_Native humour--Deceptive signs--Adventures in search of humour--Irish
and Cornish expression--A traveller in a stony country--The
stone-digger--Taking you literally--The danger of using figures
of speech--Anecdotes--The Cornish funny man--English and Cornish
humour--Unconscious humour of two kinds--A woman preacher--A story of
Brett the artist--Examples of unconscious humour--A local preacher--An
old man and a parrot--Children's humour--Guize-dancing._
|IT is permissible to a writer once in a lifetime to illustrate his work
by an allusion to that celebrated "Chapter on Snakes," in an island in
which these reptiles are not found. But I am not saying that there is no
humour in Cornwall. There may be such a thing; but if you meet with
it you will find that it is of the ordinary sort, only of an inferior
quality, and that there is very little. What I can say is there is no
Cornish humour, no humour of the soil and race, as there is an Irish and
a Scotch humour, and even as there is an English humour, which may be
of a poor description in comparison with the Hibernian, but is
humour nevertheless, native and local, and not confined to Dorset and
Warwickshire but to be met with in every county from the Tamar to the
Tweed.
This came as a great surprise to me since I had often read in books
and articles about the county that the Cornish are a humorous folk, and
those who have been there and profess to know the people say that it
is so. Their humour, like their imagination (for they are also credited
with that faculty), is sometimes vaguely described as of the Celtic
sort. My surprise was all the greater when I came and saw the people and
received confirmation, as I imagined, through the sense of sight of
all I had been told. They looked it, yet were without it; the signs,
"gracious as rainbows," deceived me (as they had doubtless deceived
others), but only for a season; they were the outward marks of quite
other pleasing qualities with which we are not now concerned. I looked
for humour and met with some amusing adventures in my search for that
rare, elusive quality.
Walking to a village one day I fell in with a man who had, like many a
West Cornishman, a strikingly Irish countenance, also an Irish voice and
flow of spirits. Hearing where I was going he at once undertook to show
me the nearest way. It would, he asserted, save me a good mile: _his_
way proved in the end two miles further than the one I had chosen, but
it led him near to his own cottage and he wanted badly to shorten the
way with talk--that was all.
I did not mind, because I wished to listen to him, thinking that I had
at length got hold of the right person, one who would give me a taste
of the genuine native humour. Not a bit of it! He talked freely of many
things--his native place, his family, his neighbours, the good and
the bad in them, his past life and labours, future prospects and much
more--a long talk which an Irishman would have enlivened with many
flashes of quaint humour, but there was not the faintest trace of such a
quality in it.
Later in the same day I walked by a footpath which led me through what
is called the "town-place" of a small farm-house. Here I found two men
engaged in an animated discussion, and one, in ragged clothes with a
pitchfork in his hand, was the very type of a wild Irishman; in all
Connemara you would not find a more perfect specimen--rags, old battered
hat, twinkling grey-blue Irish eyes, a shock of the most fiery carroty
red hair, and, finally, a short black clay pipe, or dhudeen, in his
mouth. Yet even this man, delightful to look at, proved when I conversed
with him just as prosaic and disappointing as the other.
I certainly did not expect to find anything in these two and in scores
more I had intercourse with which could be set down in a note-book as
specimens of Cornish humour. One may spend days among Irish peasants and
never hear anything worth repeating, especially in writing. Indeed, most
of what we recognise as Irish humour is not translatable into written
language. It is like the quality of charm in women, something personal
which you receive directly and cannot convey to another. But you are all
the time conscious of the humorous spirit in them; you see it in their
eyes and mobile mouth and gestures, and you catch its accent in their
speech. And you feel how good a thing it is; that a people possessing
this quality, or faculty, in so eminent a degree is not so poor as
others who have more comforts and are more civilised; that even want and
squalor, and misery, and vice, and crime, are not as ugly and disgusting
as they appear among those who are without this sparkling spirit, this
lightning of the soul, with its unexpected flashes, which throws a
brightness on everything.
The people of the extreme west of Cornwall have so close a resemblance
to the Irish in feature and expression that quite often enough when
with them, in farms and hamlets, I could hardly avoid falling into the
illusion that I was in Ireland. It is this look in them, or in many of
them, which makes the want of the Irishman's most engaging quality
so strange and almost incredible. There is an expression of the Irish
peasant's face which is exceedingly common--one could almost say that it
is universal--which one comes to regard as an expression of a humorous
mind. It is most marked in those who see you as a stranger among them,
or in those you meet casually and converse with. It is a peculiarly
shrewd penetrating look in the eyes, which appear to be examining you
very narrowly while passing itself off as mere friendly interest in you;
and with that look in the eye there is a lighting up of the whole face.
The man, you imagine, is looking out for some signal of a sympathetic or
understanding spirit in you, a token of kinship: but when we go further
and imagine it a humorous spirit we are probably mistaken. We associate
that peculiar expression of the eyes with the humorous mind because we
have found them together in so many persons--if we have been in Ireland.
In the Cornishman, too, that same expression of the eyes is exceedingly
common--an expression which even more than feature makes him differ so
greatly from the Anglo-Saxon. But it does not denote humour, seeing that
he is inferior to the dullest of the English in this respect. But he is
more alive than the Englishman, and his ever-fresh child-like curiosity
makes him seem more human.
This peculiar Irish-like alertness and liveliness of mind, with a total
want of a sense of humour, struck me forcibly in the case of another
Cornishman I encountered in my rambles. But before I get to this story
another must be told by way of introduction.
Frequently in my wanderings on foot in that stoniest part of a stony
land, called the Connemara of Cornwall, where indeed the likeness of the
people to the Irish is most marked, I recalled an old anecdote about a
stony country which I heard in boyhood. I heard it one morning at the
breakfast table in my early home in South America. We had a big party
in the house, and the talk turned on the subject of sharp and clever
replies made by natives to derisive questions asked by travellers.
Several of the men present had been great travellers themselves, and
almost every one had a good story or two to relate, but the best of all
was one of a traveller who had been walking for many hours in one of the
stoniest districts he had ever been in. As far as he could see on every
side the earth was strewn with masses of stone, and he was quite tired
of the endless desolation. At length he came on a native engaged in
piling up stones in a field, and approaching him addressed him as
follows: "My good man, can you tell me where the people of these parts
procure stone with which to build their houses?" That was the mocking
question, and the witty answer of the native created a great laugh at
the table, but unfortunately I have forgotten what it was. I have tried
in that stony place to recall it without success. It may be that some
reader of this chapter has heard and remembers the answer; if so, I hope
he will have the goodness to communicate it to me, and relieve my tired
mind from further efforts to recover it.
Now one day in Cornwall, while walking on a vast stony hill above the
little village of Towednack, I spied a man at work digging up stone in
the middle of a freshly ploughed field at the foot of the hill. He had
a crowbar, which he would thrust down into the soil to find where there
was stone near the surface; then with his three-cornered, long-handled
spade he would dig down and expose it, and if too large to be lifted he
would, with drill and wedges and iron mallet, split it up into pieces
of a convenient size. In this way he had raised a vast heap of stones,
which would be carted away by and by.
It came into my head to try my old story as an experiment on this man,
and I went down the hill to him and after saluting him stood some time
admiring his tremendous energy. He was a slim wiry man of about thirty
or thirty-five, good-looking, with a Celtic face and that lively shrewd
expression which one associates with the Irishman's humorous spirit.
After watching him for a few minutes at his frantic task I said, "By the
by, I wish you would tell me where they get the stone in this part of
the country to build their houses with?"
He turned and stared me in the face with the greatest astonishment, then
throwing out his hand in an angry way towards the vast heap of black wet
chunks of granite he had dragged out of the earth, he cried, "This is
stone! This is what they build houses with in this part of the country!
Stone!--granite!--there's enough of it in the ground to build all the
houses we want, and _on_ the ground too!"
Then he stared again and finally waved his arm towards the hill I
had descended from, strewn all over with huge boulders and masses of
granite, and added, "All you've got to do is to use your own eyes and
they'll show you where we get stone to build houses with!"
I was obliged to explain that I had only asked that preposterous
question in fun: then he calmed down and stood silent for some time,
with eyes resting on a chunk of granite at his feet, revolving the
matter in his mind, but he did not appear to think there was anything
very funny in it. But the extraordinary thing was that after he had
quite got over the uncomfortable feeling I had given him--the suspicion,
perhaps, that his interlocutor was not quite right in his head--he
proved as lively and agreeable a talker as I have met among the Cornish
people of his class, and gave me an entertaining account of the various
occupations he had followed since the tin-mine in which he had worked
as a boy had been abandoned. He was, in fact, a very intelligent fellow,
with nice feelings and sentiments, and as pleasant to talk with as any
one could be without a sense of humour.
When we look for something and find it not our non-success is apt to
produce a dogged spirit in us and we go on looking even after our
reason has assured us that the object sought for is not there, or has
no existence. That is how it was with me; I was determined to find that
rarity in Cornwall--a man with a sense of humour. And in my quest I did
not hold my tongue about my encounter with the stone-digger; I told it
to at least a dozen persons and they one and all received it coldly. The
last one was a farmer; he listened attentively, then after an interval
of silence remarked, "Yes, I see; the man did not understand your
question in the sense you meant. It was a joke and he took it seriously;
I see." He saw but he didn't smile, and I thereupon resolved never again
to tell the story of the man digging granite in a ploughed field to any
one in Cornwall.
Another instance of this curious child-like simplicity of mind in the
native was almost painful.
[Illustration: 0187]
To have one's words taken literally in some cases produces the
uncomfortable feeling that there is something wrong with the brain of
the person spoken to. I was walking on the moor one day in spring in
oppressingly warm weather when, on passing close by a small farm-house,
I caught sight of the farmer standing outside and stopped to have a
little talk with him.
He was a handsome intelligent fellow with a very pleasing expression,
and in a few minutes we were talking and laughing like old friends. "How
far is it to Zennor?" I said; "I'm walking there." He answered that it
was exactly five miles from his door. "Then," I returned, "I wish you
could tell me how to get there without going through the intervening
space." He looked strangely puzzled. "Wel----" he began, and then
stopped and cast down his eyes. "Really--I don't quite see----------" he
started again, and again stopped, more puzzled than ever. Then he made a
desperate effort to grapple with the problem. "You see, it's this way,"
he said; "the space is there--you can't get over that, and so I can't
quite make out how---------" But I was sorry to see him distressed and
quickly changed the subject, to his great relief.
I was told by the vicar of a parish I was staying in that one had always
to remember that the Cornish people take what is said literally; if you
forget this and inadvertently make use of some little figure of speech
so common in conversation that it is hard not to use it, you are apt
to get into trouble. The vicar himself, after twenty years' intimate
relations with his parishioners, was liable to little slips of this
kind, as I found. One day when I was there a man from a neighbouring
hamlet came to the village and by chance met the vicar. "Why, Mr.
So-and-so," exclaimed the latter, shaking hands with him, "it's a
hundred years since I saw you!" Then after a little friendly talk they
separated. But that unlucky phrase stuck in the man's mind, and he spent
most of the day in going into the houses of all his intimates in the
village and discussing the subject with them. "He said it were a hundred
years since he saw me--now what did parson mean by that?" When, anxious
to make a little mischief (having nothing else to do), I reported the
matter to the vicar, he slapped his leg angrily and exclaimed, "That's
how it is with them! There's an instance for you!" But it was a very
delightful one, and in another moment his vexation vanished in a burst
of laughter.
One might imagine that such misunderstandings simply result from
stupidity. It is not so, unless we say that stupidity is nothing but
the want of that sense which acts on our social intercourse much as the
thyroid gland does on the bodily system, or, to take another image, like
that subtle ingredient of a salad which animates the whole. Curious to
say, the most striking instance I met with of this want was from a man
of that unpleasant class who must be for ever doing or saying something
to raise a laugh. They are found everywhere, even in Cornwall, and are
common as is the "merry fellow" described over a century ago in the
_Rambler_--the man whose ready hearty laugh and perpetual good humour
and desire to say something to make you happy proceed from his high
spirits. He is quite tolerable: the would-be witty or humorous person,
the clown in the company, determined to live up to his reputation, is
rather detestable, and reminds one of the actor who can never be himself
but is always posing to an audience even when alone with his wife or
nursing the baby when his wife is asleep.
I travelled with my Cornish funny man from Truro to Exeter, and as
we talked the whole time I got to know him pretty well. He was a
middle-aged, strong, good-looking fellow, and a good type of the shrewd,
hard-headed Cornishman of the small-farmer class; he was a farmer and
cattle-dealer, and had been head gamekeeper on a large landowner's
estate. The trouble was that he prided himself on his wit and humour, or
for what passes as wit among the people of his class, and, above all,
on his good stories. He would now tell us a story, he would say, which
would make us "die with laughing," and when it was received without a
smile he was puzzled, and assured us that he had always considered it
one of his best stories. However, he had others, plenty of them, which
we would perhaps think better; but these were better only because they
were coarser and more plentifully garnished with swear words, and in the
end the other passengers--two or three grave elderly gentlemen, who had
an armful of books and papers to occupy their minds--refused to listen
any longer. He then gave it up, but being of a social disposition he
continued to converse with me in a quiet sober way, but there was now
a little cloud on his countenance which had been so sunny before, as if
our want of appreciation had hurt him in a tender part. The hurt had,
perhaps, made him quarrelsome; at all events we presently fell out over
a very trivial matter. We were discussing the scenery through which we
were passing when he remarked on the prettiness of a scene that came
before our eyes and I agreed; but by and by when he used the same
expression about another scene I disagreed. "Do you not then see
anything to admire in it?" he asked, and when I said that I admired it
he wanted to know why I refused to allow that it was pretty after having
called something else pretty because I admired it? He began to harp on
this subject and to grow satirical, and wanted to know of every scene we
passed whether I called it pretty or not, and if not why not. My replies
did not seem to enlighten him much, and at last in a passion he begged
me to tell him in plain language, if of two scenes we both admired one
was pretty and the other not pretty, why he called them both pretty. I
answered that it was because he had a limited vocabulary.
He threw himself back in his seat and looked at me as if I had struck
or insulted him, then exclaimed, "Oh, that's it--I have a limited
vocabulary!" and presently he added bitterly, "This is the first time
in my life that I have been charged with having a limited vocabulary."
Without saying more he got up, and going into the corridor planted
his elbows on the sill, and supporting his head with his hands, stared
gloomily at the landscape for about a quarter of an hour. Then he came
back to his seat and looked at me with a different countenance; the
expression of sullen resentment had changed to a quite friendly one but
overcast with something like regret or shame, and speaking in a subdued
manner he said, "You are right, and I deserved it. I know it is a great
fault in me, but I assure you that when I use bad words in conversation
I mean no more harm than--what shall I say?--than a woman when she
says, 'Oh, bother it!' or 'Drat the thing!' because she can't fasten her
blouse or her belt. 'Pon my soul I don't! It's just a way I've got into,
and the words you didn't like slip out without my knowing it." And so
on, with much more in the same apologetic strain. After that there was
peace between us. I was indeed rather sorry to lose him at Exeter: as a
"funny man," without a sense of humour, he had greatly entertained me,
and wishing him well, I hoped he would continue in his mistake about a
"limited vocabulary" in the sense in which he had taken the phrase.
My friend the vicar, who made the mistake of saying it was a hundred
years since he had seen some one, told me one day that he had been
attending a meeting of the clergy of the district, and finding himself
in conversation with three friends who were all Cornishmen of good old
local families, it occurred to him that it was a good opportunity to
find out what educated men in the county would have to say on such a
subject. The question, Did the Cornish people have a sense of humour?
took them by surprise; they had never considered it--it had never come
before them until that moment. After some discussion it was decided
in the affirmative; the Cornish _have_ a sense of humour, but--a very
important but--it is not the same as the sense of humour in the English
people.
[Illustration: 0193]
English humour, they said, fell flat in Cornwall, even where it was
seen, or guessed, that the words spoken were intended to be humorous. If
they laughed or smiled, it was out of politeness or good nature, just to
please you.
And as our humour failed with them, so did theirs fail with us: we
did not appreciate it simply because it was impossible for us, being
Englishmen, to see it as they did with their Cornish minds.
A local writer, the late J. T. Tregellas, who wrote funny poems in
dialect, and surveyed life generally from the comic point of view, has
a considerable reputation in the county. In one of his works, entitled
_Peeps into the Haunts and Homes of the Population of Cornwall_ (Truro,
1879), his avowed intention is to "place before the reader a tolerably
exact picture of a Cornishman as he is, with all his rough sense of
honour, his kind heart, his self-reliance, his naivete, his ingenuity,
and his keen quiet power of wit and observation." There are scores
of more or less funny stories in this book, but one is soon weary of
reading it, because there is little or no evidence in it of the "keen
quiet power of wit" one looks for. One finds what may be described as
primitive humour--the humour of children and of men in a low state
of culture who delight in practical jokes, rough banter, farcical
adventures, grotesque blunders and misunderstandings and horse-play. Of
unconscious humour there are many examples, which undoubtedly shows a
sense of humour in the narrator: and I will quote the conclusion of one
of the tales, perhaps the gem of the book, in which an old widow relates
her three matrimonial ventures. "And then I married a tailor who did
praich sometimes, and was a soort of a teetotaler in his way, and never
drinked nothing but tay and sich like; and then he faded away to a
shaade, and this day three weeks he died; and ater he was dead they
cut un oppen to see what was the matter with un. But waan of the young
doctors that helped to do ut towled me that he died all feer and they
couldn't find nuthin in un but grooshuns [tea sediment.] I woant have
nothin' of that soort agen, but I'll get a farmer with a little money;
and so I oft to, for I've got twenty pounds a year and a house to live
in."
Books of this kind do not help us much; they are, on the contrary, apt
to be misleading when the author has an intimate knowledge of the people
and dialect--and, besides, a little invention.
There are, I take it, two common sorts of unconscious humour; one into
which persons who may be of humorous minds are apt to tumble through
thinking too quickly and being too intent on their point, and who in
their haste snatch at any expression that offers to illustrate their
meaning without considering its suitability. The result may be a bull or
a mixed metaphor. An Irishman, asked to define a bull, after a moment's
thought replied, "Well, if you were to see two cows lying down in a
field, and one was standing up, that would be a bull." A Cornishman
would be incapable of such a reply; or of the Irishman's retort when his
companion, accused of being drunk, protested that he was sober: "If ye
was sober ye'd have the sinse to know ye was dhrunk." He makes no bulls
and does not know what they are. His unconscious humour is of the second
kind, which consists in saying things in a way which would be impossible
to any person possessing a sense of humour. Here is an example:--
At St. Ives, one Sunday, I went to a Methodist chapel to hear a woman
preach--a missioner or gospeller, I think she was called. I did not find
her a Dinah, for she was rather large and stout, of a high colour, with
black eyes and hair. But it was a singularly intelligent and sympathetic
face, and to hear her was a pleasure and a relief, for it was on the eve
of the last general election, when all the Little Bethels of Bolerium
were being put to strange uses and pulpits were the rostrums of enraged
politicians in white ties. She, sweet woman, preached only religion
pure and simple in a nice voice without hysteria and with a charming
persuasiveness. To hear her was to love her. A few days later she left
the town, and then one who was interested in her work rushed in to the
minister of the chapel to ask how many souls she had won for Christ on
this occasion. For she had on previous visits been very successful in
making converts. "Not one this time," answered the minister. "We were
too busy with the elections."
A remark made by one of the fishermen at a small coast village near
Land's End about Brett, the marine painter, affords another pretty
example of the native unconscious humour. Brett's outspoken atheism and
brusque manners greatly offended the fisherfolk, and when he began work
they watched him very narrowly, curious to know what kind of picture so
extraordinary a person would produce. It astonished them to see him use
his palette-knife instead of a brush to put on paint and spread it over
the canvas. They had never seen such a method before, and it appeared
to them wrong or not a legitimate way. One day on the beach they were
discussing the strange artist within their gates with reference to some
fresh cause of offence on his part, when the remark was made by one,
"What can you expect of a man who says there's no God and paints his
pictures with a knife?"
Here is another instance from Penzance. There is a public garden in the
town, with beds of flowers, benches, a bandstand, a fountain, and at one
side some tall elm trees with a rookery. The little fishes in the basin
of water attracted a pair of kingfishers, and they haunted the gardens,
flashing a wonderful blue in the eyes of the people. But they took
the fry--the little sickly fishes which had cost the town several
shillings--and the Town Council forthwith had them destroyed. I should
have said that only in a Cornish town could so abominable an instance of
Philistinism be found had I not witnessed an even worse one when staying
at Bath, when the Corporation of that noble town ordered the killing of
the kingfishers that frequented the old Roman baths.
After the kingfishers had been destroyed at Penzance, the question of
the rooks came up for discussion, and it was resolved to shoot the birds
and pull the nests down; but here, as I was informed, the town clerk
intervened and pleaded so eloquently for the birds that they were
spared. Now one day a group of old men, habitués of the gardens, were
sunning themselves there and discussing this question of the rooks. The
birds were there, repairing their old nests in the elms with a good deal
of caw, caw. They were as talkative as the old men, but "deep in their
day's employ" at the same time. Joining in the conversation, I expressed
my opinion of the councillors for wanting to destroy the rookery, and
was asked indignantly by one of the old men how I would like it if, on a
Sunday on my way to chapel in a black coat and silk hat, I were to pass
under the rookery and something were to happen to my hat. I replied
that I always attended chapel in tweeds and that if I wore a silk hat it
would serve me right to have something happen to it. Such an occurrence
would only afford an additional reason for preserving the birds. My
questioner glared at me, and I judged from their looks that the others
did not approve of such sentiments.
It was very funny, but I heard an even funnier one when listening to the
talk of a knot of elderly and middle-aged men discussing the treatment
the Education Bill was receiving in the House of Lords. But it was not
in Penzance, and I will mercifully conceal the name of the little town
in Bolerium where I heard it. The men, it must be observed, were all
Methodists who had adopted the view of the question which the ministers
had been expounding in the chapels. "What we want in England," said one,
"is the Russian system, just to remove the men in the two Houses who are
opposing the will of the people." The sentiment was heartily applauded
by all the others. It was delightfully Cornish--just the sentiment one
would expect to hear from the deeply religious Cornishman.
At this same place I heard about a local preacher, a man of a very fine
character, who was taxed one day by his employer with having served as
a model to an artist of the town, a Mr. Charles. "Yes," he said, "I have
been sitting to Mr. Charles, and have had a good deal of conversation
with him." Then after a long interval of silence he added, "Yes, I have
been sitting to him. Mr. Charles has religion, but it is very, very,
very, very, very deep down."
This appeared to be a clue worth following up, and I at once sought out
this man and was delighted to know him; he was, physically and mentally,
a type of all that is best in the Cornishman, but after a long talk on
many subjects with him I was convinced that he was without the sense of
humour. At the same time I felt that this was scarcely a defect in one
of his nature. I felt, too, that something like this might be said of
the people generally--the sense which they lack seems less important in
their case than in that of others; it is not so much missed--because
of their perennial vitality, their fresh impressible mind and sense of
eternal youth and curious interest in little things which never fades
and fails. Here I made the acquaintance of four men whose respective
ages were eighty-one, eighty-five, eighty-six, and eighty-eight. There
was no sign of weariness in any of them; they were as much alive and in
love with life as their middle-aged neighbours and as the young, down
even to the children.
These general reflections bring back to mind yet one more incident
bearing on the point--an example of the buoyant child surviving in a man
well advanced in years.
I had wasted a day indoors at Penzance reading books when, hearing the
hour of four strike, I flew out for a walk to the neighbouring hills
before dark. Hurrying along the street, which led me away from the
front, I felt that I wanted my afternoon cup of tea and thought I had
better get it before quitting the town. I soon came to a small baker's
shop, and going in and pushing open the door at the back discovered the
baker and his family just sitting down to their tea. The women made room
for me at the table and spoke welcoming words, while the baker himself
looked at me but said nothing. He was a fine specimen of a Cornishman:
old and strongly built, with a large perfectly bald head, on which he
wore a skull cap, and a vast cloud of white hair which covered the lower
half of his face and flowed over his chest. He had the broad head, high
cheek-bones, large mouth and depressed nose, wide at the nostrils, of
the pure Cornish Celt, and, most marked feature of all, the shrewd,
prying, almost inquisitorial, yet friendly, blue-grey eyes. Those eyes,
I observed out of the corners of mine, were furtively watching me, but
I did not resent it. By and by I caught sight of another member of the
family I had not observed before also watching me very attentively with
the most brilliant eyes in the world--a fine grey parrot in a big tin
cage at the far end of the room. He was standing at the open door of
the cage, silent and motionless, with his neck craned out in a listening
attitude. I went over to him and gave him some cake, which he accepted
in a gentle manner and began eating. Then, coming back to my tea, I
began praising the bird, saying that I knew a lot about parrots and
admired and respected them because they were nearest to our noble selves
in intelligence, and that I had never seen a finer grey parrot than this
one. He was silent with me: that was the parrot's way; he was like a
wise man, very still and very observant of a stranger in the house; he
would watch and listen to know what the strange person was like before
declaring himself.
The old man did not smile nor speak but got up, went to the cage, and
taking the bird on his hand returned to his seat. Then began a lively
game between the two: the parrot climbed over and about the man,
was snatched up and tossed as a mother tosses her babe, and finally
deposited on the big bald head from which the skull-cap had been
removed. The parrot rubbed his feathered head over the shining pate and
wiped his beak on it. Then followed a fight with lightning-quick thrust
and parry, a finger and a beak for weapons, after which the bird was
snatched up and popped, back down, on the table. There he remained some
time, perfectly still, his feet stuck up in the air, but not pretending
to be dead, for the brilliant white eyes were wide open, keenly watching
us all the time. Finally the bird twisted his head round, and using his
beak as a lever turned over on his feet, and was invited to kiss and be
friends. This the bird did, pushing his way with careful deliberation
through the cloud of beard so as to plant his kisses on the lips.
During the performance I could not help remarking a singular resemblance
between man and bird: the same love of fun appeared in their bright,
watchful, penetrating eyes; one had as much pleasure in the game as the
other; they were, man and parrot, very much on a level, very like little
children, and like children they were without a sense of humour.
Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that children's humour is
rudimentary. Undoubtedly there are individuals who possess it in a
higher or more developed state, just as there are children who possess
the sense of beauty, an ear for music, and other faculties of the adult,
but such cases are exceptional.
It chanced that just before my meeting with the old man of the parrot
I had been discussing the subject of this chapter with a gentleman of
culture in the district, a member of an old and distinguished Cornish
family, who has worked in his profession among the people and knows them
intimately. He demurred to my idea that his countrymen (of the lower
ranks be it understood) were without the sense of humour, and he
instanced their "love of fun" as a proof of the contrary. Mere love of
fun, however, always strongest in children and animals, is not the
same thing as that finer, brighter, more intellectual sense we are
discussing.
But how strong the simple primitive love of fun is in the Cornish people
may be seen at Christmas time in St. Ives in their "Guize-dancing," when
night after night a considerable portion of the inhabitants turn out in
masks and any fantastic costume they can manufacture out of old garments
and bright-coloured rags to parade the streets in groups and processions
and to dance on the beach to some simple music till eleven o'clock or
later.
[Illustration: 0203]
This goes on for a fortnight. Just think of it, men, women and children
in their masks and gaudy get-up, parading the little narrow crooked
muddy streets, for long hours in all weathers! And they are Methodists,
good, sober people who crowd into their numerous chapels on Sundays to
sing hymns and listen to their preachers!
It is fun, pure and simple, and if you mix with them and witness their
gaiety and listen to their bantering talk and happy laughter you will
not discover the faintest flicker of humour in it all, and if you have
witnessed the people of some French, Italian or Spanish town amusing
themselves in this fashion, the Guize-dance will seem like a poor, rude
imitation of the carnival got up by children.
[Illustration: 0205]