PROGRESS IN THE WEST.

It would be interesting to see what out MODERN BELIEVERS IN OUR MODERN WORLD would make of St Enys, now that for a generation at least progress has had a free hand with it; or, as Douglas Jerrold puts it more cautiously, the village and its people have been 'subjected to the play of free change'. A pocket hollow in the extreme West, until lately isolated, and as proud of that isolation as it is possible for a community to be. Now on route A.30. and 'Land's End' suggests a run to a man with a fast car. And some visitors have stopped, and some have stayed for good. So, for the past ten years and more, St Enys has lain open for the modern world to do what it likes with. The reactions are worth study.

The whole question is one of extreme complexity. Let us begin with the positive gains, which allow us some measure of thankfulness.

There is no poverty worth mentioning in the place, nor an under-nourished nor an ill-clad child. Inspite of the fickle fish that have left the bay, between such fish as; what with fowls and gardens and odd jobs of building, above all the money their wives make in summer off the visitors; between these and the dole for pocket-money, we are doing very nicely indeed. Plenty to grumble about at the Inn most nights, but a standard of living not even invincible ignorance as to diet and hygiene can make too low.

A school of social philosophy. still going strong, says in effect: "Remove those two tyrants, the Squire and the Parson, and our villages will become centres of self-realisation, free from the strangle-hold of custom, and dead privilege" etc. Now this is what has happened to St Enys. The old squire's family has died out; the vicar is old, a scholar, not of long residence, and without

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West-country 'hands'. Resident gentry are poor, scattered, and all,
irredeemably 'foreigners'. St Enys is the purest specimen of a vill-
age left to its own devices that the reforming townsman could wish.

Ultimately it is its beliefs -- something Suspisciously like
what was once called its spiritual life -- that gives a group its
unity. This the parson once served, and it was the squire's often
quite unconscious business to give those values their temporal twist.
And so the culture of an age was forwarded. But in Cornwall, for more
than a century, spiritual energies have been poured into a Nonconfor-
mist mould. And to-day the virtue is going out of Nonconformity.
(There is so much nonconformity of all sorts going about.) Modernism
also is killing it, with its lack of standard uncertainty what to in-
cluse and what to reject. (It is interesting to see, in the town of
Penzance, how Spiritualism is taking its place, absorbing its congre-
gation in a new cult at which they can still sing their old hymns.)

Longer almost than any place in England Cornwall held out for
the Mass; as was taken from them bloodily, they refused the 'Christ-
mas play'. Then, for two hundred years, to relapse into their ancient
paganism into John Wesley's time.

He revived them, but it is fascinating and possible to make out
as Baring-Gould did, that the Chapel-worship preserved features of the
antique, primitive faith, especially as to the nature of the soul and
what happens after death. Beliefs of the Druids, who made the 'fuggo'
holes on Grumbla Moor above Sancreed, or even the men before them,
who, for their own purposes worked the channels on the lying stones
at Tregonebris Hill. Beliefs -- well, with a little more educa-
tion, we may see 'The Golden Bough' in every farmer's hands, and an
ancient rubric which, once again

3.

No, St Enys has forgotten Wesley, as it has forgotten Buryan and Crida and Just. Is she beginning to remember what went before them, a knowledge, perhaps, that has never been wholly forgotten. There is only St Hilary where they are remembered, St Hilary where the Mass has been restored, St Hilary of the Miracle Plays. But there even, when Mr Kensit sends down Cockney wolves, paying them a salary so that they can become members of the parrish, there he finds ready to hunt with him a full local pack.

It is rather grim. To find, of all things, a village community, drawing its life among scenes of wild and glorious loveliness, from fish out of the fierce sea, from beasts at pasture or the gold chess-board won by their ancestors out of the moors, without any living acknowledgment of God. Of course even, the ancient potencies, thankfulness to the Corn Mother, the Fruit and Leaf Maidens; or to the Potnia Theron for harvest of hare and snipe and duck, or to Our Lady of the Sea. (Hardly a relic of the Pardon survives here. They went with the Mass.) The 'tone' of the place is indeed the grimmest sort of heathen. Less than pagan, being touched with vulgarity; vulgarity, and all that is left a certain formal attendance at Church or Chapel, the Church by tradition, at the times of birth and death and 'for luck'.

In the old days Cornwall had a grim name. Looking out at the superb sea, where Pythias once sailed, one is conscious of a return,

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a wheel coming full circle, a terrible return.

Meanwhile the wireless and the cineam, clearly transport and cheap press work their will -- on minds abysmally unlearned, uncriticized outside the ancient crafts there is no one now to praise. Minds jealous also and suspicious, prone to mutual mistrust, over-reaching and vendettas. Impossible to unite them in a co-operative xxi policy over the sale of fish; 'spoiling the Egyptians' is the one thing that brings them together -- the Egyptians being the visitors.

It is bleak. There hangs over the place a sense of aridity, as of a plant whose roots have struck some unwholesomeness in the soil. The very old men and women, who remember another, and doubtless a much harder world, have a very different look in their eyes. As of another race. They have not reproduced themselves. That is clear -- as clear that many amenities have now become necessary St Enys.

Here are a people without superiors. Who, except the old, resent such an assumption -- as the general rudeness and sometimes the odious familiarity of their manners testify. (Strange to be addressed from behind a hedge with 'Cherioh' for the time of day, 'Cherioh' in B.B.C. Oxford, superimposed on the soft sea-bird speech of the West.)

A people left without admiration, equally a person to look up to as a Creator to adore. The secularised community, just turned out, rural model. 1935. But leaving aside the question of supernatural sanctions, if a man may be left without anything to adore, is it good for him to have nothing to admire?

I.

The man at the Inn in the mining town west of St Ives as-
ked us where we lived:

"St Enys?" said he, "so you've chosen to settle there. I wouldn't". He went on to explain that as people from other counties are 'foreigners' in the Duchy, so the St Enys men were 'foreigners' to their neighbours, the men of St Neot or Sancross. -- "And they say that there were foreigners here before there were English, men who came after the mines, and that all the tinners be descended from them; but we know that its the men of St Enys, the Englishmen, the white领民, the Jews, as I've heard". He said this as one relishing a local vintage joke; and after a little more to the same effect, we returned to look at St Enys with new eyes.

It lies tucked away under one of the spurs of Lands End, until lately unknown and almost inaccessible. To-day it is still possible to realise the peculiar nature of the place, and the effect in our distracted century that change is having upon it.

Of the last there is much to be said. Already we know too well the common seasonal influx, the rush of cars, the sight-seers, staring at the native residents; the pub in beer, and with luck in double rums for shamelessly concocted stories of wrecks, seasoned with two or three words of Cornish, for which I must admit that I was the original source. This form of folk-movement is impermanent. Its chief importance is on village finances, when it discovered that for two or three months of the year persons, for the majority obviously insane, would pay high prices to sleep in text-hung bedrooms with handkerchief windows, in bathless antique cottages, and live off fish and tinned fruit. For this, whose proceeds are their own, the women have given

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up their ancient crafts, even their share of the catch. For this a
community once, in many respects, matriarchal, has changed in a few
years -- not by a reversal to patriarchy, but to the present ill-defined
state that once existed in some societies of a society subjected to free
change', without determining principle but the one that says: "Get as
much cash out of things as you can".

The other influence, more persistent because applied all
the year round, comes from our general state of 'improved communications.
The roads lead to please the owners of cars, means to the native that
the county-town-plus-watering-place, once half a day's journey off, can
be reached in half an hour by 'bus. There is a new going to and for --
which the only criticism is to ask why, business is done apart, any-
one should want to visit that particular place? And with the bus has
 Lease
 vanished the donkey and his cart, the little beasts who once pastured
all along the wild cliffs, and may be reckoned one of the real losses.

Indeed it is not easy to see where the play of 'free change'
has brought one serious benefit. While, except where it has sharpened
thier Keltic interest in money, it has not affected the peculiar nature
of the St Enys men. Yet to say this in not enough; and at this very
moment, in the wild loveliness of the place, a strange and sordid spi-
ritual drama, is being enacted.

Their neighbours are right about St Enys men. For one who
For one who was who
has carried to a logical conclusion a characteris-
tic of this order of Kelt. (A study in comparative Kelts would make
good reading -- the men of the Atlantic littoral. The likeness and un-
likeness between the Breton, the Irishman, the Cornishman, the Welsh;
the men of the Outer Islands and the Scots hills.) Here we assume diff-
erences which await a collective definition.) For one who can

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Carry quarrelsomeness to itslogical conclusion; it is not on-
ly the 'foreigner' they cannot abide or the men of the next village,
they cannot live in peace with themselves. Never was there a place so
filled with petty squabbles, by contrast with which the average Saxon
village is a rehearsal for the international unity. Mr Wells is so anx-
ious about. Bloody squabbles, treacherous squabbles, squabbles about
money, about women, a parking ground, a pig. Squabbles with the
sailor's knife, the fist, the tongue. (Two sisters share a patch of
ground near the shore where cars may rest. One was willing, the other
would not have them there. With 'unspeakable words' they encroached
on the small area with a stone 'hedge' through the centre. But that
did not prevent one sister from going out at night and sewing the oth-
er's pitch with nails.) Illustration of the lighter side of these
feuds. Fueds almost as heritable as the Corsican, sily
 dangerous,
grace-destroying, sensual, thrilling. In the decline of their
faith an outlet for the tricky emotionalism, sudden as the catspaws
of wind on the eternal mask of their sea.

For most many of the implications and aspects of this,
there is no space here. While it may be allowed that, above
and
the tide of ill-will, the wave of good-will, the tide of
old men, innocent, sea-secret, understanding, like
from a 'cleaner and lardier world'.

They stand apart, not to be replaced, untouched by change,
waiting for the change for which the sea has prepared them. Watchers
of the drama being played at St Enys, the entry of change under the
principle that like attracts like.

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A few years ago there was a chance that St Enys might have been given to the world for fine uses when the first colonists from without, an old soldier, an old sailor, a few painters and writers came to settle there. Nucleus, given time, for a new local gentry, of which the originals have died out. This failed-- and largely for lack of cohesion between the older gentlefolk and the young intellectuals. almost For reasons not so creditable to the latter as it/universal now to pre-tend. They have been it all their own way, being vocal, but it is time the legend died that 'our intelligentsia' have served their racked generation well. They despised the old; as a body neither acquired power with the natives, now left wholly to their own devices, without help from any form of a governing class; when the men arrived whose business it is to make money out of St Enys. A kind of private company unthatched the ancient Inn, enclosed the commons on the wild cliffs, the bee and geese pasture; and when the old man with a rose in his hat wept because it belonged to him and to his to let his birds go there, threatened him with the police.

When this happened -- and a hundred similar things, whose aim was to rule St Enys by accentuating the division between neighbour and neighbour, a wave of anger rose. Rage with anguish behind it, like the wave-tower, the low hundred feet of sea, square like Giotto's tower, that rises behind the Prisons in the winter storms. Hangs for a moment over them to fall in an awful ruin of white. Force that rose in the village, but without the strength there is in green water, actually to change the water into blood. How much it costs, we do not know. In the mean time, the rock.

It is quite easy to see why. Emotion that in a saxon village

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would have meant revolution, here spent itself, among men whom not even
such a threat as the utter destruction of their own could unite in de-
fence of one another, in defence of their heritage. On whose behalf
they have agreed to hate all other men.

With the inevitability of some natural law in motion, we
saw the attack develop, the counter-attack spend itself. Incidentally
as it seemed, in ancient and primitive curses, which running under-
ground, have spread fear; and certainly a curious ill-luck has dogged
the exploitation of St Enys.

We are now on the edge of something final, a decisive
engagement, the third act. This time over the question whether the
ruined cottage in the garden, with its ten foot/fuscia and veronica,
~~which~~ is to be pulled down and turned into a garage. Or not. For in-
to that house are built the stones, and the lintel was once, probably,
part of the altar of the Chapel of St Enys. The saint and the hermits
who succeeded him; who, for centuries, said Mass there and tended a
fire to warn ships. For a garage that is not wanted, it is this that
~~there~~ men from atria insist must go. But by what happens now will be shewn the fate
of St Enys. A contest behind which is emerging, ever more clearly, the
forms of the spiritual reality behind it. Reason apart, garage apart,
it seems necessary to the men who threaten life here that this place, on
once a sanctuary, should be destroyed. Equally they hesitate, actually,
to lay hands on it; or decide who shall pull out the first stone. The
village, so far vocal, so far defeated all along the line, is suddenly
practising silence. As though it were into the hands of their ancient
heaven that the question had been laid.

But if the chapel goes, it will mark an end. Until indeed