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 who have passed with honours through the eyes of needles. Dungeness slowly crawling out to sea still seems the same. The only material change in all that passage is the dangerous failure called Dover Harbour, against which the rushing tide of the Straits tumbles angrily, finding interference after so many æons of freedom: so that just outside Dover in almost any weather you are tossed by a confused and irritated sea. But all the rest, the Forelands Light and the Goodwins, are what I have always known. Up and down that stretch of water there is somewhat more building on the land, slightly changing the aspect of the distant shore. There is the curious long group of huts on Shoreham beach, Seaford sending up red brick on to the green of the heights above it, and Bexhill to-day where once was loneliness. But take it all in all, it is the same scene, after nearly forty years of sailing on that sea and watching that land with Highdown still for the best sea-mark, and with the clump of Chanctonbury—yes, even the stump of Halnacker Mill, though it is now all ruins. The marks are the same. I might turn boy again and set sailing and not find the sea-things other than I had known them.
But on land—in the heart of man—what a transformation! There went into it the England of the seventies—an England aristocratic, free, with ease of movement within and acting externally, at will, upon all nations. An England with a sense of increasing wealth and of increasing knowledge, and an England English. Of all the men and women you met, most had been born in the villages, or little market towns, which are the roots of England. It was one society: that of to-day is another, almost foreign to the first.
Of all this revolutionary change, covering the short space of half a lifetime, two effects are most prominent: the fall of Parliament from great honour to contempt, and the change in the press. Of these the change in the press is the most obvious, and perhaps the most remarkable.
The press of England has passed, as a whole, in that space of time from one social condition to another totally new. There are still dignified exceptions, but they are survivals and abnormal. The general spirit of the press has utterly changed. It is as great a change as a man might experience who, having been brought up, let us say, as an English public school boy and university man, should so sink as to pass his middle age up-country in a strange colony far overseas, as a labourer among labourers.
At the beginning of the period, England had a press—daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly—especially designed for, and consonant to, an aristocracy: not designed for, and consonant to, lords and ladies; but designed for, and consonant to, a highly cultivated governing class whose power was unquestioned, and which then directed the whole community. The intellectual life of the nation was concentrated in that class: it included men of all births, but having in common the same cultivation of spirit, the same manner of talking, the same sufficient knowledge of the European past, the same less, but still sufficient knowledge, of contemporary Europe: and, what was most important, the same philosophy and social outlook.
This class (the gentry, or whatever you like to call it), had its own press, the great daily papers, the weekly reviews, the serious monthly and quarterly reviews. Side by side with that press there was a frankly popular press, which had no sort of power, and which was intended to amuse the non-political mass below. It was represented in two or three very vulgar Sunday newspapers full of police court cases, and murders, and the rest; and weekly papers with tittle-tattle about the superiors of the class which read them; but it was the press of the educated class which represented, mirrored, and to some extent influenced the general action of England.
In that press you had, for its daily papers, information more rapidly acquired, better balanced, more detailed, and more extensive by far than was to be found in the press of any other country. Everything of importance was known to the governing class of England through that press, and was known at once; and, on the whole, was known in something like the right proportion. The weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies were powerful organs of intellectual expression, and set also a literary standard. You saw in them the names of Tennyson or Browning, of Huxley and the Duke of Argyll, of Lord Salisbury, of Arnold. There was about the whole atmosphere of this press something of that tone of equality, ease, and sure touch which is the mark of a governing class in any aristocratic state.