Cornwall

by G. E. Mitton

Perhaps this impression as to the interior has grown because the painting fraternity, now a recognized part of Cornish society, mostly paint views on or near the coast, having settled chiefly at and near Newlyn and St. Ives. Mr. Lewis Hind, in his book on Cornwall, says: "Probably two hundred canvases are despatched each year from the Delectable Duchy to Burlington House and elsewhere; of this number seven-eighths have been painted in Newlyn or St. Ives.... The great centres are Newlyn, St. Ives, and Falmouth, and the votes of the Cornish contingent, it is said, can turn the scale in an election at the Royal Academy."

The truth is, Cornwall must be taken in bits, and often the most hideous lie close up alongside the most attractive; however they only help to intensify that which is very good. People who look too cursorily are the most often disappointed.

Wandering about Cornwall certainly induces one ache, and that is the ache to be more knowledgeable. Those lucky creatures who know something of botany and geology here have delights not unfolded to others. Cornwall is a paradise for the botanist and geologist, because for the former there are rare species and some altogether unknown elsewhere, such as the Erica vagans so often mentioned, which grows in the neighbourhood of the Lizard. In fact Cornwall possesses more specialities in plant-life than any other county in England. For the latter because even the amateur can see the wonder and difference of the rocks: the pink tinged granite of Land's End, the great granite tors inland on the moors, and the variegated serpentine at the Lizard, as well as the cruel, sharp-edged slate of the northern coast. While as for the archæologist is there any part of Britain that affords him such endless material? A mere enumeration of the ancient stone crosses, the standing stone circles, the cromlechs, the British huts, the earthworks, the cliff-castles, the hill-castles or camps, the stone graves, the chambered cumuli, the barrows, and other relics of a long-past age, would fill pages. The moors are covered with them and the bare heights above Land's End are a rich hunting-ground.

THE COAST NEAR THE LIZARD

This evidence of the lives and habits of the very ancient inhabitants adds much depth and flavour to the "atmosphere," and especially when it is remembered that the original Cornish are the purest example of that old race—the British. Mr. W. H. Hudson, in his book The Land's End, quotes Lord Courtney's saying: "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 [Penzance and Land's End district] in which we meet with probably so pure a breed of human beings."

The nation now calling itself British has Saxon, Teutonic, French, and Norse blood in its veins, as well as that of the original stock; but when the successive waves of invaders swept over the country, they usually exhausted themselves before reaching this remote corner, into which the oldest island stock was swept up.

This probably accounts for the queer impression one often gets in Cornwall of being abroad. It comes suddenly, rising like one of the Cornish mists and enveloping one, until suddenly the conviction that one is across the sea, far from home, flows almost overwhelmingly over the mind. There is much more likeness and kinship between parts of Cornwall and parts of Brittany than between Cornwall and most of the rest of England. There is no doubt that Cornwall differeth not as "one county from another county," but as one county from all the rest. Here, where the British race had its last stronghold, the stamp of the national characteristics was retained in its effects much longer than elsewhere. Nowadays of course there is intermarrying and travelling, and frequent streams of new blood coming in—half the people you speak to are not Cornish at all—but still there is something remaining which stamps them as a whole. It has often been noticed that there are traces of Spanish blood to be found in the dwellers in the extreme west where many of the great Spanish galleons were wrecked in bygone days; just as there are found brown faces and black hair in the Fair Isle of the Shetlands, where half the population intermarried with some Spaniards of the great Armada wrecked on their coast. In this part of Cornwall one constantly sees women with clear-skinned faces, dark-brown eyes and hair, of a distinctly foreign type. The people, with their rather remote and surface friendliness, have often been described. They will greet you pleasantly and courteously—courteous manners have lingered here—small boys, and men too, still salute a stranger in passing with a greeting, and if one asks the way the answer will be no abrupt direction, but a careful and minute description repeated until clearly understood. Even in Wilkie Collins's time the people were noticeable for their courtesy. He says: "The manners of the Cornish of all ranks, down to the lowest, are remarkably distinguished by courtesy—a courtesy of that kind which is quite independent of artificial breeding, and which proceeds solely from natural motives of kindness and from an innate anxiety to please. Few of the people pass you without a salutation."

As it was then so it is now.

Yet everywhere one feels a want; there is a lack of something. Perhaps it is they are too matter-of-fact; a passing jest leaves them puzzled. There is none of the dry humour of the Scot, which makes every man you meet on the road in Scotland instinctively approach a remark from what may be called the humorous angle. As an example of the Cornish lack of this quality, when I remarked to a man who was showing me a real fine golf-links stretching over the sandy towans of bent-grass, "these sandhills are simply made for golf," he answered: "Oh no, they were not made for the links; they were here long before!"