Part 6

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.’”