[Illustration: DEAL.]
I have had occasion,[W] elsewhere, to consider at some length, the
peculiar love of the English for neatness and minuteness: but I have
only considered, without accounting for, or coming to any conclusion
about it; and, the more I think of it, the more it puzzles me to
understand what there can be in our great national mind which delights
to such an extent in brass plates, red bricks, square curbstones, and
fresh green paint, all on the tiniest possible scale. The other day I
was dining in a respectable English "Inn and Posting-house," not ten
miles from London, and, measuring the room after dinner, I found it
exactly twice and a quarter the height of my umbrella. It was a highly
comfortable room, and associated, in the proper English manner, with
outdoor sports and pastimes, by a portrait of Jack Hall, fisherman of
Eton, and of Mr. C. Davis on his favorite mare; but why all this hunting
and fishing enthusiasm should like to reduce itself, at home, into twice
and a quarter the height of an umbrella, I could not in any wise then,
nor have I at any other time been able to ascertain.
[W] _Modern Painters_, vol. iv. chap. 1.
Perhaps the town of Deal involves as much of this question in its aspect
and reputation, as any other place in Her Majesty's dominions: or at
least it seemed so to me, coming to it as I did, after having been
accustomed to the boat-life at Venice, where the heavy craft, massy in
build and massy in sail, and disorderly in aquatic economy, reach with
their mast-vanes only to the first stories of the huge marble palaces
they anchor among. It was very strange to me, after this, knowing that
whatever was brave and strong in the English sailor was concentrated in
our Deal boatmen, to walk along that trim strip of conventional
beach, which the sea itself seems to wash in a methodical manner, one
shingle-step at a time; and by its thin toy-like boats, each with its
head to sea, at regular intervals, looking like things that one would
give a clever boy to play with in a pond, when first he got past
petticoats; and the row of lath cots behind, all tidiness and telegraph,
looking as if the whole business of the human race on earth was to know
what o'clock it was, and when it would be high water,--only some slight
weakness in favor of grog being indicated here and there by a
hospitable-looking open door, a gay bow-window, and a sign intimating
that it is a sailor's duty to be not only accurate, but "jolly."
Turner was always fond of this neat, courageous, benevolent, merry,
methodical Deal. He painted it very early, in the Southern Coast series,
insisting on one of the tavern windows as the principal subject, with a
flash of forked lightning streaming beyond it out at sea like a narrow
flag. He has the same association in his mind in the present plate;
disorder and distress among the ships on the left, with the boat going
out to help them; and the precision of the little town stretching in
sunshine along the beach.