Songs of the Ridings | Page 5

Pope, Keats, Tennyson, all spoke to them in a
language which they could not understand, and presented to them a
world of thought and life in which they had no inheritance. But the
Yorkshire dialect verse which circulated through the dales in chap-book
or Christmas almanac was welcomed everywhere. Two memories come
before my mind as I write. One is that of a North Riding farm labourer
who knew by heart many of the dialect poems of the Eskdale poet, John
Castillo, and was in the habit of reciting them to himself as he followed
the plough. The other is that of a blind girl in a West Riding village

who had committed to memory scores of the poems of John Hartley,
and, gathering her neighbours round her kitchen fire of a winter
evening, regaled them with 'Bite Bigger', 'Nelly 'o Bob's' and other
verses of the Halifax poet. My object is to add something to this chorus
of local song. It was the aim of Addison in his 'Spectator' essays to
bring "philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses"; and,
in like manner, it should be the aim of the writer of dialect verse to
bring poetry out of the coteries of the people of leisure and to make it
dwell in artisans' tenements and in cottagers' kitchens. "Poetry,"
declared Shelley, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the
happiest and best minds," and it is time that the working men and
women of England were made partakers in this inheritance of wealth
and joy.
It maybe argued that it should be the aim of our schools and
universities to educate the working classes to appreciate what is best in
standard English poetry. I do not deny that much maybe done in this
way, but let us not forget that something more will be needed than a
course of instruction in poetic diction and metrical rhythm. Our great
poets depict a world which is only to a very small extent that of the
working man. It is a world of courts and drawingrooms and General
Headquarters, a world of clubs and academies. The working man or
woman finds a place in this charmed world only if his occupation is
that of a shepherd, and even then he must be a shepherd of the Golden
Age and answer to the name of Corydon. Poets, we are solemnly
assured by Pope, must not describe shepherds as they really are, "but as
they may be conceived to have been when the best of men followed the
employment of shepherd."
Class-consciousness--a word often on the
lips of our democratic leaders of today--has held far too much sway
over the minds of poets from the Elizabethan age onwards. Spenser
writes his 'Faerie Queene' "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in
virtuous and gentle discipline," and Milton's audience, fit but few, is
composed of scholars whose ears have been attuned to the harmonies of
epic verse from their first lisping of Virgilian hexameters, or of
latter-day Puritans, like John Bright, who overhear in 'Paradise Lost'
the echoes of a faith that once was stalwart.

But what, it may be asked, of Crabbe, and what of Wordsworth? The
former by his own confession, paints
the cot,
As truth will paint it and as bards will not;
but as we listen to his verse tales we can never forget that it is the Rev.
George Crabbe who is instructing us, or that his pedestal is the topmost
story of his three-decker pulpit at Aldborough. Wordsworth's sympathy
with the lives of the Cumberland peasantry is profound, and the time is
surely not distant when such a poem as 'Michael' will win a place in the
hearts of working men; but it is to be feared that in his own generation
"Mr Wudsworth" served rather--as a warning than an encouragement to
his peasant neighbours. "Many's the time," an old Cumberland
innkeeper told Canon Rawnsley, "I've seed him a-takin' his family out
in a string, and niver geein' the deariest bit of notice to 'em; standin' by
hissel' an' stoppin' behind a-gapin', wi' his jaws workin' the whoal time;
but niver no crackin' wi' 'em, nor no pleasure in 'em--a desolate-minded
man, ye kna... It was potry as did it."(2)
Our English non-dramatic poetry from the Renaissance onwards is
second to none in richness of thought and beauty of diction, but it lacks
the highest quality of all--universality of interest and appeal. Our poets
have turned a cold shoulder to the activities and aims of the working
man, and the working man has, in consequence, turned a cold shoulder
to the great English classic poets. The loss on either side has been great,
though it is only