Richard Manx

“ What wickedness there is in the world!”
“It is so,” said Richard Manx, with a smile, as though we were conversing on a pleasant subject. “Then what shall a man do? Live well—eat well—drink well—sleep well. There is a reason. The world is wicked. I cannot alter it. You cannot alter it. A lesson comes. Enjoy. Must you go? Must you leave me? I kiss your hand. No? In my fancy, then. Till again, fair Becky, adieu.”
Our conversation was at an end, and I was [14] thankful. I have been particular in my endeavour to show you the man, from his words and manner of speech. ”

“ The sea goes into their bones, it comes out at their skin. Their talk is full of it. They buy by it, they sell by it, they quarrel by it, they fight by it, they swear by it, they pray by it. Of course they are not conscious of this. Only their degenerate son, myself to wit, a chiel among them takin’ notes, knows how the sea exudes from the Manxmen. Say you ask if the Governor is at home. If he is not, what is the answer? “He’s not on the island, sir.” You inquire for the best hotel. “So-and-so is the best hotel on the island, sir.” You go to a Manx fair and hear a farmer selling a cow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He played with his clergy as long as they had anything to lose, and then he played with a deemster and lost five hundred pounds himself. Poor little island, that had two such men for its masters, the one its master in the things of this world, the other its master in the things of the world to come! If anything is needful to complete the picture of wretchedness in which the poor Manx people must have existed then, it is the knowledge of what manner of man a deemster was in those days, what his powers were, and how he exercised them. ”

“ Just about enough humanity in the four to make one complete man. But with vigour enough, fire enough, heart enough—I daren’t say soul enough—in their dismembered old trunks to make ten men apiece; born sea-rovers, true sons of Orry, their blood half brine. Well, is it not conceivable that in those earlier days of treasure seeking, when Elizabeth’s English captains were spoiling the Spaniard in the Indies, Manx sailors were also there? ”

“ The one is the best type of Manx seaman, a true son of the sea, full of wise saws and proverbs, full of long yarns and wondrous adventures, up to anything, down to anything, pragmatical, a mighty moralist in his way, but none the less equal to a round ringing oath; a sapient adviser putting on the airs of a philosopher, but as simple as the baby of a girl—in a word, dear old Tom Baynes of “Fo’c’s’le Yarns,” old salt, old friend, old rip. The other type is that of the Manx parish patriarch. This good soul it would be hard to beat among all the peoples of earth. ”

“ 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;” ”

“ You will remember the Danish book called “Letters from Hell,” containing exactly the same idea, and conclude that the Manx bard was poking fun at some fashionable yet worldly-minded preacher. But no; he was too much a child of Nature for that.
There is not much satire in the Manx character, and next to no cynicism at all. The true Manxman is white-hot. I have heard of one, John Gale, called the Manx Burns, who lampooned the upstarts about him, and also of one, Tom the Dipper, an itinerant Manx bard, who sang at fairs ”

“ There is nothing that more broadly indicates the Norse strain in the Manx character than the non-sanguine temperament of the Manxmen. Where the pure Celt will hope anything and promise everything, the Manxman will hope not at all and promise nothing. “Middling” is the commonest word in a Manxman’s mouth. Hardly anything is entirely good, or wholly bad, but nearly everything is middling. It’s a middling fine day, or a middling stormy one; the sea is middling smooth or middling rough; the herring harvest is middling big or middling little ”

“ But apart from tangible loss, I regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of sentiment. In this old tongue our fathers played as children, bought and sold as men, prayed, preached, gossiped, quarrelled, and made love. It was their language at Tynwald; they sang their grim carvals in it, and their wailing, woful ballads.
* The Rev. T. E. Brown.
When it is dead more than half of all that makes us Manxmen will be gone. Our individuality will be lost, the greater barrier that separates us from other peoples will be broken down. ”

“ Each girl who undertakes to keep watch must have a separate supper and a separate candle, and all talking is to end before the clock goes twelve, for there must not be any speaking before the spirits. From these superstitions, and from the generally received idea that the spirits of all the parishioners are to be observed entering the church on St. Mark’s E’en, it may be inferred that the Manx footprint is made by the wraith of the person doomed to death.’ Compare pp. ”

“ Patrick, and of St. Maughold were printed in Manx in the sixteenth century. Truly that is not enough, for, after all, we have no evidence that Shakespeare, who knew everything, knew Manx. But then Man has long been famous for its seamen. We had one of them at Trafalgar, holding Nelson in his arms when he died. The best days, or the worst days—which?—of the trade of the West Coast of Africa saw Manx captains in the thick of it. ”

“ Fetching the child to the wedding to have the bad name taken off it—no? They were standing the lil bogh—-it's only three—two is it, Grannie, only two?—well, they were standing the lil thing under its mother's perricut while the sarvice was saying.”
“You don't say!”
“Aw, truth enough, sir! It's the ould Manx way of legitimating. The parsons are knowing nothing of it, but I've seen it times.”
“John's right,” said Mr. Jelly; “and I can tell you more—it was just that the man went to church for.” ”

“ Fact is not my domain, and I shall have to be content if in default of it I have got you close to that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-land, shown you our island, helped you to see its blue waters and to scent its golden gorse, and to know the Manxman from other men. ”

“ He is not as good a man as his father was before him. I dare say that in his desire to make everything English that is Manx, he may some day try to abolish the House of Keys, or at least dig up the Tynwald Hill. ”

“ There isn’ the lek of him on the island at all, at all!” Always the island, the island, the island, or else the boats, and going out to the herrings. The sea is always present. You feel it, you hear it, you see it, you can never forget it. It dominates you. Manxmen are all sea-folk.
You will think this implies that Manxmen stick close to their island. They do more than that. I will tell you a story. Five years ago I went up into the mountains to seek an old Manx bard, last of a race of whom I shall have something to tell you in their turn. All his life he had been a poet. ”

“ And now I come to the one incident in modern Manx history which shares, with the three legs of Man and the Manx cat, the consciousness of everybody who knows anything about our island and its people. This is the incident of the betrayal of Man and the Stanleys to the Parliament in the time of Cromwell. It was a stirring drama, and though the curtain has long fallen on it, the dark stage is still haunted by the ghosts of its characters. Chief among these was William Christian, the Manxman called Iliam Dhoan, Brown William, a familiar name that seems to hint of a fine type of man. ”

“ No great man among us, no great event in our history, nothing to make us memorable. But I have been re-assured when I have remembered that, after all, to look on a life so simple and natural might even be a tonic. Here we are in the heart of the mighty world, which the true Manxman knows only by vague report; millions on millions huddled together, enough to make five hundred Isles of Man, more than all the Manxmen that have lived since the days of Orry, more than all that now walk on the island, added to all that rest under it ”

“ I can see them strutting with noses up, through old Douglas market-place on market morning, past the Manx folk in their homespun, their curranes and undyed stockings. Then out at Mount Murray, the home of the Athols, their imitations of Vauxhall, torches, dancings, bows and congés, bankrupt shows, perhaps, but the bankrupt Barrys making the best of them—one seems to see it all. And then again, their genteel quarrels—quarrels were easily bred in that atmosphere. “Sir, I have the honour to tell you that you are a pimp, lately escaped from the Fleet.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Manx are, as a rule, a sober people, and highly religious; as regards their tenets, they are mostly members of the Church of England or Wesleyan Methodists, or else both, which is by no means unusual. ”

“ So the Norsemen married the Celtic women, and from that union came the Manx people. Thus the Manxman to begin with was half Norse, half Celt. He is much the same still. Manxmen usually marry Manx women, and when they do not, they often marry Cumberland women. As the Norseman settled in Cumberland as well as in Man the race is not seriously affected either way. So the Manxman, such as he is, taken all the centuries through, is thoroughbred.
Now what King Orry did in the Isle of Man was the greatest work that ever was done there. He established our Constitution. ”

“ This, if I may be pardoned the continued parallel, is our Manx Miranda. And indeed it is difficult to shake off the idea that Shakespeare must have known something of the early story of Man, its magicians and its saints. We know the perfidy of circumstance, the lying tricks that fact is always playing with us, too well and painfully to say anything of the kind with certainty. But the angles of resemblance are many between the groundwork of the “Tempest” and the earliest of Manx records. Mannanan-beg-Mac-y-Lear, the magician who surrounded the island with mists when enemies came near in ships ”

“ 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. ”

“ The incident is given in the story of Cúchulainn’s Sick-bed; and the reader, doubtless, knows the passage about Brian and the taghairm in the fourth Canto of Scott’s Lady of the Lake. But the Manx girl has only to eat a salt herring, bones and all, without drinking or uttering a word, and to retire backwards to bed. When she sleeps and dreams, she will behold her future husband approaching to give her drink.
Probably none of the practices which I have enumerated, or similar ones mentioned to me, are in any sense peculiar to the Isle of Man ”

“ I have one more story to tell, and that is of Manx pride, which is a wondrous thing, usually-very ludicrous. A young farming girl who will go about barefoot throughout the workdays of the week would rather perish than not dress in grand attire, after her own sort, on Sunday afternoon. But Manx pride in dress can be very touching and human. When the lighthouse was built on the Chickens Rock, the men who were to live in it were transferred from two old lighthouses on the little islet called the Calf of Man, but their families were left in the disused lighthouses. ”

“ The persons able to undo the witches’ work, and remove the malignant influence of the evil eye, are known in Manx English as charmers, and something must now be said of them. They have various ways of proceeding to their work. A lady of about thirty-five, living at Peel, related to me how, when she was a child suffering from a swelling in the neck, she had it charmed [297] away by an old woman. This charmer brought with her no less than nine pieces of iron, consisting of bits of old pokers, old nails, and other odds and ends of the same metal, making in all nine pieces. ”