“‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,‘That name does not belong to me;I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,And I’m come to visit thee.’”
“‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,‘That name does not belong to me;I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,And I’m come to visit thee.’”
“‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,‘That name does not belong to me;I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,And I’m come to visit thee.’”
“‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,
‘That name does not belong to me;
I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,
And I’m come to visit thee.’”
But in C. she says:
“‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;Inever carried my head sae hie;For I am but a lady gay,Come out to hunt in my follee.’”
“‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;Inever carried my head sae hie;For I am but a lady gay,Come out to hunt in my follee.’”
“‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;Inever carried my head sae hie;For I am but a lady gay,Come out to hunt in my follee.’”
“‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;
Inever carried my head sae hie;
For I am but a lady gay,
Come out to hunt in my follee.’”
The idiom there is quite enough to settle the question for me. But there is another point. The peasantry will never name the fairies if they can help it. They call them the “Good People” or the “Little People,” and go no nearer. Well, observe, and let Professor Pound observe, how C. version gets round that difficulty.
Lastly, I will touch upon the delicate subject of ballads like “Sheath and Knife”, “Lizzie Wan”, “The King’s Daughter, Lady Jean”, and others. The romantic treatment of that subject is very rare in literature. Ford’s play I believe to be the first case of it in ours; and after Ford you must travel down to Shelley for another. With a peasant poet or a peasant auditory there would be no difficulty. For all sorts of reasons, that class knew a great deal about such matters. If you are to conceive those particular ballads as written for the gentry you are adding to fine literature things unknown before the seventeenth century, and then out of sight until the nineteenth. Let the Professor perpend. It does not do to be too exclusive in estimating ballad-origins.
A chance remark of mine the other day to the effect that the worth of a novelist could be best ascertained by the number of souls he had added to the population has drawn me into more correspondence than I care for. You don’t look—at least, I don’t—for precision in suchobiter dicta, but you must have plausibility, and I do think it plausible. You read your novel—say,Emma, and while you read, Emma and Jane Fairfax, Miss Bates and Mrs. Weston and all the rest of them live, and their affairs are your affairs. But when you have shut up the book and put it back in its place, Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates have not disappeared with their circle of acquaintance. You feel about them that they are in history. They have lived in a different way altogether. They have lived as Charles Lamb lived, or Oliver Goldsmith. You would know them if you met them; your great-grandfather may have met them. If you went to Leatherhead (if itwasLeatherhead) you would want to visit their houses. Jane Fairfax is a girl in a book; Miss Bates is a person.
Surely that is true. Consider other cases. There’s no doubt but that Falstaff has reality in a way in which Hamlet has not. Hamlet, so to say, is anad hoccreation. He lives in the play. Falstaff lived in Eastcheap. There’s no doubt about “my” Uncle Toby. Certainly he must have served under Marlborough in Flanders. Neither of Tom Jones nor Sir Charles Grandisoncould so much be said. They were nobody’s Uncle Tom or Uncle Charles, out of their books. Amelia would have been a delicious aunt, but I doubt if she was one. Well, then, there’s no doubt about Mrs. Gamp, or Mr. F.’s Aunt, or Betsy Trotwood or Captain Cuttle. Dickens enriched the population enormously—but not always. There’s a sense in which Dr. Blimber lived, and Major Bagstock did not. Generation was capricious, even with Dickens. Squeers never lived, Creakle did. Micawber lived, Pecksniff didn’t. Trabb’s Boy lived, the Fat Boy didn’t. Cousin Feenix didn’t, Inspector Buckett didn’t—and so on. But if you go through Dickens methodically, as I did during a wakeful two hours in bed the other night, you will find five scores to one miss—in the minor characters. With leading parts it is another thing. I shall come to that presently.
Let me go on. The Wife of Bath—certainly a British subject. In Shakespeare—all the Eastcheap set, and Shallow and Slender; and Parolles, and Dogberry and Verges, and Bottom, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek; and Polonius, the only one inHamlet; and Launcelot Gobbo, the only one inThe Merchant of Venice. Walter Scott: the Baillie and Dandie Dinmont; Andrew Fairservice and Dugald Dalgetty. Last we have Don Quixote and Sancho, much more real to most of us than Philip II or IV, or Alva or Medina-Sidonia, or, for that matter, Miguel de Cervantes himself.
Those two last are enough to prove that it is not only eccentrics who have stepped out of theirbook-covers and found dusty death in the real world: though generally, no doubt, it is the few lines which give life, and provide that the reader shall be one of the parents. You need bold undercutting, and elaboration is apt to blur the outline. The second part of the book might have robbed the pair of their immortality. Yet they live, and have lived, in spite of the Duke and Duchess and the Island. Falstaff, with the better part of two plays to his credit, is the only hero of Shakespeare’s whose reality gets out of the theatre. I can’t admit Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello or Shylock. At Malvolio I hesitate—but if you make a hero of Malvolio you turnTwelfth Nightinto a tragedy. In 1623, the year of Shakespeare’s death, the play was calledMalvolio; and King Charles I annotated the title,Twelfth Night, in his folio with the true name in his own hand.Tantum religio potuit suadere—bonorum.So is it with the women in Shakespeare: the heavy leads are not so persuasive as the small. Of Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse there can be no doubt whatever. But of the heroines, I can only put forward Rosalind—but even Rosalind won’t do. Compare her objectivity with Becky Sharp’s. Who has not felt the immanence of Becky in Brussels? I am afraid that settles Rosalind.
Neither Scott nor Dickens succeeded with heroes and heroines; but Scott has a girl to his credit whose reality is historical: Jeannie Deans. I cannot listen to a doubt about that noble creature. If Scott had given her a burial-place I should have gone to look for her tomb, and never doubted of finding her name in the parishregister. In that he beats Dickens, with whom and Shakespeare he must strive for the crown in this matter of adding to the population. In heroes Dickens has a slight apparent advantage with David Copperfield. At first blush you might think he had lived: turn it over and you won’t think so. Even if you decided for him that would only put Dickens level with Scott and Shakespeare; for his girls don’t live in the pages of their books, and have not so much as temporal creation. I would put Colonel Newcome to Thackeray’s score (with dozens ofminora sidera: Major Pendennis, for instance!) and, personally, the handsome Ethel, on whose account I myself have been to Brighton, and who can bring strong testimony forward in the horde of maidens she has stood for at the font. Surely no other heroine of fiction has been so many times a godmother! Guy Livingstone and Sir Guy Morville, in their day, gave their names pretty handsomely, but—! I had nearly left out, but must by all means add, Alexandre Dumas, who devoted three novels to his musketeers, and, in Porthos, made a living soul. D’Artagnan had been one already, but Dumas barely added anything for all his pains; and with Athos whom he loved and Aramis whom he hated failed altogether. It was not, of course, Dumas’ line to create an illusion by dialogue or description. His was the historical method; his people lived by incident. But Porthos lived anyhow, and would have lived without incident if needs were. “‘En effet,’ fît Porthos, ‘je suis très incrédule.’” The man who said that was once a breathing giant.
What, then, is requisite to the production of this prolonged illusion? A relish, on the writer’s part, a sudden glory, a saliency; nothing which will be a hair’s-breadth out of character, and nothing too much. On the reader’s part intimacy, relish too, the sort of affection you feel towards Sir Roger de Coverley, and a faith which is, like that of a lover, a point of honour. Just as—if I may hazard the comparison—to millions of simple Christians their Saviour, though dead and risen, is still a Child, abambino, so it is with them who have accepted Don Quixote, and have stood by his death-bed. Such a death must have been died, such a life lived indeed. “Believing where we cannot prove.” The heart plays queer tricks with us.
Stevenson’s is an odd case. He really spent himself to give reality to Alan Breck, and failed. He played with Theophilus Godall, the superb tobacconist, and with the Chevalier Burke, and behold, they lived! He added those two to the population. He could not go wrong with them, had them to a tick. It is observable that extravagance of matter is no bar to illusion. But what is wrong with Alan Breck?
The peasant is a shy bird, by nature wild, by habit as secret as a creature of the night. If he is ever vocal you and I are the last to hear of it. He is as nearly inarticulate as anyone living in civilisation may be. Consequently a peasant sufficiently moved, or when moved, sufficiently armed with vocables to become a poet, even a bad poet, has always been rare. When you need to add genius to sensibility and equipment, as you must to get a good poet, you may judge of the rarity. Indeed, to put a name to him,exceptis excipiendis, I can only find John Clare. Other names occur, but for various reasons have to be cut out. There was a postman poet in Devonshire, a policeman poet in Yorkshire; and there was a footman poet. One of those certainly had merit, even genius, and any one of them may have been a peasant in origin. But by the time they began to make poetry they had ceased to be peasants; and that rules them out, as it does Robert Blomfield and Thomas Hardy. Then there is Burns. But Burns was not a peasant. We in England should have called him a yeoman. Besides, his is one of those cases of transcendent genius where origin goes for nothing, but all seems the grace of God. At that rate the corn-chandlers might claim Shakespeare, or the chemists’ assistants Keats.
But there’s no doubt about Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant, son of peasants, brought up at a dame-school, and at farm labour all hisworking life. It is true that he was “discovered” by Taylor and Hessey, published, sold; that his first book ran into three editions in a year; that he was lionised, became one of the Lamb-Hazlitt-Haydon circle, and thus inevitably sophisticated with the speculations not of his own world. But roughly speaking, from start to close, his merits were the merits of the peasantry, and his faults as pardonable as theirs. He was never gross, as they never are; he was never common, as the pick of them are not; he was deeply rooted, as “The Flitting”, one of his best poems, will prove; he was exceedingly amorous, but a constant lover; nothing in nature escaped his eye; and lastly, in his technique he was a realist out and out. Of his quality take this from “Summer Evening”:
“In tall grass, by fountain head,Weary then he crops to bed.”
“In tall grass, by fountain head,Weary then he crops to bed.”
“In tall grass, by fountain head,Weary then he crops to bed.”
“In tall grass, by fountain head,
Weary then he crops to bed.”
“He” is the evening moth.
“From the haycocks’ moistened heapsStartled frogs take sudden leaps;And along the shaven mead,Jumping travellers, they proceed:Quick the dewy grass divides,Moistening sweet their speckled sides;From the grass or flowret’s cupQuick the dew-drop bounces up.Now the blue fog creeps along,And the bird’s forgot his song:Flowers now sleep within their hoods;Daisies button into buds;From soiling dew the buttercupShuts his golden jewels up;And the rose and woodbine theyWait again the smiles of day.”
“From the haycocks’ moistened heapsStartled frogs take sudden leaps;And along the shaven mead,Jumping travellers, they proceed:Quick the dewy grass divides,Moistening sweet their speckled sides;From the grass or flowret’s cupQuick the dew-drop bounces up.Now the blue fog creeps along,And the bird’s forgot his song:Flowers now sleep within their hoods;Daisies button into buds;From soiling dew the buttercupShuts his golden jewels up;And the rose and woodbine theyWait again the smiles of day.”
“From the haycocks’ moistened heapsStartled frogs take sudden leaps;And along the shaven mead,Jumping travellers, they proceed:Quick the dewy grass divides,Moistening sweet their speckled sides;From the grass or flowret’s cupQuick the dew-drop bounces up.Now the blue fog creeps along,And the bird’s forgot his song:Flowers now sleep within their hoods;Daisies button into buds;From soiling dew the buttercupShuts his golden jewels up;And the rose and woodbine theyWait again the smiles of day.”
“From the haycocks’ moistened heaps
Startled frogs take sudden leaps;
And along the shaven mead,
Jumping travellers, they proceed:
Quick the dewy grass divides,
Moistening sweet their speckled sides;
From the grass or flowret’s cup
Quick the dew-drop bounces up.
Now the blue fog creeps along,
And the bird’s forgot his song:
Flowers now sleep within their hoods;
Daisies button into buds;
From soiling dew the buttercup
Shuts his golden jewels up;
And the rose and woodbine they
Wait again the smiles of day.”
The poem runs to length, as most of Clare’s do, but the amount of exact, close and loving observation in it may be gauged from my extract. It is remarkable, and worthy of memory for the sake of what is to follow. You may say that such microscopic work may be outmatched by gentle poets; you may tell me of sandblind Tennyson, who missed nothing, of Cockney Keats and the “Ode to Autumn,” and say that it is a matter of the passion which drives the poet. There is, I think, this difference to be noted. Observation induces emotion in the peasant-poet, whereas the gentle or scholar poet will not observe intensely, if at all, until he is deeply stirred. I don’t say that that will account for everybody: it will not dispose of Tennyson, nor of Wordsworth—but it is true of the great majority.
There is one other quality I should look for in a peasant-poet, and that is what I can only go on calling “the lyric cry.” It is a thing unmistakable when you find it, the pure and simple utterance in words of the passion in the heart. “Had we never lov’d sae kindly”, “Come away, come away, Death”, “The Sun to the Summer, my Willie to me”, “Toll for the brave”, “Ariel to Miranda, take”, “I have had playmates”, “Young Jamie lou’d me weel”,—they crowd upon me. Absolute simplicity, water-clear sincerity are ofthe essence of it, and of both qualities the peasant is possessed; but to them it is requisite to add the fire of passion and the hue of beauty before they can tremble into music. These things cannot be told, since private grief is sacred, but I have had experience of late years in my intercourse with village people: men bereaved of their sons, girls mourning their lovers. Words, phrases have broken from them to which a very little more was needed to make them sound like this:
“The wind doth blow to-day, my love,And a few small drops of rain;I never had but one true-love,In cold grave she was lain.”
“The wind doth blow to-day, my love,And a few small drops of rain;I never had but one true-love,In cold grave she was lain.”
“The wind doth blow to-day, my love,And a few small drops of rain;I never had but one true-love,In cold grave she was lain.”
“The wind doth blow to-day, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.”
That is a perfect example of what I mean. It comes from Sussex, and if there could be any doubt of its peasant-origin the weather lore of the first two lines should settle it. And this from Scotland may be compared with it:
“It fell about the Martinmass,When nights were lang and mirk,The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,And their hats were of the birk.“It neither grew in dyke nor ditch,Nor yet in any sheugh;But at the gates o’ ParadiseThat birk grew fair eneugh.”
“It fell about the Martinmass,When nights were lang and mirk,The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,And their hats were of the birk.“It neither grew in dyke nor ditch,Nor yet in any sheugh;But at the gates o’ ParadiseThat birk grew fair eneugh.”
“It fell about the Martinmass,When nights were lang and mirk,The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,And their hats were of the birk.
“It fell about the Martinmass,
When nights were lang and mirk,
The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,
And their hats were of the birk.
“It neither grew in dyke nor ditch,Nor yet in any sheugh;But at the gates o’ ParadiseThat birk grew fair eneugh.”
“It neither grew in dyke nor ditch,
Nor yet in any sheugh;
But at the gates o’ Paradise
That birk grew fair eneugh.”
No gentle poet short of Shakespeare could get the awful simplicity of that; and Shakespeare,I think, only achieved it when, as for Ophelia’s faltered songs, he used peasant-rhymes.
It is, to me, a task of absorbing interest to go through Child’s huge repertorium piece by piece and pick out the folk-ballads which have the marks of peasant origin. So far as I can tell at present, certainly one half, and it may be three-fourths of them are peasant songs—I don’t say necessarily made by peasants, but in any case madeforthem. If one could, by such means, form aCorpus Poeticum Villanumthere would be a treasure-house worth plundering by more students than one. For as nothing moves a people more than poetry, when it is good poetry, so nothing needs truth for its indispensable food so much as poetry. If you have what most deeply touched and stirred a people you have that which was dearest to them, the blood as it were of their hearts. Thecriteriaare as I have indicated: minute observation, stark simplicity, the lyric cry, and realism. You may add to those a preference of sentiment to romance, and a decided adherence to the law of nature when that is counter to the law of the Church. Thus incontinence in love is not judged hardly when passion in the man or kindness in the woman has brought it about; on the other hand, infidelity to the marriage vow never escapes. Again, that which the Italians call “assassino per amore” is a matter of course in peasant-poetry; and another crime, universally condemned, except by about two of our gentle poets, is freely treated, and—not to say condoned—freely pitied. Perhaps one of the most curious of all the ballads is “LittleMusgrave,” which is English and of unknown age. It is quoted inThe Knight of the Burning Pestleof 1611. Little Musgrave and Lord Barnard’s wife fall in love, and betray his lordship. He, however, is informed by his page, and rides out to clear his honour. Musgrave hears something:
“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,Methinks I hear the jay;Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,And I would I were away.”
“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,Methinks I hear the jay;Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,And I would I were away.”
“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,Methinks I hear the jay;Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,And I would I were away.”
“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,
Methinks I hear the jay;
Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,
And I would I were away.”
But she answers him:
“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,And huddle me from the cold;’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boyA-driving his sheep to the fold.”
“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,And huddle me from the cold;’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boyA-driving his sheep to the fold.”
“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,And huddle me from the cold;’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boyA-driving his sheep to the fold.”
“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,
And huddle me from the cold;
’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boy
A-driving his sheep to the fold.”
Lord Barnard breaks in and does his affair with the two of them. Then:
“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd,‘To put these lovers in;But lay my lady on the upper hand,For she came of the better kin!’”
“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd,‘To put these lovers in;But lay my lady on the upper hand,For she came of the better kin!’”
“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd,‘To put these lovers in;But lay my lady on the upper hand,For she came of the better kin!’”
“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd,
‘To put these lovers in;
But lay my lady on the upper hand,
For she came of the better kin!’”
Realism indeed: but a poem.
If Mr. Cecil Sharp, as I hope, is collecting his many and scattered publications under one roof, so to speak, he will be doing a service to a number of people besides me. I await his learned leisure, having now possessed myself of hisEnglish Folk-Songs, Vols. I and II. He will not achieve what I want to see done before I die, aCorpus Poeticum Villanum, because, being a musician before all things, he is only interested in peasant verse of which the music has survived. He won’t do that, but he will help somebody else towards it with an indispensable supplement to Child, in an accessible form; and that will be great gain—goodliness with contentment, in fact.
Valuable variants of many and many a folk-song are to be found in his first instalment; though such was the phenomenal patience and far-flung activity of the American that in two volumes of a hundred songs Mr. Sharp has only been able to find one which is not in the great work. That is one which would have delighted the Professor—“Bruton Town.” TheEnglish and Scottish Popular Balladscontains nothing at all like “Bruton Town”; yet the theme of it is one of those which was common to every folk, no doubt, in Europe. Boccaccio gave it its first fame, Hans Sachs followed him. In England we had to wait for Keats, who, so far as we are concerned, supplanted the Florentine and the Nuremberger; for all the Britains know somethingof Isabella and the Pot of Basil. It must, however, be noted that the specific note of those masterpieces is not the real theme, and never could have been. The horrid dealings with the murdered man’s head are macabre embroidery altogether too sophisticated for a folk-tale. The real theme is the Squire of Low Degree. You get it in the “Duchess of Malfy,” and you get it in “Bruton Town.” There is no instance of the morbid in a peasant-ballad. Elemental human beings dealt in elemental passions. Love, pride, scorn, birth, death were concern enough for them. So, in “Bruton Town,” the theme is the trusty servant, his master’s daughter, the young men’s reprobation and vindication of their sister’s “honour.” Here is the opening:
“In Bruton Town there lived a farmerWho had two sons and one daughter dear.By day and night they were a-contrivingTo fill their parents’ hearts with fear.“One told his secret to none other,But to his brother this he said:I think our servant courts our sister,I think they have a mind to wed.”
“In Bruton Town there lived a farmerWho had two sons and one daughter dear.By day and night they were a-contrivingTo fill their parents’ hearts with fear.“One told his secret to none other,But to his brother this he said:I think our servant courts our sister,I think they have a mind to wed.”
“In Bruton Town there lived a farmerWho had two sons and one daughter dear.By day and night they were a-contrivingTo fill their parents’ hearts with fear.
“In Bruton Town there lived a farmer
Who had two sons and one daughter dear.
By day and night they were a-contriving
To fill their parents’ hearts with fear.
“One told his secret to none other,But to his brother this he said:I think our servant courts our sister,I think they have a mind to wed.”
“One told his secret to none other,
But to his brother this he said:
I think our servant courts our sister,
I think they have a mind to wed.”
Doggerel or not, I don’t see how that could be bettered. Mr. Sharp thinks something has been lost, but I think not. What could heighten the note of mystery and dread with which the second quatrain opens—“One told his secret to none other”? Mr. Sharp has not—he confesses it—been able to refrain from the temptation whichhas always beset the ballad-hunter, from Percy and Sir Walter onwards, of working on the ore which he finds; but that stroke of art in particular is unpremeditated and original, I feel sure. It is constant to all the versions of “Bruton Town” which I have seen.
The hasty whispered plot follows, the preparation of the “day of hunting,” the murder, and the sister’s discovery of the deed. She rises early and finds the corpse. Then comes:
“She took her kerchief from her pocket,And wiped his eyes though he was blind;‘Because he was my own true lover,My own true lover and friend of mine.’”
“She took her kerchief from her pocket,And wiped his eyes though he was blind;‘Because he was my own true lover,My own true lover and friend of mine.’”
“She took her kerchief from her pocket,And wiped his eyes though he was blind;‘Because he was my own true lover,My own true lover and friend of mine.’”
“She took her kerchief from her pocket,
And wiped his eyes though he was blind;
‘Because he was my own true lover,
My own true lover and friend of mine.’”
That again is constant, and could not be mended: though Mr. Sharp would mend it if he could, thinking that the hasty shifting of persons, from third to first, is awkward. It may be awkward, but is very characteristic and, as I think, evidence of authenticity. One more verse, which devotes the mourner to a shared grave, ends “Bruton Town” in pure tragedy; pity, terror, but not disgust. Boccaccio’s additament is nasty, and Keats did not avoid it, though he was not so nasty as Boccaccio.
“Bruton Town” comes from Somerset, and is worthy of that songful shire. It carries in itself its own conviction of peasant origin. No other race of our people would have conceived the verse last quoted exactly like that, nor any other audience have accepted it as adequate. “Friend of mine” is thepièce de conviction: the sweetestname a village girl can give her lover is that of her friend. The pathos of “And wiped his eyes though he was blind” is the pathos of a wounded bird. It is beyond the compass of art altogether, one of those strokes of truth which puts art out of court. It is Nature’s justification before the schools.
Doggerel, then, or not? There are other things in Mr. Sharp’s volumes which may help to determine. There is the well-known “Little Sir Hugh,” where the sacrifice of a Christian child by the Jews is sung. Mr. Sharp’s version is in parts new. Take this out of it for good doggerel:
“She set him up in a gilty chair,She gave him sugar sweet;She laid him out on a dresser board,And stabbed him like a sheep.”
“She set him up in a gilty chair,She gave him sugar sweet;She laid him out on a dresser board,And stabbed him like a sheep.”
“She set him up in a gilty chair,She gave him sugar sweet;She laid him out on a dresser board,And stabbed him like a sheep.”
“She set him up in a gilty chair,
She gave him sugar sweet;
She laid him out on a dresser board,
And stabbed him like a sheep.”
Well, without any pretence atcuriosa felicitas, that does its work. It is terse, tense, yet easy and colloquial. It is shocking rather than pitiful; but it means to be so. It might be evidence at the Assizes, where, term by term, they supply just the kind of thing which would have given that versifier what he wanted. Mr. Sharp’s “Little Sir Hugh” in fact is not far from Catnachery, of which he gives some avowed examples. It has only to be set beside “Bruton Town” to settle it that if “Sir Hugh” is doggerel, the other is not. Ease, tensity, colloquialism both have; but then comes the difference. “Sir Hugh” shocks, “Bruton Town” moves; “Bruton Town” has in it the lyric cry, “Sir Hugh” has it not.
Take as a last case “The True Lover’s Farewell,” pure doggerel, but excellent of its kind. Everybody knows it, for a reason:
“O fare you well, I must be goneAnd leave you for a while;But wherever I go I will return,If I go ten thousand mile,My dear,If I go ten thousand mile.”
“O fare you well, I must be goneAnd leave you for a while;But wherever I go I will return,If I go ten thousand mile,My dear,If I go ten thousand mile.”
“O fare you well, I must be goneAnd leave you for a while;But wherever I go I will return,If I go ten thousand mile,My dear,If I go ten thousand mile.”
“O fare you well, I must be gone
And leave you for a while;
But wherever I go I will return,
If I go ten thousand mile,
My dear,
If I go ten thousand mile.”
Now for the reason. Burns lifted that for his occasions, and hardly altered it. He took it and fitted it into its place among other verses on the same model—but this is how he began:
“O my luve’s like a red, red roseThat’s newly sprung in June:O my luve’s like the melodieThat’s sweetly played in tune—”
“O my luve’s like a red, red roseThat’s newly sprung in June:O my luve’s like the melodieThat’s sweetly played in tune—”
“O my luve’s like a red, red roseThat’s newly sprung in June:O my luve’s like the melodieThat’s sweetly played in tune—”
“O my luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June:
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune—”
An opening, observe, of three beats; and then, as a kind of chorus, the emotions quickened up, three four-beat verses of abandonment increasing in reckless simile, and ending with:
“And fare thee well, my only luve;And fare thee well awhile!And I will come again, my luve,Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
“And fare thee well, my only luve;And fare thee well awhile!And I will come again, my luve,Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
“And fare thee well, my only luve;And fare thee well awhile!And I will come again, my luve,Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
“And fare thee well, my only luve;
And fare thee well awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.
Not long ago I was on the Downs in pursuit of wild raspberries, which, as the old phrase goes, are very plenty this year. Although the days are still those of the dog, there was autumn in the air even then: a grey sky with a cool stream of wind from the west in which was that familiar taint of things dying which autumn always brings. The flowers were of autumn too—scabious, bedstraw and rest-harrow; mushrooms were to be had for the stooping, which we usually seek in dewy September dawns. On the other hand, there were the raspberries; the brambles were in flower, and the corn just tinged with yellow. After a burning May and June, a dripping July, the times are out of joint—but I filled a hat full of raspberries.
I found the best of them in a pear-shaped hollow in the ground, a place rather like a giant’s sauce-boat, in depth perhaps some six feet. Allowing for the slow accumulation of soil tumbled from the sides, for growth by vegetation and decay spread over many centuries, it may once have been another three feet down. Call it, then, nine feet deep. By outside measurements it was fourteen yards long by nine at the broad end of the pear, narrowing down to three where the stalk would have been. To-day the actual floor-space is barely two yards at the broad end. That is because the sides have fallen in, and made descent a matter of walking, which originally, no doubt, was contrived by some sort of a ladder, orby slithering down a tree-trunk. Vegetation is profuse in there: the turf like a sponge, the scabious as big as ladies’ watches, the raspberries good enough for Bond Street. Well they may be, for they are rooted in the bones and household spoil of more than two thousand years. The place was a house long before Cæsar knew Britain, before the Belgae were in Wilts, before Wilts was Wilts. To revert to a convenient term, I picked my raspberries in an Iberian house.
I considered it that day in the light thrown upon its proportions for me (all unknown to the author) by a terrible little book, the more terrible for its dispassionate statement, called “The Woman in the Little House,” whose author, Mrs. Margaret Eyles, has herself experienced what she writes of. Her Little House is one of, I daresay, a million; one of those narrow, flat-faced boxes of brick—“two up and two down,” as they are expressed—sprawling far and wide over the home counties about London, in which the artisans and operatives who work thereabout contrive, as best they may, to bestow themselves. It does not need—or should not—Mrs. Eyles’s calm and good-tempered account to realise that such dwellings are bad for health and morals, fatal to the nerves and ruinous to the purses of their occupants. Yet she mentions more than one simple truth which proves immediately that the smallest house at the lowest possible rent may be much more costly than a large one—for instance, she points out that the smallness of the house and the want of storage room make purchase of stores in any kind of bulk out of the question. But Ihave neither the time nor the knowledge to develop these questions properly. I have only one criticism to make, and that is that the sufferings of the small householder cannot all be laid to size; that the difficulties of the Woman in the Little House are not only economic. Fecklessness in the Woman must take its share of blame. It is hard to bring up a family in the fear of God and the use of soap, where there seems to be neither room for the one nor chance for the other. It is wearing-down work to be nurse to many small and fretful children while you are carrying yet another, to keep order in a household which has neither scope for, nor desire of order, to deal with drunken husband, grudging landlord, quarrelsome neighbour—and so on. But Mrs. Eyles knows that these things can be done by the woman who realises that they must, that they have been done and are being done; and though both of us may grudge, as we do, the waste of nerve, youth, beauty, vitality which they involve, yet had we rather preach the gospel of such heroic dumb endurance, such constancy in adversity, such piety,and their reward, than have the heroines fall back, flounder in the trough of the wave, or the “sensual sty.” But for their lamps held up, indeed would “universal darkness cover all.”
I seem to be far from my neolithic dwelling; yet am close to it; for that itself was not much smaller than the “Little House” of to-day, and yet is three thousand years older at the very least. To its successor, the Celtic and early English wattle-and-daub hut this brick box has succeeded,while here in the village under the Down there are two-roomed, three-roomed tenements in which may be found man, wife, and eight or ten children. So far as floor-space, air-space, headroom, sanitation go, they will be very little better than the hole in the chalk. So far as intellectual and moral outlook go, so far as foresight, restraint of members, mental capacity, while tradition is still the universal guide—a tradition which it is not easy to distinguish from mere instinct—there is little reason to suppose the occupants of the one differ materially from those of the other. I am not to regret it or reprove it, but to state it; and go on to say that when tradition is modified by character the state of a family so conditioned may be not only orderly, not only prosperous, but happy—and by that I don’t mean merely contented, but consciously and avowedly happy. I know several which are so; and while I see, or hear, of their well-being I have no reason for being anything but glad of it. Sir Alfred Mond, to be sure, has had nothing to do with it; but it is my belief that when it comes to a tug-of-war between character and Sir Alfred Mond, character will pull the right honourable baronet all over the place.
I cannot bring myself to be that whole-hearted kind of reformer who says, my sauce must be your sauce, or there is no health for the world. If I must provide a villager (as surely I must) with store-room for his potatoes, I would not give him a bath-room for the purpose. I am uncomfortable myself if I don’t souse every morning in warm water; but I know several persons whodo nothing of the sort, and are not in the least uncomfortable, nor (to the senses) unclean. I have been a guest in a house in Northumberland of the right Iberian kind, which consisted of one room only. A better-conditioned, more wholesome, more intelligent family than I found there I don’t expect to find easily anywhere. Tradition explained, and character made tolerable, such a dwelling. I have not actually seen, but know the appearance of the house in Ecclefechan, where Carlyle was reared. I should be surprised to learn that it was more than “two up and one down,” rather surprised if it was so much. I don’t put Thomas Carlyle forward as an example of the modification of circumstance by character: he was much the reverse. But all that he tells me of his father and mother was written for my learning. The rule of Saint Use was well kept in Ecclefechan, or I am the more deceived. If Carlyle’s mother would have exchanged her lot for that of any woman born she was not the woman he celebrates. And have we not heard of Margaret Ogilvie, and been the better of it? It is not the present-day practice to consider our social troubles from the moral end, and I am sorry for it. The economic end engrosses us altogether; yet it is not, strictly speaking, the “business-end.” It is little use abolishing this or that institution while human nature remains as it always was.
There is one serious subject which Mrs. Eyles has had to deal with, into which I hesitate to intrude. Iberian women are kind, and their men clamative. As she has heard it said by many a one of them, the day may be endured, but not thenight. Well, there again character can modify use-and-wont, either by teaching acquiescence or by inspiring revolt. And yet I cannot but remember what was said to a friend of mine in a neighbouring village in the first of our terrible four years of war. The speaker was a woman, a mother of children, who for the first time in her life had enough money and her house to herself. “Ah, ma’am,” she said, “you may depend upon it, this war has made many happy homes.”
The valley is narrow, not much more than a hundred and fifty yards wide, where I am stationed now. Of them some twenty are claimed by the headlong river and its beaches of flat grey stones, and perhaps eighty more by small green garths, divided by walls. Then broken ground of boulders, bent and bracken, and then, immediately, the fells rise up like walls to a ragged skyline. They stream with water at every fissure, are quickly clouded, blurred and blotted by rain; then clear, and shining like glass in the sun. The look of things is not the same for half an hour at a time. Fleets of cloud come up from the Atlantic, anchor themselves on the mountain-tops, and descend in floods of rain, sharp and swift as arrows. Or if the wind drive them they will fleet across the landscape like white curtains, and whelm the world in blown water. You don’t “make” your hay in this country, you “win” it if you can: you steal it, as they say. As for your patches of oats, as likely as not you will use them for green fodder. Roots would be your crop if you had room for them among the stones—but in Eskdale you are a sheep-farmer, with a thousand head of sheep and a thousand acres of fell to feed them on.
I am new to this corner of our country, where Lancashire and Cumberland run so much in and out of each other that the people have given up county categories and call it all indifferently Furness Fells. I don’t know any other part ofEngland so sparely occupied. The farms are few, large and far apart; there are practically no villages; and my own cottage (which was built for a dead and buried mining scheme, and is the last of its clan) is the only one to be found within miles of empty country. A plain-faced, plain-dealing, plain-spoken race lives here, in a countryside where every natural landmark has a Norse name, and one is recalled to the Sagas at every turn of the valley, and by every common occupation of man. The economy of life exactly follows that told of in the Icelandic tales. In the homestead live the farmer and his thralls, the wife and her maids. There are no married labourers, and board and lodging is part of every young man’s and young woman’s hire. Twelve such people live in the farmhouse nearest to me—twelve people, eleven dogs, an uncertain number of children, and a bottle-fed black lamb. Not only so, but it is true that the dalesmen and their servants are Icelandic in favour and way of speech. Dialect is not much to the point; intonation is a great deal to it. That runs flat, level and monotonous—unemotionally, like Danish. It makes a kind of muted speech, so that it is hard to know whether a woman is pleased or angry, or a man of agreeable or offensive intention.
I never met with a people more innately democratic than the Danes until I met this year with this people of Eskdale. It is not at all that they seek to assert their equality: it is that they know it. The manners depicted in the Sagas are those of men dealing with men. Neither inflation nor deflation is deemed necessary, neither arrogancenor condescension. You make a statement, short and unadorned: it is for the other man to take or leave. Speech is not epigrammatic because minds move slowly here. But it is very terse—because it may rain before you have finished. Plainer than speech are manners. They were that in the Sagas, in more than one of which the starting-point of feud and vendetta was the persistent and obtuse besetting of a daughter of one house by the son of another. She was busy, or busied, as in all primitive societies the women are; but he was not. So he hung about her house, not attempting speech with her, not explaining or justifying or extenuating his oppressive behaviour, simply overshadowing the poor thing, causing her to be talked about, and scandalising her family. There was but one way of dealing with him in those days, which was to crack his skull. That was done, and so the drama put on its legs. Things are better than that now, yet the principle is the same. I remember the discomfort and alarm of three southern maids whom we once brought up with us to a farmhouse in Selkirk. At their supper-hour three strange young men were discovered sitting on a gate in full view of the kitchen window. Nothing makes an Iberian so uncomfortable as to be watched at a meal. But nothing would move the young men, not even the drawing of the curtains. They had no explanation to give, no excuse to make. One faintly whistled between his teeth, and then said that it was a free country. So it was, if to make free is to be so.
It is much the same here. The young men of the farm regard every young woman, of whateverwalk in life, as a thing to be whistled in, like a sheep-dog. They have the Saga knack of declaring the state of their feelings by imposing themselves upon its object. They beleaguer the house, shadow the desired, trust to wearing her down, hope to bore her into love. Or, rather, they don’t care whether she love or not, so long as they are allowed it. Woman in the Sagas is a chattel, a thing to be bought or stolen. So she was to the Homeric hero. So she seems to be here.
The Danes, as we loosely call our Norse invaders, were a more dominant strain than whatever people they found in Furness. Not only have they implanted their form, feature and hue upon the Cumbrians, not only named their rivers and hills for them, or a great many of them, but they have established their social code. “Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,” is not a sentiment of Southern Britain. It is firmly implanted in the mind of the young Dalesman, who finds it right and proper.
I believe that we have always had the good conceit of ourselves which we have still. We complain freely of our weather, institutions, habits, manners and customs—but that is a freedom which we arrogate to ourselves: when foreigners do the same we are merely amused, not for a moment supposing either that their charges are true or that they really mean them. Though our grousing can hardly be dated with safety before Horace Walpole, our complacency is of pretty old standing, and goes back to the time when we began to look Europe over, to say nothing of America, and incidentally grew curious about our own country. Leland, Speed, Camden, Drayton, Coryat, and finally old Thomas Fuller, between them have fairly summed up what there can have been to say for us when we had emerged from the Middle Ages and were beginning to shape for posterity; and of all those Fuller is perhaps the least known and the best worth a thought, if only because his eyes were upon what he saw rather than what he knew. The rock upon which most of our eulogists split was archæology. There Leland foundered, Speed and Camden too. Drayton had his troubles elsewhere, and plenty of them, as a poet would. Avoiding Scylla, he barged into Charybdis, where mythopoiesis lurked for him like a mermaid, and sank him so deep that he never came up again. He is very nearly unreadable; he invites ridicule and winsdisgust. Over and over his bemused corpus of rime, John Selden, a most learned spider, spun webs of erudition. It is difficult to read either of them, but of the two I prefer the poet. The present Laureate puts the antiquary first. But when you come to Thomas Fuller, D.D., hisWorthies of England, that wordy work, encumbered though it be with texts of divinity, you do at least get your teeth into something upon which to bite. He did not live to finish it, though, and the piety of his son John, “the author’s orphan,” as he described himself, erected it as a monument to his memory in 1672.
Fuller, I think, set out with the intention of belauding the human products of our realm. He cast all mankind into categories and, with them for a sieve, shook out the shires to see what he could find. To that he added matter concerning the natural and manufactured commodities of England, which forms the best reading in him to-day. One does not particularly want to know what he had to say about Sir Walter Raleigh or Cardinal Wolsey; even his opinion of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson need not detain us long, though he seems to have known personally the pair of them, and to have considered Jonson considerably the greater man. Wit was always reckoned above genius in that day. But he admits Shakespeare as a worthy of Warwickshire, accords him exactly as much space as Michael Drayton, “a pious poet,” and thinks that in our greatest man “three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded”; a sufficiently qualified judgment. Those three are—“Martial, in thewarlike sound of his surname”; Ovid, “the most natural and witty of all the poets”; and Plautus, “an exact comedian, yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself.” He goes on, “Add to all these, that though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious.” Not extravagant praise. He does not know the date of his death, leaves it blank. And so much for Shakespeare.
It doesn’t matter; nor are his judgments of Jonson and Donne of any more moment. But it is interesting to know what the counties were doing in 1660, though, except grazing, it was little enough. In fact, what he does not say is surprising. I had certainly understood, for instance, that Newcastle was exporting coal long before that; but Fuller has no “natural commodities” to report of Northumberland. No coal in Lancashire, either. Lancashire’s products were “oates,” “allume,” and “oxen,” and her only manufacture, so declared, “fustians.” Bolton, he tells you, “is the staple place for this commodity, being brought thither” from all parts of the county. But Manchester was spinning cotton. “As for Manchester, the cottons thereof carry away the credit in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago. For when learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his guide travailed Lancashire, he called Manchester the fairest and quickest town in this county, and sure I am it has lost neither spruceness nor spirits since that time.” That is a good report, made no worse probably by theentire absence of Liverpool from the record. But there is more to come. “Other commodities made in Manchester are so small in themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an haberdasher of small wares. Being therefore too many for me to reckon up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in someManchester-Tickin, and to fasten them with thepinns, or tye them with thetape, and also (because sure bind sure find) to bind them about withpointsandlaces, all made in the same place.” That is as near to jocularity as Dr. Fuller can go. With much the same elephantine gambols used Mr. Pecksniff in a later day to entertain his daughters and pupils.
He records as proverbial of Lancashire her “fair women,” not without pointing a moral. “I believe that the God of nature having given fair complections to the women in this county art may save herpains(not to say hersinnes) in endeavouring to better them. But let the females of this county know, that though in the Old Testament express notice be taken of the beauty of many women,a.Sarah,b.Rebekah,c.Rachel,e.Thamar,f.Abishaig,g.Esther; yet in the New Testament no mention is made at all of the fairness of any woman.” Grace, he would have you know, is all, and “soul-piercing perfection far better than skin-deep fairness.” Two other facts about Lancashire are noteworthy: “It is written upon a wall in Rome,Ribchesterwas as rich as any town in Christendom”—that is one; and the other is that “About Wiggin and elsewhere in this county men go a-fishing with spadesand matthooks.” As thus: “First they pierce the turfie ground, and under it meet with a black and deadish water, and in it small fishes do swim.” Such fish, he thinks, are likely unwholesome, and so do I; therefore I am pleased with his comfortable conclusion. “Let them be thankful to God in the first place who need not such meat to feed upon. And next them let those be thankful which have such meat to feed upon, when they need it.” Very much in the manner of Dr. Pangloss.
Fuller’s own fishing after “natural commodities” obliges him to use a small mesh. Even so he sometimes wins nothing. Cambridgeshire gives him eels, hares, saffron, and willows—a mixed bag; Essex oysters, hops andpuitts, by which he intends peewits. Hants does better, with red deer, honey, wax, and hogs; but Wilts can only offer tobacco-pipes, and wool. Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness they are far short of the Indian”—but there they are. He tops up a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones: Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”; Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth andlarks”; slightly better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent, “cherries, sainfoin, madder”; Hereford, “wool and salmons.” Clearly it was a day of small things. Staffordshire was making nails; Derbyshire mining lead and brewing mildale; Somerset produced serges at Taunton; Yorkshire bred horses and made knives at Sheffield, as she did in Chaucer’s time; and that is about all that “the painted counties” were doing in 1660. For the rest, it was grazing and small-farming, large families and the beginning of religious ferment which was to work for another hundred years before it came to a head.
But old Fuller himself was what he calls somebody else, “a cordial protestant,” and does not allow us to forget it for a page at a time. He cannot speak of salt in Cheshire without remembering Lot’s wife, nor of polled cattle without head-shaking over the calf in Horeb. “The historian,” he reminds himself, “must not devour the divine in me.” He never does. The Scriptures are his real affair, as they were coming to be ours in 1660. It would be an edifying exercise, remembering that, to reckon up our gains and losses out of his meandering pages.
The Athenians, I believe, used to round off their bouts of high tragedy with a farce of satyrs and clowns, and the practice has survived almost to our own day. When Charles Lamb and his sister went to Drury Lane,PizzaroorArtaxerxeswould be followed byHarlequin Dame Trot, orHarlequin Dick Whittington and his Cat. I am not scholar enough to say of the Elizabethans that they were in the same tradition; but if they were I can perceive some intention inGammer Gurton’s Needle, which has been newly edited and printed for Mr. Basil Blackwell of Oxford. Otherwise I confess myself at a loss. It is an Elizabethan or, as I think, an even earlier knockabout, in which those only who saw fun in a harlequinade would find the kind of thing that they liked. That it should have been contrived for the amusement of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is perhaps not so wonderful as it would have been if Ben Jonson’sBartholomew’s Fairhad not been revived the other day with some measure of success. And I suppose that the persons who were diverted by seeing Malvolio in the cage were very capable of being pleased withGammer Gurion’s Needle. It is no worse than Shakespeare at his worst, and much better than Ben Jonson in that it is much shorter. Launcelot Gobbos, Speeds, Launces fill the stage. There are no Dogberrys, nor Dame Quickleys; no Master Shallow, no Bottom, and of course no Falstaff. But the difference is ofdegree, not of kind.Gammer Gurtonis writtende haut en bas, as Shakespeare also wrote of rural life and manners. Its author, “Mr. S., Mr. of Art,” whoever he was—and the editor thinks that he was William Stevenson, Fellow of Christ’s in the fifteen-fifties—as heartily scorned the peasantry as William Shakespeare ever did; and I think that he knew quite as much about them. In fact, I am led to believe that the thing is not far from being a faithful picture, as nearly so, indeed, as its comic intention will allow it to be. If that is so it deserves study. When we talk, as we are apt to do, of “Merrie England,” it is as well that we should know in what England’s merriment consisted.
Gammer Gurton is mending the breeches of her man Hodge when she sees the cat at the milk-bowl. Starting up to trounce the thief, she drops her needle, her “fayre long strayght neele that was her onely treasure.” That is serious. The house is turned inside out and upside down. Tib the maid has to sift the rubbish-heap; Cock the boy spends his day on all-fours and his nose to the ground. Enters here the villain of the piece, the village half-wit, Bedlam Dick, and says that Dame Chat has the “neele.” That prepares for the great scene of the play, a slanging match between the two old women, which ends in a tooth-and-nail affair. Gammer Gurton sends for the priest; Bedlam Dick primes Dame Chat. He tells her that Hodge is going to rob her hen-roost; and later, to the priest, he suggests a hiding-place whence he can spy on Dame Chat and the “neele” in felonious use. The priestedges in; Dame Chat thinks he is the chicken-thief, and cracks his skull for him. Mighty hullabaloo: the bailiff is called in to arbitrate. Bedlam Dick gives Hodge a smack on the buttocks, and drives the needle home. That is the plot, expounded in plain words which, no doubt, were exceedingly close to the bone.
According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the life of the English peasant in Reformation days was a purely animal process, punctuated only by foul language. Eating and drinking were the pleasures, working was the pain, contriving how to get liquor without working for it the only intellectual exercise. InGammer Gurton’s Needlethere was not even love to complicate existence. Ale was the Good, and the only good.