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