My informant happens to be one of the Englishmen in Cornwall who do not experience that antipathy or sense of separation in mind from the people they live with, and are not looked at as foreigners. I have met with several such who have very pleasant relations with their neighbours, and can love and are loved by them, and are almost able to forget that they are not natives. But, unless I am mistaken, in such cases the stranger is not wholly a stranger; in other words he is partly of the same race, therefore able to sympathise and to identify himself with them. And it may be due to the Celtic element in me that I feel very much at home with the people. A Dumnonian, if not a "swart Belerian," with an admixture of Irish blood, I feel myself related to them and therefore do not think they can justly resent my having described them as I have found them without the usual pretty little lying flatteries. Your relations are privileged critics. Moreover, if I love them they cannot, according to their own saying, have any but a kindly feeling forme. "Karenza whelas Karenza" is all the Cornish I know.
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CHAPTER XII CORNISH HUMOUR
Native humour—Deceptive signs—Adventures in search of humour—Irish and Cornish expression—A traveller in a stony country—The stone-digger—Taking you literally—The danger of using figures of speech—Anecdotes—The Cornish funny man—English and Cornish humour—Unconscious humour of two kinds—A woman preacher—A story of Brett the artist—Examples of unconscious humour—A local preacher—An old man and a parrot—Children's humour—Guize-dancing.
IT is permissible to a writer once in a lifetime to illustrate his work by an allusion to that celebrated "Chapter on Snakes," in an island in which these reptiles are not found. But I am not saying that there is no humour in Cornwall. There may be such a thing; but if you meet with it you will find that it is of the ordinary sort, only of an inferior quality, and that there is very little. What I can say is there is no Cornish humour, no humour of the soil and race, as there is an Irish and a Scotch humour, and even as there is an English humour, which may be of a poor description in comparison with the Hibernian, but is humour nevertheless, native and local, and not confined to Dorset and Warwickshire but to be met with in every county from the Tamar to the Tweed.
This came as a great surprise to me since I had often read in books and articles about the county that the Cornish are a humorous folk, and those who have been there and profess to know the people say that it is so. Their humour, like their imagination (for they are also credited with that faculty), is sometimes vaguely described as of the Celtic sort. My surprise was all the greater when I came and saw the people and received confirmation, as I imagined, through the sense of sight of all I had been told. They looked it, yet were without it; the signs, "gracious as rainbows," deceived me (as they had doubtless deceived others), but only for a season; they were the outward marks of quite other pleasing qualities with which we are not now concerned. I looked for humour and met with some amusing adventures in my search for that rare, elusive quality.