Essay: Where Is Our Dover Beach?

In 1851, the year, according to scholars, that Matthew Arnold wrote his poem Dover Beach, England was the richest, most powerful, most industrially sophisticated nation in the world. Progress was the nation’s goddess, in whose honor was staged the Great Exhibition of 1851, a festival of English wealth and material advancement. While England celebrated itself, Arnold was on his honeymoon in the seaport town of Dover, writing a brief poem that eventually would be remembered by many more people than would remember the Great Exhibition, indeed would become the most anthologized poem in English. But Dover Beach was not a celebration of the age; it was a lament, a complaint and a prayer. Looking coldly and sadly at what he saw as his country’s destructive self-confidence, Arnold despaired that the advancement of knowledge should be attended by the loss of human feeling.

In 1985 the world looks a good deal different from the one that appeared to Arnold. The imperial impulse that brought Europe to its glory eventually helped bring it to its knees, and the world’s richest, most powerful, most industrially sophisticated nation now lies to the west of England, on the far side of an ocean. In 1851 Arnold could stand in his country, gaze across the Channel at France and behold the world’s two giants. These days one may behold the world’s two giants from the moon or from the Bering Strait. But where, metaphorically, is our Dover Beach today? To Arnold, the divorce of intellect and feeling was the central ailment of his age. What is the central ailment of our age?

In searching for a modern Dover Beach, it might help to pause first at Arnold’s. What must have been, in Arnold’s time, an attractively hectic seaside resort and sailing port seems strangely lifeless now, in spite of the fact that Dover remains one of the largest passenger ports in the world. Huge, squat ferries chug efficiently and frequently between Dover and Calais. Travelers walk a few steps from a train to a boat and are off. The ease and speed with which a Channel crossing is now done may have deprived Dover of its 19th century character, except in places in the town where history asserts itself, such as Dover Castle, still garrisoned on the white cliffs where Normans first erected it, and the Roman Pharos, a lighthouse tower built in the 2nd century A.D. These days Dover looks like any small, half-hearted New England city–a shopping center of a town populated by dolled-up teen-agers, and mothers purposefully pushing babies in strollers. Shops specialize in videotapes, computer books and Kentucky Fried Chicken. A memorial to the dead of two wars stands before the library.

Exactly where Mr. and Mrs. Arnold honeymooned, no one seems to know. In fact nothing in the Dover town records or in the town history books mentions Arnold or his famous poem. If the Arnolds stopped at the grandest of the town’s hotels in 1851, it would have been the Lord Warden, a square, elegant, four- story structure where Dickens gave readings and Napoleon III stayed the night. In those days one would not simply hop a train after a ship ride, but would plan to spend some restful time in Dover before proceeding inland.

The former Lord Warden Hotel now houses the customs and excise offices. From a window on the top floor, it is still possible to hear “the grating roar of pebbles” that Arnold heard on the beach at night. A recent morning was very still. The steel-and-concrete docks jutted out into the harbor; a hovercraft bobbed passively on the water; passengers moved single file from a ferry to a train that soon started up, shrieked metal on metal and moved on. The sea continually changed color and direction, the sun laying a slice of silver on the horizon, which faded to a dull blue a moment later. In the office a boyish customs officer played rock music on his tape deck on a plastic table: “I’ve got you, baby./ You’ve got me.” He did not mind the presence of a visitor. “Breaks the boredom,” he said.

From a similar window 134 years ago, Arnold beheld his progressive, aggressive world and began serenely: “The sea is calm tonight./ The tide is full, the moon lies fair/ Upon the Straits . . . Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” A long, successful life lay ahead of him. His new bride was near by. But by the end of the stanza, he was hearing the “eternal note of sadness” in the sea and the rolling of the pebbles, and by the second stanza, the “ebb and flow/ Of human misery” was overwhelming. The final lines of Dover Beach are racked with disillusionment about a “world which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,” but that had “neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” The only way to survive what Arnold in another poem called “this strange disease of modern life” was for people to “be true to one another” (“I’ve got you, baby./ You’ve got me”). He pledged constancy to the woman near him.

Is our Dover Beach the same place as Arnold’s? Certainly the disjuncture between feeling and intellect–or science and emotion–has only seemed to widen since the mid-19th century. The transition from the industrial society to what Daniel Bell called the post-industrial society, consisting of services rather than manufacturing, has resulted in a difference of occupations but not of attitude; people are more than ever the bewildered children of progress. The past year alone has produced enough scientific inventiveness to shake the spirit for a lifetime: the first baby from a frozen embryo, surrogate mothers, genetic transfers between animals, a record number of heart transplants, an animal heart transplant, another artificial heart. The central ailment of the age may simply be Arnold’s writ larger.

But this does not ring true somehow. Unlike the industrial adventurers of the 19th century, most people today are very much aware of the problems, economic and spiritual, wrought by dead-eyed materialism. Arnold’s criticism of his times would not be a bit shocking in ours; such criticism has been along on the march of progress for quite a while–even if it often sounds like short- order disapproval, whipped up automatically for predictable occasions. The computer is born, the computer is pilloried. An oil rig goes up, conservationists marshal their forces. Nineteenth century minds may have planted the seeds of our deterioration alongside our advancement, but they also–in people like Freud, Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold himself–taught us how to worry. At the same time, critics, grown somewhat more compromising, are no longer certain that science and technology signal the end of the world. Thomas Pynchon wrote in the New York Times Book Review last year that modern Luddites seem to be adjusting their antimechanical sensibilities to accommodate at least a few enticing inventions, like the word processor. There seems “a growing consensus,” said Pynchon, “that knowledge really is power.” Clearly, this is not the brash self-assurance Arnold deplored, but rather something far more deliberate and open-minded. In Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, Arnold complained that he was “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” Today there is plenty of evidence that a new world of knowledge is not only capable of being born, but that in such a world cancer will be defeated, Jupiter visited, and quadriplegics will dance.

If the divorce of intellect and feeling is the wrong place to look for a modern Dover Beach, however, it may yet have bearing on the right one. The world does not look as unremittingly bleak as Arnold painted it in those final lines of Dover Beach (How could it?), but it often can feel that bleak–minus joy, love, light, certitude, peace and help for pain. As yet, no industry has disinvented poverty or starvation. And one advanced invention threatens to turn the earth into a polar waste. Even if most people learn to adjust to machines or the new science without the loss of human feeling, that hardly seems the cure for the fearfulness or the hollow detachment of much of modern life.

Perhaps the central ailment of the age is a more personal matter, one that relates to the general advancement of knowledge, but that takes its effect silently in individuals. Jacques Ellul criticized the modern idea of work as compared with the ancient because, he said, work with machines puts people at a distance from their labors and thus evokes a feeling of absence instead of presence. Arnold, too, focused on the absence of things. It is a peculiarly desolating experience to look upon something new that one despises or has no feeling for and to recall with pleasure whatever it displaced, or to see nothing where something was that once was cherished. Our affection attaches to that which is not there, but we are there. Thus the absence of things of value becomes a form of self-hate.

The absence of beauty, for example, could be the major problem of modern life. Most aestheticians have decided that a sense of beauty requires a perceived harmony or integrity both within the object and between the object and ourselves. The form and function of a glum, glass office building may be adequate to the financial needs of the Glum & Glass Corp., but the structure offends and dispirits the employees, who work in airless boxes, as well as those outside the building who are forced to see the thing. “Has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested?” asked Tom Wolfe in his contentious book on the Bauhaus. Wolfe railed against the citizen’s abdication of control of modern architecture, and his anger may well embrace $ all the ugly furnishings of the times, which people have simply accepted. Where there is no felt attachment to physical surroundings, the surroundings will be allowed to go their own way, and the individual realizes a constant ache of discontentment with his life, an ache whose source he cannot identify because the source is himself.

The absence of a connection with nature could also be the central ailment of the times. Like the absence of beauty, this is an old complaint, but it seems to have grown more urgent in recent years, especially when an attachment to nature has been increasingly defined as the manipulation of nature. It is not that no one appreciates birds and trees any more; only that nature is rarely thought to offer any serious benefit to the mind. Questions of the environment are almost always reduced to issues of politics. Most people no longer make personal identifications with nature, yet people recognize themselves as natural objects. Here, too, then, the absence of something worthwhile leads back to a dissociation from oneself.

Both these ailments are related to a third–the absence of time–which, finally, may be the modern ailment that most needs curing. The Industrial Revolution may eventually give back much more than it took away, but it has never restored time. As anguished as were Arnold’s thoughts in Dover, at least he had the time to deal with them; the world that had neither “certitude nor peace” was evidently not spinning so rapidly in the wrong direction that it allowed no moment for a corrective or contemplative voice. Arnold took hold of that moment; he felt that it was his to take. Yet even as he wrote Dover Beach, the railroads that had spread across England like unwound threads in the early part of the century were stretching toward the sea to accelerate the world’s speed. Were the Arnolds to take a hotel room in Dover, 1985, it would be in the Holiday Inn. Nothing in Dover today invites a meditative use of time.

Again, the problem seems one of will, of whether or not one decides to seize time for one’s advantage or to adopt the sinister equation that “Time is money.” In A Question of Upbringing, Anthony Powell was struck by Poussin’s painting of the dancing figures of Time who were “unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.” Today the dance has grown frenetic beyond measure. Yet everything hinges on the “perhaps”; in the world of punctuality and appointments, one may not be able to control ( all of time or even much of it, but some hours have to be claimed as one’s own if time is to have value and not mere use. The missed appointments are with oneself. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man sought to live on the nodes of time so that he might “slip into the breaks and look around.”

Death is the antithesis of time, since death means infinite stopping, while time means infinite motion. It may be that we are willingly caught up in time because we seek to stave off death. But the effort is self-defeating if life begins to feel like death, if in fact nothing seems worth dying for. All our familiar complaints about the lack of heroism in modern life may be traced to our servitude to time. Save time, beat the clock. The only real way a clock may be beaten is to pay no attention to it, to rediscover privacy, cling to it, hoard it; to determine one’s own proper unhurried pace. We often apologize for wasting time, when all we mean is that we have violated someone else’s standards of progress.

In a sense, our Dover Beach is Dover now–a place built for easy embarkations, absent of beauty or a connection with nature, and ruled by clocks and timetables. There is nothing terribly wrong with Dover, and nothing especially right. The town is a point of convenience, which is exactly the point that the Industrial Revolution originally spied, strode toward and reached. Who in Dover today would describe the world as various and beautiful and new? Yet how is the world less so than it was 134 years ago or a thousand, or the way it will be a thousand years hence, since its variety, beauty and novelty are always in the hands of people no different from those who strolled about the harbor or slept as Arnold scratched out his poem by the window? Everything depends on how one wishes to live one’s life, which still requires the constancy Arnold promised his bride, and a good deal of courage besides. So we race wide-eyed into one more year, searching for the land of dreams that lies as near as you.