Chapter IX: Part 9

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.