. To-day the only sailors familiar with the solemnity of which I speak are those who ply in the small boats of the slate trade, or who, like myself, have employed a curious leisure in searching out new things here in the seas of home. For all my life I have made discoveries close at hand, and have found the Island of Britain to be infinite. But who in our times knows where to look for vision?
Indeed, this lack of fame applies to perhaps half the greater visions, even of the modern over-frequented and travelled earth. Men know half of them to satiety, but the other half they never see. Every one has wearied of the Bay of Naples, repeated a thousand times, but what of that lonely field by the flat Adriatic sand whence you may see the dark eastern Fall of the Gran Sasso, tragic, with storms about it, dominating a deserted shore? Everybody has his bellyful of Gavarnie, but what of the valley of Araxas, which proclaims so terribly the glory of God? Where are the pictures of that? Who has drawn it? Yet it is but half a day from Gavarnie.
So it is with this awful parade of the great mountains standing on guard over the northern corner of Cardigan Bay, seen from the silence and the flat of ocean, towering above its glass; and all that late afternoon and evening I adored them until, with the last of the light, and a westerly air which was but the suggestion of a breeze, we groped north anxiously for the opening to Port Madoc channel. How I should make it, even upon the flood, in the darkness, I knew not; for the sands there are miles wide, and this channel (which I had never yet made) shifts continually. But God sent me a pilot.
He hailed us out of the half-darkness from a small boat, and asked us in the dialect which I will call ‘Anglo-Welsh’ (after Anglo-Catholic, Anglo-German, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-African, and the rest), ‘Whether we would not have a pilot, ah?’
Nor was he a pilot, as the event shall show; but at any rate he belonged to that shore, and would have more knowledge than I. So I gave him the helm, and went up forward to look out over the bows, as the Nona glided slowly along the flood into the channel which they call ‘The Water of the Smooth Lake’ (‘Afon Glaslyn’). For half an hour of that very slow gliding all went well. The darkness had quite fallen. There was no moon.
The gliding stopped; there was a slight thrill. She had hit Wales: an under-water, advance guard of Wales. The man at the helm was not apologetic, he was not humble, but he was at least subdued; and he said, ‘Her will float soon, so her will!’ I forbore to reproach him, not from kindness, but from cowardice.
The flood lifted her foot, she swung off, and we went on again up the darkness, with the least of little airs to give steering-way.
So for a quarter of an hour, covering perhaps a third of a mile: then again, rather sharper this time, came the honest thrust into the sand, and, what was more, she had run up against it so high this time that she was careening a little; she was taking it very hard, as the highbrows used to say of their beloved Prussia after the Armistice.
This time it was a good half-hour before she floated, and all that time the culprit was silent, nor did I reproach him. He at least had some vague memory of where the channel might be, and that I certainly had not.
As we lay there, waiting for the rising water to lift us, a clear sound of hammering rang from the black shore, far away, over the vast expanse of sand. It meant something to the pseudo-pilot, for he called out in loud, sing-song tones five or six words in the Welsh language, wherein I distinguished the word ‘afon,’ which means ‘water’; and his very distant Kymric fellow, there unperceived in the night, answered with a distant cry. What they said I know not; perhaps the unjust man at the helm was asking at what hour she would have water enough to lie higher up.
She floated again (it was now deep into the night, and the dim stars, through the haze overhead, watched our misery). The Nona glided on.
To be coming thus into a very shoal fairway, after dark, and to be in the hands of a pilot who was quite clearly one of God’s Three Welsh Fools—one of the Triad, one of the Three Great Fools of Britain—was a strain to the temper, a strain to breaking point. It was no good my taking the tiller, for I had no idea of the channel, and only saw now and then, straining my eyes forward, a little blob on the darkness that would be a drum-headed buoy slowly drifting past as we lifted on the young flood.
I used to think that the irritation against fools was irrational and purposeless. Where it is written in Holy Whit that one should tolerate fools even with gladness, I thought that this was a general rule of conduct. But now I know it to be a counsel of perfection and, indeed, like so many things in the Old Testament, a counsel generally to be avoided. For the strong exasperation against fools is, I am now sure, an instinct implanted in us (or, as fools themselves would say, ‘evolved’) whereby we defend ourselves against such accidents as this perpetual bumping which the Nona was undergoing on the sands of Port Madoc. Our anger against fools is a natural faculty of conservation, like the sensitiveness of the nerves of the skin; and in those countries where fools are too much tolerated (of which England) many little disasters proceeding from such tolerated fools combine to make a great one at last and to break down the state.
It is high time that a new book were written on Fools, like those of the sixteenth century, which are so excellent, and which you have in Latin, in German, in French, and in English: ‘The Praise of Folly,’ ‘The Ship of Fools,’ ‘The Fool’s Paradise,’ and others. If I had the leisure, it is one of the many hundred books which I should like to write myself: ‘The Fool, sociological, biological, and pathological, with many portraits and an appendix on the newly discovered Giant Fool of Aphasia.’ As I have not the leisure (and never had it) I bequeath the idea to other and younger and wealthier men, just as some years ago I bequeathed them the idea of a Cads’ Encyclopædia.
Among other chapters in this book I would have one on the Fool and the Label. For I maintain that labels are the great support and sustenance of the Human Fool.
Labels help the fool to do what little dull thinking he manages to get through. He knows whom to respect and whom to despise and what wine to choose, and so on—all by the label. And then again, labels are very useful to the fool by getting him taken for more than he is worth. Any number of my friends have said to me at one time or another, when I was having my laugh at the politicians: ‘A man does not get to a position like that (Secretary of State for Drainage, or Prime Minister, or what not) without abilities.’ Now this error shows how useful the label is to the fool. For a matter of fact I can testify, if any living man can, that the politicians who get their share of the swag are of all degrees in the matter of intelligence. Some have first-rate abilities, especially among the lawyers; many are of the ordinary second-rate, fifty-eight per cent, β _minus_ or Wandsworth intelligence; and quite a large proportion are Plumb Stuffed Fools, true Fools Absolute and of the Nadir; Rooted Fools. I knew one Fool Secretary of State who, in his Whitehall office, used to look at his official documents with a sort of tragic stare, as men look on the dead, and slowly wag them up and down in front of his face with a hopeless gesture. Then he would call upon his permanent official, who would explain to him what they meant, whereupon he would use one after another of the great Fool Phrases which are the furniture of the Fool’s Mind, such as, ‘Yes,’ ‘I see,’ ‘Quite,’ ‘Precisely,’ and then again ‘Yes.’ Having done this, he would sign his name to a number of papers which meant no more to him than so many Chinese tracts, and with a groan he would go off to spend his hundred pounds a week at Brighton.