SOURCE: "The Conserving Myth of William Barnes," in Victorian Studies, Vol. VI, No. 4, June, 1963, pp. 325-54.

[In the following essay, Forsyth probes Barnes's theme of the preservation of rural simplicity.]

The view that a group of people hold towards their past is one of the controlling factors in their morals, religion, art, and intellectual pursuits, to say nothing of the sights, sounds, and actual feel of their daily experience.

Charles Frankel, "Explanation and Interpretation in History," in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner

I need not insist upon the social, ethical, and political significance of an age's image of man, for it is patent that the view one takes of man affects profoundly one's standard of dignity and the humanly possible. And it is in the light of such a standard that we establish our laws, set our aspirations for learning, and judge the fitness of men's acts…. Nor is it simply a matter of public concern. For man as individual has a deep and emotional investment in his image of himself… [and he] has powerful and exquisite capacities for defending himself against violation of his cherished self-image.

Jerome S. Bruner, "Freud and the Image of Man," in Freud and the Twentieth Century, ed. Benjamin Nelson

I

It is a byword that the Victorians responded in many different ways to finding themselves on "a darkling plain." This diversity indicates not only the complexity of their situation, which resulted from the scientific and industrial revolution that transformed English life during the century, but also the characteristic vigour of their efforts to disentangle and comprehend it. These ranged from Charles Kingsley's muscular embrace to Matthew Arnold's fastidious fortification against anarchy. Others were attracted by the ritualistic fervour and traditionalism of Newman, the semi-religious enthusiasm of the Pre-Raphaelites, or the individualism of Mill; still others looked for some effective way of combining these positions.

By contrast with these earnest efforts the response of the Dorset poet, William Barnes, appears at first sight to be simply a nostalgia for the peace of the "good old days," which it seemed had been replaced almost traumatically by the insecurity of a withered faith and a permeating materialism. Certainly Barnes looked back persistently, both in his poetry and at many other levels in his creative and personal life, to his own youth in the countryside and the rural ethos it typified. I want to suggest, however, that viewed properly within the total complex of his personality, this backward-looking habit of mind, which dictated his particularity of selection and treatment of country life and its virtues, did not result from a sentimental evasion of contemporary issues, but amounted rather to a conscious criticism unwaveringly aimed at those very issues. I think one may go even further by suggesting that Barnes's work, more especially his poetry, constituted a myth of minor though not insignificant proportions, and of a thoroughness and consistency to be measured by the graceful strength of his verse. And Barnes's achievement is enhanced in that it stands in direct opposition to the idea of progress—which became identified with technical advances and was increasingly regarded, therefore, as mechanically inevitable—an idea which more than any other characterized the popular conception of the age as it went spinning "down the ringing grooves of change," urged on by the conviction "that the Heavenly City is at this moment having its building plots laid out on earth."¹

Many Victorian poets spent their inheritance of Romantic idealism in striving, for the most part unsuccessfully, to find an intellectual faith through a sort of argumentative lyricism. The source of that inheritance was, of course, the revolt of the intuitive imagination against Augustan rationalism and empiricism, the attempt to comprehend imaginatively a mechanistic and materialistic view of the universe. This led to the rediscovery of an organic relationship between man and the dynamic force of nature which took on religious overtones that were translated into poetic myth. But Barnes's myth resulted, not from an involvement in revolutionary adaptation, but from a desire to preserve; he is not a nature poet in the sense commonly applied to Wordsworth, for example. His religion is immovably Episcopalian, and he rarely philosophizes or moralizes in his poetry about the "Spirit of Nature." As Tennyson commented after a conversation, their only one together, about Darwinism and pantheism—near sacrilege for the good parson—"he is not accustomed to strong views theologic."²²

Barnes's "myth," to use T. S. Eliot's definition, is the "manipulating [of] a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity … a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."³ His parochial isolation was not simply a regionalist limitation. It was, rather, a considered and coherent attempt to preserve an imaginative Eden—with all the emotional and religious overtones of his own youth in the vale of Blackmore—as well as the people's traditional life in "England's green and pleasant land" from what seemed to him to be the disastrous degeneration of that ethos into the "futility and anarchy" of the "dark Satanic Mills" of Coketown. That Barnes's poetry is concerned largely with recording the annals of the village is clear enough. But it seems to me that his writing about this rather circumscribed topic is obliquely also a commentary on his own life, symbolizing the virtues of a rural existence in the context of the cultural revolution which Ruskin characterized as the "storm cloud of the nineteenth century." It is Barnes's imaginative comprehension of those virtues, his accommodation of his individual talent to an ancient tradition, which is the basis of his art and of his validity as a poet of the countryside. As Hardy observed, he held "a unique position [as] probably the most interesting link between past and present forms of rural life that England possessed," and that position constituted the "world of circumstance," to use Keats's formulation of the spiritual struggle of man, in which Barnes discovered his "sense of identity."⁴ For, as Hardy continues, the uniqueness of his position resulted not only from the great span of his life—it was, for instance, "a day almost within his remembrance when … a stagecoach made its first entry into Sturminster-Newton"—but also from the "remoteness even from contemporary provincial civilization, of the pastoral recesses in which his earlier years were passed—places with whose now obsolete customs and beliefs his mind was naturally imbued."⁵

What I am suggesting in no way denies, of course, that Barnes's excessively modest and retiring temperament found complete satisfaction in living in the countryside, nor that the creative and personal sides of his life were, as a result, aligned. As Hardy justly observed of him, "the poetic side of his nature … was but faintly ruled by the practical at any time, [and] his placeattachment was strong almost to a fault" (p. lvii). But to conclude that this satisfaction was the motivating source of his poetry is both negative and tautological, leaving completely out of account, for instance, that the real significance of his many personal and creative activities lies in their knitted inter-relationship. His archaeological investigations, to take an example, led him not only to refute "the common view that our prehistoric colonists were a pack of H. G. Wellsian savages," but also directly to evolve a "theory of the origin of poetry and music as a trilogy of song-tune-dance … found … in Stonehenge—Chorea Giganteum, the song-dance of the giants."⁶

Such a conclusion also leaves out of account his extended attempts to restore the language to its pristine Anglo-Saxon health, as well as, more obviously, his writing much of his best poetry in a dialect of which he said, "It is my mother tongue, and is to my mind the only true speech of the life that I draw."⁷ The close association here between language and a particular way of life is important because it points to his continual concern with an organic wholeness of sensibility, whose image is the compactness and coherence of his conserving myth. It may be true, as Geoffrey Grigson says in the Introduction to his selection of Barnes's poetry, that, "In the narrow sense, there are not art-and-society reasons for urging that Barnes should be read" (Grigson, p. 29). I would emphasize, however, a notion expressed earlier in the same excellent essay, that Grigson "may have suggested, wrongly … that Barnes was indifferent to the times, or separated from them entirely" (p. 27). Coventry Patmore too seems to me to be, even in the narrowest sense, wide of the mark when he writes, "Mr. Barnes, in his poems, is nothing but a poet. He does not there protest against anything in … the arrangements of society."⁸

II

Barnes was a countryman born and bred, and because his poetry is always about scenes and events and people he knows intimately, it has a quality of authenticity which can be derived only from first-hand experience. As Hopkins rightly pointed out, "the use of dialect to a man like Barnes is to tie him down to the things that he or another Dorset man has said or might say, which though it narrows his field heightens his effects."⁹ It would be false, however, to think of him as an untutored yokel, for he was in fact an educated and wellinformed person of wide interests. Besides being a parson and schoolmaster, he was an accomplished linguist, a somewhat eccentric philologist, a competent wood-carver; he dabbled in etymology and archaeology, invented a quadrant and an instrument for describing ellipses, played the flute, violin, and piano, sang and composed songs, and was an expert in Welsh and Persian prosody. The list could be extended; but enough has been given to establish the point and to dispel any illusion about the quality of his reclusiveness. Nor did he have, as Patmore caustically remarked, "the advantage of being able to demand the admiration of the sympathizing public on the score that he is a chimney-sweep, or a rat-catcher, and has never learned to read" (p. 155).

It is clear that a person of such varied interests, and the exuberant participation in life that they suggest, was not one who, for instance, refused until middle-age to go to London, or to try to make his literary way, out of a sense of personal limitation. And more important is the implication, tacit in much of his prose, that the talented diversity of his activities, many of them rooted in the ancient soil of folk-lore, and all of them stressing the primacy in artistic creation of "fitness" or harmonious proportion of form, constitutes an oblique criticism of what he regarded as the straggling and fragmentary quality of many city-dwellers' lives.

The fading rural civilization, in many of its aspects, lived richly in Barnes's imagination, particularly through boyhood memories of the prosperous market town of Sturminster-Newton, which, two miles from his home across Bagber Common, was where he received his only schooling up to the age of thirteen. For it was there, as Giles Dugdale notes, that deep into the century "most of the articles of equipment needed in the daily lives of the country folk living many miles around … which, elsewhere, the Industrial Revolution was accustoming Englishmen to buy from the large towns, were still made locally by skilled craftsmen."¹⁰ Even the knowledge necessary for effective participation in country children's games—"We … braided fishing lines of white horse-hair, and made floats for them, and hung them on a peeled withy wand, and made small rush baskets for our fish"—Barnes regarded as one "level of folklore."¹¹ The inclusive scope and intimacy of the relationship between his creative life as an artist and what could almost be called its prerequisite, the rural ethos, comes out in a letter of Sophia Williams to Barnes's son after the poet's death: "The increase of ready-made articles and of contrivances to save trouble did not commend themselves to him. He said it destroyed invention and self-reliance in childhood, weakened the sense of responsibility in later life, and reduced things to a standard of mere money cheapness, which he thought involved cheapness of character too" (in Dugdale, p. 185).

The Rev. O. P. Cambridge, in a memorial tribute, observed of Barnes, "His life forms a harmonious whole such as the world rarely sees."¹² And in the opinion of Rayner Unwin, he approached "in his activities … the complete man of the Renaissance."¹³ It is this quality of fulfilment which should warn us against taking too literally the poet's own statement, echoed by those not fully aware of the disciplined construction of his verse, that his poetry was a "leisure" activity, "simply a refreshment of mind from cares and irksomeness" (in Dugdale, p. 207). This view seems incongruous in the light of those frequent first-hand accounts in which one sees not a simple country parson, but a man profoundly involved in creation. There is, for example, his daughter's recollection of the poet's habit of sitting in his garden "with his eyes closed and face upturned into the sunlight … for an hour at a time, sometimes brooding poetry through the medium of visions, sometimes thinking out a deep question of ethics or philosophy, or perhaps puzzling with a new metre" (in Dugdale, p. 180). The significant issue for us at this point is that though by far the most important of his many imaginative activities, poetry was not an exception to, but an integral part of his creative personality. And that personality gained its coherence, as inevitably as did the rural sensibility he typified, from the sense of community that crowned a country upbringing. In Barnes, microcosm and macrocosm were harmoniously integrated.

III

Barnes's alert awareness of contemporary problems of living, and his distinctive response to them, is well illustrated by his little-known work on the emergent science of economics, entitled Views of Labour and Gold (1859). There his concern was "to show the possible effect of the increase of great working-capitals and monopolies on the labourer's freedom or welfare."¹⁴ One could hardly describe the work as a devastating criticism of the "dismal science," nor were his recommendations sufficiently practicable to suggest how current hard times might be alleviated. Yet the views expressed in it are so germane to the pattern of Barnes's thought and life that, despite the seemingly obsolete premises from which he reasons, one must give due weight to the earnestness of his argument and not dismiss the book as the uninformed ramblings of a crank. There is, after all, nothing more inherently sensible in the "humanity" of Sissy Jupe, or in the pathos of Stephen Blackpool, or yet again, in Tennyson's resolution of his conflict in "The Two Voices," than in the values of honesty and honourableness in commercial transactions which Barnes realised had been supplanted by the Utilitarianism of Bounderby and Gradgrind. And it was honesty and honourableness which he wished to see restored.

For Barnes, what was cardinal irreplaceable was the functioning at all levels of human intercourse of Christian ethic and morality, and he seems not to have been merely timid or sentimental in holding out no great expectations that they could flourish except within the conservative guarantee of small and simply organized communities. For as R. H. Tawney has pointed out, one of the major revolutions through which the human spirit has passed was the abdication by Christian churches in the nineteenth century of "one whole department of life, that of social and political conduct." As a result, they acquiesced "in the popular assumption that the acquisition of riches was the main end of man, and confined themselves to preaching such personal virtues as did not conflict with its achievement."¹⁵ Barnes clearly perceived this revolution and refused to compromise his deep sense of democracy in the village community against which it offended. He clung, rather, to the "old-fashioned" idea that labour was the measure of commercial value and repudiated the usurious exploitation of money which transformed it from a token into a self-generating commodity bearing more money. Of course, the primitive labour-barter economy he envisaged as ideal was thoroughly inadequate to the needs of an expanding industrial economy, but the following homely anecdote, which he quoted with relish, suggests his awareness of the money morality, an inherent aspect of the Manchester School, and its human implications: "Patoo Mata Moigna, a Tonga chief, and his wife, went with an English ship to Botany Bay, where he saw people eating in a cookshop, and he thought the good house-father was sharing out food in the Tonga fashion, and went in with the claim of hunger, but was speedily kicked out with the foot of the man who had been born in the land of the Bible."¹⁶

Barnes's ideal emerges as a type of Christian "noble savage." By formulating it in this way, one may best understand his desire to incorporate in an organic unity the virtues of Christian morality and the dignity and health, both physical and spiritual, which to his mind resulted from the varied activities and sense of community and continuity making up the rural life. Industrialism and vast urban development had made that unity difficult to attain. The moral of the anecdote about the "noble Tongan" is that he would never have behaved in the same way as the civilized "Christian," because his way of life was rooted in the soil and in the traditions of people who had not been corrupted by worshipping Mammon. In that idolatry, Barnes perceived, lay a moral trap into which economists such as Ricardo had fallen. It resulted from the false elevation of statistics to the status of "Natural Law," by which industrial capitalists were able to claim as inevitable and unalterable, indeed as part "of the nature of things," their treatment of workers under laissez-faire. Barnes's exposure of this moral dishonesty was as forthright as that which gave Marxism its apocalyptic force, though its impact was blunted because he did not share with Engels the advantage of being able to retaliate with the very argument of statistical analysis in terms of which the situation was being condoned and applauded. He had grasped, however, the essential danger in the flux of contemporary life—the emergence of a new avarice which used the mechanical inventions of the age of steam to achieve its ends and, as it discovered the massive strength of machines, became increasingly impatient of traditional religious and ethical safeguards against economic exploitation of those who operated them.

Barnes tends, admittedly, to reduce human existence to the simplicity of an isolated and static Christian community, where "The labour of man … is the making of his gear for the winning of his food" (Views of Labour and Gold, p. 1). But one should not be diverted from the burden of his criticism by his quaintness of orientation or expression, or the seeming obsolescence of his retaliation. For when, in the same strain of argument, he perceptively urges that "labour is both the action of the body or mind, and the reaction of the work on the body or mind" (p. 31; my italics), one ought to hear as a chorus of agreement the more sophisticated complaints of later writers who inherited the culture that Barnes criticized in its early stages of growth. There is William Morris's quiet lament, implying a state of affairs that had dissolved with the advent of the division of labour and mass production: "Time was when everyone that made anything, made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods; and it gave them pleasure to do it."¹⁷ And complementary to it, the frustrated outcry from D. H. Lawrence on his return home to Derbyshire in 1915, when he observed the mining people from whom he had sprung: "These men, whom I love so much … they understand mentally so horribly: only industrialism, only wages and money and machinery. They can't think anything else … only this industrial-mechanical-wage idea."¹⁸ Both Morris and Lawrence would accept the implication of Barnes's statement that labour is best when it provides harmonious balance of body and mind.

Barnes's book, then, is not an academic refutation of current economic practice which had acquired scientific status through the pragmatic deductions of Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo. The book really constituted a rejection of the concept of the "economic man." And his rejection rests on sound if somewhat neglected values, which he regarded as imperative for the health of the whole man. It is a plea against fragmenting the manifestly composite stability of rural life into meretricious divisions to be either separately catered to, or ignored, in what was for him the urban chaos. His view here, as elsewhere, is considered, and when he writes, for instance, that "it is more healthy to rack one's mind in effectual devices to win a skilful end, than to work as a machine without a free aim or thought" (Views of Labour and Gold, p. 91), he is making not only a plea for the creative dignity of labour, but also very pertinent "criticism of life."

IV

Geoffrey Grigson is right when he says that "In English poetry, [Barnes's] own practice was based on the Enlightenment" (Selected Poems, p. 16). From another viewpoint, however, I would suggest that his poetry may be profitably regarded as reflecting both an ancient and multifarious, though uncomplex folk-culture, and the bleak age of revolution which destroyed it. This formulation points up the importance of the observation in the Preface to his Poems of Rural Life (1844), where, referring to himself, he writes, "As he has not written for readers who have had their lots cast in town-occupations of a highly civilized community, and cannot sympathize with the rustic mind, he can hardly hope that they will understand either his poems or his intention; since with the not uncommon notion that every change from the plough towards the desk and from the desk towards the couch of empty-handed idleness is an onward step towards happiness and intellectual and moral excellence, they will most likely find it very hard to conceive that wisdom and goodness would be found speaking in a dialect which may seem to them a fit vehicle for the animal wants and passions of a boor" (in Dugdale, p. 113). It is apparent from this that Barnes was aware not only of the scope and standard of his audience, but also that his function in the community was defined by the demands of the lives and language of its members. An observation earlier in the Preface further illuminates the issue: "As increasing communication among the inhabitants of different parts of England, and the spread of school education among the lower ranks of the people tend to substitute book English for the provincial dialects, it is likely that after a few years many of them will linger only in the more secluded parts of the land, if they live at all" (in Dugdale, p. 112). Barnes's underlying concern here is clearly similar to that which led Wordsworth to make his famous attempt in the Lyrical Ballads to employ "a selection of language really used by men." That attempt was largely unsuccessful, but the opposite is true with regard to the impressive mass of Barnes's dialect poems. Indeed they may fairly be regarded as the practical demonstration of Wordsworth's justification of his choice of "humble and rustic life," and his adoption of a diction purified from defects "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived." And language, for Barnes, was essentially speech, which he described as "shapen of the breath-sounds of speakers, for the ear of hearers, and not from speech-tokens [letters] in books."¹⁹ The "beau ideal" was the speech of his youth in Blackmore Vale—a language firmly rooted in the oral tradition of the folk, and therefore untrammelled by the literary associations and importations of National English. His struggle for its continuance was life-long—"I have done some little to preserve the speech of our forefathers … [as it was] spoken in my youth" (in Dugdale, p. 226), was his comment on receiving a few months before his death the author's copy of his Glossary of the Dorset Dialect.

We read elsewhere in the Preface to his Poems that those members of the community he had in mind as audience were people like the ploughman and his wife. Coventry Patmore elaborates on this: Barnes's "humble glory was to recite to delighted audiences of farmers and ploughmen and their wives and sweethearts a series of lyrics, idylls, eclogues, which, being the faultless expression of elementary feelings and perceptions, are good for all but those in whom such feelings and perceptions are extinct."²⁰ Hardy suggests, in keeping with this picture of Barnes, that "the enthusiasm which accompanied" these readings was probably "more grateful to him than the admiration of a public he had never seen" (p. lvi). Furthermore, he published his poems in book form only relatively late, after he had for years contributed to the "Poet's Corner" in the local newspaper. A consideration of these facts shows that his poetic function in the community was an issue consciously thought about, and one which formed an integral part of his artistic intention, as well as confirming his mode of life. This view is supported not only by the main subject of his poetry and by his use of dialect, but also by his deep and technically informed interest in old bardic poetry, many of the characteristics of which he experimented with, eventually incorporating them as basic aspects of his poetic talent. Had Barnes's interest been only historical and philological, it would have been incidental to his purpose. However, in the light of his own poetical practice, the issue takes on a central importance because of his statement in the illuminating article, "The Old Bardic Poetry,"²¹ that his interest in the techniques of that poetry stems from their enabling a "bookless and unwriting" people to remember better their lore in "verse-locks." For such people, "verse is rather a need than a joy"; it is indeed their "history." From this central assertion, Barnes proceeds to describe the various techniques which ancient bards, and he also to a large degree, used, "to keep together the true text, and fasten it on the learner's mind." His knowledge was based with typical thoroughness on a study of Welsh, Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Persian bardic writings. Many of Barnes's contributions to the "Poet's Corner" were brief experiments resulting from his acquired knowledge, and the frequent recurrence in the

body of his writing of these ancient techniques relates closely to his consciousness of the intention he expounded in his article.

The following brief examples will help to indicate the nature of "bardic" techniques and Barnes's use of them in his poetry. Firstly, there is "cymmeriad … or the keeping of the same word through sundry verses, for the sake of oneness of time, or subject or thought," as it occurs in "Went Hwome," where each of the three stanzas ends as follows:

As noon did smite, wi' burnén) light,
The road so white, to Meldonley.

As I did goo, while skies wer blue,
Vrom view to view, to Meldonley.

Till I come down, vrom Meldon's crown
To rufs o'brown, at Meldonley.²²

Here the repetition of "Meldonley," effectively supported by the internal rhymes, heightens the warmth of his "welcome hwome" by accentuating the close relationship for Barnes of domesticity and specific locality. The rhyming in these lines also derives from "bardic" practice, for in ancient Irish poetry the rhyming of a word at the end of a line with one in the middle of the following line was known as "union." Then there is the Celtic "cynghanedd" or consonant rhyme, as in "In our abode in Arby Wood," where the repeated consonants in the two parts of the line are: u, r, b, d / u, r, b, d. Next there are the various highly complicated rhyme schemes which comprise the "Englyn." One of the more simple forms of this is the "awdlau," or one-rhyme lines, as Barnes uses it in "The Cock," after the Welsh of Siôn Powel,

I heard the homely cock by fits to crow,
With golden wings, ere dawn began to glow,
And sing his cheery sounds from high to low,
Mild in the morn, amid the glitt'ring snow.

(Grigson, Selected Poems, p. 282)

Also to be considered among the "verse-locks" through which the bard, with intricate security, hoped to "fasten … on the learner's mind" his simple "history," are "metre [which] where it is true, will forbid a word to be put in for another of less or more syllables," the conventional "voice-rhyme, which keeps many words from displacement by any but those of like sound," and, finally, the less well-known "clipping-rhyme, or the rhyming of articulation, or alliteration" ("Old Bardic Poetry," p. 306).

Aspects of Barnes's writing less specifically technical than those just listed show equally the conscious intention and scope of his association with "bardic" practice. The persistent lack of metaphorical elaboration in his "history" of the old civilization, for instance, might perhaps be seen as more than the result of restrained "fitness," in the light of his observation that "the poet can relieve the flatness of such historical truths, as Homer did the roll of his ships, or leaders, only with a few epithets" (p. 308). Considering Welsh bardic poetry, he refers to Llywarch Hen, who had coined compound epithets such as "greyhoundhearted," "brushfire-hearted," which are frequently used with a similar "instressed" precision by Barnes as in "dark-treed night," "peäle-twinklén stars," or "hedge-climb'd hills." Also, it is surprising to discover that lines such as "or as a short-stand-quick-night-watch foreflown" and "which at early morn with blowing-green-blithe bloom" are not discarded exercises by Hopkins, but translations from Old Friesian by Barnes (see The Harp of Aeolus, p. 122).

One must, then, disagree with Grigson that it is "curious to find him down in his Dorset isolation writing that 'the measures of song … may themselves be measured, not only by the steps of the dramatic dance, but by the steps of a march, or by the strokes of oars, as in the Tonga songs of the kind called Towalo or paddle songs, which Mariner says are never accompanied with instrumental music, but which are short songs sung in canoes while paddling, the strokes of the paddles being coincident with the cadence of the tune" (Selected Poems, p. 16). It is not at all curious—because Barnes's interest in this type of folk-song springs directly from his deep concern with its intimate and accepted association with the declining folk civilization he wished to preserve. Folk-songs such as those Barnes here describes are an integral part of any rural community; they are, as James Reeves observes, "the result of oral tradition in a rural society."²³ The English equivalents in song to dramatic dance, or the steps of a march, or the strokes of oars, were for Barnes part of the continued security of the rural way of life; and their slowly falling into disuse, or being supplanted by more lurid city-ballads, became for him a painful and continual reminder of transformation. This was so, furthermore, not only because those songs frequently accompanied some traditional craft or piece of work which might now have been displaced, but also because, as was acknowledged by Cecil Sharp (whose salvaging interest in the whole process was, by contrast, merely antiquarian) "the folk-singer attaches far more importance to the words of his song than to its tune" (Reeves, p. 11). It is no exaggeration, therefore, to regard these songs as a vital part of the simple "history" of country folk. H. J. Massingham even asserts of Barnes that "His verse is the old communal folk-song made the vehicle of an individual spirit whose reinterpretation of it was an act of genius" (p. 125).

V

Another important aspect of Barnes's presentation of his countryman's world is the relationship between his extensive description of the natural scene and his aesthetic theory. We have already noted the general absence of moralizing, philosophical speculation, or visionary insight in his treatment of nature; and his delineation of the natural world of sight and sound is a logical extension of this. While taking an intense delight in natural beauty, Barnes never submerges his personality in it. One finds in his poetry, therefore, no attempt to create luxuriant or picturesque effects. He adopts a sane countryman's attitude of objectivity and directness, and his descriptions are characterized by a sparse, fastidious selection of particular detail which precludes much metaphorical elaboration. Associated with this simplicity of line is Barnes's uncomplicated use of colour. He invariably uses, often in contrast, bright heraldic colours which stand out like symbols of his honest observation in the uncomplicated world of peace and certainty he cherished. These qualities of simplicity and colour may be seen in the following typical passage:

I love the narrow lane's dark bows,
When summer glows or winter blows;
Or in the fall, when leaves all fade,
Yet flutt'ring in the airy shade,

And in the shelter'd shaw the blast
Has shaken down the green-cupp'd mast,
And time is black'ningue-skinn'd sloes,
And blackberries on bramble bows,
And ripening haws are growing red
Around the grey-rin'd hawthorn's head,
And hazel branches, okentipp'd
And brown, of all their nuts are stripp'd,
And in the leazes, whiffling white,
The whirling thistle seeds alight
In sunshine, struck from bents' brown stalks
By strolling girls in Sunday walks.

("The Lane," Barnes's italics; II, 665)

These aspects of Barnes's observation are closely related to his aesthetic theory, which is Christian in origin and application. In his "Thoughts on Beauty and Art" (1861), he bases his definition of Beauty on the accepted deterioration of Man and Nature after the Fall. In his view, "the beautiful in nature is the unmarred result of God's first creative or forming will" (in Dugdale, p. 276). Furthermore, because of their innate perfection, interference with any forms of Divine creation amounted to marring them; so "if an ash-tree is polled, there grow out of its head more young runnels than would have sprouted if the work of God's first will had not been marred by the manwielded polling-blade" (p. 277). In light of this it is no surprise to see flourishing, admittedly amidst pragmatically observed detail, the perennial yet elusive dictum, "Nature is the best school of art" (p. 287). However, his use of "Nature" is not as vague as its blunt statement here might lead one to fear; for through a variation of Platonism, in which the exclusive presence of uncorrupted forms associated "Heaven" with prelapsarian Nature, he suggests that the devout may yet perceive, or construe from only partially deformed examples, the "beau ideal" of God's will, the "seeking and interpreting" of which, "and a working with His truth," become the priestlike "aim of high art" (p. 293).

Barnes's poetic practice is clearly related to his aesthetic theorizing, particularly with regard to the bare directness of the "unmarred" objectivity of his observation. What he is, in fact, frequently attempting in his poetry is to set down pictures of those original pure forms untrammelled by any embellishment or personal interpretation. And in doing this he was not merely being pious. For in his discovery and accurate recording of the "beau ideal," he is not only creating beauty and praising his God, but also "preserving" from disruptive man-made forces the pristine glory of Godcreated rural England, where "God's untarnished earthly good" is mainly to be found. In his view, the age had become one of "falsehood and sham" because most of "the beauty of God's primary work … [unmarred forms] in plants, animals, and man" (p. 277) was almost by definition to be found in the countryside and in the lives of the inheritors of the ancient folk civilization; and all this had been replaced by its perversion in urban existence: "we have deal painted and veneered into an imitation of more costly wood … cloth shown to our neighbours for leather; paste for gems; imitations instead of nature's truth," produced by artisans radically different from "the old workmen [who] were faithful and wrought to God, or art, or conscience, rather than to Pluto" (p. 294). He substantiates fully, in his terms, the validity of his world by criticizing the limitations of the city, which define by contrast the "wealth" of the disintegrating rural ethos, when he observes that in the "great towns … much of the beautiful in nature must be far forlorn by many of working people. Many a plain wall rises high between the workman and the glory of the passing sun, and has shut out his window-framed piece of blue sky, and the cheering whiteness of the flying cloud. Many a day of smoke has blackened the clearness of the sweet spring-tide; many a bright-leaved tree has heretofore given way to crowded shades of narrow rooms. Many a rood of flowery sward has become rattling streets, where, for songs of birds, they have the din of hammers. Many a cheek has been paled, and lovely piece of childhood marred, by longsome hours of over-work" (p. 294). Moreover, he extends his concept of "beauty" to include moral actions for "the winning of God's first given, and since forlorn good" (p. 292)—an extension exactly paralleled and illumination by Sir Joshua Reynolds' elaboration (in the Discourses) of his idea of Nature to comprehend "not only the forms which Nature produces, but also the nature and internal fabric and organization, as I may call it, of the human mind and imagination."²⁴ Barnes's criticism in this context as elsewhere, then, is broadly based not in sentimental retreat from the great "march of mind," but in a liberal and humane concern with the conditions of life most conducive to spiritual and moral health.

VI

There is a further aspect of Barnes's aesthetic theory worth considering—the influence of the tradition of natural theology, best represented for our purposes by William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), which the poet probably read as a prescribed text while a "Ten Year Man" at Cambridge in 1847. We have seen that Barnes's assumption concerning the superiority of the rural life rested on the belief that it offered the possibility of more constant contact with the greatest number of unmarred forms created by God, that the "forms and colours of objects in a landscape [reveal] a fitness and harmony of the good of God's formative will…. The beautiful is also the good by reason of a fitness or harmony which it possesses" (in Dugdale, pp. 288, 278). This attitude rests on a basic assumption of Paley's Natural Theology: "that in a vast plurality of instances in which contrivance is perceived, the design of the contrivance is beneficial."²⁵ John Stuart Mill, however, was to suggest that if Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" proved to be correct, it would provide a radically different account of the appearances of benevolent contrivance in Nature, and "would greatly attenuate the evidences for it."²⁶ Darwinism seemed to imply that the traditional religious view of a universe contrived and regulated by divine omniscience would increasingly be replaced by new visions of a universe ordered by laws of physics or of the jungle, by human intelligence or the lawlessness of blind chance. Barnes's response to these implications is clearly one more of the elements that went into the making of his mythical world.

Natural theologians were mainly concerned to show God's beneficence towards the animate creatures of the universe by exhibiting for rational judgment evidence that inanimate creation had been adapted to their needs and gratification. And this argument for the existence and "continuing care … of a ruling Providence," as Paley stated, was of necessity based on the Newtonian "established order of nature which we must suppose to prevail, or we cannot reason at all upon the subject" (II, 190, 155). Frequently Paley's "evidences" to prove that "design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is God" (II, 130), rest on a simple presupposition of the very benevolence of the Designer whose existence they are supposed to prove. At one important point, for instance, in considering the sensuous delights offered in Nature to men, he argues that this need not have been the case, for God might have made "everything we tasted, bitter; everything we saw, loathsome; everything we touched, a sting; every smell, a stench; and every sound, a discord" (II, 150). By referring comprehensively to "everything," he tacitly ignores in his listing the actual and inconvenient presence of these qualities in many natural phenomena. It is a similar sort of "fitness" that Barnes discovers when contemplating "the forms and colours of objects in a landscape." For he finds "evidence" of "God's formative will" in the "green of the earth, and the blue of the sky [which] are less wearisome and destructive to the sight than would be a world of red or white, and blinds our eyes more slowly than would an earth of silvery brightness, or a lasting vision of blood" (in Dugdale, p. 288). The conclusions drawn from such characteristic statements by Barnes and those of Paley and the natural theologians generally are identical

The retention of this established order of nature, as opposed to the emergent one propounded by Darwin, was imperative for the continuance of the world of imaginative reality Barnes created in his poetry. And it was equally important to his aesthetic, which formed a bridge between that world and the daily duties as a country parson which in Dugdale's opinion were his "true vocation" (p. 122). For as Paley had stated, if one laid Natural Theology as "the foundation of everything which is religious … the world henceforth becomes a temple, and life itself one continued act of adoration" (II, 199). Of course, Barnes was free to choose with Disraeli the angels rather than the apes, but the point of interest here is that his choice seems to have been dictated not only by his Christian convictions, but also by his artistic realization that his myth would no longer have been viable had he chosen the latter. The evolution of a "chance good" in a dispensation where "God and Nature" were "at strife" was for Barnes a degradation of that pristine and harmonious "fitness" of "unmarred forms" created by "God's formative will" through which by contrast he criticized the new cosmology and its implications. In his single poem explicitly on evolutionism, "The Happy Days When I Wer Young," where he writes on "what's atalked about/By many now—that to despise/The laws o' God an' man is wise" (I, 171), Barnes feels no need to re-justify to men the ways of an inscrutable God. The usual backward-looking title of the poem heightens his sense of the immemorial sanity of rural life, thereby endorsing his belief in the justice of the natural order; and he is led to repudiate Darwinism in a significant phrase—as he did in his review of "Patmore's Poems"²⁷—as "venom": the serpent in his Eden, in fact. It was a serpent brought "To kill our hope an' taint our thought." The ideas were, with an almost predatory pervasiveness, intruding on the stable perfection of his world.

VII

As stated earlier, there is no philosophizing or moralizing about the "Spirit of Nature" in Barnes's poetry. His prime concern is with the activities and the relationships, both amongst themselves and with their environment, of country people, and only indirectly with the natural world as such. In relating Barnes's treatment of country folk to his overally mythopoeic activity, however, one must from the outset have clearly in mind the anomaly that, although he was almost exclusively a rural poet, Barnes was never an intimate acquaintance of the local rustics; and until he achieved some renown in later life, he was scorned as an eccentric by the "upper class." He was no Stephen Duck or Robert Bloomfield ("literary" peasants who misguidedly tried to adopt an urbanity that ill suited their unsophisticated origins and talents). Nor can the anomaly be explained by reference to Barnes's acknowledged shyness; indeed that only complicates the issue if we place in the context of the spiritual and intellectual loneliness that must have characterized his years of greatest creativity, the observation by an ex-pupil that Barnes was "nearly isolated" socially.²⁸ Furthermore, aside from scything his own grass in summer, he took no part in agricultural labour; yet the exactness of his knowledge about such matters and rural life generally (as, for instance, in his article "Dorset Folk and Dorset"²⁹), is manifest throughout his work.

These biographical details throw into illuminating relief the very obvious limitation of scope in Barnes's treatment of country people in his poetry. Rayner Unwin surely exaggerates when he writes that Barnes's poems "depict the countryman in all the aspects of his life" (p. 158). Unlike Hardy and George Borrow, he shows no interest, for example, in the picturesque fringe of rural society composed of pedlars, tinkers, and gipsies. Also he has only a single poem, "Culver Dell and the Squire," on a member of the gentry, all others treating of the working people. And even in that exception the squire is an ideal, if not idealized, figure. Again, except for a solitary poem, "The Love Child," there is no suggestion of cruelty or immorality in the countryside. And this was hardly because of Barnes's ignorance of such aspects of rural life. He was probably quite aware, for instance, of the fearful and loathsome scenes of drunkenness and domestic misery which "Rabin Hill," a contemporary dialect poet of nearby Sturminster-Newton, was later to recall as being fairly common when he and Barnes were both young (see Dugdale, p. 22). Furthermore, besides the evidence to the contrary Barnes provides in his pamphlet, Humilis Domus: Some Thoughts on the Abodes, Life and Social Conditions of the Poor, Especially in Dorsetshire,³⁰ there are his concluding remarks to the otherwise glowing account of "Dorset Folk and Dorset": "If I have painted a picture of Dorset life that is light, I have not given light where there is none; but I ought to say that there is among us darkness as well as light, and that you may too readily pitch on a man who is a shame to us." For a reader of his poetry, however, there is no such man, or woman, to "pitch on."

It is not coincidence that the most considerable of Barnes's poems on a particular topic of social interest, "The Common a-took in," is concerned with enclosure; for as George Sturt stated in his invaluable record of the changing village, it was this more than any other single factor that was thought to have altered the appearance of the countryside and brought about the rapid deterioration of what he called the ancient "folk civilization." The Enclosure Acts covered the period of rapid industrialization which transformed "a social system of eight hundred years' duration"³¹ into one which, in Hardy's words, served "smoke and fire rather than frost and sun."³² The transformation resulted in what the Hammonds aptly described as "a world in disorder" (p. 233). Yet this was ostensibly also the world presented by Barnes in his poetry. He was probably unaware, for instance, of the actual statistics showing that by 1851 in almost all the great towns the migrants outnumber the people born there,³³ or that between 1792 and 1831 Poor Law expenditure in the County of Dorset increased 214 per cent and expenses for prosecutions for crime 2,135 per cent, while the population had increased by only 40 per cent.³⁴ But he could hardly have been unaware of the general cultural changes which were so radically altering the world he had grown up in. E. M. Forster points to a particular instance when he observes, "He could live through the Labourers' Revolt in 1830 without its shadows falling across his verse" (in Dugdale, p. 89). It is not only that Barnes's range in portraying the life of a world he knew intimately is restricted, but also that his presentation is limited to a particular type of observation and treatment. The result is a picture of country life that is curiously distorted, one which, if not idealized, was at least selected to illustrate and corroborate specific sentiments and beliefs about that life. The attempt to "explain" this selectiveness (even granting fully the autonomy of the creative artist to plot his own area of imaginative activity) by saying that "His mind was attuned to harmonies, not discords" (Cambridge, p. xx), or that he was "a sundial recording only the shining hours" (Dugdale, p. 22) ignores the positive aspects of his achievement. It seems more accurate to state that in presenting his selective treatment of country life and its virtues, as in other fields already considered, he was motivated by a very real awareness of the contemporary cultural revolution.

VIII

The sphere of living to which Barnes devotes most attention is the family. This is the stable axis about which spin rural activities and pastimes within the confined circle of the immediate neighbourhood, and it is a reasonable preoccupation of one born and bred in the tight isolation of a small community. His stress on warm, intimate relationships within the domestic group and among close friends is consonant with his temperament and his artistic intention. Barnes writes consistently about such relationships, and although his dignified restraint largely forestalls sentimentality, they are invariably happy. The quiet and peace of rural domesticity he saw as a complementary commentary on the whole of rural life, whose excellence made it possible. But his attitudes here emerge not only from personal experience with his wife Julia, or from a thoughtful countryman's awareness of the family's importance in a daily routine unrelieved by much entertainment. For, on turning to the pamphlet Humilis Domus mentioned earlier, one finds a wider intellectual conviction based, in contrast with the conditions of the rustic poor, on the overcrowding and slums inevitable in expanding industrial cities, from which, he thought, "there must follow a train of moral evils too loathsome for a mind brought up in moral purity to behold in imagination" (p. 4).

But Barnes was not only concerned with the home as a sanctuary for preserving "the most lovely social Christian graces"; he also regarded it in a broader perspective as the greatest safeguard against political disruption in a revolutionary situation. He feared what in fact has subsequently happened, though not as dramatically as he had anticipated—that the family with its multiple functions would become devitalized in the more fluid social structure of large cities, especially when people lived in congested slums away from ancient rural sanctions. Joseph Ashby, a true villager, believed that in the lean years that followed on the Enclosures, the labourers in his village of Tysoe "kept to the straight way because the village had been once a true community."³⁵ And as late as 1902 Rider Haggard's exhaustive investigation into the desertion of the countryside and the decline of husbandry led him to the "modest statement [that they] can mean nothing less than the progressive deterioration of the race."³⁶ Barnes would have agreed with Hardy that "This process, which is designated by statisticians as 'the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns,' is really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced."³⁷ Barnes was painfully aware that the countryman suffered irreparable loss by his migration. The point is nicely made in the following passage where he is ostensibly writing about impoverished Dorset rustics, but with the consoling implication that the rural slum-dweller still had the protection of a conservative social structure and the solidarity of a traditional ethos to guard him from the ravages which would undermine his urban counterpart: "the true school for the training of good national subjects is the good father's roof: and a house training under the law of the house's head, is the only one to which we have good grounds to look for the rearing of good lawbound citizens; and the weaker may be the law of the house, the more bloody must be the law of the land; and if the social atoms of the nation are not gathered into family crystals by the house association, no monarch can afterwards form them into the strength of a sound political body" (Humilis Domus, p. 3).

Barnes's attitude toward domesticity in country life is best observed, however, in his treatment of women. It is noteworthy, in the first place, that the vast majority of people he writes about are women and children—"The Maid o' Newton," "Jessie Lee," "The Motherless Child," for example, and the list could be greatly extended. Men are most frequently seen, anonymously, at such work as felling trees, or else as husbands who return to the domestic hearth at sunset. Furthermore, the virtues in women which he admires most are the reliable homely ones which make for domestic stability, and his admiration is always restrained and unimpassioned. This is particularly noticeable in his love poems, which are most often not concerned with present passion, but with the expectation of happiness deferred until marriage unites the pair by the hearth of their own home, thereby establishing them as a social unit. And parallel to this, there is a considerable number of poems, such as "A Little Lost Sister," "Meäry Wedded," "Jenny Away from Home," based on familial relationships and the distruption of these by death, departure, or even marriage.

Clearly Barnes's treatment of women in his poetry is based on the correlation of the virtuous life and domestic happiness. These were the inseparable elements in the traditional structure of rural society. But he is concerned not only to commemorate the way of life he knew and admired, but also to deny its viability in an urban context, thereby implying that the good life crumbled with the dislocation of the rural ethos. This he frequently attempts to do by contrasting the "accepted" excellence of the rural character with the corrupting wealth, vice, and vanity which he imputes to the urban environment. Opposed, therefore, to his estimate of unsophisticated country people, there are frequent derogatory references in the poetry to a vain, superficial, and amorphous nobility. The unreality of these personages is the measure of his elevation of the "folk." For no allusion is made to the local gentry as one might expect if Barnes was just being assertively democratic in an age which saw the rise of the proletariat and the establishment of the first Agricultural Labourers' Union under Joseph Arch, or fervently regionalist over the principled heroism of the Tolpuddle martyrs. Thus it is that he "do little ho vor goold or pride,/ To leäve the plain abode where love do bide" ("Knowlwood," I, 283). And Jeäne sits like some rustic Cleopatra, "steätely as a queen o'vo'k" ("The Bwoate," I, 343); Poll the milkmaid walks, "Wi' her white pail below her eärm/ As if she wore a goolden crown" ("The Milk-maid o' the Farm," I, 80); and the poet asserts that even were he extremely wealthy, and "as high in rank/ As any duke or lord," he would remain uncorrupted in his choice of mistress though she were "a leäser in the glen" ("My Love is Good," I, 455). Tacit criticism of the city also underlies his joy in "Ellen Dare o'Lindenore," whose charm results directly from the rustic modesty and tranquillity of her way of life, and the beauty of her home's natural surroundings, which are the opposite of the distracting city's "Swift bwoats, wi' water-plowén keels," its "broad high-roads a-wore/ By vurbrought trav'lers' cracklén wheels," its "crowds a-passen to and fro,/ Upon the bridge's high-sprung bow." The mutually enhancing interaction between "Lindenore" and "Feair Ellen Dare" substantiates the perfection of each. Imperceptive and hurrying "town-vo'k ha' but seldom calls/ O' business" on fair Ellen, but Barnes, by contrast, appreciates how she epitomizes saner values, like "Calm air do vind the rwose-bound door/ Ov Ellen Dare o'Lindenore" ("Lindenore," I, 405). It is pertinent to note however that Barnes married neither "Ellen Dare" nor milkmaid, but the daughter of the middleclass Supervisor of Excise in Dorchester.

IX

It might be thought from the continual presence of hostility between rural and urban life in Barnes's poetry and thinking generally, that he could best be understood in terms of literary history as either a pastoralist or a regionalist. In fact neither category applies. Regionalism, as recently defined, "establishes a comparison between the rural world, seen in terms of its richly picturesque local traits, and the complex industrial society of today, just as the old pastoral established a comparison between peasant life and the court"; it exploits, then, an historical contrast similar to that found in pastoral, "by looking back from a present of advanced technology to the period, still not very far away, when the roads were dirt lanes, farmers walked behind horse-drawn ploughs, and the rural community depended pretty much on its own produce."³⁸ But Barnes looks back neither from corrupt court nor complex city. Although he accepts in its Christian version the pastoral concept of the restoration of some Golden Age men have forfeited through sin or abusive folly, he never as a result views rural life from the vantage ground of urban sophistication on which both he and his audience live. For his perspective is governed by his faith in the exclusive value of the rural ethos, so that past and present become telescoped into the ritualistic recurrence of the seasons.

The authority of his poetry is not thereby diminished as would be the case if his method were the subtle ironies of contrast. There is no equivalent to the Forest of Arden in Barnes's presentation; his criticism is, rather, overt, in that he asserts imaginatively those very elements which give his art and personal life their mutually enhancing validity. And the historical significance of his criticism becomes clear if one realises that it was being undertaken concurrently with the transformation of those dirt lanes into roads and the replacement of horse-drawn ploughs by such strange machines as the "horse-drill" Donald Farfrae introduced to a Casterbridge, "where the venerable seed-lip was still used for sowing as in the days of the Heptarchy."³⁹

As might be expected, it is the apparent immutability of rural life that Barnes cherished greatly—perhaps even more than the peace and honest living he associated with the countryside. This was the source of his regret at any change that occurred, from death or decay, in the established pattern of relationships and activities.

In many of Barnes's poems, then, such as "Hallowed Places," "The Voices that be Gone," "Joy Passing By," there is a nostalgic regret at the passage of time and the changes it has brought about. It is invariably associated with his strong countryman's sense of place, and it is this association which makes remarkable an otherwise common enough sentiment. Pertinent here is the Rev. Francis Kilvert's diary record of a conversation with the poet whom he visited in 1874: "He said that some of the names of people and places mentioned in his [poems] are fictitious, but they all represent real places and persons. The real name of Ellen Brine of Allenburn, he said, was Mary Hames, and the poem was true to the life. In describing a scene he always had an original in his mind, but sometimes he enlarged and improved upon the original. 'For instance,' he explained, 'sometimes I wanted a bit of water, or wood, or a hill, and then I put these in. "Pentridge by the River," was a real place. The river was the Stour'" (in Dugdale, p. 203). It is from such remembered localities and activities that Barnes constructs much of his rural world. For the permanence or decay of individual objects in a particular locality is not only commemorated in itself, but becomes also a symbol of the continuity or collapse of rural life as a whole. Seen in relation to past generations and the regular flow of country traditions, local objects become on the one hand touchstones of certainty and continuity in a changing world, and on the other, depressing signs of change in the structure of living. Thus it is that he frequently mourns the decay of houses (Pentridge House, for instance) which are, in their relation with domesticity, richly suggestive for him of a previously secure and beautiful life now crumbling under the weight of intrusive events. The disintegration brought about by the passage of time is to some extent, however, redeemed for Barnes by the continuity of the seasons through which he as a countryman measures it, correlating the cyclic regularity of the fugitive, recurring seasons with the activities appropriate to each being performed by the younger generation who thereby continue the established tradition. Thus even though "My seasonmeasur'd time's a-vled" ("Zummer Stream," I, 462), and "we ourselves do vollow on/ Our own vorelivers dead an' gone" ("Our Be'th Place," I, 275), it is nevertheless satisfying to see country life still following its ancient pattern, of a necessity which is an inherent part of its excellence:

'Tis good to come back to the pleäce,
Back to the time, to goo noo mwore;
'Tis good to meet the younger feäce
A-mentén others here avore.

("Zummer Stream")

Barnes, then, in re-creating his own "youth" through a presentation of remembered scenes, activities, people, and houses was not just furnishing idly with nostalgic memories an ageing man's recollection of happy bygone days, but was presenting in living terms, heightened by the productive diversity of his own life, his Christian aesthetic and the "actuality" of his remembrances, an allegory of the new Fall of Man. This was how he viewed the Victorian cultural revolution. He immersed himself in past events, or those hallowed by ancient practice or seasonal recurrence, not simply because he was by poetic temperament a recorder and not a creator of images and symbols, but rather because by "manipulating a continuous parallel between [the] contemporaneity" of his own long life, and the "antiquity" of an incorruptible Eden resurrected from his innocent rural youth, he was attempting to create a stable defence amidst the "immense panorama of futility and anarchy" of a world rapidly "maturing" into the confusion of industrial society. And for Barnes the symbol of this confusion and spiritual desolation came to be the city because it stood "outside" Nature, and in seeming opposition to the ancient sanctions that hallowed rural life. This was his real perception, incandescent with moral and imaginative vigour, withholding the encroaching shadows caused by a change visibly effected in the spreading towns and devitalized villages. The city was to become the image, not only of "man's inhumanity to man"; it was also inextricably associated with the romantic turbulence of the search for individual values and a sense of identity in a world made increasingly alien, not only by materialism and rationalism, but also, and more important for Barnes, because the established incorporation of man in the ancient cosmological trinity with God and His Nature had been disrupted. Barnes's world, through which he presents his image of Man, is his defence against this "city of dreadful night."

That image is persuasively delineated in the quality of Barnes's serene liberty when he wrote "My Orchard in Linden Lee," with the well-known lines:

Let other vo'k meäke money vaster
In the air o' dark-room'd towns,
I don't dread a peevish meäster;
Though noo man do heed my frowns,
I be free to goo abrode,
Or teäke ageän my hwomeward road
To where, vor me, the apple tree
Do leän down low in Linden Lea.

(I, 234)

The stanza, and the whole poem, derive from his obvious satisfaction in sitting in his orchard. But the issues raised for Barnes by this typically rural activity are rather more complex than a simple gloating would imply. For through his sitting in the orchard, unlike the less fortunate townsman who is "fairly bound to yield to a clock-service," Barnes it able to participate in the cyclic ritual of the seasons, whose unfailing bounty is suggested by the apple tree that "Do leän down low in Linden Lea." And his mental and physical peace is contrasted implicitly with the restless turbulence, and "sudden fits of crowd-moodiness [and] acts of violence" which result from the "spiritual destitution" he associates with "the thick herding of people in houses" in cities (Views of Labor and Gold, pp. 112-115). Their money-grubbing and economic slavery, their "hirelingship" (p. 68), must lead to a spiritual subservience that is dehumanizing in contrast to the freedom of spirit he experiences. Such moments as these, amidst, and made possible by, the beneficence of "God's untarnished earthly good," release Barnes from the enervating struggle in the cultural prison of what Lionel Trilling has called the "opposing self'; for here he experiences that liberation of complete identity with self founded in a satisfying mode of life such as Huckleberry Finn experienced on escaping to the river from the feuding shore, discovering that "there warn't no home like a raft, after all."

When, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Farfrae says that the new mechnical horse-drill would "revolutionize sowing hereabout," Elizabeth-Jane comments, "Then the romance of the sower is gone for good… . 'He that observeth the wind shall not sow,' so the Preacher said; but his words will not be to the point any more. How things change!" (ch. xxiv). In an analogous way Barnes clung to what he conceived to be an untranslatable "language" in communicating with the deepest and most abiding sources of spiritual and moral well-being. In earlier times the presence of a beneficent order had been manifest in the appearance and regulation of the scheme of things, and was reinforced by the intricate set of correspondences between man and nature which was the rationale of the great unifying chain of being. In the emergent urban world, however, characterized to an ever-growing degree by uncertain values and a complex loneliness, the serene unity of man in God's love which had led him to "green pastures" was dissipated in spiritual exhaustion. In attempting to justify a dispensation where God's Nature was found to be "red in tooth and claw," and Himself, therefore, either malicious or illusory, Tennyson, for instance, at a moment of deepest despair quite naturally expressed his sense of destitution in terms of urban desolation:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

(In Memoriam, vii)

It is not, of course, just a case of facilely observing the urban "tenor" of the image, to use I. A. Richards' term, but rather to remark the fact that in the central, and to most contemporaries, consoling poetic statement of the age, the poet frequently uses as the "vehicle" of his imagery what Dickens referred to as "the shame, desertion, wretchedness and exposure of the great capital."⁴⁰ Many sensitive people found themselves living between two worlds where, from one point of view, nature was being increasingly conquered and manipulated for man's material aggrandizement; but from another, metaphysical, aspect, nature was through that process having its cosmological role adapted to the new man-made setting. Thus the removal of nature from the prime and immediate context of human life led men to translate optimism in a rational dispensation into faith in progress in an industrialized environment, bringing about a radical dislocation of traditional values and standards, and replacing them, ineffectually for many, with the iron restriction of Necessity and the earth-bound aspiration of social perfectibility. This change of role resulted in a situation infinitely more perplexing than implied in the simple opposition of "God made the country, and man made the town"; it became commensurately more difficult to believe, in what seemed to Barnes and many of his contemporaries the worst of all possible worlds, that "He prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things both great and small." The difficulty is dramatized with terrifying effect by James Thomson. In his wanderings through the "City of Dreadful Night," whose ruin is suggested by the rubble of Love, Faith, and Hope, triple pillars that had supported a God-oriented cosmos, he meets a degenerate and forlorn man who hopes with grotesque improbability to find his way "From this accursed night … to Eden's innocence in Eden' clime" (Sec. xviii). By contrast, the world of William Barnes embodies a way of life, an attitude of mind, rooted firmly in his efforts to conserve the "Eden innocence" of rural Dorset—whose "life and … landscape," as Hopkins expressed it, "had taken flesh and tongue in the man" (p. 221)—from degenerating into such an "accursed night." Those efforts are the medium of his mythopoeic activity—his "powerful and exquisite [capacity] for defending himself against violation of his cherished self-image"—and constitute, in fact, the very "art-and-society reasons for urging that Barnes should be read."

Notes

¹ S. E. Hyman, "Psychoanalysis and the Climate of Tragedy," in Freud and the Twentieth Century, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York, 1957), p. 170.

² Hallam Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A Memoir (London, 1897), I, 514.

³ Quoted in William Van O'Connor, Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry (Chicago, 1948), p. 18.

⁴The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. B. Forman (Oxford, 1935), pp. 334-337.

⁵ Thomas Hardy, "The Rev. William Barnes, B.D.," reprinted in Lionel Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy (London, 1895), p. 1.

⁶ H. J. Massingham, The English Countryman (London, 1943), p. 127.

⁷ Quoted in Selected Poems of William Barnes, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1950), p. 10.

⁸ "William Barnes: the Dorsetshire Poet," Macmillan's Magazine, VI (1862), 155.

⁹The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C. Abbott (Oxford, 1955), p. 88.

¹⁰William Barnes of Dorset (London, 1953), p. 21.

¹¹ Quoted in Dugdale, p. 20, from Barnes's "Foresay" to Judge Udal's Dorsetshire Folklore.

¹² "In Memoriam Rev. William Barnes, B.D.," Procedings of the Dorsret Natural History and Autiquarian Field Club, VIII (1887), xviii.

¹³The Rural Muse (London, 1954), p. 152.

¹⁴ Quoted in Geoffrey Grigson, The Harp of Acolus (London, 1947), p. 121.

¹⁵The Acquistive Society (London, 1933), pp. 231-233.

¹⁶Views of Labour and Gold (London, 1859), p. 12.

¹⁷ Quoted in Montague Weekley, William Morris (London, 1934), p. 134.

¹⁸The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (London, 1932), p. 300.

¹⁹ Quoted from Barnes's "Foresay" to An Outline of English Speech-craft, in The Harp of Aeolus, p. 111.

²⁰ "An English Classic, William Barnes," Fortnightly Review, XL (1886), 664.

²¹Macmillan's Magazine, XVI (1867), 306.

²²The Poems of William Barnes, ed. Bernard Jones (London, 1962), I, 392. All citations of Barnes's poetry will be from this edition, unless otherwise noted.

²³The Idiom of the People (London, 1958), p. 30.

²⁴ "Discourse VII" (1776), quoted in H. A. Needham, Taste and Criticism in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1952), p. 135.

²³Natural Theology: Or the Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (London, 1802), II, 143.

²⁶Three Essays on Religion (London, 1885), p. 174.

²⁷Fraser's Magazine, LXVIII (1863), 130-134.

²⁸ C. J. Wallis, "Early Manhood of William Barnes," Gentleman's Magazine, CCLXV (1888), 29.

²⁹ This article is not listed in Dugdale's bibliography (pp. 237-244). It originally appeared in The Leisure Hour for 1883 (which I have not been able to consult). A copy of the article in pamphlet form, presumably reprinted from The Leisure Hour, appears among Barnes's papers in the Dorset County Museum. It has apparently not been reprinted since.

³⁰ This pamphlet is among Barnes's papers in the Dorset Museum. It was probably privately printed as a pamphlet by Barnes in 1849 from the Poole Herald, where it first appeared.

³¹ Thomas Edwards Kebbel, "English Farmers," Blackwood's Magazine, CXLV (1889), 135.

³² Quoted in J. L. and L. B. Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry (London, 1930), p. 3.

³³ J. L. and L. B. Hammond, The Bleak Age (New York, 1947), p. 34.

³⁴ G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, 1945), pp. 475-476.

³⁵ Mabel Kay Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859-1919 (Cambridge, 1961), p. 285.

³⁶ Quoted in Douglas Brown, Thomas Hardy (London, 1954), p. 38.

³⁷ "The Dorsetshire Labourer," Longman's Magazine, II (1883), 269.

³⁸ J. F. Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (New Haven, 1960), pp. 57-58.

³⁹ Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge (London, 1912), ch. xxiv.

⁴⁰ Quoted in Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (London, 1957), p. 5.