that is negligible. All you have in the way of real evidence is
a few bones which are almost certainly older than the records of
any civilisation, and quite numerous relics of barbaric culture,
fish-hooks, and coarse weaving, and coarse pottery, and so on.
Behind that you have—but after an impossible gulf—roughly-chipped
stones, of which some small proportion may have been fashioned by an
intelligent being, but of which most, in spite of the cocksureness of
those who collect and describe them, are very doubtful indeed. No one
really knows how far back these things go, for no one knows the rate
at which earth may be or was laid down in floods, of what nature the
catastrophes of the past may have been. But of transition from such
doubtful fragments to the neolithic and from this to civilised man who
carves splendour out of granite, and who measures earth and heaven, not
a trace.
What is most remarkable, no one that I have ever read has properly
tabulated the rough stone implements in a series.
Now that is what we want. We ought to have some large monograph,
properly illustrated, showing in a graduated series such so-called
‘paleoliths’ as are possibly of human handicraft; then others less
likely be so, and so on down to the most doubtful. It is of no use
to the ordinary educated man to be told by self-styled experts that
this or that lumpish thing was (though it doesn’t look it) of human
handiwork; he can judge that for himself: and as the expert is all out
for making it human if he possibly can, he is to be discounted. What
we want is, I say, a monograph giving specimens in a graded series:
and then, side by side with these, a full description of the place and
conditions where they were found.
When that is done we shall be able to judge for ourselves, and not to
accept the priestcraft of the people who call themselves scientists;
we shall be able to make some rough judgment on the comparative age of
such implements. If evident paleoliths are discovered under a depth
of stratified stone (not gravel or earth) which argues some very long
period of accumulation, I should conclude that man did make them in
some very remote time, to which, perhaps, a minimum limit can be set;
but until we have them all graded, and discussed according to their
grades, and with proof of the rate of stratification, we are at the
mercy of men whose business it is to bring forward as many marvels as
possible, as it has been the business of all who in all times desire to
cut a figure before the people.
And, again, even if we had (which we have not) a proper analysis of
this sort of evidence, there would still remain the unbridged gulf
between the barbaric and the civilised man.
It stands to reason that civilisation cannot have been born complete.
It must have arisen from simple origins; of what sort were those
origins? The only reply so far is silence on the part of the wise, and
loud, unsupported affirmation on the part of the popular writer. We
have, for instance, no series in sculpture proceeding from the rude
to the complete. There is a series from the archaic onwards, but the
archaic is the work of a high culture. Nowhere in the world is there,
so far, apparent, in any art, a set of vague beginnings gradually
becoming more definite. The same is true of writing. You may show,
indeed, the development of picture writing in the Valley of the Nile,
but no one has yet shown the groping and the tentative origins of the
thing—if tentative and groping origins there were. Sergi launched
what was merely a guess, quite unconvincing, that certain marks upon
Western rough monoliths were the origins of the alphabet; the proof he
adduced was quite insignificant. No one would invest five pounds on the
strength of it in a prospectus.
The truth is that we do not know where writing came from, nor how
it was developed. Nor do we know where building with cut stones and
with bricks came from. Nor do we know where any of the origins of
civilisation are to be found.
One despairing suggestion has been that its origins are now drowned
under the sea. That is as likely a guess as any other. At any rate, we
know nothing of the way in which the full life of man took its rise. It
may have come catastrophically in a very short period of time; under
what influences, through what accidents or guidance, we cannot tell.
All humanity remembers dimly a very good state of affairs a very long
time ago—and beyond that mere memory and tradition we have nothing to
go on.
So much for ‘prehistory’—I am weary of it and of its now discredited
prophets. Speculation is the concealed material of their Mumbo-Jumbo;
assertion its ritual. Rather let me consider the known past, and,
entering Torbay all alone under so glad a morning, let me consider
that other, that real, that known affair, the landing of the Prince of
Orange, the Patron of Belfast and of Saint James’s Square and of other
things, less suitable to ears polite.
I should like to have seen that big Dutch fleet, with its few English
renegades on board, come sweeping into Torbay. I should like to have
seen the crowded boats passing to and fro, landing the Dutchmen and
other foreign troops, and the great lords who were conspiring against
their king, and the saturnine William himself. I should like to have
seen that mercenary army of adventurers, hired to give the last blow
to so great a victim as the wounded kingship of the English, formed in
column, and the march up to Exeter: with the villagers timidly peeping
from behind closely shut windows at the strange faces, hearing alien
speech, and wondering what the issue of the invasion would be.
There was a fine pageantry about all that miserable business which
ended the age-long, but dying, tradition of monarchy in Britain, and
put the rich in the saddle for good, without a master. From the moment
when the huge armament bowled through the Straits of Dover under a
southeast wind (forming such a crescent that the horns of it neared
either shore) to that afternoon, two days later, when the high gilded
poops of the Dutchmen stood out in line across Torbay, the whole evil
thing was full of grandeur and of colour.
Whenever I recollect that business of the fall of the Stuarts, two
things stand out in my mind: so much pageantry and so much comic stuff.
For, to my thinking, there is something comic in the financing of the
expedition with Dutch money, secured upon taxes promised _beforehand_
as sure to be levied from the English (specifically on their tobacco),
should it succeed. This way of making the victim pay for his own
execution without his knowing it, and without consulting him, is full
of the spirit of comedy. There are a hundred other comic details.
Churchill leaning his handsome, villainous face over the dinner table
of the inn, and trying to persuade the unfortunate James to come out
for a ride on that fine moonlight night; Churchill well knowing how,
on that fine moonlight night, the scouts of the enemy were waiting to
carry off the King. And, again, the picture of the subsequent dinner
at Andover; James dining with his daughter’s husband, the Prince of
Denmark, that great bagful of stupidity, repeating to everything
that was said, ‘_Est-il possible!_’ then he and his suite excusing
themselves for a moment to attend to some business; James, the King,
wondering when they would return to the room. They never returned. That
business on which they had excused themselves was treason, and the
woman in town and her husband at Andover had betrayed.
What a Calvary James had to climb! It is a pity that Anne should have
done such a thing, for she seems to have been the best of all that
gang—which is not saying much. I have always trusted Swift’s judgment,
who wrote of her: ‘The only good woman I ever met in my life.’ But
there he exaggerated; for he certainly profoundly admired at least two
others, and he would not have admired them if he had not thought them
good in a very evil world.
From Torbay westward the bold man in the small boat makes direct for
Portland Bill, cutting across the Bay, and looking for the bell buoy
halfway, if it is too thick to see his direction. There is nothing
to disturb him here, no strong current, very little inset, and he is
pretty certain of making the Bill by his card, even in thick weather.
He will do well to keep a little north of his course, so that he may
have a choice of coming down the Bill on the strength of the flood, and
of anchoring to wait for his tide, if that be necessary; though it is
true that anchoring-ground has to be carefully picked in that corner by
Chesil Cove.
But I am not bold; and when I leave Torbay, I run to Lyme Regis.
The mouth of the Exe puzzles me with an unanswered question, which
recurs in one river-mouth after another all over the West. It is this:
How were they used by antiquity?
The trade of the ancients and of the earlier Middle Ages (and sometimes
the later trade), the pirate fleets, every form of seafaring, used
these silted rivers from the Gold Coast to the Baltic. How did they
do it? Some say that even Salisbury was reached from the sea, and
Winchester. Certainly Exeter was; Arundel still can be by ships of some
size. Bramber was so reached, and Rye, and, I suppose, in its day,
Lewes. And the Stour formed a harbour, once at Canterbury, later at its
mouth; and so on all along the coast east and west. The mouth of the
Kus, in Morocco, at Larache, and that of the Sebu, at Rabat, tell the
same story. All these places are to-day impossible or difficult.
The general answer given to this question is that rivers silt
themselves up in the process of time, and that is the obvious, rational
answer to give. These harbour-mouths were once deep, but the river kept
on bringing down mud and sand, checked at the mouth by the sea, and
forming a bar.
Like nearly all merely rational answers to distant questions on which
we have no direct evidence, this answer breaks down. The rivers have
been running for centuries incalculable. They have had half an eternity
in which to silt up their mouths; and if this were the chief factor at
work it must have reached its limits long before man sailed the sea.
It cannot be the chief factor at work. I fancy the chief factor must
be the heaving up and down of the earth. In places the level rises,
and the river-mouths become very difficult, and the lagoon becomes dry
land. In places the level sinks, and harbours of which you never hear
the use in antiquity come into play. The truth is, we know nothing
about these things, or so little as only to give food for speculation,
and for guesswork, which is the breeding-ground of false dogma and of
quarrel, and the true accelerator of the human mind. I find that things
affirmed carry a curious kind of conviction—a disturbed, exasperated
kind, when they repose upon an apparently sufficient process of
reasoned proof; whereas things affirmed, but reposing upon no proof
at all, are accepted most kindly, and the faith in them lasts much
longer and is altogether better rooted: indeed, sometimes (when the
thing affirmed without proof is true) it lasts from the moment of its
first affirmation throughout the story of all human life. I suppose
the reason of this is that things affirmed without proof repose upon
general experience, and have, converging to support them from every
side, a great body of half-recognised experiment.
Thus, a religious doctrine is tested by the moral experience of
innumerable individuals, and also by its effect upon society through
generations, and also by its consonance with a vast number of other
observed things, small and great.
There is here, to use a mathematical metaphor, integration.
Certitude comes from the integration of an indefinitely great number
of differentials. It is in this way that we have certitude of a
personality, of a voice, of a type. We see an elm tree half a mile
away, and say, ‘That is an elm tree,’ although if we could set
down exactly what it is we see, the indications would seem quite
insufficient for so certain a conclusion. What we see is but a vague
blotch, but we read into it, from an indefinitely large number of
slight indications, what we have always known nearer by for an elm tree.
This kind of belief stands on the broadest base, even when it deals
with things not appreciable to our senses (for instance, the ancient
Western doctrine of immortality). But the affirmations of the sort
called to-day ‘scientific,’ are balanced upon a point. The apparent
proof of them lies along a narrow chain, every link of which, behind
the first physical appreciation of the senses, depends upon a number of
postulates, each capable of breaking down under some new consideration.
For instance, our senses tell us, and we know, that if you mix two
known substances in a certain fashion, and in a certain proportion, say
two portions by weight of the one and four portions by weight of the
other, they will disappear, and a third totally different thing will
appear in their stead. That is what happens when you try any one of
a thousand chemical experiments. It is what happens when an electric
spark is passed through a certain mixture of oxygen and hydrogen under
certain conditions. We know that with the same conditions, and the
same proportionate weights this astonishing thing takes place: the
substitution of a third totally different thing for the two things
which have disappeared: all that remains being the combined weight,
which does not change. We also know that, under suitable conditions,
the new third thing, totally different from the two original things
it has supplanted, will disappear, and the two original things will
reappear; and we know that the combined weights of the first two, and
the weight of the third thing which takes their place, are the same.
All that is real knowledge, definite, proved and certain science, in
the old and exact sense of the word ‘science’—which signifies a sort
of knowledge depending upon proof so conclusive that the human reason
cannot admit the possibility of the opposite.
We further know that when we repeat these conditions a dozen, or
a myriad times, the same results appear, as in the case of any
other natural sequence in the physical world; as in the case of a
stone falling from a height, or a sound following from a blow. On
such knowledge we erect an hypothesis, we say that the mysterious
substitution of a third totally different thing for the first two, but
the maintenance of an equal weight throughout, can only _on the analogy
of our other experience_ be explained by the constitution of matter in
certain ultimate particles which we call ‘atoms’; for, as it seems to
our very limited imaginations, if that be not the ultimate constitution
of matter, the only other way in which the thing can take place, the
only other way imaginable to us—that is, capable of being presented to
our minds as a picture—is a transformation through the mere effect of
number, a certain magic in number having some inherent power to affect
the modes of what we call ‘matter.’
But as the former concept—that of the atom—is mechanical, and easy to
picture, while the latter is highly mysterious, escapes measurement,
and involves qualities which we do not to-day associate with any
inherent power of number, we accept the first hypothesis. We assume—we
do not prove—that matter consists thus of atoms.
Granted that hypothesis, we can give the measurement of the supposed
atom, and investigate its qualities. But having begun with an
hypothesis, each new stage of investigation depends on a further
hypothesis: a second built on the first, a third on the second, and so
on—till you get to the exceedingly hypothetical electron. Strictly
speaking, pure science stops at the first phenomenon ascertainable by
the senses—the change of two into a third and of the third back into
the two. All the rest is but a scaffolding of _presumptions_ built upon
the _supposed_ nature of that change. It has not attaching to it proof
so conclusive that the possibility of an opposite cannot be imagined.
It is not science.
It is, further, true that with each stage in hypothesis the element of
probability, however high, is less than it was in the last stage; the
tenth of ten successive guesses, each reposing on the last, is less
secure than the ninth; the ninth than the eighth.
But the academies do not grasp this evident truth; they live by
imaginaries, which they affirm to be things; and that is why one of the
wisest of the moderns launched that decisive phrase, ‘the bankruptcy
of science’: that is the bankruptcy of the promises advanced by false
modern science.
The great Ferrero quarrels with that famous phrase. Yet he himself has
written one more damning; for he writes: ‘The men of the nineteenth
century thought they knew everything, and they knew nothing.’
The harbours of that coast between Torbay and Portland I do not
sufficiently know. I have never entered Teignmouth, in spite of the
lyrical invitation to its beauties which is set like a gem in the
‘Channel Pilot.’ I have never attempted the shallow bar of Exmouth.
Bridport Haven I only entered once, with several companions in a
crowded boat. Never was I more fascinated by any little haven, for it
has the delightful qualities of a model.
I had been running for Portland Bill in a fairly fresh wind, which
rose more than I liked. It was blowing from a little west of south,
so that she would just point at the smooth water which usually lies
between the Race and the land. We were far outside, and had about ten
miles to go, but the wind rose more and more, until it threatened
us, and also backed a little southerly. We turned round and ran for
Bridport, which was about seven miles away to the north of us and a
little east. It was near high water, so we had no fears for getting in,
and we ran through the long, narrow bottle-neck of an entrance, more
like a canal than a harbour, to find ourselves in a basin about the
size of a large drawing-room, but with everything complete—a Lloyd’s
office, a harbour master, and a signal station, a hotel, and all on
the scale of the place. It was above here, in Bridport town, that
Monmouth, who had landed at Lyme (and I must say it did great credit to
his shipmaster, for he came with three craft, if I remember right, and
seems to have found room for all of them) met his first check. But the
name Monmouth starts me off again—I cannot hold the mount when that
hunt of history is up: and I don’t want to.
The more you read of those expeditions—as of William’s two years
later—the more difficult you will find it to estimate what measure
of support the invaders had. What may be called the legend—the
sort of rodomontade you get in the clear, if obvious, rhetoric of
Macaulay—may be left aside with contempt. It is not historical, and it
is not intended to be historical; it is pamphleteering for a prepared
audience; a flattery of ignorant complacency: written not to examine
or to inform, but to sell. The picture of a whole England, ardently
opposed to James, desiring nothing more than his dethronement, is as
false as would be to-day a picture of an England ardently desiring
prohibition. But there were elements present which made it worth while
to risk the throw; and (as we know) with the aid of a group of very
wealthy men, and of plenty of hypocrisy and foreign subvention, the
second invasion, the Dutch invasion, succeeded.
I think the real reason we find it difficult to-day to estimate the
forces of that society, is that we have a false way of thinking in
terms of exact measurement; a habit we have borrowed from the more
advanced physical science of our time, but one not applicable to
political factors. We think in terms of majorities, and ask ourselves
how many men were on one side and how many men on the other.
Now things did not stand like that at all in 1686, or in 1688, and
they hardly ever so stand in any national crisis. The bulk of men will
accept an event, unless it be quite outrageously opposed to their daily
habits. Further, the bulk of men are moved by tradition and custom and
nearly always incline, very vaguely, to a continuance of what they have
known. And at the same time, paradoxically, all men have an appetite
for _something_ new and are more or less adventurous for a change. In
the main issue of the Revolution of 1688, we can be pretty clear on two
large majorities, not dividing men into groups, but dividing the mind
of each man within himself.
There was a very large majority in general sympathetic with the
Protestant culture which had gradually triumphed since the pivot-date
of the Gunpowder Plot. What proportion of this was ardent, and in what
degree, no one can establish; but you may safely say that throughout
England as a whole, there was, by the last quarter of the seventeenth
century, not more than about one seventh definitely Catholic in
confession and open adherence, and hardly as many again indifferent,
or slightly sympathetic with that one seventh. But, on the other hand,
the number of people who believed that James II was attempting the
impossible task of upsetting what had become the national religion,
cannot have been large. It is true that popular illusion is capable of
anything—witness ‘the Russians in England’ during the war. But I see
no sign of that absurd accusation against James having taken root in
the masses. The number who objected to his policy of toleration and to
his proposal that Catholics should have the same rights as their fellow
subjects was large; but it certainly was not, and could not have been,
an enthusiastic majority. On the other hand, the number who objected to
the idea of their national king belonging to what was to them an alien
religion was certainly very large indeed: nearly three quarters of
England.
But then you get another cross category: the number who desired to see
the Stuart dynasty extinguished was insignificant. Charles II had been
immensely popular and deservedly so, and James, the reigning King,
represented legitimacy. Had not the two princesses remained to carry
on the idea of the royal house—the symbol of it at least—I think
one can safely say that the nation would not have tolerated a change;
as for those who desired the reign of William, who were attached to
his character and who respected, let alone loved him as a leader,
there were none. Monmouth, if he had had the money, if the moment of
his attack had come after the birth of the Prince of Wales, if he had
intrigued at length and with skill to get the full support of the small
wealthy group which was conspiring against the King, would have had a
better chance of success than William.
I wish we had more details on the way in which he recruited his little
army. It seems to have been mainly got together from the very poor
miners of the Mendips: men who could be hired for any adventure: who
had nothing to lose. They seem to have been pretty well the only
material available, and, of course, they were worthless as soldiers.
They must have been quite untrained. Sedgemoor was not a battle.
There is also in this coast an entry called Charmouth, where the Danish
pirates of the Dark Ages fought hard against the King of Winchester,
but I know it only as a slight mark caught far off from the sea.
What I have made over and over again in this way, in one boat or
another, and often in the Nona, is Lyme Regis.
What produced Lyme Regis? How came there to be a harbour there?
Men need harbours almost as much as they need the gods.