WEST COUNTRY LORE.*
Mu. BARING-GOITLD has written what is something betwixt and between a guide-book and a county history. It retails the gossip and traditions, old and new, that hang about a country which has always been rich in both, and one finds reflected in it very faithfully the author's tastes and predilec- tions. There is a little geology picturesquely and popularly
stated ; a good deal of ethnology and a good deal about archi- tecture; a great deal of folk-lore; details about tin-mining and details about lace-making ; the history of many saints and the history of many sinners. A book of this kind cannot possibly have any structure ; it must by the law of its existence be a hotch-potch, a sort of resurrection-pie. Now resurrection. pie is all very well, but it needs careful seasoning, and the only seasoning here available is style. It is in a way the easiest kind of book to write, and in a way the hardest, for, since it cannot have the literary merits of plan, proportion, and continuous development, it must rely upon felicity of manner and incidental ornament for whatever charm it possesses. It seems to us that Mr. Baring-Gould has neglected his seasoning. He knew that he ought to keep in a. conversational tone, he did not fear sufficiently the danger of becoming slipshod. Sentence after sentence is clumsily, even ungrammatically, written, and in a good many Instances there is an effort to secure vivacity by lapses into slang. Here is a fair instance :—
"According to Celtic law all sons equally divided the inherit- ance and principalities of their father. The consequence was that on the death of a king the most masterful of his sons cut the throats of such of his brothers as he could lay hold of. And as these little games were enacted periodically in Brittany, the breath was no sooner out of the body of a prince than such sons as felt they had no chance of maintaining their rights made a bolt of it, crossed into Cornwall, and either halted there or passed through it on their way to Wales, where they very generally got married."
It seems to us that the intrusion of these cant phrases into the utterance of a scholar jars horribly, and recalls the cheap artifices by which a temperance lecturer labours after humour. Mr. Baring-Gould has a strong, masculine way of writing,
dignified enough in itself, but colloquialisms sit ill upon
it The book, in our judgment, is not a good book ; and it might have been such a good book. These Western counties have always been curiously distinct from the rest of England, full of picturesque and engaging character ; and here was the man of all others to write about them, steeped in all their folk-lore, learned in the little-known history of the Celtic times which have left so strong an impress on the names and traditions of these counties, knowing the people as no one but a clergyman or a village doctor can know them, and endowed, on the top of all this, with the art of the novelist,—
•
• A Book of the West : being an Introduction to Devon and Cornwall. By S. Baring-Gould. Vol. I., Devon. with 35 Illustrations. Vol. H., Cornwall, with 33 lataitrausils. London : 1Imhuen and Co res e.46.]
the ideal chronicler. One can only say regretfully that be has not taken trouble enough. Nor can we praise the illus- trations, for the most part mere reproductions of photo- graphs.
Nevertheless the book as it stands contains a mass of curious and interesting information. Much of it relates to the close connection between Cornwall and Ireland in the early days of Christianity. In those days Ireland produced saints in abundance, and, so far as we can judge, the criterion
of a saint was his ability to 'found churches. This he did by fasting : a fast of forty days observed upon any spot entitled the faster to found there a cell—the germ of a religious settlement—which should be called after him in all perpetuity ; and in this way one saint acquired many churches, which passed from him to his coarb or representative. Each suc- ceeding head of the settlement was the coarb or steward of the first founder, who retained in the next world his interest in this. Women, of course, became saints as well as men, and they too had their coarbs under them, who, at least while the saint was living, were held in strict obedience. This, as Mr. Baring-Gould observes, made perhaps the most marked change occasioned by the advent of Christianity When the Celts were Christianised woman might be man's equal, even his overlord in matters spiritual : before that she had been his squaw, his house-slave and watchdog, who even in the hut held a lower station, living all but naked in a trench dug in the floor. Those who read this book will at least have one thing impressed upon them,—the debt of modern civilisation to Ireland and the extreme value and in- terest of the Irish documents which remain to preserve, almost alone, some sketch of Northern Europe as it was in the centuries when Christianity began to spread. A very interest- ing note, by the way, is that dealing with the Celtic interlaced ornamentation, which antiquarian ingenuity has at last traced to its origin. It reproduces the beautiful intricacy of the osier plaits developed among a people who used wattles in all their architecture.
One cannot give any idea of the contents of volumes so varied in their range. There is, of course, a mass of smuggling stories capitally told, but some of them have been told already by Mr. Norway in his Highways and Byways of Devon and Cornwall. Newer to us was a chapter upon the rotten- boroughs which swarmed in Cornwall ; most of them created before 164,0, when the conflict with Parliament was impend- ing, and the duchy of Cornwall, being an appanage of the Prince of Wales, was selected as a fitting place to return subservient legislators. Thereby in the long run the estimable burgesses of these little towns, few but important folk, were exceedingly enriched. In the Devon volume the inquiring mind will discover all the latest views upon cairns, cromlechs, kistvaens, and menhirs. Many of the so-called crosses—there are about a dozen such at Glen Columbkille in Donegal—are simply rude stone obelisks or menhirs— probably memorials to the dead—on which the Celtic saints carved crosses ; for it was everywhere their practice not to destroy the pagan symbols, but to annex and consecrate them to the uses of the new faith. The antiquities of Dartmoor afford a fascinating subject, and the average man who wants to know how his prehistoric forerunners in these islands lived cannot do better than read this chapter and then go to see for himself. The hut- dwellers of Dartmoor were probably a tall, gentle, straight- haired people, who used the reindeer for draught, and who were swept out of Great Britain by the dusky Ivernian race speaking a tongue akin to the Basque ; and these in their turn were overrun by the Saxon. But in the outlying parts of the South-Western peninsula, mountainous and boggy, the older blood remained comparatively pure, as it has done in the islands of the Western Coast of Ireland, where you can see by dozens men whom no one would for an instant confuse with any type of Englishman. On the Atlantic seaboard, rather than on the Channel Coast, one would look to find those special qualities which still give to Devon and to Corn- wall a character apart, —the qualities which have been so admirably rendered in literature not so much by Kingsley, who is Teuton in all his sympathies, as by Mr. Blackmore, Mr. Baring-Gould himself, Mr. Quiller-Couch, and a younger writer, "Zack." This charm of the people has drawn, and always will draw, strangers to the West, to its soft airs and
lazy accents. As for the scenery, many of us will assent with all our heart to what Mr. Baring-Gould writes (in one of his best and freshest chapters, that concerning the Scilly Isles) :—
"Have you ever made acquaintance with the horrors of Lowestoft, a flat, insipid shore, where the sea is always charged with mud, and no breakers thunder, where the land scene is as dull and insipid as is the seascape ? I was there last summer. It was a dismal place, made the more dismal by being invaded and pervaded, spread out, exposed, devoted to the 'tripper.' And I fled to the West Coast, to the Atlantic, with his water crystal clear, through which you look down into infinity, and to the glorious cliffs about which that transparent water tosses, shakes its silver mane, curls its waves blue and iridescent as a peacock's neck, and I wondered that any should ever visit the East Coast of England."
At all events, whatever may be the natural longing for brass bands, golf-links, and the other amenities of the East Coast, it is wonderful to us that any one who can get there should leave unvisited the West.
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