Chapter 6

Let me in a last clause attempt a sketch of the history of the Manx Church in the century or more that has followed Bishop Wilson's death. The last fifty years of it are featureless, save for an attempt to abolish the Bishopric. This foolish effort first succeeded and then failed, and was a poor bit of mummery altogether, ending in nothing but waste of money and time, and breath and temper. The fifty years immediately succeeding Bishop Wilson were full of activity. But so far as the Church was concerned, the activity was not always wholesome. If religion was kept alive in Man in those evil days, and the soul hunger of the poor Manx people was satisfied, it was not by the masters of the Manx Church, the Pharisees who gave alms in the streets to the sound of a trumpet going before them, or by the Levites who passed by on the other side when a man had fallen among thieves. It was partly by dissent, which was begun by Wesley in 1775 (after Quakerism had been suppressed), and partly by a small minority of the Manx clergy, who kept going the early evangelicalism of Newton and Cowper and Cecil--dear, sunny, simple-hearted old Manx vicars, who took sweet counsel together in their old-fashioned homes, where you found grace in all senses of the word, purity of soul, the life of the mind, and gentle courtliness of manners.

Bishop Wilson's successor was Doctor Mark Hildlesley, in all respects a worthy man. He completed the translation of the Scriptures into Manx, which had been begun by his predecessor, and established Sunday-schools in Man before they had been commenced in any other country. But after him came a line of worthless prelates, Dr. Richmond, remembered for his unbending haughtiness; Dr. Mason, disgraced by his debts; and Claudius Cregan, a bishop unfit to be a curate. Do you not read between the broad lines of such facts? The Athol dynasty was now some thirty years established in Man, and the swashbuckler Court of fine gentlemen was in full swing. In that costume drama of soiled lace and uproarious pleasures, what part did the Church play? Was it that of the man clad in camel's skin, living on locusts and wild honey, and calling on the generation of revellers to flee from the wrath to come? No; but that of the lover of cakes and ale. The records of this period are few and scanty, but they are full enough to show that some of the clergy of the Athols knew more of backgammon than of theology. While they pandered to the dissolute Court they lived under, going the errands of their masters in the State, fetching and carrying for them, and licking their shoes, they tyrannised over the poor ignorant Manx people and fleeced them unmercifully. Perhaps this was in a way only natural. Corruption was in the air throughout Europe. Dr. Youngs were grovelling for preferments at the feet of kings' mistresses, and Dr. Warners were kissing the shoebuckles of great ladies for sheer love of their faces, plastered red and white, The parasites of the Manx clergy were not far behind some of their English brethren. There is a story told of their life among themselves which casts lurid light on their character and ways of life. It is said that two of the Vicars-general summoned a large number of the Manx people to Bishop's Court on some business of the spiritual court, Many of the people had come long distances, chiefly a-foot, without food, and probably without money. After a short sitting the court was adjourned for dinner. The people had no dinner, and they starved. The Vicars-general went into the palace to dine with the Bishop. Some hours passed. The night was gathering. Then a message came out to say that no more business could be done that day. Some of the poor people were old, and had to travel fifteen miles to their homes. The record tells us that the Bishop gave his guests "most excellent wine." What of a scene like that? Outside, a sharp day in Spring, two score famished folks tramping the glen and the gravel-path, the gravel-path and the glen, to and fro, to and fro, minute after minute, hour after hour. Inside, my lord Bishop, drenched in debt, dining with his clergy, drinking "most excellent wine" with them, unbending his mighty mind with them, exchanging boisterous stories with them, jesting with them, laughing with them, until his face grows as red as the glowing turf on his hearth. Presently a footfall on the gravel, and outside the window a hungry, pinched, anxious face looking nervously into the room. Then this colloquy:

"Ah, the court, plague on't, I'd forgotten it."

"Adjourn it, gentlemen."

"Wine like yours, my lord, would make a man forget Paradise."

"Sit down again, gentlemen. Juan, go out and tell the people to come back to-morrow."

"Your right good health, my lord!"

"And yours, gentlemen both!"

Oh, if there is any truth in religion, if this world is God's, if a day is coming when the weak shall be exalted and the mighty laid low, what a reckoning they have gone to whose people cried for bread and they gave them a stone! And if there is not, if the hope is vain, if it is all a sham and a mockery, still the justice of this world is sure. Where are they now, these parasites? Their game is played out. They are bones and ashes; they are in their forgotten graves.

THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE

THE MANX LANGUAGE

A friend asked me the other day if there was any reason why I should not deliver these lectures in Manx. I answered that there were just forty good and sufficient reasons. The first was that I did not speak Manx. Like the wise queen in the story of the bells, he then spared me the recital of the remaining nine-and-thirty. But there is at least one of the number that will appeal strongly to most of my hearers. What that is you shall judge for yourselves after I have braved the pitfalls of pronunciation in a tongue I do not know, and given you some clauses of the Lord's Prayer in Manx.

Ayr ain t'ayns niait, (Father our who art in heaven.)

Caskerick dy row dty ennym. (Holy be Thy name.)

Dy jig dty reeriaght. (Come Thy kingdom.)

Dty aigney dy row jeant er y thalloo mry te ayns niau. (Thy will be done on the earth even as in heaven.)

*****

Son dy bragh, as dy bragh, Amen. (For ever and ever. Amen.)

I asked a friend--it was Mr. Wilson Barrett--if in its fulness, its fine chest-notes, its force and music, this old language did not sound like Italian.

"Well, no," he answered, "it sounds more like hard swearing."

I think you must now understand why the greater part of these lectures should be delivered in English.

Manx is a dialect mainly Celtic, and differing only slightly from the ancient Scottish Gaelic. I have heard my father say that when he was a boy in Ramsey, sixty years ago, a Scotch ship came ashore on the Carrick, and next morning after the wreck a long, lank, bony creature, with bare legs, and in short petticoats, came into the marketplace and played a tune on a little shrieking pair of smithy bellows, and then sang a song. It was a Highland piper, and he sang in his Gaelic, but the Manx boys and girls who gathered round him understood almost every word of his song, though they thought his pronunciation bad. Perhaps they took him for a poor old Manxman, somehow strayed and lost, a sort of Manx Rip Van Winkle who had slept a century in Scotland, and thereby lost part of his clothes.

You will wonder that there is not more Norse in our language, remembering how much of the Norse is in our blood. But the predominance of the Celtic is quite natural. Our mothers were Celts, speaking Celtic, before our Norse-fathers came. Was it likely that our Celtic mothers should learn much of the tongue of their Norse husbands? Then, is it not our mother, rather than our father, who teaches us to speak when we are children? So our Celtic mothers taught us Celtic, and thus Celtic became the dominant language of our race.

MANX NAMES

But though our Norse fathers could not impose their Norse tongue on their children, they gave them Norse names, and to the island they gave Norse place-names. Hence we find that though Manx names show a preponderance of the Celtic, yet that the Norse are numerous and important. Thus we have many _dales, fells, garths_, and _ghylls_. Indeed, we have many pure Scandinavian surnames and place-names. When I was in Iceland I sometimes found myself face to face with names which almost persuaded me that I was at home in our little island of the Irish Sea. There is, for example, a Snaefell in Man as well as in Iceland. Then, our Norwegian surnames often took Celtic prefixes, such as _Mac_, and thus became Scandio-Gaelic. But this is a subject on which I have no right to speak with authority. You will find it written down with learning and judgment in the good book of my friend Mr. A. W. Moore, of Cronkbourne. What concerns me more than the scientific aspect of the language is its literary character. I seem to realise that it was the language of a poetic race. The early generations of a people are often poetic. They are child-like, and to be like a child is the best half of being like a poet. They name their places by help of their observatory powers. These are fresh and full of wonder, and Nature herself is beautiful or strange until man tampers with her.

So when an untaught and uncorrupted mind looks upon a new scene and bethinks itself of a name to fit it, the name is almost certainly full of charm or rugged power. Thus we find in Man such mixed Norse and Celtic names as: _Booildooholly_ (Black fold of the wood), _Douglas_ (Black stream), _Soderick_ (South creek), _Trollaby_ (Troll's farm), _Gansy_ (Magic isle), _Cronk-y-Clagh Bane_ (Hill of the white stone), _Cronk-ny-hey_ (Hill of the grave), _Cronk-ny-arrey-lhaa_ (Hill of the day watch).

MANX IMAGINATION

This poetic character of the place-names of the island is a standing reproach to us as a race. We have degenerated in poetic spirit since such names were the natural expression of our feelings. I tremble to think what our place-names would be if we had to make them now. Our few modern Christenings set my teeth on edge. We are not a race of poets. We are the prosiest of the prosy. I have never in my life met with any race, except Icelanders and Norwegians, who are so completely the slave of hard fact. It is astounding how difficult the average Manxman finds it to put himself into the mood of the poet. That anything could come out of nothing, that there is such a thing as imagination, that any human brother of an honest man could say that a thing had been, which had not been, and yet not lie--these are bewildering difficulties to the modern Manxman. That a novel can be false and yet true--that, well that's foolishness. I wrote a Manx romance called "The Deemster;" and I did not expect my fellow-countrymen of the primitive kind to tolerate it for a moment. It was merely a fiction, and the true Manxman of the old sort only believes in what is true. He does not read very much, and when he does read it is not novels. But he could not keep his hands off this novel, and on the whole, and in the long run, he liked it--that is, as he would say, "middling," you know! But there was only one condition on which he could take it to his bosom--it must be true. There was the rub, for clearly it transgressed certain poor little facts that were patent to everybody.

Never mind, Hall Caine did not know poor Man, or somebody had told him wrong. But the story itself! The Bishop, Dan, Ewan, Mona, the body coming ashore at the Mooragh, the poor boy under the curse by the Calf, lord-a-massy, that was thrue as gospel! What do you think happened? I have got the letters by me, and can show them to anybody. A good Manxman wrote to remonstrate with me for calling the book a "romance." How dare I do so? It was all true. Another wrote saying that maybe I would like to know that in his youth he knew my poor hero, Dan Mylrea, well. They often drank together. In fact, they were the same as brothers. For his part he had often warned poor Dan the way he was going. After the murder, Dan came to him and gave him the knife with which he had killed Ewan. He had got it still!

Later than the "Deemster," I published another Manx romance, "The Bondman." In that book I mentioned, without thought of mischief, certain names that must have been lying at the back of my head since my boyhood. One of them becomes in the book the name of an old hypocrite who in the end cheats everybody and yet prays loudly in public. Now it seems that there is a man up in the mountains who owns that name. When he first encountered it in the newspapers, where the story was being published as a serial, he went about saying he was in the "Bondman," that it was all thrue as gospel, so it was, that he knew me when I was a boy, over Ramsey way, and used to give me rides on his donkey, so he did. This was before the hypocrite was unmasked; and when that catastrophe occurred, and his villany stood naked before all the island, his anger knew no limits. I am told that he goes about the mountains now like a thunder-cloud, and that he wants to meet me. I had never heard of the man before in all my life.

What I say is true only of the typical Manxman, the natural-man among Manxmen, not of the Manxman who is Manxman plus man of the world, the educated Manxman, who finds it as easy as anybody else to put himself into a position of sympathy with works of pure imagination. But you must go down to the turf if you want the true smell of the earth. Education levels all human types, as love is said to level all ranks; and to preserve your individuality and yet be educated seems to want a strain of genius, or else a touch of madness.

The Manx must have been the language of a people with few thoughts to express, but such thoughts as they had were beautiful in their simplicity and charm, sometimes wise and shrewd, and not rarely full of feeling. Thus _laa-noo_ is old Manx for child, and it means literally half saint--a sweet conception, which says the best of all that is contained in Wordsworth's wondrous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." _Laa-bee_ is old Manx for bed, literally half-meat, a profound commentary on the value of rest. The old salutation at the door of a Manx cottage before the visitor entered was this word spoken from the porch: _Vel peccaghs thie?_ Literally: Any sinner within? All humanity being sinners in the common speech of the Manx people.

MANX PROVERBS

Nearly akin to the language of a race are its proverbs, and some of the Manx proverbs are wise, witty, and racy of the soil. Many of them are the common possession of all peoples. Of such kind is "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip." Here is one which sounds like an Eastern saying: "Learning is fine clothes for the rich man, and riches for the poor man." But I know of no foreign parentage for a proverb like this: "A green hill when far away; bare, bare when it is near."

That may be Eastern also. It hints of a long weary desert; no grass, no water, and then the cruel mirage that breaks down the heart of the wayfarer at last. On the other hand, it is not out of harmony with the landscape of Man, where the mountains look green sometimes from a distance when they are really bare and stark, and so typify that waste of heart when life is dry of the moisture of hope, and all the world is as a parched wilderness. However, there is one proverb which is so Manx in spirit that I could almost take oath on its paternity, so exactly does it fit the religious temper of our people, though it contains a word that must strike an English ear as irreverent: "When one poor man helps another poor man, God himself laughs."

MANX BALLADS

Next to the proverbs of a race its songs are the best expression of its spirit, and though Manx songs are few, some of them are full of Manx character. Always their best part is the air. A man called Barrow compiled the Manx tunes about the beginning of the century, but his book is scarce. In my ignorance of musical science I can only tell you how the little that is left of Manx music lives in the ear of a man who does not know one note from another. Much of it is like a wail of the wind in a lonely place near to the sea, sometimes like the soughing of the long grass, sometimes like the rain whipping the panes of a window as with rods. Nearly always long-drawn like a moan rarely various, never martial, never inspiriting, often sad and plaintive, as of a people kept under, but loving liberty, poor and low down, but with souls alive, looking for something, and hoping on,--full of the brine, the salt foam, the sad story of the sea. Nothing would give you a more vivid sense of the Manx people than some of our old airs. They would seem to take you into a little whitewashed cottage with sooty rafters and earthen floor, where an old man who looks half like a sailor and half like a landsman is dozing before a peat fire that is slumbering out. Have I in my musical benightedness conveyed an idea of anything musical? If not, let me, by the only vehicle natural to me, give you the rough-shod words of one or two of our old ballads. There is a ballad, much in favour, called _Ny kirree fo niaghey_, the Sheep under the Snow. Another, yet better known, is called _Myle Charaine_. This has sometimes been called the Manx National Air, but that is a fiction. The song has nothing to do with the Manx as a nation. Perhaps it is merely a story of a miser and his daughter's dowry. Or perhaps it tells of pillage, probably of wrecking, basely done, and of how the people cut the guilty one off from all intercourse with them.

O, Myle Charaine, where got you your gold? Lone, lone, you have left me here, O, not in the curragh, deep under the mould, Lone, lone, and void of cheer.

This sounds poor enough, but it would be hard to say how deeply this ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun shines fair on Carlisle wa'."

MANX CAROLS

The paraphrase I have given you was done by George Borrow, who once visited the island. My friend the Rev. T. E. Brown met him and showed him several collections of Manx carols, and he pronounced them all translations from the English, not excepting our famous _Drogh Vraane_, or carol of every bad woman whose story is told in the Bible, beginning with the story of mother Eve herself. And, indeed, you will not be surprised that to the shores of our little island have drifted all kinds of miscellaneous rubbish, and that the Manxmen, from their very simplicity and ignorance of other literatures, have had no means of sifting the flotsam and assigning value to the constituents. Besides this, they are so irresponsible, have no literary conscience, and accordingly have appropriated anything and everything. This is true of some Manx ballads, and perhaps also of many Manx carols. The carols, called Carvals in Manx, serve in Man, as in other countries, the purpose of celebrating the birth of Jesus, but we have one ancient custom attached to them which we can certainly claim for our own, so Manx is it, so quaint, so grimly serious, and withal so howlingly ludicrous.

It is called the service of Oiel Verree, probably a corruption of _Feaill Vorrey_, literally the Feast of Mary, and it is held in the parish church near to midnight on Christmas Eve. Scott describes it in "Peveril of the Peak," but without personal knowledge.

Services are still held in many churches on Christmas Eve; and I think they are called Oiel Verree, but the true Oiel Verree, the real, pure, savage, ridiculous, sacrilegious old Oiel Verree, is gone. I myself just came in time for it; I saw the last of it, nevertheless I saw it at its prime, for I saw it when it was so strong that it could not live any longer. Let me tell you what it was.

The story carries me back to early boyish years, when, from the lonely school-house on the bleak top of Maughold Head, I was taken in secret, one Christmas Eve, between nine and ten o'clock, to the old church of Kirk Maughold, a parish which longer than any other upheld the rougher traditions. My companion was what is called an original. His name was Billy Corkill. We were great chums. I would be thirteen, he was about sixty. Billy lived alone in a little cottage on the high-road, and worked in the fields. He had only one coat all the years I knew him. It seemed to have been blue to begin with, but when it had got torn Billy had patched it with anything that was handy, from green cloth to red flannel. He called it his Joseph's coat of many colours. Billy was a poet and a musical composer. He could not read a word, but he would rather have died than confess his ignorance. He kept books and newspapers always about him, and when he read out of them, he usually held them upside down. If any one remarked on that, he said he could read them any way up--that was where his scholarship came in. Billy was a great carol singer. He did not know a note, but he never sang except from music. His tunes were wild harmonies that no human ear ever heard before. It will be clear to you that old Billy was a man of genius.

Such was my comrade on that Christmas Eve long ago. It had been a bitter winter in the Isle of Man, and the ground was covered with snow. But the church bells rang merrily over the dark moorland, for Oiel Verree was peculiarly the people's service, and the ringers were ringing in the one service of the year at which the parishioners supplanted the Vicar, and appropriated the old parish church. In spite of the weather, the church was crowded with a motley throng, chiefly of young folks, the young men being in the nave, and the girls (if I remember rightly) in the little loft at the west end. Most of the men carried tallow dips, tied about with bits of ribbon in the shape of rosettes, duly lighted, and guttering grease at intervals on to the book-ledge or the tawny fingers of them that held them. It appeared that there had been an ordinary service before we arrived, and the Vicar was still within the rails of the communion. From there he addressed some parting words of solemn warning to the noisy throng of candle-carriers. As nearly as I can remember, the address was this: "My good people, you are about to celebrate an old custom. For my part, I have no sympathy with such customs, but since the hearts of my parishioners seem to be set on this one, I have no wish to suppress it. But tumultuous and disgraceful scenes have occurred on similar occasions in previous years, and I beg you to remember that you are in God's house," &c. &c. The grave injunction was listened to in silence, and when it ended, the Vicar, a worthy but not very popular man, walked towards the vestry. To do so, he passed the pew where I sat under the left arm of my companion, and he stopped before him, for Billy had long been a notorious transgressor at Oiel Verree.

"See that you do not disgrace my church to-night," said the Vicar. But Billy had a biting tongue.

"Aw, well," said he, "I'm thinking the church is the people's."

"The people are as ignorant as goats," said the Vicar.

"Aw, then," said Billy, "you are the shepherd, so just make sheeps of them."

At that the Vicar gave us the light of his countenance no more. The last glimpse of his robe going through the vestry door was the signal for a buzz of low gossip, and straightway the business of Oiel Verree began.