When you curse the weather (as I do now) summon to your aid a great group of vapid Aurelian thoughts. It will do you no harm. Such thoughts are a pleasant repose for the mind, a sort of croon.
If you doubt that word "Aurelian," either read the notes Marcus Aurelius left, or, what is better, go to the British Museum and see the statue of that booby upon his horse. The horse is more intelligent than he.
What, then, are these which I call "Aurelian thoughts"? They are not unlike, in motive (though far inferior in quality), to the contrasted categories of Defoe inRobinson Crusoe, admirably parodied by Mr. Barry Pain inRobinson Crusoe's Return, a book than which....
These categories you will remember consist in two columns: the first, grouse; the second, ingenious gratitude. In the first column: "I find myself upon a beach, shipwrecked, without any money, very damp and with nothing to eat." In the opposite column: "On the other hand I might have been born a chimpanzee in a place where chimpanzees are hunted."
It is one way of getting consolation, and a veryepicurean way, in the strictest sense of the term epicurean.
Do the same about the weather. "It rains. I have not seen the sun for three months. But, on the other hand, I might be freezing to death in the Arctic, or sitting up with a candle killing scorpions on some damned barren island of the Levantine Seas."
The crab about this method is that it does not really satisfy the mind. I have only to use these words "Levantine Seas," when at once the man deprived of sun thinks of sunlight and the man deprived of warmth thinks of warmth, and the scorpion seems a delightful beast, and if the island is barren, so much the better; it means that there is not too much rain, which is a curse.
I have noticed that men living in climates not human, never even try to console themselves, as do people living in England, which has the best climate in the world. They do not say: "Would that I were in a place of clouds and water!" They sit down sullenly (though with bright eyes), endure it, and die. It is only people just on the edge of perfection who complain. It is so with social things. The loudest cry rises not from the seller of papers in the streets, but from the man who finds that there is something wrong with his big motor-car, or that he cannot reserve a carriage to the Riviera, but has to travel in a train full of Frenchmen.
And to go back to climate.
If one could exactly balance all the things which one desires in a climate, I will tell you what would happen. One would lose three things, each more important than the last—energy, decent morals and happiness. I suppose that what one would exactly balance in a climate would be a sufficiency of moisture without discomfort, a sufficiency of light without loss of repose, and a sufficiency of heat without the breeding of noxious things. I take it that the climate of the Balearics in early March carried on throughout the year would fill the bill; or rather the climate of the Balearics supplemented by large rivers which had no mud upon their banks and never overflowed or ran dry, deep forests which were never tangled or marshy, and sublime mountains which never sent down tempest or any other disaster, and which were not, as most mountains are, inhabited by demons.
Well, if one lived in such a climate, I say that one would lose energy and morals and happiness. They say that the mind turns inward when it suffers too much sorrow. That is true; but it remains alive. It turns inward also, but in a permanent,deadfashion, when it has no stimulus at all. What people really mean when they say that they would like a perfect climate (granted that they are human beings and not immortals) is that they would like to preserve all the advantages they have acquired from living in their own climate, and yet have them in anotherand a more delightful climate. Another way of putting it is that they would like all the advantages of contrast without the disadvantages of tedium. Or, to put it more simply still, they would like to go on assuaging their thirst for ever and yet never assuaging it. It is a contradiction in terms; at least, for mortals.
The immortals, by the way, had very odd ideas upon climate. It was the custom of the Gods of Hellas (who had an excellent climate offered them on the slopes of the hills) to take their leisure above the snow-line, and then at a moment's notice to go south of the first cataract of the Nile into a fiendish heat and eat heavily for days with the Ethiopians, just as our rich go to the Riviera. But with this difference: that they went to Ethiopia not only for climate but for the morals of the inhabitants—which is more than you can say of those who go to the Riviera, my experience of which detestable belt is that no one can decide who most despises the other, the aboriginal or his visitants. The Gods of Hellas also (now dead, because the climate changed) rather concerned themselves with controlling climate than with enjoying it. And that, by the way, is a lesson for us. They were the masters of their environment, and not its subjects. The same is true of very young people, whom I, with these mine eyes, have seen deliberately taking a walk in the rain, or picking up snow itself in their hands, or (what may seemincredible) bathing in cold water and swimming about in it: and when I say cold water I mean very cold water, as, for instance, the English seas in April.
There is not on earth a man more miserable than the man who wanders about following the climate. Before the war very wealthy men were able to do this in Western Europe, and they did it with damnable insistence. If the war should compel them to know their own country, it will have done a little good. But I notice also about these wealthy men (and women)—on the whole, it was truer of the wealthy women than of the wealthy men—that they did not even keep to the silly rules of their silly class. They did not know where the climate was to be found which they were seeking. Which of them knew the Rousillon? Or which of them the divine coast of the Peaks of Europe above Cavadonga and the hundred little bays of that more glorious Devonshire of the Asturias?
The truth is that the unexpected alone floods the mind—speaking, I say, of mortals.In Hac Lachrymarum Valle.Of how it may be on the other side I say nothing.
You are going by night, having missed your way, through an abominable Alpine mist, and you would willingly die if you could find some place to die in. Then comes a glimmering of light through the fog, a little whisper of warmer air, the wreathing of the cloud. You are in achestnut grove, and it dawns. You get a little lower down through the fragrant forest, you are in its open glades. You hear the torrent, and just before it is day, things are so pleasant that you go to sleep upon the tufted and now dry grass. As you go to sleep you say: "I am in Paradise." So you are. But you would not be if you lived there more than three days.
I think it is the business of the sea which makes men get nearest to the truth in this matter of climate. I have noticed that men who sail the seas never speak of climate, but of weather, and talk of the Tropics and the Arctic, gale and calm and fog and drought and all the million colours and changes of this earthly vestibule of Heaven, as though they were a matter of course, like the furniture of one's house. I never yet heard a sailor say: "Would that I were in this or that climate!" and I never yet knew a sailor who did not settle down at home, here in England, when at last he could, often in a comfortable native slum. And this is especially true of pilots.
But in all this I have used the word "immortal," writing as though this acquiescence in climate, this restraint of desire, were suitable only for mortals. I will admit that, in some unchanging place where the soul also is unchanging, a permanent climate, permanently suited to the permanent soul, may do well enough and may be better even than a cold, rainy, sunless day in the deep mud of the Weald. Indeed, I know sucha place, for I visited it once in company with immortal spirits for more than half an hour. It is in the Californian Sierras, where the trees are so high that they are part of the sky. It is in the Tuolumne valley, towards the upper waters of it. In that place men obtain a vision which corresponds to the word "Paradise."
And, talking of Paradise, what fortune is attached to a word! Here is a Persian word wandering about, hopping from tree to tree like a bird, flying to Greece, nesting in the Western liturgy, caged by the monks of the Dark Ages, making a good stay among the French, but settling down at last to be a supreme symbol in the language of the English. So that, to-day, there is no word in English to beat it. It can give the word "Heaven" great odds and come to the post with half a length to spare. That is a great lesson in the history of words.
But if I go on at this rate, there would be no end to my writing, for I should be led on from word to word, and that is the temptation of all writers, against which it is their duty to fight, as it is the duty of an honest man in a late, frosty, wet, diseased, green, sogging January in the clay of the Weald to fight against any disparagements of his climate: his climate of the mud, where falls not rain, nor hail, nor any snow, but only a perpetual drizzle day after day after day after day after day.
Strange accident in the history of men! What men most care for, what a particular society most cherishes, what is most vital to it, dies as the individual dies and can never be recovered by posterity. Would you understand a century in the past? You read of it and at once you are bewildered at finding a passionate attachment to things long since grown indifferent; at discovering standards taken for granted, and a scale of values taken for granted, which to-day have disappeared; what is more, at stumbling continually upon terms obviously fundamentalthen, and yet referring to thingsnowso dead that we cannot even translate them. And all this is true of the immediate past as well as of the remote past.
Among these astonishingly important things which disappear with the disappearance of living men, consider accent.
If there is one thing really important to-day, it is accent. After money, it most distinguishes the divisions of our society. And what do you think posterity will make of that?
There was a man who made a statement in Parliament a few years ago which seemed to hishearers so fantastic as to be hardly sane. He was talking of a certain religious minority, an obscure sect, and its peculiar form of education, and he said: "So strongly do we feel upon this matter" (meaning the right to pursue a separate form of education for the children of this sect) "that we would rather our children should drop their h's than lose the Faith." That sounded to a mixed public assembly of modern Englishmen something very nearly mad. The idea that a man would rather have his son drop his h's than lose his religion was something so thoroughly out of their accepted scale of values that it savoured of the unreal. It was like saying that rather than wear brown boots a man would wear no boots at all, or that rather than eat foreign food he would eat nothing. Yet this intensity of feeling upon particular modes of pronunciation is quite modern—at least, as distinguishing classes within the State. As distinguishing foreigners and enemies from natives, the value of accent is, of course, as old as the hills, but as distinguishing the superior social tradition from the inferior, it is brand-new.
It is interesting to note what accents are tolerated and what not; what this modern religion regards as heresy and what as no more than a "diocesan use."
The Irish accent in its various forms is universally admitted. People talking English with an Irish accent do not thereby declare anydifference of rank—that is, of inherited wealth—but only a difference of nationality, which is respected. And the same thing is true—though very much modified—of the Scotch accent. I am not quite sure that it is true of the Welsh. Perhaps there is not a sufficiently large body of wealthy men boasting the Welsh accent to determine the matter.
But other accents, not national but local, are barred with a religious bar. They are profane. And that is the more remarkable when one considers their strength in the three elements of number, of intensity and of difference.
If people recognised real truths of experience instead of being led away by print they would admit that the northern speech is, in southern ears, almost a foreign tongue. A man brought up in the south and finding himself among the populace in a Lancashire town will at first not understand half of what he hears. It is true that the roots are so similar and the words in common so often repeated that the new dialect is mastered much more quickly than would be a foreign tongue. Nevertheless, if the speech of Lancashire belonged to a separate realm, and if the Kentish man, let us say, came into Lancashire as a foreign country, he would think of the Lancashire dialect as a foreign language. Had the two forms of speech developed in different Royal Courts and adopted each its own experiment in spelling (let alone each its alphabet) the one would bemore foreign to the other than is Low German to Dutch.
The first of all words, the personal pronoun, is an example. The Kentish man says "I"; he translates the classic word "ego" by a sound which is a rapid diphthong of the pure A, "Ah," and the pure I, "EE." The Lancashire man expresses exactly the same idea by the open A, "AH"; a completely different sound. When he talks in his own name the personal pronoun rhymes with "BAH." When the Kentish man says exactly the same thing the personal pronoun rhymes with "PIE." And you could not get two vowel sounds more distinct. You may take any number of instances. The "o" of "OLD" in the south is "ow" in the north. Then there is the closed "e" of the south and the open "e" of the north—"Yes" and "Yaahs," and, on the contrary, the closed "a" of the north and the open "a" of the south—"păth" and "pahth."
There is another point about accent which is its curious variability within a short space of time. It varies so rapidly that within one human life a vulgarism or a jest becomes meaningless. What has happened to the "v" replacing the "w" in the Cockney speech, for instance? When thePickwick Paperscame out it was universal; Dickens was as close an observer of the physical realities of his time as Mr. Bernard Shaw is to-day. Compare Dickens's Cockney with Mr. Bernard Shaw's admirable and exacttransliteration of that noble tongue in its present phase. They are almost two different things! Some have explained this by saying that there has been a change in race, that London has been invaded from the north and from the Midlands; that it was the old Kentish accent which London spoke with in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and that a Mercian accent has displaced it. The late Professor Yorke Powell maintained this. It may be so; more probably the change is a changein situ. Mr. Weller's great grandson (who, I am sorry to say, is now driving a motor-bus instead of a stage coach) talks the modern tongue, and it is utterly different from his forbear's speech.
The imposition of a standard education upon the poorer people in the State Schools is having an effect, but we hardly know in what direction, although the agency has been at work for some fifty years. Its chief observable effect so far seems to be not in the modification of accent, but in the syllabic pronunciation of certain words, especially names of places.
I have heard—like a tale from a far country—the astonishing story that little innocent children were told to say CI-REN-CES-TER in the place of "Cisseter." And there is again with this change another change, which is the introduction of new and usually pedantic Græco-Latin terms in the place of the old native terms. This is not only the effect of the schools, it is also the effectof the Press and of the ubiquitous action of the modern English State official, who plays a far larger part in our society than do his colleagues in any other province of Europe, not excepting the Germanies. He impresses himself especially in medicine: but also in law, in the payment of State doles and insurances, in the gathering of State dues, in minute and continual inquisition upon every detail of daily life in the home and the factory and the field.
Would you believe that a stout peasant could use the word "circumference" (which is not quite accurate) for the outside headlands of a ploughed field? It was used to me only last week by a man on my farm. And as for "dilution," "percentage," "contributory" and "implement," they have become the tame kittens of cottage speech and roam about at large. With such have also come a great mass of legal and quasi-legal terms, and these are modifying the language as much as anything. There we have a most interesting parallel to a thing which changed all the speech of Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, for a great mass of our words which used to be called "Teutonic" have turned out, as Wiener shows in his revolutionary essay, to be no more "Teutonic" than the Æneid. They are corruptions of the technical terms used in the Roman Law Courts and Bureaus of Administration. Such, for instance, is all the group of words "Ritter, Rider, Road"—they come from thePosting system of the Roman Empire and its taxation.
But this is taking me very far from my original text of accents, and I return to it with a certain matter for conclusion—it is a matter really near my heart, and it has been haunting me ever since I began this article. It is the slight differences of pronunciation between people of my own social rank (which may be called the professional middle class) and the richer class above it. I mean (in so far as it still exists) the permanently rich class. Here I must say at once that I champion, not only without hesitation but with contempt for all other opinion, the pronunciation of my own class. Not only in accent but in every other thing it is the class which has made the civilisation of Europe, and when the people above us differ from us, they are just as wrong as the people below us. So much for them....
But it rankles all the same, that my superiors should put on airs, and I will take a test case: the word "PIANO." When I say "Curse the piano" (and it is a horrible instrument, is it not?) I make it rhyme with the name of the suffete "HANNO," but those above me make it rhyme with "AH NO." They make of it a more pathetic, and I a more downright word.
It is curious that these slight differences in accent should exist, for the two sets of people are brought up together in the same schools, they meet daily, and even (I am ashamed to say)inter-marry. Many would pretend that by this time of day there was no difference left. But there is; and if you watch half a dozen typical words closely I think you will agree with me. I am not speaking of locutions, you will note, but of accent. Now in our locutions we differ enormously from those above and below us, and when I say above and below I do not mean above and below in any scale except the ludicrous but powerful, constant scale of social vanity. Our locutions, I am afraid, we tend to submit to the judgment of those wealthier than ourselves. It is a pity, for our locutions are right and theirs are wrong. For instance, it is right to say "Riding in a carriage," and wrong to say "Driving in a carriage," but "Riding in a carriage" has been heavily defeated by "Driving in a carriage," and is now on the run. Personally, I regret it.
It is high time that a new etiquette book came out about these things. The last one I remember reviewing is now twelve years old, and it was not quite satisfactory, because it dealt largely with (a) the abuse of vulgarisms of which no one ever heard, and (b) the assertion of rules which were not sound rules at all. It came as a message from the rich to the middle class, and was therefore a very unnatural pronouncement. For it is our part to teach them and not their part to teach us. For instance, this book said: "Do not talk of people by their postal towns, do not say (if you are going to stop at a rich man'shouse) that you are going to stop at Puddiford, or whatever the name of the nearest market town may be, but give his palace its full title, and with due respect." But I, for my part, never heard any one allude to a rich man's house by the nearest postal town. On the contrary, my experience is that people tumble over each other to underline or shout the name of the palace in which they propose to find a brief and humiliating entertainment from Saturday to Monday.
Again, in this book we were told not to say "Port," but "Port Wine"—but that would lead me into the most bitter controversy of modern times, compared with which the old quarrel between Θεοτὁκοϛ [Greek: theotokos] and θεογὁνοϛ [Greek: theogonos] was but a lovers' tiff. So I end.... But talking of accents, have I got those Greek accents right? I doubt it, for I write this in Wolverhampton, a town divorced from Hellas and heavily blanketing the Alexandrians.
What a pleasure it will be—a minor pleasure, I admit, but life is complex and it is difficult to establish values—what a pleasure it will be when maps and statistics return!
To-day, in this delightful year of 1922, they are all at sixes and sevens. So is everything else, you may say, especially currency—let alone morals. But still, one regrets maps and statistics most because to lose them is to lose one's moorings. We are all adrift without them.
What fun it used to be before the war to discuss the various "Powers" (as they were called). There was a Power called "Germany," and there was another called "Austria," or sometimes "Austria-Hungary," and there was one called "Russia," and there was "the Anglo-Saxon Race," too, and all sorts of things.
When I was a very little boy there was an enormous green blob over the bottom right-hand corner of the map, marked "Turkey," and I remember a learned man telling me that a bit called "Rumania" did not really count as Turkey, and a bit called "Servia" was really quite separate: and they were marked round with a dotted line. But I thought this man an interfering hair-splitter.I was a human being, though so young, and I liked to stand squarely upon my two feet and to know exactly where I was. So I thought of a country called "Turkey," inhabited by people called "Turks," and I used to see, wandering all over their country, animals called "Turkeys," which, I had been told by some foolish older person, took their name from this district. The young are not yet broken-in to change.
So, on through my early and middle life there was a recognisable Europe. One knew the debatable points (at least, on the map), but there were frontiers. There were powerful centres also, and anomalies to season the dish.
Where is all that to-day?
Thank God, this island at least has a frontier. It is the inviolate sea. I remember a boy at school who used to read the passage "the violet sea," so as to make sense, and I applaud him still. "Surrounded by the violet sea," read this sturdy youth. We all knew what "violet" meant: it was a sort of blue. But what the devil was "inviolate"! Lucidity is the soul of style. Therefore, I say, I applaud that youth.
Anyhow, colour or no, brown, green, or grey, the sea sounds all round England. Those who live in this island know where it begins and where it ends, in spite of the bookish people who say that one frontier is the enemy's coastline. (Heaven have mercy upon them, they are living in the past. Some day I will show them anaeroplane!) North of the Pyrenees nobody on the Continent can say as much to-day: since the war! One country has a frontier expanding outwards, bulging, and another has ceased to be a country; and a third, whilst still a country, has but a theoretical frontier which feels like touchpaper, or like burnt rag; and yet another is a new country, sprung up out of the effect of the war, and with frontiers which are to the old strict frontiers what the chopped-up prose of the new poets is to Pope or Dryden.
I do wish the maps would come back, but I fear they will not come back in my time. I see that, in despair, the people who must sell maps or perish are taking to printing merely physical maps, maps of mountains and rivers and seas. They are returning to Pan and the original gods of this ironic globe. They are (virtually) saying: "Mankind has abandoned its job. Men are no longer political. We yield to you, spirits of the stream and of the hill, the throne we once possessed."
I do not say that the advertisers, printers, company promoters, touts, circularisers, boomsters, spell-binders, and all the rest of the happy throng who are producing the new atlases use these very words; but that is what they are at, all the same.
Only the other day a man showed me a superb map of Mexico and the United States (as we used to call them in our dear old-fashionedlanguage) up to about the cañon of the Colorado. I said to him: "It is very beautiful, and the contours stand out. The rivers are of a bold blue: the swamps are green: the mountains brown. But I do not see the division between the United States and Mexico." He said to me: "It has not yet been put in because of the League of Nations"—a funny reason....
Then there are statistics. Anything in the world can be proved by statistics, and it was half the occupation of a serious man with a bee in his bonnet (as most serious men have) to work statistics, to knead them with the fists, and to tread them with the feet, and to juggle them with the thumbs, and to smooth them down with the palm, and to pat them into shape with the fingers, and to square them off with a trowel, and to bake them very cunningly into a hard form. He, having done this, would prove to you anything on earth—I mean before the year 1914. He would prove to you that the French were going down and the Germans going up: that everybody was going to talk English in fifty years: that London (oh! joyful thought!) would stretch out beyond Dorking and Reigate, beyond Hertford and Marlow, within the life of a man: that the United States (I mean America) would easily grow to eat up Europe: that most of the African deserts would be filled with cads, and that the greatness of a nation depended not upon its religion, still less upon its morals, hardly atall upon its courage or intelligence, but wholly upon its hoicking out of coal.
I do wish those statistics would come back! We have had none of them for so many years! We cannot talk of the birth-rate of Egypt or Persia. We no longer know what is meant by export and import ... and with these two dread words another suggestion works its way into my mind.
The war has produced propaganda. Truth took to its bed in the spring of 1915 and died unregretted, with few attendants, about a year later. Everything since then has been propaganda.
It is an imperative duty to serve one's country, and one's country in danger of death had to be served by silence and by lies. But now the root has struck, and all this lying and all this silence has become a habit. So to-day, when you read this or that in a paper, you know very well that you are not reading any cold truth at all, but an advertisement. Time was, if a public document said: "The road from Pekaboo to Chakanugga is under repair after the third mile-stone," you believed it and went round by a side way. But to-day, when you read such things, you know that it means, not that the road is under repair, but that it is to the advantage of some man, corporation, policy or State to suggest that it is under repair.... If itisunder repair, well and good ... but it is a pure chance. They use thetruth when it suits them, but only because it suits them. Most of the time they lie.
And here, like a man discovering a diamond in blue clay, let me admit the great exception. Through all this welter of falsehood the Admiralty stands firm. I pick up my charts, I read my various "Pilots" (especially my beloved "English Channel Pilot I"), and the truth comes out, august, white-robed, with level brows, contemptuous of advocacy. The documents of this great Department please me like the Creed. Their level voice is the voice of doom. "Halnacker Mill open of Bognor Church Spire leads through the Swatchway." It is true that the sweeps have fallen from Halnacker Mill and you cannot see it as well from sea as you used to do. If you will allow me (without offence, I hope) to tell you the plain truth, not one man in fifty in one day out of ten has ever seen Halnacker Mill from outside the Owers. All he sees, even in fair weather, is a sort of blur, which he hopes to be Sussex, or Paradise. Anyhow, the document, the record, is there. If you can see Halnacker Mill, even with the sweeps gone down, and if you open it east of Bognor Church Spire, you will get through the Swatchway: if you don't you will strike the Owers, and I for one shall not care.
So it is with all these pronouncements of marble and of bronze.
"Note.—The mariner will do well to avoid the passage of the Looe Stream at the fall of nightagainst an adverse tide, especially if the wind is freshening from the south-west." He will, by God! This is not a statement to frighten Germans or to pacify Jugo-Slavs. It is the thing itself. Stark Truth: Reality, the eldest-born Daughter of Heaven; that Goddess whom some call Aletheia from her lovely face, and others Ananke from her damnable muscles, the grip of whose hand when you ask her to lead you through this tangled world is extraordinarily firm, tactless and painful.
I then, who love statistics and maps, shall, for the next few months or years, confine myself to the publications of the Admiralty in the "Channel Pilot" I and II, in "The West Coast Pilot" and the rest. Their pictures of the British coast are the best I know. The information of the Admiralty is exact, and its motives (alone of the motives now governing our chaotic world) are pure.
It was in Morocco: it was not yet day; and there was a little drizzling rain of that tiresome, feverish sort which you get in those outlandish countries south of Europe and cousin to the desert, only saved from being desert by this same evil rain which does sometimes fall on them. I woke and rose before my companions, and to their annoyance made them rise also, telling them that we needed every hour if we were to reach the sea before the next night.
There was no road, not even such a track as one may see in the American West. Only here and there the sign that wheels had passed over the interminable dusty mud of the plain. We started the unfortunate motor-car and jerked off northwards just as the sad, wet darkness was turning into a sad, wet day. Already the glimmering light showed us the forms of the land, but not yet any direction, and in that first half-hour, as the light grew, we twice urged back, at the peril of our gears, from thick boggy land to harder soil. Then, when it was full daylight, we could better determine our way. There was not a tree anywhere, not even on the distant mountains to the right. There was not a blade of grass. Itwas a wilderness, where I could see barren slopes and peaks as much as fifty miles away.
I have often wondered what the original Hebrew was for the term "howling," which so admirably describes a wilderness in the Bible. Some day I will look it up; for whoever got that metaphor knew how to write. Also these damnable empty spaces are not good for the soul: they isolate it beyond due measure.
And so we went North. At nearly every dry stream bed (they came at intervals of some five miles) we had to cast about for the passage. In each we feared to remain. But each was at last successfully passed, though I wondered how long the old machine would stand it. The car was, like most of these models of earlier years, very strongly built, and it was patient and willing; but we were asking too much of it.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning that we came at last to a true river, flowing between steep banks, perhaps thirty feet high or more; banks of crumbling earth, and even there not a shrub—mere water, coloured as tawny as the waste itself, and cutting through the waste without result. Here it was that the car gave up the ghost. Crawling down the mass of mud upon the zigzag it reached, with many groans and grindings, the river bed. It crossed the ford, making a noise like a saw; but when it was asked to breast the further bank, in one last gallant effort it sobbed out its life and died.
Upon the height of the bank against the sky there stood a Spaniard, to whom, as is natural in that country, we spoke in French. He told us that near by we should find a small town. We begged him in the meanwhile to fetch us many labourers and a stout rope. This he did. We tied the rope to the front axle in two places, leaving its ends free in the shape of two traces, which traces were taken each by a dozen men, and so, cumbrously, were we hauled to the plateau above. There, sure enough, we saw as filthy a little town as ever was permitted by demons to survive; but the sea was still very far away.
What has always astonished me about these little towns of Islam is the apparent importance of their history compared with their present appearance. I know that it is the fashion to accept, literally enough, the stories of their past doings, and I know that I am going against the fashion in flatly refusing to accept those stories. I do not believe them. I do not believe them of Cordova, and I am fully prepared to disbelieve them of Granada itself. Certainly I disbelieve them of this little town which, as I have so abused it and as, after all, it gave me hospitality, I will not dishonour by name. Its wretched crumbling plaster, its low hovels, the lump of mud which it called a Mosque, the incredible accumulation of filth upon all sides, the air of stagnation and disease, the mere scale of the place, belied the exaggerations of the chronicles. And as Iconsidered that I might have to spend there Heaven knows how many days while messengers were fetching what might or might not bring to life the poor dead car, I could not bear the prospect.
I therefore did something which I could not afford. I took aside the chief of my hauling gang of twenty-four and struck a bargain with him. I said to him: "I cannot possibly reach the port which I intended to reach over this illimitable wet mass of dusty earth; it is a day's journey away, even if the car were in working order. Is there no other place on the sea coast nearer by where I could get some sort of vessel to take me to a human land? I care not what vessel it is, even though it be one of those vessels which they beach, which are open without deck and run under one lateen sail," for I was not (at the nearest point) much more than a full hundred miles from Cadiz and the Ports of Spain.
He told me that there was one little third-rate port, if you could call it a port, and it was one day's walk away, or, say, five or six hours of marching. Then, at an enormous price, was it arranged with a new team that the car should be hauled by ropes, and hauled it was through the most incredible places, I sitting at the steering-wheel and good Moors hauling in two teams over sandy hillock and across awkward ghylls, until, from a height, we saw suddenly a new road properly modelled, European, Christian, civilised; and beyond it the mixed roofs of Christendom andof Islam; beyond these again the sea: that sea to which the Mohammedan Conqueror came more than a thousand years ago, and into which he rode his horse, saying: "Lord, God! Were I not stopped by this your sea I would ride farther and farther to the West, conquering all lands for your honour and that of your Prophet."
Once on this road things grew easier. There were vehicles and there was life. I paid off my team with a heavy heart, adding (as courtesy, custom, and necessity demanded) a great deal to the agreed sum. Then I went down into the little town.
It was a delightful surprise to find as pleasant a little town as ever the evil powers permitted to survive upon this earth. It was clean, it was even coquettish. It was neat; it climbed down the side of a steep hill and below it a charming little harbour held a brig of sorts, very old, many native boats—large open boats, used for fishing—and, to my great joy, a steamer!
It was a tramp steamer, and that of the smaller sort. It was the least of steamers; it was a Benjamin; but when I heard that it would try to start next day for Cadiz I thought it as great a piece of luck as a reprieve, or a fortune, or the sudden power to write a piece of verse which one has been in travail of for years. The next day I paid my money and I went on board, and at noon, which was high tide, that steamer got across the Bar.
Not all steamers can cross the Bar of this little port. Even as we went out we saw the rusty skeleton of a French ship which had gone to pieces in that same attempt a year before.
It was a dreadful Bar. I can only compare it to Appledore in Devon, and I doubt if there was any more water than there is over Appledore; perhaps less; but, as I have said, this steamer was the least of steamers and drew as little as a steamer can if it is to take the high seas at all.
There was little wind upon the Atlantic, but huge rollers coming in unbroken, one over the other, monotonously enormous, unceasing. And I said to myself, as she pointed her nose northward: "It will be slow; it must be endured; but we are making for Christian land, and this night perhaps (for what is a hundred miles?) I shall sleep in Paradise, or, at any rate, in Cadiz." But not at all. There happened a very strange thing indeed. Hardly had her nose been pointed North and the Bar perhaps half a mile behind us, and Africa the horrible, the sterile, the bare, now no longer a place of weariness but a coastline to be observed at my ease, when the man commanding this little ship dropped anchor and lit a pipe.
I have always made it a rule in all my travels not to speak to any one in command, though it is a rule I have found it very difficult to keep. The reason of this rule is that if you speak to any human being you may agree with him or you may quarrel with him. Now, quarrelling with anequal is entertaining or fatiguing according to one's mood, but quarrelling with one in command is always disastrous unless one has great ambition. Therefore, I did not ask the Captain why he did this thing; but I sat there on the little iron bridge and myself lit a pipe, and indulged in that infantile trick for disappointing fate, which is to imagine things worse than they are.
I said to myself: "We will probably remain anchored here for a day, or perhaps for two days, but within the week I shall see Christian land." And I wondered whether the food in my bag (which was bread and a little cold pork and a bottle of wine) would last out, or whether I should have to depend upon their food, and, if so, what their food was like.
So we lay under the hot sun, rising and falling with the enormous rolls, now in the trough and now on the crest, as regular as the swing of the great silver lamp in front of the Tomb of St. James in Galicia, but on a much bigger scale of rise and fall.
There came out of the North a little point of light, which was foam upon the bows of a boat. She came nearer; in an hour one could make out what she was; another tiny steamer; and in another hour she was fairly close at hand. I said to myself: "This is what we are waiting for." But not at all: the little steamer passed us, the Captain at my side muttered her name; she was off to some Southern port: perhaps Mogador.
And so the hours went by. But at last, not too late in the afternoon, the true cause of our delay appeared. A boat set out from the harbour upon the ebb, rode over the great swell with ease and dexterity; just caught the moment to toss on board of us, as the sea lifted it, a gentleman extremely well dressed, lean, courteous, and silent. He had preferred to take a comfortable luncheon on shore: had I known that such a thing was possible I would have done so too. His appearance was, for some reason, the signal.
The moment he got on board the ship woke up again, the anchor chain rattled, and she began her way. She made five knots but not seven (at least, that was my guess), and so all day long we wallowed, past Africa, and I saw upon my beam a little pirate town and after that a great mountain. At sunset there opened before me for the first time in my life the Gates of Hercules, and marvellous they were to see thus from the West under the reddening light. They were very far away, the narrowest part of the Straits one could barely see, tiny points upon the horizon, and the Rock of Gibraltar one could not see at all, either because it was too far away or because it was hidden round a point of land.
There are sights which if one sees them for the first time in boyhood, when one can still feel, are like memories of Heaven; great revelations which build up the mind for the rest of one's life. These sights seen in the decline of life stillstir one, though there is a mournful contrast between their power now and their power then. I had not thought that any novel sight could move me as this, my first sight of the Straits, moved me in the fall of that glaring African day.
"Here," said I to myself, "is the entry to the antique world. This is the place out of which the first galleys came and knew the tide. Perhaps through this also (who knows?) long ships from Atlantis once hauled in with oars bringing arts and letters to those from whom we spring." Through these Straits at this hour was running that convergence of European life which is their modern mark. There were six steamers in sight and the light of others appeared as the darkness fell. After the emptiness of the Atlantic I felt as though the Straits of Gibraltar were a highway, and I amused myself during all the first hours of the night in calculating the courses of the ships by the red and the green lights and their eclipse.
There was no moon; the stars came out in the warm air, very brilliant and single, and we were nearly nose on for the pointers of the Bear.
But, Lord, how slow was that ship! The last light declined as we put Trafalgar on the beam; it was nearly calm, and I, with a vague memory of Trafalgar and Cadiz being quite close together on the map, thought myself already in harbour. But not at all! It was hour after hour, after hour. At last, long past midnight, and when Ihad hoped that first one light and then another might be the light of Cadiz (and had indeed long watched the light of Cadiz itself, which is white and flashing) and was still trying to make out far off to the West the glint of Spartel, I saw a sight which overjoyed me—a buoy with changing coloured lights, such a thing as marks the entrance to a fairway; and along that fairway we went, going the way that the ships of Tyre had gone before us into the great landlocked harbour; the ships of Tyre at which the Hebrew prophet railed so ineffectually. For he said that Tyre would come to nothing. So it did. But it took much longer than he thought.
We steered carefully between ships moored and took up a berth of which they knew, and dropped anchor, and the journey was done.
But I could not land till morning, and all the remaining hours of the night after so strange a passage I watched the Bear going about his monotonous round, and failing to take part in the baths of ocean, until at last it grew bright quickly over the Eastern hills and Cadiz turned white and the sea took on its colour. Then did I land in Christendom and I was greeted by the rising of the sun.
I never sail the sea but I wonder what makes a people take to it and then leave it again. Nor have I ever seen an explanation of this; therefore it is that the speculation is of value, for it is one of those which go round and round upon themselves and never come to an end, and so give entertainment to the mind.
When you read in books that such-and-such a nation took to the sea you are usually given a very pretty little explanation of a material kind, as is the modern fashion. They took to the sea because they were situated at such-and-such a point, because the sea they lived on was sheltered, or because they had very good harbours.
It is all nonsense. Those who write like that cannot themselves have sailed the sea. To sail the sea is an occupation at once repulsive and attractive. It is repulsive because it is dangerous, horribly uncomfortable, cramped and unnatural: for man is a land animal. It is attractive because it brings adventure and novelty at every moment, and because, looking back upon it, a man feels a certain pride both in danger overcome and in experience. But it is also attractive in another and much more powerful fashion. It is attractiveby a sort of appetite. A man having sailed the sea and the habit having bitten into him, he will always return to it: why, he cannot tell you. It is what modern people call a "lure" or a "call." He has got it in him and it will not let him rest.
That, I think, is the best answer in the long run to the question I put myself whenever I come back from sailing the sea.
The question, why did such-and-such nations take to the sea and why for so long a time, and then again abandon it for so long a time, I can answer in no other way.
It is a beckoning from powers outside mankind.
It is not even the establishment of commerce by sea which takes a people to sea. Nothing more likely than for a nation to become a nation of transport and yet to see its crews gradually becoming foreign, as its own people grew to dislike the nasty but mysteriously summoning business of wet decks and thumping. It certainly is not proximity to the sea that does the trick. You have all over the world great lumps of population, millions and millions, right on to the sea, who never take to it, but leave a fringe of foreigners to do their sailing. Witness the Slavs. And though, of course, it is true that inland nations are not seafaring nations, the real reason is much more that they choose to be inland than that they happen to be inland.
I have asked myself often enough why the oldEgyptians did not take to the sea. Perhaps they did very long ago, but at any rate the memory of it has died out. The other people who traded with them from the North have not even legends of Egyptians coming to them. We have no stories or inscriptions of Egyptians common in the harbours of the Mediterranean. And yet they had a great river going straight out to sea and a coast that for thousands of years, in the height of their power, invited them. They had ships, no doubt, which were sea-going. We know of fleets, but we are not always certain that they were Egyptian fleets, even when they were fleets under the command of the Egyptian king. What we have not got is an Egyptian maritime legend or tradition.
On the other hand, you find an enormous, volcanic, seafaring energy just where it should not be—on the harbourless coast of the Levant. And it seems certain, to me reading, that those seafarers who kept it up for centuries, the people of Tyre and Sidon, were driven by masterful instinct. It seems possible or even probable that they started from some little islands in the Persian Gulf, and that, for some reason, they came all this way across desert land and began again from other little islands hundreds of miles away upon another sea. Once they had started from the Levantine coast they did everything that the sea makes one do. They explored, and they named. They must have felt the fun of the thing.Commerce can only have been their second motive, though naturally it is the motiveweput first to-day.
A learned member of the University of Paris has shown that most of the inexplicable Greek names of the Mediterranean were but Phœnician names transformed, and they even went out of the tideless sea into the huge unknown swell of the ocean. And they reached, according to one story, those tin-mines which were either off the Spanish coast or in some part of Britain—perhaps Cornwall.
But remark that these people had everything against them. It is silly to say that they were driven to commerce by their geographical position between East and West. It was just the other way. Their geographical position was the worst possible. The splendid harbours which lay some days' sail to the west of them they knew nothing of. They were on a coast less suited for the shelter of vessels than any in the whole Mediterranean, unless it be the eastern coast of Barbary. They went to sea because a passion seized them for it, because it was in their blood.
I notice again that this passion for the sea does not go, as one would think it ought to, with a particular physical type, nor even with a particular mental type. It certainly goes with a love of adventure, but not with mere vigour, nor even with mere imagination. And the same race will appear, for generations, inhabited by thishaunting of the sea, and then will suddenly drop it again.
This island is an example. It was seafaring all during the Roman centuries. Then after the robber raids of the Saxons, Angles, Irish, Frisians, Franks, and the rest, it lost all idea of the sea. When England had become a welter of little districts Pagan and Christian all fighting each other in the sixth and seventh centuries, England no longer went to sea. It got cut off; and when, a little later, seafaring men from Scandinavia attacked it, it could not defend itself. It lay passive. It was not till Alfred's time, more than four hundred years after the catastrophe of the first pirate raids in Britain, that there was something of a reluctant seafaring again; and even then it was for more than a hundred years easier to hire Scandinavian crews than to get Englishmen aboard.
But all this while the Irish and the people of the Far West, the Welsh, Southern and Northern, and the Cornish, were filling their legends with the sea.
Then, after a few centuries, the English woke up again to the sea most furiously, in the turn of the Middle Ages. The sea moves them less and less later on. They half forget it. And again, 350 years ago, it catches them again, and they became great captains and have so remained, the English.
This makes me think of another thing, whichis the difference in the way the sea has affected the literature of one seafaring nation and another. And there again I can find no explanation. The poems of Homer (which were not, if I may humbly suggest it, written by a committee, but by one man, for it is a rare and individual thing to write a good poem, and these poems are good) are not so much influenced by the sea as are themselves the sea. The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics of the sea—yes, not only the Odyssey, but the Iliad too. The sea comes in all the time and mixes up with the story in a way it does with no other story, not even with the story of Tristan. The moment a word or two on the sea comes into the Iliad the phrase wakes up and moves, and, what is more,thereyou get exact physical description, physical description by a man who has sailed. In most of Homer what is vivid is either a knowledge of what was in men's minds, or a thing told to the writer by others, or the gentle contemplation of some art of which he was himself ignorant and which seemed to him marvellous. But in the matter of the sea it is quite another thing. The names of the Nereids, of the "Nereids as many as there are in the depths of the salt," from the thirty-eighth to the forty-eighth line, those ten lines of marvel, are the names of waves, and of waves seen by the eye of a man. They are not at second hand. They are all the aspects and all the revelations of the wave.
I am told also that the poet Hesiod gave acomplete catalogue of these same ladies, but did it rather less well. Homer has a heavenly roll-call of them, and the best of their names, in my unfortunate judgment, is "Limnoreia," "the wave that runs along the shore." For I also have seen Her, gently running in easy weather along the half-ebb glistening sand, a distant shore. But all their names are at once beautiful and true.
Then also, how exact are his words for the noise of a boat speaking through the depths of the water! And what an epithet for the sea is "cloud-shadowed," or, for the matter of that, "wine dark," though it is true the same word is granted to oxen.
But the thing is not to be argued. You feel it or you do not. I think that conception of horses running on wave-tops was written by a man who had often sailed the sea.
I am tempted to go on with the theme. But if I went further I should be tedious, and perhaps I am so already, for all I know.
To continue, therefore (for if you are being tedious you cannot let go, any more than a tired horse can stop running lest it fall); there are cities made for the sea, and yet they allow themselves to be visited, and do not themselves attempt the sea at all. While there are other cities which you would think long fate and suffering would cure of desperate attempts to use the sea, and yet they use it in the teeth of fate; among which last I count—though they are not cities atall, but only little towns—my own small harbours of the Channel.
These holes in the land are for the most part quite unsuited to the business of navigation. But how gallantly they keep it up! I know one of them where there forms with regularity every few weeks an enormous island of shingle right in the fairway. It is a harbour out of which no man can come (without a tug) except once in twelve hours on the top of the tide. And even so that huge mass of shingle is piled up plumb in the mouth of it by the south-west wind after every gale, and the gales come every week in winter. Yet do these hearty people dredge that shingle away year after year, and they have done so, I suppose, for two thousand years, rather than forego their occupation of the sea.
What sort of people do you suppose were those fellows of the Morbihan who produced vast ships rigged with iron chains, and boasting leathern sails, yet having nowhere, you would say, whither they could trade? The indomitable Romans defeated them at last in their own waters a little north of St. Nazaire, under Quiberon; but what a fight they put up! I think they must have gone to sea for the mere love of it, these men of the Morbihan, as do their descendants to this day. For they are all poor men and get little from their occupation beyond dreams and death.
I know a town also with which the name of Columbus is associated, and some even say(falsely) that his family came from there. It is a town about a day's march north of Vigo, on the Galician coast, and is called "The Green Port," lying at the head of a land-locked bay. One would have thought that Vigo close by, with its incomparable harbour, would have killed it. But, on the contrary, it flourishes because it is in love with the sea. It is the neatest, whitest little town in the world.
But when it comes to daring, there is nothing we can show, with our modern ease of appliance, like the things that those men did, and not only they, but all the early unrecorded heroes of our race. When the Roman poet wondered at the courage of those who first set out to sea at all, he was right. But what must have been the courage of those who went out until they had long lost sight of land in an adventure as enormous as that of death and who chanced a land-fall after a day or twenty days? If you go across the Atlantic now, for instance, in any one of our ships that are like towns, and look at the size of the seas in a storm, you may ask yourself how men must have felt in that same water upon a craft of, say, three hundred tons, and with no knowledge at all of what lay beyond or whether they should ever see land again.
It is curious that those same historians who belittle the past (and most modern historians do that) will not admit at least that our fathers could build good ships. I have said "threehundred tons" modestly, but your modern historian will, as a rule, reduce the tonnage of the past to the most ridiculous cockle-shells. He wants to believe that nothing big in the way of a ship was made until the time of people who thought like himself—that is, who had his own religion. Yet in spreading this falsehood our modern historians do but increase our admiration of our fathers' courage. They do not diminish the great past by this particular lie. It is clear that both antiquity and the Middle Ages had large ships: not large compared with the monsters of to-day, but much larger than modern history allows. I have had arguments on this both in print and by word of mouth. For by some fatality the modern historian, who is ignorant of most things (such as ploughing or riding on horses or the length of a day's march), is particularly ignorant of the sea.
When such people tell you, for instance, that the fleet of William the Conqueror was made up of ships like fishing-smacks, ask him how that invader carried his horses; and carry their horses they certainly did, because within a day or two of landing they were there armed and mounted in great numbers. Or ask him, also, for that matter, how they carried their provisions and all the accompaniment of an army.
I seem to remember making a note somewhere of a ship that was built in Bayonne in the Middle Ages, the keel of which, apart from theoverhang, was well over 100 ft. long. I was going to say 190, but as it is only a memory, and I have not the notes by me, I may be wrong if I say that. It was certainly well over 100, and the record was exact. After all, there is no reason why men who could build a wooden ship at all—I mean a ship to hold the sea—could not build one up to a thousand tons or more. The limit is rather a limit of handling sails than of building. For what made our sudden modern increase in the size of ships was the use of a new motive power.
But one thing was certainly true of all those old ships, and remained true until quite modern times, and that was their light draught. They were all flat; and this is the more remarkable when one considers their high free-board. I have no doubt that those who study these things, which I do not, and who are experts in them, can explain the affair: it has always puzzled me badly. In very old pictures, miniatures, sculptures, or later engravings and drawings and paintings, the first thing that strikes me is this excess of free-board. I think it must strike the most casual observer who goes down to Portsmouth and looks at the modern low lines of the great men-of-war and contrasts them with the huge wall of the "Victory" size for size. One would think that so much free-board would have made the old craft top-heavy.
In the earlier ships we note regularly greatstructures forward and astern, poops and forecastles, which look as though they would give a most dangerous purchase to a beam wind, let alone lifting the centre of gravity of the boat too high. Yet they carried these easily, for all their light draught. How very light that draught was until quite modern times, we know by the nature of the harbours they entered, and we also know it from their habit of beaching boats. You read often enough of shipwreck, but very rarely indeed of shipwreck through capsizing. That may be because in earlier times they did not take the wind abeam. But I doubt it.
I imagine the common judgment that sailing into the wind is a recent art to be false. The old ships may not have sailed close to the wind; they certainly did not sail as close to the wind as we do; but that they could sail with the wind a little forward of the beam seems to me common sense. No one can sail a boat of the simplest rig—a boat with a mere balance sail or catrig—without finding that she can go into the wind. And a boat that could not go into the wind at all could never be certain of harbour. It is true they waited for a fair wind, as for that matter would most sailing-boats to-day if they had the time, and as do all sailing-boats when the wind is too much against them. No man, for instance, could beat out of Rye. There is no room. And in any modern week you may see sailing craft anchored in the Downs, or west of Dungeness, or in anyone of the Roads of the Channel, waiting for a favourable wind to take them up or down. But that the ships our forefathers used could not sail into the wind at all seems to me nonsense. Being flat, however, they must have made a lot of leeway, and that is perhaps why it was not worth their while to try and beat for any distance against a strong breeze.
"Leeway!" Why did the devices for overcoming that drawback arrive so late in history? They are deep keels—which is a waste of space and a forbidding of harbours, so that antiquity apparently never adopted them—lee boards and centre boards.
Now lee boards I take to be an invention of the Dutch, who also gave us, if I am not mistaken, the origin of that admirable rig, perfected in the Thames, the London barge. But why did people take such a very long time to think of lee boards? I cannot pretend to the required scholarship and I may be wrong, but surely there is no example of a lee board in antiquity, nor even in any picture remaining to us of the Middle Ages? I take it that the lee board was one of those thousand things quietly invented, unspoken of, between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, and that the people of the Low Countries were its authors.
As for the centre board, we know that it is a thing of yesterday. If I am not mistaken, the Americans first sailed on it. I can understand why the centre board should have come so late.It wants great skill in fitting. It seems to invite a leak. It cannot be fitted upon any very large craft easily—and so on. But why did it take humanity such a very long time to think of lee boards, and why, when they came, did they come in this particular corner of Europe?
There is nothing more fascinating than this guess-work upon the origin of little human tricks and the observation of the long and great effect of routine.
To this day the Mediterranean shortens sail along the yard of a lateen—why, I have never got any one to explain to me. It would seem the obvious thing to take in a reef from the deck, to put your craft up into the wind, lower your sail somewhat, and then take your reef along the foot of it. Indeed, it would be much easier to take in a reef in this fashion on a lateen sail than it is to take one along the boom in an ordinary fore-and-aft rig. You need no ear-ring, and the thing could be done in a moment. Instead of which the swarthy men prefer to lower away the whole contraption. I do not understand the reason at all. Perhaps there is no reason—or, again, perhaps I am wrong and therefore there is no problem at all.
These are the two delightful ways of meeting all the problems which upset mankind, from that of free will to fascinating discussions on the currency, now so much in vogue.
And a blessing I wish you all.