When we had lain tossing in the White Horse Race all through that morning and on to well past noon, there came, to our great joy, about half-past one, a little breath, a little slant of wind, from off Hartland Point. For all those hours we had had no steering-way at all, merely drifting and tossing to the loud clapping of empty canvas. But now the sails filled and, weary of the sea, we put her nose round for Bideford River, with this pleasant little breeze slightly blowing and coming right from the starboard quarter, so that she sailed at her best. The tide was at the neaps, there was little current, we had a straight course to steer.
The wind rose, the sun was clear and shining, and all the sea sparkled and was alive. It was a weather in which to remember the little sacred places of the shore; the little towns with their own gods of the sea, and springs tumbling through them from the cliffs above: the little places that preserve their own happenings. And one such place of which I had very often heard was there, far off upon the starboard quarter, and I knew it by the chart for Clovelly.
There are places holy to Apollo, Delian places, protected tiny townships of the sea.
So from the tumbling water between Bideford River and Lundy, that wooded coast, so isolated, remote, sacred, appeared the touch of white in the green which marked Clovelly. Looked on thus over the water that rushed by, and in the swirl of the ship’s way, Clovelly seemed what I had read in books as a boy it was, and what I suppose it once may have been, when England was England.
But England to-day from the land is a very different thing to England forever from the sea. Some years later I had again to seek Clovelly from the land, and I shall no more forget it than did that Northumbrian man whom God raised from the dead, and whose experience is told us by the Venerable Bede, could forget his glimpse of hell.
I had come with friends in a motor-car, because I had been told a man should see Clovelly before he died. I had come from the noble isolation of Hartland, where the great seas were running in upon the rocks after a gale and thundering at the doors of that good inn which faces ocean there. Our road ran high above the sea, and as we came near to the turning beyond which the cleft of Clovelly would open below us, and its vision of peace, we heard a murmur like that of bees swarming. As we came nearer it was a confused clamour of human beings, and as we came nearer still we saw the dreadful thing in its entirety.
A great mass of chars-à-bancs were parked on the road itself, on the steep edge of the hill and cleft whence one looked down on the village and the sea below. There, blocking the ridge road, an immense mass of lost souls struggled and fought for the most part, or stood squeezed in a sullen despair. Their function was—not their intention, but the use to which the irony of Divine Vengeance had put them—their function was to form a solid wall by which all access from the village below, all further opportunity of climbing, should be forbidden. Meanwhile up that cleft swirled, surged, pushed, strenuously and unfailingly, one mass of packed, dark-clothed mortality, closely hemmed in by the cottages (I wondered that their walls stood the strain!), and looking from where we stood very much like black pressed German caviare, the acid stuff which is sold for the destruction of the race. This wedge had its base upon the seashore and was filled with a communal desire, with a mass mind, impelling it to attempt the height—a hopeless task! For the char-à-banc crowd above could not have been pierced by cavalry, let alone by an untrained infantry such as was this mob working hopelessly uphill.
So far so bad; but worse remained behind. For on the calm sea of that bay were to be discovered three steamers, each of them looking like a piece of cigar-shaped board on which innumerable black ants had swarmed. Of these the one nearest to the shore was still discharging in its boats further human beings, who were fighting to land on whatever little strip of foothold could be found, while the two other ships stood by ready to reënforce the attack.
So true is it that men desire beauty before all things and that great beauty draws all men to it.
The atheists, of whom some few stalwarts remain, strong against the pantheist flood; those who despise mankind when they are healthy and when they are unhealthy despair of it; the men who make nothing of life and think it immaterial whether man be or no—these are, in my judgment, of a clumsy habit in argument. For they talk in mere negations. But if they would breed (as is their intention) a proper contempt for the supposed Divine in man, a proper negligence of our fellow beings and a right view of the whole insignificant human affair, they ought not to confine themselves to negatives, they ought to present vivid images, concrete and striking, and say: ‘Look there and judge mankind!’ I suggest to them Clovelly on a holiday; also the sands of Weston-super-Mare; also Saint Lazare Station in Paris, the Frederick Street Station in Berlin, or Liverpool Street in London, just after office hours on a week-day; or again, a crowd in Catalonia, outside the ring, when by some accident the bull gets loose.
There are other brilliant images all ready to the atheist’s hand: a dining-table of the rich, with some thirty guests, men and women, exactly alternate, like the red and the black cards in a patience, the wretched couples turning ten minutes to the left and ten minutes to the right, like jacks; the wine of only one kind—yellow and acid with bubbles in it. Or again, they might give the same effect with the vision of any public vehicle, designed to hold twenty-four but packed with forty. Or again, they might do no more than distribute snapshots, judiciously snapped, of the men who are most talked about in this our day.
The truth is the atheists do not know their job; for it has been clearly proved upon the thumb and the four fingers of the left hand that men cut off from the Divine are also cut off from reason.
So we sailed on, leaving that tiny white point of Clovelly far behind in its combe, dark against the afternoon sun, and ran straight for Bideford River, till we came to the fairway.
We had also a mark to steer by which was unmistakable; it was a gate of dark smooth water in a mass of white surge. For rollers, though there was but a hearty breeze, through some mysterious process of the sea, were bursting with violence upon the bar of the river as though it blew a gale. The bar looked like one tumbling wall of angry white, even from a long way off, and, between that wall and the east side of the harbour-mouth, was this one narrow gateway of smooth water. We passed through it safely enough, steering by the leading marks, which are here quite clear, and brought up in the deep pool off Appledore, waiting for the tide to take us up to Bideford.
All that bit of coast is Charles Kingsley, with his violent fanatical genius (for it was no less) and his power of imprinting himself upon the place. Fanatical men are not usually happy; but I think Kingsley must have been happy, because he had the tide under him all the time. Everything in his own lifetime was going his way. The cause to which he was attached, the destruction of the Faith, appeared to be triumphing more and more; though the slightest accident the other way (such as Newman’s conversion) was an intolerable irritant to him. He lived in that part of the earth which he most loved, he enjoyed all its habits, he was supported by everything around. You could get no better and, at the same time, no more comic criticism of that Kingsleian mood than what has happed to the name ‘Westward Ho,’ which Kingsley rendered famous. ‘Westward Ho’ simply means the westerly of two landing-places. ‘Ho,’ or ‘Hoe,’ is a wharf: but that ‘Ho’ has been spread broadcast throughout the world of English as a sort of ‘Halloa,’ or ‘Yoicks,’ to call the adventurous overseas; and not one man in a thousand, I suppose, but thinks of those two little letters as a hoot (perhaps he gives them a nobler name); as a call, resonant of the Elizabethan sailings.
One of the saddest things I know about the beach near Bideford River is the deadly hatred with which the dons have persecuted poor, dear Kenwith. Kenwith is a place where a few boatloads of Danes landed in the Dark Ages, and were defeated by the English. The name is quite clear, the tradition is equally clear, and the description of the position is unmistakable. Therefore have the learned, as is their wont, insisted with the utmost virulence that the tradition, the name, the description, are all a popular error, and that the place where the little scrimmage really came off was miles away.
It is interesting to analyse the motives of this sort of thing. We are all familiar with it. The universities of all countries, but especially of our own, are a regular hothouse for breeding it; but when one first comes across it, one is puzzled why it should come into being at all. Whence springs this lust for saying that the Gospel of Saint John was not written by Saint John? that Homer was not written by Homer? that the Battle of Hastings was not called the Battle of Hastings—although all the people who fought there called it the Battle of Hastings? that William the Conqueror had only a handful of men there—though his secretary, who saw them, and read all the documents connected with them, gives us fifty thousand? that Julius Cæsar’s Gallic War was written by his tutor—and all the rest of the nonsense?