Chapter XIV: Part IV: , CHA to CRO. I turn to the article on Cricket, and am referred (2)

"Z said, 'Here is a box of Zinc, Get in, my little master!
We'll shut you up; we'll nail you down: we will, my little master!
We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'"

To speak as seriously as may be, the language is no longer hortatory, like Holland's, but minatory, even comminatory. It is (as its author would not deny) the language of panic deliberately employed, a calculated attempt to strengthen the _materiel_ of the navy at the cost of Englishmen's fears. Now let me define my feeling towards the Navy League. As an ordinary British citizen, I must heartily approve its aim of strengthening the navy and keeping it efficient. As an ordinary reasonable man, I must admit that its efforts, if rightly directed, may be of great national service. But language such as I have quoted must (so far as it is not merely contemptible) be merely demoralising, and anyone who works on the fears of a nation--and especially of a nation which declines conscription and its one undoubted advantage of teaching men what war means--does a harm which is none the less wicked for being incalculable. These Navy Leaguers cry incessantly for more _material_ strength. They tell us that in material strength we should at least be equal to any two other countries. A few months pass, and then, their appetite growing with the terror it feeds upon, they insist that we must be equal to any three other countries. Also "it does not appear," they sagely remark, "that Nelson and his contemporaries left any record as to what the proportion of the blockading should bear (_sic_) to one blockaded,"--a curious omission of Nelson's, to be sure! He may perhaps have held that it depended on the quality of the antagonists.

To this a few ordinary stupid Britons like myself have always answered that no amount of _materiel_ can ever replace _morale_; and that all such panic-making is a mischievous attempt to lower the breed, and the more mischievous because its mischief may for a while be imperceptible. We can see our warships growing: we cannot see the stamina decaying; yet it is our stamina on which we must rely finally in the fatal hour of trial. We said this, and we were laughed at; insulted as unpatriotic--a word of which one may say in kindness that it would not so readily leap to the lips of professional patriots if they were able to understand what it means and, by consequence, how much it hurts.

Yes, and behold, along comes Admiral Togo, and at one stroke proves that we were simply, absolutely and henceforward incontestably right! What were our little three-power experts doing on the morrow of Togo's victory? They are making irrelevant noises in the halfpenny press, explaining how Admiral Togo did it with an inferior force, and in a fashion that belies all their axioms. But I turn to _The Times_ and I read:--

"The event shows that mere material equality is but as dust in the
balance when weighed in the day of battle against superiority of
moral equipment."

--Which, when you come to think of it, is precisely what Bacon meant when he wrote:--

"Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of Horse,
Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery and the like: all
this is but a Sheep in a Lion's skin except the Breed and disposition
of the People be stout and warlike. Nay, Number (it selfe) in Armies
importeth not much where the People is of weake Courage: For
(as _Virgil_ saith) _it never troubles a Wolfe how many the Sheepe
be_."

Do our friends of the Navy League seriously believe that a principle as old as humankind can be suddenly upset by the invention of a submarine or of some novelty in guns? Even in their notions of what material strength means I hold them to be mistaken. The last resource which a nation ought to neglect is its financial credit. It was Walpole's long policy of peace which made possible Pitt's conquests. But I hold with far stronger conviction that he does wickedly who trades on a nation's cowardice to raise money for its protection. An old text, my masters! It seems a long while that some of us were preaching it in vain until Admiral Togo came along and proved it.

I observe that a Member of Parliament for a West of England constituency (a better fellow than Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments with which these precious experts attacked me; that because I sometimes write novels I cannot be supposed to think seriously on public affairs. My only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral view of the province of a man of letters consider him worthy to pay income-tax.

I pass over some tempting reflections on the queer anomaly that this prohibition should be addressed (as it so often is) by writers to writers, by newspaper writers to men who write books, and (so far as a distinction can be drawn) by men who write in a hurry to men who write deliberately. I wish to look quietly into the belief on which it rests and to inquire how that belief was come by.

There certainly was a time when such a belief would have been laughed at as scarcely reasonable enough to be worth discussing. And that time, oddly enough, was almost conterminous with the greatest era of the world's literature, the greatest era of political discovery, and the greatest era of Empire-making. The men who made Athens and the men who made Rome would have disputed (I fear somewhat contemptuously) the axiom on which my friend the West Country member builds his case. They held it for axiomatic that the artist and man of letters ought not to work in cloistral isolation, removed from public affairs, and indifferent to them; that on the contrary they are direct servants of their State, and have a peculiar call to express themselves on matters of public moment. To convince you that I am not advancing any pet theory of my own let me present it in the words of a grave and judicious student, Mr. W. J. Courthope, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford:--

"The idea of the State lay at the root of every Greek conception of
art and morals. For though, in the view of the philosopher, the
virtue of the good citizen was not always necessarily identical with
the virtue of the individual man, and though, in the city of Athens
at all events, a large amount of life was possible to the individual
apart from public interests, yet it is none the less true that the
life of the individual in every Greek city was in reality moulded by
the customary life, tradition and character, in one intranslatable
word, by the _ethos_ of the State. Out of this native soil grew
that recognised, though not necessarily public, system of education
(_politike paideia_ ), consisting of reading and writing, music
and gymnastic, which Plato and Aristotle themselves accepted as the
basis of the constitution of the State. But this preliminary
education was only the threshold to a subsequent system of political
training, of which, in Athens at least, every citizen had an
opportunity of availing himself by his right to participate in public
affairs; so that, in the view of Pericles, politics themselves were
an instrument of individual refinement. 'The magistrates,' said he,
in his great funeral oration, 'who discharge public trusts, fulfil
their domestic duties also; the private citizen, while engaged in
professional business, has competent knowledge of public affairs; for
we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter
not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and
pronounce on public matters when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps
strike out for ourselves correct reasonings upon them; far from
accounting discussion an impediment to action, we complain only if we
are not told what is to be done before it becomes our duty to do it.'

"The strenuous exertion of the faculties of the individual in the
service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects
itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is
the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect,
alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as
the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation.
It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of
Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in
such plays as the _Persae_ and _Eumeuides_ of AEschylus, the
_Antigone_ of Sophocles, the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, the History
of Thucydides and the Orations of Demosthenes, its last embodiment
being perhaps the famous oath of that orator on the souls of those
who risked their lives at Marathon."--_History of English Poetry_,
vol. i., c 2.

In the most brilliant age of Greece, then, and of Greek art and letters, the civic spirit was the inspiring spirit. But as the Greek cities sank one by one before the Macedonian power and forfeited their liberties, this civic spirit died for lack of nourishment and exercise, and literature was driven to feed on itself--which is about the worst thing that can ever happen to it, and one of the worst things that can happen to a nation. The old political education gave place to an 'encyclopaedic' education. The language fell into the hands of grammarians and teachers of rhetoric, whose inventions may have a certain interest of their own, but--to quote Mr. Courthope again--no longer reflect the feelings and energies of free political life. Roman literature drives home the same, or a similar, moral. "The greatness of Rome was as entirely civic in its origin as that of any Greek city, and, like the Greek cities, Rome in the days of her freedom, and while she was still fighting for the mastery, preserved a system of political education, both in the hearth and the Senate, which was suited to her character. Cato, the Censor, according to Plutarch, 'wrote histories for his son, with his own hand, in large characters; so that without leaving his father's house he might gain a knowledge of the illustrious actions of the ancient Romans and the customs of his country': and what is of importance to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even after the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational ideal was felt to be the foundation of Roman greatness by the orators and poets who adorned the golden age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at once the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's eloquence, and still acts as its antiseptic. It breaks through the conventional forms of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such passages as the famous eulogy--

"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 circumstances, 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 practitioners) 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 passing 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 assertion has been repeated until second-rate minds confuse it with an axiom. People of a certain class 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 repetition the assurance 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 repetitions. 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 massacres 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 massacres 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 assertions 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 passed 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 assured 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 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--