All that you can say of it is that it is queer.  It is not picturesque, or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer.  An enfilading glance gives this impression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the added effect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs’ legs inverted in a downward plunge.

On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a philosopher of humble condition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand.  This made us beg each other’s pardon; he said that he did not know I was there, and I said it did not matter.  Then we both looked at the bathing, and he said: 

“I don’t like that.”

“Why,” I asked, “do you see any harm in it?”

“No.  But I don’t like the looks of it.  It ain’t nice.  It’s queer.”

It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a very public appearance.  This promiscuous bathing was not much in excess of the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct.  Here and there a gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand.  But otherwise all was a damp and dreary decorum.  I challenged my philosopher in vain for a specific cause of his dislike of the scene.

Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the sea-bathing.  A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over them.  There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who seemed getting the most of the good that was going.

VI.

But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating the good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, I have since thought of it as rather melancholy.  It was in fact no wiser or livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it afforded.  The best thing about it was that it left the guests very much to their own devices.  The established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-looking; but one could eschew them.  The more of them one eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day’s rest is more than most people can bear.  They endure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after a twenty-mile run on the wheel.  The road, by-the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driver professed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of his profession.