“What a clashing of water-drops!” I said, thinking of a line somewhere in Coleridge’s Remorse. “They are but water-drops, after all, that make this great noise upon the rocks; only there is a great many of them.”
“Yes,” said Percivale. “But look out yonder. You see a single sail, close-reefed—that is all I can see—away in the mist there? As soon as you think of the human struggle with the elements, as soon as you know that hearts are in the midst of it, it is a clashing of water-drops no more. It is an awful power, with which the will and all that it rules have to fight for the mastery, or at least for freedom.”
“Surely you are right. It is the presence of thought, feeling, effort that gives the majesty to everything. It is even a dim attribution of human feelings to this tormented, passionate sea that gives it much of its awe; although, as we were saying the other day, it is only a picture of the troubled mind. But as I have now seen how matters are with the elements, and have had a good pluvial bath as well, I think I will go home and change my clothes.”
“I have hardly had enough of it yet,” returned Percivale. “I shall have a stroll along the heights here, and when the tide has fallen a little way from the foot of the cliffs I shall go down on the sands and watch awhile there.”
“Well, you’re a younger man than I am; but I’ve seen the day, as Lear says. What an odd tendency we old men have to boast of the past: we would be judged by the past, not by the present. We always speak of the strength that is withered and gone, as if we had some claim upon it still. But I am not going to talk in this storm. I am always talking.”
“I will go with you as far as the village, and then I will turn and take my way along the downs for a mile or two; I don’t mind being wet.”
“I didn’t once.”
“Don’t you think,” resumed Percivale, “that in some sense the old man—not that I can allow you that dignity yet, Mr. Walton—has a right to regard the past as his own?”
“That would be scanned,” I answered, as we walked towards the village. “Surely the results of the past are the man’s own. Any action of the man’s, upon which the life in him reposes, remains his. But suppose a man had done a good deed once, and instead of making that a foundation upon which to build more good, grew so vain of it that he became incapable of doing anything more of the same sort, you could not say that the action belonged to him still. Therein he has severed his connection with the past. Again, what has never in any deep sense been a man’s own, cannot surely continue to be his afterwards. Thus the things that a man has merely possessed once, the very people who most admired him for their sakes when he had them, give him no credit for after he has lost them. Riches that have taken to themselves wings leave with the poor man only a surpassing poverty. Strength, likewise, which can so little depend on any exercise of the will in man, passes from him with the years. It was not his all the time; it was but lent him, and had nothing to do with his inward force. A bodily feeble man may put forth a mighty life-strength in effort, and show nothing to the eyes of his neighbour; while the strong man gains endless admiration for what he could hardly help. But the effort of the one remains, for it was his own; the strength of the other passes from him, for it was never his own. So with beauty, which the commonest woman acknowledges never to have been hers in seeking to restore it by deception. So, likewise, in a great measure with intellect.”
“But if you take away intellect as well, what do you leave a man that can in any way be called his own?”