statesmen. Jane Austen, whose personality perhaps has more real womanly
attractiveness than that of any sister novelist of the first rank,
declared playfully that if she could have been persuaded to change her
state it would have been to become Mrs. Crabbe; and who can forget Sir
Walter Scott's request in his last illness: "Read me some amusing
thing--read me a bit of Crabbe." They read to him from _The Borough_,
and we all remember his comment, "Capital--excellent--very good." Yet at
this time--in 1832--any popularity that Crabbe had once enjoyed was
already on the wane. Other idols had caught the popular taste, and from
that day to this there was to be no real revival of appreciation for
these poems. There were to be no lack of admirers, however, of the
audience "fit though few." Byron's praise has been too often quoted for
repetition. Wordsworth, who rarely praised his contemporaries in poetry,
declared of Crabbe that his works "would last from their combined merit
as poetry and truth." Macaulay writes of "that incomparable passage in
Crabbe's _Borough_ which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry
like a child"--the passage in which the condemned felon
Takes his tasteless food, and when 'tis done,
Counts up his meals, now lessen'd by that one,--
a story which Macaulay bluntly charges Robert Montgomery with stealing.
Lord Tennyson, again, at a much later date, admitted that "Crabbe has a
world of his own."
Not less impressive surely is the attitude of the two writers as far as
the poles asunder in their outlook upon life and its mysteries--Cardinal
Newman and Edward FitzGerald. The famous theologian, we learn from the
_Letters and Correspondence_ collected by Anne Mozley, writes in 1820 of
his "excessive fondness" for _The Tales of the Hall_, and thirty years
later in one of his _Discourses_ he says of Crabbe's poems that they are
among "the most touching in our language." Still another twenty years,
and the aged cardinal reread Crabbe to find that he was more delighted
than ever with our poet. That great nineteenth century pagan, on the
other hand, that prince of letter-writers and wonderful poet of whom
Suffolk has also reason to be proud, Edward FitzGerald, was even more
ardent. Praise of Crabbe is scattered freely throughout the many volumes
of his correspondence, and he edited, as we all know, a book of
Selections, which I want to see reprinted. It contains a preface that,
it may be admitted, is not really worthy of FitzGerald, so lacking is it
in the force and vigour of his correspondence. But this also was in fact
yet another death-bed tribute, for it was, I think, one of the last
things FitzGerald wrote. FitzGerald, however, has done more for Crabbe
among the moderns than any other man. His keen literary judgment must
have brought new converts to that limited brotherhood of the elect, of
which this gathering forms no inconsiderable portion.
We have one advantage in speaking about George Crabbe that does not
obtain with any other poet of great eminence; that is to say, that his
life story has not been hackneyed by repetition. With almost any other
writer there is some standing biography which is widely familiar. The
_Life of George Crabbe_, written by his son, although it is one of the
very best biographies that I have ever read, is little known. It was
quite out of print for years, and it has never been reprinted separately
from the poems. It is an admirable biography, and it offers a
contradiction of the view occasionally urged that a man's life should not
be written by a member of his own family; for George Crabbe the second
would seem not only to have been an exceedingly able man, but possessed
of a frankness of disposition in criticizing his father which sons are
often prone to show in real life, but which, I imagine, they rarely show
in print. His book is a model of candid statement, treating of Crabbe's
little weaknesses--and who of us has not his little weaknesses--in the
most cheery possible manner. It is perhaps a small matter to tell us in
one place of his father's want of "taste," his insensibility to the
beauty of order in his composition--that had been done by the critics
before him; but he even has something to say about the philandering which
characterized the old gentleman in the last years of his life, his
apparent anxiety to get married again. {106} The only thing that he all
but ignores is Crabbe's opium habit--a habit that came to him as a
sedative from a painful complaint and inspired, as was the case with
Coleridge, his more melodious utterances. Taken altogether the picture
is as pleasant as it is capable and exhaustive. We see his early boyhood
at Aldeburgh, his schooldays: his first period of unhappiness at
Slaughden Quay, his apprenticeship near Bury St. Edmunds, where we seem
to hear his master's daughters, when he reached the door, exclaim with
laughter, "La! Here's our new 'prentice." We follow him a little
higher, to the house of the Woodbridge surgeon, then through his
prolonged courtship of Sarah Elmy, then to those dreary, uncongenial
duties of piling up butter casks on Slaughden Quay. A brief period of
starvation in London, and we find him again in a chemist's shop in
Aldeburgh. Lastly comes his most important journey to London upon the
borrowed sum of 5 pounds, only three of which he carried in hard cash.
His hand to mouth existence in London for some months is among the most
interesting things in literature. Chatterton's tragic fate might have
been his, but, more fortunate than Chatterton, he had friends at Beccles
who helped him, and he was even able to publish a poem, _The Candidate_.
Although this poem contained only thirty-four pages, one is not quite
sure but that it helped to ruin its publisher. In any case that
publisher went bankrupt soon after.
Crabbe has been reproached for having continually attempted to secure a
"patron" at this time, and it has been hinted by Sir Leslie Stephen that
he ought to have recognized that the patron was out of date, killed by
Dr. Johnson's sturdy defiance. I do not agree with this view. Dr.
Johnson, in spite of his famous epigram, was always more or less assisted
by the patron, although his personality was strong enough to enable him
to turn the tables at the end. When one comes to think of it, Thrale the
brewer was a patron of Johnson, so was Strahan the printer. And does he
not say in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield that "Seven years, my
lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was
repulsed from your door," clearly implying that if Chesterfield was not
Johnson's patron it was not the great Doctor's fault? In any case the
patron must always exist for the poor man of letters in every age. Now,
he is frequently a collective personality rather than an individual. He
is represented for the author who has tried and failed by the Royal
Literary Fund, by such bounty as is awarded by the Society of Authors, or
by the Civil List Grant. For the author in embryo he is assisted above
all by the literary log-roller who flourishes so much in our day. If he
is not this "collective personality," or one of the others I have named,
then he is something much worse--that is, a capitalist publisher. We can
none of us who have to earn a living run away from the patronage of
capital, and when Sir Leslie Stephen was being paid a salary by the late
Mr. George Smith for editing the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and
was told, as we remember that he frequently was, that it was not a
remunerative venture and that, as Mr. Smith was fond of saying, his
publishing business did not pay for his vineries, Sir Leslie Stephen was
experiencing a patronage, if he had known it, not less melancholy than
anything Crabbe suffered from Edmund Burke or the Duke of Rutland.
When one meets a writer who desires to walk on high stilts and to talk of
the independence of literature, one is entitled to ask him if it was a
greater indignity for Lord Tennyson in his younger days to have received
200 pounds a year from the Civil List than for Crabbe to have received
the same sum as the Duke of Rutland's chaplain; in fact, Crabbe earned
the money, and Tennyson did not. There are, as I have said, some most
wonderful and pathetic touches in the account of Crabbe's attempt to
conquer London. There are his letters to his sweetheart, for example,
his "dearest Mira," in one of which he says that he is possessed of
6.25_d._ in the world. In another he relates that he has sold his
surgical instruments in order to pay his bills. Nevertheless, we find
him standing at a bookstall where he sees Dryden's works in three
volumes, octavo, for five shillings, and of his few shillings he ventures
to offer 3_s._ 6_d._--and carries home the Dryden. What bibliophile but
must love such a story as that, even though a day or two afterwards its
hero writes, "My last shilling became 8_d._ yesterday." But what a good
investment withal. Dryden made him a much better poet. Then comes the
famous letter to Burke, and the less known second letter to which I have
referred, and Burke's splendid reception of the writer. Nothing, I
repeat, in the life of any great man is more beautiful than that. As
Crabbe's son finely says: "He went in Burke's room a poor young
adventurer, spurned by the opulent and rejected by the publishers, his
last shilling gone, and his last hope with it. He came out virtually
secure of almost all the good fortune that by successive stages
afterwards fell to his lot." The success that comes to most men is built
up on such chances, on the kind help of some one or other individual.
Finally there came--for I am hastily recapitulating Crabbe's story--the
years of prosperity, curacies, rectories, the praise of great
contemporaries, but nothing surely more edifying than the burning of
piles of manuscripts so extensive that no fireplace would hold them. The
son's account of his assisting at these conflagrations is not the least
interesting part of his biography, the merits of which I desire to
emphasize.
People who make jokes about that most succulent edible, the crab, when
the poet Crabbe is mentioned in their presence--and who can resist an
obvious pun--are not really far astray. There can be little doubt but
that a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the
"shellfish," as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in calling
it; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of an
ancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear of
Cromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct from
what I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found in
Aldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet's life. For there
cannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of his
origin. His family, it is clear, came first from Norfolk. The Crabbes
of Norfolk were farmers, the Crabbes of Suffolk always favoured the
seacoast, and all the glory that surrounds the name of the poet to whom
we do honour to-day is reflected in the town in which he was born and
bred. Aldeburgh is Crabbe's own town, and it is an interesting fact that
no other poet can be identified with one particular spot in the way in
which Crabbe can be identified with this beautiful watering-place in
which we are now assembled. Shakspere was more of a Londoner than a
Stratfordian; nearly all his best work was written in London, and many of
the most receptive years of his life were spent in that city. Milton's
honoured name is identified with many places, apart from London, the city
of his birth. Shelley, Byron and Keats were essentially cosmopolitans in
their writings as in their lives. Wordsworth was closely identified with
Grasmere, although born in a neighbouring county; but he went to many and
varied scenes, and to more than one country, for some of his most
inspired verses. Then Cowper, the poet of whom one most often thinks
when one is recalling the achievement of Crabbe, is a poet of some half-
dozen places other than Olney, and perhaps his best verses were written
at Weston-Underwood. Now George Crabbe in the years of his success was
identified with many places other than Aldeburgh: with Belvoir Castle,
with Muston, and with Trowbridge, where he died, and some of his admirers
have even identified him with Bath. When all this is allowed, it is upon
Aldeburgh that the whole of his writings turned, the place where he was
born, where he spent his boyhood, and the earlier years of a perhaps too
sordid manhood, whither he returned twice, as a chemist's assistant and
as curate. It is the place that primarily inspired all his verses.
Aldeburgh stands out vividly before us in each succeeding poem--in _The
Village_, _The Borough_, _The Parish Register_, _The Tales_, and even in
those _Tales of the Hall_, composed in later life in faraway Trowbridge.
Crabbe's vivid observations indeed come home to every one who has studied
his works when they have visited not only Aldeburgh but its vicinity.
Every reach of the river Ald recalls some striking line by him: the
scenery in _The Lover's Journey_ we know is a description of the road
between Aldeburgh and Beccles, and all who have sailed along the river to
Orford have recognized that no stream has been so perfectly portrayed by
a poet's pen. Here in his writings you may have a suggestion of Muston,
here of Allington, and here again of Trowbridge; but in the main it is
the Suffolk scenery that most of us here know so well that was ever in
his mind.
When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway to
identify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes were
identified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that of
Sir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement that
up to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, all
that is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrase
beloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies that
any county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great a
writer. Yet I venture to say that within the next ten years the "Crabbe
Country" will sound as familiar to the officials of the Great Eastern as
the "Wordsworth Country" does to those of the Midland or the North
Western. It is true that once in the bitterness of his heart the poet
referred to Aldeburgh as "a little venal borough in Suffolk" and that he
more than once alluded to his unkind reception upon his reappearance as a
curate, when he had previously failed at other callings. "In my own
village they think nothing of me," he once said. But who does not know
how the heart turns with the years to the places associated with
childhood and youth, and Crabbe was a remarkable exemplification of this.
A well-known literary journal stated only last week that "Crabbe's
connexion with Aldeburgh was not very protracted." So far from this
being true it would be no exaggeration to say that it extended over the
whole of his seventy-eight years of life. It included the first five-and-
twenty years almost entirely. It included also the brief curacy, the
prolonged residence at Parham and Glenham, frequent visits for holidays
in after years, and who but a lover of his native place would have done
as his son pictures him doing when at Stathern--riding alone to the coast
of Lincolnshire, sixty miles from where he was living, only to dip in the
waves that also washed the beach of Aldeburgh and returned immediately to
his home. "There is no sea like the Aldeburgh sea," said Edward
FitzGerald, and we may be sure that was Crabbe's opinion also, for
revisiting it in later life he wrote:--
There once again, my native place I come
Thee to salute, my earliest, latest home.
One picture in Crabbe's life stands out vividly to us all--the long years
of devotion given by him to Sarah Elmy, and the reciprocal devotion of
the very capable woman who finally became his wife. Crabbe's courtship
and marriage affords a pleasant contrast to the usual unhappy relations
of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley,
and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure
how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the
fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The
public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state of things.
I have given thus much time to Crabbe's life story because it interests
me, and I do not believe that it is possible nowadays to kindle a very
profound interest in any writer without a definite presentation of his
personality. Apart from his biography--his three biographies by George
Crabbe the second, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, and Canon Ainger, there are the
seven volumes of his works. Now I do not imagine that any great
accession will be made to the ranks of Crabbe's admirers by asking people
to take down these seven volumes and read them right through--a thing I
have myself done twice, and many here also I doubt not. Rather would I
plead for a reprint of Edmund FitzGerald's Selections, or failing that I
would ask you to look at the volume of Selections made by Mr. Bernard
Holland, or that other admirable selection by the Rev. Anthony Deane. "I
must think my old Crabbe will come up again, though never to be popular,"
wrote FitzGerald to Archbishop Trench. Well, perhaps the "large still
books" of the older writers are never destined to be popular again, but
they will always maintain with genuine book lovers their place in English
Literature, and if the adequate praise they have received from many good
judges is well kept to the front there will be constant accessions to the
ranks, and readers will want the whole of Crabbe's works in which to dig
for themselves. Crabbe's place in English Literature needed not such a
gathering as this to make it secure, but we want celebrations of our
literary heroes to keep alive enthusiasm, and to encourage the
faint-hearted.
In the glorious tradition of English Literature, then, Crabbe comes after
Cowper and before Wordsworth. There is a lineal descent as clear and
well-defined as any set forth in the peerages of "Burke" or "Debrett." We
read in vain if we do not fully grasp the continuity of creative work.
Cowper was born in 1731, Crabbe in 1754, and Cowper was called to the Bar
in the year that Crabbe was born. In spite of this disparity of years
they started upon their literary careers almost at the same time. _The
Village_ was published in 1783, and _The Task_ in 1785, yet Cowper is in
every sense the elder poet, inheriting more closely the traditions of
Pope and Dryden, coming less near to humanity than Crabbe, and being more
emphatically a child of the eighteenth century in its artificial aspects.
It is impossible to indict a whole century with all its varied
accomplishments, and the century that produced Swift and Cowper and
Crabbe had no lack of the finer instincts of brotherhood. Yet the
century was essentially a cruel one. Take as an example the attitude of
naturally kindly men to the hanging of Dr. Dodd for forgery. Even Samuel
Johnson, who did what he could for Dodd, did not find, as he should have
done, his whole soul revolted by such a punishment for a crime against
property. Cowper has immense claim upon our regard. He is one of the
truest of poets, and one of the most interesting figures in all English
literature, although no small share of his one-time popularity was due to
his identification with Evangelicalism in religion. Cowper had humour
and other qualities which enabled him to make the universal appeal to all
hearts which is the test of the greatest literature--the appeal of "John
Gilpin," the "Lines" to his Mother's Portrait, and his verses on "The
loss of the _Royal George_." Crabbe made no such appeal, and he has not
the adventitious assistance that association with a religious sect
affords. Hence the popularity he once enjoyed was more entirely on his
merits than was that of Cowper. He was the first of the eighteenth
century poets who was able to _see things as they really are_. Therein
lies his strength. Were they poets at all--those earlier eighteenth
century writers? It sounds like rank blasphemy to question it, but what
is poetry? Surely it is the expression artistically in rhythmic form--or
even without it--of the sincerest emotions concerning nature and life.
The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere--a very bad poet can
be that--but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfect
art. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope,
Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters of
language every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but not
poets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson that
claim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emancipate himself
from the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emancipated himself still
further. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poet
even if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many know
Crabbe only by the parody of his manner in _Rejected Addresses_:
John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs Esquire;
But when John Dwyer listed in the blues,
Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs's shoes.
and it must be admitted that there are plenty of lines like these in
Crabbe, as for example:--
Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire
Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher.
or this:--
The church he view'd as liberal minds will view
And there he fixed his principles and pew.
Banalities of this kind are scattered through his pages as they are
scattered through those of Wordsworth. Nevertheless he was a great poet,
bringing us before Wordsworth out of the ruck of artificiality and
insincerity. Does any one suppose that Pope in his _Essay on Man_, that
Johnson in his _London_ or that Goldsmith in his _Deserted Village_ had
any idea other than the production of splendid phrases. Each and all of
them were brilliant men of letters. Crabbe was not a brilliant man of
letters, but he was a fine and a genuine poet. You will look in vain in
his truest work for the lyrical and musical gift that we associate with
poets who came after:--Shelley, Keats, Tennyson--poets who made Crabbe's
work quite distasteful for some three generations. Crabbe it has been
claimed had that gift also, to be found in "Sir Eustace Grey" and other
verses written under the inspiration of opium, as much of Coleridge's
best work was written--but it is not in these that his admirers will seek
to emphasize his achievement--it is in his work which treats of
The simple annals of my parish poor.
_The Village_, _The Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and many of the
_Tales_ bear witness to a clear vision of life as it is lived by the
majority of people born into this world. I have seen criticism of Crabbe
which calls him the poet who took the middle classes for his subjects,
criticism which compared him with George Eliot. All this is quite beside
the mark. Crabbe is pre-eminently the poet of the poor, with a lesson
for to-day as much as for a century ago. Villages are not now what they
were then, we are told. But I fully believe that there are all the
conditions of life to-day hidden beneath the surface as Crabbe's close
observations pictured them. "The altered position of the poor," says Mr.
Courthope, "has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the reality
they once possessed." I do not believe it. The closely packed towns,
the herding together of families, the squalor are still to be found in
our midst. Crabbe has his message for our time as well as for his own.
How he tore the veil from the conventional language of his day, the
picture of the ideal village where the happy peasantry passed through
life so joyously. Contrast such pictures with his sad declaration--
I've seldom known, though I have often read
Of happy peasants on their dying-bed.