politician. He signed the nomination paper for John Wilson Croker the
Tory in his native Aldeburgh, and he supported a Whig at the same
election at Trowbridge. His politics were summed up in backing his
friends of both parties. But he did see, as politicians are only
beginning to see to-day, that the ultimate solution was a social one and
not a mere question of political parties. Generations have passed away
since he lived, and men are still shouting themselves hoarse to prove
that in this Shibboleth or in that may be found the salvation of the
country, yet we have still our thousands on the verge of starvation, we
have still the very poor in our midst, and the problem seems as far from
solution as ever. But it would be all the better for the State if we
could keep the questions raised by Crabbe in his wonderful pictures more
continually in view,--lacking in taste as they may sometimes seem to weak
stomachs, coarse, unvarnished narratives though they be of a life which
is really almost entirely sordid.
Then let us turn to Crabbe's gallery of pictures. Phoebe Dawson, and the
equally pathetic Ruth, Blaney and Clelia, Peter Grimes and many another.
They are as clearly defined a set of entirely human beings as any Master
has given us. It is not assuredly in George Eliot, as Canon Ainger
suggests, that I find an affinity to Crabbe among the moderns, but in two
much greater writers of quite different texture, Balzac and Dickens. Had
Crabbe not been bounded and restrained by the conventions of his cloth,
he might have become one of the most popular story-tellers in our
literature--the English Balzac. At a hundred points Charles Dickens is
an entire contrast to Crabbe--in his buoyant humour, his gaiety of heart,
in the glamour that he throws over the life of the poor, a glamour that
was more present in the early Victorian era than in our own, but Crabbe
is with Balzac and with Dickens in that he presents as no other moderns
have done living pictures of suffering human lives.
There is yet one other literary force, powerful in our day, that has been
largely influenced by Crabbe. Those who love the novels of Mr. Thomas
Hardy, whom we rejoice to see with us at this Celebration,--his
_Woodlanders_, _The Return of the Native_, _Far from the Madding Crowd_,
and many another book that touches the very heart of things in nature and
human life, will rejoice to hear that this great writer has admitted
George Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work.
I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe,
whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever.
"Crabbe was our first great English realist" Mr. Hardy would tell you if
only we could persuade him to speak from this platform, as unfortunately
he will not.
Lastly let us take Crabbe as a great story-teller. He has many more
ideas than most of the novelists. That is why we do well to recall the
hint of the writer who said that when a new work came out we should take
down an old one from our shelves. Instead of the "un-idead" novels, that
come out by the dozen and are so popular. I wish we could agree to read
Crabbe's novels in verse. Unhappily their form is against them in the
present age. But it would not be at all a misfortune if we could make
Crabbe's _Tales_ once more the vogue. They are good stories, absorbingly
interesting. They leave a very vivid impression on the mind. Once read
they are unforgettable.
I have seen it stated that these stories are old-fashioned both in manner
and in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintain
they are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter-
day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It is
this essential modernity that is to make Crabbe's place in English
literature secure for generations yet to come.
Finally, Crabbe's place in English literature is as the bridge between
the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With him begins that "enthusiasm
of humanity" which the eighteenth century so imperfectly understood.
Byron and Wordsworth, disliking each other cordially, did well to praise
him, for he was their forerunner. A master of pathos, you may find in
his work incentive to tears and laughter, although sometimes the humour,
as in _The Learned Boy_, is sadly unconscious.
But I must bring these rambling remarks to a close, and in doing so I
must once again quote that other Suffolk worthy to whom many of us are
very much attached, I mean Edward FitzGerald. When Sir Leslie Stephen
wrote what is to my mind a singularly infelicitous essay on Crabbe in the
_Cornhill_, he quoted the remark, which seemed to be new to FitzGerald,
as to Crabbe being a "pope in worsted stockings"--a remark made by Horace
Smith of _Rejected Addresses_, although I have seen it ascribed to Byron
and others. "Pope in worsted stockings," exclaimed FitzGerald, "why I
could cite whole paragraphs of as fine a texture as Moliere; 'incapable
of epigram,' the jackanapes says--why, I could find fifty of the very
best epigrams in five minutes," and later, in another letter he writes--
I am positively looking over my everlasting Crabbe again; he naturally
comes in about the fall of the year.
Here surely is an appropriate quotation, a little prophetic perhaps, for
our gathering--the "everlasting Crabbe." We cannot all love Crabbe as
much as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain if
after this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems more
sympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proud
of the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closely
identified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writer
is closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man--a
Suffolk man he was--yet even more in the future than in the past, he is
destined to gain the whole world for his parish. He is the everlasting
Crabbe!
V. THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF EAST ANGLIA
An address to the East Anglian Society on the occasion of a dinner to Mr.
William Dutt, author of "Highways and Byways in East Anglia." March 25,
1901.
I appreciate the privilege of being allowed to speak this evening for a
few minutes upon the literary associations of East Anglia, of being
permitted to ask you, while doing honour to a well-known East Anglian
writer of to-day, to cast a glance back upon the literature of the past
so far as it affects that portion of the British Empire with which we
nearly all of us here are proud to be associated. There is necessarily
some difference of opinion as to what constitutes East Anglia. I find
that our guest of to-night tells us that it is "Norfolk, Suffolk and
portions of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire." Dr. Knapp, the
biographer of Borrow, says that it is Norfolk, Suffolk and
Cambridgeshire; personally I am content with that classification,
because, although I was born in London, I claim, apart from schoolboy
days at Downham Market, a pretty lengthy ancestry from Norwich on one
side--which is indisputably East Anglia--and from Welney, near Wisbeach,
on another side, and Welney and Wisbeach are, I affirm, just as much East
Anglia as Norwich and Ipswich. With reference to those other counties
and portions of counties, I think that the inhabitants must be allowed to
decide for themselves. I imagine that they will give every possible
stretch to the imagination in order to allow themselves the honour of
being incorporated in East Anglia, a name that one never pronounces
without recalling that fine old-world compliment of St. Augustine of
Canterbury to our ancestors, that they ought to be called not "Angles"
but "Angels."
Every one in particular who loves books must be proud to partake of our
great literary tradition. If it is difficult to decide precisely what
East Anglia is, it is perhaps equally difficult to speak for a few
minutes on so colossal a theme as the literature of East Anglia. It
would be easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will
provide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; to
remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates--John Skelton, of
Diss, the author of _Colyn Cloute_, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill,
the playwright--the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two
very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at
Thetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist
in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; as
also the famous brother and sister whose works appealed to totally
different minds, James and Harriet Martineau. Then there was that
pathetic creature and indifferent poet, Robert Bloomfield, whose
_Farmer's Boy_ once appeared in the luxurious glories of an expensive
quarto. Finally, one recalls that two of the most popular women writers
of an earlier generation, Clara Reeve, the novelist, and Agnes
Strickland, the historian, were Suffolk women.
But I am not concerned to give you a recapitulation of all the East
Anglian writers, whose names, as I have said, can be found in any
biographical dictionary, and the quality of whose work would rather
suggest that East Anglia, from a literary point of view, is a land of
extinct volcanoes. I am naturally rather anxious to make use of the
golden opportunity that has been afforded me to emphasize my own literary
sympathies, and to say in what I think lies the glory of East Anglia, at
least so far as the creation of books is concerned. Here I make an
interesting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in Captain
Marryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century
who has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prose
writers of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browne
and George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example of a
learned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again the
most remarkable letter-writers in the English language--Margaret Paston,
Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only three
serious rivals as letter-writers--William Cowper, Thomas Grey and Charles
Lamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in our
midst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertaining
diarist, Fanny Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same William
Cowper--who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim on that
and for other reasons some share and participation in his genius--a great
and much loved poet. It has given us indeed in William Cowper and George
Crabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the English
literature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet of
Scotland--Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pin
my faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their names
that I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of the
literature which has most inspired our East Anglian life.
In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us.
Only occasionally has a great English author a special claim on one
particular portion of England. He has not been the lesser or the greater
for that, it has merely been an accident of his birth and of his career.
The greatest of all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturally
the most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant association with
Warwickshire, but Shakspere stands almost alone in this, as in many
things. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London;
they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties or
countries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively local
tradition. Shelley was born in Sussex, but a hundred cities, including
Rome, where his ashes rest, may claim some participation in his fine
spirit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, who was born in Cumberland,
certainly obtained the greater part of his inspiration from the
neighbouring county of Westmorland, where his life was passed. But when
we come to East Anglia we are face to face with a body of writers who
belong to the very soil, upon whom the particular character of the
landscape has had a permanent effect, who are not only very great
Englishmen and Englishwomen, but are great East Anglians as well.
I have said that Captain Marryat was an East Anglian, and have we not a
right to be proud of Marryat's breezy stories of the sea? Our youth has
found such plentiful stimulus in _Peter Simple_, _Frank Mildmay_, and
_Mr. Midshipman Easy_; generations of boys have read them with delight,
generations of boys will read them. And not only boys, but men. One
recalls that Carlyle, in one of his deepest fits of depression, took
refuge in Marryat's novels with infinite advantage to his peace of mind.
Speaking of Captain Marryat and books for boys, a quite minor kind of
literature perhaps some of you may think, I must recall that an earlier
and still more famous story for children had an East Anglian origin. Did
not The Babes in the Wood come out of Norfolk? Was it not their estate
in that county that, as we learn from Percy's _Reliques_, their wicked
uncle coveted, and were not the last hours of those unfortunate children,
in this most picturesque and pathetic of stories, solaced by East Anglian
robins and their poor bodies covered by East Anglian vegetation?
Let me pass, however, to what may be counted more serious literature.
What can one say of Sir Thomas Browne unless indeed one has an hour in
which to say it. Every page of that great writer's _Religio Medici_ and
_Urn Burial_ is quotable--full of worldly wisdom and of an inspiration
that is not of the world. Browne was born in London, and not until he
was thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was "much
resorted to for his skill in physic," and where he lived for forty-five
years, when the fine church of St. Peter Mancroft, received his ashes--a
church in which, let me add, with pardonable pride, my own grandfather
and grandmother were married. I am glad that Norwich is shortly to
commemorate by a fitting monument not the least great of her sons, one
who has been aptly called "the English Montaigne." {138}
Perhaps there are those who would dispute my claim for Marryat and for
Sir Thomas Browne that they were East Anglians--both were only East
Anglians by adoption. There are even those who dispute the claim for one
whom I must count well-nigh the greatest of East Anglian men of
letters--George Borrow. Borrow, I maintain, was an East Anglian if ever
there was one, although this has been questioned by Mr. Theodore Watts-
Dunton. Now I have the greatest possible regard for Mr. Watts-Dunton. He
is distinguished alike as a critic, a poet, and a romancer. But I must
join issue with him here, and you, I know, will forgive me for taking up
your time with the matter; for if Mr. Watts-Dunton were right, one of the
chief glories would be shorn from our East Anglian traditions. He denies
in the Introduction to a new edition of _The Romany Rye_, just published,
the claim of Borrow to be an East Anglian, although Borrow himself
insisted that he was one.
One might as well call Charlotte Bronte a Yorkshire woman as call
Borrow an East Anglian. He was no more an East Anglian than an
Irishman born in London is an Englishman. His father was a Cornishman
and his mother of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian
blood was in the veins of Borrow's father, and very little in the
veins of his mother. Borrow's ancestry was pure Cornish on one side,
and on the other mainly French. But such was the egotism of Borrow
that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look
upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.
Well, I am not prepared to question the suggestion that East Anglia is
the hub of the universe, only to question Mr. Watts-Dunton's position.
There is virtue in that qualification of his that there was "very little"
East Anglian blood in the veins of Borrow's mother, and that she was
"mainly" French. As a matter of fact she was, of course, partly East
Anglian; that is to say, she must have had two or three generations of
East Anglian blood in her, seeing that it was her great-grandfather who
settled in Norfolk from France, and he and his children and grandchildren
intermarried with the race. But I do not pin my claim for Borrow upon
that fact--the fact of three generations of his mother's family at
Dumpling Green--or even on the fact that he was born near East Dereham.
There is nothing more certain than that we are all of us influenced
greatly by our environment, and that it is this, quite as much as birth
or ancestry, that gives us what characteristics we possess. It is the
custom, for example, to call Swift an Irishman, whereas Swift came of
English parentage and lived for many of his most impressionable years in
England. Nevertheless, he may be justly claimed by the sister-island,
for during a long sojourn in that country he became permeated with the
subtle influence of the Irish race, and in many things he thought and
felt as an Irishman. It is the custom to speak of Maria Edgeworth as an
Irish novelist, yet Miss Edgeworth was born in England of English
parentage. Nevertheless, she was quite as much an Irish novelist as
Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, for all her life was spent in direct
communion with the Irish race, and her books were Irish books. It is, on
the other hand, quite unreasonable to deny that Charlotte Bronte was a
Yorkshire woman. Only once at the end of her life did she visit Ireland
for a few weeks. Her Irish father and her Cornish mother doubtless
influenced her nature in many ways, but not less certain was the
influence of those wonderful moors around Haworth, and the people among
whom she lived. Neither Ireland nor Cornwall has as much right to claim
her as Yorkshire. I am the last to disclaim the influence of what is
sometimes called "Celticism" upon English literature; upon this point I
am certain that Matthew Arnold has said almost the last word. The
Celts--not necessarily the Irish, as there are three or four races of
Celts in addition to the Irish--have in the main given English literature
its fine imaginative quality, and even where he cannot trace a Celtic
origin to an English writer we may fairly assume that there is Celtic
blood somewhere in an earlier generation.
Nevertheless, the impressions, as I have said, derived from environment
are of the utmost vitality, and assuredly Borrow was an East Anglian, as
Sir Thomas Browne was an East Anglian. In each writer you can trace the
influence of our soil in a peculiar degree, and particularly in Borrow.
Borrow was proud of being an East Anglian, and we are proud of him. In
_Lavengro_, I venture to assert, we have the greatest example of prose
style in our modern literature, and I rejoice to see a growing Borrow
cult, a cult that is based not on an acceptance of the narrower side of
Borrow--his furious ultra-Protestantism, for example--as was the
popularity that he once enjoyed, but upon the fact that he was a
magnificent artist in words. No artist in words but is influenced by
environment. Charles Kingsley, for example, who came from quite
different surroundings, was profoundly influenced by the East Anglian fen-
country:--
"They have a beauty of their own, those great fens," he said, "a
beauty of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Overhead the
arch of heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and that vastness
gives such cloud-lands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen
nowhere else within these isles."
But I must hasten on, although I would fain tarry long over George Borrow
and his works. I have said that East Anglia is the country of great
letter writers. First, there was Margaret Paston. There is no such
contribution to a remote period of English history as that contained in
the _Paston Letters_, and I think we must associate them with the name of
a woman--Margaret Paston. Margaret's husband, John Paston; her son, Sir
John Paston; and her second son, who, strangely enough, was also a John,
and called himself "John Paston the Youngest," come frequently before us
in the correspondence, but Margaret Paston is the central figure.
It may not be without interest to some of my hearers who are married to
recall that Margaret Paston addresses her husband not as "Dear John," or
"My dear John," as I imagine a wife of to-day would do, but as "Right
Reverend and Worshipful Husband." Nowhere is there such a vivid picture
of a bygone age as that contained in these _Paston Letters_. We who sit
quietly by the hearth in the reign of King Edward VII may read what it
meant to live by the hearth in the reign of King Edward IV. It is
curious that the most humane documents of far-off times in our history
should all come from East Anglia, not only those _Paston Letters_,
brimful of the most vital interest concerning the reigns of Henry VI and
Edward IV, but also an even earlier period--the life, or at least the
monastic life in the time of the first Richard and of King John is in a
most extraordinarily human fashion mirrored for us in that Chronicle of
St. Edmund's Bury Monastery known as the Jocelyn Chronicle, published by
the Camden Society, which Carlyle has vitalized so superbly for us in
_Past and Present_.
But I was speaking of the great letter writers, commencing with Margaret
Paston. Who are our greatest letter writers? Undoubtedly they are
Horace Walpole, William Cowper and Edward FitzGerald. You know what a
superb picture of eighteenth century life has been presented to us in the
nine volumes of correspondence we have by Horace Walpole. {144} Walpole
was to all practical purposes an East Anglian, although he happened to be
born in London. His father, the great Sir Robert Walpole, was a notable
East Anglian, and he had the closest ties of birth and association with
East Anglia. Many of his letters were written from the family mansion of
Houghton. {145}
Next in order comes William Cowper. I believe that more than one
literary historian has claimed Cowper as a Norfolk man. Cowper was born
in Hertfordshire; he lived for a very great deal of his life in Olney, in
Buckinghamshire, in London and in Huntingdon, but if ever there was a man
who took on the texture of East Anglian scenery and East Anglian life it
was Cowper. That beautiful river, the Ouse, which empties itself into
the Wash, was a peculiar inspiration to Cowper, and those who know the
scenery of Olney know that it has conditions exactly analogous in every
way to those of East Anglia. One of Cowper's most beautiful poems is
entitled "On Receipt of my Mother's Portrait out of Norfolk," and he
himself, as I have said, found his last resting-place on East Anglian
soil--at East Dereham.
If there may be some doubt about Cowper, there can be none whatever about
Edward FitzGerald, the greatest letter-writer of recent times. In
mentioning the name of FitzGerald I am a little diffident. It is like
introducing "King Charles's head" into this gathering; for was he not the
author of the poem known to all of us as the _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_,
and there is no small tendency to smile to-day whenever the name of Omar
Khayyam is mentioned and to call the cult a "lunacy." It is perhaps
unfortunate that FitzGerald gave that somewhat formidable title to his
paraphrase, or translation, of the old Persian poet. It is not the fault
of those who admire that poem exceedingly that it gives them a suspicion
of affecting a scholarship that they do not in most cases possess. What
many of us admire is not Omar Khayyam the Persian, nor have we any desire
to see or to know any other translation of that poet. We simply admit to
an honest appreciation of the poem by Edward FitzGerald, the Suffolk
squire, the poem that Tennyson describes as "the one thing done divinely
well." That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the English
language, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an East
Anglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celtic
quality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an East
Anglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea.
Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It is
astonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I might
give you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out of
East Anglia. Crabbe must have had one in mind when he wrote of Arabella
in one of his _Tales_:--