I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from towns and
railroads, will have any literary associations for the reader, unless
he be a person of exceptionally good memory, who has taken a special
interest in the minor poets of the last century; or that it would
help him if I add the names of Honington and Sapiston, two other small
villages a couple of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little
Ouse, or a branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the
birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet" in the
early part of the last century (although Crabbe was living then and was
great, as he is becoming again after many years); while at Sapiston, the
rustic village on the other side of the old stone bridge, he acquired
that love of nature and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which
came out later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little village
in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a person of importance in
his day, who discovered Bloomfield, found a publisher for his poems, and
boomed it with amazing success.
I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in readers of
literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me;
that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote
rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable
trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic
Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and
by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one
of the immortals.
I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal
friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put
anything of this sort into print. He would warn me that it matters
nothing that Bloomfield's verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that
twenty-five or thirty editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within
three years of its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for
half a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive
to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile
and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day.
Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked
at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants to look at
it now.
Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless, I think
I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker who has long fallen
out; and though I may be unable to make a case out, the kindly critic
may find some circumstance to extenuate my folly--to say, in the end,
that this appears to be one of the little foolishnesses which might be
forgiven.
I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of his poems,
the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of literary taste or
the critical faculty; it is also, to some extent, a matter of
association,--and as the story of how this comes about is rather
curious, I will venture to give it.
In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief delight
was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find something about
nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us
by nature, which was, in my case, inseparable from seeing and hearing,
and was, to me, the most important thing in life. For who could look
on earth, water, sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without
experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In due time I
discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found
chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling
about nature often gave me more satisfaction than a whole volume of
prose on such subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not
obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas. There were a
couple of hundred volumes on the shelves--theology, history, biography,
philosophy, science, travels, essays, and some old forgotten fiction;
but no verse was there, except Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless
volume. This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana
tripping o'er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews her eye
to think yon playful kid must die. To my uncultivated mind--for I had
never been at school, and lived in the open air with the birds and
beasts--this seemed intolerably artificial; for I was like a hungry
person who has nothing but kickshaws put before him, and eats because
he is hungry until he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the
appetite. Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or
even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a slight return
of that old sensation of nausea. If Shenstone alone had come to me, the
desire for poetry would doubtless have been outlived early in life;
but there were many passages, some very long, from the poets in various
books on the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive. There was
Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate his point
with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in my case being that
they were almost exclusively drawn from Akenside, who was not "rural."
But there were other books in which other poets were quoted, and of
all these the passages which invariably pleased me most were the
descriptions of rural sights and sounds.
One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I discovered in a
mean street, in the southern part of the town, a second-hand bookshop,
kept by an old snuffy spectacled German in a long shabby black coat. I
remember him well because he was a very important person to me. It was
the first shop of the kind I had seen--I doubt if there was another in
the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour among this mass of
old books on the dusty shelves and heaped on the brick floor was a novel
and delightful experience. The books were mostly in Spanish, French,
and German, but there were some in English, and among them I came upon
Thomson's Seasons. I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I
snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding. It was the
first book in English I ever bought, and to this day when I see a copy
of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is often enough, I cannot keep
my fingers off it and find it hard to resist the temptation to throw
a couple of shillings away and take it home. If shillings had not been
wanted for bread and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by
now.
Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return to it from
time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite
of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers
of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read--that he is
unreadable.
After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow in that
delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by the discovery of
yet another poem of rural England--the Farmer's Boy. I was prepared to
like it, for although I did not know anything about the author's early
life, the few passages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's
and other old natural history compilations had given me a strong desire
to read the whole poem. I certainly did like it--this quiet description
in verse of a green spot in England, my spiritual country which so far
as I knew I was never destined to see; and that I continue to like it
is, as I have said, the reason of my being in this place.
While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circumstances of the case
caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made it very much more to
me than it could be to persons born in England with all its poetical
literature to browse on, I am at the same time convinced that this is
not the sole reason for my regard.
I take it that the Farmer's Boy is poetry, not merely slightly poetized
prose in the form of verse, although it is undoubtedly poetry of a very
humble order.
Mere descriptions of rural scenes do not demand the higher qualities of
the poet--imagination and passion. The lower kind of inspiration is, in
fact, often better suited to such themes and shows nature by the common
light of day, as it were, instead of revealing it as by a succession of
lightning flashes. Even among those who confine themselves to this lower
plane, Bloomfield is not great: his small flame is constantly sinking
and flickering out. But at intervals it burns up again and redeems
the work from being wholly commonplace and trivial. He is, in fact, no
better than many another small poet who has been devoured by Time since
his day, and whose work no person would now attempt to bring back. It
is probable, too, that many of these lesser singers whose fame was brief
would in their day have deeply resented being placed on a level with the
Suffolk peasant-poet. In spite of all this, and of the impossibility of
saving most of the verse which is only passably good from oblivion, I
still think the Farmer's Boy worth preserving for more reasons than one,
but chiefly because it is the only work of its kind.
There is no lack of rural poetry--the Seasons to begin with and much
Thomsonian poetry besides, treating of nature in a general way; then we
have innumerable detached descriptions of actual scenes, such as we find
scattered throughout Cowper's Task, and numberless other works. Besides
all this there are the countless shorter poems, each conveying an
impression of some particular scene or aspect of nature; the poet of
the open air, like the landscape painter, is ever on the look out for
picturesque "bits" and atmospheric effects as a subject. In Bloomfield
we get something altogether different--a simple, consistent, and fairly
complete account of the country people's toilsome life in a remote
agricultural district in England--a small rustic village set amid green
and arable fields, woods and common lands. We have it from the inside by
one who had part in it, born and bred to the humble life he described;
and, finally, it is not given as a full day-to-day record--photographed
as we may say--with all the minute unessential details and repetitions,
but as it appeared when looked back upon from a distance, reliving it in
memory, the sights and sounds and events which had impressed the boy's
mind standing vividly out. Of this lowly poem it may be truly said that
it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity," to use the phrase invented
by Wordsworth when he attempted a definition of poetry generally and
signally failed, as Coleridge demonstrated.
It will be said that the facts of Bloomfield's life--that he was a
farmer's boy whose daily tasks were to scare the crows, feed the pigs,
and forty things besides, and that later, when learning the shoemaker's
trade in a London garret, he put these memories together and made them
into a poem--are wholly beside the question when we come to judge the
work as literature. A peasant poet may win a great reputation in his own
day on account of the circumstances of the case, but in the end his work
must be tried by the same standards applied in other and in all cases.
There is no getting away from this, and all that remains is to endeavour
to show that the poem, although poor as a whole, is not altogether bad,
but contains many lines that glow with beautiful poetic feeling, and
many descriptive passages which are admirable. Furthermore, I will
venture to say that despite the feebleness of a large part of the work
(as poetry) it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its
unique character. It may be that I am the only person in England able
to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in which it first came to my
notice, and the critical reader can, if he thinks proper, discount what
I am now saying as mere personal feeling. But the case is this: when, in
a distant region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I
could find relating to country scenes and life in England--the land of
my desire--I was never able to get an extended and congruous view of it,
with a sense of the continuity in human and animal life in its relation
to nature. It was all broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in
detached scenes, vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases,
but unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of rural subjects
hanging on the walls of a room. Even the Seasons failed to supply this
want, since Thomson in his great work is of no place and abides nowhere,
but ranges on eagle's wings over the entire land, and, for the matter
of that, over the whole globe. But I did get it in the Farmer's Boy. I
visualized the whole scene, the entire harmonious life; I was with him
from morn till eve always in that same green country with the same sky,
cloudy or serene, above me; in the rustic village, at the small church
with a thatched roof where the daws nested in the belfry, and the
children played and shouted among the gravestones in the churchyard; in
woods and green and ploughed fields and the deep lanes--with him and his
fellow-toilers, and the animals, domestic and wild, regarding their life
and actions from day to day through all the vicissitudes of the year.
The poem, then, appears to fill a place in our poetic literature, or to
fill a gap; at all events from the point of view of those who, born and
living in distant parts of the earth, still dream of the Old Home. This
perhaps accounts for the fact, which I heard at Honington, that most of
the pilgrims to Bloomfield's birthplace are Americans.
Bloomfield followed his great example in dividing his poem into the four
seasons, and he begins, Thomson-like, with an invitation to the Muse:--
O come, blest spirit, whatsoe'er thou art,
Thou kindling warmth that hov'rest round my heart.
But happily he does not attempt to imitate the lofty diction of the
Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I imagine,
Thomson derived his sonorous style. He had a humble mind and knew his
limitations, and though he adopted the artificial form of verse which
prevailed down to his time he was still able to be simple and natural.
"Spring" does not contain much of the best of his work, but the opening
is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos in his apologetic
description of himself, as Giles, the farmer's boy.
Nature's sublimer scenes ne'er charmed my eyes
Nor Science led me...
From meaner objects far my raptures flow...
Quick-springing sorrows, transient as the dew,
Delight from trifles, trifles ever new.
'Twas thus with Giles; meek, fatherless, and poor,
Labour his portion...
His life was cheerful, constant servitude...
Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
The fields his study, Nature was his book.
The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable master; the
animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small flock of fore-score
ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are described, and the result
left to the powers above:
Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around,
And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground;
In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun,
His tufted barley yellow with the sun.
While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to do
protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows; one of the
multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that have been shot, for
although--
Their danger well the wary plunderers know
And place a watch on some conspicuous bough,
Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise
Will scatter death among them as they rise.
'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about the fields,
since in a little while they are no more regarded than the men of rags
and straw with sham rifles in their hands. It was for him to shift
the dead from place to place, to arrange them in dying attitudes with
outstretched wings. Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead
crows, to be guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge
round to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach of
hungry night-prowlers. Called up at daybreak each morning, he would take
his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks to "fields remote from
home" to redistribute his dead birds, then to fetch the cows, and here
we have an example of his close naturalist-like observation in his
account of the leading cow, the one who coming and going on all
occasions is allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by
many a broil," with just pride. A picture of the cool dairy and its
work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and luxury of
the over-populous capital which drains the whole country-side of all
produce, which makes the Suffolk dairy-wives run mad for cream, leaving
nothing but the "three-times skimmed sky-blue" to make cheese for local
consumption. What a cheese it is, that has the virtue of a post, which
turns the stoutest blade, and is at last flung in despair into the
hog-trough, where
It rests in perfect spite,
Too big to swallow and too hard to bite!
We then come to the sheep, "for Giles was shepherd too," and here there
is more evidence of his observant eye when he describes the character of
the animals, also in what follows about the young lambs, which forms the
best passage in this part. I remember that, when first reading it, being
then little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid
beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging each other
to a game, especially at a spot where they have a mound or hillock for a
playground which takes them with a sort of goatlike joyous madness. For
how often in those days I used to ride out to where the flock of one to
two thousand sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and
watch the glad romps of the little lambs with keenest delight! I cannot
but think that Bloomfield's fidelity to nature in such pictures as
these does or should count for something in considering his work. He
concludes:--
Adown the slope, then up the hillock climb,
Where every mole-hill is a bed of thyme,
Then panting stop; yet scarcely can refrain;
A bird, a leaf, will set them off again;
Or if a gale with strength unusual blow,
Scattering the wild-briar roses into snow,
Their little limbs increasing efforts try,
Like a torn rose the fair assemblage fly.
This image of the wind-scattered petals of the wild rose reminds
him bitterly of the destined end of these joyous young lives--his
white-fleeced little fellow-mortals. He sees the murdering butcher
coming in his cart to demand the firstlings of the flock; he cannot
suppress a cry of grief and indignation--he can only strive to shut out
the shocking image from his soul!
"Summer" opens with some reflections on the farmer's life in a prosy
Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a rule Bloomfield
no sooner attempts to rise to a general view than he grows flat; and in
like manner he usually fails when he attempts wide prospects and large
effects. He is at his best only when describing scenes and incidents
at the farm in which he himself is a chief actor, as in this part when,
after the sowing of the turnip seed, he is sent out to keep the small
birds from the ripening corn:
There thousands in a flock, for ever gay,
Loud chirping sparrows welcome on the day,
And from the mazes of the leafy thorn
Drop one by one upon the bending corn.
Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with his
brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he takes a rest by
the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in shade, his attention is
attracted to the minute insect life that swarms about him:
The small dust-coloured beetle climbs with pain
O'er the smooth plantain leaf, a spacious plain!
Then higher still by countless steps conveyed,
He gains the summit of a shivering blade,
And flirts his filmy wings and looks around,
Exulting in his distance from the ground.
It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his vision is
called to the springing lark:
Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings,
And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings;
Still louder breathes, and in the face of day
Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way.
Close to his eye his hat he instant bends
And forms a friendly telescope that lends
Just aid enough to dull the glaring light
And place the wandering bird before his sight,
That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along;
Lost for a while yet pours a varied song;
The eye still follows and the cloud moves by,
Again he stretches up the clear blue sky,
His form, his motions, undistinguished quite,
Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.
In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his poles and
starts again brushing round.
Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village beauty,
taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in their unwonted
liveliness and new-found wit
Confess the presence of a pretty face.