ALPHONSE ESQUIROS ON CORNWALL*
M. ALrooNsE ESQUIROS represents, in his own person, a happy combination of the French feuilletoniste and the English penny- a-liner. The literary gentlemen whose duty it is to fill the lower part of the pages of the Journal des Debate, the Constitutionnel, and the Moniteur Universal, with a prescribed quantity of read- able matter every day, deal chiefly in fiction, while that most • vaeful member of the British Fourth Estate, who is supposed to be paid at the rate of a penny per line for his contributions, mainly report facts, or things passing as such. In the various books he has produced, M. Alphonse Esquiros has shown how these two qualities and degrees of skill may be happily blended, and facts and fiction may be woven together so that neither can be recog- nized. The work on the Dutch at Home was a good specimen of this art, and still more so the book called the English at Home. M. Esquiros's latest performance is another bit of a story concern- ing " the English," and though it is not equal to his former books, it is altogether a neat specimen of literary mosaic work on the new pattern. M. Alphonse Esquires did Cornwall the honour to visit it last autumn for a few weeks, audit naturally- occurred to him to shape the vast experiences thus gained into a book for the enlightenment of mankind in general, and of " the English" in particular. For " the English," he assures us, nothing is better than travelling and reading books of travel. The philosophical reason is obvious, in the fact " that the heavy and damp climate of England necessitates a change, and that the English, by re- newing their stock of fresh air, are only obeying one of the laws of the national hygiene."
. Having decided upon renewing his own stock, M. Alphonse Esquiros descended upon Cornwall. " What attracted me to this part of England was a curiosity for novelty and unexpected scenes." Of course the inevitable book was kept in view by the anxious traveller, as much as the " curiosity for novelty." He meant to bring " flowers "—" copy " the printer would call them—back from Cornwall, firmly believing that, "in spite of its savage rocks and abrupt coasts, it has been less deflowered than other counties by tourists." M. Alphonse Esquires com- menced his deflowering process immediately on arriving by steamer at the mouth of the Tamar. The bold traveller here saw an extraordinary sight, namely, "vessels of all shapes and
* COTAWLIII and as Coasts. 137 Alphonse Esquires, Anther of the Efeedish at Home, Sc. London: Chapman and Hall.
all sizes, from the slim gunboats up to the gigantic three-deckers which sleep in the shadow of their masts." But before bestowing further notice upon these sleeping wonders, M. Esquiros vouch- safes a piece of sound rudimentary teaching. " We must first form," he says, "a precise idea of the geographical position and form of Cornwall." Now, listen, and look at the map of the country of the English. You will find that England is " an old woman warming her hands and feet in the setting sun, or if you prefer it, at the extinct volcanoes of Ireland. These imaginary feet are formed by a promontory that juts out for more than eighty miles into the Atlantic. This promontory is Cornwall." If, after this, you have no " precise idea of the geographical position and form of Cornwall," do not blame M. Alphonse Esquires.
The enterprising traveller had not been many days in Cornwall before he discovered that " it is the county of metals—lead, iron, cobalt, bismuth, and uranium, are found there in larger or smaller quantities." Nothing more wonderful than the mines in which these various minerals are found. " A mine is a being ; it lives, it works, it breathes ; the shafts are its lungs, the pump-pipes its circulating system, it eats coal, which is thrown to it by tons ; it has a name, a personality, a sex. The English, who have not, like us, in their language a masculine and feminine for inanimate things, but who range all in a neutral gender, have made an exception in favour of the mine. She is a woman, a sort of dark Proserpine, with features possessing a stern and glacial beauty. The miners speak of her with respect ; she kills them, and they love her. She is for them the mysterious power of good and evil, she tears out her entrails to enrich the human race, she daily enlarges her wounds whence flow tin and copper, but she has poisoned blasts which shorten the miner's life, and abysses that swallow him up." This is feuilleton, clear and unmistakable ; it reads as if taken from La Presse, especially that bit about the "wounds whence flow tin and copper," and the final "swallow him up." But the whole is a grand picture nevertheless. England is an old woman warming her feet at the fire, and she, the mine, is an old woman also, but " stern and glacial." So that we have one very cold old woman within another very warm, or warmed- up, old hag. It utterly extinguishes penny-a-lining of the ordinary stamp.
Perhaps it is not generally known that " the English" of Corn- wall are different from " the English" of others parts of the king- dom. M. Alphonse Esquires acquaints us with the fact. " You have scarce crossed the border of Devon and enter Cornwall, ere you are struck by a change in the human physiognomy. On the roads, in the inns, in the waggons, you continually notice oval faces, with elongated features, black hair, grey eyes, prominent noses, large mouths, in a word, the Celtic type. Are we still in England ? We might doubt the fact, as we no longer see around us the round heads of the Anglo-Saxons; with the plump cheeks and light hair and whiskers. This change in the external traits evidently marks the passage from one race to another." Pondering deeply on this subject, M. Alphonse Esquires happily fell in with " an old fisherman," who greatly widened the horizon of his knowledge. To his surprise and delight, the bold traveller learned that the " change in the human physiognomy,". including the "prominent noses," which had so greatly puzzled him, was to be explained by the simple fact that the people of Cornwall were all Jews, that is, of Jewish origin. There landed on the Cornish coast many centuries ago—date of no consequence—a great Queen called Zenobia. Being shipwrecked, she lost her dresses and petticoats on stepping ashore, but fortu- nately saved two or three of her maids of honour, who constructed a tent for her out of an old sail. Although thus unadorned in outward appearance, the natives, with a fine instinct, at once perceived that royalty had come among them. They offered the Queen lumps of tin and crystals—let us hope also a little food— and appointed a page, who, "with a bough in his his hand, fanned the august face of Zenobia." Well, to make a long story short, the maids of honour after a while got rebellious, and " despairing about marrying princes, consented, after some hesitation, to ally themselves with poor sailors." Fancy the rage of august Zenobia ! "The Queen complained bitterly, but seeing that her com- plaints were of no use, and that all hands were occupied elsewhere, she bravely resolved to serve herself. As she was still young, she grew tired of widowhood, and became a fisherman's wife." It is pleasant to learn that the august Queen became expert in growing cabbages, and, better still, " had plenty of children." So far the ancient chronicle interpreted by M. Alphonse Esquires. But it is justice to say that he does not believe that all the inhabitants of Cornwall, despite the testimony of long noses, are descended from Jewish Queen Zenobia and her maids of honour. His belief is " that the inhabitants of Cornwall, t.tken in a mass, are simply ancient Britons who have become English." This is greatly reassuring.
The sight of the Laud's End deeply impressed M. Alphonse Esquires. " You notice the wild waves of the Atlantic beating the wall of granite with the sombre and monotonous noise of an eternity." " On seeing this army of waves rushing with blind fury against the reef, you would be inclined to say that the wave is conquered. But that would be an error. The rock wears out, and the wave does not." Admirable discovery 1 " The defeat is slow, I confess, for the granite assumes even on the surface of the repulsed waters an air of empire and triumph ; but look at the base, it is undermined. The sea hollows in these solid masses mysterious passages, perfidious anpactriosities, into which the con- tracted and troubled water bursts with a dull roar ; it gnaws but little, but it constantly gnaws. These ravages heighten the solemnities of the scene." A friend of ours who visited the Land's End very recently told us that he found written on the furthermost rock the solemn sentence—" Who is Griffiths ?" Did M. Alphonse Esquires see this among the " perfidious anpactriosities?"
With all his admiration for the " dull roar" and the " sombre and monotonous noise of an eternity," M. Esquires cannot help finding fault with the name of Land's End. It ought to be called, he thinks, the "monotony of melancholy." According to him, "the name of Land's End is a geographical falsehood ; beyond that ending point of land another land begins ; you have America before you." America, it appears, immediately begins where Corn- wall ends. It is only about half a mile distant, perhaps not quite so much. Australia itself, according to M. Alphonse Esquires, is but three thousand miles from Cornwall. " Some years ago, some young fishermen of Newlyn resolved to go and seek their fortunes in Australia. How could they cross 3,000 miles of water without money ? The difficulty was soon solved ; they had among them a fishing boat of about twelve tons, which they set to work fitting up. This done, they hoisted sail, and soon lost sight of the quiet houses of the hamlet, when many hearts were alarmed at their departure. Out at sea there were obliged to trace their maritime chart out of their own heads. Half the crew slept on deck, while the other half watched, held the tiller, and consulted the stars or the compass. After considerable efforts they reached Australia." The fact of Australia being only three thousand miles from Cornwall makes voyages to it, even pleasure trips, extraordinarily frequent among the descendants of Queen Zenobia. M. Alphonse Esquires found that " going to Australia or New Zealand is a sort of sport for persona born on the coast. There are very few families which have not some of their members at the antipodes." It seems a great pity that this extremely short cut to Australia vid the Land's End is as yet grossly neglected by the majority of English traders and emigrants.
The few specimens here given may show what a marvellously interesting book of travels M. Alphonse Esquires has added to English literature. Though but a few weeks in Cornwall, he managed to pick up more information about the county than many an inhabitant would have collected in the course of a life- time. There is not a subject concerning the interesting peninsula which on the map of England represents the feet of the Old Woman about which M. Alphonse Esquires has not something to say, and regarding which he has not some fresh knowledge to impart. He speaks authoritatively on the mines, the agriculture, the trade, shipping, and commerce of Cornwall ; he gives full details about the coast, the rocks, the lighthouses, the harbours, lifeboats, and floating lights, and he has a thousand anecdotes on such miscellaneous subjects as labourers' homes, pilchard fishery, the Jews, salt herrings, Peter the Great, John Wesley's sermons, the dress of the fisherwomen, sea-gulls, and the civilization of the ancient Romans. In discoursing on these topics M. Alphonse Esquires slides with inimitable grace into others more remote, exhi- biting an amount of erudition seldom found in ordinary books of travel. And in freely imparting to others all this vast fund of knowledge, the author has the noblest ends in view. He hints at them in his favourite mode of speech—the anecdotal form. "An English tourist who had strolled for many years along all the roads in Great Britain and Ireland once explained to me the motive of his excursions. I travel,' he said to me, in order to get rid of my selfishness." So also does M. Alphonse Esquires travel, and it is in this mood he opens to others his immense store- house of knowledge gathered on the road.
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