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.’”
That again is constant, and could not be mended: though Mr. Sharp would
mend it if he could, thinking that the hasty shifting of persons,
from third to first, is awkward. It may be awkward, but is very
characteristic and, as I think, evidence of authenticity. One more
verse, which devotes the mourner to a shared grave, ends “Bruton Town”
in pure tragedy; pity, terror, but not disgust. Boccaccio’s additament
is nasty, and Keats did not avoid it, though he was not so nasty as
Boccaccio.
“Bruton Town” comes from Somerset, and is worthy of that songful shire.
It carries in itself its own conviction of peasant origin. No other
race of our people would have conceived the verse last quoted exactly
like that, nor any other audience have accepted it as adequate. “Friend
of mine” is the _pièce de conviction_: the sweetest name a village
girl can give her lover is that of her friend. The pathos of “And wiped
his eyes though he was blind” is the pathos of a wounded bird. It is
beyond the compass of art altogether, one of those strokes of truth
which puts art out of court. It is Nature’s justification before the
schools.
Doggerel, then, or not? There are other things in Mr. Sharp’s volumes
which may help to determine. There is the well-known “Little Sir Hugh,”
where the sacrifice of a Christian child by the Jews is sung. Mr.
Sharp’s version is in parts new. Take this out of it for good doggerel:
“She set him up in a gilty chair,
She gave him sugar sweet;
She laid him out on a dresser board,
And stabbed him like a sheep.”
Well, without any pretence at _curiosa felicitas_, that does its work.
It is terse, tense, yet easy and colloquial. It is shocking rather
than pitiful; but it means to be so. It might be evidence at the
Assizes, where, term by term, they supply just the kind of thing which
would have given that versifier what he wanted. Mr. Sharp’s “Little
Sir Hugh” in fact is not far from Catnachery, of which he gives some
avowed examples. It has only to be set beside “Bruton Town” to settle
it that if “Sir Hugh” is doggerel, the other is not. Ease, tensity,
colloquialism both have; but then comes the difference. “Sir Hugh”
shocks, “Bruton Town” moves; “Bruton Town” has in it the lyric cry,
“Sir Hugh” has it not.
Take as a last case “The True Lover’s Farewell,” pure doggerel, but
excellent of its kind. Everybody knows it, for a reason:
“O fare you well, I must be gone
And leave you for a while;
But wherever I go I will return,
If I go ten thousand mile,
My dear,
If I go ten thousand mile.”
Now for the reason. Burns lifted that for his occasions, and hardly
altered it. He took it and fitted it into its place among other verses
on the same model--but this is how he began:
“O my luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June:
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune--”
An opening, observe, of three beats; and then, as a kind of chorus, the
emotions quickened up, three four-beat verses of abandonment increasing
in reckless simile, and ending with:
“And fare thee well, my only luve;
And fare thee well awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.
THE IBERIAN’S HOUSE
Not long ago I was on the Downs in pursuit of wild raspberries, which,
as the old phrase goes, are very plenty this year. Although the days
are still those of the dog, there was autumn in the air even then: a
grey sky with a cool stream of wind from the west in which was that
familiar taint of things dying which autumn always brings. The flowers
were of autumn too--scabious, bedstraw and rest-harrow; mushrooms were
to be had for the stooping, which we usually seek in dewy September
dawns. On the other hand, there were the raspberries; the brambles were
in flower, and the corn just tinged with yellow. After a burning May
and June, a dripping July, the times are out of joint--but I filled a
hat full of raspberries.
I found the best of them in a pear-shaped hollow in the ground, a place
rather like a giant’s sauce-boat, in depth perhaps some six feet.
Allowing for the slow accumulation of soil tumbled from the sides, for
growth by vegetation and decay spread over many centuries, it may once
have been another three feet down. Call it, then, nine feet deep. By
outside measurements it was fourteen yards long by nine at the broad
end of the pear, narrowing down to three where the stalk would have
been. To-day the actual floor-space is barely two yards at the broad
end. That is because the sides have fallen in, and made descent a
matter of walking, which originally, no doubt, was contrived by some
sort of a ladder, or by slithering down a tree-trunk. Vegetation
is profuse in there: the turf like a sponge, the scabious as big as
ladies’ watches, the raspberries good enough for Bond Street. Well
they may be, for they are rooted in the bones and household spoil of
more than two thousand years. The place was a house long before Cæsar
knew Britain, before the Belgae were in Wilts, before Wilts was Wilts.
To revert to a convenient term, I picked my raspberries in an Iberian
house.
I considered it that day in the light thrown upon its proportions
for me (all unknown to the author) by a terrible little book, the
more terrible for its dispassionate statement, called “The Woman in
the Little House,” whose author, Mrs. Margaret Eyles, has herself
experienced what she writes of. Her Little House is one of, I daresay,
a million; one of those narrow, flat-faced boxes of brick--“two up and
two down,” as they are expressed--sprawling far and wide over the home
counties about London, in which the artisans and operatives who work
thereabout contrive, as best they may, to bestow themselves. It does
not need--or should not--Mrs. Eyles’s calm and good-tempered account to
realise that such dwellings are bad for health and morals, fatal to the
nerves and ruinous to the purses of their occupants. Yet she mentions
more than one simple truth which proves immediately that the smallest
house at the lowest possible rent may be much more costly than a large
one--for instance, she points out that the smallness of the house and
the want of storage room make purchase of stores in any kind of bulk
out of the question. But I have neither the time nor the knowledge to
develop these questions properly. I have only one criticism to make,
and that is that the sufferings of the small householder cannot all be
laid to size; that the difficulties of the Woman in the Little House
are not only economic. Fecklessness in the Woman must take its share of
blame. It is hard to bring up a family in the fear of God and the use
of soap, where there seems to be neither room for the one nor chance
for the other. It is wearing-down work to be nurse to many small and
fretful children while you are carrying yet another, to keep order in
a household which has neither scope for, nor desire of order, to deal
with drunken husband, grudging landlord, quarrelsome neighbour--and so
on. But Mrs. Eyles knows that these things can be done by the woman who
realises that they must, that they have been done and are being done;
and though both of us may grudge, as we do, the waste of nerve, youth,
beauty, vitality which they involve, yet had we rather preach the
gospel of such heroic dumb endurance, such constancy in adversity, such
piety, _and their reward_, than have the heroines fall back, flounder
in the trough of the wave, or the “sensual sty.” But for their lamps
held up, indeed would “universal darkness cover all.”
I seem to be far from my neolithic dwelling; yet am close to it; for
that itself was not much smaller than the “Little House” of to-day,
and yet is three thousand years older at the very least. To its
successor, the Celtic and early English wattle-and-daub hut this brick
box has succeeded, while here in the village under the Down there
are two-roomed, three-roomed tenements in which may be found man,
wife, and eight or ten children. So far as floor-space, air-space,
headroom, sanitation go, they will be very little better than the hole
in the chalk. So far as intellectual and moral outlook go, so far as
foresight, restraint of members, mental capacity, while tradition
is still the universal guide--a tradition which it is not easy to
distinguish from mere instinct--there is little reason to suppose the
occupants of the one differ materially from those of the other. I am
not to regret it or reprove it, but to state it; and go on to say
that when tradition is modified by character the state of a family
so conditioned may be not only orderly, not only prosperous, but
happy--and by that I don’t mean merely contented, but consciously and
avowedly happy. I know several which are so; and while I see, or hear,
of their well-being I have no reason for being anything but glad of it.
Sir Alfred Mond, to be sure, has had nothing to do with it; but it is
my belief that when it comes to a tug-of-war between character and Sir
Alfred Mond, character will pull the right honourable baronet all over
the place.
I cannot bring myself to be that whole-hearted kind of reformer who
says, my sauce must be your sauce, or there is no health for the world.
If I must provide a villager (as surely I must) with store-room for
his potatoes, I would not give him a bath-room for the purpose. I am
uncomfortable myself if I don’t souse every morning in warm water;
but I know several persons who do nothing of the sort, and are not
in the least uncomfortable, nor (to the senses) unclean. I have been
a guest in a house in Northumberland of the right Iberian kind, which
consisted of one room only. A better-conditioned, more wholesome, more
intelligent family than I found there I don’t expect to find easily
anywhere. Tradition explained, and character made tolerable, such a
dwelling. I have not actually seen, but know the appearance of the
house in Ecclefechan, where Carlyle was reared. I should be surprised
to learn that it was more than “two up and one down,” rather surprised
if it was so much. I don’t put Thomas Carlyle forward as an example of
the modification of circumstance by character: he was much the reverse.
But all that he tells me of his father and mother was written for my
learning. The rule of Saint Use was well kept in Ecclefechan, or I am
the more deceived. If Carlyle’s mother would have exchanged her lot for
that of any woman born she was not the woman he celebrates. And have
we not heard of Margaret Ogilvie, and been the better of it? It is not
the present-day practice to consider our social troubles from the moral
end, and I am sorry for it. The economic end engrosses us altogether;
yet it is not, strictly speaking, the “business-end.” It is little use
abolishing this or that institution while human nature remains as it
always was.
There is one serious subject which Mrs. Eyles has had to deal with,
into which I hesitate to intrude. Iberian women are kind, and their men
clamative. As she has heard it said by many a one of them, the day may
be endured, but not the night. Well, there again character can modify
use-and-wont, either by teaching acquiescence or by inspiring revolt.
And yet I cannot but remember what was said to a friend of mine in a
neighbouring village in the first of our terrible four years of war.
The speaker was a woman, a mother of children, who for the first time
in her life had enough money and her house to herself. “Ah, ma’am,” she
said, “you may depend upon it, this war has made many happy homes.”
SCANDINAVIAN ENGLAND
The valley is narrow, not much more than a hundred and fifty yards
wide, where I am stationed now. Of them some twenty are claimed by
the headlong river and its beaches of flat grey stones, and perhaps
eighty more by small green garths, divided by walls. Then broken ground
of boulders, bent and bracken, and then, immediately, the fells rise
up like walls to a ragged skyline. They stream with water at every
fissure, are quickly clouded, blurred and blotted by rain; then clear,
and shining like glass in the sun. The look of things is not the same
for half an hour at a time. Fleets of cloud come up from the Atlantic,
anchor themselves on the mountain-tops, and descend in floods of rain,
sharp and swift as arrows. Or if the wind drive them they will fleet
across the landscape like white curtains, and whelm the world in blown
water. You don’t “make” your hay in this country, you “win” it if you
can: you steal it, as they say. As for your patches of oats, as likely
as not you will use them for green fodder. Roots would be your crop
if you had room for them among the stones--but in Eskdale you are a
sheep-farmer, with a thousand head of sheep and a thousand acres of
fell to feed them on.
I am new to this corner of our country, where Lancashire and Cumberland
run so much in and out of each other that the people have given up
county categories and call it all indifferently Furness Fells. I don’t
know any other part of England so sparely occupied. The farms are few,
large and far apart; there are practically no villages; and my own
cottage (which was built for a dead and buried mining scheme, and is
the last of its clan) is the only one to be found within miles of empty
country. A plain-faced, plain-dealing, plain-spoken race lives here,
in a countryside where every natural landmark has a Norse name, and
one is recalled to the Sagas at every turn of the valley, and by every
common occupation of man. The economy of life exactly follows that
told of in the Icelandic tales. In the homestead live the farmer and
his thralls, the wife and her maids. There are no married labourers,
and board and lodging is part of every young man’s and young woman’s
hire. Twelve such people live in the farmhouse nearest to me--twelve
people, eleven dogs, an uncertain number of children, and a bottle-fed
black lamb. Not only so, but it is true that the dalesmen and their
servants are Icelandic in favour and way of speech. Dialect is not much
to the point; intonation is a great deal to it. That runs flat, level
and monotonous--unemotionally, like Danish. It makes a kind of muted
speech, so that it is hard to know whether a woman is pleased or angry,
or a man of agreeable or offensive intention.
I never met with a people more innately democratic than the Danes
until I met this year with this people of Eskdale. It is not at all
that they seek to assert their equality: it is that they know it.
The manners depicted in the Sagas are those of men dealing with men.
Neither inflation nor deflation is deemed necessary, neither arrogance
nor condescension. You make a statement, short and unadorned: it is
for the other man to take or leave. Speech is not epigrammatic because
minds move slowly here. But it is very terse--because it may rain
before you have finished. Plainer than speech are manners. They were
that in the Sagas, in more than one of which the starting-point of feud
and vendetta was the persistent and obtuse besetting of a daughter of
one house by the son of another. She was busy, or busied, as in all
primitive societies the women are; but he was not. So he hung about her
house, not attempting speech with her, not explaining or justifying or
extenuating his oppressive behaviour, simply overshadowing the poor
thing, causing her to be talked about, and scandalising her family.
There was but one way of dealing with him in those days, which was
to crack his skull. That was done, and so the drama put on its legs.
Things are better than that now, yet the principle is the same. I
remember the discomfort and alarm of three southern maids whom we once
brought up with us to a farmhouse in Selkirk. At their supper-hour
three strange young men were discovered sitting on a gate in full view
of the kitchen window. Nothing makes an Iberian so uncomfortable as to
be watched at a meal. But nothing would move the young men, not even
the drawing of the curtains. They had no explanation to give, no excuse
to make. One faintly whistled between his teeth, and then said that it
was a free country. So it was, if to make free is to be so.
It is much the same here. The young men of the farm regard every young
woman, of whatever walk in life, as a thing to be whistled in, like
a sheep-dog. They have the Saga knack of declaring the state of their
feelings by imposing themselves upon its object. They beleaguer the
house, shadow the desired, trust to wearing her down, hope to bore her
into love. Or, rather, they don’t care whether she love or not, so long
as they are allowed it. Woman in the Sagas is a chattel, a thing to be
bought or stolen. So she was to the Homeric hero. So she seems to be
here.
The Danes, as we loosely call our Norse invaders, were a more dominant
strain than whatever people they found in Furness. Not only have they
implanted their form, feature and hue upon the Cumbrians, not only
named their rivers and hills for them, or a great many of them, but
they have established their social code. “Whistle and I’ll come to you,
my lad,” is not a sentiment of Southern Britain. It is firmly implanted
in the mind of the young Dalesman, who finds it right and proper.
OUR BLOOD AND STATE IN 1660