It may be a disappointment to the children each year at play upon so many
beaches--even if they are but dimly aware of their lack--to find their
annual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing, indeed, to
them, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once a year, but
not annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons, not waxing and
waning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons whereof no
one knows which is the highest point and the secret and the ultimate
purpose, not recreated, not new, and not yielding to the child anything
raw and irregular to eat.
Sand castles are well enough, and they are the very commonplace of the
recollections of elders, of their rhetoric, and of what they think
appropriate for their young ones. Shingle and sand are good playthings,
but absolute play is not necessarily the ideal of a child; he would
rather have a frolic of work. Of all the early autumn things to be done
in holiday time, that game with the beach and the wave is the least good
for holiday-time.
Not that the shore is everywhere so barren. The coast of the
Londoners--all round the southern and eastern borders of England--is
indeed the dullest of all sea-margins. But away in the gentle bays of
Jersey the summer grows a crop of seaweed which the long ocean wave
leaves in noble curves upon the beach; for under sunny water the storms
have gathered the crops. The Channel Island people go gleaning after the
sea, and store the seaweed for their fields. Thus the beaches of Jersey
bays are not altogether barren, and have a kind of dead and accessory
harvest for the farmer. After a night of storm these crops are stacked
and carted and carried, the sea-wind catching away loose shreds from the
summits of the loads.
Further south, if the growth of the sea is not so put to use, the shore
has yet its seasons. You could hardly tell, if you did not know the
month, whether a space of sea or a series of waves, at Aldborough, say,
or at Dover, were summer or winter water; but in those fortunate regions
which are southern, yet not too southern for winter, and have thus the
strongest swing of change and the fullest pulse of the year, there are a
winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate
variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of
September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and
unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head
while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and the
vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can
rest; and where you float, there float also by you opalescent jelly-fish,
half transparent in the perfectly transparent water. An hour in the warm
sea is not enough. Rock-bathing is done on lonely shores. A city may be
but a mile away, and the cultivated vineyards may be close above the
seaside pine-trees, but the place is perfectly remote. You pitch your
tent on any little hollow of beach. A charming Englishwoman who used to
bathe with her children under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villa
in the motionless white evenings of summer put white roses in her hair,
and liked to sit out on a rock at sea where the first rays of the moon
would touch her.
You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing in the
world is more uninteresting than eleven o'clock. It is the hour of
mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o'clock on a shingly
beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing. Twelve has a
dignity always, and everywhere its name is great. The noon of every day
that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly. One
o'clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hour
of the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening and
lingering life. To bathe at eleven in the sun, in the wind, to bathe
from a machine, in a narrow sea that is certainly not clear and is only
by courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience to a tyrannical tide and in
water that is always much colder than yourself, to bathe in a hurry and
in public--this is to know nothing rightly of one of the greatest of all
the pleasures that humanity takes with nature.
By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea than
of mere straits. These temperate islands would be better called the
Ocean Islands. When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, he
composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter of
some thought. The final decision was to direct it, "A Victor Hugo,
Ocean." It reached him. It even received a reply: "I am the Past, you
are the Future; I am, etc." If an English boy had had the same idea the
name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it. "A Victor Hugo, La
Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but
"the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last is
suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland--formless
grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by a
perpetual wind.
As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea,
machine-bathing at eleven o'clock will hardly furnish them with a magical
early memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the
rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It was
vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of all
ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the
unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and
returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and
superfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of water had they," poor
infants.
None the less is the barren shore the children's; and St. Augustine,
Isaac Newton, and Wordsworth had not a vision of sea-beaches without a
child there.