_ As it was reported to me, the story went that one Sunday morning in August a family stood in a window not far from this window of mine--the window of an hotel coffee-room--and debated where to go for divine worship. They were three: father, mother, and daughter, arrived the night before from the Midlands, to spend their holiday. "The fisher-folk down here are very religious," said the father, contemplating the anchored craft-- yachts, trading-steamers, merchantmen of various rigs and nationalities-- in which he supposed the native population to go a-fishing on week-days: for he had been told in the Midlands that we were fisher-folk. "Plymouth Brethren mostly, I suppose," said the wife: "we changed at Plymouth." "Bristol." "Was it Bristol? Well, Plymouth was the last big town we stopped at: I am sure of _that_. And this is on the same coast, isn't it?" "What _are_ Plymouth Brethren?" the daughter asked. "Oh, well, my dear, I expect they are very decent, earnest people. It won't do us any harm to attend their service, if they have one. What I say is, when you're away on holiday, do as the Romans do." The father had been listening with an unprejudiced air, as who should say, "I am here by the seaside for rest and enjoyment." He called to the waiter, "What places of worship have you?" The waiter with professional readiness hinted that he had some to suit all tastes, "Church of England, Wesleyan, Congregational, Bible Christian--" "Plymouth Brethren?" The waiter had never heard of them: they had not, at any rate, been asked for within his recollection. He retired crestfallen. "That's the worst of these waiters," the father explained: "they get 'em down for the season from Lord knows where, Germany perhaps, and they can tell you nothing of the place." "But this one is not a German, and he told me last night he'd been here for years." "Well, the question is, Where we are to go? Here, Ethel,"--as a second daughter entered, buttoning her gloves--"your mother can't make up her mind what place of worship to try." "Why, father, how can you _ask?_ We must go to the Church, of course--I saw it from the 'bus--and hear the service in the fine old Cornish language."
Now, I suspect that the friend to whom I am indebted for this story introduced a few grace-notes into his report. But it is a moral story in many respects, and I give it for the sake of the one or two morals which may be drawn from it. In the first place, absurd as these people appear, their ignorance but differs by a shade or two from the knowledge of certain very learned people of my acquaintance. That is to say, they know about as much concerning the religion of this corner of England to-day as the archaeologists, for all their industry, know concerning the religion of Cornwall before it became subject to the See of Canterbury in the reign of Athelstan, A.D. 925-40; and their hypotheses were constructed on much the same lines. Nay, the resemblance in method and in the general muddle of conclusions obtained would have been even more striking had these good persons mixed up Plymouth Brethren (founded in 1830) with the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed out of Plymouth in 1620, and are already undergoing the process of mythopoeic conversion into Deucalions and Pyrrhas of the United States of America. Add a slight confusion of their tenets with those of Mormonism, or at least a disposition to lay stress on all discoverable points of similarity between Puritans and Mormons, and really you have a not unfair picture of the hopeless mess into which our researchers in the ancient religions of Cornwall have honestly contrived to plunge themselves and us. It was better in the happy old days when we all believed in the Druids; when the Druids explained everything, and my excellent father grafted mistletoe upon his apple-trees--in vain, because nothing will persuade the mistletoe to grow down here. But nobody believes in the Druids just now: and the old question of the Cassiterides has never been solved to general satisfaction: and the Indian cowrie found in a barrow at Land's End, the tiny shell which raised such a host of romantic conjectures and inspired Mr. Canton to write his touching verses:--
"What year was it that blew
The Aryan's wicker-work canoe
Which brought the shell to English land?
What prehistoric man or woman's hand,
With what intent, consigned it to this grave--
This barrow set in sound of the Ancient World's last wave?"
"Beside it in the mound
A charmed bead of flint was found.
Some woman surely in this place
Covered with flowers a little baby-face,
And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast;
And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?"
"No man shall ever know.
It happened all so long ago
That this same childless woman may
Have stood upon the cliffs around the bay
And watched for tin-ships that no longer came,
Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman flame."
This cowrie--are we even certain that it was Indian?--that it differed so unmistakably from the cowries discoverable by twos and threes at times on a little beach off which I cast anchor half a dozen times every summer? I speak as a man anxious to get at a little plain knowledge concerning the land of his birth, and the researchers seem honestly unable to give me any that does not tumble to pieces even in their own hands. For--and this seems the one advance made--the researchers themselves are honest nowadays. Their results may be disappointing, but at least they no longer bemuse themselves and us with the fanciful and even mystical speculations their predecessors indulged in. Take the case of our inscribed stones and wayside crosses. Cornwall is peculiarly rich in these: of crosses alone it possesses more than three hundred. But when we make inquiry into their age we find ourselves in almost complete fog. The merit of the modern inquirer (of Mr. Langdon, for instance) is that he acknowledges the fog, and does not pretend to guide us out of it by haphazard hypotheses propounded with pontifical gravity and assurance--which was the way of that erratic genius, the Rev. R. S. Hawker:--
"Wheel-tracks in old Cornwall there were none, but there were strange and narrow paths across the moorlands, which, the forefathers said, in their simplicity, were first traced by Angels' feet. These, in truth, were trodden and worn by religious men: by the Pilgrim as he paced his way towards his chosen and votive bourne; or by the Palmer, whose listless footsteps had neither a fixed Kebla nor future abode. Dimly visible, by the darker hue of the crushed grass, these strait and narrow roads led the traveller along from one Hermitage to another Chapelry, or distant and inhabited cave; or the byeways turned aside to reach some legendary spring, until at last, far, far away, the winding track stood still upon the shore, where St. Michael of the Mount rebuked the dragon from his throne of rock above the seething sea. But what was the wanderer's guide along the bleak unpeopled surface of the Cornish moor? The Wayside Cross! . . ." Very pretty, no doubt! but, unlike the Wayside Cross, this kind of writing leads nowhere. We want Mr. Hawker's authority for what 'the forefathers said, in their simplicity'; without that, what the forefathers said resembles what the soldier said in being inadmissible as evidence. We want Mr. Hawker's authority for saying that these paths '_in truth_, were trodden, and worn by religious men.' Nay we want his authority for saying that there were any paths at all! The hypotheses of symbolism are even worse; for these may lead to anything. Mr. Langdon was seriously told on one occasion that the four holes of a cross represented the four evangelists. "This," says he plaintively, "it will be admitted, is going a little too far, as nothing else but four holes could be the result of a ring and cross combined." At Phillack, in the west of Cornwall, there is _part_ of a coped stone having a rude cable mounting along the top of the ridge. Two sapient young archaeologists counted the remaining notches of this cable, and, finding they came to _thirty-two_, decided at once that they represented our Lord's age! They were quite certain, having counted them twice. In fact, there seems to be nothing that symbolism will not prove. Do you meet with a pentacle? Its five points are the fingers of Omnipotence. With a six-pointed star? Then Omnipotence has taken an extra finger, to include the human nature of the Messiah: and so on. It reminds one of the Dilly Song:--
"I will sing you Five, O!"
"What is your Five, O?"
"Five it is the Dilly Bird that's never seen but heard, O!"
"I will sing you Six, O! . . ."
And six is 'The Cherubim Watchers,' or 'The Crucifix,' or 'The Cheerful Waiters,' or 'The Ploughboys under the Bowl,' or whatever local fancy may have hit on and made traditional.
The modern researcher is honest and sticks to facts; but there are next to no facts. And when he comes to a tentative conclusion, he must hedge it about with so many 'ifs,' that practically he leaves us in total indecision. Nothing, for instance, can exceed the patient industry displayed in the late Mr. William Copeland Borlase's _Age of the Saints_ --a monograph on Early Christianity in Cornwall: but, in a way, no more hopeless book was ever penned. The author confessed it, indeed, on his last page. "There seems to be little ground for hope that we shall be ever able to gain a perfectly true insight into the history of the epoch with which we have attempted to deal, or to unravel the meshes of so tangled a web." He felt his task, as he put it, to be not unlike that of gathering up the broken pieces of pottery from some ancient tomb, with the hope of fitting them together so as to make one large and perfect vase, but finding during the process that they belong to several vessels, not one of which is capable of restoration as a whole, though some faint notion of the pristine shape of each may be gained from the general pattern and contour of its shards. All that can be gained from the materials at hand is a reasonable probability that Cornwall, before it bent its neck to the See of Canterbury, had been invaded by three distinct streams of missionary effort--from Ireland, from Wales, and from Brittany. But even in what order they came no man can say for certain.
The young lady in my friend's story wished to hear the service of the Church of England in 'the fine old Cornish language.' Alas! if Edward VI. and his advisers had been as wise, the religious history of Cornwall, during two centuries at least, had been a happier one. It was liberal to give Englishmen a Liturgy in their own tongue; but it was neither liberal nor conspicuously intelligent to impose the same upon the Cornishmen, who neither knew nor cared about the English language. It may be easy to lay too much stress upon this grievance; since Cornishmen of this period had a knack of being 'agin the government, anyway,' and had contrived two considerable rebellions less than sixty years before, one because they did not see their way to subscribing 2,500 pounds towards fighting King James IV. of Scotland for protecting Perkin Warbeck, and the other under Perkin's own leadership. But it was at least a serious grievance; and the trouble began in the first year of Edward VI.'s reign. The King began by issuing several Injunctions about religion; and among them, this one: That all images found in churches, for divine worship or otherwise, should be pulled down and cast forth out of those churches; and that all preachers should persuade the people from praying to saints, or for the dead, and from the use of beads, ashes, processions, masses, dirges, and praying to God publicly in an unknown tongue. A Mr. Body, one of the commissioners appointed to carry out this Injunction, was pulling down images in Helston church, near the Lizard, when a priest stabbed him with a knife: "of which wound he instantly fell dead in that place. And though the murderer was taken and sent up to London, tried, found guilty of murder in Westminster Hall, and executed in Smithfield, yet the Cornish people flocked together in a tumultuous and rebellious manner, by the instigation of their priests in divers parts of the shire or county, and committed many barbarities and outrages in the same." These disturbances ended in Arundel's rebellion, the purpose of which was to demand the restoration of the old Liturgy; and, in truth, the Seven Articles under which they formulated this demand must have seemed very moderate indeed to their conservative minds. The rebellion failed, of course, after a five weeks' siege of Exeter; and was bloodily revenged, with something of the savage humour displayed by Jeffreys in punishing a later Western rebellion. This part of the business was committed to Sir Anthony (_alias_ William) Kingston, Knight, a Gloucestershire man, as Provost Marshal; and "it is memorable what sport he made, by virtue of his office, upon men in misery." Here are one or two of his merry conceits, which read strangely like the jests reported by Herodotus:--
(1) "One Boyer, Mayor of Bodmin in Cornwall, had been amongst the rebels, not willingly, but enforced: to him the Provost sent word he would come and dine with him: for whom the Mayor made great provision. A little before dinner, the Provost took the Mayor aside, and whispered him in the ear, that an execution must that day be done in the town, and therefore required to have a pair of gallows set up against dinner should be done. The Mayor failed not of the charge. Presently after dinner the Provost, taking the Mayor by the hand, intreated him to lead him where the gallows was, which, when he beheld, he asked the Mayor if he thought them to be strong enough. 'Yes' (said the Mayor),'doubtless they are.' 'Well, then'(said the Provost), 'get you up speedily, for they are provided for you.' 'I hope' (answered the Mayor), 'you mean not as you speak.' 'In faith' (said the Provost), 'there is no remedy, for you have been a busie rebel.' And so without respite or defence he was hanged to death; a most uncourteous part for a guest to offer his host." --Sir Rich. Baker, 1641.
(2) "Near the same place dwelt a Miller, who had been a busie actor in that rebellion; who, fearing the approach of the Marshal, told a sturdy fellow, his servant, that he had occasion to go from home, and therefore bid him, that if any man came to inquire after the miller, he should not speak of him, but say that himself was the miller, and had been so for three years before. So the Provost came and called for the miller, when out comes the servant and saith he was the man. The Provost demanded how long he had kept the mill? 'These three years' (answered the servant). Then the Provost commanded his men to lay hold on him and hang him on the next tree. At this the fellow cried out that he was not the miller, but the miller's man. 'Nay, sir' (said the Provost), 'I will take you at your word, and if thou beest the miller, thou art a busie knave; if thou beest not, thou art a false lying knave; and howsoever, thou canst never do thy master better service than to hang for him'; and so, without more ado, he was dispatched."--_Ibid_. The story of one Mayow, whom Kingston hanged at a tavern signpost in the town of St. Columb, has a human touch. "Tradition saith that his crime was not capital; and therefore his wife was advised by her friends to hasten to the town after the Marshal and his men, who had him in custody, and beg his life. Which accordingly she prepared to do; and to render herself the more amiable petitioner before the Marshal's eyes, this dame spent so much time in attiring herself and putting on her French hood, then in fashion, that her husband was put to death before her arrival."
Such was the revenge wreaked on a population which the English of the day took so little pains to understand that (as I am informed) in an old geography book of the days of Elizabeth, Cornwall is described as 'a foreign country on that side of England next to Spain.'
And now that the holiday season is upon us, and the visitor stalks our narrow streets, perhaps he will not resent a word or two of counsel in exchange for the unreserved criticism he lavishes upon us. We are flattered by his frequent announcement that on the whole he finds us clean and civil and fairly honest; and respond with the assurance that we are always pleased to see him so long as he behaves himself. We, too, have found him clean and fairly honest; and if we have anything left to desire, it is only that he will realise, a little more constantly, the extent of his knowledge of us, and the extent to which his position as a visitor should qualify his bearing towards us. I address this hint particularly to those who make copy out of their wanderings in our midst; and I believe it has only to be suggested, and it will be at once recognised for true, that the proper attitude for a visitor in a strange land is one of modesty. He may be a person of quite considerable importance in his own home, even if that home be London; but when he finds himself on strange soil he may still have a deal to learn from the people who have lived on that soil for generations, adapted themselves to its conditions and sown it with memories in which he cannot have a share.
In truth, many of our visitors would seem to suffer from a confusion of thought. Possibly the Visitors' Books at hotels and places of public resort may have fostered this. Our guest makes a stay of a few weeks in some spot to which he has been attracted by its natural beauty: he idles and watches the inhabitants as they go about their daily business; and at the end he deems it not unbecoming to record his opinion that they are intelligent, civil, honest, and sober--or the reverse. He mistakes. It is _he_ who has been on probation during these weeks--_his_ intelligence, _his_ civility, _his_ honesty, _his_ sobriety. For my part, I look forward to a time when Visitors' Books shall record the impressions which visitors leave behind them, rather than those which they bear away. For an instance or two:--
(1) "The Rev. and Mrs. '--', of '--', arrived here in August, 1897, and spent six weeks. We found them clean, and invariably sober and polite. We hope they will come often."
(2) "Mr. X and his friend Y, from Z, came over here, attired in flannels and the well-known blazer of the Tooting Bec Cricket Club. They shot gulls in the harbour, and made themselves a public nuisance by constant repetition of a tag from a music-hall song, with an indecent sub-intention. Their behaviour towards the young women of this town was offensive. Seen in juxtaposition with the natural beauties of this coast, they helped one to realise how small a thing (under certain conditions) is man."
(3) "Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so and family spent a fortnight here. The lady complained that the town was dull, which we (who would have the best reason to complain of such a defect) do not admit. She announced her opinion in the street, at the top of her voice; and expressed annoyance that there should be no band to play of an evening. She should have brought one. Her husband carried about a note-book and asked us questions about our private concerns. He brought no letters of introduction, and we do not know his business. The children behaved better."
(4) "Mr. Blank arrived here on a bicycle, and charmed us with the geniality of his address. We hope to see him again, as he left without discharging a number of small debts." It is, I take it, because the Briton has grown accustomed to invading other people's countries, that he expects, when travelling, to find a polite consideration which he does not import. But the tourist pushes the expectation altogether too far. When he arrives at a town which lays itself out to attract visitors for the sake of the custom they bring, he has a right to criticise, _if he feel quite sure he is a visitor of the sort which the town desires_. This is important: for a town may seek to attract visitors, and yet be exceedingly unwilling to attract some kinds of visitors. But should he choose to plant himself upon a spot where the inhabitants ask only to go about the ordinary occupations of life in quietness, it is the height of impertinence to proclaim that the life of the place does not satisfy his needs. Most intolerable of all is the conduct of the uninvited stranger who settles for a year or two in some quiet town--we suffer a deal from such persons along the south-western littoral--and starts with the intention of "putting a little 'go' into it," or, in another of his favourite phrases, of "putting the place to rights." Men of this mind are not to be reasoned with; nor is it necessary that they should be reasoned with. Only, when the inevitable reaction is felt, and they begin to lose their temper, I would beg them not to assume too hastily that the 'natives' have no sense of humour. All localities have a sense of humour, but it works diversely with them. A man may even go on for twenty years, despising his neighbours for the lack of it. But when the discovery comes, he will be lucky if the remembrance of it do not wake him up of nights, and keep him writhing in his bed--that is, if we suppose _him_ to have a sense of humour too.
An aeronaut who had lost his bearings, descending upon some farm labourers in Suffolk, demanded anxiously where he was. "Why, don't you know? You be up in a balloon, bo." A pedestrian in Cornwall stopped a labourer returning from work, and asked the way to St.--'. "And where might you come from?" the labourer demanded. "I don't see what affair that is of yours. I asked you the way to St. '--'." "Well then, if you don't tell us where you be come from, we bain't goin' to tell you the way to St. '--'" It seems to me that both of these replies contain humour, and the second a deal of practical wisdom.
The foregoing remarks apply, with very little modification, to those strangers who take up their residence in Cornwall and, having sojourned among us for a while without ever penetrating to the confidence of the people, pass judgment on matters of which, because they were above learning, knowledge has been denied to them. A clergyman, dwelling in a country parish where perhaps he finds himself the one man of education (as he understands it), is prone enough to make the mistake; yet not more fatally prone than your Gigadibs, the literary man, who sees his unliterary (even illiterate) neighbours not as they are, but as a clever novelist would present them to amuse an upper or middle class reader. Stevenson (a greater man than Gigadibs) frankly confessed that he could make nothing of us:--
"There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish: for my part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel--that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home." This straightforward admission is worth (to my mind) any half-dozen of novels written about us by 'foreigners' who, starting with the Mudie-convention and a general sense that we are picturesque, write commentaries upon what is a sealed book and deal out judgments which are not only wrong, but wrong with a thoroughness only possible to entire self-complacency.
And yet . . . It seems to a Cornishman so easy to get at Cornish hearts-- so easy even for a stranger if he will approach them, as they will at once respond, with that modesty which is the first secret of fine manners. Some years ago I was privileged to edit a periodical--though short-lived not wholly unsuccessful--the _Cornish Magazine_. At the end of each number we printed a page of 'Cornish Diamonds,' as we called them--scraps of humour picked up here and there in the Duchy by Cornish correspondents; and in almost all of them the Cornishman was found gently laughing at himself; in not one of them (so far as I remember) at the stranger. Over and over again the jest depended on our small difficulties in making our own distinctions of thought understood in English. Here are a few examples:--
(1) "Please God," said Aunt Mary Bunny, "if I live till this evenin' and all's well I'll send for the doctor."
(2) "I don't name no names," said Uncle Billy "but Jack Tremenheere's the man."
(3) "I shan't go there nor nowhere else," said old Jane Caddy, "I shall go 'long up Redruth."
(4) "I thought 'twere she, an' she thought 'twere I," said Gracey Temby, "but when we come close 'twadn't narry wan o' us."
(5) A crowd stood on the cliff watching a stranded vessel and the lifeboat going out to her.
"What vessel is it?" asked a late arrival.
"The _Dennis Lane_."
"How many be they aboord?"
"Aw, love and bless 'ee, there's three poor dear sawls and wan old Irishman."
(6) Complainant (cross-examining defendant's witness): "What colour was the horse?"
"Black."
"Well, I'm not allowed to contradict you, and I wouldn' for worlds: but I say he wasn't."
(7) A covey of partridges rose out of shot, flew over the hedge, and was lost to view. "Where do you think they've gone?" said the sportsman to his keeper. "There's a man digging potatoes in the next field. Ask if he saw them."
"Aw, that's old Sam Petherick: he hasna seed 'em, he's hard o' hearin'."
(8) _Schoolmaster_: "I'm sorry to tell you, Mr. Minards, that your son Zebedee is little better than a fool."
_Parent_: "Naw, naw, schoolmaster; my Zebedee's no fule; only a bit easy to teach." [I myself know a farmer who approached the head master of a Grammar School and begged for a reduction in terms: "because," he pleaded, "I know my son: he's that thick you can get very little into en, and I believe in payment by results."]
Here we pass from confusion of language into mere confusion of thought, the classical instance of which is the Mevagissey man who, having been asked the old question, "If a herring and a half cost three-halfpence, how many can you buy for a shilling?'" and having given it up and been told the answer, responded brightly, "Why, o' course! Darn me, if I wasn' thinkin' of pilchards!" I met with a fair Devon rival to this story the other day in the reported conversation of two farmers discussing the electric light at Chagford (run by Chagford's lavish water-power). "It do seem out of reason," said the one, "to make vire out o' watter." "No," agreed the other, "it don't seem possible: but there,"--after a slow pause--"'tis butiful water to Chaggyford!"
It was pleasant, while the Magazine lasted, to record these and like simplicities: and though the voyage was not long, one may recall without regret its send-off, brave enough in its way:--
"'WISH 'EE WELL!'
"The ensign's dipped; the captain takes the wheel.
'So long!' the pilot waves, and 'Wish 'ee well!'
Go little craft, and with a home-made keel
'Mid loftier ships, but with a heart as leal,
Learn of blue waters and the long sea swell!
"Through the spring days we built and tackled thee,
Tested thy timbers, saw thy rigging sound,
Bent sail, and now put forth unto the sea
Where those leviathans, the critics, be,
And other monsters diversely profound.
"Some bronzed Phoenician with his pigmy freight
Haply thy herald was, who drave of yore
Deep-laden from Bolerium by the Strait
Of Gades, and beside his city's gate
Chaffered in ingots cast of Cornish ore.
"So be thou fortunate as thou art bold;
Fare, little craft, and make the world thy friend:
And, it may be--when all thy journey's told
With anchor dropped and tattered canvas rolled,
And some good won for Cornwall in the end--
"Thou wilt recall, as best, a lonely beach,
And a few exiles, to the barter come,
Who recognised the old West-country speech,
And touched thee, reverent, whispering each to each--
'She comes from far--from very far--from home.'"
I have a special reason for remembering _The Cornish Magazine_, because it so happened that the first number (containing these hopeful verses) was put into my hands with the morning's letters as I paced the garden below this Cornish Window, careless of it or of anything but a doctor's verdict of life or death in the house above. The verdict was for life. . . .
Years ago as a child I used to devour in that wonderful book _Good Words for the Young_, the _Lilliput Levee_ and _Lilliput Lyrics_ of the late William Brighty Rands: and among Rands' lyrics was one upon "The Girl that Garibaldi kissed." Of late years Rands has been coming to something like his own. His verses have been republished, and that excellent artist Mr. Charles Robinson has illustrated them. But I must tell Mr. Robinson that his portrait of the Girl that Garibaldi kissed does not in the least resemble her. I speak with knowledge--I the child who have lived to meet and know the child whom Garibaldi kissed and blessed as the sailors were weighing anchor to carry him out of this harbour and away from England. Wild horses shall not drag from me the name of that young person; because it happened--well, at an easily discoverable date--and she may not care for me to proclaim her age (as certainly she does not look it).
"He bowed to my own daughter,
And Polly is her name;
She wore a shirt of slaughter,
Of Garibaldi flame--
"Of course I mean of scarlet;
But the girl he kissed--who knows?--
May be named Selina Charlotte,
And dressed in yellow clothes!"
But she isn't; and she wasn't; for she wore a scarlet pelisse as they handed her up the yacht's side, and the hero took her in his arms.
"It would be a happy plan
For everything that's human,
If the pet of such a man
Should grow to such a woman!
"If she does as much in her way
As he has done in his--
Turns bad things topsy-turvy,
And sad things into bliss--
"O we shall not need a survey
To find that little miss,
Grown to a woman worthy
Of Garibaldi's kiss!"
Doggrel? Yes, doggrel no doubt! Let us pass on.
In the early numbers of our _Cornish Magazine_ a host of contributors (some of them highly distinguished) discussed the question, 'How to develop Cornwall as a holiday resort.' 'How to bedevil it' was, I fear, our name in the editorial office for this correspondence. More and more as the debate went on I found myself out of sympathy with it, and more and more in sympathy with a lady who raised an indignant protest--
"Unless Cornishmen look to it, their country will be spoilt before they know it. Already there are signs of it--pitiable signs; Not many months ago I visited Tintagel, which is justly one of the prides of the Duchy. The 'swinging seas' are breaking against the great cliffs as they broke there centuries ago when Arthur and Launcelot and the Knights of the Round Table peopled the place. The castle is mostly crumbled away now, but some fraction of its old strength still stands to face the Atlantic gales, and to show us how walls were built in the grand old days. In the valley the grass is green and the gorse is yellow, and overhead the skies are blue and delightful: but facing Arthur's Castle--grinning down, as it were, in derision--there is being erected a modern hotel--'built in imitation of Arthur's Castle,' as one is told! . . . There is not yet a rubbish shoot over the edge of the cliff, but I do not think I am wrong in stating that the drainage is brought down into that cove where long ago (the story runs) the naked baby Arthur came ashore on the great wave!" In summing up the discussion I confess with shame that I temporised. It was hard to see one's native country impoverished by the evil days in which mining (and to a lesser degree, agriculture) had fallen; to see her population diminishing and her able-bodied sons emigrating by the thousand. It is all very pretty for a visitor to tell us that the charm of Cornwall is its primaeval calm, that it seems to sleep an enchanted sleep, and so on; but we who inhabit her wish (and not altogether from mercenary motives) to see her something better than a museum of a dead past. I temporised therefore with those who suggested that Cornwall might yet enrich herself by turning her natural beauty to account: yet even so I had the sense to add that--
"Jealous as I am for the beauty of our Duchy, and delighted when strangers admire her, I am, if possible, more jealous for the character of her sons, and more eager that strangers should respect _them_. And I do see (and hope to be forgiven for seeing it) that a people which lays itself out to exploit the stranger and the tourist runs an appreciable risk of deterioration in manliness and independence. It may seem a brutal thing to say, but as I had rather be poor myself than subservient, so would I liefer see my countrymen poor than subservient. It is not our own boast--we have it on the fairly unanimous evidence of all who have visited us--that hitherto Cornishmen have been able to combine independence with good manners. For Heaven's sake, I say, let us keep that reputation, though at great cost! But let us at the same time face the certainty that, when we begin to take pay for entertaining strangers it will be a hard reputation to keep. Were it within human capacity to decide between a revival of our ancient industries, fishing and mining, and the development of this new business, our decision would be prompt enough. But it is not." I despaired too soon. Our industries seem in a fair way to revive, and with that promise I recognise that even in despair my willingness to temporise was foolish. For my punishment--though I helped not to erect them,--hideous hotels thrust themselves insistently on my sight as I walk our magnificent northern cliffs, and with the thought of that drain leading down to Arthur's cove I am haunted by the vision of Merlin erect above it, and by the memory of Hawker's canorous lines:--
"He ceased; and all around was dreamy night:
There stood Dundagel, throned; and the great sea
Lay, like a strong vassal at his master's gate,
And, like a drunken giant, sobbed in sleep!" _