From these ungracious thoughts let
me turn again, in a last word, to the old island itself,
the true Mannin-veg-Veen of the real Manxman.
In these lectures you have seen it only as in flashes
from a dark lantern. I am conscious that an historian
would have told you so much more of solid fact that
you might have carried away tangible ideas. Fact
is not my domain, and I shall have to be content if
in default of it I have got you close to that less
palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-land, shown
you our island, helped you to see its blue waters and
to scent its golden gorse, and to know the Manxman
from other men. Sometimes I have been half ashamed
to ask you to look at our countrymen, so rude are they
and so primitive russet-coated, currane-shod
men and women, untaught, superstitious, fishing the
sea, tilling their stony land, playing next to no
part in the world, and only gazing out on it as a mystery
far away, whereof the rumour comes over the great
waters. No great man among us, no great event
in our history, nothing to make us memorable.
But I have been re-assured when I have remembered
that, after all, to look on a life so simple and natural
might even be a tonic. Here we are in the heart
of the mighty world, which the true Manxman knows only
by vague report; millions on millions huddled together,
enough to make five hundred Isles of Man, more than
all the Manxmen that have lived since the days of
Orry, more than all that now walk on the island, added
to all that rest under it; streets on streets of us,
parks on parks, living a life that has no touch of
Nature in the ways of it; save only in our own breasts,
which often rebel against our surroundings, struggling
with weariness under their artificiality, and the wild
travesty of what we are made for. Do what we
will, and be what we may, sometimes we feel the falseness
of our ways of life, and surely it is then a good and
wholesome thing to go back in thought to such children
of Nature as my homespun Manx people, and see them
where Nature placed them, breathing the free air of
God’s proper world, and living the right lives
of His servants, though so simple, poor, and rude.