The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
I can bear the thought of them no more. I must get back to realities
and to things loved.
I must return to my Nona.
We came to Berry Head and opened Torbay.
It is with Torbay as with the Fowey coast. I have known it only under
such weathers as leave a hint of heaven: never have I opened Torbay in
passing Berry Head but it was morning, with the young sea delighting in
a leading breeze; and once, a draught to last forever, I came up under
such a dawn and with so tender a dying crescent in the sky that I spent
an hour in Paradise.
What are those days of glory? They are not memories: are they
premonitions, or, are they visions?
They are not memories, though perhaps Plato thought them so, and our
modern pantheists, with Wordsworth for their spokesman here, called and
believed them so.
I will hope that they are premonitions, hints granted beforehand of a
state to be attained. At the worst they are visions of such a state
lying all about us, the home of the Blessed, which we are permitted to
glimpse at for a moment, even those of us sad ones who may never reach
that place.
As for those who call such joy illusion, they are of that great _Schola
Stultorum_, that new herd of fools peculiar to our day; they who have
made the discovery that Something comes out of Nothing, who pour quarts
out of pint-pots and give emptiness creative power.
Neglect them, but ask yourself, as I do when such rare moods are
granted, whether they be visions or premonitions, and hope that
premonitions they may be. For certainly they are the supports of this
life, and we creep from one to another like travellers from inn to inn,
and when they fail us, the world will be no more endurable.
Such thoughts I had—and have had repeatedly—in this run of water
under a morning sky. It is inhabited, is all that air and sea, by
something beneficent—at least, I have always found it so.
But there are pictures more definite and of the hard past which come
into my mind every time I round Berry Head and see Torbay before me.
And of all such thoughts that crowd upon me when I pass the point, and
open that deep recess of water, two stand out most vividly. It was here
on the southern shore of the Bay that the Dutch, and other mercenaries
of William of Orange, landed for the destruction of the last poor
remnants of English kingship; it was here that a Catholic priest
discovered the first ancient human relics, and thus started our modern
controversies.
This last is a most interesting story and little known. Here is what
would seem to have happened:
There is a cave near Torquay in which the water, passing, I think,
through limestone, leaves a deposit. Under this deposit a Catholic
priest in the place, a certain Dr. McEnery (I suppose, an Irishman,
but I have not read sufficiently about him) found a number of human
bones; associated with them were barbaric implements and the remains
of animals, some of such tropical kinds as can no longer live in our
climate, others wholly extinct.
He came to the very just conclusion that he had here evidence of an
antiquity for man far removed beyond the bounds which had been set by
the idolators of the written word of Scripture. He started that ball
rolling which has bounded down so devious a course through our time,
until to-day the grossly ignorant talk of an imaginary being, whom
they call a ‘cave man,’ and the half-learned can bamboozle the public
at will with the pretence that they know all about what they call the
‘prehistory’ of our race.
That man, as man—I mean man as we know him (not imperfect man)—has
lived upon this earth for very much more than ten thousand years,
we are now pretty sure; and we owe the first step to this same Dr.
McEnery—whose name no one hears. The later discoveries in the Somme
Valley we also owe to another priest, and that is as it should be.
What a turmoil so simple a discovery aroused in Biblical countries, to
be sure!
But that turmoil was but the forerunner of something prodigious:
nothing less than the shaking, splitting, and at last the collapse
of all the foundations upon which had been erected half the modern
culture of the West.
For one may say that the modern culture of the West lay after 1600 in
two halves, increasingly different one from the other: the Catholic
culture and the Protestant.
Now, on the Catholic culture, physical discovery of any kind, in
geology, or biology, or chemistry, can have no effect, save that of
some slight expansion, that is, some addition to the general powers of
its members; just as the learning of mathematics at Cambridge will not
transform, but only somewhat extend the general culture of an English
public school boy. The culture of an English public school is founded
upon a system and tradition which mathematics do not affect one way
or another, save somewhat to increase them. The Catholic culture is
founded on a philosophy which physical science does not affect.
In the Catholic culture of Europe, and especially among the French, who
are the leaders of all our discussions, the opposing camps were upon
the one side those possessed of Catholic dogmatic theology, a strong
metaphysical structure, and, on the other, those sceptics who denied
and ridiculed the claims of such a theology, standing upon the platform
of what they called pure reason; and this ideal of pure reason was as
unaffected by material science as that of its opponents. The sceptical
school of the Great Encyclopædists (which is still and will long remain
the one half of the Catholic culture in Europe) was in no way shaken
because certain of its adventitious conceptions, in no way connected
with its general philosophy, were proved false. The profound effect
of Voltaire was not lessened through his ridicule of fossils, and his
conclusion that the imprint of fishbones upon Alpine rocks came from
the dried herrings of mediæval pilgrims. These conceptions were proved
false, but Voltaire’s power did not depend upon their truth. Nor were
the Encyclopædists’ speculations upon some original, simple, incorrupt,
and admirable savage so essential to their doctrine that the full
discovery of the real savage affected their influence.
No more, on the other side, on the side of those practising and
affirming religion of the Catholic culture, did any material
discoveries upset doctrines which were not connected with specific
material instances, but were transcendental. It mattered nothing to the
two great antagonists, Belief and Unbelief, in Catholic Europe whether
man had existed politically on earth for five, ten, twenty, or fifty
thousand years. Their quarrel was on another and infinitely higher
plane. The vast progress of modern physical discovery has somewhat
extended the powers of either camp, but has not changed the main issue,
which was joined far earlier, from before the middle of the eighteenth
century, and which turns on the great question ‘Is Religion from God or
from man?’ No mere physical discovery can affect the Catholic culture
as a whole, whether in its clerical or in its anti-clerical branches.
The ruin of the Darwinian nonsense during the last twenty years has
been largely effected by anti-clerical biologists: the greatest
achievements in research—Pasteur’s among others—have been the work of
practising Catholics.
But with the Protestant culture of the North it was far otherwise.
_That_ had been based upon a book, and the literal interpretation
of that book. It had, of course, its profound spiritual origin, an
excessive and enthusiastic passion for lonely communion with God. But
its rock of authority was the Book.
The fragments of Hebrew folklore which the Catholic Church affirms
to be inspired, had always been used by that Church as examples,
positive and negative, in support of her doctrines; and particularly as
mystical, often allegorical, prophetic figurings of one great event
that was to come: the Incarnation. But, in the Protestant culture,
these Old Testament stories were _lived_. They had become flesh and
bone of their readers. The very characters therein took on a divine
air; the cruelties, the obscenities, the puerilities, equally with
the occasional sublime actions and sayings of those Old Testament
characters, became in men’s minds the attributes of demigods.
This absorption in the ancient relics of Hebrew Scripture produced
a corresponding vivid attachment to the pictures aroused by their
reading. The allegories became for men of the Protestant culture
concrete and undoubted events, taken for granted as historical and,
which is much more, made the basis of all daily life. Adam and Eve, for
instance, were to Milton, and to all who read Milton, for one hundred
and fifty years and more, a particular man and woman, of an aspect
remembered from the frontispiece of the family Bible. They lived in
a particular place not unlike the finer landscapes of England. They
walked with God and with his angels as one walks in a garden; the
humans and their majestic companions sauntered over real lawns, upon
real feet, taking steps some two feet long—real steps. And the couple
ate, not even a vague fruit, but a particular apple to their hurt. So
it was right through. On such pictures, taken to be plain history and
history inspiring all action, was the new culture of the seventeenth
century built in the North.
When all this structure was blown to pieces in the nineteenth century
by those discoveries of which this priest’s at Torquay was the
first, it did not follow that the tradition and momentum of the old
superstition would disappear as easily. Far from that. The main effects
of the old Bibliolatry are with us to-day in London, and in Berlin, in
Scandinavia, in the United States; though divergent and under various
forms, the effects of Bibliolatry have clearly produced a something
in common which still profoundly separates the Protestant from the
Catholic culture.
The upsetting of the Bible authority, then, did not produce in
the nations of Protestant culture a revolt against the Protestant
rule of life. That is not what happened. But what did happen was
a bewilderment, a chaos, a disintegration of all the solid things
which had stood firm in the North from the first generation of the
seventeenth century down to the first generation of the nineteenth.
The Protestant culture did not separate into a clerical and an
anti-clerical, a traditional and practising as against a mocking
temper: it moved in the main as one. But it moved, eddying and changing
continually, like a great cloud of dust following on the crash of a
building. It continued, after the catastrophe, to whirl and change: so
much so, that no one can tell at this moment, or could tell under the
very different spirit of, say twenty years ago, what form the ultimate
settlement may take.
For there is no settlement yet. Even to-day, even in the (for the
moment) popular mythology of cave men and prehistory and the rest of
it, there is nothing fixed. Characteristically enough, the guesswork
is turned into dogma, and faith reposes on concrete images. But the
dogmas change every few years, and the images as well. All within the
murk is still changing, and will continue to change, until the dust of
the explosion has come slowly to earth and has stratified. When that
happens there will be a new heresy. I wonder what it will be like?
Well, the man who first lit the match, the man who was the author of
the explosion, was Dr. McEnery, Catholic priest, of Torquay.
He was not listened to. The truth seemed too fantastic. The great
Cuvier had dealt with so many hoaxes of the kind (men having sent him,
among other things, the bones of fossil elephants by way of pre-Adamite
giants) that even in a rational society there would have been