It is true they will now and then do a thing which will come as a surprise. Here is an example—an incident I have just witnessed. All day the wind had been blowing half a gale from the sea when I went down to the rocks to get a good mouthful of air before it was dark. There were the gulls at the usual spot; and no sooner had I climbed into a sheltered nook among the rocks than they were all up floating overhead, swooping and rising, and pouring out their insistent loud anxious angry cries. For they were just beginning to nest on the ledges of the cliff beneath me and were troubled at my presence. In spite of the very cold wind and the growing obscurity, when the sun had gone down, I kept my place for upwards of an hour, and for the whole of the time they continued soaring and screaming above me: now with extended motionless wings seeming not to move yet mounting all the time, higher and higher, until they would be four or five hundred yards above me and would begin to look very small; then down and down again in the same imperceptible way, but sometimes descending with an angry rush until they were no more than thirty or forty yards high and one bird among them would make a violent swoop to intimidate me, coming to within a couple of yards of my head with loud swish of wings and sudden savage scream. I noticed that the swoops were all made by one bird, that this same bird acted throughout as fugleman and leader, that whenever the others began to drift away, further and further apart, and their cries grew fainter and less persistent, he or she reanimated them and brought them back with a fresh outburst of fury, emitting louder screams and dashing down in a more violent manner. The longer I watched them the more wonderful appeared the difference in disposition between this one bird, this white flying image of wrath, and the others.
Now at intervals of about three or four minutes my attention would wander from the gull to see and listen to a rock-pipit that had its home at that spot and was also nesting in a chink quite close to the gullery. Every day and all day long, in all weathers, the little singer could be seen and heard at that exposed spot, soaring up at intervals to a height of a couple of hundred yards; then slowly falling back to the rocks, head down, tail spread and wings pressed to its sides with the quills standing out—a shuttlecock or miniature parachute in figure; and while descending he emitted the series of airy tinkling sounds that make his melody. And now, in spite of the lateness of the hour and increasing gloom on the sea and clouded sky and of the cold wind, the little creature would not desist from its flight and song. Its little big passion was as strong and inexhaustible as that of the enraged gull. Then occurred the incident I set out to tell: the gulls with their prolonged monotonous wailing cries were balanced in the air at a height of ninety or a hundred yards, their trumpeter and inspirer keeping in the centre of the scattered company directly above my head. The pipit shot up from the pile of rocks in which I was lying, and rising obliquely from the land side reached the highest point of its flight well over the sea, and then just as it set its feathers to begin its descent a furious gust of wind caught and whirled it landwards, still emitting its tinkling sound, into the very midst of the company of hovering gulls. No sooner was it among them than the angry, alert leading bird, half closing its wings, swooped down on the little tinkler, and instantly a frantic chase began, with lightning-quick doublings, now over the sea, now the land, the gull with its open beak almost touching the terrified little fugitive. "Save yourself, pipit!" I exclaimed, for another inch and the small spotted singer would have been in the big hungry yellow beak and flight and tinkling song ended for ever. And in another moment the tension was ended, for the little thing had gained the rocks and was safe: but it sang no more that evening.
Now, strange as all this may seem—that the pipit should live and breed just by or among the herring gulls, ready at all times to seize and devour any living creature that comes by chance in their way, and that it should go on ascending and descending, singing and singing, every day and all day long, just where the gulls are perpetually floating and flying hither and thither, always on the look-out for something to devour—it is but acting in accordance with its known character. The small bird is without fear of its big rapacious neighbours: it has its own quickness and adroitness to save it from all natural dangers of winds and waves and killing birds; it was only the rare chance of that gust of wind striking it just when it paused in mid-air before dropping, and carrying it away sideways into the midst of the herring gulls, which so nearly cost it its life. On the following morning the gulls would be there, flying about hungry as ever, and the pipit would go on with flight and song in the same old way, free as ever from apprehension. And as with the pipits so it is with all creatures that are preyed upon: sudden violent death as the result of any failure, or mistake, or slight accident, is a condition of wild life, else its vigour would not be so perfect and its faculties so bright.
Every day, in fact, when I am observing the actions of birds, or of animals generally, from a dog or a donkey to a fly, I may witness something unexpected, an action which will come as a surprise; but this will be only because of its rarity, or because it comes about through a rare concurrence of circumstances, but not because the creature has acted in any way contrary to its nature.
It is sadly different (sadly, I mean, for the naturalist) with regard to human beings. You cannot generalise from the actions of an individual as you may safely do in the case of a titlark or a gull or a donkey. You study a dozen or a hundred, and then begin to think that you have not had a sufficient number owing to the variety you have noticed, and you study a hundred more and after all you are still in doubt. It may appear that, in the last chapter, I have not shown much doubt as to the want of a sense of humour (as we understand it) in the Cornish. J have not; but when it comes to another and a greater faculty—imagination, to wit—I am not very sure.
If it could be taken for granted that a people who have never produced any artistic or literary work worth preserving are without imagination, to use the word in its higher sense, as the creative faculty, the question would be a very simple one, seeing that Cornwall has given us nothing or next to nothing. Compare it in that respect with the adjoining county, divided from it by a little river, but distinct racially: what lustre Devon has shed on the whole kingdom! how many of her sons are so great in arms and arts, above all in literature, that we regard them as among the immortals; and what a multitude of lesser men who have made us richer in many ways! Now as one with a very superficial knowledge on this subject I have put the following question to the three men of my acquaintance who have the widest knowledge of English poetic literature: "Has Cornwall ever produced a poet?" and in each case came the quick reply, "Y es, Hawker of Morwenstow." Now Hawker is a great man to us on account of his strong and original character, but he was a very small poet; I should say that during the last half-century England has always had twenty or thirty living minor poets who rank high above him. Finally, he was not a Cornish but a Devon man, and it therefore struck me as exceedingly curious that I should have had that same answer from the last of the three friends interrogated, seeing that he is himself a highly accomplished poet, a Devonian whose birthplace is just on the borders of the duchy. The reply—"Yes, Hawker of Morwenstow" may then be taken to mean "No, not one."
Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Cornwall has contributed absolutely nothing to literature. I have already sung the praises of Richard Carew's work; but he was a prose writer—he failed pitifully when he attempted verse; he therefore stands on a lower level, with perhaps two or three more who have written good prose—William Scawen and Borlase, the antiquary, may be mentioned. But there is Thomas Carew, the lyrist, and friend of Donne, Suckling and Ben Jonson—if he may be called a Cornishman. His name is not included in Boase and Courtney's monumental Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, in the preface of which work they courageously say, "The writers of Cornwall bear no inconsiderable place in the literature of their country." But if we take it that this Carew was a Cornishman, though born out of the county, we must admit that Cornwall has produced one good poet. He does not count for very much, however—this one poet who lived three centuries ago and wrote half a dozen little things that sparkle like diamonds—seeing that he was of that class which is never native, of the soil. Even in those old days men of birth did not spend their lives at home; they attended the court and went forth wide in the world wonders for to see, and intermarried with families outside of their own class, so that, like the Jews among us, they were and always are, racially as well as socially, a distinct people among the people. Norman and Saxon and Dane are we, says the poet truly enough, and he might have added Celt, but the mixing process has been infinitely greater in the upper ranks. The Cornish people, I take it, are Celts with less alien blood in their veins than any other branch of their race in the British Islands.
One day in a village street I met a fine athletic-looking oldish man with a very marked characteristic Cornish face, but painted by alien suns to deepest brown, and that colour of the tropics contrasted oddly with the bright blue-grey eyes and reddish-grey beard. He laughed when I said that I supposed he was a stranger there. Yes, a stranger in a sense, he said, since he had been away over forty years, working in the mines, in America, Africa and Australia. But his forty years' labour had not hurt him much; he felt young still and was going back to Queensland after a little look round. For one thing he had never touched alcohol in his life and he would like to pit his strength against that of any man of thirty in that village where he was born sixty-seven years ago. Yes, it was his own native place which he had come back after forty years to have a look at. His people were there still, and had been there to their certain knowledge over six hundred years. And I dare say, he added, if we knew all we could say a thousand.
Five or ten thousand would perhaps have been nearer the truth. And so it is with the common people generally. They have become great roamers nowadays; they go forth in hundreds every year into all parts of the world, but they appear to cherish the old Cornish feeling against marrying among strangers; they return after few or many years to find wives, and that, I conjectured, was the old miner's motive in coming back to his village "just to have a look round." One of the saddest things in this perpetual going and coming is that a great many men, young and in the prime of life, return after contracting miner's disease, usually in Africa; and though it is known to every one that they are doomed men, they marry and live just long enough to leave a child or two before they are gathered to their fathers.
To return to the main point. Is this surprising dearth of the creative faculty, or of genius, in art and literature a good criterion—does it justify us in saying that the people are devoid of imagination?