_Value of first impressions--Market day in Penzance--Cornish cows--The
main thoroughfare--Characteristics--Temperance in drink--A foreigner
on English drinking habits--Irish intemperance--The craving for
drink--False ideas--Wales--Methodism and temperance--Carew's
testimony--Conclusion._
|PLACES are like faces--a first sight is almost invariably the one
that tells you most. When the first sharp, clear impression has grown
blurred, or is half forgotten or overlaid with subsequent impressions,
we have as a rule lost more than we have gained: it is hardly too much
to say in a majority of instances that the more familiar a place becomes
to us the less well we know it. At all events we have ceased to know
it in the same way; we no longer vividly, consciously, see it in its
distinctive character.
Here it must be explained that by "place" several things are meant--the
appearance of the buildings, if it be a town or village; its scenery
and physical conditions generally; and, finally, its inhabitants, their
physique, dress, speech and character.
Now that I know Penzance fairly well, having visited it a dozen or
twenty times, occasionally staying a week or longer in it, I am glad to
be able to go back to my very first impression, which, fortunately, I
did not leave wholly to memory.
The first visit was on a Tuesday, which is market day in Penzance,
always the best day on which to visit a country town if one is
interested in the people and their domestic animals. Although in
midwinter, the day was exceptionally mild and very fine, and arriving
early, I spent some hours in strolling about the streets, peeping
into the churches, and visiting the public gardens, the sea-front and
cattle-market. The town itself, despite its fine situation on Mount's
Bay, with the famous castle on the island hill, opposite Marazion,
on one hand and the bold coast scenery by Newlyn and Mousehole on the
other, interested me as little as any country town I have seen. Streets
narrow and others narrower still, some straight, some very crooked,
with houses on either side, mostly modern, all more or less mean or
commonplace in appearance. The market, too, was curiously mean, and the
animals poor; it was a surprise to see such cattle in a district which
is chiefly dependent on dairy produce. The cows were small, mostly lean
and all in an incredibly rough and dirty condition, their haunches,
and in many instances half their coats, covered with an old crust of
indurated mud and dung. The farmers do nothing to improve their cattle
and are not only satisfied to go on keeping these small beasts of no
particular breed--a red and white animal which looks like a degenerated
Jersey--but it is customary to allow them to breed a year too soon.
[Illustration:0149]
This, however, is not a question to dogmatise about; one would certainly
wish to see the beasts better cared for in the winter months and brought
to market in a less filthy state, but I doubt that any improved breed
would flourish in the conditions in which these animals exist in the
small dairy farms on the stony moors in this rough unsheltered district.
The cow of the Land's End country is, in some degree, a product of the
place and in harmony with its environment, like the Land's End fox and
badger.
At noon the market was over, but the town continued full of people until
long after dark, the main thoroughfare, Market Jew Street, and one or
two streets adjoining, being thronged with farmer folk and people
from the villages who had come in to sell their produce and do their
shopping. Carriers' carts stood in rows by the side of the pavements,
and as in other market towns each had brought in its little cargo
of humanity, mostly women with sun-browned faces, all in that rusty
respectable dowdy black dress which is universal in rural England and
would make an ugly object of any woman in the world. Again, as is the
custom in market towns, the thoroughfare was the place where the people
congregated to meet and converse with their friends and relations. This
meeting with friends appeared to be a principal object of a visit to
Penzance on market day. It was a sort of social function, and the longer
I remained in the street, sauntering about, watching the people and
listening to endless dialogues, the more I was interested. Not only was
this the healthiest-looking crowd I had ever seen in a town, without a
sickly or degraded face in it, but it was undoubtedly the most cheerful,
and at the same time the most sober. The liveliness of the crowd,
its perpetual flow of hilarious talk, its meetings and greetings and
handshakings, and its numerous little groups in eager good-humoured
discussion, made me very watchful, but down to the end I was unable
to detect the slightest sign of inebriety. It was a new and curious
experience to find myself in a considerable gathering of rustics who
had succeeded in getting through their day away from home so pleasantly
without the aid of intoxicants.
Some of the town police I conversed with on the subject during the day
assured me there was very little drinking going on; and that on the last
occasion of the great annual fair of Corpus Christi, which lasts two
or three days, when the people of all the country round are gathered in
Penzance and a good deal of merry-making goes on, they had not a single
case of drunkenness. The policemen, abstainers themselves they informed
me, believed the people were sober because they were mostly church and
chapel goers and had been brought up to regard intemperance as a great
defect in a man and a great sin.
This explanation of the soberness of the Cornish people, especially in
the west part, is, I found, the usual one: it is short and easy to carry
about in the brain, and a policeman or any one you question on the point
is as ready to supply you with it as he would be to give you a match to
light your pipe. Religion may be one cause, but I imagine that another
and a much more important one is to be traced in the character of this
people.
I here recall a striking explanation of the drinking habit in England
given me by an independent witness and a very keen observer. He was an
Argentine of an old native family. I first knew him as a young student;
he rose afterwards to a very high place in the government of his
country, and a few years ago, while on a visit to England, he looked me
up and we renewed our old friendship.
His idea about drinking in England was that it was indulged in to remedy
a defect in us, a certain slowness or dullness of thought or feeling
from which we desired at times to escape. He gave the following
illustration. Two British workmen, old friends, meet by chance after a
long interval and clasp hands delightedly and each asks the other how
he is. One says "Just so so" or "Pretty well," the other says "Mustn't
grumble." They appear, then, to have got to the end of their powers of
speech, yet are conscious that there is more to be said if they are
ever to get back into the old comfortable intimacy. Suddenly one has
an inspiration and proposes a drink. The other agrees with a sense of
relief, and they incontinently repair to the nearest public, where,
after a glass or two, what they desired and tried to get but could not
is at once theirs: their tongues are loosed, they laugh in pure joy at
their new-found freedom and ability to express themselves; they talk of
their work, their families, of a hundred things they had forgotten but
remember now, and are glad to feel in sympathy with each other.
Now, he continued, we of another race and disposition in our country
when we meet an old friend, although it may not be very long since we
last saw him, feel no such restraint, but at once the joy of meeting
him sets us off. The pleasure is stimulus enough of itself; it sends
the blood spinning through our brains, and we are, in fact, almost
intoxicated by it. To take alcohol is unnecessary, and would, indeed, be
very foolish.
So far my Argentine friend, and whether he was right or wrong it struck
me at Penzance that the naturally lively disposition of Cornishmen,
their quick feeling and responsiveness, was the chief cause of their
temperance in drink. This made it easy for them to practise temperance;
it made it possible for friend to meet friend and spend the day without
an artificial aid to cheerfulness.
It is true that the Irish, racially related to the Cornish and
resembling them in disposition, are not a sober people; on this point I
will only venture to suggest that their love of whisky and ether may not
result from the same cause as the Anglo-Saxon's love of drink. Probably
their misery has got a great deal to do with it, for just as whisky
or beer will unfreeze the currents of the soul in two stolid English
friends and set them flowing merrily, so in men of all races will
alcohol lift them above themselves and give them a brief happiness.
It may seem odd to quote the Rev. R. J. Campbell in this connection,
but I find in a recent pronouncement of his a curiously apposite remark
about drunkenness. "The man," he says, "who got dead drunk last night
did so because of the inspiration in him to break through the barriers
of his limitations, to express himself and realize the more abundant
life." We need not follow him any further in his quaint contention that
sin is, after all, nothing but a spasmodic effort of the sinner to reach
to or capture higher things--a "quest of God" as he curiously puts it.
It is nothing but a prolonged and somewhat shrill echo of a wiser or a
saner man's thoughts. "The sway of alcohol over mankind," says
Professor William James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, "is
unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties
of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry
criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and
says, No; drunkenness expands, unites and says, Yes.... It brings its
votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes
him for the moment one with truth... it is part of the deeper mystery
and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we
immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of
us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so
degrading a poisoning."
Mr. Campbell's striver after the higher life who got dead drunk last
night is brother to the savage. It is stated by no less an authority
on the drink question than Dr. Archdall Reid that there is in man a
passion, an instinct, for alcohol, and that the savage has a craving for
drink. There is no such craving. The natural happiness of the savage,
as I know him, is in hunting and fighting; and in the intervals of those
stirring pursuits he has a somewhat dull, lethargic existence. Alcohol
produces the state of mind he is in when occupied with the chase or
in raiding and fighting. It is a joyful excitement, a short cut to
happiness and glory which he will take at every opportunity. They will
even sell their weapons and the skins that cover them for a little of
this happiness; but when there is no more of it to be had they return
to their normal life, and think no more about it unless the poison has
permanently or very seriously injured them. One effect on the poisoned
man, savage or civilised, is that "craving", or mad thirst, with which,
Dr. Reid imagines, Nature has cursed her human children.
We have now got a good distance away from the subject we started with;
but I have no intention of returning to Penzance. That town interested
me solely as a place where Cornishmen may be seen and studied. To go
back a little further in time to my first impressions of Cornwall, I
was struck, as most persons are on a first visit, with its unlikeness to
other parts of England. You find the unlikeness, not only in the aspect
of the country, but in the people too; you would hardly feel that
you had gone so far from the England you know if you had crossed the
Atlantic. The differences are many and great, but in this chapter I am
concerned with only one--the greater temperance of the people: indeed,
my impression of Penzance was given mainly to serve as an introduction
to this subject. It is a very important one. Our judges and magistrates
are always telling us that most of the crimes committed in this country
are due to drink. The case of Cornwall certainly favours that view: it
is, if the statistics are accepted as showing the true state of things,
the most sober and has the cleanest record in the land. The Devonians
are not a vicious people; they compare well enough with most counties,
and they are next-door neighbours to the Cornish; yet the indictable
offences in Devon are about double per thousand of the population to
those of Cornwall. What is the reason of this? Why are the Cornish more
temperate than others?
I am sorry I ever wasted an hour over a book on Cornwall with the idea
that it would be helpful to me. The time would have been more profitably
spent if I had stood with my hands in my pockets watching a sparrow
carry up straws to its nesting-hole under the eaves; or, better still,
if I had talked to a child or an old man in some village street. To
read is to imbibe false ideas, and in the end, if you are capable of
observing for yourself and care anything about the matter, you are put
to the trouble of ridding yourself of them.
When the Penzance policemen--abstainers and religious men
themselves--gave me a reason for the people's soberness they were
telling me what they had been taught, and I accepted it as probably
true. I too had read that statement and here was a confirmation of it!
It is a great satisfaction, a relief, to have our problems solved for
us. Blessings on the man who runs out before us to remove some obstacle
from the path!
But the relief was not for long: doubts began to assail me. What the
good policemen had said was what the Methodists have been saying in
their writings these hundred years or longer: they are saying it now,
all the time, and believe it because it flatters them, and poor weak
humanity is ever credulous of a flattering falsehood.
One day, a few miles from Penzance, I met a young coastguardsman and
had a nice long talk with him, in the course of which he gave me his
impression of the country. For he was not a native and had not long been
in Cornwall; he came from South Wales where he had been stationed two
or three years. The people of that place--I will not mention the
locality--were, he said, horrible to live with, degraded and brutish
beyond what he could have imagined possible in any civilised
country. They were drunkards, fighters, dreadfully profane, and as to
lechery--called _immorality_ in the journals and blue-books--no woman
could go out after dark, or by day into any lonely place, without danger
of assault. The change to West Cornwall was so great that for several
weeks he could not realise it; he could not believe that the people were
all sober and decent and friendly in disposition as he had been assured.
When he spied a man coming along the road his impulse was to lower his
eyes or turn his face away to avoid seeing a brutalised countenance.
He always expected to hear some obscene expression or a torrent of
profanity from every stranger he met. Even now, after some months in
this new clean land, he had not grown quite accustomed to regard every
one, stranger or not, as a being just like himself, one he could freely
address and feel sure of receiving friendly pleasant words in return.
It was interesting to hear the coastguardsman's story because of his
feelings in the matter and what the change to Cornwall meant to him.
That he was right in his facts we know. We know, for instance, that
just as Cornwall is the cleanest county, so some of the Welsh
counties--especially in the coalmining districts--are the foulest. Yet
the Welsh are Celts too and Methodists of a hundred and fifty years
standing! They are, in fact, the truer Methodists if we consider what
that creed is and that its most essential point is that there can be no
salvation without a sudden conversion, with or without the accompaniment
of groanings, shriekings, and other manifestations of the kind. But what
are the facts of the case as to the condition of Cornwall, with regard
to drunkenness, before its conversion to Methodism? They are not so
easily got as one may think. There is plenty of material, and any
one with a preconceived opinion on the question would doubtless find
something to confirm him in it. I had no opinion, and my sole desire was
to find out the truth. My first superficial study of the question made
me a believer in the claim made by the Methodists, but it did not bear
a closer investigation. What I found was that when tin-mining was in a
highly prosperous state and the population of the mining centres vastly
greater than it is now there was a good deal of intemperance among the
miners; but there is nothing to show that they were as degraded as the
Welsh of to-day. It is also indisputable that Wesley's preaching had a
profound effect on the tin-miners. That is the most that can be said.
That the Methodism invented after Wesley's death and imposed on his
followers in his name--the name of one who abhorred Dissent--is the
cause of the temperance of the Cornish people generally there is no
evidence to show, and no reason to believe. On the contrary there is
very good reason for disbelief.
The Cornish people are incomparably better off now, so far as material
comforts go, than they were in the last half of the sixteenth century,
when Richard Carew wrote his _Survey of Cornwall_; but there have been
no really great, no radical changes--no transformations, as in so many
other parts of Britain. The life of to-day is very much like the old
life, and the people now are like their forefathers of three centuries
ago as described by Carew. He pointed out that the tin-mines were a
great evil--the curse of Cornwall, since it was impossible for the
miners to escape the abominable temptations to drink which were thrust
in their way. Every second house was a drinking-place, into which the
poor wretches were enticed to waste their earnings, with the result that
their families were in a chronic state of want. But the rural population
were in a very different case; those who worked on the land were indeed
poor, fared coarsely, dressed meanly and wore no shoes, but they were
sober and industrious and lived in decent homes, and their wives and
children were properly fed and clothed; so that in the end they were far
better off and happier than the workers in the mines.
So we arrive at the conclusion that the Cornish people are not, and
never have been, intemperate generally; for one reason, because they
are of a singularly happy disposition, lively and sociable, with a very
intense love of their families and homes; and, secondly, because of the
idyllic conditions in which they exist, and always have existed, in a
country thinly populated, without big towns, with the healthiest, most
equable and genial climate in Britain; and, best of all, isolated,
outside of and remote from civilisation with its feverish restlessness,
vices and dreadful problems.
[Illustration: 0161]