Essaka Joshua The romantics and the May Day tradition (2007)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.by Michael Mason (London: Longman,1992), p.60, ll.113 16.4 Brand, Preface to Observations, 1777, p.ix.5 Ibid.6 Ibid., p.iii.7 Ibid.8 Ibid., p.xi.9 Joseph Strutt, Glig-gamena Angel-�eod, or, The Sports and Pastimes of the People ofEngland including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May-Games, Mummeries, Pageants,Processions, and Pompous Spectacles, from the earliest Period to the Present Time (London:J.White, 1801), p.i.10 Ibid. Precious rites and customs 29Period to extinguish the Character of our boasted national Bravery.11 Francis Doucesees the revival of traditional custom as the saviour of contemporary culture: it isextremely probable that from the present rage for re nement and innovation, therewill remain, in the course of a short time, but few vestiges of our popular customsand antiquities.12 Wordsworth too denounces sophisticated culture and discourse,and maintains a particular distrust of expressions of sensibility divorced from thepassions produced by real events regarding them as trivial and indicative of socialvanity.13 The Preface to Lyrical Ballads endorses the language and simple customsof the common man as the essence to which the poet must return.Although he did little eldwork, Brand s interpretation of the task of a studentof popular antiquity is imagined, metaphorically, as a physical engagement withhis subject.He colourfully pictures himself as a traveller in search of the hiddenSources of the Nile in the barren African sands.14 Recognizing the problem ofpromoting that which may be regarded as ephemeral, Brand stresses here the efforttaken in collecting folkloric information.His metaphorical voyage into the heart ofdarkness suggests an explorer excited by the unknown.Wordsworth s poetic questsimilarly anticipates engagement with difference.For Wordsworth the poet is[& ] the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywherewith him relationship and love.In spite of difference of soil and climate, of languageand manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things gone silently out of mind and thingsviolently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire ofhuman society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time.15Importantly, Wordsworth stresses the accessibility of customs to the poet and hispossession of an intellect capable of encompassing all cultures.Folklore is not,Brand suggests, trivial or easily obtained knowledge, and in this he concurs withWordsworth.Thomas Love Peacock s dismissal of the folkloric element of contemporarypoetry, in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), is indicative of the conservative backlashagainst the increased interest in popular custom in the literary public sphere.Peacockcalls the poet of his age a semi-barbarian in a civilized community , denouncingthe contemporary interest in rural manners as a waste of time.16 The poet s ideas,thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs,and exploded superstitions.17 The poet who pursues disjointed relics of tradition , fragments of second hand observation and village legends from old women andsextons is taking a retrogressive step: his [the poet s] intellect is like that of a11 Brand, Preface to Observations, 1777, p.vi.12 Douce, II, 482.13 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p.71 and p.61.14 Brand, Preface to Observations, 1777, p.iv.15 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p.77, my italics.16 The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed.by H.F.B.Brett-Smith and C.E.Jones, TheHalliford Edition, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1974), VIII, 20.17 Ibid.30 The Romantics and the May Day Traditioncrab, backward.18 Brand glori es the folklorist as the heroic explorer; Peacock seesmerely the blind digger who lives in a land of perpetual darkness.Brand s Observations incorporates the whole of Henry Bourne s AntiquitatesVulgares, or the Antiquities of the Common People (1725), providing commentaryand footnotes on Bourne s original text.Brand s interpolations bring Bourne s textup to date, but they do more than this.Brand makes his text appear typographicallyand textually academic, emphasizing exegesis through considerable annotation.Richard Dorson describes the confusion that Brand s academicism generates:[T]he original sections of Bourne s treatise are dispersed, to sink into the mass of quotations,tailnotes, footnotes, thoughts, and afterthoughts which comprise the huge, undigestedscrapbook.Set in three sizes of type, the [Observations on] Popular Antiquities gives theimpression of notes upon notes upon notes, with ever increasing eyestrain.19The annotation of the volume continued even after Brand s death, as his incompletestudy was nished by Henry Ellis in 1813 and re-edited by him in 1849, becomingthe standard source for folklore material.The 1813 edition of the Observations on Popular Antiquities came forth at the right timefor the right public, the intellectually curious, non-academic Victorians [sic], absorbedin their England and the by-ways of its culture, hobbyists with a purpose, amateurantiquaries blessed with leisure and private libraries.For them, as well as for professionalmen of letters and learning, Brand-Ellis became a vade mecum, an automatic referenceand authority on antique custom and odd superstition.20 Brand s incorporation of materialfrom a range of regional studies, newspapers and correspondents is indicative of anincreasingly discursive approach to folklore studies.Brand, Douce and Strutt, while important mediators of popular culture, representthe approach of the generalist.Their studies encompass many regions, but theydo not give sustained and detailed accounts of particular places.For this, a longresidence in an area is required.It was left to local observers such as James Clarke,whose A Survey of the Lakes was published in 1787, to provide regional detail.21Wordsworth builds on and to some extent functions within both of these traditions.Like the antiquarians, Wordsworth never manages to move beyond a bourgeoisview of the common sphere, one that, for all its idealization of this sphere, nevermanages to see it as anything more than an object of study.He nevertheless stressesthe accessibility of customs to the poet, linking this openness to the possession of anintellect capable of encompassing all cultures.Wordsworth s speaker, in Michael ,tells the history of a heap of stones for the sake / Of youthful Poets who come18 Ibid., VIII, 21.19 Richard M.Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1968), pp.17 18.20 Ibid., p.18.Dorson mistakes the dates of the Victorian period.21 Local newspapers are also helpful in ascertaining the prevalence of a custom, thoughthere is a tradition in this type of publication of pasting together accounts from other sources,and there is often a strong element of nostalgia. Precious rites and customs 31after him.22 Michael af rms that the public value of poetry is its af rmation ofthe common sphere.Like John Clare after him, Wordsworth calls attention to theresponsibilities of the poet as having a duty to make common culture live again [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki