Part 10

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.

[Illustration:

_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.

“Rum little face that dog’s got,” said the man. “Wonder what the next fad in dogs for ladies will be. That one can hardly breathe, and can’t walk.”