ABSTRACT
in english, broadcasting has made “region” a word of daily usage, but has obscured its meaning. The region in which I live, the Northern Region, is not a region in anything but an arbitrary geographical sense—its bounds determined partly by administrative convenience and partly by the vagaries of electro-magnetic radiation. Lancashire is in the north, but it has little in common with the county on the east of the Pennines. Even in that county there are three ridings, each with very distinct geographical and ethnographical peculiarities. I doubt if we could isolate a distinctive “northernness”, getting more intense the farther north we go. Indeed, beyond Northumberland we come to a region called the Border, which is not a geometrical boundary, as the name might indicate, but what might be called a buffer-region, dividing incompatible realms. But the Border is precisely one of the authentic regions, and the Border ballads one of the best examples of great literature rooted in a defined geographical space. Sir Walter Scott, collecting these ballads, gave his volume “the misleading and indeed mendacious title”, as Swinburne called it, of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border—Swinburne retaliated with a volume entitled Ballads of the English Border, and in a draft of a Preface to this volume he remarked rather bitterly that “it needs no more acquaintance with the Borderland than may be gathered from print by an English Cockney or a Scotch highlander, to verify, the palpable and indisputable fact that even if England can claim no greater share than Scotland in the splendid and incomparable ballad literature which is one of the crowning glories, historic and poetic, of either kingdom, Scotland can claim no greater share in it than England: and the blatant Caledonian boobies whose ignorance is impudent enough to question the claims of the English ballad—nay, even to deny its existence, and consequently the existence of any ballads dealing with any such unheard-of heroes as Robin Hood, Guy of Gisborne, Adam Bell, Clym o’ the Clough, and William of Cloudesley—may be confuted and put to shame, if shame be possible for such thick-skinned audacity to feel or understand, by the veriest smatterer who has an honest and intelligent eye in his head”. Swinburne was a Borderer himself, so his indignation is understandable. But the point he makes is also the first point I would like to make: that what we call regionalism in literature has nothing to do with nationalism in literature, which is usually a disguise for politics. Regionalism in literature (and in all the arts) is a product of historical tradition and geographical restrictions. The geographical factors come first, but geographical is not quite the right word for them. There is the basic factor of landscape—the actual conformation of the region—its hills and streams, its woods and buildings—all the surface appearances that make a familiar scene, loved for its own sake. But the buildings, as well as the fields and gardens, are themselves an expression of the people who generation after generation patiently and consistently created them. The people have a continuity of race—of intermarried families and accepted customs; and a continuity of language—and language which they may share for the most part with other regions, but which they speak with a special intonation and pronunciation. The dialect of a region, to those who live in the region, is an unconscious bond of feeling, and all these things—climate, landscape, buildings, speech and customs, make up an invisible matrix in which the minds of the people are moulded.
