The Ghost Ship | Page 2

irregular pieces, each
in itself crazy and meaningless and irritating by its very lack of
meaning: now we see each part adapted to the other and the whole is
one picture and one purpose.
But the first thing necessary to this achievement is the recognition of
the fact that there is a puzzle. There are many people who go through
life persuaded that there isn't a puzzle at all; that it was only the infancy
and rude childhood of the world which dreamed a vain dream of a
picture to be made out of the jagged bits of wood, There never has been
a picture, these persons say, and there never will be a picture, all we
have to do is to take the bits out of the box, look at them, and put them
back again. Or, returning to Richard Middleton's excellent example:
there is no such thing as London, there are only houses. No man has
seen London at any time; the very word (meaning "the fort on the lake")
is nonsensical; no human eye has ever beheld aught else but a number
of houses; it is clear that this "London" is as mythical and monstrous
and irrational a concept as many others of the same class. Well, people

who talk like that are doubtless sent into the world for some useful but
mysterious process; but they can't write real books. Richard Middleton
knew that there was a puzzle; in other words, that the universe is a great
mystery; and this consciousness of his is the source of the charm of
"The Ghost Ship."
I have compared this orthodox view of life and the universe and the
fine art that results from this view to the solving of a puzzle; but the
analogy is not an absolutely perfect one. For if you buy a jig-saw in a
box in the Haymarket, you take it home with you and begin to put the
pieces together, and sooner or later the toil is over and the difficulties
are overcome: the picture is clear before you. Yes, the toil is over, but
so is the fun; it is but poor sport to do the trick all over again. And here
is the vast inferiority of the things they sell in the shops to the universe:
our great puzzle is never perfectly solved. We come across marvellous
hints, we join line to line and our hearts beat with the rapture of a great
surmise; we follow a certain track and know by sure signs and signals
that we are not mistaken, that we are on the right road; we are furnished
with certain charts which tell us "here there be water-pools," "here is a
waste place," "here a high hill riseth," and we find as we journey that so
it is. But, happily, by the very nature of the case, we can never put the
whole of the picture together, we can never recover the perfect
utterance of the Lost Word, we can never say "here is the end of all the
journey." Man is so made that all his true delight arises from the
contemplation of mystery, and save by his own frantic and invincible
folly, mystery is never taken from him; it rises within his soul, a well of
joy unending.
Hence it is that the consciousness of this mystery, resolved into the
form of art, expresses itself usually (or always) by symbols, by the part
put for the whole. Now and then, as in the case of Dante, as it was with
the great romance-cycle of the Holy Graal, we have a sense of
completeness. With the vision of the Angelic Rose and the sentence
concerning that Love which moves the sun and the other stars there is
the shadow of a catholic survey of all things; and so in a less degree it
is as we read of the translation of Galahad. Still, the Rose and the Graal
are but symbols of the eternal verities, not those verities themselves in
their essences; and in these later days when we have become
clever--with the cleverness of the Performing Pig--it is a great thing to

find the most obscure and broken indications of the things which really
are. There is the true enchantment of true romance in the Don
Quixote--for those who can understand--but it is delivered in the mode
of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy,
"The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this collection of tales. Take
this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its
frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon blown in by a great tempest to a
turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road
about half-way between London and the sea; the farmer