_The naturalist's mind and men's complex nature--An eminent
ethnologist--The use of fools--The simple animal mind--Herring gull and
rock-pipit--Man and animals compared--The imaginative faculty--Cornish
poets--Hawker of Morwenstow--Prose writers--Thomas Carew--Purity of race
in Cornwall--Dearth of imaginative work--A prosaic people--Cornwall
and Ireland contrasted--Reason of difference--Cornish legends--Mystery
plays--Wesley's mission and greatness--Ugliness of Methodism--Effect on
the child's mind._
|THE naturalist's mental habit of always trying to get at the reason and
hidden significance of things is apt to become a worry when he begins to
look closely at his fellow-creatures with the object of finding out what
they really are, or what the character of this particular human family
or herd is compared with that of some other herd which he has studied
and thinks he knows. Or perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that
his anxiety to classify everything is the source of his trouble, when
with a Réaumur's skill his curious mind would distinguish men according
to their racial and temperamental characters. It vexes his little busy
brain, which loves neatness and symmetry, that men are so various,
so complex, that they have so many hidden meanings and motives and
instincts--so many invisible threads in the woven texture of their
natures, which occasionally shine out, yellow and purple and scarlet
among the threads of sober grey, yet when looked at closely, or examined
with a magnifying-glass, become invisible again. Either he must give up
the quest and the task in despair or else go doggedly on with a sort of
stupid courage, trying not to think that he is blundering all the time.
It is consoling in a difficulty of this kind to recall the case of an
eminent ethnologist, who was exceedingly industrious and prolific and
was very great a short generation ago, about which time his learned
contemporaries, vexed at his facile method of overcoming all
difficulties, rose up against and overthrew him, smashing and
pulverising his beautiful theories. After which, with a very engaging,
proud humility, he boasted that he had been the fool to rush in where
the angels (his opponents) had feared to tread, and that to attack and
overthrow they had had to follow him into new and wider fields where
they otherwise would never have ventured. We must all be fools in
the same way, if we have a little of that courage which I have called
stupid, each in his own small sphere, and we certainly do a useful thing
if, in exposing our thick skulls to knocks (which don't matter), we
succeed in giving courage to better men.
If I had not been a fool, or had not troubled myself with this serious
question, it would have been much pleasanter for me in my rambles at
this end of all the land, seeing that the inferior animals are so very
much simpler and more easy to read than men. Those donkeys, for example,
which I meet on the moor, and their scarcely less intelligent friends
the jackdaws, I know them a hundred times better than I can know any
man--even my own self. And the house-dog too, who is supposed to be
mentally more like his masters than any other beast--this dog who
watches my comings and goings out of the corners of his eyes and who
thinks himself wonderfully clever when, knowing that I don't want him,
he steals secretly off an hour before I go out and meets me (by chance)
among the furze bushes a mile from home--do I not know every thought in
his curly black head, if his little mental trick of putting two and two
together can be called thought? And the gulls on the cliff--do I not
know just how they will comport themselves; how each bird will eye me
suspiciously, sideways, with one brilliant eye at a time; how they will
rise and float and dwell on the air, or sit on a rock with beaks to
the wind--do I not know every word they will say in their herring-gull
language?
It is true they will now and then do a thing which will come as a
surprise. Here is an example--an incident I have just witnessed. All day
the wind had been blowing half a gale from the sea when I went down to
the rocks to get a good mouthful of air before it was dark. There
were the gulls at the usual spot; and no sooner had I climbed into a
sheltered nook among the rocks than they were all up floating overhead,
swooping and rising, and pouring out their insistent loud anxious angry
cries. For they were just beginning to nest on the ledges of the cliff
beneath me and were troubled at my presence. In spite of the very cold
wind and the growing obscurity, when the sun had gone down, I kept
my place for upwards of an hour, and for the whole of the time they
continued soaring and screaming above me: now with extended motionless
wings seeming not to move yet mounting all the time, higher and higher,
until they would be four or five hundred yards above me and would begin
to look very small; then down and down again in the same imperceptible
way, but sometimes descending with an angry rush until they were no more
than thirty or forty yards high and one bird among them would make a
violent swoop to intimidate me, coming to within a couple of yards of my
head with loud swish of wings and sudden savage scream. I noticed
that the swoops were all made by one bird, that this same bird acted
throughout as fugleman and leader, that whenever the others began to
drift away, further and further apart, and their cries grew fainter and
less persistent, he or she reanimated them and brought them back with
a fresh outburst of fury, emitting louder screams and dashing down in
a more violent manner. The longer I watched them the more wonderful
appeared the difference in disposition between this one bird, this white
flying image of wrath, and the others.
Now at intervals of about three or four minutes my attention would
wander from the gull to see and listen to a rock-pipit that had its home
at that spot and was also nesting in a chink quite close to the gullery.
Every day and all day long, in all weathers, the little singer could be
seen and heard at that exposed spot, soaring up at intervals to a height
of a couple of hundred yards; then slowly falling back to the rocks,
head down, tail spread and wings pressed to its sides with the quills
standing out--a shuttlecock or miniature parachute in figure; and while
descending he emitted the series of airy tinkling sounds that make his
melody. And now, in spite of the lateness of the hour and increasing
gloom on the sea and clouded sky and of the cold wind, the little
creature would not desist from its flight and song. Its little big
passion was as strong and inexhaustible as that of the enraged gull.
Then occurred the incident I set out to tell: the gulls with their
prolonged monotonous wailing cries were balanced in the air at a height
of ninety or a hundred yards, their trumpeter and inspirer keeping in
the centre of the scattered company directly above my head. The
pipit shot up from the pile of rocks in which I was lying, and rising
obliquely from the land side reached the highest point of its flight
well over the sea, and then just as it set its feathers to begin its
descent a furious gust of wind caught and whirled it landwards, still
emitting its tinkling sound, into the very midst of the company of
hovering gulls. No sooner was it among them than the angry, alert
leading bird, half closing its wings, swooped down on the little
tinkler, and instantly a frantic chase began, with lightning-quick
doublings, now over the sea, now the land, the gull with its open beak
almost touching the terrified little fugitive. "Save yourself, pipit!" I
exclaimed, for another inch and the small spotted singer would have been
in the big hungry yellow beak and flight and tinkling song ended for
ever. And in another moment the tension was ended, for the little thing
had gained the rocks and was safe: but it sang no more that evening.
Now, strange as all this may seem--that the pipit should live and breed
just by or among the herring gulls, ready at all times to seize and
devour any living creature that comes by chance in their way, and that
it should go on ascending and descending, singing and singing, every
day and all day long, just where the gulls are perpetually floating
and flying hither and thither, always on the look-out for something to
devour--it is but acting in accordance with its known character. The
small bird is without fear of its big rapacious neighbours: it has its
own quickness and adroitness to save it from all natural dangers of
winds and waves and killing birds; it was only the rare chance of that
gust of wind striking it just when it paused in mid-air before dropping,
and carrying it away sideways into the midst of the herring gulls, which
so nearly cost it its life. On the following morning the gulls would
be there, flying about hungry as ever, and the pipit would go on with
flight and song in the same old way, free as ever from apprehension.
And as with the pipits so it is with all creatures that are preyed upon:
sudden violent death as the result of any failure, or mistake, or slight
accident, is a condition of wild life, else its vigour would not be so
perfect and its faculties so bright.
Every day, in fact, when I am observing the actions of birds, or of
animals generally, from a dog or a donkey to a fly, I may witness
something unexpected, an action which will come as a surprise; but this
will be only because of its rarity, or because it comes about through
a rare concurrence of circumstances, but not because the creature has
acted in any way contrary to its nature.
It is sadly different (sadly, I mean, for the naturalist) with regard to
human beings. You cannot generalise from the actions of an individual
as you may safely do in the case of a titlark or a gull or a donkey. You
study a dozen or a hundred, and then begin to think that you have not
had a sufficient number owing to the variety you have noticed, and you
study a hundred more and after all you are still in doubt. It may appear
that, in the last chapter, I have not shown much doubt as to the want of
a sense of humour (as we understand it) in the Cornish. J have not; but
when it comes to another and a greater faculty--imagination, to wit--I
am not very sure.
If it could be taken for granted that a people who have never produced
any artistic or literary work worth preserving are without imagination,
to use the word in its higher sense, as the creative faculty, the
question would be a very simple one, seeing that Cornwall has given
us nothing or next to nothing. Compare it in that respect with the
adjoining county, divided from it by a little river, but distinct
racially: what lustre Devon has shed on the whole kingdom! how many of
her sons are so great in arms and arts, above all in literature, that we
regard them as among the immortals; and what a multitude of lesser men
who have made us richer in many ways! Now as one with a very superficial
knowledge on this subject I have put the following question to the three
men of my acquaintance who have the widest knowledge of English poetic
literature: "Has Cornwall ever produced a poet?" and in each case came
the quick reply, "Y es, Hawker of Morwenstow." Now Hawker is a great man
to us on account of his strong and original character, but he was a very
small poet; I should say that during the last half-century England has
always had twenty or thirty living minor poets who rank high above him.
Finally, he was not a Cornish but a Devon man, and it therefore struck
me as exceedingly curious that I should have had that same answer from
the last of the three friends interrogated, seeing that he is himself
a highly accomplished poet, a Devonian whose birthplace is just on the
borders of the duchy. The reply--"Yes, Hawker of Morwenstow" may then be
taken to mean "No, not one."
Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Cornwall has contributed absolutely
nothing to literature. I have already sung the praises of Richard
Carew's work; but he was a prose writer--he failed pitifully when he
attempted verse; he therefore stands on a lower level, with perhaps two
or three more who have written good prose--William Scawen and Borlase,
the antiquary, may be mentioned. But there is Thomas Carew, the lyrist,
and friend of Donne, Suckling and Ben Jonson--if he may be called a
Cornishman. His name is not included in Boase and Courtney's monumental
_Bibliotheca Cornubiensis_, in the preface of which work they
courageously say, "The writers of Cornwall bear no inconsiderable place
in the literature of their country." But if we take it that this Carew
was a Cornishman, though born out of the county, we must admit that
Cornwall has produced one good poet. He does not count for very much,
however--this one poet who lived three centuries ago and wrote half a
dozen little things that sparkle like diamonds--seeing that he was of
that class which is never native, of the soil. Even in those old days
men of birth did not spend their lives at home; they attended the court
and went forth wide in the world wonders for to see, and intermarried
with families outside of their own class, so that, like the Jews among
us, they were and always are, racially as well as socially, a distinct
people among the people. Norman and Saxon and Dane are we, says the poet
truly enough, and he might have added Celt, but the mixing process has
been infinitely greater in the upper ranks. The Cornish people, I take
it, are Celts with less alien blood in their veins than any other branch
of their race in the British Islands.
One day in a village street I met a fine athletic-looking oldish man
with a very marked characteristic Cornish face, but painted by alien
suns to deepest brown, and that colour of the tropics contrasted oddly
with the bright blue-grey eyes and reddish-grey beard. He laughed when
I said that I supposed he was a stranger there. Yes, a stranger in a
sense, he said, since he had been away over forty years, working in the
mines, in America, Africa and Australia. But his forty years' labour had
not hurt him much; he felt young still and was going back to Queensland
after a little look round. For one thing he had never touched alcohol in
his life and he would like to pit his strength against that of any man
of thirty in that village where he was born sixty-seven years ago. Yes,
it was his own native place which he had come back after forty years to
have a look at. His people were there still, and had been there to their
certain knowledge over six hundred years. And I dare say, he added, if
we knew all we could say a thousand.
Five or ten thousand would perhaps have been nearer the truth. And so
it is with the common people generally. They have become great roamers
nowadays; they go forth in hundreds every year into all parts of the
world, but they appear to cherish the old Cornish feeling against
marrying among strangers; they return after few or many years to find
wives, and that, I conjectured, was the old miner's motive in coming
back to his village "just to have a look round." One of the saddest
things in this perpetual going and coming is that a great many men,
young and in the prime of life, return after contracting miner's
disease, usually in Africa; and though it is known to every one that
they are doomed men, they marry and live just long enough to leave a
child or two before they are gathered to their fathers.
To return to the main point. Is this surprising dearth of the creative
faculty, or of genius, in art and literature a good criterion--does it
justify us in saying that the people are devoid of imagination?
For an answer one can only go to the people themselves--not to those of
good birth who are in a sense foreigners, or different racially as
we have seen, but to the true natives who remain from generation to
generation on the land. We are told so often and so insistently by
persons who speak with authority that the Celts are an imaginative
people that we come to regard it as an established fact, beyond
controversy, as true, for instance, as that the blood of a dark-haired
person is heavier than the blood of a blonde. It consequently came to
me as a great surprise to find that a people so markedly Celtic as the
Cornish were the most prosaic I had ever known. At first I could not
quite believe that it was so: it was only that I was a stranger among
them and had not yet found the way to the hidden romantic vein and
poetic spirit in them. Gradually it was borne in on me that the vein was
not there, that it had no existence--that my wish and no secret living
spring or hidden treasure in the earth had caused the hazel twig to
dance and dip in my hand. Or, if they had it, then, like their sense of
humour, it was of that lower or undeveloped root kind discoverable in
children and in primitive people.
Undoubtedly this is contrary to the conclusion any person would most
probably form on a first and superficial acquaintance with the people,
on account of their manner and disposition, in which they differ so
greatly from the more stolid, slower-moving, thinking and speaking
English peasant. Nevertheless in the English peasant in the north, south
and Midlands, in spite of that seemingly mental and physical heaviness
and absorption in the purely material things which concern him in his
struggle for existence, I have found that hidden vein of romance and
that poetic feeling which I have failed to find in West Cornwall.
On this subject I do not venture to speak of the Cornish people
generally. There may be important differences. I have been told that in
the more easterly parts, particularly in mining districts, the people
are not of so lively, friendly and communicative a disposition as in
West Cornwall; but I assume that here, in Bolerium, we get the least
mixed, the truer, Cornishman. Here it seemed to me that not only with
regard to the æsthetic faculties, but in various other ways too, in
mind and disposition, they are like children of a larger growth. On this
point however, one may very easily go wrong, since the same thought
will sometimes strike us with regard to other Celtic families. Yet in
Cornwall I could not get away from the idea that the child-like traits
in the character of the people were not merely a matter of disposition,
of the buoyant child surviving in the man, but that it marked a lower
stage in mental development.
[Illustration: 0217]
This may be wrong: but after all what one wants is a working theory, and
it does not very much matter whether it be true or false so long as it
enables us to get over the ground.
When we live with savages, or uncivilised people, it is very much like
living with children; we get to know them as we never know the civilised
beings we spend our lives with although they are our own people.
For however unexpected their changes of temper and actions may be,
especially where these place us in sudden peril, we yet know that they
are only feeling, thinking and acting in accordance with their true
natures. They are not quite so simple and easy to read as the lower
animals; nevertheless the difference between the uncivilised and
civilised man is so immense that we can say of the first that it is as
easy to understand him as it is to understand a dog or a donkey or a
child.
It may also be observed that there is a vast difference in this respect
between the members of separate classes in the same community, in spite
of their racial relationship--between peasant and gentleman; and it may
perhaps be taken as a truth that complex conditions of life make complex
characters. The Cornish peasant appeared to me easier to understand than
the English, and, as I imagined, because he was nearer, mentally, to
the child. It may even be that the greater sympathy with children of the
Cornish people, men and women, is due to this fact that man and child
are nearer in mind than is the case with the English people. They are
moved emotionally in the same way as children and are liable to gusts
of passion, and, like children, are apt to be cruel in their anger.
They are candid, pliant and delighted to serve you when pleased, but
are subject to petulant and stubborn fits, and will brood in sullen
resentment for days, meditating revenge, for some trivial imaginary
slight. And they are intensely fond of things which please
children--gifts, shows, gay colours, noise and excitement. Here is a
little characteristic incident in which we see the bad stubborn boy
surviving in the adult. The late Royal Academician, Hook, was on the
sands at Whitesand Bay working at a sea-piece when two natives came up
and planted themselves just behind him. There was nothing the artist
hated more than to be watched by strangers over his shoulders in this
way, and pretty soon he wheeled round on them and angrily asked them how
long they were going to stand there. His manner served to arouse their
spirit and they replied brusquely that they were going to stay as long
as they thought proper. He insisted on knowing just how long they were
going to stay there to his annoyance, and by and by, after some more
loud and angry discussion one of them incautiously declared that he
intended standing at that spot for an hour. "Do you mean that?" shouted
Hook, pulling out his watch. Yes, they returned, they would not stir one
inch from that spot for an hour. "Very well!" he said, and pulled up his
easel, then marching off to a distance of thirty yards, set it up again
and resumed his painting. And there within thirty yards of his back the
two men stood for one hour and a quarter, for as they did not have a
watch they were afraid of going away before the hour had expired. Then
they marched off muttering curses.
In all this, and still more in their occasional emotional outbreaks,
which when produced by religious excitement are so painful to witness,
the Cornish are no doubt very much like other Celts in Britain; but in
some things, with one of which alone I am concerned here--to wit, the
imaginative faculty--these separate branches of the race have diverged
very widely indeed. The old literatures of Ireland and Wales live to
show it, and in Ireland, at all events, this fountain of inspiration has
never ceased to flow. It is flowing copiously as ever now, and making
us richer every day. What is the secret of this great difference--the
reason of this creative faculty which has given Ireland, in spite of
her misery, so splendid a place in our literature, which appears like
a touch of rainbow colour in the humblest peasant's mind, and does not
exist and never has been in Cornwall? Doubtless from that mixture of
blood which came to pass in Ireland during those restless centuries of
tremendous changes, when ancient nations were cast into another mould,
of emigration and conquest and colonisation; and of the fusion of races
by intermarriage of the Irish Celts with the mentally more virile and
imaginative invaders from the north. We must assume, too, that this
fusion of blood did not go so far and hardly took place at all in
Cornwall. We see that the conquerors left but few and slight traces of
their occupancy in the peninsula, and the presumption is that they did
not take root in it, that when they had come and conquered and had their
carousal of blood they were glad to sail or march away, like William
Gilpin in search of the picturesque, from a country of so barren and
repellent an aspect, to seek for a permanent resting-place in a softer,
more fertile land. Lord Courtney, in a presidential address to the
Natural History and Antiquarian Society of Penzance, said: "While the
wave of conquest swept completely over other parts of England, it only
just reached this part and then receded. The population of Cornwall in
general has remained much more homogeneous, much more Celtic in type,
than in other parts; and of all Cornwall there is no part like this in
which we are met with probably so pure a breed of human beings."
The people were left in their rocky land, and what they had been--an
ancient crystallised race with the imaginative faculty undeveloped--they
remained and remain to this day.
It has been thought that because Cornwall is preeminently the land of
strange beliefs and of old tales and legends relating to mythical saints
and heroes, to giants and demons with a great variety of fantastic
beings--mermaids, fairies, pigsies and piskies and other little
people--the Cornish are a highly imaginative people. These things are
old survivals, and are of the imagination in its childish or primitive
stage. The belief in all these fanciful beings is pretty well dead and
gone now; at all events, I was unable to find even an old woman who
had anything to say of the old beliefs which was not disrespectful. But
these beliefs undoubtedly kept their hold on the Cornish mind very much
longer than in any other part of the country, and with these beliefs
certain pagan, or Druidical, observances were also kept up, and have
only died out within the last thirty or forty years. Similar beliefs and
observances were as common all over England as in Cornwall; there was
not a hill or down, or lake or stream, or singular tree or rock, which
did not have its own special demon or genius. All this passed away
with the fusion of the British Celts with a people in a more advanced
psychological stage. But although these childish things have been put
away so long, you will still find faint traces of them everywhere,
even in the most Saxon districts in England. They inspire little or no
belief, but are kept in memory, like old ballads, and passed on from
generation to generation. In Cornwall belief in them continued to within
very recent times, and they are remembered still. It was said not very
long ago by a well-known Penzance writer that folklorists, when they
come to Cornwall, especially the west, complain that the materials are
so abundant they do not know how to manage them. Merely to enumerate
and classify legends and beliefs in giants, little men, and fairies of
a dozen denominations, ghosts, souls, semi-devils and phantoms of divers
sorts, goblins, monsters and mermaids, is more than they can do. A very
large number of these legends, enough, one would imagine, to satisfy the
greatest enthusiast, have been collected by Robert Hunt in his Popular
Romances of the West of England, and by William Bottrell in Stories and
P'olflore of West Cornwall, in three series. There we have it, or as
much of it as we want, a huge crude mass, the rough material out of
which an early literature might have come had there ever been a mind
capable of assimilating and giving it literary form.
When the old language was in a moribund state during the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, there appeared to be but one man in the
county to lament its passing--William Scawen, who loved the old things,
old usages and traditions, and who rebuked his fellow-Cornishmen for
their indifference with a bitter eloquence. But he did not grieve over
the dying language on account of any noble or beautiful or otherwise
valuable work enshrined in it. The few mystery or miracle plays and
other native productions which existed (and exist still) were not worth
preserving. What troubled him was the thought that the old ways and
spirit were to a great extent dependent on the old tongue. The plays
were valueless as literature and were of the same quality as a thousand
more which were once performed in most parts of England, the loss of
which nobody regrets, but their performance drew people together from
all parts to the vast open-air theatre, the _plan-au-Guare_, and in
this way whatever little romance and poetry existed in the minds of the
people was kept alive.
A mightier change was to come later, when Wesley made his descent on
the county about the middle of the eighteenth century and converted the
people wholesale to Methodism. This was in many ways the very worst form
of religion for a people of the temper and character of the Cornish, but
it suited them exactly at the time it came to them--a dull and stagnant
period in their history when the Church was indifferent. They were a
highly emotional race and were in a starved condition, hungry for some
great excitement, some outlet for their repressed natures, some excuse
for a mad outburst, and this gave it them--these wonderful gatherings of
miners, fishermen and labourers on the land, in the old disused theatres
under the wide open sky, listening to that mysterious supernatural man
who had it in his power to call down God to them. That same God who had
been growing further removed from their lives and dimmer in their minds
for years and for generations, until He was little more than one of
the Cornish giants or supernatural monsters believed in by the "old
people"--now once more an awful stupendous reality, a gigantic kite
hovering on broad black wings over their congregated thousands, his
burning, rapacious eyes fixed on them, while from time to time he made
his little tentative swoops to set them fluttering and screaming.
For they were like terrified fowls and chickens in a farm-yard, each
expecting and dreading to be made a victim--each knowing that his
miserable soul might not be saved until the winged terror fell upon him
to grip and bury its crooked lacerating talons in his flesh. And when
the stoop and grip came he rolled on the ground bellowing and shrieking
to the accompaniment of groans and sobs and piercing cries of those
around him. Dreadful as this was, and horrible and loathsome to witness
by any person of a decent or reverent mind, it was yet a joy to them and
gave them what they wanted--a glorious emotional feast. From the days
of Wesley to the present time these unseemly spectacles have been common
throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula, as they have been in
Wales, and one may be thankful that the Irish kept the old faith,
which does not permit such things, since it saved them from a like
degradation.
I rejoice, and all who have any respect and love for humanity will
rejoice, that in Cornwall at all events these exhibitions are declining.
Last year one day a Truro acquaintance of mine got into a railway
carriage in which were five Methodist ministers returning from a
conference they had been attending. They were discussing the decrease in
the number of converts and the decline of revivals during the last few
years. One of them, a stout, elderly person, said he did not take so
pessimistic a view of the position as the others appeared to do. He
thought the falling off, if there were any, was perhaps attributable to
the ministers themselves, and then added, "All I have got to do is to
preach my Judgment-Day sermon to set them howling." The others were
silent for a little, and then one said, "Do you think it wise to say
much about everlasting punishment at the present juncture?" No one
replied to the question, and after an uncomfortable interval they
changed the subject.
One would hardly suppose that the "present juncture" would be causing
much anxiety in far Bolerium; yet even here in this ancient rocky
fastness of Dissent the trumpets of the New Theology are beginning to
sound in some of the chapels. Methodism, on account of its wealth and
the perfection of its machine, will be the last of the sects to feel the
impending changes; but this is a subject which does not concern us here,
and enough has perhaps been said to show that Methodism with its
revival campaigns and notion as to the necessity of sudden conversion,
accompanied with the outward visible signs of the inner struggle and
change--sobbings, howlings, contortions and Glory Hallelujahs--is not a
healthy one for so extremely emotional a people.
Wesley's fame does not however suffer from these sad incidental results
of his great propaganda. He remains a very great man, the greatest of
all the sons of the Anglican Church, one who went about his work among
Celts and Saxons indifferently in a white heat which set men's hearts on
fire. He had no pleasure in seeing people carried so completely away by
their feelings and behaving like lunatics or frenzied wild beasts in a
cage; on the contrary, he abhorred the sight of such things even as
he abhorred Dissent and that "odious familiarity with the Deity" which
grieved and disgusted his reverent mind in his preachers. Nor did he
consider, nor was it possible for him to know, in his long strenuous
life, which was but a battle and a march, as the poet has said of
another leader of men, while like the wind, homeless, without resting,
he stormed across a world convulsed by a tremendous religious awakening
and excitement--he did not know that he was inflicting a deadly injury
on the Church which he loved above all things and clung to all his life
long, and, finally, that in the end it would all make for ugliness.
This is indeed the chief cause of the repulsion with which Methodism
and Nonconformity in general is regarded by those who have the sense of
beauty, whose hearts echo the poet's cry
Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
There is one God; but the gods which men worship are innumerable as
the stars in heaven and as the sands on the seashore, and they vary in
character even as their worshippers do. To go back to the dark days of
the seventeenth century, we see that beauty and whatever was of good
report, which became associated in the Puritan mind with the life and
forms of worship of their enemies, was a thing accurst. And, the human
mind being what it is, it was but natural that the particular god of
their worship came to be the very god of ugliness, a despiser of beauty
who looked with jealousy on those who were won by it even as he did on
those who kissed their hands to the rising moon. He was not the God to
whose glory the great fanes of England were raised. And from that
far time "of Oliver's usurpation when all monumental things became
despicable" this same temper of mind and dismal delusion has come
down to us in a hundred denominations with their temples of ugliness
sprinkled over all the land.
Any house is good enough to worship God in, is a treasured saying, and
it has been remarked that no place of worship has ever been raised by
Nonconformity in England which any person would turn aside from the
road to look at. This would be too little to say of the chapels in West
Cornwall, where the principle of any-house-good-enough has been carried
to an extreme. The principle may or may not be insulting to a personal
Deity, mindful of man and anxious that man should do Him honour--we
cannot know _His_ mind on such a question; but these square naked
granite boxes set up in every hamlet and at roadsides, hideous to look
at and a blot and disfigurement to the village and to God's earth, are
assuredly an insult to every person endowed with a sense of beauty
and fitness. You will notice that a cow-house, or a barn or any other
outbuilding at even the most squalid-looking little farm in a
Cornish hamlet strikes one as actually beautiful by contrast with the
neighbouring conventicle. And in a way it is so, being suited to its
purpose and in its lines in harmony with the surrounding buildings, with
the entire village grouped or scattered round the old church with its
dignified old stone tower, and finally with the rocky land in which it
is placed. From such a building--barn or cow-house--one turns to the
chapel with a feeling of amazement, and asks for the thousandth time,
How can men find it in them to do such things?
The interior of these chapels is on a par with their exterior
appearance. A square naked room, its four dusty walls distempered a
crude blue or red or yellow, with a loud-ticking wooden kitchen clock
nailed high up on one of them to tell how the time goes. Of the service
I can only say that after a good deal of experience of chapel services
in many parts of England I have found nothing so unutterably repellent
as the services here, often enough conducted by a "local preacher," an
illiterate native who holds forth for an hour on the Lord's dealings
with the Israelites in a loud metallic harsh Cornish voice.
I observed that as a rule but few adults attended the morning services
in the villages and small towns; the women had their housework to do and
dinner to cook; the men liked a long rest on a Sunday morning, and did
not care to wear their best suit of clothes the whole day. These all
flocked to the afternoon or evening services; but alas for the little
ones!--they were all packed off to chapel in the morning. Again and
again on taking my seat in a chapel at the early service I found myself
in a congregation chiefly composed of children. What can be the effect
on the child mind of such an interior and of such a service--the
intolerable sermon, the rude singing, the prayers of the man who with
"odious familiarity" buttonholes the Deity and repeats his "And now, O
Lord" at every second sentence--the whole squalid symbolism! One can but
say that if any imagination, any sense of beauty, any feeling of wonder
and reverence at the mystery of life and nature had survived in their
young minds it must inevitably perish in such an atmosphere.
[Illustration: 0230]