be
founded. In _Penguin Island_ the scorn at times ceases to be entirely
kindly. It ceases even to be scorn. It becomes utter despair. But in
_Thais_, in _Sur la Pierre Blanche_, in _Le Mannequin d'Osier_, with
what a comprehending sympathy he despises the human race! How amiably
he impales the little creatures, too, and lectures us on the humours
of amorousness and quarrelsomeness and heroism in the insect world!
Even the French Revolution he sees in _Les Dieux Ont Soif_ as a
scuffle of insects to be regarded with amusement rather than amazement
by the philosopher among his cardboard toys. Not really amusement, of
course, but pity disguised as amusement--the pity, too, not of a
philosopher in a garden, but of a philosopher always curiously
hesitating between the garden and the street.

XXV

THE SEA

It is only now and then, when some great disaster like the sinking of
the _Empress of Ireland_ occurs, that man recovers his ancient dread
of the sea. We have grown comfortably intimate with the sea. We use it
as a highway of business and pleasure with as little hesitation as the
land. The worst we fear from it is the discomfort of sea-sickness, and
we are inclined to treat that half-comically, like a boy's sickness
from tobacco. There are still a few persons who are timid of it, as
the more civilised among us are timid of forests: they cannot sleep if
they are near its dull roar, and they hate, like nagging, the damnable
iteration of its waves. For most of us, however, the sea is a
domesticated wonder. We pace its shores with as little nervousness as
we walk past the bears and lions in the Zoological Gardens. With less
nervousness, indeed, for we trust our bodies to the sea in little
scoops of wood, and even fling ourselves half-naked into its waters as
a luxury--an indulgence bolder than any we allow ourselves with the
tamest lions. Let an accident occur, however--let a ship go down or a
bather be carried out in the wash of the tide--and something in our
bones remembers the old fears of the monster in the waters. We realise
suddenly that we who trust the sea are like the people in other lands
who live under the fiery mountains that have poured death on their
ancestors time and again. We are amazed at the faith of men who
rebuild their homes under a volcano, but the sea over which we pass
with so smiling a certainty is more restless than a volcano and more
clamorous for victims. Originally, man seems to have d