There is a certain small class of
persons in the history of literature the members of
which possess, at least for literary students, an
interest peculiar to themselves. They are the
writers who having attained, not merely popular vogue,
but fame as solid as fame can ever be, in their own
day, having been praised by the praised, and having
as far as can be seen owed this praise to none of
the merely external and irrelevant causes politics,
religion, fashion or what not from which
it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short
time after their death the fate of being, not exactly
cast down from their high place, but left respectfully
alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
these writers, over the gate of whose division of the
literary Elysium the famous, “Who now reads
Bolingbroke?” might serve as motto, the author
of “The Village” and “Tales of the
Hall” is one of the most remarkable. As
for Crabbe’s popularity in his own day there
is no mistake about that. It was extraordinarily
long, it was extremely wide, it included the select
few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more or
less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse
tastes, habits, and literary standards. His was
not the case, which occurs now and then, of a man
who makes a great reputation in early life and long
afterwards preserves it because, either by accident
or prudence, he does not enter the lists with his
younger rivals, and therefore these rivals can afford
to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and
cheap. Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth
century, and might have boasted, altering Landor’s
words, that he had dined early and in the best of
company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, “I
have Johnson and Burke: all the wits have been
here.” But when his studious though barren
manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an
old man, to write poetry, he entered into full competition
with the giants of the new school, whose ideals and
whose education were utterly different from his.
While “The Library” and “The Village”
came to a public which still had Johnson, which had
but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other poetical
novelty before it than Cowper, “The Borough”
and the later Tales entered the lists with “Marmion”
and “Childe Harold,” with “Christabel”
and “The Excursion,” even with “Endymion”
and “The Revolt of Islam.” Yet these
later works of Crabbe met with the fullest recognition
both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,
the most grudging, of all the poets of the day towards
their fellows, united in praising Crabbe; and unromantic
as the poet of “The Village” seems to us
he was perhaps Sir Walter’s favourite English
bard. Scott read him constantly, he quotes him
incessantly; and no one who has read it can ever forget
how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical
pages ever written Lockhart’s account
of the death at Abbotsford. Byron’s criticism
was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron
had no doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight
of memory or even of imagination can hardly get together
three contemporary critics whose standards, tempers,
and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much
to say that they are all in a tale about Crabbe.
In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there rose (for
some others who can hardly have admired him much were
simply silent) one single note, so far as I know,
or rather one single rattling peal of thunder on the
other side. It is true that this was significant
enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.
Yet against this chorus, which was
not, as has sometimes happened, the mere utterance
of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the
almost total forgetfulness of his work which has followed.
It is true that of living or lately living persons
in the first rank of literature some great names can
be cited on his side; and what is more, that these
great names show the same curious diversity in agreement
which has been already noticed as one of Crabbe’s
triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyam, his
friend the present Laureate, and the author of “The
Dream of Gerontius,” are men whose literary
ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of
Gifford, Jeffrey, and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron,
and Scott. Much more recently Mr. Courthope has
used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite
to the comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie
Stephen has discussed him as one who knows and loves
his eighteenth century. But who reads him?
Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I
can venture to say, with all proper humility, that
I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say with
neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person
whose business it has been for some years to read
books, and articles, and debates, that I know what
has been written and said in England lately. You
will find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings
and sayings. He does not even survive, as “Matthew
Green, who wrote ‘The Spleen,’” and
others survive, by quotations which formerly made
their mark, and are retained without a knowledge of
their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
to the general reader, it is the parody in “Rejected
Addresses,” an extraordinarily happy parody
no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in Crabbe’s
weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally
there is nothing of his best there; and it is by his
best things, let it be repeated over and over in face
of all opposition, that a poet must be judged.
Although Crabbe’s life, save
for one dramatic revolution, was one of the least
eventful in our literary history, it is by no means
one of the least interesting. Mr. Kebbel’s
book gives a very fair summary of it; but the Life
by Crabbe’s son which is prefixed to the collected
editions of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel’s
own is avowedly based, is perhaps the more interesting
of the two. It is written with a curious mixture
of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling
on the writer’s part that he is not a literary
man himself, and that not only his father, but Mr.
Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other high
literary persons who assisted him were august beings
of another sphere. This is all the more agreeable,
in that Crabbe’s sons had advantages of education
and otherwise which were denied to their father, and
might in the ordinary course of things have been expected
to show towards him a lofty patronage rather than
any filial reverence. The poet himself was born
at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known watering-place
(the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins
in No Name) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That
not uncommon infirmity of noble minds which seeks
to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family,
who maintained themselves to be at the best Norfolk
yeomen, and though they possessed a coat-of-arms,
avowed with much frankness that they did not know how
they got it. A hundred and forty years ago they
had apparently lost even the dignity of yeomanhood,
and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of the
middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers
in the navy or the merchant service, and so forth.
George Crabbe, the grandfather, was collector of customs
at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a parish
schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he returned
to the Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as
salt-master, or collector of the salt duties.
He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education,
especially in mathematics, appears to have been considerable,
and his ability in business not small. The third
George, his eldest son, was also fairly though very
irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
that he was “a fool about a boat,” had
the rather unusual common sense to destine him to
a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe
chose or which was chosen for him that
of medicine was not the best suited to his
tastes or talents, the resources of the family were
not equal to giving him a full education, even in
that. He was still at intervals employed in the
Customs warehouses at “piling up butter and cheese”
even after he was apprenticed at fourteen to a country
surgeon. The twelve years which he spent in this
apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time
to the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London,
where he had no means to walk the hospitals, and in
an attempt to practise with little or no qualification
at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history
of apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love
was, for once, most truly and literally Crabbe’s
solace and his salvation, his master and his patron.
When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and
possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners
nor prospects, he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy.
She was three or four years older than himself and
much better connected, being the niece and eventual
co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was,
it is said, pretty; she was evidently accomplished,
and she seems to have had access to the country society
of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her,
perhaps merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century,
perhaps in remembrance of Fulke Greville’s heroine
(for he knew his Elizabethans rather well for a man
of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy
to think that the last syllables of her Christian
name and surname in a way spelt the appellation, fell
in love with the boy and made his fortune. But
for her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly
but stolidly, into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the
time, consoling himself with snuff (which he always
loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that
in his youth he was not averse). Mira was at
once unalterably faithful to him and unalterably determined
not to marry unless he could give her something like
a position. Their long engagement (they were not
married till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three)
may, as we shall see, have carried with it some of
the penalties of long engagements. But it is
as certain as any such thing can be that but for it
English literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.
There is no space here to go through
the sufferings of the novitiate. At last, at
the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once
more to seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature
only, in London. His son too has printed rare
scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira which
he kept during at least a part of the terrible year
of struggle which he passed there. He saw the
riots of ’80; he canvassed, always more or less
in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent three-and-sixpence
of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
much less disturbed about imminent starvation than
by the delay of a letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally”
she becomes with a pathetic lapse from convention,
when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
had enough left to pay the postage of one. He
writes prayers (but not for the public eye), abstracts
of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather adulatory)
to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All
this has the most genuine note that ever man of letters
put into his work, for whatever Crabbe was or was
not, now or at any time, he was utterly sincere; and
his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
journals unusually interesting. At last, after
a year, during which his means of subsistence are
for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he says
himself, fixed “by some propitious influence,
in some happy moment” on Edmund Burke as the
subject of a last appeal.
Nothing in all literary history is,
in a modest way and without pearls and gold, quite
so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe’s
fortunes which this propitious influence brought about.
On the day when he wrote to Burke he was, as he said
in the letter, “an outcast, without friends,
without employment, without bread.” In some
twenty-four hours (the night-term of which he passed
in ceaselessly pacing Westminster Bridge to cheat
the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It
was not merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke
procured him a solid and an increasing income.
He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own
work: Burke took him into his own house for months,
encouraged him to submit his poems, criticised them
at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw
country boy into a man who at least had met society
of the best kind. It is a platitude to say that
for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage
there is scarcely one who will take trouble of this
kind; and if any devil’s advocate objects the
delight of producing a “lion,” it may be
answered that for Burke at least this delight would
not have been delightful at all.
The immediate form which the patronage
of Burke and that, soon added, of Thurlow took, is
one which rather shocks the present day. They
made Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant
bishop to ordain him. They sent him (a rather
dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own native
place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy
at Belvoir. The young Duke of Rutland, who had
been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was fond of letters,
and his Duchess Isabel, who was, like her
elder kinswoman, Dryden’s Duchess of Ormond
A daughter of the rose, whose
cheeks unite
The varying beauties of the
red and white,
in other words, a Somerset, was one
of the most beautiful and gracious women in England.
Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest
possible kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,
and his ever-prudent Mira still would not marry him.
At last Thurlow’s patronage took the practical
form (it had already taken that, equally practical,
of a hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor’s
livings in Dorsetshire, residence at which was dispensed
with by the easy fashions of the day. The Duke
of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland, did not take Crabbe with him, a circumstance
which has excited some unnecessary discussion; but
he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where he and
his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a
neighbouring curacy his wife, for even
Mira’s prudence had yielded at last to the Dorsetshire
livings, and they were married in December 1783.
They lived together for nearly thirty years, in, as
it would seem, unbroken mutual devotion, but Mrs.
Crabbe’s health seems very early to have broken
down, and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe’s
on a letter of hers has been preserved. I do
not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, “And
yet happiness was denied” a sentence
fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and other good men
who have denounced long engagements. The story of
Crabbe’s life after his marriage may be told
very shortly. His first patron died in Ireland,
but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed on
Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient
and rather better livings in the neighbourhood of
Belvoir, at the chief of which, Muston, Crabbe long
resided. The death of his wife’s uncle made
him leave his living and take up his abode for many
years at Glemham, in Suffolk, only to find, when he
returned, that (not unnaturally, though to his own
great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession
of the parish. His wife died in 1813, and the
continued kindness, after nearly a generation, of
the house of Rutland, gave him the living of Trowbridge,
in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency
near Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge
he lived nearly twenty years, revisiting London society,
making the acquaintance personally (he had already
known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable
visit to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple
fashion with many ladies, writing much and being even
more of a lion in the society of George the Fourth’s
reign than he had been in the days of George the Third.
He died on 3rd February 1832.
Crabbe’s character is not at
all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in those letters
and diaries of his which have been published, as in
anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous
story of his politely endeavouring to talk French
to divers Highlanders, during George the Fourth’s
visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered Lockhart,
who tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If
he did gently but firmly extinguish a candle-snuff
while Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were indulging
in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations
of the smoke, there may have been something to say
for him as Anne Scott, to whom Wordsworth told the
story, is said to have hinted, from the side of one
of the senses. His life, no less than his work,
speaks him a man of amiable though by no means wholly
sweet temper, of more common sense than romance, and
of more simplicity than common sense. His nature
and his early trials made him not exactly sour, but
shy, till age and prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity
was his chief characteristic in age and youth alike.
The mere facts of his strictly literary
career are chiefly remarkable for the enormous gap
between his two periods of productiveness. In
early youth he published some verses in the magazines
and a poem called “Inebriety,” which appeared
at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in London
saw the publication of another short piece “The
Candidate,” but with the ill-luck which then
pursued him, the bookseller who brought it out became
bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered
in “The Library,” 1781, followed by “The
Village,” 1783, which Johnson revised and improved
not a little. Two years later again came “The
Newspaper,” and then twenty-two years passed
without anything appearing from Crabbe’s pen.
It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
little or nothing to do, and for the greater part of
the time, lived away from his parish. It was
not that he was idle, for we have his son’s
testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that
holocausts of manuscripts in prose and verse used
from time to time to be offered up in the open air,
for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass.
At last, in 1807, “The Parish Register”
appeared, and three years later “The Borough” perhaps
the strongest division of his work. The miscellaneous
Tales came in 1812, the “Tales of the Hall”
in 1819. Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected
editions appeared, the last and most complete being
in 1829 a very comely little book in eight
volumes. His death led to the issue of some “Posthumous
Tales” and to the inclusion by his son of divers
fragments both in the Life and in the Works.
It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published
with less harm to the author’s fame and with
less fear of incurring a famous curse than in the
case of almost any other poet.
For Crabbe, though by no means always
at his best, is one of the most curiously equal of
verse-writers. “Inebriety” and such
other very youthful things are not to be counted;
but between “The Village” of 1783 and
the “Posthumous Tales” of more than fifty
years later, the difference is surprisingly small.
Such as it is, it rather reverses ordinary experience,
for the later poems exhibit the greater play of fancy,
the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression.
Yet there is nothing really wonderful in this, for
Crabbe’s earliest poems were published under
severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a
time which still thought nothing of such value in
literature as correctness, while his later were written
under no particular censorship, and when the Romantic
revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated
the world. The change was in Crabbe’s case
not wholly for the better. He does not in his
later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes considerably
less intelligible. There is a passage in “The
Old Bachelor,” too long to quote but worth referring
to, which, though it may be easy enough to understand
it with a little goodwill, I defy anybody to understand
in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and
Johnson saved him from one of them in the very first
lines of “The Village.” Yet Johnson
could never have written the passages which earned
Crabbe his fame. The great lexicographer knew
man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
nowhere shows anything like Crabbe’s power of
seizing and reproducing man in particular. Crabbe
is one of the first and certainly one of the greatest
of the “realists” who, exactly reversing
the old philosophical signification of the word, devote
themselves to the particular only. Yet of the
three small volumes by which he, after his introduction
to Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived
for a quarter of a century, the first and the last
display comparatively little of this peculiar quality.
“The Library” and “The Newspaper”
are characteristic pieces of the school of Pope, but
not characteristic of their author. The first
catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth,
and then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity,
and the rest, but is otherwise written very much in
the air. “The Newspaper” suited Crabbe
a little better, because he pretty obviously took a
particular newspaper and went through its contents scandal,
news, reviews, advertisements in his own
special fashion: but still the subject did not
appeal to him. In “The Village,”
on the other hand, contemporaries and successors alike
have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein.
The two famous passages which attracted the suffrages
of judges so different as Scott and Wordsworth, are
still, after more than a hundred years, fresh, distinct,
and striking. Here they are once more:
Theirs is yon House that holds
the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce
bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours,
flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful
through the day;
There children dwell who know
no parents’ care;
Parents who know no children’s
love dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their
joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers
never wed;
Dejected widows, with unheeded
tears,
And crippled age with more
than childhood fears;
The lame, the blind, and,
far the happiest they!
The moping idiot and the madman
gay.
. . .
. .
Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,
All pride and business, bustle and conceit;
With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,
With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to
go,
He bids the gazing throng around him fly,
And carries fate and physic in his eye:
A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
And whose most tender mercy is neglect.
Paid by the parish for attendance here,
He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;
In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,
Impatience marked in his averted eyes;
And some habitual queries hurried o’er,
Without reply he rushes on the door:
His drooping patient, long inured to pain,
And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,
He ceases now the feeble help to crave
Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.
The poet executed endless variations
on this class of theme, but he never quite succeeded
in discovering a new one, though in process of time
he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen
and townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals.
His landscape is always marvellously exact, the strokes
selected with extraordinary skill ad hoc so
as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather
than hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather
than any joy of living. Attempts have been made
to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a gloomy
poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly
think that they have been quite serious. Crabbe,
our chief realist poet, has an altogether astonishing
likeness to the chief prose realist of France, Gustave
Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in
point of style the two have small resemblance.
One of the most striking things in Crabbe’s
biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion
of a day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed
in a new boat of his father’s. We all of
us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
proverbial duck’s back, have these experiences
and these remembrances of them. But most men
either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
a little farther, console themselves by regarding their
own disappointments from the ironic and humorous point
of view. Crabbe, though not destitute of humour,
does not seem to have been able or disposed to employ
it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over
the terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year
in London: perhaps the difference between the
Mira of promise and the Mira of possession the
“happiness denied” had something
to do with it: perhaps it was a question of natural
disposition with him. But when, years afterwards,
as a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series
of published poems once more with “The Parish
Register,” the same manner of seeing is evident,
though the minute elaboration of the views themselves
is almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever
succeed in altering this manner, if he ever tried
to do so.
With the exception of his few Lyrics,
the most important of which, “Sir Eustace Grey”
(one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
different metre, and a few other occasional pieces
of little importance, the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous
as it is, is framed upon a single pattern, the vignettes
of “The Village” being merely enlarged
in size and altered in frame in the later books.
The three parts of “The Parish Register,”
the twenty-four Letters of “The Borough,”
some of which have single and others grouped subjects,
and the sixty or seventy pieces which make up the
three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening.
They are also almost wholly devoted to narratives,
partly satirical, partly pathetic, of the lives of
individuals of the lower and middle class chiefly.
Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the
plots or stories of these tales; but it is a little
amusing to notice that he does it for the most part
exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
dramatist. “The object,” says he,
in one place, “is to show that a man’s
fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence
in the approbation of his auditors”: “In
Squire Thomas we have the history of a mean, domineering
spirit,” and so forth. Gifford in one place
actually discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall
make some further reference to this curious attitude
of Crabbe’s admiring critics. For the moment
I shall only remark that the singularly mean character
of so much of Crabbe’s style, the “style
of drab stucco,” as it has been unkindly called,
which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how
the youth at the theatre
Regained the felt and felt
what he regained,
is by no means universal. The
most powerful of all his pieces, the history of Peter
Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
free from it, and so are a few others. But it
is common enough to be a very serious stumbling-block.
In nine tales out of ten this is the staple:
Of a fair town where Dr. Rack
was guide,
His only daughter was the
boast and pride.
Now that is unexceptionable verse
enough, but what is the good of putting it in verse
at all? Here again:
For he who makes me thus on
business wait,
Is not for business in a proper
state.
It is obvious that you cannot trust
a man who, unless he is intending a burlesque, can
bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only
brings himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates
in the style. The tale from which that last luckless
distich is taken, “The Elder Brother,”
is full of pathos and about equally full of false
notes. If we turn to a far different subject,
the very vigorously conceived “Natural Death
of Love,” we find a piece of strong and true
satire, the best thing of its kind in the author,
which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts
of poetry, it is so good that none can complain.
Then the page is turned and one reads:
“I met,” said
Richard, when returned to dine,
“In my excursion with
a friend of mine.”
It may be childish, it may be uncritical,
but I own that such verse as that excites in me an
irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any
one say that pedestrian passages of the kind are inseparable
from ordinary narrative in verse and from the adaptation
of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but
it is not. Pope seldom indulges in such passages,
though he does sometimes: Dryden never does.
He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that
has a throb and a quiver and a swell in it, and is
not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In Crabbe, save
in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
description the last an excellent setting
for poetry but not necessarily poetical this
rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter which
it serves to convey is, with the limitations above
given, varied, and it is excellent. No one except
the greatest prose novelists has such a gallery of
distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set
before the reader. Exasperating as Crabbe’s
style sometimes is, he seldom bores never
indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection.
It has, I think, been observed, and if not the observation
is obvious, that he has done with the pen for the
neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what Crome
and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich
with the pencil. His observation of human nature,
so far as it goes, is not less careful, true, and
vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect
grotesque or faded, dead as the manners themselves
are. His pictures of motives and of facts, of
vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects
are perennial and are truly caught. Even his
plays on words, which horrified Jeffrey
Alas! your reverence, wanton
thoughts I grant
Were once my motive, now the
thoughts of want,
and the like are not worse
than Milton’s jokes on the guns. He has
immense talent, and he has the originality which sets
talent to work in a way not tried by others, and may
thus be very fairly said to turn it into genius.
He is all this and more. But despite the warnings
of a certain precedent, I cannot help stating the
case which we have discussed in the old form, and
asking, was Crabbe a poet?
And thus putting the question, we
may try to sum up. It is the gracious habit of
a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of
the famous men our fathers that were before us.
I have already referred to Hazlitt’s criticism
on Crabbe in The Spirit of the Age, and I need
not here urge at very great length the cautions which
are always necessary in considering any judgment of
Hazlitt’s. Much that he says even in the
brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to
Crabbe is unjust; much is explicably, and not too
creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a successful man,
and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was
a clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt
did not love clergymen of the Church of England:
he had been a duke’s chaplain, and Hazlitt loathed
dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though
Hazlitt does not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal,
but his Liberalism had been Torified into a tame variety.
Again, Crabbe, though by no means squeamish, is the
most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author
of Liber Amoris. Accordingly there is
much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
which the critic devotes to the poet. But there
are two passages in this tirade which alone might
show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
Here in a couple of lines ("they turn, one and all,
on the same sort of teasing, helpless, unimaginative
distress”) is the germ of one of the most famous
and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr.
Arnold; and here again is one of those critical taps
of the finger which shivers by a touch of the weakest
part a whole Rupert’s drop of misapprehension.
Crabbe justified himself by Pope’s example.
“Nothing,” says Hazlitt, “can be
more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking:
Crabbe would have described merely what was there....
In Pope there was an appeal to the imagination, you
see what was passing in a poetical point of view.”
Even here (and I have not been able
to quote the whole passage) there is one of the flaws,
which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
“striking”; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is
often striking enough. But the description of
Pope as showing things “in a poetical point of
view” hits the white at once, wounds Crabbe
mortally, and demolishes realism, as we have been
pleased to understand it for the last generation or
two. Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up
the attack, as I shall hope to show in an instant;
but he has indicated the right line of it. As
far as mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is
that he is pictorial rather than poetic, and photographic
rather than pictorial. He sees his subject steadily,
and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not
see it in the poetical way. You are bound in
the shallows and the miseries of the individual; never
do you reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
at the universal. The absence of selection, of
the discarding of details that are not wanted, has
no doubt a great deal to do with this Hazlitt
seems to have thought that it had everything to do.
I do not quite agree with him there. Dante, I
think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe; and
I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt
himself would single out, as Hazlitt expressly does,
the death-bed scene of Buckingham as a conquering
instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know
that the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this.
But suppose he had not? Would it have been worse
verse? I think not. Although the faculty
of selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself
justly contends, is one of the things which make poesis
non ut pictura, it is not all, and I think myself
that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester’s
corpse. Is that not poetry?
The defect of Crabbe, as it seems
to me, is best indicated by reference to one of the
truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
Joubert that the lyre is a winged instrument
and must transport. There is no wing in Crabbe,
there is no transport, because, as I hold (and this
is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music.
In all poetry, the very highest as well as the very
lowest that is still poetry, there is something which
transports, and that something in my view is always
the music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence,
of the rhythm, of the sounds superadded to the meaning.
When you get the best music married to the best meaning,
then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you get
some music married to even moderate meaning, you get,
say, Moore. Wordsworth can, as everybody but
Wordsworthians holds, and as some even of Wordsworthians
admit, write the most detestable doggerel and platitude.
But when any one who knows what poetry is reads
Our noisy years seem moments
in the being
Of the eternal silence,
he sees that, quite independently
of the meaning, which disturbs the soul of no less
a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
to the articulate music of the world a note
that never will leave off resounding till the eternal
silence itself gulfs it. He leaves Wordsworth,
he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth
century, and he sees Thomson with his hands in his
dressing-gown pockets biting at the peaches, and hears
him between the mouthfuls murmuring
So when the shepherd of the
Hebrid Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy
main,
and there is another note, as different
as possible in kind yet still alike, struck for ever.
Yet again, to take example still from the less romantic
poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel
specially and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe,
when we read the old schoolboy’s favourite
When the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods,
we hear the same quality of music
informing words, though again in a kind somewhat lower,
commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
matters that are worth handling at all, we come of
course ad mysterium. Why certain combinations
of letters, sounds, cadences, should almost without
the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely assisted
by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no
man can say. But they do; and the chief merit
of criticism is that it enables us by much study of
different times and different languages to recognise
some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and
complete causes, of the production.
Now I can only say that Crabbe does
not produce, or only in the rarest instances produces,
this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and
becoming merely a gelid critic, I do not discover
even in Crabbe’s warmest admirers any evidence
that he produced this effect on them. Both in
the eulogies which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those
that he does not quote, I observe that the eulogists
either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by poetry,
or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not
distinctly poetical. Cardinal Newman said that
Crabbe “pleased and touched him at thirty years’
interval,” and pleaded that this answers to the
“accidental definition of a classic.”
Most certainly; but not necessarily to that of a poetical
classic. Jeffrey thought him “original
and powerful.” Granted; but there are plenty
of original and powerful writers who are not poets.
Wilson gave him the superlative for “original
and vivid painting.” Perhaps; but is Hogarth
a poet? Jane Austen “thought she could
have married him.” She had not read his
biography; but even if she had would that prove him
to be a poet? Lord Tennyson is said to single
out the following passage, which is certainly one
of Crabbe’s best, if not his very best:
Early he rose, and looked
with many a sigh
On the red light that filled
the eastern sky;
Oft had he stood before, alert
and gay,
To hail the glories of the
new-born day;
But now dejected, languid,
listless, low,
He saw the wind upon the water
blow,
And the cold stream curled
onward as the gale
From the pine-hill blew harshly
down the vale;
On the right side the youth
a wood surveyed,
With all its dark intensity
of shade;
Where the rough wind alone
was heard to move
In this, the pause of nature
and of love
When now the young are reared,
and when the old,
Lost to the tie, grow negligent
and cold:
Far to the left he saw the
huts of men,
Half hid in mist that hung
upon the fen:
Before him swallows gathering
for the sea,
Took their short flights and
twittered o’er the lea;
And near the bean-sheaf stood,
the harvest done,
And slowly blackened in the
sickly sun;
All these were sad in nature,
or they took
Sadness from him, the likeness
of his look
And of his mind he
pondered for a while,
Then met his Fanny with a
borrowed smile.
It is good: it is extraordinarily
good: it could not be better of its kind.
It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever
did but is it quite? If it is (and
I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it seems
to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here,
with its special effect of “transporting”
of “making the common as if it were uncommon,”
is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that
in fact there is music as well as meaning. Hardly
anywhere else, not even in the best passages of the
story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music; and
in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly
than of Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest
poetical undertone with him even into the rant of
Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable arguments
of “Religio Laici” and “The
Hind and the Panther”) that he is a classic
of our prose.
Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy
in him are all qualities which are valuable to the
poet, and which for the most part are present in good
poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was
what actually deceived some of his contemporaries
and made others content for the most part to acquiesce
in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits.
It must be remembered that even the latest generation
which, as a whole and unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe,
had been brought up on the poets of the eighteenth
century, in the very best of whom the qualities which
Crabbe lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently
present. It must be remembered too, that from
the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth century,
its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously
free. The return to nature was not the only secret
of the return to poetry; but it was part of it, and
that Crabbe returned to nature no one could doubt.
Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction
which practically ended with Evelina and the
school of prose fiction which opened its different
branches with Waverley and Sense and Sensibility.
His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative
power, the faculty of character-drawing, the genius
for description of places and manners, which they
found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost all,
if not in all the great poets there is narrative power,
faculty of character-drawing, genius for description.
Yet again, Crabbe put these gifts into verse which
at its best was excellent in its own way, and at its
worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley.
Some readers may have had an uncomfortable though
only half-conscious feeling that if they had not a
poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At
all events they made up their minds that they had
a poet in him.
But are we bound to follow their example?
I think not. You could play on Crabbe that odd
trick which used, it is said, to be actually played
on some mediaeval verse chroniclers and unrhyme him that
is to say, put him into prose with the least possible
changes and his merits would, save in rare
instances, remain very much as they are now. You
could put other words in the place of his words, keeping
the verse, and it would not as a rule be much the
worse. You cannot do either of these things with
poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude
that save at the rarest moments, moments of some sudden
gust of emotion, some happy accident, some special
grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless toil
in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I
have not the least intention of denying that he was
great, and all but of the greatest among English writers.