CHAPTER XI MANNERS AND MORALS
Carew's Survey of Cornwall—Books on Cornwall—Excessive praise and dispraise—Saxon and Celt—Charge of insincerity—"One-and-all" spirit—Dishonesty—Untruthfulness—An Englishman's view of the Welsh—The question of immorality—Cruelty to animals—Offences unpunished—Cornish civilisation a "veneer"—Wrecking and what it means—Sunday observance—Cornish and English consistency—Englishmen who understand.
AFTER having marched over the land, and waded through the sea, to describe all the creatures therein, insensible and sensible, the course of method summoneth me to discourse of the reasonable, to wit, the inhabitants."
Thus said Richard Carew in his Survey of Cornwall, written at the end of the sixteenth century. I have no course of method, nor any order in which to record these impressions of rocks and waters and birds and flowers, or any other thing, insensible or sensible; but now, after having written one entire long chapter on the soberness of the Cornish people, explaining the causes, as I conceive them, of this peculiar state, I think it may be just as well to go on about the reasonable, to wit the inhabitants, and endeavour to get a little nearer to a proper understanding of them. And here I must modify what I said in my haste about the worthlessness (to me) of all books on Cornwall, protesting that my time would have been better spent in listening to the chirruping of a cock sparrow than in reading them. Carew's book is a notable exception, pleasant and profitable to read after three centuries, and, if we exclude living authors, it may be described as the one very good book ever written by a Cornishman.
Having said so much it strikes me as an odd fact that the boast Carew made about his important and long-living book—that it was his very own, or, to use his more picturesque expression, that he gathered the sticks for the building of his poor nest—I, too, can make of this unimportant work which may not have more years of life than the Survey has had centuries.
For impressions of nature one goes to nature—the visible world which lies open before us; but when it comes to that other nature of the human heart, half-hidden in clouds and mist and half-revealed in gleams of the sun, one modestly looks to others for guidance and to the books which have been written in the past. And of books there are plenty—histories, topographies, guides, hand-books, tours, travels, itineraries, journeys and journals, wherein are many useful facts originally collected very long ago and carried on from book to book—facts about the pilchard fishery, tin and tin-mining, geology and natural history, Cornish crosses and cromlechs with other antiquities; also legends of saints and giants and the happenings of a thousand years ago. But about the reasonable, to wit the inhabitants, next to nothing, and that very little as a rule misleading. It is mostly of a flattering description.
It is indeed curious to note that while those who have written on the Cornish people almost invariably say the pleasantest things about them, the English, or Anglo-Saxons, who live among them, the strangers who reside permanently or for long periods within their gates, have a very different opinion. The praise and the dispraise to my mind are equally far from the truth; moreover, it is not difficult to discover the reason of such widely divergent opinions. Those who visit the land to write a book about it, or for some other purpose, but do not remain long enough to know anything properly, are charmed and misled by the exceedingly friendly and pleasant demeanour towards strangers which is almost universal, seeing in it only the outward expression of divers delightful qualities. Those who live with the people, if they happen to be Saxons, discover that the friendliness is a manner, that when you penetrate beneath it you come upon a character wholly un-Saxon, therefore of a wrong description or an inferior quality. For it is a fact that the Englishman is endowed with a very great idea of himself, of the absolute rightness of his philosophy of life, his instincts, prepossessions, and the peculiar shape and shade of his morality. He is, so to speak, his own standard, and measures everybody from China to Peru by it, and those who fall short of it, who have a somewhat different code or ideal, are of the meaner sort of men which one expects to find outside of these islands. It is undoubtedly a noble state of mind, befitting a world-conquering people, and has served to make us respected, feared and even disliked in other countries, but some small disadvantages and some friction result from it at home, and one is that the lord of human kind residing among inferior Celts finds himself out of harmony with the people about him. He is not as a rule quick, but after a few months or years in a place he begins to find his neighbours out, and they on their side are not insensible of the change in his regard. He sees that they have faults and vices which being unlike those of the English he finds it hard to tolerate. Not only does he disapprove of them on this account but he resents having been taken in. "You are charmed with this people, you tell me! Wait till you have lived years with them as I have done and know them as I do, then give me your opinion," they are accustomed to say in their bitterness—the feeling which cannot but make a man unjust.
It is not easy or not pleasant to descend to particulars, but having gone so far as to state the question it would hardly be fair not to go further, although by so doing I shall most probably incur the displeasure of both sides.
A common charge against the Cornish is a want of solidity or stability of character. You cannot rely on them. You are constantly deceived by their manner: they are the readiest of any people on earth to fall in with your views and do exactly what you want. But they don't do it. You may waste years or indeed your whole life in striving to make them see things in your better way, and give them every instruction and make them understand (for they are not stupid) how much more may be done by following an improved method, and you will always be brought back to the same old We don't belong to do it that way, and after a hundred or a thousand trials you give it up in despair. Or you may take your defeat philosophically (with a little added wormwood) and say that although they are not stupid, their intelligence, like that of the lower animals, is non-progressive.
Then as to the one-and-all spirit. This, I am assured on all hands, is the veriest fiction, or at all events it is quite a different thing from what it is usually supposed to be. The members of each little community are as a fact more unfriendly and spiteful towards one another than is the case in an English village: they are one only when they make a combined attack on some person who has been so unfortunate as to offend everybody at the same time. So envious are they that every one hates to see any benefit or gift bestowed on another. You must treat all alike; you may not give a hundred of coals to the poorest, most suffering old woman without exciting general ill-will, unless you are prepared to give as much to every other old woman in the parish. They would rather the old creature should be left to shiver in a fireless room. Nor must you speak in praise of another: do not say to Mrs. Trevenna, what a nice, or what a well-behaved, or pretty, or attractive child that is of your sister or friend or neighbour, Mrs. Trevasgis, if you do not want to set the Trevenna tongue wagging against both you and the Trevasgis woman.
These little uncharitablenesses—to describe them all in one word—are universal in man or woman, perhaps in both, and being part of our nature they probably have their uses: if they strike us more in the Cornish than in our own people it is because of the difference of temperament or disposition—because their feelings, good or bad, are more readily excited and are expressed with less restraint.
That they are not truthful and not honest is another count in the long indictment. With regard to honesty it is one I always hear with surprise; for can it be said that we are as a people honest? Consider the one matter of our food and drink—the amount of legislation we have found necessary on the subject, the cost to the country of maintaining a vast army of inspectors and analysts to prevent us from poisoning each other for the sake of a small extra gain! Would any one in England give me for love or money a glass of milk or beer, or a slice of bread and butter, which would not seriously injure my health but for the fear of the law? And after all we have done to protect ourselves we are assured every day by the experts that we are living in a fool's paradise seeing that dishonesty is so ingrained in us that it will always find out a way to defeat our best efforts.
This charge may then be dropped—for the present at all events. When our moral condition has been properly examined and reported on by travellers and missionaries from Thibet or some undiscovered country on the other side of the Mountains of the Moon we may be in a position to affirm that Cornwall is not as honest as, say, Middlesex.
But if honesty is or ought to be a painful subject, perhaps in discussing the question of truthfulness we shall be able to make out a better case and recover our self-esteem. Here we have it as it is stated by one of my correspondents: "However bad the English commercial morality may be, the average Englishman's word still stands for something. When he lies he does so deliberately for some important purpose. Some other races, including the Celts, appear to have a different perception of truth, and to lie, as children do, readily and gracefully, because lies and exaggerations are more interesting and agreeable than plain truth. A difference of temperament: the Englishman may be better or worse, but he knows where he is and resents being fooled."
This reminds me of the experience of a young friend of mine, a pure Englishman, exceptionally intelligent, and so sympathetic and adaptive that he is happy with all sorts of people and they with him. From boyhood he has lived in Wales, a somewhat rambling life, in towns, villages and farm-houses, and his playmates, fellow-students and companions have been natives. Yet he assures me that he has never been able to feel himself one of them, and never been able to see anything eye to eye with even his most intimate and dearest friends of that race. It all seems to come to an ineradicable difference of mind in the two races. There is no better and no worse, and the only quarrel is when any one, Saxon or Celt, is offended at another's inability to see eye to eye with him, regarding it as a bad habit which ought to be overcome, or a sheer piece of perversity on his part.
Then we have the complicated question of morality, or rather of "immorality," by which some journalists, authors and compilers of blue-books mean sexual intercourse unsanctified by marriage. Norden, who wrote nigh on three centuries before the nice modern mind invented a new meaning for an old word, described it as the "sweet synn" which was regarded as venial in Cornwall. But Norden spoke of the gentry; the manners and morals of what he described as the "baser sort of men," including rustics, miners, mechanics, farmers and yeomen, did not interest his lofty mind. But the sweet sin was also common among Norden's "baser sort of men," and exists to-day as it did in the past, and as it exists in the Principality, and perhaps in Ireland, where the power and vigilance of the priests are now able to keep it dark. It is really not so much a vice as a custom of the country, perhaps of the race, seeing that the illicit intercourse usually ends in marriage. It has been said that in Cornwall matrimony is the result of maternity. For it must be borne in mind that I am speaking only of Cornwall.
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We have seen in the last chapter how it is in Wales, in some of the mining districts; but these bestial developments are not known and have probably never existed in the duchy. It is true that some poor women are left to bear their burden alone, and that their frail sisters who have had better fortune are as ready as others to persecute them, but the proportion of these unhappy ones is really less than in very many English villages.
It is of the villages and small towns I speak: the towns are mostly very small; but as population increases with the revival of the mining industry (the curse of the country "from ancientie") the extraordinary liberty which young women are allowed, or have taken for themselves, and their pleasant ways with men may result in a troublesome problem in the larger centres.
It is said of the Cornish, as it has been said of the Irish and of Celtic people generally, that they are cruel. I doubt if they are more cruel than others if we restrict the word to its proper meaning—the infliction of pain for the pleasure of it; but there is a great deal of barbarity of the kind one sees in Spanish and Italian countries which results from temper. The Cornish, like the Spanish, are passionate and when anything goes wrong they are apt to wreak their fury on the poor unresisting beast—cow, calf, horse, donkey or sheep. I have witnessed many shocking acts of this kind which it would be too painful to me to have to describe, and in discussing this subject with others, some of them Cornishmen who naturally love their people and are anxious to see them in the most favourable light, they have confessed to me that this kind of brutality is very common; that it is the greatest blot on the Cornishman's character and a constant cause of pain to persons of a humane disposition. What to me makes it peculiarly painful is the knowledge that the man I have witnessed horribly ill-treating some patient dumb beast, and hated and wished that I had had the power to annihilate him—this very man, his fit of fury over, would prove himself a genuine Cornishman, a very pleasant fellow, temperate, religious, hospitable, a good husband, devoted to his children.
Celtic cruelty, Tennyson said, was due to want of imagination. He was speaking of the Irish, who are not supposed to be without that faculty. Whether or not the Cornish have it is another question, but it may be that Celtic cruelty, like the Spanish, is due rather to a drop of black blood in the heart—an ancient latent ferocity which comes out in moments of passion.
The fact that prosecutions for cruelty to animals are so rare—one case, I should say, in about every five thousand getting into court—reminds me here of another charge brought against the Cornish by the strangers within their gates. If Cornwall, the critics say, is able to show the cleanest record in England it is because the law-breakers are not treated as in other counties. Offences are winked at or overlooked by the police in many instances, and when a prosecution takes place magistrates will not convict if they can possibly help it. Not only are they too tolerant and hate to hurt one of their own people, but they think of themselves, of their own material interests, and are anxious above all things that their county should maintain its nice reputation.
Something more will have to be said on the subject of cruelty to animals in another chapter about wild birds during severe weather. At present, to conclude this chapter, we have to consider another matter which is that of the gravest charge of all and is indicated in the following words spoken to me by a professional man, a resident in West Cornwall. "I have lived and worked for twenty years among this people and have long lost the last vestige of respect and affection I once had for them. They are at heart what their forefathers were; their religion, softer manners and apparent friendliness to strangers, is all on the surface—a veneer. The old barbarism lives and burns under it, and if it were not for the watch kept on them and the altered conditions generally they would go gladly back to the ancient trade of wrecking."
This spontaneous outburst on the part of a person occupying an important position in the community made me curious to know more about the man himself. He was in a sense a good man, a generous giver according to his means, and as he gave secretly even those who hated him (because they knew, I imagine, that he despised and hated them) were never unwilling to go to him for help when they required it. But he was by nature an alien, one of those downright uncompromising Saxons who cannot get on with those of a different and in some things antagonistic race. He had tried his best to bridge the gulf over. His ambition had been to make himself the most loved man in the place and naturally his signal failure had embittered him.
But what about the charge? Was there a particle of truth in it? And, finally, what is meant by wrecking?
I take it that two distinct things are meant—one a very black crime indeed, the other nothing worse than a disregard of regulations and petty pilfering. With regard to the first it is believed from certain stories and traditions which have come down to us, the origin of which is lost in the mists of antiquity, that the natives of the dangerous parts of the coast made it a custom to lure vessels on to the rocks to their destruction by displaying false lights. This may be true: we know that the various races and tribes composing the nation—Celts and Saxons, Danes and Normans—vied with each other in every form of atrocity and of cruelty; but no instance of the crime in question can be authenticated as having taken place in recent times. Nevertheless the belief is cherished and kept alive in books, mainly religious tales and novels, that this frightful custom continued down to the middle of the eighteenth century when Wesley appeared to convert the Cornish people from their vicious ways and all kinds of wickedness, including that of deliberately wrecking vessels and murdering the unhappy wretches who succeeded in escaping from the fury of the waves. As the books containing these veracious statements, so flattering to the Cornish, are exceedingly popular in the Duchy and nowhere out of it, the Cornish people are themselves responsible for keeping these fables alive.
As for the other lesser crime or offence, I fancy that it is not one an Englishman can look on as a very serious matter.
I was one day discussing the Sunday observance question with an English clergyman whose parish lies on the Cornish coast, and related the following incident to him. I was lodging with an intelligent and well-to-do artisan and his wife in a Somerset village when one Sunday morning, the weather being very fine, my host, finding that I was not going to church, asked me if I would take a walk with him as he wished to show me some nice spots in the neighbouring woods and copses where he was accustomed to go. The woods were certainly very beautiful, with green open spaces and a fine stream where we watched the trout and saw a kingfisher flash by. We said it was not a bad place to spend a Sunday morning in and then fell into a long talk about Sunday observance, and the fact that village people, the men especially, had lost the habit of going to church but had discovered no way of spending the day pleasantly or profitably. I thought that outdoor games ought to be encouraged as it was plainly beneficial both to mind and body and saved them from tedium and the temptations to drink and smoke more than was good for them. I thought too that when the parson of the parish took this line the effect was entirely good; it taught them to look on him as more human and one of themselves and capable of putting himself in their place.
My companion looked grave and shook his head at this, and when I told him that I knew clergymen who were as good men as could be found in the land who agreed with my view, and were the promoters of Sunday games in their parishes, he answered that if a thing were wrong, even ministers of the Gospel could not make it right. He was in the middle of his argument when we came out from a big copse into a large open space, and created a panic in a multitude of rabbits feeding there. Away they scuttled in every direction—hundreds of rabbits, old and half-grown young. Going a little further we noticed our small spaniel sniffing at a burrow. "He's a clever little dog," said my companion; "he always lets me know when a rabbit is not too far down." With that he got down on the turf, and thrusting his arm in to the shoulder, quickly pulled out a young rabbit, which, after snapping its neck, he thrust into his large coat-tail pocket. Putting his arm down again he pulled out a second one, then a third, and having snapped their necks and pocketed them, he got up and we resumed our walk and our discussion. "No, no," he said. "I'm not a religious man, and don't go to church as a rule, but I draw the line at playing games on a Sunday."
Then he came to a stop beside a close thicket of brambles and thorn, and began pulling the rabbits out of his pocket. "After all I don't want them, and they are a nuisance to carry," he said, and with that he threw them into the thicket.
That was my story.
"We are just as consistent here," said the Cornish clergyman. "The people are religious and strict Sabbatarians; they go regularly to church or chapel, but if a vessel in distress is in sight, and there is a chance of its going on the rocks, they make an exception; they will pace the cliffs all day long in the hope of a bit of flotsam coming in their way."
They may appear equally inconsistent—the Somerset man and the Cornishman—but can we say that one is morally worse than the other? The case of the good artisan who drew the line at cricket on Sunday is not a singular one: one doubts if there is a peasant in England, however truly religious a man he may be, who would not pick up a rabbit or hare if he got the chance on any day of the week. They do not believe it is wrong, consequently it does not hurt their conscience, and the only fear they have is to be found out. And so with the Cornishman; it is ingrained in him, and is like an inherited knowledge, that if the Power that rules the winds and waves, and who holds the lives of all men in the hollow of his hand, sends a ship upon the rocks, it is because he thinks proper to destroy that ship and incidentally to scatter gifts among his people living on the coast. Shall they refuse to take any good thing he chooses to send them? If their minister tells them it is wrong it is because he does not know the rights of it. Their fathers did it, and their forefathers, for generations back and were no worse for it. It would indeed be strange if they did not resent as an injustice, an interference with their natural rights, that so strict a watch is kept on them, and that they are forbidden to take anything the waves may cast up in their way.
Quite recently we had some rather startling manifestations of this feeling and one amusing instance may be given. Just after a big ship had come to grief on the rocks, at the most dangerous point on the coast, another ship was in great peril near the same spot; fortunately, towards evening, the weather moderated a little and it began to look as if there was not going to be a second disaster just then. My informant was standing on the shore with some of the fishermen of the place looking at the sea. The sky was clearing and the sun, near the horizon, came forth a great globe of red fire and threw its light over the tumultuous waters. Then all at once one of the men burst out in a storm of execration, and cursed the sun and wind and sea and pretty well the whole universe. For it seemed so hard just when things were looking so well that the sun should shine and the wind begin to fall and the sea moderate! My informant asked him indignantly how he, a Christian man, could entertain such feelings and how he dared to express them. He answered by putting out his right arm and baring it to the elbow, then, feeling the muscles with the fingers of the left hand, he said with a somewhat rueful expression, "It's in the bone, and we cant help it!"
Yet this very man had been foremost in the work of rescuing the people in the ship that had gone on the rocks.
My informant happens to be one of the Englishmen in Cornwall who do not experience that antipathy or sense of separation in mind from the people they live with, and are not looked at as foreigners. I have met with several such who have very pleasant relations with their neighbours, and can love and are loved by them, and are almost able to forget that they are not natives. But, unless I am mistaken, in such cases the stranger is not wholly a stranger; in other words he is partly of the same race, therefore able to sympathise and to identify himself with them. And it may be due to the Celtic element in me that I feel very much at home with the people. A Dumnonian, if not a "swart Belerian," with an admixture of Irish blood, I feel myself related to them and therefore do not think they can justly resent my having described them as I have found them without the usual pretty little lying flatteries. Your relations are privileged critics. Moreover, if I love them they cannot, according to their own saying, have any but a kindly feeling forme. "Karenza whelas Karenza" is all the Cornish I know.
