In the last years of the eighteenth century there was a sudden awakening

among the bishops to the growing abuse of non-residence and pluralities

on the part of the clergy. One prelate of distinction devoted his

triennial charge to the subject, and a general "stiffening" of episcopal

good nature set in all round. The Bishop of Lincoln addressed Crabbe,

with others of his delinquent clergy, and intimated to him very

distinctly the duty of returning to those few sheep in the wilderness at

Muston and Allington. Crabbe, in much distress, applied to his friend

Dudley North to use influence on his behalf to obtain extension of

leave. But the bishop, Dr. Pretyman (Pitt's tutor and friend--better

known by the name he afterwards adopted of Tomlins) would not yield, and

it was probably owing to pressure from some different quarter that

Crabbe succeeded in obtaining leave of absence for four years longer.

Dudley North would fain have solved the problem by giving Crabbe one or

more of the livings in his own gift in Suffolk, but none of adequate

value was vacant at the time. Meanwhile, the house rented by Crabbe,

Great Glemham Hall, was sold over Crabbe's head, by family arrangements

in the North family, and he made his last move while in Suffolk, by

taking a house in the neighbouring village of Rendham, where he remained

during his last four years. Crabbe was looking forward to his elder

son's going up to Cambridge in 1803, and this formed an additional

reason for wishing to remain as long as might be in the eastern

counties.

The writing of poetry seems to have gone on apace. _The Parish Register_

was all but completed while at Rendham, and _The Borough_ was also

begun. After so long an abstinence from the glory of print, Crabbe at

last found the required stimulus to ambition in the need of some further

income for his two sons' education. But during the last winter of his

residence at Rendham (1804-1805), Crabbe produced a poem, in stanzas, of

very different character and calibre from anything he had yet written,

and as to the origin of which one must go back to some previous

incidents in Crabbe's history. His son is always lax as to dates, and

often just at those periods when they would be the most welcome. It may

be inferred, however, that at some date between 1790 and 1792 Crabbe

suffered from serious derangements of his digestion, attended by sudden

and acute attacks of vertigo. The passage in the memoir as to the exact

period is more than usually vague. The writer is dealing with the year

1800, and he proceeds:

"My father, now about his forty-sixth year, was much

more stout and healthy than when I first remember him.

Soon after that early period he became subject to vertigoes,

which he thought indicative of a tendency to apoplexy; and

was occasionally bled rather profusely, which only increased

the symptoms. When he preached his first sermon at Muston

in the year 1789 my mother foreboded, as she afterwards told

us, that he would preach very few more: but it was on one

of his early journeys into Suffolk, in passing through Ipswich,

that he had the most alarming attack."

This account of matters is rather mixed. The "early period" pointed to

by young Crabbe is that at which he himself first had distinct

recollection of his father, and his doings. Putting that age at six

years old, the year would be 1791; and it may be inferred that as the

whole family paid a visit of many months to Suffolk in the year 1790, it

was during that visit that he had the decisive attack in the streets of

Ipswich. The account may be continued in the son's own words:--

"Having left my mother at the inn, he walked into the

town alone, and suddenly staggered in the street, and fell.

He was lifted up by the passengers" (probably from the stagecoach

from which they had just alighted), "and overheard

some one say significantly, 'Let the gentleman alone, he will

be better by and by'; for his fall was attributed to the

bottle. He was assisted to his room, and the late Dr. Clubbe

was sent for, who, after a little examination, saw through the

case with great judgment. 'There is nothing the matter with

your head,' he observed, 'nor any apoplectic tendency; let

the digestive organs bear the whole blame: you must take

opiates.' From that time his health began to amend rapidly,

and his constitution was renovated; a rare effect of opium,

for that drug almost always inflicts some partial injury, even

when it is necessary; but to him it was only salutary--and

to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it may be attributed

his long and generally healthy life."

The son makes no reference to any possible effects of this "slightly

increasing dose" upon his father's intellect or imagination. And the

ordinary reader who knows the poet mainly through his sober couplets may

well be surprised to hear that their author was ever addicted to the

opium-habit; still more, that his imagination ever owed anything to its

stimulus. But in FitzGerald's copy there is a MS. note, not signed

"G.C.," and therefore FitzGerald's own. It runs thus: "It" (the opium)

"probably influenced his dreams, for better or worse" To this FitzGerald

significantly adds, "see also the _World of Dreams_, and _Sir Eustace

Grey_."

As Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day, _Sir

Eustace Grey_ will be hardly even a name to them. For it lies, with two

or three other noticeable poems, quite out of the familiar track of his

narrative verse. In the first place it is in stanzas, and what Browning

would have classed as a "Dramatic Lyric." The subject is as follows: The

scene "a Madhouse," and the persons a Visitor, a Physician, and a

Patient. The visitor has been shown over the establishment, and is on

the point of departing weary and depressed at the sight of so much

misery, when the physician begs him to stay as they come in sight of the

"cell" of a specially interesting patient, Sir Eustace Grey, late of

Greyling Hall. Sir Eustace greets them as they approach, plunges at once

into monologue, and relates (with occasional warnings from the doctor

against over-excitement) the sad story of his misfortunes and consequent

loss of reason. He begins with a description of his happier days:--

"Some twenty years, I think, are gone

(Time flies, I know not how, away),

The sun upon no happier shone

Nor prouder man, than Eustace Grey.

Ask where you would, and all would say,

The man admired and praised of all,

By rich and poor, by grave and gay,

Was the young lord of Greyling Hall.

"Yes! I had youth and rosy health,

Was nobly formed, as man might be;

For sickness, then, of all my wealth,

I never gave a single fee:

The ladies fair, the maidens free.

Were all accustomed then to say,

Who would a handsome figure see,

Should look upon Sir Eustace Grey.

"My lady I--She was all we love;

All praise, to speak her worth, is faint;

Her manners show'd the yielding dove,

Her morals, the seraphic saint:

She never breathed nor looked complaint;

No equal upon earth had she:

Now, what is this fair thing I paint?

Alas! as all that live shall be.

"There were two cherub-things beside,

A gracious girl, a glorious boy;

Yet more to swell my fall-blown pride,

To varnish higher my fading joy,

Pleasures were ours without alloy,

Nay, Paradise,--till my frail Eve

Our bliss was tempted to destroy--

Deceived, and fated to deceive.

"But I deserved;--for all that time

When I was loved, admired, caressed,

There was within each secret crime,

Unfelt, uncancelled, unconfessed:

I never then my God addressed,

In grateful praise or humble prayer;

And if His Word was not my jest--

(Dread thought!) it never was my care."

The misfortunes of the unhappy man proceed apace, and blow follows blow.

He is unthankful for his blessings, and Heaven's vengeance descends on

him. His wife proves faithless, and he kills her betrayer, once his

trusted friend. The wretched woman pines and dies, and the two children

take some infectious disease and quickly follow. The sufferer turns to

his wealth and his ambitions to drug his memory. But "walking in pride,"

he is to be still further "abased." The "Watcher and the Holy One" that

visited Nebuchadnezzar come to Sir Eustace in vision and pronounce his

fate:

"Full be his cup, with evil fraught--

Demons his guides, and death his doom."

Two fiends of darkness are told off to tempt him. One, presumably the

Spirit of Gambling, robs him of his wealth, while the Spirit of Mania

takes from him his reason, and drags him through a hell of horriblest

imaginings. And it is at this point that what has been called the

"dream-scenery" of the opium-eater is reproduced in a series of very

remarkable stanzas:

Upon that boundless plain, below,

The setting sun's last rays were shed,

And gave a mild and sober glow,

Where all were still, asleep, or dead;

Vast ruins in the midst were spread,

Pillars and pediments sublime,

Where the grey moss had form'd a bed,

And clothed the crumbling spoils of time.

"There was I fix'd, I know not how,

Condemn'd for untold years to stay:

Yet years were not;--one dreadful _Now_

Endured no change of night or day;

The same mild evening's sleepy ray

Shone softly-solemn and serene,

And all that time I gazed away,

The setting sun's sad rays were seen.

"At length a moment's sleep stole on,--

Again came my commission'd foes;

Again through sea and land we're gone,

No peace, no respite, no repose:

Above the dark broad sea we rose,

We ran through bleak and frozen land;

I had no strength their strength t' oppose,

An infant in a giant's hand.

"They placed me where those streamers play,

Those nimble beams of brilliant light;

It would the stoutest heart dismay,

To see, to feel, that dreadful sight:

So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright,

They pierced my frame with icy wound;

And all that half-year's polar night,

Those dancing streamers wrapp'd me round

"Slowly that darkness pass'd away,

When down, upon the earth I fell,--

Some hurried sleep was mine by day;

But, soon as toll'd the evening bell,

They forced me on, where ever dwell

Far-distant men in cities fair,

Cities of whom no travellers tell,

Nor feet but mine were wanderers there

"Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,

As on we hurry through the dark;

The watch-light blinks as we go past,

The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark;

The watch-tower's bell sounds shrill; and, hark!

The free wind blows--we've left the town--

A wide sepulchral ground I mark,

And on a tombstone place me down.

"What monuments of mighty dead!

What tombs of various kind are found!

And stones erect their shadows shed

On humble graves, with wickers bound;

Some risen fresh, above the ground,

Some level with the native clay:

What sleeping millions wait the sound,

'Arise, ye dead, and come away!'

Alas! they stay not for that call;

Spare me this woe! ye demons, spare!--

They come! the shrouded shadows all,--

'Tis more than mortal brain can bear;

Rustling they rise, they sternly glare

At man upheld by vital breath;

Who, led by wicked fiends, should dare

To join the shadowy troops of death!"

For about fifteen stanzas this power of wild imaginings is sustained,

and, it must be admitted, at a high level as regards diction. The reader

will note first how the impetuous flow of those visionary recollections

generates a style in the main so lofty and so strong. The poetic diction

of the eighteenth century, against which Wordsworth made his famous

protest, is entirely absent. Then again, the eight-line stanza is

something quite different from a mere aggregate of quatrains arranged in

pairs. The lines are knit together; sonnet-fashion, by the device of

interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh lines

rhyming. And it is singularly effective for its purpose, that of

avoiding the suggestion of a mere ballad-measure, and carrying on the

descriptive action with as little interruption as might be.

The similarity of the illusions, here attributed to insanity, to those

described by De Quincey as the result of opium, is too marked to be

accidental. In the concluding pages of his _Confessions_, De Quincey

writes: "The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were

both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in

proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive ... This

disturbed me very much less than the vast expansion of time. Sometimes I

seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night."

Compare Crabbe's sufferer:--

"There was I fix'd, I know not how,

Condemn'd for untold years to stay

Yet years were not;--one dreadful _Now_

Endured no change of night or day."

Again, the rapid transition from one distant land to another, from the

Pole to the Tropics, is common to both experiences. The "ill-favoured

ones" who are charged with Sir Eustace's expiation fix him at one moment

"--on the trembling ball

That crowns the steeple's quiv'ring spire"

just as the Opium-Fiend fixes De Quincey for centuries at the summit of

Pagodas. Sir Eustace is accused of sins he had never committed:--

"Harmless I was: yet hunted down

For treasons to my soul unfit;

I've been pursued through many a town

For crimes that petty knaves commit."

Even so the opium-eater imagines himself flying from the wrath of

Oriental Deities. "I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a

deed, they said, which the Ibis and the Crocodile trembled at." The

morbid inspiration is clearly the same in both cases, and there can be

little doubt that Crabbe's poem owes its inception to opium, and that

the frame work was devised by him for the utilisation of his dreams.

But a curious and unexpected _dénouement_ awaits the reader. When Sir

Eustace's condition, as he describes it, seems most hopeless, its

alleviation arrives through a religious conversion. There has been

throughout present to him the conscience of "a soul defiled with every

stain." And at the same moment, under circumstances unexplained, his

spiritual ear is purged to hear a "Heavenly Teacher." The voice takes

the form of the touching and effective hymn, which has doubtless found a

place since in many an evangelical hymn-book, beginning

"Pilgrim, burthen'd with thy sin,

Come the way to Zion's gate;

There, till Mercy let thee in,

Knock and weep, and watch and wait.

Knock!--He knows the sinner's cry.

Weep!--He loves the mourner's tears.

Watch!--for saving grace is nigh

Wait,--till heavenly light appears."

And the hymn is followed by the pathetic confession on the sufferer's

part that this blessed experience, though it has brought him the

assurance of heavenly forgiveness, still leaves him, "though elect,"

looking sadly back on his old prosperity, and bearing, but unresigned,

the prospect of an old ago spent amid his present gloomy surroundings.

And yet Crabbe, with a touch of real imaginative insight, represents him

in his final utterance as relapsing into a vague hope of some day being

restored to his old prosperity:

"Must you, my friends, no longer stay?

Thus quickly all my pleasures end;

But I'll remember, when I pray,

My kind physician and his friend:

And those sad hours you deign to spend

With me, I shall requite them all.

Sir Eustace for his friends shall send,

And thank their love at Greyling Hall."[4]

The kind physician and his friend then proceed to diagnose the patient's

condition--which they agree is that of "a frenzied child of grace," and

so the poem ends. To one of its last stanzas Crabbe attached an

apologetic note, one of the most remarkable ever penned. It exhibits the

struggle that at that period must have been proceeding in many a

thoughtful breast as to how the new wine of religion could be somehow

accommodated to the old bottles:--

"It has been suggested to me that this change from restlessness to

repose in the mind of Sir Eustace is wrought by a methodistic call; and

it is admitted to be such: a sober and rational conversion could not

have happened while the disorder of the brain continued; yet the verses

which follow, in a different measure," (Crabbe refers to the hymn) "are

not intended to make any religious persuasion appear ridiculous; they

are to be supposed as the effect of memory in the disordered mind of the

speaker, and though evidently enthusiastic in respect to language, are

not meant to convey any impropriety of sentiment."

The implied suggestion (for it comes to this) that the sentiments of

this devotional hymn, written by Crabbe himself, could only have brought

comfort to the soul of a lunatic, is surely as good a proof as the

period could produce of the bewilderment in the Anglican mind caused by

the revival of personal religion under Wesley and his followers.

According to Crabbe's son _Sir Eustace Grey_ was written at Muston in

the winter of 1804-1805. This is scarcely possible, for Crabbe did not

return to his Leicestershire living until the autumn of the latter year.

Probably the poem was begun in Suffolk, and the final touches were added

later. Crabbe seems to have told his family that it was written during a

severe snow-storm, and at one sitting. As the poem consists of

fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex construction, the

accuracy of Crabbe's account is doubtful. If its inspiration was in some

degree due to opium, we know from the example of S.T. Coleridge that the

opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of memory or the accurate

presentation of facts. After Crabbe's death, there was found in one of

his many manuscript note-books a copy of verses, undated, entitled _The

World of Dreams_, which his son printed in subsequent editions of the

poems. The verses are in the same metre and rhyme-system as _Sir

Eustace_, and treat of precisely the same class of visions as recorded

by the inmate of the asylum. The rapid and continuous transition from

scene to scene, and period to period, is the same in both. Foreign kings

and other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in ghostly and

repellent forms:--

"I know not how, but I am brought

Into a large and Gothic hall,

Seated with those I never sought--

Kings, Caliphs, Kaisers--silent all;

Pale as the dead; enrobed and tall,

Majestic, frozen, solemn, still;

They make my fears, my wits appal,

And with both scorn and terror fill."

This, again, may be compared, or rather contrasted, with Coleridge's

_Pains of Sleep_, and it can hardly be doubted that the two poems had a

common origin.

The year 1805 was the last of Crabbe's sojourn in Suffolk, and it was

made memorable in the annals of literature by the appearance of the _Lay

of the Last Minstrel_. Crabbe first met with it in a bookseller's shop

in Ipswich, read it nearly through while standing at the counter, and

pronounced that a new and great poet had appeared.

This was Crabbe's first introduction to one who was before long to prove

himself one of his warmest admirers and friends. It was one of Crabbe's

virtues that he was quick to recognise the worth of his poetical

contemporaries. He had been repelled, with many others, by the weak side

of the _Lyrical Ballads_, but he lived to revere Wordsworth's genius.

His admiration for Burns was unstinted. But amid all the signs of a

poetical _renaissance_ in progress, and under a natural temptation to

tread the fresh woods and pictures new that were opening before him, it

showed a true judgment in Crabbe that he never faltered in the

conviction that his own opportunity and his own strength lay elsewhere.

Not in the romantic or the mystical--not in perfection of form or melody

of lyric verse, were his own humbler triumphs to be won. Like

Wordsworth, he was to find a sufficiency in the "common growth of

mother-earth," though indeed less in her "mirth" than in her "tears,"

Notwithstanding his _Eustace Grey_, and _World of Dreams_, and the

really powerful story of Aaron the Gipsy (afterwards to appear as the

_The Hall of Justice_), Crabbe was returning to the themes and the

methods of _The Village_. He had already completed _The Parish

Register_, and had _The Borough_ in contemplation, when he returned to

his Leicestershire parish. The woods of Belvoir, and the rural charms of

Parham and Glemham, had not dimmed the memory of the sordid little

fishing-town, where the spirit of poetry had first met him, and thrown

her mantle round him.

And now the day had come when the mandate of the bishop could no longer

be ignored. In October 1805, Crabbe with his wife and two sons returned

to the Parsonage at Muston. He had been absent from his joint livings

about thirteen years, of which four had been spent at Parham, five at

Great Glemham, and four at Rendham, all three places lying within a

small area, and within reach of the same old friends and relations. No

wonder that he left the neighbourhood with a reluctance that was

probably too well guessed by his parishioners in the Vale of Belvoir.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Richard Turner of Yarmouth was a man of considerable

culture, and belonged to a family of scholars. His eldest brother was

Master of Pembroke, Cambridge, and Dean of Norwich: his youngest son was

Sir Charles Turner, a Lord Justice of Appeal; and Dawson Turner was his

nephew. Richard Turner was the intimate friend of Dr. Parr, Paley, and

Canning.]

[Footnote 4: Readers of Lockhart's Biography will remember that in one

of Scott's latest letters to his son-in-law, before he left England for

Naples, he quoted and applied to himself this stanza of _Sir Eustace

Grey_. The incident is the more pathetic that Scott, as he wrote the

words, was quite aware that his own mind was failing.]

CHAPTER VI

THE PARISH REGISTER

(1805-1809)

"When in October, 1805, Mr. Crabbe resumed the charge of his own parish

of Muston, he found some changes to vex him, and not the less because he

had too much reason to suspect that his long absence from his incumbency

had been, partly at least, the cause of them. His cure had been served

by respectable and diligent clergymen, but they had been often changed,

and some of them had never resided within the parish; and he felt that

the binding influence of a settled and permanent minister had not been

withdrawn for twelve years with impunity. A Wesleyan missionary had

formed a thriving establishment in Muston, and the congregations at the

parish church were no longer such as they had been of old. This much

annoyed my father; and the warmth with which he began to preach against

dissent only irritated himself and others, without bringing back

disciples to the fold."

So writes Crabbe's son with his wonted frankness and good judgment.

Moreover, besides the Wesleyan secession, the mischievous extravagances

of William Huntington (S.S.) had found their way into the parish. To

make matters worse, a former gardener of Crabbe's had set up as a

preacher of the doctrines of this fanatic, who was still attracting

crowds in London. Then, too, as another fruit of the rector's long

absence, strange stories of his political opinions had become current.

Owing, doubtless, to his renewed acquaintance with Dudley North at

Glemham, and occasional association with the Whig leaders at his house,

he had exposed himself to the terrible charge that he was a Jacobin!

Altogether Crabbe's clerical position in Leicestershire, during the next

nine years, could not have been very comfortable. But he was evidently

still, as always, the devout and kindly pastor of his flock, and happily

for himself, he was now to receive new and unexpected tributes to his

popularity in other fields. His younger son, John, now eighteen years of

age, was shortly to go up to Cambridge, and this fresh expense had to be

provided for. To this end, a volume of poems, partly old and partly new,

had been for some time in preparation, and in September 1807, it

appeared from the publishing house of John Hatchard in Piccadilly. In it

were included _The Library_, _The Newspaper_, and _The Village_. The

principal new poem was _The Parish Register_, to which were added _Sir

Eustace Grey_ and _The Hall of Justice_. The volume was prefaced by a

Dedication to Henry Richard Fox, third Lord Holland, nephew and sometime

ward of Charles James Fox, and the reason for such dedication is told at

greater length in the long autobiographical introduction that follows.

Twenty-two years had elapsed since Crabbe's last appearance as an

author, and he seems to have thought it due to his readers to give some

reason for his long abstention from the poet's 'idle trade.' He pleads a

higher 'calling,' that of his professional duties, as sufficient

excuse. Moreover, he offers the same excuse for his 'progress in the art

of versification' being less marked than his readers might otherwise

expect. He then proceeds to tell the story of the kindness he had

received from Burke (who had died in 1797); the introduction by him to

Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through him again to Samuel Johnson. He gives

in full Johnson's note approving _The Village_, and after a further

laborious apology for the shortcomings of his present literary venture,

goes on to tell the one really relevant incident of its appearance.

Crabbe had determined, he says, now that his old valued advisers had

passed away, not to publish anything more--

"unless I could first obtain the sanction of such an opinion

as I might with some confidence rely upon. I looked for a

friend who, having the discerning taste of Mr. Burke and the

critical sagacity of Doctor Johnson, would bestow upon my

MS. the attention requisite to form his opinion, and would

then favour me with the result of his observations; and it

was my singular good fortune to obtain such assistance--the

opinion of a critic so qualified, and a friend so disposed to

favour me. I had been honoured by an introduction to the

Right Hon. Charles James Fox, some years before, at the

seat of Mr. Burke; and being again with him, I received a

promise that he would peruse any work I might send to him

previous to its publication, and would give me his opinion.

At that time I did not think myself sufficiently prepared;

and when afterwards I had collected some poems for his inspection,

I found my right honourable friend engaged by the

affairs of a great empire, and struggling with the inveteracy

of a fatal disease. At such time, upon such mind, ever disposed

to oblige as that mind was, I could not obtrude the

petty business of criticising verses; but he remembered the

promise he had kindly given, and repeated an offer which

though I had not presumed to expect, I was happy to receive.

A copy of the poems, now first published, was sent to him,

and (as I have the information from Lord Holland, and his

Lordship's permission to inform my readers) the poem which

I have named _The Parish Register_ was heard by Mr. Fox,

and it excited interest enough by some of its parts to gain for

me the benefit of his judgment upon the whole. Whatever he

approved, the reader will readily believe, I have carefully

retained: the parts he disliked are totally expunged, and

others are substituted, which I hope resemble those more

conformable to the taste of so admirable a judge. Nor can I

deny myself the melancholy satisfaction of adding that this

poem (and more especially the history of Phoebe Dawson,

with some parts of the second book) were the last compositions

of their kind that engaged and amused the capacious, the

candid, the benevolent mind of this great man."

It was, as we have seen, at Dudley North's residence in Suffolk that

Crabbe had renewed his acquaintance with Fox, and received from him

fresh offers of criticism and advice. And now the great statesman had

passed beyond reach of Crabbe's gratitude. He had died in the autumn of

1806, at the Duke of Devonshire's, at Chiswick. His last months wore of

great suffering, and the tedium of his latter days was relieved by being

read aloud to--the Latin poets taking their turn with Crabbe's pathetic

stories of humble life. In the same preface, Crabbe further expresses

similar obligations to his friend, Richard Turner of Yarmouth. The

result of this double criticism is the more discernible when we compare

_The Parish Register_ with, its successor, _The Borough_, in the

composition of which Crabbe admits, in the preface to that poem, that he

had trusted more entirely to his own judgment.

In _The Parish Register_, Crabbe returns to the theme which he had

treated twenty years before in _The Village,_ but on a larger and more

elaborate scale. The scheme is simple and not ineffective. A village

clergyman is the narrator, and with his registers of baptisms,

marriages, and burials open before him, looks through the various

entries for the year just completed. As name after name recalls

interesting particulars of character and incident in their history, he

relates them as if to an imaginary friend at his side. The precedent of

_The Deserted Village_ is still obviously near to the writer's mind, and

he is alternately attracted and repelled by Goldsmith's ideals. For

instance, the poem opens with an introduction of some length in which

the general aspects of village life are described. Crabbe begins by

repudiating any idea of such life as had been described by his

predecessor:--

"Is there a place, save one the poet sees,

A land of love, of liberty, and ease;

Where labour wearies not, nor cares suppress

Th' eternal flow of rustic happiness:

Where no proud mansion frowns in awful state,

Or keeps the sunshine from the cottage-gate;

Where young and old, intent on pleasure, throng,

And half man's life is holiday and song?

Vain search for scenes like these! no view appears,

By sighs unruffled, or unstain'd by tears;

Since vice the world subdued and waters drown'd,

Auburn and Eden can no more be found."

And yet the poet at once proceeds to describe his village in much the

same tone, and with much of the same detail as Goldsmith had done:--

"Behold the Cot! where thrives th' industrious swain,

Source of his pride, his pleasure, and his gain,

Screen'd from the winter's-wind, the sun's last ray

Smiles on the window and prolongs the day;

Projecting thatch the woodbine's branches stop,

And turn their blossoms to the casement's top;

All need requires is in that cot contain'd,

And much that taste untaught and unrestrain'd

Surveys delighted: there she loves to trace,

In one gay picture, all the royal race;

Around the walls are heroes, lovers, kings;

The print that shows them and the verse that sings."

Then follow, as in _The Deserted Village_, the coloured prints, and

ballads, and even _The Twelve Good Rules_, that decorate the walls: the

humble library that fills the deal shelf "beside the cuckoo clock"; the

few devotional works, including the illustrated Bible, bought in parts

with the weekly sixpence; the choice notes by learned editors that raise

more doubts than they close. "Rather," exclaims Crabbe:

"Oh! rather give me commentators plain

Who with no deep researches vex the brain;

Who from the dark and doubtful love to run,

And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun."

The last line of which he conveyed, no doubt unconsciously, from Young.

Nothing can be more winning than the picture of the village home thus

presented. And outside it, the plot of carefully-tended ground, with not

only fruits and herbs but space reserved for a few choice flowers, the

rich carnation and the "pounced auricula":--

"Here, on a Sunday eve, when service ends,

Meet and rejoice a family of friends:

All speak aloud, are happy and are free,

And glad they seem, and gaily they agree.

What, though fastidious ears may shun the speech,

Where all are talkers, and where none can teach;

Where still the welcome and the words are old,

And the same stories are for ever told;

Yet theirs is joy that, bursting from the heart,

Prompts the glad tongue these nothings to impart;

That forms these tones of gladness we despise,

That lifts their steps, that sparkles in their eyes;

That talks or laughs or runs or shouts or plays,

And speaks in all there looks and all their ways."

This charming passage is thoroughly in Goldsmith's vein, and even shows

markedly the influence of his manner, and yet it is no mere echo of

another poet. The scenes described are those which had become dear and

familiar to Crabbe during years of residence in Leicestershire and

inland Suffolk. And yet at this very juncture, Crabbe's poetic

conscience smites him. It is not for him, he remembers, to deal only

with the sweeter aspects, though he knows them to exist, of village

life. He must return to its sterner side:--

"Fair scenes of peace! ye might detain us long,

But vice and misery now demand the song;

And turn our view from dwellings simply neat,

To this infected Row we term our Street."

For even the village of trim gardens and cherished Bibles has its

"slums," and on these slums Crabbe proceeds to enlarge with almost

ferocious realism:--

"Here, in cabal, a disputatious crew

Each evening meet; the sot, the cheat, the shrew;

Riots are nightly heard:--the curse, the cries

Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies,

While shrieking children hold each threat'ning hand,

And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand;

Boys, in their first-stol'n rags, to swear begin;

And girls, who heed not dress, are skill'd in gin."

It is obvious, I think, that Crabbe's representations of country life

here, as in _The Village_ and _The Borough_, are often eclectic, and

that for the sake of telling contrast, he was at times content to blend

scenes that he had witnessed under very opposite conditions.

The section entitled "Baptisms" deals accordingly with many sad

instances of "base-born" children, and the section on "Marriages" also

has its full share of kindred instances in which the union in Church has

only been brought about by pressure from the parish authorities. The

marriage of one such "compelled bridegroom" is related with a force and

minuteness of detail throughout which not a word is thrown away:--

"Next at our altar stood a luckless pair,

Brought by strong passions and a warrant there;

By long rent cloak, hung loosely, strove the bride

From every eye, what all perceived, to hide.

While the boy-bridegroom, shuffling in his pace,

Now hid awhile, and then exposed his face;

As shame alternately with anger strove

The brain, confused with muddy ale, to move,

In haste and stammering he perform'd his part,

And look'd the rage that rankled in his heart:

(So will each lover inly curse his fate,

Too soon made happy, and made wise too late:)

I saw his features take a savage gloom,

And deeply threaten for the days to come.

Low spake the lass, and lisp'd and minced the while,

Look'd on the lad, and faintly tried to smile;

With soften'd speech and humbled tone she strove

To stir the embers of departed love:

While he, a tyrant, frowning walk'd before,

Felt the poor purse, and sought the public door,

She sadly following in submission went

And saw the final shilling foully spent;

Then to her father's hut the pair withdrew,

And bade to love and comfort long adieu!

Ah! fly temptation, youth, refrain! refrain!

I preach for ever; but I preach in vain!"

There is no "mealy-mouthed philanthropy" here. No one can doubt the

earnestness and truth of the poet's mingled anger and sorrow. The misery

of irregular unions had never been "bitten in" with more convincing

force. The verse, moreover, in the passage is freer than usual from many

of Crabbe's eccentricities. It is marked here and there by his fondness

for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists

have not overlooked. The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in

serious verse than Dickens's mention of the lady who went home "in a

flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indulgence in this habit

is never a mere concession to the reader's flippant taste. His epigrams

often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:--

"Too soon made happy, and made wise too late."

The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in

the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful. The gradual

steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a

hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of

Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is

yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute

individuality. The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as

Frederick Walker's _Lost Path_, or Langhorne's "Child of misery,

baptized in tears." That it will ever again be ranked with such may be

doubtful, for _technique_ is the first quality demanded of an artist in

our day, and Crabbe's _technique_ is too often defective in the extreme.

These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at

proper intervals by some of lighter complexion. There is the gentleman's

gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names

of his plants,--Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio. Then we have the

gallant, gay Lothario, who not only fails to lead astray the lovely

Fanny Price, but is converted by her to worthier aims, and ends by

becoming the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic suitor.

There is an impressive sketch of the elderly prude:--

"--wise, austere, and nice,

Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice";

and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great

House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants

to the tender mercies of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described

in lines curiously anticipating Hood's _Haunted House_:--

"--forsaken stood the Hall:

Worms ate the floors, the tap'stry fled the wall:

No fire the kitchen's cheerless grate display'd;

No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey'd;

The crawling worm that turns a summer fly,

Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die

The winter-death:--upon the bed of state,

The bat shrill shrieking woo'd his flickering mate."

In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:--

"Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,

With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;

Presents no objects tender or profound

But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around."

And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing "some scholar" read the

list of her titles and her virtues, "looked disdain and said":--

"Away, my friends! why take such pains to know

What some brave marble soon in Church shall show?

Where not alone her gracious name shall stand,

But how she lived--the blessing of the land;

How much we all deplored the noble dead,

What groans we uttered and what tears we shed;

Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes

Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise;

Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave,

The noble Lady to our sorrows gave!"

These portraits of the ignoble rich are balanced by one of the "noble

peasant" Isaac Ashford, drawn, as Crabbe's son tells us, from a former

parish-clerk of his father's at North Glemham. Coming to be past work

through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the probability of

the parish poorhouse, and reconciling himself to his lot is happily

spared the sore trial:--

"Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view!

But came not there, for sudden was his fate,

He dropp'd, expiring, at his cottage-gate.

I feel his absence in the hours of prayer,

And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there:

I see no more those white locks thinly spread

Round the bald polish of that honour'd head;

No more that awful glance on playful wight,

Compell'd to kneel and tremble at the sight,

To fold his fingers, all in dread the while,

Till Mister Ashford soften'd to a smile;

No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer,

Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there:--

But he is blest, and I lament no more

A wise, good man, contented to be poor."

Where Crabbe is represented, not unfairly, as dwelling mainly on the

seamy side of peasant and village life, such passages as the above are

not to be overlooked.

This final section ("Burials") is brought to a close by an ingenious

incident which changes the current of the vicar's thoughts. He is in the

midst of the recollections of his departed flock when the tones of the

passing-bell fall upon his ear. On sending to inquire he finds that they

tell of a new death, that of his own aged parish-sexton, "old Dibble"

(the name, it may be presumed, an imperfect reminiscence of Justice

Shallow's friend). The speaker's thoughts are now directed to his old

parish servant, and to the old man's favourite stories of previous

vicars under whom he has served. Thus the poem ends with sketches of

Parson Addle, Parson Peele, Dr. Grandspear and others--among them the

"Author-Rector," intended (the younger Crabbe thought) as a portrait of

the poet himself. Finally Crabbe could not resist the temptation to

include a young parson, "a youth from Cambridge," who has imbibed some

extreme notions of the school of Simeon, and who is shown as fearful on

his death-bed lest he should have been guilty of too many good works. He

appeals to his old clerk on the subject:--

"'My alms-deeds all, and every deed I've done,

My moral-rags defile me every one;

It should not be:--what say'st thou! Tell me, Ralph.'

'Quoth I, your Reverence, I believe you're safe;

Your faith's your prop, nor have you pass'd such time

In life's good works as swell them to a crime.

If I of pardon for my sins were sure,

About my goodness I would rest secure.'"

The volume containing _The Parish Register, The Village_, and others,

appeared in the autumn of 1807; and Crabbe's general acceptance as a

poet of mark dates from that year. Four editions were issued by Mr.

Hatchard during the following year and a half--the fourth appearing in

March 1809. The reviews were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in

the _Edinburgh_, and within two days of the appearance of this article,

according to Crabbe's son, the whole of the first edition was sold off.

At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still

more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in

his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers

gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite

pleasure. At the time "when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was

unborn," he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real

life. After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar

benefit. The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then

sunk. When Crabbe published his _Parish Register_, the novels of the day

were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without

atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck

the note of a new development in her _Castle Rackrent_, not to mention

the delightful stories in _The Parents' Assistant, Simple Susan, Lazy

Lawrence_, or _The Basket-Woman_. Galt's masterpiece, _The Annals of the

Parish_, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk. The

Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant. Miss

Mitford's sketches in _Our Village_--the nearest in form to Crabbe's

pictures of country life--were to come later still. Crabbe, though he

adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet,

is really a chief founder of the rural novel--the _Silas Marner_ and the

_Adam Bede_ of fifty years later. Of course (for no man is original) he

had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors. Pope was his

earliest master in his art. And what Pope had done in his telling

couplets for the man and woman of fashion--the Chloes and Narcissas of

his day--Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid

inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson's "lovely young

Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and poor widow gathering her

cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share

of influence. But Crabbe's achievement was practically a new thing. The

success of _The Parish Register_ was largely that of a new adventure in

the world of fiction. Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might

discover in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories--for a

truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could

not be unshared.

In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now reduced by the

publisher to the form of two small volumes, and in their fourth edition)

to Walter Scott, who acknowledged them and Crabbe's accompanying letter

in a friendly reply, to which reference has already been made. After

mentioning how for more than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of

a personal introduction to Crabbe, and how, as a lad of eighteen, he had

met with selections from _The Village_ and _The Library_ in _The Annual

Register_, he continues:--

"You may therefore guess my sincere delight when I saw

your poems at a late period assume the rank in the public

consideration which they so well deserve. It was a triumph

to my own immature taste to find I had anticipated the

applause of the learned and the critical, and I became very

desirous to offer my _gratulor_ among the more important

plaudits which you have had from every quarter. I should

certainly have availed myself of the freemasonry of authorship

(for our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Abhorson's)

to address to you a copy of a new poetical attempt, which I

have now upon the anvil, and I esteem myself particularly obliged

to Mr. Hatchard, and to your goodness acting upon his

information, for giving me the opportunity of paving the way

for such a freedom. I am too proud of the compliments

you honour me with to affect to decline them; and with

respect to the comparative view I have of my own labours

and yours, I can only assure you that none of my little folks,

about the formation of whose tastes and principles I may be

supposed naturally solicitous, have ever read any of my own

poems--while yours have been our regular evening's amusement

My eldest girl begins to read well, and enters as well

into the humour as into the sentiment of your admirable

descriptions of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has

seldom existed among those who know by experience that

there are much better things in the world than literary

reputation, and that one of the best of those good things is

the regard and friendship of those deservedly and generally

esteemed for their worth or their talents. I believe many

dilettante authors do cocker themselves up into a great

jealousy of anything that interferes with what they are

pleased to call their fame: but I should as soon think of

nursing one of my own fingers into a whitlow for my private

amusement as encouraging such a feeling. I am truly sorry

to observe you mention bad health: those who contribute so

much to the improvement as well as the delight of society

should escape this evil. I hope, however, that one day your

state of health may permit you to view this country."

This interchange of letters was the beginning of a friendship that was

to endure and strengthen through the lives of both poets, for they died

in the self-same year. The "new poetical attempt" that was

"on the anvil" must have been _The Lady of the Lake_, completed and

published in the following year. But already Scott had uneasy misgivings

that the style would not bear unlimited repetition. Even before Byron

burst upon the world with the two first cantos of _Childe Harold_, and

drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, Scott had made the

unwelcome discovery that his own matter and manner was imitable, and

that others were borrowing it. Many could now "grow the flower" (or

something like it), for "all had got the seed." It was this persuasion

that set him thinking whether he might not change his topics and his

metre, and still retain his public. To this end he threw up a few tiny

_ballons d'essai_--experiments in the manner of some of his popular

contemporaries, and printed them in the columns of the _Edinburgh Annual

Register_. One of these was a grim story of village crime called _The

Poacher_, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe. Scott was earnest

in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but

only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of

the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's metre, and as far as he could

compass it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once

again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into

another's mould. A few lines may suffice, in evidence. The couplet about

the vicar's sermons makes one sure that for the moment Scott was

good-humouredly copying one foible at least of his original:--

"Approach and through the unlatticed window peep.

Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep;

Sunk 'mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun

Stoop to the west, the plunderer's toils are done.

Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand,

Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand,

While round the hut are in disorder laid

The tools and booty of his lawless trade;

For force or fraud, resistance or escape

The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape;

His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards,

And the filched lead the church's roof affords--

(Hence shall the rector's congregation fret,

That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.)

The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there,

Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare,

Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare.

Bartered for game from chase or warren won,

Yon cask holds moonlight,[5] seen when moon was none;

And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart,

To wait the associate higgler's evening cart."

Happily for Scott's fame, and for the world's delight, he did not long

pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. _Rokeby_ appeared,

was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in

prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of _Waverley_ and the need of

conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever. But his

affection for Crabbe never waned. In his earlier novels there was no

contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters--and

it was Crabbe's _Borough_ to which he listened with unfailing delight

twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: A cant term for smuggled spirits.]

CHAPTER VII

_THE BOROUGH_

(1809-1812)

The immediate success of _The Parish Register_ in 1807 encouraged Crabbe

to proceed at once with a far longer poem, which had been some years in

hand. _The Borough_ was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, continued

at Muston after the return thither in 1805, and finally completed during

a long visit to Aldeburgh in the autumn of 1809. That the Poem should

have been "in the making" during at least eight years is quite what

might be inferred from the finished work. It proved, on appearance, to

be of portentous length--at least ten thousand lines. Its versification

included every degree of finish of which Crabbe was capable, from his

very best to his very worst. Parts of it were evidently written when the

theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely

bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive

memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet

that might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme. In the preface

to the poem, on its appearance in 1810, Crabbe displays an uneasy

consciousness that his poem was open to objection in this respect. In

his previous ventures he had had Edmund Burke, Johnson, and Fox,

besides his friend Turner at Yarmouth, to restrain or to revise. On the

present occasion, the three first-named friends had passed away, and

Crabbe took his MS. with him to Yarmouth, on the occasion of his visit

to the Eastern Counties, for Mr. Richard Turner's opinion. The scholarly

rector of Great Yarmouth may well have shrunk from advising on a poem of

ten thousand lines in which, as the result was to show, the

pruning-knife and other trenchant remedies would have seemed to him

urgently needed. As it proved, Mr. Turner's opinion was on the whole

"highly favourable; but he intimated that there were portions of the new

work which might be liable to rough treatment from the critics."

_The Borough_ is an extension--a very elaborate extension--of the topics

already treated in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. The place

indicated is undisguisedly Aldeburgh; but as Crabbe had now chosen a far

larger canvas for his picture, he ventured to enlarge the scope of his

observation, and while retaining the scenery and general character of

the little seaport of his youth, to introduce any incidents of town life

and experiences of human character that he had met with subsequently.

_The Borough_ is Aldeburgh extended and magnified. Besides church

officials it exhibits every shade of nonconformist creed and practice,

notably those of which the writer was now having unpleasant experience

at Muston. It has, of course, like its prototype, a mayor and

corporation, and frequent parliamentary elections. It supports many

professors of the law; physicians of high repute, and medical quacks of

very low. Social life and pleasure is abundant, with clubs,

card-parties, and theatres. It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons,

and schools for all classes. The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos

or sections, written as "Letters" to an imaginary correspondent who had

bidden the writer "describe the borough," each dealing with its separate

topic--professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players,

almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. These descriptions are relieved at

intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in _The Parish

Register_--the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably

pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a

prisoner in the gaol. Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe's

previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work

was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent defects of

workmanship, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity,

though to many a reader to-day such, episodes may be chiefly known to

exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay's _Essays_, where he

speaks of "that pathetic passage in Crabbe's _Borough_ which has made

many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child."

The passage referred to is the once-famous description of the condemned

Felon in the "Letter" on _Prisons_. Macaulay had, as we know, his

"heightened way of putting things," but the narrative which he cites, as

foil to one of Robert Montgomery's borrowings, deserves the praise. It

shows Crabbe's descriptive power at its best, and his rare power and

insight into the workings of the heart and mind. He has to trace the

sequence of thoughts and feelings in the condemned criminal during the

days between his sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier days

that haunt his pillow--days when he wandered with his sweetheart or his

sister through their village meadows:--

"Yes! all are with him now, and all the while

Life's early prospects and his Fanny's smile.

Then come his sister and his village friend,

And he will now the sweetest moments spend

Life has to yield,--No! never will he find

Again on earth such pleasure in his mind

He goes through shrubby walks these friends among,

Love in their looks and honour on the tongue.

Nay, there's a charm beyond what nature shows,

The bloom is softer and more sweetly glows;

Pierced by no crime and urged by no desire

For more than true and honest hearts require,

They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed

Through the green lane,--then linger in the mead,--

Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom,--

And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum;

Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass,

And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender grass,

Whore dwarfish flowers among the grass are spread,

And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed;

Then 'cross the bounding brook they make their way

O'er its rough bridge--'and there behold the bay!--

The ocean smiling to the fervid sun--

The waves that faintly fall and slowly run--

The ships at distance and the boats at hand,

And now they walk upon the sea-side sand,

Counting the number, and what kind they be,

Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea:

Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold

The glittering waters on the shingles rolled;

The timid girls, half dreading their design,

Dip the small foot in the retarded brine,

And search for crimson weeds, which spreading flow,

Or lie like pictures on the sand below:

With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun,

Through the small waves so softly shines upon;

And those live lucid jellies which the eye

Delights to trace as they swim glittering by:

Pearl-shells and rubied star-fish they admire,

And will arrange above the parlour fire,--

Tokens of bliss!--'Oh! horrible! a wave

Roars as it rises--save me, Edward! save!'

She cries:--Alas! the watchman on his way

Calls and lets in--truth, terror, and the day!"

Allowing for a certain melodramatic climax here led up to, we cannot

deny the impressiveness of this picture--the first-hand quality of its

observation, and an eye for beauty, which his critics are rarely

disposed to allow to Crabbe. A narrative of equal pathos, and once

equally celebrated, is that of the village-girl who receives back her

sailor-lover from his last voyage, only to watch over his dying hours.

It is in an earlier section (No. ii. _The Church_), beginning:

"Yes! there are real mourners--I have seen

A fair sad girl, mild, suffering, and serene,"

too long to quote in full, and, as with Crabbe's method generally, not

admitting of being fairly represented by extracts. Then there are

sketches of character in quite a different vein, such as the vicar,

evidently drawn from life. He is the good easy man, popular with the

ladies for a kind of _fade_ complimentary style in which he excels; the

man of "mild benevolence," strongly opposed to every thing new:

"Habit with him was all the test of truth:

'It must be right: I've done it from my youth,'

Questions he answered in as brief a way:

'It must be wrong--it was of yesterday.'"

Feeble good-nature, and selfish unwillingness to disturb any existing

habits or conventions, make up his character:

"In him his flock found nothing to condemn;

Him sectaries liked--he never troubled them:

No trifles failed his yielding mind to please,

And all his passions sunk in early ease;

Nor one so old has left this world of sin,

More like the being that he entered in."

An excellent companion sketch to that of the dilettante vicar is

provided in that of the poor curate--the scholar, gentleman, and devout

Christian, struggling against abject poverty to support his large

family. The picture drawn by Crabbe has a separate and interesting

origin. A year before the appearance of _The Borough_, one of the

managers of the Literary Fund, an institution then of some twenty years'

standing, and as yet without its charter, applied to Crabbe for a copy

of verses that might be appropriate for recitation at the annual dinner

of the Society, held at the Freemasons' Tavern. It was the custom of the

society to admit such literary diversions as part of the entertainment.

The notorious William Thomas Fitzgerald had been for many years the

regular contributor of the poem, and his efforts on the occasion are

remembered, if only through the opening couplet of Byron's _English

Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, where Fitzgerald is gibbeted as the

_Codrus_ of Juvenal's satire:

"Still must I hear? shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl

His creaking couplets in a Tavern-Hall?"

His poem for this year, 1809, is printed at length in the _Gentleman's

Magazine_ for April--and also Crabbe's, recited at the same dinner.

Crabbe seems to have composed it for the occasion, but with the

intention of ultimately weaving it into the poem on which he was then

engaged. A paragraph prefixed to the lines also shows that Crabbe had a

further object in view. "The Founder of this Society having intimated a

hope that, on a plan which he has already communicated to his particular

Friends, its Funds may be sufficiently ample to afford assistance and

relief to learned officiating Clergymen in distress, though they may not

have actually commenced Authors--the Author, in allusion to this hope,

has introduced into a Poem which he is preparing for the Press the

following character of a learned Divine in distress."

Crabbe's lines bearing on the proposed scheme (which seems for a time at

least to have been adopted by the administrators of the Fund) were left

standing when _The Borough_ was published, with, an explanatory note.

They are effective for their purpose, the pathos of them is genuine, and

worthy of attention even in these latter days of the "Queen Victoria

Clergy Fund." The speaker is the curate himself:

"Long may these founts of Charity remain,

And never shrink, but to be filled again;

True! to the Author they are now confined,

To him who gave the treasure of his mind,

His time, his health,--and thankless found mankind:

But there is hope that from these founts may flow

A side-way stream, and equal good bestow;

Good that may reach us, whom the day's distress

Keeps from the fame and perils of the Press;

Whom Study beckons from the Ills of Life,

And they from Study; melancholy strife!

Who then can say, but bounty now so free,

And so diffused, may find its way to me?

Yes! I may see my decent table yet

Cheered with the meal that adds not to my debt;

May talk of those to whom so much we owe,

And guess their names whom yet we may not know;

Blest, we shall say, are those who thus can give,

And next, who thus upon the bounty live;

Then shall I close with thanks my humble meal,

And feel so well--Oh! God! how shall I feel!"

Crabbe is known to most readers to-day by the delightful parody of his

style in the _Rejected Addresses,_ which appeared in the autumn of 1812,

and it was certainly on _The Borough_ that James Smith based his

imitation. We all remember the incident of Pat Jennings's adventure in

the gallery of the theatre. The manner of the narrative is borrowed from

Crabbe's lighter and more colloquial style. Every little foible of the

poet, when in this vein, is copied with great skill. The superfluity of

information, as in the case of--

"John Richard William Alexander Dwyer,"

whose only place in the narrative is that he preceded Pat Jennings's

father in the situation as

"Footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire";

or again in the detail that,

"Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy

Up as a corn-cutter--a safe employ"

(a perfect Crabbian couplet), is imitated throughout, Crabbe's habit of

frequent verbal antithesis, and even of something like punning, is

exactly caught in such a couplet as:

"Big-worded bullies who by quarrels live--

Who give the lie, and tell the lie they give."

Much of the parody, no doubt, exhibits the fanciful humour of the

brothers Smith, rather than of Crabbe, as is the case with many

parodies. Of course there are couplets here and there in Crabbe's

narratives which justify the burlesque. We have:

"What is the truth? Old Jacob married thrice;

He dealt in coals, and avarice was his vice,"

or the lines which the parodists themselves quote in their

justification,

"Something had happened wrong about a Bill

Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill,

So to amend it I was told to go,

And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co."

But lines such as these in fact occur only at long intervals. Crabbe's

couplets are more often pedestrian rather than grotesque.

The poet himself, as the witty brothers relate with some pride, was by

no means displeased or offended by the liberty taken. When they met in

later years at William Spencer's, Crabbe hurried to meet James Smith

with outstretched hand, "Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?" Again,

writing to a friend who had expressed some indignation at the parody,

Crabbe complained only of the preface. "There is a little

ill-nature--and I take the liberty of adding, undeserved ill-nature--in

their prefatory address; but in their versification they have done me

admirably." Here Crabbe shows a slight lack of self-knowledge. For when

to the Letter on _Trades_ the following extenuating postscript is found

necessary, there would seem to be hardly any room for the parodist:

"If I have in this Letter praised the good-humour of a man

confessedly too inattentive to business, and if in the one on

_Amusements_, I have written somewhat sarcastically of 'the

brick-floored parlour which the butcher lets,' be credit given

to me that in the one case I had no intention to apologise for

idleness, nor any design in the other to treat with contempt

the resources of the poor. The good-humour is considered as

the consolation of disappointment, and the room is so mentioned

because the lodger is vain. Most of my readers will

perceive this; but I shall be sorry if by any I am supposed to

make pleas for the vices of men, or treat their wants and

infirmities with derision or with disdain."

After this, Crabbe himself might have admitted that the descent is not

very far to the parodist's delightful apology for the change from "one

hautboy" to "one fiddle" in the description of the band. The subsequent

explanation, how the poet had purposely intertwined the various

handkerchiefs which rescued Pat Jennings's hat from the pit, lest the

real owner should be detected, and the reason for it, is a not less

exquisite piece of fooling:--"For, in the statistical view of life and

manners which I occasionally present, my clerical profession has taught

me how extremely improper it would be by any allusion, however slight,

to give any uneasiness, however trivial, to any individual, however

foolish or wicked." It might perhaps be inferred from such effusions as

are here parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of humour. This

would certainly be too sweeping an inference, for in many of his

sketches of human character he gives unmistakable proof to the contrary.

But the talent in question--often so recklessly awarded or denied to us

by our fellow-creatures--is very variable in the spheres of its

operation. The sense of humour is in its essence, as we have often been

told, largely a sense of proportion, and in this sense Crabbe was

certainly deficient. The want of it accounts for much more in his

writings than for his prose notes and prefaces. It explains much of the

diffuseness and formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp

the great truth how much the half may be greater than the whole.

In spite, however, of these defects, and of the inequalities of the

workmanship, _The Borough_ was from the first a success. The poem

appeared in February 1810, and went through six editions in the next six

years. It does not indeed present an alluring picture of life in the

provinces. It even reminds us of a saying of Tennyson's, that if God

made the country, and man made the city, then it was the devil who made

the country-town. To travel through the borough from end to end is to

pass through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and under a cloudy

heaven, with only rare gleams of sunshine, and patches of blue sky.

These, when they occur, are proportionally welcome. They include some

exquisite descriptions of nature, though with Crabbe it will be noticed

that it is always the nature close about his feet, the hedge-row, the

meadow, the cottage-garden: as his son has noted, his outlook never

extends to the landscape beyond.

In the respects just mentioned, the qualities exhibited in the new poem

have been noticed before in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. In

_The Borough_, however, appear some maturer specimens of this power,

showing how Crabbe's art was perfecting by practice. Very noticeable are

the sections devoted to the almshouse of the borough and its

inhabitants. Its founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of

the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions

follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn

from life. The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives

in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes

his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all his poorer neighbours in

distress:--

"A twofold taste he had; to give and spare,

Both were his duties, and had equal care;

It was his joy to sit alone and fast,

Then send a widow and her boys repast:

Tears in his eyes would, spite of him, appear,

But he from other eyes has kept the tear:

All in a wintry night from far he came

To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame,

Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant

A lingering, but reforming punishment:

Home then he walked, and found his anger rise

When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes;

But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed

To Heaven in hope, he calmly sank to rest."

The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth year was past, a

building was seen rising on the green north of the village--an almshouse

for old men and women of the borough, who had struggled in life and

failed. Having built and endowed this harbour of refuge, and placed its

government in the hands of six trustees, the modest donor and the pious

lady-relative who had shared in his good works passed quietly out of

life.

This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees who succeeded to

the management after the founder's death, among them a Sir Denys Brand,

a lavish donor to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the

founder had been humble and modest. This man defeats the intentions of

the founder by admitting to the almshouses persons of the shadiest

antecedents, on the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in

their day:

"Not men in trade by various loss brought down,

But those whose glory once amazed the town;

Who their last guinea in their pleasure spent,

Yet never fell so low as to repent:

To these his pity he could largely deal,

Wealth they had known, and therefore want could feel."

From this unfit class of pensioner Crabbe selects three for his minute

analysis of character. They are, as usual, of a very sordid type. The

first, a man named "Blaney," had his prototype in a half-pay major known

to Crabbe in his Aldeburgh days, and even the tolerant Jeffrey held that

the character was rather too shameless for poetical treatment. The next

inmate in order, a woman also drawn from the living model, and disguised

under the title of _Clelia_, is a study of character and career, drawn

with consummate skill. Certain abortive attempts of Crabbe to write

prose fiction have been already mentioned. But this narrative of the

gradual degradation of a coquette of the lower middle class shows that

Crabbe possessed at least some of the best qualities of a great

novelist. Clelia is, in fact, a kind of country-town Becky Sharp, whose

wiles and schemes are not destined to end in a white-washed reputation

at a fashionable watering-place. On the contrary she falls from one

ignominy to another until, by a gross abuse of a public charity, she

ends her days in the almshouse!

One further instance may be cited of Crabbe's persistent effort to

awaken attention to the problem of poor-law relief. In his day the

question, both as to policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor

relief, was still unsettled. In _The Borough_, as described, many of the

helpless poor were relieved at their own homes. But a new scheme, "The

maintenance of the poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred,"

seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that time confined to

that county. It differed from the workhouse of to-day apparently in this

respect, that there was not even an attempt to separate the young and

old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and vicious from the

respectable and honest. Yet Crabbe's powerful picture of the misery thus

caused to the deserving class of inmate is not without its lesson even

after nearly a century during which thought and humanity have been

continually at work upon such problems. The loneliness and weariness of

workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and

friends, in "the day-room of a London workhouse," have been lately set

forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_,

with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the

following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe's _Borough_:--

"Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet?

Who learn the story current in the street?

Who to the long-known intimate impart

Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart?

They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend,

Or seek companions at their journey's end?

Here are not those whom they when infants knew;

Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew;

Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived;

Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived;

Whom time and custom so familiar made,

That looks the meaning in the mind conveyed:

But here to strangers, words nor looks impart

The various movements of the suffering heart;

Nor will that heart with those alliance own,

To whom its views and hopes are all unknown

What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy,

Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy?

'Tis cheerless living in such bounded view,

With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new;

Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep;

The day itself is, like the night, asleep."

The essence of workhouse monotony has surely never been better indicated

than here.

_The Borough_ did much to spread Crabbe's reputation while he remained,

doing his duty to the best of his ability and knowledge, in the quiet

loneliness of the Vale of Belvoir, but his growing fame lay far outside

the boundaries of his parish. When, a few years later, he visited London

and was received with general welcome by the distinguished world of

literature and the arts, he was much surprised. "In my own village," he

told James Smith, "they think nothing of me." The three years following

the publication of _The Borough_ were specially lonely. He had, indeed,

his two sons, George and John, with him. They had both passed through

Cambridge--one at Trinity and the other at Caius, and were now in holy

orders. Each held a curacy in the near neighbourhood, enabling them to

live under the parental roof. But Mrs. Crabbe's condition was now

increasingly sad, her mind being almost gone. There was no daughter, and

we hear of no other female relative at hand to assist Crabbe in the

constant watching of the patient. This circumstance alone limited his

opportunities of accepting the hospitalities of the neighbourhood,

though with the Welbys and other county families, as well as with the

surrounding clergy, he was a welcome guest.

_The Borough_ appeared in February 1810, and the reviewers were prompt

in their attention. The _Edinburgh_ reviewed the poem in April of the

same year, and the _Quarterly_ followed in October. Jeffrey had already

noticed _The Parish Register_ in 1808. The critic's admiration of Crabbe

had been, and remained to the end, cordial and sincere. But now, in

reviewing the new volume, a note of warning appears. The critic finds

himself obliged to admit that the current objections to Crabbe's

treatment of country life are well founded. "His chief fault," he says,

"is his frequent lapse into disgusting representations." All powerful

and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in "images of distress,"

but these images must never excite "disgust," for that is fatal to the

ends which poetry was meant to produce. A few months later the

_Quarterly_ followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a more

questionable doctrine. The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary

canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it

happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its

place. "We turn to poetry," he says, "not that we may see and feel what

we see and feel in our daily experience, but that we may be refreshed by

other emotions, and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the

realities of life in the paradise of Fancy."

The appearance of these two prominent reviews to a certain extent

influenced the direction of Crabbe's genius for the remainder of his

life. He evidently had given them earnest consideration, and in the

preface to the _Tales_, his next production, he attempted something like

an answer to each. Without mentioning any names he replies to Jeffrey in

the first part of his preface, and to the _Quarterly_ reviewer in the

second. Jeffrey had expressed a hope that Crabbe would in future

concentrate his powers upon some interesting and connected story. "At

present it is impossible not to regret that so much genius should be

wasted in making us perfectly acquainted with individuals of whom we are

to know nothing but their characters." Crabbe in reply makes what was

really the best apology for not accepting this advice. He intimates that

he had already made the experiment, but without success. His peculiar

gifts did not fit him for it. As he wrote the words, he doubtless had in

mind the many prose romances that he had written, and then consigned to

the flames. The short story, or rather the exhibition of a single

character developed through a few incidents, he felt to be the method

that fitted his talent best.

Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the

_Quarterly_ reviewer, how far many passages in _The Borough_, when

concerned with low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in

reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had

never been disputed. He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life

indeed, and in the same rhymed metre. "If all that kind of satire

wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as

genuine poetry," then what becomes of the author of _The Canterbury

Tales_? Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to

this question. He could not discern that the treatment is everything,

and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself--the

spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these,

gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension.

From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on

whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing

that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this

nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of

course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and

his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both

described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly

where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and

could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often

excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The

_Quarterly_ reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description

in _The Borough_ of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of

the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very

graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather

metrical fiction than poetry. There is more of the essence of poetry in

a single couplet of Pope's:

"See how the world its veterans rewards--

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards."

For here the expression is faultless, and Pope has educed

an eternally pathetic truth, of universal application.

Even had the gentle remonstrances of the two reviewers never been

expressed, it would seem as if Crabbe had already arrived at somewhat

similar conclusions on his own account. At the time the reviews

appeared, the whole of the twenty-one _Tales_ to be published in August

1812 were already written. Crabbe had perceived that if he was to retain

the admiring public he had won, he must break fresh ground. Aldeburgh

was played out. It had provided abundant material and been an excellent

training-ground for Crabbe's powers. But he had discovered that there

were other fields worth cultivating besides that of the hard lots of the

very poor. He had associated in his later years with a class above

these--not indeed with the "upper ten," save when he dined at Belvoir

Castle, but with classes lying between these two extremes. He had come

to feel more and more the fascination of analysing human character and

motives among his equals. He had a singularly retentive memory, and the

habit of noting and brooding over incidents--specially of "life's little

ironies"--wherever he encountered them. He does not seem to have

possessed much originating power. When, a few years later, his friend

Mrs. Leadbeater inquired of him whether the characters in his various

poems were drawn from life, he replied:--"Yes, I will tell you readily

about my ventures, whom I endeavour to paint as nearly as I could, and

_dare_--for in some cases I dared not.... Thus far you are correct:

there is not one of whom I had not in my mind the original, but I was

obliged in most cases to take them from their real situations, and in

one or two instances even to change their sex, and in many, the

circumstances.... Indeed I do not know that I could paint merely from my

own fancy, and there is no cause why I should. Is there not diversity

enough in society?"

CHAPTER VIII

_TALES_

(1812)

Crabbe's new volume--"Tales. By the Rev. George Crabbe, LL.B."--was

published by Mr. Hatchard of Piccadilly in the summer of 1812. It

received a warm welcome from the poet's admirers, and was reviewed, most

appreciatively, by Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_ for November. The _Tales_

were twenty-one in number, and to each was prefixed a series, often four

or five, of quotations from Shakespeare, illustrating the incidents in

the Tales, or the character there depicted. Crabbe's knowledge of

Shakespeare must have been in those days, when concordances were not,

very remarkable, for he quotes by no means always from the best known

plays, and he was not a frequenter of the theatre. Crabbe had of late

studied human nature in books as well as in life.

As already remarked, the Tales are often built upon events in his own

family, or else occurring within their knowledge. The second in order of

publication, _The Parting Hour_, arose out of an incident in the life of

the poet's own brother, which is thus related in the notes to the

edition of 1834:

"Mr. Crabbe's fourth brother, William, taking to a sea-faring

life, was made prisoner by the Spaniards. He was

carried to Mexico, where he became a silversmith, married,

and prospered, until his increasing riches attracted a charge

of Protestantism; the consequence of which was much persecution.

He at last was obliged to abandon Mexico, his

property, and his family; and was discovered in the year

1803 by an Aldeburgh sailor on the coast of Honduras,

where again he seems to have found some success in business.

This sailor was the only person he had seen for many a year

who could tell him anything about Aldeburgh and his family,

and great was his perplexity when he was informed that his

eldest brother, George, was a clergyman. 'This cannot be

_our_ George,' said the wanderer, 'he was a _Doctor_! This was

the first, and it was also the last, tidings that ever reached

Mr. Crabbe of his brother William; and upon the Aldeburgh

sailor's story of his casual interview, it is obvious that

he built this tale."

The story as developed by Crabbe is pathetic and picturesque, reminding

us in its central interest of _Enoch Arden_. Allen Booth, the youngest

son of his parents dwelling in a small seaport, falls early in love with

a child schoolfellow, for whom his affection never falters. When grown

up the young man accepts an offer from a prosperous kinsman in the West

Indies to join him in his business. His beloved sees him depart with

many misgivings, though their mutual devotion was never to fade. She

does not see him again for forty years, when he returns, like Arden, to

his "native bay,"

"A worn-out man with wither'd limbs and lame,

His mind oppress'd with woes, and bent with age his frame."

He finds his old love, who had been faithful to her engagement for ten

years, and then (believing Allen to be dead) had married. She is now a

widow, with grown-up children scattered through the world, and is

alone. Allen then tells his sad story. The ship in which he sailed from

England had been taken by the Spaniards, and he had been carried a slave

to the West Indies, where he worked in a silver mine, improved his

position under a kind master, and finally married a Spanish girl,

hopeless of ever returning to England though still unforgetful of his

old love. He accumulates money, and, like Crabbe's brother, incurs the

envy of his Roman Catholic neighbours. He is denounced as a heretic, who

would doubtless bring up his children in the accursed English faith. On

his refusal to become a Catholic he is expelled the country, as the

condition of his life being spared:

"His wife, his children, weeping in his sight,

All urging him to flee, he fled, and cursed his flight."

After many adventures he falls in with a ship bound for England, but

again his return is delayed. He is impressed (it was war-time), and

fights for his country; loses a limb, is again left upon a foreign shore

where his education finds him occupation as a clerk; and finally, broken

with age and toil, finds his way back to England, where the faithful

friend of his youth takes care of him and nurses him to the end. The

situation at the close is very touching--for the joy of re-union is

clouded by the real love he feels for the Spanish wife and children from

whom he had been torn, and who are continually present to him in his

dreams.

Nor is the treatment inadequate. It is at once discernible how much

Crabbe had already gained by the necessity for concentration upon the

development of a story instead of on the mere analysis of character. The

style, moreover, has clarified and gained in dignity: there are few, if

any, relapses into the homelier style on which the parodist could try

his hand. Had the author of _Enoch Arden_ treated the same theme in

blank-verse, the workmanship would have been finer, but he could hardly

have sounded a truer note of unexaggerated pathos.

The same may be said of the beautiful tale of _The Lover's Journey_.

Here again is the product of an experience belonging to Crabbe's

personal history. In his early Aldeburgh days, when he was engaged to

Sarah Elmy with but faint hope of ever being able to marry, it was one

of the rare alleviations of his distressed condition to walk over from

Aldeburgh to Beccles (some twenty miles distant), where his betrothed

was occasionally a visitor to her mother and sisters. "It was in his

walks," writes the son, "between Aldeburgh and Beccles that Mr. Crabbe

passed through the very scenery described in the first part of _The

Lover's Journey_; while near Beccles, in another direction, he found the

contrast of rich vegetation introduced in the latter part of that tale;

nor have I any doubt that the _disappointment_ of the story figures out

something that, on one of these visits, befell himself, and the feelings

with which he received it.

"Gone to a friend, she tells me;--I commend

Her purpose: means she to a female friend?"

"For truth compels me to say, that he was by no means free from the less

amiable sign of a strong attachment--jealousy." The story is of the

slightest--an incident rather than a story. The lover, joyous and

buoyant, traverses the dreary coast scenery of Suffolk, and because he

is happy, finds beauty and charm in the commonest and most familiar

sights and sounds of nature: every single hedge-row blossom, every group

of children at their play. The poem is indeed an illustration of

Coleridge's lines in his ode _Dejection_:

"O Lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live,--

Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud."

All along the road to his beloved's house, nature wears this

"wedding-garment." On his arrival, however, the sun fades suddenly from

the landscape. The lady is from home: gone to visit a friend a few miles

distant, not so far but that her lover can follow,--but the slight, real

or imaginary, probably the latter, comes as such a rebuff, that during

the "little more--how far away!" that he travels, the country, though

now richer and lovelier, seems to him (as once to Hamlet) a mere

"pestilent congregation of vapours." But in the end he finds his

mistress and learns that she had gone on duty, not for pleasure,--and

they return happy again, and so happy indeed, that he has neither eyes

nor thoughts for any of nature's fertilities or barrennesses--only for

the dear one at his side.

I have already had occasion to quote a few lines from this beautiful

poem, to show Crabbe's minute observation--in his time so rare--of

flowers and birds and all that makes the charm of rural scenery--but I

must quote some more:

"'Various as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,'

Exclaim'd Orlando: 'all that grows has grace:

All are appropriate--bog, and marsh, and fen,

Are only poor to undiscerning men;

Here may the nice and curious eye explore

How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor,

Here the rare moss in secret shade is found,

Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground;

Beauties are these that from the view retire,

But well repay th' attention they require;

For these my Laura will her home forsake,

And all the pleasures they afford, partake.'"

And then follows a masterly description of a gipsy encampment on which

the lover suddenly comes in his travels. Crabbe's treatment of peasant

life has often been compared to that of divers painters--the Dutch

school, Hogarth, Wilkie, and others--and the following curiously

suggests Frederick Walker's fine drawing, _The Vagrants_:

"Again, the country was enclosed, a wide

And sandy road has banks on either side;

Where, lo! a hollow on the left appear'd,

And there a gipsy tribe their tent had rear'd;

'Twas open spread, to catch the morning sun,

And they had now their early meal begun,

When two brown boys just left their grassy seat,

The early Trav'ller with their prayers to greet:

While yet Orlando held his pence in hand,

He saw their sister on her duty stand;

Some twelve years old, demure, affected, sly,

Prepared the force of early powers to try;

Sudden a look of languor he descries,

And well-feigned apprehension in her eyes;

Train'd but yet savage in her speaking face,

He mark'd the features of her vagrant race;

When a light laugh and roguish leer express'd

The vice implanted in her youthful breast:

Forth from the tent her elder brother came,

Who seem'd offended, yet forbore to blame

The young designer, but could only trace

The looks of pity in the Trav'ller's face:

Within, the Father, who from fences nigh

Had brought the fuel for the fire's supply,

Watch'd now the feeble blaze, and stood dejected by.

On ragged rug, just borrowed from the bed,

And by the hand of coarse indulgence fed,

In dirty patchwork negligently dress'd,

Reclined the Wife, an infant at her breast;

In her wild face some touch of grace remain'd,

Of vigour palsied and of beauty stain'd;

Her bloodshot eyes on her unheeding mate

Were wrathful turn'd, and seem'd her wants to state,

Cursing his tardy aid--her Mother there

With gipsy-state engross'd the only chair;

Solemn and dull her look; with such she stands,

And reads the milk-maid's fortune in her hands,

Tracing the lines of life; assumed through years,

Each feature now the steady falsehood wears.

With hard and savage eye she views the food,

And grudging pinches their intruding brood;

Last in the group, the worn-out Grandsire sits

Neglected, lost, and living but by fits:

Useless, despised, his worthless labours done,

And half protected by the vicious Son,

Who half supports him; he with heavy glance

Views the young ruffians who around him dance;

And, by the sadness in his face, appears

To trace the progress of their future years:

Through what strange course of misery, vice, deceit,

Must wildly wander each unpractised cheat!

What shame and grief, what punishment and pain,

Sport of fierce passions, must each child sustain--

Ere they like him approach their latter end,

Without a hope, a comfort, or a friend!

But this Orlando felt not; 'Rogues,' said he,

'Doubtless they are, but merry rogues they be;

They wander round the land, and be it true

They break the laws--then let the laws pursue

The wanton idlers; for the life they live,

Acquit I cannot, but I can forgive.'

This said, a portion from his purse was thrown,

And every heart seem'd happy like his own."

_The Patron_, one of the most carefully elaborated of the Tales, is on

an old and familiar theme. The scorn that "patient merit of the unworthy

takes"; the misery of the courtier doomed "in suing long to bide";--the

ills that assail the scholar's life,

"Toil, envy, want, the Patron and the jail,"

are standing subjects for the moralist and the satirist. In Crabbe's

poem we have the story of a young man, the son of a "Borough-burgess,"

who, showing some real promise as a poet, and having been able to render

the local Squire some service by his verses at election time, is invited

in return to pay a visit of some weeks at the Squire's country-seat. The

Squire has vaguely undertaken to find some congenial post for the young

scholar, whose ideas and ambitions are much in advance of those

entertained for him in his home. The young man has a most agreeable time

with his new friends. He lives for the while with every refinement about

him, and the Squire's daughter, a young lady of the type of Lady Clara

Vere de Vere, evidently enjoys the opportunity of breaking a country

heart for pastime, "ere she goes to town." For after a while the family

leave for their mansion in London, the Squire at parting once more

impressing on his young guest that he will not forget him. After waiting

a reasonable time, the young poet repairs to London and seeks to obtain

an interview with his Patron. After many unsuccessful trials, and

rebuffs at the door from the servants, a letter is at last sent out to

him from their master, coolly advising him to abjure all dreams of a

literary life and offering him a humble post in the Custom House. The

young man, in bitterness of heart, tries the work for a short time; and

then, his health and spirits having utterly failed, he returns to his

parents' home to die, the father thanking God, as he moves away from his

son's grave, that no other of his children has tastes and talents above

his position:

"'There lies my Boy,' he cried, 'of care bereft,

And, Heaven be praised, I've not a genius left:

No one among ye, sons! is doomed to live

On high-raised hopes of what the Great may give.'"

Crabbe, who is nothing if not incisive in the drawing of his moral, and

lays on his colours with no sparing hand, represents the heartless

Patron and his family as hearing the sad tidings with quite amazing

_sang-froid_:

"Meantime the news through various channels spread,

The youth, once favour'd with such praise, was dead:

'Emma,' the Lady cried, 'my words attend,

Your siren-smiles have kill'd your humble friend;

The hope you raised can now delude no more,

Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore'

Faint was the flush of anger and of shame,

That o'er the cheek of conscious beauty came:

'You censure not,' said she, 'the sun's bright rays,

When fools imprudent dare the dangerous gaze;

And should a stripling look till he were blind,

You would not justly call the light unkind;

But is he dead? and am I to suppose

The power of poison in such looks as those?'

She spoke, and pointing to the mirror, cast

A pleased gay glance, and curtsied as she pass'd.

My Lord, to whom the poet's fate was told,

Was much affected, for a man so cold:

'Dead!' said his lordship, 'run distracted, mad!

Upon my soul I'm sorry for the lad;

And now, no doubt, th' obliging world will say

That my harsh usage help'd him on his way:

What! I suppose, I should have nursed his muse,

And with champagne have brighten'd up his views,

Then had he made me famed my whole life long,

And stunn'd my ears with gratitude and song.

Still should the father hear that I regret

Our joint misfortune--Yes! I'll not forget.'"

The story, though it has no precise prototype in Crabbe's own history,

is clearly the fruit of his experience of life at Belvoir Castle,

combined with the sad recollection of his sufferings when only a few

years before he, a young man with the consciousness of talent, was

rolling butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay.

Much of the Tale is admirably and forcibly written, but again it may be

said that it is powerful fiction rather than poetry--and indeed into

such matters poetry can hardly enter. It displays the fine observation

of Miss Austen, clothed in effective couplets of the school of Johnson

and Churchill. Yet every now and then the true poet comes to the

surface. The essence of a dank and misty day in late autumn has never

been seized with more perfect truth than in these lines:

"Cold grew the foggy morn, the day was brief,

Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf;

The dew dwelt ever on the herb; the woods

Roar'd with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods:

All green was vanish'd, save of pine and yew,

That still displayed their melancholy hue;

Save the green holly with its berries red,

And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread."

The scheme of these detached Tales had served to develop one special

side of Crabbe's talent. The analysis of human character, with its

strength and weakness (but specially the latter), finds fuller exercise

as the poet has to trace its effects upon the earthly fortunes of the

persons portrayed. The Tale entitled _The Gentleman Farmer_ is a

striking illustration in point. Jeffrey in his review of the _Tales_ in

the _Edinburgh_ supplies, as usual, a short abstract of the story, not

without due insight into its moral. But a profounder student of human

nature than Jeffrey has, in our own day, cited the Tale as worthy even

to illustrate a memorable teaching of St. Paul. The Bishop of Worcester,

better known as Canon Gore to the thousands who listened to the

discourse in Westminster Abbey, finds in this story a perfect

illustration of what moral freedom is, and what it is often erroneously

supposed to be:

"It is of great practical importance that we should get a

just idea of what our freedom consists in. There are men

who, under the impulse of a purely materialist science, declare

the sense of moral freedom to be an illusion. This is of course

a gross error. But what has largely played into the hands of

this error is the exaggerated idea of human freedom which is

ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by ignoring

our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this

that we need to have brought home to us. There is an admirable

story among George Crabbe's _Tales_ called 'The Gentleman

Farmer.' The hero starts in life resolved that he will

not put up with any bondage. The orthodox clergyman,

the orthodox physician, and orthodox matrimony--all these

alike represent social bondage in different forms, and he will

have none of them So he starts on a career of 'unchartered

freedom'

'To prove that _he alone was king of him,_'

and the last scene of all represents him the weak slave of

his mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist--'which things

are an allegory.'"

The quotation shows that Crabbe, neglected by the readers of poetry

to-day, is still cherished by the psychologist and divine. It is to the

"graver mind" rather than to the "lighter heart" that he oftenest

appeals. Newman, to mention no small names, found Crabbe's pathos and

fidelity to Human Nature even more attractive to him in advanced years

than in youth. There is indeed much in common between Crabbe's treatment

of life and its problems, and Newman's. Both may be called "stern"

portrayers of human nature, not only as intended in Byron's famous line,

but in Wordsworth's use of the epithet when he invoked Duty as the

"stern Daughter of the voice of God." A kindred lesson to that drawn by

Canon Gore from _The Gentleman Farmer_ is taught in the yet grimmer Tale

of _Edward Shore_. The story, as summarised by Jeffrey, is as follows:

"The hero is a young man of aspiring genius and enthusiastic

temper with an ardent love of virtue, but no settled

principles either of conduct or opinion. He first conceives an

attachment for an amiable girl, who is captivated with his

conversation; but, being too poor to marry, soon comes to

spend more of his time in the family of an elderly sceptic of

his acquaintance, who had recently married a young wife, and

placed unbounded confidence in her virtue, and the honour of

his friend. In a moment of temptation they abuse this

confidence. The husband renounces him with dignified composure;

and he falls at once from the romantic pride of his

virtue. He then seeks the company of the dissipated and

gay, and ruins his health and fortune without regaining his

tranquillity. When in gaol and miserable, he is relieved by

an unknown hand, and traces the benefaction to the friend

whose former kindness he had so ill repaid. This humiliation

falls upon his proud spirit and shattered nerves with an

overwhelming force, and his reason fails beneath it. He is

for some time a raving maniac, and then falls into a state of

gay and compassionable imbecility, which is described with

inimitable beauty in the close of this story."

Jeffrey's abstract is fairly accurate, save in one particular. Edward

Shore can hardly be said to feel an "ardent love of virtue." Rather is

he perfectly confident of his respectability, and bitterly contemptuous

of those who maintain the necessity of religion to control men's unruly

passions. His own lofty conceptions of the dignity of human nature are

sufficient for himself:

"'While reason guides me, I shall walk aright,

Nor need a steadier hand, or stronger light;

Nor this in dread of awful threats, design'd

For the weak spirit and the grov'ling mind;

But that, engaged by thoughts and views sublime,

I wage free war with grossness and with crime.'

Thus looked he proudly on the vulgar crew,

Whom statutes govern, and whom fears subdue."

As motto for this story Crabbe quotes the fine speech of Henry V. on

discovering the treachery of Lord Scrope, whose character had hitherto

seemed so immaculate. The comparison thus suggested is not as felicitous

as in many of Crabbe's citations. Had _In_ _Memoriam_ been then

written, a more exact parallel might have been found in Tennyson's

warning to the young enthusiast:

"See thou, that countest reason ripe

In holding by the law within,

Thou fail not in a world of sin,

And ev'n for want of such a type."

The story is for the most part admirably told. The unhappy man, reduced

to idiocy of a harmless kind, and the common playmate of the village

children, is encountered now and then by the once loved maid, who might

have made him happy:

"Kindly she chides his boyish flights, while he

Will for a moment fix'd and pensive be;

And as she trembling speaks, his lively eyes

Explore her looks; he listens to her sighs;

Charm'd by her voice, th' harmonious sounds invade

His clouded mind, and for a time persuade:

Like a pleased infant, who has newly caught

From the maternal glance a gleam of thought,

He stands enrapt, the half-known voice to hear,

And starts, half conscious, at the falling tear.

Rarely from town, nor then unwatch'd, he goes,

In darker mood, as if to hide his woes;

Returning soon, he with impatience seeks

His youthful friends, and shouts, and sings, and speaks;

Speaks a wild speech with action all as wild--

The children's leader, and himself a child;

He spins their top, or at their bidding bends

His back, while o'er it leap his laughing friends;

Simple and weak, he acts the boy once more,

And heedless children call him _Silly Shore_."

In striking contrast to the prevailing tone of the other Tales is the

charming story, conceived in a vein of purest comedy, called _The Frank

Courtship_. This Tale alone should be a decisive answer to those who

have doubted Crabbe's possession of the gift of humour, and on this

occasion he has refrained from letting one dark shadow fall across his

picture. It tells of one Jonas Kindred, a wealthy puritanic Dissenter of

narrowest creed and masterful temper. He has an only daughter, the pride

of her parents, and brought up by them in the strictest tenets of the

sect. Her father has a widowed and childless sister, with a comfortable

fortune, living in some distant town; and in pity of her solitary

condition he allows his naturally vivacious daughter to spend the

greater part of the year with her aunt. The aunt does not share the

prejudices of her brother's household. She likes her game of cards and

other social joys, and is quite a leader of fashion in her little town.

To this life and its enjoyments the beautiful and clever Sybil takes

very kindly, and unfolds many attractive graces. Once a year the aunt

and niece by arrangement spend a few weeks in Sybil's old home. The

aunt, with much serpentine wisdom, arranges that she and her niece shall

adapt themselves to this very different atmosphere--eschew cards, attend

regularly at chapel, and comply with the tone and habits of the family.

The niece, however, is really as good as she is pretty, and her

conscience smites her for deceiving her father, of whom she is genuinely

fond. She stands before him "pure, pensive, simple, sad,"--yet

"the damsel's heart,

When Jonas praised, reproved her for the part;

For Sybil, fond of pleasure, gay and light,

Had still a secret bias to the right;

Vain as she was--and flattery made her vain--

Her simulation gave her bosom pain."

As time wears on, however, this state of things must come to a close.

Jonas is anxious that his daughter shall marry suitably, and he finds

among his neighbours an admirable young man, a staunch member of the

"persuasion," and well furnished in this world's goods. He calls his

daughter home, that she may be at once introduced to her future husband,

for the father is as certain as Sir Anthony Absolute himself that

daughters should accept what is offered them and ask no questions. Sybil

is by no means unwilling to enter the holy state, if the right man can

be found. Indeed, she is wearying of the aimless life she lives with her

worldly aunt, and the gradual change in her thoughts and hopes is

indicated in a passage of much delicacy and insight:

"Jonas now ask'd his daughter--and the Aunt,

Though loth to lose her, was obliged to grant.--

But would not Sybil to the matron cling,

And fear to leave the shelter of her wing?

No! in the young there lives a love of change,

And to the easy they prefer the strange!

Then, too, the joys she once pursued with zeal,

From whist and visits sprung, she ceased to feel:

When with, the matrons Sybil first sat down,

To cut for partners and to stake her crown,

This to the youthful maid preferment seem'd,

Who thought what woman she was then esteem'd;

But in few years, when she perceived indeed

The real woman to the girl succeed,

No longer tricks and honours fill'd her mind,

But other feelings, not so well defined;

She then reluctant grew, and thought it hard

To sit and ponder o'er an ugly card;

Rather the nut-tree shade the nymph preferr'd,

Pleased with the pensive gloom and evening bird;

Thither, from company retired, she took

The silent walk, or read the fav'rite book."

The interview between Sybil and the young man is conceived with real

skill and humour. The young lady receives her lover, prepared to treat

him with gentle mockery and to keep him at a convenient distance. The

young lover is not daunted, and plainly warns her against the

consequences of such levity. But as the little duel proceeds, each

gradually detects the real good that underlies the surface qualities of

the other. In spite of his formalism, Sybil discerns that her lover is

full of good sense and feeling; and he makes the same discovery with

regard to the young lady's _badinage._ And then, after a conflict of

wits that seems to terminate without any actual result, the anxious

father approaches his child with a final appeal to her sense of filial

duty:

"With anger fraught, but willing to persuade,

The wrathful father met the smiling maid:

'Sybil,' said he, 'I long, and yet I dread

To know thy conduct--hath Josiah fled?

And, grieved and fretted by thy scornful air,

For his lost peace, betaken him to prayer?

Couldst then his pure and modest mind distress

By vile remarks upon his speech, address,

Attire, and voice?'--'All this I must confess.'

'Unhappy child! what labour will it cost

To win him back!'--'I do not think him lost.'

'Courts he then (trifler!) insult and disdain?'--

'No; but from these he courts me to refrain.'

'Then hear me, Sybil: should Josiah leave

Thy father's house?'--'My father's child would grieve.'

'That is of grace, and if he come again

To speak of love?'--'I might from grief refrain.'

'Then wilt thou, daughter, our design embrace?'--

Can I resist it, if it be of grace?'

'Dear child! in three plain words thy mind express:

Wilt thou have this good youth?'--'Dear father! yes.'"

All the characters in the story--the martinet father and his poor

crushed wife, as well as the pair of lovers--are indicated with an

appreciation of the value of dramatic contrast that might make the

little story effective on the stage. One of the Tales in this

collection, _The Confidant_, was actually turned into a little drama in

blank verse by Charles Lamb, under the changed title of _The Wife's

Trial: or the Intruding Widow_. The story of Crabbe's _Confidant_ is not

pleasant; and Lamb thought well to modify it, so as to diminish the

gravity of the secret of which the malicious friend was possessed. There

is nothing but what is sweet and attractive in the little comedy of _The

Frank Courtship_, and it might well be commended to the dexterous and

sympathetic hand of Mr. J.M. Barrie.

CHAPTER IX

VISITING IN LONDON