PRESIDENT'S REPORT
American Heritage published in their December issue a small symposium on the question: "Is History Dead?" Three distinguished historians said, in effect: "No, but she's not healthy." They blamed teaching methods, shallowrooted patterns of thinking among those who tend to set patterns for American society, and the general unease of the American culture today, approximately in that order, for Clio's parlous state. This is a question of some seriousness for those who believe that man flourishes only as he masters his experience across more than one generation, and acts in a manner to contribute to future generations. We would be grateful if readers of SH would give us their thoughts on this. We seem to be afflicted today by stupid, dangerously stupid, concepts like "the need for relevance ." Relevance to what? The need is for people, rather, to relate to their history, past, present and future-as the chart of their voyaging through time. On that chart you can plot a course and try to sail it, and maybe learn and find some joy in the experience. To ask the chart, or the ocean of time it represents, to tell you what you want to hear is crazy. This leads to a second thought I'll toss in as grist to the mills of the gods: that the image of a course of action is not really a nourishing substitute for the act itself. Starting as placebo, such things become (in a healthy society) emetics: alternatively they become poisons that destroy the society. Witness the Romans. They built very straight roads. Only, toward the end, they failed to send very straight messages down them. A Celebration of Straightness The art exhibition, "Marine Art Lives!" is reported in extenso in this issue as a first call to summon another of the Muses to the aid of History's Muse Clio. We hope there will be further oc-
casions, many, to do this. It is by people's natural sense of art that they find their ways to lives that have meaning to themselves and to others-and thereby to history. There are many mansions to the house of art, obviously. In trying to find out what marine artists are doing today, we think we found one strong common strand: they are students of the sea experience, after the thing itself, not the image of the thing, or the way to make it or themselves look good. Robert Murphy, Advisor to the National Society, put the show together, an exhibition that opens at the National Boat Show in New York January 15 . He and his wife Maryanne do this kind of thing because they like to volunteer for hazardous assignments. They are prepared for the shot and shell this show-the first ever attempted that brings so many leading marine artists together-is sure to attract. For their comfort in a difficult and extremely demanding service, I will quote here a thing from Pierre Schnieder, writing on August 20, 1973, in the New York Times. Art, he said, is "more complex and more modest" than most of the talk we hear about it suggests. It is a thing of elder breed, and has little to do with the "shrill, proud, eclectic language" of cult and counter-cult. Its function? "It insinuates the dream of eternity," he wrote, "into the very fabric of history, and seeks the sacred at the grassroots level." That, I believe, is where we live. Of course we will have made errors in this show. We must rely on our readers to tear into it, like Henry VIII into a piece of chicken, and see how they come out. We would very much like hearing about it. Sea Roads We very much like hearing from readers of SH in general. We pursue our
work doing the best we can, and risking it in the marketplace of your opinion and judgment and interest. We suffer an illusion we are not easily to be dissuaded of, that the work is of interest. But we truly need that interest more focussed. Our Chairman Wally Schlech is very good at focussing such interests and our Trustees share my concern that we know more of what people think and want and know in this work than what we may think they are thinking, or want, or know. The Art Show of course is not the only thing in this issue. Ted Miles's Gloucesterman article may open some fruitful lines. I had the honor of sailing the Howard into South Street and spent time-well spent!-hunting down Lady of Good Voyage in Gloucester and tracing her original waterline graving marks, and measuring the angle of her bobstay iron as its scar was left upon the stem, to get the length of the bowsprit she once carried. So whatever perspective I bring to this job of editor vanished when I saw that article. Another question: What do you think of our policy of running advertising in these pages? I like the idea of SH being a marketplace as well as a forum. I would hate our becoming dependent upon any one interest, other than the governing interest of history which is universal but all too weak (see supra), but shouldn't American industry and commerce be in our act, and we perhaps in theirs? Advertising of course brings us revenue, and makes more things possible for us. "The reality," said Joseph Conrad, "is better than the dream." I favor that view. More people can share in a thing that really happens. And I think the thing will grow up straighter and truer if it grows in hard-case conditions, up against the same kind of challenge that bred our excellent ships and the disciplines of their people. Respectfully submitted: Peter Stanford