with, or your wife for the matter of that, just as many people undoubtedly find tea with milk and sugar very nice.  But the former is no more the way to get the full and perfect pleasure of staying at the seaside than the latter is the way to get the full and perfect flavour of the tea.  True staying at the seaside is neither the repetition of old conversations in new surroundings nor the exposure of one’s affections to ozone.  It is something infinitely higher.  It is pure quiescence.  It is the experience of a waking inanition savouring of Buddha and the divine.

Now, staying at the seaside is so rarely done well, because of the littleness of man.  To do it properly needs many of the elements of greatness.  Your common man, while he has life in him, can let neither himself nor the universe alone.  He must be asserting himself in some way, even if it is only by flinging pebbles at a stick.  That self-forgetfulness which should be a delight is a terror to him.  He brings dogs down to the beach to stand between him and the calm of nature, and yelp.  He does worse than that.

The meditative man going daily over by the cliff and along the parade, to get his ounce of tobacco, has a sad spectacle of what human beings may be driven to in this way.  One sees altogether some hundreds of people there who have heard perhaps that staying at the seaside is good, and who have, anyhow, got thus far towards it, and stopped.  They have not the faintest idea how to make themselves happy.  The general expression is veiled curiosity.  They sit—­mostly with their backs to the sea—­talking poorly of indifferent topics and watching one another.  Most obviously they want hints of what to do with themselves.  Behind them is a bank of flowers like those in Battersea Park, and another parallel parade, and beyond are bathing-machines.  The pier completely cuts the horizon out of the background.  There is a stout lady, in dark blue, bathing.  The only glances directed seaward are furtive ones at her.  Many seem to be doubting whether this is not what they came down for.  Others lean dubiously to the invitations of the boatmen.  Others again listen to vocalists and dramatic outcasts who, for ha’pence, render obvious the reason of their professional degradation.  It seems eccentric to travel seventy or eighty miles to hear a man without a voice demonstrate that he is unfit to have one, but they do.  Anyone curious in these matters need only go to a watering-place to see and, what is worse, to hear for himself.  After an excursion train to Eastbourne, upwards of a thousand people have been seen thus heaped together over an oblong space of a mile long by twenty yards wide.  Only three miles away there was a towering white cliff overhanging a practically desert beach; and one seagull circled above one solitary, motionless, supine man, really staying at the seaside.