The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/Written in the Sand

In the mid-way of this our mortal life, I find myself (as in one of the changes of a dream) at a watering-place on the East Coast. I find among other things that it is raining and that my fellow creatures, or at least my fellow visitors, are in a state of irrational indignation over that circumstance. `How paradoxical it is in you,' I say to them with astonishment, `to come to a watering-place and exhibit distress when it waters you.' I explain to them how unjust, how fundamentally unpoetic is the current prejudice against rain.

I point out to them how singular an example this prejudice affords of the perverse and artificial nature of our modern English patriotism... All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. Everybody vilifies this land of violent and benignant clouds, the only land that could have produced the stormy summers of Constable or the red apocalypse of Turner. Of these mysterious phases rain is only one, and not the least beautiful. When I point this out to my fellow Englishmen their spirit takes on something of the turbid transformations of the English sky. `How colossal, how cosmic a vision,' I say to them, `is the rain upon the sea. Worms, you are permitted to gaze upon a reversal of the fifth day of creation. The waters below the firmament were divided from the waters that were above the firmament. And lo! they are wedded again.' This kind of conversation naturally makes me popular.

I am particularly beloved by those who are frustrated in their desire for sea-bathing. `What,' I exclaim, `your whole heart is set on wetting yourself in that silly pool of salt. Give me,' I cry ecstatically, `the Baths of Heaven!' After thus discussing the matter with various groups of people, I find myself thrown back on a gentle solitude. I wander along the lean sands by the bright, bleak sea. The weather is clearing, and sky and sea shine like pale steel, as if they had been washed and rubbed by the rain. Along the empty sands two small boys are trailing their feet disconsolately. They do not know what to do; they do not know where to go. Only a dim and blind gregarious instinct, a brotherhood as deep as the brutes, leads them to do nothing together and to go nowhere together. They do not speak, they are too weary even to quarrel, though they have made no exertion; they are sunk in that strange and sudden and very occasional boredom which belongs to boyhood, and which is like all boyhood's experiences, like its love and its fear, pure and intense, the undiluted essence of ennui.

At last, after what seems like leagues of drifting, something happens. Either the sun paints one strip of silver on the leaden sea, or, more likely, the soul itself, with its mysterious silences and activities, rebels and flashes; but one of the boys bounds suddenly into an excavation in the sand, the remains of some other boy's fortress, and begins to bank it up again furiously, as if he were walling the wild sea out of the flats of England. The other stares a little while with a stupid curiosity, as at a trifle; then on him also comes the primeval will to action which drives metaphysicians to madness, and he also leaps, like Remus, over the wall and begins to build the city. Three minutes afterwards they are talking; six minutes afterwards, still happier sign, they are fighting.

I will not go so far as to say that these two boys were some dark and dreadful cherubim sent to act before my eyes a spiritual mystery, however fine a background for it would have been the grey edge of the sea and that strange blank light so white and wet which grows in the clearing sky. But it is certainly true that the episode of the two little boys depicts as in a small miracle play one of the least of the truths that lie behind our modern civilisation, and constitute the answer to that question which is asked in large letters all over the newspapers, `What is Wrong?'

The thing that is wrong is a certain fallacy with which we English have comforted ourselves for same decades, which may be called the fallacy of unity, or in another and slighter form, the fallacy of sociability. What I mean is this, that we have fallen into a habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is full of quarrelling as a sign that it is weak. And we have fallen into the more dangerous habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is not full of quarrelling as a sign that it is strong or energetic. The reason that the Irish fight each other, and even hate each other, is not that they are Celts. It is not even that they are Irish. It is simply that they have something to do. The reason that the French groups split and fight is not that they are Latins; it is not even that they are French. It is simply that they have something to do. And the reason that English politicians work together in unity is certainly not that they are English. It is that they have nothing to do; when, for instance, they had James II to dethrone, or when they had Walpole to howl against, or when they had Napoleon to fight, they behaved exactly as the French and the Irish do; parties were broken by secessions; heads were broken by sticks.

We are like the two little boys walking along the sands. We go together easily enough as long as we are going nowhere. We can do as others do cheerfully enough, as long as we are doing nothing. But the moment we agree to do anything we begin to disagree about it.