Abut two years ago I published a collection of Yorkshire dialect poems,
chosen from many authors and extending over a period of two hundred and
fifty years[1]. The volume was well received, and there are abundant
signs that the interest in dialect literature is steadily growing in
all parts of the county and beyond its borders. What is most
encouraging is to find that the book has found an entrance into the
homes of Yorkshire peasants and artisans where the works of our great
national poets are unknown. I now essay the more venturesome task of
publishing dialect verses of my own. Most of the poems contained in
this little volume have appeared, anonymously, in the Yorkshire press,
and I have now decided to reissue them in book form and with my name on
the title-page.
A generation ago the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen, an
object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with
him: we knew him—or her—as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory—an
amiable fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already,
in its short course, done much to remove this prejudice, and the minor
poet is no longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of readers,
though small, is sympathetic, and the outside public is learning to
tolerate him and to recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for
him to write and publish his verses as it is for the minor painter to
depict and exhibit in public his interpretation of the beauty and power
which he sees in human life and in nature. All this is clear gain, and
the time may not be far distant when England will again become what it
was in Elizabethan days - a nest of singing birds, where te minor poets
will be able to take their share in the chorus of song, leaving the
chief parts in the oratorio to the Shakespeares and Spensers of
tomorrow.
The twenty-five poems of which this volume consists are meant to serve
a double purpose. Most of them are character-sketches or dramatic
studies, and my wish is to bring before the notice of my readers the
habits of mind of certain Yorkshire men and women whose acquaintance I
have made. For ten years I have gone up hill and down dale in the three
Ridings, intent on the study of the sounds, words and idioms of the
local folk-speech. At first my object was purely philological, but soon
I came to realise that men and women were more interesting than words
and phrases, and my attention was attracted from dialect speech to
dialect speakers. Among Yorkshire farmers, farm labourers, fishermen,
miners and mill workers I discovered a vitality and an outlook upon
life of which I, a bourgeois professor, had no previous knowledge. Not,
only had I never met such men before, but I had not read about them in
literature, or seen their portraits painted on canvas. The wish to give
a literary interpretation of the world into which I had been privileged
to enter grew every day more insistent, and this volume is the
fulfilment of that wish.
Of all forms of literature, whether in Verse or prose, the dramatic
monologue seemed to me the aptest for the exposition of character and
habits of mind. It is the creation—or recreation—of Robert Browning,
the most illuminating interpreter of the workings of the human mind
that England has produced since Shakespeare died. My first endeavour
was therefore
to watch
The Master work, and catch
Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool’s true play.
I have been, I fear, a clumsy botcher in applying the lessons that
Browning was able to teach, but the dramatic monologues of which this
volume is largely composed owe whatever art they may possess to his
example. My dramatic studies are drawn from life. For example, the
local preacher who expresses his views on the rival merits of Church
and Chapel is a Wharfedale acquaintance, and the farmer in _Cambodunum_
who declares that “eddication’s nowt but muckment” actually expressed
this view to a Chief Inspector of Schools, a member of the West Riding
Education Committee, and myself, when we visited him on his farm. I do
not claim that I have furnished literal transcripts of what I heard in
my conversations with my heroes and heroines, but my purpose throughout
has been to hold a mirror up to Nature, to give a faithful
interpretation of thought and character, and to show my readers some of
the ply of mind and habits of life that still prevail among
Yorkshiremen whose individuality has not been blunted by convention and
who have the courage to express their reasoned or instinctive views of
life and society.
But the interpretation of the minds of Yorkshire peasants and artisans
for the benefit of the so-called general reader is only the secondary
object which I have in view. My primary appeal is not to those who have
the full chorus of English song, from Chaucer to Masefield, at their
beck and call, but to a still larger class of men and women who are not
general readers of literature at all, and for whom most English poetry
is a closed book. In my dialect wanderings through Yorkshire I
discovered that while there was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of
the people, the great masterpieces of our national song made little or
no appeal to them. They were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and
profusion, but it consisted of food that they could not assimilate.
Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, all spoke to them in a language
which they could not understand, and presented to them a world of
thought and life in which they had no inheritance. But the Yorkshire
dialect verse which circulated through the dales in chap-book or
Christmas almanac was welcomed everywhere. Two memories come before my
mind as I write. One is that of a North Riding farm labourer who knew
by heart many of the dialect poems of the Eskdale poet, John Castillo,
and was in the habit of reciting them to himself as he followed the
plough. The other is that of a blind girl in a West Riding village who
had committed to memory scores of the poems of John Hartley, and,
gathering her neighbours round her kitchen fire of a winter evening,
regaled them with _Bite Bigger_, _Nelly o’ Bob’s_ and other verses of
the Halifax poet. My object is to add something to this chorus of local
song. It was the aim of Addison in his _Spectator_ essays to bring
“philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses”; and,
in like manner, it should be the aim of the writer of dialect verse to
bring poetry out of the coteries of the people of leisure and to make
it dwell in artisans’ tenements and in cottagers’ kitchens. “Poetry,”
declared Shelley, “is the record of the best and happiest moments of
the happiest and best minds,” and it is time that the working men and
women of England were made partakers in this inheritance of wealth and
joy.
It maybe argued that it should be the aim of our schools and
universities to educate the working classes to appreciate what is best
in standard English poetry. I do not deny that much maybe done in this
way, but let us not forget that something more will be needed than a
course of instruction in poetic diction and metrical rhythm. Our great
poets depict a world which is only to a very small extent that of the
working man. It is a world of courts and drawingrooms and General
Headquarters, a world of clubs and academies. The working man or woman
finds a place in this charmed world only if his occupation is that of a
shepherd, and even then he must be a shepherd of the Golden Age and
answer to the name of Corydon. Poets, we are solemnly assured by Pope,
must not describe shepherds as they really are, “but as they may be
conceived to have been when the best of men followed the employment of
shepherd.” Class-consciousness—a word often on the lips of our
democratic leaders of today—has held far too much sway over the minds
of poets from the Elizabethan age onwards. Spenser writes his _Faerie
Queene_ “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle
discipline,” and Milton’s audience, fit but few, is composed of
scholars whose ears have been attuned to the harmonies of epic verse
from their first lisping of Virgilian hexameters, or of latter-day
Puritans, like John Bright, who overhear in _Paradise Lost_ the echoes
of a faith that once was stalwart.
But what, it may be asked, of Crabbe, and what of Wordsworth? The
former by his own confession, paints
the cot,
As truth will paint it and as bards will not;
but as we listen to his verse tales we can never forget that it is the
Rev. George Crabbe who is instructing us, or that his pedestal is the
topmost story of his three-decker pulpit at Aldborough. Wordsworth’s
sympathy with the lives of the Cumberland peasantry is profound, and
the time is surely not distant when such a poem as ‘Michael’ will win a
place in the hearts of working men; but it is to be feared that in his
own generation “Mr Wudsworth” served rather—as a warning than an
encouragement to his peasant neighbours. “Many’s the time,” an old
Cumberland innkeeper told Canon Rawnsley, “I’ve seed him a-takin’ his
family out in a string, and niver geein’ the deariest bit of notice to
’em; standin’ by hissel’ an’ stoppin’ behind a-gapin’, wi’ his jaws
workin’ the whoal time; but niver no crackin’ wi’ ’em, nor no pleasure
in ’em—a desolate-minded man, ye kna... It was potry as did it.”[2]
Our English non-dramatic poetry from the Renaissance onwards is second
to none in richness of thought and beauty of diction, but it lacks the
highest quality of all—universality of interest and appeal. Our poets
have turned a cold shoulder to the activities and aims of the working
man, and the working man has, in consequence, turned a cold shoulder to
the great English classic poets. The loss on either side has been
great, though it is only now beginning to be realised. “A literature
which leaves large areas of the national activity and aspiration
unexpressed is in danger of becoming narrow, esoteric, unhealthy. Areas
of activity and aspiration unlit by the cleansing sun of art, untended
by the loving consideration of the poet, will be dungeons for the
national spirit, mildewed cellars in which rats fight, misers hoard
their gold, and Guy Fawkes lays his train to blow the superstructure
sky-high.”[3]
There was a time when poetry meant much more to the working men of
England. In the later Middle Ages, above all in that fifteenth century
which literary historians are fond of describing as the darkest period
in English literature, the working man had won for himself what seemed
a secure place in poetry. Narrative, lyric and dramatic poetry had all
opened their portals to him, and made his life and aims their theme.
Side by side with the courtly verse romances, which were read in the
bowers of highborn ladies, were the terse and popular ballads, which
were chanted by minstrels, wandering from town to town and from village
to village. Among the heroes of these ballads we find that “wight
yeoman,” Robin Hood, who wages war against mediaeval capitalism, as
embodied in the persons of the abbot-landholders, and against the class
legislation of Norman game laws which is enforced by the King’s
sheriff. The lyric poetry of the century is not the courtly Troubadour
song or the Petrarchian sonnet, but the folk-song that sings from the
heart to the heart of the beauty of Alysoun, “seemliest of all things,”
or, in more convivial mood, accounts good ale of more worth than a
table set with many dishes:
Bring us in no capon’s flesh, for that is often dear,
Nor bring us in no duck’s flesh, for they slobber in the mere,
But bring us in good ale!
Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
For our blessed Lady sake bring us in good ale.
Most remarkable of all is the history of the drama in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The drama was clerical and not popular in its
origin, and when, in course of time, it passed out of the hands of the
clergy it is natural to suppose that it would find a new home at the
King’s court or the baron’s castle. It did nothing of the kind. It
passed from the Church to the people, and it was the artisan craftsmen
of the English towns, organised in their trade-guilds, to whom we owe
the great cycles of our miracle plays. The authors of these plays were
restricted to Bible story for their themes, but the popular character
of their work is everywhere apparent in the manner in which the
material is handled and the characters conceived. The Noah of the
Deluge plays is an English master joiner with a shrewish wife, and
three sons who are his apprentices. When the divine command to build an
ark comes to him, he sets to work with an energy that drives away “the
weariness of five hundred winters” and, “ligging on his line,” measures
his planks, “clenches them with noble new nails”, and takes a
craftsman’s delight in the finished work: