employments of a country life,” and marrying before he was twenty,
he had to work at top pressure in order to make time to read the
_Spectator_, which he did “all over sweat and heat, without regarding
his own health.” He “got English just as we get Latin.” He studied
“Paradise Lost” as others study the classics, with the help of a
dictionary. When he wrote about the life best known to him, it was
usually as any of those gentlemen who helped him would have done. He
made very little advance on Sir Philip Sidney.
Nevertheless, some things he did write which were true and were
unlikely to have been written by any one else, as when he described the
thresher’s labour,--
“When sooty Pease we thresh, you scarce can know
Our native Colour as from Work we go:
The Sweat, the Dust, and suffocating Smoke,
Make us so much like Ethiopians look.
We scare our Wives, when Ev’ning brings us home,
And frighted Infants think the Bugbear come.
Week after Week, we this dull Task pursue,
Unless when winn’wing Days produce a new;
A new, indeed, but frequently a worse,
The Threshal yields but to the Master’s Curse.
He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day;
Then swears we’ve idled half our Time away:
‘Why, look ye, Rogues, d’ye think that this will do?
Your neighbours thresh as much again as you.’
Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools,
To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools;
But, wanting these, we just like Schoolboys look,
When angry Masters view the blotted Book:
They cry, ‘Their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;’
We, ‘The Corn threshes bad, ’twas cut too green.’”
He might have equalled Bloomfield, he might have been a much lesser
Crabbe, if he could have thrown Cuddy and Chloe on to the mixen and
kept to the slighted homely style. Instead of merely writing as if he
had been to Oxford, he might have reached men’s ears with his appeal,--
“Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare,
Pity the Reapers, who their Feasts prepare.”
As a rule his work--I mean his writing--is so remote from Wiltshire and
Duck, or the sort of reality connected with them which we to-day look
for, that even the grain or two about Salisbury Plain or the Pewsey
Vale not quite dissolved in his floods of Alexanderpopery delight us,
as when he calls the lambs bleating,--
“Too harsh, perhaps, to please politer Ears,
Yet much the sweetest Tune the Farmer hears:”
or when he compares the haymakers to sparrows at the approach of
storm,--
“Thus have I seen, on a bright Summer’s Day,
On some green Brake, a Flock of Sparrows play;
From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly;
And with continued Chirping fill the Sky:
But, on a sudden, if a Storm appears,
Their chirping Noise no longer dins our Ears.
They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush,
There silent sit, and all at once is hush.”
He says little more than enough to make us feel how much he could have
said if--well, if, for example, he had been the sort of man to wish to
employ his flail, not to drown the master’s curses, but to break his
head. But he was ineffectual, if not beautiful. The only known material
effect of his verse was to draw charity from Lord Palmerston for
providing an annual threshers’ dinner, which is still given at Charlton
on June 30. This feast proves him greater as prophet than as poet in
writing,--
“Oft as this Day returns, shall Temple cheer
The Threshers’ Hearts with Mutton, Beef, and Beer;
Hence, when their Children’s Children shall admire
This Holiday, and, whence deriv’d, inquire,
Some grateful Father, partial to my Fame,
Shall thus describe from whence, and how it came:
‘Here, Child, a Thresher liv’d in ancient Days;
Quaint Songs he sung, and pleasing Roundelays;
A gracious Queen his Sonnets did commend,
And some great Lord, one Temple, was his Friend.
That Lord was pleas’d this Holiday to make,
And feast the Threshers for that Thresher’s sake.’”
A hundred years were to pass before a countryman came to do something
of what Duck left undone, but, however honestly, did it from the point
of view of a spectator, a clergyman, a schoolmaster, an archæologist,
a reader of Tennyson, and the refined contemplators of rural life. He
lived and died in a country of which most of the conditions are to
be paralleled on Salisbury Plain and the Pewsey Vale. I mean William
Barnes.
Dorset is a county of chalk hills divided by broad valleys and,
in particular, by the valleys of the Stour and the Frome. William
Barnes is the poet of the valleys, the elm and not the beech being
his favourite tree. In the first year of last century he was born in
Blackmoor Vale, which is watered by a tributary of the Stour: at his
death, only fourteen years from the century’s end, he was rector of
Came, which is in the valley of the Frome. The son of a Dorset farmer,
and for most of his life a schoolmaster or clergyman within the county,
the Dorset dialect was his mother tongue, his “only true speech.” He
wrote of Dorset, and for Dorset, and strangers, perhaps natives also,
might say that the man was Dorset. His poems are full of the names and
the aspects of its towns and villages, its rivers and brooks, and the
hills that lie around its great central height of Bulbarrow, which is
mid-way between the homes of his childhood and old age.
In his “Praise o’ Dorset” the poet is very modest, with a kind of
humorous modesty, about the county. Though we may be homely, is the
beginning, we are not ashamed to own our place; we have some women “not
uncomely,” and so on. Homeliness, in fact, is characteristic of Barnes
and of his Dorset. He became in some ways a learned man, but when
he wrote in his mother tongue and from the heart, he was the Dorset
farmer’s son and nothing else. From the humble homeliness of his work
he might have been a labourer, and he did more or less deliberately
make himself the mouth-piece of the Dorset carters, cowmen, mowers, and
harvesters. These songs, narratives, and dialogues bring forward the
men at their labours, walking with their club flags to church, singing
the songs of Christmas or Harvest Home. Here they court, wed, grow old
together, build a new house, or return with money saved to their “poor
fore-fathers’ plot o’ land.” He celebrates the horses, Smiler, Violet,
Whitefoot, Jack, and “the great old wagon uncle had.” Separate poems
are given to notable trees--“the great oak tree that’s in the dell,”
the cottage lilac tree, the solitary may tree by the pond, an aspen by
the river at Pentridge, the great elm in the little home-field and its
fall. “Trees be Company” is the title of one of his poems.
Many of his best passages are about old houses, with hearths “hallowed
by times o’ zitten round,” and fires that made the heart gay in storm
or winter, and some of them, like “the great old house of mossy stone,”
with memories of stately ladies that once did use
“To walk wi’ hoops an’ high-heel shoes”
along its terraces. It makes me think of a man whose ancestors, at any
rate, had often been cold, homeless, and tired, when I see how often he
speaks of the hearth, the fire, the shelter of house walls, at evening,
in hard weather, or in old age. Again and again he shows us the men
forgetting their work for a little while, as they sit among children
or friends, watching the flames in the window glass, or listening to
the wind and rain. Give me, he says in one poem, even though I were
the squire, “the settle and the great wood fire.” In another, he feels
that he can endure all if only evening bring peace at home. A man with
work, a family, and a store of wood for the winter, has everything: the
evening meal and the wife smiling make bliss.
Barnes felt the pathos of the labourer’s rest, and one of his finest
poems depicts a cottage under a swaying poplar, with the moonlight on
its door,--
“An’ hands, a-tired by day, wer still,
Wi’ moonlight on the door.”
He uses the same effect a second time, adding the reflection that the
children now sleeping in the moonlit house will rise again to fun, and
their widowed mother to sorrow. These people are pathetic because in
their “little worold” they want and have so little,--
“Drough longsome years a-wanderen,
Drough lwonesome rest a-ponderen.”
Anything may eclipse, though nought can extinguish, their little joy;
yet they seem made rather for sorrow than joy. They have longings,
but hardly passions. They want to rest after all, not to become
discontented ghosts like “the weeping lady.” They are prepared for the
worst in this life, but the worst is tempered. The dead, for example,
are safe from all weathers, better off than the bereaved who grieve
for them “with lonesome love.” The dead even seem beautiful in memory.
There is a “glory round the old folk dead,” the old uncle and aunt
who used to walk arm in arm on Sunday evenings about the farm, the
grandmother who wore “a gown with great flowers like hollyhocks,” and
told tales of ancient times, the old kindly squire who so enjoyed
life,--
“But now I hope his kindly feäce
Is gone to vind a better pleäce.”
Many poems are given to another and not very different kind of
memories, those of childhood, and the essence of them, with a hundred
pretty variations, is,--
“How smoothly then did run my happy days,
When things to charm my mind and sight were nigh.”
Most are memories of the open air, of “lonesome woodlands, sunny
woodlands,” the river and the harvest fields, to the accompaniment of
the songs of birds and milkmaids. The children are always laughing,
playing, dancing in their “tiny shoes,” but their heavy elders and the
home under the elm or in the “lonesome” grove of oak remind us, if not
them, of age and death.
The love-poems further illustrate Barnes’s Dorset homeliness and
humbleness. Young maidens delight him much as children do; yet even
while he is praising the Blackmoor maidens he says,--
“Why, if a man would wive
An’ thrive, ’ithout a dow’r,
Then let en look en out a wife
In Blackmwore by the Stour.”
The girls all have something wifely about them. The wooer never forgets
that the sweetheart may be the wife; he wishes her less care than her
mother had, and looks forward to old age in her company. He is not a
wild wooer. He is content to sit in a gathering and hear his Jane “put
in a good word now and then,” and have a smile and a blush from her at
the door on parting: having carried her pail he is satisfied to know
that she would have bowed when she took it back had it not been too
heavy. He wants a maid who is “good and true,” “good and fair,” and
healthy, and to have always beside him the “welcome face and homely
name.” Once he may have been ruffled by a mere beauty in a scarlet
cloak, but probably he soon sets his heart on one who may bring him
happiness with children, contentment with age, and perhaps help him
to a little fortune in the thatched cottage “below the elems by the
bridge.” The lovers, like the poet himself, go with heads a little
bowed, as if in readiness for blows. It is in contrast with these
rather stiff, darkened men and women, who have winter and poverty on
their horizon, that the children in Barnes’s poetry are so blithe, his
Spring days so buoyant, and his flowers and birds among the brightest
and freshest in any of the poets.
But there is a greater than Duck or Barnes still among us, a
wide-ranging poet, who is always a countryman of a somewhat lonely
heart, Mr. Thomas Hardy. For I do notice something in his poetry which
I hope I may with respect call rustic, and, what is much the same
thing, old-fashioned. It enables him to mingle elements unexpectedly,
so that, thinking of 1967 in the year 1867, he spoke not only of the
new century having “new minds, new modes, new fools, new wise,” but
concluded,--
“For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love”--
which is as antique as Donne’s Flea that wedded the lovers by combining
blood from both of them within its body. The same rusticity manifests
itself elsewhere as Elizabethanism, and the poet is something of a
“liberal shepherd” in his willingness to give things their grosser
names or to hint at them. He has a real taste for such comparisons
as that made by a French officer looking at the English fleet at
Trafalgar,--
“Their overcrowded sails
Bulge like blown bladders in a tripeman’s shop
The market-morning after slaughter-day.”
Then, how his illustrations to his own poems--such as the pair of
spectacles lying right across the landscape, following “In a Eweleaze
near Weatherbury”--remind us of a seventeenth-century book of emblems!
Sometimes his excuse is that he is impersonating a man of an earlier
age, as in the Sergeant’s song,--
“When Husbands with their Wives agree,
And Maids won’t wed from modesty,
Then little Boney he’ll pounce down,
And march his men on London town.
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lorum,
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lay.”
He has written songs and narratives which prove his descent from some
ancient ballad-maker, perhaps the one who wrote “A pleasant ballad of
the merry miller’s wooing of the baker’s daughter of Manchester,” or
“A new ballade, showing the cruel robberies and lewd life of Philip
Collins, _alias_ Osburne, commonly called Philip of the West, who was
pressed to death at Newgate in London the third of December last past,
1597,” to be sung to the tune of “Pagginton’s round.” Some of the lyric
stanzas to which he fits a narrative originated probably in some such
tune.
And how often is he delighted to represent a peasant’s view, a
peasant’s contribution to the irony of things, a capital instance
being the Belgian who killed Grouchy to save his farm, and so lost
Napoleon the battle of Waterloo.
With this rusticity, if that be the right name for it, I cannot help
connecting that most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of Fate,
the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man, crawling
in multitudes like caterpillars, twitched by the Immanent Will hither
and thither. Over and over again, from the earliest poems up to the
“Dynasts,” he amplifies those words which he puts into the mouth of
God,--
“My labours, logicless,
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.”
And, referring to the earth,--
“It lost my interest from the first,
My aims therefor succeeding ill;
Haply it died of doing as it durst.
Lord, it existeth still.”
“Sportsman Time” and “those purblind Doomsters” are characteristic
phrases. The many things said by him of birth he sums up at the end of
a death-bed poem,--
“We see by littles now the deft achievement
Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all,
In view of which our momentary bereavement
Outshapes but small.”
As gravely he descends to the ludicrous extreme of making a country
girl planting a pine-tree sing,--
“It will sigh in the morning,
Will sigh at noon,
At the winter’s warning,
In wafts of June;
Grieving that never
Kind Fate decreed
It could not ever
Remain a seed,
And shun the welter
Of things without,
Unneeding shelter
From storm and drought.”
He puts into the mouths of field, flock, and tree--because while he
gazed at them at dawn they looked like chastened children sitting in
school silent--the question,--
“Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?”
Napoleon, in the “Dynasts,” asks the question, “Why am I here?” and
answers it,--
“By laws imposed on me inexorably.
History makes use of me to weave her web.”
Twentieth century superstition can no farther go than in that enormous
poem, which is astonishing in many ways, not least in being readable.
I call it superstition because truth, or a genuine attempt at truth,
has been turned apparently by an isolated rustic imagination into an
obsession so powerful that only a very great talent could have rescued
anything uninjured from the weight of it. A hundred years ago, Mr.
Hardy would have seen “real ghosts.” To-day he has to invent them, and
call his Spirits of the Years and of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and
Ironic, Rumours and Recording Angels, who have the best seats at the
human comedy, “contrivances of the fancy merely.”
Even his use of irony verges on the superstitious. Artistically,
at least in the shorter poems, it may be sound, and is certainly
effective, as where the old man laments on learning that his wife is to
be in the same wing of the workhouse, instead of setting him “free of
his forty years’ chain.” But the frequent use and abuse of it change
the reader’s smile into a laugh at the perversity.
Mr. Hardy must have discovered the blindness of Fate, the indifference
of Nature, and the irony of Life, before he met them in books. They
have been brooded over in solitude, until they afflict him as the
wickedness of man afflicts a Puritan. The skull and crossbones, Death
the scythed skeleton, and the symbolic hour-glass have been as real to
him as to some of those carvers of tombstones in country churchyards,
or to the painter of that window at St. Edmund’s in Salisbury who
represented “God the Father ... in blue and red vests, like a little
old man, the head, feet, and hands naked; in one place fixing a pair of
compasses on the sun and moon.” If I were told that he had spent his
days in a woodland hermitage, though I should not believe the story, I
should suspect that it was founded on fact.
But the woodland, and the country in general, have given Mr. Hardy some
of his principal consolations. And one, at least, of these is almost
superstitious. I mean the idea that “the longlegs, the moth, and the
dumbledore” know “earth-secrets” that he knows not. In the “Darkling
Thrush” it is to be found in another stage, the bird’s song in Winter
impelling him to think that “some blessed Hope” of which he was unaware
was known to it. He compares town and country much as Meredith does.
The country is paradise in the comparison; for he speaks of the Holiday
Fund for City Children as temporarily “changing their urban murk to
paradise.” Country life, paradise or not, he handles with a combination
of power and exactness beyond that of any poet who could be compared to
him, and for country women I should give the palm to his “Julie-Jane,”--
“Sing; how ’a would sing,
How ’a would raise the tune,
When we rode in the wagon from harvesting
By the light of the moon....
Bubbling and brightsome eyed,
But now--O never again!
She chose her bearers before she died
From her fancy-men.”
Such a woman has even made him merry like his fiddling ancestor, in the
song of “The Dark-eyed Gentleman,”--
“And he came and he tied up my garter for me.”
And what with Nature and Beauty and Truth he is really farther from
surrender than might appear in some poems. His “Let me enjoy”--
“Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight”--
is in the minor key, but by no means repudiates or makes little of Joy,
and is at least as likely as,
“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,”
to make a marching song.
VI.
THE AVON, THE BISS, THE FROME.
Once in the night I awoke and heard the weir again, but the first sound
in the morning was a thrush singing in a lilac next my window. For the
main chorus of dawn was over. It was a still morning under a sky that
was one low arch of cloud, a little whiter in places, but all gray.
Big drops glistened on the undersides of horizontal rails. There had
been a white frost, and, as they said, we seldom have many white frosts
before it rains again. But not until I went out could I tell that it
was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields
away was hidden.
Cycling is inferior to walking in this weather, because in cycling
chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You
travel too quickly to notice many small things; you see nothing save
the troops of elms on the verge of invisibility. But walking I saw
every small thing one by one; not only the handsome gateway chestnut
just fully dressed, and the pale green larch plantation where another
chiff-chaff was singing, and the tall elm tipped by a linnet pausing
and musing a few notes, but every primrose and celandine and dandelion
on the banks, every silvered green leaf of honeysuckle up in the hedge,
every patch of brightest moss, every luminous drop on a thorn tip. The
world seemed a small place: as I went between a row of elms and a row
of beeches occupied by rooks, I had a feeling that the road, that the
world itself, was private, all theirs; and the state of the road under
their nests confirmed me. I was going hither and thither to-day in the
neighbourhood of my stopping place, instead of continuing my journey.
At a quarter-past nine it drizzled slightly more, but by ten the sky
whitened, the grass gleamed. Over the broad field where the fowls and
turkeys feed, and a retriever guards them, the keeper was walking slow
and heavy, carrying a mattock, and after him two men, one in gaiters.
While they were disappearing from sight in the corner where the field
runs up into the wood, the chained retriever stood and whined piteously
after them. I understood him very well. And somehow the men setting
out thus for a day’s work in the woods prophesied fine weather. Yet at
half-past ten the gray thrust the white down again to the horizon,
where the elms printed themselves against it.
The sun came out in earnest at eleven, and shone upon a field of tall
yellow mustard and a man loading a cart with it, and I ceased to bend
my back and crook my neck towards violet, primrose, anemone, and dog’s
mercury in the blackthorn hedges, and I let the sun have a chance
with me. I was trespassing, but, alas! no glory any longer attaches
to trespassing, because every one is so civil unless you are a plain
or ill-dressed woman, or a child, or obviously a poet. So I came
well-warmed to Rudge, a hamlet collected about a meeting of roads and
scattered up a steep hill, along one of these roads. The collection
includes a small inn called the “Half Moon,” a plain Baptist chapel,
several stone cottages, several ruins, solid but roofless, used solely
to advertise sales, and a signpost pointing to Berkley and Frome
past the ruined cottages, to Westbury and Bradley downhill from the
inn, through the woods about the river Biss, and uphill to Road and
Beckington. Southward I saw the single bare hump of Cley Hill five
miles away, near Warminster: northward, the broad wooded vale rising
up to hills on the horizon. I went uphill, between two bright trickles
of water. The steep roadside bank, strengthened by a stone wall, was
well-grown with pennywort and cranesbill, overhung by goose grass and
ivy, and bathed at its foot by grass and nettles. The wall in one place
is hollowed out into a cavernous, dark dip-well or water-cupboard. The
rest of the village is built upon the banks. First comes a Wesleyan
chapel, a neat, cold, demure little barn of the early nineteenth
century, having a cypress on either side of its front door, and a few
gravestones round about. One of these caught my eye with the verse--
“And am I born to die,
To lay this body down,
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?”--