Part 15

When our acquaintance drove us to the top of the High Street, we said good-bye, resisting his offers to drive us back to Truro.

Amid this Saturday bustle and press of business, we found it somewhat difficult to find accommodation at a decent inn, where anything like quietude reigned. At some places we could have had bedrooms, but no tea; at others, tea, but no rooms. At one inn the servant asked us if we were professionals, eyeing my huge sketch-book. “Professionals”--we glanced at one another. Surely the girl doesn’t take us for photographers?

“What professionals did you think we were?” asked the Wreck.

“Please, sir, I thought as how you was hactors,” she said. “There’s a lot of ’em come down here to-day to play-act to-night.”

Alas! when we told her we were not hactors, we could see her face change, and guessed that a fond illusion had been destroyed. We saw at once that we were inferior beings, and regretted for the first time in our lives that we were not upon the stage. It was perhaps as well they had not sufficient room for us here: we should have felt, so long as we stayed, how shamefully we had deluded that trusting servant girl, and how guilefully personated those bright beings of a higher sphere than ours, whose privilege it is to strike attitudes, and say, “Ah, ha!” at frequent intervals, together with other such colloquial and ordinary expressions.

At length we found tea and a rest for the remainder of the day--not before they were necessary.

LXIII.

The rain rained all the remainder of the afternoon, and winds blew, and evening mists eventually hid the dismal prospect. All the available literature of the hotel lay in railway-guides and directories, an old copy of the “Pickwick Papers,” and a copy of a new humorist, whose work I am not going to mention by title. We glanced at Dickens with little satisfaction. His humour has long gone threadbare; Pickwickian feasts do not divert nowadays; the spreads are not appetising; the cakes are stale; the ale flat. As for the new humorist, he gave us, as the Noo ’umor would have it, “the hump.” No man can read the Noo ’umor and yet retain his literary digestion unimpaired. It seems the distinguishing mark of this appalling novelty that its sentences be cut up into short sharp lengths, with an effort at smartness; more often, though, the result, instead of being smart, is merely silly.

But in authorship, even as in M.P.ship, there is, in these days, much queer company, for, mark you, we may have in these latter times our Stevenson, but also our Sullivan, of the dishonoured prize-ring; a Barrie, but, _per contra_, him whom we may call by analogy _Monsieur de Londres_, throttling Mr. Berry: these have each his place in the catalogue of the British Museum Library, and, title for title, they bulk the same, although the difference between them is the very considerable one existing between letters and pothooks. As for the Society of the Talking Shop at Westminister, are not ----[12] and ----[12] its admired and honoured members?

We found, too, some crumpled copies of local newspapers. Lord! how can any one on this God’s earth read such chronicles of small beer. But to whom had that stale copy of the _Guardian_ belonged that we discovered behind the horsehair sofa? The Wreck found it with joy, for its bulk promised plenty reading; but he presently slung the thing into the coal-scuttle, with remarks uncomplimentary, to say the least of them, to that flatulent print.

“Divinity,” said he, “I can understand, and ordinary worldly matters I appreciate better still; but hang me if I can make much sense out of that abominable mixture of this and other worldliness that seems to be a printed corroboree by Fleet Street journalists masquerading in alb and crucible.”

“Chasuble, you mean, dear boy,” I remarked.

“No matter,” he replied, with the slanginess which I grieve to report; “they’re all the same price to me. Let’s go out.”

And we went.

The High Street was still noisily busy, and with the coming of night was brilliant with many lights. The rain, too, sputtered only fitfully, and so the open air stall-keepers hung out their wares again. This was not like Cornwall, to our thinking; it more nearly resembled the Edgware Road on a Saturday night, save that dissipation was not evident. The folk were orderly, as might be expected of the Cornish people, even on Saturday evening.

The Cornishman is imaginative, and deeply, emotionally, but unaffectedly religious. He is a Celt, and consequently he generally wears an air of gentle melancholy. Hospitality and warm-heartedness are also among his characteristics, as all who have journeyed much in Cornwall have occasion to know.

But although the Cornishman is so religiously disposed, Cornwall is by no means a stronghold of the Established Church; the Cornishman’s piety runs in the channel of Dissent, and in many lonely valleys, and frequently on wild moorlands, far from sight of other houses, you come upon his conventicles, built after the fashion of the houses that are represented in children’s first efforts at drawing, in what I may perhaps be allowed to term the “box-of-bricks” style of architecture.

These Bible Christian or Bryanite chapels, with their Wesleyan rivals, are numerous above those of all other sects, and are nearly all inexpressibly dreary in appearance. In the larger towns they are often of immense bulk, as witness the chapels of the various Wesleyan sects at Redruth, of a size larger beyond comparison with the parish church.

Not only is the Establishment weak in its hold on the people; it labours under the additional disadvantage of scanty revenues; rich livings are the exception rather than the rule in Cornwall. If you take up the “Clergy List,” and scan the values of Cornish livings, you will find them, in a very large proportion of cases, extremely meagre; the clerk in holy orders frequently not receiving so large a sum as the small stipend accorded his secular namesake of London city--poor clerk!

We did not remain at Redruth the following day (Sunday), but left the town shortly after breakfast, on our way westward. Carn Brea Hill loomed ahead beyond the works of the tin-streamers, and we made direct for it.

LXIV.

Carn Brea is a hill of commanding personality, steep and rugged, and encumbered with huge granite boulders, that give its highest point a peculiarly fantastic corona. Here, where rocks are largest and more wildly strewn, long-forgotten builders have contrived a gaunt tower, perched airily on devil-poised crags, overlooking the scarred and streaked mining-field that here stretches from sea to sea. It is with disgust that, as you make a painful and involved ascent of the hillside, and draw nearer this old fortress, you observe its walls repaired with stucco, and its windows filled with ginger-beer bottles and bottles of sweets.

Exploration always brings its peculiar disillusionments; it had been better for a proper and enduring reverence of Carn Brea and its gory Druidic traditions to have gazed and speculated from below than to have resolved our speculations into facts so uncongenial. For, really, to view Carn Brea from the valley on a day of mingled storm and shine is to receive an impression of grandeur and Brocken-like weirdness. The Druidical cromlechs and stone altars of Borlase’s vivid imagination, the craggy tower, the modern Dunstanville pillar, break the sky-line into mysterious points and notches; even the white cottages, the brutal ugliness of the Dissenting chapel, and the merely commercial aspect of the tin and copper mines of Pool village, that straggle down into middle distance and foreground, take a decorative value and strange significance.

The roadways that lead from Pool into Camborne are bordered on either side with immense heaps of crushed rock and dirt, the roads themselves grimy with coal-dust, where they are not stodgy with the overflowed red mud from the mine-adits. Pool itself is notable for nothing, except that its railway station, now named Carn Brea, was once a fruitful source of error in sending passengers and goods to Cornwall, instead of to the Poole in Dorsetshire. Hence the change of name.

Rather more than a mile down the road is Camborne, and midway are the huge works of that very ancient tin and copper mine, Dolcoath, which on week-days make the country side resound with the blows of their steel stamps crushing up the ore-laden rock by the ton. Some of the galleries of Dolcoath mine are 2300 feet deep, and over five million pounds’ value of tin and copper ore have been brought to bank. I have been here on a week-day, when the stamps were at work, and the noise was simply terrific. I have never heard anything to equal it. Not only is it impossible to hear or be heard in speaking, but the mind seems almost to be stunned by the clamour. And to the stranger, the result of all this uproar is merely so many streams of leaden coloured water, flowing into what look like great mud reservoirs. But the grey and slate-coloured particles that go to the colouring of those streams are so many grains of tin ore, and the neat-looking girls who are stirring up the reservoirs with brooms are not engaged upon making mud-pies, but are busily washing the impurities from the metal grains.

Camborne streets straggle almost as far as Dolcoath, and doubtless many of them are built over some of the galleries and levels of that immense mine. Camborne is an offence to the eye. It is much larger than either Truro, Redruth, or Penzance, numbering 15,000 inhabitants, most of whom live upon mines, either directly or indirectly. Indeed, many of them live in the mines, and merely come home to sleep. Thus it is that all day long Camborne seems almost a city of the dead. It is a town whose houses, if not squalid, are the most abjectly characterless of any I have ever seen, stony granite affairs, which wear the look of having once upon a time been inhabited--but a very long while ago, and meanwhile having been preserved from decay by some mystic preservative power.

LXV.

The finest thing in Camborne is the road that leads out of it. That is a clumsy paraphrase of Johnson, I know, touched, too, with a suspicion of Irishry; but for all that, true enough. I don’t know that the little hamlet of Barrepper would, with an advent from more pleasing scenes, have seemed so welcome a place, but after Camborne it was welcome indeed. A little hamlet, Barrepper, on the highroad to Hayle. It consists, apparently, of half a dozen cottages, every one uninhabited and in ruins, and one general shop, which is also the post-office. One wonders whence come the people to buy and post. No one was there when we passed by, save the shopkeeper postmaster, and he sat outside his shop, reading a newspaper in the road. Close by a brooklet trickled across the highway, under a rude stone bridge, and this was all of Barrepper. Now the country side became flat and singularly uninteresting; utterly undistinguished. The mining-field was left behind, and the streams ran clear again, but the level lands and the smug hamlet of Carnhell Green, through which we passed, were featureless. The straggling stony village of Gwinear, too, is remarkable for nothing but its name--a name, like those of many Cornish villages, full of possibilities.

The Cornish have a wonderful Procrustean trick of altering proper names to suit the conveniences of their speech, only the trick works commonly but one way with them, and that is with the lopping off, rather than the addition or elongation of, syllables.

For example, the villages and churches of Phillack and Filleigh are named after the martyr saint Felicitas; and what was once a baptismal name for girls, Felicity, very often met with in the county, is at this day not only colloquially but baptismally given as Filly or Philly.[13]

To see these names (as one frequently does) on tombstones of quiet sober graveyards, strikes the stranger with an effect of misapplied humour, but a Cornishman sees no levity in them.

But, in Cornwall generally, girls’ names are strangely contorted, as witness the very favourite appellations of Jenifer for Guinevere, and Tamsin for Thomasine. These we saw often, and once that rare and pretty name, Avice.

To revert again to place-names, Saint Blazey is a rendition of Saint Blaise; Saint Rumon, who lends his name to two parishes, becomes Ruan; Saint Austell presumably derives from Augustulus; Saint Buryan is a shortening of the name of Saint Buriana; the village of Gerran has its name from Gerennius, who was nothing of a saint, indeed, but very much of a chieftain; and Saint Mellion is from Saint Melanius. Sennen, too, smells suspiciously like a corruption of Symphorien. Even where names are not thus reduced, or where, being of but one syllable, they admit of no further contraction, your true Cornishman will contrive to twist them inconceivably. Of these, Saint Clare has become Saint Cleer, and the name of Saint Erth, the village by which we now came into Penwith, was once Saint Erith. Here we entered upon the final stage of our journey, catching glimpses of Mount’s Bay and Saint Michael’s Mount, and Marazion, as the sun went down.

When we came to the level-crossing that mars the roadway just outside Marazion Road Station, the gates were closed for all but foot-passengers, and we heard the rushing of the “down” train between the hills. It was quite dark now, and I knew the road from here into Penzance for a dusty and stony two miles, so we needed little consideration upon the question whether or not we should take train for that short distance. We took it, or, to avoid quibbles, I will say it took us.

LXVI.

Now we were housed at Alverton, which, you should know, is the Kensington of Penzance, a suburb of the old town, which has gradually become absorbed, a place of many villas, where the visitor generally finds his rest, where gardens meet the eye at every turn, where fuchsias, geraniums, and myrtles grow to astonishing sizes.

Our windows looked down upon the sunlit waves of Mount’s Bay, while through the open casements came the rich odours of these flowers, but above all the piercing scent of the clove-carnation. Among the brave show of blossoms were the peculiar waxy flowers of the _Escallonia_ shrub, brilliantly red.

From adown the street, sloping toward the shore, came every morning the high-pitched cry of “Pilchers, fine fresh pilchers,” for there were fine catches of pilchards overnight; and at a soothing distance, a more or less German band generally murdered current comic operas.

Pirates there are not at Penzance, and nothing approaching them, unless we except these German band-itti; but they are, indeed, or were, when last I heard them, desperate characters, who would think nothing of murdering “The Mikado” or “The Gondoliers.” Indeed, they have done so many times, and will again, unless some action is taken in the matter. I shudder to think how many fine and robust comic operas have been done to death on moonlit nights upon the esplanade in front of the Queen’s Hotel, or in the gloomy by-ways of the Morrab Road. I have seen these bravos standing in a circle round their helpless victim, and noted the brazen flash of their deadly weapons, and heard the agonising demi-semi-quavers of his dying notes as the remorseless band blew out his bars. Ah! sometimes, when they little thought their criminal deeds were overheard, I have listened a while to them making shameful overtures to their captives, and have presently hurried away, fingers to ears, to shut out the fearful shrieks which such deeds have produced. What class of people is it that supports these hired assassins? Alas! I know not, but that they are supported is a solemn fact. So callous are some of these folk that--I assure you it is so--I have actually seen them place bribes in the hand of the chief miscreant, and have observed them loitering by, with heartless smiles of approval, until the deed was done. What harmony, what tender chords can exist in a town where such doings fall flat upon accustomed ears?

And yet the place looks so fresh, so fair, so happy. It is ten miles from the Land’s End; the wail of the Cockney concertina is never heard within these gates; and Plymouth, the nearest large town, is eighty-one miles away. Penzance knows nothing of London. Visitors come from the Metropolis to the shores of Mount’s Bay; but although they are--in instances--known to his from London town, that place is the merest geographical expression in Penwith. We don’t read London papers at Penzance (unless we are--for our sins--authors, when our friends kindly post us those copies containing slashing reviews, obligingly blue-pencilled); we read few papers of any sort, and those are printed at Plymouth. Visitors do not get through much reading at Penzance. They have breakfast, and disappear for the day, to return only at night, tired and hungry, from strenuous excursions to all sorts of wild and impossible places, with names that only a Celt can properly get his tongue round. A stranger coming into Penzance upon a mid-day of its season would opine from the evidence of his eyes that the town had lost its favour, but nothing would be farther from the truth. Half the visitors are at Land’s End or the Logan Rock; some at Saint Ives; many at the Mount, or Newlyn, or Mousehole; a few have gone to Truro or the Lizard.

Penzance is a harmony in grey and blue, looking seaward; in grey and green to the inward glance. Its chief street, Market-jew Street, climbing up to the centre of the town, has at its summit the somewhat gloomy granite building of the Market House--severely classic--fronted with a statue in white marble of Sir Humphry Davy, a native of Ludgvan village near by. Over a doorway of the building you may see, carved in the granite, the arms of Penzance, i.e., the Head of Saint John Baptist (I disclaim at once all responsibility for the apparent Irishry of the arms of the town being a head), with the legend “Pen Sans, 1614.” At the Alverton end of the town you may still see an old, heavily thatched cottage, where was born that doughty hero, Edward Pellew, who afterwards rose through his prowess to the title of Viscount Exmouth, a title more hardly earned than some parallel patents of nobility in this little day.

’Tis a languorous air, of Mount’s Bay; thus it fell that the morning was usually well advanced before we happened in the street or by the harbour. Here, on certain week-days, is great bustle, when the mail steamer is preparing to cast off for the voyage across to Scilly. The passengers, like the poet’s “little victims,” laugh and are merry, “all unconscious of their doom.” For, of a truth, ’tis a rolling sea, and, as the humorist might say, the sick (!) transit takes away the _gloria mundi_.

But we leave these, and embark upon that little voyage of three miles to “the Mount,” as you come to abbreviate Saint Michael’s crags, across the shallow waters of the tumbling bay.

In less than half an hour our little launch runs alongside the massive stone walls of the tiny haven, at the foot of the historic Mount, and we presently disport ourselves upon its delightful slopes, whose history, with that of the grey castle above, goes back to very dim antiquity: a history of sieges, surprises, and fierce fights among the rocks, and on the sands below. The Mount is now the property and the residence of Lord Saint Levan, the present head of the Saint Aubyns, whose name one constantly meets throughout Cornwall. The loyal Saint Aubyns have zealously recorded the Royal visit to the Mount in 1846, when her Majesty landed at the stairs of the haven; for there has been let into the rugged granite a brass-plate, inscribed with a “V.R.,” and fashioned to represent the Royal boot-sole, by which you gather that the Queen wore most uncommonly square-toed shoes in those days.

I warn strangers that, before visiting the Mount, it were well to dismiss from the mind all recollections of it as done into paint and water-colour, for artists have all tacitly agreed to exaggerate its height and steepness. Thus, Turner’s grand painting, and Clarkson Stanfield’s huge achievement in water-colour, would be introductions by which a subsequent acquaintance with the place would only disappoint. But then, to expect topographical accuracy in these things (and especially in Turner’s later work) were indeed vain. The best point of view for an idea of the Mount is that half-way up to the left hand, whence this drawing was taken; for here you have bulk and composition without the need for exaggeration.

The castle, crowning the heights, has still much of interest to show, though modern additions are everywhere about. Thus, the Chevy Chase Hall, anciently the refectory of the religious house that once held sway here, is worthy attention. Its name is derived from the decorative frieze that runs round its walls, a representation of old-time hunting scenes. The Royal Arms above, are, of course, a very modern addition, and the spears and other weapons seen on the walls are, for the most part, spoils of the Soudan campaigns, brought from Egypt by Lord Saint Levan’s son, who went through those expeditions.

The chapel, too, though now bare enough, is of Perpendicular date. A horrid _oubliette_ is shown beneath the stalls, a small chamber, without light or air or any outlet when the paving-stone above is lowered to its place in the floor. Some years since, when this dismal living tomb was accidentally discovered, the skeleton of a man of extraordinary stature was found within. Who he had been must ever remain matter for conjecture--poor wretch, left here to be forgotten.

It is a darksome climb to the battlements of the old tower of the castle, so high above the world. Penzance and Newlyn lie below in the distance, and their white walls flash upon the grey of granite and the dull green of the moors beyond. Presently, as you gaze, comes a trail of smoke from eastward, and the “down” train glides into the wayside station of Marazion Road, bringing its complement of holiday-makers, who will swarm up the Logan Rock, sail to Lamorna, adventure (if they be hardy pedestrians) to Porthgwarra or Saint Levan (whence Sir John Saint Aubyn’s jubilee peerage), or Cape Cornwall; but those spots are innumerable where the tourist loves to dwell. Above all places he goes to Land’s End, but never or rarely does he hie him eastward, to Perranuthno, to Cuddan Point, or to Pengersick. Civilisation goes ever westward, and, as the tourist is its peculiar product, ’tis only fitting he should follow its march.

I recollect another day, when we went to Land’s End, along ten miles of ofttimes rough and heavy walking, through Alverton’s lanes, along the short stretch of dusty road that passes by the wrecked sea-wall, designed to join those near neighbours of Penzance and Newlyn, but demolished by the first storm that rolled in from the south-west.

We sat upon the tumbled blocks of granite, and captured this view of the town, and then came upon Newlyn and its decaying school of artists. What has become of the Newlyn School, so-called, that ephemeral blossom? Are we to assume that, its leading exponent having won to academic honours, its mission is fulfilled?