Yet some people say this is agreeable! this senseless movement of a ship, this utter waste of time and energy! But you know better. You let go of the post, bolt down the deck, dive into the smoke-room, and fling yourself again upon the leather couch. As you touch it, a magic calm o'erspreads the sea. Then all is well until your sense of duty pricks again.
AH, CONFIDENCES BESIDE A LIFE-BOAT ON THE UPPER DECK!
That the smoke-room is iniquitous, I own—as iniquitous as a comfortable club, with nice dark wainscoting, leather chairs and couches, and little bells to touch when good cigars and other things are wanted. It is, therefore, quite the nicest place on the whole ship.
My deck-walking friends will not subscribe to this, of course. They call my smoke-room views and habits anything but healthy, and urge me to come out upon the cold and slippery decks, and get the chilly "benefits" of being on the sea. Alas! there is but one benefit for me, and that is Europe. I detest the sea. I abhor it with an awful loathing. It offends alike my physical system and my sense of proportion. It is too sickeningly out of scale, too hideously large!
Do not fancy that I object to water, as such. In glasses, in bath-tubs, under bridges, or trimmed with swans and water-lilies, water is all well enough. But to put so much of it in one place is a wasteful, vulgar show!
You see that I am telling you the truth about the sea. I am not one to sit upon the shore and write you poetry (of the kind that is described as rollicking) about it. What occupation could be more despicable than that of making sea-songs to mislead the public?
The sea! The sea! The open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.
Do you grasp the ambiguity, the subtle trickery of that last line? What does it really mean? It means that Bryan W. Procter, who wrote it, had to be upon the shore to love the sea; that the more he was upon the shore the more he loved the sea and that the more he was upon the sea the more he loved the shore. In other words, he loathed the sea, as I do. And I am told he hardly left his native England for dread of the Channel trip.
As for Coleridge, Cunningham, and Campbell, it is only too evident that they wrote sea-songs in vain celebration of their own initials. Byron and Wallace Irwin were probably bribed by the transatlantic steamship companies and the Navy Department.