women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,[4] and his ever-prudent
Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
did not take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
curacy--his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
happiness was denied"--a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
other good men who have denounced long engagements.[5] The story of
Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather
better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.
Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
those letters and diaries of his which have been published, as in
anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous story of his politely
endeavouring to talk French to divers Highlanders, during George the
Fourth's visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered--Lockhart, who
tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If he did gently but firmly
extinguish a candle-snuff while Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were
indulging in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations of the
smoke, there may have been something to say for him as Anne Scott, to
whom Wordsworth told the story, is said to have hinted, from the side of
one of the senses. His life, no less than his work, speaks him a man of
amiable though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense
than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and
his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and
prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in
age and youth alike.
The mere facts of his strictly literary career are chiefly remarkable
for the enormous gap between his two periods of productiveness. In early
youth he published some verses in the magazines and a poem called
"Inebriety," which appeared at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in
London saw the publication of another short piece "The Candidate," but
with the ill-luck which then pursued him, the bookseller who brought it
out became bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered in "The
Library," 1781, followed by "The Village," 1783, which Johnson revised
and improved not a little. Two years later again came "The Newspaper,"
and then twenty-two years passed without anything appearing from
Crabbe's pen. It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
little or nothing to do, and for the greater part of the time, lived
away from his parish. It was not that he was idle, for we have his son's
testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that holocausts of
manuscripts in prose and verse used from time to time to be offered up
in the open air, for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass. At
last, in 1807, "The Parish Register" appeared, and three years later
"The Borough"--perhaps the strongest division of his work. The
miscellaneous Tales came in 1812, the "Tales of the Hall" in 1819.
Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected editions appeared, the last
and most complete being in 1829--a very comely little book in eight
volumes. His death led to the issue of some "Posthumous Tales" and to
the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
the case of almost any other poet.
For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit the greater play of
fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
of the three small volumes by which he, after his introduction to
Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
pieces of the school of Pope, but not characteristic of their author.
The first catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth, and
then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity, and the rest, but
is otherwise written very much in the air. "The Newspaper" suited Crabbe
a little better, because he pretty obviously took a particular newspaper
and went through its contents--scandal, news, reviews, advertisements--in
his own special fashion: but still the subject did not appeal to him. In
"The Village," on the other hand, contemporaries and successors alike
have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein. The two famous
passages which attracted the suffrages of judges so different as Scott
and Wordsworth, are still, after more than a hundred years, fresh,
distinct, and striking. Here they are once more:--
Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;--
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents who know no children's love dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows, with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
· · · · ·
Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,
All pride and business, bustle and conceit;
With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,
With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go,
He bids the gazing throng around him fly,
And carries fate and physic in his eye:
A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
And whose most tender mercy is neglect.
Paid by the parish for attendance here,
He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;
In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,
Impatience marked in his averted eyes;
And some habitual queries hurried o'er,
Without reply he rushes on the door:
His drooping patient, long inured to pain,
And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,
He ceases now the feeble help to crave
Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.
The poet executed endless variations on this class of theme, but he
never quite succeeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
_ad hoc_ so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.
Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession--the
"happiness denied"--had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
evident, though the minute elaboration of the views themselves is
almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
manner, if he ever tried to do so.
With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
Register," the twenty-four Letters of "The Borough," some of which have
single and others grouped subjects, and the sixty or seventy pieces
which make up the three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening. They are
also almost wholly devoted to narratives, partly satirical, partly
pathetic, of the lives of individuals of the lower and middle class
chiefly. Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories
of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for
the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's
fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the
approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a
mean, domineering spirit," and so forth. Gifford in one place actually
discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall make some further reference to
this curious attitude of Crabbe's admiring critics. For the moment I
shall only remark that the singularly mean character of so much of
Crabbe's style, the "style of drab stucco," as it has been unkindly
called, which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how the youth at
the theatre
Regained the felt and felt what he regained,
is by no means universal. The most powerful of all his pieces, the
history of Peter Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
free from it, and so are a few others. But it is common enough to be a
very serious stumbling-block. In nine tales out of ten this is the
staple:--
Of a fair town where Dr. Rack was guide,
His only daughter was the boast and pride.
Now that is unexceptionable verse enough, but what is the good of
putting it in verse at all? Here again:--
For he who makes me thus on business wait,
Is not for business in a proper state.
It is obvious that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a
burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings
himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from
which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full
of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far
different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of
Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its
kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:--
"I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,
"In my excursion with a friend of mine."
It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
description--the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
necessarily poetical--this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
which it serves to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores--never
indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
Jeffrey--
Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant
Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,
and the like--are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
immense talent, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we have
discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?
And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in _The Spirit of the Age_, and I need not
here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.[6] Much that he says even in
the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of _Liber Amoris_.
Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
Here in a couple of lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
the imagination, you see what was passing _in a poetical point of
view_."
Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
"striking"; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
individual; never do you reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this--Hazlitt
seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
one of the things which make _poesis non ut pictura_, it is not all, and
I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
that not poetry?
The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
Joubert--that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
the music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
get some music married to even moderate meaning, you get, say, Moore.
Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence,
he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave off
resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring--
So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main,
and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
schoolboy's favourite--
When the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods,
we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course _ad
mysterium_. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
the production.
Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
poetical. Cardinal Newman said that Crabbe "pleased and touched him at
thirty years' interval," and pleaded that this answers to the
"accidental definition of a classic." Most certainly; but not
necessarily to that of a poetical classic. Jeffrey thought him
"original and powerful." Granted; but there are plenty of original and
powerful writers who are not poets. Wilson gave him the superlative for
"original and vivid painting." Perhaps; but is Hogarth a poet? Jane
Austen "thought she could have married him." She had not read his
biography; but even if she had would that prove him to be a poet? Lord
Tennyson is said to single out the following passage, which is certainly
one of Crabbe's best, if not his very best:--