I don’t believe a man who is not a sailor can write a really good book about the sea. The knowledge involved is so intimate, and requires years of soaking in. There are, of course, exceptions. Shakespeare has led some people to believe that, besides being a lawyer, a Lord Chancellor, and a woman, he was also a sailor. Rudyard Kipling, I should say, could deceive the elect, and surely “Captains Courageous” is one of the very best sea-stories ever written. “Treasure Island” is an adventure book, and a masterpiece, but then it really deals very little with the sea. Turn to Marryat: what a difference there is between him and the amateur sea-writer! You feel that the sea is his whole life; he lays bare the very pulse of the machine of sea-life. I wish some of the great novelists had spent their early years on a training-ship. I wonder what would have been the result had this been the fate of George Meredith, for instance. I think it would have made his style more lucid; but perhaps not. Can you imagine a ship of whom the skipper was George Meredith, the first mate Henry James, the second mate Thomas Hardy, the purser Bernard Shaw, the ship’s cook G. K. Chesterton, and the steward Max Beerbohm? I can imagine the following conversation taking place:-- _Scene: Deck of a Ship in the Indian Ocean_ CAPTAIN MEREDITH (_to First Mate James_): I think we had better fiddle harmonics on the strings of the mainsail. FIRST MATE JAMES: I mentioned to you, sir, the last time that we somewhat infelicitously met, that I intended to appeal, with a dozen differential precautions, to another and probably more closely qualified meteorologic authority on the subject of the Second Mate’s whimsical, wanton, perhaps fortunate but so far unconfirmed and unqualified change of course, and indeed, if I may venture without presumption, and at the risk of incurring the suspicion of undue parenthesis, and of an almost tremulous desire to say everything, I would, and indeed I had done so already, but for a fugitive shade of displeasure on your eyebrows, I would adumbrate the shadow of a surmise, that, faced as we are-- CAPTAIN MEREDITH (_impatiently_): The young who fear to enter the forest of advice do so at the cost of losing their way in the lane that knows no ending. (_Enter Ship’s Cook Chesterton_) COOK CHESTERTON: The Purser complains of the pea-soup. He says it is not fit for a dog. It is true. It is not fit for a dog, but the whole soul and glory of this fast and frantic life is to eat and to enjoy food that a dog rejects. He doesn’t see that it is the dog who is wrong.