The Cruise of the Nona (continued 4)

Since this great point in history involves a moral judgment quite as much as the mere interpretation of texts, it should also, I think, be laid down that, in matters of life and death, a nation, like an individual, has the right to stretch even a formal text to the very limits of interpretation.

I would say that even if a formal and solemn alliance had existed, any one holding authority in England at that moment and conceiving that participation in the Continental war would ultimately ruin Great Britain, had a right to seek for any phrase in the written pact which could save his country from disaster—and such phrases can always be found. I will go further: I will say that the certitude of disaster on such a scale would excuse even a breach of faith: but I know that this is passing the bounds ordinarily allowed; and I say it only because there seems to me an implied distinction between war for a local object which could do no more than advantage or hurt a country somewhat, and war of a sort which this war turned out to be, wherein the whole structure of human society was imperilled. In the same way, if I have promised to help a man and support him in various details of his domestic life, even though I have taken good consideration for my services, I have the right to fly from his house if it catches fire in order to save my child from being burnt to death. A vast difference in the scale between the reasonably expected effects of a compact and the suddenly discovered real effects would seem to release a man from the obligation of that compact.

But in this case there was not even a definite compact. Therefore, no one could advance a moral plea against the hesitation which our politicians showed in that grave moment. No, what is to be advanced against the politicians who so lamentably bungled that affair is a charge drawn from the intellectual, not from the moral side of our nature. They acted stupidly, as indeed their trade leads men to act: for professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise. It was bad judgment to leave the matter in doubt to the last; and the decision was deferred and deferred again, simply because your professional politician, always absorbed in a wretched personal intrigue, blinked and was bewildered by a great issue suddenly thrust upon him.

You will often hear it said war could not but come when once the three great Continental Powers had mobilised. It has been repeated that the act of mobilisation—of full mobilisation—renders war necessary. The statement is untrue. Certainly the French mobilisation did not, even up to the very last moment, render war necessary; and the same is true of the German.

Again, it is still said by fanatics that the Russian Government intended and provoked the war. And many men not fanatics, but ignorant of Europe, or at issue with Christendom, repeat the myth. Those who plead in favour of Prussia and of the German General Staff (they are numerous in England to-day) still pretend, as do all the German writers, that the mobilisation ordered from Berlin was but a reply to the earlier orders issued from Saint Petersburg.

History will not accept that. There is altogether too much against it. There is the connection between the ‘Lokal Anzeiger’ and the German General Staff. Still more there is the nature of German mobilisation, which was so designed that preliminary orders were, to its general scheme, what final orders were in any other country. The Prussian scheme of mobilisation may be compared to a loaded gun. If I know that a man has his gun loaded and he aims it at me, my then loading mine is not a provocation.

Much more is there, against so strained and distorted a piece of special pleading, the truth obvious to any one, even the most superficial, who had seen Germany since 1911: the whole mass of that population supported its government in a determination for what was believed would prove a short and highly lucrative campaign, and one not only highly lucrative, but settling forever the security of that great experiment which Prussia had not quite consolidated by her series of rapid victories a lifetime before.

But though the German mobilisation was indeed proof of the truth that Prussia and her subjects desired war, that war so eagerly desired was a Continental war only. The Continental war envisaged at Berlin excluded the factor of English intervention. Not that it was believed such intervention would make any great difference in what was assumed would be an immediate and crushing victory in the West, but that sea power continuously exercised could not but have given pause upon what Berlin thought would be the probable result of the struggle in the East. Granted an immediate and certain German victory in the West (as a fact it failed), there would still be an Eastern campaign which the German General Staff believed to be necessarily prolonged and which they dreaded; blockade during that trial they dared not face.

Two men, I think, deserved well of their country at that moment, granted that an entry into the war sooner or later was inevitable. One was Mr. Winston Churchill, who upon his own initiative mobilised the Fleet; and the other was Lord Haldane, who convinced his colleagues of the nature of the peril and who, it should be remembered, had made possible the coöperation of Britain in the war by his scheme for mobilisation. All that followed was based upon the work originally done by him at the War Office at a time when, to the great bulk of his countrymen, the idea of such a conflict was still quite unfamiliar and its enormous implications incredible.

For the rest, it is neither generous nor wise to pick out any particular set of misjudgments; for the whole of Europe, all its culture and all its intelligence, was at fault in estimates of the war. You may say of all the mass of stuff that has been written since the Armistice that it can be graded in degrees of intelligence according to its admission of the unexpected and the fortuitous throughout those terrible years. The less intelligent the writer the more he ascribes this or that development to a plan; the more intelligent he is the more he admits factors independent of our wills and our intelligences: factors proceeding, as our fathers would have said, and as I believe, consciously from a Will above humanity or (as it is the modern fashion to affirm) coming into human affairs from no god, but blindly—at any rate, factors external to human direction. In the individual actions can be traced clearly enough what measure of conclusion their success involved, or what lack of it their failure was due to. But, in the general lines of the turmoil, it is not so. Here and there a chance guess proved right, but it was no more than a guess, unless we except Lord Kitchener’s warning that the war would last at least three years: he gave it when most men thought it might not last three months.

It is with regard to the Great War as it is with regard to every set of campaigns in history; if you omit that which was not subject to any human will and intelligence, you omit nine tenths of the factors that make for the final result—and that is why every great captain has put his trust in Fortune and in a star, a destiny of his own. For great captains know what part Fortune plays in their trade.

I remember Boulanger saying, when I was a boy of nineteen: ‘La guerre est une chose aléatoire.’ It was one of those enormous truisms which make one shake with laughter, and, coming from the lips of such a man, it was particularly comic; he, with the short stature which he owed to his Welsh blood, with his middle-aged hesitations, and his ludicrous incapacity for the rôle into which the popular anger against politicians had unnaturally thrust him, and his very natural disinclination, being what he was, to accept risk. I saw him in Portland Place, and it was there that I heard him discourse in such fashion. Young as I was, I hugely enjoyed the unconscious meiosis of such a phrase. Yes, indeed: la guerre est une chose aléatoire! Would that this fortuitous character in it were confined to its immediate operations! But they stretch outward over a lifetime at least and, in some great effects, for much longer.

As I write this, it is more than ten years since the dice of that ‘chose aléatoire’ were thrown, and no one can even yet determine what interests in Europe have, upon the whole, most suffered; though (alas!) the larger lines of the result are already apparent.

Some day, I suppose—but a good time hence—one of the mob of witnesses to what went on in Paris between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles will write us an amusing book full of truths, made up of anecdote without much comment. Or perhaps, better still, we shall have a highly readable book from the pen of a man who was not there. We had a glimpse of such possibilities from a witness in a few sentences of Mr. Keynes’, which were very illuminating; but Mr. Keynes’ book had not for its object an historical relation, but rather financial propaganda, so that the part dealing with the comedy of small men in big places was too short. If he had confined himself to the words and gestures of parliamentarians suddenly confronted with the task of diplomats, I think he would have produced something memorable. One or two other pens have dealt with that comic affair, but none sufficiently, nor at any length.

I was not myself present. I was continually between Paris and London, I had many friends and a few relations engaged, and I heard a mass of stories from many who were witnesses. Of that mass of stories, not a few sounded probable, and quite a reasonable number were vouched for by witnesses whom I could trust. I have had quoted to me, for instance, the excellent story of a Prime Minister pettishly complaining that he would not be bothered about the Dalmatian coast because they had not yet come to consider the Baltic. And the same man curiously moved a squat forefinger along the river Save upon the map, saying with a would-be-important smile, ‘Now here is the Upper Danube.’ Really in this I have some sympathy with the little fellow; for when I first went to school I always thought it a shame that the Save, running in a straight line with the lower Danube, should not carry the same name. I thought there was something irregular about the Danube taking its great bend past Budapest.

Then there was that other story of the indignant politician who, upon reading the French word ‘demander’ in a memorandum, indignantly protested against this insolent use of the word ‘demand.’

Poland was a subject of ceaseless blunders. One politician vaguely thought it a province of Russia; another was surprised to hear that Danzig had ever been a Polish town; and the same man was contented to express his simple conviction that it was no use setting up Poland again, seeing that such a state could never last.

That they should get mixed up about their figures is pardonable; there were more naughts than a man could count. Still, there is all the difference between one hundred and twenty-five milliard francs and one hundred and twenty-five million francs: but I am assured it was not always easy for every member of the august group to carry the distinction clearly in his head, especially in the morning. Would that some more than human power had suddenly descended—or lacking such a Being, a corporal and four men—and taken the politicians forcibly into three rooms, put paper and pen before them and bade them write down, under heavy penalties, all they could remember of Europe! It would have been a pretty examination!

Now parliamentarians such as these are ridiculous, not only by the absurd disproportion between their nominal powers and their capacities, but more by their ambition—which swells out to bursting the little vessel containing it. They have not talent, save for intrigue against fellow politicians: they cannot speak or write, let alone do, anything worth hearing. None the less would you find, if you could take the tin lid off their hollow minds and look in, a froth of insane vanity, bred of years of speech-making; a more than kingly assurance bred of knowing no control and of immunity; and (what is astonishing in men of such calibre) ambition itself. A paltry ambition, to be sure: an ambition to fill the newspapers: but still, ambition.

Yet, if there is one thing I have noted more than another in the few men worthy of admiration in this our time (men worthy of admiration through their capacities as well as through their characters), it is the absence of ambition.

There could be no better commentary upon the days in which we live. For it is reasonable and normal that men of great capacity should have ambition to exercise it in government, in the ordering of their fellow men. It was a chief quality always looked for by our fathers in those who rose high, and were worthy so to rise; nor were they disappointed. Ambition of old was a mark of greatness. But to-day it is the mark of the capable man that ambition disgusts him. That mark is most notable in Mussolini. It is most notable in Foch. It was notable in most of the commanders of armies; in the admirals of fleets. It was most notable, of course, in the saintly eminence of Mercier. It was notable in almost every one I had the privilege to meet and watch during and after the struggle who had been capable of doing something great in that time.

It is not difficult to discover when you speak with Mussolini that his interest is in his job, not in his name. It is apparent to all that the great work of the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines is remote from all personal motive—and ambition is essentially personal. As for Foch, it is manifest, not only in his every gesture and expression, but in the life he has lived after saving Europe. But this novel feature, the absence of ambition in our greatest men to-day, goes further. It has been notable in our chief discoverers in physical science—all can bear witness to that; it is even becoming apparent in the best writers, though writers are among the vainest of mankind.

All men of real capacity in this our time seem to be agreed that the peculiar odour of modern success is a thing for a decent man to avoid. It is becoming a sort of habit of the mind throughout the West—that is, throughout civilised Europe to-day—in such few men as can do some great work, to do it silently and apart, and to disconnect it wholly from immediate renown.

Conversely, you will have monstrous advertisement surrounding the mere name of a man incompetent, and usually thoroughly dishonest as well, because he is athirst for publicity of the modern sort, and loves it, and because he is quite content to serve those lumps of wealth and vulgarity who, through their possession of the mob newspapers, can grant or withhold publicity.

Here is a situation thoroughly diseased: the spur of ambition withdrawn from those who can do. It cannot last. How it will be resolved I do not know, nor does any other man; but that it cannot last is apparent. The mere force of competition, the mere mathematics of the world will see to it that blaring incompetence shall not permanently wield even nominal power; and it holds more than nominal power to-day.

I was interested, among the many things I heard from the more advertised civilians of the Great War, to note two things: the first was a rooted conviction in the most advertised Parliament men that things and people foreign to their experience were inferior to them. We know, of course, that that is the natural instinct of the schoolboy, and of the very simple good person without experience; but the astonishing thing was to find it in men whom one would expect, in spite of their origins, to have become a little polished by long conversation with their fellows, a little trained by responsibility. Before the end of the conflict one would have thought that even your politician must acquire some judgment from so much vivid and informing experience. Not a bit of it! It went off him like so much water off a duck’s back, and you may hear him to-day, six years after the Armistice, peddling the same inanities as he peddled in 1913.

The second thing I noticed was the alarming difference between politicians and the soldiers in the sense of reality. I say alarming because, after the war, Europe, instead of continuing the rule of soldiers as it should have done, returned to its vomit; and the miserable parliamentary figures of the old degraded day put on again costume and grease-paint, filed back upon the stage, and began to play their old antics as though nothing had happened. The French, who ought to know better (for they have found parliaments out), behaved disgracefully in this matter. You may take up any French newspaper to-day, and find yourself appalled with the recurrence of such names as Caillaux, Briand, Herriot, Loucheur, who ought never to have been mentioned again after such an experience as the Great War.

Italy has done better: but only under the stress of a threatened dissolution. Society in Italy had to reach the point of acute peril before that reaction took place which saved the country; but what a fine reaction it was, not only in its virtues, but, what is more important, in its spirit! What a strong critical sense Italy has shown! What intelligence in rejection of sophistry, and what virility in execution! May it last! But will it last? Even in Italy?

Everything good in this world is doomed to perish, and I cannot tell how long this excellent experiment will stand, or whether it will take firm root, and make Italy all that it desires to be, and all that Italy should be—seeing the strength of the blood, the industry, the intelligence, and the warmth of all that people. But, at any rate, it is good to visit a society still under such an impulse, and to feel that, in one section of Europe at least, things are going well.

I made a sort of pilgrimage to see Mussolini, the head of the movement, and I wrote about him for the Americans. I had the honour of a long conversation with him alone, discovering and receiving his judgments. What a contrast with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian! What a sense of decision, of sincerity, of serving the nation, and of serving it towards a known end with a definite will! Meeting this man after talking to the parliamentarians in other countries was like meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean village after compulsory draughts of marsh water in the mosses of the moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.

One thing, however, struck me in his comments which was, as I thought, extreme and ill-founded; and that was his complete contempt for all majorities. Mussolini laid it down to me that the conception of majority government is as ridiculous as it is immoral, and should be fiercely combated as a lie and an evil in itself. I do not agree; it seems to me that the rational basis of majority government stands firm upon certain conditions.

The right of a majority to rule is, indeed, an absurd doctrine as we hear it commonly stated. I do not mean the doctrine of majority government under what is called ‘the representative system,’ for that is not majority government at all: it is mere oligarchy in the hands of an intriguing caucus, and perhaps as base a form of oligarchy as mankind has ever tolerated. I mean real majority government; the reference of a question to the body of the governed, and the taking of a decision according to the superior number of votes recorded on the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ side. Such a test used as a universal decider is ridiculous. What would a majority vote do with bimetallism, or the appointment of admirals? But there are conditions in which a decision by majority is just, and they are surely these:

(1) When the question arises from a homogeneous community; (2) when there is an active popular demand for its settlement; (3) when the matter under discussion is reasonably familiar to all; (4) when it concerns all, or nearly all, directly, and in much the same degree; (5) when the majority is substantial.

You must be dealing with a homogeneous community—for in one made up of various races, or fundamentally different religions, a majority means nothing towards a decision. It is a mere affirmation of discord. You must have a real and popular demand for a decision, and it must proceed from the people themselves: not from a body claiming the right to frame the question: a vote on matters of no popular interest—as a vote on Welsh disestablishment in North London, or on mining regulations in Brighton—is a manifest abuse. Even on a burning matter, discussed by, known to, and affecting all, no small majority can possibly be decisive, or make an accord—for a half is not the general will. But when a community of one stuff votes by a large majority in favour of something they both understand and desire, and that something close to their own lives, then that majority is of true effect.

Under those conditions the moral argument for majority government seems to me unanswerable, for under those conditions you have the will of the community really expressed by the majority. Now the community is ultimately sovereign; for if the community be not sovereign, what else can claim sovereignty? It is the old dilemma of Suarez, the great Jesuit doctrine, as absolutely secure as a mathematical conclusion; ultimately, the community is sovereign. But unless these conditions are present, and unless all of them are present, the majority is not the community, and to call it so is either a delusion or a trick. It is always immoral, usually fatuous, and occasionally disastrous.

By what right shall fifty-one men out of a hundred, who have no particular taste for the drinking of tea, who, upon the whole, dislike it, but not earnestly, forbid the other forty-nine to drink tea, when those forty-nine feel tea-drinking to be a very necessity of their lives? For what reason shall fifty-one men—of whom perhaps only one knows anything upon the subject—outvote forty-nine—of whom perhaps five know something of the subject? decide (for instance) upon the annexation of an Asian islet? How can you trust fifty-one white men to legislate for forty-nine black men, or, to put it more strongly, fifty-one black men to legislate for forty-nine white? Who does not know that in such a case only organised force could decide?

Mussolini’s reaction (as the Americans would call it) was, I think, against the ludicrous abuse of the doctrine of majority, which has brought Europe to its present pass; for there is nothing so wicked or so senseless or so degrading but a majority (to the honour of our race it is generally a sham majority) can be quoted in its favour.

There is a very deplorable instance of this to-day in French politics. A small but active caucus in France hates the Christian religion. Its members are afraid to make a frontal attack on that religion, because such action would endanger their skins, but they will take any measures which will, they think, indirectly weaken its influence. Particularly do they desire to restrain the activity of the religious orders, and, so far as they can, to prevent those orders from having any corporate existence at all. The mass of the people are, in varying degrees, attached both to their traditional religion and to the more popular and active forms of the monastic institution: that is, the teaching and nursing religious orders. The contemplative orders they do not come in touch with. Most men and women in the nation would leave things alone, and that with a bias towards religion. Very many are almost indifferent. More, though preferring to go on as their forefathers went on, do not put it—religion—in the forefront of their lives. Many more think it of some importance, but are far more actively concerned with their material interests. A small body, quite as small, perhaps, as the anti-Christian caucus on the other side, are active in defence of religion. After a wearisome, meaningless rite of making marks on bits of paper, the said rite (confused by a hundred legal and personal interests, and conducted by the wire-pulling inherent in all such performances) throws up some five or six hundred members of a parliament, nearly all of them intriguers moved by a petty appetite for money or for notoriety, or both. Of these it may be that fifty-five out of the hundred follow the anti-Christian caucus, and look to it for salaries and jobs, forty-five are organised on the other side. Or the numbers may be the other way. When the fifty-five turn up on one side, the whole vast organisation of the religious orders in France (most of which are beneficent, the rest certainly doing no harm) is suddenly imperilled and shaken; its members are exiled, its goods are stolen and spent riotously by the lowest sort of politicians and their hangers-on, its accumulation of wealth dissipated and destroyed. Then another chance majority comes along in four years, and offers a restoration which can but only be most precarious: a restoration of their natural rights to these infamously (and ridiculously) harassed men and women, but a restoration liable to be ruined in another four years.

After the war there happened to be in the French Parliament a vague uncertain majority more or less pledged to traditional things. The politicians most prominent in that gang approached the Carthusians who had been exiled, and had taken up a new home in Tarragona, and offered them a chance of returning to the Grande Chartreuse. These exiles very wisely refused, for they said: ‘How do we know that after all the expenditure of reëstablishing ourselves in our ancient foundation—venerable for centuries, peaceable, remote—we may not at your next “elections,” as you call them, find ourselves turned out?’ They were very wise: but what a commentary upon a system of government! Think of it! Here is a great House with its roots right back in the beginnings of the Middle Ages, with its oaken traditions, its reserves of strength available for itself and all men; doing nothing which could be construed as perilous under any system of common morals, either to the State or to any individual. Merely because a clique of anti-Christians hates them, this doctrine of artificial majorities can turn the whole community out of doors at a moment’s notice, exile its members, loot its fortune.

Nor let it be said that these things happen only in countries like France, to which the disease of parliaments is unnatural and of alien importation; they happen in one form or another wherever the parliamentary fraud is at work. In countries which have lost dogmatic religion and have only vague opinion left, the parliamentary evil takes another form, that of a perpetual restriction against common liberties; or it takes the form of putting finance secretly within the power of inferior men, who fill their pockets at the expense of the commonwealth; or it takes the form of treason in time of war—attempting to make peace with the enemy behind the back of the people and their allies. Or it takes the form of saving the enemy after his defeat. There is no form of parliamentary activity which is not deplorable, save in aristocracies.

For, in aristocracies, which are, of their nature, governments by a clique, a parliament—which is a clique—can be normal and natural. In communities based on the idea of equality and of action by the public will they are cancers, under which such nations always sicken and may die.

I can bear the thought of them no more. I must get back to realities and to things loved.

I must return to my Nona.

We came to Berry Head and opened Torbay.

It is with Torbay as with the Fowey coast. I have known it only under such weathers as leave a hint of heaven: never have I opened Torbay in passing Berry Head but it was morning, with the young sea delighting in a leading breeze; and once, a draught to last forever, I came up under such a dawn and with so tender a dying crescent in the sky that I spent an hour in Paradise.

What are those days of glory? They are not memories: are they premonitions, or, are they visions?

They are not memories, though perhaps Plato thought them so, and our modern pantheists, with Wordsworth for their spokesman here, called and believed them so.

I will hope that they are premonitions, hints granted beforehand of a state to be attained. At the worst they are visions of such a state lying all about us, the home of the Blessed, which we are permitted to glimpse at for a moment, even those of us sad ones who may never reach that place.

As for those who call such joy illusion, they are of that great Schola Stultorum, that new herd of fools peculiar to our day; they who have made the discovery that Something comes out of Nothing, who pour quarts out of pint-pots and give emptiness creative power.

Neglect them, but ask yourself, as I do when such rare moods are granted, whether they be visions or premonitions, and hope that premonitions they may be. For certainly they are the supports of this life, and we creep from one to another like travellers from inn to inn, and when they fail us, the world will be no more endurable.

Such thoughts I had—and have had repeatedly—in this run of water under a morning sky. It is inhabited, is all that air and sea, by something beneficent—at least, I have always found it so.

But there are pictures more definite and of the hard past which come into my mind every time I round Berry Head and see Torbay before me. And of all such thoughts that crowd upon me when I pass the point, and open that deep recess of water, two stand out most vividly. It was here on the southern shore of the Bay that the Dutch, and other mercenaries of William of Orange, landed for the destruction of the last poor remnants of English kingship; it was here that a Catholic priest discovered the first ancient human relics, and thus started our modern controversies.

This last is a most interesting story and little known. Here is what would seem to have happened:

There is a cave near Torquay in which the water, passing, I think, through limestone, leaves a deposit. Under this deposit a Catholic priest in the place, a certain Dr. McEnery (I suppose, an Irishman, but I have not read sufficiently about him) found a number of human bones; associated with them were barbaric implements and the remains of animals, some of such tropical kinds as can no longer live in our climate, others wholly extinct.

He came to the very just conclusion that he had here evidence of an antiquity for man far removed beyond the bounds which had been set by the idolators of the written word of Scripture. He started that ball rolling which has bounded down so devious a course through our time, until to-day the grossly ignorant talk of an imaginary being, whom they call a ‘cave man,’ and the half-learned can bamboozle the public at will with the pretence that they know all about what they call the ‘prehistory’ of our race.

That man, as man—I mean man as we know him (not imperfect man)—has lived upon this earth for very much more than ten thousand years, we are now pretty sure; and we owe the first step to this same Dr. McEnery—whose name no one hears. The later discoveries in the Somme Valley we also owe to another priest, and that is as it should be.

What a turmoil so simple a discovery aroused in Biblical countries, to be sure!

But that turmoil was but the forerunner of something prodigious: nothing less than the shaking, splitting, and at last the collapse of all the foundations upon which had been erected half the modern culture of the West.

For one may say that the modern culture of the West lay after 1600 in two halves, increasingly different one from the other: the Catholic culture and the Protestant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To return to harbours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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