I wish I had been one of those men who first sailed beyond the Pillars
of Hercules and first saw, as they edged northward along a barbarian
shore, the slow swinging of the sea. How much, I wonder, did they think
themselves enlarged? How much did they know that all the civilization
behind them, the very ancient world of the Mediterranean, was something
protected and enclosed from which they had escaped into an outer world?
And how much did they feel that here they were now physically caught by
the moving tides that bore them in the whole movement of things?
For the tide is of that kind; and the movement of the sea four times
daily back and forth is a consequence, a reflection, and a part of the
ceaseless pulse and rhythm which animates all things made and which
links what seems not living to what certainly lives and feels and has
power over all movement of its own. The circuits of the planets stretch
and then recede. Their ellipses elongate and flatten again to the
semblance of circles. The Poles slowly nod once every many thousand
years, there is a libration to the moon; and in all this vast
harmonious process of come and go the units of it twirl and spin, and,
as they spin, run more gravely in ordered procession round their
central star: that star moves also to a beat, and all the stars of
heaven move each in times of its own as well, and their movement is one
thing altogether. Whoever should receive the mighty business moving in
one ear would get the music of it in a perfect series of chords,
superimposed the one upon the other, but not a tremble of them out of
tune.
The great scheme is not infinite, for were it infinite such rhythms
could not be. It was made, and it moves in order to the scheme of its
making without caprice, not wayward anywhere, but in and out and back
and forth as to a figure set for it. It must be so, or these exact
arrangements could not be.
Now with this regulated breathing and expiration, playing itself out in
a million ways and co-extensive with the universe of things, the tides
keep time, and they alone of earthly things bring its actual force to
our physical perception, to our daily life. We see the sea in movement
and power before us heaving up whatever it may bear, and we feel in an
immediate way its strong backward sagging when the rocks appear above
it as it falls. We have our hand on the throb of the current turning in
a salting river inland between green hills; we are borne upon it bodily
as we sail, its movement kicks the tiller in our grasp, and the
strength beneath us and around us, the rush and the compulsion of the
stream, its silence and as it were its purpose, all represent to us,
immediately and here, that immeasurable to and fro which rules the
skies.
When the Roman soldiers came marching northward with Caesar and first
saw the shores of ocean: when, after that occupation of Gaul which has
changed the world, they first mounted guard upon the quays of the Itian
port under Gris-Nez, or the rocky inlets of the Veneti by St. Malo and
the Breton reefs, they were appalled to see what for centuries chance
traders and the few curious travellers, the men of Marseilles and of
the islands, had seen before them. They saw in numbers and in a
corporate way what hitherto individuals alone had seen; they saw the
sea like a living thing, advancing and retreating in an ordered dance,
alive with deep sighs and intakes, and ceaselessly proceeding about a
work and a doing which seemed to be the very visible action of an
unchanging will still pleased with calculated change. It was the
presence of the Roman army upon the shores of the Channel which brought
the Tide into the general conscience of Europe, and that experience, I
think, was among the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of those new
things which rushed upon the mind of the Empire when it launched itself
by the occupation of Gaul.
The tide, when it is mentioned in brief historical records of times
long since, suddenly strikes one with vividness and with familiarity,
so that the past is introduced at once, presented to us physically, and
obtruded against our modern senses alive. I know of no other physical
thing mentioned in this fashion, in chronicle or biography, which has
so powerful an effect to restore the reality of a dead century.
The Venerable Bede is speaking in one place of Southampton Water, in
his ecclesiastical history, or, rather, of the Isle of Wight, whence
those two Princes were baptized and died under Cadwalla. As the
historian speaks of the place he says:
“In this sea” (which is the Solent) “comes a double tide out of the
seas which spring from the infinite ocean of the Arctic surrounding all
Britain.”
And he tells us how these double tides rush together and fight
together, sweeping as they do round either side of the island by the
Needles and by Spithead into the land-locked sheet within.
Now that passage in Bede’s fourth book is more real to me than anything
in all his chronicle, for in Southampton Water to-day the living thing
which we still note as we sail is the double tide. You take a falling
tide at the head of the water, near Southampton Town, and if you are
not quick with your business it is checked in two hours and you meet a
strange flood, the second flood, before you have rounded Calshott
Castle.
Then there is a Charter of Newcastle. Or, rather, the inviolable
Customs of that town, very old, drawn up nearly eight hundred years
ago, but beginning from far earlier; and in these customs you find
written:
“If a plea shall arise between a burgess and a merchant it must be
determined before the third flowing of the sea”—that is, within three
tides; a wise provision! For thus the merchant would not miss the last
tide of the day after the quarrel. How living it is, a phrase of that
sort coming in the midst of those other phrases!
All the rest, worse luck, has gone. Burgage-tenure, and the economic
independence of the humble, and the busy, healthy life of men working
to enrich themselves, not others, and that corporate association which
was the blood of the Middle Ages, and the power of popular opinion,
and, in general, freedom. But out of all these things that have
perished, the tide remains, and in the eighteen clauses of the Customs,
the tidal clause alone stands fresh and still has meaning. The capital,
great clinching clause by which men owned their own land within the
town has gone utterly and altogether. The modern workman on the Tyne
would not understand you perhaps, to whom in that very place you should
say, “Many centuries ago the men that came before you here, your
fathers, were not working precariously at a wage, or paying rent to
others, but living under their own roofs and working for themselves.”
There is only one passage in the document that all could understand in
Newcastle to-day—the very few rich who are hardly secure, the myriads
of poor who are not secure at all—and that passage is the passage which
talks of the third tide; for even to-day there is some good we have
left undestroyed and the sea still ebbs and flows.
This little note of the Newcastle men, and of the flowing and the
ebbing of their sea, is to be found, you say, in the archives of
England? Not at all! It is to be found in the Acts of the Parliament of
Scotland—at least, so my book assures me, but why I do not know.
Perhaps of the times when between Tyne and Tees, men looked northward
and of the times when they looked southward (for they alternately did
one and the other during many hundreds of years) those times when they
looked northward seemed the more natural to them. Anyhow, the reference
is to the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, and that is the end of
it.