Ah now, dear Chaise! of all the radiant host,
Who loves you most?
I think I know him, kneeling on his knees;
Is it Saint Francis of Assise?
Chaise, poor Chaise.
MANX CHARACTERISTICS
I have rambled on too long about my eccentric Manx characters, and left myself little space for a summary of the soberer Manx characteristics. These are independence, modesty, a degree of sloth, a non-sanguine temperament, pride, and some covetousness. This uncanny combination of characteristics is perhaps due to our mixed Celtic and Norse blood. Our independence is pure Norse. I have never met the like of it, except in Norway, where a Bergen policeman who had hunted all the morning for my lost umbrella would not take anything for his pains; and in Iceland, where a poor old woman in a ragged woollen dress, a torn hufa on her head, torn skin shoes on her feet, and with rheumatism playing visible havoc all over her body, refused a kroner with the dignity, grave look, stiffened lips, and proud head that would have become a duchess. But the Manxman’s independence almost reaches a vice. He is so unwilling to owe anything to any man that he is apt to become self-centred and cold, and to lose one of the sweetest joys of life—that of receiving great favours from those we greatly love, between whom and ourselves there is no such thing as an obligation, and no such thing as a debt. There is something in the Manxman’s blood that makes him hate rank; and though he has a vast respect for wealth, it must be his own, for he will take off his hat to nobody else’s.
The modesty of the Manxman reaches shyness, and his shyness is capable of making him downright rude. One of my friends tells a charming story, very characteristic of our people, of a conversation with the men of the herring-fleet. “We were comin’ home from the Shetland fishing, ten boats of us; and we come to an anchor in a bay. And there was a tremenjis fine castle there, and a ter’ble great lady. Aw, she was a ter’ble kind lady; she axed the lot of us (eighty men and boys, eight to each boat) to come up and have dinner with her. So the day come—well, none of us went! That shy!” My friend reproved them soundly, and said he wished he knew who the lady was that he might write to her and apologise. Then followed a long story of how a breeze sprung up and eight of the boats sailed. After that the crew of the remaining two boats, sixteen men and boys, went up to the tremenjis great castle, and the ter’ble great lady, and had tea. If any lady here present knows a lady on the north-west coast of Scotland who a year or two back invited eighty Manx men and boys to dinner, and received sixteen to tea, she will redeem the character of our race if she will explain that it was not because her hospitality was not appreciated that it was not accepted by our foolish countrymen.
There is nothing that more broadly indicates the Norse strain in the Manx character than the non-sanguine temperament of the Manxmen. Where the pure Celt will hope anything and promise everything, the Manxman will hope not at all and promise nothing. “Middling” is the commonest word in a Manxman’s mouth. Hardly anything is entirely good, or wholly bad, but nearly everything is middling. It’s a middling fine day, or a middling stormy one; the sea is middling smooth or middling rough; the herring harvest is middling big or middling little; a man is never much more, than middling tired, or middling well, or middling hungry, or middling thirsty, and the place you are travelling to is alwaya middling near or middling far. The true Manxman commits himself to nothing. When Nelson was shot down at Trafalgar, Cowle, a one-armed Manx quartermaster, caught him in his remaining arm. This was Cowle’s story: “He fell right into my arms, sir. ‘Mr. Cowle,’ he says, ‘do you think I shall recover?’ ‘I think, my lord,’ I says, ‘we had better wait for the opinion of the medical man.’” Dear old Cowle, that cautious word showed you were no Irishman, but a downright middling Manxman.
I have one more story to tell, and that is of Manx pride, which is a wondrous thing, usually-very ludicrous. A young farming girl who will go about barefoot throughout the workdays of the week would rather perish than not dress in grand attire, after her own sort, on Sunday afternoon. But Manx pride in dress can be very touching and human. When the lighthouse was built on the Chickens Rock, the men who were to live in it were transferred from two old lighthouses on the little islet called the Calf of Man, but their families were left in the disused lighthouses. Thus the men were parted from their wives and children, but each could see the house of the other, and on Sunday mornings the wives in their old lighthouses always washed and dressed the children and made them “nice” and paraded them to and fro on the platforms in front of the doors, and the men in their new lighthouse always looked across the Sound at their little ones through their powerful telescopes.
MANX TYPES
Surely that is a lovely story, full of real sweetness and pathos. It reminds me that amid many half-types of dubious quality, selfish, covetous, quarrelsome, litigious, there are at least two types of Manx character entirely charming and delightful. The one is the best type of Manx seaman, a true son of the sea, full of wise saws and proverbs, full of long yarns and wondrous adventures, up to anything, down to anything, pragmatical, a mighty moralist in his way, but none the less equal to a round ringing oath; a sapient adviser putting on the airs of a philosopher, but as simple as the baby of a girl—in a word, dear old Tom Baynes of “Fo’c’s’le Yarns,” old salt, old friend, old rip. The other type is that of the Manx parish patriarch. This good soul it would be hard to beat among all the peoples of earth. He unites the best qualities of both sexes; he is as soft and gentle as a dear old woman, and as firm of purpose as a strong man. Garrulous, full of platitudes, easily moved to tears by a story of sorrow and as easily taken in, but beloved and trusted and reverenced by all the little world about him. I have known him as a farmer, and seen him sitting at the head of his table in the farm kitchen, with his sons and daughters and men-servants and women-servants about him, and, save for ribald gossip, no one of whatever condition abridged the flow of talk for his presence. I have known him as a parson, when he has been the father of his parish, the patriarch of his people, the “ould angel” of all the hillside round about. Such sweetness in his home life, such nobility, such gentle, old-fashioned ceremoniousness, such delightful simplicity of manners. Then when two of these “ould angels” met, two of these Parson Adamses, living in content on seventy pounds a year, such high talk on great themes, long hour after long hour in the little low-ceiled Vicarage study, with no light but the wood fire, which glistened on the diamond window-pane! And when midnight came seeing each other home, spending half the night walking to and fro from Vicarage to Vicarage, or turning out to saddle the horse in the field, but (far away “in wandering mazes lost”) going blandly up to the old cow and putting on the blinkers and saying, “Here he is, sir.” Have we anything like all this in England? Their type is nearly extinct even in the Isle of Man, where they have longest survived. And indeed they are not the only good things that are dying out there.
LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS