CORNWALL
For the group of miners whom Stevenson encountered , the process of partial absorption or assimilation had not even begun. It was perfectly natural, in this period of transition in particular, that they should keep together; for they had much in common, and not least the calling which they and their ancestors had followed for centuries. A pity that R.L.S. could not have overheard the talk among those up rooted men instead of having had to make a guess about its nature. More than likely it consisted not at all of “the secrets of their old-world mysterious race”—unless these be construed as the technicalities and adventures of tin and copper mining—but of simple and wistful evocations of the Cornish scene, which had become for them a precious memory since they had seen through the darkness far astern the last faint gleam of the Lizard light.
The fact remains that Stevenson was not favourably impressed. “Lady Hester Stanhope,” he wrote, “believed that 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. This is one of the lessons of travel—that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home . ”So far as I know , Stevenson was the only man of his times, Or any other, to have left on record a flat confession of failure to make anything at all of the Cornish; and I cannot help thinking that the Cornish may have been less responsible for Stevenson’s failure than he was himself, with his preconceived notion of race division—real enough in its way, it is
true, but easily bridged by a person with that imaginative sympathy which is among the predominant characteristics of the Keltic peoples and which, in much of his writing ,Stevenson displayed.
A very different impression might have been left upon R.L.S. if his contacts with Cornish miners had been in circumstances which brought out their real qualities; if, for example, he had sailed fifty years earlier from Falmouth in the brig Cambria and had had as fellow-passengers Cornish miners bound for the Mexican mines. On a boisterous March
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