The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated

by W. H. Hudson

Walking to a village one day I fell in with a man who had, like many a West Cornishman, a strikingly Irish countenance, also an Irish voice and flow of spirits. Hearing where I was going he at once undertook to show me the nearest way. It would, he asserted, save me a good mile: his way proved in the end two miles further than the one I had chosen, but it led him near to his own cottage and he wanted badly to shorten the way with talk—that was all.

I did not mind, because I wished to listen to him, thinking that I had at length got hold of the right person, one who would give me a taste of the genuine native humour. Not a bit of it! He talked freely of many things—his native place, his family, his neighbours, the good and the bad in them, his past life and labours, future prospects and much more—a long talk which an Irishman would have enlivened with many flashes of quaint humour, but there was not the faintest trace of such a quality in it.

Later in the same day I walked by a footpath which led me through what is called the "town-place" of a small farm-house. Here I found two men engaged in an animated discussion, and one, in ragged clothes with a pitchfork in his hand, was the very type of a wild Irishman; in all Connemara you would not find a more perfect specimen—rags, old battered hat, twinkling grey-blue Irish eyes, a shock of the most fiery carroty red hair, and, finally, a short black clay pipe, or dhudeen, in his mouth. Yet even this man, delightful to look at, proved when I conversed with him just as prosaic and disappointing as the other.

I certainly did not expect to find anything in these two and in scores more I had intercourse with which could be set down in a note-book as specimens of Cornish humour. One may spend days among Irish peasants and never hear anything worth repeating, especially in writing. Indeed, most of what we recognise as Irish humour is not translatable into written language. It is like the quality of charm in women, something personal which you receive directly and cannot convey to another. But you are all the time conscious of the humorous spirit in them; you see it in their eyes and mobile mouth and gestures, and you catch its accent in their speech. And you feel how good a thing it is; that a people possessing this quality, or faculty, in so eminent a degree is not so poor as others who have more comforts and are more civilised; that even want and squalor, and misery, and vice, and crime, are not as ugly and disgusting as they appear among those who are without this sparkling spirit, this lightning of the soul, with its unexpected flashes, which throws a brightness on everything.

The people of the extreme west of Cornwall have so close a resemblance to the Irish in feature and expression that quite often enough when with them, in farms and hamlets, I could hardly avoid falling into the illusion that I was in Ireland. It is this look in them, or in many of them, which makes the want of the Irishman's most engaging quality so strange and almost incredible. There is an expression of the Irish peasant's face which is exceedingly common—one could almost say that it is universal—which one comes to regard as an expression of a humorous mind. It is most marked in those who see you as a stranger among them, or in those you meet casually and converse with. It is a peculiarly shrewd penetrating look in the eyes, which appear to be examining you very narrowly while passing itself off as mere friendly interest in you; and with that look in the eye there is a lighting up of the whole face. The man, you imagine, is looking out for some signal of a sympathetic or understanding spirit in you, a token of kinship: but when we go further and imagine it a humorous spirit we are probably mistaken. We associate that peculiar expression of the eyes with the humorous mind because we have found them together in so many persons—if we have been in Ireland. In the Cornishman, too, that same expression of the eyes is exceedingly common—an expression which even more than feature makes him differ so greatly from the Anglo-Saxon. But it does not denote humour, seeing that he is inferior to the dullest of the English in this respect. But he is more alive than the Englishman, and his ever-fresh child-like curiosity makes him seem more human.

This peculiar Irish-like alertness and liveliness of mind, with a total want of a sense of humour, struck me forcibly in the case of another Cornishman I encountered in my rambles. But before I get to this story another must be told by way of introduction.

Frequently in my wanderings on foot in that stoniest part of a stony land, called the Connemara of Cornwall, where indeed the likeness of the people to the Irish is most marked, I recalled an old anecdote about a stony country which I heard in boyhood. I heard it one morning at the breakfast table in my early home in South America. We had a big party in the house, and the talk turned on the subject of sharp and clever replies made by natives to derisive questions asked by travellers. Several of the men present had been great travellers themselves, and almost every one had a good story or two to relate, but the best of all was one of a traveller who had been walking for many hours in one of the stoniest districts he had ever been in. As far as he could see on every side the earth was strewn with masses of stone, and he was quite tired of the endless desolation. At length he came on a native engaged in piling up stones in a field, and approaching him addressed him as follows: "My good man, can you tell me where the people of these parts procure stone with which to build their houses?" That was the mocking question, and the witty answer of the native created a great laugh at the table, but unfortunately I have forgotten what it was. I have tried in that stony place to recall it without success. It may be that some reader of this chapter has heard and remembers the answer; if so, I hope he will have the goodness to communicate it to me, and relieve my tired mind from further efforts to recover it.

Now one day in Cornwall, while walking on a vast stony hill above the little village of Towednack, I spied a man at work digging up stone in the middle of a freshly ploughed field at the foot of the hill. He had a crowbar, which he would thrust down into the soil to find where there was stone near the surface; then with his three-cornered, long-handled spade he would dig down and expose it, and if too large to be lifted he would, with drill and wedges and iron mallet, split it up into pieces of a convenient size. In this way he had raised a vast heap of stones, which would be carted away by and by.

It came into my head to try my old story as an experiment on this man, and I went down the hill to him and after saluting him stood some time admiring his tremendous energy. He was a slim wiry man of about thirty or thirty-five, good-looking, with a Celtic face and that lively shrewd expression which one associates with the Irishman's humorous spirit. After watching him for a few minutes at his frantic task I said, "By the by, I wish you would tell me where they get the stone in this part of the country to build their houses with?"

He turned and stared me in the face with the greatest astonishment, then throwing out his hand in an angry way towards the vast heap of black wet chunks of granite he had dragged out of the earth, he cried, "This is stone! This is what they build houses with in this part of the country! Stone!—granite!—there's enough of it in the ground to build all the houses we want, and on the ground too!"