XI.
I have been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants,
but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been
explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon
has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken
virtue and unutterable dulness, men will cast their thoughts back to
our age, and will idealize our romance and--our courage, even as we
do that of our distant forbears. "It is wonderful what these people
did with their rude implements and their limited appliances!" That
is what they will say when they read of our explorations, our
voyages, and our wars.
Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight's "Cruise
of the Falcon." Nature was guilty of the pun which put this soul
into a body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if there
is anything in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen--solicitors,
if I remember right--go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a
long-shore youth, and they embark in a tiny boat in which they put
to sea. Where do they turn up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they
penetrate to Paraquay, return to the West Indies, sell their little
boat there, and so home. What could the Elizabethan mariners have
done more? There are no Spanish galleons now to vary the monotony of
such a voyage, but had there been I am very certain our adventurers
would have had their share of the doubloons. But surely it was the
nobler when done out of the pure lust of adventure and in answer to
the call of the sea, with no golden bait to draw them on. The old
spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with top hats, frock
coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they also will seem
romantic when centuries have blurred them.
Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still
linger upon earth is that large copy of the "Voyage of the Discovery
in the Antarctic" by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion
with no attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or
perhaps all the more) leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one
reads it, and reflects on what one reads, one seems to get a clear
view of just those qualities which make the best kind of Briton.
Every nation produces brave men. Every nation has men of energy. But
there is a certain type which mixes its bravery and its energy with
a gentle modesty and a boyish good-humour, and it is just this
type which is the highest. Here the whole expedition seem to have
been imbued with the spirit of their commander. No flinching, no
grumbling, every discomfort taken as a jest, no thought of self,
each working only for the success of the enterprise. When you have
read of such privations so endured and so chronicled, it makes one
ashamed to show emotion over the small annoyances of daily life.
Read of Scott's blinded, scurvy-struck party staggering on to their
goal, and then complain, if you can, of the heat of a northern sun,
or the dust of a country road.
That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too
much. We are not ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was
otherwise--when it was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman
should always be the Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected
by the small troubles of life. "You look cold, sir," said an English
sympathizer to a French emigre. The fallen noble drew himself up
in his threadbare coat. "Sir," said he, "a gentleman is never cold."
One's consideration for others as well as one's own self-respect
should check the grumble. This self-suppression, and also
the concealment of pain are two of the old noblesse oblige
characteristics which are now little more than a tradition. Public
opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who must hop because
his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are
bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity,
but of contempt.
The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans
as well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is
Greely's "Arctic Service," and it is a worthy shelf-companion
to Scott's "Account of the Voyage of the Discovery." There are
incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of
those twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one
a day from cold and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our
puny tragedies of romance. And the gallant starving leader giving
lectures on abstract science in an attempt to take the thoughts of
the dying men away from their sufferings--what a picture! It is bad
to suffer from cold and bad to suffer from hunger, and bad to live
in the dark; but that men could do all these things for six months
on end, and that some should live to tell the tale, is, indeed, a
marvel. What a world of feeling lies in the exclamation of the poor
dying lieutenant: "Well, this _is_ wretched," he groaned, as he
turned his face to the wall.
The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there
is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer
ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals,
not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more
sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the
British army who went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And
this expedition of Greely's gave rise to another example which seems
to me hardly less remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the
book, that even when there were only about eight unfortunates still
left, hardly able to move for weakness and hunger, the seven took
the odd man out upon the ice, and shot him dead for breach of
discipline. The whole grim proceeding was carried out with as much
method and signing of papers, as if they were all within sight of
the Capitol at Washington. His offence had consisted, so far as
I can remember, of stealing and eating the thong which bound two
portions of the sledge together, something about as appetizing as a
bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to say, however, that it
was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the thong of a sledge
might mean life or death to the whole party.
Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas
is always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within
the borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most
lovely and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain
something of its glamour. Standing on the confines of known
geography I have shot the southward flying ducks, and have taken
from their gizzards pebbles which they have swallowed in some
land whose shores no human foot has trod. The memory of that
inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes of deep blue water,
of the cloudless sky shading away into a light green and then into
a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy companionable birds, of
the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the slug-like seals,
startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of the ice--all of
it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem little more
than some fantastic dream itself, go removed is it from the main
stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in
weight, and worth two thousand pounds--but what in the world has
all this to do with my bookcase?
Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me
straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen's "Cruise of the
Cachelot," a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of
the sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it
in ships. This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and
very different from that Greenland ice groping in which I served
a seven-months' apprenticeship. Both, I fear, are things of the
past--certainly the northern fishing is so, for why should men
risk their lives to get oil when one has but to sink a pipe in the
ground. It is the more fortunate then that it should have been
handled by one of the most virile writers who has described a
sailor's life. Bullen's English at its best rises to a great height.
If I wished to show how high, I would take that next book down,
"Sea Idylls."
How is this, for example, if you have an ear for the music of prose?
It is a simple paragraph out of the magnificent description of a
long calm in the tropics.
"A change, unusual as unwholesome, came over the bright blue
of the sea. No longer did it reflect, as in a limpid mirror,
the splendour of the sun, the sweet silvery glow of the
moon, or the coruscating clusters of countless stars. Like
the ashen-grey hue that bedims the countenance of the dying,
a filmy greasy skin appeared to overspread the recent
loveliness of the ocean surface. The sea was sick, stagnant,
and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic vapour
like a breath of decay, which clung clammily to the palate
and dulled all the senses. Drawn by some strange force,
from the unfathomable depths below, eerie shapes sought the
surface, blinking glassily at the unfamiliar glare they had
exchanged for their native gloom--uncouth creatures bedight
with tasselled fringes like weed-growths waving around them,
fathom-long, medusae with coloured spots like eyes clustering
all over their transparent substance, wriggling worm-like
forms of such elusive matter that the smallest exposure to
the sun melted them, and they were not. Lower down, vast pale
shadows creep sluggishly along, happily undistinguishable
as yet, but adding a half-familiar flavour to the strange,
faint smell that hung about us."
Take the whole of that essay which describes a calm in the Tropics,
or take the other one "Sunrise as seen from the Crow's-nest," and
you must admit that there have been few finer pieces of descriptive
English in our time. If I had to choose a sea library of only a
dozen volumes I should certainly give Bullen two places. The others?
Well, it is so much a matter of individual taste. "Tom Cringle's
Log" should have one for certain. I hope boys respond now as they
once did to the sharks and the pirates, the planters, and all the
rollicking high spirits of that splendid book. Then there is Dana's
"Two Years before the Mast." I should find room also for Stevenson's
"Wrecker" and "Ebb Tide." Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf
for himself, but anyhow you could not miss out "The Wreck of the
Grosvenor." Marryat, of course, must be represented, and I should
pick "Midshipman Easy" and "Peter Simple" as his samples. Then
throw in one of Melville's Otaheite books--now far too completely
forgotten--"Typee" or "Omoo," and as a quite modern flavour
Kipling's "Captains Courageous" and Jack London's "Sea Wolf," with
Conrad's "Nigger of the Narcissus." Then you will have enough to
turn your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your
cars, if written words can do it. Oh, how one longs for it sometimes
when life grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood begins to
stir! Surely it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in
an island but had an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more
must the salt drop tingle in the blood of an American when you
reflect that in all that broad continent there is not one whose
forefather did not cross 3000 miles of ocean. And yet there are in
the Central States millions and millions of their descendants who
have never seen the sea.
I have said that "Omoo" and "Typee," the books in which the sailor
Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too
rapidly into obscurity. What a charming and interesting task there
is for some critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment
to undertake rescue work among the lost books which would repay
salvage! A small volume setting forth their names and their claims
to attention would be interesting in itself, and more interesting
in the material to which it would serve as an introduction. I am
sure there are many good books, possibly there are some great ones,
which have been swept away for a time in the rush. What chance, for
example, has any book by an unknown author which is published at a
moment of great national excitement, when some public crisis arrests
the popular mind? Hundreds have been still-born in this fashion,
and are there none which should have lived among them? Now, there
is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth under thirty. It
is Snaith's "Broke of Covenden," and it scarce attained a second
edition. I do not say that it is a Classic--I should not like to
be positive that it is not--but I am perfectly sure that the man
who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him. Here
is another novel--"Eight Days," by Forrest. You can't buy it. You
are lucky even if you can find it in a library. Yet nothing ever
written will bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book
will do. Here's another which I will warrant you never heard of.
It is Powell's "Animal Episodes." No, it is not a collection of
dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it is a series of very singularly told
stories which deal with the animal side of the human, and which you
will feel have an entirely new flavour if you have a discriminating
palate. The book came out ten years ago, and is utterly unknown.
If I can point to three in one small shelf, how many lost lights
must be flitting in the outer darkness!
Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the
romance of travel and the frequent heroism of modern life. I have
two books of Scientific Exploration here which exhibit both these
qualities as strongly as any I know. I could not choose two better
books to put into a young man's hands if you wished to train him
first in a gentle and noble firmness of mind, and secondly in a
great love for and interest in all that pertains to Nature. The one
is Darwin's "Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle." Any discerning
eye must have detected long before the "Origin of Species" appeared,
simply on the strength of this book of travel, that a brain of the
first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had
arisen. Never was there a more comprehensive mind. Nothing was too
small and nothing too great for its alert observation. One page is
occupied in the analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute
spider, while the next deals with the evidence for the subsidence of
a continent and the extinction of a myriad animals. And his sweep of
knowledge was so great--botany, geology, zoology, each lending its
corroborative aid to the other. How a youth of Darwin's age--he was
only twenty-three when in the year 1831 he started round the world
on the surveying ship Beagle--could have acquired such a mass of
information fills one with the same wonder, and is perhaps of the
same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by instinct the touch
of the master. Another quality which one would be less disposed
to look for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger, which is
veiled in such modesty that one reads between the lines in order
to detect it. When he was in the Argentina, the country outside the
Settlements was covered with roving bands of horse Indians, who gave
no quarter to any whites. Yet Darwin rode the four hundred miles
between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos refused
to accompany him. Personal danger and a hideous death were small
things to him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.
The second book to which I alluded is Wallace's "Malay Archipelago."
There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men, the same
courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the
same catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion
for the observation of Nature. Wallace by a flash of intuition
understood and described in a letter to Darwin the cause of the
Origin of Species at the very time when the latter was publishing
a book founded upon twenty years' labour to prove the same thesis.
What must have been his feelings when he read that letter? And yet
he had nothing to fear, for his book found no more enthusiastic
admirer than the man who had in a sense anticipated it. Here also
one sees that Science has its heroes no less than Religion. One of
Wallace's missions in Papua was to examine the nature and species
of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in the course of the years of his
wanderings through those islands he made a complete investigation
of the whole fauna. A footnote somewhere explains that the Papuans
who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed cannibals.
Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours! Let a young
fellow read these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his
mind and his spirit strengthened by the reading.
