FullReads

‘I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.’

I found the other day an old letter from Henley that told me of the circumstances in which he wrote that poem. ‘I was a patient,’ he writes, ‘in the old infirmary of Edinburgh. I had heard vaguely of Lister, and went there as a sort of forlorn hope on the chance of saving my foot. The great surgeon received me, as he did and does everybody, with the greatest kindness, and for twenty months I lay in one or other ward of the old place under his care. It was a desperate business, but he saved my foot, and here I am.’ There he was, ladies and gentlemen, and what he was doing during that ‘desperate business’ was singing that he was master of his fate.

If you want an example of courage try Henley. Or Stevenson. I could tell you some stories abut these two, but they would not be dull enough for a rectorial address. For courage, again, take Meredith, whose laugh was ‘as broad as a thousand beeves at pasture.’ Take, as I think, the greatest figure literature has still left us, to be added to-day to the roll of St. Andrews’ alumni, though it must be in absence. The pomp and circumstance of war will pass, and all others now alive may fade from the scene, but I think the quiet figure of Hardy will live on.

I seem to be taking all my examples from the calling I was lately pretending to despise. I should like to read you some passages of a letter from a man of another calling, which I think will hearten you. I have the little filmy sheets here. I thought you might like to see the actual letter; it has been a long journey; it has been to the South Pole. It is a letter to me from Captain Scott of the Antarctic, and was written in the tent you know of, where it was found long afterwards with his body and those of some other very gallant gentlemen, his comrades. The writing is in pencil, still quite clear, though toward the end some of the words trail away as into the great silence that was waiting for them. It begins:

‘We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot.
Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write
you a word of farewell. I want you to think well of me
and my end.’ (After aome private instructions too
intimate to read, he goes on): ‘Goodbye–I am not at
all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple
pleasure which I had planned for the future in our long
marches. . . . We are in a desperate state–feet
frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it
would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our
songs and our cheery conversation. . . . Later–(it
is here that the words become difficult)–We are very
near the end. . . . We did intend to finish ourselves
when things proved like this, but we have decided to die
naturally without.’

I think it may uplift you all to stand for a moment by that tent and listen, as he says, to their songs and cheery conversation. When I think of Scott I remember the strange Alpine story of the youth who fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion, one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that the body would again appear at a certain date and place many years afterwards. When that time came round some of the survivors returned to the glacier to see if the prediction would be fulfilled; all old men now; and the body reappeared as young as on the day he left them. So Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities always young.