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 have just said that the Looe Stream is the gate into the Sussex seas; and so it is, unless you go outside those rocks called Owers, which is a long way round: for the Owers run miles out to sea. The Looe Stream runs like a river in the midst of the sea between the long-concealed flats and little rocks just under water at low tide of Selsea Bill and the reefs of the Owers outside. There is nearly three fathom in it at low spring tides, and the entry is marked by a couple of buoys just as one might mark the entry to a harbour: also, as with the entry to a harbour, you had best take the Looe Stream on the flood. So did we on that morning after the storm make our way against the ebb until we had Selsea Bill close before us, and we caught the flood through the Looe by the afternoon. There I saw, upon the left, the pole and basket of the Mixen, that sea-mark which is my Sussex gatepost. And from that point, taking a course just south of east, I carried on for Beachy all through the night. The wind held, strangely unchanged, and no more rain fell. It was one of the longest spells of similar weather, exactly suited for my little boat under all plain sail, that I had known. For when the dull morning broke (and it was hazy) she still carried the same wind in her sails. Indeed, it was so thick that I was a little anxious to catch the chalk precipice against the east and know where I was. There is a little inset making into the Bight of Sussex once one is beyond the Owers, and I might have been carried—especially with some little leeway—inside the point. When I did see land it was not Beachy at first, but, a good way off on the port bow, a murky gleam, from the Seven Sisters: but then, quickly after, I saw dimly on a grim sky the sharp, perpendicular line of the Head and the stump of the lighthouse at its foot. My course had been well kept: I was heading well outside. There is little to tell of that run, for it was uneventful. We had that day, somewhere about the Royal Sovereign Shoals, a dropping of the wind and its rising again from offshore, north of west, but nothing heavy in it, serving us well for our course up-Channel, the weather still too thick to see much of the land between Beachy and Dungeness. It was in full darkness that we made and passed that light and, with the next day, we still carried on to Dover. I have a grudge against that great harbour of Dover: mainly, I suppose, because I have had bad luck in it, but also because it seems to me so wasted an effort of human energy. It has founded one of our new peerages, and while it was being made there was any amount of political talk about it, and also about the electoral conditions of its town. Those who know assure me that it was of vast service in the war, but I have read recently, I know not on what authority, that the Navy has abandoned it. It must always have been a difficult place to enter, with its two narrow gates and the violent tide across them. There is nearly always a lump outside, where the sea shows its annoyance at having this obstacle thrust into it; and trying to get in with a small boat like mine and in a light wind is a trial. There is peril of missing the entry in the rush of the tide, unless one comes close up to the breakwater-heads. If one does this, one never knows but that some great death-ship, on its way to Calais or Ostend, will leap out suddenly upon one as one opens the harbour. Moreover, there are all manner of regulations which I do not understand, as to where you may drop anchor, and as to where you may not, and once, when I left the boat for some weeks in secure care, I found her on my return completely covered with the soot of His Majesty’s coal. We put in that day for water and to provision. We stayed but a little while, coming in by the southern and going out by the eastern gate, and passing as we did so that sad wreck of munitions wherein lay, I believe, the bodies of men entombed. My companion took the helm up past the Foreland in a rather fresher breeze than we had yet had, and with more north in it, and I looked back along our wake and thought how here our time has managed to change too thoroughly what was the most famous sight of western Europe, the entry into England. Although the old harbour (which lay between the hills—where the gasworks are to-day) had long ago gone dry, yet the marks of it and much human ingenuity added, maintained the port of Dover; and through that port went the prodigious traffic which bound this province of Christendom to the rest. Here, throughout the intense activity of the Middle Ages, passed and repassed the blood of the State, and the life running outwards from the heart of Europe at Rome. During all that time, on to days I can myself remember, this main majestic entry into England presented something of the same aspect to the traveller coming in from the sea. There was the town in its cleft; the masts in the little harbour; the castle on its height. Now, to my eye, the huge new haven, with its miles of wall, has changed and spoilt all this. But, alas, something worse, more dreadful and more definite has come by way of change. Something which cannot be undone and which has subtly stolen their meaning not only from old Dover, but from the great keels of the fleet and its guns. You may see the memorial of it marked upon the turf: the memorial of the place where the first man (and he a Frenchman), having flown the Channel, landed upon the sacred island, without leave of the sea. That was a date for you, if you like! That was a year to remember! In history perhaps, many a generation hence, it will be made a dividing point between the old and the new relations of the peoples of Europe. It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving. It is absorbing to watch change coming upon a whole civilisation. The thirty years of active manhood, the forty years of consecutive experience and memory which a man of my age can remember, the years 1884-1894-1924 form, perhaps, the best period for watching such things that we Europeans of the West have had since the Renaissance. That may sound extravagant. The very great change introduced by the use of coal, and the machinery dependent upon coal, one hundred and fifty years ago, produced, I suppose, greater outward effects; but the spiritual fruits of the change were not ripe till our day. The characteristic of our time is the crisis in the _philosophy_ of Western Christendom: the thing began with Voltaire, but it has come to a head somewhat suddenly, following long after the material change. For the great characteristic of the mental change between, say, 1885 and the present day, is the final segregation of Catholic philosophy from an opponent mood. That is the formula now applying to all the Occident, to all the one group of human beings who are variously called the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, the English, the more southern Germans of the Rhine and the Danube, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Irish, and the Scotch. It is this group of human beings which conducts the world and will probably continue to conduct it; for it has the best physical stock, the greatest energy, the greatest intelligence, and the strongest and most continuous will: and its colonies can never replace it. It has always been at the head of humanity, even before it acquired, through its conversion to Catholicism fifteen hundred years ago, those vast new powers which have since distinguished it. Before Western Europe had opportunities for conducting the world as a whole, it was still manifestly the greatest thing in the world, and when its soldierly adventurers and seamen, and its growing mastery over physical things gave it opportunity it took a place from which I do not think it can be dislodged. Most modern men assume a shifting of the headship of the world from our regions to some other; as to Asia or to the New World. But as they base their calculation upon mere measurement they are sure to be wrong. They make their estimate of human affairs on the analogy of physical science: counting only what can be exactly calculated and noting only the growth or decline of numbers, in men, in goods, in speed. But human affairs are moved from deeper springs altogether. A spirit moves them. It is by the acceptation, the denial, the renewal of philosophies that this society of immortal mortals is marked, changed, or restored. The Catholic philosophy is, I say, to-day, at last clean separate from its opponent. Its opponent is losing all trace of Catholic dogma. That is the special mark of our time. It is important to emphasise this position; unless we understand it, the future which is upon us will not be understood. In the sixteenth century the unity of Western Christendom made shipwreck. But there did not then arise (as would seem to have been the necessary sequence when one reads the great men of the Renaissance, Erasmus, or any of the lesser ones) an immediate separation between the Catholic exposition of the world, the Catholic revelation, and a new scepticism. The process was much slower than that. It covered nearly four hundred years, and it went, as is a habit of human change, through very tortuous channels before it settled into its final form—which has now arrived. First came a curious process of irrational selection in dogma. Nearly all those who were reacting against the authority of Catholic truth preferred to select a bundle of Catholic dogmas, and even of Catholic disciplines out of the total and to reject the remainder. Most of those in revolt, for instance, accepted the Incarnation and the Trinity; nearly all accepted the personal immortality of the soul. The general Catholic discipline of society, such as property, indissoluble monogamous marriage, and the rest was still taken for granted. For more than a century the growing division appeared as a contrast between Catholic tradition and what was called ‘Protestantism’ in its various forms, the latter presenting bodies of doctrine chosen out of Catholicism, but less than the total of Catholic doctrine and discipline. The new selections produced, of course, a harvest of social results more tangible and concrete than the abstract differences in dogma and formula, and there arose a Protestant culture of the North side by side with the remaining Catholic culture of the South. The geographical division was purely accidental. Nothing could be more Catholic than the Irish of Donegal, nor more Protestant than the Huguenots of Nîmes, and the living centre of Protestantism was rather in southern France than in any other one region of the West. But to this there succeeded another phase which, again, was not as logical as it should have been: a respectable development called ‘rationalism,’ which arose in France and gradually permeated Europe. Its highest moment of expression was the middle of the eighteenth century, its greatest pen that of Voltaire, and perhaps its clearest intelligence that of Diderot. This short-lived but attractive philosophy reduced its main dogmas, or postulates, to as small a number as possible, and proposed that nothing should be accepted save upon the criteria admissible by all sane men: particularly the criteria of the senses and common experience. It still tended to preserve a certain small but fundamental proportion of Catholic dogma; but it did so on the plea that such dogma was (as it imagined) universal to the human race, or at least to all sane men. Most of its adherents—not all of them—postulated one,