genius (for it was no less) and his power of imprinting himself upon
the place. Fanatical men are not usually happy; but I think Kingsley
must have been happy, because he had the tide under him all the time.
Everything in his own lifetime was going his way. The cause to which he
was attached, the destruction of the Faith, appeared to be triumphing
more and more; though the slightest accident the other way (such as
Newman’s conversion) was an intolerable irritant to him. He lived in
that part of the earth which he most loved, he enjoyed all its habits,
he was supported by everything around. You could get no better and, at
the same time, no more comic criticism of that Kingsleian mood than
what has happed to the name ‘Westward Ho,’ which Kingsley rendered
famous. ‘Westward Ho’ simply means the westerly of two landing-places.
‘Ho,’ or ‘Hoe,’ is a wharf: but that ‘Ho’ has been spread broadcast
throughout the world of English as a sort of ‘Halloa,’ or ‘Yoicks,’
to call the adventurous overseas; and not one man in a thousand, I
suppose, but thinks of those two little letters as a hoot (perhaps
he gives them a nobler name); as a call, resonant of the Elizabethan
sailings.
One of the saddest things I know about the beach near Bideford River
is the deadly hatred with which the dons have persecuted poor, dear
Kenwith. Kenwith is a place where a few boatloads of Danes landed in
the Dark Ages, and were defeated by the English. The name is quite
clear, the tradition is equally clear, and the description of the
position is unmistakable. Therefore have the learned, as is their wont,
insisted with the utmost virulence that the tradition, the name, the
description, are all a popular error, and that the place where the
little scrimmage really came off was miles away.
It is interesting to analyse the motives of this sort of thing. We are
all familiar with it. The universities of all countries, but especially
of our own, are a regular hothouse for breeding it; but when one first
comes across it, one is puzzled why it should come into being at all.
Whence springs this lust for saying that the Gospel of Saint John was
not written by Saint John? that Homer was not written by Homer? that
the Battle of Hastings was not called the Battle of Hastings—although
all the people who fought there called it the Battle of Hastings? that
William the Conqueror had only a handful of men there—though his
secretary, who saw them, and read all the documents connected with
them, gives us fifty thousand? that Julius Cæsar’s Gallic War was
written by his tutor—and all the rest of the nonsense?
The powerful force urging dons to make fools of themselves in this
way seems to me to come from a convergence of three currents. First
of all there is the vanity of the learned man, who has all the better
opportunities for action because few have any knowledge at all of the
matter, and he is fairly safe from criticism—or thinks himself so. His
fellows will not give him away. It is clearly a flattering thing to
think that one is right where all the world has been wrong, and, in a
time like ours, when there has been accumulated such a mass of special
technical knowledge, people are ready to swallow almost any assertion,
because they know not what new evidence may have appeared.
The second source is that very human thing, the love of the
marvellous—though it is the love of the marvellous appearing in a
very degraded form. Your pedant says: ‘All the apparent evidence, all
tradition, all that you would call common sense, would make out Little
Muddipool to be that same Little Muddipool where the treaty of Little
Muddipool was signed. It is called in plain words “The Treaty of Little
Muddipool,” and its last words are “Made by us at Little Muddipool.”
But _I_ tell you that it was not Little Muddipool at all, but a place a
hundred miles away with a different name.’ The spirit at work there is
exactly the same spirit as that which says: ‘Common sense and your own
experience will tell you that the bishop must have crossed the river
either by a bridge or by a boat. _I_ tell you that the holy man sailed
across it on his coat. What do you think of that?’
And the third cause is a negative one. The perpetual substitution
of hypothesis for fact (which is the great mark of dons to-day)
ends by getting men into a state of mind where they can no longer
weigh the proportions of evidence: they can no longer distinguish
between the certain, the probable, and the absurd. Thus, it was but
a little time ago that an Oxford don came out with a miracle. He
said he had discovered any number of classical passages containing
concealed anagrams, furnishing the most astonishing information; for
instance, that Euripides, when he was a little boy, wrote the plays of
Æschylus. A stopper was put on him, however, by a man who wrote to the
‘Spectator’ (of all papers), proving that the said don’s name was but
thinly concealed in an anagram of the opening lines of the ‘Iliad,’ so
that he must have written that excellent poem, not when he was a little
boy, but long before he was born. And so much for that.
Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling
contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over
against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore:
Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore
for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost
incomprehensible to the other. I have sometimes thought that whenever
the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore
will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin
channel) and storm and loot Instow. Pretty well every modern set of
human habitations has this contrast of rich and poor quarters, but when
there is water flowing in between them it is the more striking: with
hard work on one side of the stream and the fruits of it in leisure
upon the other.
My voyage was over. I had brought up in Bideford River before the long
bridge of Bideford, and I made all quiet for the night, and for a long
time to come. For there would I leave the Nona in charge, till I could
take her out again.
Swaying in the cabin that night also, I finished writing the Chanty of
the Nona, of which if any man say that it is a vile piece of verse, I
am ready to agree with him, but if another man say that it heartens
him, and fills him with the sea, why, I am ready to agree with him
also. It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a
place of rest. We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come
into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.
I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much,
after thirty, over literary fame: if it comes, let it come, but for
God’s sake let us have no publicity with it, for to be pointed at and
known is to live in a glass cage. And very much do I applaud those men
who do what in youth I myself desired to do, but was unable to do, that
is, to write consistently under a false name, and carefully cover one’s
tracks. I wanted to write verse under one name, history under another,
travel under another—but fate was too strong.
Of the men who have done this in my time the most successful was
Dodgson, the mathematical don at Christ Church—that is, of The House.
He had calculated well; and the immense fame of Lewis Carroll and of
‘Alice in Wonderland’ left him private and secure.
Mention of that book also makes me consider how false is nearly all
literary fame, or, rather, how great an element of falsity there is in
nearly all such fame. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a very remarkable book,
as are, indeed, other books of Dodgson’s, though not all. But a large
element in its vast diffusion was its consonance with a particular
‘drawing-room’ mood of a particular day. I shall be called blasphemous,
I know, but I am perfectly certain that ‘Alice’ will not long survive
the ease and unquestioned security of the England of her day. For every
implication in morals, and even in humour, with which Dodgson’s books
are crammed, sprang from that security and that ease. Nor is there a
stronger symptom of so abnormal a passage in human affairs as was the
English gentry’s generation of 1833-99 (abnormal, for normal men live
under a strain and a peril, and in active defence against the barbarian
or the menacing enemy) than the delight of Dodgson’s vast audience in
nonsense: in the humour which is founded upon folly as contrasted with
the wit that is founded upon wisdom. Even the facile composition of odd
childish words, which had a slightly reminiscent sound, was sufficient
to delight that generation. But when the terrors and the heroisms
permanently return, the sawdust will run out of such things.
And, after all, what is the possession of literary fame? Can dead men
use it? Does any man possessing it, unless he be asinine in his vanity,
think himself the true creator of some really high line his pen has
happened to set down? Is there any writing man with a true judgment of
great things in writing who does not doubt his own achievement? Or is
there any who, when some particular piece of verse or rhetoric which
he has written convinces him of its merit, does not admit to his own
soul that not _he_ was the true author, but rather some force working
through him?
Again, does not any writer who is also reasonably manly prefer any one
of man’s virtues to an accident of verse or prose? Who with stuff in
him would not rather be a brave boor than a cowardly poet?
So much for literary gents. Excluding my own self, I should like to see
them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea
and there scuttled. Their absurd little quarrels, their posings, their
insufficiency, the chaos of their minds—all these things are a burden,
and there is not one day’s riding upon a horse or sailing upon the sea
(let alone still better things which, for the honour I bear you, I will
not mention here) that is not worth the whole tonnage and shiploads of
their printed stuff, save here and there a piece of lyric verse, or
here and there a good run and rhythm in half a page of prose.
But, I say again, that’s all one. Here am I in Bideford River, at
anchor and come to the end of the seas, leaving her, the Nona, my
companion and my home, my very loyal boat, under the tutelage of the
long bridge of Bideford, which is notoriously the end of the world.
Now a day came when I had some freedom again. So I set out at once from
Devon with one companion, and, finding all on board as I had left it, I
set sail to leave Bideford River. I proposed to myself to explore the
outer sea beyond Hartland, which till then I had not seen, though now I
know its character and its harbours familiarly enough.
The tide so served that it was evening when I set out, nor was it easy
to shoot the channel at the bar of Appledore, in spite of the strong
ebb, because such slight wind as there was had too much north in it.
For the same reason we had to beat all that night, fetching up towards
Hartland Point in two long boards; helped at first by the tide, but
later, of course, finding it against us. It was daylight again before
we came to the headland, and opened the coast beyond.
The ancients made a solemn and special sanctity, it seems, of this
barrenness and strength and height of Hartland. The Romans called it
the Point of Hercules. They felt, I think, that when they rounded it,
they were coming into another sea; for they were much alive to the
mystery of things. If they thought this of Hartland, that it was a
boundary, they were right. Within Hartland, you are under the wing of
England, and in homely water; outside Hartland, you have all the West
before you, and the power of Ocean. And so with us that morning. Even
as the wind died down there came a mighty succession of slow heavings,
which grew more regular and defined until at last the smooth water,
just crisped here and there, by mere breaths of air, ran in giant
folds—parallel, regular, unceasing, enormous. All that sea, I say, is
odd, and I have felt spells upon it.
The long rollers came prodigious out of the southwest under almost
a calm. There was not wind enough to do more than give the boat
steerage-way—it was lucky we had that, for if it had been a dead
calm she would have rolled broadside on and shaken herself badly with
that too tall topmast of hers, as she had done on an earlier day in
the White Horse Race. The rollers came on and on; not the relic of a
gale (for there had been none anywhere), but raised by one of those
innumerable mysterious influences which between them make the sea. They
lifted one after the other, hiding the horizon; we topped them, we
sank into the trough; they heaved majestically on, to thunder upon the
savage grandeur of Hartland.
Our time has discovered so many things in the material world (and has
grown paralysed to so many other more important things) that we profess
to explain everything with perfect links of cause and effect. It is an
occasion to use the phrase ‘We miserable sinners.’ For we shall never
know anything at all compared with the unknown. What makes such waves?
For that matter, why is one sea so different from another? You measure
the amount of salt, the weight of the water, the strength of the wind.
Though you had all the factors we can measure, these three and a score
of others (the pressure of the air, its wetness, its heat, and so on),
yet you could never say why the difference between one sea and another
appears. All measurable factors might be the same, and yet the seas
quite different. You can, indeed, hardly describe that difference any
more than you can describe the difference between two instruments
of music, the flute and the trumpet; or the difference between two
materials in portraiture, marble and bronze. We only know that it is
there. But our stupidly proud time misses such essential categories.
Why is it that what they call ‘The New World’ is something utterly
different in quality, taste, intimate soul, from the old? We have here
not only the conflict between England and America, but between Spain
and the Argentine, and between England herself and the white colonies,
and between the French and the French Canadians. It is not newness; it
is not lack of tradition; it is difference of _timbre_—as violent as
the difference between a railway whistle and the note of a thrush, or
between wood and iron.
Modern men knowing a dozen out of a million causes reason downwards
from the rules they have, instead of trusting their perceptions as
their fathers did.
I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from
these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart
from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul. Meanwhile,
men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.
The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not
pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still
less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood
and, as it were, entered into it. That is government; that is Empire:
to get into the shoes of the governed.
In the strange, successful, perhaps ephemeral, adventure which has put
our high European culture in command over the lives of others in the
East and in Africa, not a few men have arisen tested by circumstance
and conforming to this idea. I have heard with respect the judgment of
others upon half a dozen Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen of the sort,
though I have not seen their work. Russians have told me of compatriots
of their own who have achieved such things beyond the Urals and the
Caspian. Of Germans I never heard that any were so much as capable of
beginning the great task. That the Spaniards changed half a continent
we know. But the only instance that ever came under my own eyes, and
that but for a few days, was the instance of Marshal Lyautey. Lyautey’s
Morocco is an astonishing affair.
It is true that there lay behind his great achievement more than
a lifetime of foundation—the steady French transformation of
North Africa. It is like a coral reef, solid, detailed, infinitely
particular: the work of innumerable units, sacrificed, obscure,
tenacious, creative, permanent. None the less, what Lyautey has done
is a building by itself. It is like the new Gothic of Brazenose or
Magdalen at Oxford: one may say that there lay behind this also the
multitudinous, patient work of a lifetime or more since Pugin began: or
it is like Parsons’ turbine, which came after so much experiment, but
stands by itself all the same.
It is not belittling Lyautey’s great work in Morocco to say that these
things are only possible when there is frankly recognised the essential
principle of personal responsibility in governing; or (to put it in
Colonial phrasing), ‘one-man control,’ or, to put it in Aristotelian
terms, ‘MONARCHY.’
There is no other working form of administration over multitudes
of men, except the aristocratic; and the aristocratic form of
administration—which ruled for nearly three hundred years over
Protestant England after the Reformation had destroyed popular monarchy
and made wealth supreme—is only possible in those rare communities
where men enjoy being governed by a clique and look up to, and revere,
a special class whom they think of as their natural masters.
What Marshal Lyautey has done in the organisation of French Morocco
has been based upon two foundations which, when they are absent from
the effort to govern aliens—as one or both commonly are—make such
government increasingly difficult; until, at last, it has to be
abandoned. The first of these foundations is _working with_ the alien
people whom one administrates, not _against_ them, nor even _above_
them. The second foundation is the deliberate investment of one’s own
capital and energy _for the benefit of the alien governed_ rather than
for one’s own benefit: that is, the development of communications
and of building, the extension of instruction, the improvement of
waterways, afforestation—all manner of expensive functions which you
can only get from a government directly concerned for the good of _all_
the people and which will never be undertaken by the private home
trader working for his pocket alone.
It is the absence of this sympathy with, and eager help of, the
governed which prevents a trading community from ever biting into alien
soil. For, in a trading community, the administration of a foreign
dependency is directed to helping the home merchant or settler. The
road is driven, the river is bridged, not primarily for the benefit of
the governed, but primarily for the immediate profit of the governors.
With this there goes a contempt of the governed, which is a dangerous
sign, and later, that more dangerous sign, a hatred of them.
The foreign rule, therefore, gets more and more distasteful to
the governed. For half a lifetime they wonder at it: then they
grow restive, finding themselves despised to no purpose. Then they
permanently rebel. At last the unnatural tyranny breaks down. When it
breaks down the governors gradually depart and little impress of their
foreign rule remains.
It was so apparently between Carthage and her dependencies.
But when the governors expend themselves for the good of the governed,
an amalgamation takes place between the national spirit of the one and
of the other, and the superior trains and shepherds his subjects into a
common civilisation. One of the tests of success in alien government
is to note whether the governors despise or admire the governed. If
they despise them it is proof that they are unfit to govern. If they
admire in them what is to be admired, all goes well. I found in Morocco
that a contempt for Islam (I do not say a difference from Islam, but
a _contempt_ for it, a contempt which would regard the Moor as a
‘native’ and the French as in some way a ‘superior race’) was only to
be discovered here and there among the worst of the colonists. It was
your half-educated, lower-middle-class immigrant who took this attitude
and gave all the trouble. The higher you went in the scale, the greater
was the liking for the Moor and for his civilisation, the greater
the desire to understand him and to know his past, the greater the
admiration of his art, his dignity, his faith. When one got to the head
of things, in the Residency-General and in the Marshal’s own household,
there was an understanding of the whole Moorish past and present like
the understanding which a scholar has of his beloved text; it was an
intimate and all-pervading familiarity.
I carried away with me from that glimpse of the Atlas and of the
treeless run of burnt land beyond (for I travelled while the heat was
still upon us) vivid pictures in the mind: first of a vast tract of
dead upland, utterly bare, between Oudja and the Moulouya (I had come
from Oran); this tract had about it the accursed inhuman effect of the
great American deserts in the West of the United States; then, next in
order, of Taza on the edge of the hill fighting, and of the story I
was told there of two Moorish brothers. One of these would fight under
the French for six months and then desert. Thereupon the other brother
would enlist in his place. So much was the object of each the pleasure
of fighting and the advantage of pay, and so little the political idea
of independence.
Nor could any one forget who has seen it (and it is now become or will
soon become, a commonplace of travel) that great new road which I saw
in its last making, but which was already nearly completed. It is
driven right through Barbary like a stay, like a back-bone, from the
Bay of Carthage to the river-mouth of Rabat on the Atlantic tide; near
one thousand miles in its actual trace, and following the great ride
which the first Mohammedans took when they overwhelmed the West—when
that horseman rode into the sea surf on the sands by the bar of Rabat
River and cried out: ‘Had you not set bounds, O God, to the earth,
with this your sea, I would ride for ever westward and continue to
conquer in Your Name.’ A man may take his motor-car on the boat to-day
from Marseilles to Tunis and follow that strict and graded broad way
uninterruptedly till he comes to the Atlantic and, turning south to
Casablanca, ship it again for Europe.
The surprise of that Moroccan feat was the way in which it was handled
during the Great War. When war was already certain in the last days
of July, 1914, the Government in Paris, the politicians, sent orders
to the Resident-General that all troops should be withdrawn to the
coast, the interior to be abandoned, and reconquest (if possible!) to
be achieved after the Peace. We who know what those words ‘after the
Peace’ have come to mean, know also that it would have been the end
of the French in Morocco. It would have been the return to the old
pressure upon the Algerian frontier and evidence to all Islam that
Europe had failed.
What the soldier did was to maintain his garrisons in spite of the
politicians. What was astonishing, he continued the development of
Morocco during all those four years of mortal strain, as though the
peace had not been broken. Still was the railway laid, and still the
new road completed, and still were the buildings set up, and still was
the wild hill country contained by its ring of troops; until, when
the curtain lifted in ’19, Europe saw, not the Morocco there had been
when the Occident entered on its great struggle, but another Morocco,
wealthier, stronger and more settled, with great new European towns
side by side with the Moslem, and with the whole territory organised.