CHAPTER XIII THE POETIC SPIRIT
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.
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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.
