By what obscure cause, through what ill-directed industry, and under the
constraint of what disabling hands, had the language of English poetry
grown, for an age, so rigid that a natural writer at the end of the
eighteenth century had much ado to tell a simple story in sufficient
verse? All the vital exercise of the seventeenth century had left the
language buoyant; it was as elastic as deep and mobile waters; then
followed the grip of that incapacitating later style. Much later,
English has been so used as to become flaccid--it has been stretched, as
it were, beyond its power of rebound, or certainly beyond its power of
rebound in common use (for when a master writes he always uses a tongue
that has suffered nothing). It is in our own day that English has been
so over-strained. In Crabbe's day it had been effectually curbed,
hindered, and hampered, and it cannot be said of Crabbe that he was a
master who takes natural possession of a language that has suffered
nothing. He was evidently a man of talent who had to take his part with
the times, subject to history. To call him a poet was a mere convention.
There seems to be not a single moment of poetry in his work, and
assuredly if he had known the earlier signification of the word he would
have been the last man to claim the incongruous title of poet. But it is
impossible to state the question as it would have presented itself to
Crabbe or to any other writer of his quality entering into the same
inheritance of English.
It is true that Crabbe read and quoted Milton; so did all his
contemporaries; and to us now it seems that poetry cannot have been
forgotten by any age possessing _Lycidas_. Yet that age can scarcely be
said to have in any true sense possessed _Lycidas_. There are other
things, besides poetry, in Milton's poems. We do not entirely know,
perhaps, but we can conjecture how a reader in Crabbe's late eighteenth
century, looking in Milton for authority for all that he unluckily and
vainly admired, would well find it. He would find the approval of
Young's "Night Thoughts" did he search for it, as we who do not search
for it may not readily understand. A step or so downwards, from a few
passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," an inevitable drop
in the derivation, a depression such as is human, and everything, from
Dryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," follows, without violence and
perhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet Milton fathered,
legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity. Milton, therefore, who might
have kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights of poetry by
lines like these--