That is a thing I have never understood. High land which ought to be plainly visible, and even overhanging one, disappears like this at sea magically on a clear day. When the weather is thick, one expects that; but the curious thing is that one may see clear air all around and a sharp horizon, nothing but sky and sea, and yet know perfectly well that the empty heaven at which one is gazing is really full of great hills close at hand. I do not know whether this happens in the clearer parts of the world. I have never seen it off North Africa or California. But upon the coasts of these islands it happens continually, and it is one of the hundred things which, I think, has made their inhabitants familiar with mystery and amenable to the unseen. For those of these islands, British and Irish, have always been remarkable for the sense of mystery; and among them none feel the effect of mystery more strongly than such as sail upon the sea.
It was an astonishing thing to sit there, at the end of the afternoon, just past the end of Saint Patrick’s Causeway, heading for Strumbles light below the horizon, with a slight air, now from the northwest, giving the boat steering-way and no more, with the tiller lazily pushed a little up to keep her course, and looking over the rail to the left, eastward, and seeing nothing there but an horizon of empty sky; yet knowing very well that the sky was not empty, but that the enormous mass of Cader Idris and the enormous mass of Plinlimmon stood guarding the sea. It was like the continual experience of this life wherein the wise firmly admit vast Presences to stand in what is an apparent emptiness, unperceived by any sense.
As I thus looked over the rail musing upon the strangeness of such things, I remembered how, many years ago, in this same boat and holding this same tiller, I had wondered, after a too rapid passage across the Channel from France, under too much canvas and with too much wind, how near I might be to England. For one could not see the coast at all. The wind had dropped suddenly, it had grown dead calm, and the Nona lolloped on the big lump which the breeze had left. I had no idea, within ten miles, where I might be; it is a ridiculous confession to make, but true. It was the height of the spring tides, and I only roughly knew the set of them in mid-Channel. While I was so wondering, I thought I saw some difference between the lower and the upper sky, as though the lower grey were faintly darker than the upper. In a moment the line was defined, and I found myself looking at the turn of the high land east of Folkestone, where it runs away inland towards the old Roman harbour of Lympne. I was not more than three miles from shore.
And as there is a concealment of reality at sea, corresponding to the concealment of reality from our experience in human life, so also at sea there is occasionally vision, corresponding to that occasional vision which you also have in human life: but vision is much rarer than the concealment of reality.
Once out near the Looe with an ugly thunderstorm glowering and lumbering down from the north, full of zigzags of lightning, I, in this same boat, was shortening sail rapidly to meet the gust when it should come. Even as I did so, I saw a fierce red light beating upon the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head, more than forty miles away. You could see every detail of those chalk cliffs. You could have touched them with your hand; yet the sea in between was vague: and that was a vision of the unseen. I say that the sea is in all things the teacher of men.
With the afternoon the wind freshened, and, as it freshened, went right round by north to a little east of north, whence it blew steadily enough, and gave us about four knots at the fall of darkness.
My companion had never held a tiller, but he was very expert at all sports, and I thought to myself, ‘I will see whether so simple a thing as steering a boat cannot be easily accomplished by a man at the first trial. Then shall I be able to get what I badly need, which is a little sleep.’ So I lighted the binnacle lamp, I explained to him the function of the lubber’s mark, and gave him the point on the card which he was to keep on the lubber’s mark. I said to him: ‘If it comes on to blow a little harder and the card swings, and the boat tends to yaw a little, don’t mind that, but keep the lubber’s mark on the average at the point I have given and that will be enough.’ He said that he understood all these things, and for the first time in his life set himself to steer a ship. But I, for my part, went down to sleep, confident that if it should come on to blow at all hard it would awaken me there and then, so no great harm could come. I slept for many hours, when suddenly I was awakened by my companion giving a loud cry of astonishment. I tumbled up on deck quickly, and I found him pointing at a light which shone brilliantly upon the horizon, dead on our bow. He said to me: ‘Look, look, there is a light dead ahead!’ I said to him: ‘Of course!’ and that it was the light of Strumble Head, outside Fishguard; and I asked him what he would have expected. I had given him his course, and, naturally, he had lifted the light in good time. But he, for his part, could not get over it; he thought it a sort of miracle. He kept on repeating his amazement that so clumsy a thing as a tiller and a rudder, and so coarse an instrument as an old battered binnacle compass, should thread the eye of a needle like that; it was out of all his experience. It is true that he had not been disturbed by any current or strong tide, but even had he been so, he was bound on a clear night to make that light not much off either bow.
That things should turn out so gave him quite a new conception of the sea and the sailing of it, and he talked henceforward as though it were his home.
This corroboration by experience of a truth emphatically told, but at first not believed, has a powerful effect upon the mind.
I suppose that of all the instruments of conviction it is the most powerful. It is an example of the fundamental doctrine that truth confirms truth. If you say to a man a thing which _he_ thinks nonsensical, impossible, a mere jingle of words, although you yourself know it very well by experience to be true; when later he finds this thing by his own experience to be actual and living, then is truth confirmed in his mind: it stands out much more strongly than it would had he never doubted. On this account, it is always worth while, I think, to hammer at truths which one knows to be important, even those which seem, to others, at their first statement mere nonsense. For though you may die under the imputation of being a man without a sense of proportion, or even a madman, yet reality will in time confirm your effort. And even though that confirmation of your effort, the triumph of the truth, should never be associated with your own name, yet it is worth making, for the sake of the truth, to which I am sure we owe a sort of allegiance: not because it is the truth—one can have no allegiance to an abstraction—but because whenever we insist upon a truth we are witnessing to Almighty God.
A man who knows that the earth is round but lives among men who believe it to be flat ought to hammer in his doctrine of the earth’s roundness up to the point of arrest, imprisonment, or even death. Reality will confirm him, and he is not so much testifying to the world as it is—which is worth nothing—as to Him who made the world, and Who is worth more than all things. And, as it seems to me, a man ought to do this even about the truths not so very important, but he should observe some proportion between them and truths of vital importance. For instance, it is a truth of no very apparent immediate importance to-day that any great poem of the past must have been written by a poet, and that those who think a great poem can be written by a committee or pieced together out of traditional ballads, think nonsense. It is also a truth that Great Britain is no longer secured by sea power. It is also a truth that the interests of this country were till lately identical with the interests of international banking and finance—and are so no longer.
All these three truths are true, but the first truth touches no vital matter, while the last two truths are of immediate importance; and a man aware of them should hammer away at them, and not neglect them in order to pursue too constantly that other much less important truth about old poems.
It is not often that one comes across men in a modern lifetime intent upon the proclamation of unaccepted, or of ill-accepted or unknown truths; for such men must suffer. And few will suffer to-day save for some reward. Very few modern men value any reward that is not immediate and material. Huxley, who sacrificed himself entirely, both to false things which he believed to be true and to real things that were true, I never knew. But I knew Déroulède well, and Déroulède hammered away all his life at the expense of ceaseless insult and contempt, paying for the preservation of his honour the heavy price of an unbroken isolation, and dying without seeing any apparent fruit of his effort. It was his mission to proclaim to his French compatriots the elementary truth that, until they had secured the defeat of Prussia in a war, they themselves were doomed to increasing decay, and Europe to increasing ills. I visited his grave just after the Battle of the Marne. It is in a little, somewhat neglected churchyard, some three miles from the house he had inherited: a place windswept and overlooking from beyond its walls a great horizon to the north. The season being late summer, and the war having left the little place untended, the grass was rank and high around the mound and the slab which marked the place where he lay. There, leaning against the wall, some one had put casually, as though by chance, in high dedication to his memory, the first of the frontier posts which the army had pulled up from the summits of the Vosges during the first ill-fated charge into Alsace.