But we shall not, ‘though we have seen this, with tongue in venom steep’d, pronounce treason against fortune’s state,’ or against the Managers of Drury-lane. Mr. Kean shewed his usual talents in this part; but it afforded less scope and fewer opportunities for them than any part in which we have ever seen him. We are not sorry, however, that he has got into the part, as a kind of truce with tragedy. Why should he not, like other actors, sometimes have a part to walk through? Must we for ever be expecting from him, as if he were a little Jupiter tonans, ‘thunder, nothing but thunder?’ It is too much for any mortal to play Othello and Sir Giles in the same week—we mean, as Mr. Kean plays them. He is, we understand, to appear in a new character, and sing a new song, for his benefit to-morrow week.
CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY PEOPLE
| The Examiner.] | [July 18, 1819. |
‘Here be truths.’—Dogberry.
First, there is an old woman in the neighbouring village, fifty-six years old, with a wooden leg, who never saw a leg of mutton roasted, or a piece of beef put into the pot; and who regards any person who has not lived all his life on rusty bacon as a non-descript or ‘mountain foreigner.’ Yet this venerable matron, who now officiates as cook to a lady ‘retired from public haunts’ into a remote part of the country, kept her father’s house, who was a little farmer, for twenty years; so that she ranks, in the scale of rural existence, above her neighbours. What then must the notions of most of them be of the savoir vivre? Is this the sum and substance of all our boasts of the roast-beef of old England?—The truth is, that the people in this part of the country (I do not know how it is in others) have neither food nor cloathing wherewith to be content; nor are they content without them, nor with those that have them. Any one dressed in a plain broad-cloth coat is in their eyes a sophisticated character, as outlandish a figure as my Lord Foppington. A smock-frock, and shoes with hob-nails in them, are an indispensable part of country etiquette; and they hoot at or pelt any one, who is presumptuous enough to depart from this appropriate costume. This, if we may believe a philosophical poet of the present day, is the meaning of the phrase in Shakespear, ‘pelting villages,’ he having been once set upon in this manner by ‘a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,’ who disliked him for the fantastic strangeness of his appearance. Even their tailors (of whom you might expect better things) hate decency, and will spoil you a suit of clothes, rather than follow your directions. One of them, the little hunch-backed tailor of P—tt—n, with the handsome daughter, whose husband ran away from her and went to sea, was ordered to make a pair of brown or snuff-coloured breeches for my friend C—— L——;—instead of which the pragmatical old gentleman (having an opinion of his own) brought him home a pair of ‘lively Lincoln-green,’ in which I remember he rode in triumph in Johnny Tremain’s cross-country caravan through Newberry, and entered Oxford, ‘fearing no colours,’ the abstract idea of the jest of the thing prevailing in his mind (as it always does) over the sense of personal dignity.
If a stranger comes to live among country people, they have a bad opinion of him at first; and all he can do to overcome their dislike, only confirms them in it. It is in vain to attempt to conciliate them: the more you strive to persuade them that you mean them no harm, the more they are determined not to be convinced. They attribute any civility or kindness you shew them to a design to cajole them. They are not to be taken in by appearances. They are feræ naturæ, and not to be tamed by art. In proportion as you give them no cause of offence, they summon their whole stock of prejudice, impudence, and cunning, to aid their tottering opinion; and hate you the more for the injustice they seem to do you. They had rather you did them an injury that they might keep their original opinion of you. If there is the smallest circumstance or insinuation to your prejudice, their rancour against you, and self-complacency in their own sagacity, eagerly seizes hold of it; fans their suspicions into a flame, and breaks out into open insult and all the triumph of brutal derision. On the contrary, if they find you, after all, a quiet, inoffensive person, they think you a fool, and so have you that way. Used to contempt, they have not much respect to spare for other people. Finding themselves none the better for them, they have not much faith in your demonstrations of good-will towards them. Prepared for repulses and hard treatment, the expression of their gratitude is not very spontaneous or sincere.—An aged Sybil of this place, having gone to a lady, who had just settled here, with a doleful tale of distress, and an empty bottle, received a shilling instead of having her bottle replenished with liquor; when being met on her return by one of her gossips coming on the same errand, and being asked her success, she held up her empty bottle in sign of scorn, saying, ‘Look here!’ Such is the beau ideal of unsophisticated human nature in her obscure retreats, about which there have been so many ‘songs of delight and rustical roundelays.’
Is it strange that these people who know nothing, hate all that they do not understand? Their rudeness, intolerance, and conceit, are in exact proportion to their ignorance: for as they never saw or scarcely heard of any thing out of their own village, every thing else appears to them odd and unaccountable, and they cannot suspect that their own notions are wrong, when they are totally unacquainted with any others. We naturally despise whatever baffles our comprehension, and dislike what contradicts our prejudices, till we are taught better by a liberal course of study; but these people are no better taught than fed. It is a rule which they act upon as self-evident, and from which you will not get them to flinch in a hurry—to scout every proceeding which differs from their own, and to consider every person, of whose birth, parentage, and education, they do not know the several particulars, as a suspicious character. They have no knowledge of literature or the fine arts; which, if once banished from the city and the court, would soon ‘be trampled in the mire under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ A mischievous wag of the present day undertook to read some pastoral and lyrical effusions, (remarkable for their simplicity) to a collection of Cumberland peasants, to see if they would recognise the sentiments put into their mouths; and they only (which was what he expected) laughed at him for his pains. ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and the free maids that weave their thread with bones,’ may indeed relieve the welcome pedlar of his wares, his laces, his true love-knots, or penny-Ballads, but they will have nothing to say to the Lyrical ballads, nor will the united counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, and Durham, subscribe to lighten the London warehouses of a single copy of the Excursion. The hewers of wood and drawers of water know nothing of poetry, and they hate the very look of a poet. They like a painter as little. An artist who was making a sketch of a fine old yew tree in a romantic situation, was asked by a knowing hand, if he could tell how many foot of timber it contained? Falstaff asks as a question not to be answered—‘May I not take mine ease at mine inn?’ But this was in East-Cheap. I cannot do so in the country; for while I am writing this, I hear a fellow disputing in the kitchen, whether a person ought to live (as he expresses it) by pen and ink; and the landlord the other day (in order, I suppose, the better to prepare himself for such controversies) asked me if I had any object in reading through all those books which I had brought with me, meaning a few odd volumes of old plays and novels. The people born here cannot tell how an author gets his living or passes his time; and would fain hunt him out of the place as they do a strange dog, or as they formerly did a conjuror or a witch. Ask the first country clown you meet, if he ever heard of Shakespear or Newton, and he will stare in your face: and I remember our laughing a good deal at W——’s old Molly, who had never heard of the French Revolution, ten years after it happened. Oh worse than Gothic ignorance!
They have no books, nor ever feel the want of them. How indeed should they?[[33]] They have no works of poetry or fiction, to ‘fleet the golden time carelessly;’ but they do not therefore want for fabulous resources. Necessity is the mother of invention; and their talent for lying and scandal is nourished by the very lack of materials.[[34]] They live not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of their mouths. They are employed, like the Athenians of old, in hearing or telling some new thing. The draw-well is the source from which they pump up idle rumours, and the blacksmith’s shop is the place at which they forge the proofs, and turn them to shape, ‘giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’ They lie like devils through thick and thin. They tell and believe all incredible things; and the greater the improbability, the more readily and greedily is it swallowed, for it imposes more on the imagination. To elevate and surprise is the great rule for producing a theatrical or pastoral effect. People in a state of nature believe any thing for want of something to divert the mind, as they plot mischief for want of better employment. Credulity and imposture are two of the strongest propensities of the human mind. Men are as prone to deceive themselves as others, without any other temptation than the exercise it affords to the imagination. It is a false test of historical evidence, that it is necessary to assign a motive why men should consent to be dupes or undertake to be cheats. Curiosity is the source of superstition; for we must have objects to occupy the attention, and fill up the craving void of knowledge; and in the absence of truth, falsehood is called in to supply its place, and with the gross and ignorant, supplies it much better. To ask why the untutored savage believes every marvellous story that is told him, in the dearth of all real knowledge, is to ask why he slakes his thirst at the first fountain that he meets, or devours the prey he has just taken. With all their tendency to bigotry and superstition, country people have scarcely any idea of religion. They have as little divine as human learning. The Bible is the only book they have, but that they do not read, except with spectacles, when they grow old and half-blind. They are to a man and woman of Mrs. Quickly’s opinion—‘But I told him a’ should not think of God yet.’ They go to church, to be sure, as a matter of course, and from not knowing what else to do with themselves on Sundays; but they never think of what they hear, from one week’s end to another. Heaven and Hell are out-of-the-way places, not accessible to the apprehensions of those whose ideas cannot get beyond the parish where they were born; and their joys or sorrows indifferent to an imagination, taken up with the wants of the belly. An old woman, who lived in a cottage by herself, on hearing the account of the Crucifixion, said it was a sad thing, but she hoped it was not true, as it happened so far off and such a long time ago. A servant girl, hearing a Sermon read in which there was a striking account of the Resurrection and the Day of Judgment, was very much alarmed, and said she hoped it would not be in her time. The Decalogue has no terrors, and the Book of Revelations no charms for them. They will be damned, but they will steal and lie, and bear false witness against each other; or if they do not, it is the fear of being hanged, or whipped, or summoned before the Justice of the Peace, and not of being called to account in another world, that prevents them. They are of the earth, earthy. They take thought only for the morrow; or rather, conform to the text—‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ There is not a greater mistake, or a more wilful fallacy, than the common observation, that the lower orders are kept in order (and can only be so) by their faith in religion. They have no more belief in it practically than most of their betters, who propose to keep them in order by it, have speculatively. The ignorant and destitute are restrained from certain things by the fear of the law, or of what will be said of them by their neighbours; and as to other things which are denounced by Scripture, but to which no penalty attaches here, they think if they have a mind to do them, and chuse to go to hell for it, they have a right to do so. That is their phrase. It is nobody’s business but their own. It is (generally speaking) the absence of temptation or opportunity, and not an excess of religious apprehension, that keeps them within the pale of salvation. Their self-will balances their fear of the Devil, and when it comes to the push, the present motive turns the scale, and the flesh proves too hard for the spirit. Burns’s old man in the Cottar’s Saturday Night must pass for a very poetical character, at least in this part of the country. We see constant accounts in the papers, in the case of malefactors that have come to an untimely end, that it was owing in the first instance to the want of religion, to the habit of swearing and Sabbath-breach. The same account would hold equally true of those who are not hanged: for if all but the godly and sober among the lower classes came to the gallows, the population would soon be thinned to a surprising degree.
‘’Twould thin the land
Such numbers to string on Tyburn tree.’