Perhaps if he had brought a little imagination to bear upon his relations with Muston and Allington, Crabbe would not have deserted his people so soon after coming among them. The stop made him many enemies. For here was no case of a poor curate accepting, for his family’s sake, a more lucrative post. Crabbe was leaving the Vale of Belvoir because an accession of fortune had befallen the family, and it was pleasanter to live in his native county and in a better house. So, at least, his action was interpreted at the time, and Crabbe’s son takes no very different view. “Though tastes and affections, as well as worldly interests, prompted this return to native scenes and early acquaintances, it was a step reluctantly taken, and I believe, sincerely repented of. The beginning was ominous. As we were slowly quitting the place preceded by our furniture, a stranger, though one who knew my father’s circumstances, called out in an impressive tone, ‘You are wrong, you are wrong!'” The sound, he afterwards admitted, found an echo in his own conscience, and during the whole journey seemed to ring in his ears “like a supernatural voice.”
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: See a pleasant paper on Crabbe at Muston and Allington by the Rev. W.H. Hutton of St John’s College, Oxford, in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for June 1901.]
CHAPTER V
IN SUFFOLK AGAIN
(1792-1805)
On the arrival of the family at Parham, poor Crabbe discovered that even an accession of fortune had its attendant drawbacks. His son, George, records his own recollections (he was then a child of seven years) of the scene that met their view on their alighting at Parham Lodge. “As I got out of the chaise, I remember jumping for very joy, and exclaiming, ‘Here we are, here we are–little Willy and all!'”–(his parents’ seventh and youngest child, then only a few weeks old)–“but my spirits sunk into dismay when, on entering the well-known kitchen, all there seemed desolate, dreary, and silent. Mrs. Tovell and her sister-in-law, sitting by the fireside weeping, did not even rise up to welcome my parents, but uttered a few chilling words and wept again. All this appeared to me as inexplicable as forbidding. How little do children dream of the alterations that older people’s feelings towards each other undergo, when death has caused a transfer of property! Our arrival in Suffolk was by no means palatable to all my mother’s relations.”
Mr. Tovell’s widow had doubtless her suitable jointure, and probably a modest dower-residence to retire to; but Parham Hall had to be vacated, and Crabbe, having purchased its furniture, at once entered on possession. The mere re-arrangement of the contents caused many heartburnings to the spinster-sister, who had known them under the old _regime_, and the alteration of the hanging of a picture would have made “Jacky,” she averred, to turn in his grave. Crabbe seems, however, to have shown so much good-feeling and forbearance in the matter that the old lady, after grimly boasting that she could “screw Crabbe up and down like a fiddle,” was ultimately friendly, and her share of her brother’s estate came in due course to Crabbe and his wife. Moreover, the change of tenancy at the Hall was anything but satisfactory to the village generally. Mr. Tovell had been much given to hospitality, and that of a convivial sort. Such of the neighbours as were of kindred tastes had been in the habit of “dropping in” of an evening two or three times a week, when, if a _quorum_ was present, a bowl of punch would be brewed, and sometimes a second and a third. The substitution for all this of the quiet and decorous family life of the Crabbes was naturally a hoary blow and grave discouragement to the village reveller, and contributed to make Crabbe’s life at starting far from happy. His pursuits and inclinations, literary as well as clerical, made such company distasteful; and his wife, who had borne him seven children in nine years, and of these had lost four in infancy, had little strength or heart for miscellaneous company. But there was compensation for her husband among the county gentry of the neighbourhood, and notably in the constant kindness of Dudley North, of Little Glemham Hall, the same friend who had helped him with money when twelve years before he had left Aldeburgh, an almost penniless adventurer, to try his fortune in London. At Mr. North’s table Crabbe had once more the opportunity of meeting members of the Whig party, whom he had known through Burke. On one such occasion Fox expressed his regret that Crabbe had ceased to write, and offered his help in revising any future poem that he might produce. The promise was not forgotten when ten years later _The Parish Register_ was in preparation.
During his first year at Parham, Crabbe does not appear to have undertaken any fixed clerical duties, and this interval of leisure allowed him to pay a long visit to his sister at Aldeburgh, and here he placed his two elder boys, George and John, at a dame school. On returning to Parham, he accepted the office of curate-in-charge at Sweffling, the rector, Rev. Richard Turner, being resident at his other living of Great Yarmouth. The curacy of Great Glemham, also within easy reach, was shortly added. Crabbe was still residing at Parham Lodge, but the incidents of such residence remained far from pleasant, and, after four years there, Crabbe joyfully accepted the offer of a good house at Great Glemham, placed at his disposal by his friend Dudley North. Here the family remained for a further period of four or five years.
A fresh bereavement in his family had made Crabbe additionally anxious for change of scene and associations for his wife. In 1796, another child died–their third son, Edmund–in his sixth year. Two children, out of a family of seven, alone remained; and this final blow proved more than the poor mother could bear uninjured. From this time dated “a nervous disorder,” which indeed meant a gradual decay of mental power, from which she never recovered; and Crabbe, an ever-devoted husband, tended her with exemplary care till her death in 1813. Southey, writing about Crabbe to his friend, Neville White, in 1808, adds: “It was not long before his wife became deranged, and when all this was told me by one who knew him well, five years ago, he was still almost confined in his own house, anxiously waiting upon this wife in her long and hopeless malady. A sad history! It is no wonder that he gives so melancholy a picture of human life.”
Save for Mrs. Crabbe’s broken health and increasing melancholy, the four years at Glemham were among the most peaceful and happiest of Crabbe’s life. His son grows eloquent over the elegance of the house and the natural beauties of its situation. “A small well-wooded park occupied the whole mouth of the glen, whence, doubtless, the name of the village was derived. In the lowest ground stood the commodious mansion; the approach wound down through a plantation on the eminence in front. The opposite hill rose at the back of it, rich and varied with trees and shrubs scattered irregularly; under this southern hill ran a brook, and on the banks above it were spots of great natural beauty, crowned by whitethorn and oak. Here the purple scented violet perfumed the air, and in one place coloured the ground. On the left of the front in the narrower portion of the glen was the village; on the right, a confined view of richly wooded fields. In fact, the whole parish and neighbourhood resemble a combination of groves, interspersed with fields cultivated like gardens, and intersected with those green dry lanes which tempt the walker in all weathers, especially in the evenings, when in the short grass of the dry sandy banks lies every few yards a glowworm, and the nightingales are pouring forth their melody in every direction.”
It was not, therefore, for lack of acquaintance with the more idyllic side of English country-life that Crabbe, when he once more addressed the public in verse, turned to the less sunny memories of his youth for inspiration. It was not till some years after the appearance of _The Parish Register_ and _The Borough_ that the pleasant paths of inland Suffolk and of the Vale of Belvoir formed the background to his studies in human character.
Meantime Crabbe was perpetually writing, and as constantly destroying what he wrote. His small flock at Great and Little Glemham employed part of his time; the education of his two sons, who were now withdrawn from school, occupied some more; and a wife in failing health was certainly not neglected. But the busy husband and father found time to teach himself something of French and Italian, and read aloud to his family of an evening as many books of travel and of fiction as his friends would keep him supplied with. He was preparing at the same time a treatise on botany, which was never to see the light; and during “one or two of his winters in Suffolk,” his son relates, “he gave most of his evening hours to the writing of novels, and he brought not less than three such works to a conclusion. The first was entitled ‘The Widow Grey,’ but I recollect nothing of it except that the principal character was a benevolent humorist, a Dr. Allison. The next was called ‘Reginald Glanshaw, or the Man who commanded Success,’ a portrait of an assuming, over-bearing, ambitious mind, rendered interesting by some generous virtues, and gradually wearing down into idiotism. I cannot help thinking that this Glanshaw was drawn with very extraordinary power; but the story was not well managed in the details I forget the title of his third novel; but I clearly remember that it opened with a description of a wretched room, similar to some that are presented in his poetry, and that on my mother’s telling him frankly that she thought the effect very inferior to that of the corresponding pieces in verse, he paused in his reading, and after some reflection, said, ‘Your remark is just.'”
Mrs. Crabbe’s remark was probably very just. Although her husband had many qualifications for writing prose fiction–insight into and appreciation of character, combined with much tragic force and a real gift for description–there is reason to think that he would have been stilted and artificial in dialogue, and altogether wanting in lightness of hand. Crabbe acquiesced in his wife’s decision, and the novels were cremated without a murmur. A somewhat similar fate attended a set of Tales in Verse which, in the year 1799, Crabbe was about to offer to Mr. Hatchard, the publisher, when he wisely took the opinion of his rector at Sweffling, then resident at Yarmouth, the Rev. Richard Turner[3]. This gentleman, whose opinion Crabbe greatly valued, advised _revision_, and Crabbe accepted the verdict as the reverse of encouraging. The Tales were never published, and Crabbe again deferred his reappearance in print for a period of eight years. Meantime he applied himself to the leisurely composition of the _Parish Register_, which extended, together with that of some shorter poems, over the period just named.
In the last years of the eighteenth century there was a sudden awakening among the bishops to the growing abuse of non-residence and pluralities on the part of the clergy. One prelate of distinction devoted his triennial charge to the subject, and a general “stiffening” of episcopal good nature set in all round. The Bishop of Lincoln addressed Crabbe, with others of his delinquent clergy, and intimated to him very distinctly the duty of returning to those few sheep in the wilderness at Muston and Allington. Crabbe, in much distress, applied to his friend Dudley North to use influence on his behalf to obtain extension of leave. But the bishop, Dr. Pretyman (Pitt’s tutor and friend–better known by the name he afterwards adopted of Tomlins) would not yield, and it was probably owing to pressure from some different quarter that Crabbe succeeded in obtaining leave of absence for four years longer. Dudley North would fain have solved the problem by giving Crabbe one or more of the livings in his own gift in Suffolk, but none of adequate value was vacant at the time. Meanwhile, the house rented by Crabbe, Great Glemham Hall, was sold over Crabbe’s head, by family arrangements in the North family, and he made his last move while in Suffolk, by taking a house in the neighbouring village of Rendham, where he remained during his last four years. Crabbe was looking forward to his elder son’s going up to Cambridge in 1803, and this formed an additional reason for wishing to remain as long as might be in the eastern counties.
The writing of poetry seems to have gone on apace. _The Parish Register_ was all but completed while at Rendham, and _The Borough_ was also begun. After so long an abstinence from the glory of print, Crabbe at last found the required stimulus to ambition in the need of some further income for his two sons’ education. But during the last winter of his residence at Rendham (1804-1805), Crabbe produced a poem, in stanzas, of very different character and calibre from anything he had yet written, and as to the origin of which one must go back to some previous incidents in Crabbe’s history. His son is always lax as to dates, and often just at those periods when they would be the most welcome. It may be inferred, however, that at some date between 1790 and 1792 Crabbe suffered from serious derangements of his digestion, attended by sudden and acute attacks of vertigo. The passage in the memoir as to the exact period is more than usually vague. The writer is dealing with the year 1800, and he proceeds:
“My father, now about his forty-sixth year, was much more stout and healthy than when I first remember him. Soon after that early period he became subject to vertigoes, which he thought indicative of a tendency to apoplexy; and was occasionally bled rather profusely, which only increased the symptoms. When he preached his first sermon at Muston in the year 1789 my mother foreboded, as she afterwards told us, that he would preach very few more: but it was on one of his early journeys into Suffolk, in passing through Ipswich, that he had the most alarming attack.”
This account of matters is rather mixed. The “early period” pointed to by young Crabbe is that at which he himself first had distinct recollection of his father, and his doings. Putting that age at six years old, the year would be 1791; and it may be inferred that as the whole family paid a visit of many months to Suffolk in the year 1790, it was during that visit that he had the decisive attack in the streets of Ipswich. The account may be continued in the son’s own words:–
“Having left my mother at the inn, he walked into the town alone, and suddenly staggered in the street, and fell. He was lifted up by the passengers” (probably from the stagecoach from which they had just alighted), “and overheard some one say significantly, ‘Let the gentleman alone, he will be better by and by’; for his fall was attributed to the bottle. He was assisted to his room, and the late Dr. Clubbe was sent for, who, after a little examination, saw through the case with great judgment. ‘There is nothing the matter with your head,’ he observed, ‘nor any apoplectic tendency; let the digestive organs bear the whole blame: you must take opiates.’ From that time his health began to amend rapidly, and his constitution was renovated; a rare effect of opium, for that drug almost always inflicts some partial injury, even when it is necessary; but to him it was only salutary–and to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it may be attributed his long and generally healthy life.”
The son makes no reference to any possible effects of this “slightly increasing dose” upon his father’s intellect or imagination. And the ordinary reader who knows the poet mainly through his sober couplets may well be surprised to hear that their author was ever addicted to the opium-habit; still more, that his imagination ever owed anything to its stimulus. But in FitzGerald’s copy there is a MS. note, not signed “G.C.,” and therefore FitzGerald’s own. It runs thus: “It” (the opium) “probably influenced his dreams, for better or worse” To this FitzGerald significantly adds, “see also the _World of Dreams_, and _Sir Eustace Grey_.”
As Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day, _Sir Eustace Grey_ will be hardly even a name to them. For it lies, with two or three other noticeable poems, quite out of the familiar track of his narrative verse. In the first place it is in stanzas, and what Browning would have classed as a “Dramatic Lyric.” The subject is as follows: The scene “a Madhouse,” and the persons a Visitor, a Physician, and a Patient. The visitor has been shown over the establishment, and is on the point of departing weary and depressed at the sight of so much misery, when the physician begs him to stay as they come in sight of the “cell” of a specially interesting patient, Sir Eustace Grey, late of Greyling Hall. Sir Eustace greets them as they approach, plunges at once into monologue, and relates (with occasional warnings from the doctor against over-excitement) the sad story of his misfortunes and consequent loss of reason. He begins with a description of his happier days:–
“Some twenty years, I think, are gone (Time flies, I know not how, away),
The sun upon no happier shone
Nor prouder man, than Eustace Grey. Ask where you would, and all would say, The man admired and praised of all,
By rich and poor, by grave and gay, Was the young lord of Greyling Hall.
“Yes! I had youth and rosy health,
Was nobly formed, as man might be; For sickness, then, of all my wealth,
I never gave a single fee:
The ladies fair, the maidens free. Were all accustomed then to say,
Who would a handsome figure see,
Should look upon Sir Eustace Grey.
“My lady I–She was all we love;
All praise, to speak her worth, is faint; Her manners show’d the yielding dove,
Her morals, the seraphic saint:
She never breathed nor looked complaint; No equal upon earth had she:
Now, what is this fair thing I paint? Alas! as all that live shall be.
“There were two cherub-things beside, A gracious girl, a glorious boy;
Yet more to swell my fall-blown pride, To varnish higher my fading joy,
Pleasures were ours without alloy, Nay, Paradise,–till my frail Eve
Our bliss was tempted to destroy– Deceived, and fated to deceive.
“But I deserved;–for all that time
When I was loved, admired, caressed, There was within each secret crime,
Unfelt, uncancelled, unconfessed: I never then my God addressed,
In grateful praise or humble prayer; And if His Word was not my jest–
(Dread thought!) it never was my care.”
The misfortunes of the unhappy man proceed apace, and blow follows blow. He is unthankful for his blessings, and Heaven’s vengeance descends on him. His wife proves faithless, and he kills her betrayer, once his trusted friend. The wretched woman pines and dies, and the two children take some infectious disease and quickly follow. The sufferer turns to his wealth and his ambitions to drug his memory. But “walking in pride,” he is to be still further “abased.” The “Watcher and the Holy One” that visited Nebuchadnezzar come to Sir Eustace in vision and pronounce his fate:
“Full be his cup, with evil fraught– Demons his guides, and death his doom.”
Two fiends of darkness are told off to tempt him. One, presumably the Spirit of Gambling, robs him of his wealth, while the Spirit of Mania takes from him his reason, and drags him through a hell of horriblest imaginings. And it is at this point that what has been called the “dream-scenery” of the opium-eater is reproduced in a series of very remarkable stanzas:
Upon that boundless plain, below,
The setting sun’s last rays were shed, And gave a mild and sober glow,
Where all were still, asleep, or dead; Vast ruins in the midst were spread,
Pillars and pediments sublime,
Where the grey moss had form’d a bed, And clothed the crumbling spoils of time.
“There was I fix’d, I know not how,
Condemn’d for untold years to stay: Yet years were not;–one dreadful _Now_ Endured no change of night or day;
The same mild evening’s sleepy ray Shone softly-solemn and serene,
And all that time I gazed away,
The setting sun’s sad rays were seen.
“At length a moment’s sleep stole on,– Again came my commission’d foes;
Again through sea and land we’re gone, No peace, no respite, no repose:
Above the dark broad sea we rose,
We ran through bleak and frozen land; I had no strength their strength t’ oppose, An infant in a giant’s hand.
“They placed me where those streamers play, Those nimble beams of brilliant light; It would the stoutest heart dismay,
To see, to feel, that dreadful sight: So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright,
They pierced my frame with icy wound; And all that half-year’s polar night,
Those dancing streamers wrapp’d me round
“Slowly that darkness pass’d away,
When down, upon the earth I fell,– Some hurried sleep was mine by day;
But, soon as toll’d the evening bell, They forced me on, where ever dwell
Far-distant men in cities fair,
Cities of whom no travellers tell, Nor feet but mine were wanderers there
“Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast, As on we hurry through the dark;
The watch-light blinks as we go past, The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark; The watch-tower’s bell sounds shrill; and, hark! The free wind blows–we’ve left the town– A wide sepulchral ground I mark,
And on a tombstone place me down.
“What monuments of mighty dead!
What tombs of various kind are found! And stones erect their shadows shed
On humble graves, with wickers bound; Some risen fresh, above the ground,
Some level with the native clay:
What sleeping millions wait the sound, ‘Arise, ye dead, and come away!’
Alas! they stay not for that call;
Spare me this woe! ye demons, spare!– They come! the shrouded shadows all,–
‘Tis more than mortal brain can bear; Rustling they rise, they sternly glare
At man upheld by vital breath;
Who, led by wicked fiends, should dare To join the shadowy troops of death!”
For about fifteen stanzas this power of wild imaginings is sustained, and, it must be admitted, at a high level as regards diction. The reader will note first how the impetuous flow of those visionary recollections generates a style in the main so lofty and so strong. The poetic diction of the eighteenth century, against which Wordsworth made his famous protest, is entirely absent. Then again, the eight-line stanza is something quite different from a mere aggregate of quatrains arranged in pairs. The lines are knit together; sonnet-fashion, by the device of interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh lines rhyming. And it is singularly effective for its purpose, that of avoiding the suggestion of a mere ballad-measure, and carrying on the descriptive action with as little interruption as might be.
The similarity of the illusions, here attributed to insanity, to those described by De Quincey as the result of opium, is too marked to be accidental. In the concluding pages of his _Confessions_, De Quincey writes: “The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive … This disturbed me very much less than the vast expansion of time. Sometimes I seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night.”
Compare Crabbe’s sufferer:–
“There was I fix’d, I know not how,
Condemn’d for untold years to stay Yet years were not;–one dreadful _Now_ Endured no change of night or day.”
Again, the rapid transition from one distant land to another, from the Pole to the Tropics, is common to both experiences. The “ill-favoured ones” who are charged with Sir Eustace’s expiation fix him at one moment
“–on the trembling ball
That crowns the steeple’s quiv’ring spire”
just as the Opium-Fiend fixes De Quincey for centuries at the summit of Pagodas. Sir Eustace is accused of sins he had never committed:–
“Harmless I was: yet hunted down
For treasons to my soul unfit;
I’ve been pursued through many a town For crimes that petty knaves commit.”
Even so the opium-eater imagines himself flying from the wrath of Oriental Deities. “I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the Ibis and the Crocodile trembled at.” The morbid inspiration is clearly the same in both cases, and there can be little doubt that Crabbe’s poem owes its inception to opium, and that the frame work was devised by him for the utilisation of his dreams.
But a curious and unexpected _denouement_ awaits the reader. When Sir Eustace’s condition, as he describes it, seems most hopeless, its alleviation arrives through a religious conversion. There has been throughout present to him the conscience of “a soul defiled with every stain.” And at the same moment, under circumstances unexplained, his spiritual ear is purged to hear a “Heavenly Teacher.” The voice takes the form of the touching and effective hymn, which has doubtless found a place since in many an evangelical hymn-book, beginning
“Pilgrim, burthen’d with thy sin,
Come the way to Zion’s gate;
There, till Mercy let thee in,
Knock and weep, and watch and wait. Knock!–He knows the sinner’s cry.
Weep!–He loves the mourner’s tears. Watch!–for saving grace is nigh
Wait,–till heavenly light appears.”
And the hymn is followed by the pathetic confession on the sufferer’s part that this blessed experience, though it has brought him the assurance of heavenly forgiveness, still leaves him, “though elect,” looking sadly back on his old prosperity, and bearing, but unresigned, the prospect of an old ago spent amid his present gloomy surroundings. And yet Crabbe, with a touch of real imaginative insight, represents him in his final utterance as relapsing into a vague hope of some day being restored to his old prosperity:
“Must you, my friends, no longer stay? Thus quickly all my pleasures end;
But I’ll remember, when I pray,
My kind physician and his friend:
And those sad hours you deign to spend With me, I shall requite them all.
Sir Eustace for his friends shall send, And thank their love at Greyling Hall.”[4]
The kind physician and his friend then proceed to diagnose the patient’s condition–which they agree is that of “a frenzied child of grace,” and so the poem ends. To one of its last stanzas Crabbe attached an apologetic note, one of the most remarkable ever penned. It exhibits the struggle that at that period must have been proceeding in many a thoughtful breast as to how the new wine of religion could be somehow accommodated to the old bottles:–
“It has been suggested to me that this change from restlessness to repose in the mind of Sir Eustace is wrought by a methodistic call; and it is admitted to be such: a sober and rational conversion could not have happened while the disorder of the brain continued; yet the verses which follow, in a different measure,” (Crabbe refers to the hymn) “are not intended to make any religious persuasion appear ridiculous; they are to be supposed as the effect of memory in the disordered mind of the speaker, and though evidently enthusiastic in respect to language, are not meant to convey any impropriety of sentiment.”
The implied suggestion (for it comes to this) that the sentiments of this devotional hymn, written by Crabbe himself, could only have brought comfort to the soul of a lunatic, is surely as good a proof as the period could produce of the bewilderment in the Anglican mind caused by the revival of personal religion under Wesley and his followers.
According to Crabbe’s son _Sir Eustace Grey_ was written at Muston in the winter of 1804-1805. This is scarcely possible, for Crabbe did not return to his Leicestershire living until the autumn of the latter year. Probably the poem was begun in Suffolk, and the final touches were added later. Crabbe seems to have told his family that it was written during a severe snow-storm, and at one sitting. As the poem consists of fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex construction, the accuracy of Crabbe’s account is doubtful. If its inspiration was in some degree due to opium, we know from the example of S.T. Coleridge that the opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of memory or the accurate presentation of facts. After Crabbe’s death, there was found in one of his many manuscript note-books a copy of verses, undated, entitled _The World of Dreams_, which his son printed in subsequent editions of the poems. The verses are in the same metre and rhyme-system as _Sir Eustace_, and treat of precisely the same class of visions as recorded by the inmate of the asylum. The rapid and continuous transition from scene to scene, and period to period, is the same in both. Foreign kings and other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in ghostly and repellent forms:–
“I know not how, but I am brought
Into a large and Gothic hall,
Seated with those I never sought– Kings, Caliphs, Kaisers–silent all;
Pale as the dead; enrobed and tall, Majestic, frozen, solemn, still;
They make my fears, my wits appal, And with both scorn and terror fill.”
This, again, may be compared, or rather contrasted, with Coleridge’s _Pains of Sleep_, and it can hardly be doubted that the two poems had a common origin.
The year 1805 was the last of Crabbe’s sojourn in Suffolk, and it was made memorable in the annals of literature by the appearance of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. Crabbe first met with it in a bookseller’s shop in Ipswich, read it nearly through while standing at the counter, and pronounced that a new and great poet had appeared.
This was Crabbe’s first introduction to one who was before long to prove himself one of his warmest admirers and friends. It was one of Crabbe’s virtues that he was quick to recognise the worth of his poetical contemporaries. He had been repelled, with many others, by the weak side of the _Lyrical Ballads_, but he lived to revere Wordsworth’s genius. His admiration for Burns was unstinted. But amid all the signs of a poetical _renaissance_ in progress, and under a natural temptation to tread the fresh woods and pictures new that were opening before him, it showed a true judgment in Crabbe that he never faltered in the conviction that his own opportunity and his own strength lay elsewhere. Not in the romantic or the mystical–not in perfection of form or melody of lyric verse, were his own humbler triumphs to be won. Like Wordsworth, he was to find a sufficiency in the “common growth of mother-earth,” though indeed less in her “mirth” than in her “tears,” Notwithstanding his _Eustace Grey_, and _World of Dreams_, and the really powerful story of Aaron the Gipsy (afterwards to appear as the _The Hall of Justice_), Crabbe was returning to the themes and the methods of _The Village_. He had already completed _The Parish Register_, and had _The Borough_ in contemplation, when he returned to his Leicestershire parish. The woods of Belvoir, and the rural charms of Parham and Glemham, had not dimmed the memory of the sordid little fishing-town, where the spirit of poetry had first met him, and thrown her mantle round him.
And now the day had come when the mandate of the bishop could no longer be ignored. In October 1805, Crabbe with his wife and two sons returned to the Parsonage at Muston. He had been absent from his joint livings about thirteen years, of which four had been spent at Parham, five at Great Glemham, and four at Rendham, all three places lying within a small area, and within reach of the same old friends and relations. No wonder that he left the neighbourhood with a reluctance that was probably too well guessed by his parishioners in the Vale of Belvoir.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Richard Turner of Yarmouth was a man of considerable culture, and belonged to a family of scholars. His eldest brother was Master of Pembroke, Cambridge, and Dean of Norwich: his youngest son was Sir Charles Turner, a Lord Justice of Appeal; and Dawson Turner was his nephew. Richard Turner was the intimate friend of Dr. Parr, Paley, and Canning.]
[Footnote 4: Readers of Lockhart’s Biography will remember that in one of Scott’s latest letters to his son-in-law, before he left England for Naples, he quoted and applied to himself this stanza of _Sir Eustace Grey_. The incident is the more pathetic that Scott, as he wrote the words, was quite aware that his own mind was failing.]
CHAPTER VI
THE PARISH REGISTER
(1805-1809)
“When in October, 1805, Mr. Crabbe resumed the charge of his own parish of Muston, he found some changes to vex him, and not the less because he had too much reason to suspect that his long absence from his incumbency had been, partly at least, the cause of them. His cure had been served by respectable and diligent clergymen, but they had been often changed, and some of them had never resided within the parish; and he felt that the binding influence of a settled and permanent minister had not been withdrawn for twelve years with impunity. A Wesleyan missionary had formed a thriving establishment in Muston, and the congregations at the parish church were no longer such as they had been of old. This much annoyed my father; and the warmth with which he began to preach against dissent only irritated himself and others, without bringing back disciples to the fold.”
So writes Crabbe’s son with his wonted frankness and good judgment. Moreover, besides the Wesleyan secession, the mischievous extravagances of William Huntington (S.S.) had found their way into the parish. To make matters worse, a former gardener of Crabbe’s had set up as a preacher of the doctrines of this fanatic, who was still attracting crowds in London. Then, too, as another fruit of the rector’s long absence, strange stories of his political opinions had become current. Owing, doubtless, to his renewed acquaintance with Dudley North at Glemham, and occasional association with the Whig leaders at his house, he had exposed himself to the terrible charge that he was a Jacobin!
Altogether Crabbe’s clerical position in Leicestershire, during the next nine years, could not have been very comfortable. But he was evidently still, as always, the devout and kindly pastor of his flock, and happily for himself, he was now to receive new and unexpected tributes to his popularity in other fields. His younger son, John, now eighteen years of age, was shortly to go up to Cambridge, and this fresh expense had to be provided for. To this end, a volume of poems, partly old and partly new, had been for some time in preparation, and in September 1807, it appeared from the publishing house of John Hatchard in Piccadilly. In it were included _The Library_, _The Newspaper_, and _The Village_. The principal new poem was _The Parish Register_, to which were added _Sir Eustace Grey_ and _The Hall of Justice_. The volume was prefaced by a Dedication to Henry Richard Fox, third Lord Holland, nephew and sometime ward of Charles James Fox, and the reason for such dedication is told at greater length in the long autobiographical introduction that follows.
Twenty-two years had elapsed since Crabbe’s last appearance as an author, and he seems to have thought it due to his readers to give some reason for his long abstention from the poet’s ‘idle trade.’ He pleads a higher ‘calling,’ that of his professional duties, as sufficient excuse. Moreover, he offers the same excuse for his ‘progress in the art of versification’ being less marked than his readers might otherwise expect. He then proceeds to tell the story of the kindness he had received from Burke (who had died in 1797); the introduction by him to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through him again to Samuel Johnson. He gives in full Johnson’s note approving _The Village_, and after a further laborious apology for the shortcomings of his present literary venture, goes on to tell the one really relevant incident of its appearance. Crabbe had determined, he says, now that his old valued advisers had passed away, not to publish anything more–
“unless I could first obtain the sanction of such an opinion as I might with some confidence rely upon. I looked for a friend who, having the discerning taste of Mr. Burke and the critical sagacity of Doctor Johnson, would bestow upon my MS. the attention requisite to form his opinion, and would then favour me with the result of his observations; and it was my singular good fortune to obtain such assistance–the opinion of a critic so qualified, and a friend so disposed to favour me. I had been honoured by an introduction to the Right Hon. Charles James Fox, some years before, at the seat of Mr. Burke; and being again with him, I received a promise that he would peruse any work I might send to him previous to its publication, and would give me his opinion. At that time I did not think myself sufficiently prepared; and when afterwards I had collected some poems for his inspection, I found my right honourable friend engaged by the affairs of a great empire, and struggling with the inveteracy of a fatal disease. At such time, upon such mind, ever disposed to oblige as that mind was, I could not obtrude the petty business of criticising verses; but he remembered the promise he had kindly given, and repeated an offer which though I had not presumed to expect, I was happy to receive. A copy of the poems, now first published, was sent to him, and (as I have the information from Lord Holland, and his Lordship’s permission to inform my readers) the poem which I have named _The Parish Register_ was heard by Mr. Fox, and it excited interest enough by some of its parts to gain for me the benefit of his judgment upon the whole. Whatever he approved, the reader will readily believe, I have carefully retained: the parts he disliked are totally expunged, and others are substituted, which I hope resemble those more conformable to the taste of so admirable a judge. Nor can I deny myself the melancholy satisfaction of adding that this poem (and more especially the history of Phoebe Dawson, with some parts of the second book) were the last compositions of their kind that engaged and amused the capacious, the candid, the benevolent mind of this great man.”
It was, as we have seen, at Dudley North’s residence in Suffolk that Crabbe had renewed his acquaintance with Fox, and received from him fresh offers of criticism and advice. And now the great statesman had passed beyond reach of Crabbe’s gratitude. He had died in the autumn of 1806, at the Duke of Devonshire’s, at Chiswick. His last months wore of great suffering, and the tedium of his latter days was relieved by being read aloud to–the Latin poets taking their turn with Crabbe’s pathetic stories of humble life. In the same preface, Crabbe further expresses similar obligations to his friend, Richard Turner of Yarmouth. The result of this double criticism is the more discernible when we compare _The Parish Register_ with, its successor, _The Borough_, in the composition of which Crabbe admits, in the preface to that poem, that he had trusted more entirely to his own judgment.
In _The Parish Register_, Crabbe returns to the theme which he had treated twenty years before in _The Village,_ but on a larger and more elaborate scale. The scheme is simple and not ineffective. A village clergyman is the narrator, and with his registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials open before him, looks through the various entries for the year just completed. As name after name recalls interesting particulars of character and incident in their history, he relates them as if to an imaginary friend at his side. The precedent of _The Deserted Village_ is still obviously near to the writer’s mind, and he is alternately attracted and repelled by Goldsmith’s ideals. For instance, the poem opens with an introduction of some length in which the general aspects of village life are described. Crabbe begins by repudiating any idea of such life as had been described by his predecessor:–
“Is there a place, save one the poet sees, A land of love, of liberty, and ease;
Where labour wearies not, nor cares suppress Th’ eternal flow of rustic happiness:
Where no proud mansion frowns in awful state, Or keeps the sunshine from the cottage-gate; Where young and old, intent on pleasure, throng, And half man’s life is holiday and song? Vain search for scenes like these! no view appears, By sighs unruffled, or unstain’d by tears; Since vice the world subdued and waters drown’d, Auburn and Eden can no more be found.”
And yet the poet at once proceeds to describe his village in much the same tone, and with much of the same detail as Goldsmith had done:–
“Behold the Cot! where thrives th’ industrious swain, Source of his pride, his pleasure, and his gain, Screen’d from the winter’s-wind, the sun’s last ray Smiles on the window and prolongs the day; Projecting thatch the woodbine’s branches stop, And turn their blossoms to the casement’s top; All need requires is in that cot contain’d, And much that taste untaught and unrestrain’d Surveys delighted: there she loves to trace, In one gay picture, all the royal race; Around the walls are heroes, lovers, kings; The print that shows them and the verse that sings.”
Then follow, as in _The Deserted Village_, the coloured prints, and ballads, and even _The Twelve Good Rules_, that decorate the walls: the humble library that fills the deal shelf “beside the cuckoo clock”; the few devotional works, including the illustrated Bible, bought in parts with the weekly sixpence; the choice notes by learned editors that raise more doubts than they close. “Rather,” exclaims Crabbe:
“Oh! rather give me commentators plain Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.”
The last line of which he conveyed, no doubt unconsciously, from Young. Nothing can be more winning than the picture of the village home thus presented. And outside it, the plot of carefully-tended ground, with not only fruits and herbs but space reserved for a few choice flowers, the rich carnation and the “pounced auricula”:–
“Here, on a Sunday eve, when service ends, Meet and rejoice a family of friends:
All speak aloud, are happy and are free, And glad they seem, and gaily they agree. What, though fastidious ears may shun the speech, Where all are talkers, and where none can teach; Where still the welcome and the words are old, And the same stories are for ever told; Yet theirs is joy that, bursting from the heart, Prompts the glad tongue these nothings to impart; That forms these tones of gladness we despise, That lifts their steps, that sparkles in their eyes; That talks or laughs or runs or shouts or plays, And speaks in all there looks and all their ways.”
This charming passage is thoroughly in Goldsmith’s vein, and even shows markedly the influence of his manner, and yet it is no mere echo of another poet. The scenes described are those which had become dear and familiar to Crabbe during years of residence in Leicestershire and inland Suffolk. And yet at this very juncture, Crabbe’s poetic conscience smites him. It is not for him, he remembers, to deal only with the sweeter aspects, though he knows them to exist, of village life. He must return to its sterner side:–
“Fair scenes of peace! ye might detain us long, But vice and misery now demand the song; And turn our view from dwellings simply neat, To this infected Row we term our Street.”
For even the village of trim gardens and cherished Bibles has its “slums,” and on these slums Crabbe proceeds to enlarge with almost ferocious realism:–
“Here, in cabal, a disputatious crew Each evening meet; the sot, the cheat, the shrew; Riots are nightly heard:–the curse, the cries Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies, While shrieking children hold each threat’ning hand, And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand; Boys, in their first-stol’n rags, to swear begin; And girls, who heed not dress, are skill’d in gin.”
It is obvious, I think, that Crabbe’s representations of country life here, as in _The Village_ and _The Borough_, are often eclectic, and that for the sake of telling contrast, he was at times content to blend scenes that he had witnessed under very opposite conditions.
The section entitled “Baptisms” deals accordingly with many sad instances of “base-born” children, and the section on “Marriages” also has its full share of kindred instances in which the union in Church has only been brought about by pressure from the parish authorities. The marriage of one such “compelled bridegroom” is related with a force and minuteness of detail throughout which not a word is thrown away:–
“Next at our altar stood a luckless pair, Brought by strong passions and a warrant there; By long rent cloak, hung loosely, strove the bride From every eye, what all perceived, to hide. While the boy-bridegroom, shuffling in his pace, Now hid awhile, and then exposed his face; As shame alternately with anger strove
The brain, confused with muddy ale, to move, In haste and stammering he perform’d his part, And look’d the rage that rankled in his heart: (So will each lover inly curse his fate, Too soon made happy, and made wise too late:) I saw his features take a savage gloom, And deeply threaten for the days to come. Low spake the lass, and lisp’d and minced the while, Look’d on the lad, and faintly tried to smile; With soften’d speech and humbled tone she strove To stir the embers of departed love:
While he, a tyrant, frowning walk’d before, Felt the poor purse, and sought the public door, She sadly following in submission went
And saw the final shilling foully spent; Then to her father’s hut the pair withdrew, And bade to love and comfort long adieu! Ah! fly temptation, youth, refrain! refrain! I preach for ever; but I preach in vain!”
There is no “mealy-mouthed philanthropy” here. No one can doubt the earnestness and truth of the poet’s mingled anger and sorrow. The misery of irregular unions had never been “bitten in” with more convincing force. The verse, moreover, in the passage is freer than usual from many of Crabbe’s eccentricities. It is marked here and there by his fondness for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists have not overlooked. The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse than Dickens’s mention of the lady who went home “in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair.” But Crabbe’s indulgence in this habit is never a mere concession to the reader’s flippant taste. His epigrams often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:–
“Too soon made happy, and made wise too late.”
The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful. The gradual steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality. The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as Frederick Walker’s _Lost Path_, or Langhorne’s “Child of misery, baptized in tears.” That it will ever again be ranked with such may be doubtful, for _technique_ is the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and Crabbe’s _technique_ is too often defective in the extreme.
These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at proper intervals by some of lighter complexion. There is the gentleman’s gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names of his plants,–Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio. Then we have the gallant, gay Lothario, who not only fails to lead astray the lovely Fanny Price, but is converted by her to worthier aims, and ends by becoming the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic suitor. There is an impressive sketch of the elderly prude:–
“–wise, austere, and nice,
Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice”;
and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants to the tender mercies of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described in lines curiously anticipating Hood’s _Haunted House_:–
“–forsaken stood the Hall:
Worms ate the floors, the tap’stry fled the wall: No fire the kitchen’s cheerless grate display’d; No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey’d; The crawling worm that turns a summer fly, Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die The winter-death:–upon the bed of state, The bat shrill shrieking woo’d his flickering mate.”
In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:–
“Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene; Presents no objects tender or profound
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around.”
And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing “some scholar” read the list of her titles and her virtues, “looked disdain and said”:–
“Away, my friends! why take such pains to know What some brave marble soon in Church shall show? Where not alone her gracious name shall stand, But how she lived–the blessing of the land; How much we all deplored the noble dead, What groans we uttered and what tears we shed; Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise; Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave, The noble Lady to our sorrows gave!”
These portraits of the ignoble rich are balanced by one of the “noble peasant” Isaac Ashford, drawn, as Crabbe’s son tells us, from a former parish-clerk of his father’s at North Glemham. Coming to be past work through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the probability of the parish poorhouse, and reconciling himself to his lot is happily spared the sore trial:–
“Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view! But came not there, for sudden was his fate, He dropp’d, expiring, at his cottage-gate. I feel his absence in the hours of prayer, And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there: I see no more those white locks thinly spread Round the bald polish of that honour’d head; No more that awful glance on playful wight, Compell’d to kneel and tremble at the sight, To fold his fingers, all in dread the while, Till Mister Ashford soften’d to a smile; No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer, Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there:– But he is blest, and I lament no more
A wise, good man, contented to be poor.”
Where Crabbe is represented, not unfairly, as dwelling mainly on the seamy side of peasant and village life, such passages as the above are not to be overlooked.
This final section (“Burials”) is brought to a close by an ingenious incident which changes the current of the vicar’s thoughts. He is in the midst of the recollections of his departed flock when the tones of the passing-bell fall upon his ear. On sending to inquire he finds that they tell of a new death, that of his own aged parish-sexton, “old Dibble” (the name, it may be presumed, an imperfect reminiscence of Justice Shallow’s friend). The speaker’s thoughts are now directed to his old parish servant, and to the old man’s favourite stories of previous vicars under whom he has served. Thus the poem ends with sketches of Parson Addle, Parson Peele, Dr. Grandspear and others–among them the “Author-Rector,” intended (the younger Crabbe thought) as a portrait of the poet himself. Finally Crabbe could not resist the temptation to include a young parson, “a youth from Cambridge,” who has imbibed some extreme notions of the school of Simeon, and who is shown as fearful on his death-bed lest he should have been guilty of too many good works. He appeals to his old clerk on the subject:–
“‘My alms-deeds all, and every deed I’ve done, My moral-rags defile me every one;
It should not be:–what say’st thou! Tell me, Ralph.’ ‘Quoth I, your Reverence, I believe you’re safe; Your faith’s your prop, nor have you pass’d such time In life’s good works as swell them to a crime. If I of pardon for my sins were sure,
About my goodness I would rest secure.'”
The volume containing _The Parish Register, The Village_, and others, appeared in the autumn of 1807; and Crabbe’s general acceptance as a poet of mark dates from that year. Four editions were issued by Mr. Hatchard during the following year and a half–the fourth appearing in March 1809. The reviews were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_, and within two days of the appearance of this article, according to Crabbe’s son, the whole of the first edition was sold off.
At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite pleasure. At the time “when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn,” he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real life. After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar benefit. The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then sunk. When Crabbe published his _Parish Register_, the novels of the day were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck the note of a new development in her _Castle Rackrent_, not to mention the delightful stories in _The Parents’ Assistant, Simple Susan, Lazy Lawrence_, or _The Basket-Woman_. Galt’s masterpiece, _The Annals of the Parish_, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk. The Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant. Miss Mitford’s sketches in _Our Village_–the nearest in form to Crabbe’s pictures of country life–were to come later still. Crabbe, though he adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really a chief founder of the rural novel–the _Silas Marner_ and the _Adam Bede_ of fifty years later. Of course (for no man is original) he had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors. Pope was his earliest master in his art. And what Pope had done in his telling couplets for the man and woman of fashion–the Chloes and Narcissas of his day–Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson’s “lovely young Lavinia,” and Goldsmith’s village-parson and poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share of influence. But Crabbe’s achievement was practically a new thing. The success of _The Parish Register_ was largely that of a new adventure in the world of fiction. Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might discover in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories–for a truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could not be unshared.
In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now reduced by the publisher to the form of two small volumes, and in their fourth edition) to Walter Scott, who acknowledged them and Crabbe’s accompanying letter in a friendly reply, to which reference has already been made. After mentioning how for more than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of a personal introduction to Crabbe, and how, as a lad of eighteen, he had met with selections from _The Village_ and _The Library_ in _The Annual Register_, he continues:–
“You may therefore guess my sincere delight when I saw your poems at a late period assume the rank in the public consideration which they so well deserve. It was a triumph to my own immature taste to find I had anticipated the applause of the learned and the critical, and I became very desirous to offer my _gratulor_ among the more important plaudits which you have had from every quarter. I should certainly have availed myself of the freemasonry of authorship (for our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Abhorson’s) to address to you a copy of a new poetical attempt, which I have now upon the anvil, and I esteem myself particularly obliged to Mr. Hatchard, and to your goodness acting upon his information, for giving me the opportunity of paving the way for such a freedom. I am too proud of the compliments you honour me with to affect to decline them; and with respect to the comparative view I have of my own labours and yours, I can only assure you that none of my little folks, about the formation of whose tastes and principles I may be supposed naturally solicitous, have ever read any of my own poems–while yours have been our regular evening’s amusement My eldest girl begins to read well, and enters as well into the humour as into the sentiment of your admirable descriptions of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has seldom existed among those who know by experience that there are much better things in the world than literary reputation, and that one of the best of those good things is the regard and friendship of those deservedly and generally esteemed for their worth or their talents. I believe many dilettante authors do cocker themselves up into a great jealousy of anything that interferes with what they are pleased to call their fame: but I should as soon think of nursing one of my own fingers into a whitlow for my private amusement as encouraging such a feeling. I am truly sorry to observe you mention bad health: those who contribute so much to the improvement as well as the delight of society should escape this evil. I hope, however, that one day your state of health may permit you to view this country.”
This interchange of letters was the beginning of a friendship that was to endure and strengthen through the lives of both poets, for they died in the self-same year. The “new poetical attempt” that was “on the anvil” must have been _The Lady of the Lake_, completed and published in the following year. But already Scott had uneasy misgivings that the style would not bear unlimited repetition. Even before Byron burst upon the world with the two first cantos of _Childe Harold_, and drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, Scott had made the unwelcome discovery that his own matter and manner was imitable, and that others were borrowing it. Many could now “grow the flower” (or something like it), for “all had got the seed.” It was this persuasion that set him thinking whether he might not change his topics and his metre, and still retain his public. To this end he threw up a few tiny _ballons d’essai_–experiments in the manner of some of his popular contemporaries, and printed them in the columns of the _Edinburgh Annual Register_. One of these was a grim story of village crime called _The Poacher_, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe. Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe’s metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into another’s mould. A few lines may suffice, in evidence. The couplet about the vicar’s sermons makes one sure that for the moment Scott was good-humouredly copying one foible at least of his original:–
“Approach and through the unlatticed window peep. Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep; Sunk ‘mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun Stoop to the west, the plunderer’s toils are done. Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand, Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand, While round the hut are in disorder laid The tools and booty of his lawless trade; For force or fraud, resistance or escape The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape; His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards, And the filched lead the church’s roof affords– (Hence shall the rector’s congregation fret, That while his sermon’s dry, his walls are wet.) The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there, Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare, Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare. Bartered for game from chase or warren won, Yon cask holds moonlight,[5] seen when moon was none; And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart, To wait the associate higgler’s evening cart.”
Happily for Scott’s fame, and for the world’s delight, he did not long pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. _Rokeby_ appeared, was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of _Waverley_ and the need of conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever. But his affection for Crabbe never waned. In his earlier novels there was no contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters–and it was Crabbe’s _Borough_ to which he listened with unfailing delight twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: A cant term for smuggled spirits.]
CHAPTER VII
_THE BOROUGH_
(1809-1812)
The immediate success of _The Parish Register_ in 1807 encouraged Crabbe to proceed at once with a far longer poem, which had been some years in hand. _The Borough_ was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, continued at Muston after the return thither in 1805, and finally completed during a long visit to Aldeburgh in the autumn of 1809. That the Poem should have been “in the making” during at least eight years is quite what might be inferred from the finished work. It proved, on appearance, to be of portentous length–at least ten thousand lines. Its versification included every degree of finish of which Crabbe was capable, from his very best to his very worst. Parts of it were evidently written when the theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet that might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme. In the preface to the poem, on its appearance in 1810, Crabbe displays an uneasy consciousness that his poem was open to objection in this respect. In his previous ventures he had had Edmund Burke, Johnson, and Fox, besides his friend Turner at Yarmouth, to restrain or to revise. On the present occasion, the three first-named friends had passed away, and Crabbe took his MS. with him to Yarmouth, on the occasion of his visit to the Eastern Counties, for Mr. Richard Turner’s opinion. The scholarly rector of Great Yarmouth may well have shrunk from advising on a poem of ten thousand lines in which, as the result was to show, the pruning-knife and other trenchant remedies would have seemed to him urgently needed. As it proved, Mr. Turner’s opinion was on the whole “highly favourable; but he intimated that there were portions of the new work which might be liable to rough treatment from the critics.”
_The Borough_ is an extension–a very elaborate extension–of the topics already treated in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. The place indicated is undisguisedly Aldeburgh; but as Crabbe had now chosen a far larger canvas for his picture, he ventured to enlarge the scope of his observation, and while retaining the scenery and general character of the little seaport of his youth, to introduce any incidents of town life and experiences of human character that he had met with subsequently. _The Borough_ is Aldeburgh extended and magnified. Besides church officials it exhibits every shade of nonconformist creed and practice, notably those of which the writer was now having unpleasant experience at Muston. It has, of course, like its prototype, a mayor and corporation, and frequent parliamentary elections. It supports many professors of the law; physicians of high repute, and medical quacks of very low. Social life and pleasure is abundant, with clubs, card-parties, and theatres. It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons, and schools for all classes. The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos or sections, written as “Letters” to an imaginary correspondent who had bidden the writer “describe the borough,” each dealing with its separate topic–professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players, almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. These descriptions are relieved at intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in _The Parish Register_–the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a prisoner in the gaol. Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe’s previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent defects of workmanship, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity, though to many a reader to-day such, episodes may be chiefly known to exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay’s _Essays_, where he speaks of “that pathetic passage in Crabbe’s _Borough_ which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child.”
The passage referred to is the once-famous description of the condemned Felon in the “Letter” on _Prisons_. Macaulay had, as we know, his “heightened way of putting things,” but the narrative which he cites, as foil to one of Robert Montgomery’s borrowings, deserves the praise. It shows Crabbe’s descriptive power at its best, and his rare power and insight into the workings of the heart and mind. He has to trace the sequence of thoughts and feelings in the condemned criminal during the days between his sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier days that haunt his pillow–days when he wandered with his sweetheart or his sister through their village meadows:–
“Yes! all are with him now, and all the while Life’s early prospects and his Fanny’s smile. Then come his sister and his village friend, And he will now the sweetest moments spend Life has to yield,–No! never will he find Again on earth such pleasure in his mind He goes through shrubby walks these friends among, Love in their looks and honour on the tongue. Nay, there’s a charm beyond what nature shows, The bloom is softer and more sweetly glows; Pierced by no crime and urged by no desire For more than true and honest hearts require, They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed Through the green lane,–then linger in the mead,– Stray o’er the heath in all its purple bloom,– And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum; Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass, And press the sandy sheep-walk’s slender grass, Whore dwarfish flowers among the grass are spread, And the lamb browses by the linnet’s bed; Then ‘cross the bounding brook they make their way O’er its rough bridge–‘and there behold the bay!– The ocean smiling to the fervid sun–
The waves that faintly fall and slowly run– The ships at distance and the boats at hand, And now they walk upon the sea-side sand, Counting the number, and what kind they be, Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea: Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold The glittering waters on the shingles rolled; The timid girls, half dreading their design, Dip the small foot in the retarded brine, And search for crimson weeds, which spreading flow, Or lie like pictures on the sand below: With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun, Through the small waves so softly shines upon; And those live lucid jellies which the eye Delights to trace as they swim glittering by: Pearl-shells and rubied star-fish they admire, And will arrange above the parlour fire,– Tokens of bliss!–‘Oh! horrible! a wave Roars as it rises–save me, Edward! save!’ She cries:–Alas! the watchman on his way Calls and lets in–truth, terror, and the day!”
Allowing for a certain melodramatic climax here led up to, we cannot deny the impressiveness of this picture–the first-hand quality of its observation, and an eye for beauty, which his critics are rarely disposed to allow to Crabbe. A narrative of equal pathos, and once equally celebrated, is that of the village-girl who receives back her sailor-lover from his last voyage, only to watch over his dying hours. It is in an earlier section (No. ii. _The Church_), beginning:
“Yes! there are real mourners–I have seen A fair sad girl, mild, suffering, and serene,”
too long to quote in full, and, as with Crabbe’s method generally, not admitting of being fairly represented by extracts. Then there are sketches of character in quite a different vein, such as the vicar, evidently drawn from life. He is the good easy man, popular with the ladies for a kind of _fade_ complimentary style in which he excels; the man of “mild benevolence,” strongly opposed to every thing new:
“Habit with him was all the test of truth: ‘It must be right: I’ve done it from my youth,’ Questions he answered in as brief a way: ‘It must be wrong–it was of yesterday.'”
Feeble good-nature, and selfish unwillingness to disturb any existing habits or conventions, make up his character:
“In him his flock found nothing to condemn; Him sectaries liked–he never troubled them: No trifles failed his yielding mind to please, And all his passions sunk in early ease; Nor one so old has left this world of sin, More like the being that he entered in.”
An excellent companion sketch to that of the dilettante vicar is provided in that of the poor curate–the scholar, gentleman, and devout Christian, struggling against abject poverty to support his large family. The picture drawn by Crabbe has a separate and interesting origin. A year before the appearance of _The Borough_, one of the managers of the Literary Fund, an institution then of some twenty years’ standing, and as yet without its charter, applied to Crabbe for a copy of verses that might be appropriate for recitation at the annual dinner of the Society, held at the Freemasons’ Tavern. It was the custom of the society to admit such literary diversions as part of the entertainment. The notorious William Thomas Fitzgerald had been for many years the regular contributor of the poem, and his efforts on the occasion are remembered, if only through the opening couplet of Byron’s _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, where Fitzgerald is gibbeted as the _Codrus_ of Juvenal’s satire:
“Still must I hear? shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl His creaking couplets in a Tavern-Hall?”
His poem for this year, 1809, is printed at length in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for April–and also Crabbe’s, recited at the same dinner. Crabbe seems to have composed it for the occasion, but with the intention of ultimately weaving it into the poem on which he was then engaged. A paragraph prefixed to the lines also shows that Crabbe had a further object in view. “The Founder of this Society having intimated a hope that, on a plan which he has already communicated to his particular Friends, its Funds may be sufficiently ample to afford assistance and relief to learned officiating Clergymen in distress, though they may not have actually commenced Authors–the Author, in allusion to this hope, has introduced into a Poem which he is preparing for the Press the following character of a learned Divine in distress.”
Crabbe’s lines bearing on the proposed scheme (which seems for a time at least to have been adopted by the administrators of the Fund) were left standing when _The Borough_ was published, with, an explanatory note. They are effective for their purpose, the pathos of them is genuine, and worthy of attention even in these latter days of the “Queen Victoria Clergy Fund.” The speaker is the curate himself:
“Long may these founts of Charity remain, And never shrink, but to be filled again; True! to the Author they are now confined, To him who gave the treasure of his mind, His time, his health,–and thankless found mankind: But there is hope that from these founts may flow A side-way stream, and equal good bestow; Good that may reach us, whom the day’s distress Keeps from the fame and perils of the Press; Whom Study beckons from the Ills of Life, And they from Study; melancholy strife! Who then can say, but bounty now so free, And so diffused, may find its way to me? Yes! I may see my decent table yet
Cheered with the meal that adds not to my debt; May talk of those to whom so much we owe, And guess their names whom yet we may not know; Blest, we shall say, are those who thus can give, And next, who thus upon the bounty live; Then shall I close with thanks my humble meal, And feel so well–Oh! God! how shall I feel!”
Crabbe is known to most readers to-day by the delightful parody of his style in the _Rejected Addresses,_ which appeared in the autumn of 1812, and it was certainly on _The Borough_ that James Smith based his imitation. We all remember the incident of Pat Jennings’s adventure in the gallery of the theatre. The manner of the narrative is borrowed from Crabbe’s lighter and more colloquial style. Every little foible of the poet, when in this vein, is copied with great skill. The superfluity of information, as in the case of–
“John Richard William Alexander Dwyer,”
whose only place in the narrative is that he preceded Pat Jennings’s father in the situation as
“Footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire”;
or again in the detail that,
“Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy Up as a corn-cutter–a safe employ”
(a perfect Crabbian couplet), is imitated throughout, Crabbe’s habit of frequent verbal antithesis, and even of something like punning, is exactly caught in such a couplet as:
“Big-worded bullies who by quarrels live– Who give the lie, and tell the lie they give.”
Much of the parody, no doubt, exhibits the fanciful humour of the brothers Smith, rather than of Crabbe, as is the case with many parodies. Of course there are couplets here and there in Crabbe’s narratives which justify the burlesque. We have:
“What is the truth? Old Jacob married thrice; He dealt in coals, and avarice was his vice,”
or the lines which the parodists themselves quote in their justification,
“Something had happened wrong about a Bill Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill, So to amend it I was told to go,
And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.”
But lines such as these in fact occur only at long intervals. Crabbe’s couplets are more often pedestrian rather than grotesque.
The poet himself, as the witty brothers relate with some pride, was by no means displeased or offended by the liberty taken. When they met in later years at William Spencer’s, Crabbe hurried to meet James Smith with outstretched hand, “Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?” Again, writing to a friend who had expressed some indignation at the parody, Crabbe complained only of the preface. “There is a little ill-nature–and I take the liberty of adding, undeserved ill-nature–in their prefatory address; but in their versification they have done me admirably.” Here Crabbe shows a slight lack of self-knowledge. For when to the Letter on _Trades_ the following extenuating postscript is found necessary, there would seem to be hardly any room for the parodist:
“If I have in this Letter praised the good-humour of a man confessedly too inattentive to business, and if in the one on _Amusements_, I have written somewhat sarcastically of ‘the brick-floored parlour which the butcher lets,’ be credit given to me that in the one case I had no intention to apologise for idleness, nor any design in the other to treat with contempt the resources of the poor. The good-humour is considered as the consolation of disappointment, and the room is so mentioned because the lodger is vain. Most of my readers will perceive this; but I shall be sorry if by any I am supposed to make pleas for the vices of men, or treat their wants and infirmities with derision or with disdain.”
After this, Crabbe himself might have admitted that the descent is not very far to the parodist’s delightful apology for the change from “one hautboy” to “one fiddle” in the description of the band. The subsequent explanation, how the poet had purposely intertwined the various handkerchiefs which rescued Pat Jennings’s hat from the pit, lest the real owner should be detected, and the reason for it, is a not less exquisite piece of fooling:–“For, in the statistical view of life and manners which I occasionally present, my clerical profession has taught me how extremely improper it would be by any allusion, however slight, to give any uneasiness, however trivial, to any individual, however foolish or wicked.” It might perhaps be inferred from such effusions as are here parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of humour. This would certainly be too sweeping an inference, for in many of his sketches of human character he gives unmistakable proof to the contrary. But the talent in question–often so recklessly awarded or denied to us by our fellow-creatures–is very variable in the spheres of its operation. The sense of humour is in its essence, as we have often been told, largely a sense of proportion, and in this sense Crabbe was certainly deficient. The want of it accounts for much more in his writings than for his prose notes and prefaces. It explains much of the diffuseness and formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp the great truth how much the half may be greater than the whole.
In spite, however, of these defects, and of the inequalities of the workmanship, _The Borough_ was from the first a success. The poem appeared in February 1810, and went through six editions in the next six years. It does not indeed present an alluring picture of life in the provinces. It even reminds us of a saying of Tennyson’s, that if God made the country, and man made the city, then it was the devil who made the country-town. To travel through the borough from end to end is to pass through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and under a cloudy heaven, with only rare gleams of sunshine, and patches of blue sky. These, when they occur, are proportionally welcome. They include some exquisite descriptions of nature, though with Crabbe it will be noticed that it is always the nature close about his feet, the hedge-row, the meadow, the cottage-garden: as his son has noted, his outlook never extends to the landscape beyond.
In the respects just mentioned, the qualities exhibited in the new poem have been noticed before in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. In _The Borough_, however, appear some maturer specimens of this power, showing how Crabbe’s art was perfecting by practice. Very noticeable are the sections devoted to the almshouse of the borough and its inhabitants. Its founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn from life. The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all his poorer neighbours in distress:–
“A twofold taste he had; to give and spare, Both were his duties, and had equal care; It was his joy to sit alone and fast,
Then send a widow and her boys repast: Tears in his eyes would, spite of him, appear, But he from other eyes has kept the tear: All in a wintry night from far he came
To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame, Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant A lingering, but reforming punishment:
Home then he walked, and found his anger rise When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes; But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed To Heaven in hope, he calmly sank to rest.”
The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth year was past, a building was seen rising on the green north of the village–an almshouse for old men and women of the borough, who had struggled in life and failed. Having built and endowed this harbour of refuge, and placed its government in the hands of six trustees, the modest donor and the pious lady-relative who had shared in his good works passed quietly out of life.
This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees who succeeded to the management after the founder’s death, among them a Sir Denys Brand, a lavish donor to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the founder had been humble and modest. This man defeats the intentions of the founder by admitting to the almshouses persons of the shadiest antecedents, on the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in their day:
“Not men in trade by various loss brought down, But those whose glory once amazed the town; Who their last guinea in their pleasure spent, Yet never fell so low as to repent:
To these his pity he could largely deal, Wealth they had known, and therefore want could feel.”
From this unfit class of pensioner Crabbe selects three for his minute analysis of character. They are, as usual, of a very sordid type. The first, a man named “Blaney,” had his prototype in a half-pay major known to Crabbe in his Aldeburgh days, and even the tolerant Jeffrey held that the character was rather too shameless for poetical treatment. The next inmate in order, a woman also drawn from the living model, and disguised under the title of _Clelia_, is a study of character and career, drawn with consummate skill. Certain abortive attempts of Crabbe to write prose fiction have been already mentioned. But this narrative of the gradual degradation of a coquette of the lower middle class shows that Crabbe possessed at least some of the best qualities of a great novelist. Clelia is, in fact, a kind of country-town Becky Sharp, whose wiles and schemes are not destined to end in a white-washed reputation at a fashionable watering-place. On the contrary she falls from one ignominy to another until, by a gross abuse of a public charity, she ends her days in the almshouse!
One further instance may be cited of Crabbe’s persistent effort to awaken attention to the problem of poor-law relief. In his day the question, both as to policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor relief, was still unsettled. In _The Borough_, as described, many of the helpless poor were relieved at their own homes. But a new scheme, “The maintenance of the poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred,” seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that time confined to that county. It differed from the workhouse of to-day apparently in this respect, that there was not even an attempt to separate the young and old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and vicious from the respectable and honest. Yet Crabbe’s powerful picture of the misery thus caused to the deserving class of inmate is not without its lesson even after nearly a century during which thought and humanity have been continually at work upon such problems. The loneliness and weariness of workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and friends, in “the day-room of a London workhouse,” have been lately set forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_, with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe’s _Borough_:–
“Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet? Who learn the story current in the street? Who to the long-known intimate impart
Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart? They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend, Or seek companions at their journey’s end? Here are not those whom they when infants knew; Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew; Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived; Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived; Whom time and custom so familiar made,
That looks the meaning in the mind conveyed: But here to strangers, words nor looks impart The various movements of the suffering heart; Nor will that heart with those alliance own, To whom its views and hopes are all unknown What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy, Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy?
‘Tis cheerless living in such bounded view, With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new; Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep; The day itself is, like the night, asleep.”
The essence of workhouse monotony has surely never been better indicated than here.
_The Borough_ did much to spread Crabbe’s reputation while he remained, doing his duty to the best of his ability and knowledge, in the quiet loneliness of the Vale of Belvoir, but his growing fame lay far outside the boundaries of his parish. When, a few years later, he visited London and was received with general welcome by the distinguished world of literature and the arts, he was much surprised. “In my own village,” he told James Smith, “they think nothing of me.” The three years following the publication of _The Borough_ were specially lonely. He had, indeed, his two sons, George and John, with him. They had both passed through Cambridge–one at Trinity and the other at Caius, and were now in holy orders. Each held a curacy in the near neighbourhood, enabling them to live under the parental roof. But Mrs. Crabbe’s condition was now increasingly sad, her mind being almost gone. There was no daughter, and we hear of no other female relative at hand to assist Crabbe in the constant watching of the patient. This circumstance alone limited his opportunities of accepting the hospitalities of the neighbourhood, though with the Welbys and other county families, as well as with the surrounding clergy, he was a welcome guest.
_The Borough_ appeared in February 1810, and the reviewers were prompt in their attention. The _Edinburgh_ reviewed the poem in April of the same year, and the _Quarterly_ followed in October. Jeffrey had already noticed _The Parish Register_ in 1808. The critic’s admiration of Crabbe had been, and remained to the end, cordial and sincere. But now, in reviewing the new volume, a note of warning appears. The critic finds himself obliged to admit that the current objections to Crabbe’s treatment of country life are well founded. “His chief fault,” he says, “is his frequent lapse into disgusting representations.” All powerful and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in “images of distress,” but these images must never excite “disgust,” for that is fatal to the ends which poetry was meant to produce. A few months later the _Quarterly_ followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a more questionable doctrine. The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its place. “We turn to poetry,” he says, “not that we may see and feel what we see and feel in our daily experience, but that we may be refreshed by other emotions, and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the realities of life in the paradise of Fancy.”
The appearance of these two prominent reviews to a certain extent influenced the direction of Crabbe’s genius for the remainder of his life. He evidently had given them earnest consideration, and in the preface to the _Tales_, his next production, he attempted something like an answer to each. Without mentioning any names he replies to Jeffrey in the first part of his preface, and to the _Quarterly_ reviewer in the second. Jeffrey had expressed a hope that Crabbe would in future concentrate his powers upon some interesting and connected story. “At present it is impossible not to regret that so much genius should be wasted in making us perfectly acquainted with individuals of whom we are to know nothing but their characters.” Crabbe in reply makes what was really the best apology for not accepting this advice. He intimates that he had already made the experiment, but without success. His peculiar gifts did not fit him for it. As he wrote the words, he doubtless had in mind the many prose romances that he had written, and then consigned to the flames. The short story, or rather the exhibition of a single character developed through a few incidents, he felt to be the method that fitted his talent best.
Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the _Quarterly_ reviewer, how far many passages in _The Borough_, when concerned with low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had never been disputed. He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life indeed, and in the same rhymed metre. “If all that kind of satire wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as genuine poetry,” then what becomes of the author of _The Canterbury Tales_? Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to this question. He could not discern that the treatment is everything, and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself–the spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has “no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere”? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The _Quarterly_ reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description in _The Borough_ of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather metrical fiction than poetry. There is more of the essence of poetry in a single couplet of Pope’s:
“See how the world its veterans rewards– A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.”
For here the expression is faultless, and Pope has educed an eternally pathetic truth, of universal application.
Even had the gentle remonstrances of the two reviewers never been expressed, it would seem as if Crabbe had already arrived at somewhat similar conclusions on his own account. At the time the reviews appeared, the whole of the twenty-one _Tales_ to be published in August 1812 were already written. Crabbe had perceived that if he was to retain the admiring public he had won, he must break fresh ground. Aldeburgh was played out. It had provided abundant material and been an excellent training-ground for Crabbe’s powers. But he had discovered that there were other fields worth cultivating besides that of the hard lots of the very poor. He had associated in his later years with a class above these–not indeed with the “upper ten,” save when he dined at Belvoir Castle, but with classes lying between these two extremes. He had come to feel more and more the fascination of analysing human character and motives among his equals. He had a singularly retentive memory, and the habit of noting and brooding over incidents–specially of “life’s little ironies”–wherever he encountered them. He does not seem to have possessed much originating power. When, a few years later, his friend Mrs. Leadbeater inquired of him whether the characters in his various poems were drawn from life, he replied:–“Yes, I will tell you readily about my ventures, whom I endeavour to paint as nearly as I could, and _dare_–for in some cases I dared not…. Thus far you are correct: there is not one of whom I had not in my mind the original, but I was obliged in most cases to take them from their real situations, and in one or two instances even to change their sex, and in many, the circumstances…. Indeed I do not know that I could paint merely from my own fancy, and there is no cause why I should. Is there not diversity enough in society?”
CHAPTER VIII
_TALES_
(1812)
Crabbe’s new volume–“Tales. By the Rev. George Crabbe, LL.B.”–was published by Mr. Hatchard of Piccadilly in the summer of 1812. It received a warm welcome from the poet’s admirers, and was reviewed, most appreciatively, by Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_ for November. The _Tales_ were twenty-one in number, and to each was prefixed a series, often four or five, of quotations from Shakespeare, illustrating the incidents in the Tales, or the character there depicted. Crabbe’s knowledge of Shakespeare must have been in those days, when concordances were not, very remarkable, for he quotes by no means always from the best known plays, and he was not a frequenter of the theatre. Crabbe had of late studied human nature in books as well as in life.
As already remarked, the Tales are often built upon events in his own family, or else occurring within their knowledge. The second in order of publication, _The Parting Hour_, arose out of an incident in the life of the poet’s own brother, which is thus related in the notes to the edition of 1834:
“Mr. Crabbe’s fourth brother, William, taking to a sea-faring life, was made prisoner by the Spaniards. He was carried to Mexico, where he became a silversmith, married, and prospered, until his increasing riches attracted a charge of Protestantism; the consequence of which was much persecution. He at last was obliged to abandon Mexico, his property, and his family; and was discovered in the year 1803 by an Aldeburgh sailor on the coast of Honduras, where again he seems to have found some success in business. This sailor was the only person he had seen for many a year who could tell him anything about Aldeburgh and his family, and great was his perplexity when he was informed that his eldest brother, George, was a clergyman. ‘This cannot be _our_ George,’ said the wanderer, ‘he was a _Doctor_! This was the first, and it was also the last, tidings that ever reached Mr. Crabbe of his brother William; and upon the Aldeburgh sailor’s story of his casual interview, it is obvious that he built this tale.”
The story as developed by Crabbe is pathetic and picturesque, reminding us in its central interest of _Enoch Arden_. Allen Booth, the youngest son of his parents dwelling in a small seaport, falls early in love with a child schoolfellow, for whom his affection never falters. When grown up the young man accepts an offer from a prosperous kinsman in the West Indies to join him in his business. His beloved sees him depart with many misgivings, though their mutual devotion was never to fade. She does not see him again for forty years, when he returns, like Arden, to his “native bay,”
“A worn-out man with wither’d limbs and lame, His mind oppress’d with woes, and bent with age his frame.”
He finds his old love, who had been faithful to her engagement for ten years, and then (believing Allen to be dead) had married. She is now a widow, with grown-up children scattered through the world, and is alone. Allen then tells his sad story. The ship in which he sailed from England had been taken by the Spaniards, and he had been carried a slave to the West Indies, where he worked in a silver mine, improved his position under a kind master, and finally married a Spanish girl, hopeless of ever returning to England though still unforgetful of his old love. He accumulates money, and, like Crabbe’s brother, incurs the envy of his Roman Catholic neighbours. He is denounced as a heretic, who would doubtless bring up his children in the accursed English faith. On his refusal to become a Catholic he is expelled the country, as the condition of his life being spared:
“His wife, his children, weeping in his sight, All urging him to flee, he fled, and cursed his flight.”
After many adventures he falls in with a ship bound for England, but again his return is delayed. He is impressed (it was war-time), and fights for his country; loses a limb, is again left upon a foreign shore where his education finds him occupation as a clerk; and finally, broken with age and toil, finds his way back to England, where the faithful friend of his youth takes care of him and nurses him to the end. The situation at the close is very touching–for the joy of re-union is clouded by the real love he feels for the Spanish wife and children from whom he had been torn, and who are continually present to him in his dreams.
Nor is the treatment inadequate. It is at once discernible how much Crabbe had already gained by the necessity for concentration upon the development of a story instead of on the mere analysis of character. The style, moreover, has clarified and gained in dignity: there are few, if any, relapses into the homelier style on which the parodist could try his hand. Had the author of _Enoch Arden_ treated the same theme in blank-verse, the workmanship would have been finer, but he could hardly have sounded a truer note of unexaggerated pathos.
The same may be said of the beautiful tale of _The Lover’s Journey_. Here again is the product of an experience belonging to Crabbe’s personal history. In his early Aldeburgh days, when he was engaged to Sarah Elmy with but faint hope of ever being able to marry, it was one of the rare alleviations of his distressed condition to walk over from Aldeburgh to Beccles (some twenty miles distant), where his betrothed was occasionally a visitor to her mother and sisters. “It was in his walks,” writes the son, “between Aldeburgh and Beccles that Mr. Crabbe passed through the very scenery described in the first part of _The Lover’s Journey_; while near Beccles, in another direction, he found the contrast of rich vegetation introduced in the latter part of that tale; nor have I any doubt that the _disappointment_ of the story figures out something that, on one of these visits, befell himself, and the feelings with which he received it.
“Gone to a friend, she tells me;–I commend Her purpose: means she to a female friend?”
“For truth compels me to say, that he was by no means free from the less amiable sign of a strong attachment–jealousy.” The story is of the slightest–an incident rather than a story. The lover, joyous and buoyant, traverses the dreary coast scenery of Suffolk, and because he is happy, finds beauty and charm in the commonest and most familiar sights and sounds of nature: every single hedge-row blossom, every group of children at their play. The poem is indeed an illustration of Coleridge’s lines in his ode _Dejection_:
“O Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live,– Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.”
All along the road to his beloved’s house, nature wears this “wedding-garment.” On his arrival, however, the sun fades suddenly from the landscape. The lady is from home: gone to visit a friend a few miles distant, not so far but that her lover can follow,–but the slight, real or imaginary, probably the latter, comes as such a rebuff, that during the “little more–how far away!” that he travels, the country, though now richer and lovelier, seems to him (as once to Hamlet) a mere “pestilent congregation of vapours.” But in the end he finds his mistress and learns that she had gone on duty, not for pleasure,–and they return happy again, and so happy indeed, that he has neither eyes nor thoughts for any of nature’s fertilities or barrennesses–only for the dear one at his side.
I have already had occasion to quote a few lines from this beautiful poem, to show Crabbe’s minute observation–in his time so rare–of flowers and birds and all that makes the charm of rural scenery–but I must quote some more:
“‘Various as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,’ Exclaim’d Orlando: ‘all that grows has grace: All are appropriate–bog, and marsh, and fen, Are only poor to undiscerning men;
Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature’s hand adorns the rushy moor, Here the rare moss in secret shade is found, Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But well repay th’ attention they require; For these my Laura will her home forsake, And all the pleasures they afford, partake.'”
And then follows a masterly description of a gipsy encampment on which the lover suddenly comes in his travels. Crabbe’s treatment of peasant life has often been compared to that of divers painters–the Dutch school, Hogarth, Wilkie, and others–and the following curiously suggests Frederick Walker’s fine drawing, _The Vagrants_:
“Again, the country was enclosed, a wide And sandy road has banks on either side; Where, lo! a hollow on the left appear’d, And there a gipsy tribe their tent had rear’d; ‘Twas open spread, to catch the morning sun, And they had now their early meal begun, When two brown boys just left their grassy seat, The early Trav’ller with their prayers to greet: While yet Orlando held his pence in hand, He saw their sister on her duty stand;
Some twelve years old, demure, affected, sly, Prepared the force of early powers to try; Sudden a look of languor he descries,
And well-feigned apprehension in her eyes; Train’d but yet savage in her speaking face, He mark’d the features of her vagrant race; When a light laugh and roguish leer express’d The vice implanted in her youthful breast: Forth from the tent her elder brother came, Who seem’d offended, yet forbore to blame The young designer, but could only trace The looks of pity in the Trav’ller’s face: Within, the Father, who from fences nigh Had brought the fuel for the fire’s supply, Watch’d now the feeble blaze, and stood dejected by. On ragged rug, just borrowed from the bed, And by the hand of coarse indulgence fed, In dirty patchwork negligently dress’d, Reclined the Wife, an infant at her breast; In her wild face some touch of grace remain’d, Of vigour palsied and of beauty stain’d; Her bloodshot eyes on her unheeding mate Were wrathful turn’d, and seem’d her wants to state, Cursing his tardy aid–her Mother there With gipsy-state engross’d the only chair; Solemn and dull her look; with such she stands, And reads the milk-maid’s fortune in her hands, Tracing the lines of life; assumed through years, Each feature now the steady falsehood wears. With hard and savage eye she views the food, And grudging pinches their intruding brood; Last in the group, the worn-out Grandsire sits Neglected, lost, and living but by fits: Useless, despised, his worthless labours done, And half protected by the vicious Son,
Who half supports him; he with heavy glance Views the young ruffians who around him dance; And, by the sadness in his face, appears To trace the progress of their future years: Through what strange course of misery, vice, deceit, Must wildly wander each unpractised cheat! What shame and grief, what punishment and pain, Sport of fierce passions, must each child sustain– Ere they like him approach their latter end, Without a hope, a comfort, or a friend!
But this Orlando felt not; ‘Rogues,’ said he, ‘Doubtless they are, but merry rogues they be; They wander round the land, and be it true They break the laws–then let the laws pursue The wanton idlers; for the life they live, Acquit I cannot, but I can forgive.’
This said, a portion from his purse was thrown, And every heart seem’d happy like his own.”
_The Patron_, one of the most carefully elaborated of the Tales, is on an old and familiar theme. The scorn that “patient merit of the unworthy takes”; the misery of the courtier doomed “in suing long to bide”;–the ills that assail the scholar’s life,
“Toil, envy, want, the Patron and the jail,”
are standing subjects for the moralist and the satirist. In Crabbe’s poem we have the story of a young man, the son of a “Borough-burgess,” who, showing some real promise as a poet, and having been able to render the local Squire some service by his verses at election time, is invited in return to pay a visit of some weeks at the Squire’s country-seat. The Squire has vaguely undertaken to find some congenial post for the young scholar, whose ideas and ambitions are much in advance of those entertained for him in his home. The young man has a most agreeable time with his new friends. He lives for the while with every refinement about him, and the Squire’s daughter, a young lady of the type of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, evidently enjoys the opportunity of breaking a country heart for pastime, “ere she goes to town.” For after a while the family leave for their mansion in London, the Squire at parting once more impressing on his young guest that he will not forget him. After waiting a reasonable time, the young poet repairs to London and seeks to obtain an interview with his Patron. After many unsuccessful trials, and rebuffs at the door from the servants, a letter is at last sent out to him from their master, coolly advising him to abjure all dreams of a literary life and offering him a humble post in the Custom House. The young man, in bitterness of heart, tries the work for a short time; and then, his health and spirits having utterly failed, he returns to his parents’ home to die, the father thanking God, as he moves away from his son’s grave, that no other of his children has tastes and talents above his position:
“‘There lies my Boy,’ he cried, ‘of care bereft, And, Heaven be praised, I’ve not a genius left: No one among ye, sons! is doomed to live On high-raised hopes of what the Great may give.'”