poets, the other the most humble and prosaic. If the poetry of the one
is like the arch of the rainbow, spanning and adorning the earth, that
of the other is like a dull, leaden cloud hanging over it. Mr. Crabbe's
style might be cited as an answer to Audrey's question--"Is poetry
a true thing?" There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no
illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song is one sad reality,
one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe. Literal fidelity serves
him in the place of invention; he assumes importance by a number of
petty details; he rivets attention by being tedious. He not only deals
in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most
familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he
relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with
which he dissects the most trivial objects--and for the interest he
excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most
painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called
in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches of the
peace; and makes out a parochial list of accidents and offences. He
takes the most trite, the most gross and obvious and revolting part of
nature, for the subject of his elaborate descriptions; but it is Nature
still, and Nature is a great and mighty Goddess! It is well for the
Reverend Author that it is so. Individuality is, in his theory, the only
definition of poetry. Whatever _is_, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever
makes an exact image of any thing on the earth, however deformed or
insignificant, according to him, must succeed--and he himself has
succeeded. Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of our
living authors. That he is so, can be accounted for on no other
principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world about us, and
our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any manner powerfully and
directly reminds us of it. His Muse is not one of _the Daughters of
Memory_, but the old toothless, mumbling dame herself, doling out the
gossip and scandal of the neighbourhood, recounting _totidem verbis et
literis_, what happens in every place of the kingdom every hour in the
year, and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels.
But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous, leaving
nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest grievances, a
village-oracle and critic, most veritable, most identical, bringing us
acquainted with persons and things just as they chanced to exist, and
giving us a local interest in all she knows and tells. Mr. Crabbe's
Helicon is choked up with weeds and corruption; it reflects no light
from heaven, it emits no cheerful sound: no flowers of love, of hope,
or joy spring up near it, or they bloom only to wither in a moment. Our
poet's verse does not put a spirit of youth in every thing, but a spirit
of fear, despondency, and decay: it is not an electric spark to kindle
or expand, but acts like the torpedo's touch to deaden or contract. It
lends no dazzling tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the
heart, it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view the
current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited, half under ground,
muddy, and clogged with all creeping things. The world is one vast
infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary, of which our author
is the overseer: to read him is a penance, yet we read on! Mr. Crabbe,
it must be confessed, is a repulsive writer. He contrives to "turn
diseases to commodities," and makes a virtue of necessity. He puts us
out of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should do;
yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to another. His morbid
feelings droop and cling to the earth, grovel where they should soar;
and throw a dead weight on every aspiration of the soul after the good
or beautiful. By degrees we submit, and are reconciled to our fate, like
patients to the physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell. We can
only explain this by saying, as we said before, that Mr. Crabbe gives
us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the
distressing; that he does this thoroughly and like a master, and we
forgive all the rest.
Mr. Crabbe's first poems were published so long ago as the year 1782,
and received the approbation of Dr. Johnson only a little before he
died. This was a testimony from an enemy; for Dr. Johnson was not an
admirer of the simple in style or minute in description. Still he was an
acute, strong-minded man, and could see truth when it was presented to
him, even through the mist of his prejudices and his foibles. There was
something in Mr. Crabbe's intricate points that did not, after all, so
ill accord with the Doctor's purblind vision; and he knew quite
enough of the petty ills of life to judge of the merit of our poet's
descriptions, though he himself chose to slur them over in high-sounding
dogmas or general invectives. Mr. Crabbe's earliest poem of the
_Village_ was recommended to the notice of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua
Reynolds; and we cannot help thinking that a taste for that sort of
poetry, which leans for support on the truth and fidelity of its
imitations of nature, began to display itself much about that time, and,
in a good measure, in consequence of the direction of the public taste
to the subject of painting. Book-learning, the accumulation of wordy
common-places, the gaudy pretensions of poetical fiction, had enfeebled
and perverted our eye for nature. The study of the fine arts, which came
into fashion about forty years ago, and was then first considered as a
polite accomplishment, would tend imperceptibly to restore it. Painting
is essentially an imitative art; it cannot subsist for a moment on empty
generalities: the critic, therefore, who had been used to this sort of
substantial entertainment, would be disposed to read poetry with the
eye of a connoisseur, would be little captivated with smooth, polished,
unmeaning periods, and would turn with double eagerness and relish to
the force and precision of individual details, transferred, as it were,
to the page from the canvas. Thus an admirer of Teniers or Hobbima
might think little of the pastoral sketches of Pope or Goldsmith; even
Thompson describes not so much the naked object as what he sees in his
mind's eye, surrounded and glowing with the mild, bland, genial vapours
of his brain:--but the adept in Dutch interiors, hovels, and pig-styes
must find in Mr. Crabbe a man after his own heart. He is the very thing
itself; he paints in words, instead of colours: there is no other
difference. As Mr. Crabbe is not a painter, only because he does not use
a brush and colours, so he is for the most part a poet, only because
he writes in lines of ten syllables. All the rest might be found in a
newspaper, an old magazine, or a county-register. Our author is himself
a little jealous of the prudish fidelity of his homely Muse, and tries
to justify himself by precedents. He brings as a parallel instance of
merely literal description, Pope's lines on the gay Duke of Buckingham,
beginning "In the worst inn's worst room see Villiers lies!" But surely
nothing can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking, Crabbe
would have described merely what was there. The objects in Pope stand
out to the fancy from the mixture of the mean with the gaudy, from the
contrast of the scene and the character. There is an appeal to the
imagination; you see what is passing in a poetical point of view. In
Crabbe there is no foil, no contrast, no impulse given to the mind. It
is all on a level and of a piece. In fact, there is so little connection
between the subject-matter of Mr. Crabbe's lines and the ornament of
rhyme which is tacked to them, that many of his verses read like serious
burlesque, and the parodies which have been made upon them are hardly so
quaint as the originals.
Mr. Crabbe's great fault is certainly that he is a sickly, a querulous,
a uniformly dissatisfied poet. He sings the country; and he sings it in
a pitiful tone. He chooses this subject only to take the charm out of
it, and to dispel the illusion, the glory, and the dream, which had
hovered over it in golden verse from Theocritus to Cowper. He sets out
with professing to overturn the theory which had hallowed a shepherd's
life, and made the names of grove and valley music to our ears, in order
to give us truth in its stead; but why not lay aside the fool's cap and
bells at once? Why not insist on the unwelcome reality in plain prose?
If our author is a poet, why trouble himself with statistics? If he is a
statistic writer, why set his ill news to harsh and grating verse? The
philosopher in painting the dark side of human nature may have reason
on his side, and a moral lesson or remedy in view. The tragic poet, who
shews the sad vicissitudes of things and the disappointments of the
passions, at least strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and
lends wings to our desires, by which we, "at one bound, high overleap
all bound" of actual suffering. But Mr. Crabbe does neither. He gives
us discoloured paintings of life; helpless, repining, unprofitable,
unedifying distress. He is not a philosopher, but a sophist, a
misanthrope in verse; a _namby-pamby_ Mandeville, a Malthus turned
metrical romancer. He professes historical fidelity; but his vein is not
dramatic; nor does he give us the _pros_ and _cons_ of that versatile
gipsey, Nature. He does not indulge his fancy, or sympathise with us, or
tell us how the poor feel; but how he should feel in their situation,
which we do not want to know. He does not weave the web of their lives
of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, but clothes them all in the
same dingy linsey-woolsey, or tinges them with a green and yellow
melancholy. He blocks out all possibility of good, cancels the hope, or
even the wish for it as a weakness; check-mates Tityrus and Virgil at
the game of pastoral cross-purposes, disables all his adversary's white
pieces, and leaves none but black ones on the board. The situation of a
country clergyman is not necessarily favourable to the cultivation of
the Muse. He is set down, perhaps, as he thinks, in a small curacy for
life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader's imagination
in luckless verse. Shut out from social converse, from learned colleges
and halls, where he passed his youth, he has no cordial fellow-feeling
with the unlettered manners of the _Village_ or the _Borough_; and he
describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than
himself. All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising
generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast
with sterile, blighting lines, the only leaf of his books where honour,
beauty, worth, or pleasure bloom, is that inscribed to the Rutland
family! We might adduce instances of what we have said from every page
of his works: let one suffice--
"Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.
When tides were neap, and in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels, that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fall'n flood:
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How side-long crabs had crawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye;
What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,
Gave from the salt ditch-side the bellowing boom:
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice;
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound;
Where all, presented to the eye or ear,
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear."
This is an exact _fac-simile_ of some of the most unlovely parts of the
creation. Indeed the whole of Mr. Crabbe's _Borough_, from which the
above passage is taken, is done so to the life, that it seems almost
like some sea-monster, crawled out of the neighbouring slime, and
harbouring a breed of strange vermin, with a strong local scent of
tar and bulge-water. Mr. Crabbe's _Tales_ are more readable than his
_Poems_; but in proportion as the interest increases, they become more
oppressive. They turn, one and all, upon the same sort of teazing,
helpless, mechanical, unimaginative distress;--and though it is not
easy to lay them down, you never wish to take them up again. Still in
this way, they are highly finished, striking, and original portraits,
worked out with an eye to nature, and an intimate knowledge of the
small and intricate folds of the human heart. Some of the best are
the _Confidant_, the story of _Silly Shore_, the _Young Poet_, the
_Painter_. The episode of _Phoebe Dawson_ in the _Village_, is one of
the most tender and pensive; and the character of the methodist parson
who persecutes the sailor's widow with his godly, selfish love, is one
of the most profound. In a word, if Mr. Crabbe's writings do not add
greatly to the store of entertaining and delightful fiction, yet they
will remain "as a thorn in the side of poetry," perhaps for a century to
come!
[Footnote A:
"Like angels' visits, short and far between."--.
_Blair's Grave_.]
[Footnote B: Is not this word, which occurs in the last line but one,
(as well as before) an instance of that repetition, which we so often
meet with in the most correct and elegant writers?]
* * * * *
SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.
The subject of the present article is one of the ablest and most
accomplished men of the age, both as a writer, a speaker, and a
converser. He is, in fact, master of almost every known topic, whether
of a passing or of a more recondite nature. He has lived much in
society, and is deeply conversant with books. He is a man of the
world and a scholar; but the scholar gives the tone to all his other
acquirements and pursuits. Sir James is by education and habit, and we
were going to add, by the original turn of his mind, a college-man; and
perhaps he would have passed his time most happily and respectably, had
he devoted himself entirely to that kind of life. The strength of his
faculties would have been best developed, his ambition would have met
its proudest reward, in the accumulation and elaborate display of grave
and useful knowledge. As it is, it may be said, that in company he talks
well, but too much; that in writing he overlays the original subject and
spirit of the composition, by an appeal to authorities and by too formal
a method; that in public speaking the logician takes place of the
orator, and that he fails to give effect to a particular point or to
urge an immediate advantage home upon his adversary from the enlarged
scope of his mind, and the wide career he takes in the field of
argument.
To consider him in the last point of view, first. As a political
partisan, he is rather the lecturer than the advocate. He is able to
instruct and delight an impartial and disinterested audience by the
extent of his information, by his acquaintance with general principles,
by the clearness and aptitude of his illustrations, by vigour and
copiousness of style; but where he has a prejudiced or unfair antagonist
to contend with, he is just as likely to put weapons into his enemy's
hands as to wrest them from him, and his object seems to be rather to
deserve than to obtain success. The characteristics of his mind are
retentiveness and comprehension, with facility of production: but he is
not equally remarkable for originality of view, or warmth of feeling, or
liveliness of fancy. His eloquence is a little rhetorical; his reasoning
chiefly logical: he can bring down the account of knowledge on a vast
variety of subjects to the present moment, he can embellish any cause he
undertakes by the most approved and graceful ornaments, he can support
it by a host of facts and examples, but he cannot advance it a step
forward by placing it on a new and triumphant 'vantage-ground, nor
can he overwhelm and break down the artificial fences and bulwarks
of sophistry by the irresistible tide of manly enthusiasm. Sir James
Mackintosh is an accomplished debater, rather than a powerful orator: he
is distinguished more as a man of wonderful and variable talent than
as a man of commanding intellect. His mode of treating a question is
critical, and not parliamentary. It has been formed in the closet and
the schools, and is hardly fitted for scenes of active life, or the
collisions of party-spirit. Sir James reasons on the square; while the
arguments of his opponents are loaded with iron or gold. He makes,
indeed, a respectable ally, but not a very formidable opponent. He is as
likely, however, to prevail on a neutral, as he is almost certain to be
baffled on a hotly contested ground. On any question of general
policy or legislative improvement, the Member for Nairn is heard with
advantage, and his speeches are attended with effect: and he would have
equal weight and influence at other times, if it were the object of the
House to hear reason, as it is his aim to speak it. But on subjects of
peace or war, of political rights or foreign interference, where the
waves of party run high, and the liberty of nations or the fate of
mankind hangs trembling in the scales, though he probably displays equal
talent, and does full and heaped justice to the question (abstractedly
speaking, or if it were to be tried before an impartial assembly), yet
we confess we have seldom heard him, on such occasions, without pain for
the event. He did not slur his own character and pretensions, but he
compromised the argument. He spoke _the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth_; but the House of Commons (we dare aver it) is
not the place where the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth can be spoken with safety or with advantage. The judgment of the
House is not a balance to weigh scruples and reasons to the turn of a
fraction: another element, besides the love of truth, enters into the
composition of their decisions, the reaction of which must be calculated
upon and guarded against. If our philosophical statesman had to open the
case before a class of tyros, or a circle of grey-beards, who wished to
form or to strengthen their judgments upon fair and rational grounds,
nothing could be more satisfactory, more luminous, more able or more
decisive than the view taken of it by Sir James Mackintosh. But the
House of Commons, as a collective body, have not the docility of youth,
the calm wisdom of age; and often only want an excuse to do wrong, or
to adhere to what they have already determined upon; and Sir James,
in detailing the inexhaustible stores of his memory and reading, in
unfolding the wide range of his theory and practice, in laying down
the rules and the exceptions, in insisting upon the advantages and the
objections with equal explicitness, would be sure to let something drop
that a dextrous and watchful adversary would easily pick up and turn
against him, if this were found necessary; or if with so many _pros_ and
_cons_, doubts and difficulties, dilemmas and alternatives thrown into
it, the scale, with its natural bias to interest and power, did not
already fly up and kick the beam. There wanted unity of purpose,
impetuosity of feeling to break through the phalanx of hostile and
inveterate prejudice arrayed against him. He gave a handle to his
enemies; threw stumbling-blocks in the way of his friends. He raised so
many objections for the sake of answering them, proposed so many doubts
for the sake of solving them, and made so many concessions where none
were demanded, that his reasoning had the effect of neutralizing itself;
it became a mere exercise of the understanding without zest or spirit
left in it; and the provident engineer who was to shatter in pieces
the strong-holds of corruption and oppression, by a well-directed and
unsparing discharge of artillery, seemed to have brought not only his
own cannon-balls, but his own wool-packs along with him to ward off
the threatened mischief. This was a good deal the effect of his maiden
speech on the transfer of Genoa, to which Lord Castlereagh did not deign
an answer, and which another Honourable Member called "a _finical_
speech." It was a most able, candid, closely argued, and philosophical
exposure of that unprincipled transaction; but for this very reason it
was a solecism in the place where it was delivered. Sir James has, since
this period, and with the help of practice, lowered himself to the tone
of the House; and has also applied himself to questions more congenial
to his habits of mind, and where the success would be more likely to be
proportioned to his zeal and his exertions.
There was a greater degree of power, or of dashing and splendid effect
(we wish we could add, an equally humane and liberal spirit) in the
_Lectures on the Law of Nature and Nations_, formerly delivered by Sir
James (then Mr.) Mackintosh, in Lincoln's-Inn Hall. He shewed greater
confidence; was more at home there. The effect was more electrical and
instantaneous, and this elicited a prouder display of intellectual
riches, and a more animated and imposing mode of delivery. He grew
wanton with success. Dazzling others by the brilliancy of his
acquirements, dazzled himself by the admiration they excited, he lost
fear as well as prudence; dared every thing, carried every thing before
him. The Modern Philosophy, counterscarp, outworks, citadel, and all,
fell without a blow, by "the whiff and wind of his fell _doctrine_," as
if it had been a pack of cards. The volcano of the French Revolution
was seen expiring in its own flames, like a bon-fire made of straw: the
principles of Reform were scattered in all directions, like chaff before
the keen northern blast. He laid about him like one inspired; nothing
could withstand his envenomed tooth. Like some savage beast got into
the garden of the fabled Hesperides, he made clear work of it, root and
branch, with white, foaming tusks--
"Laid waste the borders, and o'erthrew the bowers."
The havoc was amazing, the desolation was complete. As to our visionary
sceptics and Utopian philosophers, they stood no chance with our
lecturer--he did not "carve them as a dish fit for the Gods, but hewed
them as a carcase fit for hounds." Poor Godwin, who had come, in the
_bonhommie_ and candour of his nature, to hear what new light had broken
in upon his old friend, was obliged to quit the field, and slunk away
after an exulting taunt thrown out at "such fanciful chimeras as a
golden mountain or a perfect man." Mr. Mackintosh had something of the
air, much of the dexterity and self-possession, of a political and
philosophical juggler; and an eager and admiring audience gaped and
greedily swallowed the gilded bait of sophistry, prepared for their
credulity and wonder. Those of us who attended day after day, and were
accustomed to have all our previous notions confounded and struck out of
our hands by some metaphysical legerdemain, were at last at some loss to
know _whether two and two made four_, till we had heard the lecturer's
opinion on that head. He might have some mental reservation on the
subject, some pointed ridicule to pour upon the common supposition,
some learned authority to quote against it. To anticipate the line of
argument he might pursue, was evidently presumptuous and premature. One
thing only appeared certain, that whatever opinion he chose to take up,
he was able to make good either by the foils or the cudgels, by gross
banter or nice distinctions, by a well-timed mixture of paradox and
common-place, by an appeal to vulgar prejudices or startling scepticism.
It seemed to be equally his object, or the tendency of his Discourses,
to unsettle every principle of reason or of common sense, and to leave
his audience at the mercy of the _dictum_ of a lawyer, the nod of a
minister, or the shout of a mob. To effect this purpose, he drew largely
on the learning of antiquity, on modern literature, on history, poetry,
and the belles-lettres, on the Schoolmen and on writers of novels,
French, English, and Italian. In mixing up the sparkling julep, that
by its potent operation was to scour away the dregs and feculence and
peccant humours of the body politic, he seemed to stand with his back
to the drawers in a metaphysical dispensary, and to take out of them
whatever ingredients suited his purpose. In this way he had an antidote
for every error, an answer to every folly. The writings of Burke, Hume,
Berkeley, Paley, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Grotius, Puffendorf, Cicero,
Aristotle, Tacitus, Livy, Sully, Machiavel, Guicciardini, Thuanus, lay
open beside him, and he could instantly lay his hand upon the passage,
and quote them chapter and verse to the clearing up of all difficulties,
and the silencing of all oppugners. Mr. Mackintosh's Lectures were after
all but a kind of philosophical centos. They were profound, brilliant,
new to his hearers; but the profundity, the brilliancy, the novelty were
not his own. He was like Dr. Pangloss (not Voltaire's, but Coleman's)
who speaks only in quotations; and the pith, the marrow of Sir James's
reasoning and rhetoric at that memorable period might be put within
inverted commas. It, however, served its purpose and the loud echo died
away. We remember an excellent man and a sound critic[A] going to hear
one of these elaborate effusions; and on his want of enthusiasm being
accounted for from its not being one of the orator's brilliant days, he
replied, "he did not think a man of genius could speak for two hours
without saying something by which he would have been electrified."
We are only sorry, at this distance of time, for one thing in these
Lectures--the tone and spirit in which they seemed to have been composed
and to be delivered. If all that body of opinions and principles of
which the orator read his recantation was unfounded, and there was an
end of all those views and hopes that pointed to future improvement, it
was not a matter of triumph or exultation to the lecturer or any body
else, to the young or the old, the wise or the foolish; on the contrary,
it was a subject of regret, of slow, reluctant, painful admission--
"Of lamentation loud heard through the rueful air."