|
PREFATORY NOTE.
――――♦――――
THE two first volumes
of this Collected Edition of the works of Edwin Waugh contain his earliest
miscellaneous prose writings, including those which were originally
published under the title of Lancashire Sketches, and a few which
are especially interesting on account of their having reference to the
period of the Cotton Famine in Lancashire.
The present volume, being the third of the series, reproduces
the whole of the stories which have "Besom Ben" for their hero. In
the "Introduction" which accompanies the first volume of this edition I
have drawn attention to the great merit of these Besom Ben Stories.
In them Waugh makes a serious attempt to construct and maintain a
character. Evidently the light-hearted besom-maker of Lobden
moor-side was a favourite with him, and, like Wordsworth, he tries to show
how tenderness, and kindly feeling, and gentleness, as of one well-born,
and even susceptibility to the influences of external nature, may co-exist
with comparative ignorance and a menial employment. One may desire
that less prominence had been given to the rough pastime of rustic clowns;
but there remains an abundance of finer material. The descriptions
of nature are wonderfully accurate and vivid, and show a minute
acquaintance with all the phenomena of the changing seasons; the account
of Ben's cleanly cottage and smiling garden presents an ever-delightful
picture; the landlady's story of the "Old Blanket" needs only the
"accomplishment of verse" to make it equal to one of Tennyson's best
dialectal poems; and the passage which seeks to prove that Ben's donkey
was a gentleman is full of ingenious humour. Best of all, however,
is the tender delineation of the poor besom-maker's guileless affection
for his wife and child. In the pages devoted to this subject the
sweet household sentiment, which made the poem of "Come Whoam to thi
Childer and Me" so popular, is expanded without being weakened, and the
result is a country idyll in prose, which, for simple beauty and natural
pathos, has not often been surpassed.
G. M. |
