CHAPTER XX PILGRIMS AT THE LAND'S END
How this book came to be written—Fascination of the Land's End—Aged pilgrims—A vision of the land of rest—An Unsentimental Journey through Cornwall—-A horde of trippers from Lancashire—A sentiment to be cherished—An appeal.
I RECALL now that I did not come to Cornwall to write a book about it, or any part of it. But like many others I had to see the Land's End; and it was winter, when the Wiltshire Downs, where it was my desire to be, are bleak, and I had a cold to get rid of, so I came to the "rocky land of strangers," to look once in my life on the famous headland and return with the wheatear and stone curlew to the lonely green hills. Being here I put down some impressions of gulls and fishing-boats at St. Ives for a weekly journal; other impressions followed, and because the place held me month after month, and the old habit of taking notes, or stick-gathering, even when the sticks are of no more use than the vast store of stolen objects which my friend's pet white rat, who has the run of a big house, is accustomed to accumulate, the material grew on my hands, until in the end I determined to put the best of it in a volume. In that way the book and every chapter grew. One chapter, headed "Bolerium", contained my impressions of the famous headland itself, and having written it I imagined there would be no more for me to say on that subject. Nevertheless, I continued to haunt the spot; familiarity had not lessened its fascination, and there, by chance, one day in spring, I witnessed a scene which suggested, or perhaps I should say compelled me to write, this additional chapter as a conclusion to the book.
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There were days at the headland when I observed a goodish number of elderly men among the pilgrims, some very old, and this at first surprised me, but by and by it began to seem only natural. I was particularly impressed one day at noon in early spring in clear but cold weather with a biting north-east wind, when I found six or seven aged men sitting about on the rocks that lie scattered over the green slope behind the famous promontory. They were too old or too feeble to venture down on the rough headland: their companions had strayed away, some to the fishing cove, others along the higher cliffs, and left them there to rest. They were in great-coats with scarves and comforters round their necks, and hats or caps drawn well down; and they sat mostly in dejected attitudes, bending forward, their hands resting on the handles of their sticks, some with their chins on their hands, but all gazed in one direction over the cold grey sea. Strangers to each other, unlike in life and character, coming from widely separated places, some probably from countries beyond the ocean, yet all here, silently gazing in one direction beyond that rocky foreland, with the same look of infinite weariness on their grey faces and in their dim sad eyes, as if one thought and feeling and motive had drawn them to this spot. Can it be that the sentiment or fancy which is sown in our minds in childhood and lies asleep and forgotten in us through most of our years, revives and acquires towards the end a new and strange significance when we have entered upon our second childhood? The period, I mean, when we recover our ancient mental possessions—the heirlooms which cannot be alienated or lost, which have descended to us from our remotest progenitors through centuries and thousands of years. These old men cannot see the objects which appear to younger eyes—the distant passing ships, and the land—that dim, broken line as of a low cloud on the horizon, of the islands: their sight is altered from what it was, yet is, perhaps, now able to discern things invisible to us—other islands, uncharted, not the Cassiterides. What are they, these other islands, and what do we know of them? Nothing at all; indeed, nothing can be known to the generality; only these life-weary ancients, sitting on rocks and gazing at vacancy, might enlighten us if they would. Undoubtedly there are differences of sight among them which would make their descriptions vary, but they would probably all agree in affirming that the scene before them has no resemblance to the earlier vision. This grey-faced very old man with his chin on his hands, who looks as if he had not smiled these many years, would perhaps smile now if he were to recall that former vision, which came by teaching and served well enough during his hot youth and strenuous middle age. He does not see before him a beautiful blessed land bright with fadeless flowers, nor a great multitude of people in shining garments and garlands who will come down to the shore to welcome him with sounds of shouting and singing and playing on instruments of divers forms, and who will lead him in triumph to the gardens of everlasting delight and to mansions of crystal with emerald and amethyst colonnades and opal domes and turrets and pinnacles. Those glories and populous realms of joy have quite vanished: he sees now only what his heart desires—a silent land of rest. No person will greet him there; he will land and go up alone into that empty and solitary place, a still grey wilderness extending inland and upward hundreds of leagues, an immeasurable distance, into infinity, and rising to mountain ridges compared with which the Himalayas are but mole-hills. The sky in that still land is always pale grey-blue in colour, and the earth, too, is grey like the rocks, and the trees have a grey-green foliage—trees more ancient in appearance than the worn granite hills, with gnarled and buttressed trunks like vast towers and immense horizontal branches, casting a slight shade over many acres of ground. Onwards and upwards, with eyes downcast, he will slowly take his devious way to the interior, feeling the earth with his staff, in search of a suitable last resting-place. And when he has travelled many, many leagues and has found it—a spot not too sunny nor too deeply shaded, where the old fallen dead leaves and dry moss have formed a thick soft couch to recline on and a grey exposed root winding over the earth offers a rest to his back—there at length he will settle himself. There he will remain motionless and contented for ever in that remote desert land where is no sound of singing bird nor of running water nor of rain or wind in the grey ancient trees: waking and sleeping he will rest there, dreaming little and thinking less, while year by year and age by age the memory of the world of passion and striving of which he was so unutterably tired grows fainter and fainter in his mind. And he will have neither joy nor sorrow, nor love nor hate, nor wish to know them any more; and when he remembers his fellow-men it will comfort him to think that his peace will never be broken by the sight of human face or the sound of human speech, since never by any chance will any wanderer from the world discover him in that illimitable wilderness.
This may not have been the precise vision of that old man, sitting on a rock with chin resting on his hands; it is merely my interpretation of his appearance and expression at that spot—his grey weary face, his dejected attitude, his immobility; his and that of the five or six others—those grey old men who, by a strange chance, had all come to the place one day at the same hour, and had been left to their own melancholy thoughts by their younger, more active companions. It was mere chance, but the sight profoundly impressed me and gave me a more vivid idea than I had hitherto had of the fascination this last rocky headland has for our minds.
Then, when the strange spectacle of those aged men on that bleak day, seated, each on his rock, twenty or thirty yards apart, absorbed in his own mournful thoughts and gazing out fixedly on the troubled sea, was still fresh, other incidents came to keep the subject uppermost in my mind and to compel me to return to it and to make in conclusion a practical suggestion.
One of the "incidents" mentioned was the perusal of a book on Cornwall which I picked up in Penzance for the sake of the excellent illustrations rather than to read it. I had already read or glanced through forty or fifty or, it may be, a hundred books on Cornwall with little pleasure or profit and did not want to read any more. It was An Unsentimental Journey through Cornwall, by the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, a lady who could not be unsentimental if she tried ever so hard.
The book is dated 1884, but a few years before the author's death, when she was a feeble old lady whose long life-work of producing novels was over, and her time in Cornwall was limited to seventeen September days. We are concerned only with her visit to the Land's End, and I quote here a portion of her account of it:—
"It would be hard if, after journeying thus far and looking forward to it so many years, the day on which we went to the Land's End should turn out a wet day!... We wondered for the last time, as we had wondered for half a century, what the Land's End would be like....
"At first our thought had been What in the world shall we do here for two mortal hours? Now we wished we had two whole days. A sunset, a sunrise, a starlit night, what would they have been in this grand lonely place—almost as lonely as a ship at sea!...
"The bright day was darkening, and a soft greyness began to creep over land and sea. No, not soft, that is the very last adjective applicable to the Land's End. Even on that calm day there was a fresh wind—there must be always a wind—and the air felt sharper and more salt than any sea-air I ever knew, stimulating too, so that our nerves were strung to the highest pitch of excitement. We felt able to do anything without fear and without fatigue.... Still, though a narrow and giddy path, there was a path, and the exploit, though a little risky, was not foolhardy. We should have been bitterly sorry not to have done it—not to have stood for one grand ten minutes where in all our lives we may never stand again, at the furthest point where footing is possible, gazing out on that magnificent circle of sea which sweeps over the submerged land of Lyonesse, far, far away into the wide Atlantic....
"Half a mile from Marazion the rain ceased, and a light like that of a rising moon began to break through the clouds. What a night it might be, or might have been, could we have stayed at the Land's End!
"That ghastly 'might have been'! It is in great things as in small, the worry, the torment, the paralyzing burden of life. Away with it! We have done our best to be happy and we have been happy. We have seen the Land's End."
Her cheerfulness makes one's eyes moisten—that one day at the Land's End, when her life's work was over, when in spite of her years and weak nerves she ventured painfully down and out among those rough crags, assisted by her guide and companion, for one grand ten minutes on the outermost rock—the fulfilment of a dream of fifty years!
She was a very gentle, tender-hearted woman, as sweet and lovable a soul as ever dwelt on earth, but her mind was only an average one, essentially mediocre; in her numerous works she never rose above the commonplace. There are thousands of women all over the country who could produce as many and as good books as hers if they were industrious enough and thought it worth their while to take up novel-writing as a profession. She wrote for the million and is understood by them, and I take it that in her dream and sentiment about the Land's End she represents her public—the mass of the educated women in England—just as she represents their feeling about love and the domestic virtues and life generally in her John Halifax, Mistress and Maid, A Life for a Life and scores of other works.
But books, however eloquent and heart-searching they may be, cannot produce an effect comparable to that of seeing and hearing—to the sight and sound of emotion in men's faces and voices and in their words. The passage I have quoted, and all the other passages on the subject in the other books I had read, gave me no such vivid idea of the strength of the sentiment we are considering as did the other incident I wish to relate when, on May 24, at Penzance station, I witnessed the arrival, in four trains, of about twelve hundred trippers from some of the cotton-spinning centres forty or fifty miles north of Manchester. The first train steamed into the station, where a crowd had gathered to see the horde of strange people from the north, at 10.45 the last of the four arrived a little before 12 at noon. The return journey would begin at 6.30 on the same day: the entire distance to and from Penzance was considerably over eight hundred miles; the time it took, twenty-six to twenty-eight hours, and the time the travellers had at their disposal at their destination was about seven hours. I was amazed that twelve hundred men had been found to undertake such a journey just to see Penzance—one of the least interesting towns in the kingdom; but when I mixed with and talked with them on their arrival, they assured me they had not come for such an object and would be content to go back without seeing Penzance. Nor did they come for the sake of anything in fine scenery which Cornwall could show them; North Wales with its bold sea-coast and magnificent mountain scenery was easily accessible to them. What they came to see was the Land's End.
The Cornishmen who were present could not understand this. I talked with one poor fellow, who sat down on a bench looking very pale, saying that after thirteen hours in the train without a wink of sleep he felt very tired; but he was greatly disappointed at not having got a seat in the first lot of conveyances which were driving off loaded with his fellow travellers to the Land's End, and feared that he might miss seeing it after all. Among those who had gathered round to hear what was said were two old Penzance men and they laughed heartily. "Why," said one, "I've been here within ten miles of the Land's End all my life and have never seen it." "I can say as much, and more," said the other; "I've never seen it and never want to see it."
"Perhaps," I remarked, "if you had been born five hundred or five thousand miles away you would have felt differently about it." The poor pale Lancastrian looked pleased. "That's true!" he exclaimed. "I've always wanted to see the Land's End, and it's the same with all of us: we've come to see it and for nothing else."
It was the literal truth, as I found by hanging about and talking with these men from the north all that day, watching them going and returning. But the motor buses, char-a-bancs and other vehicles were not enough to take them all, and when it came to three o'clock and half-past three, and there was but time left to go with all speed, look for a few brief minutes at the rocks, and hasten back in time for the last train, the poor fellows began offering five shillings per man to be driven there and back, and then at the last some offered ten shillings. But it was too late and they could not be taken!
Is this sentiment, which is not confined to our island country but survives in the transplanted race in other regions of the globe, this feeling which the matter-of-fact Cornishman laughs at and which may make many of us smile when we meet with it in a printed book, but is in us all the same and a part of our life—is this sentiment of any value and worth cherishing? I take it that it is, since if we were stripped of sentiment, illusions and such traditions, romance and dreams, as we inherit or which gather about and remain with us to the end of our days, we should be beggared indeed. Well, let it be so, it may be said in reply; 'tis in you and in many of us, and some have it not, and that's all there is to be said about it—why then speak of cherishing? For the following reason in this particular case: the sentiment relates to a locality, a spot of land with peculiar features and character, a rocky headland with the boundless ocean in front and the desolate wind-swept moor behind. These features, an image of which is carried in our minds from childhood, are bound up with and are part and parcel of the feeling, so that to make any change in such a spot, to blow up the headland, for instance, as any one could do with a few shillings' worth of dynamite, or to alter and deface the surface of the adjacent land and build big houses and other ugly structures on it, would be felt by every pilgrim as an indignity, a hateful vandalism. We have seen in the case of Hindhead and of many other places which powerfully attract us, what the greed and philistinism of man will do to destroy an ancient charm. A man may do what he likes with his own—a frightful liberty when we remember how God's footstool has been parcelled out among private persons, and what brutish men, or men without the sense of beauty, have done and may do to spoil it. I suppose that if Sir Edmund Antrobus thought proper he could run up a red-brick hotel or sanatorium high as Hankey's Mansions at Stonehenge: but not Stonehenge, nor Mona, nor Senlac, nor that hoary fane where Britain buries her great dead, nor any castle or cathedral, or tower or river or mountain or plain in all the land draws us so powerfully as this naked moor and rude foreland with its ancient dim memories and associations. And we now see what is being done with it—how plots of land for building purposes are being sold right and left, and the place in every way vulgarised and degraded.
Undoubtedly there are men so devoid of sentiment and imagination that they would not hesitate to stamp out the last beautiful thing on earth, if its beauty, or some sentiment connected with it which made it seem beautiful, is the only reason or the only excuse that can be given for its existence. But all are not of this character, and to those who have something besides Cornish tin and copper in their souls, who are not wholly devoted to their own and, incidentally, to their county's, material prosperity, I would appeal to rescue from degradation and to preserve unspoilt for all time this precious spot to which pilgrims resort from all the land.
It is not necessary, I hope, to describe the Land's End as the county's best "asset" or as the "goose that lays the golden eggs", or by some such abominable phrase, which is yet well understood by all since it appeals to the baser nature in every man—to his greed and his cunning; still, it might be well to remind even those who are wholly concerned with material things that the sentiment they make light of probably exists in some degree in a majority of the inhabitants of this country—which, be it remembered, is mainly Anglo-Saxon, a sentimental race, to use the word in its better sense—and that it is the desire of most persons to see the Land's End; also that probably nine of every ten visitors to Cornwall think of that headland as their objective point.
To save this spot it would undoubtedly have to be taken from private ownership; and, given the desire, there would be small difficulty in obtaining an Act of Parliament for the compulsory sale of a strip of the sea-front with, let us say, a couple of thousand acres of the adjoining moor. The buildings which now deform the place, the unneeded hotels, with stables, shanties, zinc bungalows sprawling over the cliff, and the ugly big and little houses could be cleared away, leaving only the ancient village of St. Sennen, the old farm-houses, the coastguard and Trinity House stations, and the old fishing hamlet under the cliff.
If a Cornish Society, formed for the purpose, and working with the County Council, could not do this without outside help, the money needed could no doubt be easily raised by public subscription. We know that very large sums are frequently given by the public for similar purposes, also for various other purposes which appeal to comparatively very few, as, for example, when the sum of £45,000 was recently given by private subscribers to purchase the Rokeby "Venus" for the National Gallery. Yet for every single subscriber to that fund, and, I may say, for every person in England who regards that canvas as a valuable acquisition, there are probably thousands who would gladly see the Land's End made a National possession, and who would willingly subscribe for such an object.
