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;
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.
There is one other quality I should look for in a peasant-poet, and 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.