Songs of the Ridings | Page 7

The Elizabethan court could find no use for the
popular ballad, but, like other forms of literature, it was attracted from
the country-side to the city. Forgetful of the greenwood, it now
battened on the garbage of Newgate, and 'Robin Hood and Guy of
Gisburn' yields place to 'The Wofull Lamentation of William Purchas,
who for murthering his Mother at Thaxted, was executed at
Chelmsford'.
We are justly proud of the Renaissance and of the glories of our
Elizabethan literature, but let us frankly own that in the annals of
poetry there was loss as well as gain. The gain was for the courtier and

the scholar, and for all those who, in the centuries that followed the
Renaissance, have been able, by means of education, to enter into the
courtier's and scholar's inheritance. The loss has been for the people.
The opposition between courtly taste and popular taste is hard to
analyse, but we have only to turn our eyes from England to Scotland,
which lost its royal court in 1603, in order to appreciate the reality of
the opposition. In Scotland the courtly poetry of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries soon disappeared when James I exchanged
Holyrood for Whitehall, but popular poetry continued to live and grow.
The folk-song gathered power and sweetness all through the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, till it culminated at last in the
lyric of Burns. Popular drama, never firmly rooted in Scotland, was
stamped out by the Reformation, but the popular ballad outlived the
mediaeval minstrel, was kept alive in the homes of Lowland farmers
and shepherds, and called into being the great ballad revival of the
nineteenth century.
It is idle to speculate what would have been the progress of poetry in
England if the Renaissance had not come and the Elizabethan courtier
had not enriched himself at the expense of the people. What we have to
bear in mind is that all through the centuries that followed the
Renaissance the working men and women of England looked almost in
vain to their poets for a faithful interpretation of their life and aims. The
wonder is that the instinct for poetry did not perish in their hearts for
lack of sustenance.
There are at the present time clear signs of a revival of popular poetry
and popular drama. The verse tales of Masefield and Gibson, the lyrics
of Patrick MacGill, the peasant or artisan plays which have been
produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Gaiety Theatre,
Manchester, may well be the beginning of a great democratic literary
movement. Democracy, in its striving after a richer and fuller life for
the people of England, is at last turning its attention to literature and art.
It is slowly realising two great truths. The first is that literature may be
used as a mighty weapon in the furtherance of political justice and
social reform, and that the pied pipers of folk-song have the power to
rouse the nation and charm the ears of even the Mother of Parliaments.

The second is that the working man needs something more to sustain
him than bread and the franchise and a fair day's wage for a fair day's
work. Democracy, having obtained for the working man a place in the
government of the nation, is now asserting his claim to a place in the
temples of poetry. The Arthurian knight, the Renaissance courtier, the
scholar and the wit must admit the twentieth-century artisan to their
circle. Piers the ploughman must once more become the hero of song,
and Saul Kane, the poacher, must find a place, alongside of Tiresias
and Merlin, among the seers and mystics. Let democracy look to
William Morris, poet, artist and social democrat, for inspiration and
guidance, and take to heart the message of prophecy which he has left
us: "If art, which is now sick, is to live and not die, it must in the future
be of the people, for the people, by the people."
In the creation of this poetry "of the people, by the people" dialect may
well be called upon to play a part. Dialect is of the people, though in a
varying degree in the different parts of the wide areas of the globe
where the English language is spoken; it possesses, moreover, qualities,
and is fraught with associations, which are of the utmost value to the
poet and to which the standard speech can lay no claim. It may be that
for some of the more elaborate kinds of poetry, such as the formal epic,
dialect is useless; let it be reserved, therefore, for those kinds which
appeal most directly to the hearts of the people. The poetry of the
people includes the ballad and the verse tale, lyric in all its forms, and
some kinds of