(1812-1819)

In the margin of FitzGerald's copy of the _Memoir_ an extract is quoted

from Crabbe's Diary: "1810, Nov. 7.--Finish Tales. Not happy hour." The

poet's comment may have meant something more than that so many of his

Tales dealt with sad instances of human frailty. At that moment, and for

three years longer, there hung over Crabbe's family life a cloud that

never lifted--the hopeless illness of his wife. Two years before,

Southey, in answer to a friend who had made some reference to Crabbe and

his poetry, writes:

"With Crabbe's poems I have been acquainted for about

twenty years, having read them when a schoolboy on their

first publication, and, by the help of _Elegant Extracts_,

remembered from that time what was best worth remembering.

You rightly compare him to Goldsmith. He is an imitator,

or rather an _antithesizer_ of Goldsmith, if such a word may be

coined for the occasion. His merit is precisely the same as

Goldsmith's--that of describing things clearly and strikingly;

but there is a wide difference between the colouring of the

two poets. Goldsmith threw a sunshine over all his pictures,

like that of one of our water-colour artists when he paints

for ladies--a light and a beauty not to be found in Nature,

though not more brilliant or beautiful than what Nature

really affords; Crabbe's have a gloom which is also not in

Nature--not the shade of a heavy day, of mist, or of clouds,

but the dark and overcharged shadows of one who paints by

lamplight--whose very lights have a gloominess. In part

this is explained by his history."

Southey's letter was written in September 1808, before either _The

Borough_ or the _Tales_ was published, which may account for the

inadequacy of his criticism on Crabbe's poetry. But the above passage

throws light upon a period in Crabbe's history to which his son

naturally does little more than refer in general and guarded terms. In a

subsequent passage of the letter already quoted, we are reminded that as

early as the year 1803 Mrs. Crabbe's mental derangement was familiarly

known to her friends.

But now, when his latest book was at last in print, and attracting

general attention, the end of Crabbe's long watching was not far off. In

the summer of 1813 Mrs. Crabbe had rallied so far as to express a wish

to see London again, and the father and mother and two sons spent nearly

three months in rooms in a hotel. Crabbe was able to visit Dudley North,

and other of his old friends, and to enter to some extent into the

gaieties of the town, but also, as always, taking advantage of the

return to London to visit and help the poor and distressed, not

unmindful of his own want and misery in the great city thirty years

before. The family returned to Muston in September, and towards the

close of the month Mrs. Crabbe was released from her long disease. On

the north wall of the chancel of Muston Church, close to the altar, is a

plain marble slab recording that not far away lie the remains of "Sarah,

wife of the Rev. George Crabbe, late Rector of this Parish."

Within _two_ days of the wife's death Crabbe fell ill of a serious

malady, worn out as he was with long anxiety and grief. He was for a few

days in danger of his life, and so well aware of his condition that he

desired that his wife's grave "might not be closed till it was seen

whether he should recover." He rallied, however, and returned to the

duties of his parish, and to a life of still deeper loneliness. But his

old friends at Belvoir Castle once more came to his deliverance. Within

a short time the Duke offered him the living of Trowbridge in Wiltshire,

a small manufacturing town, on the line (as we should describe it today)

between Bath and Salisbury. The value of the preferment was not as great

as that of the joint livings of Muston and Allington, so that poor

Crabbe was once more doomed to be a pluralist, and to accept, also at

the Duke's hands, the vicarage of Croxton Kerrial, near Belvoir Castle,

where, however, he never resided.

And now the time came for Crabbe's final move, and rector of Trowbridge

he was to remain for the rest of his life. He was glad to leave Muston,

which now had for him the saddest of associations. He had never been

happy there, for reasons we have seen. What Crabbe's son calls

"diversity of religious sentiment" had produced "a coolness in some of

his parishioners, which he felt the more painfully because, whatever

might be their difference of opinion, he was ever ready to help and

oblige them all by medical and other aid to the utmost extent of his

power." So that in leaving Muston he was not, as was evident, leaving

many to lament his departure. Indeed, malignity was so active in one

quarter that the bells of the parish church were rung to welcome

Crabbe's successor before Crabbe and his sons had quitted the house!

For other reasons, perhaps, Crabbe prepared to leave his two livings

with a sense of relief. His wife's death had cast a permanent shadow

over the landscape. The neighbouring gentry were kindly disposed, but

probably not wholly sympathetic. It is clear that there was a certain

rusticity about Crabbe; and his politics, such as they were, had been

formed in a different school from that of the county families. A busy

country town was likely to furnish interests and distractions of a

different kind. But before finally quitting the neighbourhood he visited

a sister at Aldeburgh, and, his son writes, 'one day was given to a

solitary ramble among the scenery of bygone years--Parham and the woods

of Glemham, then in the first blossom of May. He did not return until

night; and in his note-book I find the following brief record of this

mournful visit:

"Yes, I behold again the place,

The seat of joy, the source of pain;

It brings in view the form and face

That I must never see again.

The night-bird's song that sweetly floats

On this soft gloom--this balmy air--

Brings to the mind her sweeter notes

That I again must never hear.

Lo! yonder shines that window's light,

My guide, my token, heretofore;

And now again it shines as bright,

When those dear eyes can shine no more.

Then hurry from this place away!

It gives not now the bliss it gave;

For Death has made its charm his prey,

And joy is buried in her grave."

In family relationships, and indeed all others, Crabbe's tenderness was

never wanting, and the verse that follows was found long afterwards

written on a paper in which his wife's wedding-ring, nearly worn through

before she died, was wrapped:

"The ring so worn, as you behold,

So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:

The passion such it was to prove;

Worn with life's cares, love yet was love."

Crabbe was inducted to the living of Trowbridge on the 3rd of June 1814,

and preached his first sermon two days later. His two sons followed him,

as soon as their existing engagements allowed them to leave

Leicestershire. The younger, John, who married in 1816, became his

father's curate, and the elder, who married a year later, became curate

at Pucklechurch, not many miles distant. As Crabbe's old cheerfulness

gradually returned he found much congenial society in the better

educated classes about him. His reputation as a poet was daily

spreading. The _Tales_ passed from edition to edition, and brought him

many admirers and sympathisers. The "busy, populous clothing town," as

he described Trowbridge to a friend, provided him with intelligent

neighbours of a class different from any he had yet been thrown with.

And yet once more, as his son has to admit, he failed to secure the

allegiance of the church-going parishioners. His immediate predecessor,

a curate in charge, had been one of those in whom a more passionate

missionary zeal had been stirred by the Methodist movement--"endeared to

the more serious inhabitants by warm zeal and a powerful talent for

preaching extempore." The parishioners had made urgent appeal to the

noble patron to appoint this man to the benefice, and the Duke's

disregard of their petition had produced much bitterness in the parish.

Then, again, in Crabbe there was a "lay" element, which had probably not

been found in his predecessor, and he might occasionally be seen "at a

concert, a ball, or even a play." And finally, not long after his

arrival, he took the unpopular side in an election for the

representation of the county. The candidate he supported was strongly

opposed by the "manufacturing interest," and Crabbe became the object of

intense dislike at the time of the election, so much so that a violent

mob attempted to prevent his leaving his house to go to the poll.

However, Crabbe showed the utmost courage during the excitement, and his

other fine qualities of sterling worth and kindness of heart ultimately

made their way; and in the sixteen years that followed, Crabbe took

still firmer hold of the affection of the worthier part of his

parishioners.

Crabbe's son thought good to devote several pages of his _Memoir_ to the

question why his father, having now no unmarried son to be his

companion, should not have taken such a sensible step as to marry again.

For the old man, if he deserved to be so called at the age of sixty-two,

was still very susceptible to the charms of female society, and indeed

not wholly free from the habit of philandering--a habit which

occasionally "inspired feelings of no ordinary warmth" in the fair

objects of "his vain devotion." One such incident all but ended in a

permanent engagement. A MS. quotation from the poet's Diary, copied in

the margin of FitzGerald's volume, may possibly refer to this occasion.

Under date of September 22 occurs this entry: "Sidmouth. Miss Ridout.

Declaration. Acceptance." But under October 5 is written the ominous

word, "Mr. Ridout." And later: "Dec. 12. Charlotte's picture returned."

A tragedy (or was it a comedy?) seems written in these few words. Edward

FitzGerald adds to this his own note: "Miss Ridout I remember--an

elegant spinster; friend of my mother's. About 1825 she had been at

Sidmouth, and known Crabbe." The son quotes some very ardent verses

belonging to this period, but not assignable to any particular charmer,

such as one set beginning:

"And wilt thou never smile again;

Thy cruel purpose never shaken?

Hast thou no feeling for my pain,

Refused, disdain'd, despised, forsaken?"

The son indicates these amiable foibles in a filial tone and in

apologetic terms, but the "liberal shepherds" sometimes spoke more

frankly. An old squire remarked to a friend in reference to this

subject, "D--mme, sir! the very first time Crabbe dined at my house he

made love to my sister!" And a lady is known to have complained that on

a similar occasion Crabbe had exhibited so much warmth of manner that

she "felt quite frightened." His son entirely supports the same view as

to his father's almost demonstratively affectionate manner towards

ladies who interested him, and who, perhaps owing to his rising repute

as an author, showed a corresponding interest in the elderly poet.

Crabbe himself admits "the soft impeachment." In a letter to his newly

found correspondent, Mrs. Leadbeater (granddaughter of

Burke's old schoolmaster, Richard Shackleton), he confesses that women

were more to him than men:

"I'm alone now; and since my removing into a busy town

among the multitude, the loneliness is but more apparent and

more melancholy. But this is only at certain times; and then

I have, though at considerable distances, six female friends,

unknown to each other, but all dear, very dear, to me. With

them I do not much associate; not as deserting, and much less

disliking, the male part of society, but as being unfit for it;

not hardy nor grave, not knowing enough, nor sufficiently

acquainted with the everyday concerns of men. But my

beloved creatures have minds with which I can better assimilate.

Think of you, I must; and of me, I must entreat that

you would not be unmindful."

Nothing, however, was destined to come of these various flirtations or

_tendresses_. The new duties at Trowbridge, with their multiplying calls

upon his attention and sympathies, must soon have filled his time and

attention when at work in his market town, with its flourishing woollen

manufactures. And Crabbe was now to have opened to him new sources of

interest in the neighbourhood. His growing reputation soon made him a

welcome guest in many houses to which his mere position as vicar of

Trowbridge might not have admitted him. Trowbridge was only a score or

so of miles from Bath, and there were many noblemen's and gentlemen's

seats in the country round. In this same county of Wilts, and not very

far away, at his vicarage of Bremhill, was William Lisle Bowles, the

graceful poet whose sonnets five-and-twenty years before had first

roused to poetic utterance the young Coleridge and Charles Lamb when at

Christ's Hospital. Through Bowles, Crabbe was introduced to the noble

family at Bowood, where the third Marquis of Lansdowne delighted to

welcome those distinguished in literature and the arts. Within these

splendid walls Crabbe first made the acquaintance of Rogers, which soon

ripened into an intimacy not without effect, I think, upon the remaining

efforts of Crabbe as a poet. One immediate result was that Crabbe

yielded to Rogers's strong advice to him to visit London, and take his

place among the literary society of the day. This visit was paid in the

summer of 1817, when Crabbe stayed in London from the middle of June to

the end of July.

Crabbe's son rightly included in his _Memoir_ several extracts from his

father's Diary kept during this visit. They are little more than

briefest entries of engagements, but serve to show the new and brilliant

life to which the poet was suddenly introduced. He constantly dined and

breakfasted with Rogers, where he met and was welcomed by Rogers's

friends. His old acquaintance with Fox gave him the _entrée_ of Holland

House. Thomas Campbell was specially polite to him, and really attracted

by him. Crabbe visited the theatres, and was present at the farewell

banquet given to John Kemble. Through Rogers and Campbell he was

introduced to John Murray of Albemarle Street, who later became his

publisher. He sat for his portrait to Pickersgill and Phillips, and saw

the painting by the latter hanging on the Academy walls when dining at

their annual banquet. Again, through an introduction at Bath to Samuel

Hoare of Hampstead, Crabbe formed a friendship with him and his family

of the most affectionate nature. During the first and all later visits

to London Crabbe was most often their guest at the mansion on the summit

of the famous "Northern Height," with which, after Crabbe's death,

Wordsworth so touchingly associated his name, in the lines written on

the death of the Ettrick Shepherd and his brother-poets:

"Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,

Like London with its own black wreath,

On which with thee, O Crabbe, forth looking,

I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath."

Between Samuel Hoare's hospitable roof and the _Hummums_ in Covent

Garden Crabbe seems to have alternated, according as his engagements in

town required.

But although living, as the Diary shows, in daily intercourse with the

literary and artistic world, tasting delights which were absolutely new

to him, Crabbe never forgot either his humble friends in Wiltshire, or

the claims of his own art. He kept in touch with Trowbridge, where his

son John was in charge, and sends instructions from time to time as to

poor pensioners and others who were not to be neglected in the weekly

ministrations. At the same time, he seems rarely to have omitted the

self-imposed task of adding daily to the pile of manuscript on which he

was at work--the collection of stories to be subsequently issued as

_Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe had resolved, in the face of whatever

distractions, to write if possible a fixed amount every day. More than

once in the Diary occur such entries as: "My thirty lines done; but not

well, I fear." "Thirty lines to-day, but not yesterday--must work up."

This anticipation of a method made famous later in the century by

Anthony Trollope may account (as also in Trollope's case) for certain

marked inequalities in the merit of the work thus turned out. At odd

times and in odd places were these verses sometimes composed. On a

certain Sunday morning in July 1817, after going to church at St.

James's, Piccadilly (or was it the Chapel Royal?), Crabbe wandered

eastward and found inspiration in the most unexpected quarter: "Write

some lines in the solitude of Somerset House, not fifty yards from the

Thames on one side, and the Strand on the other; but as quiet as the

sands of Arabia. I am not quite in good humour with this day; but,

happily, I cannot say why."

The last mysterious sentence is one of many scattered through, the

Diary, which, aided by dashes and omission-marks by the editorial son,

point to certain sentimentalisms in which Crabbe was still indulging,

even in the vortex of fashionable gaieties. We gather throughout that

the ladies he met interested him quite as much, or even more, than the

distinguished men of letters, and there are allusions besides to other

charmers at a distance. The following entry immediately precedes that of

the Sunday just quoted:--

"14th.--Some more intimate conversation this morning with

Mr. and Mrs. Moore. They mean to go to Trowbridge. He

is going to Paris, but will not stay long. Mrs. Spencer's

album. Agree to dine at Curzon Street. A welcome letter

from ----. This makes the day more cheerful. Suppose it

were so. Well, 'tis not! Go to Mr. Rogers, and take a farewell

visit to Highbury. Miss Rogers. Promise to go when ----.

Return early. Dine there, and purpose to see Mr.

Moore and Mr. Rogers in the morning when they set out for

Calais."

On the whole, however, Crabbe may have found, when these fascinating

experiences were over, that there had been safety in a multitude. For he

seems to have been equally charmed with Rogers's sister, and William

Spencer's daughter, and the Countess of Bessborough, and a certain Mrs.

Wilson,--and, like Miss Snevellicci's papa, to have "loved them every

one."

Meanwhile Crabbe was working steadily, while in London, at his new

poems. Though his minimum output was thirty lines a day, he often

produced more, and on one occasion he records eighty lines as the fruit

of a day's labour. During the year 1818 he was still at work, and in

September of that year he writes to Mary Leadbeater that his verses "are

not yet entirely ready, but do not want much that he can give them." He

was evidently correcting and perfecting to the best of his ability, and

(as I believe) profiting by the intellectual stimulus of his visit to

London, as well as by the higher standards of versification that he had

met with, even in writers inferior to himself. The six weeks in London

had given him advantages he had never enjoyed before. In his early days

under Burke's roof he had learned much from Burke himself, and from

Johnson and Fox, but he was then only a promising beginner. Now,

thirty-five years later, he met Rogers, Wordsworth, Campbell, Moore, as

social equals, and having, like them, won a public for himself. When his

next volumes appeared, the workmanship proved, as of old, unequal, but

here and there Crabbe showed a musical ear, and an individuality of

touch of a different order from anything he had achieved before. Mr.

Courthope and other critics hold that there are passages in Crabbe's

earliest poems, such as _The Village_, which have a metrical charm he

never afterwards attained. But I strongly suspect that in such passages

Crabbe had owed much to the revising hand of Burke, Johnson, and Fox.

In the spring of 1819 Crabbe was again in town, visiting at Holland

House, and dining at the Thatched House with the "Literary Society," of

which he had been elected a member, and which to-day still dines and

prospers. He was then preparing for the publication of his new Tales,

from the famous house in Albemarle Street. Two years before, in 1817, on

the strength doubtless of Rogers's strong recommendation, Murray had

made a very liberal offer for the new poems, and the copyright of all

Crabbe's previous works. For these, together, Murray had offered three

thousand pounds. Strangely enough, Rogers was at first dissatisfied with

the offer, holding that the sum should be paid for the new volumes

alone. He and a friend (possibly Campbell), who had conducted the

negotiation, accordingly went off to the house of Longman to see if they

could not get better terms. To their great discomfiture the Longmans

only offered £1000 for the privilege that Murray had valued at three

times the amount; and Crabbe and his friends were placed in a difficult

position. A letter of Moore to John Murray many years afterwards, when

Crabbe's _Memoir_ was in preparation, tells the sequel of the story, and

it may well be given in his words:

"In this crisis it was that Mr. Rogers and myself, anxious

to relieve our poor friend from his suspense, called upon

you, as you must well remember, in Albemarle Street; and

seldom have I watched a countenance with more solicitude,

or heard words that gave me much more pleasure than

when, on the subject being mentioned, you said 'Oh! yes.

I have heard from Mr. Crabbe, and look upon the matter as

all settled.' I was rather pressed, I remember, for time that

morning, having an appointment on some business of my

own, but Mr. Rogers insisted that I should accompany him

to Crabbe's lodgings, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing him

relieved from his suspense. We found him sitting in his

room, alone, and expecting the worst; but soon dissipated

all his fears by the agreeable intelligence which we brought.

"When he received the bills for £3000, we earnestly advised

that he should, without delay, deposit them in some safe hands;

but no--he must take them with him to Trowbridge, and show

them to his son John. They would hardly believe in his

good luck, at home, if they did not see the bills. On his

way down to Trowbridge, a friend at Salisbury, at whose

house he rested (Mr. Everett, the banker), seeing that he

carried these bills loosely in his waistcoat pocket, requested

to be allowed to take charge of them for him: but with

equal ill success. 'There was no fear,' he said, 'of his losing

them, and he must show them to his son John.'"

It was matter of common knowledge in the literary world of Crabbe's day

that John Murray did not on this occasion make a very prudent bargain,

and that in fact he lost heavily by his venture. No doubt his offer was

based upon the remarkable success of Crabbe's two preceding poems. _The

Borough_ had passed through six editions in the same number of years,

and the _Tales_ reached a fifth edition within two years of publication.

But for changes in progress in the poetic taste of the time, Murray

might safely have anticipated a continuance of Crabbe's popularity. But

seven years had elapsed since the appearance of the _Tales_, and in

these seven years much had happened. Byron had given to the world one by

one the four cantos of _Childe Harold_, as well as other poems rich in

splendid rhetoric and a lyric versatility far beyond Crabbe's reach.

Wordsworth's two volumes in 1815 contained by far the most important and

representative of his poems, and these were slowly but surely winning

him a public of his own, intellectual and thoughtful if not as yet

numerous. John Keats had made two appearances, in 1817 and 1818, and the

year following the publication of Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_ was to

add to them the Odes and other poems constituting the priceless volume

of 1820--_Lamia and other Poems_. Again, for the lovers of

fiction--whom, as I have said, Crabbe had attracted quite as strongly as

the lovers of verse--Walter Scott had produced five or six of his finest

novels, and was adding to the circle of his admirers daily. By the side

of this fascinating prose, and still more fascinating metrical

versatility, Crabbe's resolute and plodding couplets might often seem

tame and wearisome. Indeed, at this juncture, the rhymed heroic couplet,

as a vehicle for the poetry of imagination, was tottering to its fall,

though it lingered for many years as the orthodox form for university

prize poems, and for occasional didactic or satirical effusions. Crabbe,

very wisely, remained faithful to the metre. For his purpose, and with

his subjects and special gifts, none probably would have served him

better. For narrative largely blended with the analytical and the

epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse (had he ever

mastered it) would have sufficed. But in Crabbe's last published volumes

it was not only the metre that was to seem flat and monotonous in the

presence of new proofs of the boundless capabilities of verse. The

reader would not make much progress in these volumes without

discovering that the depressing incidents of life, its disasters and

distresses, were still Crabbe's prevailing theme. John Murray in the

same season published Rogers's _Human Life_ and Crabbe's _Tales of the

Hall_. The publisher sent Crabbe a copy of the former, and he

acknowledged it in a few lines as follows:

"I am anxious that Mr. Rogers should have all the

success he can desire. I am more indebted to him than I

could bear to think of, if I had not the highest esteem. It

will give me great satisfaction to find him cordially admired.

His is a favourable picture, and such he loves so do I, but

men's vices and follies come into my mind, and spoil my

drawing."

Assuredly no more striking antithesis to Crabbe's habitual impressions

of human life can be found than in the touching and often beautiful

couplets of Rogers, a poet as neglected today as Crabbe. Rogers's

picture of wedded happiness finds no parallel, I think, anywhere in the

pages of his brother-poet:--

"Across the threshold led,

And every tear kissed off as soon as shed,

His house she enters, there to be a light

Shining within, when all without is night;

A guardian angel o'er his life presiding,

Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing!

How oft her eyes read his; her gentle mind

To all his wishes, all his thoughts, inclined;

Still subject--ever on the watch to borrow

Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow.

The soul of music slumbers in the shell,

Till waked to rapture by the master's spell;

And feeling hearts--touch them but rightly--pour

A thousand melodies unheard before."

It may be urged that Rogers exceeds in one direction as unjustifiably

as Crabbe in the opposite. But there is room in poetry for both points

of view, though the absolute--the Shakespearian--grasp of Human Life may

be truer and more eternally convincing than either.

CHAPTER X

THE TALES OF THE HALL

(1819)

The _Tales of the Hall_ were published by John Murray in June 1819, in

two handsome octavo volumes, with every advantage of type, paper, and

margin. In a letter of Crabbe to Mrs. Leadbeater, in October 1817, he

makes reference to these Tales, already in preparation. He tells his

correspondent that "Remembrances" was the title for them proposed by his

friends. We learn from another source that a second title had been

suggested, "Forty Days--a Series of Tales told at Binning Hall." Finally

Mr. Murray recommended _Tales of the Hall_, and this was adopted.

In the same letter to Mrs. Leadbeater, Crabbe writes: "I know not how to

describe the new, and probably (most probably) the last work I shall

publish. Though a village is the scene of meeting between my two

principal characters, and gives occasion to other characters and

relations in general, yet I no more describe the manners of village

inhabitants. My people are of superior classes, though not the most

elevated; and, with a few exceptions, are of educated and cultivated

minds and habits." In making this change Crabbe was also aware that some

kind of unity must be given to those new studies of human life. And he

found at least a semblance of this unity in ties of family or friendship

uniting the tellers of them. Moreover Crabbe, who had a wide and even

intimate knowledge of English, poetry, was well acquainted with the

_Canterbury Tales_, and he bethought him that he would devise a

framework. And the plan he worked out was as follows:

"The Hall" under whose roof the stories and conversations arise is a

gentleman's house, apparently in the eastern counties, inhabited by the

elder of two brothers, George and Richard. George, an elderly bachelor,

who had made a sufficient fortune in business, has retired to this

country seat, which stands upon the site of a humbler dwelling where

George had been born and spent his earliest years. The old home of his

youth had subsequently passed into the hands of a man of means, who had

added to it, improved the surroundings, and turned it into a modern and

elegant villa. It was again in the market when George was seeking a

retreat for his old age, and he purchased it--glad, even under the

altered conditions, to live again among the loved surroundings of his

childhood.

George has a half-brother, Richard, much younger than himself. They are

the children of the same mother who, some years after her first

widowhood, had married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by whom

she had this second child. George had already left home to earn his

living, with the consequence that the two brothers had scarcely ever met

until the occasion upon which the story opens. Richard, after first

trying the sea as a profession, had entered the army during the war with

Napoleon; distinguished himself in the Peninsula; and finally returned

to his native country, covered with glory and enjoying a modest

pension. He woos and wins the daughter of a country clergyman, marries,

and finds a young family growing up around him. He is filled with a

desire to resume friendly relations with his half-brother George, but is

deterred from making the first advances. George, hearing of this through

a common friend, cordially responds, and Richard is invited to spend a

few weeks at Binning Hall. The two brothers, whose bringing up had been

so different, and whose ideas and politics were far removed,

nevertheless find their mutual companionship very pleasant, and every

evening over their port wine relate their respective adventures and

experiences, while George has also much to tell of his friends and

neighbours around him. The clergyman of the parish, a former fellow of

his college, often makes a third at these meetings; and thus a

sufficient variety of topic is insured. The tales that these three tell,

with the conversations arising out of them, form the subject matter of

these _Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe devised a very pleasant means of

bringing the brother's visit to a close. When the time originally

proposed for the younger brother's stay is nearing its end, the brothers

prepare to part. At first, the younger is somewhat disconcerted that his

elder brother seemed to take his departure so little to heart. But this

display of indifference proves to be only an amiable _ruse_ on the part

of George. On occasion of a final ride together through the neighbouring

country, George asks for his brother's opinion about a purchase he has

recently made, of a pleasant house and garden adjoining his own

property. It then turns out that the generous George has bought the

place as a home for his brother, who will in future act as George's

agent or steward. On approaching and entering the house, Richard finds

his wife and children, who have been privately informed of the

arrangement, already installed, and eagerly waiting to welcome husband

and father to this new and delightful home.

Throughout the development of this story with its incidental narratives,

Crabbe has managed, as in previous poems, to make large use of his own

personal experience. The Hall proves to be a modern gentleman's

residence constructed out of a humbler farmhouse by additions and

alterations in the building and its surroundings, which was precisely

the fate which had befallen Mr. Tovell's old house which had come to the

Crabbe family, and had been parted with by them to one of the Suffolk

county families. "Moated Granges" were common in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Mr. Tovel's house had had a moat, and this too had been a feature of

George's paternal home:

"It was an ancient, venerable Hall,

And once surrounded by a moat and wall;

A part was added by a squire of taste

Who, while unvalued acres ran to waste,

Made spacious rooms, whence he could look about,

And mark improvements as they rose without;

He fill'd the moat, he took the wall away,

He thinn'd the park and bade the view be gay."

In this instance, the squire who had thus altered the property had been

forced to sell it, and George was thus able to return to the old

surroundings of his boyhood. In the third book, _Boys at School_, George

relates some of his recollections, which include the story of a

school-fellow, who having some liking for art but not much talent,

finds his ambitions defeated, and dies of chagrin in consequence. This

was in fact the true story of a brother of Crabbe's wife, Mr. James

Elmy. Later, again, in the work the rector of the parish is described,

and the portrait drawn is obviously that of Crabbe himself, as he

appeared to his Dissenting parishioners at Muston:

"'A moral teacher!' some, contemptuous, cried;

He smiled, but nothing of the fact denied,

Nor, save by his fair life, to charge so strong replied.

Still, though he bade them not on aught rely

That was their own, but all their worth deny,

They called his pure advice his cold morality.

* * * * *

He either did not, or he would not see,

That if he meant a favourite priest to be,

He must not show, but learn of them, the way

To truth--he must not dictate, but obey;

They wish'd him not to bring them further light,

But to convince them that they now were right

And to assert that justice will condemn

All who presumed to disagree with them:

In this he fail'd, and his the greater blame,

For he persisted, void of fear or shame."

There is a touch of bitterness in these lines that is unmistakably that

of a personal grievance, even if the poet's son had not confirmed the

inference in a foot-note.

Book IV. is devoted to the _Adventures of Richard_, which begin with his

residence with his mother near a small sea-port (evidently Aldeburgh);

and here we once more read of the boy, George Crabbe, watching and

remembering every aspect of the storms, and making friends with the

wives and children of the sailors and the smugglers:

"I loved to walk where none had walk'd before,

About the rocks that ran along the shore;

Or far beyond the sight of men to stray,

And take my pleasure when I lost my way;

For then 'twas mine to trace the hilly heath,

And all the mossy moor that lies beneath:

Here had I favourite stations, where I stood

And heard the murmurs of the ocean-flood,

With not a sound beside except when flew

Aloft the lapwing, or the grey curlew,

Who with wild notes my fancied power defied,

And mock'd the dreams of solitary pride."

And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal experiences to make

out the material for his work, the same also holds with regard to the

incidental Tales. Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not of

his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits the same of others.

One, as we have seen, happened in the Elmy family; another was sent him

by a friend in Wiltshire, to which county the story belonged; while the

last in the series, and perhaps the most painful of all, _Smugglers, and

Poachers_ was told to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly, whom he had met at

Hampstead, only a few weeks before Romilly's own tragic death. Probably

other tales, not referred to by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered

by the poet in his intercourse with his parishioners, or submitted to

him by his friends. We might infer this from the singular inequality, in

interest and poetical opportunity, of the various plots of these

stories. Some of them are assuredly not such as any poet would have sat

down and elaborated for himself, and it is strange how little sense

Crabbe seems to have possessed as to which were worth treating, or could

even admit of artistic treatment at all. A striking instance is afforded

by the strange and most unpleasing history, entitled _Lady Barbara: or,

The Ghost_.

The story is as follows: A young and beautiful lady marries early a

gentleman of good family who dies within a year of their marriage. In

spite of many proposals she resolves to remain a widow; and for the sake

of congenial society and occupation, she finds a home in the family of a

pious clergyman, where she devotes herself to his young children, and

makes herself useful in the parish. Her favourite among the children is

a boy, George, still in the schoolroom. The boy grows apace; goes to

boarding-school and college; and is on the point of entering the army,

when he discovers that he is madly in love with the lady, still an

inmate of the house, who had "mothered him" when a child. No ages are

mentioned, but we may infer that the young man is then about two and

twenty, and the lady something short of forty. The position is not

unimaginable, though it may be uncommon. The idea of marrying one who

had been to her as a favourite child, seems to the widow in the first

instance repulsive and almost criminal. But it turns out that there is

another reason in the background for her not re-entering the marriage

state, which she discloses to the ardent youth. It appears that the

widow had once had a beloved brother who had died early. Those two had

been brought up by an infidel father, who had impressed on his children

the absurdity of all such ideas as immortality. The children had often

discussed and pondered over this subject together, and had made a

compact that whichever of them died first should, if possible, appear to

the survivor, and thus solve the awful problem of a future life. The

brother not long after died in foreign parts. Immediately after his

death, before the sister heard the news, the brother's ghost appeared in

a dream, or vision, to the sister, and warned her in solemn tones

against ever marrying a second time. The spirit does not appear to have

given any reasons, but his manner was so impressive and so unmistakable

that the lady had thus far regarded it as an injunction never to be

disobeyed. On hearing this remarkable story, the young man, George,

argues impatiently against the trustworthiness of dreams, and is hardly

silenced by the widow showing him on her wrist the mark still remaining

where the spirit had seized and pressed her hand. In fine, the

impassioned suitor prevails over these superstitious terrors, as he

reckons them, of the lady--and they become man and wife.

The reader is here placed in a condition of great perplexity, and his

curiosity becomes breathless. The sequel is melancholy indeed. After a

few months' union, the young man, whose plausible eloquence had so moved

the widow, tires of his wife, ill-treats her, and breaks her heart. The

Psychical Society is avenged, and the ghost's word was worth at least "a

thousand pounds." It is difficult for us to take such a story seriously,

but it must have interested Crabbe deeply, for he has expended upon it

much of his finest power of analysis, and his most careful writing. As

we have seen, the subject of dreams had always had a fascination for

him, of a kind not unconnected perhaps with the opium-habit. The story,

however it was to be treated, was unpromising; but as the _dénouement_

was what it proved to be, the astonishing thing is that Crabbe should

not have felt the dramatic impropriety of putting into the young man's

mouth passages of an impressive, and almost Shakespearian, beauty such

as are rare indeed in his poetry. The following lines are not indeed

placed within inverted commas, but the pronoun "I" is retained, and they

are apparently intended for something passing in the young suitor's

mind:

"O! tell me not of years,--can she be old?

Those eyes, those lips, can man unmoved behold?

Has time that bosom chill'd? are cheeks so rosy cold?

No, she is young, or I her love t'engage

Will grow discreet, and that will seem like age:

But speak it not; Death's equalising age

Levels not surer than Love's stronger charm,

That bids all inequalities be gone,

That laughs at rank, that mocks comparison.

There is not young or old, if Love decrees;

He levels orders, he confounds degrees:

There is not fair, or dark, or short, or tall,

Or grave, or sprightly--Love reduces all;

He makes unite the pensive and the gay,

Gives something here, takes something there away;

From each abundant good a portion takes,

And for each want a compensation makes;

Then tell me not of years--Love, power divine,

Takes, as he wills, from hers, and gives to mine."

In those fine lines it is no doubt Crabbe himself that speaks, and not

the young lover, who was to turn out in the sequel an unparalleled

"cad." But then, what becomes of dramatic consistency, and the

imperative claims of art?

In the letter to Mrs. Leadbeater already cited Crabbe

writes as to his forthcoming collection of Tales: "I do not know, on a

general view, whether my tragic or lighter Tales, etc., are most in

number. Of those equally well executed the tragic will, I suppose, make

the greater impression." Crabbe was right in this forecast. Whether more

or less in number, the "tragic" Tales far surpass the "lighter" in their

effect on the reader, in the intensity of their gloom. Such stories as

that of _Lady Barbara, Delay has Danger, The Sisters, Ellen, Smugglers

and Poachers_, Richard's story of _Ruth_, and the elder brother's

account of his own early attachment, with its miserable sequel--all

these are of a poignant painfulness. Human crime, error, or selfishness

working life-long misery to others--this is the theme to which Crabbe

turns again and again, and on which he bestows a really marvellous power

of analysis. There is never wanting, side by side with these, what

Crabbe doubtless believed to be the compensating presence of much that

is lovable in human character, patience, resignation, forgiveness. But

the resultant effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of

cheering. The fine lines of Wordsworth as to

"Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight;

And miserable love, that is not pain

To hear of, for the glory that redounds

Therefrom to human kind, and what we are,"

fail to console us as we read these later stories of Crabbe. We part

from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human

nature. We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally

base and sordid.

The _Tales of the Hall_ are full of surprises even to

those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems. He can still allow couplets

to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand,

when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused,

he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's supremest

heights. Moreover, the poems contain passages of description which, for

truth to Nature, touched by real imagination, are finer than anything he

had yet achieved. The story entitled _Delay has Danger_ contains the

fine picture of an autumn landscape seen through the eyes of the

miserable lover--the picture which dwelt so firmly in the memory of

Tennyson:

"That evening all in fond discourse was spent,

When the sad lover to his chamber went,

To think on what had pass'd, to grieve, and to repent:

Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh

On the red light that fill'd the eastern sky:

Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,

To hail the glories of the new-born day;

But now dejected, languid, listless, low,

He saw the wind upon the water blow,

And the cold stream curl'd onward as the gale

From the pine-hill blew harshly down the dale;

On the right side the youth a wood survey'd,

With all its dark intensity of shade;

Where the rough wind alone was heard to move,

In this, the pause of nature and of love,

When now the young are rear'd, and when the old,

Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold--

Far to the left he saw the huts of men,

Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen;

Before him swallows, gathering for the sea,

Took their short flights, and twitter'd on the lea;

And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,

And slowly blacken'd in the sickly sun;

All these were sad in nature, or they took

Sadness from him, the likeness of his look,

And of his mind--he ponder'd for a while,

Then met his Fanny with a borrow'd smile."

The entire story, from which this is an extract, is finely told, and the

fitness of the passage is beyond dispute. At other times the description

is either so much above the level of the narrative, or below it, as to

be almost startling. In the very first pages of _Tales of the Hall_, in

the account of the elder brother's early retirement from business, occur

the following musical lines:

"He chose his native village, and the hill

He climb'd a boy had its attraction still;

With that small brook beneath, where he would stand

And stooping fill the hollow of his hand

To quench th' impatient thirst--then stop awhile

To see the sun upon the waters smile,

In that sweet weariness, when, long denied,

We drink and view the fountain that supplied

The sparkling bliss--and feel, if not express,

Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness."

Yet it is only a hundred lines further on that, to indicate the elder

brother's increasing interest in the graver concerns of human thought,

Crabbe can write:

"He then proceeded, not so much intent,

But still in earnest, and to church he went

Although they found some difference in their creed,

He and his pastor cordially agreed;

Convinced that they who would the truth obtain

By disputation, find their efforts vain;

The church he view'd as liberal minds will view,

And there he fix'd his principles and pew."

Among those surprises to which I have referred is the apparently recent

development in the poet of a lyrical gift, the like of which he had not

exhibited before. Crabbe had already written two notable poems in

stanzas, _Sir Eustace Grey_ and that other painful but exceedingly

powerful drama in monologue, _The Hall of Justice_. But since the

appearance of his last volumes, Crabbe had formed some quite novel

poetical friendships, and it would seem likely that association with

Rogers, though he saw and felt that elegant poet's deficiencies as a

painter of human life, had encouraged him to try an experiment in his

friend's special vein. One of the most depressing stories in the series

is that of the elder brother's ill-fated passion for a beautiful girl,

to whom he had been the accidental means of rendering a vital service in

rescuing her and a companion from the "rude uncivil kine" in a meadow.

To the image of this girl, though he never set eyes on her again for

many years, he had remained faithful. The next meeting, when at last it

came, brought the most terrible of disillusions. Sent by his chief to

transact certain business with a wealthy banker ("Clutterbuck & Co."),

the young merchant calls at a villa where the banker at times resided,

and finds that the object of his old love and his fondest dreams is

there installed as the banker's mistress. She is greatly moved at the

sight of the youthful lover of old days, who, with more chivalry than

prudence, offers forgiveness if she will break off this degrading

alliance. She cannot resolve to take the step. She has become used to

luxury and continuous amusement, and she cannot face the return to a

duller domesticity. Finally, however, she dies penitent, and it is the

contemplation of her life and death that works a life-long change in the

ambitions and aims of the old lover. He wearies of money-making, and

retires to lead a country life, where he may be of some good to his

neighbours, and turn to some worthy use the time that may be still

allowed him. The story is told with real pathos and impressive force.

But the picture is spoiled by the tasteless interpolation of a song

which the unhappy girl sings to her lover, at the very moment apparently

when she has resolved that she can never be his:

"My Damon was the first to wake

The gentle flame that cannot die;

My Damon is the last to take

The faithful bosom's softest sigh;

The life between is nothing worth,

O! cast it from thy thought away;

Think of the day that gave it birth,

And this its sweet returning day.

"Buried be all that has been done,

Or say that nought is done amiss;

For who the dangerous path can shun

In such bewildering world as this?

But love can every fault forgive,

Or with a tender look reprove;

And now let nought in memory live,

But that we meet, and that we love."

The lines are pretty enough, and may be described as a blend of Tom

Moore and Rogers. A similar lyric, in the story called _The Sisters_,

might have come straight from the pen which has given us "Mine be a cot

beside a hill," and is not so wholly irrelevant to its context as the

one just cited.

Since Crabbe's death in 1832, though he has never been without a small

and loyal band of admirers, no single influence has probably had so much

effect in reviving interest in his poetry as that of Edward FitzGerald,

the translator of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald was born and lived the

greater part of his life in Suffolk, and Crabbe was a native of

Aldeburgh, and lived in the neighbourhood till he was grown to manhood.

This circumstance alone might not have specially interested FitzGerald

in the poet, but for the fact that the temperament of the two men was

somewhat the same, and that both dwelt naturally on the depressing sides

of human life. But there were other coincidences to create a strong tie

between FitzGerald and the poet's family. When FitzGerald's father went

to live at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, in 1835, Crabbe's son George

had recently been presented to the vicarage of the adjoining parish of

Bredfield (FitzGerald's native village), which he continued to hold

until his death in 1857. During these two and twenty years, FitzGerald

and George Crabbe remained on the closest terms of friendship, which was

continued with George Crabbe's son (a third George), who became

ultimately rector of Merton in Norfolk. It was at his house, it will be

remembered, that FitzGerald died suddenly in the summer of 1883. Through

this long association with the family FitzGerald was gradually acquiring

information concerning the poet, which even the son's _Biography_ had

not supplied. Readers of FitzGerald's delightful _Letters_ will remember

that there is no name more constantly referred to than that of Crabbe.

Whether writing to Fanny Kemble, or Frederick Tennyson, or Lowell, he is

constantly quoting him, and recommending him. During the thirty years

that followed Crabbe's death his fame had been on the decline, and poets

of different and greater gifts had taken his place. FitzGerald had

noted this fact with ever-increasing regret, and longed to revive the

taste for a poet of whose merits he had himself no doubt. He discerned

moreover that even those who had read in their youth _The Village_ and

_The Borough_ had been repelled by the length, and perhaps by the

monotonous sadness, of the _Tales of the Hall_. It was for this reason

apparently (and not because he assigned a higher place to the later

poetry than to the earlier) that he was led, after some years of

misgiving, to prepare a volume of selections from this latest work of

Crabbe's which might have the effect of tempting the reader to master it

as a whole. Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe's verse, what

was ordinarily called an "anthology" was out of the question. FitzGerald

was restricted to a single method. He found that readers were impatient

of Crabbe's _longueurs_. It occurred to him that while making large

omissions he might preserve the story in each case, by substituting

brief prose abstracts of the portions omitted. This process he applied

to the Tales that pleased him most, leaving what he considered Crabbe's

best passages untouched. As early as 1876 he refers to the selection as

already made, and he printed it for private circulation in 1879.

Finally, in 1882, he added a preface of his own, and published it with

Quaritch in Piccadilly.

In his preface FitzGerald claims for Crabbe's latest work that the net

impression left by it upon the reader is less sombre and painful than

that left by his earlier poems. "It contains," he urges, "scarce

anything of that brutal or sordid villainy of which one has more than

enough in the poet's earlier work." Perhaps there is not so much of the

"brutal or sordid," but then in _The_ _Parish Register_ or _The

Borough_, the reader is in a way prepared for that ingredient, because

the personages are the lawless and neglected poor of a lonely seaport.

It is because, when he moves no longer among these, he yet finds vice

and misery quite as abundant in "a village with its tidy homestead, and

well-to-do tenants, within easy reach of a thriving country-town," that

a certain shock is given to the reader. He discovers that all the evil

passions intrude (like pale Death) into the comfortable villa as

impartially as into the hovels at Aldeburgh. But FitzGerald had found a

sufficient alleviation of the gloom in the framework of the Tales. The

growing affection of the two brothers, as they come to know and

understand each other better, is one of the consistently pleasant

passages in Crabbe's writings. The concluding words of FitzGerald's

preface, as the little volume is out of print and very scarce, I may be

allowed to quote:--

"Is Crabbe then, whatever shape he may take, worth

making room for in our over-crowded heads and libraries?

If the verdict of such critics as Jeffrey and Wilson be set

down to contemporary partiality or inferior 'culture,' there is

Miss Austen, who is now so great an authority in the representation

of genteel humanity, so unaccountably smitten with

Crabbe in his worsted hose that she is said to have pleasantly

declared he was the only man whom she would care to marry.

If Sir Walter Scott and Byron are but unaesthetic judges of the

poet, there is Wordsworth who was sufficiently exclusive in

admitting any to the sacred brotherhood in which he still

reigns, and far too honest to make any exception out of

compliment to any one on any occasion--he did nevertheless

thus write to the poet's son and biographer in 1834: 'Any

testimony to the merit of your revered father's works would,

I feel, be superfluous, if not impertinent. They will last

from their combined merits as poetry and truth, full as long

as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first

made their appearance'--a period which, be it noted, includes

all Wordsworth's own volumes except _Yarrow Revisited_, _The

Prelude_, and _The Borderers_. And Wordsworth's living successor

to the laurel no less participates with him in his

appreciation of their forgotten brother. Almost the last time

I met him he was quoting from memory that fine passage in

_Delay has Danger_, where the late autumn landscape seems to

borrow from the conscience-stricken lover who gazes on it the

gloom which it reflects upon him; and in the course of further

conversation on the subject Mr. Tennyson added, 'Crabbe has

a world of his own'; by virtue of that original genius, I

suppose, which is said to entitle and carry the possessor to

what we call immortality."

Besides the stories selected for abridgment in the volume there were

passages, from Tales not there included, which FitzGerald was never

weary of citing in his letters, to show his friends how true a poet was

lying neglected of men. One he specially loved is the description of an

autumn day in _The Maid's Story_:--

"There was a day, ere yet the autumn closed,

When, ere her wintry wars, the earth reposed;

When from the yellow weed the feathery crown,

Light as the curling smoke, fell slowly down;

When the winged insect settled in our sight,

And waited wind to recommence her flight;

When the wide river was a silver sheet,

And on the ocean slept th' unanchor'd fleet,

When from our garden, as we looked above,

There was no cloud, and nothing seemed to move."

Another passage, also in Crabbe's sweeter vein, forms the conclusion of

the whole poem. It is where the elder brother hands over to the younger

the country house that is to form the future home of his

wife and children:--

"It is thy wife's, and will thy children's be,

Earth, wood, and water! all for thine and thee.

* * * * *

There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view,

She knows our deed, and she approves it too;

Before her all our views and plans were laid,

And Jacques was there to explain and to persuade.

Here on this lawn thy boys and girls shall run,

And play their gambols when their tasks are done,

There, from that window shall their mother view

The happy tribe, and smile at all they do;

While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight

Shalt cry, 'O! childish!' and enjoy the sight."

FitzGerald's selections are made with the skill and judgment we should

expect from a critic of so fine a taste, but it may be doubted whether

any degree of skill could have quite atoned for one radical flaw in his

method. He seems to have had his own misgivings as to whether he was

not, by that method, giving up one real secret of Crabbe's power. After

quoting Sir Leslie Stephen's most true remark that "with all its

short-and long-comings Crabbe's better work leaves its mark on the

reader's mind and memory as only the work of genius can, while so many a

more splendid vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark

behind." FitzGerald adds: "If this abiding impression result (as perhaps

in the case of Richardson or Wordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked

in through the longer process by which the man's peculiar genius works,

any abridgement, whether of omission or epitome, will diminish from the

effect of the whole." FitzGerald is unquestionably in sight of a truth

here. The parallel with Wordsworth is indeed not exact, for the best of

Wordsworth's poetry neither requires nor admits of condensation. _The

Excursion_ might benefit by omission and compression, but not _The

Solitary Reaper_, nor _The Daffodils_. But the example of Richardson is

fairly in point. Abridgments of _Clarissa Harlowe_ have been attempted,

but probably without any effect on the number of its readers. The power

of Richardson's method does actually lie in the "soaking process" to

which FitzGerald refers. Nor is it otherwise with Crabbe. The

fascination which his readers find in him--readers not perhaps found in

the ranks of those who prefer their poetry on "hand-made paper"--is

really the result of the slow and patient dissection of motive and

temptation, the workings of conscience, the gradual development of

character. These processes are slow, and Crabbe's method of presenting

them is slow, but he attains his end. A distinction has lately been

drawn between "literary Poetry," and "Poetry which is Literature."

Crabbe's is rarely indeed that of the former class. It cannot be denied

that it has taken its place in the latter.

The apology for Crabbe's lengthiness might almost be extended to the

singular inequalities of his verse. FitzGerald joins all other critics

in regretting his carelessness, and indeed the charge can hardly be

called harsh. A poet who habitually insists on producing thirty lines a

day, whether or no the muse is willing, can hardly escape temptations to

carelessness. Crabbe's friends and other contemporaries noted it, and

expressed surprise at the absence in Crabbe of the artistic conscience.

Wordsworth spoke to him on the subject, and ventured to express regret

that he did not take more pains with the workmanship of his verse, and

reports that Crabbe's only answer was "it does not matter." Samuel

Rogers had related to Wordsworth a similar experience. "Mr. Rogers once

told me that he expressed his regret to Crabbe that he wrote in his

later works so much less correctly than in his earlier. 'Yes,' replied

he, 'but then I had a reputation to make; now I can afford to relax.'"

This is of course very sad, and, as has already been urged, Crabbe's

earlier works had the advantage of much criticism, and even correction

from his friends. But however this may be, it may fairly be urged that

in a "downright" painter of human life, with that passion for realism

which Crabbe was one of the first to bring back into our literature,

mere "polish" would have hindered, not helped, the effects he was bent

on producing. It is difficult in polishing the heroic couplet not to

produce the impression of seeking epigrammatic point. In Crabbe's

strenuous and merciless analyses of human character his power would have

been often weakened, had attention been diverted from the whole to the

parts, and from the matter to the manner. The "finish" of Gray,

Goldsmith, and Rogers suited exquisitely with their pensive musings on

Human Life. It was otherwise with the stern presentment of such stories

of human sin and misery as _Edward Shore_ or _Delay has Danger._

CHAPTER XI

LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE

(1819-1832)

The last thirteen years of Crabbe's life were spent at Trowbridge,

varied by occasional absences among hiss friends at Bath, and in the

neighbourhood, and by annual visits of greater length to the family of

Samuel Hoare at Hampstead. Meantime his son John was resident with him

at Trowbridge, and the parish and parishioners were not neglected. From

Mrs. Hoare's house on Hampstead Heath it was not difficult to visit his

literary friends in London; and Wordsworth, Southey, and others,

occasionally stayed with the family. But as early as 1820, Crabbe became

subject to frequent severe attacks of neuralgia (then called _tic

douloureux_), and this malady, together with the gradual approach of old

age, made him less and less able to face the fatigue of London

hospitalities.

Notwithstanding his failing health, and not infrequent absence from his

parish--for he occasionally visited the Isle of Wight, Hastings, and

other watering-places with his Hampstead friends--Crabbe was living down

at Trowbridge much of the unpopularity with which he had started. The

people were beginning to discover what sterling qualities of heart

existed side by side with defects of tact and temper, and the lack of

sympathy with certain sides of evangelical teaching. His son tells us,

and may be trusted, that his father's personal piety deepened in his

declining years, an influence which could not be ineffectual. Children,

moreover, were growing up in the family, and proved a new source of

interest and happiness. Pucklechurch. was not far away, and his son

George's eldest girl, Caroline, as she approached her fourth birthday,

began to receive from him the tenderest of letters.

The most important incident in Crabbe's life during this period was his

visit to Walter Scott in Edinburgh in the early autumn of 1822. In the

spring of that year, Crabbe had for the first time met Scott in London,

and Scott had obtained from him a promise that he would visit him in

Scotland in the autumn. It so fell out that George the Fourth, who had

been crowned in the previous year, and was paying a series of Coronation

progresses through his dominions, had arranged to visit Edinburgh in the

August of this year. Whether Crabbe deliberately chose the same period

for his own visit, or stumbled on it accidentally, and Scott did not

care to disappoint his proposed guest, is not made quite clear by

Crabbe's biographer. Scott had to move with all his family to his house

in Edinburgh for the great occasion, and he would no doubt have much

preferred to receive Crabbe at Abbotsford. Moreover, it fell to Scott,

as the most distinguished man of letters and archaeologist in Edinburgh,

to organise all the ceremonies and the festivities necessary for the

King's reception. In Lockhart's phrase, Scott stage-managed the whole

business. And it was on Scott's return from receiving the King on board

the Royal yacht on the 14th of August that he found awaiting him in

Castle Street one who must have been an inconvenient guest. The

incidents of this first meeting are so charmingly related by Lockhart

that I cannot resist repeating them in his words, well known though they

may be:--

"On receiving the poet on the quarter-deck, his Majesty

called for a bottle of Highland whisky, and having drunk his

health in this national liquor, desired a glass to be filled for

him. Sir Walter, after draining his own bumper, made a

request that the king would condescend to bestow on him the

glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health: and

this being granted, the precious vessel was immediately

wrapped up and carefully deposited in what he conceived to

be the safest part of his dress. So he returned with it to

Castle Street; but--to say nothing at this moment of graver

distractions--on reading his house he found a guest established

there of a sort rather different from the usual visitors

of the time. The Poet Crabbe, to whom he had been introduced

when last in London by Mr. Murray of Albemarle

Street, after repeatedly promising to follow up the acquaintance

by an excursion to the North, had at last arrived in the

midst of these tumultuous preparations for the royal advent.

Notwithstanding all such impediments, he found his quarters

ready for him, and Scott entering, wet and hurried, embraced

the venerable man with brotherly affection. The royal gift

was forgotten--the ample skirt of the coat within which it had

been packed, and which he had hitherto held cautiously in

front of his person, slipped back to its more usual position--he

sat down beside Crabbe, and the glass was crushed to

atoms. His scream and gesture made his wife conclude that

he had sat down on a pair of scissors, or the like: but very

little harm had been done except the breaking of the glass, of

which alone he had been thinking. This was a damage not to

be repaired: as for the scratch that accompanied it, its scar

was of no great consequence, as even when mounting the

'cat-dath, or battle-garment' of the Celtic Club, he adhered,

like his hero, Waverley, to _the trews_."

What follows in Lockhart's pages is also too interesting, as regards

Scott's visitor himself, to be omitted. The Highland clans, or what

remained of them, were represented on the occasion, and added greatly to

the picturesqueness of the procession and other pageantry. And this is

what occurred on the morning after the meeting of Scott and his guest:--

"By six o'clock next morning Sir Walter, arrayed in the

'Garb of old Gaul,' (which he had of the Campbell tartan, in

memory of one of his great-grandmothers) was attending a

muster of these gallant Celts in the Queen Street Gardens,

where he had the honour of presenting them with it set of

colours, and delivered a suitable exhortation, crowned with

their rapturous applause. Some members of the Club, all of

course in their full costume, were invited to breakfast with

him. He had previously retired for a little to his library, and

when he entered the parlour, Mr. Crabbe, dressed in the

highest style of professional neatness and decorum, with

buckles in his shoes, and whatever was then befitting an

English clergyman of his years and station, was standing in

the midst of half-a-dozen stalwart Highlanders, exchanging

elaborate civilities with them in what was at least meant to

be French. He had come into the room shortly before, without

having been warned about such company, and hearing the

party conversing together in an unknown tongue, the polite

old man had adopted, in his first salutation, what he considered

as the universal language. Some of the Celts, on their

part, took him for some foreign Abbé or Bishop, and were

doing their best to explain to him that they were not the

wild savages for which, from the startled glance he had thrown

on their hirsute proportions, there seemed but too much reason

to suspect he had taken them; others, more perspicacious,

gave in to the thing for the joke's sake; and there was high

fun when Scott dissolved the charm of their stammering, by

grasping Crabbe with one hand, and the nearest of these

figures with the other, and greeted the whole group with the

same hearty _good-morning_."

In spite, however, of banquets (at one of which Crabbe was present) and

other constant calls upon his host's time and labour, the southern poet

contrived to enjoy himself. He wandered into the oldest parts of

Edinburgh, and Scott obtained for him the services of a friendly caddie

to accompany him on some of these occasions lest the old parson should

come to any harm. Lockhart, who was of the party in Castle Street, was

very attentive to Scott's visitor, Crabbe had but few opportunities of

seeing Scott alone. "They had," writes Lockhart, "but one quiet walk

together, and it was to the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel and Mushat's

Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by _The Heart of

Midlothian_ had given him an earnest wish to see. I accompanied them;

and the hour so spent--in the course of which the fine old man gave us

some most touching anecdotes of his early struggles--was a truly

delightful contrast to the bustle and worry of miscellaneous society

which consumed so many of his few hours in Scotland. Scott's family were

more fortunate than himself in this respect. They had from infancy been

taught to reverence Crabbe's genius, and they now saw enough of him to

make them think of him ever afterwards with tender affection."

Yet one more trait of Scott's interest in his guest should not be

omitted. The strain upon Scott's strength of the King's visit was made

more severe by the death during that fortnight of Scott's old and dear

friend, William Erskine, only a few months before elevated to the bench,

with the title of Lord Kinedder. Erskine had been irrecoverably wounded

by the circulation of a cruel and unfounded slander upon his moral

character. It so preyed on his mind that its effect was, in Scott's

words, to "torture to death one of the most soft-hearted and sensitive

of God's creatures." On the very day of the King's arrival he died,

after high fever and delirium had set in, and his funeral, which Scott

attended, followed in due course. "I am not aware," says Lockhart, "that

I ever saw Scott in such a state of dejection as he was when I

accompanied him and his friend Mr. Thomas Thomson from Edinburgh to

Queensferry in attendance upon Lord Kinedder's funeral. Yet that was one

of the noisiest days of the royal festival, and he had to plunge into

some scene of high gaiety the moment after we returned. As we halted in

Castle Street, Mr. Crabbe's mild, thoughtful face appeared at the

window, and Scott said, on leaving me, 'Now for what our old friend

there puts down as the crowning curse of his poor player in _The

Borough_:--

"To hide in rant the heart-ache of the night."'"

There is pathos in the recollection that just ten years later when Scott

lay in his study at Abbotsford--the strength of that noble mind slowly

ebbing away--the very passage in _The Borough_ just quoted was one of

those he asked to have read to him. It is the graphic and touching

account in Letter XII. of the "Strolling Players," and as the

description of their struggles and their squalor fell afresh upon his

ear, his own excursions into matters theatrical recurred to him, and he

murmured smiling, "Ah! Terry won't like that! Terry won't like that!!"

The same year Crabbe was invited to spend Christmas at his old home,

Belvoir Castle, but felt unable to face the fatigue in wintry weather.

Meantime, among other occupations at home, he was finding time to write

verse copiously. Twenty-one manuscript volumes were left behind him at

his death. He seems to have said little about it at home, for his son

tells us that in the last year of his father's life he learned for the

first time that another volume of Tales was all but ready for the press.

"There are in my recess at home," he writes to George, "where they have

been long undisturbed, another series of such stories, in number and

quantity sufficient for another octavo volume; and as I suppose they are

much like the former in execution, and sufficiently different in events

and characters, they may hereafter, in peaceable times, be worth

something to you." A selection from those formed the _Posthumous Poems_,

first given to the world in the edition of 1834. The _Tales of the

Hall_, it may be supposed, had not quite justified the publisher's

expectations. John Murray had sought to revive interest in the whole

bulk of Crabbe's poetry, of which he now possessed the copyright, by

commissioning Richard Westall, R.A., to produce a series of

illustrations of the poems, thirty-one in number, engravings of which

were sold in sets at two guineas. The original drawings, in delicate

water-colour, in the present Mr. John Murray's possession, are

sufficiently grim. The engravings, lacking the relief of colour, are

even more so, and a rapid survey of the entire series amply shows how

largely in Crabbe's subjects bulks the element of human misery. Crabbe

was much flattered by this new tribute to his reputation, and dwells on

it in one of his letters to Mrs. Leadbeater.

A letter written from Mrs. Hoare's house at Hampstead in June 1825

presents an agreeable picture of his holiday enjoyments:--

"My time passes I cannot tell how pleasantly when the

pain leaves me. To-day I read one of my long stories to my

friends and Mrs. Joanna Baillie and her sister. It was a task;

but they encouraged me, and were, or seemed, gratified. I

rhyme at Hampstead with a great deal of facility, for nothing

interrupts me but kind calls to something pleasant; and

though all this makes parting painful, it will, I hope, make

me resolute to enter upon my duties diligently when I return.

I am too much indulged. Except a return of pain, and that

not severe, I have good health; and if my walks are not so

long, they are more frequent. I have seen many things and

many people; have seen Mr. Southey and Mr. Wordsworth;

have been some days with Mr. Rogers, and at last have been

at the Athenaeum, and purpose to visit the Royal Institution.

I have been to Richmond in a steamboat; seen also the

picture-galleries and some other exhibitions; but I passed one

Sunday in London with discontent, doing no duty myself, nor

listening to another; and I hope my uneasiness proceeded not

merely from breaking a habit. We had a dinner social and

pleasant, if the hours before it had been rightly spent; but I

would not willingly pass another Sunday in the same manner.

I have my home with my friends here (Mrs. Hoare's), and

exchange it with reluctance for the Hummums occasionally.

Such is the state of the garden here, in which I walk and read,

that, in a morning like this, the smell of the flowers is

fragrant beyond anything I ever perceived before. It is

what I can suppose may be in Persia or other oriental

countries--a Paradisiacal sweetness. I am told that I or my

verses, or perhaps both, have abuse in a boot of Mr. Colburn's

publishing, called _The Spirit of the Times_. I believe I felt

something indignant; but my engraved seal dropped out of

the socket and was lost, and I perceived this moved me much

more than the _Spirit_ of Mr. Hazlitt."

The reference is, of course, to Hazlitt's _Spirit of the Age_, then

lately published In reviewing the poetry of his day Hazlitt has a

chapter devoted to Campbell and Crabbe. The criticism on the latter is

little more than a greatly over-drawn picture of Crabbe's choice of

vice and misery for his subjects, and ignores entirely any other side of

his genius, ending with the remark that he would long be "a thorn in the

side of English poetry." Crabbe was wise in not attaching too much

importance to Hazlitt's attack.

Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, mentioned in the letter just cited,

saw much of Crabbe during his visits to Hampstead. A letter from Joanna

to the younger George speaks, as do all his friends, of his growing

kindliness and courtesy, but notes how often, in the matter of judging

his fellow-creatures, his head and his heart were in antagonism. While

at times Joanna was surprised and provoked by the charitable allowances

the old parson made for the unworthy, at other times she noted also that

she would hear him, when acts of others were the subject of praise,

suggesting, "in a low voice as to himself," the possible mixture of less

generous motives. The analytical method was clearly dominant in Crabbe

always, and not merely when he wrote his poetry, and is itself the clue

to much in his treatment of human nature.

Of Crabbe's simplicity and unworldliness in other matters Miss Baillie

furnishes an amusing instance. She writes:--

"While he was staying with Mrs. Hoare a few years since

I sent him one day the present of a blackcock, and a message

with it that Mr. Crabbe should look at the bird before it was

delivered to the cook, or something to that purpose. He

looked at the bird as desired, and then went to Mrs. Hoare in

some perplexity to ask whether he ought not to have it

stuffed, instead of eating it. She could not, in her own house,

tell him that it was simply intended for the larder, and he

was at the trouble and expense of having it stuffed, lest I

should think proper respect had not been put upon my

present."

Altogether the picture presented in these last years of Crabbe's

personality is that of a pious and benevolent old man, endearing himself

to old and new friends, and with manners somewhat formal and overdone,

representing perhaps what in his humbler Aldeburgh days he had imagined

to be those of the upper circles, rather than what he had found them to

be in his prosperous later days in London.

In the autumn of 1831 he was visiting his faithful and devoted friends,

the Samuel Hoares, at their residence in Clifton. The house was

apparently in Princes Buildings, or in the Paragon, for the poet

describes accurately the scene that meets the eye from the back-windows

of those pleasant streets:--

"I have to thank my friends for one of the most beautiful

as well as comfortable rooms you could desire. I look from

my window upon the Avon and its wooded and rocky bounds--the

trees yet green. A vessel is sailing down, and here comes

a steamer (Irish, I suppose). I have in view the end of the Cliff

to the right, and on my left a wide and varied prospect over

Bristol, as far as the eye can reach, and at present the novelty

makes it very interesting. Clifton was always a favourite

place with me. I have more strength and more spirits since

my arrival at this place, and do not despair of giving a good

account of my excursion on my return."

It is noteworthy that Crabbe, who as a young man witnessed the Lord

George Gordon Riots of 1780, should, fifty years later, have been in

Bristol during the disgraceful Reform Bill Rising of 1831, which,

through the cowardice or connivance of the government of the day, went

on unchecked to work such disastrous results to life and property. On

October the 26th he writes to his son:--

"I have been with Mrs. Hoare at Bristol, where all appears

still. Should anything arise to alarm, you may rely upon our

care to avoid danger. Sir Charles Wetherell, to be sure, is

not popular, nor is the Bishop, but I trust that both will be

safe from violence--abuse they will not mind. The Bishop

seems a good-humoured man, and, except by the populace, is

greatly admired."

A few days later, however, he has to record that his views of the

situation were not to be fulfilled. He writes:--

"Bristol, I suppose, never in the most turbulent times of

old, witnessed such outrage. Queen's Square is but half

standing; half is a smoking ruin. As you may be apprehensive

for my safety, it is right to let you know that my friends

and I are undisturbed, except by our fears for the progress of

this mob-government, which is already somewhat broken into

parties, who wander stupidly about, or sleep wherever they

fall wearied with their work and their indulgence. The

military are now in considerable force, and many men are

sworn in as constables; many volunteers are met in Clifton

Churchyard, with white round one arm to distinguish them,

some with guns and the rest with bludgeons. The Mayor's

house has been destroyed; the Bishop's palace plundered,

but whether burned or not I do not know. This morning a

party of soldiers attacked the crowd in the Square; some lives

were lost, and the mob dispersed, whether to meet again is

doubtful. It has been a dreadful time, but we may reasonably

hope it is now over. People are frightened certainly, and no

wonder, for it is evident these poor wretches would plunder

to the extent of their power. Attempts were made to burn

the Cathedral, but failed. Many lives were lost. To attempt

any other subject now would be fruitless. We can think,

speak, and write only of our fears, hopes, or troubles. I

would have gone to Bristol to-day, but Mrs. Hoare was

unwilling that I should. She thought, and perhaps rightly,

that clergymen were marked objects. I therefore only went

half-way, and of course could learn but little. All now is

quiet and well."

In the former of these last quoted letters Crabbe refers sadly to the

pain of parting from his old Hampstead friends,--a parting which he felt

might well be the last. His anticipation was to be fulfilled. He left

Clifton in November, and went direct to his son George, at Pucklechurch.

He was able to preach twice for his son, who congratulated the old man

on the power of his voice, and other encouraging signs of vigour. "I

will venture a good sum, sir," he said "that you will be assisting me

ten years hence." "Ten weeks" was Crabbe's answer, and the implied

prediction was fulfilled almost to the day. After a fortnight at

Pucklechurch, Crabbe returned to his own home at Trowbridge. Early in

January he reported himself as more and more subject to drowsiness,

which he accepted as sign of increasing weakness. Later in the month he

was prostrated by a severe cold. Other complications supervened, and it

soon became apparent that he could not rally. After a few days of much

suffering, and pious resignation, he passed away on the third of

February 1832, with his two sons and his faithful nurse by his side. The

death of the rector was followed by every token of general affection and

esteem. The past asperities of religious and political controversy had

long ceased, and it was felt that the whole parish had lost a devout

teacher and a generous friend. All he had written in _The Borough_ and

elsewhere as to the eccentricities of certain forms of dissent was

forgotten, and all the Nonconformist ministers of the place and

neighbourhood followed him to the grave. A committee was speedily formed

to erect a monument over his grave in the chancel. The sculptor chosen

produced a group of a type then common. "A figure representing the dying

poet, casting his eyes on the sacred volume; two celestial beings, one

looking on as if awaiting his departure." Underneath was inscribed,

after the usual words telling his age, and period of his work at

Trowbridge, the following not exaggerated tribute:--

"Born in humble life, he made himself what he was.

By the force of his genius,

He broke through the obscurity of his birth

Yet never ceased to feel for the

Less fortunate;

Entering (as his work can testify) into

The sorrows and deprivations

Of the poorest of his parishioners;

And so discharging the duties of his station as a

Minister and a magistrate,

As to acquire the respect and esteem

Of all his neighbours.

As a writer, he is well described by a great

Contemporary, as

'Nature's sternest painter yet her best.'"

A fresh edition of Crabbe's complete works was at once arranged for by

John Murray, to be edited by George Crabbe, the son, who was also to

furnish the prefatory memoir. The edition appeared in 1834, in eight

volumes. An engraving by Finden from Phillips's portrait of the poet was

prefixed to the last volume, and each volume contained frontispieces and

vignettes from drawings by Clarkson Stanfield of scenery or buildings

connected with Crabbe's various residences in Suffolk and the Yale of

Belvoir. The volumes were ably edited; the editor's notes, together

with, quotations from Crabbe's earliest critics in the _Edinburgh_ and

_Quarterly Reviews_, were interesting and informing, and the

illustrations happily chosen. But it is not so easy to acquiesce in an

editorial decision on a more important matter. The eighth volume is

occupied by a selection from the Tales left in manuscript by Crabbe, to

which reference has already been made. The son, whose criticisms of his

father are generally sound, evidently had misgivings concerning these

from the first. In a prefatory note to this volume, the brothers

(writing as executors) confess these misgivings. They were startled on

reading the new poems in print at the manifest need of revision and

correction before they could be given to the world. They delicately hint

that the meaning is often obscure, and the "images left imperfect." This

criticism is absolutely just, but unfortunately some less well-judging

persons though "of the highest eminence in literature" had advised the

contrary. So "second thoughts prevailed," instead of those "third

thoughts which are a riper first," and the Tales, or a selection from

them, were printed. They have certainly not added to Crabbe's

reputation. There are occasional touches of his old and best pathos, as

in the story of Rachel; and in _The Ancient Mansion_ there are brief

descriptions of rural nature under the varying aspects of the seasons,

which exhibit all Crabbe's old and close observation of detail, such

as:--

"And then the wintry winds begin to blow,

Then fall the flaky stars of gathering snow,

When on the thorn the ripening sloe, yet blue,

Takes the bright varnish of the morning dew;

The aged moss grows brittle on the pale,

The dry boughs splinter in the windy gale."

But there is much in these last Tales that is trivial and tedious, and

it must be said that their publication has chiefly served to deter many

readers from the pursuit of what is best and most rewardful in the study

of Crabbe. To what extent the new edition served to revive any flagging

interest in the poet cannot perhaps be estimated. The edition must have

been large, for during many years past no book of the kind has been more

prominent in second-hand catalogues. As we have seen, the popularity of

Crabbe was already on the wane, and the appearance of the two volumes of

Tennyson, in 1842, must farther have served to divert attention from

poetry so widely different. Workmanship so casual and imperfect as

Crabbe's had now to contend with such consummate art and diction as that

of _The Miller's Daughter_ and _Dora_.

As has been more than once remarked, these stories belong to the

category of fiction as well as of poetry, and the duration of their

power to attract was affected not only by the appearance of greater

poets, but of prose story-tellers with equal knowledge of the human

heart, and with other gifts to which Crabbe could make no claim. His

knowledge and observation of human nature were not perhaps inferior to

Jane Austen's, but he could never have matched her in prose fiction. He

certainly was not deficient in humour, but it was not his dominant gift,

as it was hers. Again, his knowledge of the life and social ways of the

class to which he nominally belonged, does not seem to have been

intimate. Crabbe could not have written prose fiction with any

approximation to the manners of real life. His characters would have

certainly _thou'ed_ and _thee'ed_ one another as they do in his verse,

and a clergyman would always have been addressed as "Reverend Sir!"

Surely, it will be argued, all this is sufficient to account for the

entire disappearance of Crabbe from the list of poets whom every

educated lover of poetry is expected to appreciate. Yet the fact

remains, as FitzGerald quotes from Sir Leslie Stephen, that "with all

its short-and long-comings, Crabbe's better work leaves its mark on the

reader's mind and memory as only the work of genius can," and almost all

English poets and critics of mark, during his time and after it, have

agreed in recognising the same fact. We know what was thought of him by

Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson. Critics differing as

widely in other matters as Macaulay, John Henry Newman, Mr. Swinburne,

and Dr. Gore, have found in Crabbe an insight into the springs of

character, and a tragic power of dealing with them, of a rare kind. No

doubt Crabbe demands something of his readers. He asks from them a

corresponding interest in human nature. He asks for a kindred habit of

observation, and a kindred patience. The present generation of

poetry-readers cares mainly for style. While this remains the habit of

the town, Crabbe will have to wait for any popular revival. But he is

not so dead as the world thinks. He has his constant readers still, but

they talk little of their poet. "They give Heaven thanks, and make no

boast of it." These are they to whom the "unruly wills and affections"

of their kind are eternally interesting, even when studied through the

medium of a uniform and monotonous metre.

A Trowbridge friend wrote to Crabbe's son, after his father's death,

"When I called on him, soon after his arrival, I remarked that his house

and garden were pleasant and secluded: he replied that he preferred

walking in the streets, and observing the faces of the passers-by, to

the finest natural scenes." There is a poignant line in _Maud_, where

the distracted lover dwells on "the faces that one meets." It was not by

the "sweet records, promises as sweet," that these two observers of life

were impressed, but rather by vicious records and hopeless outlooks. It

was such countenances that Crabbe looked for, and speculated on, for in

such, he found food for that pity and terror he most loved to awaken.

The starting-point of Crabbe's desire to portray village-life truly was

a certain indignation he felt at the then still-surviving conventions of

the Pastoral Poets. We have lately watched, in the literature of our own

day, a somewhat similar reaction against sentimental pictures of

country-life. The feebler members of a family of novelists, which some

one wittily labelled as the "kail-yard school," so irritated a young

Scottish journalist, the late Mr. George Douglas, that he resolved to

provide what he conceived might be a useful corrective for the public

mind. To counteract the half-truths of the opposite school, he wrote a

tale of singular power and promise, _The House with the Green

Shutters_. Like all reactions, it erred in the violence of its

colouring. If intended as a true picture of the normal state of a small

Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in

its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs. But for Mr.

Douglas's untimely death--a real loss to literature--he would doubtless

have shown in future fictions that the pendulum had ceased to swing, and

would have given us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human

life. With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never ceased to act until

his life's end. The leaven of protest against the sentimentalists never

quite worked itself out in him, although, no doubt, in some of the later

tales and portrayals of character, the sun was oftener allowed to shine

out from behind the clouds

We must not forget this when we are inclined to accept without question

Byron's famous eulogium. A poet is not the "best" painter of Nature,

merely because he chooses one aspect of human character and human

fortunes rather than another. If he must not conceal the sterner side,

equally is he bound to remember the sunnier and more serene. If a poet

is to deal justly with the life of the rich or poor, he must take into

fullest account, and give equal prominence to, the homes where happiness

abides. He must remember that though there is a skeleton in every

cupboard, it must not be dragged out for a purpose, nor treated as if it

were the sole inhabitant. He must deal with the happinesses of life and

not only with its miseries; with its harmonies and not only its

dislocations. He must remember the thousand homes in which is to be

found the quiet and faithful discharge of duty, inspired at once and

illumined by the family affections, and not forget that in such as these

the strength of a country lies. Crabbe is often spoken of as our first

great realist in the poetry and fiction of the last century, and the

word is often used as if it meant chiefly plain-speaking as to the

sordid aspects of life. But he is the truest realist who does not

suppress any side of that which may be seen, if looked for. Although

Murillo threw into fullest relief the grimy feet of his beggar-boys

which so offended Mr. Ruskin, still what eternally attracts us to his

canvas is not the soiled feet but the "sweet boy-faces" that "laugh amid

the Seville grapes." It was because Crabbe too often laid greater stress

on the ugliness than on the beauty of things, that he fails to that

extent to be the full and adequate painter and poet of humble life.

He was a dispeller of many illusions. He could not give us the joy that

Goldsmith, Cowper, and William Barnes have given, but he discharged a

function no less valuable than theirs, and with an individuality that

has given him a high and enduring place in the poetry of the nineteenth

century.

There can be no question that within the last twenty or thirty years

there has been a marked revival of interest in the poetry of Crabbe. To

the influence of Edward FitzGerald's fascinating personality this

revival may be partly, but is not wholly, due. It may be of the nature

of a reaction against certain canons of taste too long blindly followed.

It may be that, like the Queen in _Hamlet_, we are beginning to crave

for "more matter and less art"; or that, like the Lady of Shalott, we

are growing "half-sick of shadows," and long for a closer touch with

the real joys and sorrows of common people. Whatever be the cause, there

can be no reason to regret the fact, or to doubt that in these days of

"art for art's sake," the influence of Crabbe's verse is at once of a

bracing and a sobering kind.

INDEX

A

_Aaron the Gipsy_

Addison

_Adventures of Richard, The_

Aldeburgh

_Allegro_ (Milton)

Allington (Lincolnshire)

_Ancient Mansion, The_

_Annals of the Parish, The_ (Galt)

_Annual Register, The_

Austen, Jane

Autobiography, Crabbe's

B

Baillie, Agnes

--Joanna

Barnes, William

Barrie, J.M.

Barton, Bernard,

_Basket-Woman, The_ (Edgeworth)

Bath

Beccles

Belvoir Castle

Biography, Crabbe's

"Blaney"

_Borough, The_

Boswell

Bowles, William Lisle

_Boys at School_

Bristol

Bunbury, Sir Henry

Burke

Burns

Butler, Joseph

Byron

C

Campbell, Thomas

_Candidate, The_

_Canterbury Tales, The_ (Chaucer)

_Castle Rackrent_ (Edgeworth)

Celtic Club

Chatterton

Chaucer

_Childe Harold_ (Byron)

Church, English

Churchill (poet)

_Clarissa Harlowe_ (Richardson)

"Clelia"

Clergy, non-residence of

sketches of

Clifton

Coleridge

_Confessions of an Opium Eater_, (De Quincey)

_Confidant, The_

Courthope, Mr.

Cowley

Cowper

Crabbe, George, birth and family

history of;

early literary bent;

school days;

apprenticed to a surgeon;

life at Woodbridge;

falls in love;

first efforts in verse;

practises as a surgeon;

dangerous illness;

engagement to Miss Elmy;

seeks his fortune in London;

poverty in London;

keeps a diary;

unsuccessful attempts to sell his poems;

appeals to Edmund Burke;

Burke's help and patronage;

invited to Burke's country seat;

publishes _The Library_;

friendship with Burke;

second letter to Burke;

meetings with prominent men;

takes Holy Orders;

returns to Aldeburgh as curate;

coldly received by his fellow-townsmen;

becomes domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland;

life at Belvoir Castle;

_The Village_;

receives LL.B. degree;

presented to two livings;

marriage;

curate of Stathern;

his children;

village traditions concerning him;

_The Newspaper_;

life at Stathern;

moves to Muston;

revisits his native place;

goes to Parham;

lives at Great Glemham Hall;

moves to Rendham;

ill-health;

use of opium;

returns to Muston;

publishes a new volume of poems;

_The Parish Register_;

his great popularity;

friendship with Sir Walter Scott;

_The Borough_;

_Tales_;

visit to London;

returns to Muston;

death of his wife;

serious illness;

rector of Trowbridge;

departure from Muston;

intercourse with literary men in London;

a member of the "Literary Society";

receives £3000 from John Murray;

returns to Trowbridge;

_Tales of the Hall_;

visits Scott in Edinburgh;

_Posthumous Poems_;

last years at Trowbridge;

illness and death;

his religious temperament;

rusticity and lack of polish;

indifference to art;

want of tact;

love of female society;

acquaintance and sympathy with the poor;

his preaching;

inequality of his work;

influence of preceding poets;

his reputation at its height;

knowledge of botany;

his descriptions of nature;

first great realist in verse;

fondness for verbal antithesis;

his epigrams;

defective _technique_;

his influence on subsequent novelists;

parodies of his style;

his sense of humour;

defects of his poetry;

his retentive memory;

his characters drawn from life;

his treatment of peasant life;

power of analysing character;

choice of sordid and gloomy subjects;

his lyric verses;

Edward FitzGerald's great admiration of his poetry;

contemporary and other estimates of his work;

revival of interest in him;

Crabbe, George (father of the poet)

--Mrs. (mother)

--George (son)

--Mrs. (wife)

--John

--Edmund

--William

--(brother)

--George (grandson)

--Caroline

_Critical Review_

D

_Daffodils, The_ (Wordsworth)

_Dejection, Ode to_ (Coleridge)

_Delay has Danger_

De Quincey

_Deserted Village, The_ (Goldsmith)

Diary, Crabbe's

Dickens

Dodsley (publisher)

_Dora_ (Tennyson)

Douglas, George

_Dunciad_ (Pope)

Dunwich

E

Edgeworth, Miss

Edinburgh

_Edinburgh Annual Register_

_Edinburgh Review_

_Edward Shore_

_Elegant Extracts_ (Vicesimus Knox)

_Elegy in a Country Churchyard,_ (Gray)

_Ellen_

Elmy, Miss Sarah. _See_ Crabbe, Mrs. (wife)

_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ (Byron)

_Enoch Arden_ (Tennyson)

Erskine, William

_Essay on Man_ (Pope)

_Excursion, The_ (Wordsworth)

F

Felon, the condemned, Description of

Fielding

Finden (artist)

FitzGerald, Edward

--William Thomas

Fox, Charles James

--Henry Richard. _See_ Holland, Lord

_Frank Courtship, The_

Fund, The Literary

G

_Gentleman Farmer, The_

_Gentleman's Magazine_

George IV

Glemham

Glynn, Dr. Robert

Goldsmith

Gordon, Lord George

Gore, Dr. (Bishop of Worcester)

Grantham

Gray

H

_Hall of Justice, The_

Hampstead

_Hanmer, Sir Thomas Memoir and Correspondence of_

Hatchard, John (publisher)

_Haunted House, The_ (Hood)

Hazlitt

_Heart of Midlothian, The_ (Scott)

_Henry V_ (Shakespeare)

"Hetty Sorrel"

Highlanders

Hoare family

Hogarth

Holland, Lord

_House with the Green Shutters, The_ (George Douglas)

Huchon, M. (University of Nancy)

_Human Life_ (Rogers)

Huntingdon, William

Hutton, Rev. W.H.

I

_Inebriety_

_In Memoriam_ (Tennyson)

"Isaac Ashford"

J

Jeffrey _(Edinburgh Review)_

Johnson, Samuel

Jordan, Mrs. (actress)

K

"Kailyard school"

Keats

Kemble, Fanny

--John

L

_Lady Barbara_

_Lady of the Lake, The_ (Scott)

Lamb, Charles

_Lamia and other Poems_ (Keats)

Lansdowne, Third Marquis of

Langborne (painter)

_Lay of the Last Minstrel, The_ (Scott)

_Lazy Lawrence_ (Edgeworth)

Leadbeater, Mrs.

_Library, The_

Literary Society, The

Lockhart

Longmans (publisher)

Lothian, Lord

Lowell

_Lover's Journey, The_

_Lyrical Ballads_ (Wordsworth)

M

Macaulay

_Maid's Story, The_

Manners, Lord Robert

_Maud_ (Tennyson)

Memoir of Crabbe. _See_ Biography

Methodism

_Miller's daughter The_ (Tennyson)

Minerva Press, The

"Mira"

Mitford, Miss

Montgomery, Robert

_Monthly Review_

Moore, Thomas

Murillo

Murray, John (publisher)

Muston (Leicestershire)

N

_New Monthly_

Newman, Cardinal

_Newspaper, The_

_Nineteenth Century_

North, Mr. Dudley

--Lord

Novels in Crabbe's day

O

Omar Khayyam

Opium eating

_Our Village_ (Miss Mitford)

P

_Pains of Sleep_ (Coleridge)

_Parents' Assistant, The_ (Edgeworth)

Parham

_Parish Register, The_

_Parting Hour, The_

_Patron, The_

Phillips (artist)

"Phoebe Dawson"

Pluralities

_Poacher, The_ (Scott)

Poor, State relief of

Pope

_Posthumous Poems_

Pretyman, Bishop

Priest, Description of Parish

_Progress of Error_ (Cowper)

Pucklechurch

Q

_Quarterly Review_

Queensberry, Duke of

R

Raleigh

Reform Bill Riots

_Rejected Addresses_ (Smith)

Rendham

Reynolds, Sir Joshua

Richardson (novelist)

Ridout, Miss Charlotte

Riots, Gordon; Bristol

Rogers, Samuel

_Rokeby_ (Scott)

Romilly, Sir Samuel

Ruskin

_Ruth_

Rutland, Duke of

S

Scott, Sir Walter

_Seasons, The_ (Thomson)

Sellers, Miss Edith

Shackleton, Edward

Shakespeare

Shelburne, Lord, lines to

Shelley

Siddons, Mrs.

_Simple Susan_ (Edgeworth)

_Sir Eustace Grey_

_Sisters The_

Smith, James (_Rejected, Addresses_)

Smollett

_Smugglers and Poachers_

_Solitary Reaper, The_ (Wordsworth)

Southey

Spenser

_Spirit of the Age_. (Hazlitt)

Stanfield, Clark on

Stathern (Leictershire)

Stephen, Sir Leslie

Stothard (painter)

Sweffling (Suffolk)

Swift

Swinburne

T

_Table Talk_ (Cowper)

_Tales_

_Tales of the Hall_

Tennyson

--Frederick

Thomson

Thurlow, Lord

Tomlins, Dr. _See_ Pretyman

Tovell family

_Traveller, The_ (Goldsmith)

Trollope, Anthony

Trowbridge

Turner, Rev. Richard

V

_Village, The_

W

Walker, Frederick (artist)

Watson, Bishop

_Waverley_ (Scott)

Wesley

Wesleyan Movement

Westall, Richard (artist)

Whitefield Revival

_Widow's Tale, The_

_Wife's Trial, The_ (Lamb)

Wilkie

Wolfe

Woodbridge

Wordsworth

_World of Dreams, The_

Y

Young