Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

So much for the editor of ----. We do not know, indeed, though we sometimes think and always hope that we do, what makes for immortality. Shakespeare, you say? Who (except Shakespeare himself) thought Shakespeare immortal on the day when he was alive and dead? Who thought Johnson’s Dictionary immortal? Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_? Yes, I fancy that any serious reader of that book, when it was published, knew in his heart that it would live. But take smaller things. Why, out of all Landor’s verse, was _Rose Aylmer_ taken, and why were others left, many of them technically as perfect? You don’t know. Nor do I. Well, then, which out of the beautiful numbers of _A Shropshire Lad_ will live for six hundred years--as long as Chaucer? Which out of the quatrains of Fitzgerald’s _Omar_? We may think that we know. But do we? Really, all that we do know is that among the copious poets (and Landor was very copious) some produced more perdurable lyrics than others. We know that Burns did, that Heine did: we don’t know how or why. Universality we say goes to immortality. It certainly does: the thing must go home to everybody. So does heart, whatever that is; the “lyric cry,” the sense of tears. Look at _Auld Robin Gray_: that is immortal. Look at _The Wife of Usher’s Well_. Those things might last as long as Homer or the Bible. The exact proportion, the exquisite admixture of those qualities I have mentioned, with others--felicity, limpidity, grace, and so on--do make certain poems as immortal as you please; and the want of them cuts others out. That is all there is to say.

On the whole, it is a good thing that we don’t know the recipe. It is one of several things we had better not know. Immortality in this world, immortality in another! Suppose that we were as certain of the latter as we are of getting to Paris by the 11 a.m. from Victoria. Either the world would be emptied by suicide, or--it wouldn’t! Suppose that immortality for a poem was a matter of formula. Take of universality so much, of heart so much, of grace so much: add tears, so much, and simmer gently till done ...! What would be the result? Everybody’s poems would be immortal. The Golden Treasury would stretch from here to Easter. It would be as bad as the Order of the British Empire. Nobody would want to be in it. And the result of that would be that mortal poems would be the only immortal ones. To be too bad for the Golden Treasury would be a real title of honour. And somebody would compile a Platinum Treasury to put you in.

BALLAD-ORIGINS

Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry, or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab. Whether Homer was written by Homer, or “by another man of the same name,” has been, and still is being, debated. Herr Wolff started the ingenious suggestion that, instead of one or two Homers, there were dozens of him. The late Mr. Butler put up a woman for author of the Odyssey, and gave her a name. But Mr. Butler loved two things above all else in life: little jokes and annoying other people. He must not be taken seriously. Similarly, the authorship of the ballads has ever been in debate. The man of our time who knew more about them than any man who ever lived--Professor Child, to wit--knew so much about them that he never committed himself to any hypothesis of their origin. That showed indeed the supreme of knowledge of his subject. But Professor Kittredge, who followed him, built himself a little bungalow of theory; and Professor Gummere presently reared a mansion of it; and now comes Professor Louise Pound from Nebraska with pick and crowbar to level them with the ground. It is very good fun, as I have admitted, except perhaps for Professors Kittredge and Gummere.

Professor Gummere gets the worst of it; but then he has put himself up a mansion of surmise. Professor Kittredge went no further than to declare a peasant-origin for ballad-poetry. Professor Gummere, according to his present housebreaker, erected a theory of something like spontaneous generation--a truly daring conception, one which makes ballad-poetry unlike any other poetry in the world. Throng-inspiration does not commend itself to me, knowing something of throngs and of inspiration. As Professor Pound has no difficulty in establishing, such a thing never happens now, and never happened to anything else, unless Horace Walpole’s account of the effect of putting horsehair into a bottle of water may be accepted. But if it may not, and if it never happened to any other kind of poetry, why should it have happened to ballad-poetry? _Queste cose non si fanno._ These things are not done.

However, when Professor Gummere argues that the folk-ballads originated in folk-dancing he is building his house of theory upon a footing of rock. _Ballare_ means “to dance”; there’s no escape from that; and if ballads, or ballets, had nothing to do with dancing, why were they called ballads or ballets? Then he can put forward the refrains or burthens which a goodly number of ballads still retain: jingles like “Bow down,” like “Eh, wow, bonnie,” like “Three, three, and thirty-three.” The first of those describes an act of dancing; the second is foolishness unless you dance it; the third, even now, insists on being danced. If he had left it at that, without piling upon it his additament of spontaneous generation, I don’t think Professor Pound could have done any good with her crowbar. But he was too ingenious by half; he soared--he soared into the inane. So down he comes, and we are where we were before.

With all respect for the courage and learning of Professor Pound, I don’t think she has disproved the close connection of song and dance in my country’s youthful days. But “dance” is a word of special connotation now, and it is necessary to remember a much wider application of it in times gone by. It was once a word of ritual significance, as when “David danced before the Lord,” as now when the Canons of Seville dance at Easter; and it was once a word of sport. That, in all probability, is the right connotation of it where ballads are concerned. In certain phases of the dance as a game drama comes in. Drama involves dialogue, and may easily involve narration. “Here we go round the mulberry bush” is both drama, dance, and narration. “Sally, Sally Waters” is the same. So too “Ring a ring of Roses.” But to say of such things, as I suppose Professor Gummere says, that the dancing-game generated the dialogue or narration is to put the cart before the horse. If, as I have said, the jingle “three, three and thirty-three” insists on being danced, is it not more reasonable to suppose that in all cases the jingle, or lilt, or sentiment--“the broom blooms bonnie and says it is fair”--inspired the dance? Personally, I can conceive of spontaneous throng-generation of a dance much more readily. Let the Professor try it, when next he has a throng of children in his garden. Let him begin to jig up and down, saying repeatedly “three, three, and thirty-three,” and see what happens.

I am not at all concerned to say that all ballad-poetry originated in dancing-games, nor concerned to argue against Professor Pound when she suggests that they began in church. She has there the support of the fact, for what it is worth, that the earliest ballads we can find are concerned with religion. That is a fact, though it will not take her as far as she would like. Unfortunately very few such things can be dated before the fifteenth century; and the Professor must remember that preoccupation with religion was by no means confined to the clerical caste. The thirteenth century was the flowering time of the friars. They carried religion into corners where no cleric would ever have set his foot. If religious balladry had a religious origin it would be Franciscan. She does not insist upon all this, however, and certainly I do not. All the concern I have with a possible religious origin of ballad-poetry is with the certainty it affords that, if the friars had anything to do with the beginning of popular epic-narration, as they undoubtedly had to do with that of popular drama, their efforts were addressed to the populace rather than to the court, to the market-square and village green rather than to the hall.

What does Professor Pound herself believe about this obscure matter? She quotes, and quarrels with, Andrew Lang, who said that “Ballads spring from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue nearest to the natural state of man.... The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up from its shores.” That seems to me so obviously true of most of the ballads that I should require a stronger case than Professor Pound’s, and a case less weakened by strange oversights, to cause me to think twice of it. Apparently Professor Pound’s main belief about ballads is that they were by origin “literary.” Being literature, that may be supposed by anybody without taking a body very far. But if she means by that that they were composed by professional “literary men,” and not by or for the peasants, I have to suggest to her that there is much in the peasantry and much in the ballads themselves which she has not brought into account; and that that must be sought _within_ the peasantry, and _within_ the ballads, rather than round about them. It is, for instance, a serious error to assume a courtly origin--courtly poet or courtly auditory--in all ballads which deal with courtly people--Lord Thomases, Estmere Kings, Child Horns, Little Musgraves, and so on. Such personages are the stock-in-trade of romance, from Homer to the _Family Herald_. Reasoning of that kind will land the Professor in uncharted seas. There is a fallacy in it comparable to that in “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Not a doubt of it but Professor Child’s great book contains a number of courtly ballads--“Chevy Chase” and the like; it needs nothing but a knowledge of literature and the texts to settle it. I should compute the number of such in Child to be between a third and a half of the whole.

To decide upon the remainder, whether they are written by or for the peasantry (and it does not matter which, because in either case the traditions of the peasantry would be preserved), one must go to the ballads themselves. Within them such literary tact and peasant-lore as you possess--and you cannot have too much--will infallibly detect the origin of a given ballad. So much as that, at least, is involved in the very nature of literature. A ballad--any ballad--was either written _up_ to the height of his own powers by an original poet (a Burns, a Clare), or written _down_ to the auditory’s capacity, which is the way of the hack, or professional minstrel. According as you judge (_a_) apprehensions of fact, (_b_) locutions, (_c_) _parti pris_, you will put the thing down to the idiosyncrasy and origin of the poet _or_ to the idiosyncrasy and _milieu_ of the auditory; and you will nearly always be right. It may not be possible to be sure whether a peasant-poet wrote, though the probabilities will be high; it will always be possible to be sure whether a peasant-audience was addressed, and whether, consequently, by a peasant-audience the ballad was learned and preserved. Who in particular the poet may have been does not matter. But it matters very much, to us, that we should have all we can collect of the nature of our indigenes, though we shall never be able to get it with the clearness and precision with which Professor Pound can get at the nature of hers.

As good an example as anyone could want of the truth of the preceding paragraph is furnished by “The Twa Corbies.” Everybody knows “The Twa Corbies,” a cynical, romantic, highly literary, and most successful thing in the Scots manner; assuredly written for the gentry. But Professor Child juxtaposes to it an English version, called “The Three Ravens,” and provides an instructive comparison. The earliest copy he finds of that is of 1611. It is as surely of peasant origin as the “Twa Corbies” is not. Firstly, it has a rollicking chorus, neither to be desired nor approved by the gentry; secondly, instead of being romantic, it is sentimental; thirdly, instead of ending with a wry mouth, it ends as genially as the circumstances allow. Cynicism has never “gone down” with the peasantry. I don’t quote it, for considerations of space. Another interesting comparison can be made by means of “Thomas Rymer” in Child’s versions A. and C. In each Thomas takes the Queen of Faëry for her of Heaven, and in each she denies it. In A. she says:

“‘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;
I _never 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.

REAL AND TEMPORAL CREATION

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 such _obiter 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 it _was_ Leatherhead) 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 an _ad hoc_ creation. 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 Grandison could 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 in _Hamlet_; and Launcelot Gobbo, the only one in _The 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 their book-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 turn _Twelfth Night_ into a tragedy. In 1623, the year of Shakespeare’s death, the play was called _Malvolio_; 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 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.

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 who do 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 the night. 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.”

SCANDINAVIAN ENGLAND

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 of England 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 arrogance nor 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 whatever walk 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.

OUR BLOOD AND STATE IN 1660