Chapter VI: On the Chesil Bank (1)

I

The Chesil Bank was new to me, and it had no message. It was pleasing, but it was strange, though it was England. It was but a whitewashed wall topped by a tamarisk hedge. Below the wall was a deserted ridge and beach of shingle, tawny and glowing, and a wide sea without a ship in sight. The white wall, the pale and shimmering stones, and the bright sea, were as far from my own interests as a West Indian cay.

A figure appeared in the distance, so unusual a blot on the shingle that I watched it two miles away. There was nothing else to do. It moved with briskness and determination, but appeared to be unconcerned with anything I could see on that strand. It came straight towards me as though it knew I was there, and at length handed me a telegram. It was a smiling and rosy-cheeked little messenger from the post-office, three miles away. The child waited, like the eternal figure of Eros in a British uniform, as though it had been doing this, off and on, in some form or other, since the gods began to sport with the affairs of earth. “What’s all this about?” I asked Eros. But he only smiled. I wondered who was in such a hurry to announce something, and opened the envelope. “Conrad is dead.”

I stared at the messenger for a space, as though there must be something more to come. But nothing more came. Then the messenger spoke. “Anything to go back?”

Anything to go back? No, nothing to go back. Somehow, life seems justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not seem to leave us any the poorer. But to-day, when it happens, we feel a distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed of late years by lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainty that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance of solace in years that have not been easily borne.

Yet I cannot pretend to intimacy with him, nor to complete absorption in his work. There was something in him not to be clearly discerned. It was sought in his books with curiosity, but it did not appear to be there. The man was only partly seen, as through a veil. Sometimes his face peered through the filmy obscurity, massively, in still and overlooking scrutiny, his eyes remote but intent, kindly but dangerous, a face in a seclusion one could approach but never enter. Most of us are aware, of course, that we are secluded, and that our friends can never find out where we are. We wish they could. It is not a joy to us that, in the nature of things, we must be alone. But Conrad, perhaps, was more accustomed to exile and a solitary watch under the silent stars. Occasionally he would vouchsafe a closer glimpse of himself, something to make us alert, but at once fade into his own place. He would utter such a word as _Meddlers_, meaning you and me, meaning all those Englishmen, who, for example, are restive under the constraint of foolish men and statutes, and plainly show it. He would exclaim _Humanitarians_ in a way that implied, merely implied, that pitiful men are a nuisance. My own guess is that he desired to take part in English affairs, for he had strong antipathies, but that he repressed himself, doubting his right to--well, to meddle. Perhaps it is as well he kept out. He would have proved a formidable opponent. But mainly he was silent about the affairs that provoked the prejudices of the English, giving no more than an appraising and ironic glance. Or he would, when we talked with emphasis about our national concerns, make an enigmatic gesture. He was an aristocrat. Yet what does that mean? Of course he was. Aristocrat and democrat are tokens that to-day look much alike, and appear to have no relevance even to a money-lender. We may throw them away. Everybody has forgotten what they mean.

I suppose it is about eighteen years ago since I began to read Conrad. I knew of him, but mistrusted the evidence of the critics. The literature of the sea did not interest me, for I had had some experience with that rollicking stuff; the stories which, we are told, have something called “tang” in them, the stories that represent seamen as good-natured imbeciles, with a violent bully here and there among them altogether too ingenious and foul-mouthed for comfort. Hearty yarns! But I happened to know several seamen, and a few ships. However, one day, in a hurry for a train, I snatched up the _Nigger_, and began it in the cab on the way to Euston. That was a great surprise. The _Narcissus_ was certainly the kind of craft which made fast in the South-West India Dock; and old man Singleton was the embodiment of the virtues and faults of a race of mariners which, in the year in which I read the book, had all but gone. Singleton was of the clippers. I had known some of those men, and I recognised Singleton at once. This novelist had made a picture of a type of British seaman which, but for his genius, would have been lost to us and forgotten.

There could be no doubt about it. The _Nigger_ was the thing itself, and I had never expected to see it. Next I read _Typhoon_; and the _Nan-Shan_ and her men were exactly what even now you may meet any day somewhere east of Tower Hill, if you care to look, and know what to look for. I was not certain whether the critics knew it, but to me it was plain that this worker, who was a Pole, I was told, had added to the body of English literature testimony to a period of British ships and seamen which otherwise would have passed as unmarked as the voyages of the men of Tyre and Sidon. Its very atmosphere was there. As for _Youth_ it is, without doubt, one of the finest short narratives in the language, and there will never be again such a yarn of such a voyage in such a ship.

Conrad told me that not seldom seamen wrote to him to say that they knew Singleton well, though “that was not his name.” Of course they knew Singleton. The novelist was very pleased that he could say Singleton had been recognised. It was the kind of assurance he needed then. It is all very well for us to make a fuss now, but Conrad had given the public his best work years before he received from us any worthy signal. He was an extremely sensitive man, and shy and modest, and not so long ago he desired to learn from Englishmen that his addition to our literature of the sea was just, and the kind that we approved. We were in no hurry to give it. I met him first in the company of Norman Douglas and Austin Harrison, in the office of the _English Review_ in its earlier days. Because I knew he was a noteworthy man, and because he looked distinguished and a little haughty, and because only a few weeks before I had reviewed one of his books of the sea, I was nervous and merely looked on. Presently Douglas and Harrison began to talk of the affairs of their Review; Conrad then came over, and stood beside me. He touched my arm, apparently as nervous as I was myself. “Thank you very much for what you said about my book. You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

I was then a journalist on the staff of a daily newspaper. I was at Sidney Street and elsewhere. But Conrad’s first words to me gave me one of the shocks of my life. Here was a man, whose work, however neglected by the public, was manifestly an admirable achievement. It would be living when much of what was being done in London, and many of the great men whose names were in the headlines daily, would be forgotten. It did not want much knowledge to divine that. And hardly a robust young writer who had a column to fill somewhere every other day but was assured of his place in the handsome scheme of things, and expected one to know his work. Yet this man, who had _Youth_ to his credit, and _Typhoon_ and _Lord Jim_, touched the arm of his junior and was pleased to say “You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

A remark of that kind might go far to wreck one’s own career, if it sank properly in. Yet it is as well to point out that, though modest, Conrad could be quick enough in attack when folly or presumption was about. He was not the man to suffer gladly the more ruinous absurdities of his fellows. It was heartening to see that graciousness and diffidence suddenly go, and those dark eyes become lambent at the naming of an arrogant crudity.

I must say there is one of the company of the _Narcissus_ that I deplore. Conrad should never have shipped that man Donkin. He is not a man, but an unresolved dislike, a blot in a good book. Donkin does a little to spoil the voyage of the _Narcissus_, for Conrad imagined that he had shipped a Cockney; yet Donkin, whenever he speaks, distresses the ear of a Londoner. We do not know his dialect. I fear that Donkin may be, if examined, queer evidence of what was behind that veil which Conrad preferred to keep between himself and his readers.

Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Joseph Conrad’s posthumous _Tales of Hearsay_, quotes with evident pleasure from one of the tales: “It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret patriotism worthily--or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and men.” Vulgar refinement! A shining epithet. And how it would be quoted with unction by one group of ardent patriots, who would cheerfully shoot another group, with admirable sincerity of feeling, because the patriotism of their opponents, just as sincere if less admirable, stood in their way! Patriotism doubtless is like true religion. It may be entirely an expression of faith, and so need not be reasonable. And we know who have true religion. We have it.

No matter. “There is a fountain in Marrakesh,” says Mr. Cunninghame Graham, “with a palm tree near it, a gem of Moorish art, with tiles as iridescent as the scales upon a lizard’s back. Written in Cufic characters, there is this legend ‘Drink and admire.’ Read and admire; then return thanks to Allah who gives water to the thirsty and at long intervals sends us refreshment for the soul.” And we return thanks to Allah. There is that to go back.

II

When I return to a London suburb I think I shall try to cultivate something resembling one of the drains which occur here and there on the lower slopes of the Wessex moorland above the Chesil Bank. These ditches make our best horticultural efforts as vulgar as excessive begonias. The effect achieved by a ditch comes, apparently, without intent and labour. When a drain is constant over shelves of limestone from an upper spring, and then gathers into a shallow basin before losing itself in the porous desert near the sea; when it occurs so in a narrow combe with a southerly descent and is sheltered from the hard drive of westerly weather, then the still lower air is tropical, and English weeds flourish with an extravagance which hints at a fearful vitality suppressed by cultivation.

One such tiny combe is a short walk above the tamarisks and the white wall of my house. It is easy and even pleasant to carry thither those books some wilful editors consider that I ought to read, unluckily for the books and for them; because if I get well above the ditch then the smell of thyme makes the synthetic odours of a modern novel, as from a dressing table, seem a little queer. No getting round that criticism. And if I stay by the ditch then I waste all the morning standing about in that luxuriant tangle, as fascinated by it as the hover-flies appear to be. No good then to try to read any book. Foolish to expect the wit of recent prose to prove like a dragon-fly, or a lyric to soar and poise like a red admiral. On a hot day, too, the smell of the water mint would make the strongest inducement of Mille Fleurs seem very silly. Besides, one has first to get to the ditch. It is quite near, but the time one takes to reach it is ridiculous. The ditch lies on the other side of an old wall, which is built--or created, for the wall bears no evidence of design--of loose slabs of a limestone of the Lias.

That wall is the trouble. It is hard to get over it, and impossible to get round it. Most of it is hidden in a torrent of bramble, which pours headlong downhill. That wild of bramble is itself a domain in its own right. I have discovered that it is an inhabited tunnel, and the waves of hooked branches form its roof. One morning a stoat, which was leaping about in a game that needs but one player, saw me coming, and dived into a lower door of the mass. Out of other doors, till then unknown, rabbits shot at once, as by magic. It was as though this earth could erupt all the life it needs, at any moment. I suspect these hills could do very well without us, and if Downing Street were to become permanently untenanted perhaps our island would not look any the worse, from one point of view.

A good length of the wall is exposed, at one place. That part of it is, as an orderly mind would say, in need of repair. I hope it will never get it. It is a delightful ruin. Slabs of limestone are scattered about the foot of a ruin of loose rock. They vary in colour. They may be a pale buff, or a bluish grey. The surface of a slab is frequently water-worn, and then it is smooth and silky to the touch, and is lustrous. It looks warm and rich, as though the bones of earth had an unctuous marrow. And any chance fragment makes the age of the tumuli on the hill-top as recent as yesterday, for it will be loaded with fossils, the relics of a sea in which the dinosaurs lived. The chance cross-sections of many nacreous shells give such a tablet of rock the appearance of being marked with shining hieroglyphics; what reading matter for us! No wonder it takes some time to get over it, this wall! Lizards whisk into its crevices, the flickering of shadows where all is still.

Below the overturned wall is the combe in which runs the ditch. There is a dark screen of stunted Scotch firs on the edge of its far side to keep any of the Channel gusts from spilling over. The weeds below have no need to adjust themselves to the draughts. They grow as they please. Teazle and hemp-agrimony flourish into small trees. Once you begin to climb uphill through that jungle, out of the lower fringe of mint and flea-bane--it is time a better name was found for that pleasant little yellow herb of the waste and damp lands--you feel that the heat of the sun is really a direct and incessant burning. The air is humid, and strongly aromatic. The growth in that hollow might be the work of a spell. It does not move. It seems theatrical and even a little threatening in its absolute quietude and stillness. Some resolution is needed for an advance into it. The pinkish murk of the crowns of hemp-agrimony rises above the cream plumes of the meadow-sweet, and though one knows of no attraction in its flower-heads, the butterflies do. I suppose it gives them an upper platform in the light. Out in the wind you may not see a butterfly all day, but here it is usual on a sunny morning to find a gathering of scores of tortoise-shells, peacocks, and red admirals. Perhaps it is a tradition with them that this is the best retreat on the coast. It is a good tradition and should be preserved. I am not sure which of those insects is the most handsome, but I think whichever one of them happens to be arranging itself on the nearest crown, heliotropically, really presenting to the sun its coloured design, yet behaving--if I remain as still as the garden itself--as though it were doing its best to get into the right light for my benefit. Well, it is for my benefit, as well as for my humiliation, because I realise that such a design, though worked to no useful purpose that I can guess, being in that respect inferior to my own designs, yet still might be considered superior to the art of my own well-directed efforts. In any case, while that assembly of useless living colours is winged and convulsive above the weeds, on a good morning, it seems a sort of idleness to make the usual notes of a critic of books.

III

There is no harbour on the curved sweep of this bank of shingle for many miles in either direction. The line of the beach in the north curves so imperceptibly that to the eye it looks straight; towards the southern end it sweeps round like the blade of a sickle, and is as sharp in the run. The five-fathom mark is close inshore, so the first line of breakers is direct upon the shingle. The usual weather, of course, is westerly; nearly always south of west. And in that direction I suppose the next land would be the Bahamas, but I have only local maps, and can lay no exact course to what landfall is in the eye of the wind. Anyhow, there is so much ocean between us and the next land that the waves come in, with any seaward breeze, in regular and massed attacks. They growl as they charge. In summer weather like this it is a cheerful noise, for they are only playing roughly. Then they break and make the shingle fly, with a roar; and a myriad little stones, as a wave draws back, follow it with thin cries.

Both the sea and the coast look bare and barren. Terns in couples patrol up and down, and so close to me that I can see their black caps. Occasionally one will dive--two seconds under water--and it comes up with something which glitters for an instant. On the ridge of the shingle bank a little vegetation is recumbent, forming close mats and cushions, with sere stalks that quiver in the wind, as though apprehensive of their footing. The sea looks even more infertile than the desert of stones. You feel that you and your book, and the terns which now and then find something which glitters, are all the intruding life there is. But some distance away there are a few boats drawn up high and dry--they make good shelters to leeward of sun and wind, and they have a strong but pleasing smell--and at odd times, usually towards evening, a crew of six men will come along to get one out. She is launched down the slope on wooden rollers, in short runs. Half the crew go in her, and one of them throws a seine net steadily overside. The other fellows have the shore end of the seine. The boat goes round a considerable bight, and then lands the other end of the net. If you imagine that hauling in that net and its floats, when any tide is running, is nothing but fun, the men will not object if you put on your weight. That way there is much to be learned.

The gradient of the shingle is steep, and when climbing it with a line in tow the feet slip back into the polished stones at every step. What has this to do, you ask, with a reader of books? Well, what do you suppose a bookman learns at a study table about life? Make him sail a boat now and then, or haul on a net, or herd cows, or dig clay, or weed a field instead of new novels; make him work, if not for a living, then just for a change. What does he imagine keeps London’s chimneys smoking? Once I heard a rude fellow interrupt a famous political economist, who was deploring the sad ways of coal miners. “If you,” he said, “could keep warm in winter only by hewing your own coal out of the rock, you know very well you’d sooner buy a pair of dumb-bells.”

The feet crunch and slip, steadily, while the floats of the net seem to bob no nearer the shore. The weight comes with a rush just about when you feel it is better to read books than to handle seine nets. There is a heaving and a slapping on the stones. To most of us, of course, fish is fish. There is only fish. Yet one haul of the net is almost sure to bring in forms that are fishes, certainly, but which demand to be named. They are so challenging that they stick in the memory, and must be exorcised with names, as we resolve, by putting names to them, all the mysteries that trouble us.

I love fish markets. I enjoy even Billingsgate, though one does get pushed about there, early mornings, and its rain of slobber is bad for neat raiment. One of the most beautiful and terrifying scenes on this earth is a fish market of the tropics. When next you are in Tanjong Priok, do not forget, as you did last time, to go to its fish market. But this English shingle beach, barren as its stones look, is a good substitute for the Tanjong, when the seine net is fruitful. For occasionally it is fruitful, though a deal of wet and heavy labour may be wasted on six mackerel and some squids. The fishermen have no use for the squids, nor have I, but they may be enjoyed. You need only look at them, for they are like odd Chinese shapes in polished and transparent quartz, but magically illuminated from within by the principle of life. Life flushes each hyaline figure. And though, to one way of thinking, six mackerel are not so good as six thousand, yet from another they are just as good. A wonderful family, that of the mackerel! You no sooner begin to remember tunny, albacore, and bonito, than you are translated to a distant sea. There is something else, too. We never see mackerel--or, for that matter, any other fish, in London. We see only provender there. On the stones of this beach, when the red globe of the sun sits almost a-top of the western headland, and the air grows bleak, a mackerel fresh from the sea might be a big fire-opal lost to the ocean’s enchantment. Yes, you may feel a shudder of fear when overlooking the heaving pocket of the seine net.

And how little one knows of such a gathering from the gardens of the pulse! A red gurnard, with its staring eyes of violet, and the livid violet margin to its pectorals, never suggests anything for the pot. Those steady eyes look at you with disconcerting interest. There are red mullet and grey, gar-fish like green snakes, horse mackerel, herring, plaice and dabs, and fry that might be leaping shavings of bright metal. The other afternoon a salmon came in with the rest, a very king, a resplendent silver torpedo of a fellow, who scattered the shingle before he was overcome. And now, because I have been warned that I may look for even stranger messengers from the world we do not know, I am waiting for the opah, the _chimæra mirabilis_, the angel fish, Darkie Charlie, and the oar-fish or sea-serpent.

IV

That overcrowding of which we complain--declaring first that our cities are much too great, and then blaming our officials because the buildings do not spread quickly enough--is something we really enjoy, I suppose. We could not live without the support of the multitude. We love to walk down Fleet Street, jostling each other on the inadequate sidewalks, pressed together between the motor-buses and the shop fronts. We find the crowd, and keep with it on instinct. The fruits of solitude are astringent and we do not like them. Nothing else will explain why we would sooner sit uncomfortably with fifty strangers in a charabanc, for a journey through a land we cannot see, to a place which is exactly like the one from which we started, than stroll across country in peace at our own gait.

Yesterday I had to go to town again. It ought to have been a pleasure trip, because the town nearest to me is described on the posters, with coloured illustrations, as the kind of place for which men forsake even their London employment. When I remembered its many advertised attractions I felt almost glad that I was out of tobacco. At last I should see this notable pleasure resort with its golden sands and its joyous throng. The change would be interesting, because nothing had happened in my neighbourhood for some time, except weather. True, the tamarisk pennants had begun to rust, and in the next field there was stubble instead of oats. But, except the admonitions of a few selected books, the only sounds at an isolated cottage had been the occasional mewing of the gulls and the mourning of the sea. I had an idea, too, that the wind, as it came ashore, was glad to find our key-hole, for it desired a local habitation and a voice. The voice of the wind, I noticed, was in keeping with the monody of the sea. It is rare for any stranger to pass this house, though some porpoises went by the other afternoon. Just beyond a most individual sea-stock, which somehow is rooted and exalted on the wall at the foot of the garden, daring the light of the ocean, I saw the black forms of the little whales arch past, close in. And the other day a float, from one of the submarine nets of the days that were, drifted ashore, to have a chat with me about old times. It was the only distinguished stranger on the beach.

The pleasure resort, therefore, I expect to bring me back to a conscious existence. Not far from its station there is a magnificent hotel, with a glass verandah and palms, under which I saw men in golfing dress sitting in wicker chairs brooding appreciatively across a broad asphalted road to the gathering ground of the charabancs; and, just beyond the motor vehicles, multitudes of red and yellow and blue air-balloons were swaying aloft, though their attachment to earth was out of sight. I threaded the charabancs, pushed aside men in white ulsters who shouted at me that it was only two bob, and brought up against some iron railings. I leaned on the iron railings for support; they were providential. The beach was below; I mean that I suppose it was, for it all was out of sight except a pailful of it immediately under my eyes, which a child was treasuring. A man was beside the child, in a canvas chair. How he got there it was impossible to see, but he looked worried about it, though resigned. Rank on rank of deck chairs stood between him and the sea, all occupied by people reading newspapers, or asleep, or dead; the intermediate spaces were filled with children. The very sea was invaded. It was impossible to discern where it reached the land. The crowds went out to meet it. They slurred its margin. And on either side of that holiday-maker below me, for miles apparently, the deck chairs extended and shut him in; the sea wall rose behind him. Would he starve to death? Nobody seemed to care. Nobody lowered a rope. When I left him he had fallen asleep, luckily; perhaps to dream of freedom.

Whoever that man was, he was a voluntary prisoner. He must have sought it. If that had been the only beach on that coast, the only view of the sea to be got in the neighbourhood, it would be fair to guess that he had gambled with his hour, and had drawn a blank. Such an accident might happen to anybody, even in the desperate matter of catching the only train of the day, which one had hoped was late. Yet that will not explain his wretched position, because, whether he knew it or not, there is a beach not a great distance from where he was a prisoner on which could be lost the population of a city; but, as I happened to know, no life was there that morning except a few fishermen and some parties of sea-birds. Moreover, the views from that untenanted strand are incomparably finer and wider. It is possible to see from there what a desirable island we have, an island very far from being as overcrowded as we imagine.

Indeed, if the country about that imprisoned holiday-maker has a fault, it is that it is largely as it was when the folk who built its hut-circles and cromlechs occupied it; though I myself do not find that fault with it. For most of a long day on its uplands a traveller will see more tumuli about him than warm and smoking homesteads. Within a morning’s walk of that crowded holiday beach, a fox dropped his rabbit, which he was carrying home, as I came round a prehistoric earthwork, and trotted off reluctantly, in broad daylight. He must have been greatly surprised to find a stranger was trespassing on his hill. On another morning we startled a weasel, which at that moment had worse than startled a short-tailed field mouse. He was more reluctant to go than the fox, but he did retire into a tangle. Not for long, though. His tiny snake-like head was out in a few moments, inspecting us. Then he stole out to look for his abandoned dinner. He became very peevish when he could not find it, for we had hidden it, and explored all the ruts and tussocks in the neighbourhood in impulsive leaps and gallops. We had a leisured view of his cream and chestnut figure, darting and writhing about a roadway which has long been obsolete. Once or twice he seemed as though he were on the point of attacking us.

The land about that holiday resort has been loved by many great artists. The men who first tried to convert the English barbarians to Christianity saw its fruitfulness and settled there; but you might suppose, in spite of its colour, the nobility of its form, and the wealth of its tradition, that there was something wrong with it, for if you keep away from the tarred roads which connect the towns, and that is easy enough, you are in the England that was before the coming of the machines. Its contrast with that near holiday beach where the golden strand is invisible through pleasure-seekers suggests that the machines have so disordered our minds that we shall never again feel happy in independent contact with the earth.

V

The breakers are towering to-day. They explode above the tops of the tamarisks, which are tormented by a south-wester. If a door is opened, pandemonium enters the house. So I have been reading the poets when their subject is the sea. Byron when in a kindly mood once counselled the sea to “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.” Man, especially man the poet, with his conscious understanding of the universe, is inclined to haughtiness. He is a conqueror. He feels that he is one with the powers that roll and are blue. When he is not haughty and sombre in the presence of these powers, he includes them with those embracing thoughts which fondly gather in little children, fawns, and daisies. I do not speak with certain knowledge, but I should guess that any anthology of what poets have written about the sea must cause a mariner a little astonishment. Are they the waters he knows? Then he must be a rude and careless fellow. Now and then when turning the leaves of the book it may occur to him that perhaps the poet did not know what he was talking about. He may set out with “a wet sheet and a flowing sea and a wind that follows fast,” and bound along at the rate of knots for some stanzas; but presently he is sure to ask himself why with the wind in that quarter the good ship “leaves old England on the lee.”

Yet that is a minor difficulty. We can see that a slip of that sort might happen even to a sailor who attempted poetry, especially when one remembers the exigencies of metre and rhyming. No; what would give the mariner most surprise would be the love the poets feel for the sea, their delight in it, their robust faith in its blueness and its rolling and in its beneficent and healing qualities. It might be a public garden, maintained by a highly capable Gardener. I have a number of those special anthologies, and a re-reading of them helps me to understand why it is that the people who, as they say, love the sea, prefer to show their love only at certain favoured points of our coasts, and to leave most of the shore line to the wind and the gulls. These anthologies are not together for their assuagement; for the most part, the poems concern an ocean which can be enjoyably contemplated on a warm day, in choice company, with light thoughts hovering about, vague but gleaming, like the birds. We must have the moral support of society when loving the sea. What would happen if we were left alone with it? One lonely evening by its margin might be enough to scare most of us towards the comfort of the nearest railway station’s lamps. There is but little suggestion of this, however, in the anthologies. They brave it out. “_High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_,” or “_The Sands of Dee_”--such unexpected chill shadows may at times intervene, and change the look of the sea. The brightness goes. Yet only as the sun goes when a trifling cloud blows across its light and warmth. The waves soon sparkle once more according to their poetic wont, and the deep and dark blue ocean rolls on, the ships are brave and free, and jovial sailors look out on their world like happy imbeciles whose function it is to provide matter for our superior amusement. At the worst they saunter through Ratcliffe, as did the crew of the steamer _Bolivar_, “drunk and raising Cain,” but maintaining even then, we see, their reputation for imbecility. If they survive a dangerous voyage in a steamer, which was only a pack of “rotten plates puttied up with tar,” and meant to founder, their sailor-like protest shows merely in a riotous booze. “Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the eternal sea!” So let us adjourn to a tavern.

We appear to be incorrigibly romantic. We prefer to give the reality any name but the one which shows we have surmised its nature. It is impolite in Malay society, and even unlucky at night, to mention the dreaded tiger by name. You must refer to him in an allusive and friendly way. With a maritime people the sea is lovely, and sailors are “salts” who provide some comic relief. The more absurd we find those fellows, then the more certain it is that they are genuine “old shellbacks.” How curious it is, then, that sea-lovers are so careful about encountering the object of their affections that they abstain from it except with the support of a multitude! What we mean is, I suppose, that we enjoy leisure when in the midst of our fellow creatures, in a place where everything is done to prevent our coming under those shadows cast by matters which puzzle or distress us, and therefore should be ignored or misnamed.

The sea is such a shadow, whatever the light upon it. The soul of the sea, if it has one, is like that fabulous “soul of the war,” something from which no joy can come by brooding upon it. The sea fascinates me, I admit. I should not enjoy an English holiday away from the coast, and I should be glad if some wise person could explain exactly why. I have felt the same attraction, though then it was more acute, in the aspect of a desolate village which was under the ruthless eye of the enemy’s guns. I did not want to go there, but I went. At sunset alone on a beach where there is nothing but sea and sky and the forsaken shore, the look of the running waters, their harsh and melancholy voices, and the bleak wind which shivers the very herbage, make you feel that you are a homeless stranger. Is this your place? It does not look like it. If verses from the poets then come to your mind, it is only in an ironic way. Absurd to apostrophise that scene! Much effect upon it loving it would have. Perhaps the mere effort encourages the fearful and doubting heart of man, and for that reason we may welcome the poets and the romanticists, who give us the sensation of conquerors, which is something towards the conquest of mind over matter.

The romance of the sea, the sea that inspired exultant lyric and stately prose, the sea wonderful with the old clippers to which we have looked back wistfully, is not quite the sea, we are beginning to feel, that we used to picture. Does that sea exist? It may be ungracious to question it at this moment, so soon after our recent rapture, sincerely felt, over the _Cutty Sark_. Yet there it is. We are living in an age of revolt. We are interrogating much that once was never questioned. Things must prove themselves anew. What we used to value may be lumber, and must go if it is, even when it is lumber of the mind.

_As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever_--
]

As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever, though it will absorb anything the poet will give it. It is as alien as the stars, which are bright over lovers, but were just as friendly to Scott’s little party when the blizzard stopped. We may feel what we like when we witness, from a ship off Sumatra, a tropical sunset. The spectacle of the billows of the uplifted Western ocean, in a winter twilight, is enough to make a man feel that he ought to have a religion; but that is only a confession of man’s wondering and questioning mind. There is more pertaining to man in a kitchen midden than in the spacious ocean when it most attracts us. Man, fronting the sea, the sea which is, inexplicably, both hostile and friendly to him because it knows nothing of his existence and his noble aims, is saddened, and is driven to meet its impersonal indifference with fine phrases, that his sense of his worth and his dignity may be rehabilitated. He knows it is absurd to pretend to any love for the sea.

Then why does the sea attract us? For it does, even though we feel now that our lyrical exultation over its moods has been oddly irrelevant. It attracted in the same way the good seamen who were so ill-rewarded for their skill and endurance when making for us what is now the wistful memory of the clippers. They were ill-used, those men. We may make their times romantic in retrospective brooding, and with a sombre imagining of the soul of man fronting the hostile elements in stoic endurance. But it will not do. So much of their heroic endurance was necessitated by facts which any sensible dog would have avoided once he knew what they were like. To live in such quarters, on such food, while doing such work, when there was no need for it, when so easily it could have been ordered otherwise, may afford matter for an Iliad, if we choose to ignore the critical intelligence, but we cannot get credit for common sense on the score of it. And that kind of sense should be the beginning of the literature of the sea, as of all literature.

Let us examine more cautiously, for example, that favourite book of the sea of ours, _The Nigger_. Remember that the barque _Narcissus_ was property, just as is a farm, and might never have been on her beam ends but for an eagerness for more money. Now consider the attitude of her master and his officers to their charge, as Conrad posed them for our approval; regard the fortitude and skill of the men in circumstances which Conrad pictures so vividly that we shrink as from a physical contact; and then observe Donkin, that Cockney guy set up for the contempt of all stout and virtuous lovers of duty; and own up! Is it just? Do we know Donkin the Cockney as at once we know Singleton, the old man of the sea? We know we do not. Such treatment ashore drove agricultural labourers to the penal settlements of Australia. These facts, so important in any examination of the problem of conduct--and that, we know, is what the _Nigger_ is,--are obscured by our admiration for Conrad’s noble tribute to Singleton, and for his pictures of a ship fighting the Southern Ocean.

No doubt it would suit some ship-owners if the sea could be accepted as a cheap and providential means of testing the fundamental quality of the souls of men; and obviously some men would stand the test well. But beyond noting that this would ease the labours of the Recording Angel, I can see nothing in its favour. There is a need in literature, as in politics, to clear the mind of cant. Men intrinsically may be of less importance than good ships and the august spectacle of the sea; but they ought not to be so to us.

But one could go on for a long time on such a subject as the sea in English literature, if one named merely the books and poems which to us seem to be right. There is, however, no need. One great sea story comprehends them all, as all who know _Moby Dick_ know well enough. It is the greatest book in the language on ships and the sea, because it is more than that. For the White Whale, that mythical monster, is as elusive as the motive of a symphony of Beethoven’s. Did the whale ever exist? There is the music to prove it. The harpooners followed it, a shadow among the very stars. That is something like a whaling voyage, when the boats leave the seas to hurl a lance at the Great Bear. Other voyages must end. But the quest of Captain Ahab’s ship is without end; and what would we expect of a craft whose master soliloquises like Macbeth? Outside the epistles of St. Paul, is there a sermon in any book which is like Father Mapple’s to the folk in his chapel at New Bedford? The cross-bearings taken by Captain Ahab to find his ship’s position, to set, if he can, the right course for her, would bring his ship to a harbour no man has ever reached. And he did not reach it. Destiny sank him and his companions in the waste. Yet we know the high adventure of his phantom whaler continues in the hearts of men. That is where the _Pequod_ sank.

Many years ago I was discussing the literature of the sea with a Fleet Street colleague, a clever and versatile man against whose volatile enthusiasms experience had taught me to guard myself well. He began to talk of _Moby Dick_. Talk! He soon became incoherent. He swept aside all other books of the sea with a free, contemptuous gesture. There was only one book of the sea, and there never would be another. I fear that a native caution has shut me from many good things in life, so I smiled at my friend; yet, in the way of a cautious man, I smiled at him with sound reason. I had not read the White Whale; I had only heard rumours of it. But I had read _Typee_ and _Omoo_, and I knew them even better than my colleague; about whom I may point out that a brief experience on the Somme battlefield unbalanced his mind at last, and he died insane. Now _Typee_ and its mate are brisk and attractive narratives of travel and adventure, exuberantly descriptive, lively with their honey-coloured girls and palm groves, jolly with the talk of seamen in forecastles of ships sailing waters few of us know, though we all wish we did, and full of the observation of an original mind in a tropic world that is no more. But they are not great literature. I knew perfectly well that the author of _Typee_ was not the man to rise to that stellar altitude which moved my colleague to rapture and wonder. That was not Melville’s plane, and having read the American writer’s first two books, I thought a busy man, amid a wilderness of unread works, need not bother himself about this White Whale, for hardly a doubt it was just a whale.

I was wrong. My friend who was unbalanced by the war was right. I find it difficult now to speak of Melville’s book within measure, for I have no doubt _Moby Dick_ goes into that small company of extravagant and generative works which have made other writers fertile, the books we cannot classify, but which must be read by every man who writes, _Gargantua and Pantagruel_, _Don Quixote_, _Gulliver’s Travels_, _Tristram Shandy_, and the _Pickwick Papers_. That is where _Moby Dick_ is, and it is therefore as important a creative effort as America has made in her history. I would sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” if that is the proper hymn, with fervour, with the deepest sense of debt and gratitude, at any patriotic service of thanksgiving over _Moby Dick_. That book is one of the best things America has done since the Declaration of Independence. It justifies her revolution. I would assist another body of Pilgrim Fathers to any place on earth if on their venture depended the vitality of the seed of such a book as that. The indeterminate jungle of humanity flowers and is justified in its bibles, which carry in microcosm the fortunate future of mankind, or if there be no fortune for it in its future, then in its tragic but godlike story.

If a reader of books desires to know the truth about his understanding of English prose, whether it is natural and proper, or whether his interest in it has been but suggested by the critics and the conventions of the more popular reading of his time, like the habit of going to Church or voting at elections, there is a positive test. Let him read the book by Herman Melville about a whale. If he does not like it he should not read it. As soon as imagination begins to sport with our language, then our words, that were familiar, become strange; their import seems different; you cannot see quite through them. They suggest that they are mocking us. They seem a trifle mad. They break free from our rules and behave indecorously. They are transmuted from the solid currency into invalid hints and shadows with shifting lights and implications. They startle with suggestions of deeps around us the existence of which we had not suspected. They hover too perilously near the horizon of sanity and proved things, beyond which we venture at our peril. They become alive and opalescent, and can be terrifying with the foreshadowing of powers beyond the range of what has been explored and is understood. As in all great art, something is suggested in Melville’s book that is above and greater than the matter of the story. Upon the figures in Melville’s drama and their circumstances there fall lights and glooms from what is ulterior, tremendous, and undivulged. Through the design made by the voyage of the _Pequod_ there is determined, as by chance, a purpose for which her men did not sign, and which is not in her charter.

But if we wish to criticize the book then we might as well try to analyse the precession of the equinoxes. The book defies the literary critics, who are not used to sperm whales. While reading _Moby Dick_ you often feel that the author is possessed, that what he is doing is dictated by something not himself which compels him to use our accepted symbols with obliquity. You fear, now and then, that the sad and steady eye of the Ancient Mariner is on the point of flaring into a mania that may prophesy, or rave. His words go to the limit of their hold on the polite and reasonable. Yet they do not break loose. It is possible that we have not sufficient intelligence to rise to the height at which Melville was considered to be mad. After all, what is common sense? The commonest sense, Thoreau tells us, is that of men asleep, which they express by snoring; and we know that we ourselves might be thought a little queer if we went beyond the plain and verifiable noises in everybody’s language.

But who has resolved poetry into its elements? Who knows what _Christabel_ means? And who knows why a book, which was neglected for seventy years, should be accepted to-day as though light had only just come through it? I suppose our thoughts have veered. Certainly of late years much has happened to change them; and when our thoughts change, then the apparitions change about us. We change our thoughts and change our world. We see even in _Moby Dick_ what was invisible to the people to whom the book was first given. On a winter’s night, only a year or two ago, I was intrigued into a drawing-room in a London suburb to hear a group of neighbours, who were men of commerce, discuss this book of Melville’s. They did so with animation, and the symptoms of wonder. It could not have happened before the war. Was some unseen door now open? Were we in communication with influences that had been unknown to us? I was greatly surprised, for I knew well enough that I and they would not have been found there, ten years before, discussing such a book. The polite discussion of accepted books is all very well; but this book was dangerous. One ought not, without due consideration, to set out at night from a suburban villa to hunt a shadowy monster in the sky. Heaven alone knows where they may lead us. And my wonder was the greater when a shy stranger there, who looked more like a bank manager than a South Sea Whaler, confessed during the discussion, quite casually, that Melville’s book reminded him of Macbeth. Of course, those knocks on the castle door! That was the very thought which had struck me. I looked at that man with awe, as though I was in the wake of the White Whale itself. I left that gathering much too late of a winter’s night for comfort, and a blizzard struck us. But what is a blizzard at midnight to a wayfarer who has just had happy confirmation, an unexpected signal amid the bewildering chaos and disasters of his time and culture, that he is in the dawn of another age, and that other watchers of the sky know of more light?

VI

The home-sick palm that was dying on the hotel verandah touched with a dry finger the coat sleeve of the man next to me. He picked up the leaf and idly rolled it like a cigarette. “Pleasant here, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes wandered kindly round the assembly of wicker chairs in that glasshouse. We were nearest to the door, and could feel what little air was stirring. A woman remarkable because her lips were a crimson imposition which did not restore youth to the seamed pallor of her face, and who wore a necklace of great lumps of amber, was giving chocolates to a spaniel at the next table.