clergyman, Crabbe’s experiences, on which he founded his rhymed
tales--for such his poems really are--are considered to have been
mainly clerical. But, to understand him aright, we must remember that
he was more or less engaged in the practice of medicine from the age of
fourteen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy to quote many lines
wherein the doctor and not the parson is revealed, and he never lost
the professional dislike of quacks or contempt of valetudinarians.
Let us now consider how Crabbe’s experiences of Aldeburgh appear in
his poems. I will take most of my extracts from his early poem, “The
Village,” but a few will be from “The Borough,” which did not appear
till more than twenty years later.
In “The Village” Crabbe boldly asks:
“From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”
and declines to follow the fashion of speaking of rural life as the
height of felicity. He says:
“I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms;”
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place.
* * * * *
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?”
In this spirit he describes the barren coast of East Suffolk, not then
the haunt of the holiday-maker and the golfer, but the battleground of
the smuggler and the preventive men, the home of--
“A bold and artful, surly, savage race,
Who only skilled to take the finny tribe,
The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe;
Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high,
On the tossed vessel bend their eager eye,
Which to the coast directs its venturous way,
Theirs, or the ocean’s miserable prey.”
This description of the barren land about the coast well illustrates
Crabbe’s power of observation:
“Lo, where the heath with withering brake grown o’er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its wither’d ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o’er the land, and rob the blighted rye;
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
Here the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high above the slender sheaf,
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O’er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade;
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,
And a sad splendour vainly shines around.”
We have already heard of the workhouse hospital and the “potent quack”
who attended to the sick. Let us now listen to Crabbe’s description of
the young clergyman who ministered to the afflicted of his village:
“A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task
As much as God or man can fairly ask;
The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.
* * * * *
A sportsman keen, he shouts through half the day,
And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.”
But I must reluctantly forbear to quote more from “The Village,” and
ask you to turn your attention to two passages in “The Borough,” which
show what sort of men lived in Crabbe’s native town, and also indicate
the power our author has in depicting two very different characters.
I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, first. Grimes was one of
those human monsters who delight in cruelty; and the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, to its shame, furnished victims for its
exercise in workhouse apprentices. The guardians of the overflowing
workhouses of London were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous
numbers by binding children as apprentices to masters, who practically
became the owners of the little victims they were paid to teach.
“Peter had heard there were in London then--
Still have their being!--workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind;
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.”[8]
Grimes did several of these wretched boys to death by his cruelty,
which was notorious in the borough, but the shocking thing was that
nobody troubled to interfere.
“None put the question: ‘Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? What, man! the lad must live;
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’
None reasoned thus; and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”
At last Grimes, who seems to have been never quite sane in his
brutality, went mad, and died raving at visions of his aged father and
the boys he had done to death.
More inviting is a picture of another fisherman, the mayor of the
borough:
“He was a fisher from his earliest day,
And placed his nets within the borough bay,
Where, by his skates, his herrings, and his soles,
He lived, nor dreamed of corporation doles.”
At last he saved £240 ($1200), and asked a friend what to do with it.
The friend suggests “put it out on interest.”
“‘Oh, but,’ said Daniel, ‘that’s a dangerous plan,
He may be robbed like any other man.’”
The friend tells Daniel that he will be paid five per cent. every year.
“‘What good is that?’ quoth Daniel, ‘for ’tis plain
If part I take, there can but part remain.’”
With great difficulty the principle of a mortgage is explained, and at
last,
“Much amazed was that good man. ‘Indeed,’
Said he, with gladdening eye, will money breed?
How have I lived? I grieve with all my heart
For my late knowledge of this precious art;
Five pounds for every hundred will he give?
And then the hundred--I begin to live.”
Such was the simplicity of the good folk of Aldeburgh, and so little
news of the great world reached the place that, when Crabbe, at the age
of twenty-five or six, went to London in 1780, he had never heard of
the genius and tragic fate of Chatterton.
I shall pass over the terrible year our aspirant for fame spent in
the Metropolis. It is a matter of personal pride to me to quote the
following passage from the “Life”:
“The only acquaintance he had on entering London was a Mrs. Burcham,
who had been in early youth a friend of Miss Elmy’s, and who was now
the wife of a linen-draper in Cornhill. This worthy woman and her
husband received him with cordial kindness; then invited him to make
their house his home whenever he chose; and as often as he availed
himself of this invitation he was treated with that frank familiarity
which cancels the appearance of obligation.” (“Life,” by the Rev. G.
Crabbe.)
I am glad to think my great-grand-parents understood the duty of
hospitality.
At last, after a terrible struggle with poverty and the unsuccessful
publication of a poem called “The Candidate,” Crabbe, who had hitherto
sought for a patron in vain, found one in Edmund Burke. It is said that
the following lines, expressive of the writer’s feelings on quitting
Aldeburgh, satisfied Burke that his petitioner was a poet:
“As on their neighbouring beach the swallows stand,
And wait for favouring winds to leave the land,
While still for flight the ready wing is spread,
So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;
Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign,
And cried, ‘Ah! hapless they who still remain,
Who still remain to hear the ocean roar,
Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore;
Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,
Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;
When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,
And begs a poor protection from the poor.’”
Burke selected two poems, “The Village” and “The Library,” for
publication. He introduced Crabbe to Fox, and also to Reynolds: the
latter brought him to Dr. Johnson; and when Burke heard that Crabbe
desired to be ordained, he induced Dr. Yonge, Bishop of Norwich, to
overlook his unacademic education, and to admit him to the ministry.
Lord Thurlow, himself an East Anglian, had at first refused to receive
Crabbe, but now treated him with much kindness, and gave him £100
($500); so Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh a clergyman--a very different
position from that which he had occupied on leaving--and was shortly
summoned thence to be domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, on the
recommendation of his firm friend, Mr. Burke. From the Duke’s seat
at Belvoir “The Village” was published, after it had been submitted
to Burke and Johnson. Naturally Crabbe’s sentiments about rustic
happiness and virtue accorded with the views of the worthy doctor, but
it is pleasing to remark the kindness which made him at the height
of his fame labour to improve the work of the younger poet. Very
characteristic are Johnson’s corrections of Crabbe’s manuscript. Here
is how Crabbe writes at the commencement of “The Village”:
“In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,
Tityrus the pride of Mantuan swains might sing:
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,
Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?”
From Johnson’s hands little remains unchanged:
“On Mincio’s banks in Cæsar’s bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the golden age again,
Must sleepy bards the flattering dreams prolong
Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”
I cannot feel very certain myself that the poet or his corrector got
the concluding line right.
I must now pass somewhat hurriedly over a long period. In 1785 Crabbe
published “The Newspaper,” and for twenty-two years he settled down
to his clerical duties and did not reappear as an author. He lived at
Stathern and Muston in Leicestershire the happy, domestic life of a
country clergyman, returning to Suffolk when his wife inherited a share
in the estate of her uncle, Mr. Tovell, at Parham.
In 1807 Crabbe appeared once more as a poet with “The Parish Register,”
and from this time his fame was unquestioned. “The Borough” followed
and then “The Tales.” But I need not weary you with dates and details.
A new generation arose to encourage Crabbe. His first poems had been
hailed by Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox; his later
by Scott, Byron, Lord Holland, and Rogers. His last days were spent
in comfort and comparative affluence at Trowbridge, to which he had
been appointed by a later Duke of Rutland. In 1817 he was lionised in
London, and in 1822 he paid his famous visit to Edinburgh and found Sir
Walter Scott in the midst of that preposterous pageant in which the
King and Sir William Curtis, Alderman of the City of London, delighted
the Scottish nation by appearing at Holyrood, tremendous in Stewart
tartan, with claymore, philabeg, and other accessories of the garb of
old Gaul. Scott, unwearied by his efforts to organise the King’s visit,
had time to welcome a brother poet, and it will be remembered that so
delighted was he to greet one whose writings had so often occupied
his attention that he sat down on the sacred glass out of which George
IV had deigned to drink, with the natural result.[9] Crabbe lived on
till February, 1832, passing away, full of years and honours, in the
seventy-eighth year of his age.
Crabbe’s works are sufficient to fill seven volumes, and it is not
possible to do more than endeavour to form an estimate of him by
limiting oneself to a few topics. I must content myself with three, and
I fear that even then I cannot do justice to these. Those I propose are:
I. Crabbe as reflecting the manners of his age.
II. As a delineator of character.
III. His place as a poet.
I. I have spoken of Crabbe’s scientific education--such as it was--and
of his power of observation, and I find, even in later life, more of
the doctor than the parson. It is for this reason that his work is of
more value than that of greater poets in reflecting his age. For Crabbe
was not one of those who let “fancy lead the way,” but dealt with
sober realities of experience, and even refrained from generalising
or theorising. For the religious life of the period Crabbe’s poems
are an invaluable document of which historians have, I suggest, made
too little use. There is no reason to suppose that our author took
Orders simply to secure literary leisure. His early diaries prove him
a most devout man, and the fact that he occupied himself twenty-two
years in parish work, without publishing, shows his devotion to his
profession. Yet he apparently saw no harm in accepting two livings
in Dorsetshire from the Lord Chancellor, which he scarcely ever went
near, but took other work in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any
compunctions later in leaving his parishes in the Midlands to the care
of a non-resident clergyman in order to live on his wife’s property
in Suffolk; and he evidently considered the then Duke of Rutland
unduly slow in providing for him. He was not always popular with his
parishioners. This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had been
known under less prosperous circumstances, but he met with a good deal
of opposition when, after his long residence in Suffolk, he returned
to Muston; and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly
for his flock, and only slowly won their sincere respect. A strict
moralist, he had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a staunch Whig
he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind. The serious and the profane
alike distrusted him. The worldly remonstrated at his description
of the workhouse chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and in
deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines
in “The Library”:
“Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast,
Nor finds a single heretic to roast,”
make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarised from Dryden:
“Socinians here and Calvinists abide
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide.”
Let us consider the clergy and religious teachers generally as he
describes them.
I can only allude to the five rectors, whom old Dibble, the village
clerk in the “Parish Register,” remembered. First comes “Good Master
Addle,” who
“Filled the seven-fold surplice fairly out,”
and “dozing died”; Next was Parson Peele, whose favourite text was “I
will not spare you,” and with “piercing jokes, and he’d a plenteous
store,” raised the tithes all round. Dr. “Grandspear” followed Peele, a
man who never stinted his “nappy beer,” and whom even cool Dissenters
wished and hoped that a man so kind, “A way to heaven, though not
their own, might find.” After him came the “Author Rector”--
“Careless was he of surplice, hood and band,
And kindly took them as they came to hand.”
He was succeeded by the young man from Cambridge, assailed in his youth
by a “clamorous sect,” who preached “conviction” so violently that “Our
best sleepers started as they slept.”
But says old Dibble:
“Down he sank upon his wretched bed
And gloomy crotchets filled his wandering head.”
And it is on this point that Crabbe is so illuminating as to the
spirit of his age. His difficulties as a clergyman were due rather to
the fanaticism than to the indifference of his flock. In “Sir Eustace
Grey,” a very powerful description of a madman who finds religious
peace at last, the poet concludes,--
“But, Ah! though time could yield relief
And soften woes it cannot cure;
Would we not suffer pain and grief
To have our reason sound and sure?
Then let us keep our bosoms pure
Our fancies’ favourite flights suppress;
Prepare the body to endure,
And bend the mind to meet distress,
And then His Guardian care implore,
Whom demons dread and men adore.”
As the doctor recommends a moderate and temperate life as the best
preventive of disease, and distrusts strong remedies and universal
panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the best medical tradition) regards the
pastoral work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most respects, he is
severe on what the eighteenth century styled “enthusiasm,” and on
sentimentalism in religion generally.
Thus, in “The Borough” we have in the letter on religious sects a
description of the contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had for Church
teaching:
“Hark to the Churchman; day by day he cries:
Children of men, be virtuous, be wise,
Seek patience, justice, temp’rance, meekness, truth,
In age be courteous, be sedate in youth,--So
they advise, and when such things be read,
How can we wonder that their flocks are dead?”
This “cauld morality,” as Scott makes Mr. Trumbull call it in
“Redgauntlet,” is contrasted with a really rousing sermon:
“Further and further spread the conquering word
As loud he cried--‘the Battle of the Lord.’
Ev’n those apart who were the sound denied,
Fell down instinctive, and in spirit died.
Nor stayed he yet--his eye, his frown, his speech,
His very gesture, had a power to teach;
With outstretch’d arms, strong voice, and piercing call
He won the field and made the Dagons fall;
And thus in triumph took his glorious way,
Through scenes of horror, terror, and dismay.”
Crabbe often found his work hindered by a sort of fatalistic quietism
which gave no hope to the “unconverted,” even when they sought the aid
of the minister of religion. In “Abel Keene” we have the story of a
merchant’s clerk who abandoned his faith, and then in days of poverty
came for help:
“Said the good man, ‘and then rejoice therefore:
’Tis good to tremble: prospects then are fair,
When the lost soul is plunged in just despair.
Once thou wert simply honest, just and pure,
Whole as thou thought’st, and never wish’d a cure:
* * * * *
‘What must I do,’ I said, ‘my soul to free?’
‘Do nothing, man--it will be done for thee.’--
‘But must I not, my reverend guide, believe?’
‘If thou art call’d thou wilt the faith receive:’--
‘But I repent not.’--Angry he replied,
‘If thou art call’d thou need’st naught beside:
Attend on us, and if ’tis Heaven’s decree
The call will come--if not, ah, woe! for thee.’”
Crabbe had very little toleration for spiritual valetudinarians. He
liked a good practical Christianity and was a little inclined to class
the overscrupulous with the _malades imaginaires_. In “The Gentleman
Farmer” we have a cleverly told story of a man of property, a professed
atheist and an avowed enemy of priests and doctors. At last he fell
ill; and his artful housekeeper, the meek Rebecca, produces a Scotch
cousin, Dr. Mollet. He is so successful that Rebecca decides to allow
the Rev. Mr. Whisp, a converted ostler, to advise her master. Mollet
and Whisp between them point out that it is his duty to marry Rebecca.
Then the three batten happily on their victim:
“Mollet his body orders, Whisp his soul,
And o’er his purse the lady takes control.”
Though Crabbe lived in the days of the French Revolution and Tom Paine,
infidelity seems to have given him far less trouble than the enthusiasm
of his parishioners. In “The Learned Boy” we have the tale of a
precocious lad such as our poet detested, a mean little creature, neat
and docile at school, to whom much could be taught because he could
imitate without reflecting:
“He thought not much indeed--but what depends
On pains and care, was at his fingers’ ends.”
As it was impossible to make such a lad into a farmer like his honest
father, he was sent to an office in town and picked up some up-to-date
views of the Bible from a brother-clerk. On his return he thus
explained his views to his grandmother, much to the dear old lady’s
distress:
“I myself began
To feel disturbed and to my Bible ran;
I now am wiser--yet agree in this,
The book has things that are not much amiss;
It is a fine old work, and I protest
I hate to hear it treated as a jest;
The book has wisdom in it, if you look
Wisely upon it as another book.”
The father, overhearing his hopeful son, treats him to a long
discourse, driven home with a cartwhip, and concluding:
“Teachers men honour, learners they allure;
But learners teaching of contempt are sure;
Scorn is their certain meed, and smart their only cure.”
I have dealt hitherto with the subject of religion as showing how
Crabbe can be used to illustrate his age. For politics I may refer to
the witty tale of “The Dumb Orators”; for social life to “Amusements in
the Borough,” and to “Clelia” and “Blaney” in the same collection.
II. In the biography the son writes with much discrimination of his
father’s genius:
“Whatever truth there may be in these lines (from “The Learned Boy,”
disparaging order), it is certain that this insensibility to the
beauty of order was a defect in his own mind; arising from what I
must call his want of taste.... This view of his mind is, I must add,
confirmed by his remarkable indifference to almost all the proper
objects of taste. He had no real love for painting, for music, for
architecture, or for what a painter’s eye considers as the beauties
of a landscape. But he had a passion for science--the science of the
human mind first--,” etc.
I believe that in delineation of character Crabbe is an artist indeed,
worthy to rank with Jane Austen and the Brontës, and perhaps even more
subtle than these ladies. He was not without a certain cynicism, and
his powers of critical observation were great. He draws the drunken
old reprobate in “The Borough,” the magnificent “Sir Denys Brand,” the
gentle, suffering “Ellen Orford,” the University don in “Schools,” with
masterly skill. I can only indicate his power in this respect by a few
inadequate quotations.
The sketches of the characters in the almshouses in “The Borough”
I commend to you as masterpieces. Clelia and Blaney had come down
in life, and were without much excuse. They had been jobbed into
the institution by Sir Denys Brand, and his words at the meeting of
trustees throw a world of light on the baronet’s character. Of Blaney
he says:
“‘’Tis true,’ said he, ‘the fellow’s quite a brute--
A very beast; but yet, with all his sin,
He has a manner--let the devil in.’”
Of Clelia:
“‘With all her faults,’ he said, ‘the woman knew
How to distinguish--had a manner, too,
And, as they say, she is allied to some
In decent station--let the creature come.’”
But though these two are powerfully drawn, Crabbe expends more care and
skill in depicting Benbow, who had been
“a jovial trader; men enjoyed
The night with him: the day was unemployed.”
Benbow, whenever he could find an audience, used to dilate on “The
men of might to mingle strong drink,” whom he had known. There was
Squire Asgill, whose manor house was a disgrace and scandal to the
countryside. It is needless to particularise. I can explain best by
saying that his life was that of Sir Pitt Crawley in his later days,
only he was more hospitable and generous. Let us see the worthy squire
at his best, in church:
“His worship ever was a churchman true,
He held in scorn the methodistic crew;
May God defend the Church and save the King,
He’d pray devoutly and divinely sing.
Admit that he the holy day would spend
As priests approved not, still he was a friend;
Much then I blame the preacher as too nice
To call such trifles by the name of vice;
Hinting, though gently and with cautious speech,
Of good example--’tis their trade to preach.
* * * * *
A weaker man, had he been so reviled,
Had left the place--he only swore and smiled.”
A still greater hero of Benbow’s was Captain Dowling, who was ready to
drink against any rival:
“Man after man they from the trial shrank,
And Dowling ever was the last that drank.”
But we must leave the old reprobate, and go on to a far subtler
delineation of character. Sir Denys Brand, to use Crabbe’s own words,
was “maybe too highly placed for an author, who seldom ventures above
middle life to delineate.” It is admitted that Sir Denys was a real
person, and the biographer withholds his name out of consideration for
his family.[10] It must be remembered that Crabbe’s nature was both
proud and sensitive, and the scathing satire he expends on Sir Denys
was probably provoked by some real or fancied slight.
He is one of the trustees of the almshouses. He took the office--
“True ’twas beneath him; but to do men good
Was motive never by his heart withstood.”
Sir Denys is an aristocratic prig of the first water, and Crabbe hated
prigs. He is one of those men who can be, with a certain amount of
truth, described as possessing all the virtues: