Cornish

“ Cornish mining is almost at its end. Every week away from the peninsula goes a shipload of miners for whom their occupation is gone, and with them the old cap'n.
Well, what is our loss is others' gain! and he goes to another part of the round world to be there as a waft of fresh air, a racy and delightful companion, a typical Cornish Celt, every inch a man, strong in body, and as strong in opinions, a little rough at times, but with a tenderness of heart like that of a woman. ”

“ Although Cornish must now be classed with the extinct languages, it has certainly shown a marvelous vitality. More than four hundred years of Roman occupation, more than six hundred years of Saxon and Danish sway, a Norman conquest, a Saxon Reformation, and civil wars, have all passed over the land; but, like a tree that may bend before a storm but is not to be rooted up, the language of the Celts of Cornwall has lived on in an unbroken continuity for at least two thousand years. ”

“ The Cornish woman possesses an adroitness and self-possession, a modulated readiness of speech, far removed from the awkward heartiness of the Anglo-Saxon woman, the emotional inexpressiveness of the Lancashire lass whose eyes wander [22] around as she seeks for words, perhaps completing her unfinished sentence by a snap of the fingers. The Cornish woman—at all events while she is young and not submerged by the drudgery of life—exhibits a certain delightful volubility and effervescence. ”

“ The most conservative of all men is the fisher, whose little all can be put on board his boat, and who is seldom far from the smoke of his own chimney. The miners are restless, and always ready to strike their tent and march. Only, wherever they go overseas, their children are Cornish—the saints and piskies, the nuggies and buccas, are all drummed into them, and there's no sun so bright, no sea so blue, no air so soft in all the world, as in the dear old county which they "belong" to, and shall see one day. ”

“ From the earliest periods of history, the Cornish have been famous for their enthusiastic fondness of the athletic exercises of hurling, racing, wrestling, and rowing, and for the pious fervour of the hymns which the Druids instructed them to sing round the Cromlechs of the departed brave. ”

“ All along the Cornish coast the bathing is delightful—when you can get it; but sometimes for miles and miles the cliffs rise in a huge impregnable wall, without a single break. Then perhaps there comes a sudden cleft in the rock, a green descent, possibly with a rivulet trickling through it, and leading to a sheltered cove or a sea-cave, accessible only at low water, but one of the most delicious little nooks that could be imagined. ”

“ Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornishmen. ”

“ The Bookworm said Cornwall was a bigger place than it looked, or than could be gripped between the arms of the Atlantic, because of the tributaries it sent all over the world, every man taking with him a bit of Cornish earth and love, and setting up a new colony beyond the seas, just as the old Greeks carried with them some of the fire from the ancient hearths. ”

“ Language is less than ever a final test of race. Most Cornishmen habitually speak English, and few, very few, could hold five minutes’ conversation in the old Celtic speech. Yet the memory of it lingers on, and no one can talk about the country itself, and mention the places in it, without using a wealth of true Cornish words. ”

“ We had been to Castle-an-Dinas the day before—I, and the inevitable fellow tourist without whom I never travel. We had passed I know not how many hours, taking it out of ourselves after the most approved fashion: clambering about Cornish rocks and tolmens, and up and down Cornish hills: anon falling down steep places, and picking ourselves up again, and exhausting ourselves, by various adventures, along the Cornish roads. ”

“ In 1630 Sir John Dodridge in his History of the Ancient and Modern estate of the Principality of Wales, Duchy of Cornwall, and Earldom of Chester, says: “The people inhabiting the same [i.e. Cornwall] are call’d Cornishmen, and are also reputed a remanent of the Britaines . . . they have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use) , differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France.” ”

“ There were no emigrants direct from Europe—save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish: for my part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. ”

“ Inland the little towns are of slight interest, with the exception of the old cross at Lambrenny, but the walk along the cliffs—and the Cornish are amiably ignorant that trespassers ought to be prosecuted—presents an ever-changing panorama of lichened rocks and lacy surf and every shade of wonderful blue. ”

“ Cornish began to die out in Cornwall about the time of the Reformation, being slowly but surely supplanted by English, till it was buried with Dolly Pentreath and similar worthies about the end of the last century.60 Now there is in most languages, but more particularly in those which are losing their consciousness or their vitality, what, by a name borrowed from geology, may be called a metamorphic process. ”

“ The Cornish are imaginative, vivacious, quick to realize situations. When there is any difficulty about words, a man or woman will get over it by acting the part. Watch the men disputing, and you see unrehearsed comedy—and very good comedy in its way. The old Cornish were very fond of mysteries and miracle-plays, which were performed in the open, and for the love of the thing. ”

“ The Cornish language is by no means a pure or unmixed language,—at least we do not know it in its pure state. It is, in fact, a mere accident that any literary remains have been preserved, and three or four small volumes would contain all that is left to us of Cornish literature. ”

“ It is said of the Cornish, as it has been said of the Irish and of Celtic people generally, that they are cruel. I doubt if they are more cruel than others if we restrict the word to its proper meaning—the infliction of pain for the pleasure of it; but there is a great deal of barbarity of the kind one sees in Spanish and Italian countries which results from temper. The Cornish, like the Spanish, are passionate and when anything goes wrong they are apt to wreak their fury on the poor unresisting beast—cow, calf, horse, donkey or sheep. ”

“ That which brought it into more intimate association with English thought, interests, and progress was the loss of the old Cornish tongue.
The isolation in which Cornwall had stood has tended to develop in it much originality of character; and the wildness of the coast has bred a hardy race of seamen and smugglers ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although Cornwall can boast many saints, St. Piran has greater right than any other to be called the patron of the Duchy. To him the Cornish in the old days attributed a vast number of good actions, among them the discovery of tin, the mining of which has for centuries formed one of the chief Cornish industries. ”

“ Thus it is that inflections which in the late Cornish often seem to have been almost, if not quite, inaudible, have been written in full, for that is the author’s notion, founded on what Middle Cornishmen actually did write, of what Modern Cornishmen were trying to express. For most things he has precedents, though he has allowed himself a certain amount of conjecture at times, and in most cases of difficulty he has trusted, as he would advise his readers to do, to Breton rather than to Welsh, for the living Breton of to-day is the nearest thing to Cornish that exists. ”

“ The Cornish are not a booky folk, they have not produced a great literature, [Pg 88] and even nowadays they read little but their Bibles. Such a people would be likely to remember and treasure up the stories handed down from mother to child. They are, moreover, very social. ”

“ I'll just tell them it's the Cornish air, and Cornish skies, and Cornish cream, and Cornish everything—the place where Old Nick built churches, just for want of something to do. That'll be a new sensation in the States for men with piles wanting an extension of time to look around before the next-of-kin pay the death duties. ”

“ Long after other parts of England had settled into an improved agriculture, and submitted to the discipline of more civilised life, the Cornish were wont to hew their resources out of the bowels of their mother earth, or to haul into their nets the native harvest of the sea. ”

“ One should come into the duchy to hear how the English language may acquire a languorous ease, which makes one want to sit still at the first milestone, and never to go any further. At first, Guy wanted everything "sharp"—boots "sharp," breakfast "sharp," everything to the minute, and every one on the alert. The Cornish constitution wasn't made to work that way in Cornish air. A woman was selling fruit at a street corner, and Guy bought some. A small boy was sent to change a coin, and Guy grew tired and impatient of waiting. ”

“ No doubt it is well known that the original inhabitants of Cornwall were Celts, and that Cornish is a Celtic language; and that, if we divide the Celtic languages into two classes, Welsh with Cornish and Breton forms one class, the Cymric; while the Irish with its varieties, as developed in Scotland and the Isle of Man, forms another class, which is called the Gaelic or Gadhelic. ”

“ The old Cornish language of the Celtic stock became extinct only in the 18th century, and the Cornish character remains as a heritage of the time when the land had leisure to mould the life and the habits of the man. ”

“ For the South Wales man understandeth not perfectly the North Wales man, and the North Wales man little of the Cornish, but the South Wales man much. The pronunciation of the tongue differs in all, but the Cornish is far the easier to be pronounced.” Here he goes on to compare the sound of it with the Welsh, to the disadvantage of the latter. . . . “But of late the Cornishmen have much conformed themselves to the use of the English tongue, and their English is equal to the best, especially in the Eastern partes; even from Truro eastward is in a manner wholly Englishe. ”

“ Whatever in the Cornish dictionary cannot be traced back to any other source, whether Latin, Saxon, Norman, or German, may safely be considered as Cornish, and therefore as ancient Celtic. Whatever in the antiquities of Cornwall cannot be claimed by Romans, Saxons, Danes, or Normans, may fairly be considered as genuine remains of the earliest civilization of this island, as the work of the Celtic discoverers of Britain. ”

“ All I protest against is that any one of these facts could be proved, or even supported, by the Cornish name of the Mount, whether cara cowz in clowze, or cara clowse in cowze, or by the English name, communicated by William of Worcester, “the [pg 342] Hore rock in the wodd,” or finally by the legend which gave rise to these names, and which, as can be proved by irrefragable evidence, was transplanted by mistake from the Norman to the Cornish coast. ”

“ These, written by men who spoke Cornish fluently and had no theories and often no knowledge of philology, probably represent what people really spoke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That faintness and even silence of final letters, which seems to have been a characteristic of Cornish as it is of French, was the cause that, in writing as phonetically as they knew how, these practical speakers of Cornish often omitted the ends of words, and made it seem as though their verbs had largely lost their inflections. ”

“ We wish to correct an error that many persons, not Cornish, entertain with regard to the language of Cornish working people. Their mistake originates, in many instances, from seeing in stories—misnamed Cornish, and for the most part written by strangers to the country—such an uncouth jargon, put into the mouths of West Country folks, which is no more the common dialect of Cornwall than it is of Jericho. ”

“ Nothing can be much better adapted to show how simple and unsophisticated the Cornish character still remains in many respects, than Cornish notions of organizing a public festival, and Cornish enjoyment of that festival when it is organized. We had already seen how they managed a public boat-race at Looe, and we saw again how they conducted the preparations for the same popular festival, on a larger scale, at the coast town of Fowey. ”