Wearied with this insolent silence, I leant over the rail and asked him what we should make for and where we had best lie in Pwllheli. He pulled the pipe out of his mouth and cursed Pwllheli loudly, in English, but in English so Welsh that it reminded me of the famous story of the man who said, “There will be folk in London today: one hundred and twenty are coming from Pwllheli.” I said to him, therefore, desiring to soften his mood, “I see that you are not from Pwllheli yourself.” “Ess, put I am!” he answered simply, and then fell to swearing again most abominably.
His grievance I found, after a little more questioning, was that a financier had persuaded the people of Pwllheli to turn it into an earthly paradise, with a band upon an island, and gondolas or whatnot, and this just after he had bought a cottage to be his very own, so that he was burdened with rates; that was his grievance.
More of this local father I could not make. I think he hated all mankind as well as Pwllheli, and when we got into the broader water at the end of the entry and were moving up to the wharf in stately fashion, he gave me another surly sign to cast him off, which I did, and then, without a “good evening,” he pulled for the shore. As for the Nona, she slid alongside, and my companion and I moored, stowed, ate, slept, and waited for the morning.
When morning came, and we woke late (for the fatigue of Bardsey passage was still on us, even after two days), we found under a clear but hazy sky no stir of wind. It was well past noon and the ebb beginning; indeed, it was nearer two o’clock when there seemed to come just a breath, still from the north, that would take us down that strange entry and out to sea again. So we set sail, after casting off, and drifted rather than steered for the corridor end. As we left the stonework, I saw gathered there on the quay a group of men talking angrily and excitedly, with words which I could not understand, for they were Welsh; and, as they debated, or quarrelled (but perhaps they had a common trouble, and were only doing what our papers and the French police call “demonstrating”), many more ran up, until they were quite a crowd. Whereupon one man of their number, a very intense-looking, fierce fellow, jumped up on to a baulk of wood, so as to stand above them, and in a shrill, singing, passionate voice addressed them all. They fell silent, every face turned towards his, some with their mouths open, all with their eyes staring. Then, after he had spoken for a few minutes, he jumped down again and, behold, the crowd dispersed, some few knots still talking low among themselves, but the most of them remaining silent and slouching away.
Now what was it he had said in that strange tongue to achieve his result so well?
… Certainly the management of men is an art; and there are in it two factors which are nearly always set in conflict, although they ought to be harmonised. Indeed, one of them is nearly always thrust forward to the exclusion of the other: from which error in proportion civic disasters are born. These two factors in government are the direction of many and the interpretation of many. A number of men, a number too large to be appealed to individually (and the number gets too large after half a dozen or so), must be controlled and directed by him who governs, otherwise there is chaos. But it is only so controlled and directed by an interpretation of, and even a sort of subservience to, the common mind. Now control without understanding breaks a community, and sympathy without control dissolves it.
This man had succeeded, it seemed, with the mob at the wharf from which I had just sailed. His success set me thinking upon the matter of the management of men, the control of numbers: speakership, chairmanship, captaincy, and all the rest.
There is one element in the affair which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or “eye” in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined—the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole—you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.
A man can only talk of the things he himself has known, and I myself have only seen one example of this inspiration in its perfection. It was (I regret to say) an experience of the House of Commons, a nasty place in which to find anything remarkable. There I saw the Speaker of my time (Mr. Lowther, as he then was) exercising the art through two Parliaments with a perfection which I had thought impossible, and which moved me, at the watching of it, as much as I am moved by great lines of Milton or Racine, or the harmonies of certain musics.
Consider what the business was! He had
