Cornish Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

JOHN HARRIS, THE MINER POET

A plum-pudding without plums may be a good suet dumpling, and without suet also a respectable batter pudding, but neither is a plum-pudding; and a set of verses without ideas may be pleasant verses, but is not poetry; and without ideas and without imagination is very poor stuff indeed. John Harris could write smooth lines, he had a tender appreciation of the beauties of nature, but he went no further. His verses bear the same relation to poetry that Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy bears to the Philosophy of Plato. But to return to his life. He tells us that "from first to last the majority of my poems have been written in the open air, in lanes and leas, by old stiles and farm gates, by rocks and rivers and mossy moors."

He was put to a miserable school where the hedge-school master was hard-hearted and cruel, and "verily hoots the lessons in his ears. He beats his pupils without mercy, with a polished piece of flat wood studded with small, sharp nails, until the blood runs down, and soon scares the little learner from his straw-roofed academy."

From this school he was removed to another after a few days. "On the edge of a brown common, in a little thatched school-house by the side of the highway, very near the famous Nine Maidens, he finds another master, who wore a wooden leg, with more of the milk of human kindness in his soul, a thorough Christian, and a man of prayer." He says further: "You might have seen him on a summer evening, when his merry schoolmates are chattering in the hollow—you might have seen him walking by the stream, or stretched on the moss listening to the wind tuning its organ among the rocks, or gazing up at the purple heavens. He roams among the flowers, kissing them for very joy, calling them his fragrant sisters. Born on the crest of the hill, amid the crags and storms, he grows up in love with Nature, and she becomes his chief teacher. And now come the promptings of early genius, which develop themselves in snatches of unpolished song, pencilled on the leaves of his copybook for the amusement of his wondering schoolmates. He often writes his rhymes on the clean side of cast-off labelled tea-papers which his mother brings from the shop, and then reads them to his astonished compeers with rapt delight."

At the age of nine he was taken from school and put to work in the fields. At the age of ten he was employed by an old tin-streamer to throw up the sand from the river, earning threepence a day. At twelve he was working on the surface "nearly three miles from his favourite home. As he travels to and fro from his labour through long lanes bramble covered, and over meadows snowy with daisies, or by hedges blue with hyacinths, or over whispering cairns redolent with the hum of bees—" he means thyme on which the bees hover gathering honey—"the beautiful world around him teems with syllables of song. Even then he pencils his strange ditties, reciting them at intervals of leisure to the dwellers of his own district, and older heads than his tell of his future fame."

One thing is evident, that at this early age he was inordinately conceited. He had a true appreciation of the beauties of Nature. He had a receptive soul, but it was that which might have made of him a painter, not necessarily a poet.

At the age of thirteen, or as he styles it, "When thirteen summers have filled his lap with roses, and fanned his forehead with the breeze of health, we find him sweating in the hot air of the interior of a mine (Dolcoath), working with his father nearly two hundred fathoms below the green fields."

So time passes, and he grows to manhood. Then in his stilted style he says: "Love meets him on his flowery pathway, and he weaves a chaplet of the choicest roses to adorn her head. He worships at the shrine of beauty till they stand before the sacred altar, and the two are made one." In plain English, he fell in love and got married to Jane Rule.