cloak for scorn of good morals. He tells how boys run away to sea, or
join strolling players, and have in consequence to beg their bread at
the end of their days. The almshouse or the county gaol is the natural
end of his villains, and he paints to the life the evil courses which
generally lead to such a climax. Nobody describes better the process of
going to the dogs. And most of all, he sympathises with the village
maiden who has listened too easily to the voice of the charmer, in the
shape of a gay sailor or a smart London footman, and has to reap the
bitter consequences of her too easy faith. Most of his stories might be
paralleled by the experience of any country clergyman who has entered
into the life of his parishioners. They are as commonplace and as
pathetic as the things which are happening round us every day, and which
fill a neglected paragraph in a country newspaper. The treatment varies
from the purely humorous to the most deep and genuine pathos; though it
never takes us into the regions of the loftier imagination.
The more humorous of these performances may be briefly dismissed. Crabbe
possesses the faculty, but not in any eminent degree; his hand is a
little heavy, and one must remember that Mr. Tovell and his like were of
the race who require to have a joke driven into their heads with a
sledge-hammer. Once or twice we come upon a sketch which may help to
explain Miss Austen's admiration. There is an old maid devoted to Mira,
and rejoicing in stuffed puppies and parrots, who might have been
ridiculed by Emma Woodhouse, and a parson who would have suited the
Eltons admirably:--
Fiddling and fishing were his arts; at times
He altered sermons and he aimed at rhymes;
And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards,
Oft he amused with riddles and charades.
Such sketches are a pleasant relief to his more sombre portraiture; but
it is in the tragic elements that his true power comes out. The motives
of his stories may be trivial, but never the sentiment. The deep manly
emotion makes us forget not only the frequent clumsiness of his style
but the pettiness of the incident, and what is more difficult, the
rather bread-and-butter tone of morality. If he is a little too fond of
bringing his villains to the gallows, he is preoccupied less by the
external consequences than by the natural working of evil passions. With
him sin is not punished by being found out, but by disintegrating the
character and blunting the higher sensibilities. He shows--and the
moral, if not new, is that which possesses the really intellectual
interest--how evil-doers are tortured by the cravings of desires that
cannot be satisfied, and the lacerations inflicted by ruined
self-respect. And therefore there is a truth in Crabbe's delineations
which is quite independent of his more or less rigid administration of
poetical justice. His critics used to accuse him of having a low opinion
of human nature. It is quite true that he assigns to selfishness and
brutal passion a very large part in carrying on the machinery of the
world. Some readers may infer that he was unlucky in his experience, and
others that he loved facts too unflinchingly. His stories sometimes
remind one of Balzac's in the descriptions of selfishness triumphant
over virtue. One, for example, of his deeply pathetic poems is called
'The Brothers;' and repeats the old contrast given in Fielding's Tom
Jones and Blifil. The shrewd sly hypocrite has received all manner of
kindnesses from the generous and simple sailor, and when, at last, the
poor sailor is ruined in health and fortune, he comes home expecting to
be supported by the gratitude of the brother, who has by this time made
money and is living at his ease. Nothing can be more pathetic or more in
the spirit of some of Balzac's stories than the way in which the rich
man receives his former benefactor; his faint recognition of fraternal
feelings gradually cools down under the influence of a selfish wife;
till at last the poor old sailor is driven from the parlour to the
kitchen, and from the kitchen to the loft, and finally deprived of his
only comfort, his intercourse with a young nephew not yet broken into
hardness of heart, on the plea that the lad is not to be corrupted by
the coarse language of his poor old uncle. The rich brother suspects
that the sailor has broken this rule, and is reviling him for his
ingratitude, when suddenly he discovers that he is abusing a corpse.
The old sailor's heart is broken at last; and his brother repents too
late. He tries to comfort his remorse by cross-examining the boy, who
was the cause of the last quarrel:--
'Did he not curse me, child?' 'He never cursed,
But could not breathe, and said his heart would burst.'
'And so will mine'----'But, father, you must pray;
My uncle said it took his pains away.'
Praying, however, cannot bring back the dead; and the fratricide, for
such he feels himself to be, is a melancholy man to the end of his days.
In Balzac's hands repentance would have had no place, and selfishness
have been finally triumphant and unabashed. We need not ask which would
be the most effective or the truest treatment; though I must put in a
word for the superior healthiness of Crabbe's mind. There is nothing
morbid about him. Still it would be absurd to push such a comparison
far. Crabbe's portraits are only spirited vignettes compared with the
elaborate full-lengths drawn by the intense imagination of the French
novelist; and Crabbe's whole range of thought is incomparably narrower.
The two writers have a real resemblance only in so far as in each case a
powerful accumulation of life-like details enables them to produce a
pathos, powerful by its vivid reality.
The singular power of Crabbe is in some sense more conspicuous in the
stories where the incidents are almost audaciously trifling. One of them
begins with this not very impressive and very ungrammatical couplet:--
With our late Vicar, and his age the same,
His clerk, hight Jachin, to his office came.
Jachin is a man of oppressive respectability; so oppressive, indeed,
that some of the scamps of the borough try to get him into scrapes by
temptations of a very inartificial kind, which he is strong enough to
resist. At last, however, it occurs to Jachin that he can easily
embezzle part of the usual monthly offerings while saving his character
in his own eyes by some obvious sophistry. He is detected and dismissed,
and dies after coming upon the parish. These materials for a tragic poem
are not very promising; and I do not mean to say that the sorrows of
poor Jachin affect us as deeply as those of Gretchen or Desdemona. The
parish clerk is perhaps a fit type of all that was least poetical in the
old social order of the country, and virtue which succumbs to the
temptation of taking two shillings out of a plate scarcely wants a
Mephistopheles to overcome it. We may perhaps think that the apologetic
note which the excellent Crabbe inserts at the end of his poem, to the
effect that he did not mean by it to represent mankind as 'puppets of an
overpowering destiny,' or 'to deny the doctrine of seducing spirits,' is
a little superfluous. The fact that a parish-clerk has taken to petty
pilfering can scarcely justify those heterodox conclusions. But when we
have smiled at Crabbe's philosophy, we begin to wonder at the force of
his sentiment. A blighted human soul is a pathetic object, however
paltry the temptation to which it has succumbed. Jachin has the dignity
of despair, though he is not quite a fallen archangel; and Crabbe's
favourite scenery harmonises with his agony.
In each lone place, dejected and dismayed,
Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid,
Or to the restless sea and roaring wind
Gave the strong yearnings of a ruined mind;
On the broad beach, the silent summer day,
Stretched on some wreck, he wore his life away;
Or where the river mingles with the sea,
Or on the mud-bank by the elder tree,
Or by the bounding marsh-dyke, there was he.
Nor would he have been a more pitiable object if he had betrayed a
nation or sold his soul for a Garter instead of the pillage of a
subscription plate. Poor old Jachin's story may seem to be borrowed from
a commonplace tract; but the detected pilferer, though he has only lost
the respect of the parson, the overseer, and the beadle, touches us as
deeply as the Byronic hero who has fallen out with the whole system of
the world.
If we refuse to sympathise with the pang due to so petty a
catastrophe--though our sympathy should surely be proportioned to the
keenness of the suffering rather than the absolute height of the
fall--we may turn to tragedy of a deeper dye. Peter Grimes, as his name
indicates, was a ruffian from his infancy. He once knocked down his poor
old father, who warned him of the consequences of his brutality:--
On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
This he revolved, and drank for his relief.
Adopting such a remedy, he sank from bad to worse, and gradually became
a thief, a smuggler, and a social outlaw. In those days, however, as is
proved by the history of Mrs. Brownrigg, parish authorities practised
the 'boarding-out system' after a reckless fashion. Peter was allowed to
take two or three apprentices in succession, whom he bullied, starved,
and maltreated, and who finally died under suspicious circumstances. The
last was found dead in Peter's fishing-boat after a rough voyage: and
though nothing could be proved, the Mayor told him that he should have
no more slaves to belabour. Peter, pursuing his trade in solitude,
gradually became morbid and depressed. The melancholy estuary became
haunted by ghostly visions. He had to groan and sweat with no vent for
his passion:--
Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
At the same time the same dull views to see,
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.
Peter grew more sullen, and the scenery became more weird and
depressing. The few who watched him remarked that there were three
places where Peter seemed to be more than usually moved. For a time he
hurried past them, whistling as he rowed; but gradually he seemed to be
fascinated. The idle loungers in the summer saw a man and boat lingering
in the tideway, apparently watching the gliding waves without casting a
net or looking at the wildfowl. At last his delirium becoming stronger,
he is carried to the poorhouse, and tells his story to the clergyman.
Nobody has painted with greater vigour that kind of externalised
conscience which may still survive in a brutalised mind. Peter Grimes,
of course, sees his victims' spirits and hates them. He fancies that his
father torments him out of spite, characteristically forgetting that the
ghost had some excuse for his anger:--
'Twas one hot noon, all silent, still, serene,
No living being had I lately seen;
I paddled up and down and dipped my net,
But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get--
A father's pleasure, when his toil was done,
To plague and torture thus an only son!
And so I sat and looked upon the stream,
How it ran on, and felt as in a dream;
But dream it was not; no!--I fixed my eyes
On the mid stream and saw the spirits rise;
I saw my father on the water stand,
And hold a thin pale boy in either hand;
And there they glided ghastly on the top
Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop;
I would have struck them, but they knew the intent,
And smiled upon the oar, and down they went.
Remorse in Peter's mind takes the shape of bitter hatred for his
victims; and with another characteristic confusion, he partly attributes
his sufferings to some evil influence intrinsic in the locality:--
There were three places, where they ever rose--
The whole long river has not such as those--
Places accursed, where, if a man remain,
He'll see the things which strike him to the brain.
And then the malevolent ghosts forced poor Peter to lean on his oars,
and showed him visions of coming horrors. Grimes dies impenitent, and
fancying that his tormentors are about to seize him. Of all haunted men
in fiction, it is not easy to think of a case where the horror is more
terribly realised. The blood-boulter'd Banquo tortured a noble victim,
but scarcely tortured him more effectually. Peter Grimes was doubtless a
close relation of Peter Bell. Bell having the advantage of Wordsworth's
interpretation, leads us to many thoughts which lie altogether beyond
Crabbe's reach; but, looking simply at the sheer tragic force of the two
characters, Grimes is to Bell what brandy is to small beer. He would
never have shown the white feather like his successor, who,
After ten months' melancholy,
Became a good and honest man.
If, in some sense, Peter Grimes is the most effective of Crabbe's
heroes, he would, if taken alone, give a very distorted impression of
the general spirit of the poetry. It is only at intervals that he
introduces us to downright criminals. There is, indeed, a description of
a convicted felon, which, according to Macaulay, has made 'many a rough
and cynical reader cry like a child,' and which, if space were
unlimited, would make a striking pendant to the agony of the burdened
Grimes. But, as a rule, Crabbe can find motives enough for tenderness in
sufferings which have nothing to do with the criminal law, and of which
the mere framework of the story is often interesting enough. His
peculiar power is best displayed in so presenting to us the sorrows of
commonplace characters as to make us feel that a shabby coat and a
narrow education, and the most unromantic of characters, need not cut
off our sympathies with a fellow-creature; and that the dullest
tradesman who treads on our toes in an omnibus may want only a power of
articulate expression to bring before us some of the deepest of all
problems. The parish clerk and the grocer--or whatever may be the
proverbial epitome of human dulness--may swell the chorus of lamentation
over the barrenness and the hardships and the wasted energies and the
harsh discords of life which is always 'steaming up' from the world, and
to which it is one, though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's
functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers,
must be studied at full length, and therefore quotations are necessarily
unjust. It will be sufficient if I refer--pretty much at random--to the
short story of 'Phoebe Dawson' in the 'Parish Register,' to the more
elaborate stories of 'Edward Shore' and the 'Parting Hour' in the
'Tales,' or to the story of 'Ruth' in the 'Tales of the Hall,' where
again the dreary pathos is strangely heightened by Crabbe's favourite
seaport scenery, to prove that he might be called as truly as Goldsmith
_affectuum potens_, though scarcely _lenis, dominator_.
It is time, however, to conclude with a word or two as to Crabbe's
peculiar place in the history of English literature. I said that, unlike
his contemporaries, Cowper and Burns, he adhered rigidly to the form of
the earlier eighteenth-century school, and partly for this reason
excited the wayward admiration of Byron, who always chose to abuse the
bridge which carried him to fame. But Crabbe's clumsiness of expression
makes him a very inadequate successor of Pope or of Goldsmith, and his
claims are really founded on the qualities which led Byron to call him
'nature's sternest painter, yet her best.' On this side he is connected
with some tendencies of the school which supplanted his early models. So
far as Wordsworth and his followers represented the reaction from the
artificial to a love of unsophisticated nature, Crabbe is entirely at
one with them. He did not share that unlucky taste for the namby-pamby
by which Wordsworth annoyed his contemporaries, and spoilt some of his
earlier poems. Its place was filled in Crabbe's mind by an even more
unfortunate disposition for the simply humdrum and commonplace, which,
it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his
verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably
destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's
influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not,
like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested 'persons
of quality,' and never gives us the impression of having composed his
rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has
gone out into country fields and village lanes, and paints directly from
man and nature, with almost a cynical disregard of the accepted code of
propriety. But the points on which he parts company with his more
distinguished contemporaries is equally obvious. Mr. Stopford Brooke has
lately been telling us with great eloquence what is the theology which
underlies the poetical tendencies of the last generation of poets. Of
that creed, a sufficiently vague one, it must be admitted, Crabbe was by
no means an apostle. Rather one would say he was as indifferent as a
good old-fashioned clergyman could very well be to the existence of any
new order of ideas in the world. The infidels, whom he sometimes
attacks, read Bolingbroke, and Chubb, and Mandeville, and have only
heard by report even of the existence of Voltaire. The Dissenters, whom
he so heartily detests, have listened to Whitefield and Wesley, or
perhaps to Huntington, S.S.--that is, as it may now be necessary to
explain, Sinner Saved. Every newer development of thought was still far
away from the quiet pews of Aldborough, and the only form of Church
restoration of which he has heard is the objectionable practice of
painting a new wall to represent a growth of lichens. Crabbe appreciates
the charm of the picturesque, but has never yet heard of our elaborate
methods of creating modern antiques. Lapped in such ignorance, and with
a mind little given to speculation, it is only in character that Crabbe
should be totally insensible to the various moods of thought represented
by Wordsworth's pantheistic conceptions of nature, or by Shelley's
dreamy idealism, or Byron's fierce revolutionary impulses. Still less,
if possible, could he sympathise with that love of beauty, pure and
simple, of which Keats was the first prophet. He might, indeed, be
briefly described by saying that he is at the very opposite pole from
Keats. The more bigoted admirers of Keats--for there are bigots in
matters of taste or poetry as well as in science or theology or
politics--would refuse the title of poet to Crabbe altogether on the
strength of the absence of this element from his verses. Like his most
obvious parallels in painting, he is too fond of boors and pothouses to
be allowed the quality of artistic perception. I will not argue the
point, which is, perhaps, rather a question of classification than of
intrinsic merit; but I will venture to suggest a test which will, I
think, give Crabbe a very firm, though, it may be, not a very lofty
place. Though I should be unwilling to be reckoned as one of Macaulay's
'rough and cynical readers,' I admit that I can read the story of the
convicted felon, or of Peter Grimes, without indulging in downright
blubbering. Most readers, I fear, can in these days get through pathetic
poems and novels without absolutely using their pocket-handkerchiefs.
But though Crabbe may not prompt such outward and visible signs of
emotion, I think that he produces a more distinct tendency to tears than
almost any poet of his time. True, he does not appeal to emotions,
accessible only through the finer intellectual perceptions, or to the
thoughts which 'lie too deep for tears.' That prerogative belongs to men
of more intense character, greater philosophical power, and more
delicate instincts. But the power of touching readers by downright
pictures of homespun griefs and sufferings is one which, to my mind,
implies some poetical capacity, and which clearly belongs to Crabbe.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] It seems, one is sorry to add, that Murray made a very bad bargain
in this case.
_WILLIAM HAZLITT_
There are few great books or great men that do not sadden us by a sense
of incompleteness. The writer, we feel, is better than his work. His
full power only reveals itself by flashes. There are blemishes in his
design, due to mere oversight or indolence; his energy has flagged, or
he has alloyed his pure gold to please the mob; or some burst of wayward
passion has disturbed the fair proportions of his work, and the man
himself is a half-finished or half-ruined fragment. The rough usage of
the world leaves its mark on the spiritual constitution of even the
strongest and best amongst us; and perhaps the finest natures suffer
more than others in virtue of their finer sympathies. 'Hamlet' is a
pretty good performance, if we make allowances; but what would it have
been if Shakespeare could have been at his highest level all through,
and if every element of strength in him had been purified from every
weakness? What would it have been, shall we say, if he could have had
the advantage of reading a few modern lectures on æsthetics? We may,
perhaps, be content with Shakespeare as circumstances left him; but in
reading our modern poets, the sentiment of regret is stronger. If Byron
had not been driven into his wild revolt against the world; if Shelley
had been judiciously treated from his youth; if Keats had had healthier
lungs; if Wordsworth had not grown rusty in his solitude; if Scott had
not been tempted into publisher's speculations; if Coleridge had never
taken to opium--what great poems might not have opened the new era of
literature, where now we have but incomplete designs, and listen to
harmonies half destroyed by internal discord? The regret, however, is
less when a man has succeeded in uttering the thought that was in him,
though it may never have found a worthy expression. Wordsworth could
have told us little more, though the 'Excursion' had been as complete a
work as 'Paradise Lost;' and if Scott might have written more
'Waverleys' and 'Antiquaries' and 'Old Mortalities,' he could hardly
have written better ones. But the works of some other writers suggest
possibilities which never even approached fulfilment. If the opinion
formed by his contemporaries of Coleridge be anywhere near the truth, we
lost in him a potential philosopher of a very high order, as we more
clearly lost a poet of singular fascination. Coleridge naturally
suggests the name of De Quincey, whose works are as often tantalising as
satisfying. And to make, it is true, a considerable drop from the
greatest of these names, we often feel when we take up one of Hazlitt's
glowing Essays, that here, too, was a man who might have made a far more
enduring mark as a writer of English prose. At their best, his writings
are admirable; they have the true stamp; the thought is masculine and
the expression masterly; phrases engrave themselves on the memory; and
we catch glimpses of a genuine thinker and no mere manufacturer of
literary commonplace. On a more prolonged study, it is true, we become
conscious of many shortcomings, and the general effect is somehow rather
cloying, though hardly from an excess of sweetness. And yet he deserves
the study both of the critic and the student of character.
The story of Hazlitt's life has been told by his grandson; but there is
a rather curious defect of materials for so recent a biography. He kept,
it seems, no letters,--a weakness, if it be a weakness, for which one is
rather apt to applaud him in these days: but, on the other hand, nobody
ever indulged more persistently in the habit of washing his dirty linen
in public. Not even his idol Rousseau could be more demonstrative of his
feelings and recollections. His Essays are autobiographical, sometimes
even offensively; and after reading them we are even more familiar than
his contemporaries with many points of his character. He loved to pour
himself out in his Essays
as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.