CHAPTER X AN IMPRESSION OF PENZANCE
Value of first impressions—Market day in Penzance—Cornish cows—The main thoroughfare—Characteristics—Temperance in drink—A foreigner on English drinking habits—Irish intemperance—The craving for drink—False ideas—Wales—Methodism and temperance—Carew's testimony—Conclusion.
PLACES are like faces—a first sight is almost invariably the one that tells you most. When the first sharp, clear impression has grown blurred, or is half forgotten or overlaid with subsequent impressions, we have as a rule lost more than we have gained: it is hardly too much to say in a majority of instances that the more familiar a place becomes to us the less well we know it. At all events we have ceased to know it in the same way; we no longer vividly, consciously, see it in its distinctive character.
Here it must be explained that by "place" several things are meant—the appearance of the buildings, if it be a town or village; its scenery and physical conditions generally; and, finally, its inhabitants, their physique, dress, speech and character.
Now that I know Penzance fairly well, having visited it a dozen or twenty times, occasionally staying a week or longer in it, I am glad to be able to go back to my very first impression, which, fortunately, I did not leave wholly to memory.
The first visit was on a Tuesday, which is market day in Penzance, always the best day on which to visit a country town if one is interested in the people and their domestic animals. Although in midwinter, the day was exceptionally mild and very fine, and arriving early, I spent some hours in strolling about the streets, peeping into the churches, and visiting the public gardens, the sea-front and cattle-market. The town itself, despite its fine situation on Mount's Bay, with the famous castle on the island hill, opposite Marazion, on one hand and the bold coast scenery by Newlyn and Mousehole on the other, interested me as little as any country town I have seen. Streets narrow and others narrower still, some straight, some very crooked, with houses on either side, mostly modern, all more or less mean or commonplace in appearance. The market, too, was curiously mean, and the animals poor; it was a surprise to see such cattle in a district which is chiefly dependent on dairy produce. The cows were small, mostly lean and all in an incredibly rough and dirty condition, their haunches, and in many instances half their coats, covered with an old crust of indurated mud and dung. The farmers do nothing to improve their cattle and are not only satisfied to go on keeping these small beasts of no particular breed—a red and white animal which looks like a degenerated Jersey—but it is customary to allow them to breed a year too soon.
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This, however, is not a question to dogmatise about; one would certainly wish to see the beasts better cared for in the winter months and brought to market in a less filthy state, but I doubt that any improved breed would flourish in the conditions in which these animals exist in the small dairy farms on the stony moors in this rough unsheltered district. The cow of the Land's End country is, in some degree, a product of the place and in harmony with its environment, like the Land's End fox and badger.
At noon the market was over, but the town continued full of people until long after dark, the main thoroughfare, Market Jew Street, and one or two streets adjoining, being thronged with farmer folk and people from the villages who had come in to sell their produce and do their shopping. Carriers' carts stood in rows by the side of the pavements, and as in other market towns each had brought in its little cargo of humanity, mostly women with sun-browned faces, all in that rusty respectable dowdy black dress which is universal in rural England and would make an ugly object of any woman in the world. Again, as is the custom in market towns, the thoroughfare was the place where the people congregated to meet and converse with their friends and relations. This meeting with friends appeared to be a principal object of a visit to Penzance on market day. It was a sort of social function, and the longer I remained in the street, sauntering about, watching the people and listening to endless dialogues, the more I was interested. Not only was this the healthiest-looking crowd I had ever seen in a town, without a sickly or degraded face in it, but it was undoubtedly the most cheerful, and at the same time the most sober. The liveliness of the crowd, its perpetual flow of hilarious talk, its meetings and greetings and handshakings, and its numerous little groups in eager good-humoured discussion, made me very watchful, but down to the end I was unable to detect the slightest sign of inebriety. It was a new and curious experience to find myself in a considerable gathering of rustics who had succeeded in getting through their day away from home so pleasantly without the aid of intoxicants.
Some of the town police I conversed with on the subject during the day assured me there was very little drinking going on; and that on the last occasion of the great annual fair of Corpus Christi, which lasts two or three days, when the people of all the country round are gathered in Penzance and a good deal of merry-making goes on, they had not a single case of drunkenness. The policemen, abstainers themselves they informed me, believed the people were sober because they were mostly church and chapel goers and had been brought up to regard intemperance as a great defect in a man and a great sin.
This explanation of the soberness of the Cornish people, especially in the west part, is, I found, the usual one: it is short and easy to carry about in the brain, and a policeman or any one you question on the point is as ready to supply you with it as he would be to give you a match to light your pipe. Religion may be one cause, but I imagine that another and a much more important one is to be traced in the character of this people.
I here recall a striking explanation of the drinking habit in England given me by an independent witness and a very keen observer. He was an Argentine of an old native family. I first knew him as a young student; he rose afterwards to a very high place in the government of his country, and a few years ago, while on a visit to England, he looked me up and we renewed our old friendship.
His idea about drinking in England was that it was indulged in to remedy a defect in us, a certain slowness or dullness of thought or feeling from which we desired at times to escape. He gave the following illustration. Two British workmen, old friends, meet by chance after a long interval and clasp hands delightedly and each asks the other how he is. One says "Just so so" or "Pretty well," the other says "Mustn't grumble." They appear, then, to have got to the end of their powers of speech, yet are conscious that there is more to be said if they are ever to get back into the old comfortable intimacy. Suddenly one has an inspiration and proposes a drink. The other agrees with a sense of relief, and they incontinently repair to the nearest public, where, after a glass or two, what they desired and tried to get but could not is at once theirs: their tongues are loosed, they laugh in pure joy at their new-found freedom and ability to express themselves; they talk of their work, their families, of a hundred things they had forgotten but remember now, and are glad to feel in sympathy with each other.
Now, he continued, we of another race and disposition in our country when we meet an old friend, although it may not be very long since we last saw him, feel no such restraint, but at once the joy of meeting him sets us off. The pleasure is stimulus enough of itself; it sends the blood spinning through our brains, and we are, in fact, almost intoxicated by it. To take alcohol is unnecessary, and would, indeed, be very foolish.
So far my Argentine friend, and whether he was right or wrong it struck me at Penzance that the naturally lively disposition of Cornishmen, their quick feeling and responsiveness, was the chief cause of their temperance in drink. This made it easy for them to practise temperance; it made it possible for friend to meet friend and spend the day without an artificial aid to cheerfulness.
It is true that the Irish, racially related to the Cornish and resembling them in disposition, are not a sober people; on this point I will only venture to suggest that their love of whisky and ether may not result from the same cause as the Anglo-Saxon's love of drink. Probably their misery has got a great deal to do with it, for just as whisky or beer will unfreeze the currents of the soul in two stolid English friends and set them flowing merrily, so in men of all races will alcohol lift them above themselves and give them a brief happiness.
It may seem odd to quote the Rev. R. J. Campbell in this connection, but I find in a recent pronouncement of his a curiously apposite remark about drunkenness. "The man," he says, "who got dead drunk last night did so because of the inspiration in him to break through the barriers of his limitations, to express himself and realize the more abundant life." We need not follow him any further in his quaint contention that sin is, after all, nothing but a spasmodic effort of the sinner to reach to or capture higher things—a "quest of God" as he curiously puts it. It is nothing but a prolonged and somewhat shrill echo of a wiser or a saner man's thoughts. "The sway of alcohol over mankind," says Professor William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, "is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says, No; drunkenness expands, unites and says, Yes.... It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth... it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning."
Mr. Campbell's striver after the higher life who got dead drunk last night is brother to the savage. It is stated by no less an authority on the drink question than Dr. Archdall Reid that there is in man a passion, an instinct, for alcohol, and that the savage has a craving for drink. There is no such craving. The natural happiness of the savage, as I know him, is in hunting and fighting; and in the intervals of those stirring pursuits he has a somewhat dull, lethargic existence. Alcohol produces the state of mind he is in when occupied with the chase or in raiding and fighting. It is a joyful excitement, a short cut to happiness and glory which he will take at every opportunity. They will even sell their weapons and the skins that cover them for a little of this happiness; but when there is no more of it to be had they return to their normal life, and think no more about it unless the poison has permanently or very seriously injured them. One effect on the poisoned man, savage or civilised, is that "craving", or mad thirst, with which, Dr. Reid imagines, Nature has cursed her human children.
We have now got a good distance away from the subject we started with; but I have no intention of returning to Penzance. That town interested me solely as a place where Cornishmen may be seen and studied. To go back a little further in time to my first impressions of Cornwall, I was struck, as most persons are on a first visit, with its unlikeness to other parts of England. You find the unlikeness, not only in the aspect of the country, but in the people too; you would hardly feel that you had gone so far from the England you know if you had crossed the Atlantic. The differences are many and great, but in this chapter I am concerned with only one—the greater temperance of the people: indeed, my impression of Penzance was given mainly to serve as an introduction to this subject. It is a very important one. Our judges and magistrates are always telling us that most of the crimes committed in this country are due to drink. The case of Cornwall certainly favours that view: it is, if the statistics are accepted as showing the true state of things, the most sober and has the cleanest record in the land. The Devonians are not a vicious people; they compare well enough with most counties, and they are next-door neighbours to the Cornish; yet the indictable offences in Devon are about double per thousand of the population to those of Cornwall. What is the reason of this? Why are the Cornish more temperate than others?
I am sorry I ever wasted an hour over a book on Cornwall with the idea that it would be helpful to me. The time would have been more profitably spent if I had stood with my hands in my pockets watching a sparrow carry up straws to its nesting-hole under the eaves; or, better still, if I had talked to a child or an old man in some village street. To read is to imbibe false ideas, and in the end, if you are capable of observing for yourself and care anything about the matter, you are put to the trouble of ridding yourself of them.
When the Penzance policemen—abstainers and religious men themselves—gave me a reason for the people's soberness they were telling me what they had been taught, and I accepted it as probably true. I too had read that statement and here was a confirmation of it! It is a great satisfaction, a relief, to have our problems solved for us. Blessings on the man who runs out before us to remove some obstacle from the path!
But the relief was not for long: doubts began to assail me. What the good policemen had said was what the Methodists have been saying in their writings these hundred years or longer: they are saying it now, all the time, and believe it because it flatters them, and poor weak humanity is ever credulous of a flattering falsehood.
One day, a few miles from Penzance, I met a young coastguardsman and had a nice long talk with him, in the course of which he gave me his impression of the country. For he was not a native and had not long been in Cornwall; he came from South Wales where he had been stationed two or three years. The people of that place—I will not mention the locality—were, he said, horrible to live with, degraded and brutish beyond what he could have imagined possible in any civilised country. They were drunkards, fighters, dreadfully profane, and as to lechery—called immorality in the journals and blue-books—no woman could go out after dark, or by day into any lonely place, without danger of assault. The change to West Cornwall was so great that for several weeks he could not realise it; he could not believe that the people were all sober and decent and friendly in disposition as he had been assured. When he spied a man coming along the road his impulse was to lower his eyes or turn his face away to avoid seeing a brutalised countenance. He always expected to hear some obscene expression or a torrent of profanity from every stranger he met. Even now, after some months in this new clean land, he had not grown quite accustomed to regard every one, stranger or not, as a being just like himself, one he could freely address and feel sure of receiving friendly pleasant words in return.
It was interesting to hear the coastguardsman's story because of his feelings in the matter and what the change to Cornwall meant to him. That he was right in his facts we know. We know, for instance, that just as Cornwall is the cleanest county, so some of the Welsh counties—especially in the coalmining districts—are the foulest. Yet the Welsh are Celts too and Methodists of a hundred and fifty years standing! They are, in fact, the truer Methodists if we consider what that creed is and that its most essential point is that there can be no salvation without a sudden conversion, with or without the accompaniment of groanings, shriekings, and other manifestations of the kind. But what are the facts of the case as to the condition of Cornwall, with regard to drunkenness, before its conversion to Methodism? They are not so easily got as one may think. There is plenty of material, and any one with a preconceived opinion on the question would doubtless find something to confirm him in it. I had no opinion, and my sole desire was to find out the truth. My first superficial study of the question made me a believer in the claim made by the Methodists, but it did not bear a closer investigation. What I found was that when tin-mining was in a highly prosperous state and the population of the mining centres vastly greater than it is now there was a good deal of intemperance among the miners; but there is nothing to show that they were as degraded as the Welsh of to-day. It is also indisputable that Wesley's preaching had a profound effect on the tin-miners. That is the most that can be said. That the Methodism invented after Wesley's death and imposed on his followers in his name—the name of one who abhorred Dissent—is the cause of the temperance of the Cornish people generally there is no evidence to show, and no reason to believe. On the contrary there is very good reason for disbelief.
The Cornish people are incomparably better off now, so far as material comforts go, than they were in the last half of the sixteenth century, when Richard Carew wrote his Survey of Cornwall; but there have been no really great, no radical changes—no transformations, as in so many other parts of Britain. The life of to-day is very much like the old life, and the people now are like their forefathers of three centuries ago as described by Carew. He pointed out that the tin-mines were a great evil—the curse of Cornwall, since it was impossible for the miners to escape the abominable temptations to drink which were thrust in their way. Every second house was a drinking-place, into which the poor wretches were enticed to waste their earnings, with the result that their families were in a chronic state of want. But the rural population were in a very different case; those who worked on the land were indeed poor, fared coarsely, dressed meanly and wore no shoes, but they were sober and industrious and lived in decent homes, and their wives and children were properly fed and clothed; so that in the end they were far better off and happier than the workers in the mines.
So we arrive at the conclusion that the Cornish people are not, and never have been, intemperate generally; for one reason, because they are of a singularly happy disposition, lively and sociable, with a very intense love of their families and homes; and, secondly, because of the idyllic conditions in which they exist, and always have existed, in a country thinly populated, without big towns, with the healthiest, most equable and genial climate in Britain; and, best of all, isolated, outside of and remote from civilisation with its feverish restlessness, vices and dreadful problems.
