All peoples that dwell by the sea sometimes venture out upon it. The boys are eager to swim and sail, and the men may be turned into habitual navigators by the spirit of enterprise or by necessity. But some races take to the water more kindly than others, either because they love the waves more or the furrow less. We may imagine that sheer distress drove the Norse fishermen and pirates into their open boats. The ocean they explored was rough and desolate; the fish and the pillaged foreigner had to compensate them for their privations. They quitted their fiords and brackish islands dreaming of happier lands. But with the Greeks and the English the case was somewhat different. There are no happier lands than theirs; and they set forth for the most part on summer seas, towards wilder and less populous regions. They went armed, of course, and ready to give battle: they had no scruples about carrying home anything they might purloin or obtain by enormously advantageous barter, but they were not in quest of softer climes or foreign models; their home remained their ideal. They were scarcely willing to settle in foreign parts unless they could live their home life there.
This love of home merged in their minds with the love of liberty; it was a loyalty inwardly grounded and not a mere tribute to habit or external influences. They could consequently retain their manners wherever they went, and could found free colonies, almost as Greek or as English as the mother country; for it was not Greece that originally formed the Greeks nor England the English, but the other way round; the Greeks and the English, wherever they might be, spun their institutions about them like a cocoon. Certainly the geographical environment was favourable; the skies and waters that embosomed them—when in their migrations they had reached those climes—simply met their native genius half-way and allowed it to bloom as it had not elsewhere. But the winds could carry that same seed to fructify in other soils; and as there were many Greek cities sprung from one, so there are several local Englands in Great Britain, and others all over the world. Even people who are not heirs of these nations according to the flesh may assimilate their spirit in some measure. All men are Greek in the best sense in so far as they are rational, and live and think on the human scale; and all are English in so far as their souls are individual, each the imperturbably dominant cell in its own organism, each faithful to its inner oracle.
Life at sea is very favourable to this empire of personal liberty. The inner man, the hereditary Psyche that breeds the body and its discursive thoughts, craves to exercise ascendancy; it is essentially a formative principle, an organ of government. Mere solitude and monastic reverie, such as a hermit or satirist may enjoy even in great cities, weary and oppress the Englishman. He wants to do something or else to play at something. His thoughts are not vivid and substantial enough for company; his passions are too nebulous to define their innate objects, until accident offers something that perhaps may serve. At sea there is always something doing: you must mind the helm, the sails, or the engines; you must keep things shipshape; brasses must be always bright and eyes sharp; decorum is essential, since discipline is so; you may even dress for dinner and read prayers on Sunday. This routine does not trespass on the liberty and reserve of your inner man. You can exchange a few hearty commonplaces with the other officers and sailors, or even with a casual passenger; now and then you may indulge in a long talk, pacing the deck beneath the stars. There is space, there is the constant shadow of danger, the chance of some adventure at sea or on a strange shore. There is a continual test and tension of character. There are degrees of authority and of competence, but the sailor's art is finite; his ship, however complicated and delicate a creature, has a known structure and known organs; she will not do anything without a reason; she is not too wayward (as is the course of things on terra firma) for a clear-headed man to understand nor for a firm hand to steer. Maritime fortune in its uncertainty has after all not many forms of caprice; its worst tricks are familiar; your life-belt is hanging over your bunk, and you are ready.
Every one grumbles at his lot and at his profession; but what is man that he should ask for more? These buffeting winds, these long hours of deep breathing, these habits of quick decision and sharp movement whet your appetite; you relish your solid plain food, whilst your accustomed drink smooths over the petty worries of the day, and liberates your private musings; and what a companionable thing your pipe is! The women—dear, dogmatic, fussy angels—are not here; that is a relief; and yet you are counting the weeks before you can return to them at home. And all those tender episodes of a more fugitive sort, how merrily you think them over now! more merrily perhaps than you enacted them, since you need not call to mind the little shabby accompaniments and false notes that may have marred them in reality. Your remoter future, too, is smiling enough for an honest man who believes in God and is not a snob in the things of the spirit. You see in your mind's eye a cottage on some sunny hillside over-looking the sea; near it, from a signal-post that is a ship's mast, the flags are flapping in the breeze; your children are playing on the beach—except the eldest, perhaps, already a sailor. There is a blessed simplicity about the sea, with its vast inhumanity islanding and freeing the humanity of man.
[11]
PRIVACY
The secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The Englishman establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his inner man, and from that citadel of rightness he easily measures the value of everything that comes within his moral horizon. In what may lie beyond he takes but a feeble interest. Enterprising enough when in a roving mood, and fond of collecting outlandish objects and ideas, he seldom allows his wanderings and discoveries to unhinge his home loyalties or ruffle his self-possession; and he remains, after all his adventures, intellectually as indolent and secure as in the beginning. As to speculative truth, he instinctively halts short of it, as it looms in the distance and threatens to cast a contemptuous and chilling shadow across his life. He would be very severe to any who dreaded cold water and wouldn't learn to swim; yet in the moral world he is himself subject to illusions of timidity. He does not believe, there, in the overwhelming rewards of courage. His chosen life is indeed beautiful—as the shy boy's might be—ill its finitude; all the more beautiful and worth preserving because, like his country, it is an island in the sea. His domestic thermometer and barometer have sufficed to guide him to the right hygiene.
Hygiene does not require telescopes nor microscopes. It is not concerned, like medicine or psychology, with the profound hidden workings of our bodies or minds, complexities hardly less foreign to our discoursing selves than are the mysteries of the great outer world. Hygiene regards only the right regimen of man in his obvious environment, judged by his conscious well-being. If it goes afield at all, it does so in the interests of privacy. All it asks of life is that it should be comely, spontaneous, and unimpeded: all it asks of the earth is that it should be fit for sport and for habitation. Men, to be of the right hygienic sort, must love the earth, and must know how to range in it. This the Englishman knows; and just as, in spite of his insularity, he loves this whole terraqueous globe simply and genuinely, so the earth, turned into mud by the vain stampings of so many garrulous and sickly nations, would doubtless say: Let the Englishman inhabit me, and I shall be green again.
In matters of hygiene the Englishman's maxims are definite and his practice refined. He has discovered what he calls good form, and is obstinately conservative about it, not from inertia, but in the interests of pure vitality. Experience has taught him the uses to which vitality can be put, so as to preserve and refresh it. He knows the right degree of exertion normally required to do things well—to walk or to talk, for instance; he does not saunter nor scramble, he does not gesticulate nor scream. In consequence, perhaps, on extraordinary occasions he fails at first to exert himself enough; and his eloquence is not torrential nor inspired, even at those rare moments when it ought to be so. But when nothing presses, he shows abundant energy, without flurry or excess. In manners and morals, too, he has found the right mean between anarchy and servitude, and the wholesome measure of comfort. What those who dislike him call his hypocrisy is but timeliness in his instincts, and a certain modesty on their part in not intruding upon one another. Your prayers are not necessarily insincere because you pray only in church; you are not concealing a passion if for a time you forget it and slough it off. These alternations are phases of the inner man, not masks put on in turn by some insidious and calculating knave. All the Englishman's attitudes and habits—his out-of-door life, his clubs, his conventicles, his business—when they are spontaneous and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man in its privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them, are in the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Wordsworth's skylark, true to the kindred points of heaven and home; and perhaps these points seem to him kindred only because they are both functions of himself. Home is the centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. Heaven is a realm of friendly inspiring breezes and setting suns, enveloping his rambles and his perplexities. The world to him is a theatre for the soliloquy of action. There is a comfortable luxuriousness in all his attitudes. He thinks the prize of life worth winning, but not worth snatching. If you snatch it, as Germans, Jews, and Americans seem inclined to do, you abdicate the sovereignty of your inner man, you miss delight, dignity, and peace; and in that case the prize of life has escaped you.