The variety of life during a fortnight here, yet all afloat, was abounding. One day sailing in company with other small boats up the winding Medina, or tacking about, close-reefed, in rough water; the next day cruising in some splendid schooner away and away towards the Needles. Every one was kind and hospitable, and often dipping their ensigns to the yawl. Surely we have named her cruise wrongly as “the voyage alone;” and, indeed, I could scarcely get time in my cabin for a glance at a paper, to see the news and doings of the land folk, bricked up ashore: their wars and congresses and the general rasping they get for it all by a hard squeeze in the press at the end of every week, to keep them from forgetting their own discomforts or their neighbours’ ills, for Parliament being dispersed in vacation, there is the fourth estate to legislate by public acclaim.
Most remarkable it is, and commendable, and a feature only a few years old, that the principal morning and evening papers should take up one after another of philanthropic institutions, and even of individual cases, and advocate them vigorously, while they spare no wrong from censure, and freely discuss remedies, which are much harder to talk of than any wrongs. Philanthropy is made popular by the press, and many a good worker is cheered by this powerful help. Blessings on their type!
But on the other hand, lest we should subside into doing good, hoping better, and making the best of things in a practical way, the whole has to be reviewed at the end of each week by a hard hebdomadal board, on which a dozen clear thinkers sit aside and criticise all the rest of us. Perhaps it is a part of the irreverence of our times that one should gradually lose awe in the presence of this weekly printed wisdom. Or is it that experience finds types are just as fallible as tongues for telling truth, and that years give us hardiness even in the presence of that most mighty, wise, and impudent of all earthworms,—man, that judges the very God of Heaven.
However, the brilliancy of these critics flares out and attracts, and it ought to attract, though it need not dazzle, even if it be the brilliancy of the electric light, warming as little, and darkening one side as much. Their thoughts reach thousands, and without the answers: thus to thousands they are judgments, not arguments. It is a tremendous responsibility to wield such powers, and perhaps it is not felt by a corporate body as each one of them would acknowledge for himself.
It is a good sign of them, or of the age, that they should yield to man’s innate love of continuous detraction?
Is not their own shibboleth the hardest of all, the most shifting, the most inaudibly pronounced by themselves, if it be not a universal “No,” and yet the most rigorously insisted upon? Is there not a “cant” of the vague and complacent denial, quite as bad as that of the too positive and assumed belief? Will it cure the weakness of the milk-and-water they complain of to pour in mustard and vinegar? and would not any one man, with all these bristling points of sarcasm, dispraise, and bitterness, be about as pleasant in social life as a porcupine? Surely this powerful literary lever could be plied to raise heavier stones, and to settle them in goodly order. Let others grub in the rubbish; but the leading organ of the week could sound with a grander harmony, more pleasant, and not less piquant if it gave rhythm to the mind of England in a forward march against misery.
Perhaps to write thus is too daring; for while Saturn masticates his own offspring it is a bold child that complains to his face; but it is better to be called rash than to be proved timid.
Meantime we are nearing Cowes in our sail from Portsmouth, and must mind the rocks and beacons rather than soliloquies, for this one question may be put after all:—Is it right to moralize at all in a log-book? and will not the reader say, that when there is not a storm in the yawl, or a swamp, there is sure to come a sermon?
CHAPTER XVII.
Continental sailors—Mal de mer—Steam-launches—Punt chase—The ladies—Fireworks—Catastrophe—Impudence—Drifting yachts—Tool chest—Spectre ship—Where am I?—Canoe v. yawl—Selfish—Risk and toil—Ridicule.