education had already made him; the outward Crabbe, by the help of
Burke, rapidly put on a more prosperous appearance. His poems were
published and achieved success. He took orders and found patrons.
Thurlow gave him £100, and afterwards presented him to two small
livings, growling out with an oath that he was 'as like Parson Adams as
twelve to a dozen.' The Duke of Rutland appointed him chaplain, a
position in which he seems to have been singularly out of his element.
Further patronage, however, made him independent, and he married his
Mira and lived very happily ever afterwards. Perhaps, with his
old-fashioned ideas, he would not quite have satisfied some clerical
critics of the present day. His views about non-residence and
pluralities seem to have been lax for the time; and his hearty dislike
for dissent was coupled with a general dislike for enthusiasm of all
kinds. He liked to ramble about after flowers and fossils, and to hammer
away at his poems in a study where chaos reigned supreme. For twenty-two
years after his first success as an author, he never managed to get a
poem into a state fit for publication, though periodical conflagrations
of masses of manuscript--too vast to be burnt in the chimney--testified
to his continuous industry. His reappearance seems to have been caused
chiefly by his desire to send a son to the University. His success was
repeated, though a new school had arisen which knew not Pope. The youth
who had been kindly received by Burke, Reynolds, and Johnson, came back
from his country retreat to be lionised at Holland House, and be petted
by Brougham and Moore, and Rogers and Campbell, and all the rising
luminaries. He paid a visit to Scott contemporaneously with George IV.,
and pottered about the queer old wynds and closes of Edinburgh, which he
preferred to the New Town, and apparently to Arthur's Seat, with a
judicious _caddie_ following to keep him out of mischief. A more
tangible kind of homage was the receipt of £3,000 from Murray for his
'Tales of the Hall,' which so delighted him that he insisted on carrying
the bills loose in his pocket till he could show them 'to his son John'
in the country.[2] There, no doubt, he was most at home; and his
parishioners gradually became attached to their 'Parson Adams,' in spite
of his quaintnesses and some manful defiance of their prejudices. All
women and children loved him, and he died at a good old age in 1832,
having lived into a new order in many things, and been as little
affected by the change as most men. The words with which he concludes
the sketch of the Vicar in his 'Borough' are not inappropriate to
himself:--
Nor one so old has left this world of sin
More like the being that he entered in.
The peculiar homeliness of Crabbe's character and poetry is excellently
hit off in the 'Rejected Addresses,' and the lines beginning
John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire,
are probably more familiar to the present generation than any of the
originals. 'Pope in the worsted stockings' is the title hit off for him
by Horace Smith, and has about the same degree of truth as most smart
sayings of the kind. The 'worsted stockings' at least are
characteristic. Crabbe's son and biographer indicates some of the
surroundings of his father's early life in a description of the uncle, a
Mr. Tovell, with whom the poet's wife, the Mira of his Journal, passed
her youth. He was a sturdy yeoman, living in an old house with a moat, a
rookery, and fishponds. The hall was paved with black and white marble,
and the staircase was of black oak, slippery as ice, with a chiming
clock and a barrel-organ on the landing-places. The handsome
drawing-room and dining-rooms were only used on grand occasions, such as
the visit of a neighbouring peer. Mrs. Tovell jealously reserved for
herself the duty of scrubbing these state apartments, and sent any
servant to the right-about who dared to lay unhallowed hands upon them.
The family sat habitually in the old-fashioned kitchen, by a huge open
chimney, where the blaze of a whole pollard sometimes eclipsed the
feeble glimmer of the single candle in an iron candlestick, intended to
illuminate Mrs. Tovell's labours with the needle. Masters and servants,
with any travelling tinker or ratcatcher, all dined together, and the
nature of their meals has been described by Crabbe himself:--
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 huge 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 party drew
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;
then, the poet goes on to intimate, squeamish persons might feel a
little uncomfortable. After dinner followed a nap of precisely one hour.
Then bottles appeared on the table, and neighbouring farmers, with faces
rosy with brandy, drifted in for a chat. One of these heroes never went
to bed sober, but scandalised all teetotallers by retaining all his
powers and coursing after he was ninety. Bowl after bowl of punch was
emptied, and the conversation took so convivial a character that Crabbe
generally found it expedient to withdraw, though his son, who records
these performances, was held to be too young to be injured, and the
servants were too familiar for their presence to be a restraint.
It was in this household that the poet found his Mira. Crabbe's own
father was apparently at a lower point of the social scale; and during
his later years took to drinking and to flinging dishes about the room
whenever he was out of temper. Crabbe always drew from the life; most of
his characters might have joined in his father's drinking bouts, or told
stories over Mr. Tovell's punchbowls. Doubtless a social order of the
same kind survived till a later period in various corners of the island.
The Tovells of to-day get their fashions from London, and their
labourers, instead of dining with them in their kitchen, have taken to
forming unions and making speeches about their rights. If, here and
there, in some remote nooks we find an approximation to the coarse,
hearty patriarchal mode of life, we regard it as a naturalist regards a
puny modern reptile, the representative of gigantic lizards of old
geological epochs. A sketch or two of its peculiarities, sufficiently
softened and idealised to suit modern tastes, forms a picturesque
background to a modern picture. Some of Miss Brontë's rough
Yorkshiremen would have drunk punch with Mr. Tovell; and the farmers in
the 'Mill on the Floss' are representatives of the same race, slightly
degenerate, in so far as they are just conscious that a new cause of
disturbance is setting into the quiet rural districts. Dandie Dinmont
again is a relation of Crabbe's heroes, though the fresh air of the
Cheviots and the stirring traditions of the old border life have
conferred upon him a more poetical colouring. To get a realistic picture
of country life as Crabbe saw it, we must go back to Squire Western, or
to some of the roughly-hewn masses of flesh who sat to Hogarth. Perhaps
it may be said that Miss Austen's delicate portrait of the more polished
society, which took the waters at Bath, and occasionally paid a visit to
London, implies a background of coarser manners and more brutal
passions, which lay outside her peculiar province. The question
naturally occurs to social philosophers, whether the improvement in the
external decencies of life and the wider intellectual horizon of modern
days prove a genuine advance over the rude and homely plenty of an
earlier generation. I refer to such problems only to remark that Crabbe
must be consulted by those who wish to look upon the seamy side of the
time which he describes. He very soon dropped his nymphs and shepherds,
and ceased to invoke the idyllic muse. In his long portrait gallery
there are plenty of virtuous people, and some people intended to be
refined; but features indicative of coarse animal passions, brutality,
selfishness, and sensuality are drawn to the life, and the development
of his stories is generally determined by some of the baser elements of
human nature. 'Jesse and Colin' are described in one of the Tales; but
they are not the Jesse and Colin of Dresden china. They are such rustics
as ate fat bacon and drank 'heavy ale and new;' not the imaginary
personages who exchanged amatory civilities in the old-fashioned
pastorals ridiculed by Pope and Gay.
Crabbe's rough style is indicative of his general temper. It is in
places at least the most slovenly and slipshod that was ever adopted by
any true poet. The authors of the 'Rejected Addresses' had simply to
copy, without attempting the impossible task of caricaturing. One of
their familiar couplets, for example, runs thus:--
Emmanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy
Up as a corn-cutter, a safe employ!
And here is the original Crabbe:--
Swallow, a poor attorney, brought his boy
Up at his desk, and gave him his employ.
When boy cannot be made to rhyme with employ, Crabbe is very fond of
dragging in a hoy. In the 'Parish Register' he introduces a narrative
about a village grocer and his friend in these lines:--
Aged were both, that Dawkins, Ditchem this,
Who much of marriage thought and much amiss.
Or to quote one more opening of a story:--
Counter and Clubb were men in trade, whose pains,
Credit, and prudence, brought them constant gains;
Partners and punctual, every friend agreed
Counter and Clubb were men who must succeed.
But of such gems anyone may gather as many as he pleases by simply
turning over Crabbe's pages. In one sense, they are rather pleasant than
otherwise. They are so characteristic and put forward with such absolute
simplicity that they have the same effect as a good old provincialism in
the mouth of a genuine countryman. It must, however, be admitted that
Crabbe's careful study of Pope had not initiated him in some of his
master's secrets. The worsted stockings were uncommonly thick. If Pope's
brilliance of style savours too much of affectation, Crabbe never
manages to hit off an epigram in the whole of his poetry. The language
seldom soars above the style which would be intelligible to the merest
clodhopper; and we can understand how, when in his later years Crabbe
was introduced to wits and men of the world, he generally held his
peace, or, at most, let fall some bit of dry quiet humour. At rare
intervals he remembers that a poet ought to indulge in a figure of
speech, and laboriously compounds a simile which appears in his poetry
like a bit of gold lace on a farmer's homespun coat. He confessed as
much in answer to a shrewd criticism of Jeffrey's, saying that he
generally thought of such illustrations and inserted them after he had
finished his tale. Here is one of these deliberately-concocted
ornaments, intended to explain the remark that the difference between
the character of two brothers came out when they were living together
quietly:--
As various colours in a painted ball,
While it has rest are seen distinctly all;
Till, whirl'd around by some exterior force,
They all are blended in the rapid course;
So in repose and not by passion swayed
We saw the difference by their habits made;
But, tried by strong emotions, they became
Filled with one love, and were in heart the same.
The conceit is ingenious enough in one sense, but painfully ingenious.
It requires some thought to catch the likeness suggested, and then it
turns out to be purely superficial. The resemblance of such a writer to
Pope obviously does not go deep. Crabbe imitates Pope because everybody
imitated him at that day. He adopted Pope's metre because it had come to
be almost the only recognised means of poetical expression. He stuck to
it after his contemporaries had introduced new versification, partly
because he was old-fashioned to the backbone and partly because he had
none of those lofty inspirations which naturally generate new forms of
melody. He seldom trusts himself to be lyrical, and when he does his
versification is nearly as monotonous as it is in his narrative poetry.
We must not expect to soar with Crabbe into any of the loftier regions;
to see the world 'apparelled in celestial light,' or to descry
Such forms as glitter in the muses' ray,
With orient hues, unborrowed of the sun.
We shall find no vehement outbursts of passion, breaking loose from the
fetters of sacred convention. Crabbe is perfectly content with the
British Constitution, with the Thirty-nine Articles, and all
respectabilities in Church and State, and therefore he is quite content
also with the good old jogtrot of the recognised metres; his language,
halting invariably, and for the most part clumsy enough, is sufficiently
differentiated from prose by the mould into which it is run, and he
never wants to kick over the traces with his more excitable
contemporaries.
The good old rule
Sufficeth him, the simple plan
that each verse should consist of ten syllables, with an occasional
Alexandrine to accommodate a refractory epithet, and should rhyme
peaceably with its neighbour.
From all which it may be too harshly inferred that Crabbe is merely a
writer in rhyming prose, and deserving of no attention from the more
enlightened adherents of a later school. The inference, I say, would be
hasty, for it is impossible to read Crabbe patiently without receiving a
very distinct and original impression. If some pedants of æsthetic
philosophy should declare that we ought not to be impressed because
Crabbe breaks all their rules, we can only reply they are mistaking
their trade. The true business of the critic is to discover from
observation what are the conditions under which a book appeals to our
sympathies, and, if he finds an apparent exception to his rules, to
admit that he has made an oversight, and not to condemn the facts which
persist in contradicting his theories. It may, indeed, be freely granted
that Crabbe has suffered seriously by his slovenly methods and his
insensibility to the more exquisite and ethereal forms of poetical
excellence. But however he may be classified, he possesses the essential
mark of genius, namely, that his pictures, however coarse the
workmanship, stamp themselves on our minds indelibly and
instantaneously. His pathos is here and there clumsy, but it goes
straight to the mark. His characteristic qualities were first distinctly
shown in the 'Village,' which was partly composed under Burke's eye, and
was more or less touched by Johnson. It was, indeed, a work after
Johnson's own heart, intended to be a pendant, or perhaps a corrective,
to Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village.' It is meant to give the bare blank
facts of rural life, stripped of all sentimental gloss. To read the two
is something like hearing a speech from an optimist landlord and then
listening to the comments of Mr. Arch. Goldsmith, indeed, was far too
exquisite an artist to indulge in mere conventionalities about
agricultural bliss. If his 'Auburn' is rather idealised, the most
prosaic of critics cannot object to the glow thrown by the memory of the
poet over the scene of now ruined happiness, and, moreover, Goldsmith's
delicate humour guards him instinctively from laying on his rose-colour
too thickly. Crabbe, however, will have nothing to do with rose-colour,
thick or thin. There is one explicit reference in the poem to his
predecessor's work, and it is significant. Everybody remembers, or ought
to remember, Goldsmith's charming pastor, to whom it can only be
objected that he has not the fear of political economists before his
eyes. This is Crabbe's retort after describing a dying pauper in need of
spiritual consolation:--
And does not he, the pious man, appear,
He, 'passing rich with forty pounds a year?'
Ah! no; a shepherd of a different stock,
And far unlike him, feeds this little flock:
A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task
As much as God or man can fairly ask;
The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.
None better skilled the noisy pack to guide,
To urge their chase, to cheer them, or to chide;
A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,
And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.
This fox-hunting parson (of whom Cowper has described a duplicate) lets
the pauper die as he pleases; and afterwards allows him to be buried
without attending, performing the funerals, it seems, in a lump upon
Sundays. Crabbe admits in a note that such negligence was uncommon, but
adds that it is not unknown. The flock is, on the whole, worthy of the
shepherd. The old village sports have died out in favour of smuggling
and wrecking. The poor are not, as rich men fancy, healthy and well fed.
Their work makes them premature victims to ague and rheumatism; their
food is
Homely, not wholesome, plain, not plenteous, such
As you who praise would never deign to touch.
The ultimate fate of the worn-out labourer is the poorhouse, described
in lines of which it is enough to say that Scott and Wordsworth learnt
them by heart, and the melancholy deathbed already noticed. Are we
reading a poem or a Blue Book done into rhyme? may possibly be the
question of some readers. The answer should perhaps be that a good many
Blue Books contain an essence which only requires to be properly
extracted and refined to become genuine poetry. If Crabbe's verses
retain rather too much of the earthly elements, he is capable of
transmuting his minerals into genuine gold, as well as of simply
collecting them. Nothing, for example, is more characteristic than the
mode in which the occasional descriptions of nature are harmoniously
blended with the human life in his poetry. Crabbe is an ardent lover of
a certain type of scenery, to which justice has not often been done. We
are told how, after a long absence from Suffolk, he rode sixty miles
from his house to have a dip in the sea. Some of his poems appear to be
positively impregnated with a briny, or rather perhaps a tarry, odour.
The sea which he loved was by no means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur
of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the
sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of his beloved
Suffolk. He likes even the shelving beach, with fishermen's boats and
decaying nets and remnants of stale fish. He loves the dreary estuary,
where the slow tide sways backwards and forwards, and whence
High o'er the restless deep, above the reach
Of gunner's hope, vast flocks of wildfowl stretch.
The coming generation of poets took to the mountains; but Crabbe
remained faithful to the dismal and yet, in his hands, the impressive
scenery of his native salt-marshes. His method of description suits the
country. His verses never become melodramatic, nor does he ever seem to
invest nature with the mystic life of Wordsworth's poetry. He gives the
plain prosaic facts which impress us because they are in such perfect
harmony with the sentiment. Here, for example, is a fragment from the
'Village,' which is simply a description of the neighbourhood of
Aldborough:--
Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring 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 stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf,
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade.
The writer is too obviously a botanist; but the picture always remains
with us as the only conceivable background for the poverty-stricken
population whom he is about to describe. The actors in the 'Borough' are
presented to us in a similar setting; and it may be well to put a
sea-piece beside this bit of barren common. Crabbe's range of
descriptive power is pretty well confined within the limits so defined.
He is scarcely at home beyond the tide-marks:--
Be it the summer noon; a sandy space
The ebbing tide has left upon its place;
Then just the hot and stony beach above,
Light twinkling streams in bright confusion move;
* * * * *
There the broad bosom of the ocean keeps
An equal motion; swelling as it sleeps,
Then slowly sinking; curling to the strand,
Faint lazy waves o'ercreep the ridgy sand,
Or tap the tarry boat with gentle blow,
And back return in silence, smooth and slow.
Ships in the calm seem anchored: for they glide
On the still sea, urged slowly by the tide:
Art thou not present, this calm scene before
Where all beside is pebbly length of shore,
And far as eye can reach, it can discern no more?
I have omitted a couplet which verges on the scientific; for Crabbe is
unpleasantly anxious to leave nothing unexplained. The effect is, in its
way, perfect. Anyone who pleases may compare it with Wordsworth's calm
in the verses upon Peele Castle, where the sentiment is given without
the minute statement of facts, and where, too, we have the inevitable
quotation about the 'light that never was on sea or land,' and is pretty
nearly as rare in Crabbe's poetry. What he sees we can all see, though
not so intensely, and his art consists in selecting the precise elements
that tell most forcibly towards bringing us into the required frame of
mind. To enjoy Crabbe fully, we ought perhaps to be acclimatised on the
coast of the Eastern Counties; we should become sensitive to the
plaintive music of the scenery, which is now generally drowned by the
discordant sounds of modern watering-places, and would seem insipid to a
generation which values excitement in scenery as in fiction. Readers,
who measure the beauty of a district by its average height above the
sea-level, and who cannot appreciate the charm of a 'waste enormous
marsh,' may find Crabbe uncongenial.
The human character is determined, as Mr. Buckle and other philosophers
have assured us, by the climate and the soil. A little ingenuity, such
as those philosophers display in accommodating facts to theory, might
discover a parallel between the type of Crabbe's personages and the
fauna and flora of his native district. Declining a task which might
lead to fanciful conclusions, I may assume that the East Anglian
character is sufficiently familiar, whatever the causes by which it has
been determined. To define Crabbe's poetry we have simply to imagine
ourselves listening to the stories of his parishioners, told by a
clergyman brought up amongst the lower rank of the middle classes,
scarcely elevated above their prejudices, and not willingly leaving
their circle of ideas. We must endow him with that simplicity of
character which gives us frequent cause to smile at its proprietor, but
which does not disqualify him from seeing a great deal further into his
neighbours than they are apt to give him credit for doing. Such insight,
in fact, is due not to any great subtlety of intellect, but to the
possession of deep feeling and sympathy. Crabbe saw little more of Burke
than would have been visible to an ordinary Suffolk farmer. When
transplanted to a ducal mansion, he only drew the pretty obvious
inference, embodied in a vigorous poem, that a patron is a very
disagreeable and at times a very mischievous personage. The joys and
griefs which really interest him are of the very tangible and solid kind
which affect men and women to whom the struggle for existence is a stern
reality. Here and there his good-humoured but rather clumsy ridicule may
strike some lady to whom some demon has whispered 'have a taste;' and
who turns up her nose at the fat bacon on Mr. Tovell's table. He pities
her squeamishness, but thinks it rather unreasonable. He satirises too
the heads of the rustic aristocracy; the brutal squire who bullies his
nephew the clergyman for preaching against his vices, and corrupts the
whole neighbourhood; or the speculative banker who cheats old maids
under pretence of looking after their investments. If the squire does
not generally appear in Crabbe in the familiar dramatic character of a
rural Lovelace, it is chiefly because Crabbe has no great belief in the
general purity of the inferior ranks of rural life. But his most
powerful stories deal with the tragedies--only too life-like--of the
shop and the farm. He describes the temptations which lead the small
tradesman to adulterate his goods, or the parish clerk to embezzle the
money subscribed in the village church, and the evil influence of
dissenting families in fostering a spiritual pride which leads to more
unctuous hypocrisy; for, though he says of the wicked squire that
His worship ever was a Churchman true,
And held in scorn the Methodistic crew,