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
road throughout.’ He is pretty certain to be right.
On the parallel of physical science, this habit of prophecy as the
confirmation of judgment spread to things, in which, by their nature,
mechanical judgment is impossible.
Another negative source was ignorance, and especially ignorance of the
past. Our moderns have more and more lost the knowledge of the past.
They have been taught to despise it; they think of it first as of
something foreign and odd; later, if they study, as of something very
different from what it was. They, therefore, miss the lessons of the
past, and especially the chief lesson, which is that the developments
of society follow no mechanical process; that their way is not the way
of an arrow, but of a serpent. Ignorant of this, men fall into the
simple error of taking the tangent to the curve, of prolonging the
actions of causes immediately before their eyes, and of conceiving the
future in terms of the present, as children do. Hence these confident
assertions that in so many years such and such a country will have
grown to such and such a population: that such and such a language will
have become dominant—and so forth.
But it is to be noted that this process is not often applied to evils,
for men do not like to face an evil future.
I notice in this political or social prophecy one very strange
omission: they never by any chance allow for that cause which is the
major cause of change in human affairs: I mean religion.
Thirteen hundred years ago, the great fact before all men’s eyes
was the Roman Empire of the East. The commander of the armies, a
half-divine being seated in Constantinople, was the centre of the
world and the acknowledged head of all that counted, from the Atlantic
to the Persian borders, and from the Northern barbarism to the
desert. Pressure menaced from the Persian hills and from the Tigris,
and there was pressure from savage hordes in the mountains, and in
the plains beyond to the north. Had men then been in the habit of
prophesying after our foolish modern fashion, they would have told you
this or that, but all in terms of the Empire, or the German and Slav
barbarians, or the Persians; and while they so thought in terms of the
only things they knew, there had already arisen, in a place remote and
utterly insignificant, among tribes of a few hundreds without power,
culture, or tradition, under conditions utterly negligible, the flaming
spirit of Islam.
To our own modern world there must come either some vast religious
reaction, or some vast religious novelty, or both. It is inevitable;
for men live by religion. Yet no one speaking of the future takes it
for one moment into account. I know of but one book, a book of singular
genius, in which the thing appears, though tentatively; and that is in
Jefferies’ fine vision called ‘After London.’ But even Jefferies did
not make of it the main source of change. In his day men had already
begun to lose the significance of religion in human affairs.
The great light of the Forelands on the weather side, the Goodwin
Lights on the lee, stood like the lamps of a street in the fall of that
darkness as, with the tide beneath us, we ran up for London River. But,
the wind coming from more northerly, we had to choose between beating
up and standing out.
We did the last, though the wind was falling, because that lane of
water is full of the world’s shipping, and it was plainer to keep a
course. By midnight the breeze had died down to a light air, and,
somewhat later, the sky now very clear, we bore up on the other tack,
the starboard tack, and went round till we had the dying air right
abeam, and so came under brilliant stars within the point of Thanet
land and dropped anchor and slept.
But early the next morning we woke to see the sun rising up undimmed
over the wide North Sea, cut sharply by the calm horizon. It promised a
warm and kindly day....
I could wish that this book, already so long as to have become
intolerable to the reader, the writer, the printer, and all others
concerned in its production, already so heavy as to have become a
business to the publisher, the carman, and the railway people (if,
indeed, they transport it, but I have known of books transported in
bulk on shipboard, and sinking to the glory of God, before they reached
their destination, and that to the great advantage of our miserable
world, which is abominably overcrowded with books)—I could wish that
this book, already so prolix, so otiose, so weary of its way that no
poor gabbler in an inn ever more offended his audience than I will
mine; I could wish that this book, which may be called The Great Sea
Serpent of books, or again, The Cromwell Road of Books, or once again,
The Pambiblicon, or endless Compendium, or again, The Long Arctic
Night—what you will—I could wish that this book were longer still, I
say, in order that I might drag you to perdition with the tedium of a
million memories north of the Forelands, north of the Goodwins, north
of Long Nose: memories of the Muddy Rivers of the Trinobantes, whose
descendants inhabit rather than cultivate the Essex clay: memories
of sandbanks rising out of the misty seas like whales, and of the
platters of Harwich, and of the King’s ship called The Serpent, and of
Orford River, and of the Onion, and of Lowestoft, Yarmouth, and the
exceedingly difficult labyrinth of the Wash, and of the awful great
tide at King’s Lynn.
But I renounce—not so much for your sakes as for my own, nor do I even
speak of that Thames River which sailors called London River, and of
the getting across it slantwise in spite of the great ships and the way
in which time has silted up that harbour.
There are many curious things to be noted about the opening of London
River. There is the double tide, so that a man making Long Nose from
the Channel finds a new tide taking him up towards London. There is
the way in which the best of all the channels into the river is the
one least used, because it would make ships go out of their way. Ships
come into the Thames either from the north or from the south, so they
save time, which is money, by skirting either coast, but the main mid
channel only the Dutchmen use when they have occasion to come up London
River; I approve them. Then there is the way in which undoubtedly all
this has silted up and risen since the time of the ancients. It is
not only the stuff brought down by the river which has piled up these
banks; there is also, I am sure, a lifting of the land. Nothing else
could account for Thanet ceasing to be an island, or for Richborough
standing now high and dry. The surface of the earth moves slowly up and
down over centuries, and no one shall persuade me that Pevensey has run
dry, Rye has been drained, Lympne has run far inland, Dover inlet has
been closed, and the Wensum turned from a great sea passage to a ditch
by any action other than the lifting of the land. The last thing to be
said about Thamesmouth is this, that it was never shut for traffic
since the beginning of recorded time ... until.... Men always traded up
and down it with a swarm of shipping since men first left memorial of
their doings, _until_ the fourth of August, 1914.
It is not the least arresting of those many portents accompanying the
Great War that in its first week, for the first time in human history,
the port of London was paralysed.
And so back to the Forelands, and the run between the Kentish corner
and the Goodwin Sands, with a few kind words to Saint Augustine, and
Julius Cæsar, and the men that murdered Saint Thomas, and so grew
tails, and such others as have landed at this turn of the coast; but
none for Hengist and Horsa, who never lived at all, and yet have done
all manner of harm. So through the Downs into the Channel again and
back on my way to the sea of Sussex, and to the shores which may be
drowned and swamped for a while by alien townsmen, but will keep their
own counsel and in due time will rise again.
We brought up as night fell under the shelter of Folkestone Breakwater.
It had fallen almost calm as we slid into the oily place under the
darkness, and there was a long exasperating swell, not regular, but
coming in stupidly from the southeast, whence no wind blew, and washing
back from the stones of the pier. A drizzling rain also was falling
and, in general, my companion and I paid for the splendour of those
last days round the corner of Kent and across the Thames. It was too
early to sleep and, as I had had the helm the night before, I had slept
also during the day. I sat looking at my main chart, though I knew
every inch (oh! come! say rather millimetres) of the coast I was to
follow; and I pondered upon that shore-line of Kent and Sussex, and
upon places which I had passed far off on my way eastward, and which
I would now see from closer by as I stood down-Channel on my westward
journey home.
How well (too well?... No) does a man get to know a bit of coast like
this between Selsea and the Downs after half a life of lazy passages
along it, and (to be just) sometimes of wicked winds! It becomes as
familiar as a street; not only the aspect of the shore—changeable
as that is—not only lights and buoys, and the hours for the turn of
tides and all the rest of it, but the very sea itself in spite of its
innumerable diversity.
But one effect of this familiarity is odd and unexpected,—I know not
whether others have felt it; I have felt it profoundly (especially in
the last few years),—and that is, the way in which the sameness of the
sea, the reiteration at sea of similar emotions, of similar heights and
bearing-marks of the coast, the unity of scene, of time, of action,
the eternity of the sea, throw into relief the catastrophic change,
the cataract of change, inland: the revolution which has transformed
modern England; so that, of all the states I know, none has become so
intimately different from its own immediate past, within the memory of
men elderly, but not yet old, as England: yes, even South England: the
refuge.
To many I know this is a cause of rejoicing. Worse things have given
way to better in their eyes. To others it is a despair; they are
of that temperament which can only repose in fixed sanctities. For
my part, it is to me a regret. Because the change is unhappy, and
happiness is the end of man.
The older England I knew (the spirit of which has almost disappeared)
was a happier place; happier not only in the immediate elements of
personal happiness, but in the more distant elements of corporate
happiness, such as national pride and security. Yet some find the
change to be good: so they do.
At any rate, in this mixture of good and evil, the thing that we
should note—the thing the historian will note with amazement—is the
profundity and the rapidity of the change.
There stand the same marks, the same headlands, which I knew as a boy;
the sight to landward is very little changed. There are the same three
forts of Spithead, through which I used to set out from the sheltered
water. There is the same odd entry, somewhat shoal and difficult, to
the branches of Chichester Harbour and Bosham, that famous hamlet in
the story of England. There is the low shelf of Selsea Bill, and the
mark on the Mixen, and the two buoys of the Looe Stream, and the Owers
Light winking outside—as I remember it winking when I watched it, a
little boy, from the height of the Downs. The entry to Littlehampton is
the same, and to Shoreham. The breakwater at Newhaven, though it still
seems new to me, is already old. Beachy Head Light, which used to be
on the summit of the cliff, has been shifted to the beach below. The
breakwater at Hastings has failed, but Fairlight gives you the same
marks; and the entry to Rye is what it always was, a caution to camels