The Cruise of the Nona (part 2)

Now, on the Catholic culture, physical discovery of any kind, in geology, or biology, or chemistry, can have no effect, save that of some slight expansion, that is, some addition to the general powers of its members; just as the learning of mathematics at Cambridge will not transform, but only somewhat extend the general culture of an English public school boy. The culture of an English public school is founded upon a system and tradition which mathematics do not affect one way or another, save somewhat to increase them. The Catholic culture is founded on a philosophy which physical science does not affect.

In the Catholic culture of Europe, and especially among the French, who are the leaders of all our discussions, the opposing camps were upon the one side those possessed of Catholic dogmatic theology, a strong metaphysical structure, and, on the other, those sceptics who denied and ridiculed the claims of such a theology, standing upon the platform of what they called pure reason; and this ideal of pure reason was as unaffected by material science as that of its opponents. The sceptical school of the Great Encyclopædists (which is still and will long remain the one half of the Catholic culture in Europe) was in no way shaken because certain of its adventitious conceptions, in no way connected with its general philosophy, were proved false. The profound effect of Voltaire was not lessened through his ridicule of fossils, and his conclusion that the imprint of fishbones upon Alpine rocks came from the dried herrings of mediæval pilgrims. These conceptions were proved false, but Voltaire’s power did not depend upon their truth. Nor were the Encyclopædists’ speculations upon some original, simple, incorrupt, and admirable savage so essential to their doctrine that the full discovery of the real savage affected their influence.

No more, on the other side, on the side of those practising and affirming religion of the Catholic culture, did any material discoveries upset doctrines which were not connected with specific material instances, but were transcendental. It mattered nothing to the two great antagonists, Belief and Unbelief, in Catholic Europe whether man had existed politically on earth for five, ten, twenty, or fifty thousand years. Their quarrel was on another and infinitely higher plane. The vast progress of modern physical discovery has somewhat extended the powers of either camp, but has not changed the main issue, which was joined far earlier, from before the middle of the eighteenth century, and which turns on the great question ‘Is Religion from God or from man?’ No mere physical discovery can affect the Catholic culture as a whole, whether in its clerical or in its anti-clerical branches. The ruin of the Darwinian nonsense during the last twenty years has been largely effected by anti-clerical biologists: the greatest achievements in research—Pasteur’s among others—have been the work of practising Catholics.

But with the Protestant culture of the North it was far otherwise. That had been based upon a book, and the literal interpretation of that book. It had, of course, its profound spiritual origin, an excessive and enthusiastic passion for lonely communion with God. But its rock of authority was the Book.

The fragments of Hebrew folklore which the Catholic Church affirms to be inspired, had always been used by that Church as examples, positive and negative, in support of her doctrines; and particularly as mystical, often allegorical, prophetic figurings of one great event that was to come: the Incarnation. But, in the Protestant culture, these Old Testament stories were lived. They had become flesh and bone of their readers. The very characters therein took on a divine air; the cruelties, the obscenities, the puerilities, equally with the occasional sublime actions and sayings of those Old Testament characters, became in men’s minds the attributes of demigods.

This absorption in the ancient relics of Hebrew Scripture produced a corresponding vivid attachment to the pictures aroused by their reading. The allegories became for men of the Protestant culture concrete and undoubted events, taken for granted as historical and, which is much more, made the basis of all daily life. Adam and Eve, for instance, were to Milton, and to all who read Milton, for one hundred and fifty years and more, a particular man and woman, of an aspect remembered from the frontispiece of the family Bible. They lived in a particular place not unlike the finer landscapes of England. They walked with God and with his angels as one walks in a garden; the humans and their majestic companions sauntered over real lawns, upon real feet, taking steps some two feet long—real steps. And the couple ate, not even a vague fruit, but a particular apple to their hurt. So it was right through. On such pictures, taken to be plain history and history inspiring all action, was the new culture of the seventeenth century built in the North.

When all this structure was blown to pieces in the nineteenth century by those discoveries of which this priest’s at Torquay was the first, it did not follow that the tradition and momentum of the old superstition would disappear as easily. Far from that. The main effects of the old Bibliolatry are with us to-day in London, and in Berlin, in Scandinavia, in the United States; though divergent and under various forms, the effects of Bibliolatry have clearly produced a something in common which still profoundly separates the Protestant from the Catholic culture.

The upsetting of the Bible authority, then, did not produce in the nations of Protestant culture a revolt against the Protestant rule of life. That is not what happened. But what did happen was a bewilderment, a chaos, a disintegration of all the solid things which had stood firm in the North from the first generation of the seventeenth century down to the first generation of the nineteenth. The Protestant culture did not separate into a clerical and an anti-clerical, a traditional and practising as against a mocking temper: it moved in the main as one. But it moved, eddying and changing continually, like a great cloud of dust following on the crash of a building. It continued, after the catastrophe, to whirl and change: so much so, that no one can tell at this moment, or could tell under the very different spirit of, say twenty years ago, what form the ultimate settlement may take.

For there is no settlement yet. Even to-day, even in the (for the moment) popular mythology of cave men and prehistory and the rest of it, there is nothing fixed. Characteristically enough, the guesswork is turned into dogma, and faith reposes on concrete images. But the dogmas change every few years, and the images as well. All within the murk is still changing, and will continue to change, until the dust of the explosion has come slowly to earth and has stratified. When that happens there will be a new heresy. I wonder what it will be like?

Well, the man who first lit the match, the man who was the author of the explosion, was Dr. McEnery, Catholic priest, of Torquay.

He was not listened to. The truth seemed too fantastic. The great Cuvier had dealt with so many hoaxes of the kind (men having sent him, among other things, the bones of fossil elephants by way of pre-Adamite giants) that even in a rational society there would have been hesitation. In the provincial society of England, 1829, there was more than hesitation—there was contempt and silence. Man older than 4004 (or 4005) B.C. was a mad blasphemy. The idea was not to be tolerated.

It took a solid thirty or forty years before even educated people in this country could be made familiar with so simple an idea. Now—after less than a hundred years—not only has that idea soaked right through society to its lowest depths, but a new conservatism has taken root, and we find the same provincial people clinging tenaciously to-day to exploded nonsense like Darwin’s Natural Selection, and the imaginary evidence of embryology.

On the whole it is a good thing, this ultra-conservative instinct. It has ridiculous sides to it, but it is a great deal better than the iconoclast spirit. It does harm when it is used to bolster up injustice or false doctrine, as in the case of men who still go on defending human cruelty and oppression on some muddle-headed plea called ‘survival of the fittest’—which simply means survival of that which survives; or when they convince themselves of some impossible blind process of uncreative change without a Creator, and therefore conceive that they may at once abandon even such poor wrecks of moral discipline as have survived in them.

More interesting to me (I am sorry to say—for I have few companions in this, and it is a lonely interest) than the discovery of evidence to the great antiquity of man, is the absence of evidence which ought to be there in the nature of things, but which no one has yet come across. What I ardently desire is discovery showing, or even hinting at, the way in which man became what we call civilised.

As far as you can go back you see civilised man existing, and, side by side with him, barbaric man: I mean, ‘as far as you can go back’ in any real record not only of writing, but of monument. Take the whole period of surviving record, whatever it may be (no one really knows: but it is certainly more than five thousand years, and may be more than six thousand). You find at the origin of it men sculpturing, building with cut stone and bricks, and leaving record of their actions; inhabiting cities; possessed of laws—and all the rest of it. Then there is a halt. You come to the end of a blind alley. You come up against a wall and there is nothing beyond.

There is plenty of guesswork, of course, passing for knowledge—but that is negligible. All you have in the way of real evidence is a few bones which are almost certainly older than the records of any civilisation, and quite numerous relics of barbaric culture, fish-hooks, and coarse weaving, and coarse pottery, and so on. Behind that you have—but after an impossible gulf—roughly-chipped stones, of which some small proportion may have been fashioned by an intelligent being, but of which most, in spite of the cocksureness of those who collect and describe them, are very doubtful indeed. No one really knows how far back these things go, for no one knows the rate at which earth may be or was laid down in floods, of what nature the catastrophes of the past may have been. But of transition from such doubtful fragments to the neolithic and from this to civilised man who carves splendour out of granite, and who measures earth and heaven, not a trace.

What is most remarkable, no one that I have ever read has properly tabulated the rough stone implements in a series.

Now that is what we want. We ought to have some large monograph, properly illustrated, showing in a graduated series such so-called ‘paleoliths’ as are possibly of human handicraft; then others less likely be so, and so on down to the most doubtful. It is of no use to the ordinary educated man to be told by self-styled experts that this or that lumpish thing was (though it doesn’t look it) of human handiwork; he can judge that for himself: and as the expert is all out for making it human if he possibly can, he is to be discounted. What we want is, I say, a monograph giving specimens in a graded series: and then, side by side with these, a full description of the place and conditions where they were found.

When that is done we shall be able to judge for ourselves, and not to accept the priestcraft of the people who call themselves scientists; we shall be able to make some rough judgment on the comparative age of such implements. If evident paleoliths are discovered under a depth of stratified stone (not gravel or earth) which argues some very long period of accumulation, I should conclude that man did make them in some very remote time, to which, perhaps, a minimum limit can be set; but until we have them all graded, and discussed according to their grades, and with proof of the rate of stratification, we are at the mercy of men whose business it is to bring forward as many marvels as possible, as it has been the business of all who in all times desire to cut a figure before the people.

And, again, even if we had (which we have not) a proper analysis of this sort of evidence, there would still remain the unbridged gulf between the barbaric and the civilised man.

It stands to reason that civilisation cannot have been born complete. It must have arisen from simple origins; of what sort were those origins? The only reply so far is silence on the part of the wise, and loud, unsupported affirmation on the part of the popular writer. We have, for instance, no series in sculpture proceeding from the rude to the complete. There is a series from the archaic onwards, but the archaic is the work of a high culture. Nowhere in the world is there, so far, apparent, in any art, a set of vague beginnings gradually becoming more definite. The same is true of writing. You may show, indeed, the development of picture writing in the Valley of the Nile, but no one has yet shown the groping and the tentative origins of the thing—if tentative and groping origins there were. Sergi launched what was merely a guess, quite unconvincing, that certain marks upon Western rough monoliths were the origins of the alphabet; the proof he adduced was quite insignificant. No one would invest five pounds on the strength of it in a prospectus.

The truth is that we do not know where writing came from, nor how it was developed. Nor do we know where building with cut stones and with bricks came from. Nor do we know where any of the origins of civilisation are to be found.

One despairing suggestion has been that its origins are now drowned under the sea. That is as likely a guess as any other. At any rate, we know nothing of the way in which the full life of man took its rise. It may have come catastrophically in a very short period of time; under what influences, through what accidents or guidance, we cannot tell. All humanity remembers dimly a very good state of affairs a very long time ago—and beyond that mere memory and tradition we have nothing to go on.

So much for ‘prehistory’—I am weary of it and of its now discredited prophets. Speculation is the concealed material of their Mumbo-Jumbo; assertion its ritual. Rather let me consider the known past, and, entering Torbay all alone under so glad a morning, let me consider that other, that real, that known affair, the landing of the Prince of Orange, the Patron of Belfast and of Saint James’s Square and of other things, less suitable to ears polite.

I should like to have seen that big Dutch fleet, with its few English renegades on board, come sweeping into Torbay. I should like to have seen the crowded boats passing to and fro, landing the Dutchmen and other foreign troops, and the great lords who were conspiring against their king, and the saturnine William himself. I should like to have seen that mercenary army of adventurers, hired to give the last blow to so great a victim as the wounded kingship of the English, formed in column, and the march up to Exeter: with the villagers timidly peeping from behind closely shut windows at the strange faces, hearing alien speech, and wondering what the issue of the invasion would be.

There was a fine pageantry about all that miserable business which ended the age-long, but dying, tradition of monarchy in Britain, and put the rich in the saddle for good, without a master. From the moment when the huge armament bowled through the Straits of Dover under a southeast wind (forming such a crescent that the horns of it neared either shore) to that afternoon, two days later, when the high gilded poops of the Dutchmen stood out in line across Torbay, the whole evil thing was full of grandeur and of colour.

Whenever I recollect that business of the fall of the Stuarts, two things stand out in my mind: so much pageantry and so much comic stuff. For, to my thinking, there is something comic in the financing of the expedition with Dutch money, secured upon taxes promised beforehand as sure to be levied from the English (specifically on their tobacco), should it succeed. This way of making the victim pay for his own execution without his knowing it, and without consulting him, is full of the spirit of comedy. There are a hundred other comic details. Churchill leaning his handsome, villainous face over the dinner table of the inn, and trying to persuade the unfortunate James to come out for a ride on that fine moonlight night; Churchill well knowing how, on that fine moonlight night, the scouts of the enemy were waiting to carry off the King. And, again, the picture of the subsequent dinner at Andover; James dining with his daughter’s husband, the Prince of Denmark, that great bagful of stupidity, repeating to everything that was said, ‘Est-il possible!’ then he and his suite excusing themselves for a moment to attend to some business; James, the King, wondering when they would return to the room. They never returned. That business on which they had excused themselves was treason, and the woman in town and her husband at Andover had betrayed.

What a Calvary James had to climb! It is a pity that Anne should have done such a thing, for she seems to have been the best of all that gang—which is not saying much. I have always trusted Swift’s judgment, who wrote of her: ‘The only good woman I ever met in my life.’ But there he exaggerated; for he certainly profoundly admired at least two others, and he would not have admired them if he had not thought them good in a very evil world.

From Torbay westward the bold man in the small boat makes direct for Portland Bill, cutting across the Bay, and looking for the bell buoy halfway, if it is too thick to see his direction. There is nothing to disturb him here, no strong current, very little inset, and he is pretty certain of making the Bill by his card, even in thick weather. He will do well to keep a little north of his course, so that he may have a choice of coming down the Bill on the strength of the flood, and of anchoring to wait for his tide, if that be necessary; though it is true that anchoring-ground has to be carefully picked in that corner by Chesil Cove.

But I am not bold; and when I leave Torbay, I run to Lyme Regis.

The mouth of the Exe puzzles me with an unanswered question, which recurs in one river-mouth after another all over the West. It is this: How were they used by antiquity?

The trade of the ancients and of the earlier Middle Ages (and sometimes the later trade), the pirate fleets, every form of seafaring, used these silted rivers from the Gold Coast to the Baltic. How did they do it? Some say that even Salisbury was reached from the sea, and Winchester. Certainly Exeter was; Arundel still can be by ships of some size. Bramber was so reached, and Rye, and, I suppose, in its day, Lewes. And the Stour formed a harbour, once at Canterbury, later at its mouth; and so on all along the coast east and west. The mouth of the Kus, in Morocco, at Larache, and that of the Sebu, at Rabat, tell the same story. All these places are to-day impossible or difficult.

The general answer given to this question is that rivers silt themselves up in the process of time, and that is the obvious, rational answer to give. These harbour-mouths were once deep, but the river kept on bringing down mud and sand, checked at the mouth by the sea, and forming a bar.

Like nearly all merely rational answers to distant questions on which we have no direct evidence, this answer breaks down. The rivers have been running for centuries incalculable. They have had half an eternity in which to silt up their mouths; and if this were the chief factor at work it must have reached its limits long before man sailed the sea. It cannot be the chief factor at work. I fancy the chief factor must be the heaving up and down of the earth. In places the level rises, and the river-mouths become very difficult, and the lagoon becomes dry land. In places the level sinks, and harbours of which you never hear the use in antiquity come into play. The truth is, we know nothing about these things, or so little as only to give food for speculation, and for guesswork, which is the breeding-ground of false dogma and of quarrel, and the true accelerator of the human mind. I find that things affirmed carry a curious kind of conviction—a disturbed, exasperated kind, when they repose upon an apparently sufficient process of reasoned proof; whereas things affirmed, but reposing upon no proof at all, are accepted most kindly, and the faith in them lasts much longer and is altogether better rooted: indeed, sometimes (when the thing affirmed without proof is true) it lasts from the moment of its first affirmation throughout the story of all human life. I suppose the reason of this is that things affirmed without proof repose upon general experience, and have, converging to support them from every side, a great body of half-recognised experiment.

Thus, a religious doctrine is tested by the moral experience of innumerable individuals, and also by its effect upon society through generations, and also by its consonance with a vast number of other observed things, small and great.

There is here, to use a mathematical metaphor, integration. Certitude comes from the integration of an indefinitely great number of differentials. It is in this way that we have certitude of a personality, of a voice, of a type. We see an elm tree half a mile away, and say, ‘That is an elm tree,’ although if we could set down exactly what it is we see, the indications would seem quite insufficient for so certain a conclusion. What we see is but a vague blotch, but we read into it, from an indefinitely large number of slight indications, what we have always known nearer by for an elm tree.

This kind of belief stands on the broadest base, even when it deals with things not appreciable to our senses (for instance, the ancient Western doctrine of immortality). But the affirmations of the sort called to-day ‘scientific,’ are balanced upon a point. The apparent proof of them lies along a narrow chain, every link of which, behind the first physical appreciation of the senses, depends upon a number of postulates, each capable of breaking down under some new consideration.

For instance, our senses tell us, and we know, that if you mix two known substances in a certain fashion, and in a certain proportion, say two portions by weight of the one and four portions by weight of the other, they will disappear, and a third totally different thing will appear in their stead. That is what happens when you try any one of a thousand chemical experiments. It is what happens when an electric spark is passed through a certain mixture of oxygen and hydrogen under certain conditions. We know that with the same conditions, and the same proportionate weights this astonishing thing takes place: the substitution of a third totally different thing for the two things which have disappeared: all that remains being the combined weight, which does not change. We also know that, under suitable conditions, the new third thing, totally different from the two original things it has supplanted, will disappear, and the two original things will reappear; and we know that the combined weights of the first two, and the weight of the third thing which takes their place, are the same. All that is real knowledge, definite, proved and certain science, in the old and exact sense of the word ‘science’—which signifies a sort of knowledge depending upon proof so conclusive that the human reason cannot admit the possibility of the opposite.

We further know that when we repeat these conditions a dozen, or a myriad times, the same results appear, as in the case of any other natural sequence in the physical world; as in the case of a stone falling from a height, or a sound following from a blow. On such knowledge we erect an hypothesis, we say that the mysterious substitution of a third totally different thing for the first two, but the maintenance of an equal weight throughout, can only on the analogy of our other experience be explained by the constitution of matter in certain ultimate particles which we call ‘atoms’; for, as it seems to our very limited imaginations, if that be not the ultimate constitution of matter, the only other way in which the thing can take place, the only other way imaginable to us—that is, capable of being presented to our minds as a picture—is a transformation through the mere effect of number, a certain magic in number having some inherent power to affect the modes of what we call ‘matter.’

But as the former concept—that of the atom—is mechanical, and easy to picture, while the latter is highly mysterious, escapes measurement, and involves qualities which we do not to-day associate with any inherent power of number, we accept the first hypothesis. We assume—we do not prove—that matter consists thus of atoms.

Granted that hypothesis, we can give the measurement of the supposed atom, and investigate its qualities. But having begun with an hypothesis, each new stage of investigation depends on a further hypothesis: a second built on the first, a third on the second, and so on—till you get to the exceedingly hypothetical electron. Strictly speaking, pure science stops at the first phenomenon ascertainable by the senses—the change of two into a third and of the third back into the two. All the rest is but a scaffolding of presumptions built upon the supposed nature of that change. It has not attaching to it proof so conclusive that the possibility of an opposite cannot be imagined. It is not science.

It is, further, true that with each stage in hypothesis the element of probability, however high, is less than it was in the last stage; the tenth of ten successive guesses, each reposing on the last, is less secure than the ninth; the ninth than the eighth.

But the academies do not grasp this evident truth; they live by imaginaries, which they affirm to be things; and that is why one of the wisest of the moderns launched that decisive phrase, ‘the bankruptcy of science’: that is the bankruptcy of the promises advanced by false modern science.

The great Ferrero quarrels with that famous phrase. Yet he himself has written one more damning; for he writes: ‘The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, and they knew nothing.’

The harbours of that coast between Torbay and Portland I do not sufficiently know. I have never entered Teignmouth, in spite of the lyrical invitation to its beauties which is set like a gem in the ‘Channel Pilot.’ I have never attempted the shallow bar of Exmouth.

Bridport Haven I only entered once, with several companions in a crowded boat. Never was I more fascinated by any little haven, for it has the delightful qualities of a model.

I had been running for Portland Bill in a fairly fresh wind, which rose more than I liked. It was blowing from a little west of south, so that she would just point at the smooth water which usually lies between the Race and the land. We were far outside, and had about ten miles to go, but the wind rose more and more, until it threatened us, and also backed a little southerly. We turned round and ran for Bridport, which was about seven miles away to the north of us and a little east. It was near high water, so we had no fears for getting in, and we ran through the long, narrow bottle-neck of an entrance, more like a canal than a harbour, to find ourselves in a basin about the size of a large drawing-room, but with everything complete—a Lloyd’s office, a harbour master, and a signal station, a hotel, and all on the scale of the place. It was above here, in Bridport town, that Monmouth, who had landed at Lyme (and I must say it did great credit to his shipmaster, for he came with three craft, if I remember right, and seems to have found room for all of them) met his first check. But the name Monmouth starts me off again—I cannot hold the mount when that hunt of history is up: and I don’t want to.

The more you read of those expeditions—as of William’s two years later—the more difficult you will find it to estimate what measure of support the invaders had. What may be called the legend—the sort of rodomontade you get in the clear, if obvious, rhetoric of Macaulay—may be left aside with contempt. It is not historical, and it is not intended to be historical; it is pamphleteering for a prepared audience; a flattery of ignorant complacency: written not to examine or to inform, but to sell. The picture of a whole England, ardently opposed to James, desiring nothing more than his dethronement, is as false as would be to-day a picture of an England ardently desiring prohibition. But there were elements present which made it worth while to risk the throw; and (as we know) with the aid of a group of very wealthy men, and of plenty of hypocrisy and foreign subvention, the second invasion, the Dutch invasion, succeeded.

I think the real reason we find it difficult to-day to estimate the forces of that society, is that we have a false way of thinking in terms of exact measurement; a habit we have borrowed from the more advanced physical science of our time, but one not applicable to political factors. We think in terms of majorities, and ask ourselves how many men were on one side and how many men on the other.

Now things did not stand like that at all in 1686, or in 1688, and they hardly ever so stand in any national crisis. The bulk of men will accept an event, unless it be quite outrageously opposed to their daily habits. Further, the bulk of men are moved by tradition and custom and nearly always incline, very vaguely, to a continuance of what they have known. And at the same time, paradoxically, all men have an appetite for something new and are more or less adventurous for a change. In the main issue of the Revolution of 1688, we can be pretty clear on two large majorities, not dividing men into groups, but dividing the mind of each man within himself.

There was a very large majority in general sympathetic with the Protestant culture which had gradually triumphed since the pivot-date of the Gunpowder Plot. What proportion of this was ardent, and in what degree, no one can establish; but you may safely say that throughout England as a whole, there was, by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, not more than about one seventh definitely Catholic in confession and open adherence, and hardly as many again indifferent, or slightly sympathetic with that one seventh. But, on the other hand, the number of people who believed that James II was attempting the impossible task of upsetting what had become the national religion, cannot have been large. It is true that popular illusion is capable of anything—witness ‘the Russians in England’ during the war. But I see no sign of that absurd accusation against James having taken root in the masses. The number who objected to his policy of toleration and to his proposal that Catholics should have the same rights as their fellow subjects was large; but it certainly was not, and could not have been, an enthusiastic majority. On the other hand, the number who objected to the idea of their national king belonging to what was to them an alien religion was certainly very large indeed: nearly three quarters of England.

But then you get another cross category: the number who desired to see the Stuart dynasty extinguished was insignificant. Charles II had been immensely popular and deservedly so, and James, the reigning King, represented legitimacy. Had not the two princesses remained to carry on the idea of the royal house—the symbol of it at least—I think one can safely say that the nation would not have tolerated a change; as for those who desired the reign of William, who were attached to his character and who respected, let alone loved him as a leader, there were none. Monmouth, if he had had the money, if the moment of his attack had come after the birth of the Prince of Wales, if he had intrigued at length and with skill to get the full support of the small wealthy group which was conspiring against the King, would have had a better chance of success than William.

I wish we had more details on the way in which he recruited his little army. It seems to have been mainly got together from the very poor miners of the Mendips: men who could be hired for any adventure: who had nothing to lose. They seem to have been pretty well the only material available, and, of course, they were worthless as soldiers. They must have been quite untrained. Sedgemoor was not a battle.

There is also in this coast an entry called Charmouth, where the Danish pirates of the Dark Ages fought hard against the King of Winchester, but I know it only as a slight mark caught far off from the sea.

What I have made over and over again in this way, in one boat or another, and often in the Nona, is Lyme Regis.

What produced Lyme Regis? How came there to be a harbour there?

Men need harbours almost as much as they need the gods.

Men so much need harbours that in any long stretch of harbourless coast they will catch at any small advantage of reef, or projecting headland, and make shift with that. Thus, all down the line of eastern Italy, where for hundreds of miles the Adriatic meets nothing but one low even line of coast, they have caught at the sorry opportunity of Ancona. But this coast has plenty of harbours, small and large. A British or Roman road came down to Lyme Regis, but that could not have produced the harbour. It must have been the other way about. The road can only have come down here because there was a harbour here. Perhaps there was here something like what was for centuries at Hastings (but is now washed away), a crumbling piece of harder rock curling out to sea in an arm and giving shelter within, and perhaps it was upon this that the Cob was afterwards built.

The modern great havens, which we can artificially make, spoil us for the harbours of antiquity, and make them small in our eyes, but Lyme Regis was a port of entry all through history, and did not lose its position until almost within the memory of men now alive. How characteristic it is of the growth of our towns inland, and of the change in English life through that growth, that, when men and women hear of Lyme Regis to-day, they think not of the English seas, nor of armed men landing here, but of works of fiction by Miss Austen! Tennyson wrote admirably of the Revenge, and believed himself a seer in the matter of the English waters and their command, but his interest in Lyme Regis was from Miss Austen. For my part, I am not ashamed to say that in my nineteenth year, when I capsized all by myself in a little open boat under Golden Cap, and with difficulty saved myself, though I was quite close to shore (it was in the month of December, dear friends, and poor weather for such gambols), I had not so much as heard of Jane Austen; nevertheless from that moment Lyme Regis was vivid enough to me without her aid, and so it was when, three years ago, touching Lyme Regis again for the tenth or twentieth time, the Nona herself capsized.

’Twas a dark and stormy night, camarades, and the wind blew from the southwest, which is the stance it likes to take up when it proposes to drive at doing a devilry. I knew well that the tide running out during the darkness would leave us high and dry, and by lantern-light I made every kind of contraption and fastening from the mast to the quay, so that she should lie even when she took the ground. But at four in the morning, with a noise like thunder, she fell over enormously to starboard upon the then dry bottom of the harbour and threw us all one on top of the other—we were three. That night we slept no more.

The English do well to build their boats deep, for only such boats can hold the sea, or rather I should say, they did well to build their boats deep in the days when they did so build them, before lines were ruined by racing. But there is this disadvantage about your deep boat: that it will not sit, but lies over. So did the Nona on that stormy night; and damnably. You will tell me that when the tide rose she floated. Yes; but not until very much water had trickled in through the dry seams, so that the pale and stormy dawn from over Dorset, and the distant grey of Chesil and the Bill saw us still bailing. And so much for Lyme Regis.

Thence eastward, coasting back home, any man who belongs to my county and to its harbours must face the passage of Portland Race and the difficult rounding of the Bill. So had I always done, whether coming or going, whether easting or westing, leaving aside all that long coast of Dorset hither of the Isle of Portland, and watching afar off the endless unbroken patch called the Chesil Beach quite empty of men.

What a gift of compensation it is that the horror of our great towns and the ease of our new communications has produced deserts between!

No one knows those deserts as well as the man who sails along the sea, following the coasts of England. The foulness of the great towns is discharged by the trainload upon beaches of sand; but all in between, or nearly all, is left more lonely than ever it was before in our history. Those cliffs of Dorset coming down on to the sea are less known to travelling Englishmen than much of foreign land. That Chesil Beach along which I have so often run is utterly bare and silent except for the noise of the sea.

There never was such loneliness! One big house, built there I suppose for the sake of the isolation, inland, under the cliff, where some old landslide has oddly disfigured the face of the earth: then, for miles and miles, nothing. At the eastern end salt waste lagoons forbid human habitation, and between them and the sea comes the strange formation of huge rounded stones, falling very steep down into the water, so that you have many fathom deep within a stone’s throw of the beach; and at last, that forbidding Chesil Cove where a few houses of fishermen, huddled together, look out upon the most inhospitable mass of threatening waters I know.

There are few corners of the English seas which give the effect of a curse; but this is one of them. The terrible Race of Portland lies three miles out, at the end of the Bill. The prison with its abominable memories stands above. The main traffic of the Channel lies far out. The gaunt and bare rocks of the Bill come down stark upon a lonely water, and that water heaves and turns unnaturally, even when there is little wind. For the roaring and the movement of that huge turmoil, the Race, send on their effect to the false shelter of Chesil Cove.

And it is a treacherous anchorage. Eastward, well inshore, there is good holding-ground, but it is only a patch, and one must be careful not to disturb the fishermen’s snares. Just outside this, in deep water, there is nothing but the rough and tumble shingle of great stones, and the anchor drags on any burst of wind, even from offshore: with a strong wind on shore you are done: and if such arise there is nothing for it but to up-anchor and beat out into the teeth of it: for that lee shore is deadly.

I have never been caught by the rising of the southwest wind in this desolate place of peril, but I have read the sailing directions about it, and I have often talked to men who have been so caught. There is nothing for it, I say, but to beat right out, unless it has come from a quarter far enough round south to enable one to scud down along the coast towards Devon, with enough sea room to spare. Chesil Cove is in the very eye of the great gales, and if a man should have taken up his insecure anchorage too near the shore, he is on it before he has got the first wind into his sails. An abominable spot!

The evil is recent. It is the work of the historic centuries. Portland Bill was once an island: and those strange tides which are now baulked and therefore twist and boil round its point, once ran normally through the strait between it and the mainland. But it has been joined to the mainland these hundreds of years by a very narrow belt, high piled, of these great rounded stones, which the sea and the wind shovelled up westward until they closed the entrance.

It is a strange feeling to leave one’s little ship at anchor in the dreadful cove, to land as best one can on that steep shore, risking the dinghy under the pounding of the sea, pulling it up over the screeching stones beyond the mark of the tide and then, in a few minutes’ walk, to be on the great placid expanse of the new Portland Harbour on the other side. It is like coming indoors out of evil weather, into firelight out of the dark; for it is only this minute or two on foot from the outer beach to the inner water; but to sail it, you must run down the millrace of the tide along the Bill and risk the buffeting of the Race. If you fail to hit the narrow belt of smooth water at the end of the Bill you are swept into the Race, and even if you just hit that smooth patch, you must calculate exactly, so as to catch the other tide up the eastern face under the old prison, and at last make Portland Harbour after ten long miles—and as many hours, and as much peril as God sees fit to send you.

Portland Harbour is one of the very, very rare successes of man in his coaxing of the sea.

I will not be sure, for I have not the knowledge, but, at any rate, I know of no other in my narrow experience except Cherbourg; and Cherbourg is not thoroughly closed. Dover is a failure—they say it ought never to have been built. Newlyn in part dries out. Fishguard and Holyhead are open to certain winds. Boulogne is not finished, and, perhaps, never will be (I have been told, I do not know with how much truth, that the Germans were paying for the building of it to receive their great liners and that the War checked the effort). Casablanca is not finished yet, so we cannot judge it—and how many more are there? I can recall no others of the great artificial harbours, unless we admit Genoa, with its noble mole, but, if I mistake not, it is not quite upon this scale. Of the artificial harbours which man has attempted in imitation of the few great natural harbours, how few have succeeded!

It would seem to be like man’s attempt to resist time in the case of his own body, of which the poet has written:

‘There is no fortress of man’s flesh so made
But subtle, treacherous Time comes creeping in.
Oh, long before his last assaults begin
The enemy’s on; the stronghold is betrayed;
And the one lonely watchman, half-dismayed,
Beyond the covering dark he hears them come:
The distant hosts of Death that march with muffled drum.’

And, indeed, it is very ridiculous the way in which men try to withstand this influence of their enemy, Time. They had far better accept the condition of mortality and remember a truth which was plainly painted in large black letters upon a large white placard in Eden, which was restated by Dante, and then repeated by Malherbe, that our only peace lies in the doing of God’s will; which includes going to pieces in the fifties, or sixties, or seventies, like an old disreputable, sodden, broken-down hulk too long adventured upon the sea. Shakespeare (another of those poets) also said that we ripe and ripe, and then we rot and rot. It is all in the Providence of God. Yet will men talk like women ‘of keeping their figure,’ and they will wear stays, or hypocritically compromise by putting whalebone into their clothes, or they will tie themselves up with bands like the infants of Italy, or paint their faces after the fashion of the warlike Germans. But here it must be admitted in fairness to the fierce Nordic stock of Mecklenburg and Pomerania that since the little trouble of 1918 they have issued an army order forbidding any officer to paint his face until he has attained the rank of major; for they judge (does the present successor of the Great High General Staff) that until a man has become a major, the furrows in his heroic skin are not deep enough to be worthy of filling in with white lead or delicately disguising with cosmetics.

To return to harbours.

When Man became the master of Earth and supplanted Heaven—which was round about the middle of the last century—he bethought him of making great harbours where no harbour had been before, and of supplementing the few secure inlets of the sea. Cherbourg was the first of them, the French being here, as usual, in the vanguard of challenge. It was attempted even in the century before. There were rocks and islands to afford a foundation, then the great breakwater was flung like a bridge across them with a pass to the left and to the right. But though Cherbourg is secure enough, there can be a memorable swell when the wind is in a northerly point.

Plymouth was, I think, the next and serves its purpose, but it does not wholly check the violence of a southerly wind.

Did not this same harbour of Portland come third? At any rate, it is the one complete success. It has caught an angle and the defences have been made sure. It is deep, yet not too deep, and no gale alarms it. What Nature built up in the Chesil Beach protects it from the main gale, and the land so curls round that no weight of wind and sea can strike it from the northeastern side; and even from the southeast the Shambles are a sort of protection. Moreover, the entrances are not endangered by the make of the tide, nor, I believe, do they silt. The southern one was blocked during the war by the sinking of a ship; but even so, the great harbour is an easy refuge and a wonderful good gift for sailing-men. But when people thought that, on the model of this, they could continue indefinitely, they were disappointed: yes, even in the tideless Mediterranean. We shall see whether Tangier’s, standing outside and subject to the ceaseless strength of ocean, will succeed or no. But for the rest, the natural harbour still holds the field, and any one would rather have the roads of Corfu, or the inland water behind the Wight than anything man ever made.

I wonder sometimes whether the Roman Empire did not attempt the same sort of thing. If it did, all the traces have gone. There are great Roman roads which come down now right on to open shores: that one, for instance, which I spoke of running through Pembrokeshire and striking the sea just above that narrow torrent of a tideway between Ramsey Island and the mainland. I thought when I first came across this strange ending of a great road, I thought, fantastically enough, what a fine harbor this narrow passage would have made had men of old blocked it on its northern entry. Then you would have had a good quiet inlet, many fathom deep, looking into the sheltered water of Saint Bride’s Bay and quite secure. I half persuaded myself that the lords of the world, from whom we inherit all that we have and are, did so block that northern entry, and did so create a harbour. But it was a nightmare guess not fit for the waking brain, for if they had built a wall between the Welsh mainland and the island, surely some traces would have remained, and there is nothing whatsoever. Yet why does that great road end so astonishingly to-day (and so many centuries past), upon an impossible coast, whence nothing could be shipped? The Pedlar’s Way through Norfolk, ending as abruptly on a coast some way from the harbour of Brancaster (itself now eaten away), may be explained by the disappearance of some former shelter engulfed by the sea, as Dunwich has been engulfed; or worn down as the natural breakwaters of Hastings were worn down under the influence of the waves. But I must confess that Saint David’s Road, ending sharply on that wild shore, puzzles me. The Lead Road of the Mendips comes down to where there is no harbour to-day. All the other Roman roads which I can call to mind in the island, and which reach the sea, reach it at a port, or at a ferry, or what was once a port or a ferry. But this Saint David’s road remains inexplicable.

It is a strange thing, beyond the average of chance, that so very few deep landlocked harbours should be of service to mankind. One hears it said sometimes that the number is small in any case. This is not so. The number is not small, though ill-distributed: it is exceedingly large. The whole Dalmatian coast is made up of a mass of such shelters. The Fjords of Scandinavia are a wealth of the same, and the Arctic abounds in them. But there seems a perverse arrangement whereby the deep harbours and secure have nothing inland to serve, while endless stretches of coastline are to be found all over the world, with much for export, but to which, in the same most exasperating manner, harbours have been refused.

Africa is quite astonishing in this. There are not four natural landlocked harbours, I believe, in the whole line of coast from Alexandria round by Barbary and the West and up from the Cape to the head of the Red Sea. The most that man can do is to use the shelter of islands, or the curl of a headland, or here and there a small and insufficient recess, or the mouth of a river. The French have made their small harbours in Northern Africa artificially, and Alexandria is artificial. The few openings which serve Morocco are very ill-provided, Rabat almost dries out at low tide, so does Laraiche, that charming little cleanly Spanish port, which I hope the coming perils will spare.

All down the Adriatic coast of Italy, there is nothing between the thigh and the heel, since Ravenna dried away. Ancona is only a curl of headland, and Bari means very little. Brindisi is ideal, and Taranto must have been exactly what antiquity needed, shallower than, but as secure as, Cadiz. But for the rest, all the eastern shelf of Italy, and the heel of the boot, is without a base on the sea.

Unwisely, pedantically, but much more hypocritically, the less exhausted countries, who were for the moment the masters of the settlement, refused the Dalmatian coast to Italy after the war. I trust that the force of things and the new vigour of the Italian people and the now increasing embarrassments of what is Puritan and base in Europe will, before I die, repair the error.

And so for rounding the Bill once more—a thing by me always dreaded—for Portland Race is a terrible affair.

Portland Race should, by rights, be the most famous thing in all the seas of the world. I will tell you why. It is a dreadful, unexpected, enormous, unique business, set right upon the highway of all our travel: it is the marvel of our seas. And yet it has no fame. There is not a tired man writing with a pencil at top speed in the middle of the night to the shaking of machinery in Fleet Street who will not use the word ‘Maelstrom’ or ‘Charybdis.’ I have seen Charybdis—piffling little thing; I have not seen the Maelstrom, but I have talked to men who told me they had seen it. But Portland Race could eat either of them and not know it had had breakfast.

I have nearly always been successful in catching the smooth, narrow belt near the point: but I also once found that smooth belt fail me, and so have gone through the tail-end of Portland Race; only the very tail-end. I had seen it from close by half a dozen times before in my life. I had very nearly got into it twice. But this time I did actually make knowledge of the ‘thing in itself’—and there is no mistaking it. It is one of the wonderful works of God.

Portland Bill stands right out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic tide. It is a gatepost, with Alderney and the Hogue for gateposts on the other side. They make the gate of the narrow sea; outside them you are really (in spite of names) in the air of the ocean, and look toward the Americas. Inside them is the domestic pond. Portland Bill thrusts out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic sea. In my folly, for many years I used to call it ‘William,’ but I will do so no longer. For there is something awful about the snake-like descending point, and dreadful menace in the waters beyond. And here Portland Bill differs from his namesake of the land. It would be familiar to call a William of the land ‘Bill.’ But in the matter of Portland it is familiar to call the Bill ‘William.’ I will never call him William again.

I thought I had well known what the Race was before I first heard it bellowing years ago. I knew after the fashion of our shadowy nominal knowledge. I knew it in printed letters. I knew it on the chart. I knew it in the ‘Channel Pilot.’ Then I came to it in the flesh, and I knew it by the senses, I saw it with my eyes, and I heard it with my ears. I had heard it roaring like a herd, or park, or pride, of lions miles away. I had seen its abominable waste of white water on a calm day: shaving it by a couple of hundred yards. But there is all the difference in the world between that kind of knowledge and knowledge from within!

He that shall go through even the tail-end of Portland Race in a small boat and in calm weather will know what he is talking about, and for so vast an accession of real knowledge, even that pain is worth while.

Portland Race lies in a great oval, sometimes three, sometimes four or five miles out from Portland Bill, like a huge pendant hanging from the tip of a demon’s ear. It is greater or smaller, according to whether the wind be offshore or on, but it is immense always, for it is two miles or more across. It lumps, hops, seethes, and bubbles, just like water boiling over the fire, but the jumps are here in feet, and the drops are tons.

There is no set of the sea in Portland Race: no run and sway: no regular assault. It is a chaos of pyramidical waters leaping up suddenly without calculation, or rule of advance. It is not a charge, but a scrimmage; a wrestling bout; but a wrestling bout of a thousand against one. It purposely raises a clamour to shake its adversary’s soul, wherein it most resembles a gigantic pack of fighting dogs, for it snarls, howls, yells, and all this most terrifically. Its purpose is to kill, and to kill with a savage pride.

And all these things you find out if you get mixed up in it on a very small boat.

Perhaps the reason why Portland Race does not take the beetling place it should in the literature of England is that those who turn out the literature of England by the acre to-day never go through it, save in craft as big as towns—liners and the rest. Even these have been taught respect. During the war Portland Race sank a ship of fourteen thousand tons, loaded with machinery, and if you were to make a list of all the things which Portland Race has swallowed up, it would rival Orcus. Portland Race is the master terror of the world.

And here I can imagine any man who had sailed saying to me that there are many other races abominable in their various degrees. I have not been through Alderney Race since the nineties, but I suppose it is still going strong. The Wild Goose Race you have already heard of—a very considerable thing. The Skerries also—I mean the one off Anglesey—is worthy to be saluted. And even little Saint Alban’s, though it is a toy compared with Portland, is a nuisance in any wind.

But the reason Portland deserves the master name which it has never achieved, the reason I write so strongly of the ignorance of England toward this chief English thing, the reason that Portland Race makes me seriously consider whether literary gents be not, after all, the guardians of greatness, and whether their neglect be not, after all, the doom of the neglected, is that this incredible thing lies to everybody’s hand, and yet has no place in the English mind. The Saxon and Danish pirates of the Dark Ages must have gone through it (and—please God—foundered). Every one making Dorset from France for two thousand years must have risked it. To-day the straight course of innumerable ships out of Southampton, making for the Start and the Lizard to the ocean, leads them right past it—yet I know nothing of it in our Letters, unless it be one allusion of Mr. Hardy’s to the ghosts which wander above it. But there is no ghost so full of beef as to wander above Portland Race!

It is, perhaps, in that word ‘Southampton’ that I have struck the cause. Until Southampton became the port for the Americas the Race lay off the track. No man running down-Channel from the Thames need touch the Race: no man running up. Even beating down or up-Channel you are free to go about before you touch the broken water; running, you need not go near it. And steam need have nothing to do with it—except all that steam which, during the last thirty years, has begun to use again more and more our one inland water of the south inside the Isle of Wight.

There is a great deal more I had intended to write about Portland Race. I had intended to talk about the folly of the Bill challenging the sea, and how it ought to be an island, as it was for centuries. I had intended to say something of that canal between Portland Roads and the West Bay which ought to have been dug long ago, and which some day people will wish they had dug, when it is too late. I had intended to give rules for getting round by the narrow smooth. I had intended to curse the absurd arrangement whereby the tide, instead of behaving like a reasonable human tide, and running six hours either way, runs southerly nine hours out of the twelve from both sides of the Bay, leaving only three for the dodge round. I had intended to add much more.

But I cannot. Let me end with this piece of advice.

Never trust any man unless he has gone round Portland Bill in something under ten tons. Never allow any man to occupy any position of import to the state until he has gone round Portland Bill under his own sail in something under ten tons. But most of all, never believe any man—no, not even if you see it printed on this page—who says that he himself has done the thing.

After Portland Race, as you run down that coast, there comes only one other patch of sea (for you will avoid the Shambles), which is a nuisance, and that is Saint Alban’s Race. When you have just been through Portland you hardly notice Saint Alban’s, but if you are going westward, so that Saint Alban’s comes first, you notice it more than a little. For all the way down England, from the North Sea and the Straits onwards, you will have come across nothing of this kind. Everything to the east is more or less reasonable. If the sea rises, it is because there is a wind. If you are checked, it is through a known tide. But off Saint Alban’s Head you run into a piece of water which has no rules.

You are first suspicious of something odd by an inability to follow the rhythm of the seas. So far you have been going well, say, with a south wind, luffing regularly to every sea and paying off again in the hollows; the regular beat of the successive ridges has become companionable; when all of a sudden a little sea from nowhere jumps up on your beam, and catches you a smack, and immediately you are in a tumble of water without rhyme or reason—nothing perilous, but intolerably inconsequential. You will suddenly find the helm pulling hard for no reason, and then as suddenly losing grip; and with all this, there is no guessing the rate at which your stream will move. I have been half a night passing Saint Alban’s with a leading wind—light, it is true, but sufficient; and that only just after the neaps, when the flood should be running slack. I have watched there in the darkness hour after hour the blacker line of cliffs against the blackness of the sky, and the shore, apparently immovable, refusing to slip by. What is worse, Saint Alban’s Race is a sentient thing. It knows all about you, and whether in its heart it only desires to play, or whether it has a wickeder mind, a mind it certainly has.

Some years ago I was running down this coast with many companions—too many for so small a craft. All was with us: an excellent wind, bright sun, and a clear air. I warned my companions about this mischievous patch (which is also haunted), and I said we would go right outside and cheat it. So we put the bow a point or two off the course we were making, so as to get right out into the open and leave the exasperation of Saint Alban’s inshore in the place to which his bad temper belongs. But not a bit of it. Even as we were looking landward, and laughing to see the tumble of water between us and the cliff, which tumble we thought to have thus escaped, even as we thought we had passed it, the thing ran at us.

It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up to play. It was abominably conscious and alive. It had said, ‘Here is a boat which thinks that, because it has gone outside, it can escape me,’ so it galloped up in a rush, and swarmed all around us, and we were in for an hour of it before we got to the regular water beyond.

I know a man who so dislikes this patch of curse upon the sea that he boasts of passing it as of a feat, though, in truth, there is no feat in it at all, but only an annoyance. So much did he pride himself upon the passage of it once that, in coming into harbour, and being asked to write something in the visiting book of the inn, he put down his name, and the date, and this poem:

‘I made my passage through Saint Alban’s Race
And came to anchor in this bloody place.’

The person who owned the inn was very angry on seeing this poem, and asked that it might be rubbed out. This the man of whom I speak very humbly did, and substituted for the offensive couplet a long, long poem in the heroic style, all in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, and iambic at that, which poem is to be read there to this day.

You gentlemen of England—if gentlemen I may still call you—who travel about in mechanical ships as big as a street of houses, know nothing of these things.

But I will tell you one last thing about Saint Alban’s Race. I have said that it is haunted. Well, what do you think of this? As I was passing there once, there came up to me, catching me up, at a pace far faster than the dear Nona could ever sail, such a fine rich little boat, with canvas so new and so tight, and so white, and painted and enamelled, and gear well trammelled, and the brasswork shining like the sun, and the cordage new, and varnish upon all the combings, and on the tiller, and at her helm a man dressed as though for Cowes Week in opéra bouffe. She foamed, and was running past in a streak. The day was bright, well past its noon, and the shores of England stood clear all abeam. There was the Wight, with its brilliant chalk cliffs taking the sunlight, and there, very clear, the Hampshire coast, and right at hand, Purbeck: all as neat as a picture. But the man in the exhibition-shop-window boat hailed me, and shouted through a horn, pointing fiercely eastward, as he stood up and steered with his knee, ‘Are those the Needles?’

Now what could such a portent mean? What was the explanation of that mystery? The sea brings all adventures, but what adventure was this? Whence did this man come? How could any man so lay a course from the Bill eastward without knowing what the Needles were, and without recognising them when he saw them? It is true we were end on; but they are the most conspicuous rocks, by their shape, in all the Channel, and they are as familiar as Piccadilly. Even a man who had never seen them must know by his chart where they lay, and by the obvious, unmistakable, glaring white point of the Island. To ask ‘Are those the Needles?’ was like asking ‘Is that the Eddystone?’ when one had been sailing with a good breeze southward from Plymouth, and perceived a tall tower standing up utterly alone in the midst of the seas, very far from land. This man could not have crossed the Atlantic (though men have done so in boats no larger), for she was spick and span. And even had he crossed the Atlantic, he would have a chart. Was he, perhaps, a Western man, who had lived all his life as in Devon or Cornwall, and had set out thus in middle age to explore the strange Eastern people beyond Portland Bill?

There may be some few such remaining who wisely root themselves in their native place, and such a man might for so short a course take no chart—in which case he would have only himself to blame for running through the Shambles, and drowning if God so willed. At any rate, there he was, asking poignantly whether, indeed, those were the Needles.

For a moment I hesitated whether I should not tell him it was the Old Man of Hoy or the Giant’s Causeway, but the spirit of truth entered into me, and I answered, ‘Yes.’

He remains a problem, and to me, therefore, fascinating; for there is nothing so holds the mind—my mind at least—as a problem connected with reality. I know that many men get an equal pleasure out of problems set them in fiction; that is why a good detective story very properly commands a large sale, especially among the intelligent: that is why a good detective story is bought by men as well as by women, whereas your ordinary best-seller, so full of what they call ‘psychology,’ is fed to the other sex, not mine. Bismarck also, intelligent among the Germans, delighted in the detective stories of fiction; but, for my part, though I take pleasure in them also (especially when they are of first-rate construction and diction, like ‘Trent’s Last Case,’ Mr. Bentley’s book, which is, without a doubt, the best detective story in English to-day), yet it is a pale pursuit compared with problems set in the midst of reality: it is all the difference between dreaming and doing. Moreover, the wretched writing man can never forget that a story written is at the author’s pleasure. That author knew the solution from the beginning—as is proper to a creator—and as we read we know that he can make the evidence fit any way he chose. But when you are dealing with reality, the evidence upon either side of the problem is not made to fit any end. You have to reconcile as best you can two opposite sets of equally certain things, which seem the one set to contradict the other. If the problem as to who that Needles man was, and where he had come from, had involved great issues, racial hatreds, the fate of a fortune, or the destiny of a realm, it would have become an historical problem; and historical problems are the most fascinating of all.

There come first in order those involving human motive, and the known probabilities of human action. Take three of them. The affair of the Diamond Necklace, the Tichborne case, and the Dreyfus case. In each of these the difficulty of finding the solution lies in the discovery of motive, and in the estimate of truth proceeding from a group of witnesses, or sometimes from only one witness, and in each of these there is an opposing set of accounts, and of depositions contradictory the one to the other.

In the affair of the Diamond Necklace, you have either to believe that a man, living in the heart of the court life of Versailles, accepted a ludicrous signature as that of the Queen; or else you have to believe that about twenty people, who had no connection one with the other, and were separated by every conceivable kind of social circumstance, place and time, conspired to tell unshaken the same lie. If you ask whether a man living in the heart of the rich society of London would accept as normal the signature ‘The Hon. Henry Hound, Esq.’ at the end of a letter (he having known for many years the said Henry Hound, let alone the fantastic nature of such a signature) you would certainly say that the thing was morally impossible. But what if you had to decide between such a moral impossibility and the necessity of believing that a railway porter at North Berwick, a small farmer in County Clare, a dilettante friend of the said Henry Hound, and Henry Hound himself, and a chance taxi-man who had once driven him, and a policeman who had noted the taxi go by, and about a dozen others equally separate, did all swear and remain unshaken under examination, and after a long process of time, to testimonies which, combined, made the conclusion inevitable that this man, accustomed to all our social usages, and living in the heart of our rich society, did regard such an absurd signature as normal?

The Tichborne case depends upon contradictions in which I have little reading; but, if I remember right, the main contrast in it lay between two sets of undoubted facts. On the one hand, a man’s mother recognised him; his distinguished advocate preferred ruin to the concealment of his own passionate conviction of the man’s identity—and, after seeing all the evidence, and hearing everything in confidence, deliberately broke the most sacred rules of his lawyers’ trade union, inviting certain disaster in order to leave conviction to posterity. As against a set of things like that you had the unaccountable ignorance of a man of middle age upon habits and words, and the rest, in which his youth must have been steeped, and many other contradictory points as well. There has been formed a comfortable legend upon this particular problem: a legend which affirms the certain justice of the verdict.

Personally, I mistrust such legends. The tendency of men to believe what it makes them happier to believe is so strong that one should lean with all one’s weight against it in public as in personal affairs. But that does not mean that the verdict was not just: it only means that the accepted legend has no authority in itself. During my boyhood the opinion of men amply qualified to judge, men eminent in the legal profession, men of the Tichbornes’ social standing and religion, was as violently divided as were later men of the same capacity for judgment in the matter of the Dreyfus affair.

Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between my elders, especially those which regularly took place in one of the Sussex houses, the squire of which had no doubt at all of the claimant’s right; and my reason for such interest in a matter to me remote is this: that the Tichborne verdict is the first thing I remember. We were living in a house in Westminster, and my nurse, who was excited in the matter, as all folk then were, rich and poor, took me into the press of people at Westminster Hall to hear the result. Of course, very early memories like this (I was but three years old) are falsified by the continual repetition of the subject by one’s elders, but I am as certain as any one can be of such a memory, and I believe it is the earliest thing of which I have any clear memory left.

Upon a similar very early memory depends one of the longest links with history with which I am acquainted. Mademoiselle de Montgolfier, the daughter of the man who made the first balloons, lived as a life-long companion of my Irish grandmother in France, and died well after her ninetieth year, when I was a boy of ten or eleven. That woman as a child of four was present in Paris when the mob poured up the Faubourg of Saint Antoine to the capture of the Bastille in 1789, and I, as a child of seven, eight, and onwards, was brought to her time and again to hear her tell the story. I am now in my fifty-fifth year, and the stretch of time is already remarkable. Were I in extreme old age, and told a child of this incident, that child himself, living to a similar old age, would be able to say that he had spoken to one who had heard of the fall of the Bastille from an eye-witness; and that would be as though some very old person to-day were to tell one that he had spoken to one who had known a page at Charles II’s Court, and had seen as a child the funeral of General Monk; or, again, it is as though some very old person to-day were to remember having met in childhood a person who had talked to one who had seen John Milton.

The Dreyfus case, after all these years, still rouses such passions that I tremble even to mention it. I have myself (so many years after!) been subject to mournful rebuke in public from the excellent pen of Dean Inge, who has reproached me in well-knit prose for being the only man in England who did not take the side of the accused. He is wrong there; for I could cite the names of half a dozen prominent Englishmen who had the right to judge through a knowledge of European affairs, and who remained in doubt of Dreyfus’ innocence, notably Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Labouchère—and there were many others.

Here also the difficulty lay in weighing opposing sets of undisputable facts. The nearer men were to a position where they could fully judge all the technical details of that highly technical evidence, and the probable motives of the clashing witnesses, the more were they divided; they remain divided to-day upon the issue after more than thirty years. On the one hand was present an overwhelming motive to secure the conviction of a man against whom there was strong prima facie evidence. That motive was the desire to preserve the Intelligence Department of the French Army intact, though rival powers were bent on its destruction. On the other side was another motive: the overwhelming motive of freeing a man who was believed innocent, and the lesser, but still very strong, motive of defending the immunity of that small immensely wealthy, very powerful clique of international financiers, one member of which—the first and the last in our time—had been challenged by the authority of a modern state. Such men regard themselves, and are, in practice, usually treated, as though they were above the law.

I, for my part, pretend to no certain conclusion in the matter, for I doubt whether any man could do that who was not on the bench in court, and physically confronted with the witnesses, and acquainted with all the documents, and able to weigh them all—even the use of the most technical terms in gunnery. But it is to be remembered that there was division upon that bench itself, and that a minority of the five judges—two out of three—were (I am told) for acquittal.

Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot and competent to judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully competent also, were, and are, convinced of his guilt.

There are in England to-day two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society, enable them to judge. They are both close friends of mine. One is for, the other against.

I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained, or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend, intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of criticising that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.

The historian will have one point to make in connection with it, and that a point of capital importance. It is to the Dreyfus case that we owe the four years of war, 1914-18: for it destroyed the French Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and Charleroi.

Perhaps problems depending upon human psychology can never be finally determined. But there are others equally absorbing which involve no such heats, and no such moral doubts: only physical and mathematical oppositions.

It would be a worthy task to draw up a list of such essentially historical problems not involving guesswork upon human motives, but dealing with plain, physical facts; problems which have remained unsolved, and which do not seem to be in the way of being solved either. Your academic writer shirks them nearly always; he writes as though they had been solved, and as though he knew the solution; so that his readers go on imagining they have been given an explanation which as a fact has been carefully avoided.

For instance, when you read of a fleet in antiquity ‘drawn up’ upon a shore, how was it done? The fleets of antiquity preferred to use, but did not depend upon, harbours; they were able to use a beach. Their large armies—for instance, a Carthaginian army of one hundred and fifty thousand men—were landed in this fashion. Cæsar landed at Deal his small but respectable force in this fashion, not through a harbour, but on a beach; and civilian sailing and piracy all used the same method. The ship of antiquity could ride, and also be moored in harbour, but was also beached. It came up to a shelving shore and was pulled up on to the land. It was pulled up out of reach of the waves; and it will be remembered how Cæsar got into trouble during his first expedition (and second!) because he had not allowed for an exceptionally high tide accompanied by a storm. He got his ships on shore all right, but he had not pulled them up far enough.

How was it done? You cannot say it was done by capstans, because that could only apply to beaches already prepared. If you say it was done by hauling upon ropes over rollers the answer is not sufficient. How was the boat kept upright while this was going on, and what numbers would not be required to beach thus even a single ship of three or four hundred tons, and, having so beached it, by what means could one rapidly float it again?

The ancients had some method which they took for granted, for they knew the difficulty of it, and which landsmen had seen practised a thousand times, and yet of which no description has come down to us in our fragmentary records of the past. The poets tell us that the ships stand upon the shore, and they leave it at that. They seem to tell us also that the boats were helped up stern foremost, but how on earth the thing could be done with a very large armament rapidly, and upon a beach unprepared, baffles us.

There is another problem I have never seen solved. How did Barbarians organise and commissariat the enormous bodies which came across the Alps for the plunder of Italy, and were as a rule destroyed by the Italian armies in antiquity. How did they get such a force as that of Radagasius across the Alps, or that of Brennus? I choose the Alps in particular because it is an extreme case, but it is almost as difficult to understand how they moved across flat country. In the case of the Alps, you had narrow tracks for much more than a day’s march, often for a week’s march; tracks from which it was impossible to deploy to right and left. There must, therefore, have been a very long column in file, a column of many, many miles. It is easy to calculate, in the case of Radagasius, that he could not possibly have extended over less than thirty miles, and probably his column covered a good deal more. Our academic writers seem to think that a body of this sort moves as a matter of course, like an individual, or like a small body which can easily organise its movements: a dozen people out for a walk. But here you have numbers in respect of which any one with an elementary knowledge of military history, knows that high organisation alone could prevent disaster.

Ask a modern staff with every modern advantage, and even with a good modern road on which the columns could advance on a front of four, to move by a single road a quarter of a million human beings, half of them fighting men, from Augsburg to Milan. Consider the preparation such a march would mean; the exact forethought required, establishing the position of each column at the end of each day’s march; the calculation of provisions, the arrangement for the passing up and down of waggons or of pack animals, the strict discipline necessary to prevent bunching throughout the whole column; the confusion—these and a hundred other points. We all know that very good staff work, taking plenty of time, and with every modern advantage of map and transport, will do it in such and such a fashion. We also know that a few mistakes on the staff might easily so bungle the affair that only a dribble would get across in time, and the bulk would starve and die. Yet these huge barbaric forces, in some undescribed way, so traversed the mountains and debouched upon the plains of Italy, having evidently thought out some form of screen or advance guard—otherwise they would have been blocked on emerging from the pass—having some clearly elaborate system of commissariat, and so on. Not a word of all that has come down to us from antiquity. We do not know how it was done. What is more, we cannot see how it was done by men who had no writing, and only the vaguest notions of topography.

The harbour of Poole, for which we were making during that run along the Dorset coast when we were hailed by the Needle man, has a problem of the sort attaching to it.

You come round the Anvil Point, and there, if you are lucky, you catch another tide. There are many such points on the coast where you can carry the tide with you much longer than the due six hours or so, by coming into the midst of a fresh tide at the very end of the old one. The main stream seems to shoot past Anvil Point, towards the Island. If you come to Anvil Point and the corner of Dorset just at the very top of the flood and have the good fortune to get round and open Swanage Bay, you are out of this main stream just before the ebb begins, and another, younger flood takes you up past Old Harry and towards Poole.

Old Harry is an isolated chimney of chalk rock which still stands, expecting doom. He had a wife standing by him for centuries—a lesser (but no doubt nobler) pillar. She crashed some years ago and now he is alone. He cannot wish to remain so much longer, staring out to sea without companionship. I think he longs for his release.

Beyond Old Harry you come to that odd entry of Poole, the history of which is, I say, inexplicable to me. It was a main harbour for the Romans; and when the Scandinavian pirates came down to destroy this outer province of Christendom, they used it as a known base. It was sailing out of Poole that a great fleet of their ships—ninety I am glad to say—coming to pillage this Roman land, were piled up and destroyed in Swanage Bay; and it was from Poole that they went up water to Wareham, and thence made their foray by land to Exeter.

Yet Poole, thus easy to the ancients, could never be entered without local knowledge. It is a trap, baited and set. As you look from overseas, there stands clear before you the entry to a great harbour. You see plainly a narrow gate, an obvious door into a wide sheet of sheltered water within. But if you steer for that entry, you strike. For, running down parallel with the coast for more than a mile, is a long, high, hidden sandbank, so that you must get into Poole to-day by making for the shore more than a mile below the entry to the harbour, and then running up a trench of which you can see nothing from the surface of the sea, but which you must keep to or wreck your ship. To-day that strange approach is amply buoyed with a bright light at the seaward end, and no one can miss it. But what did the ancients do, who had, it may be presumed, no charts—certainly the pirates had none—and who could not, save in some very special weather, have determined the exact point of entry by the lead? The savages from Norway may have depended upon captured pilots, or upon men who had purchased their knowledge of the fairway by disasters of their own in earlier pirate raids. But we hear nothing of all this in the records. We are simply told they came to Poole continually as though it were as simple a matter as going up Spithead.

Poole harbour has traps within as well as this grinning trap of an entry, and the worst of these traps is the patchiness of the holding-ground. Unless you know where to drop anchor, you may be dragged in Poole, upwards, upon as fierce a tide as I know, with the flukes of your anchor dragging as easily through the soft mud almost as they would through water. But with all that, and although the Nona has caught fire there (the sea brings all adventures), Poole is a harbour that will always have good memories for me; and perhaps the Nona will go there at last to die.

Now that I am upon the home seas steering eastward out of Poole after rounding that last great buoy of theirs (for I dare not try the Swatchway), I am concerned to defend the proposition that there is more exploration to be done in things familiar than in things unfamiliar.

With what hesitation do I not set down those words! For they are paradox, and paradox is to my personal taste as detestable as advertisement. I will even confess to a little distaste of too much metaphor—or, indeed, of any trick or hook for catching the attention of the reader. Why should I suppose him jaded when I have so many interesting things to say?

But here paradox is unavoidable; for it is clear that in the plain sense of the words the exploration of a place unknown must yield more matter than the exploration of a place familiar. What I mean is that where one knows a thousand things, each of those thousand leads on to another thousand, and so quickly makes you a million. Whereas where you know nothing, you go on from your first discovery to one or two more, and then to ten or a hundred all in a chain. So that the exploration of the known is like multiplication, and the exploration of the unknown is like addition. Or again, the survey of the known is like the sowing of a field with a manifold harvest; whereas the surveying of the unknown is but the lengthening out of a trail.

And all this mass of words am I tempted to because I am entering the home seas, which I count from the Anvil to the South Foreland as being my garden or back yard; though it is true that my general estate extends much farther afield. What is more, the home seas themselves expand a little during these last years of too much sailing along the coast of our Great Island, and I am not sure that Portland Bill is not now my gatepost, instead of the Anvil. But all this matters not at all.

The Bay between Poole and the Wight is so domestic and inward a thing that many would laugh to hear it called the sea at all. But let them be as I was on that night and they will find it is the sea right enough, and that it can raise a fine hubbub, and that the salt water of it can tumble about with the best of them.

I take it that there is no trial more trying in the sailing of a little craft than taking her through blinding weather at night close inshore—whether that weather be blinding through feather-white slants of snow or through violence of sudden rain.

Well outside you make your course and keep to it indifferently, for you have all the room you need; but when you are running from a coast point to a coast point with the wind on shore through the darkness it is another matter.

The wind that night had backed to the east of south; having so far favoured me, however, that it never backed round enough to make me go about. I was abominably short-handed, and on that particular occasion could only count upon myself, for reasons which I will not debate. My course was for the North Channel under Hurst Castle, where there is a passage so narrow that even the Nona could hardly beat through it between the shingle bank and that odd spit of land on which Hurst Castle itself stands, and where Charles, the last true King of England, lay a prisoner after having lost his power. That channel has to be made with skill. You must lie close to the land, but if you lie a thought too close you touch a hump of gravel which lies off the point. Your business in shooting at that mark on such a blinding night is to keep Hurst Light just on your landward bow until you judge that you are perhaps a mile off. Then you must pass it over your bow just to the starboard side, and then, when you are close up against it, so that it seems you might strike almost, you must pay away again, put the light to port, and skirt the land by half a cable or less, and so you will round the long spit of Hurst and find yourself inside the sheltered water of the Solent; all this if you have a leading wind.

At the setting out from Poole you must make a course lying well outside Hengestbury, not going too close inland, for there are shoals and, I think, rocks. It is only when you have the mass of Hengestbury Head standing up like a sort of dull island against the night and a mile or two north of your beam that you can begin, or a little later, to make the Hurst Light your mark; and it was there on this stormy night that my troubles began; for both the Needles far away a-weather and Hurst itself were continually obscured by the most violent sheets of rain, which came in gusts driven before the wind.

I would not go about into the open and try the Needles channel itself for three reasons: first, that it would have meant a long beat to windward; next, that in the Needles channel I should have had to meet all the outward and inward shipping, which on a night like this might have put me in some danger; and, lastly, that I should have missed my tide and, I think, met the ebb; that is why I made for Hurst and for the narrow passage between that light and the Shingles Bank: a shifting mass of gravel that shows its changing back like a whale above the seas. Now that passage demands skill.

For the first five miles or so beyond Hengestbury Head it was easy going, for after each heavy gust of rain the light appeared again, and I had not veered too much in the interval. (Whether there were an inset to this bay I had forgotten, and I could not leave the tiller to go below and read my directions. But if there were it had not affected me, though we were on the flood.)

As we came nearer to the light the difficulty increased, because it was essential to keep in that direction, and the recurrent blankets of rain blotted out the mark for five minutes and more at a time. Happily, however, the wind, though increasing, went a little more southerly, and left me free to play with the direction. She was a trifle over-canvassed, and was leaning heavily over, stiff boat though she is, and the beam-sea over that low freeboard of hers took me on the face and body time and again with little packets of salt water and spray.

It was important to get through the North Passage with the flood, for the ebb runs furiously through that trench, and I had known half a dozen times the necessity of dropping anchor outside in a seaway if one failed to get through in time, and of waiting through six hours of darkness, during which the wind could not stem the tide.

That night, however, I had good fortune, for there was no rain during the last mile of my approach. I took the Nona quite close to the Shingles, and then round through the racing channel into the calmer water beyond.

It was as well; for all that ground of big round stones is bad for holding an anchor. The good holding-ground in this part is round the back of Hurst Spit, in what they call the Roads; and if with your anchor on that bottom the wind rises and it drags, then, whether from the north or from the south, you are done; for you will either come up against Hampshire or break up at your leisure upon the Shingles, which shifts with every gale, and has upon it in the least sea a boiling of white water all around.

In the Solent I carried the flood with me and, at the same time, the wind diminished and all rain ceased, so that when day broke, which it did before I had come near Little Yarmouth (the stream was then just turning), the first dull light appeared in a watery but open grey sky to the eastward, over the hills of my own county far away.

There was a great number of craft about, for it was the season of the year, and their riding lights swung and twinkled like a dance of stars. They were so beautiful that I forgave the rich their spickness and their spanness, and their great yachts kept like toys. Yet neatness is a virtue of a kind: though the Nona will have none of it, but keeps as plain (and dirty) as a fishing-boat, to which sort of ship she is first cousin, but no relation at all to the R.Y.S.

This character of smartness in certain externals is one of the things which separates modern nations most sharply one from another. It is based, of course, upon states of mind, and these in their turn, ultimately, upon religions; but there are cross categories.

If you dig down to the fundamental, the real difference is not so much that one mood goes in everywhere for smartness, and the other allows all things to get dirty and slipshod, as that one mood wants smartness in one kind of thing, and the other wants it in another kind of thing; one mood wants accuracy and the satisfaction of proportion in one set of things, and another wants it in another set of things. The difference to the eye is very striking. I fancy it is the difference which the average casual and rapid observer notes most strongly in travel. Every one has remarked it in the contrast between Belfast and Dublin, between an English ship and a French one, between a Basque village or road, and a Castilian or Galician one over the boundary: between the Swiss-German railway management and the Italian. I am told, by those familiar with those countries, that there is a similar sharp change when you pass over the border of Finland from Russia.

It is exceedingly difficult in so subtle a matter of human motive to ferret out the root, though obviously that root must lie in the mind, and we have to seek for some mental need which is being satisfied. It is no good, for instance, saying that the Italian railway looks more slipshod than the German-Swiss railway because the Italian is lazy and the German-Swiss is industrious. We all know that both are industrious, and that of the two the Italian is, on the whole, the harder worker. It would not be true to say that Englishmen aboard ship were men of more energy than Frenchmen aboard ship. The whole point of a Frenchman is the intensity of his energy,—indeed, its excess,—which is what accounts for most of the achievements of the French, and also for all their disasters. What one has to do in examining the thing is to find out what it is which makes the Englishman, say, or the Dutchman or the Prussian uncomfortable in circumstances which he feels to be dirty and slipshod, so that he cannot rest until they have been put right, while the other sort of man is equally uncomfortable in another set of slack circumstances, and cannot rest until they are put right.

What are the two categories?

I say again it is exceedingly difficult to judge, and still more difficult to put into words, but they seem to me in my travels something of this kind. The one set of people feel their whole community to be dependent upon a gentry, a class possessed of more than the average of wealth in their society. When people take such a standard, an appetite spreads throughout the whole of the community to reduce all, as far as possible, to the conditions under which a wealthy person would live. While in the other set of people you have a conception that the community must be taken as a whole. Their centre of gravity is necessarily much lower than a gentry: it is lower even than a middle-class. It is the standard of the people. Thus, in the one sort of community certain forms of decoration in a room, such as having a carpet and curtains, will seem essential. If that standard cannot be maintained, then one must expect degradation and dirt—as in our lodging-houses of London. But in the other sort of community they aim at the cleanliness of a very poor room, of which the floor is bare boards. They wash and scrub the bare boards, as in every cottage of Normandy.

Yet that difference in social ideals is not really the heart of the difference. The heart of the difference lies surely in the relative values which people put upon different human activities. In the one community people will take it for granted that a certain smartness of externals is essential to what they call efficiency: in the other the actual working of the instrument towards its end is alone considered. The impression produced upon the citizen of the one type when he sees untidy accessories, even where these are of no service at all to the end the instrument has to serve, is that such untidiness connotes inefficiency throughout. But the other kind of man disassociates those two ideas, and is contemptuous of any one who confuses such different things. In Picardy they keep out cows with chance thorns, in England with a three-pound gate. Both keep out cows.

I have had sharp personal experience of the matter in one definite instance, and that is a battery of field artillery. In the ideas of the English service, a French field battery is extremely slack. The harness is dull, often old, and pieced together, sometimes shamefully tied up with string. The uniforms are not over-clean. There is nothing too smart about the pieces themselves, even when they are prepared for a review. The conclusion is immediately arrived at that these foreigners ought not to have guns at all, seeing they do not know how to treat them. It is the same connotation of ideas as makes one think that a man without a collar is poor, though he may be a millionaire who has just taken it off to ease his neck. Now the other commentary is worth remarking, for I have heard it from the lips of many men, and it shows the difference of mood. The smartness of the English batteries I have always heard vastly admired by the French gunners, but never in connection with gunnery. They regard it as an adjunct, as a sort of ornament which a wealthy nation possessed (as England normally is in peace time) of but a small armed force can afford. They think it rather like wearing a top hat, or like a woman wearing jewels; something having no relation whatsoever to the function of a gun and its gunners, which is to deliver projectiles accurately and rapidly rather than to look pretty.

In other words, the French gunner looks at an English battery very much as you or I would look at a good poet who had been something of a dandy. It would never occur to us that his clothes were a function of his poetry, and, on the whole, we would more likely connect the idea of good verse with slackness in clothes than with neatness in clothes.

Still, neatness is a virtue, and an excess of polish, even at sea, must be forgiven.

What is less forgivable in the rich is their contempt for the usage of the sea, and their forgetfulness of its brotherhood. I minded me as I ran down that water under the dawn, of how, when I was still young, I picked up a buoy in Cowes Roads after a long night outside, and in desperate fatigue I made fast to it and slept. I had not slept three hours when I was woken by a man so rich that he must have stolen it. He came up, rowed in a boat—I had almost written ‘of pure gold,’ anyhow all glittering with wealth, and rowed by many serfs in white raiment shining like the sun. He hollered and he swore like Mrs. McKinley in the song, and his face was purple with passion; all because I had picked up a buoy which he had bought and paid for. Now this is not the custom of the sea. One may pick up a buoy at need, though one must let go when they ask you. As for this man, his monstrous great ship soon steamed away down westward, and I sincerely hope that he struck that honest reef, the reef called Calvados, in a fog, making for Deauville, and was drowned.

But of all the picking up of buoys and moorings, the most astonishing cast I ever made was in Orford River. There was a tearing wind upstream, and I was bowling along in front of it with a tall great noisy comber of foam at the bows, and straining my eyes for something to round up to, as it was at Orford that I had planned to lie for the night. There was a crowd of men upon the shore. They shouted to me and pointed, and I took their cries to be an invitation, for there, sure enough, was a little buoy of a fine red colour. My companion put up the helm, but not so abruptly as to lose all way, and, when I came near to the buoy I picked it up and made sure that she would swing round head to wind when she felt the strain of the moorings. Far from it: there was no strain. The little buoy came up as light as a cork, and, as the poet has it, ‘the waves still broke about the bows and the ship sailed on.’ The people on the shore were behaving with frenzy, and even at that distance I gathered that they were threatening us. The more readily, therefore, did I beg my companion to put her right before it, and go upstream into the night as fast as we could. And so we hung until the darkness fell, when we brought up outside Aldborough. Then it was we learned what we had done; for the buoy was a marking-buoy for a race, laid down with the most loving precision, and showing to an inch where the winner should pass. Nor have I since dared to land at Orford.

There is no piece of inland water in the world so crowded, so too well known, as this three-spoked lake of the Solent, Spithead, and Southampton Water. There is none upon which so many thousands for a lifetime past have spent their leisure, and none which is thought to be more exhausted in all that can be known of it. But those who think so, neglect the dimension of time. For, though you should know every entry and every sounding, the first hour in every flood when your craft can safely go over the banks, the dredged channel under the Hampshire coast, and Lymington River, and Cowes Roads and Ryde Sands, and Beaulieu and Buckler’s Hard, where I am told they launched great men-of-war, and Portsmouth Harbour right up to Fareham, and the Hamble to its bridge, and all the yard and wharfs of the Test and the Itchen, yet you do not possess that piece of water unless you see moving upon it the fulness of its past. You must see the last tragedy of the Civil Wars: the craft that might have taken Charles away from Southampton to freedom, and his young son cruising with the loyal fleet (which had declared for the King against the oligarchy) cruising just outside the Wight, but unable to save the King at Carisbrooke. You must see that which I shall always regret that I am twenty years too young to have seen—the great ships under full sail making out through Spithead in line for the open water. You must see the pirate boats of a thousand years ago stranded on the Bramble, because they did not know the water, and Alfred’s men capturing them so, and taking them off to Chichester to be hanged: a proper end for all Vikings. And you must see the great fleet of Roman transports coming in by an August night with a comet in the sky, for the recovery of Britain seceded and turned into a separate realm; the German mercenaries landing and pouring up the Winchester road, and meeting their fellow Germans in battle before London, and the Emperor Theodosius riding up Ludgate Hill in triumph after the usurper’s death.

Because of its size and of its security, because of its nearness to Europe, because of its many harbours, and one great harbour, this patch of water has been packed with history as no other in Britain, except London River; and now in our time the great London Dock Strike, more than thirty years ago, has brought Southhampton Water back to the mass of modern traffic, and made it the great port of entry from the West.

For it was the great London Dock Strike of ’89 did that, of which you may say, as of all the industrial battles of our time, that the victors lost.

Well do I remember the fevers of that struggle! I was but nineteen years of age; it was my delight to follow the intense passions of the time; and those passions were real. It was before the socialist creed had been captured for sham battle at Westminster. The leaders did desire, and did think they could achieve an England in which the poor should be poor no longer, and in which there should be sustenance and happiness for all. They did still believe the amazing proposition that what they called ‘the community’—that is, in practice, the politicians—could own all we have and handle it with a superhuman justice. Great God! They believed it!

I well remember that I was myself near to believing it, but I had the excuse of youth. They had also another excuse: not intellectual, indeed, but moral; for, intellectually, the socialist has not a leg to stand on, seeing that his theory is but a piece of arithmetic, and its application, coincidently with honour and freedom, a contradiction in terms. Morally I say, those men, those socialists of ’89, were justified by the imbecility of their opponents.

Nor has that imbecility grown less. The arguments for the capitalist scheme have to-day, after half a lifetime, the same bewildering fatuity they had then. In the interval the power of combined capital, the control exercised over us by a few exceedingly unworthy men, has multiplied I know not how many fold; but the valueless defence of such a condition goes on. One might imagine, to hear them, that the defenders of capitalism honestly believed their ephemeral and empoisoned chaos to have been present amongst us from the beginning of time, and to be normal to the human race.

It is no little irony to remember that those who have to state the most contemptible of such arguments in the press are themselves men commonly indifferent, or even hostile, to the interests they are paid to serve. It is not your sudden millionaire out of the gutter who writes in the paper he owns; he could not write ten lines if he tried. It is not your monopolist in ships, who, bleeding his country dry during her life-and-death struggle in the Great War, sets out to prove that his vile wealth is of divine origin. It is not the great bankers, getting their usury out of nothingness, who could put forward that apologetic which is necessary for the continuance of the affair—even for its doubtful and uncertain continuance to-day. No; it is a scribbling proletariat, insecure and exigent, which regularly turns out column by column daily to explain how right and just it is that he should himself remain insecure and exigent. It is as though the torture were applied to some poor prisoner to compel him to proclaim the beauty of torture.

That old socialist fervour of the great Dock Strike of ’89 and its time is dead: I regret it, for there was something very noble in its folly. A good half of it or more was made up of the love of men, and of a passionate hunger and thirst for justice. There was also in it that Apocalyptic, that Messianic, expectation of a new heaven and a new earth, and of its near approach, which is out of place in men of European blood, for it is not native to them, but it moves them all the same with the flame of its enthusiasm. In those days one paper at least, and that a paper of power in the London press, supported the revolt of the poor. No one has such enthusiasm to-day.

It was a time when men who have since been caught into the net of professional politics, and have lost their souls, went down to speak fiercely at street corners, and to light in the hearts of broken men the flame of human dignity.

I have seen in those days a young man, the heir to a great fortune (later a minister of sorts) standing under the flaring naphtha lamps of a muddy London evening, calling out the new gospel and the promised land. I remember the eager, stupid, upturned faces of the men and women who had come there from bestial depths of the slums to hear him; to go back into those depths, and there to remain. They lie in those depths to-day. It is not such a creed that will save them. I remember the great mobs that followed John Burns, and how I myself would go miles through the East End to hear him; and I remember that great whirlpool of men in Trafalgar Square on the most critical day when he and others accepted imprisonment. There is nothing now for which men would act so; no one now has a creed; therefore, I call that time of my youth a better time.

Of all that enthusiasm and conviction nothing came; the mill turned noisily enough, but it ground no corn. Those fevered exaltations were transformed within a few years to a contemptible shrieking and raving called ‘imperialism,’ and that also went its way, and worked itself out to its ignoble end.... We survive to-day to hear a perpetual flattering of America, a perpetual grumbling against the workers, their sullenness, and, overseas, the increasing peril of control over the alien races once so easily governed. The vulgarians who invented this music-hall cry of empire now suffer the vacillation and the increasing peril into which their own base bullyings have led them. They must live a little time longer and dree their weird, and learn what happens to those forms of pride which have not even the merit of dignity.

Of those years, one thing remains: the dock strike made Southampton.

I see the monstrous ships of the Atlantic passage pass up and down the dredged channel to Southampton Water, and, as I look at them earning their millions for the few masters of such machines, I say to myself: ‘This was the fruit—here is the only fruit—of those nightly enthusiasms by the London Docks, and of the cry for freedom, and of the passionate belief that within a few years after 1889 the poverty of London would have passed into an evil memory.’

I carried on between the forts at Spithead under the new day, with the wind steady from just west of south until I was relieved at the helm, and hour by hour we made for the Looe.

Now, with the Looe Stream, which is the gateway to the Sussex seas, I knew not whether I should take the coast in its order between the Owers and the Forelands, or carry on day and night to the straits. For I have cruised up and down that garden wall of my own land so much that it stands in my mind as a perpetual come and go, sometimes far out into the salt beyond sight of England, sometimes a run in before too much wind, sometimes a beating up for Beachy, sometimes just missing, and at others just making, any one of the impossible entries of my harbours.

For the county of Sussex—and Kent, too, for that matter—up to Folkestone and beyond has had tricks played with it by the Creator of the sea and land. There has been done to it what is often done to a human life—that is, the granting of an insufficient opportunity; opportunity enough to compel the use of a function, not enough opportunity for the fulness of that use. All the harbours are such that they can be made, but only on sufferance; Chichester Harbour (which is also Bosham), Littlehampton, Shoreham, Newhaven, Folkestone in its day, are not to be approached at low tide save for the work of man, and Pevensey is dead, and what was once the shelter of Hastings has been worn down by the seas, the chalk reef which came out like an arm to keep off the southwest weather; nor is the breakwater they have made there sufficient. Newhaven is dredged, indeed, and they have pushed out a great pier of stone into the sea to stop the eastward making of the bank at its mouth, and Folkestone has a roadstead made for it though it is incomplete and open, but in their nature all these harbours are to be used by the favour of the tide, and that is why it is so awkward to be caught in a gale outside while Arundel River, or the Bramber River, is still ebbing out over Littlehampton or Shoreham Bar; for both those bars show out at a low spring tide. Sussex in this is less favoured than the Caux Country of Normandy, which is her opposite number. For Trouville and Dieppe, of course, and Fécamp, and even Saint Valery, a boat like mine can get into at any time. This is for two reasons: first, because the Norman streams do not come from the country beyond the chalk hills as do our Sussex rivers, but are mere brooks, so that there is no weight of water to bring the clay silt down through the harbour-mouths; next, because they are not open to the southwest wind and to the eastward drift.

The Sussex rivers left to themselves get a bar piled up in front of their mouths by the southwest wind and the inshore tide, so that a bank of gravel grows up eastwardly continually in front of them. Thus the mouth of Shoreham river, the Adur, travelled eastward for three miles and more between the Conquest and the civil wars; until at last it came out into the sea right up near Hove. But later a great storm burst through the bank and made the present entry, halfway down.

Exactly the same thing happened with the Ouse. Its bank of shingle crept out eastward until, in the Middle Ages, the entry was at Seaford, and that is why Seaford was called ‘Sea’ Ford, and that is why the French would attack Sea Ford, and that is why, when they so attacked, ‘this Pelham did repel ’em back aboard,’ as you may read in Lewes Church. After that a storm broke through the shingle bank, making a new entry right down to the westward, and so brought into being what is still called the ‘New Haven.’

I have just said that the Looe Stream is the gate into the Sussex seas; and so it is, unless you go outside those rocks called Owers, which is a long way round: for the Owers run miles out to sea.

The Looe Stream runs like a river in the midst of the sea between the long-concealed flats and little rocks just under water at low tide of Selsea Bill and the reefs of the Owers outside. There is nearly three fathom in it at low spring tides, and the entry is marked by a couple of buoys just as one might mark the entry to a harbour: also, as with the entry to a harbour, you had best take the Looe Stream on the flood. So did we on that morning after the storm make our way against the ebb until we had Selsea Bill close before us, and we caught the flood through the Looe by the afternoon.

There I saw, upon the left, the pole and basket of the Mixen, that sea-mark which is my Sussex gatepost. And from that point, taking a course just south of east, I carried on for Beachy all through the night. The wind held, strangely unchanged, and no more rain fell. It was one of the longest spells of similar weather, exactly suited for my little boat under all plain sail, that I had known. For when the dull morning broke (and it was hazy) she still carried the same wind in her sails.

Indeed, it was so thick that I was a little anxious to catch the chalk precipice against the east and know where I was. There is a little inset making into the Bight of Sussex once one is beyond the Owers, and I might have been carried—especially with some little leeway—inside the point.

When I did see land it was not Beachy at first, but, a good way off on the port bow, a murky gleam, from the Seven Sisters: but then, quickly after, I saw dimly on a grim sky the sharp, perpendicular line of the Head and the stump of the lighthouse at its foot. My course had been well kept: I was heading well outside.

There is little to tell of that run, for it was uneventful. We had that day, somewhere about the Royal Sovereign Shoals, a dropping of the wind and its rising again from offshore, north of west, but nothing heavy in it, serving us well for our course up-Channel, the weather still too thick to see much of the land between Beachy and Dungeness. It was in full darkness that we made and passed that light and, with the next day, we still carried on to Dover.

I have a grudge against that great harbour of Dover: mainly, I suppose, because I have had bad luck in it, but also because it seems to me so wasted an effort of human energy. It has founded one of our new peerages, and while it was being made there was any amount of political talk about it, and also about the electoral conditions of its town. Those who know assure me that it was of vast service in the war, but I have read recently, I know not on what authority, that the Navy has abandoned it. It must always have been a difficult place to enter, with its two narrow gates and the violent tide across them. There is nearly always a lump outside, where the sea shows its annoyance at having this obstacle thrust into it; and trying to get in with a small boat like mine and in a light wind is a trial. There is peril of missing the entry in the rush of the tide, unless one comes close up to the breakwater-heads. If one does this, one never knows but that some great death-ship, on its way to Calais or Ostend, will leap out suddenly upon one as one opens the harbour. Moreover, there are all manner of regulations which I do not understand, as to where you may drop anchor, and as to where you may not, and once, when I left the boat for some weeks in secure care, I found her on my return completely covered with the soot of His Majesty’s coal.

We put in that day for water and to provision. We stayed but a little while, coming in by the southern and going out by the eastern gate, and passing as we did so that sad wreck of munitions wherein lay, I believe, the bodies of men entombed.

My companion took the helm up past the Foreland in a rather fresher breeze than we had yet had, and with more north in it, and I looked back along our wake and thought how here our time has managed to change too thoroughly what was the most famous sight of western Europe, the entry into England.

Although the old harbour (which lay between the hills—where the gasworks are to-day) had long ago gone dry, yet the marks of it and much human ingenuity added, maintained the port of Dover; and through that port went the prodigious traffic which bound this province of Christendom to the rest. Here, throughout the intense activity of the Middle Ages, passed and repassed the blood of the State, and the life running outwards from the heart of Europe at Rome. During all that time, on to days I can myself remember, this main majestic entry into England presented something of the same aspect to the traveller coming in from the sea. There was the town in its cleft; the masts in the little harbour; the castle on its height. Now, to my eye, the huge new haven, with its miles of wall, has changed and spoilt all this.

But, alas, something worse, more dreadful and more definite has come by way of change. Something which cannot be undone and which has subtly stolen their meaning not only from old Dover, but from the great keels of the fleet and its guns.

You may see the memorial of it marked upon the turf: the memorial of the place where the first man (and he a Frenchman), having flown the Channel, landed upon the sacred island, without leave of the sea.

That was a date for you, if you like! That was a year to remember! In history perhaps, many a generation hence, it will be made a dividing point between the old and the new relations of the peoples of Europe.

It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.

It is absorbing to watch change coming upon a whole civilisation. The thirty years of active manhood, the forty years of consecutive experience and memory which a man of my age can remember, the years 1884-1894-1924 form, perhaps, the best period for watching such things that we Europeans of the West have had since the Renaissance.

That may sound extravagant. The very great change introduced by the use of coal, and the machinery dependent upon coal, one hundred and fifty years ago, produced, I suppose, greater outward effects; but the spiritual fruits of the change were not ripe till our day.

The characteristic of our time is the crisis in the philosophy of Western Christendom: the thing began with Voltaire, but it has come to a head somewhat suddenly, following long after the material change.

For the great characteristic of the mental change between, say, 1885 and the present day, is the final segregation of Catholic philosophy from an opponent mood. That is the formula now applying to all the Occident, to all the one group of human beings who are variously called the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, the English, the more southern Germans of the Rhine and the Danube, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Irish, and the Scotch.

It is this group of human beings which conducts the world and will probably continue to conduct it; for it has the best physical stock, the greatest energy, the greatest intelligence, and the strongest and most continuous will: and its colonies can never replace it. It has always been at the head of humanity, even before it acquired, through its conversion to Catholicism fifteen hundred years ago, those vast new powers which have since distinguished it. Before Western Europe had opportunities for conducting the world as a whole, it was still manifestly the greatest thing in the world, and when its soldierly adventurers and seamen, and its growing mastery over physical things gave it opportunity it took a place from which I do not think it can be dislodged.

Most modern men assume a shifting of the headship of the world from our regions to some other; as to Asia or to the New World. But as they base their calculation upon mere measurement they are sure to be wrong. They make their estimate of human affairs on the analogy of physical science: counting only what can be exactly calculated and noting only the growth or decline of numbers, in men, in goods, in speed.

But human affairs are moved from deeper springs altogether. A spirit moves them. It is by the acceptation, the denial, the renewal of philosophies that this society of immortal mortals is marked, changed, or restored.

The Catholic philosophy is, I say, to-day, at last clean separate from its opponent. Its opponent is losing all trace of Catholic dogma. That is the special mark of our time.

It is important to emphasise this position; unless we understand it, the future which is upon us will not be understood.

In the sixteenth century the unity of Western Christendom made shipwreck. But there did not then arise (as would seem to have been the necessary sequence when one reads the great men of the Renaissance, Erasmus, or any of the lesser ones) an immediate separation between the Catholic exposition of the world, the Catholic revelation, and a new scepticism. The process was much slower than that. It covered nearly four hundred years, and it went, as is a habit of human change, through very tortuous channels before it settled into its final form—which has now arrived.

First came a curious process of irrational selection in dogma. Nearly all those who were reacting against the authority of Catholic truth preferred to select a bundle of Catholic dogmas, and even of Catholic disciplines out of the total and to reject the remainder.

Most of those in revolt, for instance, accepted the Incarnation and the Trinity; nearly all accepted the personal immortality of the soul. The general Catholic discipline of society, such as property, indissoluble monogamous marriage, and the rest was still taken for granted.

For more than a century the growing division appeared as a contrast between Catholic tradition and what was called ‘Protestantism’ in its various forms, the latter presenting bodies of doctrine chosen out of Catholicism, but less than the total of Catholic doctrine and discipline. The new selections produced, of course, a harvest of social results more tangible and concrete than the abstract differences in dogma and formula, and there arose a Protestant culture of the North side by side with the remaining Catholic culture of the South. The geographical division was purely accidental. Nothing could be more Catholic than the Irish of Donegal, nor more Protestant than the Huguenots of Nîmes, and the living centre of Protestantism was rather in southern France than in any other one region of the West.

But to this there succeeded another phase which, again, was not as logical as it should have been: a respectable development called ‘rationalism,’ which arose in France and gradually permeated Europe. Its highest moment of expression was the middle of the eighteenth century, its greatest pen that of Voltaire, and perhaps its clearest intelligence that of Diderot.

This short-lived but attractive philosophy reduced its main dogmas, or postulates, to as small a number as possible, and proposed that nothing should be accepted save upon the criteria admissible by all sane men: particularly the criteria of the senses and common experience. It still tended to preserve a certain small but fundamental proportion of Catholic dogma; but it did so on the plea that such dogma was (as it imagined) universal to the human race, or at least to all sane men. Most of its adherents—not all of them—postulated one, personal, creative God, the sustainer of the universe. Of the Catholic discipline they accepted property as a moral right, and its twin institution of indissoluble monogamous marriage as a necessary thing in society, though they were perfectly ready to discuss these and any other disciplines.

Undoubtedly the underlying conception common to the rationalists was this, that there is a certain knowledge of reality to be obtained through the reason dealing with the senses and experience common to all men, and only what can be so obtained is to be affirmed as true. What could not be so obtained is to be rejected as doubtful or false. But while this was their underlying conception, they could not shake off a considerable body of their Catholic past.

This rationalism rejected the miraculous in every form, and even the unusual. It began to substitute the document for tradition in history, it proceeded to a strict and most successful progressive examination of the physical world, discovering more and more of its sequences. This imprinted on all the rationalists did (not thought) a very special stamp, the stamp of proved certitude. They carried the feeling of scientific certitude which physical research had given them into the field of ideas. They came to imagine their metaphysical dogmas to be not transcendental but demonstrable by experiment, or, at least, by the common sense of mankind. Here was a curious and, perhaps, unique incident in human history: a faith which did not know it was a faith. The rationalists had not any doubts at all, because everything exterior to their faith seemed to them insignificant save in so far as it combated their faith.

For instance, if you take Gibbon (who was the principal English writer among them, and who was the chief English pupil of Voltaire) you will see that most transcendental truths affirmed by Catholicism—such as the divinity of Our Lord, the affirmation of miracle, the admission of tradition in history, side by side with the document, etc.—were to him ideas ridiculous in themselves, and in themselves therefore of no value. But though direct Catholic statement inspired him with a strong aversion, yet he revelled in, he took for granted, that very civilisation, Europe, which the Catholic Church had made. He had no conception whither rationalism was leading.

These people were certain; they stood upon a rock; and from the nature of their certitude they took it for granted that all the world would come to the same certitude by a mere process of evidence. They took it for granted that there was in all men a certain line of reason which only had to be turned upon any mass of affirmation in order to distinguish at once what was false in it from what was true, reckoning amongst the false whatever was affirmed without such proof behind it (of document or experiment) as they required.

They made no doubt that all this was final, that they themselves had reached finality, that the world was rapidly reaching it, and that nothing could disturb such a progress save some hardly imaginable reversion to Catholicism.

They were quite wrong. Before they had so much as convinced the bulk of educated Europe, three further developments were upon them, one of which has survived, and has become the modern opponent of the Catholic Church. The first of these three developments was a sceptical attack upon the postulates of the rationalists themselves: a questioning whether humanity and its common experience had ever grasped reality. That nonsense was German; it was Kant’s muddlement of the great and clear Descartes.

Next they had to meet a development rather English than German, which noted with great practical common sense the irrational flaw in the rationalists’ position. This flaw was the statement that a thing affirmed without the proof of common experience could not be true. It does not at all follow that because a statement lacks material proof, therefore it is untrue; it does not at all follow that because a thing is most unusual therefore it has not been.

For instance, witnesses were brought forward to state that a man had lifted himself off the ground without material force to aid him, and had so remained suspended in an ecstasy. The thing was most unlikely; it was opposed to the common experience of mankind. Therefore, said the rationalists, it is false. They were attacked by those who replied: ‘Your “therefore” is ill-chosen; it is itself a mere affirmation without proof. The thing may have happened.’ Hence mere suspense of judgment and what was called ‘agnosticism’ in England.

This second phase also was destined to a very brief life; but it contained two permanent elements of truth. These were, first that it denied the necessary truth of the rationalists’ postulates save only the postulate of the evidence of the senses (it denied the necessity of common experience being the only experience), and secondly that it affirmed (what was obviously true) that a mass of things credited to be real were not susceptible of proof through the evidence of the senses, or the common sense of mankind.

This spirit advanced to the denial not of a personal God, but of the rationalists’ belief in a personal God; and it attached to the Power or Powers behind the universe the comic term ‘Great Unknowable.’

The third development attacking the rationalists now occupies all the Western mind outside the Catholic Church. It came not from the head, but from the heart. It is an affirmation that truths may be recognised emotionally, and are not to be rejected because the intellect is either incapable of analysing them or of discovering any foundation for them. One might take as the germ of this movement a commonplace sentence of Pascal’s which has become, because it is obvious and superficial, far more famous than his deeper sayings: the saying that ‘the heart has its reasons of which the head knows nothing.’ This emotional protest against rationalism appealed to the vivid response awakened in the human heart by the life of nature. Such a trend could only end in pantheism: and pantheist the modern world, outside the Catholic body, has become.

The reason, for instance, that the poet Wordsworth attained so ill-proportioned a popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England was his pantheism. He is the exponent of that mood; not the most vivid—for he is vivid only in a few flashes, and usually dull and thoroughly bad; not the most intelligent, for he made no pretence at an intelligent exposition of the mood; but because he was so thoroughly steeped in pantheism: because every line of his betrays a taken-for-granted and, as it were, necessary pantheism.

In France and Italy this same reaction took the form of accepting the universe as blind but moral; the pantheist movement of the anti-clerical factions deified what were taken to be the common moral emotions of mankind speaking particularly of ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’ as though there were real beings in a universe where the personal power and virtues of a Creator were denied. Throughout the more cultivated Europe a certain number of special marks of the thing increased, notably the insistence upon landscape, upon our fellowship with the rest of animated creation, and side by side with these a disdain or negligence or despair upon the sharp points of Divine Will, of personal immortality, of possible doom.

There was formed at last in our own time, as the crystallisation of all this boiling, a philosophy, a set of judgments accepted vaguely, but finally, by all that is not Catholic in the Occident, and this I will call ‘sceptical pantheism.’ Over against it stands the defined, exact, and traditional revelation maintained by the Catholics intact. This revelation is as separate from that other mood as is the firm strand from sea water, or waking from dreams.

Here many men reading me (if indeed many men shall read me, for whatever number of men may read this hotchpotch of a book, most of them, I think, will skip these musing passages—seeing that their subjects are the only ones of real import) will reply:

‘In face of this great, new, general, modern spirit, which you call sceptical pantheism, and which I admit to be the chief moral phenomenon of our time, the Catholic Church is negligible. I accept your statement that there is a great general modern spirit or mood full of this feeling for nature and of brotherhood with all animated creatures and a substitution of emotional materialism for dogma. I may or may not accept your particular title “sceptical pantheism,” but I know what you mean. We are all agreed that the spirit is there; and in face of it the Catholic position no longer has weight: it no longer counts. It is a mere surviving habit with most of its so-called adherents (who at heart are themselves shaken in their adherence). It is ignorance on the part of a few sincere ones; a bitter refusal to accept evidence on the part of a larger number of less sincere ones: a deliberate shutting of the eyes. Catholicism is in process of dissolution and has become politically negligible.’

That is the reply which I think most educated men in England would give to the proposition I have just advanced: the proposition that the modern world is now divided into two sharply defined camps (of which Catholicism is one) standing each over against the other.

Now these objectors are provincial, both the better informed and the less. They should appreciate the modern world more exactly. They could arrive at such an appreciation by a wise use of travel, and of even their own contemporary society; by getting to know many kinds of men intimately in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, and by reading the words written upon the Catholic side—a thing which, for the most part, they wholly neglect to do.

Indeed, I have noticed that the finest and most conclusive pieces of Catholic apologetics are, in England and America, hidden away in little publications read by no one but Catholics; and by few, even of these.

If those who make the objection I have just recited would use travel wisely, or even read contemporary Catholic writing in their own country, they would appreciate that what I have said is true if one regards Western Europe as a whole. Outside England every one is aware of the Catholic Church; two great armies face each other, and the issue is doubtful. All instructed Europe sees a great duel set between the Catholic Church and its opponent. All instructed Europe sees that this duel is taking the form of anti-Catholic laws and of proposals of laws upon the one side, and upon the other of growing Catholic social power.

Those who, in England, once followed Calvin, who then at second hand followed Diderot and Voltaire, who then at second or third hand followed the French romantics, would to-day do well to follow this great modern quarrel, as it is joined upon the old battleground of European debate: the arena which lies between the Pyrenees and the Channel, between the Rhine and the Atlantic: Gaul.

They will find that you can hardly take up a random French newspaper in a French café without coming upon the great quarrel. They will find that the statues in the towns express it; the names of the streets; the titles as well as the tendencies of the novels.

In Italy, though in a different form, it is the same thing. In Spain it is manifest; in Belgium it is the centre of interest. Throughout the Occident the struggle is engaged.

The forces on either side use every weapon to hand. Those opposed to the Catholic Church use, when they are in political power, the bludgeon of a universal and enforced anti-Catholic popular education, against which the Catholics use the force of personal intelligence and individual argument, as also a sort of perpetual wrestling against their opponents through the claim of freedom. Where it is the other way about, and the Catholic tradition has at least the sympathy of those in political power, you have not indeed (as you may have later) strong insistence on the Catholic side—as defined, as direct, and as violent as the present anti-Catholic action—you have not, for instance, an insistence upon the compulsory public teaching of Catholicism in the popular schools, as you have anti-Catholic public teaching under the anti-Catholic governments; but you have the continued support of essentially Catholic things. The new dictatorship in Italy, for example, when it had cleared out the parliamentary nastiness, took for one of its first principles the restoration of the crucifix to the schools, and insisted upon the official world hearing Mass.

Having thus stated the great quarrel, I ought, perhaps, like a good modern, to begin prophesying, and state what its development will be. But I deny the capacity of our popular prophets. I do not know the future. But that these two comparatively simple elements, the Faith and anti-Faith, stand before us to-day should, I think, be clear to all sufficiently experienced observers.

There is upon the one side (everywhere except in England) a now large, a believing, and a coherent Catholic body: there is upon the other side the mood of which I have spoken—the mood in which it is even thought worse to be cruel to an animal than to a man; the mood in which the existence and nature of the human soul are contentedly or discontentedly left aside as undiscoverable; the mood in which the most fundamental institutions of society may be questioned or denied; the mood in which the fixity of marriage is universally abandoned, and in which property has no longer a reasoned moral right. Indeed, in poor support of property (outside the Catholic philosophy) to-day only two rotten struts remain: first, the assertion that possession by a few in the midst of a free community is natural because it has always existed; that is mere ignorance of history: secondly, the asinine pretence that the few who possess have a right to possession through their greater virtue and intelligence—as for instance a millionaire eating uneatable things to the noise of an intolerable band in any one of our cosmopolitan hotels....

I marvel that those who possess on such a tenure should not perceive the frailty of their tenure. They are, it is true, now fallen into a permanent state of panic, but they still have a vague conception that the present arrangement is in some ways secure.

It is not secure. It has no moral basis or custom behind it. The stability of a society depends upon an acceptation of its laws. If their enforcement is thought right, and the institutions which they defend are accepted by the conscience of men, the laws and society stand; if not, both fall.

But who to-day defends the right of our handful of rich men to govern as they do, and to control the state? How many even grant them a moral right to property? They are themselves the negation of property. They boldly proclaim that the over-reaching of others, the catching-up of other men’s fortunes into their grasp by tricks, is the only talent they can exercise, and, indeed, the only one which they revere in their fellows. They have ruined that middle-class lacking which the institutions of the State, and particularly ownership, lose their foundation. Nevertheless, our society, of which these millionaires are to-day the masters, will not endure; for no one thinks of them as lords: all despise them, and the greater part of men have ceased to envy them, and have begun to hate. The rule they exercise through demagogy, and particularly through their purchase of the press, and (less important) through their purchase of the politicians, cannot endure. So much is certain; nor is it prophecy to affirm it any more than it is prophecy to affirm the consequences of a natural law. Yet does it not seem probable that when this ephemeral phase is over, normal freedom will return.

The mass of men in an industrial civilisation is now caught in a machine from which they cannot escape, and subservience to which has become at last their nature. Every day there die some number of those men and women who could still remember an England of the countrysides and of personal loyalties. Soon, very soon, there will be none left but those who, all their lives, have known nothing but the universal wage system of our towns.

It is this which makes the coming of compulsory labour in our great industrial cities probable enough. Any one can see that there are only three possible solutions to the present insecurity of all public service. The best solution would be the production of a contented populace through the better distribution of property. Such a populace would, though workers, be interested in the stability and security of a society in which they were also partners; but that solution will not be reached, or even approached, because it is against the mentality of time; because it seems fantastic. The next solution is the servitude of all under a tyranny of public officials. It involves confiscation of property now owned by a few, and the organisation of the industrial world despotically under a group of politicians. It is called Socialism.

That will not come either, although it is the ideal still favoured by some few belated Utopians. It will not come because the rich are too powerful and the politicians too corrupt. If it did come, it would mean a complete breakdown of society—but that is by the way.

The third solution is compulsory labour legally conducted, as it is virtually conducted to-day, for the advantage of the owners; and that solution seems to be approaching.

When the general services of the community are interrupted by a strike—the necessary service of communication by rail, for example, or the necessary service of the modern post-office—the clamour for compulsory labour at once arises. It sounds reasonable. It is consonant to the mind of the whole community; and whether it is called arbitration or fixed contract, or disciplinary power of trades unions, compulsory labour is the underlying idea. It is close upon us.

But though the chance of servitude is a thing of the highest moment, I cannot help watching with amusement a small concomitant of the great process. I confess rather ashamedly to too great an interest in a subsidiary point, and that is, watching the euphemisms under which the process is covered.

For when men return to an old institution which they have discarded, and the proper name for which has grown odious (as we are returning to the enslavement of labour), they are particularly anxious to avoid that name, and spend much of their energy in discovering some way of getting the old thing under a new title—thus no one will call compulsory labour slavery, nor will even the words ‘compulsory’ or ‘compulsion’ appear on the surface. There will be some other term, and I for one shall follow with curiosity and delight the evolution of that term.

Just for the moment the odds are in favour of the term ‘loyalty’—it has a fine chivalric ring and makes an admirable mask; so men who continue to work for the profit of their masters during a strike are called ‘loyal.’ To insist upon one’s right to sell one’s labour at one’s own price, instead of being ruled by some corrupt trade union leader who has been bought by the masters, is to be ‘disloyal’ to one’s union, or even to one’s ‘leader.’

There is quite a chance that the words ‘loyal’ and ‘loyalty’ will capture the position, and that a few generations hence we may have placards on the wall, ‘Notice: A disloyal employé of the Meat Trust is at large,’ with a description of him following; and then we shall have ‘loyalty’ courts for trying and punishing people who rebel against compulsory labour.

Another word which is still in the running is the word ‘constitutional’; it has a grander sound than ‘loyal,’ but it is less tender. Men acting as free men are nearly always striking ‘unconstitutionally,’ breaking the terms secretly purchased by the capitalists from a ‘leader.’ ‘Loyal’ has also a better chance than ‘constitutional,’ because it is a shorter word; but perhaps the two will be used side by side. The legal indictment against a runaway slave, a couple of centuries hence, will be, perhaps, that his act was ‘unconstitutional,’ while the conventional term will, perhaps, be ‘disloyal’—or there may be some new term. But two things are probable—not certain: (1) that compulsory labour will come; (2) that it will be given some name not even remotely connected with the idea of slavery or compulsion.

Probable, not certain; for who can tell, in the millioned complexity of affairs, what new factor may not arise? A man may go round on a mule calling himself a prophet, and change the whole world to-morrow.

Yet men prophesy to-day, when all is mist and fog. They prophesy as never did they prophesy before: with an assurance and a conviction born of physical science misapplied.

This passion for prophesying has several sources which converge to produce such modern folly. I think the strongest motive is mere relief to the nerves. Men find that, by prophesying that a thing will take place which they desire to take place, they are themselves soothed.

One could make shoals of books by merely cutting such pronouncements out of the European papers during the last ten years, cuttings in which it would be manifest that the writer was in a reckless mood, indifferent to the probability of his assertion.

Another motive is the motive of reputation; for if the prophet brings it off, he can point to his success and be sure of a following, whereas if he does not bring it off, he can rely upon that atrophy of the memory which the universal reading of the daily press has brought about. Another cause, as I have said, is the influence of physical science, that influence which affects the whole of modern life, and nearly always for ill. Physical science has proceeded from discovery to discovery in our time, until men are prepared for any marvel. It is true that side by side with this advance in the control of physical things there has gone a corresponding decline in the critical faculty, in the powers of reason: and a still more rapid decline in morals. But the main fact is familiar to the whole world, and is, superficially, the most astonishing thing of to-day. Our time has advanced in its knowledge of inanimate nature and in its control thereof as no other past time advanced.

Now this process was everywhere accompanied by, and tested by, prophecy. The seeker after some new ‘law’ (as a sequence of physical phenomena is rather oddly called) would experiment until sequence was discovered, and, when it was discovered, he could confidently presume upon its completion; as, for instance, in the series of atomic weights. He could say, ‘You will find that this series will follow upon such and such a course,’ and when he was proved right he had achieved his end. The whole method of the progress was of this nature. It was like a man plotting down points upon a curve until he had aligned a sufficient number to give him the general formula, after which he could confidently say, ‘You will find, when the curve is fully described, such and such other points to lie along it.’ Or it was like a man reëstablishing a Roman road. He says: ‘I find a section of it here pointing right to a neighbouring port, and a little way on another section still pointing the same, and I am confident that I shall find some place-name or parish boundary or other relic confirming that Roman road throughout.’ He is pretty certain to be right.

On the parallel of physical science, this habit of prophecy as the confirmation of judgment spread to things, in which, by their nature, mechanical judgment is impossible.

Another negative source was ignorance, and especially ignorance of the past. Our moderns have more and more lost the knowledge of the past. They have been taught to despise it; they think of it first as of something foreign and odd; later, if they study, as of something very different from what it was. They, therefore, miss the lessons of the past, and especially the chief lesson, which is that the developments of society follow no mechanical process; that their way is not the way of an arrow, but of a serpent. Ignorant of this, men fall into the simple error of taking the tangent to the curve, of prolonging the actions of causes immediately before their eyes, and of conceiving the future in terms of the present, as children do. Hence these confident assertions that in so many years such and such a country will have grown to such and such a population: that such and such a language will have become dominant—and so forth.

But it is to be noted that this process is not often applied to evils, for men do not like to face an evil future.

I notice in this political or social prophecy one very strange omission: they never by any chance allow for that cause which is the major cause of change in human affairs: I mean religion.

Thirteen hundred years ago, the great fact before all men’s eyes was the Roman Empire of the East. The commander of the armies, a half-divine being seated in Constantinople, was the centre of the world and the acknowledged head of all that counted, from the Atlantic to the Persian borders, and from the Northern barbarism to the desert. Pressure menaced from the Persian hills and from the Tigris, and there was pressure from savage hordes in the mountains, and in the plains beyond to the north. Had men then been in the habit of prophesying after our foolish modern fashion, they would have told you this or that, but all in terms of the Empire, or the German and Slav barbarians, or the Persians; and while they so thought in terms of the only things they knew, there had already arisen, in a place remote and utterly insignificant, among tribes of a few hundreds without power, culture, or tradition, under conditions utterly negligible, the flaming spirit of Islam.

To our own modern world there must come either some vast religious reaction, or some vast religious novelty, or both. It is inevitable; for men live by religion. Yet no one speaking of the future takes it for one moment into account. I know of but one book, a book of singular genius, in which the thing appears, though tentatively; and that is in Jefferies’ fine vision called ‘After London.’ But even Jefferies did not make of it the main source of change. In his day men had already begun to lose the significance of religion in human affairs.

The great light of the Forelands on the weather side, the Goodwin Lights on the lee, stood like the lamps of a street in the fall of that darkness as, with the tide beneath us, we ran up for London River. But, the wind coming from more northerly, we had to choose between beating up and standing out.

We did the last, though the wind was falling, because that lane of water is full of the world’s shipping, and it was plainer to keep a course. By midnight the breeze had died down to a light air, and, somewhat later, the sky now very clear, we bore up on the other tack, the starboard tack, and went round till we had the dying air right abeam, and so came under brilliant stars within the point of Thanet land and dropped anchor and slept.

But early the next morning we woke to see the sun rising up undimmed over the wide North Sea, cut sharply by the calm horizon. It promised a warm and kindly day....

I could wish that this book, already so long as to have become intolerable to the reader, the writer, the printer, and all others concerned in its production, already so heavy as to have become a business to the publisher, the carman, and the railway people (if, indeed, they transport it, but I have known of books transported in bulk on shipboard, and sinking to the glory of God, before they reached their destination, and that to the great advantage of our miserable world, which is abominably overcrowded with books)—I could wish that this book, already so prolix, so otiose, so weary of its way that no poor gabbler in an inn ever more offended his audience than I will mine; I could wish that this book, which may be called The Great Sea Serpent of books, or again, The Cromwell Road of Books, or once again, The Pambiblicon, or endless Compendium, or again, The Long Arctic Night—what you will—I could wish that this book were longer still, I say, in order that I might drag you to perdition with the tedium of a million memories north of the Forelands, north of the Goodwins, north of Long Nose: memories of the Muddy Rivers of the Trinobantes, whose descendants inhabit rather than cultivate the Essex clay: memories of sandbanks rising out of the misty seas like whales, and of the platters of Harwich, and of the King’s ship called The Serpent, and of Orford River, and of the Onion, and of Lowestoft, Yarmouth, and the exceedingly difficult labyrinth of the Wash, and of the awful great tide at King’s Lynn.

But I renounce—not so much for your sakes as for my own, nor do I even speak of that Thames River which sailors called London River, and of the getting across it slantwise in spite of the great ships and the way in which time has silted up that harbour.

There are many curious things to be noted about the opening of London River. There is the double tide, so that a man making Long Nose from the Channel finds a new tide taking him up towards London. There is the way in which the best of all the channels into the river is the one least used, because it would make ships go out of their way. Ships come into the Thames either from the north or from the south, so they save time, which is money, by skirting either coast, but the main mid channel only the Dutchmen use when they have occasion to come up London River; I approve them. Then there is the way in which undoubtedly all this has silted up and risen since the time of the ancients. It is not only the stuff brought down by the river which has piled up these banks; there is also, I am sure, a lifting of the land. Nothing else could account for Thanet ceasing to be an island, or for Richborough standing now high and dry. The surface of the earth moves slowly up and down over centuries, and no one shall persuade me that Pevensey has run dry, Rye has been drained, Lympne has run far inland, Dover inlet has been closed, and the Wensum turned from a great sea passage to a ditch by any action other than the lifting of the land. The last thing to be said about Thamesmouth is this, that it was never shut for traffic since the beginning of recorded time ... until.... Men always traded up and down it with a swarm of shipping since men first left memorial of their doings, until the fourth of August, 1914.

It is not the least arresting of those many portents accompanying the Great War that in its first week, for the first time in human history, the port of London was paralysed.

And so back to the Forelands, and the run between the Kentish corner and the Goodwin Sands, with a few kind words to Saint Augustine, and Julius Cæsar, and the men that murdered Saint Thomas, and so grew tails, and such others as have landed at this turn of the coast; but none for Hengist and Horsa, who never lived at all, and yet have done all manner of harm. So through the Downs into the Channel again and back on my way to the sea of Sussex, and to the shores which may be drowned and swamped for a while by alien townsmen, but will keep their own counsel and in due time will rise again.

We brought up as night fell under the shelter of Folkestone Breakwater. It had fallen almost calm as we slid into the oily place under the darkness, and there was a long exasperating swell, not regular, but coming in stupidly from the southeast, whence no wind blew, and washing back from the stones of the pier. A drizzling rain also was falling and, in general, my companion and I paid for the splendour of those last days round the corner of Kent and across the Thames. It was too early to sleep and, as I had had the helm the night before, I had slept also during the day. I sat looking at my main chart, though I knew every inch (oh! come! say rather millimetres) of the coast I was to follow; and I pondered upon that shore-line of Kent and Sussex, and upon places which I had passed far off on my way eastward, and which I would now see from closer by as I stood down-Channel on my westward journey home.

How well (too well?... No) does a man get to know a bit of coast like this between Selsea and the Downs after half a life of lazy passages along it, and (to be just) sometimes of wicked winds! It becomes as familiar as a street; not only the aspect of the shore—changeable as that is—not only lights and buoys, and the hours for the turn of tides and all the rest of it, but the very sea itself in spite of its innumerable diversity.

But one effect of this familiarity is odd and unexpected,—I know not whether others have felt it; I have felt it profoundly (especially in the last few years),—and that is, the way in which the sameness of the sea, the reiteration at sea of similar emotions, of similar heights and bearing-marks of the coast, the unity of scene, of time, of action, the eternity of the sea, throw into relief the catastrophic change, the cataract of change, inland: the revolution which has transformed modern England; so that, of all the states I know, none has become so intimately different from its own immediate past, within the memory of men elderly, but not yet old, as England: yes, even South England: the refuge.

To many I know this is a cause of rejoicing. Worse things have given way to better in their eyes. To others it is a despair; they are of that temperament which can only repose in fixed sanctities. For my part, it is to me a regret. Because the change is unhappy, and happiness is the end of man.

The older England I knew (the spirit of which has almost disappeared) was a happier place; happier not only in the immediate elements of personal happiness, but in the more distant elements of corporate happiness, such as national pride and security. Yet some find the change to be good: so they do.

At any rate, in this mixture of good and evil, the thing that we should note—the thing the historian will note with amazement—is the profundity and the rapidity of the change.

There stand the same marks, the same headlands, which I knew as a boy; the sight to landward is very little changed. There are the same three forts of Spithead, through which I used to set out from the sheltered water. There is the same odd entry, somewhat shoal and difficult, to the branches of Chichester Harbour and Bosham, that famous hamlet in the story of England. There is the low shelf of Selsea Bill, and the mark on the Mixen, and the two buoys of the Looe Stream, and the Owers Light winking outside—as I remember it winking when I watched it, a little boy, from the height of the Downs. The entry to Littlehampton is the same, and to Shoreham. The breakwater at Newhaven, though it still seems new to me, is already old. Beachy Head Light, which used to be on the summit of the cliff, has been shifted to the beach below. The breakwater at Hastings has failed, but Fairlight gives you the same marks; and the entry to Rye is what it always was, a caution to camels who have passed with honours through the eyes of needles. Dungeness slowly crawling out to sea still seems the same. The only material change in all that passage is the dangerous failure called Dover Harbour, against which the rushing tide of the Straits tumbles angrily, finding interference after so many æons of freedom: so that just outside Dover in almost any weather you are tossed by a confused and irritated sea. But all the rest, the Forelands Light and the Goodwins, are what I have always known. Up and down that stretch of water there is somewhat more building on the land, slightly changing the aspect of the distant shore. There is the curious long group of huts on Shoreham beach, Seaford sending up red brick on to the green of the heights above it, and Bexhill to-day where once was loneliness. But take it all in all, it is the same scene, after nearly forty years of sailing on that sea and watching that land with Highdown still for the best sea-mark, and with the clump of Chanctonbury—yes, even the stump of Halnacker Mill, though it is now all ruins. The marks are the same. I might turn boy again and set sailing and not find the sea-things other than I had known them.

But on land—in the heart of man—what a transformation! There went into it the England of the seventies—an England aristocratic, free, with ease of movement within and acting externally, at will, upon all nations. An England with a sense of increasing wealth and of increasing knowledge, and an England English. Of all the men and women you met, most had been born in the villages, or little market towns, which are the roots of England. It was one society: that of to-day is another, almost foreign to the first.

Of all this revolutionary change, covering the short space of half a lifetime, two effects are most prominent: the fall of Parliament from great honour to contempt, and the change in the press. Of these the change in the press is the most obvious, and perhaps the most remarkable.

The press of England has passed, as a whole, in that space of time from one social condition to another totally new. There are still dignified exceptions, but they are survivals and abnormal. The general spirit of the press has utterly changed. It is as great a change as a man might experience who, having been brought up, let us say, as an English public school boy and university man, should so sink as to pass his middle age up-country in a strange colony far overseas, as a labourer among labourers.

At the beginning of the period, England had a press—daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly—especially designed for, and consonant to, an aristocracy: not designed for, and consonant to, lords and ladies; but designed for, and consonant to, a highly cultivated governing class whose power was unquestioned, and which then directed the whole community. The intellectual life of the nation was concentrated in that class: it included men of all births, but having in common the same cultivation of spirit, the same manner of talking, the same sufficient knowledge of the European past, the same less, but still sufficient knowledge, of contemporary Europe: and, what was most important, the same philosophy and social outlook.

This class (the gentry, or whatever you like to call it), had its own press, the great daily papers, the weekly reviews, the serious monthly and quarterly reviews. Side by side with that press there was a frankly popular press, which had no sort of power, and which was intended to amuse the non-political mass below. It was represented in two or three very vulgar Sunday newspapers full of police court cases, and murders, and the rest; and weekly papers with tittle-tattle about the superiors of the class which read them; but it was the press of the educated class which represented, mirrored, and to some extent influenced the general action of England.

In that press you had, for its daily papers, information more rapidly acquired, better balanced, more detailed, and more extensive by far than was to be found in the press of any other country. Everything of importance was known to the governing class of England through that press, and was known at once; and, on the whole, was known in something like the right proportion. The weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies were powerful organs of intellectual expression, and set also a literary standard. You saw in them the names of Tennyson or Browning, of Huxley and the Duke of Argyll, of Lord Salisbury, of Arnold. There was about the whole atmosphere of this press something of that tone of equality, ease, and sure touch which is the mark of a governing class in any aristocratic state.

To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared. Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.

No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago, when Italy was first rising to her modern position. Then the English papers closely followed all the ferment in Italy. It was to their columns that foreign statesmen turned for the facts and news on the progress of Savoy. To-day no Continental statesman looks at our press, save now and then to protest against some childish blunder. Again, even as I write, there is taking place in London a highly important conference between the bankers and politicians, the object of which, on the one side, is to diminish French power and, on the other, to maintain it. I turn to the ‘Temps,’ or to the ‘Corriere,’ and I find in the first paper very full and detailed accounts of the debates of the committees with an adequate educated judgment upon the results attained. In the second paper, I find a good, balanced judgment upon the situation with a leaning towards the English interest regarded as nearly identical with the Italian. But I defy any one to make out from ‘The Times’ what is really going on at that conference! You will read plenty of abuse of the French; plenty of self-praise and acres of generalities. But you will not find yourself informed—although the great business is going on here in London right under our eyes.

I thought it the part of a contemporary to follow the affair as closely as I could. I soon found it necessary to give up looking at the English papers, and to buy the papers of the Continent in order to instruct myself. The method had the disadvantage of delay, but had the advantage of giving me real information. The few papers which still keep up the façade of culture in their form, though certainly not in their contents, are, again, of less importance than the new popular press which makes no pretence to culture in any form, which is owned by impossible adventurers, such as no one a generation ago would have had in his house, even had they then existed;and it is this popular press now which is the main instrument in the moulding of opinion.

The revolution is complete. It is as complete as though the education of the country were to pass from the hands of the classicists and the mathematicians to those of Big Business, and boys were to be taught advertisement and salesmanship instead of the humanities. And this our passing from one mode of public expression, and control by suggestion, to another utterly different and far baser system, has come silently and has worked its effect unnoticed. It is only by contrasting then with now that we notice it.

We are arrived in England to-day at a condition in which the popular newspaper gives its owner a power in the State comparable only to the power of finance and far superior to the nominal power of those poor play-actors, embarrassed, furtive, who still bear titles of authority: Secretaries of State for this or that. And yet, by the very nature of the organism, this new instrument of power, the mob press, must be ill-informed, unreal, and—what is not without its importance—morally vile.

Less obvious than the complete change in the press, in its functions and character, perhaps less pronounced and less advanced, yet certainly of great moment, is the fall of the House of Commons and of Parliament in general from authority and dignity to well-deserved contempt.

But for this evil there is more hope of remedy than there is for the evil of the press. When any organ of government reaches a certain degree of decay, some other automatically takes its place, and if the substitution is made promptly enough, the state may bridge over the passage without disaster.

Such substitution lies ready to our hand. We have only to increase the power of the Crown, and that would indeed give truth to the boast too often repeated that the continuity of names is valuable to society. The monarchy is still there in name, and the giving of true power to it is therefore still possible.

The decline of Parliamentary authority and dignity has been wholly a rot from within. The people of England did not desire it; they desired nothing better than to continue their old respect for that aristocratic institution at Westminster round which every activity of the nation had centred. The damage was done by permitting personal corruption to go unpunished. When once the habit arose of condoning the use of public position for private enrichment—and that secret—it was impossible for the strength of the institution to survive. The temptation of the politician to enrich himself at the expense of the public good (to take bribes, to sell monopolies and contracts and policies) is so very strong that, unless it is met by as strong a check of discipline, it is bound to run riot, and it has done so. It has come on in a flood, especially during the last twenty years, taking every conceivable form, but all those forms proceeding from the immunity of the evil-doers. Men possessed of political power create public monopolies which they handle for their own enrichment: they take bribes, they give out contracts as against payment. They will assign a valuable state right to some company and then, resigning office, take up a highly salaried post in that company. The traffic in honours for the private advantage of those who bestow them is the least of these cancers which are eating away the body of Parliament. The habitual practice of blackmail in the course of personal intrigue for power (it is mutual between the politicians and the newspaper-owners) is the worst. But all are excessive in degree, and between them they have done their work. It is now impossible to restore to politics, which are now professional politics, the old prestige. It is gone.

In the presence of these experiences, the commonplaces of Parliamentary life with which all Parliamentarians are thoroughly familiar, and which at last the public are learning, the attitude of the politicians themselves is one of tolerance: the attitude of the public is a weary and disdainful indifference.

This attitude of tolerance on the part of the politicians, this policy they have chosen of excusing and pardoning corruption, seems to me more worthy of discussion than anything else in public life to-day; it is the centre of the whole affair.

Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government. Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption. So long as men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, for ever—so long you will have corruption present among those who govern, except under a strong king. It stands to reason that the appetite for wealth or notoriety or both will incite men in political power to obtain them, and as that power gives them in a large measure control of the courts of justice and full control of the police and of prosecution, they can be rendered in the main immune from the consequences of their actions. I should not think it remarkable to learn that in any country, at any time, there was very great corruption among the public men. What I should think remarkable, what I should think a phenomenon worthy of special study (because it would be exceptional and would necessarily produce exceptional results), would be to hear that the corruption was not punished, and that those who were caught and exposed in flagrant acts of corruption were actually promoted. That is what we have here to-day in England.

It is with the toleration of parliamentary corruption as it is with disease in the human body. Hardly anybody goes through life without some bad illness. Most people have some one or other specific weakness which develops into a long illness ending in death, and all human beings whatsoever are liable to disease, even those few who do not for the moment suffer from it. But everywhere you see the human race fighting disease, and trying to avoid its consequences. Now if you found a man who took his disease as a habit, and tended rather to accentuate it and foster it, you would think his action abnormal. You would say, ‘Certain strange consequences will follow upon this.’ And you would be right.

I have found the modern toleration of bribery and blackmail in politics to be defended with very different arguments, but I fancy that the underlying motive of the defence, the real basis of it in a Parliamentarian’s world, is patriotism combined with a certain new scale of moral values which has come in with the century. I fancy all those who have in my hearing defended this later-day toleration of corruption, really had at the back of their heads a conviction that such degradation of public life did the country no great harm, being no more than a sort of permanent necessary evil. They think that the lessening of the security of the state which would come from exposing and punishing the culprits a much greater evil than letting them go their way. It is something of the attitude which most people take towards a family scandal. They say: ‘These things will happen anyhow; and we shall lower the family by any public discussion of them.’ So say the more reputable at Westminster.

There are then, as I see it, two elements in the now admitted and universal toleration of bribery and blackmail among politicians. The first element is the noble element of patriotism which judges that of two evils you must choose the least, and that the evil of a certain minimum necessary amount of political vice is far less than the evil of shaking authority and order in society and at the same time weakening the country in the face of its rivals. The second element is the judgment that the levying of and submitting to blackmail, and the offering and taking of bribes among Parliamentarians is only one out of hundreds of moral evils in the state, and is one of the least.

If these be the real foundations of the tolerance of these evils, the artificial arguments advanced are many and varied. I remember one political dinner table in Surrey where we thrashed out the whole business at some length. Everybody present was connected with public life directly or indirectly, and no one, so far as I know, was himself or herself guilty. Yet, out of twenty, only three of us, of whom I was one, maintained the necessity of checking the evil. All the others, the remaining men and, of course, all the women, relied upon this argument: that what you wanted in the conduct of the state was ability, sound judgment of the elements in any problem to be dealt with, and a good forecast of the immediate future. If you had these, they said, the country prospered; lacking these, any disaster might come. If you got these qualities in those who governed, it did not matter whether they were also given to peculation, or to odd tricks of spying and threatening, or to selling policies and monopolies, or to taking bribes.

I think that answer would have been sound if you could have proved that there was some necessary connection between good judgment, resolute will, patriotism, and all the rest of it, and the particular vices in question. For instance, a man defending the luxury and worldliness of a religious hierarchy might very well say: ‘These are moral evils, no doubt; but you will hardly get men able to conduct a great organisation who shall at the same time be indifferent to pomp and pleasure.’ But I would contend that in the case of Parliamentary life the connection does not apply. The kind of man who advances by taking or giving bribes, especially the man who advances by taking bribes, the kind of man who spends his energy in ferreting out the secret actions of rivals and then threatening them with exposure if they continue to compete with him, is not the kind of man who will normally have good judgment. Such men are, as a rule, of a very base sort intellectually, and the vices from which they suffer are the vices of small, uncertain, and despicable minds. If I wanted a man to manage a great business with foresight, strong will, and a good understanding of the elements of the problems before him, I might choose him in spite of a record for cruelty or pride—two very detestable vices. But I should be unwise to choose him if he had a record for petty peculation and perpetual intrigue among his fellows. Men suffering from these vices do very well in the lower ranks of the secret police, but they are unfitted for high position. Indeed, we have had experience in the last few years, and very rude experience, of what happens when you give such men even a small part of the governing power in the state. It was such men who judged, for instance, that the Jewish Communist revolution in Hungary would succeed. It was such men who supported the Greek adventure against Turkey, and it was such men who capitulated to Ireland.

Another argument I have heard advanced is this: that corruption on a far larger scale was vigorous during all the lifetime in which England was rising to its modern position of a Great Power.

From Walpole to the younger Pitt, from the South Sea Bubble to the Act of Union, public life was conducted universally upon a system of bribes. No one can deny that these were the years during which the modern greatness of England was founded; therefore (it is advanced) there is something quite out of proportion in fussing about a modern Chancellor of the Exchequer taking a few thousand shares across the breakfast-table, or a modern Postmaster-General signing a contract in favour of some private company and then taking a highly paid post with that company as his reward; for, if a very much more extended system of bribery did the country no harm in its formative period, we have nothing to fear from little individual peccadilloes in the way of taking a few thousands here and there, as is the habit of our public men to-day.

I fully agree that if the bribery were of the same quality in both cases, this argument would be sound. But the whole point of the affair is that the bribery is of a different kind.

The corruption of the eighteenth century was the purchase by those who controlled honours (and in a large measure the public purse) of votes in support of their policy; at the same time it was the open grasping of lucrative sinecures and large salaries by those in power.

An eighteenth-century aristocrat would give his dependent a lucrative sinecure, or a position in which he was free to accumulate great sums; he and his would vote themselves an exaggerated salary; he would vote out of the taxes great sums to his colleagues, and he would take many private opportunities for enriching himself, as the natural action of a man possessed of the power to do so through a public post.

But your eighteenth-century aristocrats who gave the tone to all that system, the big squires of the time, and the great merchants whom they digested into their body, were neither influenced in policy nor lowered in dignity by what they did. They did not profess to be acting otherwise, they did not put themselves into an absurd position, nor live in panic of exposure. A man would take money or honours as the wages of voting for the Government, but members of the Government themselves would not habitually take money in order to advantage company promoters who desired to fleece the public. There were occasional examples of this sort of thing, but it was not normal. You cannot imagine Walpole, for instance, or the younger Pitt, at either end of the period, taking money from a chance financial adventurer who should have come to him to get a new duty put on, or an old duty taken off, or a new kind of monopoly invented, whereby to fill his pockets.

I cannot imagine a man going to the younger Pitt, and saying: ‘My brother who is your colleague in the Government and I have a project for fitting sailing-ships with such-and-such a device. If you will help us to make it a law that all British ships shall carry this device and purchase it from us, we will give you a share in the proceeds.’ Our modern politicians act in this fashion; and, what is perhaps worse for the authority of Government, they do so in a fashion which makes them ridiculous: they loudly protest their innocence on the eve of exposure, and live always in some trepidation, and in a sort of incessant wrestling match with those who could make their lives intolerable by public insistence on their little habits.

Here is, I think, the core of the whole matter. Those patriots who rightly think they serve the country by strengthening the authority of even nominal governors, but who are persuaded that the toleration of political vice strengthens such authority, make in this second postulate of theirs a very obvious error. It is an error which they would not make, I think, if they lived the life of their fellow citizens and knew the average Englishmen better than they do.

All politicians live a life apart from the general mass of the less wealthy, less privileged classes, though they themselves are so largely drawn from these strata. It is astonishing when one hears them talking among themselves to discover how remote they are from the general interests of the public, and how seriously they take their own sham divisions and sham battles, and with what strange simplicity they believe that these sham battles are of vast moment to the electorate. The public as a whole is now fully acquainted with the nastiness and degradation of public life. It certainly does not appreciate the ultimate consequences of these, but at any rate it is no longer under any illusions. Indeed, my experience is that the ordinary member of the public, the average man in the liberal professions and in commerce, rather exaggerates the evil than otherwise, although he does not recognise its danger. He is ready to believe that pretty well any politician may be found taking money, and he does not distinguish as he should between the two sharply different types of Parliamentarians: those with a dirty record of their own, and those with a clean record who permit and support the dirt in the midst of which they live. For it must be admitted that public life is full of men who would never dream of themselves doing such actions as have come to mark their profession as a whole; but these men do not on that account stand excused. They support the nastiness in the midst of which they live; they refuse to correct it; they even, as a rule, join those who would prevent its exposure. They are accessories to all those acts which they not only personally despise and are disgusted with, but which in private they denounce. For they could put an end to the system if they preferred justice to their own little careers and the general good of England to their personal ease or notoriety.

Sometimes they try to salve their consciences by substituting a general for a particular condemnation—the oldest device known to governing man for shirking the duties of government.

I remember an excellent comedy of this sort in which I myself took part. The Admiralty had given an order for the making of an important part of a man-of-war to a small company (what is called a ‘one-man’ company) run for the profit of a friend of the Prime Minister of the day.

There was nothing excessive about that bit of favouritism. It was natural that a politician should help a friend: some one must have the order, and there was no great harm done to the State. But the next step was of real importance.

It turned out that the part supplied was defective. Those who supplied it might plead that they did not know the defect to exist, nor indeed would it be to their advantage to have allowed such a defect. It was probably an accident, though it did point to the work having been given to people inadequate to its gravity. The part was sent back to be put right. Instead of being put right, as it should have been, an operation was performed with the effect of concealing the defect, instead of remedying it. The part was sent back in such a condition that, had the flaw not been discovered, the great man-of-war itself and its crew might have perished. This was obviously a very serious matter indeed. If there is one thing the politicians must not be allowed to play tricks with, it is the Navy.

Now, the Parliamentarians appointed to look into public accounts issued a fine bombastic denunciation of the awful business, and used such words as would have satisfied Jeremiah. But they were very careful not to mention a single name.

That seemed to me something of a defect. I was in Parliament at the time, and I set out to find out who were the actual human beings responsible for this crime. Unless one got on to them and punished them, one might as well have done nothing in the matter. If things of this sort can be done with impunity, they will certainly be done again.

I found the greatest difficulty in getting any single one of those six hundred-odd men in the Commons to act with me in the matter. I did not, of course, approach more than a few, because there were not more than a few who would even consider the public good; but by one of those few I was told that it was not usual to act in this fashion; that such action was regarded as ‘personal’; that the thing was now some months concluded and ought to be buried; that it was difficult to arrive at the ultimate responsibility in these affairs—and so on. They all applied to a principal unit of the British Navy, to an English man-of-war and a thousand English lives, the principle that the politician was more important than ship or crew, and that their own Parliamentary skins were more important than the country.

The individual private member of Parliament has no power of action in Parliament except the chance of the ballot or the putting-down of a question. I put down my question. It was answered in the most pathetic manner by the politician directly responsible, who called Heaven to witness that I had traduced by my question an old and valued friend of his own whom he loved as a brother. That the fault was that of ‘a subordinate.’ The House murmured its sympathy. I pointed out that I had traduced no one, that I had only asked for the names of the responsible people and for their prosecution. Whereupon, as another journalistic phrase goes, ‘the matter was allowed to drop.’ But I need hardly add that the person nominally responsible was promoted to a public honour, and that no ‘subordinate’ appeared.

It was only a small episode, though it would not have seemed small to the officers or crew if their ship had struck in the middle of the night owing to a defect in the steering gear—still, honestly, it was a small matter as politics go. There are hosts of much graver instances, but it was a characteristic one.

The argument that this now universal taint covering public life is tolerable because the same thing goes on in every country where there is a Parliament, and therefore does not weaken us in the face of our rivals, has two bad flaws in it.

The first is a neglect of the fact that the cancer called Parliament is no longer universal. Some of our rivals are already rid of it: all are disgusted with it; most will probably have cut it out within a generation.

The second is that nowhere is Parliament bound up with the Nation as it is in England.

The French parliamentary system is at least as corrupt as the English: from the little I know of it, I should say it was worse. The American, I understand, is not so bad; but it is still sufficiently corrupt to excite the perpetual vigilance of the American electorate and press, which are as ruthless in exposing such evils as we are resolute in concealing them. Of the Polish and German systems, which have just come into existence, I know nothing. The Italian was contemptible, and the Spanish a joke. They have both been happily kicked into the street, and I trust we shall hear of them no more.

But the parliamentary corruption of other countries is attached to an institution which in those countries is subsidiary to the national life. No one in France, for instance, regards the Parliament as a necessary, or even a properly working, part of the national existence; it is a modern experiment, very unpopular, and standing in some dread of far more permanent and deep-rooted institutions, such as the University, the Army, the Church, and the landed system, with which it has to work as best it may. The politicians in Paris can and do work great harm in all departments, but they do not form the traditional organ of government, rooted in the country, as the Commons do here. They live under perpetual protest.

In the United States, as everybody knows, the central representative assembly is altogether subordinate. The Senate is far more powerful, and far more respected. The President is high above both. He has monarchic powers superior to anything of the kind in Europe—superior by far to those exercised by the King of Prussia in the days when that individual was also military head of the Reich.

But in England Parliament is the great national institution. It is bound up with the whole life of the country. A disease attacking it is a national disease. The lawyers’ guild, which is in England far, far more powerful than in any other country, is inextricably bound up with Parliament. There can in England never be any question of the armed forces acting apart from Parliament; nor can there be apparently (and unfortunately) as yet a kingly power, like that of the President of the United States. A King of England would to-day find ample popular support against Parliament; but how is he to move?

Therein lies the gravity of the situation. Parliament will not reform itself, and yet there is no power external to Parliament capable of reforming it. Though the nation were in the last extremity of peril, we have not at hand some force external to Parliament capable of pushing aside its maleficent impotence and taking over the reins. Indeed, when certain politicians were secretly trying to make peace behind the back of the Allies during the crisis of the Great War, no one moved—except a few humble seamen, who stopped one important voyage of their own accord. Should we live to see an invasion of this country, or a shameful capitulation, I fear that the disaster and the shame would still be presided over by the politician. During the Great War we owed half a dozen insanities to the fact that with us a politican can order the movements of armies, in spite of the soldiers, and affect—though he can hardly direct—the foreign policy of the country, in spite of its competent permanent officials. It is true that the millionaire newspaper-owner, especially if he be devoid of instruction, and therefore of all responsibility, has more to do with the framing of a policy than has the politician, and it is true that the great and weighty financial interests are much more powerful. But Parliament is the door through which everything must pass—or, to change the metaphor, it is the instrument which alone can be used for direct effect; and its decline is on that account of very grave moment to the future of the country. It is therefore a despairing thing to say that the decline cannot be checked, that the disease must run its course; yet I fear there is nothing else to say. It is manifestly too late to set things right. There came one moment after another in which a remedy could have been applied; but each opportunity was refused, and I do not see how any sufficient one can arise in the future.

To have checked the rot at the very beginning, as, for instance, during the telephone scandal, would have been easy enough (already, a few years before, Mundella had been thrown out of public life for what was then thought a monstrous lapse, but what would now be thought hardly an irregularity). It was even possible to turn the current as late as the Marconi scandal. One virile decision in that crisis might still have saved Parliament. But I do not see, nor do I think any one else can tell me, how it can be saved now.

The test is very simple. On the day when a Cabinet Minister is heavily fined or imprisoned for irregular action in connection with money the tide will have turned. Does any one believe that such a day will come? I for my part certainly do not. Therefore the decay will continue. The system, already deep-rooted and established, will become a matter of course, and there will happen in the long run to the House of Commons what has happened to every institution which gets past praying for; but, meanwhile, what of us who have no other instrument? What of the nation?

One point of view was presented to me by a wise old gentleman who had spent about thirty years (doing nothing) in the House of Commons and then wangled a peerage (for nothing) out of his colleagues; for he desired to live on under the same roof and to spend the last of his days amusing himself—remaining an indulgent spectator of what was still, to him, a slightly interesting affair.

It was on the evening of a day when I had been trying hard to dig one of the more noisome of the politicians out of the earth in which he had taken refuge after a particularly unpleasant affair. The old fellow had watched the process with an active amusement, and I think he was grateful to me for having provided him with an entertaining day. He had been watching from the gallery, but that evening, as I dined with him, he warned me against wasting too much energy in such a pastime.

I assured him that it was no pastime—that I took it very seriously indeed.

‘I know you do,’ he answered, ‘and that is just what I am warning you against. The country is carried on not by these fellows,’ jerking his thumb towards the door, ‘but by the general activity of its people: that people is sound and will come well out of any ordeal.’

The war proved him right.

‘What the mass of the people do not do for themselves,’ he said, ‘is done by a rather too large but very conscientious body of permanent officials, underpaid, industrious, and exceedingly competent. The politicians are only the scum on the top; they have very little to do with the happiness or the unhappiness of the nation, and not much to do with its strength. Even the points of policy are, as a rule, decided outside their circle in the weightier financial world. It is a waste of energy to draw that covert too long.’

There is a great deal to be said for the old boy’s attitude. But I could not help asking him what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had been faced with a Chancellor of the Exchequer taking shares over the breakfast-table; for he remembered Mr. Gladstone well, and had for him that odd half-worship which so many men who knew that powerful, short, oratorical genius of a better past were smitten with. I said, ‘In Mr. Gladstone’s time the Secretaries of State had more privacy than our modern politicians, and their actions interfered less with the general life of England than they do to-day: with the permanent officials far less; yet you know as well as I do what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had found a member of his Government taking shares from a company promoter over the breakfast-table.’

The old man answered to this that the standard was altogether higher in his own youth than it was now, and that though he could not deny that Cabinet Ministers’ present habit of taking money was a weakness to the country, yet he thought it a small weakness. He added a thing which I have since discovered to be profoundly true, ‘At any rate, it cannot be remedied, and so you are wasting your time.’

In all the discussions—far too many!—in which I have engaged upon this subject I found only one really enthusiastic defender of the system, and that was a wealthy young Anglo-American who either just had taken up, or was just about to take up, a place in public life. To him our present way of going on had a sort of special excellence peculiar to this country and worthy of Bacchic praise. He spoke like a man who has come into a promised land, and he was moved to indignation by my criticisms against certain recent events. He applauded a Cabinet Minister who had just given a valuable monopoly to a company promoter and then resigned, and accepted a permanent highly salaried post in that company: for he repudiated any connection between the selling of the monopoly and the immediate subsequent acceptation of the salary. He was indignant that such a connection should be dreamt of. They were separate acts.

First the politician, in his capacity of public servant, honestly weighing all the pros and cons, decides that a company promoter is the right man to have a great public monopoly—worth millions. He gives him that monopoly. There the matter ends.

Then begins quite another set of actions. The politician as a private individual accepts a highly salaried post in the pay of the said company promoter and lives on the profits of the monopoly.

Only insane suspicion could connect the two acts.

It was a startling theory to hear: it was also completely new to me. But it had this advantage: it made him a contented supporter of that which others either laughed at cynically or held their tongues about.

I shall be interested to see, as I grow older, whether this type of defence develops, and whether we shall find the taking of bribes and the levying of blackmail a matter, not for commonplace acceptance, but for indignant praise. I do not think that we shall have much of that argument. It is exotic. No man of our blood is really comfortable in the presence of financial corruption. He may tolerate it: he may practise it; but it does not fit in with his conscience, still less excite his enthusiasm.

However, one never knows. There are very vile commercial transactions which certainly excite admiration to-day as surely as they would have excited in our fathers the determination to hang the culprit. Laxity in the relations between men and women which our fathers would at least have condemned is to-day not so much condoned as defended and made into a sort of religion. Direct treason in time of war merits a few months in the second division. So it is on the cards that I shall live to hear men say in awestruck tones, ‘What a fellow Binks is! The Prime Minister’s agent offered him ten thousand pounds to clear out, but he got one hundred thousand pounds in solid cash before he had done with him. He frightened the old fool to death by showing he knew all about Chapel Street.’

After all, I have heard much the same tone of religious veneration in those describing some stock-exchange swindle of our day, and a fortune made in a few weeks by the deception of the multitude and the ruin of a thousand families.

So there is still hope.

The authority and prestige of Parliament have sunk like water in a river lock, sogging away rapidly before our eyes.

The process should normally have been more rapid, and the ultimate crisis to which it should surely lead was due to come long before this.

It would have been much better for the country if it had so come. The Marconi scandal was an excellent opportunity for an explosion and a thorough clearing of the air. The far worse Dope scandal, taking place when the nation was fighting for its life, was perhaps the last chance offered. If half a dozen of the politicians and company promoters compromised in the Dope scandal had been openly tried and sent to penal servitude during the war, we should have been the better for it to-day. Instead of that the whole thing was hushed up, and the loot remained in the hands of the looters: an example followed by I know not how many others in the short seven years which have elapsed since that worst of abominations was condoned.

Perhaps the strongest brake that was put upon the pace downhill, the strongest force restraining a final collapse, and thereby condemning the country to the gradual and certain extinction of Parliamentary authority, lay in the momentum of the old Parliamentary prestige.

To an older generation, of whom some few survive, the idea of a seat in Parliament was connected with honour and a social position worthy of ambition. That generation carried on an admixture of the old tradition which only slowly died, and while it lasted supported the collapsing fabric with which it was intertwined.

Such men, before the present nastiness began, had already acquired a habit of the House of Commons, they lived in the thoughts and customs of an older and much better time, and lent to the diseased institution of their age the memories of its health during their own early youth and manhood.

Some very few still survive to lend the corruption of professional politicians a remnant of moral support. When they are gone we shall have the problem to face in full as we have not yet had to face it.

Of those men who had thus obtained a habit of the House of Commons, as it were, and who for long lent it a fictitious value which it had long ceased to possess, I would particularly recall—for I followed his public action closely and often discussed it with him—Sir Charles Dilke.

He belonged, of course, to an older time, when politics were still respectable and even dignified, and, having begun to take root in them much earlier in life, he felt acutely the wastage of his powers—for he could never have office. But he was treated by the Chair as a sort of Elder Statesman, and I shall always remember the solidity and detail of his experience in foreign affairs. He was one of the very few men of my time (overlapping from an older time) who knew what he was talking about when he discussed the Continent, and who followed the change which was taking place over all Western Europe; and he could value the degree and the quality of it in each country, or at least in the Germanies, in France, in Italy, and in Belgium. Spain he discussed less, and I do not know what his measure of acquaintance was with Spanish affairs. I always count his evidence as valuable in the interesting discussion upon the origin of Gambetta. He knew Gambetta well, and did not despise him. He said that he was a Jew, and that, therefore, he was quite alien to the French temper. That, of course, was also the thesis of many of Gambetta’s enemies (for Liberals always seem to think that they are saying something unpleasant about a man when they say that he is of Jewish race), but it was not the testimony of most of his friends. Two of Gambetta’s friends I knew well enough: one was a relative of mine, the other was that very great man, Déroulède. I do not think Déroulède was a very accurate observer, but at any rate he testified to the intensely national quality of Gambetta, and swore that there was nothing Oriental about him at all. My own relative, who was of a more cynical temper, said that he was certain of the same thing from careful observation. Gambetta seems to have been a man who commanded real and profound affection, but his legend will be distorted, for it is one of the curses of the modern political chaos that those who by accident or by their desire enter its whirlpool of personal competition and consequent advertisement must inevitably be betrayed by fate. Not one of them can appear as he is, and not one of them will ever be taken by posterity to have anything of greatness about him, however great he may be, unless he can exercise some talent outside the wretched parliamentary business into which he has been caught up.

There is in that life such an admixture of violence, cunning, and bombast, quite apart from the money taint, that a man’s name becomes a mere label for hatred and ridicule in places where the struggle is taken seriously, as it is in France or in Ireland. It becomes a mere label for play-acting and make-believe in a country such as ours, where politics are not taken seriously.

No English Parliamentarian could suffer the legacy of hatred, virulent contempt, and documented, detailed, evidenced accusation which will prevent the name of Gambetta from taking an honourable place in history. But, on the other hand, no English politician, since the nineties, will cut any figure for posterity unless he can do something outside his profession. There is nothing to prevent the Postmaster-General, or the Leader of the Opposition, or any other of the circus, from writing a good poem, or painting a good picture; but, unless he does something of the sort, his name will only be one of a hundred names, half comic and all wearisome. For the trade has lost its dignity. It is found out.

I have delayed on this subject too long. It is public property, and filth at that, and people are tired of it, for in their heart of hearts they know that nothing more can be done, that public life in its Parliamentary form is past saving.

It is possible that I exaggerate the effect of the evil; it is possible that some novel remedy besides the obvious one of increasing the power of the Crown may set things right. It has certainly done so in the past; the break-up of one institution apparently necessary to society has discovered the importance of other forces which have saved society by bringing up new forces unsuspected. It is possible. Perhaps it is probable. It is to be hoped. And that is all one can say.

Such thoughts are suitable for a drizzling calm, and for wet canvas hanging useless and dead in a hopeless dawn upon a sea without life. But with the coming of a little wind, a little northeasterly wind in the growing light; with its blowing away of the misty rain, and its bringing a heartening into the morning, I prefer to turn to better things, to the realities: to the English water and to the English land.

The mist scudded off from the Folkestone waters, the light not only brightened, but grew coloured, until at last there was a fine, flaming dawn over the Kentish chalk and the Bastion cliffs of the Kentish salient, and very soon she was running to it prettily, her wet canvas holding the wind well, and, if anything, pressing her a little too hard. My companion came on deck with the morning, woken by the new life in the hull, and by the run of the sea along the sides. As yet the water was smooth, for the wind was a trifle off shore, and would so remain until we had come into the hollow bend of the flat coast, the last of which runs almost due south, and which ends in the shingle of Dungeness. Also we were still on the ebb and the wind followed the stream.

After the sun had risen the breeze grew stronger, and even violent; but as I greatly desired to round the Ness before the tide should catch me and raise a sea, I would not take in a reef. So I held on, though with the more southerly course we were setting, and with the wind still rising, it was not over safe; for that wind was now coming almost due aft, her boom was right out, and I feared a gybe. To take every advantage of any slight northing of the wind that might come, I ran closer into the coast at a still greater risk of gybe, of course, if the wind should hold where it did when we came to the sharp turn of the Ness. We were now running for it very hard indeed, and the Nona, splendidly as she lifts when properly trimmed, was burying a little owing to too great press of mainsail, and with head sails doing no work to support her bows. A slight sea had risen, although the tide was still with us and with the wind, and once or twice she took it green as she plunged forward.

Then it was, as I held the Nona with difficulty thus, right in front of a wind that was now much too strong for her canvas, that I understood what had long puzzled me, and that is, why the ancients, down to the end of the Dark Ages in the Mediterranean, and to, perhaps, the fourteenth century in the North, continued to step the masts of their square rig so far aft. It was to prevent burying; to give the bow its chance of lifting to the sea. For this rig sailed at its best with the wind aft, and when their boats were running so with the great square sail driving them into the seas, had their mast been stepped forward, they would have buried dangerously.

And why do you think men were so long in adapting the fore-and-aft to larger boats?

But I cannot delay to consider such things of the past, for I am at the edge of Dungeness, and with my heart in my mouth lest at any moment she should gybe over.

I handed the helm to my companion, who had a better eye than I had, and a firmer hold, and he, with great skill, did just save the gybe. We had not the luck to hold the tide; we caught the turn of it and the early flood nearly two miles from Dungeness Point, and, as you may imagine, it raised a short and buffeting sea, which made our task the more perilous. My companion handled her beautifully, until I told him he could go as near as he liked to the end of the Ness, because the land shelves down here so steeply as to give one deep water right up against the shore. We were, perhaps, five minutes in the worst of the ordeal just opposite the lighthouse before we could put the helm a trifle over and get the wind fairly on our quarter and breathe again. It seemed about half an hour, for the strength of the tide, even against that wind, made us forge very slowly past the land, and it was astonishing to see the white foam racing by while the shingle, a stone’s throw away, barely crept past us; but save the gybe he did, as I said, and there came that placid moment when she would take a turn a little west of south, and then fairly west of south, and the roar of the wind was at her quarter and I had no excuse for an excessive nervousness. But she was pressing too hard altogether, so now we threw her round (as I ought to have done long before), took in two reefs, and then were able to set an easy and comfortable line for the doubtful harbour of Rye, which neither of us had yet made. We feared we might touch at the entry, but we had at least the comfort of a wind off the land, yet far round enough to take us in without beating, and we were on a rising tide.

I have often thought that a boat running snug and properly reefed to suit the wind is a model of the virtue which the theologians called temperance, and which has nothing to do with the historical dread of wine bred in those who have themselves suffered from, or have seen in their families, the disease called dipsomania. For temperance does not mean doing things half-heartedly, still less does it mean doing or not doing things extremely. It means suiting your implements to your motive power, and not carrying on at a risk. It is not unconnected with dignity, and there is something profound about it; I will call it the contralto among the virtues, and leave it at that.

We sped on (the stream against us, very slight now that we were inside the Ness); we saw before us the broomstick, or whatever you like to call it, which marks (or does not mark) the entry into Rye Haven, and the last bare remnant of what was once the crowded fairway, a market for the nations—the harbour of Rye.

The little town stood up inland, neat and beautiful, red and grey, a pyramid thrown up towards its squat steeple; for under that keen northeasterly air all was clear and well cut. The pilot book gave us no comfort; it only told us that the deep changes with every gale, and, as for the lead, there was no use for it, the shore would come too steep; what we had to do was to look out for the outer buoy, and round it, hoping that as we turned we should neither touch nor get into irons, but still have the wind easterly enough to round to take us in.

On the plan I had by me the fairway was marked dangerously near the point from which the wind was coming, but I trusted to luck, and still kept her to her course.

Any man making Rye Haven must first resign himself to the will of God, and consider, especially if the boat is running and a little over-canvassed, that death is but a mighty transition; that it is all sand hereabouts, with no cruel rocks to tear the tender body with their horrid fangs; that nothing is worth calculating in life, because things happen by fate anyhow, or by chance, but certainly not by our direction; and that if, or when, she strikes, it will not be his fault. There is no man living that can ever tell you the deep into Rye Harbour, for it shifts with every wind, and at the best it is of the narrowest. As for me, I have made it four times in my life, each time I have touched and never have I struck, and how the thing was done no one knows. Nevertheless, they still build ships in Rye, and the tradition of the sea is all about it, though what used to be the old haven is now a field.

I remember sitting up to a very late and clear sunset of a Whit-Monday, gazing, under the sharp northeast breeze (the Nona moored at last to the wooden quay), at the pyramid of red roofs, and the highly successful walls and battlements of Rye, and considering within my mind many things.

First I considered within my own dear mind how marvellously this place had been preserved, seeing what modern England is, and what modern travel is. It is, of course, a stage-scenery town, such as I have heard that Rothenburg is in Germany, and, therefore, there is an interest in preserving it; but I never heard that any such pains were taken to prevent its destruction by increase or rebuilding, or by any of those courses which bring death to beauty, such as a good train service, clubs, large and torturing hotels. Rye manages to live on. I suppose there is a spell. At any moment it may be broken, and the flood will pour in.

Being what it is, you cannot begin thinking about Rye without finding yourself dragged on to consider preciosity, and from that to the business of letters is but half a step.

Here at Rye did I meet and speak with Henry James, who was in the very heart of letters. Here also did I meet his brother, William James, whose business in life it was to write about philosophy, but whose conversation when I met him turned principally upon the subtle diplomatic genius of the King of England then reigning; upon the stability of English institutions; the excellence of the English police, and the singular faculty shown by our institutions of permitting differences without conflict. Also the piercing wit of the paper ‘Punch,’ and the profound wisdom of ‘The Times.’ I had just come back with a companion from foreign parts; I had been sleeping rough, and I was in no condition to take part in polite conversation, so I did all the listening, and, as I listened, I still considered how literary was Rye. And so now, years after, looking at Rye from my boat, was I led on to consider the trade or business of letters.

When a writing man approaches that subject, he feels—at least I feel—like a man before a jumbled heap of material of all kinds—one of those refuse-heaps in which you may pick up stray bits of machinery, or salve a little fuel, or find what you will. Or again, it is like being in one of those shops—there are few of them left, alas!—where an old half-wit has collected all manner of things, so that one knows not whether to begin by the furniture, or the glass, or the pictures, or the second-hand telescopes, or the books. For there is an indefinite number of ways of considering letters.

To those who have had to pursue letters as a trade (and to this I have been condemned all my life since my twenty-fifth year) it certainly is the hardest and the most capricious, and, indeed, the most abominable of trades, for the simple reason that it was never meant to be a trade.

A man is no more meant to live by writing than he is meant to live by conversation, or by dressing, or by walking about and seeing the world. For there is no relation between the function of letters and the economic effect of letters; there is no relation between the goodness and the badness of the work, or the usefulness of the work, or the magnitude of the work, and the sums paid for the work. It would not be natural that there should be such a relation, and, in fact, there is none.

This truth is missed by people who say that good writing has no market. That is not the point. Good writing sometimes has a market, and very bad writing sometimes has a market. Useful writing sometimes has a market, and writing of no use whatsoever, even as recreation, sometimes has a market. Writing important truths sometimes has a market. Writing the most ridiculous errors and false judgments sometimes has a market. The point is that the market has nothing to do with the qualities attached to writing. It never had and it never will. There is no injustice about it, any more than there is an injustice in the survival of beauty or ugliness in human beings, or the early death of the beautiful or the ugly. There is no more injustice about it than there is in a dry year hurting a root crop, and a wet harvest hurting a corn crop. The relationship between the excellence or the usefulness of a piece of literature, and the number of those who will buy it in a particular form, is not a causal relationship, it is a purely capricious one; and I, for my part, have never complained of the absence of a market, nor flattered myself upon the presence of one when a market turned up, though I have certainly been astonished at the way the market would behave.

For some few months thousands upon thousands—at one moment sixty thousand a week—of the articles I wrote upon the war were demanded by the public. Some months later the same articles, of the same value, or lack of value, were no longer demanded. There was no particular reason, the articles were clear, and based upon such insufficient knowledge as I shared with all my fellow citizens. I had no private information save upon the point of numbers, and that was the very point upon which the public grew most easily fatigued, and were at last most sceptical.

Mr. Hutchinson, for whose work I personally have (though I am afraid my judgment is not worth much in these things) a great liking, wrote among other books a book called ‘Once Aboard the Lugger.’ It was exceedingly amusing, fresh, and, as I should have said, well worth anybody’s buying. I do not know how many copies he sold of it, but I should imagine nothing very astonishing. A little while after he wrote a book called ‘If Winter Comes,’ and it sold by the stack, and by the ton. One could see it piled up man-high upon the counters of shops in America, and it sold, and it sold, and it sold.

Mr. Wells wrote a book which is most remarkable, and will probably make a mark in English literature. It was called ‘The Time Machine.’ When Henley (I think it was) was bringing it out by instalments, the appearance of each was, for me at least, and for very many others, the chief event of the month. I do not know how many copies he sold, but there again I will swear nothing comparable to the numbers he has sold of later books which certainly will not stand out in English literature. That one which I hear has sold most largely has always seemed to me to be a mere repetition of what his audience already thought they knew, and of a philosophy which they already held: I mean his ‘Outline of History.’ It was mainly a repetition of the popular mythology of to-day, of antiquated scientific jargon, full of the popular errors, but it was clear, well-proportioned and vivacious, showing a rare economy in the use and placing of words. It was also (and that is high minor praise for any book purporting to deal with history) astonishingly accurate in details. The names were properly spelt; south was never written for north, nor east for west; the dates were all right. Any one who has attempted the writing of history will not belittle such a feat: I, least of all, because I am constitutionally inaccurate in such things, and I will write left for right and north for south as a matter of course, and the word ‘Tyre’ for the word ‘Acre,’ and so on. At any rate, the book, with all its good and bad qualities, is obviously not of the first class, and equally obviously is not destined to endure, while ‘The Time Machine’ is quite certainly of the first class, and is quite likely to endure. But I believe that the huge ephemeral demand for the ‘Outline of History’ created no special, certainly no very great, demand for the more permanent ‘The Time Machine.’ In general, I am assured by publishers, that when there is a sudden boom in a writer’s work, they hardly ever manage to float on that boom a resale of earlier works; while if these earlier works are unknown, it is almost impossible to give them a popular fame on the strength of the later works. Witness the late Mr. Hudson’s ‘Crystal Age.’ I came across it as a young man in a bookshop in the Euston Road on a winter evening. I took it up and began reading it, and I read it so long that the bookseller told me I must buy it, which I did. Now, towards the end of Mr. Hudson’s life, he became deservedly famous as a writer upon the things of the natural world, and especially upon animals. But what made him famous was not his subject, though he was both accurate and learned; it was his manner of writing. One would have expected, therefore, that the ‘Crystal Age’ would, upon his fame tardily arising, have a quiet and equal fame. It did not. I say that there are no laws governing these movements. They are capricious and incalculable.

Sometimes one hears that a great demand for a book, or for a set of newspaper articles, is due to something touching a common feeling in a particular fashion, something which great bodies of men necessarily feel together. There is a sense, of course, in which that is a mere truism, for it is clear that obscure stuff, or stuff dealing with matters that could not interest great numbers, will never sell. Why should it? But if the statement is intended to mean (as it usually is) that whatever sells in great numbers does so through this quality of a common appeal, that anything having this quality will always sell in great numbers, and that this quality is in some way a rare thing discoverable only in ‘best-sellers,’ then the statement is manifestly false. A great deal of matter which possesses this appeal—enormously the greater part of such matter—remains unknown, and that which is best known is often rather weak in such an appeal. There are a great many factors entering into the result of a great popular demand which people forget because they are irrational: fashion is one, routine is another, inertia is a third. I know one man whose name, for the honour I bear it (he is now dead), I would not publish, since what I am about to say of his work is not flattering. He wrote a great number of stories, all of them with exactly the same plot and exactly the same characters. There was a beautiful chocolate-box girl, there was a villain, there was a hero who became rich after being poor, there were parents who objected to the match, and there was a racehorse. Had he departed from the formula, he would not have sold. As it was, he sold by the million. He was not only as modest a man as you could find, but exceedingly generous. He put on no airs; he made no error as to the nature of his success; he is already forgotten. Nothing shall persuade me that any one of many thousand men could not have written exactly the same; but a certain vast public got used to that particular insipid food, and wanted it unchanged, just as you and I get used to a particular kind of breakfast, and eat it every day of our lives.

Of course, there is a different set of factors operating in different phases of society. The popular best-seller of to-day depends upon the existence of our great towns with their machine-made citizens, all working blindly in little grooves, lacking any common direction—a dust of individuals. He depends also on that new-fangled, mechanical, and, let us hope, ephemeral, institution called ‘popular education.’ If you tell millions of boys and girls (nearly all the citizens of the state), at the age when they receive unquestioning any dogmatic teaching, that their ancestors were repulsive savages, first actually bestial, later exceedingly vile, and that these ancestors passed through certain stages, and were ‘Cavemen,’ and men of the ‘Stone Age,’ and of the ‘Bronze Age,’ and so forth; then, obviously, writers using such terms, and taking for granted such a mythology, will fit in with the popular market. The demand for books, or for writing in any form, is created by minds already moulded, and any kind of writing which tends to break the mould is resented and left on one side. In older phases of society, judgment upon writing was passed by a few well-trained and leisured people, who handed down their judgments to a larger class, but still a small class compared with the whole state; and it is clear that in such a condition of society—which was that of England from the last third of the eighteenth century to the last third of the nineteenth—there would be no best-sellers in our modern sense, and that there would be a nearer approach between the demand for a book and its excellence. But there also the mould had to be considered. Macaulay’s false rhetoric sold well, because it agreed with the religion of his day. No historical work telling the truth about James II would have sold in his day, nor for that matter would any such matter sell in ours.

For religion is here, as elsewhere, at the root of effect. Robert Louis Stevenson was an excellent writer, but his popularity reposed not upon his excellence alone, but also upon the consonance of his religion with that of his readers. A man who was perpetually telling you that it was your duty to be cheerful, that you must take pleasure in God’s creation, that you had a ‘task of happiness’ would cut no ice with the Irish, or with the Italians, or, in general, with the Catholic culture of Europe, but he rings true in the ears of the Protestant culture. Conversely, what the French powerfully call the ‘bitter taste of reality’ has very little chance with the crowd of the North. It is a spur and a relish to the crowd of the South. You could not sell Barrie in Arles nor Baudelaire in Pudsey.

The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the canon, the attempt to achieve a standard. To get a canon is the first requirement of letters. For though it is said that time will test literature for us in any case, this is not universally true; and, even in so far as it is true, it is better to have the good things to our hand than to wait for time to establish them. Such a canon requires not only intelligent analysis, but a common philosophy into which our rules must fit. It is, therefore, with great difficulty arrived at, or perhaps not to be arrived at at all, in a period of confusion like ours. But the attempt to arrive at it never loses interest—no, not even to-day.

One of the things which always seem to me best worth saying in connection with letters is that prose should be distinguished, not only from verse, but also from rhetoric; and that prose in itself, mere lucid, economic, unornamented prose, is the foundation of good letters.

If the national prose is sound, the rest of national expression will come of itself. But this matter of prose has to-day been nearly forgotten. For most of us perhaps the phrase ‘good prose,’ or ‘fine prose,’ really means rhetoric. It means a passage in which the soul is stirred by a choice of rhythm and sound, and a mystical connotation of words in some passage not definitely reduced to versification. Thus, all the great passages from the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which are familiar as examples to our generation are essentially rhetoric; so are the excerpts quoted from Bunyan, such as the fine closing passage of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; so is every single passage quoted from Carlyle; so are even those quoted from Newman and (I am sorry to say) those quoted from the greatest of our modern prose writers, Huxley.

But prose is rightly to be distinguished from anything of that kind. The excellence of prose lies in its adaptation to the function of intelligent expression or of narration. It is a statement; the end of it is not the exciting of emotion but the clear presentation, whether of a record (in fiction or fact) or of an idea, which the writer desires to communicate to his fellows.

He that succeeds in presenting the idea lucidly, so that no modification or subsidiary idea confuses the process; he that succeeds in presenting vividly to the reader an image of particular fact, or of imagined fiction, vividly arisen in his own mind, is a writer of good prose; and the better he succeeds in this faculty of mere exposition, the more he excels in the supreme character of lucidity, the better his prose. Prose which is redundant is worse than prose which is economic in the use of words, simply because economic prose is the better statement. Exactitude of word and idea makes better prose than the use of many synonyms and of vague terms, simply because it ministers to lucidity. A mass of adjectives or adverbs is usually (not always) ill in prose, because usually (not always) the idea which the writer has to express does not involve all these modifications; they only slip from his pen through laziness or through his having heard them before. It is obviously better prose to say, ‘I was tired out,’ than to say, ‘I was wholly tired out,’ unless for any particular reason you wish to express complete exhaustion. It is obviously better prose to say ‘the sky’ than ‘the blue sky,’ unless for any particular reason you are concerned in your description with the colour of the sky.

But the worst enemy of prose to-day is the snobbishness of rules and forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and no more. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, ‘except when euphony demands it.’ I would go further; I would say that when the spoken language has arrived, as ours has to-day, at the universal use of the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric and in verse the end is the emotion you desire, non-rationally, to excite; but in prose the end is rational presentation, narration, or statement of thesis: nothing more.

Judged by such standards, the two best prose writers in English are, I think, Dean Inge and Mr. Gosse; for they, each of them, write on subjects where they have much to say, with the use of no words other than those needed for such expression, and they put those words invariably in the right order. Cecil Chesterton is dead.

I had almost written that there is no such thing as ‘great’ prose, in the sense in which there is ‘great’ rhetoric or ‘great’ verse. The very best prose may be dull if the subject expressed is dull to the reader. You will get no better prose, for instance, than Newman’s ‘Arians of the Fourth Century.’ It is not dull to me, because I happen to be interested in that bit of history, but it would be fiercely dull to any reader who was not. Nevertheless it is first-rate prose. Newman, having to write about a particular thing upon which he had made himself immensely learned, having to tell a certain number of facts, and to express a certain number of ideas, does so with the best choice of words in the best order—and that is prose.

The very fact that any sound definition of prose involves many negative and only one positive (to wit, the positive need for lucid expression) makes it true that good prose is a common art. Excellence in prose is not common to all: far from it; but the faculties whereby excellence is reached are common to all. A man who is a first-rate walker, who carries his body with an exact poise, who can walk far without fatigue, and at a good pace, is a rare man; but we can all walk, and we all approach in various degrees the standard that man has reached. So it is with prose. Those who think that good prose must have something odd about it—a few archaic words, little eighteenth-century tricks here and there, subjunctives popped in, like currants into a cake—these resemble men who in walking every now and then in high spirits do a little dance for fun. They are free to do so; we are not displeased. We cannot help noticing them (which is, perhaps, their object), and no one is the worse for the gambado. But in so far as they indulge in the fantasy, they are not walking; and if they do it the least bit too much, they are playing the fool. A wise man said to me once, ‘Don’t go and get your words from the artist colourman’s.’ Would that I had remembered his words in youth as I now humbly acknowledge them in age.

But the rhetorician wisely indulges in extravagance, and as for the poet, he may use what words he likes, and go to any extreme, or to any excess, so long only as he hits the mark. For it is with poetry as with love and with singing in tune. It is with poetry as with the sense of reality. It is with poetry as with the toothache. Either you have it, or you have it not.

There is no getting near poetry; and though there are degrees in it, the boundary between its being and its not being is as sharp as a razor: on the one side is It, and on the other is nothingness. By which I do not mean to say that poetry is only found in certain violent stabs of emotion such as Shakespeare and Keats can launch, for it often inhabits page upon page, as throughout (I will maintain) all the Fourth Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and countless other great achievements of the past in every tongue. But I mean that, in a long flight or a short one, immediate or continuous, poetry is poetry, and not to be mistaken for anything else. Charles Kingsley (I ought to have dragged this in at Appledore, and not have waited for Rye) said to a woman, ‘Madam, there is poetry and there is verse; and verse is divided into two kinds—good verse and bad verse. What you have here shown me is not poetry, it is verse. It is not good verse, it is bad verse.’

But, really, if I go on in this endless way of discussing the difficult trade of letters, I shall never get her nose round for the sea again. I had almost forgot I was sailing. What! Of two such occupations, the benediction of dealing with the sea and the degradation of scribbling, can you forget the better for the worse? I can. I am of a fallen race. I follow downwards.

But I am aboard the Nona again, and must put her out down-channel. This will I now do, and sail out of Rye by the first of the ebb under too strong a northeast wind at two o’clock in the morning with the waning moon just rising, the sky clear, two reefs in my mainsail, the second jib, and a reef in my foresail, knowing well that I must watch all night, and that I shall get no sleep till morning. For it is one of the glories of sailing that you are under the authority of the heavens, and must submit to the whole world of water and of air, of which you are a part, not making laws to yourself capriciously, but acting as servant or brother of universal things.

It would be no bad thing if some one (I am not competent) were to draw up a list of advices for the brutish man who is too poor to sail a big boat, or is not such a fool as to desire one: I mean a list of advices for a man who sails such a boat as the Nona: say, boats from seven tons to twenty.

The first article in such a list would be this: Cruising is not racing.

But on this one could write a whole volume, with digressions upon the general evils and corruptions of these our latter times when the Beast has most certainly been let loose out of the Pit, and is going about the world breathing smoke out of seven mouths, and stamping 666, with his hoof, on the foreheads of all his elect.

For no one can doubt that the practice of sailing, which renews in us all the past of our blood, has been abominably corrupted by racing. I do not know whence the evil came, but I suppose it came like most evils, from a love of money. The love of money made men admire the possessors of it, and so they came to think of sailing as they do of riding horses, or of any other sport—as something to be tested by what the rich man could do. And clearly, when it came to making machines for going fast through the water by the aid of the wind alone, the rich man had his advantage. Then I suppose there came in also that craze for measurable things which has done us all so much harm in the last lifetime and a half. When I say of the Nona, ‘She is a good boat,’ when I stroke her and she purrs, there is nothing here measurable. When I say of that really abominable boat [name censored] (well worthy of her name)—that I had rather she had been sunk at birth than continue to sail the seas, you cannot apply a single measurable test to prove that the solid, noble Nona is good and the flimsy, whimsy [name censored] is bad; but in racing you can. Boat A gets in front of Boat B. Any fool can test that, and to-day was made for fools.

Well, then, whatever the root of the evil, evil it is, and it has corrupted our way of living in happy little boats. Remember, and write it down: ‘Cruising is not racing.’ If your boat is a home and a companion, and at the same time a genius that takes you from place to place and, what is much more, a good angel, revealing unexpected things, and a comforter and an introducer to the Infinite Verities,—and my boat is all these things,—then you must put away from yourself altogether the idea of racing, as much as, when you consider a wife, you must put away the intellectual woman and the waxwork girl—both of whom may have their place for all I know. The cruiser, the strong little, deep little boat, is all I have called it. It is a complete satisfaction for man; but if you let in racing you are letting in the serpent.

Here you will say, ‘Have you then never raced?’ Never, sweetheart, except to get away from danger, which I loathe. I have never raced another boat in my life, although I have been on other men’s boats when they were racing, and admired their special talent, just as I would admire the talent of a man who successfully climbed the greasy pole. You must expect of your boat—your companion boat—a rational behaviour. You must say to yourself that when she is doing seven knots, she is doing well, and when she is doing nine, she is excited, and will be the better for a night’s rest.

When you are on a long passage, even with steady weather, you had better bank on three to four knots and no more. For what with beating, fishing perhaps, the falling of wind, over-reefing in terror, and the rest of it, you will not do more. I have always thought to myself, knocking up and down the coasts of dear England, that if I did a hundred miles in my twenty-four hours, I was doing very well indeed.

Once I spent a whole day drifting with the tide from the two Etaples Lights to the Dune, and very nearly all the way back, but even that did not persuade me to a motor, for, of all things abominable to God and His Saints, I know of nothing more abominable than machinery and petrol and the rest on board a little cruising boat.

I would rather die of thirst, ten miles off the headlands in a brazen calm, having lost my dinghy in the previous storm, than have on board what is monstrously called to-day an ‘auxiliary.’ The name is worthy of the thing. By auxiliaries the Roman army perished. Further, it is a nasty foreign sort of term. Call it the machine and tell the truth. I am told by those who use the abomination that it is ashamed of itself, and often will not start, as though to say, ‘You came out to sail the seas, and I am reluctant to cheat wind, weather, and tide in your favour.’ I will not deny that mechanism is valuable to those who conduct huge hordes, the rich and the poor, from Europe to the New World, but in a little cruising boat I will have none of it. It would be foolish to be rid of it in armament, for there it does give one’s country a great advantage, but in a little cruising boat it is as much out of place as is electric light where one should use candles, or as are motor-cars in the hunting of wild beasts. But I must return to things more practical.

My next rule would be: Get everything shipshape and, so far as you can, keep it shipshape.

That is, see that the falls are clear, that everything is properly stowed away; that you know where everything is to be got at in any emergency; that you have to look for nothing; that you make the most of every space—and the rest of it.

All this I say knowing full well that I myself am incapable of it; but I am giving advice, I am not practising. I am expending myself for the good of others, and what I myself do is no affair of yours. The best known and the most tragic tag descended to us from antiquity is, ‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.’ Some would say that they are not only the most tragic words the great pagans bequeathed to us—the pagans upon whom we all repose—but would add that they are also the most ironic; for if you stop a little after the proboque, and add in another voice the following two words, you will appreciate the sardonic accent.

My own boat has usually come into port more like the disturbed nest of a dormouse than like the spick and span arrangement which I advise. Half the blocks will be jammed, the anchor will be caught under the bows, and, as like as not, the fluke of it hooked over one of the whiskers. The falls will be all tangled up together. The warping ropes will be mixed up with the anchor chain in the fo’c’sle, so that there is no getting at the one, or paying out the other. She will perhaps be coming in under three reefs with hardly enough wind to move her, because it has been blowing a few hours ago, and I have been too lazy to shake them out. Her jib will be slack, her cabin light broken where I have put my heel through it. A hundred other little familiar touches will make whatever landsman is passing his time gazing out to sea from the pier-head recognise from far off the Nona, as the Arabs recognised the great ship of Richard the Lion-hearted, saying, ‘There comes the red sail of the Frankish king.’ There never was such a boat as the Nona for coming in hugger-mugger. But do as I preach, not as I practise. Have everything in its place and a place for everything, so that, in a flash, you can shorten sail, let go the anchor, get to your warping ropes, or do any of those many things required by sailing-men. Even Plato was moved to discover the way in which the horrible Phœnicians used space aboard their ships, and had everything in order, though Heaven knows he could have had little sympathy with the sailing of the seas. Indeed, very few men who have written in the sentimental and rhetorical fashion (of which he was a master) have had also a call for the outside. But even he, I say, admired the order of shipboard. So be it with you.

Go into all the least details, think of how any object you have aboard will be treated by the weather. Use no ornament which the salt air can spoil, and put not one ounce aboard beyond what you need.

My third rule is this: Keep tight decks.

I speak with feeling here, for most of my life the rain and the salt sea have come through upon my face as I slept, as coffee does through those abominable new contraptions which they call ‘filters,’ and which they put above your cup instead of boiling the coffee honestly apart as our fathers did. Most of my life, half the days at least that I have sailed the sea, water both salt and fresh, and always tasting of varnish and of tar, has trickled through also upon my provisions, notably upon bread, which it quite astonishingly spoils. Therefore I say from experience, keep tight decks. It is very simple. You have but to go along the seams carefully on a hot, windless day, with a spike or a screw driver and a mallet, prodding in shredded rope, and treating it afterwards with any one of the compositions they sell.

My fourth rule (I am giving them in no order of importance) is: Have an anchor heavy enough for your craft.

It is a temptation to have too light a one for the easier handling. It is always a mistake. An anchor drags mainly through lack of head. Holding-ground always makes a difference but, with little craft, lack of head is the trouble. You must pay the price of heavy work for the sake of security, and it is better to have an old-fashioned anchor than the stockless anchors they sell now. These are all very well for large boats, but I do not believe in them for small ones. Be at the pains of getting your anchor up properly, and unstocking it, and also, when you let it down, of mousing the catch. Nothing will get you into more trouble than not being able to let go your anchor quickly, when there is necessity; and, in that connection also, mind you keep your chain clear. It is a good plan to tie small but conspicuous shreds of bunting or coloured string at every two or three fathoms of the chain in the first part of it; thus you will know how much you have let out, for although it is always better to let out too much than too little, it is annoying to have a great length of chain dragging about in shoal water, and the noise of it moving may confuse you into believing that you are dragging. I spent an abominable night once off a shingle bank in heaving water, where the tide ran strong, from having let out too much chain in the dark. The metal lay all along the bottom like the great sea serpent, and the movement of the boat sent a violent wrangling of iron up the chain all night long, so that I was perpetually running upon deck, between poor intervals of sleep, to judge by the distant light whether she were dragging or no. And I had good occasion for anxiety, seeing that not far upon my lee the shoal came right up out of the sea, with the water breaking upon it. You might think that however much chain you had let out, your boat would lie to the end of it; but it is not so. If you have a great deal too much chain let out in shoal water, the weight of it holds the boat like a kind of second anchor, and it grumbles and shifts and moves all the time.

Now the putting on of these little markings is of value, also, to prevent you letting out too little chain. The rule of thumb is: Three times as much chain as there is depth of water. This, in my youth (and for my youth I must be forgiven), I neglected in the port of Harwich, thinking it was nearer high tide than it was, so the little ship got adrift, and was rescued, or, as the man preferred to call it, ‘salvaged,’ by a barge called the Lily. The barge had no right to be called the Lily, for it was foully dirty, and as black as soot. The owner of the Lily claimed one third of the value of my boat, ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it was salvaged below London Bridge.’ He attached to this formula a magical importance. I offered him two pounds. He wanted much more. I appealed for help to a ship that was lying in that harbour, and they sent off a boat’s crew for me to convince the man. He took the offer I made him, but said that he had been bullied. I do not think he had. I think two pounds is a fair price to pay for the trouble a man may have been at to put a boat out, and tie a rope on to a drifting craft of that size. But still he complained that he had ‘salvaged her below London Bridge,’ and had a right to one third of her value. But there again, what was the value of any boat in which I had already sailed?

My fifth rule would be: Don’t keep too close to the wind; let her sail; keep her full.

This attempt to be always pointing up is one of the curses brought in by racing. Your own hearty middle-class boat can never point close to the wind. If she can, it is a bad sign, for she will be putting on airs. Be content if she will lie and sail at an angle of forty-five degrees from the direction in which the wind is blowing. If she cannot do that she is a bad boat, but if she can do that, she is well enough. Now this is called ‘within four points of the wind,’ being one eighth of the thirty-two points that make up the whole round of the compass. There are all sorts of smart craft which will point much closer than that, and there are particular kinds of rigs, used honestly and not for racing at all, which will keep much closer, I am told. Certainly the London barge seems to keep closer, that marvellous rig, that perfection of rigs for its purpose; and the Norfolk wherries, shooting up the rivers, seem to keep quite miraculously close, though I think in this their great momentum and the flood of the water helps them. But as for you, sailing ordinarily upon the sea, be quite content if she does her duty with the wind halfway between beam and bow. It is here as it is with most things in life, be content with the sound average, keeping the limits which God has set all around. Do not wish for too long a life, for too large a fortune, or for too much honour. Eat your peck of dirt before you die; take the rough with the smooth; consider that it is all in a day’s work; expect rain and fine. In general, write out a list of all the commandment-proverbs and learn that list by heart. Then break them.

They that sail too close to the wind have great difficulty in bringing their boat round, especially in a seaway, and there is nearly always some of their canvas (if it is an honest boat, and not one of your millionaires’ models) not doing all it should when you lie too close. In connection with this, I would add (without making it a separate rule): Take care never to pin the boat—that is, never get your mainsheet too taut; give the boom plenty of angle. Let your mainsail take the full wind. If you look at the pictures of the old boats in the time when men were men, you will see that they sailed with easy sails bellying, and were not concerned to look smart with stiff, boardlike sails. Of course, in the racing-machines, you get more speed by these tricks, but it is no way to treat a good boat of stock and sound ancestry. It is driving her and playing tricks with her. Be content to feel the power of the wind.

There are times when all these rules admit of exception. For instance, you find that you can just make a difficult channel in the last of the flow or the ebb, before it turns against you; and that you can only do it by lying very close indeed. Then you must coax your she-companion (by whom I here mean your boat), and even spill the wind out of her sails a little, so as to work her up and through, and you may then get in your mainsheet as close as you dare, and haul everything tight—too tight—headsail sheets and halyards as well, for you are attempting a feat. But I am all against doing such things as a habit; and if again you ask me why, I cannot tell you, and I will not argue. But while I am on this let me add that a great deal of your ability to lie close depends upon the proper set of your jib. The halyard always slacks a little after a bit of a run, or perhaps your traveller is not really right out to the end of the sprit. See to all that; for it is by your jib that you fetch a reach; and, talking of jibs, I come to my sixth rule, which is this:

Do not from laziness fail to change jibs often; also, carry three jibs aboard. The jib is the most sensitive part of your canvas on a small fore-and-aft craft. Too much canvas there will press you, too little will make the helm gripe, and in either case she will not be sailing her best. Changing jibs is a bother, but it is a task which must not be shirked. Many a man has got his boat out of hand by failing to set the second jib, or even the storm jib, when it was coming on to blow. Note carefully also which of your jibs goes best with such and such a reefing of your mainsail. The temptation is to carry too large a jib, and, therefore, to carry too weak a weather helm. It is better to have your canvas balanced. She will behave better in every way. The Nona, when she is under two reefs, carries her second jib pleasantly and with a smile, and yet how often (I must confess it) have I carried my first jib when I should have changed jibs! and that from indolence.

My seventh rule may seem a strange one, but I am sure that it is sound: Carry a pole mast, and do not bother too much about hoisting your topsail.

A topsail is always a business on a small boat, a business to put up and a business to strike. There is many a wind in which it would add half a knot to your speed, but you are not racing, and the half-knot does not matter. The necessary occasions for carrying a topsail are exactly two: one, when the breeze is very light, and it makes all the difference between sailing at a reasonable pace, and merely crawling; and the other, when you are getting into harbour and have wind aloft, but little along the surface, or when you have your mainsail brailed up to see your way, so that only with the topsail can you get a sufficient amount of canvas and a weather helm.

I know that all this rough and ready talk about the topsail will sound like heresy to the men who are sailing their boats in all weathers, and think, as people do, of speed as a special advantage, but I am sure I am right. Plain sail is the rule, and topsail on a little craft is always something of a frill. It is never a necessity, and over and over again you will find it a handicap. What I mean is, do not use it for the sake of using it. Do not be ashamed of sailing without your topsail when other craft have got theirs set, if in your case it is a trouble to set it. Never, never set your topsail when you think she might be at all over-canvassed under it; your business is to sail, and neither to show off nor to make time.

My eighth rule (which, if I were putting them in order of importance would come very early in the list) is: Look to every part of your gear; not only when you are starting out upon a cruise, but all the time. Look minutely to every point where there may be weakness. See that all is secure, and that all the running gear runs freely. This means running your eye and hand over the ropes and looking closely to the blocks, and to the attachments of hooks and swivels, and to the ties of the leach upon the rings, and to the parrel line at the jaws, and, indeed, to all details, of which there is a very long list, when you come to think of it, even in the simplest rig. Take nothing for granted, test everything. When you find anything doubtful—a cleat that shakes a little, or a run that jams for a second, or whatever it may be—put it right at once. The whole thing may be somewhat of a business, but in this, as in most things on board a boat, work all the time.

But who am I that I should write thus? Was it not also I who, in May-month of the year 1901, ran from France to the English island most abominably over-canvassed, not being able to take in a reef because my throat halyard had jammed? I noticed a jerk in it, even as I left the shores of the Morini, and I neglected to put the block right because I was eager to be off. I said to myself, ‘It will work all right when the time comes!’ But it did not, and, therefore, did I run with a most astonishing speed, and, on to the end of the affair, in no small terror, until I saw tall England, looming up above me out of a sort of smoke; and ever since then I have been most attentive to that one block. And why not to the others? Because conduct is by mood rather than by reason, and the do-nothing mood is a mastering one; as witness the home dogs of the rich, the cats of the poor, and sundry other beasts, including man.

Now my ninth rule is: Keep with you all the charts you can.

You can never have too many for your purpose. Many people are content with general charts, and do not take with them the plans of harbours. It is an error. The plans of harbours are even, in this sort of knocking about the coasts, more useful than the general charts. For a man can always tell where he is (more or less) along the coast, but the working in and out of harbours is the difficulty, and the knowing of where to lie, and what areas dry out, and the rest. But here it is important to warn those who are not used to such plans that to many of our harbours this guide is only approximate because the channel shifts so much. After almost every gale or exceptional tide, you need new local knowledge.

No plan, for instance, will help you much to get into Etaples or Saint Valery, in Picardy, or over Shoreham Bar and into its double fairway. You must get in as best you can by your judgment and the lead, or with a local man aboard. And the same is true of the Arum in a lesser degree, and even, once you are well within the bar, of Barnstaple River, and fifty others. Nevertheless, a plan is always invaluable. It gives you the main lines; and in the case of at least half the harbours, and all the larger ones, it gives you all you need.

In this matter of charts, never fail to have aboard you the book called the ‘Channel Pilot,’ or the ‘West Coast Pilot,’ or, in general, your book of directions for whatever part of the coast you are dealing with. The English charts are not only the best in the world, but one may almost say the only ones in the world. But our sailing-direction books are more than that—they are unique; no other nation has them, at any rate, not of the same quality. They are exact; they tell one pretty well all one wants to know.

What gives me great pleasure in them is that they are also picturesque. The unknown authors let themselves out now and then, and write down charming little descriptive sentences praising the wooded heights above the sea, or sounding great notes of warning which have in them a reminiscence of the Odyssey.

One paragraph I have put to memory, and often recite to myself with delight. It runs thus (after praising a particularly difficult passage or short cut behind a great reef of our coasts): ‘But the mariner will do well to avoid this passage at the approach of the turn of the tide; or if the wind be rising, or darkness falling upon the sea.’ I like that! If I could write Greek, I would write hexameters, translating that noble strain into the original of all seafaring language, telling how the goddess warned him of peril if he should attempt the passage when the stream of Oceanos was turning, and the night was coming forward over the abyss, and the shaker of the earth had let loose the winds.

I would write how she came up out of the deep, under the storm cloud, like a white sea bird and warned him of peril when darkness was falling upon the sea.

Do not, while I am talking of charts and the official sailing books—the ‘Channel Pilot,’ and the rest—be careless about lights. It is the easiest thing in the world to mistake a light. Time the flashes carefully, and compare them with what your chart or your book tells you. But remember that upon coming into harbour there is always confusion (especially nowadays, with electric lights everywhere and a mass of illumination on shore), which there was not twenty years ago. There is great danger to-day, on approaching any shore town, of mistaking the directions given. I have had trouble in two very different places through this: one, Hastings, where there is no true port at all, but only a breakwater, and the other Dartmouth. Not that civilians, or landsmen, or whatever you like to call them, have yet gone so far as to set up red and green lights in their windows, but that in the glare of the lights you may miss the leading marks, and that a white light when you are close in is of hardly any use at all unless it flashes regularly. I speak, of course, of small harbour lights alone. Also you must remember that these are not to be seen, as a rule, until one is quite close.

But I suppose, talking of lights, that the most difficult thing for the poor land-living fellow who now and then sails (the most difficult thing for people like you and me, that is) is dealing with the lights of moving craft when one comes up a fairway at night.

For this there are a number of rhyming rules, which we all of us have by heart:

‘When you see two lights ahead,
Port your helm and show your red.’

Or again:

‘Green to green and red to red,
All right—go ahead.’

But these rules, of which there are about a dozen or so, are only for the simplest cases, and my experience is that in any crowded fairway at night you must depend upon judgment, subject only to the first and most elementary rules, such as passing port to port. But even here there are one or two things the man of the small boat should bear in mind, and they are singularly like the things which the poor man must bear in mind in the company of the rich, or the ruler of a weak nation when he is dealing with a strong neighbour.

For instance, rules or no rules, no large craft will ever make room for you; you must make room for it. That is especially true of mechanical craft.

I remember lying off the Dorset coast in a dead calm with no steerage-way at all, and a huge great tramp going westward, full of some abominable cargo or other, and bound to some fever-stricken swamp beyond the ocean, lumping down upon me like a blind rhinoceros.

It was impossible for my little craft to avoid her. If it had been quite dark, I have no doubt she would have run me down with all the good nature in the world, but as it was still possible to follow from the shore what was happening, she did at the last moment give her helm just the slightest touch, and missed me by a nothing; so that I had the pleasure of half-shaking my spars out in the tumble of her greasy wake. When, therefore, you are in a crowded fairway at night, always give way; it is the only rule. And have the sense to behave as the lawyers do: forget that there is such a thing as justice, let alone honour or pride.

Then there is another rule to be remembered, which is serviceable enough, and that is, when you have plenty of room and the larger thing coming at you is still at some distance, keep your course for some little time, in order to give your enemy (as I will call him) the chance to do the right thing. There is nothing so baffling as to have to deal with another craft that does not know its own mind. If the hostile fellow sees you on a definite course, he has at least an opportunity for making his calculations and avoiding trouble.

Here is more advice, never get yourself in the wrong by having your own lights dimmed or out of order. Since they must be screened from the after part whence you steer, have some little splash of white or what not which shows you from the tiller that they are still alight. And as for your riding light, which so often has to do duty when all are asleep aboard, see that it is sound and of capacity and filled. You can hardly have too large a one; not for the sake of the light, but for the sake of the number of hours it will burn. And this I say, never having possessed one in my whole cruising life which did not leak or blow out in a gale, or come crashing down on deck through insecure fastening, or in one way or another behave in the fashion true and consonant to the Nona, which is the chief boat of all the boats in the world, and therefore, like the chief men of this world, is in trouble all the time.

Indeed, I think that there stand out among all the boats of history, supreme, singular, incomparable to lesser things, like the two horns of Hattin, or the Twin Stars, two boats—Noah’s Ark and the Nona; and of these two, the Nona is the better ship. I judge this by the pictures of the ark I have seen upon match-boxes, which I take to be upon the whole our best text, though late and somewhat corrupt. Such a craft could not have been handled with any satisfaction. It has no gear, only a sort of deckhouse; but it is famous, and of such antiquity that it should be revered—from its time onwards there has been nothing but the Nona. You talk of the Niña; of Columbus’s other ships—whose names I never knew, nor you either; of the Mora, that brought William of Falaise to Pevensey; of the White Ship and of the Ark Royal; of the Victory (which is now, they say, to sail upon dry land); of the Great Harry, of the Vengeur, of the Hood, and of the two beautiful enamelled motor-boats which are (I hope) to be purchased out of our pockets for the Salaried League of Nations at Geneva, and there moored along the wharf of its private garden, well called Tom Tiddler’s Ground. But none of all these ships is to be mentioned in the same breath as the Nona.

The wind dropped quite suddenly while it was yet dark before we had passed Fairlight, that is, within an hour’s running. It left, though it had been an offshore wind, something of a lump behind it, as nearly always does such a sudden cessation of strong weather. I have often noticed this; it is as though the wind blew the sea flat, and then, when the pressure of it was relieved, the water would move up again to show its freedom.

It not only dropped; it also, after half an hour’s calm, began to run right round ahead to the west, and even to the south of west, so that we had to put out far into the sea upon the starboard tack, and then beat back again towards the shore to make our course. In this way, the holy light of day had already begun to grow by the time we were opposite Hastings and the odd broken breakwater of the place; whereby they have attempted to restore, but failed to restore, something of the old harbour.

That harbour of Hastings has to-day quite disappeared, its defences worn down by the sea, but the Castle still stands there to show how important a haven it was; one of the great ports of mediæval England. What I have read upon the matter has not left me much clearer as to the exact lie of the sheltered water, but my interest in the place (apart from this, that certain of my forbears are buried there) stands in that odd disappearance of a great political function. Hastings was a port, and it is a port no more. Yet the town has survived, and even its use of the sea has survived; though now they must draw up their boats upon the shore.

I hope that Hastings has reasserted its right to christen the great battle. When I was at Oxford it was a favourite piece of humbug among the academic to call the Battle of Hastings ‘Senlac.’

This queer Gascon name they got out of a footnote of Lingard’s. Now it happens to be a sacred rule at Oxford never to admit any obligation to Lingard. Lingard is the creator of documented, exact English history. Three quarters of the things you hear put forward as modern conclusions upon the English past come first from that great and unique historian. He invented the science. Before his time no one had written a history from original texts; nor had any one taken a general survey.

Since his time he has become a quarry for all those who can, or pretend to, teach and write history. But it is an unbroken rule at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to boycott his name.

Lingard made that one bad error. He called the Battle of Hastings ‘Senlac.’ Like schoolboys who give themselves away by copying, Freeman and his gang, following Lingard’s one mistake, worked the thing to death. They seem to have thought in their ignorance that ‘Senlac’ was an Anglo-Saxon term! And then, it was so grand to give a shock to general usage, and to introduce that note of the unusual which is the mark of the charlatan. Round demolished them.

How often have I not studied that famous field. It was but this year that I went all over it with a clinometer, taking contours, with two friends to help me, so that I might reëstablish the battle.

I know not what that fascination is which attaches to seeing, touching, standing on the very site of some great business of the past. I cannot analyse its nature, but I feel the strength of it profoundly, and I would I could recover the hours I have wasted all my life long in exactly establishing this, that, and the other topographical point of the past. What reverence do I not feel, and how justly, for such work as Rice Holmes’, in which every movement of Cæsar’s in those fateful August days of the first Invasion, is clinched down with iron proof, exact, converging.

There is nothing more delightful in the ocean of modern historical work, the moving empty sea of guess and unproved affirmation, than these few solid rocks of industry and common sense. The people who get the thing settled once for all are as different from the question-mongers and theory-spinners as is a vigorous air from confused harmonies; or better, as is the grasp of a living hand from the ghostly touches of the spooks.

What could be more masterly than Holmes’ establishment of the landing-place upon Deal beach, the calculation of the march to the Stour, the crossing-place, the storming of the camp on Bigberry Hill. It is like the fitting in of a jig-saw puzzle, everything made complete, certain, absolute, where before all had been chaos. Over and over again have I climbed that hill and sat me down on the rampart, in order to look below towards the ford of the river where the seventh legion crossed, and over and over again, sailing in the narrows of the channel, I have called up that great armament on its summer’s day, the galleys rowing with the tide round the South Foreland and the heavier transports far away towards the French shore.

It is, I fear, an evil pleasure of the mind, but it is a very real pleasure, none the less, which a man takes in that which should, if he were honest and charitable, provoke him rather to indignation, and the abominable follies of the academic fool do give me that pleasure, which I suppose I ought to fly. When a don shows his great learning by spelling Clovis ‘Hclodhovech,’ I feel not pain, as I should, but pleasure: it makes me think of ‘Clodhopper.’ When the official historian, hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that the great officials of fifth-century Rome knew no Greek, or when his fellow, similarly hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that Homer’s poems were composed by a committee, I, who ought to be pained, laugh. So I do when they tell me, as one professor solemnly told the world in the pages of, I think, the ‘Spectator’ (but possibly it was another learned organ), that the French for ‘very beautiful’ was ‘beaucoup belle,’ or that the phrase ‘La volonté générale est toujours droite,’ means ‘The general will is always right.’

There is another trick of theirs which gives me infinite delight, and that is the solemn perversion of authority, of which the pleasant name is ‘Mumbo-Jumbo.’

The power to affirm anything at will to an audience of young and quite unread undergraduates, without fear of contradiction or examination, produces an impotent sort of pride in which the very nature of authority is forgotten.

A great scholar steeped in Greek literature says, ‘The style of this passage is the style of the third century.’ That is the voice of authority. A man thoroughly familiar with the language can say a thing like that, and men not familiar with the language must accept it, unless they find it challenged by any authority at least equal. If they all find similar scholars making a similar affirmation, humility and common sense demand that the affirmation should be taken as true.

But when the affirmer goes on to say that, because the style of a passage is that of the third century, therefore it cannot possibly have been written a hundred years later, he is talking nonsense so appalling that it makes one catch one’s breath.

A man steeped in English can say with authority to a foreigner, ‘This letter is in the style of Dr. Johnson, and of the eighteenth century; it cannot possibly have been written in the seventeenth.’ But of what value would his statement be if he added, ‘Nor could it possibly have been written in the nineteenth’? Scholarship has authority when it possesses data which those who accept that authority have not had the leisure or the industry or perhaps the power to examine. It possesses no authority whatever against the common sense of the most ignorant man. I come across a document in which there is used strong language against Richard III. The manuscript, which denounces him as the murderer of his nephews, qualifies the advent of the Tudor, and draws up arguments in favour of his claim. A competent expert who can say to me, ‘By the nature of the handwriting, I, who am most learned in such documents, can tell you certainly that this was not written shortly after Bosworth, but a hundred years later,’ must be believed.

The statement has authority. He can judge the date of the handwriting, and I cannot. But if he goes on to say, ‘Therefore the statement is not contemporary,’ he is talking the wildest nonsense, because our common experience is sufficient to tell us that men do, and may, take manuscript copies of things written before their time. If a man steeped in all the details of Elizabeth’s reign, says of a particular manuscript it is spurious because ‘at such a date in the late sixteenth century, a document of this particular kind would be found reduced to print and not recopied in manuscript,’ I should answer, by the use of my common sense, ‘Why not? How do you know what motive the man may have had who copied it? How do you know whether it has not been reduced to print in some form which we have lost? How do you know that it may not be some family possession which the owner did not want spread broadcast, or which he only had the curiosity to copy out himself?’

It is the nature of human pride to assume powers beyond those really possessed; but new forms of such assumption go for a long time unrecognised. The abuse of religious authority is a commonplace. Men are only beginning to wake up to the modern abuse of academic authority. Heaven knows how much we have heard of priestcraft, and it is true that men holding only spiritual authority have not infrequently pretended to an authority in other fields beyond their lawful scope. But such extravagance is far more forgivable than the academic assumption of false authority based upon supposed or affirmed proof when proof there is none. For the former is a mere exaggeration, but the latter implies a falsehood. If a man really possessed of second sight, and having given evidence of enjoying that strange faculty, goes on to pretend a knowledge of things of which he is in fact ignorant, then he is a charlatan presuming upon his merited reputation to acquire a greater and unmerited one. But it is a worse offence when a man pretends to repose his statements on common reason and actual experience in matters where these were absent.

There is one type of this false academic authority which has spread over historical work like a fungus, and particularly over the discussion of the early Church. It is the paying of deference to a man’s authority in things which have nothing whatever to do with his scholarship, and which are mere creatures of his imagination, of as much and as little value as similar creatures raised by any wholly illiterate layman. It is in the matter of the Gospel of Saint John that this rubbish has accumulated its most monstrous heap. A great scholar like Wernle (I suppose he was a great scholar; I am no judge, but I am assured by other scholars that he was so, and I must take it to be true) has authority when he says, ‘This or that passage is of the style and manner of this or that period.’ Even so, his authority is limited by the authority of other scholars, and even so, it is as well that he should put forward, even for the uninstructed reader, some grounds for his judgment. But when he ventured to affirm that the exaltation of spirit shining through the Fourth Gospel cannot be that of an eye-witness, his judgment is worth no more than that of a cook’s boy apprentice, or of a street scavenger. A man’s power of judging the psychology of his fellow men varies with capacities quite disconnected from scholarship in letters. My power to decide whether Boswell really knew Johnson (supposing there were no evidence besides the book itself) is based upon my knowledge of how men feel and act, and the difference between the way in which they talk when they are making things up, and the way in which they talk when they are bearing witness and recording a real experience. I may be right, or I may be wrong, in my conclusion: but my powers of arriving at it have nothing to do with my powers of judging a text. Yet Wernle’s empty guesswork, even when it is manifestly absurd, is treated with respect, and, what is exasperating, with special respect by the orthodox. The orthodox seem to feel, in approaching the sceptics, that they are dealing with superiors. It ought to be just the other way. The people who are in the tradition of Europe, who have behind them the whole momentum of civilisation, who have humour and common sense as the products of faith, ought to approach their contradictors as inferiors.

It is certainly so in the case of this Gospel of Saint John. A man who denies its apostolic authority, and who comes forward with a disconnected mass of guesswork, scrappy particularisms, and odd conjectures, should be regarded as the incongruous disturber of a judgment upon which millions of men through centuries had preserved a firm conclusion. It is true that even the widest tradition, the largest body of mature judgment, must listen to any objection and weigh it. To refuse that is to deny the rights of human reason. But it is monstrous that the sound, admitted, fixed, concluded thing, the heritage of the human race, should be put on its defence, and that any assault on it should be supported by a predisposition to accept any conclusion so long as it be novel.

We are accused of a bias in favour of accepted truth. We should reply that our opponents have a much worse bias against. They say we begin by desiring to find witnesses to Jesus Christ. It is true. But they begin with a fierce desire to destroy the evidence to Jesus Christ. Make them come out with their proofs: accuse them roundly of humbug. Laugh at their provincial rejection of the marvellous. Unmercifully ridicule their lack of proportion; their ignorance of the human mind; their failure to taste tradition. Rattle them. Believe me, in battle you must be fierce. The louder the victim’s cries the nearer you are to victory.

All that suggested by the mere name ‘Hastings’ and the charlatanry of ‘Senlac’; but really such a name might suggest whole cartloads of books.

Go to Battle and see the place where Harold fell. You can mark it to a yard. Look at the little tomb in which they say Odo lay; see the Malfosse still clearly there just westward of the tennis courts in the gardens of the Abbey; a trap for cavalry. Note how the Normans, Bretons, and all the rest of the foreigners could not deploy until they were at the very foot of the hill, and how they were handicapped by its steepness without the momentum of a gallop down hill to begin with; it was that which nearly lost them the battle. Mark the length of the ridge, and ask yourself how it could have been held against heavily armed horse with less than thirty or forty thousand men packed in a dense formation, for it is nearly a mile from flank to flank, and would need two thousand locked shields to cover it.

There never was, I suppose, one day spent in this island with greater consequence to Christendom.

It was but a drift past the Martello Towers during that morning, and I slept through it, having been at the helm all through the long night, till my companion relieved me. When I woke we were opposite that entry to Pevensey which is an entry no more, but which still holds, strongly challenging the sea, the Roman walls of the Andred Fort.

The place was a narrows, like those which give entry to the wide expanse of Portsmouth Harbour; and, as in that gulley between Portsmouth and Gosport to-day, there must then have raced through the gulley of Pevensey the gallop of the flood and of the ebb tides. Within was a vast expanse of level water that could hold as many score or hundred of ships as any captain might lead. To-day you can follow clearly enough the old level of the salt—but that great haven is now all dry land.

It is full of memories. The ditches in the marsh still bear the name of such poor branches and inlets of the once spacious harbour as struggled to live on into a later time. But no man will sail into Pevensey again. Thither the Mora sailed with William of Normandy aboard, ahead of his forest of a fleet, and at its bow a little cupid all in gold, and on its decks a great cask of wine broached for glory. He had made his land-fall by the white gleam of Beachy near at hand. He had outrun all his transports, and he lay there off this coast awaiting them, until a man sent up the mast cried that he saw the fleet approaching ‘like a wood.’ It was Saint Michael’s Day.

The place is full of memories. The people who wrote down the legends of England under Alfred preserved after four hundred years a dreadful memory of some pirate raid, in which all the garrison of Pevensey perished, on some day between the end of the Imperial rule and the landing of Saint Augustine.

Strangely enough, we have no record of the process whereby that vast and secure harbour lifted above the level of the sea and lost its usage. Hastings has lived on, but Pevensey died in some darkness, and has disappeared. There still stands the wall of the Roman fort, with its courses of small Roman tile-brick remaining to stamp its origin. The great town that must have stood outside has dwindled to a hamlet, and the vast stretch of flat, beyond which was once what Portsmouth is, lies utterly alone with the sea birds complaining over it.

Beyond Pevensey walls the wind rose somewhat and gave us a fair course round Beachy, coming further round, so that we could carry on without handling the headsail sheets. We ran on a wind all the miles into the Sussex bay. I stood in close to the lighthouse (for the shore is fairly steep there), not a quarter of a mile off shore. It was unwise, for I had experience, as you know, of the way the wind will spill over that height. But I wished to save mileage; I had sailed the seas enough, and was for home.

The wind from that quarter brings usually a clear air, but in the calm weather of those last few days it had blown from anywhere, for the summer’s end had upon it an anti-cyclone, which is a Mumbo-Jumbo for fine weather. In such weather winds behave unnaturally, the southwest brings no gale or rain, nor is the easterly wind dry, nor the northerly cold, nor the southerly warm; and this, I suppose, is because the winds of an anti-cyclone are but youngling winds; not great steady ancestored winds from far away with a weight behind them.

I did wish as I was rounding Beachy that day that I could see a sea serpent, which, many years ago (I had read it in print in an old magazine book which lay about in the parlour of a harbour inn), showed itself, for the conversion of the unbelieving, in these very seas.

It reared a great neck and shot at a prodigious pace through the salt with the movements of its long body, and, having been seen by a whole crew thereto adjacent, sneered contemptuously at the puny race of men, and disappeared.

I thought to myself: ‘How should I behave if I were to see some such Horrendum, and had to bear witness to it before my fellow men?’ I concluded that I would mix the truth with falsehood, like my good ancestor the wise Ulysses, and so shoe-horn a knowledge of reality into scornful men. For I have a rule in such matters given me long ago and since then by me always to be observed. I got it thus:

When I was a boy an older friend of mine said to me a thing that then seemed to me extravagant, but which I now see to have been very sound. It was, that if you wanted to be believed in any matter worth believing, you had to bring an admixture of falsity into your statement. And the reason for this is plain enough. Either a truth is something that everybody knows about, and which, therefore, is not worth telling, or else it is something unusual, and therefore improbable, and likely to be disbelieved. It is the latter kind of truth which people ordinarily tell when they desire to interest their fellow beings. But if they put that kind of truth straightforwardly, they are naturally taken for liars.

For instance, if you were to burst into a man’s room, and say, ‘Only last week I took the train in Paris after breakfast, and I was in London for dinner!’ he would believe you right enough, though he would not stand much of that sort of thing. But if you say, ‘Only last week I was in Paris for breakfast, and in Rome for dinner,’ he will think you are not telling the truth, although it can just be done by aeroplane; and if you say, ‘I was in London for breakfast, and in Calcutta for dinner’ (which may be perfectly true, supposing that the dinner and the breakfast were not on the same day), he will certainly set you down for a liar. Supposing, therefore, that you have really flown in an aeroplane from Paris to Rome, so that you left Paris comfortably after breakfast and got into Rome in plenty of time for dinner, you had far better put it differently, and say that the aeroplane has made a great difference, considering that you yourself had managed, by getting up at dawn on a summer’s day, to be in Rome just as it was falling dark, with only two slight mishaps on the way and a relay at Lyons. Then you will possibly be believed.

So do I advise those to speak who desire their fellow beings to be converted in the matter of the Great Sea Serpent.

Personally I believe in the Great Sea Serpent, and I believe in it for best of all reasons, to wit, that the proof is sufficient. A sufficient number of people have seen monsters of various kinds rising from the deep, usually monsters with great long necks, or, at any rate, a serpentine appearance. They have seen them, many men at a time, and under ordinary conditions of vision. To deny such evidence merely because it is unusual is something stupid. It is a piece of popular doubt, just as stupid as is the corresponding popular credulity.

The next time the Great Sea Serpent comes within two cables of one of His Majesty’s ships, and is familiarly seen by scores of men, I strongly advise the leader and more educated of them, whoever he may be, not to say that he and his men did, under such and such circumstances, clearly see the Great Sea Serpent. For if they do that, they are done. He had far better say that the weather being thick, and under conditions when they may have easily been deceived, he and one companion thought that they saw something like such and such an apparition; and he would do well to sketch it in a brumous fashion. Let him make it as like as possible to things with which his readers are familiar; then many idiots will write to the paper saying that it was sea-weed, or a flight of birds, or what not, but a few will believe. If he tells the plumb truth, no one will believe. For, just as it is important to mix truth with falsity, if falsity is to be accepted, so it is important to mix falsity with truth, if truth is to be accepted. All lawyers know this. Indeed, it may be called one of our Rules of Law.

But the lawyers can say this for themselves, at least, that their trade is advocacy, and that they do not so much as pretend to truth. There is no concealment. We are not deceived.

But the practice of advocacy in all those parts of the nation’s life where we used to have information and direct statement, is a very dangerous as well as an exasperating ill.

It was an evil growing before the war, but the war has increased it hugely; men have fallen into a habit of what was called during the war propaganda. They both give it and receive it. Upon every side what you hear (or what is concealed from you) is put forward or concealed with an object of advocacy, and, therefore, of distortion. It was, perhaps, during the war necessary; or, at least, necessary in those societies, such as our own, which had no national tradition of such a conflict. Men were made to swallow the most enormous camels. The unfortunate flabby German, with his silly dream of universal superiority, became a horrid fiend quite out of nature, and even those foreigners who are most hated instinctively and traditionally by the mass of the populace became gallant allies.

The most comic part of the affair was the attitude towards America. We dared not insult America, for we were naturally as keen on getting American help as is a drowning man on catching a deck chair (and, by the way, if by any chance, you of the rich want to save a drowning man from shipboard, don’t throw a life-buoy, throw a deck chair; it is always loose and always handy, and very apparent, and if it hits it stuns). In their ignorance many people came to believe that it was the duty of the Americans to come over and help, and, what was more astonishing still, it was represented to them as a matter of life and death, not to us, but to themselves. The Americans were told (Heaven knows whether any of them believed it!) that if the Germans, Austrians, Bohemians, Slovenes, Croats, Bulgarians, Turks, etc., won in their push against the English, French, and Italians, that if the half-baked won against the baked, the next thing would be a sailing of the conquerors over the sea for the rude domination of Scranton, Pa. Fiddlesticks-ends!

But people did really talk like that. They shook their fingers at the United States, and said: ‘It will be your turn next!’

Now at sea there is no advocacy. We are free from that most noisome form of falsehood, which corrupts the very inward of the soul. Truth is one of the great gifts of the sea. You cannot persuade yourself nor listen to the persuasion of another that the wind is not blowing when it is, or that a cabin with half a foot of water in it is dry, or that a dragging anchor holds. Everywhere the sea is a teacher of truth. I am not sure that the best thing I find in sailing is not this salt of reality.

Turning to the statement of any reality after a dose of advocacy is like getting out into the fresh air from an intolerable froust.

It would be a boon beyond expression to all of us if some rich man would found a little weekly newspaper (he would have to be prepared to lose three thousand a year), in which sheet the reader should be told things that had happened in Europe and at home, instead of being given a version designed to provoke from him a verdict, or to throw him into a particular mood desired by the writer’s master.

The most dangerous form of this advocacy to-day in England—and it is universal—the most dangerous gaps in the field of statement, are the advocacy put forward for a capitalist control of lives and the suppression of facts inimical to that control. They are dangerous because they provoke passions which lead to social decline, and add enormously to the sense of injustice under which the proletariat of the modern capitalist state increasingly suffers.