Before I decided that sleep was better than any book, some bad poetry I was reading put me in mind of Stephen Duck. I had been thinking of him earlier in the day at Erlestoke, because it occurred to me that the sculpture was as inappropriate on the cottages there as were the frigid graces on the thresher’s mortal pages. This man, a labourer from Charlton, some way east of Erlestoke, was made a Yeoman of the Guard in 1733 for his services to literature, and rector of Byfleet in 1752. He drowned himself in 1755, when he was fifty. His great achievements were, first, to show that an agricultural labourer could write as well as ninety-nine out of a hundred clergymen, gentlemen, and noblemen, and extremely like them, for his verses rarely had more to do with rural life than the sculpture at Erlestoke; second, to show, conversely, that a poet could use a scythe, which he tells us he did—and made[181] “the vanquished mowers soon confess his skill”—when revisiting his birthplace.

Instead of Stephen, George, and John, he sang of Colin, Cuddy, and Menalcas; of Chloe and Celia, instead of Ann and Maria. When he set himself to write of shepherds, whom he must often have met, it fell out thus,—
“From Bath, I travel thro’ the sultry vale,
Till Sal’sb’ry Plains afford a cooling Gale:
Arcadian Plains where Pan delights to dwell,
In verdant Beauties cannot these excel:
These too, like them, might gain immortal Fame,
Resound with Corydon and Thyrsis’ Flame;
If, to his Mouth, the Shepherd would apply
His mellow Pipe, or vocal Music try.”

But, alas, the poor shepherd has not heard of pastoral poetry, and does not know—oh, happy if his happiness he knew—that his country is Arcadia; for, as Duck laments,—
“Propt on his Staff, he indolently stands;
His Hands support his Head, his Staff his Hands;
Or, idly basking in the sunny Ray,
Supinely lazy, loiters Life away.”

This is a good deal more like a poet than a shepherd. The fellow might have retorted that even if he converted his sheep hook into a pen he might not be the one of whom the poet wrote,—

[182]
“Great Caroline her Royal Bounty show’d
To one, and raised him from the grov’ling Crowd”—

that Queen Caroline could not be expected to replenish the Yeomen with Arcadians only.

Duck was at least as much awed by the Queen as by Nature. Richmond Park and the Royal Gardens so disturbed his judgment that he believed it possible, if Pope’s Muse would visit him,—
“Then Richmond Hill renown’d in Verse should grow,
And Thames re-echo to the Song below;
A second Eden in my Page should shine,
And Milton’s Paradise submit to mine.”

The Queen’s Grotto in Richmond Gardens inspired him with the line,—
“The sweetest Grotto and the wisest Queen.”

And yet the poor man said, and in a preface published in his lifetime, “I have not myself been so fond of writing, as might be imagined from seeing so many things of mine as are got together in this Book. Several of them are on Subjects that were given me by Persons, to whom I have such great Obligations, that I always thought their desires commands.”

Leaving school about his fourteenth year for “the several lowest employments of a country[183] life,” and marrying before he was twenty, he had to work at top pressure in order to make time to read the Spectator, which he did “all over sweat and heat, without regarding his own health.” He “got English just as we get Latin.” He studied “Paradise Lost” as others study the classics, with the help of a dictionary. When he wrote about the life best known to him, it was usually as any of those gentlemen who helped him would have done. He made very little advance on Sir Philip Sidney.

Nevertheless, some things he did write which were true and were unlikely to have been written by any one else, as when he described the thresher’s labour,—
“When sooty Pease we thresh, you scarce can know
Our native Colour as from Work we go:
The Sweat, the Dust, and suffocating Smoke,
Make us so much like Ethiopians look.
We scare our Wives, when Ev’ning brings us home,
And frighted Infants think the Bugbear come.
Week after Week, we this dull Task pursue,
Unless when winn’wing Days produce a new;
A new, indeed, but frequently a worse,
The Threshal yields but to the Master’s Curse.
He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day;
Then swears we’ve idled half our Time away:
‘Why, look ye, Rogues, d’ye think that this will do?
Your neighbours thresh as much again as you.’
Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools,
To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools;
[184]
But, wanting these, we just like Schoolboys look,
When angry Masters view the blotted Book:
They cry, ‘Their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;’
We, ‘The Corn threshes bad, ’twas cut too green.’”

He might have equalled Bloomfield, he might have been a much lesser Crabbe, if he could have thrown Cuddy and Chloe on to the mixen and kept to the slighted homely style. Instead of merely writing as if he had been to Oxford, he might have reached men’s ears with his appeal,—
“Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare,
Pity the Reapers, who their Feasts prepare.”

As a rule his work—I mean his writing—is so remote from Wiltshire and Duck, or the sort of reality connected with them which we to-day look for, that even the grain or two about Salisbury Plain or the Pewsey Vale not quite dissolved in his floods of Alexanderpopery delight us, as when he calls the lambs bleating,—
“Too harsh, perhaps, to please politer Ears,
Yet much the sweetest Tune the Farmer hears:”

or when he compares the haymakers to sparrows at the approach of storm,—
“Thus have I seen, on a bright Summer’s Day,
On some green Brake, a Flock of Sparrows play;
[185]
From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly;
And with continued Chirping fill the Sky:
But, on a sudden, if a Storm appears,
Their chirping Noise no longer dins our Ears.
They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush,
There silent sit, and all at once is hush.”

He says little more than enough to make us feel how much he could have said if—well, if, for example, he had been the sort of man to wish to employ his flail, not to drown the master’s curses, but to break his head. But he was ineffectual, if not beautiful. The only known material effect of his verse was to draw charity from Lord Palmerston for providing an annual threshers’ dinner, which is still given at Charlton on June 30. This feast proves him greater as prophet than as poet in writing,—
“Oft as this Day returns, shall Temple cheer
The Threshers’ Hearts with Mutton, Beef, and Beer;
Hence, when their Children’s Children shall admire
This Holiday, and, whence deriv’d, inquire,
Some grateful Father, partial to my Fame,
Shall thus describe from whence, and how it came:
‘Here, Child, a Thresher liv’d in ancient Days;
Quaint Songs he sung, and pleasing Roundelays;
A gracious Queen his Sonnets did commend,
And some great Lord, one Temple, was his Friend.
That Lord was pleas’d this Holiday to make,
And feast the Threshers for that Thresher’s sake.’”

[186]

A hundred years were to pass before a countryman came to do something of what Duck left undone, but, however honestly, did it from the point of view of a spectator, a clergyman, a schoolmaster, an arch?ologist, a reader of Tennyson, and the refined contemplators of rural life. He lived and died in a country of which most of the conditions are to be paralleled on Salisbury Plain and the Pewsey Vale. I mean William Barnes.

Dorset is a county of chalk hills divided by broad valleys and, in particular, by the valleys of the Stour and the Frome. William Barnes is the poet of the valleys, the elm and not the beech being his favourite tree. In the first year of last century he was born in Blackmoor Vale, which is watered by a tributary of the Stour: at his death, only fourteen years from the century’s end, he was rector of Came, which is in the valley of the Frome. The son of a Dorset farmer, and for most of his life a schoolmaster or clergyman within the county, the Dorset dialect was his mother tongue, his “only true speech.” He wrote of Dorset, and for Dorset, and strangers, perhaps natives also, might say that the man was Dorset. His poems are full of the names and the aspects of its towns and villages, its rivers and brooks, and the hills that lie around its great[187] central height of Bulbarrow, which is mid-way between the homes of his childhood and old age.

In his “Praise o’ Dorset” the poet is very modest, with a kind of humorous modesty, about the county. Though we may be homely, is the beginning, we are not ashamed to own our place; we have some women “not uncomely,” and so on. Homeliness, in fact, is characteristic of Barnes and of his Dorset. He became in some ways a learned man, but when he wrote in his mother tongue and from the heart, he was the Dorset farmer’s son and nothing else. From the humble homeliness of his work he might have been a labourer, and he did more or less deliberately make himself the mouth-piece of the Dorset carters, cowmen, mowers, and harvesters. These songs, narratives, and dialogues bring forward the men at their labours, walking with their club flags to church, singing the songs of Christmas or Harvest Home. Here they court, wed, grow old together, build a new house, or return with money saved to their “poor fore-fathers’ plot o’ land.” He celebrates the horses, Smiler, Violet, Whitefoot, Jack, and “the great old wagon uncle had.” Separate poems are given to notable trees—“the great oak tree that’s in the dell,” the cottage lilac tree, the solitary may tree by the pond, an aspen by the river at Pentridge,[188] the great elm in the little home-field and its fall. “Trees be Company” is the title of one of his poems.

Many of his best passages are about old houses, with hearths “hallowed by times o’ zitten round,” and fires that made the heart gay in storm or winter, and some of them, like “the great old house of mossy stone,” with memories of stately ladies that once did use
“To walk wi’ hoops an’ high-heel shoes”

along its terraces. It makes me think of a man whose ancestors, at any rate, had often been cold, homeless, and tired, when I see how often he speaks of the hearth, the fire, the shelter of house walls, at evening, in hard weather, or in old age. Again and again he shows us the men forgetting their work for a little while, as they sit among children or friends, watching the flames in the window glass, or listening to the wind and rain. Give me, he says in one poem, even though I were the squire, “the settle and the great wood fire.” In another, he feels that he can endure all if only evening bring peace at home. A man with work, a family, and a store of wood for the winter, has everything: the evening meal and the wife smiling make bliss.

[189]

Barnes felt the pathos of the labourer’s rest, and one of his finest poems depicts a cottage under a swaying poplar, with the moonlight on its door,—
“An’ hands, a-tired by day, wer still,
Wi’ moonlight on the door.”

He uses the same effect a second time, adding the reflection that the children now sleeping in the moonlit house will rise again to fun, and their widowed mother to sorrow. These people are pathetic because in their “little worold” they want and have so little,—
“Drough longsome years a-wanderen,
Drough lwonesome rest a-ponderen.”

Anything may eclipse, though nought can extinguish, their little joy; yet they seem made rather for sorrow than joy. They have longings, but hardly passions. They want to rest after all, not to become discontented ghosts like “the weeping lady.” They are prepared for the worst in this life, but the worst is tempered. The dead, for example, are safe from all weathers, better off than the bereaved who grieve for them “with lonesome love.” The dead even seem beautiful in memory. There is a “glory round the old folk dead,” the old uncle and aunt who used to walk arm in arm on Sunday[190] evenings about the farm, the grandmother who wore “a gown with great flowers like hollyhocks,” and told tales of ancient times, the old kindly squire who so enjoyed life,—
“But now I hope his kindly fe?ce
Is gone to vind a better ple?ce.”

Many poems are given to another and not very different kind of memories, those of childhood, and the essence of them, with a hundred pretty variations, is,—
“How smoothly then did run my happy days,
When things to charm my mind and sight were nigh.”

Most are memories of the open air, of “lonesome woodlands, sunny woodlands,” the river and the harvest fields, to the accompaniment of the songs of birds and milkmaids. The children are always laughing, playing, dancing in their “tiny shoes,” but their heavy elders and the home under the elm or in the “lonesome” grove of oak remind us, if not them, of age and death.

The love-poems further illustrate Barnes’s Dorset homeliness and humbleness. Young maidens delight him much as children do; yet even while he is praising the Blackmoor maidens he says,—

[191]
“Why, if a man would wive
An’ thrive, ’ithout a dow’r,
Then let en look en out a wife
In Blackmwore by the Stour.”

The girls all have something wifely about them. The wooer never forgets that the sweetheart may be the wife; he wishes her less care than her mother had, and looks forward to old age in her company. He is not a wild wooer. He is content to sit in a gathering and hear his Jane “put in a good word now and then,” and have a smile and a blush from her at the door on parting: having carried her pail he is satisfied to know that she would have bowed when she took it back had it not been too heavy. He wants a maid who is “good and true,” “good and fair,” and healthy, and to have always beside him the “welcome face and homely name.” Once he may have been ruffled by a mere beauty in a scarlet cloak, but probably he soon sets his heart on one who may bring him happiness with children, contentment with age, and perhaps help him to a little fortune in the thatched cottage “below the elems by the bridge.” The lovers, like the poet himself, go with heads a little bowed, as if in readiness for blows. It is in contrast with these rather stiff, darkened men and women, who have winter and poverty on their horizon, that the[192] children in Barnes’s poetry are so blithe, his Spring days so buoyant, and his flowers and birds among the brightest and freshest in any of the poets.

But there is a greater than Duck or Barnes still among us, a wide-ranging poet, who is always a countryman of a somewhat lonely heart, Mr. Thomas Hardy. For I do notice something in his poetry which I hope I may with respect call rustic, and, what is much the same thing, old-fashioned. It enables him to mingle elements unexpectedly, so that, thinking of 1967 in the year 1867, he spoke not only of the new century having “new minds, new modes, new fools, new wise,” but concluded,—
“For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love”—

which is as antique as Donne’s Flea that wedded the lovers by combining blood from both of them within its body. The same rusticity manifests itself elsewhere as Elizabethanism, and the poet is something of a “liberal shepherd” in his willingness to give things their grosser names or to hint at them. He has a real taste for such comparisons as that made by a French officer looking at the English fleet at Trafalgar,—
“Their overcrowded sails
Bulge like blown bladders in a tripeman’s shop
The market-morning after slaughter-day.”

[193]

Then, how his illustrations to his own poems—such as the pair of spectacles lying right across the landscape, following “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury”—remind us of a seventeenth-century book of emblems!

Sometimes his excuse is that he is impersonating a man of an earlier age, as in the Sergeant’s song,—
“When Husbands with their Wives agree,
And Maids won’t wed from modesty,
Then little Boney he’ll pounce down,
And march his men on London town.
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lorum,
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lay.”

He has written songs and narratives which prove his descent from some ancient ballad-maker, perhaps the one who wrote “A pleasant ballad of the merry miller’s wooing of the baker’s daughter of Manchester,” or “A new ballade, showing the cruel robberies and lewd life of Philip Collins, alias Osburne, commonly called Philip of the West, who was pressed to death at Newgate in London the third of December last past, 1597,” to be sung to the tune of “Pagginton’s round.” Some of the lyric stanzas to which he fits a narrative originated probably in some such tune.

And how often is he delighted to represent a peasant’s view, a peasant’s contribution to the irony[194] of things, a capital instance being the Belgian who killed Grouchy to save his farm, and so lost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo.

With this rusticity, if that be the right name for it, I cannot help connecting that most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of Fate, the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man, crawling in multitudes like caterpillars, twitched by the Immanent Will hither and thither. Over and over again, from the earliest poems up to the “Dynasts,” he amplifies those words which he puts into the mouth of God,—
“My labours, logicless,
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.”

And, referring to the earth,—
“It lost my interest from the first,
My aims therefor succeeding ill;
Haply it died of doing as it durst.
Lord, it existeth still.”

“Sportsman Time” and “those purblind Doomsters” are characteristic phrases. The many things said by him of birth he sums up at the end of a death-bed poem,—

[195]
“We see by littles now the deft achievement
Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all,
In view of which our momentary bereavement
Outshapes but small.”

As gravely he descends to the ludicrous extreme of making a country girl planting a pine-tree sing,—
“It will sigh in the morning,
Will sigh at noon,
At the winter’s warning,
In wafts of June;
Grieving that never
Kind Fate decreed
It could not ever
Remain a seed,
And shun the welter
Of things without,
Unneeding shelter
From storm and drought.”

He puts into the mouths of field, flock, and tree—because while he gazed at them at dawn they looked like chastened children sitting in school silent—the question,—
“Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?”

Napoleon, in the “Dynasts,” asks the question, “Why am I here?” and answers it,—

[196]
“By laws imposed on me inexorably.
History makes use of me to weave her web.”

Twentieth century superstition can no farther go than in that enormous poem, which is astonishing in many ways, not least in being readable. I call it superstition because truth, or a genuine attempt at truth, has been turned apparently by an isolated rustic imagination into an obsession so powerful that only a very great talent could have rescued anything uninjured from the weight of it. A hundred years ago, Mr. Hardy would have seen “real ghosts.” To-day he has to invent them, and call his Spirits of the Years and of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic, Rumours and Recording Angels, who have the best seats at the human comedy, “contrivances of the fancy merely.”

Even his use of irony verges on the superstitious. Artistically, at least in the shorter poems, it may be sound, and is certainly effective, as where the old man laments on learning that his wife is to be in the same wing of the workhouse, instead of setting him “free of his forty years’ chain.” But the frequent use and abuse of it change the reader’s smile into a laugh at the perversity.

Mr. Hardy must have discovered the blindness of Fate, the indifference of Nature, and the irony of Life, before he met them in books. They have[197] been brooded over in solitude, until they afflict him as the wickedness of man afflicts a Puritan. The skull and crossbones, Death the scythed skeleton, and the symbolic hour-glass have been as real to him as to some of those carvers of tombstones in country churchyards, or to the painter of that window at St. Edmund’s in Salisbury who represented “God the Father ... in blue and red vests, like a little old man, the head, feet, and hands naked; in one place fixing a pair of compasses on the sun and moon.” If I were told that he had spent his days in a woodland hermitage, though I should not believe the story, I should suspect that it was founded on fact.

But the woodland, and the country in general, have given Mr. Hardy some of his principal consolations. And one, at least, of these is almost superstitious. I mean the idea that “the longlegs, the moth, and the dumbledore” know “earth-secrets” that he knows not. In the “Darkling Thrush” it is to be found in another stage, the bird’s song in Winter impelling him to think that “some blessed Hope” of which he was unaware was known to it. He compares town and country much as Meredith does. The country is paradise in the comparison; for he speaks of the Holiday Fund for City Children as temporarily “changing their[198] urban murk to paradise.” Country life, paradise or not, he handles with a combination of power and exactness beyond that of any poet who could be compared to him, and for country women I should give the palm to his “Julie-Jane,”—
“Sing; how ’a would sing,
How ’a would raise the tune,
When we rode in the wagon from harvesting
By the light of the moon....
Bubbling and brightsome eyed,
But now—O never again!
She chose her bearers before she died
From her fancy-men.”

Such a woman has even made him merry like his fiddling ancestor, in the song of “The Dark-eyed Gentleman,”—
“And he came and he tied up my garter for me.”

And what with Nature and Beauty and Truth he is really farther from surrender than might appear in some poems. His “Let me enjoy”—
“Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight”—

is in the minor key, but by no means repudiates or makes little of Joy, and is at least as likely as,
“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,”

to make a marching song.