Sincere though cautious, frank and yet discreet,
Just all his dealings, faithful every word,
His passions’ master and his temper’s lord.”
His benevolence was splendid, and known to all men:
“He left to meaner minds the simple deed,
By which the houseless rest, the hungry feed;
His was a public bounty, vast and grand,
’Twas not in him to work with viewless hand.
* * * * *
He the first lifeboat plann’d; to him the place
Is deep in debt--’twas he revived the race.”
Yet nobody liked him--
“’Twould give me joy [says Crabbe] some gracious deed to meet
That has not called for glory in the street;
Who felt for many, could not always shun,
In some soft moment to be kind to one;
And yet they tell us, when Sir Denys died,
That not a widow in the borough cried.”
III. Perhaps it may be said that the subject of my lecture was after
all rather a commonplace old gentleman, and if what I have said
leaves this view, it is because I have failed to convey the effect
which the study of his works has left upon me. He certainly made a
great impression in his time, and was hailed as a true poet in an age
of poets. Nor is an age always wrong when it acclaims a man in whom
posterity sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with Byron as a poet
would be as absurd as to place his little stories on a level with the
romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. But in his own time
men rated him very highly, and this is the more remarkable because
he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, who achieved his
reputation in the nineteenth. He saturated himself in Pope and Dryden,
and the wits of a bygone age, and never conformed to the taste of
his own. The romantic movement, much as he admired Scott’s writings,
never influenced Crabbe nor does he seem to have been affected by
the Lake Poets. He was simply himself: simple-minded if sensitive,
full of courage, and with a quiet dignity of his own. Unworldly, yet
remarkably shrewd, curiously blind to the beauties of Nature and of
art, yet wonderfully alive to the marvels of the world and the pathos
of life. Stern and uncompromising as a realist, he lacked neither
sympathy nor imagination, and possessed a saving sense of descriptive
humour. Lord Thurlow said of him, “He’s as like Parson Adams as twelve
to a dozen, by G--d,” and he has much of the winning simplicity of
Fielding’s charming clerical creation. And yet he had the elevation
of character and the genius with fearless hand to tear the veil which
hid the lives of the poor from their richer neighbours, to expose the
cruelty, injustice, and rapacity of an age which for all its greatness
was singularly callous and unsympathetic of weakness and suffering;
and Crabbe may take his place not only with the poets of his time, but
with the Clarksons, the Howards, the Frys, and the good men and women
who succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical humanity. We need
not grudge him the generous commendation of the greatest among his
contemporary poets--
“Nature’s sternest painter and her best.”
FOOTNOTES:
[2] My father’s first cousin, the Ven. Robert Groome, Archdeacon of
Suffolk, the intimate friend of Edward Fitzgerald, was the grandson
of a native of Aldeburgh who owned the _Unity_ smack in which Crabbe
sailed to London in 1780. My maternal great-grandparents, as will
appear, also knew the poet.
[3] One cannot fail to recall Horace’s generous acknowledgement of the
liberality of his father, “macro pauper agello,” in sending him to Rome
to be educated. _Sat._ I. vi. 71.
[4] In the “Life” by his son it is implied that Crabbe was Maskill’s
assistant; but this is denied in Huchon’s “George Crabbe and his
Times,” p. 63.
[5] So the “Life.” Huchon points out that his name at this time was
Long, and that he subsequently assumed the name of North. Crabbe went
to London on the _Unity_ smack, the property of Robinson Groome,
grandfather of Archdeacon Groome, the intimate friend of E. Fitzgerald.
Huchon, _op. cit._, p. 81.
[6] “The Village.”
[7] In the “Life” Crabbe is said to have prescribed for his
parishioners at Muston with great success.
[8] For this abominable system see Walpole, “History of England from
1815,” vol. i, p. 163, and his quotations from Romilly and Yonge.
Dickens, of course, alludes to the apprenticing of parish-boys in
“Oliver Twist.”
[9] Lockhart’s “Life of Scott.” Huchon points out several obvious
discrepancies. “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 435.
[10] He is said to have been “Challoner Arcedekne, who built Glevering
Hall,” near Parham. Huchon, “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 309. The
bitterness of the satire lies in the little known fact that at the time
the family of Arcedekne was not in the eighteenth century reckoned
among the old county families: their fortune having been recently
acquired in the East Indies.
LECTURE III
MARGARET CATCHPOLE
May I invite you to-day to a remote corner of England and ask you to
associate with rather humble folk? Our heroine is a servant maid;
her romance is her love for a smuggler and the faithful affection of
a young farmer. The greatest personages to whom I shall introduce
you are a Suffolk brewer and his worthy lady and uncommonly numerous
family, one of whom was my grandfather. Yet it is almost impossible to
imagine that men alive within our memory should have shared even as
young children in the scenes I have to describe--the lawlessness of the
country, the wild acts recorded, the stilted language employed by the
chief actors. The strange callousness of the criminal code, the very
piety displayed by some of the principal characters, are completely out
of date and almost incomprehensible. The author himself of this true
romance, though he only died in 1877, evidently wrote and thought in
ways quite alien to those now in vogue.
I shall continue what I have said about Crabbe by attempting briefly to
describe the county of Suffolk (the South-folk), which must occupy our
attention during this lecture. I do so with no apology, for I believe
that many a New England family tree springs from roots deeply embedded
in its soil.
One thing realised by every child born in East Anglia is that he is not
one of those inferior people who are born in the “Shires.” His native
land is not called after any town, Northampton, Bedford, Leicester,
or Cambridge: he belongs to a race, not to a territorial division,
invented less than a thousand years ago. He and his kinsmen, the
North folk, are East Anglians; and the rest of the world are to him
“furriners,” or people who came from the “Sheeres.” Not that he is an
unmixed race--far from it. The peasantry were in the land long before
the Angles arrived. They are a small dark people, who have survived
countless invasions and will probably outlive modern civilisation.
When you see them beating a field or covert for game and kill hares
and rabbits by throwing their sticks with unerring aim, you feel that
they do much as their ancestors did before the dawn of history. The
Anglian is a big blond man slow of speech and apparently somewhat
dull, but in a bargain he is seldom the loser. The little town of
Hadleigh was once the capital of Alfred’s rival, Guthrum, the Dane;
and the Norse origin of many families reveals itself in Grimwood,
Grimwade, Grimsey, and Grimes. Flemings and Dutch, French Huguenots,
have all contributed to the population of East Anglia; but despite
the blending of nationalities there is a strong feeling of a common
tie binding all these heterogeneous elements together. Yet there are
curious local divisions existing to this day. The eastern and western
parts of the county are at constant feud. When the county councils were
established in the ‘eighties,’ Suffolk had to be divided into East
and West, because the two would not work together. When last year the
county was made a single diocese, Ipswich would not allow the ancient
western monastic town of Bury St. Edmunds to give the bishop his
title; and Bury St. Edmunds scorned to submit to the richer but less
aristocratic Ipswich. So in desperation the diocese had to be called
‘St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich.’
To look at an Ordnance map one would say that Suffolk was very flat
and eminently agricultural. The highest hill I could find was 402
feet above the sea; seldom does the land rise over 200 feet. Yet a
motor drive in Suffolk gives one the sensation of having been on a
switchback railway. One is never on the level, and some of the little
ascents and descents are very sharp. The beautiful church towers
are usually on hills and the churches are often placed outside the
villages. The road or ‘street’ (Roman _stratum_) on each side of which
the hamlet stands frequently runs up a hill. The lanes are narrow and
muddy; and at the bottom of a hill often waterlogged. Communication
must have been exceedingly difficult--a fact which explains many
peculiarities of the people.
Nowhere is there a sharper line drawn by nature in the county than
between the agricultural land in the centre and the coast. Rarely do
the corn lands reach the sea. A belt of breezy commons, bright with
gorse, extends almost from Lowestoft to Ipswich, and a glance at the
map shews how thin the population is. Only by branch lines of recent
construction does the railway reach the Suffolk coast. Cut off by a
wild tract of commons and marshes, the inhabitants of the little ports
formed strangely isolated communities, and regarded with no friendly
eye the villagers of the interior, marrying only among themselves and
keeping carefully apart. A brief survey of the coast throws a light
on the character of the people. All along the shore the five fathom
line, sometimes half a mile, sometimes as much as three miles from the
shore, marks the continual encroachment of the North Sea. Towns like
Aldeburgh and Dunwich, once standing a mile or more from the shore,
are now, as in the case of the first, threatened by the waves; or,
like Dunwich, once a famous seaport, almost entirely washed away and
submerged. Occasionally, as from Aldeburgh to Orford, the sea makes its
own breakwater by casting up long banks of shingle, and even now, for
nearly ten miles, save for coastguard stations and lighthouses, the
Suffolk foreshore is absolutely uninhabited.
One of the most striking features of the coast is the inland tidal
rivers. In the south are the Stour and the Orwell, which converge
at the important harbour of Harwich; and at the head of the tidal
waters of the Orwell is Ipswich. The river itself when the tide is
high is a most beautiful estuary with parks and woods sloping down
to the water--Stoke Park, Wherstead Park, Woolverstone on the south,
Alnesbourn Priory and Orwell Park on the north. A few miles north
of the estuary of the Orwell and Stour is the river Deben, which
culminates inland at Woodbridge and was the scene of many a solitary
boating expedition by the famous translator of Omar Khayyam, Edward
Fitzgerald. Then comes the shingle bank I have spoken of, parting the
river Ore from the sea, as far as Slaughden, when it turns inland and
becomes the Alde, giving its name to Aldeburgh. Great salt marshes in
many places fringe these rivers and impart an air of desolation to the
surrounding scenery.
Rightly to appreciate this curious country we must divest ourselves
of modern ideas, forget that we can be in London in two hours, ignore
the fact that the commons have been turned into golf courses, that the
people are occupied by letting lodgings, that their harvest is the
holiday season, and that we can motor on most of the roads in comfort.
One must go back, and not so very far after all, to a time when it
would have needed a guide to enable you to find Aldeburgh and the
coast, and when you would have received the reverse of a hearty welcome
from its inhabitants, “a surly race” who viewed strangers with “a
suspicious eye,” and no wonder, since they had the best of reasons for
concealing “the way they got their wealth.” You must transport yourself
into this past, if you would wish to understand what the poet Crabbe
has to tell you about his native place.
I think I caught something of his spirit when I went to Aldeburgh to
prepare myself for writing this lecture. It was on a chill December
day, damp and cold with a northeast wind. I had had a cold for a week
and it lay very heavily on my chest, so my spirits were the reverse
of buoyant. Rain was falling as I made my way along the deserted High
street and walked to Slaughden Quay, where Crabbe was born, and as a
young man worked at rolling casks from the hookers to the stores. A
“dirty sea” at low tide was breaking against the shingle bank, and on
the other side was the valley of the Alde and dreary marshes stretching
to the low uplands on the horizon. On the rising ground above the town
rose the church tower of Aldeburgh; and one could well imagine what a
dreary home the desolate quay and the squalid little town must have
been, when the only approach was by the harbourless sea, or by sandy
tracks over a bleak moor, or by the sluggish river winding through the
marsh.
The peculiarities of East Anglia, both inland and on the coast, are
reflected in its inhabitants. It is a country which by its isolation
has fostered strong originality in all classes, manifesting itself
frequently in a species of coarseness of fibre and sensibility. The
people have not a character for high intelligence, at any rate in
Suffolk, where “silly” is the epithet applied to the county. Despite
this fact perhaps no part of Great Britain has produced so many
“worthies” of the highest order. In almost every one of these the
“animal” is very strong and the intelligence is dominated by practical
considerations. Suffolk and Norfolk respectively have bred perhaps
the two greatest of English statesmen--Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Robert
Walpole. Wolsey impressed his contemporaries by his native force and
arrogance; and Bishop Creighton explains in his biography of him how
sane a view he took of his country’s position in regard to the politics
of Europe. Walpole, with the tastes of a boorish squire, little
delicacy of mind, and a cynical contempt for mankind, was an unrivalled
financier and minister in days of material prosperity. In the forefront
among the pioneers of English science stands the famous Suffolk name of
Bacon. In his great achievements and his equally serious faults Francis
Bacon, Viscount Verulam, is an East Anglian. His luminous mind is seen
in the singularly lucid English in which his thoughts are expressed,
his rough common-sense reveals itself in the way in which he brushes
aside the speculative theories of the philosophers, and goes directly
for results based on practical experiment. And on the darker side, the
unscrupulous way in which he crushed friend and foe alike in order
to attain the position, which his genius entitled him to take in the
country, discloses the same lack of sensibility which we frequently see
in the East Anglian character.
Among the great judges few take a higher place than Lord Thurlow.
Scarcely anyone could inspire such fear by the mere force of his
personality than he. Whether in the House of Lords, when he crushed
the Duke of Grafton, who twitted him with being a _novus homo_; or in
the law courts; or at his own table in private life, where, in his old
age, he could make the greatest wits of the day retire in discomfiture,
he shewed himself an antagonist to be dreaded. Yet, as Crabbe attests,
under that rough exterior beat a kind heart.
Not only the genius of Nelson, the son of a Norfolk Rector, as well as
the moral failure which cast a stain on the unparalleled lustre of his
name, may be traceable to his native soil. Even to-day there is one to
whom England looks with confidence, though his stern practical ability
inspires but little affection, among whose proud and well-deserved
titles is the name of his mother’s home, an out-of-the-way Suffolk
village; for on entering the peerage Earl Kitchener assumed the style
of Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspal.[11]
The force of character which produces great men is certain almost to
manifest itself for evil also, and we recognise the truth of much of
Crabbe’s stern realism in the characters to which he introduces us.
As Dr. Jessop, a singularly acute observer of the Norfolk villager,
points out, the criminal annals of East Anglia disclose outbursts
of remarkable ferocity on the part of its inhabitants. Side by side
with this vindictive spirit is a proneness to superstition, generally
of a gloomy character. Aldeburgh has records of many portents and
apparitions in its annals; nowhere was the witch finder more active
than in Suffolk; and, even in the later half of the nineteenth
century, a woman suspected of being a witch was done to death in the
neighbouring county of Essex. We have seen in Crabbe how what was then
called “enthusiasm” in religion drove more than one of his characters
into a despair of gloom. Not that there was not a great deal of genuine
piety: the churches of East Anglia are the glory of the countryside,
and many of the most magnificent are due to the liberality of its
traders and manufacturers in the days when it was one of the industrial
centres of English life. Indeed, it may not be merely local vanity
which explains the contemptuous epithet “silly” as carrying with it
not a slight but a compliment--the word being used in its older sense
as the equivalent of the German _selig_, “pious.” Nowhere did the
Reformation obtain a stronger hold than in the diocese of Norwich; and
its roll of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary was exceptionally
large. Forcefulness for good or evil, superstition, and genuine piety
all play their part in the story I am now about to ask you to consider.
The popularity in Suffolk of the life of Margaret Catchpole--though the
literary merit of the book is not great--is a testimony that her tale
strikes a sympathetic chord to this day.
I must preface what I have to say by a few remarks about the author
of the book. The Rev. Richard Cobbold was the son of John Cobbold,
a wealthy brewer of the Cliff House, Ipswich, by his second wife,
who plays so important a part in the story I am about to put before
you. Mrs. Cobbold was a very remarkable woman, a friend of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, an author of some repute; and, what was most unusual at the
time, an eloquent public speaker. She married Mr. Cobbold when he
was a widower with fourteen children and had by him a large family
herself--six sons and a daughter. Richard was the youngest son, being
born in 1797 and dying in his eightieth year in 1877. He was Rector of
Wortham, a parish in the north of Suffolk, an author of repute in his
day, highly respected as a devoted clergyman, a strong churchman, and a
keen and active sportsman. In 1845 he brought out “Margaret Catchpole.”
In his preface he says: “The public may depend upon the truth of the
main features of this narrative; indeed, most of the facts recorded
were matters of public notoriety at the time of their occurrence. The
author who details them is a son with whom this extraordinary female
lived and from whose hands he received the letters and facts here
given.” The story of Margaret Catchpole told in the novel is briefly as
follows:
She was born at Nacton, a village not far from Ipswich, on what was
then a somewhat desolate heath on the north bank of the Orwell. Her
father was head ploughman to a farmer named Denton, a well-known
breeder of Suffolk cart horses. From childhood she was known as a good
rider, and she obtained her first place as a servant by catching a very
spirited pony of Mr. Denton’s, whose wife was taken suddenly ill, and
riding at a gallop to the town and through the streets crowded on a
market day to fetch the doctor. As she had not had time to saddle or
bridle her steed, she rode him bareback with a halter to guide him--a
really remarkable feat for a child of fourteen. As she grew up, she
found a suitor in a clever sailor named William Laud, originally a
boat builder, who had been a pupil in navigation, says the author,
under a Mr. Crabbe, a brother of the poet’s.[12] Laud’s education and
abilities seem to have been above his station in life, and had he been
able to keep straight he would have risen to the command of a merchant
ship, and possibly even to officer’s rank in the Royal Navy. As it was,
he attached himself to a man named Bargood, an unscrupulous employer of
smugglers, and became one of the leaders of that highly organized body
which in the war with France was bent on defrauding the revenue. Laud’s
influence was singularly bad for the Catchpole family. Two brothers
came to a bad end, another enlisted and disappeared for years, and
the whole household fell under suspicion of being in league with the
smugglers.
Now comes the undoubted fiction in the story. Margaret Catchpole
particularly requested that her husband’s name should be concealed, if
her adventures were ever published, in order that her children might
not know she had been a convict. Consequently we must assume that
the honest lover called John Barry of Levington, the parish next to
Nacton, is fictitious, and probably that he and his brother Edward are
introduced to heighten the romance.[13] Anyhow, in the story Laud was
severely wounded by John’s brother Edward, who commanded the preventive
men on Felixstow Beach, and was supposed to have been killed. Margaret
nursed Laud in his concealment into convalescence; and later on when
she was in service at a Mrs. Wake’s he attempted to carry her off by
violence. She was, however, protected by the faithful John Barry and
a strange old fisherman nicknamed Robinson Crusoe. John Barry was
seriously wounded. On his recovery he proposed to Margaret, who refused
him; and, in desperation, the rejected lover emigrated to the Colony
of New South Wales, Australia.
In May, 1793, Margaret entered into service with Mrs. Cobbold of the
Cliff, Ipswich. The house still stands adjoining the well-known brewery
on the shore of the river Orwell. Even to this day it lies at the
fringe of the business part of Ipswich, at the end of the docks and
quays; beyond it is country and the well-wooded banks of the beautiful
river. The girl was under-nursemaid, and also helped the cook in the
evening. She soon manifested exceptional abilities; for not only did
she learn all the lessons which the children had to prepare, but on
three occasions she saved the life of members of Mrs. Cobbold’s large
family. She rescued two little boys, George and Frederick (the latter
my grandfather), from the fall of a wall, which would inevitably have
crushed them; she saved another, Henry, in Ipswich, when he had fallen
into deep water; and when an older boy, named William, had gone alone
down the Orwell to shoot ducks and his boat had been overturned, it
was by her courage and resource that the lad was recovered in a state
of insensibility. On the latter occasion Laud reappears suddenly. He
had been pressed into the Navy and was now necessarily leading a more
reputable life, and Margaret could avow her partiality for her lover
without shame. In 1794 Laud fought in Lord Howe’s victory of the 1st of
June and apparently distinguished himself highly in the action, being
one of the crew entrusted with bringing home a valuable prize. In the
story Laud is represented as a man naturally with good impulses, but
weak and unstable; and the villain of the piece is the sailor who was
Laud’s mate in his smuggling days--one Luff.