The Garden of the Sea
One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture
the remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty
of the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride
of mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea
that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob
one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really
high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics;
slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste,
but not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks
say that rustics do not talk of Nature in an appreciative way,
they really mean that they do not talk in a bookish way.
They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs,
or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly about pigs;
and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly horsy
about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak
in a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way.
And if by any chance a simple intelligent person from the country
comes in contact with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting,
such a person's comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes
an epigram, and at worst it is never a quotation.
Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity
the ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the
subject of the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham
had never seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she
was asked what she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers.
Now that is a piece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent
and original, and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with
an analogous kinship which I could never locate; cabbages always
remind me of the sea and the sea always reminds me of cabbages.
It is partly, perhaps, the veined mingling of violet and green,
as in the sea a purple that is almost dark red may mix with a green
that is almost yellow, and still be the blue sea as a whole.
But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over
cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition,
as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and Shakespeare,
use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean. But just where my
fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to speak)
to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better
than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling,
and the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind bubbling,
and opaque. Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested;
the arches of the rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks,
as if the whole sea were one great green plant with one immense
white flower rooted in the abyss.
Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse
to see the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not
connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books
and songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large
and philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep.
He would say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first
of greens. To which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of
a parallel profession, "I would you were so honest a man."
The mention of "Hamlet" reminds me, by the way, that besides
the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew a girl who had never
seen a stage-play. She was taken to "Hamlet," and she said it
was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial
point which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions.
We are so used to thinking of "Hamlet" as a problem that we
sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy, just as we are so used
to thinking of the sea as vast and vague, that we scarcely notice
when it is white and green.
But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentleman
of culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of
the cauliflowers. The first essential of the merely bookish view
of the sea is that it is boundless, and gives a sentiment of infinity.
Now it is quite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile
was partly created by exactly the opposite impression, the
impression of boundary and of barrier. The girl thought of
it as a field of vegetables, even as a yard of vegetables.
The girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity when you
cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not a sea.
So far from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one
hard straight line in Nature. It is the one plain limit;
the only thing that God has made that really looks like a wall.
Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloud are chaotic and doubtful,
but solid mountains and standing forests may be said to melt
and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron line.
The old naval phrase, that the seas are England's bulwarks,
is not a frigid and artificial metaphor; it came into the head
of some genuine sea-dog, when he was genuinely looking at
the sea. For the edge of the sea is like the edge of a sword;
it is sharp, military, and decisive; it really looks like a bolt
or bar, and not like a mere expansion. It hangs in heaven, grey,
or green, or blue, changing in colour, but changeless in form,
behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savage
softness of the forests, like the scales of God held even.
It hangs, a perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice
which abides behind all compromises and all legitimate variety;
the one straight line; the limit of the intellect; the dark and
ultimate dogma of the world.
