To have one's words taken literally in some cases produces the uncomfortable feeling that there is something wrong with the brain of the person spoken to. I was walking on the moor one day in spring in oppressingly warm weather when, on passing close by a small farm-house, I caught sight of the farmer standing outside and stopped to have a little talk with him.
He was a handsome intelligent fellow with a very pleasing expression, and in a few minutes we were talking and laughing like old friends. "How far is it to Zennor?" I said; "I'm walking there." He answered that it was exactly five miles from his door. "Then," I returned, "I wish you could tell me how to get there without going through the intervening space." He looked strangely puzzled. "Wel——" he began, and then stopped and cast down his eyes. "Really—I don't quite see—————" he started again, and again stopped, more puzzled than ever. Then he made a desperate effort to grapple with the problem. "You see, it's this way," he said; "the space is there—you can't get over that, and so I can't quite make out how————-" But I was sorry to see him distressed and quickly changed the subject, to his great relief.
I was told by the vicar of a parish I was staying in that one had always to remember that the Cornish people take what is said literally; if you forget this and inadvertently make use of some little figure of speech so common in conversation that it is hard not to use it, you are apt to get into trouble. The vicar himself, after twenty years' intimate relations with his parishioners, was liable to little slips of this kind, as I found. One day when I was there a man from a neighbouring hamlet came to the village and by chance met the vicar. "Why, Mr. So-and-so," exclaimed the latter, shaking hands with him, "it's a hundred years since I saw you!" Then after a little friendly talk they separated. But that unlucky phrase stuck in the man's mind, and he spent most of the day in going into the houses of all his intimates in the village and discussing the subject with them. "He said it were a hundred years since he saw me—now what did parson mean by that?" When, anxious to make a little mischief (having nothing else to do), I reported the matter to the vicar, he slapped his leg angrily and exclaimed, "That's how it is with them! There's an instance for you!" But it was a very delightful one, and in another moment his vexation vanished in a burst of laughter.
One might imagine that such misunderstandings simply result from stupidity. It is not so, unless we say that stupidity is nothing but the want of that sense which acts on our social intercourse much as the thyroid gland does on the bodily system, or, to take another image, like that subtle ingredient of a salad which animates the whole. Curious to say, the most striking instance I met with of this want was from a man of that unpleasant class who must be for ever doing or saying something to raise a laugh. They are found everywhere, even in Cornwall, and are common as is the "merry fellow" described over a century ago in the Rambler—the man whose ready hearty laugh and perpetual good humour and desire to say something to make you happy proceed from his high spirits. He is quite tolerable: the would-be witty or humorous person, the clown in the company, determined to live up to his reputation, is rather detestable, and reminds one of the actor who can never be himself but is always posing to an audience even when alone with his wife or nursing the baby when his wife is asleep.
I travelled with my Cornish funny man from Truro to Exeter, and as we talked the whole time I got to know him pretty well. He was a middle-aged, strong, good-looking fellow, and a good type of the shrewd, hard-headed Cornishman of the small-farmer class; he was a farmer and cattle-dealer, and had been head gamekeeper on a large landowner's estate. The trouble was that he prided himself on his wit and humour, or for what passes as wit among the people of his class, and, above all, on his good stories. He would now tell us a story, he would say, which would make us "die with laughing," and when it was received without a smile he was puzzled, and assured us that he had always considered it one of his best stories. However, he had others, plenty of them, which we would perhaps think better; but these were better only because they were coarser and more plentifully garnished with swear words, and in the end the other passengers—two or three grave elderly gentlemen, who had an armful of books and papers to occupy their minds—refused to listen any longer. He then gave it up, but being of a social disposition he continued to converse with me in a quiet sober way, but there was now a little cloud on his countenance which had been so sunny before, as if our want of appreciation had hurt him in a tender part. The hurt had, perhaps, made him quarrelsome; at all events we presently fell out over a very trivial matter. We were discussing the scenery through which we were passing when he remarked on the prettiness of a scene that came before our eyes and I agreed; but by and by when he used the same expression about another scene I disagreed. "Do you not then see anything to admire in it?" he asked, and when I said that I admired it he wanted to know why I refused to allow that it was pretty after having called something else pretty because I admired it? He began to harp on this subject and to grow satirical, and wanted to know of every scene we passed whether I called it pretty or not, and if not why not. My replies did not seem to enlighten him much, and at last in a passion he begged me to tell him in plain language, if of two scenes we both admired one was pretty and the other not pretty, why he called them both pretty. I answered that it was because he had a limited vocabulary.
He threw himself back in his seat and looked at me as if I had struck or insulted him, then exclaimed, "Oh, that's it—I have a limited vocabulary!" and presently he added bitterly, "This is the first time in my life that I have been charged with having a limited vocabulary." Without saying more he got up, and going into the corridor planted his elbows on the sill, and supporting his head with his hands, stared gloomily at the landscape for about a quarter of an hour. Then he came back to his seat and looked at me with a different countenance; the expression of sullen resentment had changed to a quite friendly one but overcast with something like regret or shame, and speaking in a subdued manner he said, "You are right, and I deserved it. I know it is a great fault in me, but I assure you that when I use bad words in conversation I mean no more harm than—what shall I say?—than a woman when she says, 'Oh, bother it!' or 'Drat the thing!' because she can't fasten her blouse or her belt. 'Pon my soul I don't! It's just a way I've got into, and the words you didn't like slip out without my knowing it." And so on, with much more in the same apologetic strain. After that there was peace between us. I was indeed rather sorry to lose him at Exeter: as a "funny man," without a sense of humour, he had greatly entertained me, and wishing him well, I hoped he would continue in his mistake about a "limited vocabulary" in the sense in which he had taken the phrase.
My friend the vicar, who made the mistake of saying it was a hundred years since he had seen some one, told me one day that he had been attending a meeting of the clergy of the district, and finding himself in conversation with three friends who were all Cornishmen of good old local families, it occurred to him that it was a good opportunity to find out what educated men in the county would have to say on such a subject. The question, Did the Cornish people have a sense of humour? took them by surprise; they had never considered it—it had never come before them until that moment. After some discussion it was decided in the affirmative; the Cornish have a sense of humour, but—a very important but—it is not the same as the sense of humour in the English people.
English humour, they said, fell flat in Cornwall, even where it was seen, or guessed, that the words spoken were intended to be humorous. If they laughed or smiled, it was out of politeness or good nature, just to please you.
And as our humour failed with them, so did theirs fail with us: we did not appreciate it simply because it was impossible for us, being Englishmen, to see it as they did with their Cornish minds.
A local writer, the late J. T. Tregellas, who wrote funny poems in dialect, and surveyed life generally from the comic point of view, has a considerable reputation in the county. In one of his works, entitled Peeps into the Haunts and Homes of the Population of Cornwall (Truro, 1879), his avowed intention is to "place before the reader a tolerably exact picture of a Cornishman as he is, with all his rough sense of honour, his kind heart, his self-reliance, his naivete, his ingenuity, and his keen quiet power of wit and observation." There are scores of more or less funny stories in this book, but one is soon weary of reading it, because there is little or no evidence in it of the "keen quiet power of wit" one looks for. One finds what may be described as primitive humour—the humour of children and of men in a low state of culture who delight in practical jokes, rough banter, farcical adventures, grotesque blunders and misunderstandings and horse-play. Of unconscious humour there are many examples, which undoubtedly shows a sense of humour in the narrator: and I will quote the conclusion of one of the tales, perhaps the gem of the book, in which an old widow relates her three matrimonial ventures. "And then I married a tailor who did praich sometimes, and was a soort of a teetotaler in his way, and never drinked nothing but tay and sich like; and then he faded away to a shaade, and this day three weeks he died; and ater he was dead they cut un oppen to see what was the matter with un. But waan of the young doctors that helped to do ut towled me that he died all feer and they couldn't find nuthin in un but grooshuns [tea sediment.] I woant have nothin' of that soort agen, but I'll get a farmer with a little money; and so I oft to, for I've got twenty pounds a year and a house to live in."
Books of this kind do not help us much; they are, on the contrary, apt to be misleading when the author has an intimate knowledge of the people and dialect—and, besides, a little invention.
There are, I take it, two common sorts of unconscious humour; one into which persons who may be of humorous minds are apt to tumble through thinking too quickly and being too intent on their point, and who in their haste snatch at any expression that offers to illustrate their meaning without considering its suitability. The result may be a bull or a mixed metaphor. An Irishman, asked to define a bull, after a moment's thought replied, "Well, if you were to see two cows lying down in a field, and one was standing up, that would be a bull." A Cornishman would be incapable of such a reply; or of the Irishman's retort when his companion, accused of being drunk, protested that he was sober: "If ye was sober ye'd have the sinse to know ye was dhrunk." He makes no bulls and does not know what they are. His unconscious humour is of the second kind, which consists in saying things in a way which would be impossible to any person possessing a sense of humour. Here is an example:—
At St. Ives, one Sunday, I went to a Methodist chapel to hear a woman preach—a missioner or gospeller, I think she was called. I did not find her a Dinah, for she was rather large and stout, of a high colour, with black eyes and hair. But it was a singularly intelligent and sympathetic face, and to hear her was a pleasure and a relief, for it was on the eve of the last general election, when all the Little Bethels of Bolerium were being put to strange uses and pulpits were the rostrums of enraged politicians in white ties. She, sweet woman, preached only religion pure and simple in a nice voice without hysteria and with a charming persuasiveness. To hear her was to love her. A few days later she left the town, and then one who was interested in her work rushed in to the minister of the chapel to ask how many souls she had won for Christ on this occasion. For she had on previous visits been very successful in making converts. "Not one this time," answered the minister. "We were too busy with the elections."
A remark made by one of the fishermen at a small coast village near Land's End about Brett, the marine painter, affords another pretty example of the native unconscious humour. Brett's outspoken atheism and brusque manners greatly offended the fisherfolk, and when he began work they watched him very narrowly, curious to know what kind of picture so extraordinary a person would produce. It astonished them to see him use his palette-knife instead of a brush to put on paint and spread it over the canvas. They had never seen such a method before, and it appeared to them wrong or not a legitimate way. One day on the beach they were discussing the strange artist within their gates with reference to some fresh cause of offence on his part, when the remark was made by one, "What can you expect of a man who says there's no God and paints his pictures with a knife?"
Here is another instance from Penzance. There is a public garden in the town, with beds of flowers, benches, a bandstand, a fountain, and at one side some tall elm trees with a rookery. The little fishes in the basin of water attracted a pair of kingfishers, and they haunted the gardens, flashing a wonderful blue in the eyes of the people. But they took the fry—the little sickly fishes which had cost the town several shillings—and the Town Council forthwith had them destroyed. I should have said that only in a Cornish town could so abominable an instance of Philistinism be found had I not witnessed an even worse one when staying at Bath, when the Corporation of that noble town ordered the killing of the kingfishers that frequented the old Roman baths.
After the kingfishers had been destroyed at Penzance, the question of the rooks came up for discussion, and it was resolved to shoot the birds and pull the nests down; but here, as I was informed, the town clerk intervened and pleaded so eloquently for the birds that they were spared. Now one day a group of old men, habitués of the gardens, were sunning themselves there and discussing this question of the rooks. The birds were there, repairing their old nests in the elms with a good deal of caw, caw. They were as talkative as the old men, but "deep in their day's employ" at the same time. Joining in the conversation, I expressed my opinion of the councillors for wanting to destroy the rookery, and was asked indignantly by one of the old men how I would like it if, on a Sunday on my way to chapel in a black coat and silk hat, I were to pass under the rookery and something were to happen to my hat. I replied that I always attended chapel in tweeds and that if I wore a silk hat it would serve me right to have something happen to it. Such an occurrence would only afford an additional reason for preserving the birds. My questioner glared at me, and I judged from their looks that the others did not approve of such sentiments.
It was very funny, but I heard an even funnier one when listening to the talk of a knot of elderly and middle-aged men discussing the treatment the Education Bill was receiving in the House of Lords. But it was not in Penzance, and I will mercifully conceal the name of the little town in Bolerium where I heard it. The men, it must be observed, were all Methodists who had adopted the view of the question which the ministers had been expounding in the chapels. "What we want in England," said one, "is the Russian system, just to remove the men in the two Houses who are opposing the will of the people." The sentiment was heartily applauded by all the others. It was delightfully Cornish—just the sentiment one would expect to hear from the deeply religious Cornishman.
At this same place I heard about a local preacher, a man of a very fine character, who was taxed one day by his employer with having served as a model to an artist of the town, a Mr. Charles. "Yes," he said, "I have been sitting to Mr. Charles, and have had a good deal of conversation with him." Then after a long interval of silence he added, "Yes, I have been sitting to him. Mr. Charles has religion, but it is very, very, very, very, very deep down."
This appeared to be a clue worth following up, and I at once sought out this man and was delighted to know him; he was, physically and mentally, a type of all that is best in the Cornishman, but after a long talk on many subjects with him I was convinced that he was without the sense of humour. At the same time I felt that this was scarcely a defect in one of his nature. I felt, too, that something like this might be said of the people generally—the sense which they lack seems less important in their case than in that of others; it is not so much missed—because of their perennial vitality, their fresh impressible mind and sense of eternal youth and curious interest in little things which never fades and fails. Here I made the acquaintance of four men whose respective ages were eighty-one, eighty-five, eighty-six, and eighty-eight. There was no sign of weariness in any of them; they were as much alive and in love with life as their middle-aged neighbours and as the young, down even to the children.
These general reflections bring back to mind yet one more incident bearing on the point—an example of the buoyant child surviving in a man well advanced in years.
I had wasted a day indoors at Penzance reading books when, hearing the hour of four strike, I flew out for a walk to the neighbouring hills before dark. Hurrying along the street, which led me away from the front, I felt that I wanted my afternoon cup of tea and thought I had better get it before quitting the town. I soon came to a small baker's shop, and going in and pushing open the door at the back discovered the baker and his family just sitting down to their tea. The women made room for me at the table and spoke welcoming words, while the baker himself looked at me but said nothing. He was a fine specimen of a Cornishman: old and strongly built, with a large perfectly bald head, on which he wore a skull cap, and a vast cloud of white hair which covered the lower half of his face and flowed over his chest. He had the broad head, high cheek-bones, large mouth and depressed nose, wide at the nostrils, of the pure Cornish Celt, and, most marked feature of all, the shrewd, prying, almost inquisitorial, yet friendly, blue-grey eyes. Those eyes, I observed out of the corners of mine, were furtively watching me, but I did not resent it. By and by I caught sight of another member of the family I had not observed before also watching me very attentively with the most brilliant eyes in the world—a fine grey parrot in a big tin cage at the far end of the room. He was standing at the open door of the cage, silent and motionless, with his neck craned out in a listening attitude. I went over to him and gave him some cake, which he accepted in a gentle manner and began eating. Then, coming back to my tea, I began praising the bird, saying that I knew a lot about parrots and admired and respected them because they were nearest to our noble selves in intelligence, and that I had never seen a finer grey parrot than this one. He was silent with me: that was the parrot's way; he was like a wise man, very still and very observant of a stranger in the house; he would watch and listen to know what the strange person was like before declaring himself.
The old man did not smile nor speak but got up, went to the cage, and taking the bird on his hand returned to his seat. Then began a lively game between the two: the parrot climbed over and about the man, was snatched up and tossed as a mother tosses her babe, and finally deposited on the big bald head from which the skull-cap had been removed. The parrot rubbed his feathered head over the shining pate and wiped his beak on it. Then followed a fight with lightning-quick thrust and parry, a finger and a beak for weapons, after which the bird was snatched up and popped, back down, on the table. There he remained some time, perfectly still, his feet stuck up in the air, but not pretending to be dead, for the brilliant white eyes were wide open, keenly watching us all the time. Finally the bird twisted his head round, and using his beak as a lever turned over on his feet, and was invited to kiss and be friends. This the bird did, pushing his way with careful deliberation through the cloud of beard so as to plant his kisses on the lips.
During the performance I could not help remarking a singular resemblance between man and bird: the same love of fun appeared in their bright, watchful, penetrating eyes; one had as much pleasure in the game as the other; they were, man and parrot, very much on a level, very like little children, and like children they were without a sense of humour.
Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that children's humour is rudimentary. Undoubtedly there are individuals who possess it in a higher or more developed state, just as there are children who possess the sense of beauty, an ear for music, and other faculties of the adult, but such cases are exceptional.
It chanced that just before my meeting with the old man of the parrot I had been discussing the subject of this chapter with a gentleman of culture in the district, a member of an old and distinguished Cornish family, who has worked in his profession among the people and knows them intimately. He demurred to my idea that his countrymen (of the lower ranks be it understood) were without the sense of humour, and he instanced their "love of fun" as a proof of the contrary. Mere love of fun, however, always strongest in children and animals, is not the same thing as that finer, brighter, more intellectual sense we are discussing.
But how strong the simple primitive love of fun is in the Cornish people may be seen at Christmas time in St. Ives in their "Guize-dancing," when night after night a considerable portion of the inhabitants turn out in masks and any fantastic costume they can manufacture out of old garments and bright-coloured rags to parade the streets in groups and processions and to dance on the beach to some simple music till eleven o'clock or later.
This goes on for a fortnight. Just think of it, men, women and children in their masks and gaudy get-up, parading the little narrow crooked muddy streets, for long hours in all weathers! And they are Methodists, good, sober people who crowd into their numerous chapels on Sundays to sing hymns and listen to their preachers!
It is fun, pure and simple, and if you mix with them and witness their gaiety and listen to their bantering talk and happy laughter you will not discover the faintest flicker of humour in it all, and if you have witnessed the people of some French, Italian or Spanish town amusing themselves in this fashion, the Guize-dance will seem like a poor, rude imitation of the carnival got up by children.
The naturalist's mind and men's complex nature—An eminent ethnologist—The use of fools—The simple animal mind—Herring gull and rock-pipit—Man and animals compared—The imaginative faculty—Cornish poets—Hawker of Morwenstow—Prose writers—Thomas Carew—Purity of race in Cornwall—Dearth of imaginative work—A prosaic people—Cornwall and Ireland contrasted—Reason of difference—Cornish legends—Mystery plays—Wesley's mission and greatness—Ugliness of Methodism—Effect on the child's mind.
THE naturalist's mental habit of always trying to get at the reason and hidden significance of things is apt to become a worry when he begins to look closely at his fellow-creatures with the object of finding out what they really are, or what the character of this particular human family or herd is compared with that of some other herd which he has studied and thinks he knows. Or perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that his anxiety to classify everything is the source of his trouble, when with a Réaumur's skill his curious mind would distinguish men according to their racial and temperamental characters. It vexes his little busy brain, which loves neatness and symmetry, that men are so various, so complex, that they have so many hidden meanings and motives and instincts—so many invisible threads in the woven texture of their natures, which occasionally shine out, yellow and purple and scarlet among the threads of sober grey, yet when looked at closely, or examined with a magnifying-glass, become invisible again. Either he must give up the quest and the task in despair or else go doggedly on with a sort of stupid courage, trying not to think that he is blundering all the time. It is consoling in a difficulty of this kind to recall the case of an eminent ethnologist, who was exceedingly industrious and prolific and was very great a short generation ago, about which time his learned contemporaries, vexed at his facile method of overcoming all difficulties, rose up against and overthrew him, smashing and pulverising his beautiful theories. After which, with a very engaging, proud humility, he boasted that he had been the fool to rush in where the angels (his opponents) had feared to tread, and that to attack and overthrow they had had to follow him into new and wider fields where they otherwise would never have ventured. We must all be fools in the same way, if we have a little of that courage which I have called stupid, each in his own small sphere, and we certainly do a useful thing if, in exposing our thick skulls to knocks (which don't matter), we succeed in giving courage to better men.
If I had not been a fool, or had not troubled myself with this serious question, it would have been much pleasanter for me in my rambles at this end of all the land, seeing that the inferior animals are so very much simpler and more easy to read than men. Those donkeys, for example, which I meet on the moor, and their scarcely less intelligent friends the jackdaws, I know them a hundred times better than I can know any man—even my own self. And the house-dog too, who is supposed to be mentally more like his masters than any other beast—this dog who watches my comings and goings out of the corners of his eyes and who thinks himself wonderfully clever when, knowing that I don't want him, he steals secretly off an hour before I go out and meets me (by chance) among the furze bushes a mile from home—do I not know every thought in his curly black head, if his little mental trick of putting two and two together can be called thought? And the gulls on the cliff—do I not know just how they will comport themselves; how each bird will eye me suspiciously, sideways, with one brilliant eye at a time; how they will rise and float and dwell on the air, or sit on a rock with beaks to the wind—do I not know every word they will say in their herring-gull language?
It is true they will now and then do a thing which will come as a surprise. Here is an example—an incident I have just witnessed. All day the wind had been blowing half a gale from the sea when I went down to the rocks to get a good mouthful of air before it was dark. There were the gulls at the usual spot; and no sooner had I climbed into a sheltered nook among the rocks than they were all up floating overhead, swooping and rising, and pouring out their insistent loud anxious angry cries. For they were just beginning to nest on the ledges of the cliff beneath me and were troubled at my presence. In spite of the very cold wind and the growing obscurity, when the sun had gone down, I kept my place for upwards of an hour, and for the whole of the time they continued soaring and screaming above me: now with extended motionless wings seeming not to move yet mounting all the time, higher and higher, until they would be four or five hundred yards above me and would begin to look very small; then down and down again in the same imperceptible way, but sometimes descending with an angry rush until they were no more than thirty or forty yards high and one bird among them would make a violent swoop to intimidate me, coming to within a couple of yards of my head with loud swish of wings and sudden savage scream. I noticed that the swoops were all made by one bird, that this same bird acted throughout as fugleman and leader, that whenever the others began to drift away, further and further apart, and their cries grew fainter and less persistent, he or she reanimated them and brought them back with a fresh outburst of fury, emitting louder screams and dashing down in a more violent manner. The longer I watched them the more wonderful appeared the difference in disposition between this one bird, this white flying image of wrath, and the others.
Now at intervals of about three or four minutes my attention would wander from the gull to see and listen to a rock-pipit that had its home at that spot and was also nesting in a chink quite close to the gullery. Every day and all day long, in all weathers, the little singer could be seen and heard at that exposed spot, soaring up at intervals to a height of a couple of hundred yards; then slowly falling back to the rocks, head down, tail spread and wings pressed to its sides with the quills standing out—a shuttlecock or miniature parachute in figure; and while descending he emitted the series of airy tinkling sounds that make his melody. And now, in spite of the lateness of the hour and increasing gloom on the sea and clouded sky and of the cold wind, the little creature would not desist from its flight and song. Its little big passion was as strong and inexhaustible as that of the enraged gull. Then occurred the incident I set out to tell: the gulls with their prolonged monotonous wailing cries were balanced in the air at a height of ninety or a hundred yards, their trumpeter and inspirer keeping in the centre of the scattered company directly above my head. The pipit shot up from the pile of rocks in which I was lying, and rising obliquely from the land side reached the highest point of its flight well over the sea, and then just as it set its feathers to begin its descent a furious gust of wind caught and whirled it landwards, still emitting its tinkling sound, into the very midst of the company of hovering gulls. No sooner was it among them than the angry, alert leading bird, half closing its wings, swooped down on the little tinkler, and instantly a frantic chase began, with lightning-quick doublings, now over the sea, now the land, the gull with its open beak almost touching the terrified little fugitive. "Save yourself, pipit!" I exclaimed, for another inch and the small spotted singer would have been in the big hungry yellow beak and flight and tinkling song ended for ever. And in another moment the tension was ended, for the little thing had gained the rocks and was safe: but it sang no more that evening.
Now, strange as all this may seem—that the pipit should live and breed just by or among the herring gulls, ready at all times to seize and devour any living creature that comes by chance in their way, and that it should go on ascending and descending, singing and singing, every day and all day long, just where the gulls are perpetually floating and flying hither and thither, always on the look-out for something to devour—it is but acting in accordance with its known character. The small bird is without fear of its big rapacious neighbours: it has its own quickness and adroitness to save it from all natural dangers of winds and waves and killing birds; it was only the rare chance of that gust of wind striking it just when it paused in mid-air before dropping, and carrying it away sideways into the midst of the herring gulls, which so nearly cost it its life. On the following morning the gulls would be there, flying about hungry as ever, and the pipit would go on with flight and song in the same old way, free as ever from apprehension. And as with the pipits so it is with all creatures that are preyed upon: sudden violent death as the result of any failure, or mistake, or slight accident, is a condition of wild life, else its vigour would not be so perfect and its faculties so bright.
Every day, in fact, when I am observing the actions of birds, or of animals generally, from a dog or a donkey to a fly, I may witness something unexpected, an action which will come as a surprise; but this will be only because of its rarity, or because it comes about through a rare concurrence of circumstances, but not because the creature has acted in any way contrary to its nature.
It is sadly different (sadly, I mean, for the naturalist) with regard to human beings. You cannot generalise from the actions of an individual as you may safely do in the case of a titlark or a gull or a donkey. You study a dozen or a hundred, and then begin to think that you have not had a sufficient number owing to the variety you have noticed, and you study a hundred more and after all you are still in doubt. It may appear that, in the last chapter, I have not shown much doubt as to the want of a sense of humour (as we understand it) in the Cornish. J have not; but when it comes to another and a greater faculty—imagination, to wit—I am not very sure.
If it could be taken for granted that a people who have never produced any artistic or literary work worth preserving are without imagination, to use the word in its higher sense, as the creative faculty, the question would be a very simple one, seeing that Cornwall has given us nothing or next to nothing. Compare it in that respect with the adjoining county, divided from it by a little river, but distinct racially: what lustre Devon has shed on the whole kingdom! how many of her sons are so great in arms and arts, above all in literature, that we regard them as among the immortals; and what a multitude of lesser men who have made us richer in many ways! Now as one with a very superficial knowledge on this subject I have put the following question to the three men of my acquaintance who have the widest knowledge of English poetic literature: "Has Cornwall ever produced a poet?" and in each case came the quick reply, "Y es, Hawker of Morwenstow." Now Hawker is a great man to us on account of his strong and original character, but he was a very small poet; I should say that during the last half-century England has always had twenty or thirty living minor poets who rank high above him. Finally, he was not a Cornish but a Devon man, and it therefore struck me as exceedingly curious that I should have had that same answer from the last of the three friends interrogated, seeing that he is himself a highly accomplished poet, a Devonian whose birthplace is just on the borders of the duchy. The reply—"Yes, Hawker of Morwenstow" may then be taken to mean "No, not one."
Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Cornwall has contributed absolutely nothing to literature. I have already sung the praises of Richard Carew's work; but he was a prose writer—he failed pitifully when he attempted verse; he therefore stands on a lower level, with perhaps two or three more who have written good prose—William Scawen and Borlase, the antiquary, may be mentioned. But there is Thomas Carew, the lyrist, and friend of Donne, Suckling and Ben Jonson—if he may be called a Cornishman. His name is not included in Boase and Courtney's monumental Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, in the preface of which work they courageously say, "The writers of Cornwall bear no inconsiderable place in the literature of their country." But if we take it that this Carew was a Cornishman, though born out of the county, we must admit that Cornwall has produced one good poet. He does not count for very much, however—this one poet who lived three centuries ago and wrote half a dozen little things that sparkle like diamonds—seeing that he was of that class which is never native, of the soil. Even in those old days men of birth did not spend their lives at home; they attended the court and went forth wide in the world wonders for to see, and intermarried with families outside of their own class, so that, like the Jews among us, they were and always are, racially as well as socially, a distinct people among the people. Norman and Saxon and Dane are we, says the poet truly enough, and he might have added Celt, but the mixing process has been infinitely greater in the upper ranks. The Cornish people, I take it, are Celts with less alien blood in their veins than any other branch of their race in the British Islands.
One day in a village street I met a fine athletic-looking oldish man with a very marked characteristic Cornish face, but painted by alien suns to deepest brown, and that colour of the tropics contrasted oddly with the bright blue-grey eyes and reddish-grey beard. He laughed when I said that I supposed he was a stranger there. Yes, a stranger in a sense, he said, since he had been away over forty years, working in the mines, in America, Africa and Australia. But his forty years' labour had not hurt him much; he felt young still and was going back to Queensland after a little look round. For one thing he had never touched alcohol in his life and he would like to pit his strength against that of any man of thirty in that village where he was born sixty-seven years ago. Yes, it was his own native place which he had come back after forty years to have a look at. His people were there still, and had been there to their certain knowledge over six hundred years. And I dare say, he added, if we knew all we could say a thousand.
Five or ten thousand would perhaps have been nearer the truth. And so it is with the common people generally. They have become great roamers nowadays; they go forth in hundreds every year into all parts of the world, but they appear to cherish the old Cornish feeling against marrying among strangers; they return after few or many years to find wives, and that, I conjectured, was the old miner's motive in coming back to his village "just to have a look round." One of the saddest things in this perpetual going and coming is that a great many men, young and in the prime of life, return after contracting miner's disease, usually in Africa; and though it is known to every one that they are doomed men, they marry and live just long enough to leave a child or two before they are gathered to their fathers.
To return to the main point. Is this surprising dearth of the creative faculty, or of genius, in art and literature a good criterion—does it justify us in saying that the people are devoid of imagination?
For an answer one can only go to the people themselves—not to those of good birth who are in a sense foreigners, or different racially as we have seen, but to the true natives who remain from generation to generation on the land. We are told so often and so insistently by persons who speak with authority that the Celts are an imaginative people that we come to regard it as an established fact, beyond controversy, as true, for instance, as that the blood of a dark-haired person is heavier than the blood of a blonde. It consequently came to me as a great surprise to find that a people so markedly Celtic as the Cornish were the most prosaic I had ever known. At first I could not quite believe that it was so: it was only that I was a stranger among them and had not yet found the way to the hidden romantic vein and poetic spirit in them. Gradually it was borne in on me that the vein was not there, that it had no existence—that my wish and no secret living spring or hidden treasure in the earth had caused the hazel twig to dance and dip in my hand. Or, if they had it, then, like their sense of humour, it was of that lower or undeveloped root kind discoverable in children and in primitive people.
Undoubtedly this is contrary to the conclusion any person would most probably form on a first and superficial acquaintance with the people, on account of their manner and disposition, in which they differ so greatly from the more stolid, slower-moving, thinking and speaking English peasant. Nevertheless in the English peasant in the north, south and Midlands, in spite of that seemingly mental and physical heaviness and absorption in the purely material things which concern him in his struggle for existence, I have found that hidden vein of romance and that poetic feeling which I have failed to find in West Cornwall.
On this subject I do not venture to speak of the Cornish people generally. There may be important differences. I have been told that in the more easterly parts, particularly in mining districts, the people are not of so lively, friendly and communicative a disposition as in West Cornwall; but I assume that here, in Bolerium, we get the least mixed, the truer, Cornishman. Here it seemed to me that not only with regard to the æsthetic faculties, but in various other ways too, in mind and disposition, they are like children of a larger growth. On this point however, one may very easily go wrong, since the same thought will sometimes strike us with regard to other Celtic families. Yet in Cornwall I could not get away from the idea that the child-like traits in the character of the people were not merely a matter of disposition, of the buoyant child surviving in the man, but that it marked a lower stage in mental development.
This may be wrong: but after all what one wants is a working theory, and it does not very much matter whether it be true or false so long as it enables us to get over the ground.
When we live with savages, or uncivilised people, it is very much like living with children; we get to know them as we never know the civilised beings we spend our lives with although they are our own people. For however unexpected their changes of temper and actions may be, especially where these place us in sudden peril, we yet know that they are only feeling, thinking and acting in accordance with their true natures. They are not quite so simple and easy to read as the lower animals; nevertheless the difference between the uncivilised and civilised man is so immense that we can say of the first that it is as easy to understand him as it is to understand a dog or a donkey or a child.
It may also be observed that there is a vast difference in this respect between the members of separate classes in the same community, in spite of their racial relationship—between peasant and gentleman; and it may perhaps be taken as a truth that complex conditions of life make complex characters. The Cornish peasant appeared to me easier to understand than the English, and, as I imagined, because he was nearer, mentally, to the child. It may even be that the greater sympathy with children of the Cornish people, men and women, is due to this fact that man and child are nearer in mind than is the case with the English people. They are moved emotionally in the same way as children and are liable to gusts of passion, and, like children, are apt to be cruel in their anger. They are candid, pliant and delighted to serve you when pleased, but are subject to petulant and stubborn fits, and will brood in sullen resentment for days, meditating revenge, for some trivial imaginary slight. And they are intensely fond of things which please children—gifts, shows, gay colours, noise and excitement. Here is a little characteristic incident in which we see the bad stubborn boy surviving in the adult. The late Royal Academician, Hook, was on the sands at Whitesand Bay working at a sea-piece when two natives came up and planted themselves just behind him. There was nothing the artist hated more than to be watched by strangers over his shoulders in this way, and pretty soon he wheeled round on them and angrily asked them how long they were going to stand there. His manner served to arouse their spirit and they replied brusquely that they were going to stay as long as they thought proper. He insisted on knowing just how long they were going to stay there to his annoyance, and by and by, after some more loud and angry discussion one of them incautiously declared that he intended standing at that spot for an hour. "Do you mean that?" shouted Hook, pulling out his watch. Yes, they returned, they would not stir one inch from that spot for an hour. "Very well!" he said, and pulled up his easel, then marching off to a distance of thirty yards, set it up again and resumed his painting. And there within thirty yards of his back the two men stood for one hour and a quarter, for as they did not have a watch they were afraid of going away before the hour had expired. Then they marched off muttering curses.
In all this, and still more in their occasional emotional outbreaks, which when produced by religious excitement are so painful to witness, the Cornish are no doubt very much like other Celts in Britain; but in some things, with one of which alone I am concerned here—to wit, the imaginative faculty—these separate branches of the race have diverged very widely indeed. The old literatures of Ireland and Wales live to show it, and in Ireland, at all events, this fountain of inspiration has never ceased to flow. It is flowing copiously as ever now, and making us richer every day. What is the secret of this great difference—the reason of this creative faculty which has given Ireland, in spite of her misery, so splendid a place in our literature, which appears like a touch of rainbow colour in the humblest peasant's mind, and does not exist and never has been in Cornwall? Doubtless from that mixture of blood which came to pass in Ireland during those restless centuries of tremendous changes, when ancient nations were cast into another mould, of emigration and conquest and colonisation; and of the fusion of races by intermarriage of the Irish Celts with the mentally more virile and imaginative invaders from the north. We must assume, too, that this fusion of blood did not go so far and hardly took place at all in Cornwall. We see that the conquerors left but few and slight traces of their occupancy in the peninsula, and the presumption is that they did not take root in it, that when they had come and conquered and had their carousal of blood they were glad to sail or march away, like William Gilpin in search of the picturesque, from a country of so barren and repellent an aspect, to seek for a permanent resting-place in a softer, more fertile land. Lord Courtney, in a presidential address to the Natural History and Antiquarian Society of Penzance, said: "While the wave of conquest swept completely over other parts of England, it only just reached this part and then receded. The population of Cornwall in general has remained much more homogeneous, much more Celtic in type, than in other parts; and of all Cornwall there is no part like this in which we are met with probably so pure a breed of human beings."
The people were left in their rocky land, and what they had been—an ancient crystallised race with the imaginative faculty undeveloped—they remained and remain to this day.
It has been thought that because Cornwall is preeminently the land of strange beliefs and of old tales and legends relating to mythical saints and heroes, to giants and demons with a great variety of fantastic beings—mermaids, fairies, pigsies and piskies and other little people—the Cornish are a highly imaginative people. These things are old survivals, and are of the imagination in its childish or primitive stage. The belief in all these fanciful beings is pretty well dead and gone now; at all events, I was unable to find even an old woman who had anything to say of the old beliefs which was not disrespectful. But these beliefs undoubtedly kept their hold on the Cornish mind very much longer than in any other part of the country, and with these beliefs certain pagan, or Druidical, observances were also kept up, and have only died out within the last thirty or forty years. Similar beliefs and observances were as common all over England as in Cornwall; there was not a hill or down, or lake or stream, or singular tree or rock, which did not have its own special demon or genius. All this passed away with the fusion of the British Celts with a people in a more advanced psychological stage. But although these childish things have been put away so long, you will still find faint traces of them everywhere, even in the most Saxon districts in England. They inspire little or no belief, but are kept in memory, like old ballads, and passed on from generation to generation. In Cornwall belief in them continued to within very recent times, and they are remembered still. It was said not very long ago by a well-known Penzance writer that folklorists, when they come to Cornwall, especially the west, complain that the materials are so abundant they do not know how to manage them. Merely to enumerate and classify legends and beliefs in giants, little men, and fairies of a dozen denominations, ghosts, souls, semi-devils and phantoms of divers sorts, goblins, monsters and mermaids, is more than they can do. A very large number of these legends, enough, one would imagine, to satisfy the greatest enthusiast, have been collected by Robert Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England, and by William Bottrell in Stories and P'olflore of West Cornwall, in three series. There we have it, or as much of it as we want, a huge crude mass, the rough material out of which an early literature might have come had there ever been a mind capable of assimilating and giving it literary form.
When the old language was in a moribund state during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there appeared to be but one man in the county to lament its passing—William Scawen, who loved the old things, old usages and traditions, and who rebuked his fellow-Cornishmen for their indifference with a bitter eloquence. But he did not grieve over the dying language on account of any noble or beautiful or otherwise valuable work enshrined in it. The few mystery or miracle plays and other native productions which existed (and exist still) were not worth preserving. What troubled him was the thought that the old ways and spirit were to a great extent dependent on the old tongue. The plays were valueless as literature and were of the same quality as a thousand more which were once performed in most parts of England, the loss of which nobody regrets, but their performance drew people together from all parts to the vast open-air theatre, the plan-au-Guare, and in this way whatever little romance and poetry existed in the minds of the people was kept alive.
A mightier change was to come later, when Wesley made his descent on the county about the middle of the eighteenth century and converted the people wholesale to Methodism. This was in many ways the very worst form of religion for a people of the temper and character of the Cornish, but it suited them exactly at the time it came to them—a dull and stagnant period in their history when the Church was indifferent. They were a highly emotional race and were in a starved condition, hungry for some great excitement, some outlet for their repressed natures, some excuse for a mad outburst, and this gave it them—these wonderful gatherings of miners, fishermen and labourers on the land, in the old disused theatres under the wide open sky, listening to that mysterious supernatural man who had it in his power to call down God to them. That same God who had been growing further removed from their lives and dimmer in their minds for years and for generations, until He was little more than one of the Cornish giants or supernatural monsters believed in by the "old people"—now once more an awful stupendous reality, a gigantic kite hovering on broad black wings over their congregated thousands, his burning, rapacious eyes fixed on them, while from time to time he made his little tentative swoops to set them fluttering and screaming. For they were like terrified fowls and chickens in a farm-yard, each expecting and dreading to be made a victim—each knowing that his miserable soul might not be saved until the winged terror fell upon him to grip and bury its crooked lacerating talons in his flesh. And when the stoop and grip came he rolled on the ground bellowing and shrieking to the accompaniment of groans and sobs and piercing cries of those around him. Dreadful as this was, and horrible and loathsome to witness by any person of a decent or reverent mind, it was yet a joy to them and gave them what they wanted—a glorious emotional feast. From the days of Wesley to the present time these unseemly spectacles have been common throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula, as they have been in Wales, and one may be thankful that the Irish kept the old faith, which does not permit such things, since it saved them from a like degradation.
I rejoice, and all who have any respect and love for humanity will rejoice, that in Cornwall at all events these exhibitions are declining.
Last year one day a Truro acquaintance of mine got into a railway carriage in which were five Methodist ministers returning from a conference they had been attending. They were discussing the decrease in the number of converts and the decline of revivals during the last few years. One of them, a stout, elderly person, said he did not take so pessimistic a view of the position as the others appeared to do. He thought the falling off, if there were any, was perhaps attributable to the ministers themselves, and then added, "All I have got to do is to preach my Judgment-Day sermon to set them howling." The others were silent for a little, and then one said, "Do you think it wise to say much about everlasting punishment at the present juncture?" No one replied to the question, and after an uncomfortable interval they changed the subject.
One would hardly suppose that the "present juncture" would be causing much anxiety in far Bolerium; yet even here in this ancient rocky fastness of Dissent the trumpets of the New Theology are beginning to sound in some of the chapels. Methodism, on account of its wealth and the perfection of its machine, will be the last of the sects to feel the impending changes; but this is a subject which does not concern us here, and enough has perhaps been said to show that Methodism with its revival campaigns and notion as to the necessity of sudden conversion, accompanied with the outward visible signs of the inner struggle and change—sobbings, howlings, contortions and Glory Hallelujahs—is not a healthy one for so extremely emotional a people.
Wesley's fame does not however suffer from these sad incidental results of his great propaganda. He remains a very great man, the greatest of all the sons of the Anglican Church, one who went about his work among Celts and Saxons indifferently in a white heat which set men's hearts on fire. He had no pleasure in seeing people carried so completely away by their feelings and behaving like lunatics or frenzied wild beasts in a cage; on the contrary, he abhorred the sight of such things even as he abhorred Dissent and that "odious familiarity with the Deity" which grieved and disgusted his reverent mind in his preachers. Nor did he consider, nor was it possible for him to know, in his long strenuous life, which was but a battle and a march, as the poet has said of another leader of men, while like the wind, homeless, without resting, he stormed across a world convulsed by a tremendous religious awakening and excitement—he did not know that he was inflicting a deadly injury on the Church which he loved above all things and clung to all his life long, and, finally, that in the end it would all make for ugliness.
This is indeed the chief cause of the repulsion with which Methodism and Nonconformity in general is regarded by those who have the sense of beauty, whose hearts echo the poet's cry
Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
There is one God; but the gods which men worship are innumerable as the stars in heaven and as the sands on the seashore, and they vary in character even as their worshippers do. To go back to the dark days of the seventeenth century, we see that beauty and whatever was of good report, which became associated in the Puritan mind with the life and forms of worship of their enemies, was a thing accurst. And, the human mind being what it is, it was but natural that the particular god of their worship came to be the very god of ugliness, a despiser of beauty who looked with jealousy on those who were won by it even as he did on those who kissed their hands to the rising moon. He was not the God to whose glory the great fanes of England were raised. And from that far time "of Oliver's usurpation when all monumental things became despicable" this same temper of mind and dismal delusion has come down to us in a hundred denominations with their temples of ugliness sprinkled over all the land.
Any house is good enough to worship God in, is a treasured saying, and it has been remarked that no place of worship has ever been raised by Nonconformity in England which any person would turn aside from the road to look at. This would be too little to say of the chapels in West Cornwall, where the principle of any-house-good-enough has been carried to an extreme. The principle may or may not be insulting to a personal Deity, mindful of man and anxious that man should do Him honour—we cannot know His mind on such a question; but these square naked granite boxes set up in every hamlet and at roadsides, hideous to look at and a blot and disfigurement to the village and to God's earth, are assuredly an insult to every person endowed with a sense of beauty and fitness. You will notice that a cow-house, or a barn or any other outbuilding at even the most squalid-looking little farm in a Cornish hamlet strikes one as actually beautiful by contrast with the neighbouring conventicle. And in a way it is so, being suited to its purpose and in its lines in harmony with the surrounding buildings, with the entire village grouped or scattered round the old church with its dignified old stone tower, and finally with the rocky land in which it is placed. From such a building—barn or cow-house—one turns to the chapel with a feeling of amazement, and asks for the thousandth time, How can men find it in them to do such things?
The interior of these chapels is on a par with their exterior appearance. A square naked room, its four dusty walls distempered a crude blue or red or yellow, with a loud-ticking wooden kitchen clock nailed high up on one of them to tell how the time goes. Of the service I can only say that after a good deal of experience of chapel services in many parts of England I have found nothing so unutterably repellent as the services here, often enough conducted by a "local preacher," an illiterate native who holds forth for an hour on the Lord's dealings with the Israelites in a loud metallic harsh Cornish voice.
I observed that as a rule but few adults attended the morning services in the villages and small towns; the women had their housework to do and dinner to cook; the men liked a long rest on a Sunday morning, and did not care to wear their best suit of clothes the whole day. These all flocked to the afternoon or evening services; but alas for the little ones!—they were all packed off to chapel in the morning. Again and again on taking my seat in a chapel at the early service I found myself in a congregation chiefly composed of children. What can be the effect on the child mind of such an interior and of such a service—the intolerable sermon, the rude singing, the prayers of the man who with "odious familiarity" buttonholes the Deity and repeats his "And now, O Lord" at every second sentence—the whole squalid symbolism! One can but say that if any imagination, any sense of beauty, any feeling of wonder and reverence at the mystery of life and nature had survived in their young minds it must inevitably perish in such an atmosphere.