Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry/Introduction
INTRODUCTION.
Allan Cunningham was born in 1785, and died at the age of fifty-seven, in October 1842. He was born into a poor household at Blackwood, in Dumfriesshire, and had little schooling. When a child of eleven he was apprenticed to a stonemason. But he was born with a quick fancy and a love of song. In 1810 R. H. Cromek published "Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, with Historical and Traditional Notices relative to the Manners and Customs of the Peasantry." Allan Cunningham, then twenty-five years old, had taken special delight in the fireside tales and songs of the little world of peasantry to which he himself belonged, and he supplied to Cromek's Nithsdale and Galloway volume Ballads of his own making as if they were traditions of the past. They were good enough to draw towards Allan Cunningham the sympathies of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who had also come into the world with a small gift, that if small was true.
Walter Scott, who had warmly recognized the genius of the Ettrick Shepherd, was as prompt in generous appreciation of young Allan Cunningham, made his acquaintance, and the more he knew of him liked "honest Allan" the better. Encouraged by this recognition of his native power the stonecutter went, in the same year, 1810, to seek his fortune in London as a poet.
In London, Allan Cunningham endeavoured to live by his pen. He found admission among the writers in The London Magazine, and plied his pen with great industry until his death. From the worst anxieties of the struggle on which he had ventured, he was saved by the friendship of Chantrey the sculptor. Francis Chantrey was only four years older than Allan Cunningham. Chantrey had shown his bent for sculpture when apprenticed to a carver and gilder at Sheffield. He had afterwards got some instruction in London at the Royal Academy, and returned to Sheffield, where he received in 1809 from an architect an order for four colossal busts. This started Chantrey upon his career of rising power and prosperity, only a year before young Allan Cunningham appeared in London. Chantrey's ame was rising; his work was growing on his hands; Walter Scott was among those who sat to him ; and when he recognized the touch of finer thought and fancy in Allan Cunningham and found that he had left the trade of stonecutting, he restored him to it in a form that harmonized with his best aspirations; Chantrey appointed Allan Cunningham to be the principal assistant in his studio.
The work in the studio made daily bread secure, and Allan Cunningham had leisure for such reading as would in some degree train and advance his powers. He found time also for free use of his pen. He wrote a play, "Sir Marmaduke Maxwell." He wrote novels, "Paul Jones" and "Sir Michael Scott." He wrote a "Life of Burns." He wrote songs. The best of his story-books is that which is here reprinted. It was first published in 1822.
In 1826 Allan Cunningham published, in four volumes, "Songs of Scotland, ancient and modern; with an Essay and Notes, historical and critical, and Characters of the most eminent Lyrical Poets of Scotland." In 1830 he completed for John Murray's Family Library, in six volumes, his "Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects." That was his most successful work in prose. His keen interest in Art as well as Literature was shown again by his editing, in 1834, a "Cabinet Gallery of Pictures by the first masters of the Foreign and English Schools;" and in 1843, the year after his death, appeared his "Life of Sir David Wilkie, with his Journals and Tours." In 1847 Allan Cunningham's "Poems and Songs" were collected and published with an Introduction, Glossary and Notes, by Peter Cunningham, his son.
Why reprint among the works of the great masters this book that bears witness only to a little gift though true? Allan Cunningham as a storyteller caught the now obsolete fashion of his time, and there are passages of phrase and sentiment, and even of incident—as in the first part of the Selbys—that although healthy in nature are conventional in tone, with conventions that were established in a day of broken health. The true love of Literature does not walk only on the mountain tops, it leads us also to the copse and meadow on the lower slopes, and gives us rest upon the moss beside the small rills of the valley. Wherever the voice is true, if there be but a little touch of the divine gift that makes man look below the outward shows with sympathetic insight, and give poetic form to the life common to us all, the right reader has a ready ear, and passes easily through accidental fault to the essential life with which he communes.
In another way also this book has interest for the student of literature. Allan Cunningham took pleasure from early childhood in the stories of the country-side, and he here puts upon record the latest memories of the itinerant storyteller in whom the earliest form of our national literature, once dependent wholly on the recitations of the Scóp and gleeman, after many changes finally became extinct. At this day, probably, there is not one man left in the three kingdoms who earns his bread by carrying from house to house, for oral recitation, the tales and traditions of his country-side. At the end of the last century such a custom, as Allan Cunningham here tells us, was not wholly extinct. Though his Traditional Tales may be mainly of his own invention, they are the outcome of a mind that had been in much real contact with North Country peasantry, had taken eager delight in their "stories told of many a feat," and felt the music in them. The free sprinkling of song over the tales, gives us the pleasant sense also that our entertainer is a poet, while, however out of fashion some points in his style may be, we feel the artist in his prose.
Next flight is upward to the heights again.
November 1887