On the red light that filled the eastern sky;
Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,
To hail the glories of the new-born day;
But now dejected, languid, listless, low,
He saw the wind upon the water blow,
And the cold stream curled onward as the gale
From the pine-hill blew harshly down the vale;
On the right side the youth a wood surveyed,
With all its dark intensity of shade;
Where the rough wind alone was heard to move
In this, the pause of nature and of love
When now the young are reared, and when the old,
Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold:
Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen:
Before him swallows gathering for the sea,
Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea;
And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
And slowly blackened in the sickly sun;
All these were sad in nature, or they took
Sadness from him, the likeness of his look
And of his mind--he pondered for a while,
Then met his Fanny with a borrowed smile.
It is good: it is extraordinarily good: it could not be better of its
kind. It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever did--but is it
quite? If it is (and I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it
seems to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here, with its
special effect of "transporting" of "making the common as if it were
uncommon," is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that in fact
there is music as well as meaning. Hardly anywhere else, not even in the
best passages of the story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music;
and in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly than of
Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest poetical undertone with
him even into the rant of Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable
arguments of "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther") that he is
a classic of our prose.
Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy in him are all qualities which
are valuable to the poet, and which for the most part are present in
good poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was what actually
deceived some of his contemporaries and made others content for the most
part to acquiesce in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits. It
must be remembered that even the latest generation which, as a whole and
unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the
eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe
lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be
remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth
century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free.
The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry;
but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could
doubt. Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction which
practically ended with _Evelina_ and the school of prose fiction which
opened its different branches with _Waverley_ and _Sense and
Sensibility_. His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative power,
the faculty of character-drawing, the genius for description of places
and manners, which they found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost
all, if not in all the great poets there is narrative power, faculty of
character-drawing, genius for description. Yet again, Crabbe put these
gifts into verse which at its best was excellent in its own way, and at
its worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley. Some readers
may have had an uncomfortable though only half-conscious feeling that if
they had not a poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At all events
they made up their minds that they had a poet in him.
But are we bound to follow their example? I think not. You could play on
Crabbe that odd trick which used, it is said, to be actually played on
some mediæval verse chroniclers and unrhyme him--that is to say, put
him into prose with the least possible changes--and his merits would,
save in rare instances, remain very much as they are now. You could put
other words in the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
among English writers.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son: "Your
father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry and
truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since
the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's _Rogers and his
Contemporaries_. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
Crabbe's best work.
[3] _Great Writers; Crabbe_: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.
[4] Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in successive
generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and others, his
poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere echoes of
Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His son's
reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as a
confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in them--a
signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.
[5] Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined by grief
and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years, at the
end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long after her
death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was alive Rogers
knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for attaching to
the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it would usually
have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round his wife's
wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned way.
The ring so worn, as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove;
Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.
[6] See below, Essay on Hazlitt.
II
HOGG
"What on earth," it was once asked "will you make of Hogg?" I think that
there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth
the making. In the first place, it is hardly possible, without studying
"the Shepherd" pretty close, fully to appreciate three other persons,
all greater, and one infinitely greater, than himself; namely, Wilson,
Lockhart, and Scott. To the two first he was a client in the Roman
sense, a plaything, something of a butt, and an invaluable source of
inspiration or at least suggestion. Towards the last he occupied a very
curious position, never I think quite paralleled elsewhere--the position
of a Boswell who would fain be a Boswell and is not allowed to be, who
has wild notions that he is really a greater man than Johnson and
occasionally blasphemes against his idol, but who in the intervals is
truly Boswellian. In the second place, he has usually hitherto been not
criticised at all, but either somewhat sneered at or else absurdly
over-praised. In the third place, as both Scott and Byron recognised, he
is probably the most remarkable example we have of absolute
self-education, or of no education: for Burns was an academically
instructed student in comparison with Hogg. In the fourth, he produced,
amid a mass of rubbish, some charming verse and one prose-story which,
though it is almost overlooked by the general, some good judges are, I
believe, agreed with me in regarding as one of the very best things of
its kind, while it is also a very curious literary puzzle.
The anecdotic history, more or less authentic, of the Ettrick Shepherd
would fill volumes, and I must try to give some of the cream of it
presently. The non-anecdotic part may be despatched in a few sentences.
The exact date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on 9th
December 1770. His father was a good shepherd and a bad farmer--a
combination of characteristics which Hogg himself inherited unimpaired
and unimproved. If he had any early education at all, he forgot it so
completely that he had, as a grown-up man, to teach himself writing if
not reading a second time. He pursued his proper vocation for about
thirty years, during the latter part of which time he became known as a
composer of very good songs, "Donald Macdonald" being ranked as the
best. He printed a few as a pamphlet in the first year of the century,
but met with little success. Then he fell in with Scott, to whom he had
been introduced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
some money by his literary work, and Constable published _The Mountain
Bard_ together with a treatise called _Hogg on Sheep_, which I have not
read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant--the taking and
stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
given in his own _Autobiography_, in his daughter's _Memorials_, and in
the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called _The
Forest Minstrel_, and then he started a periodical, _The Spy_. On this,
as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
whether he thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
verse, _The Queen's Wake_, was published. It was deservedly successful;
but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
diligently sought the patronage of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and,
his claims being warmly supported by Scott and specially recommended by
the Duchess on her deathbed to her husband, Hogg received rent free, or
at a peppercorn, the farm of Mossend, Eltrive or Altrive. It is agreed
even by Hogg's least judicious admirers that if he had been satisfied
with this endowment and had then devoted himself, as he actually did, to
writing, he might have lived and died in comfort, even though his
singular luck in not being paid continued to haunt him. But he must
needs repeat his old mistake and take the adjacent farm of Mount Benger,
which, with a certain reckless hospitable way of living for which he is
not so blamable, kept him in difficulties all the rest of his life and
made him die in them. He lived twenty years longer; married a
good-looking girl much his superior in rank and twenty years his junior,
who seems to have made him an excellent wife; engaged in infinite
magazine- and book-writing, of which more presently; became the
inspirer, model and butt of _Blackwood's Magazine_; constantly
threatened to quarrel with it for traducing him, and once did so; loved
Edinburgh convivialities more well than wisely; had the very ill luck to
survive Scott and to commit the folly of writing a pamphlet (more silly
than anything else) on the "domestic manners" of that great man, which
estranged Lockhart, hitherto his fast friend; paid a visit to London in
1832, whereby hang tales; and died himself on 21st November 1835.
Such, briefly but not I think insufficiently given, is the Hogg of
history. The Hogg of anecdote is a much more considerable and difficult
person. He mixes himself up with or becomes by turns (whichever phrase
may be preferred) the Shepherd of the _Noctes_ and the Hogg who is
revealed to us, say his panegyrists, with "uncalled-for malignity" in
Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. But these panegyrists seem to forget that
there are two documents which happen not to be signed either "John
Gibson Lockhart" or "Christopher North," and that these documents are
Hogg's _Autobiography_, published by himself, and the _Domestic Manners
of Sir Walter Scott_, likewise authenticated. In these two we have the
Hogg of the _ana_ put forward pretty vividly. For instance, Hogg tells
us how, late in Sir Walter's life, he and his wife called upon Scott.
"In we went and were received with all the affection of old friends. But
his whole discourse was addressed to my wife, while I was left to shift
for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg elsewhere, in one of the
extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
thousand times better than he did."
Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
by Hogg in the _Domestic Manners_ and by Lockhart in his biography, and
also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's _Poetic Mirror_. In all this we
have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
his great book; and it shows how, to say the least and mildest, the
faults and foibles of the curious personage known as "the Shepherd of
the _Noctes_" were not the parts of the character on which Wilson need
have spent, or did spend, most of his invention. Even if the "boozing
buffoon" had been a boozing buffoon and nothing more, Hogg, who
confesses with a little affected remorse, but with evident pride, that
he once got regularly drunk every night for some six weeks running, till
"an inflammatory fever" kindly pulled him up, could not have greatly
objected to this part of the matter. The wildest excesses of the
_Eidolon_-Shepherd's vanity do not exceed that speech to Scott which
Professor Veitch thinks so true; and the quaintest pranks played by the
same shadow do not exceed in quaintness the immortal story of Hogg being
introduced to Mrs. Scott for the first time, extending himself on a sofa
at full length (on the excuse that he "thought he could never do wrong
to copy the lady of the house," who happened at the time to be in a
delicate state of health), and ending by addressing her as "Charlotte."
This is the story that Mrs. Garden, Hogg's daughter, without attempting
to contest its truth, describes as told by Lockhart with "uncalled-for
malignity." Now when anybody who knows something of Lockhart comes
across "malignant," "scorpion," or any term of the kind, he, if he is
wise, merely shrugs his shoulders. All the literary copy-books have got
it that Lockhart was malignant, and there is of course no more to be
said.[7] But something may be done by a little industrious clearing
away of fiction in particulars. It may be most assuredly and confidently
asserted that no one reading the _Life of Scott_ without knowing what
Hogg's friends have said of it would dream of seeing malignity in the
notices which it contains of the Shepherd. Before writing this paper I
gave myself the trouble, or indulged myself in the pleasure (for perhaps
that is the more appropriate phrase in reference to the most delightful
of biographies, if not of books), of marking with slips of paper all the
passages in Lockhart referring to Hogg, and reading them consecutively.
I am quite sure that any one who does this, even knowing little or
nothing of the circumstances, will wonder where on earth the "ungenerous
assaults," the "virulent detraction," the "bitter words," the "false
friendship," and so forth, with which Lockhart has been charged, are to
be found. But any one who knows that Hogg had, just before his own
death, and while the sorrow of Sir Walter's end was fresh, published the
possibly not ill-intentioned but certainly ill-mannered pamphlet
referred to--a pamphlet which contains among other things, besides the
grossest impertinences about Lady Scott's origin, at least one
insinuation that Scott wrote Lockhart's books for him--if any one
further knows (I think the late Mr. Scott Douglas was the first to point
out the fact) that Hogg had calmly looted Lockhart's biography of Burns,
then he will think that the "scorpion," instead of using his sting,
showed most uncommon forbearance. This false friend, virulent detractor
and ungenerous assailant describes Hogg as "a true son of nature and
genius with a naturally kind and simple character." He does indeed
remark that Hogg's "notions of literary honesty were exceedingly loose."
But (not to mention the Burns affair, which gave me some years ago a
clue to this sentence) the remark is subjoined to a letter in which Hogg
placidly suggests that he shall write an autobiographic sketch, and that
Scott, transcribing it and substituting the third person for the first,
shall father it as his own. The other offence I suppose was the remark
that "the Shepherd's nerves were not heroically strung." This perhaps
might have been left out, but if it was the fact (and Hogg's defenders
never seem to have traversed it) it suggested itself naturally enough in
the context, which deals with Hogg's extraordinary desire, when nearly
forty, to enter the militia as an ensign. Moreover the same passage
contains plenty of kindly description of the Shepherd. Perhaps there is
"false friendship" in quoting a letter from Scott to Byron which
describes Hogg as "a wonderful creature," or in describing the
Shepherd's greeting to Wilkie, "Thank God for it! I did not know you
were so young a man" as "graceful," or in the citation of Jeffrey's
famous blunder in selecting for special praise a fabrication of Hogg's
among the "Jacobite Ballads," or in the genial description, without a
touch of ridicule, of Hogg at the St. Ronan's Games. The sentence on
Hogg's death is indeed severe: "It had been better for his memory had
his end been of earlier date; for he did not follow his benefactor until
he had insulted his dust." It is even perhaps a little too severe,
considering Hogg's irresponsible and childlike nature. But Lockhart
might justly have retorted that men of sixty-four have no business to be
irresponsible children; and it is certainly true that in this unlucky
pamphlet Hogg distinctly accuses Scott of anonymously puffing himself at
his, Hogg's, expense, of being over and over again jealous of him, of
plagiarising his plots, of sneering at him, and, if the passage has any
meaning, of joining a conspiracy of "the whole of the aristocracy and
literature of the country" to keep Hogg down and "crush him to a
nonentity." Neither could Lockhart have been exactly pleased at the
passage where Scott is represented as afraid to clear the character of
an innocent friend to the boy Duke of Buccleuch.
He told me that which I never knew nor suspected before; that a
certain gamekeeper, on whom he bestowed his maledictions without
reserve, had prejudiced my best friend, the young Duke of
Buccleuch, against me by a story; and though he himself knew it
to be a malicious and invidious lie, yet seeing his grace so
much irritated, he durst not open his lips on the subject,
further than by saying, "But, my lord duke, you must always
remember that Hogg is no ordinary man, although he may have shot
a stray moorcock." And then turning to me he said, "Before you
had ventured to give any saucy language to a low scoundrel of an
English gamekeeper, you should have thought of Fielding's tale
of Black George."
"I never saw that tale," said I, "and dinna ken ought about it.
But never trouble your head about that matter, Sir Walter, for
it is awthegither out o' nature for our young chief to entertain
ony animosity against me. The thing will never mair be heard of,
an' the chap that tauld the lees on me will gang to hell, that's
aye some comfort."
Part of my reason for quoting this last passage is to recall to those
who are familiar with the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ the extraordinary felicity
of the imitation. This, which Hogg with his own pen represents himself
as speaking with his own mouth, might be found textually in any page of
the _Noctes_ without seeming in the least out of keeping with the ideal
Hogg.