Part 6

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 parish register. 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 of _minora 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, a _bambino_, 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?

PEASANT POETS

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 his working 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.”

“He” is the evening moth.

“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 of the 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.”

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’ 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 made _for_ them. If one could, by such means, form a _Corpus Poeticum Villanum_ there 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. The _criteria_ are 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 “Little Musgrave,” which is English and of unknown age. It is quoted in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ of 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.”

But she answers him:

“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!’”

Realism indeed: but a poem.

DOGGEREL OR NOT

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 his _English Folk-Songs_, Vols. I and II. He will not achieve what I want to see done before I die, a _Corpus 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.” The _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ contains 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 something of 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 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.”

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 which has 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.’”

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 the _pièce de conviction_: the sweetest name 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.”

Well, without any pretence at _curiosa 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 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 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!”

That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.

THE IBERIAN’S HOUSE

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, or by 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 I have 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.