by this, and by many and many another so divine--Milton justified also
the cold excesses of his posterity by the example of more than one group
of blank verse lines in his greatest poem. Manifestly the sanction is a
matter of choice, and depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found in
Milton such ancestry as it was fit for.
Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry. But he came into possession of a
metrical form charged by secondary poets with a contented second-class
dignity that bears constant reference, in the way of respect rather than
of imitation, to the state and nobility of Pope at his best--the couplet.
The weak yet rigid "poetry" that fell to his lot owed all the decorum it
possessed to the mechanical defences and props--the exclusions
especially--of this manner of versification. The grievous thing was
that, being moved to write simply of simple things, he had no more supple
English for his purpose. His effort to disengage the phrase--long
committed to convention and to an exposed artifice--did but prove how
surely the ancient vitality was gone.
His preface to "The Borough, a Poem," should be duly read before the
"poem" itself, for the prose has a propriety all its own. Everything is
conceived with the most perfect moderation, and then presented in a form
of reasoning that leaves you no possible ground of remonstrance. In
proposing his subject Crabbe seems to make an unanswerable apology with a
composure that is almost sweet. For instance, at some length and with
some nobility he anticipates a probable conjecture that his work was done
"without due examination and revisal," and he meets the conjectured
criticism thus: "Now, readers are, I believe, disposed to treat with more
than common severity those writers who have been led into presumption by
the approbation bestowed upon their diffidence, and into idleness and
unconcern by the praises given to their attention." It would not be
possible to say a smaller thing with greater dignity and gentleness. It
is worth while to quote this prose of a "poet" who lived between the
centuries, if only in order to suggest the chastening thought, "It is a
pity that no one, however little he may have to say, says it now in this
form!" The little, so long as it is reasonable, is so well suited in
this antithesis and logic. Is there no hope that journalism will ever
take again these graces of unanswerable argument? No: they would no
longer wear the peculiar aspect of adult innocence that was Crabbe's.