And, like all fine arts, it must be based upon a broad, solid sincerity, which, like a law of Nature, rules an infinity of different phenomena.Your endeavour must be single-minded.You would talk differently to a coal-heaver and to a professor.But is this duplicity? I deny it.The truth consists in the genuineness of the feeling, in the genuine recognition of the two men, so similar and so different, as your two partners in the hazard of life.Obviously, a humbug, thinking only of winning his little race, would stand a chance of profiting by his artifices.Men, professors or coal-heavers, are easily deceived; they even have an extraordinary knack of lending themselves to deception, a sort of curious and inexplicable propensity to allow themselves to be led by the nose with their eyes open.But a ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to the mark.In her handling a ship will not put up with a mere pretender, as, for instance, the public will do with Mr.X, the popular statesman, Mr.Y, the popular scientist, or Mr.Z, the popular - what shall we say? - anything from a teacher of high morality to a bagman - who have won their little race.But I would like (though not accustomed to betting) to wager a large sum that not one of the few first-rate skippers of racing yachts has ever been a humbug.It would have been too difficult.The difficulty arises from the fact that one does not deal with ships in a mob, but with a ship as an individual.So we may have to do with men.
But in each of us there lurks some particle of the mob spirit, of the mob temperament.No matter how earnestly we strive against each other, we remain brothers on the lowest side of our intellect and in the instability of our feelings.With ships it is not so.
Much as they are to us, they are nothing to each other.Those sensitive creatures have no ears for our blandishments.It takes something more than words to cajole them to do our will, to cover us with glory.Luckily, too, or else there would have been more shoddy reputations for first-rate seamanship.Ships have no ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have known ships who really seemed to have had eyes, or else I cannot understand on what ground a certain 1,000-ton barque of my acquaintance on one particular occasion refused to answer her helm, thereby saving a frightful smash to two ships and to a very good man's reputation.I knew her intimately for two years, and in no other instance either before or since have I known her to do that thing.The man she had served so well (guessing, perhaps, at the depths of his affection for her) Ihave known much longer, and in bare justice to him I must say that this confidence-shattering experience (though so fortunate) only augmented his trust in her.Yes, our ships have no ears, and thus they cannot be deceived.I would illustrate my idea of fidelity as between man and ship, between the master and his art, by a statement which, though it might appear shockingly sophisticated, is really very simple.I would say that a racing-yacht skipper who thought of nothing else but the glory of winning the race would never attain to any eminence of reputation.The genuine masters of their craft - I say this confidently from my experience of ships -have thought of nothing but of doing their very best by the vessel under their charge.To forget one's self, to surrender all personal feeling in the service of that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to the faithful discharge of his trust.
Such is the service of a fine art and of ships that sail the sea.
And therein I think I can lay my finger upon the difference between the seamen of yesterday, who are still with us, and the seamen of to-morrow, already entered upon the possession of their inheritance.History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced.It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Nothing will awaken the same response of pleasurable emotion or conscientious endeavour.And the sailing of any vessel afloat is an art whose fine form seems already receding from us on its way to the overshadowed Valley of Oblivion.The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which, after all, is an indispensable condition to the building up of an art.It is less personal and a more exact calling; less arduous, but also less gratifying in the lack of close communion between the artist and the medium of his art.It is, in short, less a matter of love.Its effects are measured exactly in time and space as no effect of an art can be.It is an occupation which a man not desperately subject to sea-sickness can be imagined to follow with content, without enthusiasm, with industry, without affection.Punctuality is its watchword.The incertitude which attends closely every artistic endeavour is absent from its regulated enterprise.It has no great moments of self-confidence, or moments not less great of doubt and heart-searching.It is an industry which, like other industries, has its romance, its honour and its rewards, its bitter anxieties and its hours of ease.But such sea-going has not the artistic quality of a single-handed struggle with something much greater than yourself; it is not the laborious absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate result remains on the knees of the gods.It is not an individual, temperamental achievement, but simply the skilled use of a captured force, merely another step forward upon the way of universal conquest.
