IV

That overcrowding of which we complain--declaring first that our

cities are much too great, and then blaming our officials because the

buildings do not spread quickly enough--is something we really enjoy,

I suppose. We could not live without the support of the multitude. We

love to walk down Fleet Street, jostling each other on the inadequate

sidewalks, pressed together between the motor-buses and the shop

fronts. We find the crowd, and keep with it on instinct. The fruits

of solitude are astringent and we do not like them. Nothing else will

explain why we would sooner sit uncomfortably with fifty strangers in

a charabanc, for a journey through a land we cannot see, to a place

which is exactly like the one from which we started, than stroll across

country in peace at our own gait.

Yesterday I had to go to town again. It ought to have been a pleasure

trip, because the town nearest to me is described on the posters, with

coloured illustrations, as the kind of place for which men forsake

even their London employment. When I remembered its many advertised

attractions I felt almost glad that I was out of tobacco. At last I

should see this notable pleasure resort with its golden sands and its

joyous throng. The change would be interesting, because nothing had

happened in my neighbourhood for some time, except weather. True, the

tamarisk pennants had begun to rust, and in the next field there was

stubble instead of oats. But, except the admonitions of a few selected

books, the only sounds at an isolated cottage had been the occasional

mewing of the gulls and the mourning of the sea. I had an idea, too,

that the wind, as it came ashore, was glad to find our key-hole, for

it desired a local habitation and a voice. The voice of the wind, I

noticed, was in keeping with the monody of the sea. It is rare for any

stranger to pass this house, though some porpoises went by the other

afternoon. Just beyond a most individual sea-stock, which somehow is

rooted and exalted on the wall at the foot of the garden, daring the

light of the ocean, I saw the black forms of the little whales arch

past, close in. And the other day a float, from one of the submarine

nets of the days that were, drifted ashore, to have a chat with me

about old times. It was the only distinguished stranger on the beach.

The pleasure resort, therefore, I expect to bring me back to a

conscious existence. Not far from its station there is a magnificent

hotel, with a glass verandah and palms, under which I saw men in

golfing dress sitting in wicker chairs brooding appreciatively across

a broad asphalted road to the gathering ground of the charabancs; and,

just beyond the motor vehicles, multitudes of red and yellow and blue

air-balloons were swaying aloft, though their attachment to earth was

out of sight. I threaded the charabancs, pushed aside men in white

ulsters who shouted at me that it was only two bob, and brought up

against some iron railings. I leaned on the iron railings for support;

they were providential. The beach was below; I mean that I suppose it

was, for it all was out of sight except a pailful of it immediately

under my eyes, which a child was treasuring. A man was beside the

child, in a canvas chair. How he got there it was impossible to see,

but he looked worried about it, though resigned. Rank on rank of deck

chairs stood between him and the sea, all occupied by people reading

newspapers, or asleep, or dead; the intermediate spaces were filled

with children. The very sea was invaded. It was impossible to discern

where it reached the land. The crowds went out to meet it. They slurred

its margin. And on either side of that holiday-maker below me, for

miles apparently, the deck chairs extended and shut him in; the sea

wall rose behind him. Would he starve to death? Nobody seemed to care.

Nobody lowered a rope. When I left him he had fallen asleep, luckily;

perhaps to dream of freedom.

Whoever that man was, he was a voluntary prisoner. He must have sought

it. If that had been the only beach on that coast, the only view of

the sea to be got in the neighbourhood, it would be fair to guess that

he had gambled with his hour, and had drawn a blank. Such an accident

might happen to anybody, even in the desperate matter of catching the

only train of the day, which one had hoped was late. Yet that will not

explain his wretched position, because, whether he knew it or not,

there is a beach not a great distance from where he was a prisoner on

which could be lost the population of a city; but, as I happened to

know, no life was there that morning except a few fishermen and some

parties of sea-birds. Moreover, the views from that untenanted strand

are incomparably finer and wider. It is possible to see from there

what a desirable island we have, an island very far from being as

overcrowded as we imagine.

Indeed, if the country about that imprisoned holiday-maker has a

fault, it is that it is largely as it was when the folk who built its

hut-circles and cromlechs occupied it; though I myself do not find that

fault with it. For most of a long day on its uplands a traveller will

see more tumuli about him than warm and smoking homesteads. Within a

morning’s walk of that crowded holiday beach, a fox dropped his rabbit,

which he was carrying home, as I came round a prehistoric earthwork,

and trotted off reluctantly, in broad daylight. He must have been

greatly surprised to find a stranger was trespassing on his hill. On

another morning we startled a weasel, which at that moment had worse

than startled a short-tailed field mouse. He was more reluctant to go

than the fox, but he did retire into a tangle. Not for long, though.

His tiny snake-like head was out in a few moments, inspecting us. Then

he stole out to look for his abandoned dinner. He became very peevish

when he could not find it, for we had hidden it, and explored all the

ruts and tussocks in the neighbourhood in impulsive leaps and gallops.

We had a leisured view of his cream and chestnut figure, darting and

writhing about a roadway which has long been obsolete. Once or twice he

seemed as though he were on the point of attacking us.

The land about that holiday resort has been loved by many great

artists. The men who first tried to convert the English barbarians to

Christianity saw its fruitfulness and settled there; but you might

suppose, in spite of its colour, the nobility of its form, and the

wealth of its tradition, that there was something wrong with it, for

if you keep away from the tarred roads which connect the towns, and

that is easy enough, you are in the England that was before the coming

of the machines. Its contrast with that near holiday beach where the

golden strand is invisible through pleasure-seekers suggests that the

machines have so disordered our minds that we shall never again feel

happy in independent contact with the earth.

V

The breakers are towering to-day. They explode above the tops of

the tamarisks, which are tormented by a south-wester. If a door is

opened, pandemonium enters the house. So I have been reading the

poets when their subject is the sea. Byron when in a kindly mood once

counselled the sea to “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.”

Man, especially man the poet, with his conscious understanding of the

universe, is inclined to haughtiness. He is a conqueror. He feels

that he is one with the powers that roll and are blue. When he is not

haughty and sombre in the presence of these powers, he includes them

with those embracing thoughts which fondly gather in little children,

fawns, and daisies. I do not speak with certain knowledge, but I should

guess that any anthology of what poets have written about the sea must

cause a mariner a little astonishment. Are they the waters he knows?

Then he must be a rude and careless fellow. Now and then when turning

the leaves of the book it may occur to him that perhaps the poet did

not know what he was talking about. He may set out with “a wet sheet

and a flowing sea and a wind that follows fast,” and bound along at

the rate of knots for some stanzas; but presently he is sure to ask

himself why with the wind in that quarter the good ship “leaves old

England on the lee.”

Yet that is a minor difficulty. We can see that a slip of that sort

might happen even to a sailor who attempted poetry, especially when

one remembers the exigencies of metre and rhyming. No; what would

give the mariner most surprise would be the love the poets feel for

the sea, their delight in it, their robust faith in its blueness and

its rolling and in its beneficent and healing qualities. It might be

a public garden, maintained by a highly capable Gardener. I have a

number of those special anthologies, and a re-reading of them helps

me to understand why it is that the people who, as they say, love the

sea, prefer to show their love only at certain favoured points of our

coasts, and to leave most of the shore line to the wind and the gulls.

These anthologies are not together for their assuagement; for the most

part, the poems concern an ocean which can be enjoyably contemplated

on a warm day, in choice company, with light thoughts hovering about,

vague but gleaming, like the birds. We must have the moral support of

society when loving the sea. What would happen if we were left alone

with it? One lonely evening by its margin might be enough to scare most

of us towards the comfort of the nearest railway station’s lamps.

There is but little suggestion of this, however, in the anthologies.

They brave it out. “_High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_,” or “_The

Sands of Dee_”--such unexpected chill shadows may at times intervene,

and change the look of the sea. The brightness goes. Yet only as the

sun goes when a trifling cloud blows across its light and warmth. The

waves soon sparkle once more according to their poetic wont, and the

deep and dark blue ocean rolls on, the ships are brave and free, and

jovial sailors look out on their world like happy imbeciles whose

function it is to provide matter for our superior amusement. At the

worst they saunter through Ratcliffe, as did the crew of the steamer

_Bolivar_, “drunk and raising Cain,” but maintaining even then, we see,

their reputation for imbecility. If they survive a dangerous voyage

in a steamer, which was only a pack of “rotten plates puttied up with

tar,” and meant to founder, their sailor-like protest shows merely in a

riotous booze. “Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the eternal sea!”

So let us adjourn to a tavern.

We appear to be incorrigibly romantic. We prefer to give the reality

any name but the one which shows we have surmised its nature. It is

impolite in Malay society, and even unlucky at night, to mention

the dreaded tiger by name. You must refer to him in an allusive and

friendly way. With a maritime people the sea is lovely, and sailors

are “salts” who provide some comic relief. The more absurd we find

those fellows, then the more certain it is that they are genuine

“old shellbacks.” How curious it is, then, that sea-lovers are so

careful about encountering the object of their affections that they

abstain from it except with the support of a multitude! What we mean

is, I suppose, that we enjoy leisure when in the midst of our fellow

creatures, in a place where everything is done to prevent our coming

under those shadows cast by matters which puzzle or distress us, and

therefore should be ignored or misnamed.

The sea is such a shadow, whatever the light upon it. The soul of the

sea, if it has one, is like that fabulous “soul of the war,” something

from which no joy can come by brooding upon it. The sea fascinates me,

I admit. I should not enjoy an English holiday away from the coast, and

I should be glad if some wise person could explain exactly why. I have

felt the same attraction, though then it was more acute, in the aspect

of a desolate village which was under the ruthless eye of the enemy’s

guns. I did not want to go there, but I went. At sunset alone on a

beach where there is nothing but sea and sky and the forsaken shore,

the look of the running waters, their harsh and melancholy voices, and

the bleak wind which shivers the very herbage, make you feel that you

are a homeless stranger. Is this your place? It does not look like

it. If verses from the poets then come to your mind, it is only in an

ironic way. Absurd to apostrophise that scene! Much effect upon it

loving it would have. Perhaps the mere effort encourages the fearful

and doubting heart of man, and for that reason we may welcome the poets

and the romanticists, who give us the sensation of conquerors, which is

something towards the conquest of mind over matter.

The romance of the sea, the sea that inspired exultant lyric and

stately prose, the sea wonderful with the old clippers to which we have

looked back wistfully, is not quite the sea, we are beginning to feel,

that we used to picture. Does that sea exist? It may be ungracious to

question it at this moment, so soon after our recent rapture, sincerely

felt, over the _Cutty Sark_. Yet there it is. We are living in an age

of revolt. We are interrogating much that once was never questioned.

Things must prove themselves anew. What we used to value may be lumber,

and must go if it is, even when it is lumber of the mind.

[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?