Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (815 page)

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) I have 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.

IX.

Every passage of a ship of yesterday, whose yards were braced round eagerly the very moment the pilot, with his pockets full of letters, had got over the side, was like a race — a race against time, against an ideal standard of achievement outstripping the expectations of common men.  Like all true art, the general conduct of a ship and her handling in particular cases had a technique which could be discussed with delight and pleasure by men who found in their work, not bread alone, but an outlet for the peculiarities of their temperament.  To get the best and truest effect from the infinitely varying moods of sky and sea, not pictorially, but in the spirit of their calling, was their vocation, one and all; and they recognised this with as much sincerity, and drew as much inspiration from this reality, as any man who ever put brush to canvas.  The diversity of temperaments was immense amongst those masters of the fine art.

Some of them were like Royal Academicians of a certain kind.  They never startled you by a touch of originality, by a fresh audacity of inspiration.  They were safe, very safe.  They went about solemnly in the assurance of their consecrated and empty reputation.  Names are odious, but I remember one of them who might have been their very president, the P.R.A. of the sea-craft.  His weather-beaten and handsome face, his portly presence, his shirt-fronts and broad cuffs and gold links, his air of bluff distinction, impressed the humble beholders (stevedores, tally clerks, tide-waiters) as he walked ashore over the gangway of his ship lying at the Circular Quay in Sydney.  His voice was deep, hearty, and authoritative — the voice of a very prince amongst sailors.  He did everything with an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations, but the result somehow was always on stereotyped lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart.  He kept his ship in apple-pie order, which would have been seamanlike enough but for a finicking touch in its details.  His officers affected a superiority over the rest of us, but the boredom of their souls appeared in their manner of dreary submission to the fads of their commander.  It was only his apprenticed boys whose irrepressible spirits were not affected by the solemn and respectable mediocrity of that artist.  There were four of these youngsters: one the son of a doctor, another of a colonel, the third of a jeweller; the name of the fourth was Twentyman, and this is all I remember of his parentage.  But not one of them seemed to possess the smallest spark of gratitude in his composition.  Though their commander was a kind man in his way, and had made a point of introducing them to the best people in the town in order that they should not fall into the bad company of boys belonging to other ships, I regret to say that they made faces at him behind his back, and imitated the dignified carriage of his head without any concealment whatever.

This master of the fine art was a personage and nothing more; but, as I have said, there was an infinite diversity of temperament amongst the masters of the fine art I have known.  Some were great impressionists.  They impressed upon you the fear of God and Immensity — or, in other words, the fear of being drowned with every circumstance of terrific grandeur.  One may think that the locality of your passing away by means of suffocation in water does not really matter very much.  I am not so sure of that.  I am, perhaps, unduly sensitive, but I confess that the idea of being suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of darkness and uproar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking distaste.  To be drowned in a pond, though it might be called an ignominious fate by the ignorant, is yet a bright and peaceful ending in comparison with some other endings to one’s earthly career which I have mentally quaked at in the intervals or even in the midst of violent exertions.

But let that pass.  Some of the masters whose influence left a trace upon my character to this very day, combined a fierceness of conception with a certitude of execution upon the basis of just appreciation of means and ends which is the highest quality of the man of action.  And an artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

There were masters, too, I have known, whose very art consisted in avoiding every conceivable situation.  It is needless to say that they never did great things in their craft; but they were not to be despised for that.  They were modest; they understood their limitations.  Their own masters had not handed the sacred fire into the keeping of their cold and skilful hands.  One of those last I remember specially, now gone to his rest from that sea which his temperament must have made a scene of little more than a peaceful pursuit.  Once only did he attempt a stroke of audacity, one early morning, with a steady breeze, entering a crowded roadstead.  But he was not genuine in this display which might have been art.  He was thinking of his own self; he hankered after the meretricious glory of a showy performance.

As, rounding a dark, wooded point, bathed in fresh air and sunshine, we opened to view a crowd of shipping at anchor lying half a mile ahead of us perhaps, he called me aft from my station on the forecastle head, and, turning over and over his binoculars in his brown hands, said: “Do you see that big, heavy ship with white lower masts?  I am going to take up a berth between her and the shore.  Now do you see to it that the men jump smartly at the first order.”

I answered, “Ay, ay, sir,” and verily believed that this would be a fine performance.  We dashed on through the fleet in magnificent style.  There must have been many open mouths and following eyes on board those ships — Dutch, English, with a sprinkling of Americans and a German or two — who had all hoisted their flags at eight o’clock as if in honour of our arrival.  It would have been a fine performance if it had come off, but it did not.  Through a touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament.  It was not with him art for art’s sake: it was art for his own sake; and a dismal failure was the penalty he paid for that greatest of sins.  It might have been even heavier, but, as it happened, we did not run our ship ashore, nor did we knock a large hole in the big ship whose lower masts were painted white.  But it is a wonder that we did not carry away the cables of both our anchors, for, as may be imagined, I did not stand upon the order to “Let go!” that came to me in a quavering, quite unknown voice from his trembling lips.  I let them both go with a celerity which to this day astonishes my memory.  No average merchantman’s anchors have ever been let go with such miraculous smartness.  And they both held.  I could have kissed their rough, cold iron palms in gratitude if they had not been buried in slimy mud under ten fathoms of water.  Ultimately they brought us up with the jibboom of a Dutch brig poking through our spanker — nothing worse.  And a miss is as good as a mile.

But not in art.  Afterwards the master said to me in a shy mumble, “She wouldn’t luff up in time, somehow.  What’s the matter with her?”  And I made no answer.

Yet the answer was clear.  The ship had found out the momentary weakness of her man.  Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretences, that will not put up with bad art from their masters.

X.

From the main truck of the average tall ship the horizon describes a circle of many miles, in which you can see another ship right down to her water-line; and these very eyes which follow this writing have counted in their time over a hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic ring, not very far from the Azores — ships more or less tall.  There were hardly two of them heading exactly the same way, as if each had meditated breaking out of the enchanted circle at a different point of the compass.  But the spell of the calm is a strong magic.  The following day still saw them scattered within sight of each other and heading different ways; but when, at last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very blue on a pale sea, they all went in the same direction together.  For this was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the earth, and a Falmouth fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was heading the flight.  One could have imagined her very fair, if not divinely tall, leaving a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake.

The next day there were very few ships in sight from our mast-heads — seven at most, perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull down, beyond the magic ring of the horizon.  The spell of the fair wind has a subtle power to scatter a white-winged company of ships looking all the same way, each with its white fillet of tumbling foam under the bow.  It is the calm that brings ships mysteriously together; it is your wind that is the great separator.