In like manner, the Shepherds of the Nativity plays are conceived and
fashioned by men who, fortunate in that they knew nothing of the
seductions of Arcadian pastoralism, have studied at first hand the
habits and thoughts of English fifteenth-century shepherds, and paint
these to the life.
Thus, at the close of the Middle Ages, narrative, lyric and dramatic
poetry seemed firmly established among the people. Not unmindful of
romance, it was grounded in realism and sought to interpret the life of
the peasant and the artisan of fifteenth-century England. The
Renaissance follows, and a profound change comes over poetry. The
popular note grows fainter and fainter, till at last it becomes
inaudible. Poetry leaves the farmyard and the craftsman’s bench for the
court. The folk-song, fashioned in to a thing of wondrous beauty by the
creator of Amiens, Feste and Autolycus, is driven from the stage by Ben
Jonson, and its place is taken by a lyric of classic extraction. The
popular drama, ennobled and made shapely through contact with Latin
drama, passes from the provincial market-place to Bankside, and the
rude mechanicals of the trade-guilds yield place to the Lord
Chamberlain’s players. In the dramas of Shakespeare the popular note is
still audible, but only as an undertone, furnishing comic relief to the
romantic amours of courtly lovers or the tragic fall of Princes; with
Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with Dryden and the Restoration
dramatists, the popular element in the drama passes away, and the
triumph of the court is complete. The Elizabethan court could find no
use for the popular ballad, but, like other forms of literature, it was
attracted from the country-side to the city. Forgetful of the
greenwood, it now battened on the garbage of Newgate, and _Robin Hood
and Guy of Gisburn_ yields place to _The Wofull Lamentation of William
Purchas, who for murthering his Mother at Thaxted, was executed at
Chelmsford_.
We are justly proud of the Renaissance and of the glories of our
Elizabethan literature, but let us frankly own that in the annals of
poetry there was loss as well as gain. The gain was for the courtier
and the scholar, and for all those who, in the centuries that followed
the Renaissance, have been able, by means of education, to enter into
the courtier’s and scholar’s inheritance. The loss has been for the
people. The opposition between courtly taste and popular taste is hard
to analyse, but we have only to turn our eyes from England to Scotland,
which lost its royal court in 1603, in order to appreciate the reality
of the opposition. In Scotland the courtly poetry of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries soon disappeared when James I exchanged Holyrood
for Whitehall, but popular poetry continued to live and grow. The
folk-song gathered power and sweetness all through the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, till it culminated at last in the lyric of Burns.
Popular drama, never firmly rooted in Scotland, was stamped out by the
Reformation, but the popular ballad outlived the mediaeval minstrel,
was kept alive in the homes of Lowland farmers and shepherds, and
called into being the great ballad revival of the nineteenth century.
It is idle to speculate what would have been the progress of poetry in
England if the Renaissance had not come and the Elizabethan courtier
had not enriched himself at the expense of the people. What we have to
bear in mind is that all through the centuries that followed the
Renaissance the working men and women of England looked almost in vain
to their poets for a faithful interpretation of their life and aims.
The wonder is that the instinct for poetry did not perish in their
hearts for lack of sustenance.
There are at the present time clear signs of a revival of popular
poetry and popular drama. The verse tales of Masefield and Gibson, the
lyrics of Patrick MacGill, the peasant or artisan plays which have been
produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Gaiety Theatre,
Manchester, may well be the beginning of a great democratic literary
movement. Democracy, in its striving after a richer and fuller life for
the people of England, is at last turning its attention to literature
and art. It is slowly realising two great truths. The first is that
literature may be used as a mighty weapon in the furtherance of
political justice and social reform, and that the pied pipers of
folk-song have the power to rouse the nation and charm the ears of even
the Mother of Parliaments. The second is that the working man needs
something more to sustain him than bread and the franchise and a fair
day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Democracy, having obtained for the
working man a place in the government of the nation, is now asserting
his claim to a place in the temples of poetry. The Arthurian knight,
the Renaissance courtier, the scholar and the wit must admit the
twentieth-century artisan to their circle. Piers the ploughman must
once more become the hero of song, and Saul Kane, the poacher, must
find a place, alongside of Tiresias and Merlin, among the seers and
mystics. Let democracy look to William Morris, poet, artist and social
democrat, for inspiration and guidance, and take to heart the message
of prophecy which he has left us: “If art, which is now sick, is to
live and not die, it must in the future be of the people, for the
people, by the people.”
In the creation of this poetry “of the people, by the people” dialect
may well be called upon to play a part. Dialect is of the people,
though in a varying degree in the different parts of the wide areas of
the globe where the English language is spoken; it possesses, moreover,
qualities, and is fraught with associations, which are of the utmost
value to the poet and to which the standard speech can lay no claim. It
may be that for some of the more elaborate kinds of poetry, such as the
formal epic, dialect is useless; let it be reserved, therefore, for
those kinds which appeal most directly to the hearts of the people. The
poetry of the people includes the ballad and the verse tale, lyric in
all its forms, and some kinds of satire; and for all these dialect is a
fitting instrument. It possesses in the highest degree directness of
utterance and racy vigour. How much of their force would the “Biglow
Papers” of J. R. Lowell lose if they were transcribed from the Yankee
dialect into standard English!
But the highest quality of dialect speech, and that which renders it
pre-eminently fitted for poetic use, is its intimate association with
all that lies nearest to the heart of the working man. It is the
language of his hearth and home; many of the most cherished memories of
his life are bound up with it; it is for him the language of freedom,
whereas standard English is that of constraint. In other words, dialect
is the working man’s poetic diction—a poetic diction as full of savour
as that of the eighteenth-century poets was flat and insipid.
It is sometimes said that the use of dialect makes the appeal of poetry
provincial instead of national or universal. This is only true when the
dialect poet is a pedant and obscures his meaning by fantastic
spellings. The Lowland Scots element in _Auld Lang Syne_ has not
prevented it from becoming the song of friendship of the Anglo-Saxon
race all the world over. Moreover, the provincial note in poetry or
prose is far from being a bad thing. In the _Idylls_ of Theocritus it
gave new life to Greek poetry in the third century before Christ, and
it may render the same high service to English poetry to-day or
to-morow. The rise of Provincial schools of literature, interpreting
local life in local idiom, in all parts of the British Isles and in the
Britain beyond the seas, is a goal worth striving for; such a
literature, so far from impeding the progress of the literature in the
standard tongue, would serve only to enrich it in spirit, substance and
form.
[1] _Yorkshire Dialect Poems_, 1673-1915 (Sedgwick and Jackson 1916)
[2] _Reminiscences._
[3] J. Dover Wilson, Writing in the _Athenæum_ under the pseudonym
“Muezzin,” February, 1917. The quotation is from one of four articles,
entitled “Prospects in English Literature,” to which the ideas set
forth in this Preface owe much.
[4] “York Plays”: _The Building of the Ark_.