Songs of the Ridings | Page 4

with my
name on the title-page.
A generation ago the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen,
an object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with
him: we knew him--or her--as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche
Amory--an amiable fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century
has already, in its short course, done much to remove this prejudice,
and the minor poet is no longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of
readers, though small, is sympathetic, and the outside public is learning
to tolerate him and to recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for

him to write and publish his verses as it is for the minor painter to
depict and exhibit in public his interpretation of the beauty and power
which he sees in human life and in nature. All this is clear gain, and the
time may not be far distant when England will again become what it
was in Elizabethan days--a nest of singing birds, where the minor poets
will be able to take their share in the chorus of song, leaving the chief
parts in the oratorio to the Shakespeares and Spensers of tomorrow.
The twenty-five poems of which this volume consists are meant to
serve a double purpose. Most of them are character-sketches or
dramatic studies, and my wish is to bring before the notice of my
readers the habits of mind of certain Yorkshire men and women whose
acquaintance I have made. For ten years I have gone up hill and down
dale in the three Ridings, intent on the study of the sounds, words and
idioms of the local folk-speech. At first my object was purely
philological, but soon I came to realise that men and women were more
interesting than words and phrases, and my attention was attracted from
dialect speech to dialect speakers. Among Yorkshire farmers, farm
labourers, fishermen, miners and mill workers I discovered a vitality
and an outlook upon life of which I, a bourgeois professor, had no
previous knowledge. Not, only had I never met such men before, but I
had not read about them in literature, or seen their portraits painted on
canvas. The wish to give a literary interpretation of the world into
which I had been privileged to enter grew every day more insistent, and
this volume is the fulfilment of that wish.
Of all forms of literature, whether in Verse or prose, the dramatic
monologue seemed to me the aptest for the exposition of character and
habits of mind. It is the creation--or recreation--of Robert Browning,
the most illuminating interpreter of the workings of the human mind
that England has produced since Shakespeare died. My first endeavour
was therefore
to watch
The Master work, and catch
Hints of the proper craft,
tricks of the tool's true play.
I have been, I fear, a clumsy botcher in applying the lessons that

Browning was able to teach, but the dramatic monologues of which this
volume is largely composed owe whatever art they may possess to his
example. My dramatic studies are drawn from life. For example, the
local preacher who expresses his views on the rival merits of Church
and Chapel is a Wharfedale acquaintance, and the farmer in
'Cambodunum' who declares that "eddication's nowt but muckment"
actually expressed this view to a Chief Inspector of Schools, a member
of the West Riding Education Committee, and myself, when we visited
him on his farm. I do not claim that I have furnished literal transcripts
of what I heard in my conversations with my heroes and heroines, but
my purpose throughout has been to hold a mirror up to Nature, to give
a faithful interpretation of thought and character, and to show my
readers some of the ply of mind and habits of life that still prevail
among Yorkshiremen whose individuality has not been blunted by
convention and who have the courage to express their reasoned or
instinctive views of life and society.
But the interpretation of the minds of Yorkshire peasants and artisans
for the benefit of the so-called general reader is only the secondary
object which I have in view. My primary appeal is not to those who
have the full chorus of English song, from Chaucer to Masefield, at
their beck and call, but to a still larger class of men and women who are
not general readers of literature at all, and for whom most English
poetry is a closed book. In my dialect wanderings through Yorkshire I
discovered that while there was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of the
people, the great masterpieces of our national song made little or no
appeal to them. They were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and
profusion, but it consisted of food that they could not assimilate.
Spenser, Milton,