By what obscure cause, through what
ill-directed industry, and under the constraint of
what disabling hands, had the language of English poetry
grown, for an age, so rigid that a natural writer at
the end of the eighteenth century had much ado to
tell a simple story in sufficient verse? All
the vital exercise of the seventeenth century had left
the language buoyant; it was as elastic as deep and
mobile waters; then followed the grip of that incapacitating
later style. Much later, English has been so
used as to become flaccid — it has been stretched,
as it were, beyond its power of rebound, or certainly
beyond its power of rebound in common use (for when
a master writes he always uses a tongue that has suffered
nothing). It is in our own day that English has
been so over-strained. In Crabbe’s day
it had been effectually curbed, hindered, and hampered,
and it cannot be said of Crabbe that he was a master
who takes natural possession of a language that has
suffered nothing. He was evidently a man of
talent who had to take his part with the times, subject
to history. To call him a poet was a mere convention.
There seems to be not a single moment of poetry in
his work, and assuredly if he had known the earlier
signification of the word he would have been the last
man to claim the incongruous title of poet. But
it is impossible to state the question as it would
have presented itself to Crabbe or to any other writer
of his quality entering into the same inheritance
of English.
It is true that Crabbe read and quoted
Milton; so did all his contemporaries; and to us now
it seems that poetry cannot have been forgotten by
any age possessing Lycidas. Yet that age
can scarcely be said to have in any true sense possessed
Lycidas. There are other things, besides
poetry, in Milton’s poems. We do not entirely
know, perhaps, but we can conjecture how a reader
in Crabbe’s late eighteenth century, looking
in Milton for authority for all that he unluckily and
vainly admired, would well find it. He would
find the approval of Young’s “Night Thoughts”
did he search for it, as we who do not search for
it may not readily understand. A step or so downwards,
from a few passages in “Paradise Lost”
and “Paradise Regained,” an inevitable
drop in the derivation, a depression such as is human,
and everything, from Dryden to “The Vanity of
Human Wishes,” follows, without violence and
perhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet
Milton fathered, legitimately enough, an unpoetic
posterity. Milton, therefore, who might have
kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights
of poetry by lines like these —
Who sing and singing in their glory
move —
by this, and by many and many another
so divine — Milton justified also the cold
excesses of his posterity by the example of more than
one group of blank verse lines in his greatest poem.
Manifestly the sanction is a matter of choice, and
depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found
in Milton such ancestry as it was fit for.
Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry.
But he came into possession of a metrical form charged
by secondary poets with a contented second-class dignity
that bears constant reference, in the way of respect
rather than of imitation, to the state and nobility
of Pope at his best — the couplet. The
weak yet rigid “poetry” that fell to his
lot owed all the decorum it possessed to the mechanical
defences and props — the exclusions especially — of
this manner of versification. The grievous thing
was that, being moved to write simply of simple things,
he had no more supple English for his purpose.
His effort to disengage the phrase — long
committed to convention and to an exposed artifice — did
but prove how surely the ancient vitality was gone.
His preface to “The Borough,
a Poem,” should be duly read before the “poem”
itself, for the prose has a propriety all its own.
Everything is conceived with the most perfect moderation,
and then presented in a form of reasoning that leaves
you no possible ground of remonstrance. In proposing
his subject Crabbe seems to make an unanswerable apology
with a composure that is almost sweet. For instance,
at some length and with some nobility he anticipates
a probable conjecture that his work was done “without
due examination and revisal,” and he meets the
conjectured criticism thus: “Now, readers
are, I believe, disposed to treat with more than common
severity those writers who have been led into presumption
by the approbation bestowed upon their diffidence,
and into idleness and unconcern by the praises given
to their attention.” It would not be possible
to say a smaller thing with greater dignity and gentleness.
It is worth while to quote this prose of a “poet”
who lived between the centuries, if only in order
to suggest the chastening thought, “It is a
pity that no one, however little he may have to say,
says it now in this form!” The little, so long
as it is reasonable, is so well suited in this antithesis
and logic. Is there no hope that journalism will
ever take again these graces of unanswerable argument?
No: they would no longer wear the peculiar aspect
of adult innocence that was Crabbe’s.