The Man Columbus - 3--enD

The Man Columbus - 3

True understanding of a man and estimate of his character can only be arrived at by

methods at once more comprehensive and more subtle than those commonly employed

among men. Everything that he sees, does, and suffers has its influence on the moulding

of his character; and he must be considered in relation to his physical environment, no

less than to his race and ancestry. Christopher Columbus spent a great part of his active

life on the sea; it was sea-life which inspired him with his great Idea, it was by the

conquest of the sea that he realised it; it was on the sea that all his real triumphs over

circumstance and his own weaker self were won. The influences at work upon a man

whose life is spent on the sea are as different from those at work upon one who lives on

the fields as the environment of a gannet is different from the environment of a skylark:

and yet how often do we really attempt to make due allowance for this great factor and

try to estimate the extent of its moulding influence?

To live within sound or sight of the sea is to be conscious of a voice or countenance that

holds you in unyielding bonds. The voice, being continuous, creeps into the very pulses

and becomes part of the pervading sound or silence of a man's environment; and the face,

although it never regards him, holds him with its changes and occupies his mind with its

everlasting riddle. Its profound inattention to man is part of its power over his

imagination; for although it is so absorbed and busy, and has regard for sun and stars and

a melancholy frowning concentration upon the foot of cliffs, it is never face to face with

man: he can never come within the focus of its great glancing vision. It is somewhere

beyond time and space that the mighty perspective of those focal rays comes to its point;

and they are so wide and eternal in their sweep that we should find their end, could we

but trace them, in a condition far different from that in which our finite views and ethics

have place. In the man who lives much on the sea we always find, if he be articulate,

something of the dreamer and the mystic; that very condition of mind, indeed, which we

have traced in Columbus, which sometimes led him to such heights, and sometimes

brought him to such variance with the human code.

A face that will not look upon you can never give up its secret to you; and the face of the

sea is like the face of a picture or a statue round which you may circle, looking at it from

this point and from that, but whose regard is fixed on something beyond and invisible to

you; or it is like the face of a person well known to you in life, a face which you often see

in various surroundings, from different angles, now unconscious, now in animated and

smiling intercourse with some one else, but which never turns upon you the light of

friendly knowledge and recognition; in a word, it is unconscious of you, like all elemental

things. In the legend of the Creation it is written that when God saw the gathering

together of the waters which he called the Seas, he saw that it was good; and he perhaps

had the right to say so. But the man who uses the sea and whose life's pathway is laid on

its unstable surface can hardly sum up his impressions of it so simply as to say that it is

good. It is indeed to him neither good nor bad; it is utterly beyond and outside all he

knows or invents of good and bad, and can never have any concern with his good or his

bad. It remains the pathway and territory of powers and mysteries, thoughts and energies

on a gigantic and elemental scale; and that is why the mind of man can never grapple

with the unconsciousness of the sea or his eye meet its eye. Yet it is the mariner's chief

associate, whether as adversary or as ally; his attitude to things outside himself is beyond

all doubt influenced by his attitude towards it; and a true comprehension of the man

Columbus must include a recognition of this constant influence on him, and of whatever

effect lifelong association with so profound and mysterious an element may have had on

his conduct in the world of men. Better than many documents as an aid to our

understanding of him would be intimate association with the sea, and prolonged

contemplation of that face with which he was so familiar. We can never know the heart

of it, but we can at least look upon the face, turned from us though it is, upon which he

looked. Cloud shadows following a shimmer of sunlit ripples; lines and runes traced on

the surface of a blank calm; salt laughter of purple furrows with the foam whipping off

them; tides and eddies, whirls, overfalls, ripples, breakers, seas mountains high-they are

but movements and changing expressions on an eternal countenance that once held his

gaze and wonder, as it will always hold the gaze and wonder of those who follow the sea.

So much of the man Christopher Columbus, who once was and no longer is; perished, to

the last bone and fibre of him, off the face of the earth, and living now only by virtue of

such truth as there was in him; who once manfully, according to the light that he had,

bore Christ on his shoulders across stormy seas, and found him often, in that dim light, a

heavy and troublesome burden; who dropped light and burden together on the shores of

his discovery, and set going in that place of peace such a conflagration as mankind is not

likely to see again for many a generation, if indeed ever again, in this much-tortured

world, such ancient peace find place.