St. Hilary Plays
THOUSANDS of people must know of St. Hilary and its famous parson: that remote little church upon Mount's Bay in Cornwall, its thirteenth-century spire among the trees on the right as you pass by on the high road to Penzance, and inside the exquisite paintings and ornaments : witness to the work of their parson, Bernard Walke, artist and saint. It is from this church that the St. Hilary play has been broack 1st Christmas after Christmas. Here it is now, along with two other plays, the Passion-tide one, The Upper Chamber, and The Eve of All Souls. They are very suitable for performance anywhere, especially in church, and perhaps most of all in the West Country, because of that life in which they take their rise and the dialect in which they are written.
Fr. Walke tells us that it was the thought of the plain-2n- guarry—the field pf the . play—at St., Hilary,. that led him to
write these plays and that they were an intimate expression of
the religious life of the village. In the Middle Ages many Cornish parishes had their plain-an-guard - where the miracle plays or lives of the saints or scenes 1__:n the Bible were performed. Fr. Walke may be considered as the successor— after four centuries—of that unknown canon of Glasney who
wrote the miracle-plays in Cornish which survive. These plays have the authentic spirit of those earlier ones, the country humour, the catholic familiarity with sacred things.
" Why, my dear life " (says St. Peter), " who's coming up the road now ; Judas Iscariot on his way to town. Judas Iscariot, come here. Whatever are 'ee going to town for, my dear? "
That is quite, quite right: exactly as a Cornish fisherman might say it.
I find these plays, I must say, very moving. They are so simple and true to the lives of the people, whom Fr. Walke has lived with and observed so tenderly, so lovingly. They all breathe his spirit, kindly, whimsical, with such a wise, searching eye for human beings, and always a vision of this life in terms of the Catholic Faith. It is, of course, a dream, but the kind of dream that makes one think of Hardy going to see the oxen bow the knee on Christmas Eve, " Hoping it might be so."
Cornwall has been very lucky to have such a parson in our time, another R. S. Hawker of Morwenstow. Fr. Walke has achieved, in a much more inclement time, something near to what Hawker did ; and yet at the same time it has been a creation of his own.
If I might dare to mention a word of suggested improve- ment, it is in relation to the use of Cornish dialect. Fr. Walke's command of it is extraordinary, but it is that of someone who has learned it from outside ; you need to have been inside and spoken it from your childhood to get it unerringly right. Nobody says " does " in Cornish, it is always " do " ; nobody says " one " as a personal pronoun, it is always " you " ; I have usually heard the word " vitty " with a " v," not " fitty." And so on.
But these are merely querelles d'ecole. What we want to know is whether Fr. Walke has got some more plays for u, We want at least another volume of plays and memories.
A. L. Rows.
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