Chapter IV: Part 4

The atheists, of whom some few stalwarts remain, strong against the pantheist flood; those who despise mankind when they are healthy and when they are unhealthy despair of it; the men who make nothing of life and think it immaterial whether man be or no—these are, in my judgment, of a clumsy habit in argument. For they talk in mere negations. But if they would breed (as is their intention) a proper contempt for the supposed Divine in man, a proper negligence of our fellow beings and a right view of the whole insignificant human affair, they ought not to confine themselves to negatives, they ought to present vivid images, concrete and striking, and say: ‘Look there and judge mankind!’ I suggest to them Clovelly on a holiday; also the sands of Weston-super-Mare; also Saint Lazare Station in Paris, the Frederick Street Station in Berlin, or Liverpool Street in London, just after office hours on a week-day; or again, a crowd in Catalonia, outside the ring, when by some accident the bull gets loose.

There are other brilliant images all ready to the atheist’s hand: a dining-table of the rich, with some thirty guests, men and women, exactly alternate, like the red and the black cards in a patience, the wretched couples turning ten minutes to the left and ten minutes to the right, like jacks; the wine of only one kind—yellow and acid with bubbles in it. Or again, they might give the same effect with the vision of any public vehicle, designed to hold twenty-four but packed with forty. Or again, they might do no more than distribute snapshots, judiciously snapped, of the men who are most talked about in this our day.

The truth is the atheists do not know their job; for it has been clearly proved upon the thumb and the four fingers of the left hand that men cut off from the Divine are also cut off from reason.

So we sailed on, leaving that tiny white point of Clovelly far behind in its combe, dark against the afternoon sun, and ran straight for Bideford River, till we came to the fairway.

We had also a mark to steer by which was unmistakable; it was a gate of dark smooth water in a mass of white surge. For rollers, though there was but a hearty breeze, through some mysterious process of the sea, were bursting with violence upon the bar of the river as though it blew a gale. The bar looked like one tumbling wall of angry white, even from a long way off, and, between that wall and the east side of the harbour-mouth, was this one narrow gateway of smooth water. We passed through it safely enough, steering by the leading marks, which are here quite clear, and brought up in the deep pool off Appledore, waiting for the tide to take us up to Bideford.

All that bit of coast is Charles Kingsley, with his violent fanatical genius (for it was no less) and his power of imprinting himself upon the place. Fanatical men are not usually happy; but I think Kingsley must have been happy, because he had the tide under him all the time. Everything in his own lifetime was going his way. The cause to which he was attached, the destruction of the Faith, appeared to be triumphing more and more; though the slightest accident the other way (such as Newman’s conversion) was an intolerable irritant to him. He lived in that part of the earth which he most loved, he enjoyed all its habits, he was supported by everything around. You could get no better and, at the same time, no more comic criticism of that Kingsleian mood than what has happed to the name ‘Westward Ho,’ which Kingsley rendered famous. ‘Westward Ho’ simply means the westerly of two landing-places. ‘Ho,’ or ‘Hoe,’ is a wharf: but that ‘Ho’ has been spread broadcast throughout the world of English as a sort of ‘Halloa,’ or ‘Yoicks,’ to call the adventurous overseas; and not one man in a thousand, I suppose, but thinks of those two little letters as a hoot (perhaps he gives them a nobler name); as a call, resonant of the Elizabethan sailings.

One of the saddest things I know about the beach near Bideford River is the deadly hatred with which the dons have persecuted poor, dear Kenwith. Kenwith is a place where a few boatloads of Danes landed in the Dark Ages, and were defeated by the English. The name is quite clear, the tradition is equally clear, and the description of the position is unmistakable. Therefore have the learned, as is their wont, insisted with the utmost virulence that the tradition, the name, the description, are all a popular error, and that the place where the little scrimmage really came off was miles away.

It is interesting to analyse the motives of this sort of thing. We are all familiar with it. The universities of all countries, but especially of our own, are a regular hothouse for breeding it; but when one first comes across it, one is puzzled why it should come into being at all. Whence springs this lust for saying that the Gospel of Saint John was not written by Saint John? that Homer was not written by Homer? that the Battle of Hastings was not called the Battle of Hastings—although all the people who fought there called it the Battle of Hastings? that William the Conqueror had only a handful of men there—though his secretary, who saw them, and read all the documents connected with them, gives us fifty thousand? that Julius Cæsar’s Gallic War was written by his tutor—and all the rest of the nonsense?

The powerful force urging dons to make fools of themselves in this way seems to me to come from a convergence of three currents. First of all there is the vanity of the learned man, who has all the better opportunities for action because few have any knowledge at all of the matter, and he is fairly safe from criticism—or thinks himself so. His fellows will not give him away. It is clearly a flattering thing to think that one is right where all the world has been wrong, and, in a time like ours, when there has been accumulated such a mass of special technical knowledge, people are ready to swallow almost any assertion, because they know not what new evidence may have appeared.

The second source is that very human thing, the love of the marvellous—though it is the love of the marvellous appearing in a very degraded form. Your pedant says: ‘All the apparent evidence, all tradition, all that you would call common sense, would make out Little Muddipool to be that same Little Muddipool where the treaty of Little Muddipool was signed. It is called in plain words “The Treaty of Little Muddipool,” and its last words are “Made by us at Little Muddipool.” But _I_ tell you that it was not Little Muddipool at all, but a place a hundred miles away with a different name.’ The spirit at work there is exactly the same spirit as that which says: ‘Common sense and your own experience will tell you that the bishop must have crossed the river either by a bridge or by a boat. _I_ tell you that the holy man sailed across it on his coat. What do you think of that?’

And the third cause is a negative one. The perpetual substitution of hypothesis for fact (which is the great mark of dons to-day) ends by getting men into a state of mind where they can no longer weigh the proportions of evidence: they can no longer distinguish between the certain, the probable, and the absurd. Thus, it was but a little time ago that an Oxford don came out with a miracle. He said he had discovered any number of classical passages containing concealed anagrams, furnishing the most astonishing information; for instance, that Euripides, when he was a little boy, wrote the plays of Æschylus. A stopper was put on him, however, by a man who wrote to the ‘Spectator’ (of all papers), proving that the said don’s name was but thinly concealed in an anagram of the opening lines of the ‘Iliad,’ so that he must have written that excellent poem, not when he was a little boy, but long before he was born. And so much for that.

Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore: Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost incomprehensible to the other. I have sometimes thought that whenever the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin channel) and storm and loot Instow. Pretty well every modern set of human habitations has this contrast of rich and poor quarters, but when there is water flowing in between them it is the more striking: with hard work on one side of the stream and the fruits of it in leisure upon the other.

My voyage was over. I had brought up in Bideford River before the long bridge of Bideford, and I made all quiet for the night, and for a long time to come. For there would I leave the Nona in charge, till I could take her out again.

Swaying in the cabin that night also, I finished writing the Chanty of the Nona, of which if any man say that it is a vile piece of verse, I am ready to agree with him, but if another man say that it heartens him, and fills him with the sea, why, I am ready to agree with him also. It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a place of rest. We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.

I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much, after thirty, over literary fame: if it comes, let it come, but for God’s sake let us have no publicity with it, for to be pointed at and known is to live in a glass cage. And very much do I applaud those men who do what in youth I myself desired to do, but was unable to do, that is, to write consistently under a false name, and carefully cover one’s tracks. I wanted to write verse under one name, history under another, travel under another—but fate was too strong.

Of the men who have done this in my time the most successful was Dodgson, the mathematical don at Christ Church—that is, of The House. He had calculated well; and the immense fame of Lewis Carroll and of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ left him private and secure.

Mention of that book also makes me consider how false is nearly all literary fame, or, rather, how great an element of falsity there is in nearly all such fame. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a very remarkable book, as are, indeed, other books of Dodgson’s, though not all. But a large element in its vast diffusion was its consonance with a particular ‘drawing-room’ mood of a particular day. I shall be called blasphemous, I know, but I am perfectly certain that ‘Alice’ will not long survive the ease and unquestioned security of the England of her day. For every implication in morals, and even in humour, with which Dodgson’s books are crammed, sprang from that security and that ease. Nor is there a stronger symptom of so abnormal a passage in human affairs as was the English gentry’s generation of 1833-99 (abnormal, for normal men live under a strain and a peril, and in active defence against the barbarian or the menacing enemy) than the delight of Dodgson’s vast audience in nonsense: in the humour which is founded upon folly as contrasted with the wit that is founded upon wisdom. Even the facile composition of odd childish words, which had a slightly reminiscent sound, was sufficient to delight that generation. But when the terrors and the heroisms permanently return, the sawdust will run out of such things.

And, after all, what is the possession of literary fame? Can dead men use it? Does any man possessing it, unless he be asinine in his vanity, think himself the true creator of some really high line his pen has happened to set down? Is there any writing man with a true judgment of great things in writing who does not doubt his own achievement? Or is there any who, when some particular piece of verse or rhetoric which he has written convinces him of its merit, does not admit to his own soul that not _he_ was the true author, but rather some force working through him?

Again, does not any writer who is also reasonably manly prefer any one of man’s virtues to an accident of verse or prose? Who with stuff in him would not rather be a brave boor than a cowardly poet?

So much for literary gents. Excluding my own self, I should like to see them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea and there scuttled. Their absurd little quarrels, their posings, their insufficiency, the chaos of their minds—all these things are a burden, and there is not one day’s riding upon a horse or sailing upon the sea (let alone still better things which, for the honour I bear you, I will not mention here) that is not worth the whole tonnage and shiploads of their printed stuff, save here and there a piece of lyric verse, or here and there a good run and rhythm in half a page of prose.

But, I say again, that’s all one. Here am I in Bideford River, at anchor and come to the end of the seas, leaving her, the Nona, my companion and my home, my very loyal boat, under the tutelage of the long bridge of Bideford, which is notoriously the end of the world.

Now a day came when I had some freedom again. So I set out at once from Devon with one companion, and, finding all on board as I had left it, I set sail to leave Bideford River. I proposed to myself to explore the outer sea beyond Hartland, which till then I had not seen, though now I know its character and its harbours familiarly enough.

The tide so served that it was evening when I set out, nor was it easy to shoot the channel at the bar of Appledore, in spite of the strong ebb, because such slight wind as there was had too much north in it. For the same reason we had to beat all that night, fetching up towards Hartland Point in two long boards; helped at first by the tide, but later, of course, finding it against us. It was daylight again before we came to the headland, and opened the coast beyond.

The ancients made a solemn and special sanctity, it seems, of this barrenness and strength and height of Hartland. The Romans called it the Point of Hercules. They felt, I think, that when they rounded it, they were coming into another sea; for they were much alive to the mystery of things. If they thought this of Hartland, that it was a boundary, they were right. Within Hartland, you are under the wing of England, and in homely water; outside Hartland, you have all the West before you, and the power of Ocean. And so with us that morning. Even as the wind died down there came a mighty succession of slow heavings, which grew more regular and defined until at last the smooth water, just crisped here and there, by mere breaths of air, ran in giant folds—parallel, regular, unceasing, enormous. All that sea, I say, is odd, and I have felt spells upon it.

The long rollers came prodigious out of the southwest under almost a calm. There was not wind enough to do more than give the boat steerage-way—it was lucky we had that, for if it had been a dead calm she would have rolled broadside on and shaken herself badly with that too tall topmast of hers, as she had done on an earlier day in the White Horse Race. The rollers came on and on; not the relic of a gale (for there had been none anywhere), but raised by one of those innumerable mysterious influences which between them make the sea. They lifted one after the other, hiding the horizon; we topped them, we sank into the trough; they heaved majestically on, to thunder upon the savage grandeur of Hartland.

Our time has discovered so many things in the material world (and has grown paralysed to so many other more important things) that we profess to explain everything with perfect links of cause and effect. It is an occasion to use the phrase ‘We miserable sinners.’ For we shall never know anything at all compared with the unknown. What makes such waves?

For that matter, why is one sea so different from another? You measure the amount of salt, the weight of the water, the strength of the wind. Though you had all the factors we can measure, these three and a score of others (the pressure of the air, its wetness, its heat, and so on), yet you could never say why the difference between one sea and another appears. All measurable factors might be the same, and yet the seas quite different. You can, indeed, hardly describe that difference any more than you can describe the difference between two instruments of music, the flute and the trumpet; or the difference between two materials in portraiture, marble and bronze. We only know that it is there. But our stupidly proud time misses such essential categories.

Why is it that what they call ‘The New World’ is something utterly different in quality, taste, intimate soul, from the old? We have here not only the conflict between England and America, but between Spain and the Argentine, and between England herself and the white colonies, and between the French and the French Canadians. It is not newness; it is not lack of tradition; it is difference of _timbre_—as violent as the difference between a railway whistle and the note of a thrush, or between wood and iron.

Modern men knowing a dozen out of a million causes reason downwards from the rules they have, instead of trusting their perceptions as their fathers did.

I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul. Meanwhile, men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.

The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood and, as it were, entered into it. That is government; that is Empire: to get into the shoes of the governed.

In the strange, successful, perhaps ephemeral, adventure which has put our high European culture in command over the lives of others in the East and in Africa, not a few men have arisen tested by circumstance and conforming to this idea. I have heard with respect the judgment of others upon half a dozen Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen of the sort, though I have not seen their work. Russians have told me of compatriots of their own who have achieved such things beyond the Urals and the Caspian. Of Germans I never heard that any were so much as capable of beginning the great task. That the Spaniards changed half a continent we know. But the only instance that ever came under my own eyes, and that but for a few days, was the instance of Marshal Lyautey. Lyautey’s Morocco is an astonishing affair.

It is true that there lay behind his great achievement more than a lifetime of foundation—the steady French transformation of North Africa. It is like a coral reef, solid, detailed, infinitely particular: the work of innumerable units, sacrificed, obscure, tenacious, creative, permanent. None the less, what Lyautey has done is a building by itself. It is like the new Gothic of Brazenose or Magdalen at Oxford: one may say that there lay behind this also the multitudinous, patient work of a lifetime or more since Pugin began: or it is like Parsons’ turbine, which came after so much experiment, but stands by itself all the same.

It is not belittling Lyautey’s great work in Morocco to say that these things are only possible when there is frankly recognised the essential principle of personal responsibility in governing; or (to put it in Colonial phrasing), ‘one-man control,’ or, to put it in Aristotelian terms, ‘MONARCHY.’

There is no other working form of administration over multitudes of men, except the aristocratic; and the aristocratic form of administration—which ruled for nearly three hundred years over Protestant England after the Reformation had destroyed popular monarchy and made wealth supreme—is only possible in those rare communities where men enjoy being governed by a clique and look up to, and revere, a special class whom they think of as their natural masters.

What Marshal Lyautey has done in the organisation of French Morocco has been based upon two foundations which, when they are absent from the effort to govern aliens—as one or both commonly are—make such government increasingly difficult; until, at last, it has to be abandoned. The first of these foundations is _working with_ the alien people whom one administrates, not _against_ them, nor even _above_ them. The second foundation is the deliberate investment of one’s own capital and energy _for the benefit of the alien governed_ rather than for one’s own benefit: that is, the development of communications and of building, the extension of instruction, the improvement of waterways, afforestation—all manner of expensive functions which you can only get from a government directly concerned for the good of _all_ the people and which will never be undertaken by the private home trader working for his pocket alone.

It is the absence of this sympathy with, and eager help of, the governed which prevents a trading community from ever biting into alien soil. For, in a trading community, the administration of a foreign dependency is directed to helping the home merchant or settler. The road is driven, the river is bridged, not primarily for the benefit of the governed, but primarily for the immediate profit of the governors. With this there goes a contempt of the governed, which is a dangerous sign, and later, that more dangerous sign, a hatred of them.

The foreign rule, therefore, gets more and more distasteful to the governed. For half a lifetime they wonder at it: then they grow restive, finding themselves despised to no purpose. Then they permanently rebel. At last the unnatural tyranny breaks down. When it breaks down the governors gradually depart and little impress of their foreign rule remains.

It was so apparently between Carthage and her dependencies.

But when the governors expend themselves for the good of the governed, an amalgamation takes place between the national spirit of the one and of the other, and the superior trains and shepherds his subjects into a common civilisation. One of the tests of success in alien government is to note whether the governors despise or admire the governed. If they despise them it is proof that they are unfit to govern. If they admire in them what is to be admired, all goes well. I found in Morocco that a contempt for Islam (I do not say a difference from Islam, but a _contempt_ for it, a contempt which would regard the Moor as a ‘native’ and the French as in some way a ‘superior race’) was only to be discovered here and there among the worst of the colonists. It was your half-educated, lower-middle-class immigrant who took this attitude and gave all the trouble. The higher you went in the scale, the greater was the liking for the Moor and for his civilisation, the greater the desire to understand him and to know his past, the greater the admiration of his art, his dignity, his faith. When one got to the head of things, in the Residency-General and in the Marshal’s own household, there was an understanding of the whole Moorish past and present like the understanding which a scholar has of his beloved text; it was an intimate and all-pervading familiarity.

I carried away with me from that glimpse of the Atlas and of the treeless run of burnt land beyond (for I travelled while the heat was still upon us) vivid pictures in the mind: first of a vast tract of dead upland, utterly bare, between Oudja and the Moulouya (I had come from Oran); this tract had about it the accursed inhuman effect of the great American deserts in the West of the United States; then, next in order, of Taza on the edge of the hill fighting, and of the story I was told there of two Moorish brothers. One of these would fight under the French for six months and then desert. Thereupon the other brother would enlist in his place. So much was the object of each the pleasure of fighting and the advantage of pay, and so little the political idea of independence.

Nor could any one forget who has seen it (and it is now become or will soon become, a commonplace of travel) that great new road which I saw in its last making, but which was already nearly completed. It is driven right through Barbary like a stay, like a back-bone, from the Bay of Carthage to the river-mouth of Rabat on the Atlantic tide; near one thousand miles in its actual trace, and following the great ride which the first Mohammedans took when they overwhelmed the West—when that horseman rode into the sea surf on the sands by the bar of Rabat River and cried out: ‘Had you not set bounds, O God, to the earth, with this your sea, I would ride for ever westward and continue to conquer in Your Name.’ A man may take his motor-car on the boat to-day from Marseilles to Tunis and follow that strict and graded broad way uninterruptedly till he comes to the Atlantic and, turning south to Casablanca, ship it again for Europe.

The surprise of that Moroccan feat was the way in which it was handled during the Great War. When war was already certain in the last days of July, 1914, the Government in Paris, the politicians, sent orders to the Resident-General that all troops should be withdrawn to the coast, the interior to be abandoned, and reconquest (if possible!) to be achieved after the Peace. We who know what those words ‘after the Peace’ have come to mean, know also that it would have been the end of the French in Morocco. It would have been the return to the old pressure upon the Algerian frontier and evidence to all Islam that Europe had failed.

What the soldier did was to maintain his garrisons in spite of the politicians. What was astonishing, he continued the development of Morocco during all those four years of mortal strain, as though the peace had not been broken. Still was the railway laid, and still the new road completed, and still were the buildings set up, and still was the wild hill country contained by its ring of troops; until, when the curtain lifted in ’19, Europe saw, not the Morocco there had been when the Occident entered on its great struggle, but another Morocco, wealthier, stronger and more settled, with great new European towns side by side with the Moslem, and with the whole territory organised.

These new great towns are planned and are built under a military rule—and that is very wise, for the anarchy of individual mercantile effort would have made the experiment break down. No house may be built in the European fashion to jar against the spirit of the place. Everywhere the roofs must be flat and the outline preserved. Also the European town is kept wholly distinct from the Mohammedan. Thus in Meknes you may hear Mass in a chapel which lies within the very thickness of the city wall—it is the old chapel of the Portuguese prisoners during the past of the great Sultans—but you may not enter that chapel from _within_ the city; the door faces outward, upon the country side of the wall. Upon the day before I left Morocco, a soldier who was driving me upon the heights above one of the new cities in his car said to me musingly, as we had halted to look down upon the view of mixed Europe and Africa and of all that vast new wealth: ‘It is just ten years ago that the Sultan of the day, annoyed with his brother, had him devoured by lions.’ Those who love contrast will not find it stronger anywhere than in this strange land.

But these distant memories of Morocco go ill with the presence of a Devon sea under the breaking of a chill dawn. Those African pictures in my mind, hot sand and palm, painted by memory in the night, grew pale and disappeared in the northern daylight, as do the coloured flashes of the headland lights with the coming of the day.

There was still no more wind than would just make the Nona feel her helm. My companion slept below. The heave of the sea grew less; and then, to my disgust and dread, over the sea, already too hazy (so that the high land some three miles away was like a ghost), a fog came drifting up and enveloped us altogether.

I put her up a point more westerly, so as to be on the safe side, for I did not know what current there might be here, and I had to give the land a good offing. I did not want to come up through the fog in such calm weather to hear, close at hand, the treacherous murmur of slightly moving water upon rocks.

Of all experiences at sea in a small boat, under sail, there is none in these days of steam and petrol more trying (after a certain length of it) than being thus half-becalmed with barely steering-way in a part of the sea where the great ships ply up and down, they themselves independent of the stillness that holds you fast. You can hear (as I did on that morning) the beat of the propellers, miles away or close at hand. You hear the hooting from time to time of a ship’s siren—but there is nothing to tell you where your danger may be, nor upon what line it may be approaching you. Some with more experience could, perhaps, have judged that these occasional sounds were at such and such a distance, each or none of them threatening; but to me it seemed as though every steamer in the Bristol Channel was atop of us. I have no doubt that had the fog lifted I should have had nothing in sight but a couple of outward bound tramps halfway to the horizon, and perhaps one small steamer in from the Atlantic seas, and going up to Avonmouth, rather nearer to our shore so as to save the strength of the tide. Indeed, when the fog did lift towards noon, the sea was of that appearance, with not half a dozen craft to be seen, and none near. But in the white, cold blankness of the mist (with nothing whereby to judge save the ear), the rhythmic beating of the blades seemed anywhere close at hand; and if the hooting of the steam whistles was dull and dim, that seemed due not to distance, but to the blanketing of the dense cloud. It rose at last, first in patches and wreaths, then altogether, and a pale sun showed over distant land.

There is one thing that has always puzzled me about the Devon and Cornwall peninsula, and that is why the entry into it, up to quite late in history, seems to have been from the north.

The deep harbours and secure anchorages are to-day on the south. There is a whole string of them; and it is the south that faces towards the main civilisation of the continent. You have the profound inlet of Falmouth, you have Fowey, you have the miles of inland water at Plymouth, you have the Yealm and Salcombe, and the Dart and Teignmouth. Yet the legends, and even the history of Dumnonia are more concerned with such shallow, small, and difficult places as Saint Ives, Padstow, and Bideford River. The wealth seems to have been more on the north than upon the south, for you will note that the pirate raids principally struck there, and the shrines also, the ancient shrines, are rather on the north than on the south; and on the north also is Tintagel, of which it was said by Tristram: ‘Blessed be Tintagel and all that dwell therein.’ The relics of the saints were established in the northern harbours. The seats of government were on the north: there, in the north, is the story of Arthur; and when Cornwall communicates with Brittany in the early Dark Ages, men seem to sail round the end of the land—though the southern harbours are there, pointing right at the further shore.

Did that peninsula swing as on a pivot axis? Did it deepen to the south during the long, hardly-recorded ages?

I knew nothing of these harbours of North Devon and Cornwall, not even by hearsay. I read up diligently in my ‘West Coast Pilot’ that river which seemed the best for entry along these coasts, and hoped to make it before evening. But the wind died down altogether, and we drifted aimlessly enough back upon the flood, then down again on the ebb, through the night, and all through the morning and the noon, and on into the afternoon again of the second day.

It was full evening, and the sun within an hour of its setting, the air much warmer now and the light mellow with a powdery gold, when a strong breeze came up out of the very sun, as it were; out of the glory. The Nona heeled to it, and was now to be handled at will, making a good run a little north of west, with the opportunity for beating as we chose. We beat up towards the river-mouth, sure, as we thought, that the wind would hold, and that we could easily run up the stream and so to the town beyond before darkness. What we had not reckoned with was a sheer cliff lying along the river-mouth to the west, overhanging it and cutting off the wind. On the eastern shore was an immense stretch of half-covered sand, bearing a name of disaster, and famous for wreckage. Having lost the wind, we could no longer manœuvre, and, what was worse in that narrow passage, we found that the tide did not run true to the sea-tide outside.

We had counted upon the flood making; but, whether because there was more water than usual in the river, or from some odd effect of the wind, or because locally it is always so (though the ‘West Coast Pilot’ told us nothing about it, nor the chart either), the river was still running out violently, and there seemed no sign of an upward-going stream before darkness.

I had almost determined to let her drift out again, catch the sea wind when I got beyond the wall of the cliff, find anchoring-ground well offshore, and wait there for the day, when there appeared, coming down the river at great speed, a white motor-boat, large and exquisitely apparelled, splendid with burning bronze, regally accoutred in unspotted gleaming mantle of the foam-colour, of the cloud-colour, of the snow-colour, and a line of gold all around. It was indeed a boat apparelled, not only as to itself, but as to its two humans; and shameful did the Nona appear, homely, draggle-tail, sordid, even after so very calm a passage, when contrasted with that dandy of the inland waters. Alas! That dead wealth should dig such gulfs between mortals and that poverty should lessen virtue!

But, to be just, it is not only wealth that breeds these fine sights, it is also a certain temper in the owner. And I knew very well that though I had three million pounds and some odd pence over I should never have a tidy boat. I could not sleep in such a thing.

Anyhow, there she came, thundering down the tide. I had thought she would pass me in her rush of speed, and I held up until she should have done so, for it would have been dangerous to have tried to go about with such a weight of movement coming on us, and our own course half out of control, dependent only upon occasional slight splashes of wind from over the cliff. But the motor-boat slowed down, and its owner asked us if we wanted a tow up to the town. We met him with gratitude: he was of that very considerable class known as the Good Rich, with whom are the Penitent Thieves, the Reformed Drunkards, the Sane Professors, the Womanly Furies, and all other candidates for heaven. We threw a line aboard him and made fast, and so went up just as the darkness came, and dropped anchor in the pool under a neat little city, which lived by the traffic of that difficult waterway with its strange tide. But, then, all tides are strange.

My companion and I sat in the hatch that evening under quiet stars, smoking pipes, watching that most pleasant of sights, the home lights of a little harbour town, and their trembling reflections in the water, the slight swaying of the masts of fishing-boats moored by the quay. We wondered together at the way the tide had behaved when it tried to baulk us of our entry, and we decided before we slept that it was better never to reason upon tides, nor even to accept print upon them, but to take them blindly as they came, for ‘No man living can understand the tides,’ said my companion, and, as he said it, he sighed; and he was right.

No man living can understand the tides. And the mystery of the tides is as good a corrective as one could find to our deadening pride in exact measurements, and to the folly of attempting to base real knowledge upon mere calculation: our pretence to a universal science, and to a modern omniscience upon the Nature of Things.

The bungling of landsmen in the matter of tides begins with Galileo. That worthy had a talent for getting off the rails and he bungled on the tides as he did on comets. Then came Newton. Why does the tide flow every twelve hours on the average, instead of every twenty-four? If it be true, as I suppose it roughly is, that the moon is the main puller of the tides (helped and hindered a little by the sun, and certainly by other forces of which we know nothing), then there ought to be a tide every twenty-four hours. Put a lot of fluid round a solid sphere, and set a pull, working from some point well outside the fluid. It looks as though the fluid would heap up towards the pull. It being discovered that the fluid heaped up not only towards the pull, but also on the other side of the solid sphere, away from the pull, the mind of man could not rest without proclaiming an explanatory dogma, and we were told (by Newton among others) that the pull not only heaped up the fluid towards itself, but also dragged away the earth from the water on the far side. Indeed, Newton worked it out and proved that it was so.

If the phenomenon had been the other way about, if the fluid had behaved as one would expect it to behave, and had heaped up only on the side towards the pull—oh! believe me! a formula would have been discovered to explain _that_ with just as much ease as the formula which has been drawn up to explain the real state of affairs.

But this original false dogma is not of very much interest compared with the immense complexity of the tides, and the inability to follow them with any sort of completeness by reason of that complexity.

For the tides behave in the most inexplicable fashion. They follow, of course, certain habits, which we know (from the observation of liquids everywhere) to be in the nature of a liquid in movement. They pile up higher as they rush up funnels. They are checked by ridges, they form eddies—and all the rest of it. But they are continually playing anomalous tricks; and any one who tries to work up a theory of the tides makes a fool of himself: still more does any poor sailing-man do so who uses science to discover what the tide may be doing in a place he has not yet tried. He makes not only a fool of himself, but also, very probably, shipwreck.

Why should a tide run three hours late inshore along the Bight of Sussex? We are told it is an eddy. Of course it is. But why an eddy of such extraordinary retardation? The main Channel tide runs from headland to headland. It is ‘true,’ as the phrase goes, at Saint Catharine’s, and again at Beachy and so on to Dungeness; and if you are going up-Channel outside, you carry it with you ‘true’ all the way. That it should be a little retarded in the Bight of Sussex one might understand, but that Bight is very shallow (it is only fifteen miles from the deepest point by Shoreham to the outer line), and yet you have this three hours’ difference! The tide still runs hard to the west alongshore, three—anyhow, two and three quarters—hours after it has turned eastward outside.

Who can explain why there is nine hours’ ebb on the easterly shore of Portland and only three hours’ flow? It is a monkey trick, designed to prevent the poor sailorman from sneaking in just under the Bill: it gives him only three hours out of the twelve in which to do it, with Scylla on his left, and that most abominable howling Charybdis called Portland Race on his right. And if he comes up to the Bill at the end of his three hours’ limit, he has his heart in his mouth for fear that he should find the ebb stream catching his bows the moment he is round the Bill, and driving him headlong into the heart of the Race.

And what about the double tide of the Wight and Poole, the _gulder_, as they call it—the mystery of the Dorset and the Hampshire seas? In the days of my innocence I used to believe what I was told: that the double tide in Southampton Water was due to the water coming in first through the Needles channel and then around by Spithead later. It sounded reasonable for Southampton Water. But when I first made Poole, and found that they had a double tide there as well—and even out beyond Saint Alban’s Head—my philosophy was shaken, and my scheme of things fell heavily to the ground. Why on earth should there be a double tide on that coast? Who could explain it?

The enormous tide at the end of the funnel of the Bristol Channel is reasonable enough, though it is a little odd that it should be so very much bigger at Chepstow than at Gloucester. But how will you account for the prodigious heave at Saint Malo? Why does the flood come up Arun River like a racehorse recently invigorated with a bucket of beer, and at Newhaven hardly move at all up the Ouse?

I have stood outside the old piers at Newhaven in a little boat, with a northerly wind, expecting the first of the flood to help me to beat up, and waited for the quarter flood, and the half flood, and, later than that, and still have seen the sluggish surface water running out to sea against all the tidal laws that were ever written down: running out to sea, though the level of it steadily rose.

But there is no end to the mystery of the tides. Why is there a tide at Venice? It is not much of a thing, but it is there. And, for that matter, there is _a_ tide in the Lake of Geneva. Here, again, the learned come barging in and tell us all about it. Closed basins (they say) like the Adriatic, even quite small ones, like the Lake of Geneva, have their little tides after the fashion of water swung in a basin. The explanation is given in some simile like this: ‘If you shake a basin slightly, the water will begin to swing with a regular movement back and forth.’ So it will. But who shakes the Lake of Geneva? Or who catches the Adriatic at either end, and gives it a regular balance up and down, exactly so often, every so many hours?

All this questioning sounds like the Book of Job; but, note you, that I, for my part, am with Job, and against the scientists. For Job, or God, or whoever it was who set the catechism, put the questions and was careful to avoid the answers, and for my part I will do the same, not only in the matter of the tides, but for the whole basketful of things on which the scientists have been pontificating with increasing uppishness for the last two hundred years, until at last they have led us to the morass wherein we are sinking. When they pontificate on tides it does no great harm, for the sailorman cares nothing for their theories, but goes by real knowledge, and I by my sworn authority, the Admiralty texts, the like of which for excellence the world has not: ‘High water, full and change, six hours, thirteen minutes after Dover. The stream is barely perceptible in the first three hours of the flood, but runs very strongly in the third, and through three quarters of the fourth hour; after which it slackens. There is no perceptible stream in the last two hours of the flood.’ Or again: ‘On rounding the Devil’s Point the tide is lost.’ There is no theorising, no mumbo-jumbo. The thing itself, reality, is stated; and it is true. There is not even a passing wonderment as to where the tide goes to when it is lost. The ‘Channel Pilot’ tells you the truth. You stick blindly to its text and you are saved.

There are many parts of the sea where the tide goes round like a clock, and no one can tell you why. Instead of the stream setting first east, let us say, with the flood and then west with the ebb, it goes all round the compass. It sets northwest with the beginning of the flood, then north, then northeast, then east, and so on, looking all round about itself like a performing dog, and slowly and ceaselessly revolving. It behaves not like an eddy, but like spokes. It is perfectly incomprehensible.

There is also this about the tides, which we all know to be true, and which we can see at work any day, but which I defy any man to rationalize: when the tide runs up a narrow river—or, indeed, any river—it will be still running up, say, ten miles from the mouth, when it is running _down_ again, say, five miles from the mouth. What happens in between? Slack water, of course. But _how_ is there slack water? How can the running _down_ be going on at one point and, immediately beyond, the running up, without a division? How can the water go on running _up_ from a reservoir below which it is running down? It does so, and it is all in God’s Providence, and I accept it as I do teeth, or any other oddity. But I will not pretend to explain it.

The sea teaches one the vastness and the number of things, and, therefore, the necessary presence of incalculable elements, perpetually defeating all our calculations. The sea, which teaches all wisdom, certainly does not teach any man to despise human reason. I suppose there was never yet any Kantian fool or worser pragmatist who would not have been cured of his folly by half a week of moderate weather off the Onion. No one can at sea forego the human reason or doubt that things are things, or that true ideas are true. But the sea does teach one that the human reason, working from a number of known premises, must always be on its guard, lest the conclusion be upset in practice by the irruption of other premises, unknown or not considered. In plain words, the sea makes a man practical; and the practical man is, I suppose, as much the contrary of the pragmatist as the sociable man is the contrary of the socialist, or the peaceable man the contrary of the pacifist.

And, talking of pacifists, there is nothing more pleasing to note than the excellent unconscious patriotism of the men and women who solemnly propose that patriotism is the ruin of the world.

There is a delightful irony in observing how intensely national these anti-nationalists are! It is a profound and satisfying thing to watch. Any one can get a good laugh out of the patriotism of men with no nation, or, at any rate, with a nationality very different from that which they profess. It is a common jest, the sham patriotism of the nomads. But far more subtle and penetrating is the fun of watching your genuine pacifist, who believes the divisions between nations to be evil artifices, soon to be conjured away.

Nowhere are these international pacifists more national than in England. They have all the English spontaneity and love of adventure. They carry to extreme that English love of individual action which we nearly always find associated with their odd political blindness. They nearly all display some trick of clothing or food. They will drink lime-juice instead of wine, or wear elastic-sided boots, or think it wrong to smoke tobacco, or go about without hats. If they are men, they will have hair coming down to their shoulders, which is a very greasy habit. If they are women they will go about barefoot, save for the most absurd sandals; and while they practise all these provincial follies they will be consumed with a passion for the general of mankind.

If you wanted to get a specimen—I do not say of the average Englishman, for he is certainly not that—but of a being in whom the English characteristics are to be found most deeply marked, this pacifist is the very man whom you should choose. All the English conceptions of right and wrong, all the English habits of thought, all the sheltered English attitude towards the great outer world, all the local errors, and much of the local generosity are there present to the full.

I cannot help thinking it a strength to England that the pacifist or internationalist in England should be so intensely English. It prevents any disruptive effect, and it therefore prevents the rivals of this country taking such folk seriously.

The French and Italians are far less happily circumstanced in this regard. In those two countries—and, I suppose, in Spain also, although there I have less knowledge on which to speak—the internationalist _is_ an internationalist, bearing but weakly the common marks of his own people, and willing to act not only against his country politically, but also in all his being, morally and spiritually. A French or Italian internationalist and pacifist will not only sympathise with the enemies of his country, not only give them actively all the help he can, but he will particularly attack the soul whereby his country lives, its traditions and character. If he is French he will hate wine, if Italian, macaroni. But does the English pacifist hate tea? The unrooted man is a very dangerous type, and in England happily unknown. To read anything said or written by such men as Mr. Wells or Mr. Snowden is to read something by people who evidently think of international peace as something closely connected with cricket, teetotalism, and the use of Bible language—coupled, of course, with a reverent agnosticism, which means a wearied puritanism.

I have spoken of their courage, and certainly the courage of the typical conscientious objectors during the War was an arresting thing.