From a Cornish Window Part 20

"Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra, Nec pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus Laudibus Italiae certent. . . ."

It closes the last Georgic on a high political note. Avowedly it inspires the _AEneid_. It permeates all that Horace wrote. These two poets never tire of calling on their countrymen to venerate the Roman virtues, to hold fast by the old Sabine simplicity and:

"Pure religion breathing household laws."

Again, when the mischief was done, and Rome had accepted the Alexandrine model of education and literary culture, Juvenal reinvoked the old spirit in his denunciation of the hundred and more trivialities which the new spirit engendered. It was a belated, despairing echo. You cannot expect quite the same shout from a man who leads a forlorn sortie, and a man who defends a proud citadel while yet it is merely threatened. But, allowing for changed circ.u.mstances, you will find that Juvenal's is just the old civic spirit turned to fierceness by despair. And he strikes out unerringly enough at the ministers of Rome's decline--at the poets who chatter and the rhetoricians who declaim on merely 'literary' topics; the rich who fritter away life on private luxuries and the pursuit of trivial aims; the debased Greek with his "smattering of encyclopaedic knowledge,"

but no devotion to the city in which he only hopes to make money.

Now is this civic spirit in literature (however humble its pract.i.tioners) one which England can easily afford to despise? So far as I know, it has been reserved for an age of newspapers to declare explicitly that such a spirit is merely mischievous; that a poet ought to be a man of the study, isolated amid the stir of pa.s.sing events, serenely indifferent to his country's fortunes, or at least withholding his gift (allowed, with magnificent but unconscious irony, to be 'divine') from that general contribution to the public wisdom in which journalists make so brave a show. He may, if he have the singular luck to be a Laureate, be allowed to strike his lyre and sing of an _accouchement_; this being about the only event on which politicians and journalists have not yet claimed the monopoly of offering practical advice. But farther he may hardly go: and all because a silly a.s.sertion has been repeated until second-rate minds confuse it with an axiom. People of a certain cla.s.s of mind seem capable of believing anything they see in print, provided they see it often.

For these, the announcement that somebody's lung tonic possesses a peculiar virtue has only to be repeated at intervals along a railway line, and with each repet.i.tion the a.s.surance becomes more convincing, until towards the journey's end it wears the imperativeness almost of a revealed truth. And yet no reasonable inducement to belief has been added by any one of these repet.i.tions. The whole thing is a psychological trick.

The moral impressiveness of the first placard beyond Westbourne Park Station depends entirely on whether you are travelling from London to Birmingham, or from Birmingham to London. A mind which yields itself to this illusion could probably, with perseverance, be convinced that pale pills are worth a guinea a box for pink people, were anyone interested in enforcing such a harmless proposition: and I have no doubt that the Man in the Street has long since accepted the reiterated axiom that a poet should hold aloof from public affairs, having no more capacity than a child for understanding their drift.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the cry is just a cant party trick, used by each party in its turn. Mr. Kipling writes "Cleared," Mr. Alfred Austin hymns "Jameson's Ride," and forthwith the Liberals lift hands and voices in horror. Mr. Watson denounces the Armenian ma.s.sacres or the Boer War, and the Unionists can hardly find words to express their pained surprise.

Mr. Swinburne inveighed against Irishmen, and delighted a party; inveighed against the Czar, and divided a whole Front Bench between shocked displeasure and half-humorous astonishment that a poet should have any opinions about Russia, or, having some, should find anybody to take them seriously. It is all cant, my friends--nothing but cant; and at its base lies the old dispute between principle and casuistry. If politics and statecraft rest ultimately on principles of right and wrong, then a poet has as clear a right as any man to speak upon them: as clear a right now as when Tennyson lifted his voice on behalf of the Fleet, or Wordsworth penned his 'Two Voices' sonnet, or Milton denounced the ma.s.sacres at Piedmont. While this nation retains a conscience, its poets have a clear right and a clear call to be the voice of that conscience. They may err, of course; they may mistake the voice of party for the voice of conscience: 'Jameson's Ride' and 'The Year of Shame'--one or both--may misread that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by their rightness or wrongness, and again judge them by their merits or defects as literature. Only do not forbid the poet to speak and enforce the moral conviction that is in him.

If, on the other hand, politics be a mere affair of casuistry; or worse--a mere game of opportunism in which he excels who hits on the cleverest expedient for each several crisis as it occurs; then indeed you may bid the poet hush the voice of principle, and listen only to the sufficiently dissonant instruction of those specialists at the game who make play in Parliament and the press. If politics be indeed that base thing connoted by the term "_drift_ of public affairs," then the axiom rests on wisdom after all. The poet cannot be expected to understand the "drift," and had better leave it to these specialists in drifting.

But if you search, you will find that poetry--rare gift as it is, and understood by so few--has really been exerting an immense influence on public opinion all the while that we have been deluged with a.s.sertions of this unhappy axiom. Why, I dare to say that one-half of the sense of Empire which now dominates political thought in Great Britain has been the creation of her poets. The public, if it will but clear its mind of cant, is grateful enough for such poetry as Mr. Kipling's 'Flag of England' and Mr. Henley's 'England, my England'; and gratefully recognises that the spirit of these songs has pa.s.sed on to thousands of men, women, and children, who have never read a line of Mr. Henley's or Mr. Kipling's composition.

As for the axiom, it is merely the complement of that 'Art for Art's sake'

chatter which died a dishonoured death but a short while ago, and which it is still one of the joys of life to have outlived. You will remember how loftily we were a.s.sured that Art had nothing to do with morality: that the novelist, e.g. who composed tales of human conduct, had no concern with ethics--that is to say with the principles of human conduct: that "Art's only business was to satisfy Art," and so forth. Well, it is all over now, and packed away in the rag-bag of out-worn paradoxes; and we are left to enjoy the revived freshness of the simple truth that an artist exists to serve his art, and his art to serve men and women.

AUGUST.

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 wors.h.i.+p.

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 anch.o.r.ed craft-- yachts, trading-steamers, merchantmen of various rigs and nationalities-- in which he supposed the native population to go a-fis.h.i.+ng 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 wors.h.i.+p 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, b.u.t.toning her gloves--"your mother can't make up her mind what place of wors.h.i.+p 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 n.o.body believes in the Druids just now: and the old question of the Ca.s.siterides has never been solved to general satisfaction: and the Indian cowrie found in a barrow at Land's End, the tiny sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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-s.h.i.+ps 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 a.s.surance--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 gra.s.s, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 leaders.h.i.+p. 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 wors.h.i.+p 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, ma.s.ses, dirges, and praying to G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+re 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 punis.h.i.+ng a later Western rebellion. This part of the business was committed to Sir Anthony (_alias_ William) Kingston, Knight, a Gloucesters.h.i.+re 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 st.u.r.dy 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 pet.i.tioner before the Marshal's eyes, this dame spent so much time in attiring herself and putting on her French hood, then in fas.h.i.+on, 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 a.s.surance 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 att.i.tude 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 repet.i.tion 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."