I

The Chesil Bank was new to me, and it had no message. It was pleasing, but it was strange, though it was England. It was but a whitewashed wall topped by a tamarisk hedge. Below the wall was a deserted ridge and beach of shingle, tawny and glowing, and a wide sea without a ship in sight. The white wall, the pale and shimmering stones, and the bright sea, were as far from my own interests as a West Indian cay.

A figure appeared in the distance, so unusual a blot on the shingle that I watched it two miles away. There was nothing else to do. It moved with briskness and determination, but appeared to be unconcerned with anything I could see on that strand. It came straight towards me as though it knew I was there, and at length handed me a telegram. It was a smiling and rosy-cheeked little messenger from the post-office, three miles away. The child waited, like the eternal figure of Eros in a British uniform, as though it had been doing this, off and on, in some form or other, since the gods began to sport with the affairs of earth. “What’s all this about?” I asked Eros. But he only smiled. I wondered who was in such a hurry to announce something, and opened the envelope. “Conrad is dead.”

I stared at the messenger for a space, as though there must be something more to come. But nothing more came. Then the messenger spoke. “Anything to go back?”

Anything to go back? No, nothing to go back. Somehow, life seems justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not seem to leave us any the poorer. But to-day, when it happens, we feel a distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed of late years by lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainty that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance of solace in years that have not been easily borne.

Yet I cannot pretend to intimacy with him, nor to complete absorption in his work. There was something in him not to be clearly discerned. It was sought in his books with curiosity, but it did not appear to be there. The man was only partly seen, as through a veil. Sometimes his face peered through the filmy obscurity, massively, in still and overlooking scrutiny, his eyes remote but intent, kindly but dangerous, a face in a seclusion one could approach but never enter. Most of us are aware, of course, that we are secluded, and that our friends can never find out where we are. We wish they could. It is not a joy to us that, in the nature of things, we must be alone. But Conrad, perhaps, was more accustomed to exile and a solitary watch under the silent stars. Occasionally he would vouchsafe a closer glimpse of himself, something to make us alert, but at once fade into his own place. He would utter such a word as Meddlers, meaning you and me, meaning all those Englishmen, who, for example, are restive under the constraint of foolish men and statutes, and plainly show it. He would exclaim Humanitarians in a way that implied, merely implied, that pitiful men are a nuisance. My own guess is that he desired to take part in English affairs, for he had strong antipathies, but that he repressed himself, doubting his right to—well, to meddle. Perhaps it is as well he kept out. He would have proved a formidable opponent. But mainly he was silent about the affairs that provoked the prejudices of the English, giving no more than an appraising and ironic glance. Or he would, when we talked with emphasis about our national concerns, make an enigmatic gesture. He was an aristocrat. Yet what does that mean? Of course he was. Aristocrat and democrat are tokens that to-day look much alike, and appear to have no relevance even to a money-lender. We may throw them away. Everybody has forgotten what they mean.

I suppose it is about eighteen years ago since I began to read Conrad. I knew of him, but mistrusted the evidence of the critics. The literature of the sea did not interest me, for I had had some experience with that rollicking stuff; the stories which, we are told, have something called “tang” in them, the stories that represent seamen as good-natured imbeciles, with a violent bully here and there among them altogether too ingenious and foul-mouthed for comfort. Hearty yarns! But I happened to know several seamen, and a few ships. However, one day, in a hurry for a train, I snatched up the Nigger, and began it in the cab on the way to Euston. That was a great surprise. The Narcissus was certainly the kind of craft which made fast in the South-West India Dock; and old man Singleton was the embodiment of the virtues and faults of a race of mariners which, in the year in which I read the book, had all but gone. Singleton was of the clippers. I had known some of those men, and I recognised Singleton at once. This novelist had made a picture of a type of British seaman which, but for his genius, would have been lost to us and forgotten.

There could be no doubt about it. The Nigger was the thing itself, and I had never expected to see it. Next I read Typhoon; and the Nan-Shan and her men were exactly what even now you may meet any day somewhere east of Tower Hill, if you care to look, and know what to look for. I was not certain whether the critics knew it, but to me it was plain that this worker, who was a Pole, I was told, had added to the body of English literature testimony to a period of British ships and seamen which otherwise would have passed as unmarked as the voyages of the men of Tyre and Sidon. Its very atmosphere was there. As for Youth it is, without doubt, one of the finest short narratives in the language, and there will never be again such a yarn of such a voyage in such a ship.

Conrad told me that not seldom seamen wrote to him to say that they knew Singleton well, though “that was not his name.” Of course they knew Singleton. The novelist was very pleased that he could say Singleton had been recognised. It was the kind of assurance he needed then. It is all very well for us to make a fuss now, but Conrad had given the public his best work years before he received from us any worthy signal. He was an extremely sensitive man, and shy and modest, and not so long ago he desired to learn from Englishmen that his addition to our literature of the sea was just, and the kind that we approved. We were in no hurry to give it. I met him first in the company of Norman Douglas and Austin Harrison, in the office of the English Review in its earlier days. Because I knew he was a noteworthy man, and because he looked distinguished and a little haughty, and because only a few weeks before I had reviewed one of his books of the sea, I was nervous and merely looked on. Presently Douglas and Harrison began to talk of the affairs of their Review; Conrad then came over, and stood beside me. He touched my arm, apparently as nervous as I was myself. “Thank you very much for what you said about my book. You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

I was then a journalist on the staff of a daily newspaper. I was at Sidney Street and elsewhere. But Conrad’s first words to me gave me one of the shocks of my life. Here was a man, whose work, however neglected by the public, was manifestly an admirable achievement. It would be living when much of what was being done in London, and many of the great men whose names were in the headlines daily, would be forgotten. It did not want much knowledge to divine that. And hardly a robust young writer who had a column to fill somewhere every other day but was assured of his place in the handsome scheme of things, and expected one to know his work. Yet this man, who had Youth to his credit, and Typhoon and Lord Jim, touched the arm of his junior and was pleased to say “You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

A remark of that kind might go far to wreck one’s own career, if it sank properly in. Yet it is as well to point out that, though modest, Conrad could be quick enough in attack when folly or presumption was about. He was not the man to suffer gladly the more ruinous absurdities of his fellows. It was heartening to see that graciousness and diffidence suddenly go, and those dark eyes become lambent at the naming of an arrogant crudity.

I must say there is one of the company of the Narcissus that I deplore. Conrad should never have shipped that man Donkin. He is not a man, but an unresolved dislike, a blot in a good book. Donkin does a little to spoil the voyage of the Narcissus, for Conrad imagined that he had shipped a Cockney; yet Donkin, whenever he speaks, distresses the ear of a Londoner. We do not know his dialect. I fear that Donkin may be, if examined, queer evidence of what was behind that veil which Conrad preferred to keep between himself and his readers.

Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Joseph Conrad’s posthumous Tales of Hearsay, quotes with evident pleasure from one of the tales: “It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret patriotism worthily—or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and men.” Vulgar refinement! A shining epithet. And how it would be quoted with unction by one group of ardent patriots, who would cheerfully shoot another group, with admirable sincerity of feeling, because the patriotism of their opponents, just as sincere if less admirable, stood in their way! Patriotism doubtless is like true religion. It may be entirely an expression of faith, and so need not be reasonable. And we know who have true religion. We have it.

No matter. “There is a fountain in Marrakesh,” says Mr. Cunninghame Graham, “with a palm tree near it, a gem of Moorish art, with tiles as iridescent as the scales upon a lizard’s back. Written in Cufic characters, there is this legend ‘Drink and admire.’ Read and admire; then return thanks to Allah who gives water to the thirsty and at long intervals sends us refreshment for the soul.” And we return thanks to Allah. There is that to go back.

II

When I return to a London suburb I think I shall try to cultivate something resembling one of the drains which occur here and there on the lower slopes of the Wessex moorland above the Chesil Bank. These ditches make our best horticultural efforts as vulgar as excessive begonias. The effect achieved by a ditch comes, apparently, without intent and labour. When a drain is constant over shelves of limestone from an upper spring, and then gathers into a shallow basin before losing itself in the porous desert near the sea; when it occurs so in a narrow combe with a southerly descent and is sheltered from the hard drive of westerly weather, then the still lower air is tropical, and English weeds flourish with an extravagance which hints at a fearful vitality suppressed by cultivation.

One such tiny combe is a short walk above the tamarisks and the white wall of my house. It is easy and even pleasant to carry thither those books some wilful editors consider that I ought to read, unluckily for the books and for them; because if I get well above the ditch then the smell of thyme makes the synthetic odours of a modern novel, as from a dressing table, seem a little queer. No getting round that criticism. And if I stay by the ditch then I waste all the morning standing about in that luxuriant tangle, as fascinated by it as the hover-flies appear to be. No good then to try to read any book. Foolish to expect the wit of recent prose to prove like a dragon-fly, or a lyric to soar and poise like a red admiral. On a hot day, too, the smell of the water mint would make the strongest inducement of Mille Fleurs seem very silly. Besides, one has first to get to the ditch. It is quite near, but the time one takes to reach it is ridiculous. The ditch lies on the other side of an old wall, which is built—or created, for the wall bears no evidence of design—of loose slabs of a limestone of the Lias.

That wall is the trouble. It is hard to get over it, and impossible to get round it. Most of it is hidden in a torrent of bramble, which pours headlong downhill. That wild of bramble is itself a domain in its own right. I have discovered that it is an inhabited tunnel, and the waves of hooked branches form its roof. One morning a stoat, which was leaping about in a game that needs but one player, saw me coming, and dived into a lower door of the mass. Out of other doors, till then unknown, rabbits shot at once, as by magic. It was as though this earth could erupt all the life it needs, at any moment. I suspect these hills could do very well without us, and if Downing Street were to become permanently untenanted perhaps our island would not look any the worse, from one point of view.

A good length of the wall is exposed, at one place. That part of it is, as an orderly mind would say, in need of repair. I hope it will never get it. It is a delightful ruin. Slabs of limestone are scattered about the foot of a ruin of loose rock. They vary in colour. They may be a pale buff, or a bluish grey. The surface of a slab is frequently water-worn, and then it is smooth and silky to the touch, and is lustrous. It looks warm and rich, as though the bones of earth had an unctuous marrow. And any chance fragment makes the age of the tumuli on the hill-top as recent as yesterday, for it will be loaded with fossils, the relics of a sea in which the dinosaurs lived. The chance cross-sections of many nacreous shells give such a tablet of rock the appearance of being marked with shining hieroglyphics; what reading matter for us! No wonder it takes some time to get over it, this wall! Lizards whisk into its crevices, the flickering of shadows where all is still.

Below the overturned wall is the combe in which runs the ditch. There is a dark screen of stunted Scotch firs on the edge of its far side to keep any of the Channel gusts from spilling over. The weeds below have no need to adjust themselves to the draughts. They grow as they please. Teazle and hemp-agrimony flourish into small trees. Once you begin to climb uphill through that jungle, out of the lower fringe of mint and flea-bane—it is time a better name was found for that pleasant little yellow herb of the waste and damp lands—you feel that the heat of the sun is really a direct and incessant burning. The air is humid, and strongly aromatic. The growth in that hollow might be the work of a spell. It does not move. It seems theatrical and even a little threatening in its absolute quietude and stillness. Some resolution is needed for an advance into it. The pinkish murk of the crowns of hemp-agrimony rises above the cream plumes of the meadow-sweet, and though one knows of no attraction in its flower-heads, the butterflies do. I suppose it gives them an upper platform in the light. Out in the wind you may not see a butterfly all day, but here it is usual on a sunny morning to find a gathering of scores of tortoise-shells, peacocks, and red admirals. Perhaps it is a tradition with them that this is the best retreat on the coast. It is a good tradition and should be preserved. I am not sure which of those insects is the most handsome, but I think whichever one of them happens to be arranging itself on the nearest crown, heliotropically, really presenting to the sun its coloured design, yet behaving—if I remain as still as the garden itself—as though it were doing its best to get into the right light for my benefit. Well, it is for my benefit, as well as for my humiliation, because I realise that such a design, though worked to no useful purpose that I can guess, being in that respect inferior to my own designs, yet still might be considered superior to the art of my own well-directed efforts. In any case, while that assembly of useless living colours is winged and convulsive above the weeds, on a good morning, it seems a sort of idleness to make the usual notes of a critic of books.

III

There is no harbour on the curved sweep of this bank of shingle for many miles in either direction. The line of the beach in the north curves so imperceptibly that to the eye it looks straight; towards the southern end it sweeps round like the blade of a sickle, and is as sharp in the run. The five-fathom mark is close inshore, so the first line of breakers is direct upon the shingle. The usual weather, of course, is westerly; nearly always south of west. And in that direction I suppose the next land would be the Bahamas, but I have only local maps, and can lay no exact course to what landfall is in the eye of the wind. Anyhow, there is so much ocean between us and the next land that the waves come in, with any seaward breeze, in regular and massed attacks. They growl as they charge. In summer weather like this it is a cheerful noise, for they are only playing roughly. Then they break and make the shingle fly, with a roar; and a myriad little stones, as a wave draws back, follow it with thin cries.

Both the sea and the coast look bare and barren. Terns in couples patrol up and down, and so close to me that I can see their black caps. Occasionally one will dive—two seconds under water—and it comes up with something which glitters for an instant. On the ridge of the shingle bank a little vegetation is recumbent, forming close mats and cushions, with sere stalks that quiver in the wind, as though apprehensive of their footing. The sea looks even more infertile than the desert of stones. You feel that you and your book, and the terns which now and then find something which glitters, are all the intruding life there is. But some distance away there are a few boats drawn up high and dry—they make good shelters to leeward of sun and wind, and they have a strong but pleasing smell—and at odd times, usually towards evening, a crew of six men will come along to get one out. She is launched down the slope on wooden rollers, in short runs. Half the crew go in her, and one of them throws a seine net steadily overside. The other fellows have the shore end of the seine. The boat goes round a considerable bight, and then lands the other end of the net. If you imagine that hauling in that net and its floats, when any tide is running, is nothing but fun, the men will not object if you put on your weight. That way there is much to be learned.

The gradient of the shingle is steep, and when climbing it with a line in tow the feet slip back into the polished stones at every step. What has this to do, you ask, with a reader of books? Well, what do you suppose a bookman learns at a study table about life? Make him sail a boat now and then, or haul on a net, or herd cows, or dig clay, or weed a field instead of new novels; make him work, if not for a living, then just for a change. What does he imagine keeps London’s chimneys smoking? Once I heard a rude fellow interrupt a famous political economist, who was deploring the sad ways of coal miners. “If you,” he said, “could keep warm in winter only by hewing your own coal out of the rock, you know very well you’d sooner buy a pair of dumb-bells.”

The feet crunch and slip, steadily, while the floats of the net seem to bob no nearer the shore. The weight comes with a rush just about when you feel it is better to read books than to handle seine nets. There is a heaving and a slapping on the stones. To most of us, of course, fish is fish. There is only fish. Yet one haul of the net is almost sure to bring in forms that are fishes, certainly, but which demand to be named. They are so challenging that they stick in the memory, and must be exorcised with names, as we resolve, by putting names to them, all the mysteries that trouble us.

I love fish markets. I enjoy even Billingsgate, though one does get pushed about there, early mornings, and its rain of slobber is bad for neat raiment. One of the most beautiful and terrifying scenes on this earth is a fish market of the tropics. When next you are in Tanjong Priok, do not forget, as you did last time, to go to its fish market. But this English shingle beach, barren as its stones look, is a good substitute for the Tanjong, when the seine net is fruitful. For occasionally it is fruitful, though a deal of wet and heavy labour may be wasted on six mackerel and some squids. The fishermen have no use for the squids, nor have I, but they may be enjoyed. You need only look at them, for they are like odd Chinese shapes in polished and transparent quartz, but magically illuminated from within by the principle of life. Life flushes each hyaline figure. And though, to one way of thinking, six mackerel are not so good as six thousand, yet from another they are just as good. A wonderful family, that of the mackerel! You no sooner begin to remember tunny, albacore, and bonito, than you are translated to a distant sea. There is something else, too. We never see mackerel—or, for that matter, any other fish, in London. We see only provender there. On the stones of this beach, when the red globe of the sun sits almost a-top of the western headland, and the air grows bleak, a mackerel fresh from the sea might be a big fire-opal lost to the ocean’s enchantment. Yes, you may feel a shudder of fear when overlooking the heaving pocket of the seine net.

And how little one knows of such a gathering from the gardens of the pulse! A red gurnard, with its staring eyes of violet, and the livid violet margin to its pectorals, never suggests anything for the pot. Those steady eyes look at you with disconcerting interest. There are red mullet and grey, gar-fish like green snakes, horse mackerel, herring, plaice and dabs, and fry that might be leaping shavings of bright metal. The other afternoon a salmon came in with the rest, a very king, a resplendent silver torpedo of a fellow, who scattered the shingle before he was overcome. And now, because I have been warned that I may look for even stranger messengers from the world we do not know, I am waiting for the opah, the chimæra mirabilis, the angel fish, Darkie Charlie, and the oar-fish or sea-serpent.

IV

That overcrowding of which we complain—declaring first that our cities are much too great, and then blaming our officials because the buildings do not spread quickly enough—is something we really enjoy, I suppose. We could not live without the support of the multitude. We love to walk down Fleet Street, jostling each other on the inadequate sidewalks, pressed together between the motor-buses and the shop fronts. We find the crowd, and keep with it on instinct. The fruits of solitude are astringent and we do not like them. Nothing else will explain why we would sooner sit uncomfortably with fifty strangers in a charabanc, for a journey through a land we cannot see, to a place which is exactly like the one from which we started, than stroll across country in peace at our own gait.

Yesterday I had to go to town again. It ought to have been a pleasure trip, because the town nearest to me is described on the posters, with coloured illustrations, as the kind of place for which men forsake even their London employment. When I remembered its many advertised attractions I felt almost glad that I was out of tobacco. At last I should see this notable pleasure resort with its golden sands and its joyous throng. The change would be interesting, because nothing had happened in my neighbourhood for some time, except weather. True, the tamarisk pennants had begun to rust, and in the next field there was stubble instead of oats. But, except the admonitions of a few selected books, the only sounds at an isolated cottage had been the occasional mewing of the gulls and the mourning of the sea. I had an idea, too, that the wind, as it came ashore, was glad to find our key-hole, for it desired a local habitation and a voice. The voice of the wind, I noticed, was in keeping with the monody of the sea. It is rare for any stranger to pass this house, though some porpoises went by the other afternoon. Just beyond a most individual sea-stock, which somehow is rooted and exalted on the wall at the foot of the garden, daring the light of the ocean, I saw the black forms of the little whales arch past, close in. And the other day a float, from one of the submarine nets of the days that were, drifted ashore, to have a chat with me about old times. It was the only distinguished stranger on the beach.

The pleasure resort, therefore, I expect to bring me back to a conscious existence. Not far from its station there is a magnificent hotel, with a glass verandah and palms, under which I saw men in golfing dress sitting in wicker chairs brooding appreciatively across a broad asphalted road to the gathering ground of the charabancs; and, just beyond the motor vehicles, multitudes of red and yellow and blue air-balloons were swaying aloft, though their attachment to earth was out of sight. I threaded the charabancs, pushed aside men in white ulsters who shouted at me that it was only two bob, and brought up against some iron railings. I leaned on the iron railings for support; they were providential. The beach was below; I mean that I suppose it was, for it all was out of sight except a pailful of it immediately under my eyes, which a child was treasuring. A man was beside the child, in a canvas chair. How he got there it was impossible to see, but he looked worried about it, though resigned. Rank on rank of deck chairs stood between him and the sea, all occupied by people reading newspapers, or asleep, or dead; the intermediate spaces were filled with children. The very sea was invaded. It was impossible to discern where it reached the land. The crowds went out to meet it. They slurred its margin. And on either side of that holiday-maker below me, for miles apparently, the deck chairs extended and shut him in; the sea wall rose behind him. Would he starve to death? Nobody seemed to care. Nobody lowered a rope. When I left him he had fallen asleep, luckily; perhaps to dream of freedom.

Whoever that man was, he was a voluntary prisoner. He must have sought it. If that had been the only beach on that coast, the only view of the sea to be got in the neighbourhood, it would be fair to guess that he had gambled with his hour, and had drawn a blank. Such an accident might happen to anybody, even in the desperate matter of catching the only train of the day, which one had hoped was late. Yet that will not explain his wretched position, because, whether he knew it or not, there is a beach not a great distance from where he was a prisoner on which could be lost the population of a city; but, as I happened to know, no life was there that morning except a few fishermen and some parties of sea-birds. Moreover, the views from that untenanted strand are incomparably finer and wider. It is possible to see from there what a desirable island we have, an island very far from being as overcrowded as we imagine.

Indeed, if the country about that imprisoned holiday-maker has a fault, it is that it is largely as it was when the folk who built its hut-circles and cromlechs occupied it; though I myself do not find that fault with it. For most of a long day on its uplands a traveller will see more tumuli about him than warm and smoking homesteads. Within a morning’s walk of that crowded holiday beach, a fox dropped his rabbit, which he was carrying home, as I came round a prehistoric earthwork, and trotted off reluctantly, in broad daylight. He must have been greatly surprised to find a stranger was trespassing on his hill. On another morning we startled a weasel, which at that moment had worse than startled a short-tailed field mouse. He was more reluctant to go than the fox, but he did retire into a tangle. Not for long, though. His tiny snake-like head was out in a few moments, inspecting us. Then he stole out to look for his abandoned dinner. He became very peevish when he could not find it, for we had hidden it, and explored all the ruts and tussocks in the neighbourhood in impulsive leaps and gallops. We had a leisured view of his cream and chestnut figure, darting and writhing about a roadway which has long been obsolete. Once or twice he seemed as though he were on the point of attacking us.

The land about that holiday resort has been loved by many great artists. The men who first tried to convert the English barbarians to Christianity saw its fruitfulness and settled there; but you might suppose, in spite of its colour, the nobility of its form, and the wealth of its tradition, that there was something wrong with it, for if you keep away from the tarred roads which connect the towns, and that is easy enough, you are in the England that was before the coming of the machines. Its contrast with that near holiday beach where the golden strand is invisible through pleasure-seekers suggests that the machines have so disordered our minds that we shall never again feel happy in independent contact with the earth.

V

The breakers are towering to-day. They explode above the tops of the tamarisks, which are tormented by a south-wester. If a door is opened, pandemonium enters the house. So I have been reading the poets when their subject is the sea. Byron when in a kindly mood once counselled the sea to “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.” Man, especially man the poet, with his conscious understanding of the universe, is inclined to haughtiness. He is a conqueror. He feels that he is one with the powers that roll and are blue. When he is not haughty and sombre in the presence of these powers, he includes them with those embracing thoughts which fondly gather in little children, fawns, and daisies. I do not speak with certain knowledge, but I should guess that any anthology of what poets have written about the sea must cause a mariner a little astonishment. Are they the waters he knows? Then he must be a rude and careless fellow. Now and then when turning the leaves of the book it may occur to him that perhaps the poet did not know what he was talking about. He may set out with “a wet sheet and a flowing sea and a wind that follows fast,” and bound along at the rate of knots for some stanzas; but presently he is sure to ask himself why with the wind in that quarter the good ship “leaves old England on the lee.”

Yet that is a minor difficulty. We can see that a slip of that sort might happen even to a sailor who attempted poetry, especially when one remembers the exigencies of metre and rhyming. No; what would give the mariner most surprise would be the love the poets feel for the sea, their delight in it, their robust faith in its blueness and its rolling and in its beneficent and healing qualities. It might be a public garden, maintained by a highly capable Gardener. I have a number of those special anthologies, and a re-reading of them helps me to understand why it is that the people who, as they say, love the sea, prefer to show their love only at certain favoured points of our coasts, and to leave most of the shore line to the wind and the gulls. These anthologies are not together for their assuagement; for the most part, the poems concern an ocean which can be enjoyably contemplated on a warm day, in choice company, with light thoughts hovering about, vague but gleaming, like the birds. We must have the moral support of society when loving the sea. What would happen if we were left alone with it? One lonely evening by its margin might be enough to scare most of us towards the comfort of the nearest railway station’s lamps. There is but little suggestion of this, however, in the anthologies. They brave it out. “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” or “The Sands of Dee”—such unexpected chill shadows may at times intervene, and change the look of the sea. The brightness goes. Yet only as the sun goes when a trifling cloud blows across its light and warmth. The waves soon sparkle once more according to their poetic wont, and the deep and dark blue ocean rolls on, the ships are brave and free, and jovial sailors look out on their world like happy imbeciles whose function it is to provide matter for our superior amusement. At the worst they saunter through Ratcliffe, as did the crew of the steamer Bolivar, “drunk and raising Cain,” but maintaining even then, we see, their reputation for imbecility. If they survive a dangerous voyage in a steamer, which was only a pack of “rotten plates puttied up with tar,” and meant to founder, their sailor-like protest shows merely in a riotous booze. “Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the eternal sea!” So let us adjourn to a tavern.

We appear to be incorrigibly romantic. We prefer to give the reality any name but the one which shows we have surmised its nature. It is impolite in Malay society, and even unlucky at night, to mention the dreaded tiger by name. You must refer to him in an allusive and friendly way. With a maritime people the sea is lovely, and sailors are “salts” who provide some comic relief. The more absurd we find those fellows, then the more certain it is that they are genuine “old shellbacks.” How curious it is, then, that sea-lovers are so careful about encountering the object of their affections that they abstain from it except with the support of a multitude! What we mean is, I suppose, that we enjoy leisure when in the midst of our fellow creatures, in a place where everything is done to prevent our coming under those shadows cast by matters which puzzle or distress us, and therefore should be ignored or misnamed.

The sea is such a shadow, whatever the light upon it. The soul of the sea, if it has one, is like that fabulous “soul of the war,” something from which no joy can come by brooding upon it. The sea fascinates me, I admit. I should not enjoy an English holiday away from the coast, and I should be glad if some wise person could explain exactly why. I have felt the same attraction, though then it was more acute, in the aspect of a desolate village which was under the ruthless eye of the enemy’s guns. I did not want to go there, but I went. At sunset alone on a beach where there is nothing but sea and sky and the forsaken shore, the look of the running waters, their harsh and melancholy voices, and the bleak wind which shivers the very herbage, make you feel that you are a homeless stranger. Is this your place? It does not look like it. If verses from the poets then come to your mind, it is only in an ironic way. Absurd to apostrophise that scene! Much effect upon it loving it would have. Perhaps the mere effort encourages the fearful and doubting heart of man, and for that reason we may welcome the poets and the romanticists, who give us the sensation of conquerors, which is something towards the conquest of mind over matter.

The romance of the sea, the sea that inspired exultant lyric and stately prose, the sea wonderful with the old clippers to which we have looked back wistfully, is not quite the sea, we are beginning to feel, that we used to picture. Does that sea exist? It may be ungracious to question it at this moment, so soon after our recent rapture, sincerely felt, over the Cutty Sark. Yet there it is. We are living in an age of revolt. We are interrogating much that once was never questioned. Things must prove themselves anew. What we used to value may be lumber, and must go if it is, even when it is lumber of the mind.

As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever, though it will absorb anything the poet will give it. It is as alien as the stars, which are bright over lovers, but were just as friendly to Scott’s little party when the blizzard stopped. We may feel what we like when we witness, from a ship off Sumatra, a tropical sunset. The spectacle of the billows of the uplifted Western ocean, in a winter twilight, is enough to make a man feel that he ought to have a religion; but that is only a confession of man’s wondering and questioning mind. There is more pertaining to man in a kitchen midden than in the spacious ocean when it most attracts us. Man, fronting the sea, the sea which is, inexplicably, both hostile and friendly to him because it knows nothing of his existence and his noble aims, is saddened, and is driven to meet its impersonal indifference with fine phrases, that his sense of his worth and his dignity may be rehabilitated. He knows it is absurd to pretend to any love for the sea.

Then why does the sea attract us? For it does, even though we feel now that our lyrical exultation over its moods has been oddly irrelevant. It attracted in the same way the good seamen who were so ill-rewarded for their skill and endurance when making for us what is now the wistful memory of the clippers. They were ill-used, those men. We may make their times romantic in retrospective brooding, and with a sombre imagining of the soul of man fronting the hostile elements in stoic endurance. But it will not do. So much of their heroic endurance was necessitated by facts which any sensible dog would have avoided once he knew what they were like. To live in such quarters, on such food, while doing such work, when there was no need for it, when so easily it could have been ordered otherwise, may afford matter for an Iliad, if we choose to ignore the critical intelligence, but we cannot get credit for common sense on the score of it. And that kind of sense should be the beginning of the literature of the sea, as of all literature.

Let us examine more cautiously, for example, that favourite book of the sea of ours, The Nigger. Remember that the barque Narcissus was property, just as is a farm, and might never have been on her beam ends but for an eagerness for more money. Now consider the attitude of her master and his officers to their charge, as Conrad posed them for our approval; regard the fortitude and skill of the men in circumstances which Conrad pictures so vividly that we shrink as from a physical contact; and then observe Donkin, that Cockney guy set up for the contempt of all stout and virtuous lovers of duty; and own up! Is it just? Do we know Donkin the Cockney as at once we know Singleton, the old man of the sea? We know we do not. Such treatment ashore drove agricultural labourers to the penal settlements of Australia. These facts, so important in any examination of the problem of conduct—and that, we know, is what the Nigger is,—are obscured by our admiration for Conrad’s noble tribute to Singleton, and for his pictures of a ship fighting the Southern Ocean.

No doubt it would suit some ship-owners if the sea could be accepted as a cheap and providential means of testing the fundamental quality of the souls of men; and obviously some men would stand the test well. But beyond noting that this would ease the labours of the Recording Angel, I can see nothing in its favour. There is a need in literature, as in politics, to clear the mind of cant. Men intrinsically may be of less importance than good ships and the august spectacle of the sea; but they ought not to be so to us.

But one could go on for a long time on such a subject as the sea in English literature, if one named merely the books and poems which to us seem to be right. There is, however, no need. One great sea story comprehends them all, as all who know Moby Dick know well enough. It is the greatest book in the language on ships and the sea, because it is more than that. For the White Whale, that mythical monster, is as elusive as the motive of a symphony of Beethoven’s. Did the whale ever exist? There is the music to prove it. The harpooners followed it, a shadow among the very stars. That is something like a whaling voyage, when the boats leave the seas to hurl a lance at the Great Bear. Other voyages must end. But the quest of Captain Ahab’s ship is without end; and what would we expect of a craft whose master soliloquises like Macbeth? Outside the epistles of St. Paul, is there a sermon in any book which is like Father Mapple’s to the folk in his chapel at New Bedford? The cross-bearings taken by Captain Ahab to find his ship’s position, to set, if he can, the right course for her, would bring his ship to a harbour no man has ever reached. And he did not reach it. Destiny sank him and his companions in the waste. Yet we know the high adventure of his phantom whaler continues in the hearts of men. That is where the Pequod sank.

Many years ago I was discussing the literature of the sea with a Fleet Street colleague, a clever and versatile man against whose volatile enthusiasms experience had taught me to guard myself well. He began to talk of Moby Dick. Talk! He soon became incoherent. He swept aside all other books of the sea with a free, contemptuous gesture. There was only one book of the sea, and there never would be another. I fear that a native caution has shut me from many good things in life, so I smiled at my friend; yet, in the way of a cautious man, I smiled at him with sound reason. I had not read the White Whale; I had only heard rumours of it. But I had read Typee and Omoo, and I knew them even better than my colleague; about whom I may point out that a brief experience on the Somme battlefield unbalanced his mind at last, and he died insane. Now Typee and its mate are brisk and attractive narratives of travel and adventure, exuberantly descriptive, lively with their honey-coloured girls and palm groves, jolly with the talk of seamen in forecastles of ships sailing waters few of us know, though we all wish we did, and full of the observation of an original mind in a tropic world that is no more. But they are not great literature. I knew perfectly well that the author of Typee was not the man to rise to that stellar altitude which moved my colleague to rapture and wonder. That was not Melville’s plane, and having read the American writer’s first two books, I thought a busy man, amid a wilderness of unread works, need not bother himself about this White Whale, for hardly a doubt it was just a whale.

I was wrong. My friend who was unbalanced by the war was right. I find it difficult now to speak of Melville’s book within measure, for I have no doubt Moby Dick goes into that small company of extravagant and generative works which have made other writers fertile, the books we cannot classify, but which must be read by every man who writes, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy, and the Pickwick Papers. That is where Moby Dick is, and it is therefore as important a creative effort as America has made in her history. I would sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” if that is the proper hymn, with fervour, with the deepest sense of debt and gratitude, at any patriotic service of thanksgiving over Moby Dick. That book is one of the best things America has done since the Declaration of Independence. It justifies her revolution. I would assist another body of Pilgrim Fathers to any place on earth if on their venture depended the vitality of the seed of such a book as that. The indeterminate jungle of humanity flowers and is justified in its bibles, which carry in microcosm the fortunate future of mankind, or if there be no fortune for it in its future, then in its tragic but godlike story.

If a reader of books desires to know the truth about his understanding of English prose, whether it is natural and proper, or whether his interest in it has been but suggested by the critics and the conventions of the more popular reading of his time, like the habit of going to Church or voting at elections, there is a positive test. Let him read the book by Herman Melville about a whale. If he does not like it he should not read it. As soon as imagination begins to sport with our language, then our words, that were familiar, become strange; their import seems different; you cannot see quite through them. They suggest that they are mocking us. They seem a trifle mad. They break free from our rules and behave indecorously. They are transmuted from the solid currency into invalid hints and shadows with shifting lights and implications. They startle with suggestions of deeps around us the existence of which we had not suspected. They hover too perilously near the horizon of sanity and proved things, beyond which we venture at our peril. They become alive and opalescent, and can be terrifying with the foreshadowing of powers beyond the range of what has been explored and is understood. As in all great art, something is suggested in Melville’s book that is above and greater than the matter of the story. Upon the figures in Melville’s drama and their circumstances there fall lights and glooms from what is ulterior, tremendous, and undivulged. Through the design made by the voyage of the Pequod there is determined, as by chance, a purpose for which her men did not sign, and which is not in her charter.

But if we wish to criticize the book then we might as well try to analyse the precession of the equinoxes. The book defies the literary critics, who are not used to sperm whales. While reading Moby Dick you often feel that the author is possessed, that what he is doing is dictated by something not himself which compels him to use our accepted symbols with obliquity. You fear, now and then, that the sad and steady eye of the Ancient Mariner is on the point of flaring into a mania that may prophesy, or rave. His words go to the limit of their hold on the polite and reasonable. Yet they do not break loose. It is possible that we have not sufficient intelligence to rise to the height at which Melville was considered to be mad. After all, what is common sense? The commonest sense, Thoreau tells us, is that of men asleep, which they express by snoring; and we know that we ourselves might be thought a little queer if we went beyond the plain and verifiable noises in everybody’s language.

But who has resolved poetry into its elements? Who knows what Christabel means? And who knows why a book, which was neglected for seventy years, should be accepted to-day as though light had only just come through it? I suppose our thoughts have veered. Certainly of late years much has happened to change them; and when our thoughts change, then the apparitions change about us. We change our thoughts and change our world. We see even in Moby Dick what was invisible to the people to whom the book was first given. On a winter’s night, only a year or two ago, I was intrigued into a drawing-room in a London suburb to hear a group of neighbours, who were men of commerce, discuss this book of Melville’s. They did so with animation, and the symptoms of wonder. It could not have happened before the war. Was some unseen door now open? Were we in communication with influences that had been unknown to us? I was greatly surprised, for I knew well enough that I and they would not have been found there, ten years before, discussing such a book. The polite discussion of accepted books is all very well; but this book was dangerous. One ought not, without due consideration, to set out at night from a suburban villa to hunt a shadowy monster in the sky. Heaven alone knows where they may lead us. And my wonder was the greater when a shy stranger there, who looked more like a bank manager than a South Sea Whaler, confessed during the discussion, quite casually, that Melville’s book reminded him of Macbeth. Of course, those knocks on the castle door! That was the very thought which had struck me. I looked at that man with awe, as though I was in the wake of the White Whale itself. I left that gathering much too late of a winter’s night for comfort, and a blizzard struck us. But what is a blizzard at midnight to a wayfarer who has just had happy confirmation, an unexpected signal amid the bewildering chaos and disasters of his time and culture, that he is in the dawn of another age, and that other watchers of the sky know of more light?

VI

The home-sick palm that was dying on the hotel verandah touched with a dry finger the coat sleeve of the man next to me. He picked up the leaf and idly rolled it like a cigarette. “Pleasant here, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes wandered kindly round the assembly of wicker chairs in that glasshouse. We were nearest to the door, and could feel what little air was stirring. A woman remarkable because her lips were a crimson imposition which did not restore youth to the seamed pallor of her face, and who wore a necklace of great lumps of amber, was giving chocolates to a spaniel at the next table.

“Rum little face that dog’s got,” said the man. “Wonder what the next fad in dogs for ladies will be. That one can hardly breathe, and can’t walk.”

He was amused, and touched his fair hair very lightly, for it was as accurately paraded as—I merely guess—his own platoon would be. His moustache was neat. His chin was in good taste. His eyes went seaward, where a turquoise space faded into a haze between two vague headlands, and at once he became alert and sat upright. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the Channel. “They’re destroyers out there, aren’t they?” he asked, as interested as though he hoped that truth had appeared in the offing. He carefully focussed his glasses. “And that’s a Dreadnought, I’m sure.” Yes, they seemed to be destroyers, and the other a battle cruiser.

The saturnine yachtsman, the best bridge-player in the hotel, in white duck trousers and a reefer jacket, whose yacht had not yet arrived, joined us. He said gravely, as though confirming news that was important, but till he spoke was improbable, that they were destroyers and a battle cruiser. They were, he remarked, of the latest type of destroyer. The French had nothing so good.

The lady with the dark lips left her dog and came to look seaward. “Are they really warships? How thrilling. What are they doing?”

We did not tell her. We did not know. But that cheerful and irrepressible fellow, who often intrudes an unfortunate comment which is always followed by his own laughter, though we never speak to him, blithely answered the lady. “What are they doing? Wasting taxes,” he said, and laughed, of course.

The yachtsman, whose ship was late, turned wearily and left us, the young man with the disciplined hair wound the strap round his glasses as though he had heard nothing, and the lady went to stop the noise her dog was making, for the old fellow sitting with his nurse was glaring malignantly at the spaniel over his shoulder.

“Only thing against this place is, one can’t get any golf,” my young friend complained, and began to hum a tune that was popular about the bandstand. He continued to look out to sea; his eyes avoided the asphalted promenade where the charabancs assembled. The beach was out of sight, but it must have been crowded, for a multitude of air-balloons swayed above it. Shrill far-off cries came from there. “Sounds as if the sea-serpent were among the girls,” said the young man. “Let’s go and look.”

We strolled over. We leaned on the iron rails of the concrete wall and looked down on the holiday-makers. The beach was sunk beneath deck chairs and recumbent forms. The incoming tide was compressing the multitude against the sea wall, and two more pleasure-seekers could have found no place down there.

“That nipper—that one in the red varnished breeches—he seems to have all the sand there is.” My friend pointed to a child with a toy bucket beneath. “Doesn’t look too golden, does it?”

Our eyes roved. “I say, look at this fellow,” pleaded my companion and nudged me. A man stood near us leaning on the rail. He was surveying the people from the cities taking their pleasure. It was a lumpy figure, in rough clothes, in old velveteen riding breeches, and leggings that were almost globular. His cap, perched well forward on a tousled black head, gave him a look of crafty loutishness. His jowl was purplish and enormous, and that morning’s razor had polished it. The light actually glinted on the health of that broad mask, which was as solid and placid as that of an animal.

“Pretty bovine, that fellow. Genuine bit of local clay all right,” my friend whispered. “Shouldn’t like to upset him, though. Look at his blessed arms!”

But I had, when they were bare. They are chestnut in colour, and swell in an extraordinary way when they haul on a seine net or a bogged wagon.

“If I knew how long it would take him to think about it I’d ask him what he thinks of this crowd. Anyhow, the poor fellow wouldn’t last five minutes in the place where these people come from.” Some joyous screams from the water appeared to confirm this. Perhaps the quick wits of the merry folk below had divined even our thoughts. The bovine face stared on, its chin projecting a pipe.

“He looks healthy enough,” commented my friend, “but the clay has got into his system. Do you think he has a rational opinion about anything? What makes him move about?” At that moment the man slowly raised his bulk, looked steadily at his pipe for some moments, then peered seawards, and went away, without a glance at us.

I saw him again some miles from the hotel, where he stood at the end of a path that led up to his farm, beside a patch of lusty hog-weed which was as tall as himself. He nodded, and grinned.

“Had enough of that place? I been back some time. Thought the wind was shifting.” He glanced up at the cirrus with his piggy eyes. “Ought to be mackerel in the bay this evening. Think I can smell ’em. Water looks like mackerel.... Are you passing Jimmy Higgs? Tell him to get the crew. Pretty good catch, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ll be the first boat.

“I’ll be along by the time you’re ready,” he said, turning away. “Got the cows to see to now.” He jerked his thumb towards the distant holiday-makers. “Nothing for them to eat unless we see to it.”

VII

The farmhouse with its outbuildings, all built of a mellowed limestone, from a little distance could have been only an exposure of the bare bones of the hillside. The group of grey structures were formless till the sun was through the mist that morning and touched the lichened roof of the house into a rectangle of orange light. That was the sign that it was a human habitation, for weathered buttresses and grey hummocks of rock are not infrequent on the slope above our walled garden by the shingle. The gaunt ribs of the earth show through its thin turf and shaggy tufts of furze and bracken. It surprises a visitor that England should look so abandoned and desolate, yet so bright and tranquil.

But desolation is not the same as darkness. The life on those steep and barren uplands is abundant; and, though useless, it evidently springs from the original fount, which seems to be as full as at the beginning. Nothing, we discovered, as we climbed to the moor, had been withheld from the bracken because it is an unprofitable crop. It was a maze, too, of the dry tracks of wild creatures, as though it were a busy metropolis the citizens of which were all absent for the day. The day now was radiant. The furze, which made vivid islands of new green and gold in wide lakes of purple, for the heather was in bloom, suggested that we have yet to learn the full meaning of profit. It was tough as well as effulgent, and hinted of staple crops for uses beyond any that figured in the news of the day. Those crops are not quoted. Perhaps we know less about markets than we thought. The morning was so good that one felt nonsensical.

Yet, as the visitor from London said to me: “What markets are you talking about? Don’t be absurd. And what good would they be to us if we knew them?” He wanted no transcendental nonsense, which was only a lazy trick to escape from the facts. Bracken and furze, in modern society, were enemies to be abolished. They were in the way. They ought to be mutton and butter. He regarded any other view of them as a fantasy, which had no validity except to the sentimental. “Of course,” he said, pausing, as we reached the height, at the surprise of broad valleys and hills beyond, “I enjoy this as much as you do. It’s a fine day, so far—though something is working up in the southwest, by the look of it.” He swept an arm of happy understanding over the peace and splendour of the earth. “All that is lovely merely because we have agreed to call it so. That’s its full title to loveliness. It does not exist in its own right. When we choose to change it into something different we shall. That right belongs to us. The dyes of those flowers come of fortuitous chemistry, and the forms of those hills of the chance of upheaval, the textures of the rocks, and the weather. We call the colours lovely and the forms of the hills noble. That is only our view of it. They are promoted to the titles we give them.” We strode on, the gods of the earth to which we could give any shape we chose. It certainly was a fine day.

He thought, indeed, this visitor, that the fact that we enjoyed a fine day was its sole justification. As to the gold of the furze, those bushes would as soon see us perish of exposure under their thorns as exhilarate us with their new gold. And we could please ourselves about it. It did not matter to the furze bushes whether we perished or admired. And those cushions of rosy heath, pendant in half-circles over a scar in the ground where white flints were set in buff-coloured earth which seemed self-luminous, what were they but an aesthetic arrangement of our own? In themselves they were nothing. They were not related to anything, except to what was in our own minds. We made them rational because we preferred them so. But the moor was not anything in reason at all. Perhaps that lovely arrangement had never been noticed before, and the chance brush-work of the next storm might obliterate the beautiful irrelevancy for ever. Then where would it be?

I had no answer to make. There is no answer to be made that is valid for all of us. The arrangement of rose, white and buff continued its irrelevant appeal, without any additional emphasis to assist its dumb case. The sun was warm. The air, when it stirred, smelt of herbs. The critic’s little daughter, who might have been listening to her seniors giving this world the reasons for its existence, she, too, made no sign. She was merely unquestionably bright and good, like the rose and gold, and smiled like the sun, without a word.

Possibly the critic was right. There was no sense in it all. Only our own well-being assured us the moorland was good; the coincidence was happy. “Wait and see what the place is like when the weather changes,” he said.

It changed. A fog drifted in from the sea. One hill-slope would be shining and its neighbour expunged. The time came when all the distant view had dissolved. The light went out of the colours. As we tried to find our way home in the growing murk it was noticeable that there were more thorns than gold to the furze. The tracks confused us. They were not made by creatures having our rational impulses. They lead nowhere. As we came round an old tumulus an object moved ahead of us. It vanished, unrecognised, in the mist. It left behind a dead rabbit. We were sorry to have missed a sight of that fox.

Its victim had only just died. Its moist eye looked up at us, apparently in bright understanding. We examined it, admired its soft, warm fur, and then we left it, in an unattractive huddle, on the turf. “We could continue our little discussion on nature,” he said, “with that murdered rabbit as a text, couldn’t we? Not so pretty as the purple heather?” He smiled while waiting for my answer.

I looked back at the victim. The critic’s little daughter was stooping over it, tenderly setting bunny in comfort under the shelter of a bush. Her compassionate figure was all I could see in the fog behind us.

VIII

What particularly attracted me, this autumn morning, was a blade of grass under the tamarisk hedge. There are not many such mornings, even in the best of years. It was as though the earth were trying to restore one’s faith completely for the winter, so that the soul should hibernate in security and repose—live through hard times, as it were, on the bounty of this gift of fat. The branches of the tamarisk, usually troubled, for they face the Atlantic, were in complete repose. Their green feathers were on young stems of shining coral. The sea was as placid as a lower sky. On some days here, even a modern destroyer, making for shelter, looks a poor little thing, utterly insignificant, an item of pathetic flotsam in a world which treats it with violent derision; indeed, the treatment is greatly worse than that, for it comes obviously of magnificent indifference to man the disturber and destroyer. It is as much as you can do to keep your glasses fixed in concern on that warship, which now and then is cruelly effaced. For our English seas are as fickle as is faith in the winds of doctrine.

But on this morning a sheldrake, diving about in five fathoms just off shore, was more noticeable than a fleet of ships would be on other days. When he dived he sent rings over the blue glass. The sea was like that. The distant cliffs were only something about which you were quite sure, yet but faintly remembered. It was easy to believe news had arrived that morning which we should all be glad to hear, and that somehow the sheldrake had heard the word already. And there was that blade of grass under the tamarisk. There were many blades of grass there, of course, but this one stood out. It topped the rest. It was arched above its fellows. Its blade, of bluish green, was set with minute beads of dew, and the angle of the sunlight was lucky. The blade was iridescent. It glittered from many minute suns. It flashed at times in a way to which grass has no right, and the flashes were of ruby and emerald. You may search up and down Bond Street with the ready money in your pocket, and you will not find anything so good. Yet I could not collect my treasure. I had to leave it where I found it. Is treasure always like that?

I abandoned it, feeling much more confident and refreshed than ever I do when a book of philosophy confirms, with irrefragable arguments, some of my private prejudices, and sat on a hummock of thyme to watch the sheldrake. Then a man of letters came and sat beside me. I did not tell him about my feast of grass. What would have been the good? I did not recall that that kind of refreshment is down in any book; for Nebuchadnezzar’s attempt on grass, we may recall, was somewhat different. We began, instead, to talk of Bond Street, or rather, of literary criticism, about which I know nothing but my prejudices; and they, possibly, were found somewhere in the neighbourhood of that street, and therefore have no relationship to the morning dew. I noticed that the critic himself seemed unsettled that morning, though whether the blue of the sky had got into his head to change the Oxford blue, or whether he, too, had been feeding on honeydew, it is not for me to say. One should never, except with a full sense of the awful implication, call another person mad; for the improvident beauty of the world, placed where we either miss it, or destroy it, might serve as evidence of the madness of God. It is possible that we may even lightly blaspheme when we call a strange fellow a little mad. Nevertheless, the critic’s words at least startled me. He was tying a knot in a stalk of thrift, and he remarked casually: “It seems to me you can bring all art down to one test.” He gave me that test, which is a passage beginning “Consider the lilies of the field.”

Perhaps we had better not. Perhaps a consideration which began with a lily might tarnish, if it were allowed, more than the glory of wise kings. To begin with such a challenge to one’s opinions is unwise, because it would not allow the consequent argument a chance to find approval for the things we most admire. But evidently those lilies of the field were of importance to the commentator who once begged his fellow-men to consider them, or objects so common by the wayside could not have been marked by him in favour. He so exalted those common weeds that they diminished, though that was not their aim, the cherished national tradition of a great monarch. Is that an approach to a just criticism of art? It may be so. After that accidental discovery of the wasted treasure behind me it was impossible to reject at once so disastrous a theory. I am almost prepared to believe there may be something in it. It is possible that scientific critics, who judge by fixed criteria of analysis and comparison, and who are startled as much by a show of life in a book as an anatomist would be if the corpse moved under his knife, had better regard it; unless, like the girl in melodrama, they would prefer to take the wrong turning. I heard a farmer the other day calling this a bad year. But what did he want? If he had climbed out of his fields to where the young green and gold of the furze was among the purple heather he would have seen that the fount of life was just as full as ever.

Seaward there is only light, and the smoke of a distant steamer low down. The westerly gales have ceased at last, as if there were no more reason to bring ships home to a land that not long ago was populous, but now is not. The smoke of that steamer in the southwest remains as a dark blur, the slowly fading memory of a busy past, long after she must have lifted another landmark. In all the wide world, from the beach as it is to-day, that distant trace of smoke is the only sign of human activity.

In the frail shine of this autumn morning, reminiscent and tranquil, the broad ridge of shingle, miles long, the product of centuries of storms, appears unsubstantial. There are, on its summit and terraces, mirages of blue pools and lakes where no water can be. No breakers explode on it to-day. The sea is a rigid mirror. The high downs behind the shingle, that have been dark with an antiquity of heather, tumuli, and frowning weather, are happily released to the sky, and are buoyant as though raised by an inner glow.

Not many days in the year are like this. Two, or three? And the resemblance of our own coast to a southern shore is now remarkable. The old wall of the steading behind the beach is not merely whitewashed. That wall’s brightness this morning might be, like moonshine, the assurance of what once stood there. Only the dark feathers of tamarisk above it pretend to substance, and they are drowsy after the buffeting of a wild summer, and bend asleep over the wall. That secluded place has grown familiar to me, but on a day like this, with the strong smell of decaying sea litter—long cables of pulse have been laid along the shingle by continual hard weather—and my footsteps the only sound, I approach that wall as if it were an undiscovered secret on an unfrequented strand of the Tortugas. No need to go out of England for adventure. Adventure is never anywhere unless we make it. Chance releases it; some unexpected incidence of little things. The trouble is to know it in time, when we see it. If we are not ready for it, then it is not there.

This morning I had the feeling that I was much nearer that fellow in the round barrow above the steading, whoever he used to be, than ever I felt on a glum day. Such autumn light as this is mocking. When the weather is overcast the tumulus is deeply sundered by time, but a September sun makes yesterday of it. Almost hidden in the fig-wort and hemp-agrimony of a dry ditch behind the shingle is a rusty globe, a dead mine of the war, and from an embankment above it I picked out a flint arrowhead; or rather, to-day’s odd and revealing shine betrayed it to me there. But in the gay and mocking light of such a morning both weapons belong to the same time in man’s short history. They were used in the same war. They will be separate from us, and both will become equally ancient, when we are of another mind and temper. When will that be? We may have to maintain ourselves in such light as this, regardless of the weather.

For what this oblique light makes clear is that there is a life and a tendency which goes on outside our own, and is indifferent to our most important crises. It is not affected by them. No doubt it affects us; but we do not often surmise that. It is lusty and valid, and we may suppose that it knows exactly what it is about. We may be too proud in our assurance that this other life has a less authentic word about its destiny than has been given to us. At sunrise to-day, on the high ridge of the shingle which rose between me and the sea, six herons stood motionless in a row, like immense figures of bronze. They were gigantic and ominous in that light. They stood in another world. They were like a warning of what once was, and could be again, huge and threatening, magnified out of all resemblance to birds, legendary figures which closed vast gulfs of time at a glance and put the familiar shingle in another geological epoch. When they rose and slowly beat the air with concave pinions I thought the very Heaven was undulating. With those grotesque black monsters shaking the sky, it looked as though man had not yet arrived. Anyhow, he was a mere circumstance—he could come and go—but a life not his persisted, and was in closer accord with whatever power it is that has no need to reckon time and space, but alters seas and continents at leisure.