rule—and that is very wise, for the anarchy of individual mercantile
effort would have made the experiment break down. No house may be
built in the European fashion to jar against the spirit of the place.
Everywhere the roofs must be flat and the outline preserved. Also
the European town is kept wholly distinct from the Mohammedan. Thus
in Meknes you may hear Mass in a chapel which lies within the very
thickness of the city wall—it is the old chapel of the Portuguese
prisoners during the past of the great Sultans—but you may not enter
that chapel from _within_ the city; the door faces outward, upon the
country side of the wall. Upon the day before I left Morocco, a soldier
who was driving me upon the heights above one of the new cities in his
car said to me musingly, as we had halted to look down upon the view of
mixed Europe and Africa and of all that vast new wealth: ‘It is just
ten years ago that the Sultan of the day, annoyed with his brother,
had him devoured by lions.’ Those who love contrast will not find it
stronger anywhere than in this strange land.
But these distant memories of Morocco go ill with the presence of a
Devon sea under the breaking of a chill dawn. Those African pictures in
my mind, hot sand and palm, painted by memory in the night, grew pale
and disappeared in the northern daylight, as do the coloured flashes of
the headland lights with the coming of the day.
There was still no more wind than would just make the Nona feel her
helm. My companion slept below. The heave of the sea grew less; and
then, to my disgust and dread, over the sea, already too hazy (so that
the high land some three miles away was like a ghost), a fog came
drifting up and enveloped us altogether.
I put her up a point more westerly, so as to be on the safe side, for
I did not know what current there might be here, and I had to give the
land a good offing. I did not want to come up through the fog in such
calm weather to hear, close at hand, the treacherous murmur of slightly
moving water upon rocks.
Of all experiences at sea in a small boat, under sail, there is none
in these days of steam and petrol more trying (after a certain length
of it) than being thus half-becalmed with barely steering-way in a
part of the sea where the great ships ply up and down, they themselves
independent of the stillness that holds you fast. You can hear (as
I did on that morning) the beat of the propellers, miles away or
close at hand. You hear the hooting from time to time of a ship’s
siren—but there is nothing to tell you where your danger may be, nor
upon what line it may be approaching you. Some with more experience
could, perhaps, have judged that these occasional sounds were at such
and such a distance, each or none of them threatening; but to me it
seemed as though every steamer in the Bristol Channel was atop of us.
I have no doubt that had the fog lifted I should have had nothing in
sight but a couple of outward bound tramps halfway to the horizon, and
perhaps one small steamer in from the Atlantic seas, and going up to
Avonmouth, rather nearer to our shore so as to save the strength of the
tide. Indeed, when the fog did lift towards noon, the sea was of that
appearance, with not half a dozen craft to be seen, and none near. But
in the white, cold blankness of the mist (with nothing whereby to judge
save the ear), the rhythmic beating of the blades seemed anywhere close
at hand; and if the hooting of the steam whistles was dull and dim,
that seemed due not to distance, but to the blanketing of the dense
cloud. It rose at last, first in patches and wreaths, then altogether,
and a pale sun showed over distant land.
There is one thing that has always puzzled me about the Devon and
Cornwall peninsula, and that is why the entry into it, up to quite late
in history, seems to have been from the north.
The deep harbours and secure anchorages are to-day on the south. There
is a whole string of them; and it is the south that faces towards
the main civilisation of the continent. You have the profound inlet
of Falmouth, you have Fowey, you have the miles of inland water at
Plymouth, you have the Yealm and Salcombe, and the Dart and Teignmouth.
Yet the legends, and even the history of Dumnonia are more concerned
with such shallow, small, and difficult places as Saint Ives, Padstow,
and Bideford River. The wealth seems to have been more on the
north than upon the south, for you will note that the pirate raids
principally struck there, and the shrines also, the ancient shrines,
are rather on the north than on the south; and on the north also is
Tintagel, of which it was said by Tristram: ‘Blessed be Tintagel and
all that dwell therein.’ The relics of the saints were established
in the northern harbours. The seats of government were on the north:
there, in the north, is the story of Arthur; and when Cornwall
communicates with Brittany in the early Dark Ages, men seem to sail
round the end of the land—though the southern harbours are there,
pointing right at the further shore.
Did that peninsula swing as on a pivot axis? Did it deepen to the south
during the long, hardly-recorded ages?
I knew nothing of these harbours of North Devon and Cornwall, not even
by hearsay. I read up diligently in my ‘West Coast Pilot’ that river
which seemed the best for entry along these coasts, and hoped to make
it before evening. But the wind died down altogether, and we drifted
aimlessly enough back upon the flood, then down again on the ebb,
through the night, and all through the morning and the noon, and on
into the afternoon again of the second day.
It was full evening, and the sun within an hour of its setting, the air
much warmer now and the light mellow with a powdery gold, when a strong
breeze came up out of the very sun, as it were; out of the glory. The
Nona heeled to it, and was now to be handled at will, making a good run
a little north of west, with the opportunity for beating as we chose.
We beat up towards the river-mouth, sure, as we thought, that the wind
would hold, and that we could easily run up the stream and so to the
town beyond before darkness. What we had not reckoned with was a sheer
cliff lying along the river-mouth to the west, overhanging it and
cutting off the wind. On the eastern shore was an immense stretch of
half-covered sand, bearing a name of disaster, and famous for wreckage.
Having lost the wind, we could no longer manœuvre, and, what was worse
in that narrow passage, we found that the tide did not run true to the
sea-tide outside.
We had counted upon the flood making; but, whether because there was
more water than usual in the river, or from some odd effect of the
wind, or because locally it is always so (though the ‘West Coast Pilot’
told us nothing about it, nor the chart either), the river was still
running out violently, and there seemed no sign of an upward-going
stream before darkness.
I had almost determined to let her drift out again, catch the sea
wind when I got beyond the wall of the cliff, find anchoring-ground
well offshore, and wait there for the day, when there appeared,
coming down the river at great speed, a white motor-boat, large and
exquisitely apparelled, splendid with burning bronze, regally accoutred
in unspotted gleaming mantle of the foam-colour, of the cloud-colour,
of the snow-colour, and a line of gold all around. It was indeed a
boat apparelled, not only as to itself, but as to its two humans; and
shameful did the Nona appear, homely, draggle-tail, sordid, even after
so very calm a passage, when contrasted with that dandy of the inland
waters. Alas! That dead wealth should dig such gulfs between mortals
and that poverty should lessen virtue!
But, to be just, it is not only wealth that breeds these fine sights,
it is also a certain temper in the owner. And I knew very well that
though I had three million pounds and some odd pence over I should
never have a tidy boat. I could not sleep in such a thing.
Anyhow, there she came, thundering down the tide. I had thought she
would pass me in her rush of speed, and I held up until she should have
done so, for it would have been dangerous to have tried to go about
with such a weight of movement coming on us, and our own course half
out of control, dependent only upon occasional slight splashes of wind
from over the cliff. But the motor-boat slowed down, and its owner
asked us if we wanted a tow up to the town. We met him with gratitude:
he was of that very considerable class known as the Good Rich, with
whom are the Penitent Thieves, the Reformed Drunkards, the Sane
Professors, the Womanly Furies, and all other candidates for heaven.
We threw a line aboard him and made fast, and so went up just as the
darkness came, and dropped anchor in the pool under a neat little city,
which lived by the traffic of that difficult waterway with its strange
tide. But, then, all tides are strange.
My companion and I sat in the hatch that evening under quiet stars,
smoking pipes, watching that most pleasant of sights, the home lights
of a little harbour town, and their trembling reflections in the
water, the slight swaying of the masts of fishing-boats moored by the
quay. We wondered together at the way the tide had behaved when it
tried to baulk us of our entry, and we decided before we slept that
it was better never to reason upon tides, nor even to accept print
upon them, but to take them blindly as they came, for ‘No man living
can understand the tides,’ said my companion, and, as he said it, he
sighed; and he was right.
No man living can understand the tides. And the mystery of the tides is
as good a corrective as one could find to our deadening pride in exact
measurements, and to the folly of attempting to base real knowledge
upon mere calculation: our pretence to a universal science, and to a
modern omniscience upon the Nature of Things.
The bungling of landsmen in the matter of tides begins with Galileo.
That worthy had a talent for getting off the rails and he bungled on
the tides as he did on comets. Then came Newton. Why does the tide flow
every twelve hours on the average, instead of every twenty-four? If it
be true, as I suppose it roughly is, that the moon is the main puller
of the tides (helped and hindered a little by the sun, and certainly by
other forces of which we know nothing), then there ought to be a tide
every twenty-four hours. Put a lot of fluid round a solid sphere, and
set a pull, working from some point well outside the fluid. It looks as
though the fluid would heap up towards the pull. It being discovered
that the fluid heaped up not only towards the pull, but also on the
other side of the solid sphere, away from the pull, the mind of man
could not rest without proclaiming an explanatory dogma, and we were
told (by Newton among others) that the pull not only heaped up the
fluid towards itself, but also dragged away the earth from the water on
the far side. Indeed, Newton worked it out and proved that it was so.
If the phenomenon had been the other way about, if the fluid had
behaved as one would expect it to behave, and had heaped up only on
the side towards the pull—oh! believe me! a formula would have been
discovered to explain _that_ with just as much ease as the formula
which has been drawn up to explain the real state of affairs.
But this original false dogma is not of very much interest compared
with the immense complexity of the tides, and the inability to follow
them with any sort of completeness by reason of that complexity.
For the tides behave in the most inexplicable fashion. They follow, of
course, certain habits, which we know (from the observation of liquids
everywhere) to be in the nature of a liquid in movement. They pile
up higher as they rush up funnels. They are checked by ridges, they
form eddies—and all the rest of it. But they are continually playing
anomalous tricks; and any one who tries to work up a theory of the
tides makes a fool of himself: still more does any poor sailing-man do
so who uses science to discover what the tide may be doing in a place
he has not yet tried. He makes not only a fool of himself, but also,
very probably, shipwreck.
Why should a tide run three hours late inshore along the Bight of
Sussex? We are told it is an eddy. Of course it is. But why an eddy
of such extraordinary retardation? The main Channel tide runs from
headland to headland. It is ‘true,’ as the phrase goes, at Saint
Catharine’s, and again at Beachy and so on to Dungeness; and if you are
going up-Channel outside, you carry it with you ‘true’ all the way.
That it should be a little retarded in the Bight of Sussex one might
understand, but that Bight is very shallow (it is only fifteen miles
from the deepest point by Shoreham to the outer line), and yet you have
this three hours’ difference! The tide still runs hard to the west
alongshore, three—anyhow, two and three quarters—hours after it has
turned eastward outside.
Who can explain why there is nine hours’ ebb on the easterly shore of
Portland and only three hours’ flow? It is a monkey trick, designed to
prevent the poor sailorman from sneaking in just under the Bill: it
gives him only three hours out of the twelve in which to do it, with
Scylla on his left, and that most abominable howling Charybdis called
Portland Race on his right. And if he comes up to the Bill at the end
of his three hours’ limit, he has his heart in his mouth for fear that
he should find the ebb stream catching his bows the moment he is round
the Bill, and driving him headlong into the heart of the Race.
And what about the double tide of the Wight and Poole, the _gulder_, as
they call it—the mystery of the Dorset and the Hampshire seas? In the
days of my innocence I used to believe what I was told: that the double
tide in Southampton Water was due to the water coming in first through
the Needles channel and then around by Spithead later. It sounded
reasonable for Southampton Water. But when I first made Poole, and
found that they had a double tide there as well—and even out beyond
Saint Alban’s Head—my philosophy was shaken, and my scheme of things
fell heavily to the ground. Why on earth should there be a double tide
on that coast? Who could explain it?
The enormous tide at the end of the funnel of the Bristol Channel is
reasonable enough, though it is a little odd that it should be so very
much bigger at Chepstow than at Gloucester. But how will you account
for the prodigious heave at Saint Malo? Why does the flood come up Arun
River like a racehorse recently invigorated with a bucket of beer, and
at Newhaven hardly move at all up the Ouse?
I have stood outside the old piers at Newhaven in a little boat, with a
northerly wind, expecting the first of the flood to help me to beat up,
and waited for the quarter flood, and the half flood, and, later than
that, and still have seen the sluggish surface water running out to
sea against all the tidal laws that were ever written down: running out
to sea, though the level of it steadily rose.
But there is no end to the mystery of the tides. Why is there a tide
at Venice? It is not much of a thing, but it is there. And, for that
matter, there is _a_ tide in the Lake of Geneva. Here, again, the
learned come barging in and tell us all about it. Closed basins (they
say) like the Adriatic, even quite small ones, like the Lake of Geneva,
have their little tides after the fashion of water swung in a basin.
The explanation is given in some simile like this: ‘If you shake a
basin slightly, the water will begin to swing with a regular movement
back and forth.’ So it will. But who shakes the Lake of Geneva? Or who
catches the Adriatic at either end, and gives it a regular balance up
and down, exactly so often, every so many hours?
All this questioning sounds like the Book of Job; but, note you, that
I, for my part, am with Job, and against the scientists. For Job, or
God, or whoever it was who set the catechism, put the questions and
was careful to avoid the answers, and for my part I will do the same,
not only in the matter of the tides, but for the whole basketful of
things on which the scientists have been pontificating with increasing
uppishness for the last two hundred years, until at last they have
led us to the morass wherein we are sinking. When they pontificate on
tides it does no great harm, for the sailorman cares nothing for their
theories, but goes by real knowledge, and I by my sworn authority, the
Admiralty texts, the like of which for excellence the world has not:
‘High water, full and change, six hours, thirteen minutes after Dover.
The stream is barely perceptible in the first three hours of the flood,
but runs very strongly in the third, and through three quarters of the
fourth hour; after which it slackens. There is no perceptible stream in
the last two hours of the flood.’ Or again: ‘On rounding the Devil’s
Point the tide is lost.’ There is no theorising, no mumbo-jumbo. The
thing itself, reality, is stated; and it is true. There is not even a
passing wonderment as to where the tide goes to when it is lost. The
‘Channel Pilot’ tells you the truth. You stick blindly to its text and
you are saved.
There are many parts of the sea where the tide goes round like a clock,
and no one can tell you why. Instead of the stream setting first
east, let us say, with the flood and then west with the ebb, it goes
all round the compass. It sets northwest with the beginning of the
flood, then north, then northeast, then east, and so on, looking all
round about itself like a performing dog, and slowly and ceaselessly
revolving. It behaves not like an eddy, but like spokes. It is
perfectly incomprehensible.
There is also this about the tides, which we all know to be true,
and which we can see at work any day, but which I defy any man to
rationalize: when the tide runs up a narrow river—or, indeed, any
river—it will be still running up, say, ten miles from the mouth,
when it is running _down_ again, say, five miles from the mouth.
What happens in between? Slack water, of course. But _how_ is there
slack water? How can the running _down_ be going on at one point and,
immediately beyond, the running up, without a division? How can the
water go on running _up_ from a reservoir below which it is running
down? It does so, and it is all in God’s Providence, and I accept it as
I do teeth, or any other oddity. But I will not pretend to explain it.
The sea teaches one the vastness and the number of things, and,
therefore, the necessary presence of incalculable elements, perpetually
defeating all our calculations. The sea, which teaches all wisdom,
certainly does not teach any man to despise human reason. I suppose
there was never yet any Kantian fool or worser pragmatist who would not
have been cured of his folly by half a week of moderate weather off the
Onion. No one can at sea forego the human reason or doubt that things
are things, or that true ideas are true. But the sea does teach one
that the human reason, working from a number of known premises, must
always be on its guard, lest the conclusion be upset in practice by the
irruption of other premises, unknown or not considered. In plain words,
the sea makes a man practical; and the practical man is, I suppose, as
much the contrary of the pragmatist as the sociable man is the contrary
of the socialist, or the peaceable man the contrary of the pacifist.
And, talking of pacifists, there is nothing more pleasing to note than
the excellent unconscious patriotism of the men and women who solemnly
propose that patriotism is the ruin of the world.
There is a delightful irony in observing how intensely national these
anti-nationalists are! It is a profound and satisfying thing to watch.
Any one can get a good laugh out of the patriotism of men with no
nation, or, at any rate, with a nationality very different from that
which they profess. It is a common jest, the sham patriotism of the
nomads. But far more subtle and penetrating is the fun of watching your
genuine pacifist, who believes the divisions between nations to be evil
artifices, soon to be conjured away.
Nowhere are these international pacifists more national than in
England. They have all the English spontaneity and love of adventure.
They carry to extreme that English love of individual action which we
nearly always find associated with their odd political blindness. They
nearly all display some trick of clothing or food. They will drink
lime-juice instead of wine, or wear elastic-sided boots, or think it
wrong to smoke tobacco, or go about without hats. If they are men, they
will have hair coming down to their shoulders, which is a very greasy
habit. If they are women they will go about barefoot, save for the most
absurd sandals; and while they practise all these provincial follies
they will be consumed with a passion for the general of mankind.
If you wanted to get a specimen—I do not say of the average
Englishman, for he is certainly not that—but of a being in whom the
English characteristics are to be found most deeply marked, this
pacifist is the very man whom you should choose. All the English
conceptions of right and wrong, all the English habits of thought, all
the sheltered English attitude towards the great outer world, all the
local errors, and much of the local generosity are there present to the
full.
I cannot help thinking it a strength to England that the pacifist or
internationalist in England should be so intensely English. It prevents
any disruptive effect, and it therefore prevents the rivals of this
country taking such folk seriously.
The French and Italians are far less happily circumstanced in this
regard. In those two countries—and, I suppose, in Spain also, although
there I have less knowledge on which to speak—the internationalist
_is_ an internationalist, bearing but weakly the common marks of
his own people, and willing to act not only against his country
politically, but also in all his being, morally and spiritually.
A French or Italian internationalist and pacifist will not only
sympathise with the enemies of his country, not only give them actively
all the help he can, but he will particularly attack the soul whereby
his country lives, its traditions and character. If he is French he
will hate wine, if Italian, macaroni. But does the English pacifist
hate tea? The unrooted man is a very dangerous type, and in England
happily unknown. To read anything said or written by such men as Mr.
Wells or Mr. Snowden is to read something by people who evidently think
of international peace as something closely connected with cricket,
teetotalism, and the use of Bible language—coupled, of course, with a
reverent agnosticism, which means a wearied puritanism.
I have spoken of their courage, and certainly the courage of the
typical conscientious objectors during the War was an arresting thing.
One of the most famous had been a fairly close acquaintance of mine
many years ago. I had known him to be a man of eccentric nature, hardly
mad. But I could not have believed he would have stood up as he did to
the martyrdom which he was made to suffer. The violence of his protest
against all violence was an admirable thing.
A lesser form of the paradox in these people is their hatred of the
French, and their passion for Prussia. This love of Berlin would seem
to be compounded of two elements, partly a natural desire to support
the losing side, but much more the strong religious sympathy they have
with the Northern German in Europe, and the hatred they feel (very
naturally!) for the Catholic culture, of which the French are the chief
representatives.
They preached a universal similarity. Yet there were very few of them
who would not have joyfully watched the most bloody war against the
French at any time after the Armistice, and none of them would have
doubted one moment of the issue: for they had prepared for war in
the best of all possible fashions by refusing to arm. Such men are
confident that their country must be victorious, for, in their childish
minds, anything strange and foreign seems naturally weak, and doomed
to extinction.
You see, I plead for the fools. But although I like these eccentrics
for their sincerity and for their spontaneous virtue under persecution,
yet I cannot associate with any of them long. They make me nervous—and
I think this effect is due to something insane about them.... Anyhow,
they are national, and that is always to the good.
I have noticed that this kind of fanatic, like every other kind, is in
two species; the species which too clearly thinks out its own insane
theory, and the species which remains perfectly muddle-headed.
I had a long talk lately in the ruins of the town of Rheims with one of
these people. He was drinking a sort of special fizzy coloured water,
which he had imported, and which he worshipped because no man could
become drunk thereon. He was doing very noble work in helping people
who had lost their homes. He was a ‘Helper’—and all the rest of it. He
was also occupied in spreading the Gospel, under the reservation, of
course, that it was not true; at least, as he was careful to explain to
me, he ‘was not emphasising the miraculous element.’ This person had a
great deal of money, but could none the less reason closely, and he had
evidently thought out his subject completely.