the benefit of the so-called general reader is only the secondary object
which I have in view. My primary appeal is not to those who have the full
chorus of English song, from Chaucer to Masefield, at their beck and call,
but to a still larger class of men and women who are not general readers
of literature at all, and for whom most English poetry is a closed book.
In my dialect wanderings through Yorkshire I discovered that while there
was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of the people, the great
masterpieces of our national song made little or no appeal to them. They
were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and profusion, but it consisted
of food that they could not assimilate. Spenser, Milton, 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