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.