"Yes, he seems all right, and speaks well, and promises to pay the money. But look at the colour of his eyes! No, I can't trust him."
"He's a very nice person, I have no doubt, but his eyes and hair are enough for me," etc., etc.
Even this may be merely the effect of that enmity or suspicion with which the stranger, or "foreigner," as he is called, is often regarded in rural districts. The person from another county, or from a distance, unrelated to anyone in the community, is always a foreigner, and the foreign taint may descend to the children: may it not be that in Hampshire anyone with bright colour in eyes, hair, and skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner?
It remains to speak of the last of the four distinct types, the least common and most interesting of all—the small, narrow-headed man with very black hair, black eyes, and brown skin.
We are deeply indebted to the anthropologists who have, so to speak, torn up the books of history, and are re-telling the story of man on earth: we admire them for their patient industry, and because they have gone bravely on with their self-appointed task, one peculiarly difficult in this land of many mixed races, heedless of the scoffs of the learned or of those who derive their learning from books alone, and mock at men whose documents are "bones and skins." But we sometimes see that they (the anthropologists) have not yet wholly emancipated themselves from the old written falsehoods when they tell us, as they frequently do, that the Iberian in this country survives only in the west and the north. They refer to the small, swarthy Welshman; to the so-called "black Celt" in Ireland, west of the Shannon; to the small black Yorkshireman of the Dales, and to the small black Highlander; and the explanation is that in these localities remnants of the dark men of the Iberian race who inhabited Britain in the Neolithic period, were never absorbed by the conquerors; that, in fact, like the small existing herds of indigenous white cattle, they have preserved their peculiar physical character down to the present time by remaining unmixed with the surrounding blue-eyed people. But this type is not confined to these isolated spots in the west and north; it is found here, there, and everywhere, especially in the southern counties of England: you cannot go about among the peasants of Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset without meeting examples of it, and here at all events, it cannot be said that the ancient British people were not absorbed. They, the remnant that escaped extermination, were absorbed by the blue-eyed, broad-headed, tall men, the Goidels we suppose, who occupied the country at the beginning of the Bronze Age; and the absorbers were in their turn absorbed by another blue-eyed race; and these by still another or by others. The only explanation appears to be that this type is persistent beyond all others, and that a very little black blood, after being mixed and re-mixed with blonde for centuries, even for hundreds of generations, may, whenever the right conditions occur, reproduce the vanished type in its original form.
Time brings about its revenges in many strange ways: we see that there is a continuous and an increasing migration from Wales and the Highlands into all the big towns in England, and this large and growing Celtic element will undoubtedly have a great effect on the population in time, making it less Saxon and more Celtic than it has been these thousand years past and upwards. But in all the people, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, or what not, there is that older constituent—infinitely older and perhaps infinitely more persistent; and this too, albeit in a subtler way, may be working in us to recover its long-lost world. That it has gone far in this direction in Spain, where the blue eye is threatened with extinction, and in the greater portion, if not all, of France, there appears to be some evidence to show. Here, where the Neolithic people were more nearly exterminated and the remnant more completely absorbed, the return may be very much slower. But when we find, as we do in Hampshire and many other counties, that this constituent in the blood of the people, after mixture for untold ages with so many other bloods of so many conquering races, has not only been potent to modify the entire population, but is able to reproduce the old type in its pristine purity; and when we almost invariably find that these ancients born again are better men than those in whom other racial characters predominate—more intelligent, versatile, adaptive, temperate, and usually tougher and longer lived, it becomes possible to believe that in the remote future—there are thousands of years for this little black leaven to work—these islands will once more be inhabited by a race of men of the Neolithic type.
In speaking of the character, physical and mental, of the men of distinctly Iberian type, I must confess that I write only from my own observation, and that I am hardly justified in founding general statements on an acquaintance with a very limited number of persons. My experience is that the men of this type have, generally speaking, more character than their neighbours, and are certainly very much more interesting. In recalling individuals of the peasant class who have most attracted me, with whom I have become intimate and in some instances formed lasting friendships, I find that of twenty-five to thirty no fewer than nine are of this type. Of this number four are natives of Hampshire, while the other five, oddly enough, belong to five different counties. But I do not judge only from these few individuals: a rambler about the country who seldom stays many days in one village or spot cannot become intimately acquainted with the cottagers. I judge partly from the few I know well, and partly from a very much larger number of individuals I have met casually or have known slightly. What I am certain of is that the men of this type, as a rule, differ mentally as widely as they do physically from persons of other commoner types. The Iberian, as I know him in southern and south-western England, is, as I have said, more intelligent, or at all events, quicker; his brains are nimbler although perhaps not so retentive or so practical as the slower Saxon's. Apart from that point, he has more imagination, detachment, sympathy—the qualities which attract and make you glad to know a man and to form a friendship with him in whatever class he may be. Why is it, one is sometimes asked, that one can often know and talk with a Spaniard or Frenchman without any feeling of class distinction, any consciousness of a barrier, although the man may be nothing but a workman, while with English peasants this freedom and ease between man and man is impossible? It is possible in the case of the man we are considering, simply because of those qualities I have named, which he shares with those of his own race on the Continent.
I have found that when one member of a family of mixed light and dark blood is of the distinctly Iberian type, this one will almost invariably take a peculiar and in some ways a superior position in the circle. The woman especially exhibits a liveliness, humour, and variety rare indeed among persons born in the peasant class. She entertains the visitor, or takes the leading part, and her slow-witted sisters regard her with a kind of puzzled admiration. They are sisters, yet unrelated: their very blood differs in specific gravity, and their bodily differences correspond to a mental and spiritual unlikeness. In my intercourse with people in the southern counties I have sometimes been reminded of Huxley and his account of his parents contained in a private letter to Havelock Ellis. His father, he said, was a fresh-coloured, grey-eyed Warwickshire man. "My mother came of Wiltshire people. Except for being somewhat taller than the average type, she was a typical example of the Iberian variety—dark, thin, rapid in all her ways, and with the most piercing black eyes I have seen in anybody's head. Mentally and physically (except in the matter of the beautiful eyes) I am a piece of my mother, and except for my stature ... I should do very well for a 'black Celt'—supposed to be the worst variety of that type."
The contrast between persons of this type and Saxon or blonde has often seemed to me greatest in childhood, since the blonde at that period, even in Hampshire, is apt to be a delicate pink and white whereas the individual of strongly-marked Iberian character is very dark from birth. I will, to conclude this perhaps imprudent chapter, give an instance in point.
A dark village child