The Indian Ocean: during the Monsoon
It’s not at all like the Indian Ocean of which Kipling sings, “so soft, so something, so blooming blue.” It is grey; there’s a swell, and it’s muggy. But at night you can see the Southern Cross, and that’s an excitement.
How did Dante know there was such a thing as the Southern Cross? He certainly did know it, because when he emerged from hell, somewhere near the South Pole, he says he looked at the polar sky and saw four stars which had never been seen before save by the first people—whoever they were (the inhabitants of Paradise?)—
I dare say, and I believe some commentators do say, that his meaning was allegorical, and that by the four stars he meant Woman’s Suffrage, or the battle of Waterloo. I take leave to differ. I’m sure he meant the Southern Cross. Perhaps it is in Herodotus, whose geography, long suspected of being fantastic, is proved to be more and more accurate. For instance, Herodotus said the source of the Nile was in the Silver Mountain. This was pooh-poohed for centuries, until the discovery of Mount Ruwenzori proved that Herodotus was perfectly right.
Dante was a great traveller, and the greatest pen impressionist who ever wrote. He describes a landscape in a line so that it stays with you forever. He uses the smallest possible number of words, hardly any adjectives, and the picture leaps up before you, immortal and unforgettable.
Who can do this among the moderns? Keats could sometimes. Tennyson gives you English landscape. If you read “In Memoriam” you have lived a year in the English country and seen the march of the English seasons. Crabbe can do it. Who reads Crabbe? Nobody. And yet he is a wonderful poet, as realistic as Tolstoy and Arnold Bennett, as poignant as Gorky. Byron called him the best painter of nature. (And Byron was a good judge.) He can give you a landscape in a line. For instance:—
He writes about the poor as they are, without sentimentality, and without exaggeration; and as a painter of English landscape he still remains the best.
What has the poet Crabbe got to do with the Indian Ocean? Nothing. But it can do nobody any harm to be reminded of the poet Crabbe, although he was born in 1754 and died in 1832. He may not be read by the modern generation, but he is not forgotten. A Frenchman wrote a long and excellent book about him not long ago. He is safe in the Temple of Fame, which once you have entered you cannot leave. And this temple is like a wheel. It goes round and round, and sometimes some of its inmates are in the glare of the sun, and sometimes they are in the shade, but they are there; and they never fall out. This is comforting. It also teaches us not to laugh at the taste of our fathers, because that taste which we despise may be the rage once more in the days of our grandchildren.
How we used to despise everything connected with the Early Victorian period. Now people have their rooms done up in Early Victorian style, and Early Victorian furniture is collected; rep sofas are precious, green tablecloths and antimacassars. They have passed the period of being like an out-of-date fashion plate; they have reached the hallowed moment of being picturesque and Old World. It is Late Victorian art that is now despised—William Morris and Burne-Jones. But they are safe in the temple, too, and a day will come when people will admire Burne-Jones’s pictures and collect Morris designs as a great curiosity, and say, “This is a very fine specimen of 1880 chintz.”
During this monsoon period I read more than ever. I once asked a famous politician what he did on a sea voyage. He said, “The first day I am civil to my fellow passengers, and after that I read Scott’s novels.” I adopted this plan.