(later a minister of sorts) standing under the flaring naphtha lamps
of a muddy London evening, calling out the new gospel and the promised
land. I remember the eager, stupid, upturned faces of the men and women
who had come there from bestial depths of the slums to hear him; to go
back into those depths, and there to remain. They lie in those depths
to-day. It is not such a creed that will save them. I remember the
great mobs that followed John Burns, and how I myself would go miles
through the East End to hear him; and I remember that great whirlpool
of men in Trafalgar Square on the most critical day when he and others
accepted imprisonment. There is nothing now for which men would act
so; no one now has a creed; therefore, I call that time of my youth a
better time.
Of all that enthusiasm and conviction nothing came; the mill turned
noisily enough, but it ground no corn. Those fevered exaltations were
transformed within a few years to a contemptible shrieking and raving
called ‘imperialism,’ and that also went its way, and worked itself
out to its ignoble end.... We survive to-day to hear a perpetual
flattering of America, a perpetual grumbling against the workers, their
sullenness, and, overseas, the increasing peril of control over the
alien races once so easily governed. The vulgarians who invented this
music-hall cry of empire now suffer the vacillation and the increasing
peril into which their own base bullyings have led them. They must live
a little time longer and dree their weird, and learn what happens to
those forms of pride which have not even the merit of dignity.
Of those years, one thing remains: the dock strike made Southampton.
I see the monstrous ships of the Atlantic passage pass up and down
the dredged channel to Southampton Water, and, as I look at them
earning their millions for the few masters of such machines, I say to
myself: ‘This was the fruit—here is the only fruit—of those nightly
enthusiasms by the London Docks, and of the cry for freedom, and of the
passionate belief that within a few years after 1889 the poverty of
London would have passed into an evil memory.’
I carried on between the forts at Spithead under the new day, with the
wind steady from just west of south until I was relieved at the helm,
and hour by hour we made for the Looe.
Now, with the Looe Stream, which is the gateway to the Sussex seas, I
knew not whether I should take the coast in its order between the Owers
and the Forelands, or carry on day and night to the straits. For I have
cruised up and down that garden wall of my own land so much that it
stands in my mind as a perpetual come and go, sometimes far out into
the salt beyond sight of England, sometimes a run in before too much
wind, sometimes a beating up for Beachy, sometimes just missing, and at
others just making, any one of the impossible entries of my harbours.
For the county of Sussex—and Kent, too, for that matter—up to
Folkestone and beyond has had tricks played with it by the Creator
of the sea and land. There has been done to it what is often done to
a human life—that is, the granting of an insufficient opportunity;
opportunity enough to compel the use of a function, not enough
opportunity for the fulness of that use. All the harbours are such that
they can be made, but only on sufferance; Chichester Harbour (which
is also Bosham), Littlehampton, Shoreham, Newhaven, Folkestone in its
day, are not to be approached at low tide save for the work of man, and
Pevensey is dead, and what was once the shelter of Hastings has been
worn down by the seas, the chalk reef which came out like an arm to
keep off the southwest weather; nor is the breakwater they have made
there sufficient. Newhaven is dredged, indeed, and they have pushed out
a great pier of stone into the sea to stop the eastward making of the
bank at its mouth, and Folkestone has a roadstead made for it though it
is incomplete and open, but in their nature all these harbours are to
be used by the favour of the tide, and that is why it is so awkward to
be caught in a gale outside while Arundel River, or the Bramber River,
is still ebbing out over Littlehampton or Shoreham Bar; for both those
bars show out at a low spring tide. Sussex in this is less favoured
than the Caux Country of Normandy, which is her opposite number. For
Trouville and Dieppe, of course, and Fécamp, and even Saint Valery,
a boat like mine can get into at any time. This is for two reasons:
first, because the Norman streams do not come from the country beyond
the chalk hills as do our Sussex rivers, but are mere brooks, so that
there is no weight of water to bring the clay silt down through the
harbour-mouths; next, because they are not open to the southwest wind
and to the eastward drift.
The Sussex rivers left to themselves get a bar piled up in front of
their mouths by the southwest wind and the inshore tide, so that a bank
of gravel grows up eastwardly continually in front of them. Thus the
mouth of Shoreham river, the Adur, travelled eastward for three miles
and more between the Conquest and the civil wars; until at last it came
out into the sea right up near Hove. But later a great storm burst
through the bank and made the present entry, halfway down.
Exactly the same thing happened with the Ouse. Its bank of shingle
crept out eastward until, in the Middle Ages, the entry was at Seaford,
and that is why Seaford was called ‘Sea’ Ford, and that is why the
French would attack Sea Ford, and that is why, when they so attacked,
‘this Pelham did repel ’em back aboard,’ as you may read in Lewes
Church. After that a storm broke through the shingle bank, making a new
entry right down to the westward, and so brought into being what is
still called the ‘New Haven.’
I have just said that the Looe Stream is the gate into the Sussex seas;
and so it is, unless you go outside those rocks called Owers, which is
a long way round: for the Owers run miles out to sea.
The Looe Stream runs like a river in the midst of the sea between the
long-concealed flats and little rocks just under water at low tide of
Selsea Bill and the reefs of the Owers outside. There is nearly three
fathom in it at low spring tides, and the entry is marked by a couple
of buoys just as one might mark the entry to a harbour: also, as with
the entry to a harbour, you had best take the Looe Stream on the flood.
So did we on that morning after the storm make our way against the
ebb until we had Selsea Bill close before us, and we caught the flood
through the Looe by the afternoon.
There I saw, upon the left, the pole and basket of the Mixen, that
sea-mark which is my Sussex gatepost. And from that point, taking a
course just south of east, I carried on for Beachy all through the
night. The wind held, strangely unchanged, and no more rain fell. It
was one of the longest spells of similar weather, exactly suited for my
little boat under all plain sail, that I had known. For when the dull
morning broke (and it was hazy) she still carried the same wind in her
sails.
Indeed, it was so thick that I was a little anxious to catch the chalk
precipice against the east and know where I was. There is a little
inset making into the Bight of Sussex once one is beyond the Owers, and
I might have been carried—especially with some little leeway—inside
the point.
When I did see land it was not Beachy at first, but, a good way off on
the port bow, a murky gleam, from the Seven Sisters: but then, quickly
after, I saw dimly on a grim sky the sharp, perpendicular line of the
Head and the stump of the lighthouse at its foot. My course had been
well kept: I was heading well outside.
There is little to tell of that run, for it was uneventful. We had that
day, somewhere about the Royal Sovereign Shoals, a dropping of the wind
and its rising again from offshore, north of west, but nothing heavy
in it, serving us well for our course up-Channel, the weather still
too thick to see much of the land between Beachy and Dungeness. It was
in full darkness that we made and passed that light and, with the next
day, we still carried on to Dover.
I have a grudge against that great harbour of Dover: mainly, I suppose,
because I have had bad luck in it, but also because it seems to me
so wasted an effort of human energy. It has founded one of our new
peerages, and while it was being made there was any amount of political
talk about it, and also about the electoral conditions of its town.
Those who know assure me that it was of vast service in the war, but
I have read recently, I know not on what authority, that the Navy has
abandoned it. It must always have been a difficult place to enter,
with its two narrow gates and the violent tide across them. There
is nearly always a lump outside, where the sea shows its annoyance
at having this obstacle thrust into it; and trying to get in with a
small boat like mine and in a light wind is a trial. There is peril of
missing the entry in the rush of the tide, unless one comes close up
to the breakwater-heads. If one does this, one never knows but that
some great death-ship, on its way to Calais or Ostend, will leap out
suddenly upon one as one opens the harbour. Moreover, there are all
manner of regulations which I do not understand, as to where you may
drop anchor, and as to where you may not, and once, when I left the
boat for some weeks in secure care, I found her on my return completely
covered with the soot of His Majesty’s coal.
We put in that day for water and to provision. We stayed but a little
while, coming in by the southern and going out by the eastern gate,
and passing as we did so that sad wreck of munitions wherein lay, I
believe, the bodies of men entombed.
My companion took the helm up past the Foreland in a rather fresher
breeze than we had yet had, and with more north in it, and I looked
back along our wake and thought how here our time has managed to change
too thoroughly what was the most famous sight of western Europe, the
entry into England.
Although the old harbour (which lay between the hills—where the
gasworks are to-day) had long ago gone dry, yet the marks of it and
much human ingenuity added, maintained the port of Dover; and through
that port went the prodigious traffic which bound this province of
Christendom to the rest. Here, throughout the intense activity of the
Middle Ages, passed and repassed the blood of the State, and the life
running outwards from the heart of Europe at Rome. During all that
time, on to days I can myself remember, this main majestic entry into
England presented something of the same aspect to the traveller coming
in from the sea. There was the town in its cleft; the masts in the
little harbour; the castle on its height. Now, to my eye, the huge new
haven, with its miles of wall, has changed and spoilt all this.
But, alas, something worse, more dreadful and more definite has come by
way of change. Something which cannot be undone and which has subtly
stolen their meaning not only from old Dover, but from the great keels
of the fleet and its guns.
You may see the memorial of it marked upon the turf: the memorial of
the place where the first man (and he a Frenchman), having flown the
Channel, landed upon the sacred island, without leave of the sea.
That was a date for you, if you like! That was a year to remember! In
history perhaps, many a generation hence, it will be made a dividing
point between the old and the new relations of the peoples of Europe.
It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control
the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the
effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most
speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.
It is absorbing to watch change coming upon a whole civilisation.
The thirty years of active manhood, the forty years of consecutive
experience and memory which a man of my age can remember, the years
1884-1894-1924 form, perhaps, the best period for watching such things
that we Europeans of the West have had since the Renaissance.
That may sound extravagant. The very great change introduced by the
use of coal, and the machinery dependent upon coal, one hundred and
fifty years ago, produced, I suppose, greater outward effects; but the
spiritual fruits of the change were not ripe till our day.
The characteristic of our time is the crisis in the _philosophy_ of
Western Christendom: the thing began with Voltaire, but it has come to
a head somewhat suddenly, following long after the material change.
For the great characteristic of the mental change between, say, 1885
and the present day, is the final segregation of Catholic philosophy
from an opponent mood. That is the formula now applying to all the
Occident, to all the one group of human beings who are variously called
the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, the English, the more southern
Germans of the Rhine and the Danube, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the
Irish, and the Scotch.
It is this group of human beings which conducts the world and will
probably continue to conduct it; for it has the best physical stock,
the greatest energy, the greatest intelligence, and the strongest and
most continuous will: and its colonies can never replace it. It has
always been at the head of humanity, even before it acquired, through
its conversion to Catholicism fifteen hundred years ago, those vast
new powers which have since distinguished it. Before Western Europe
had opportunities for conducting the world as a whole, it was still
manifestly the greatest thing in the world, and when its soldierly
adventurers and seamen, and its growing mastery over physical things
gave it opportunity it took a place from which I do not think it can be
dislodged.
Most modern men assume a shifting of the headship of the world from
our regions to some other; as to Asia or to the New World. But as they
base their calculation upon mere measurement they are sure to be wrong.
They make their estimate of human affairs on the analogy of physical
science: counting only what can be exactly calculated and noting only
the growth or decline of numbers, in men, in goods, in speed.
But human affairs are moved from deeper springs altogether. A spirit
moves them. It is by the acceptation, the denial, the renewal of
philosophies that this society of immortal mortals is marked, changed,
or restored.
The Catholic philosophy is, I say, to-day, at last clean separate from
its opponent. Its opponent is losing all trace of Catholic dogma. That
is the special mark of our time.
It is important to emphasise this position; unless we understand it,
the future which is upon us will not be understood.
In the sixteenth century the unity of Western Christendom made
shipwreck. But there did not then arise (as would seem to have been the
necessary sequence when one reads the great men of the Renaissance,
Erasmus, or any of the lesser ones) an immediate separation between the
Catholic exposition of the world, the Catholic revelation, and a new
scepticism. The process was much slower than that. It covered nearly
four hundred years, and it went, as is a habit of human change, through
very tortuous channels before it settled into its final form—which has
now arrived.
First came a curious process of irrational selection in dogma. Nearly
all those who were reacting against the authority of Catholic truth
preferred to select a bundle of Catholic dogmas, and even of Catholic
disciplines out of the total and to reject the remainder.
Most of those in revolt, for instance, accepted the Incarnation and the
Trinity; nearly all accepted the personal immortality of the soul. The
general Catholic discipline of society, such as property, indissoluble
monogamous marriage, and the rest was still taken for granted.
For more than a century the growing division appeared as a contrast
between Catholic tradition and what was called ‘Protestantism’ in
its various forms, the latter presenting bodies of doctrine chosen
out of Catholicism, but less than the total of Catholic doctrine and
discipline. The new selections produced, of course, a harvest of social
results more tangible and concrete than the abstract differences in
dogma and formula, and there arose a Protestant culture of the North
side by side with the remaining Catholic culture of the South. The
geographical division was purely accidental. Nothing could be more
Catholic than the Irish of Donegal, nor more Protestant than the
Huguenots of Nîmes, and the living centre of Protestantism was rather
in southern France than in any other one region of the West.
But to this there succeeded another phase which, again, was not as
logical as it should have been: a respectable development called
‘rationalism,’ which arose in France and gradually permeated Europe.
Its highest moment of expression was the middle of the eighteenth
century, its greatest pen that of Voltaire, and perhaps its clearest
intelligence that of Diderot.
This short-lived but attractive philosophy reduced its main dogmas, or
postulates, to as small a number as possible, and proposed that nothing
should be accepted save upon the criteria admissible by all sane men:
particularly the criteria of the senses and common experience. It
still tended to preserve a certain small but fundamental proportion
of Catholic dogma; but it did so on the plea that such dogma was
(as it imagined) universal to the human race, or at least to all
sane men. Most of its adherents—not all of them—postulated one,
personal, creative God, the sustainer of the universe. Of the Catholic
discipline they accepted property as a moral right, and its twin
institution of indissoluble monogamous marriage as a necessary thing
in society, though they were perfectly ready to discuss these and any
other disciplines.
Undoubtedly the underlying conception common to the rationalists was
this, that there is a certain knowledge of reality to be obtained
through the reason dealing with the senses and experience common to all
men, and only what can be so obtained is to be affirmed as true. What
could not be so obtained is to be rejected as doubtful or false. But
while this was their underlying conception, they could not shake off a
considerable body of their Catholic past.
This rationalism rejected the miraculous in every form, and even the
unusual. It began to substitute the document for tradition in history,
it proceeded to a strict and most successful progressive examination of
the physical world, discovering more and more of its sequences. This
imprinted on all the rationalists did (not _thought_) a very special
stamp, the stamp of _proved certitude_. They carried the feeling of
scientific certitude which physical research had given them into the
field of ideas. They came to imagine their metaphysical dogmas to be
not transcendental but demonstrable by experiment, or, at least, by
the common sense of mankind. Here was a curious and, perhaps, unique
incident in human history: a faith which did not know it was a faith.
The rationalists had not any doubts at all, because everything exterior
to their faith seemed to them insignificant save in so far as it
combated their faith.
For instance, if you take Gibbon (who was the principal English writer
among them, and who was the chief English pupil of Voltaire) you will
see that most transcendental truths affirmed by Catholicism—such as
the divinity of Our Lord, the affirmation of miracle, the admission
of tradition in history, side by side with the document, etc.—were
to him ideas ridiculous in themselves, and in themselves therefore of
no value. But though direct Catholic statement inspired him with a
strong aversion, yet he revelled in, he took for granted, that very
civilisation, Europe, which the Catholic Church had made. He had no
conception whither rationalism was leading.
These people were certain; they stood upon a rock; and from the nature
of their certitude they took it for granted that all the world would
come to the same certitude by a mere process of evidence. They took
it for granted that there was in all men a certain line of reason
which only had to be turned upon any mass of affirmation in order to
distinguish at once what was false in it from what was true, reckoning
amongst the false whatever was affirmed without such proof behind it
(of document or experiment) as they required.
They made no doubt that all this was final, that they themselves had
reached finality, that the world was rapidly reaching it, and that
nothing could disturb such a progress save some hardly imaginable
reversion to Catholicism.
They were quite wrong. Before they had so much as convinced the bulk
of educated Europe, three further developments were upon them, one of
which has survived, and has become the modern opponent of the Catholic
Church. The first of these three developments was a sceptical attack
upon the postulates of the rationalists themselves: a questioning
whether humanity and its common experience had ever grasped reality.
That nonsense was German; it was Kant’s muddlement of the great and
clear Descartes.
Next they had to meet a development rather English than German, which
noted with great practical common sense the irrational flaw in the
rationalists’ position. This flaw was the statement that a thing
affirmed without the proof of common experience could not be true. It
does not at all follow that because a statement lacks material proof,
therefore it is untrue; it does not at all follow that because a thing
is most unusual therefore it has not been.
For instance, witnesses were brought forward to state that a man had
lifted himself off the ground without material force to aid him, and
had so remained suspended in an ecstasy. The thing was most unlikely;
it was opposed to the common experience of mankind. Therefore, said the
rationalists, it is false. They were attacked by those who replied:
‘Your “therefore” is ill-chosen; it is itself a mere affirmation
without proof. The thing _may_ have happened.’ Hence mere suspense of
judgment and what was called ‘agnosticism’ in England.
This second phase also was destined to a very brief life; but it
contained two permanent elements of truth. These were, first that it
denied the necessary truth of the rationalists’ postulates save only
the postulate of the evidence of the senses (it denied the necessity
of common experience being the only experience), and secondly that it
affirmed (what was obviously true) that a mass of things credited to be
real were not susceptible of proof through the evidence of the senses,
or the common sense of mankind.
This spirit advanced to the denial not of a personal God, but of the
rationalists’ belief in a personal God; and it attached to the Power or
Powers behind the universe the comic term ‘Great Unknowable.’
The third development attacking the rationalists now occupies all the
Western mind outside the Catholic Church. It came not from the head,
but from the heart. It is an affirmation that truths may be recognised
emotionally, and are not to be rejected because the intellect is
either incapable of analysing them or of discovering any foundation
for them. One might take as the germ of this movement a commonplace
sentence of Pascal’s which has become, because it is obvious and
superficial, far more famous than his deeper sayings: the saying that
‘the heart has its reasons of which the head knows nothing.’ This
emotional protest against rationalism appealed to the vivid response
awakened in the human heart by the life of nature. Such a trend could
only end in pantheism: and pantheist the modern world, outside the
Catholic body, has become.
The reason, for instance, that the poet Wordsworth attained so
ill-proportioned a popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth
century in England was his pantheism. He is the exponent of that mood;
not the most vivid—for he is vivid only in a few flashes, and usually
dull and thoroughly bad; not the most intelligent, for he made no
pretence at an intelligent exposition of the mood; but because he was
so thoroughly steeped in pantheism: because every line of his betrays a
taken-for-granted and, as it were, necessary pantheism.