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They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable of producing, on the one hand, Crossing the Bar–and on the other, this comment upon it, signed “T.F.W.” and sent to the Times from Cambridge, October 27th, 1892?–

“… a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion haphazard. If the analogy is to be inexorably criticised, may it not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere passage ‘o’er life’s solemn main,’ which we all are taking, with or without reflection, but the near approach to an unexplored ocean beyond it, he was mentally assigning to the pilot in whom his confidence was fast the status of the navigator of old days, the sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains engaged in expeditions alike relied? Columbus himself married the daughter of such a man, un piloto Italiano famoso navigante. Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a piloto by whom his fleet shall be deftly (sabiamente) conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century (1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain, commanded a squadron which was to pass through the Straits of Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V. Grand Pilot of Castile. The French still call the mates of merchant vessels–that is, the officers who watch about, take charge of the deck–pilotes, and this designation is not impossibly reserved to them as representing the pilote hauturier of former times, the scientific guide of ships dans la haute mer, as distinguished from the pilote côtier, who simply hugged the shore. The last class of pilot, it is almost superfluous to observe, is still with us and does take our ships, inwards or outwards, across the bar, if there be one, and does no more. The hauturier has long been replaced in all countries by the captain, and it must be within the experience of some of us that when outward bound the captain as often as not has been the last man to come on board. We did not meet him until the ship, which until his arrival was in the hands of the côtier, was well out of harbour. Then our côtier left us.”

Prodigious!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Note, Oct. 21, 1893.–The nuisance revived again when Mr. Nettleship the younger perished on Mont Blanc. And again, the friend of Lowe and Nettleship, the great Master of Balliol, had hardly gone to his grave before a dispute arose, not only concerning his parentage (about which any man might have certified himself at the smallest expense of time and trouble), but over an unusually pointless epigram that was made at Cambridge many years ago, and neither on him, nor on his father, but on an entirely different Jowett, Semper ego auditor tantum?—

If a funny “Cantab” write a dozen funny rhymes,
Need a dozen “Cantabs” write about it to the Times?
Need they write, at any rate, a generation after,
Stating cause and date of joke and reasons for their laughter?