Complete Works

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.
    The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white tallness breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size.  The tall masts holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after sail, yard after yard, growing big, till, under the towering structure of her machinery, you perceive the insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.
    The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that, motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship’s motive-power, as it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the ship’s tall spars, stripped and shorn of their white glory, that incline themselves before the anger of the clouded heaven.
    When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and naked submission, their tallness is brought best home even to the mind of a seaman.  The man who has looked upon his ship going over too far is made aware of the preposterous tallness of a ship’s spars.  It seems impossible but that those gilt trucks which one had to tilt one’s head back to see, now falling into the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit the very edge of the horizon.  Such an experience gives you a better impression of the