THE sea, like all very large things, can only be intimately understood by
children. If we can conceive a sensible grown-up person looking at the
sea for the first time, we feel that he should either yawn or wish to
drown himself. But a child would take a sample of it in a bucket, and
consider that in all its aspects; and then it would know that the sea is
a great many bucketfuls of water, and further that by an odd freak of
destiny this water is not fit to drink. Storms and ships and
sand-castles and lighthouses and all the other side-shows would follow
later; but in the meantime the child would have seen the sea in a bucket,
as it had previously seen the moon in a looking-glass, so would know all
about it. The moon is a variable and interesting kind of lamp; the sea
is buckets and buckets and buckets full of water. I think the stars are
holes in a sort of black curtain or ceiling, and the sun is a piece of
brightness, except at sunset or in a mist, when it is a whole Dutch
cheese. The world is streets and fields and the seaside and our house.
I doubt whether a child has any sense of what I may call the appeal of
breadth. If it is confronted with a fine view, it will concentrate its
interest on a windmill or a doll’s house, and the seaside is no more than
a place where one wears no shoes or stockings, and the manufacture of mud
pies becomes suddenly licit. The child does not share the torments of
the adult Londoner, who feels that there is no room in the world to
stretch his arms and legs, and therefore wins a pathetic sense of freedom
in seeing the long yellow sands and the green wastes of the sea. Nor is
it at all excited by the consideration that there is a lot more sea
beyond the horizon; the extent of its interest in the water is the limit
to which it may paddle.
Yet in some dim, strange way the child realises æsthetic values more here
than elsewhere. I am quite sure it can see no real beauty in its normal
surroundings. Sunsets and small houses lit for evening, the shining
streets after rain, and even flowers and pictures and dolls, are never
beautiful to a child in the sense that a story or an idea may be
beautiful. But tacitly, for a child has no language to express such
things, something of the blueness of the sea seems to seek expression in
its eyes, something of the sparkle of the sand seems to be tangled in its
hair, something of the sunshine burns in its rounded calves that glow
like brown eggs. A child is always a thing of wonder. But on the edge
of the sea this wonder deepens until the artificial observer is abashed.
A seaside child is no creature to be petted and laughed over; it were as
easy to pet the tireless waters, and to laugh over the grave of a little
cat; children whom one has known very well indeed in town will find new
playing fields by the sea into which it is impossible to follow them.
Dorothy weighs five stone four pounds at Maida Vale; at Littlehampton the
sea wind blows her along like a feather; she is become a wispy, spiritual
thing, a faint, fair creature a-dance on light feet that would make the
fairy-girl of a poet’s dream seem clumsy by comparison. She is nearer to
us when she paddles. The warm sand creeping up through her toes, the
silver thread of coolness about her legs, these things are within our
comprehension though they fall no more within our experience. But when
she flings herself along the beach with the wild hair and loose limbs and
the song of an innocent Bacchante, when she bids the gold sands heave up
and support her body, tired with play, when she stoops to gather diamonds
and pearls from the shore made wet and smooth by the retreating waves,
she is as far from us and our human qualities as a new-awakened
butterfly. There have been sea-washed moments when I should not have
been astonished if she had flung out a pair of mother-of-pearl wings and
stood in the blue sky, like a child saint in a stained-glass window.
There have been other moments when she has approached me with a number of
impossible questions in wanton parody of her simple London self. Between
these two extremes her moods vary from second to second, and she plays
upon them as Pan upon his pipes, and to much the same tune. She loves
the long tresses of seaweed and the pink shells like the nails of her own
little hands; and her coloured pail, when she is not the architect of
sea-girt palaces, is a treasury of salty wonders. To climb the rough
rocks and call them mountains, to drive back the waves with a chiding
foot, and to alter the face of Nature with a wooden spade, these were not
tasks for the domesticated creature who shares the hearth-rug with the
cat at home. But the spirit of the sea has changed Dorothy; she is now a
little more and a little less than child; and she recognises no comrades
but those other nymphs of the sea, who hold the beach with the sparkle of
wet feet and careless petticoats, who run hither and thither in search of
the big adventure, while their parents and guardians sleep in the sun.
It is hard that age should deprive us of so many privileges, and least of
all can we spare the glamour of the sands of the sea. Yet to the adult
mind Brighton beach, sprinkled with newspapers and washed by a sea whose
surface is black with smuts, brings little but disgust. We insist on
having our fairy-lands clean and end, too often, by finding no fairy-land
at all. The sea, after all, is no more than water that may be caught in
a bucket; the sand may glitter on a child’s spade, and we who believe
that the essential knowledge of the thing is ours are no wiser than the
children. For me the sea is a restless and immeasurable waste of greens
and blues and greys, and I know that its strength lies in its monotony.
It is not the noisy turbulence of storms that moves me to fear, but the
dull precision of the tides and the tireless succession of waves. And my
impression is no truer than the children’s and lends itself less readily
to a sympathetic manner of living. I feel that if I could once more hold
the ocean in my bucket, if the whole earth might be uprooted by my spade,
I should be nearer to a sense of the value of life than I am now. I see
the children go trooping by with their calm eyes, not, as is sometimes
said, curious, but rather tolerant of life, and I know that for them the
universe is merely an aggregate of details, some agreeable and some
stupid, while I must needs depress myself by regarding it as a whole.
And this is the proved distinction between juvenile and adult
philosophies, if we may be permitted to regard a child’s very definite
point of view as the effect of a philosophy. Life is a collection of
little bits of experience; the seaside bits are pleasant, and there is
nothing more to be said.