"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse! that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning, how the Heavens and Earth
Rose out of chaos; or, if Sion-hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook, that flowed
Fast by the Oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thine aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit! that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou knowest: Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant; what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men."
With this glorious sound in my ears, like the opening hymn of an
archangel--language in which more music and more dignity were united
than in any composition of mere mortal man, and which heralded in the
universe, God and man, perdition and salvation, creation and the great
sum total of the human destinies,--what a fall was there to those
astounding words--
"Describe the Borough!"
It was a shock to every thing of the ideal great and poetical in the
young and sensitive mind, attuned to the harmonies of a thousand great
lays of the by-gone times, that was never to be forgotten. Are we then
come to this? I asked. Is this the scale of topic, and is this the
tone to which we are reduced in this generation? Turning over the
heads of the different Books did not much tend to remove this feeling.
The Church, Sects, the Election, Law, Physic, Trades, Clubs and Social
Meetings, Players, Almshouse and Trustees, Peter Grimes and Prisons!
What, in heaven's name, were the whole nine Muses to do with such a
set of themes! And then the actors! See a set of drunken sailors in
their ale-house:--
"The Anchor, too, affords the seaman joys,
In small smoked room, all clamor, crowds, and noise;
Where a curved settle half surrounds the fire,
Where fifty voices purl and punch require;
They come for pleasure in their leisure hour,
And they enjoy it to their utmost power;
Standing they drink, they swearing smoke, while all
Call, or make ready for a second call."
But, spite of all, a book was a book, and therefore it was read. At
every page the same struggle went on in the mind between all the old
notions of poetry, and the vivid pictures of actual life which it
unfolded. When I had read it once, I told the lender that it was the
strangest, cleverest, and most absorbing book I had ever read, but
that it was no poem. It was only by a second and a third perusal that
the first surprise subsided; the first shock gone by, the poem began
to rise out of the novel composition. The deep and experienced
knowledge of human life, the sound sense, the quiet satire, there was
no overlooking from the first; and soon the warm sympathy with poverty
and suffering, the boldness to display them as they existed, and to
suffer no longer poetry to wrap her golden haze round human life, and
to conceal all that ought to be known, because it must be known before
it could be removed; the tender pathos, and the true feeling for
nature, grew every hour on the mind. It was not long before George
Crabbe became as firmly fixed in my bosom as a great and genuine poet,
as Rembrandt, or Collins, or Edwin Landseer are as genuine painters.
Crabbe saw plainly what was become the great disease of our
literature. It was a departure from actual life and nature.
"I've often marveled, when by night, by day,
I've marked the manners moving in my way,
And heard the language and beheld the lives
Of lass and lover, goddesses and wives,
That books which promise much of life to give
Should show so little how we truly live.
To me it seems, their females and their men
Are but the creatures of the author's pen;
Nay, creatures borrowed, and again conveyed
From book to book, the shadows of a shade.
Life, if they'd seek, would show them many a change;
The ruin sudden and the misery strange;
With more of grievous, base, and dreadful things,
Than novelists relate, or poet sings.
But they who ought to look the world around,
Spy out a single spot in fairy ground,
Where all in turns ideal forms behold,
And plots are laid, and histories are told."
To these home-truths, succeeds that admirable satirical description of
our novel literature, which introduces the sad story of Ellen Orford.
My space is little, but I must give a specimen of the manner in which
the Cervantes of England strips away the sublime fooleries of our
literary knight-errantry.
"Time have I lent--I would their debt were less--
To flowing pages of sublime distress;
And to the heroine's soul-distracting fears
I early gave my sixpences and tears;
Oft have I traveled in these tender tales,
To _Darnley Cottages and Maple Vales_.
* * * * * *
I've watched a wintry night on castle walls,
I've stalked by moonlight through deserted halls;
And when the weary world was sunk to rest,
I've had such sights--as may not be expressed.
"Lo! that chateau, the western tower decayed,
The peasants shun it, they are all afraid;
For there was done a deed! could walls reveal
Or timbers tell it, how the heart would feel.
Most horrid was it:--for, behold the floor
Has stains of blood, and will be clean no more.
Hark to the winds! which, through the wide saloon,
And the long passage, send a dismal tune,--
Music that ghosts delight in; and now heed
Yon beauteous nymph who must unmask the deed:
See! with majestic sweep she swims alone
Through rooms all dreary, guided by a groan.
Though windows rattle, and though tapestries shake,
And the feet falter every step they take,
Mid moans and gibing sprites she silent goes,
To find a something which shall soon expose
The villainies and wiles of her determined foes:
And having thus adventured, thus endured,
Fame, wealth, and lover, are for life secured.
"Much have I feared, but am no more afraid,
When some chaste beauty, by some wretch betrayed,
Is drawn away with such distracted speed
That she anticipates a dreadful deed.
Not so do I. Let solid walls impound
The captive fair, and dig a moat around:
Let there be brazen locks and bars of steel,
And keepers cruel, such as never feel.
With not a single note the purse supply,
And when she begs let men and maids deny.
Be windows those from which she dare not fall,
And help so distant 'tis in vain to call;
Still means of freedom will some power devise,
And from the baffled ruffian snatch the prize."
From all this false sublime, Crabbe was the first to free us, and to
lead us into the true sublime of genuine human life. How novel at that
time, and yet how thrilling, was the incident of the sea-side visitors
surprised out on the sands by the rise of the tide. Here was real
sublimity of distress, real display of human passion. The lady, with
her children in her hand, wandering from the tea-table which had been
spread on the sands, sees the boatmen asleep, the boat adrift, and the
tide advancing:--
"She gazed, she trembled, and though faint her call,
It seemed like thunder to confound them all.
Their sailor-guests, the boatman and his mate,
Had drank and slept, regardless of their state;
'Awake!' they cried aloud! 'Alarm the shore!
Shout all, or never shall we reach it more!'
Alas! no shout the distant land can reach,
No eye behold them from the foggy beach:
Again they join in one loud, fearful cry,
Then cease, and eager listen for reply;
None came--the rising wind blew sadly by.
They shout once more, and then they turn aside
To see how quickly flowed the coming tide;
Between each cry they find the waters steal
On their strange prison, and new horrors feel.
Foot after foot on the contracted ground
The billows fall, and dreadful is the sound;
Less and yet less the sinking isle became,
And there was weeping, wailing, wrath, and blame."
It has been said that Crabbe's poetry is mere description, however
accurate, and that he has not a spark of imagination. The charge
arises from a false view of the man and his objects. He saw that the
world was well supplied with what are poems of the creative faculty,
that it was just as destitute of the poetry of truth and reality. He
saw human life lie like waste land, as worthless of notice, while our
poets and romancers
"In trim gardens took their pleasure."
He saw the vice, the ignorance, the misery, and he lifted the veil and
cried--"Behold your fellow-men! Such are the multitude of your
fellow-creatures, among whom you live and move. Do you want to weep
over distress? Behold it there, huge, dismal, and excruciating! Do you
wish for a sensation? Find it there! Follow the ruined gentleman from
his gaming and his dissipation, to his squalid den and his death.
Follow the grim savage, who murders his shrieking boy at sea. Follow
the poor maiden to her ruin, and the parent weeping and withering
under the curse of a depraved child. Go down into the abodes of
ignorance, of swarming vice, of folly, and madness--and if you want a
lesson, or a moral, there they are by thousands."
Crabbe knew that the true imaginative faculty had a great and
comprehensive task, to dive into the depths of the human heart, to
fathom the recesses and the springs of the mind, and to display all
their movements under the various excitements of various passions,
with the hand of a master. He has done this, and done it with
unrivaled tact and vigor. Out of the scum and chaos of lowest life, he
has evoked the true sublime. He has taught us that men are our proper
objects of display, and that the multitude has claims on our
sympathies that duty as well as taste demand obedience to. He was the
first to dare these desperate and deserted walks of humanity, and
prove to us that still it was humanity. At every step he revealed
scenes of the truest pathos, of the profoundest interest, and gave
instances of the most generous sacrifices, the most patient love, the
most heroic duty, in the very abodes of unvisited wretchedness. He
made us feel that these beings were men! There is no picture so
touching in all the million volumes of romance, as that of the dying
sailor and his sweetheart. What hero ever breathed a more beautiful
devotion, or clothed it in more exquisite language, than this poor
sailor youth, when believing himself dying at sea:--
"He called his friend, and prefaced with a sigh
A lover's message--'Thomas, I must die.
Would I could see my Sally, and could rest
My throbbing temples on her faithful breast,
And gazing go!--if not, this trifle take,
And say till death I wore it for her sake:
Yes, I must die--blow on, sweet breeze, blow on!
Give me one look before my life be gone,
Oh! give me that and let me not despair,
One last fond look--and now repeat the prayer.'
* * * * *
She placed a decent stone his grave above,
Neatly engraved--an offering of her love,
For that she wrought, for that forsook her bed,
Awake alike to duty and the dead."
It was by these genuine vindications of our entire humanity, that
Crabbe, by casting the full blaze of the sunshine of truth and genius
on the real condition of the laboring population of these kingdoms,
laid the foundations of that great popular feeling which prevails at
the present day. Patriots and patrons of the people are now plentiful
enough, but in Crabbe's day the work had to be begun; the swinish
multitude had yet to be visited in their sties; and the Circe of the
modern sorceries of degradation, to feel the hand of a hero upon her,
compelling her to restore the swine to their human form. George Crabbe
was not merely a poet, but the poet who had the sagacity to see into
the real state of things, and the heart to do his duty--the great
marks of the true poet, who is necessarily a true and feeling man. To
him popular education, popular freedom, popular advance into knowledge
and power, owe a debt which futurity will gratefully acknowledge, but
no time can cancel.
George Crabbe was born on the borders of that element which he so
greatly loved, and which he has so powerfully described in the first
chapter of the Borough. He has had the good-fortune to have in his son
George a biographer such as every good man would desire. The life
written by him is full of the veneration of the son, yet of the candor
of the historian; and is at once one of the most graphic and charming
of books.
From this volume we learn that the poet was born at Aldborough, in
Suffolk, on the Christmas-eve of 1754. His birthplace was an old house
in that range of buildings which the sea has now almost demolished.
The chamber projected far over the ground-floor; and the windows were
small, with diamond panes almost impervious to the light. A view of it
by Stanfield forms the vignette to the biography.
The father as well as grandfather of Crabbe bore the name of George,
as well as himself. The grandfather, a burgess of Aldborough, and
collector of customs there, yet died poor. The father, originally
educated for trade, had been in early life the keeper of a parochial
school in the porch of the church at Orford. He afterward became
schoolmaster and parish clerk at Norton, near Loddon, in Norfolk, and
finally, returning to his native Aldborough, rose to the collection of
the salt duties, as Salt-master. He was a stern, but able man, and
with all his sternness not destitute of good qualities. The mother of
Crabbe was an excellent and pious woman. Beside himself there were
five other children, all of whom, except one girl, lived to mature
years. His next brother, Robert, was a glazier, who retired from
business at Southwold. John Crabbe, the third son, was a captain of a
Liverpool slave-ship, who perished by an insurrection of the slaves.
The fourth brother, William, also a seafaring man, was carried
prisoner by the Spaniards into Mexico, and was once seen by an
Aldborough sailor on the coast of Honduras, but never heard of again.
This sailor brother, in his inquiries after all at home, had expressed
much astonishment to find that _George_ was become a _clergyman_, when
he left him a _doctor_; and on this incident Crabbe afterward founded
the sailor's story in The Parting Hour. His only surviving sister
married a Mr. Sparkes, a builder of Aldborough, and died in 1827. Such
were Crabbe's family. The scenery among which he spent his boyhood has
been frequently described in his poetry, especially in the opening
letter of his Borough. It is here equally livingly given in his son's
prose.
"Aldborough, or, as it is more correctly written, Alderburgh, was, in
those days, a poor and wretched place, with nothing of the elegance
and gayety which have since sprung up about it, in consequence of the
resort of watering-parties. The town lies between a low hill or cliff,
on which only the old church and a few better houses were then
situated, and the beach of the German ocean. It consisted of two
parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling
houses, the abodes of seafaring men, pilots, and fishers. The range of
houses nearest to the sea had suffered so much from repeated invasions
of the waves, that only a few scattered tenements appeared erect among
the desolation. I have often heard my father describe a tremendous
spring-tide of, I think, the 17th of January, 1779, when eleven houses
here were at once demolished; and he saw the breakers dash over the
roofs, and round the walls, and crush all to ruin. The beach consists
of successive ridges--large rolled stones, then loose shingles, and,
at the fall of the tide, a stripe of fine, hard sand. Vessels of all
sorts, from the large, heavy troll-boat, to the yawl and pram, drawn
up along the shore--fishermen preparing their tackle, or sorting their
spoil--and, nearer, the gloomy, old town-hall, the only indication of
municipal dignity, a few groups of mariners, chiefly pilots, taking
their quick, short walks backward and forward, every eye watchful of
the signal from the offing--such was the squalid scene which first
opened on the author of The Village!
"Nor was the landscape in the vicinity of a more engaging aspect: open
commons and sterile farms, the soil, poor and sandy, the herbage, bare
and rushy, the trees, 'few and far between,' and withered and stunted
by the bleak breezes of the sea. The opening picture of The Village
was copied, in every touch, from the scene of the poet's nativity and
boyish days:--
'Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighboring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye;
There thistles spread their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infants threaten war.'
"The broad river, called the Ald, approaches the sea close to
Aldborough, within a few hundred yards, and then turning abruptly,
continues to run for about ten miles parallel to the beach, from which
a dreary stripe of marsh and waste alone divides it, until it at
length finds its embouchure at Orford. The scenery of this river has
been celebrated as lovely and delightful, in a poem called Slaughden
Vale, written by Mr. James Bird, a friend of my father's; and old
Camden talks of 'the beautiful vale of Slaughden.' I confess, however,
that though I have ever found an indescribable charm in the very weeds
of the place, I never could perceive its claims to beauty. Such as it
is, it has furnished Mr. Crabbe with many of his happiest and most
graphical descriptions; and the same may be said of the whole line of
coast from Orford to Dunwich, every feature of which has, somewhere or
other, been reproduced in his writings. The quay of Slaughden, in
particular, has been painted with all the minuteness of a Dutch
landscape:--
'Here samphire banks and saltwort bound the flood,
There stakes and sea-weeds withering on the mud;
And higher up a range of all things base,
Which some strong tide has rolled upon the place....
Yon is our quay! those smaller hoys from town,
Its various wares for country use bring down,' etc.
* * * *
"For one destined to distinction as a portrayer of character,"
continues his son, "few scenes could have been more favorable than
that of his infancy and boyhood. He was cradled among the rough sons
of the ocean--a daily witness of unbridled passions, and of manners
remote from the sameness and artificial smoothness of polished
society. At home, as has already been hinted, he was subject to the
caprices of a stern and imperious, though not unkindly nature; and
probably few whom he could familiarly approach but had passed through
some of those dark tragedies in which his future strength was to be
exhibited. The common people of Aldborough in those days are described
as--
'A wild, amphibious race,
With sullen woe displayed in every face;
Who far from civil arts and social fly,
And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.'"
Crabbe, though imbibing every thing relating to the sea, and sailors,
and fishermen, was by no means disposed to be one of this class
himself. He early exhibited a bookish turn, and was reckoned
effeminate; but his father saw his talent, and gave him a good
education. He was then put apprentice to a surgeon, who was also a
farmer, and George alternately pounded the pestle and worked in the
fields, till he was removed to another surgeon at Woodbridge. Here he
became a member of a small literary club, which gave a new stimulus to
his love of poetry, already sufficiently strong, and in his eighteenth
year he fell in love with the young lady who was destined to be his
wife. Before the expiration of his apprenticeship he had published a
volume of poems. His apprenticeship terminated, he set out for London;
but unfurnished with money to attend the hospitals, he remained awhile
in mean lodgings in Whitechapel, and then returned to Aldborough, and
after engaging himself as an assistant for a short time, commenced
practice for himself. It would not do, however, his practice was
profitless; and as he filled up his leisure time by botanizing in the
country, the people got a notion that he gathered his medicine out of
the ditches. At length, starved out, he resolved to return to London
as a literary adventurer. With £5 in his pocket, a present for the
purpose, from Dudley North, brother to the candidate for Aldborough,
he took his passage in a sloop for town.
In thinking of Crabbe, we generally picture him to ourselves as the
well-to-do clergyman, comfortably inditing his verse in a goodly
parsonage; but Crabbe commenced as a regular hack-author about town,
and went through all the racking distress of that terrible life,
utterly without funds, without patrons, or connections. Chatterton had
perished in the desperate undertaking just before, and it appeared
likely enough for a long time that Crabbe might perish too. In vain
he wrote, nobody would publish; in vain he addressed ministers of
state in verse and prose, nobody would hear him. He maintained
this fearful struggle for twelve months. He had lodgings at a Mr.
Vickery's, a hairdresser, near the Exchange, who afterward removed to
Bishopsgate-street, whither he accompanied them. The people appeared
to behave well to him, and gave him more trust than is usual with such
people, though at length even their patience seems to have been
exhausted, and he was threatened with a prison.
While he resided there he often spent his evenings at a small
coffee-house near the Exchange, where he became acquainted with
several clever young men, then beginning the world like himself. One
of these was Bonnycastle, afterward master of the military academy at
Woolwich; another was Isaac Dalby, afterward professor of mathematics
in the military college of Marlowe; and a third, Reuben Burrow, who
rose to high distinction in the service of the East India Company, and
died in Bengal. To obtain healthy exercise, he used to walk much in
the daytime; and would accompany Mr. Bonnycastle on his visits to
different schools in the suburbs; but more frequently stole off alone
into the country, with a small edition of Ovid, Horace, or Catullus,
in his pocket. Two or three of these little volumes remained in his
possession in later days, and he set a high value on them, saying they
were his companions in his adversity. His favorite haunt was Hornsey
wood, where he sought for plants and insects. On one occasion he had
strolled too far from town to return, and having no money he was
compelled to lodge on a mow of hay, beguiling the time while it was
light with reading Tibullus, and in the morning returned to town.
Of the depth of distress to which Crabbe was reduced, his journal,
kept through that dark time, testified, but nothing more so than this
prayer:--
"My God, my God, I put my trust in thee; my troubles increase, my soul
is dismayed; I am heavy and in distress; all day long I call upon
thee; O be thou my helper in the needful time of trouble.
"Why art thou so far from me, O my Lord? why hidest thou thy face? I
am cast down; I am in poverty and affliction; be thou with me, O my
God; let me not be wholly forsaken, O my Redeemer!
"Behold, I trust in thee, blessed Lord. Guide me, and govern me unto
the end. O Lord, my salvation, be thou ever with me. Amen."
Unlike poor Chatterton, Crabbe had a firm trust in Providence, and was
neither so passionate nor so reservedly haughty. He determined to
leave no stone unturned; and at length he wrote to the only man of the
age who was likely to lend him a kindly ear--that was Edmund Burke.
From that moment his troubles were at an end, and his fortune made.
Burke sent for him, looked at his manuscripts, perceived his claims to
genius well founded, and received him to his own table. He then
introduced him to Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the surly old
Lord Chancellor Thurlow; the last of whom, though he had paid no
attention to a letter he had before written to him, nor to a stinger
which he had sent him in consequence, now sent for him, and told him
that he _ought_ to have noticed the first letter, and that he
forgave the second, and that there was his reply. He put a sealed
paper into Crabbe's hand, which on being opened contained a banknote,
value one hundred pounds! Burke advised Crabbe to take orders, as they
were walking together one day at Beaconsfield, whither Burke had
invited him. This was soon managed; he was examined and admitted to
priest's orders by the Bishop of Norwich, and was sent, to the
astonishment of the natives, to officiate as curate in his native
town. But Burke soon procured him the chaplaincy to the Duke of
Rutland, and he went down to reside at Belvoir Castle. At this
splendid establishment, and in a fine country, Crabbe did not enjoy
himself. His son says: "The numberless allusions to the nature of a
literary dependent's existence in a great lord's house, which occur in
my father's writings, and especially in the tale of The Patron, are
quite enough to lead any one that knew his character and feelings to
the conclusion that, notwithstanding the kindness and condescension of
the duke and duchess themselves--which were, I believe, uniform, and
of which he always spoke with gratitude,--the situation he filled at
Belvoir was attended with many painful circumstances, and productive
in his mind of some of the acutest sensations of wounded pride that
have ever been traced by any pen." He was always delighted to get away
from the cold stateliness of Belvoir, with its troops of insolent
menials, to the small seat of Chevely, about the period of the
Newmarket races; or to Croxton, another small seat near Belvoir, where
the family sometimes went to fish in the extensive ponds. Here the
servants were few, ceremony was relaxed, and he could wander in the
woods after his insects and his plants. Thurlow gave him two small
livings in Dorsetshire, Frome St. Quintin, and Evershot; saying at the
time, "By G--d, you are as much like Parson Adams as twelve to a
dozen." He now published The Village, which was at once popular, and
he got married.
Miss Sarah Elmy, to whom he became engaged at eighteen, had, through
all his struggles in the metropolis, with unswerving affection,
maintained the superiority of his talents, and encouraged him to
persevere. The Duke of Rutland being appointed lord-lieutenant of
Ireland, the ducal family quitted Belvoir for Dublin, and Crabbe being
left behind, was, on his proposed marriage, invited to bring his wife
to the castle, and occupy certain apartments there. This was done; but
the annoyance of another man's, and a great man's menials to attend on
you, was too much for Crabbe, and he fled the castle, and took up his
abode as curate of Stathern, in the humble parsonage there.
In this obscure parsonage Crabbe lived four years. He had three
children born there--his two sons, George and John, and a daughter,
who died in infancy. There he published, too, his poem, The Newspaper,
which also was well received; and then he laid by his poetic pursuits
for _two-and-twenty years_! Nay, his son says, that after this
period of two-and-twenty years, he published The Parish Register, and
again lay by from his thirty-first year till his fifty-second; and so
completely did he bury himself in the obscurity of domestic and
village life, that he was gradually forgotten as a living author, and
the name of Crabbe only remembered through some passages of his poems
in the Elegant Extracts.
Of the four years spent in Stathern, he used to speak as the very
happiest of his life. He had won a pleasant retreat after his
desperate clutch at fortune. His perseverance was rewarded by the
society of her who had been the one faithful and congenial friend of
his youth, and they could now ramble together at their ease amid the
rich woods of Belvoir, without any of the painful feelings which had
before checkered his enjoyment of the place. At home, a garden
afforded him healthful exercise and unfailing amusement; and, as a
mere curate, he was freed from any disputes with the villagers about
him. Here he botanized, entomologized, and geologized to his heart's
content. At one time he was tempted to turn sportsman, but neither his
feelings nor his taste would allow him to continue one; and he
employed his leisure hours much more to his satisfaction in exercising
his medical skill to relieve the pains of his parishioners.
At the instance of the Duchess of Rutland,--Thurlow having exchanged
the poet's Dorsetshire livings for those of Muston, in Leicestershire,
and Allington, in Lincolnshire, but near each other,--Mr. Crabbe, in
1789, left Stathern, and entered on his rectory at Muston. Here his
life continued much the same, but the country around was open and
uninteresting. "Here," says his son, "were no groves, nor dry green
lawns, nor gravel roads, to tempt the pedestrian in all weathers; but
still, the parsonage and its premises formed a pretty little oasis in
the clayey desert. Our front windows looked full on the church-yard,
by no means like the common forbidding receptacles of the dead, but
truly ornamental ground; for some fine elms partially concealed the
small beautiful church and its spire, while the eye traveled through
their stems, and rested on the banks of a stream, and a picturesque
old bridge. The garden inclosed the other two sides of the
church-yard; but the crown of the whole was a gothic archway, cut
through a thick hedge and many boughs; for through this opening, as in
the deep frame of a picture, appeared, in the center of the aerial
canvas, the unrivaled Belvoir."
The home picture of Crabbe, at this period, is given by his son, with
a glow of grateful remembrance of the happiness of the time to
himself, then a child, that is beautiful. "Always visibly happy in the
happiness of others, especially of children, our father entered into
all our pleasures, and soothed and cheered us in all our little
griefs, with such overflowing tenderness, that it was no wonder we
almost worshiped him. My first recollection of him is, of his carrying
me up to his private room to prayers, in the summer evenings, about
sunset, and rewarding my silence and attention, afterward, with a view
of the flower-garden through his prism. Then I recall the delight it
was to me to be permitted to sleep with him during a confinement of my
mother's--how I longed for the morning; because then he would be sure
to tell me some fairy tale of his own invention, all sparkling with
gold and diamonds, magic fountains, and enchanted princesses. In the
eye of memory I can still see him as he was at this period of his
life; his fatherly countenance, unmixed with any of the less lovable
expressions that, in too many faces, obscure that character--but
preëminently _fatherly_; conveying the ideas of kindness, intellect,
and purity; his manners grave, manly, and cheerful, in unison with his
high and open forehead; his very attitudes, whether he sat absorbed in
the arrangement of his minerals, shells, and insects, or as he labored
in his garden, until his naturally pale complexion acquired a tinge of
fresh, healthy red, or as coming lightly toward us with some
unexpected present, his smile of indescribable benevolence spoke
exultation in the foretaste of our raptures.
"But I think even earlier than these are my first recollections of my
mother. I think the very earliest is of her combing my hair one
evening, by the light of the fire, which hardly broke the long shadows
of the room, and singing the plaintive air of 'Kitty Fell,' till,
though I could not be more than two or three years old, my tears
dropped profusely."
Equally charming is the writer's recollection of a journey into
Suffolk with his father while a boy. This was to Parham, the house of
Mrs. Crabbe's uncle Tovell, with whom she had been brought up. The
picture presented of the life and establishment of a wealthy yeoman is
so vivid, that I must take leave to add it to the passage already
quoted.
"My great-uncle's establishment was that of the first-rate yeoman of
that period--the yeoman that already began to be styled by courtesy an
esquire. Mr. Tovell might possess an estate of some eight hundred
pounds per annum, a portion of which he himself cultivated. Educated
at a mercantile school, he often said of himself, 'Jack will never
make a gentleman;' yet he had a native dignity of mind and manners
which might have enabled him to pass muster in that character with any
but very fastidious critics. His house was large, and the surrounding
moat, the rookery, the ancient dovecote, and the well stored
fishponds, were such as might have suited a gentleman's seat of some
consequence; but one side of the house immediately overlooked a
farmyard, full of all sorts of domestic animals, and the scene of
constant bustle and noise. On entering the house there was nothing, at
first sight, to remind one of the farm: a spacious hall paved with
black and white marble, at one extremity a very handsome drawing-room,
and at the other a fine old stair-case of black oak, polished till it
was as slippery as ice, and having a chime clock and a barrel organ on
its landing-places. But this drawing-room, a corresponding
dining-parlor, and a handsome sleeping apartment up stairs, were all
_tabooed_ ground, and made use of on great and solemn occasions
only, such as rent-days, and an occasional visit with which Mr. Tovell
was honored by a neighboring peer. At all other times the family and
their visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen, along with
the servants. My great-uncle occupied an arm-chair, or, in attacks of
gout, a couch on one side of a large open chimney. Mrs. Tovell sat at
a small table, on which, in the evening, stood one small candle, in an
iron candlestick, plying her needle by the feeble glimmer, surrounded
by her maids, all busy at the same employment; but in winter a noble
block of wood, sometimes the whole circumference of a pollard, threw
its comfortable warmth and cheerful blaze over the apartment.
"At a very early hour in the morning, the alarum called the maids and
their mistress also; and if the former were tardy, a louder alarum,
and more formidable, was heard chiding the delay--not that scolding
was peculiar to any occasion, it regularly went on through all the
day, like bells on harness, inspiriting the work whether it was done
ill or well. After the important business of the dairy and a hasty
breakfast, their respective employments were again resumed; that which
the mistress took for her especial privilege being the scrubbing the
floors of the state apartments. A new servant, ignorant of her
presumption, was found one morning on her knees, hard at work on the
floor of one of these preserves, and was thus addressed by her
mistress:--'_You_ wash such floors as these? Give me the brush
this instant, and troop to the scullery, and wash that, madam!... As
true as G--d's in heaven, here comes Lord Rochford to call on Mr.
Tovell. Here, take my mantle,'--a blue woolen apron--'and I'll go to
the door.'
"If the sacred apartments had not been opened, the family dined in
this wise: the heads seated in the kitchen at an old table; the
farm-men standing in the adjoining scullery, with the door open; the
female servants at a side-table, called a _bouter_; with the
principal at the table, perchance some traveling rat-catcher, or
tinker, or farrier, or an occasional gardener in his shirt-sleeves,
his face probably streaming with perspiration. My father well
describes, in The Widow's Tale, my mother's situation, when living in
her younger days at Parham:
'But when the men beside their station took,
The maidens with them, and with these the cook;
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,
Filled with large balls of farinaceous food;
With bacon, mass saline! where never lean
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen:
When, from a single horn, the parties drew
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;
When the coarse cloth she saw with many a stain,
Soiled by rude hands who cut and came again;
She could not breathe, but with a heavy sigh,
Reined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye;
She minced the sanguine flesh in frustrums fine,
And wondered much to see the _creatures_ dine.'
"On ordinary days, when the kitchen dinner was over, the fire
replenished, the kitchen sanded and lightly swept over in waves,
mistress and maids, taking off their shoes, retired to their chambers
for a nap of one hour to a minute. The dogs and cats commenced their
siesta by the fire. Mr. Tovell dozed in his chair, and no noise was
heard, except the melancholy and monotonous cooing of a turtledove,
varied with the shrill treble of a canary. After the hour had expired,
the active part of the family were on the alert; the bottles--Mr.
Tovell's tea equipage--placed on the table; and, as if by instinct,
some old acquaintance would glide in for the evening's carousal, and
then another and another. If four or five arrived, the punch-bowl was
taken down, and emptied and filled again. But whoever came, it was
comparatively a dull evening, unless two especial knights-companions
were of the party. One was a jolly old farmer, with much of the person
and humor of Falstaff, a face as rosy as brandy could make it, and an
eye teeming with subdued merriment, for he had that prime quality of a
joker, superficial gravity. The other was a relative of the family, a
wealthy yeoman, middle-aged, thin, and muscular. He was a bachelor,
and famed for his indiscriminate attachment to all who bore the name
of woman--young or aged, clean or dirty, a lady or a gipsy, it
mattered not to him; all were equally admired. Such was the strength
of his constitution, that, though he seldom went to bed sober, he
retained a clear eye and stentorian voice to his eightieth year, and
coursed when he was ninety. He sometimes rendered the colloquies over
the bowl peculiarly piquant; and as soon as his voice began to be
elevated, one or two of the inmates--my father and mother, for
example--withdrew with Mrs. Tovell into her own _sanctum sanctorum_;
but I, not being supposed capable of understanding much that might be
said, was allowed to linger on the skirts of the festive circle; and
the servants, being considered much in the same point of view as the
animals dozing on the hearth, remained to have the full benefit of
their wit, neither producing the slightest restraint, nor feeling it
themselves."
This jolly old Mr. Tovell being carried off suddenly, Mr. Crabbe,
induced by the desire to be in his own county, and among his own
relatives, placed a curate at Muston, and went to reside at Parham in
Mr. Tovell's house. It was not a happy removal. It was a desertion of
his proper flock and duty in obedience to his own private
inclinations, and it was not blessed; his son says, that as they were
slowly quitting Muston, preceded by their furniture, a person who knew
them, called out in an impressive tone--"You are wrong, you are
wrong!" The sound, Crabbe said, found an echo in his own conscience,
and rung like a supernatural voice in his ears, through the whole
journey. His son believes that he sincerely repented of this step. At
Parham he did not find that happiness that perhaps the dreams of his
youth--for there lived Miss Elmy during their long attachment--had led
him first to expect there. Mrs. Elmy, his wife's mother, and Miss
Tovell, the sister of the old gentleman, were the coheiresses of their
brother, and resided with him. The latter seems to have been a regular
old-fashioned fidget. She used to stalk about with her tall
ivory-tipped walking-cane, and on any the slightest alteration made,
were it but the removal of a shrub, or a picture on the walls, would
say, "It was enough to make Jacky (her late brother) shake in his
grave if he could see it," and would threaten to make a _cadicy_
to her will.
Mr. Crabbe stood it for four years--memorable instance of
patience!--and then found a residence to his heart's content. This was
Great Glemham Hall, belonging to Mr. North, and then vacant. He took
it, and continued there five years. We may imagine these five of as
happy years as most of Crabbe's life. The house was large and
handsome. It stood in a small, but well wooded park, occupying the
mouth of a glen; and, in this glen, lay the mansion. The hills, that
were on either hand, were finely hung with wood; a brook ran at the
foot of one of these, and all round were woodlands, "and those green,
dry lanes, which tempt the walker in all weathers, especially in the
evenings, when, in the short grass of the dry, sandy banks, lies,
every few yards, a glowworm, and the nightingales are pouring forth
their melody in every direction." Just at hand was the village; and
the church at which he preached at Sweffling was convenient. At
Parham, he was not more popular out doors than he was in, because he
was no jovial fellow, like Mr. Tovell, and did not like much visiting.
Here, he was popular as a preacher, drew large congregations, and, in
Mr. Turner, his rector, had an enlightened and admiring friend. In
such a place, too, a paradise to his boys, he was as busy in botany as
ever; wrote a treatise on the subject, which, however, he was advised,
to the public loss, not to publish, because such books had usually
been published in _Latin_! He therefore burned it, as he used to
do novels, which it was his great delight to write scores of, and then
make bonfires of; his boys carrying them out to him by armfuls in the
garden, and glorying in the blaze as he presided over it.
He returned in 1805, to Muston, to which he was called by the bishop.
At the end of five years he had been obliged to quit his beautiful
retreat at Glemham. It was sold, the house pulled down, and another
built in its place. For the four further years that he continued in
Suffolk, he lived at the village of Rendham. At Muston, the shepherd
being absent, all had gone wrong; the warning voice had been
fulfilled. The Methodist and the Huntingtonian had, in the absence of
the pastor, set up their tabernacles, and had become successful
rivals. Crabbe was not destitute of professional feelings or zeal. He
preached against these interlopers, and only increased the evil. The
farmers here were shy of him, for they had heard that he was a
Jacobin, of all things! that is, he was no advocate for the terrible
war which was raging with France, and which kept up the price of their
corn. In this cold, clayey, and farming county, he continued nine
years. Here he issued to the world his Parish Register and his
Borough, perhaps, after all, his very best work, for it is full of
such a variety of life, all drawn with the force and clearness of his
prime; here also he published his Tales in verse; but here, too, he
lost his wife, who had been an invalid for many years. It was
therefore become to him a sad place. His health and spirits failed
him; and it was a fortunate circumstance, that at this juncture, the
living of Trowbridge was conferred on him by the Duke of Rutland. He
removed thither in June, 1814.
From long before the time of Mr. Crabbe's removal to Trowbridge, he
had been in the habit of making, during the season, occasionally a
visit to London. His fame, especially after the publication of The
Borough, was established. His power of painting human life and
character, the bold and faithful pencil with which he did this, the
true sympathies with the poor and afflicted and neglected which
animated him, were all fully perceived and acknowledged; and he found
himself a welcome guest in the highest circles of both aristocracy and
literature. He who had been the humble curate of Belvoir, subject to
slights and insults from pompous domestics, which are difficult to
complain of, but are deeply felt, had, long before quitting the
neighborhood of the castle, been the honored guest in the midst of the
proudest nobles. In London, all the literary coteries were eager to
have him. Holland-house, Lansdowne-house, the Duke of Rutland's, and
other great houses, found him a frequent guest amid lords and ladies,
dukes and duchesses; and at Holland-house, and Mr. Rogers's, he was
surrounded by all that was at the time brilliant and famous in the
political and literary world. These visits, after the death of his
wife, became annual, and the old man wonderfully enjoyed them. The
extracts which his son has given from his journal, teem with men and
women of title and name. He is dining or breakfasting with Lady Errol,
Lady Holland, the Duchess of Rutland. He meets Mr. Fox, Mr. Canning,
Foscolo; Lords Haddington, Dundas, Strangford, etc.; Moore, Campbell,
Sir Walter Scott, Sir James Mackintosh; Ladies Spencer and Besborough;
Duke and Duchess of Cumberland; in fact, every body. He became much
attached to the Hoares, of Hampstead, and used to take up his quarters
there, and with them make summer excursions to Hastings, the isle of
Wight, and the like places. With them he saw Miss Edgeworth, Joanna
Baillie, etc. So popular was he become, that John Murray gave him
£3000 for his Tales of the Hall, and he carried the bills for that sum
home in his waistcoat pocket. His meeting with Sir Walter Scott caused
him to accept a pressing invitation from him to Scotland, whither he
happened to go at the time of George IV.'s visit to Edinburgh; by
which means, though he saw all the gala of the time, and all Highland
costumes, he missed seeing Scott at Abbotsford. At Scott's house, in
Castle-street, occurred his adventure with the three Highland chiefs,
which has caused much merriment. He came down one morning and found
these three portly chiefs in full Highland costume, talking at a great
rate, in a language which he did not understand; and not thinking of
Gaelic, concluded that they were foreigners. They, on their part,
seeing an elderly gentleman, dressed in a somewhat antiquated style,
with buckles in his shoes, and perfectly clerical, imagined him some
learned abbé, who had come on a visit to Sir Walter. The consequence
was, that Sir Walter, entering the breakfast-room with his family,
stood a moment in amazement to hear them all conversing together in
execrable French; and then burst into a hearty laugh, saying,--"Why,
you are all fools together! This is an Englishman, and these
Highlanders, Mr. Crabbe, can speak as good English as you can." The
amazement it occasioned may be imagined.
Trowbridge is not the sort of place that you would imagine a poet as
voluntarily choosing as a place of residence. It is a manufacturing
town of about twelve thousand inhabitants, chiefly of the working
class, with a sprinkling of shop-keepers and wealthy manufacturers. It
has no striking features, but, to a person proceeding thither from
London, has a mean, huddled, and unattractive aspect. The country
round is a good dairy country, but is not by any means striking.
Crabbe, however, found there families of intelligence and great
kindness. His sons married well among them, and John acted as his
curate; George, the writer of his biography, had the living, and
occupied the parsonage of Pucklechurch, about twenty miles only
distant. These were all circumstances, with a good parsonage, and a
wide field of usefulness in comforting and relieving his poor
parishioners, as well as instructing them, which were calculated to
make a man like Crabbe happy. By all classes he soon became much
beloved; and was, in all senses, a most excellent pastor. In his own
children he seems to have been peculiarly blest; his two sons,
clergymen, being all that he could desire, and they and his
grandchildren held him in the warmest and most reverential affection.
One of his great haunts were the quarries near Trowbridge, where he
used to geologize assiduously; for, after his wife's death, he ceased
to retain his taste for botany; her youthful botanical rambles with
him no doubt now coming back too painfully upon him.
His parsonage was a good, capacious old house, of gray stone, and
pointed gables, standing in a large garden surrounded by a high wall.
It lies almost in the heart of the town, and within a hundred yards of
the church-yard. In his time, I understand, the garden was almost a
wood of lofty trees. Many of these have since been cut down. Still it
is a pleasant and spacious retirement, with some fine trees about it.
The church is a very old building, and threatening to tumble. At the
time of my visit workmen were busy lowering the tower, and the
northern aisle showed no equivocal marks of giving way, and must come
down. The church-yard was also undergoing the process of leveling; the
turf was removed, and it altogether looked dismal. A very civil and
intelligent sexton, living by the church-yard gate, in a cottage
overhung with ivy, showed me the church, and appeared much interested
in the departed pastor and poet. I ascended into the pulpit, and
imagined how often the author of The Borough had stood there and
addressed his congregation. There is a monument to his memory in the
chancel, by Baillie. The old man is represented as lying on his
death-bed, by which are two celestial beings, as awaiting his
departure. The likeness to Crabbe is said to be excellent. The
inscription is as follows: "Sacred to the memory of the Rev. George
Crabbe, LL.B., who died February the third, 1832, in the
seventy-eighth year of his age, and the nineteenth of his services as
rector of this parish. Born in humble life, he made himself what he
was. By the force of his genius he broke through the obscurity of his
birth; yet never ceased to feel for the less fortunate. Entering, as
his works can testify, into the sorrows and privations of the poorest
of his parishioners; and so discharging the duties of his station, as
a minister and a magistrate, as to acquire the respect and esteem of
all his neighbors. As a writer he is well described by a great
cotemporary, as 'Nature's sternest painter, yet her best.'"
In the north aisle is also a tablet to the memory of the wife of his
son George, who it appears died two years after Crabbe himself, and in
the very year, 1834, in which her husband published his excellent and
most interesting life of his father.
Trowbridge impressed me, as numbers of other places have done where
men of genius have lived, with the fleeting nature of human
connections. Crabbe, so long associated with Trowbridge, was gone; his
sons were gone; neither of them succeeding him in the living; and all
trace of him, except his monument, seemed already wiped out from the
place. Another pastor occupied his dwelling and his pulpit; and the
population seemed to bear no marks of a great poet having been among
them; but were rich subjects for such a pen as that of Crabbe. The
character of the place may be judged of by its head inn. It was a
fair; and I found the court-yard of this old-fashioned inn set out
with rows of benches, all filled with common people drinking. On one
side of the yard was a large room, in which the fiddle went merrily,
and a crowd of dancers hopped as merrily to it. At a window near that
room, on the same side, a woman was delivering out pots of ale, as
fast as somebody within could supply them, to the people in the yard.
On the other side of the court lay, however, the main part of the inn.
Here a gallery ran along which conducted to the different bedrooms,
through the open air, and from this sundry spectators were surveying
the scene below. All was noise; loud and eager talking; and odors not
the most delectable, of beer, fish, and heaven knows what. The house
was dirty, dark, and full of the same fumes. People, of all sorts,
were passing up and down stairs, and in and out of the house in
crowds. The travelers' room was the only place, I was informed, where
there was much room or comfort. Thither I betook myself; and while my
dinner was preparing, I heard the fine, strong, clear voice of a woman
in an adjoining room, which I instantly recognized, by the style of
singing, to be German. I walked into the said room to see who was
the singer, and what was her audience. It was a strong-built,
healthy-looking German girl, who was accompanying her singing on a
guitar, in a little room close packed with the ordinary run of people.
To these she was singing some of the finest airs of Germany, with no
mean skill or voice; but in a language of which they did not
understand a syllable. My appearance among them occasioned some
temporary bustle; but this soon passed, and they politely offered me a
chair. I stayed to hear several songs, and proposed some of the most
rare and excellent that I knew, among them some Austrian airs, which,
in every instance, the poor girl knew and sung with great effect. As I
went out, two Frenchwomen were entering with a tambourine; and I soon
heard them, accompanied by a fiddle, also performing their parts.
Thus, through the whole day, the strolling musicians of the fair
entered this little concert-room of the head inn of Trowbridge, and
entertained the fair-going bacchanals. It was a scene which Crabbe
would have made much of.