Lake Country Sketches
9781465683410
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was natural that, coming to reside in the Lake country, I should endeavour to find out what of Wordsworth's memory among the men of the Dales still lingered on.—how far he was still a moving presence among them,—how far his works had made their way into the cottages and farm houses of the valleys. But if a certain love of the humorous induced me to enter into or follow up conversations with the few still living among the peasants who were in the habit of seeing Wordsworth in the flesh, there was also a genuine wish to endeavour to find out how far the race of Westmoreland and Cumberland farm folk—the 'Matthews' and the 'Michaels' of the poet as described by him—were real or fancy pictures, or how far the characters of the dalesmen had been altered in any remarkable manner by tourist influences during the thirty two years that have passed since the aged poet was laid to rest. For notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Ruskin, writing in 1876, had said 'that the Border peasantry (painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth)' are, as hitherto, a scarcely injured race,—that in his fields at Coniston he had men who might have fought with Henry V. at Agincourt without being distinguished from any of his knights,—that he could take his tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds, and need never latch his garden gate, nor fear molestation in wood or on moor, for his girl guests; the more one went about seeking for such good life and manners and simple piety as Wordsworth knew and described in fell side homes, or such generous unselfishness and nobility among the Dale farmers as would seem to have been contemporaries of the poet, the more one was a little saddened to find a characteristic something faded away, and a certain beauty vanished that the simple retirement of old valley days of fifty years ago gave to the men amongst whom Wordsworth lived. The strangers with their gifts of gold, their vulgarity, and their requirements, have much to answer for in the matter. But it is true that the decent exterior, the shrewd wit, and the manly independence and natural knightliness of the men of the soil is to a large extent responsible for raising expectations of nobility of life and morals, the expectation of which would be justified by no other peasant class in England, and which, by raising an unfair standard for comparison, ought to be prepared for some disappointment. All said and done they are Nature's gentlefolk still.
