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Crabbe, who is nothing if not incisive in the drawing of his moral, and lays on his colours with no sparing hand, represents the heartless Patron and his family as hearing the sad tidings with quite amazing _sang-froid_:

“Meantime the news through various channels spread, The youth, once favour’d with such praise, was dead: ‘Emma,’ the Lady cried, ‘my words attend, Your siren-smiles have kill’d your humble friend; The hope you raised can now delude no more, Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore’

Faint was the flush of anger and of shame, That o’er the cheek of conscious beauty came: ‘You censure not,’ said she, ‘the sun’s bright rays, When fools imprudent dare the dangerous gaze; And should a stripling look till he were blind, You would not justly call the light unkind; But is he dead? and am I to suppose
The power of poison in such looks as those?’ She spoke, and pointing to the mirror, cast A pleased gay glance, and curtsied as she pass’d.

My Lord, to whom the poet’s fate was told, Was much affected, for a man so cold:
‘Dead!’ said his lordship, ‘run distracted, mad! Upon my soul I’m sorry for the lad;
And now, no doubt, th’ obliging world will say That my harsh usage help’d him on his way: What! I suppose, I should have nursed his muse, And with champagne have brighten’d up his views, Then had he made me famed my whole life long, And stunn’d my ears with gratitude and song. Still should the father hear that I regret Our joint misfortune–Yes! I’ll not forget.'”

The story, though it has no precise prototype in Crabbe’s own history, is clearly the fruit of his experience of life at Belvoir Castle, combined with the sad recollection of his sufferings when only a few years before he, a young man with the consciousness of talent, was rolling butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay.

Much of the Tale is admirably and forcibly written, but again it may be said that it is powerful fiction rather than poetry–and indeed into such matters poetry can hardly enter. It displays the fine observation of Miss Austen, clothed in effective couplets of the school of Johnson and Churchill. Yet every now and then the true poet comes to the surface. The essence of a dank and misty day in late autumn has never been seized with more perfect truth than in these lines:

“Cold grew the foggy morn, the day was brief, Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf; The dew dwelt ever on the herb; the woods Roar’d with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods: All green was vanish’d, save of pine and yew, That still displayed their melancholy hue; Save the green holly with its berries red, And the green moss that o’er the gravel spread.”

The scheme of these detached Tales had served to develop one special side of Crabbe’s talent. The analysis of human character, with its strength and weakness (but specially the latter), finds fuller exercise as the poet has to trace its effects upon the earthly fortunes of the persons portrayed. The Tale entitled _The Gentleman Farmer_ is a striking illustration in point. Jeffrey in his review of the _Tales_ in the _Edinburgh_ supplies, as usual, a short abstract of the story, not without due insight into its moral. But a profounder student of human nature than Jeffrey has, in our own day, cited the Tale as worthy even to illustrate a memorable teaching of St. Paul. The Bishop of Worcester, better known as Canon Gore to the thousands who listened to the discourse in Westminster Abbey, finds in this story a perfect illustration of what moral freedom is, and what it is often erroneously supposed to be:

“It is of great practical importance that we should get a just idea of what our freedom consists in. There are men who, under the impulse of a purely materialist science, declare the sense of moral freedom to be an illusion. This is of course a gross error. But what has largely played into the hands of this error is the exaggerated idea of human freedom which is ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by ignoring our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this that we need to have brought home to us. There is an admirable story among George Crabbe’s _Tales_ called ‘The Gentleman Farmer.’ The hero starts in life resolved that he will not put up with any bondage. The orthodox clergyman, the orthodox physician, and orthodox matrimony–all these alike represent social bondage in different forms, and he will have none of them So he starts on a career of ‘unchartered freedom’

‘To prove that _he alone was king of him,_’

and the last scene of all represents him the weak slave of his mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist–‘which things are an allegory.'”

The quotation shows that Crabbe, neglected by the readers of poetry to-day, is still cherished by the psychologist and divine. It is to the “graver mind” rather than to the “lighter heart” that he oftenest appeals. Newman, to mention no small names, found Crabbe’s pathos and fidelity to Human Nature even more attractive to him in advanced years than in youth. There is indeed much in common between Crabbe’s treatment of life and its problems, and Newman’s. Both may be called “stern” portrayers of human nature, not only as intended in Byron’s famous line, but in Wordsworth’s use of the epithet when he invoked Duty as the “stern Daughter of the voice of God.” A kindred lesson to that drawn by Canon Gore from _The Gentleman Farmer_ is taught in the yet grimmer Tale of _Edward Shore_. The story, as summarised by Jeffrey, is as follows:

“The hero is a young man of aspiring genius and enthusiastic temper with an ardent love of virtue, but no settled principles either of conduct or opinion. He first conceives an attachment for an amiable girl, who is captivated with his conversation; but, being too poor to marry, soon comes to spend more of his time in the family of an elderly sceptic of his acquaintance, who had recently married a young wife, and placed unbounded confidence in her virtue, and the honour of his friend. In a moment of temptation they abuse this confidence. The husband renounces him with dignified composure; and he falls at once from the romantic pride of his virtue. He then seeks the company of the dissipated and gay, and ruins his health and fortune without regaining his tranquillity. When in gaol and miserable, he is relieved by an unknown hand, and traces the benefaction to the friend whose former kindness he had so ill repaid. This humiliation falls upon his proud spirit and shattered nerves with an overwhelming force, and his reason fails beneath it. He is for some time a raving maniac, and then falls into a state of gay and compassionable imbecility, which is described with inimitable beauty in the close of this story.”

Jeffrey’s abstract is fairly accurate, save in one particular. Edward Shore can hardly be said to feel an “ardent love of virtue.” Rather is he perfectly confident of his respectability, and bitterly contemptuous of those who maintain the necessity of religion to control men’s unruly passions. His own lofty conceptions of the dignity of human nature are sufficient for himself:

“‘While reason guides me, I shall walk aright, Nor need a steadier hand, or stronger light; Nor this in dread of awful threats, design’d For the weak spirit and the grov’ling mind; But that, engaged by thoughts and views sublime, I wage free war with grossness and with crime.’ Thus looked he proudly on the vulgar crew, Whom statutes govern, and whom fears subdue.”

As motto for this story Crabbe quotes the fine speech of Henry V. on discovering the treachery of Lord Scrope, whose character had hitherto seemed so immaculate. The comparison thus suggested is not as felicitous as in many of Crabbe’s citations. Had _In_ _Memoriam_ been then written, a more exact parallel might have been found in Tennyson’s warning to the young enthusiast:

“See thou, that countest reason ripe In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And ev’n for want of such a type.”

The story is for the most part admirably told. The unhappy man, reduced to idiocy of a harmless kind, and the common playmate of the village children, is encountered now and then by the once loved maid, who might have made him happy:

“Kindly she chides his boyish flights, while he Will for a moment fix’d and pensive be; And as she trembling speaks, his lively eyes Explore her looks; he listens to her sighs; Charm’d by her voice, th’ harmonious sounds invade His clouded mind, and for a time persuade: Like a pleased infant, who has newly caught From the maternal glance a gleam of thought, He stands enrapt, the half-known voice to hear, And starts, half conscious, at the falling tear.

Rarely from town, nor then unwatch’d, he goes, In darker mood, as if to hide his woes; Returning soon, he with impatience seeks His youthful friends, and shouts, and sings, and speaks; Speaks a wild speech with action all as wild– The children’s leader, and himself a child; He spins their top, or at their bidding bends His back, while o’er it leap his laughing friends; Simple and weak, he acts the boy once more, And heedless children call him _Silly Shore_.”

In striking contrast to the prevailing tone of the other Tales is the charming story, conceived in a vein of purest comedy, called _The Frank Courtship_. This Tale alone should be a decisive answer to those who have doubted Crabbe’s possession of the gift of humour, and on this occasion he has refrained from letting one dark shadow fall across his picture. It tells of one Jonas Kindred, a wealthy puritanic Dissenter of narrowest creed and masterful temper. He has an only daughter, the pride of her parents, and brought up by them in the strictest tenets of the sect. Her father has a widowed and childless sister, with a comfortable fortune, living in some distant town; and in pity of her solitary condition he allows his naturally vivacious daughter to spend the greater part of the year with her aunt. The aunt does not share the prejudices of her brother’s household. She likes her game of cards and other social joys, and is quite a leader of fashion in her little town. To this life and its enjoyments the beautiful and clever Sybil takes very kindly, and unfolds many attractive graces. Once a year the aunt and niece by arrangement spend a few weeks in Sybil’s old home. The aunt, with much serpentine wisdom, arranges that she and her niece shall adapt themselves to this very different atmosphere–eschew cards, attend regularly at chapel, and comply with the tone and habits of the family. The niece, however, is really as good as she is pretty, and her conscience smites her for deceiving her father, of whom she is genuinely fond. She stands before him “pure, pensive, simple, sad,”–yet

“the damsel’s heart,
When Jonas praised, reproved her for the part; For Sybil, fond of pleasure, gay and light, Had still a secret bias to the right;
Vain as she was–and flattery made her vain– Her simulation gave her bosom pain.”

As time wears on, however, this state of things must come to a close. Jonas is anxious that his daughter shall marry suitably, and he finds among his neighbours an admirable young man, a staunch member of the “persuasion,” and well furnished in this world’s goods. He calls his daughter home, that she may be at once introduced to her future husband, for the father is as certain as Sir Anthony Absolute himself that daughters should accept what is offered them and ask no questions. Sybil is by no means unwilling to enter the holy state, if the right man can be found. Indeed, she is wearying of the aimless life she lives with her worldly aunt, and the gradual change in her thoughts and hopes is indicated in a passage of much delicacy and insight:

“Jonas now ask’d his daughter–and the Aunt, Though loth to lose her, was obliged to grant.– But would not Sybil to the matron cling, And fear to leave the shelter of her wing? No! in the young there lives a love of change, And to the easy they prefer the strange! Then, too, the joys she once pursued with zeal, From whist and visits sprung, she ceased to feel: When with, the matrons Sybil first sat down, To cut for partners and to stake her crown, This to the youthful maid preferment seem’d, Who thought what woman she was then esteem’d; But in few years, when she perceived indeed The real woman to the girl succeed,
No longer tricks and honours fill’d her mind, But other feelings, not so well defined; She then reluctant grew, and thought it hard To sit and ponder o’er an ugly card;
Rather the nut-tree shade the nymph preferr’d, Pleased with the pensive gloom and evening bird; Thither, from company retired, she took The silent walk, or read the fav’rite book.”

The interview between Sybil and the young man is conceived with real skill and humour. The young lady receives her lover, prepared to treat him with gentle mockery and to keep him at a convenient distance. The young lover is not daunted, and plainly warns her against the consequences of such levity. But as the little duel proceeds, each gradually detects the real good that underlies the surface qualities of the other. In spite of his formalism, Sybil discerns that her lover is full of good sense and feeling; and he makes the same discovery with regard to the young lady’s _badinage._ And then, after a conflict of wits that seems to terminate without any actual result, the anxious father approaches his child with a final appeal to her sense of filial duty:

“With anger fraught, but willing to persuade, The wrathful father met the smiling maid: ‘Sybil,’ said he, ‘I long, and yet I dread To know thy conduct–hath Josiah fled?
And, grieved and fretted by thy scornful air, For his lost peace, betaken him to prayer? Couldst then his pure and modest mind distress By vile remarks upon his speech, address, Attire, and voice?’–‘All this I must confess.’ ‘Unhappy child! what labour will it cost To win him back!’–‘I do not think him lost.’ ‘Courts he then (trifler!) insult and disdain?’– ‘No; but from these he courts me to refrain.’ ‘Then hear me, Sybil: should Josiah leave Thy father’s house?’–‘My father’s child would grieve.’ ‘That is of grace, and if he come again To speak of love?’–‘I might from grief refrain.’ ‘Then wilt thou, daughter, our design embrace?’– Can I resist it, if it be of grace?’
‘Dear child! in three plain words thy mind express: Wilt thou have this good youth?’–‘Dear father! yes.'”

All the characters in the story–the martinet father and his poor crushed wife, as well as the pair of lovers–are indicated with an appreciation of the value of dramatic contrast that might make the little story effective on the stage. One of the Tales in this collection, _The Confidant_, was actually turned into a little drama in blank verse by Charles Lamb, under the changed title of _The Wife’s Trial: or the Intruding Widow_. The story of Crabbe’s _Confidant_ is not pleasant; and Lamb thought well to modify it, so as to diminish the gravity of the secret of which the malicious friend was possessed. There is nothing but what is sweet and attractive in the little comedy of _The Frank Courtship_, and it might well be commended to the dexterous and sympathetic hand of Mr. J.M. Barrie.

CHAPTER IX

VISITING IN LONDON

(1812-1819)

In the margin of FitzGerald’s copy of the _Memoir_ an extract is quoted from Crabbe’s Diary: “1810, Nov. 7.–Finish Tales. Not happy hour.” The poet’s comment may have meant something more than that so many of his Tales dealt with sad instances of human frailty. At that moment, and for three years longer, there hung over Crabbe’s family life a cloud that never lifted–the hopeless illness of his wife. Two years before, Southey, in answer to a friend who had made some reference to Crabbe and his poetry, writes:

“With Crabbe’s poems I have been acquainted for about twenty years, having read them when a schoolboy on their first publication, and, by the help of _Elegant Extracts_, remembered from that time what was best worth remembering. You rightly compare him to Goldsmith. He is an imitator, or rather an _antithesizer_ of Goldsmith, if such a word may be coined for the occasion. His merit is precisely the same as Goldsmith’s–that of describing things clearly and strikingly; but there is a wide difference between the colouring of the two poets. Goldsmith threw a sunshine over all his pictures, like that of one of our water-colour artists when he paints for ladies–a light and a beauty not to be found in Nature, though not more brilliant or beautiful than what Nature really affords; Crabbe’s have a gloom which is also not in Nature–not the shade of a heavy day, of mist, or of clouds, but the dark and overcharged shadows of one who paints by lamplight–whose very lights have a gloominess. In part this is explained by his history.”

Southey’s letter was written in September 1808, before either _The Borough_ or the _Tales_ was published, which may account for the inadequacy of his criticism on Crabbe’s poetry. But the above passage throws light upon a period in Crabbe’s history to which his son naturally does little more than refer in general and guarded terms. In a subsequent passage of the letter already quoted, we are reminded that as early as the year 1803 Mrs. Crabbe’s mental derangement was familiarly known to her friends.

But now, when his latest book was at last in print, and attracting general attention, the end of Crabbe’s long watching was not far off. In the summer of 1813 Mrs. Crabbe had rallied so far as to express a wish to see London again, and the father and mother and two sons spent nearly three months in rooms in a hotel. Crabbe was able to visit Dudley North, and other of his old friends, and to enter to some extent into the gaieties of the town, but also, as always, taking advantage of the return to London to visit and help the poor and distressed, not unmindful of his own want and misery in the great city thirty years before. The family returned to Muston in September, and towards the close of the month Mrs. Crabbe was released from her long disease. On the north wall of the chancel of Muston Church, close to the altar, is a plain marble slab recording that not far away lie the remains of “Sarah, wife of the Rev. George Crabbe, late Rector of this Parish.”

Within _two_ days of the wife’s death Crabbe fell ill of a serious malady, worn out as he was with long anxiety and grief. He was for a few days in danger of his life, and so well aware of his condition that he desired that his wife’s grave “might not be closed till it was seen whether he should recover.” He rallied, however, and returned to the duties of his parish, and to a life of still deeper loneliness. But his old friends at Belvoir Castle once more came to his deliverance. Within a short time the Duke offered him the living of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, a small manufacturing town, on the line (as we should describe it today) between Bath and Salisbury. The value of the preferment was not as great as that of the joint livings of Muston and Allington, so that poor Crabbe was once more doomed to be a pluralist, and to accept, also at the Duke’s hands, the vicarage of Croxton Kerrial, near Belvoir Castle, where, however, he never resided.

And now the time came for Crabbe’s final move, and rector of Trowbridge he was to remain for the rest of his life. He was glad to leave Muston, which now had for him the saddest of associations. He had never been happy there, for reasons we have seen. What Crabbe’s son calls “diversity of religious sentiment” had produced “a coolness in some of his parishioners, which he felt the more painfully because, whatever might be their difference of opinion, he was ever ready to help and oblige them all by medical and other aid to the utmost extent of his power.” So that in leaving Muston he was not, as was evident, leaving many to lament his departure. Indeed, malignity was so active in one quarter that the bells of the parish church were rung to welcome Crabbe’s successor before Crabbe and his sons had quitted the house!

For other reasons, perhaps, Crabbe prepared to leave his two livings with a sense of relief. His wife’s death had cast a permanent shadow over the landscape. The neighbouring gentry were kindly disposed, but probably not wholly sympathetic. It is clear that there was a certain rusticity about Crabbe; and his politics, such as they were, had been formed in a different school from that of the county families. A busy country town was likely to furnish interests and distractions of a different kind. But before finally quitting the neighbourhood he visited a sister at Aldeburgh, and, his son writes, ‘one day was given to a solitary ramble among the scenery of bygone years–Parham and the woods of Glemham, then in the first blossom of May. He did not return until night; and in his note-book I find the following brief record of this mournful visit:

“Yes, I behold again the place,
The seat of joy, the source of pain; It brings in view the form and face
That I must never see again.

The night-bird’s song that sweetly floats On this soft gloom–this balmy air–
Brings to the mind her sweeter notes That I again must never hear.

Lo! yonder shines that window’s light, My guide, my token, heretofore;
And now again it shines as bright, When those dear eyes can shine no more.

Then hurry from this place away!
It gives not now the bliss it gave; For Death has made its charm his prey,
And joy is buried in her grave.”

In family relationships, and indeed all others, Crabbe’s tenderness was never wanting, and the verse that follows was found long afterwards written on a paper in which his wife’s wedding-ring, nearly worn through before she died, was wrapped:

“The ring so worn, as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove;
Worn with life’s cares, love yet was love.”

Crabbe was inducted to the living of Trowbridge on the 3rd of June 1814, and preached his first sermon two days later. His two sons followed him, as soon as their existing engagements allowed them to leave Leicestershire. The younger, John, who married in 1816, became his father’s curate, and the elder, who married a year later, became curate at Pucklechurch, not many miles distant. As Crabbe’s old cheerfulness gradually returned he found much congenial society in the better educated classes about him. His reputation as a poet was daily spreading. The _Tales_ passed from edition to edition, and brought him many admirers and sympathisers. The “busy, populous clothing town,” as he described Trowbridge to a friend, provided him with intelligent neighbours of a class different from any he had yet been thrown with. And yet once more, as his son has to admit, he failed to secure the allegiance of the church-going parishioners. His immediate predecessor, a curate in charge, had been one of those in whom a more passionate missionary zeal had been stirred by the Methodist movement–“endeared to the more serious inhabitants by warm zeal and a powerful talent for preaching extempore.” The parishioners had made urgent appeal to the noble patron to appoint this man to the benefice, and the Duke’s disregard of their petition had produced much bitterness in the parish. Then, again, in Crabbe there was a “lay” element, which had probably not been found in his predecessor, and he might occasionally be seen “at a concert, a ball, or even a play.” And finally, not long after his arrival, he took the unpopular side in an election for the representation of the county. The candidate he supported was strongly opposed by the “manufacturing interest,” and Crabbe became the object of intense dislike at the time of the election, so much so that a violent mob attempted to prevent his leaving his house to go to the poll. However, Crabbe showed the utmost courage during the excitement, and his other fine qualities of sterling worth and kindness of heart ultimately made their way; and in the sixteen years that followed, Crabbe took still firmer hold of the affection of the worthier part of his parishioners.

Crabbe’s son thought good to devote several pages of his _Memoir_ to the question why his father, having now no unmarried son to be his companion, should not have taken such a sensible step as to marry again. For the old man, if he deserved to be so called at the age of sixty-two, was still very susceptible to the charms of female society, and indeed not wholly free from the habit of philandering–a habit which occasionally “inspired feelings of no ordinary warmth” in the fair objects of “his vain devotion.” One such incident all but ended in a permanent engagement. A MS. quotation from the poet’s Diary, copied in the margin of FitzGerald’s volume, may possibly refer to this occasion. Under date of September 22 occurs this entry: “Sidmouth. Miss Ridout. Declaration. Acceptance.” But under October 5 is written the ominous word, “Mr. Ridout.” And later: “Dec. 12. Charlotte’s picture returned.” A tragedy (or was it a comedy?) seems written in these few words. Edward FitzGerald adds to this his own note: “Miss Ridout I remember–an elegant spinster; friend of my mother’s. About 1825 she had been at Sidmouth, and known Crabbe.” The son quotes some very ardent verses belonging to this period, but not assignable to any particular charmer, such as one set beginning:

“And wilt thou never smile again;
Thy cruel purpose never shaken?
Hast thou no feeling for my pain,
Refused, disdain’d, despised, forsaken?”

The son indicates these amiable foibles in a filial tone and in apologetic terms, but the “liberal shepherds” sometimes spoke more frankly. An old squire remarked to a friend in reference to this subject, “D–mme, sir! the very first time Crabbe dined at my house he made love to my sister!” And a lady is known to have complained that on a similar occasion Crabbe had exhibited so much warmth of manner that she “felt quite frightened.” His son entirely supports the same view as to his father’s almost demonstratively affectionate manner towards ladies who interested him, and who, perhaps owing to his rising repute as an author, showed a corresponding interest in the elderly poet. Crabbe himself admits “the soft impeachment.” In a letter to his newly found correspondent, Mrs. Leadbeater (granddaughter of Burke’s old schoolmaster, Richard Shackleton), he confesses that women were more to him than men:

“I’m alone now; and since my removing into a busy town among the multitude, the loneliness is but more apparent and more melancholy. But this is only at certain times; and then I have, though at considerable distances, six female friends, unknown to each other, but all dear, very dear, to me. With them I do not much associate; not as deserting, and much less disliking, the male part of society, but as being unfit for it; not hardy nor grave, not knowing enough, nor sufficiently acquainted with the everyday concerns of men. But my beloved creatures have minds with which I can better assimilate. Think of you, I must; and of me, I must entreat that you would not be unmindful.”

Nothing, however, was destined to come of these various flirtations or _tendresses_. The new duties at Trowbridge, with their multiplying calls upon his attention and sympathies, must soon have filled his time and attention when at work in his market town, with its flourishing woollen manufactures. And Crabbe was now to have opened to him new sources of interest in the neighbourhood. His growing reputation soon made him a welcome guest in many houses to which his mere position as vicar of Trowbridge might not have admitted him. Trowbridge was only a score or so of miles from Bath, and there were many noblemen’s and gentlemen’s seats in the country round. In this same county of Wilts, and not very far away, at his vicarage of Bremhill, was William Lisle Bowles, the graceful poet whose sonnets five-and-twenty years before had first roused to poetic utterance the young Coleridge and Charles Lamb when at Christ’s Hospital. Through Bowles, Crabbe was introduced to the noble family at Bowood, where the third Marquis of Lansdowne delighted to welcome those distinguished in literature and the arts. Within these splendid walls Crabbe first made the acquaintance of Rogers, which soon ripened into an intimacy not without effect, I think, upon the remaining efforts of Crabbe as a poet. One immediate result was that Crabbe yielded to Rogers’s strong advice to him to visit London, and take his place among the literary society of the day. This visit was paid in the summer of 1817, when Crabbe stayed in London from the middle of June to the end of July.

Crabbe’s son rightly included in his _Memoir_ several extracts from his father’s Diary kept during this visit. They are little more than briefest entries of engagements, but serve to show the new and brilliant life to which the poet was suddenly introduced. He constantly dined and breakfasted with Rogers, where he met and was welcomed by Rogers’s friends. His old acquaintance with Fox gave him the _entree_ of Holland House. Thomas Campbell was specially polite to him, and really attracted by him. Crabbe visited the theatres, and was present at the farewell banquet given to John Kemble. Through Rogers and Campbell he was introduced to John Murray of Albemarle Street, who later became his publisher. He sat for his portrait to Pickersgill and Phillips, and saw the painting by the latter hanging on the Academy walls when dining at their annual banquet. Again, through an introduction at Bath to Samuel Hoare of Hampstead, Crabbe formed a friendship with him and his family of the most affectionate nature. During the first and all later visits to London Crabbe was most often their guest at the mansion on the summit of the famous “Northern Height,” with which, after Crabbe’s death, Wordsworth so touchingly associated his name, in the lines written on the death of the Ettrick Shepherd and his brother-poets:

“Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe, forth looking, I gazed from Hampstead’s breezy heath.”

Between Samuel Hoare’s hospitable roof and the _Hummums_ in Covent Garden Crabbe seems to have alternated, according as his engagements in town required.

But although living, as the Diary shows, in daily intercourse with the literary and artistic world, tasting delights which were absolutely new to him, Crabbe never forgot either his humble friends in Wiltshire, or the claims of his own art. He kept in touch with Trowbridge, where his son John was in charge, and sends instructions from time to time as to poor pensioners and others who were not to be neglected in the weekly ministrations. At the same time, he seems rarely to have omitted the self-imposed task of adding daily to the pile of manuscript on which he was at work–the collection of stories to be subsequently issued as _Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe had resolved, in the face of whatever distractions, to write if possible a fixed amount every day. More than once in the Diary occur such entries as: “My thirty lines done; but not well, I fear.” “Thirty lines to-day, but not yesterday–must work up.” This anticipation of a method made famous later in the century by Anthony Trollope may account (as also in Trollope’s case) for certain marked inequalities in the merit of the work thus turned out. At odd times and in odd places were these verses sometimes composed. On a certain Sunday morning in July 1817, after going to church at St. James’s, Piccadilly (or was it the Chapel Royal?), Crabbe wandered eastward and found inspiration in the most unexpected quarter: “Write some lines in the solitude of Somerset House, not fifty yards from the Thames on one side, and the Strand on the other; but as quiet as the sands of Arabia. I am not quite in good humour with this day; but, happily, I cannot say why.”

The last mysterious sentence is one of many scattered through, the Diary, which, aided by dashes and omission-marks by the editorial son, point to certain sentimentalisms in which Crabbe was still indulging, even in the vortex of fashionable gaieties. We gather throughout that the ladies he met interested him quite as much, or even more, than the distinguished men of letters, and there are allusions besides to other charmers at a distance. The following entry immediately precedes that of the Sunday just quoted:–

“14th.–Some more intimate conversation this morning with Mr. and Mrs. Moore. They mean to go to Trowbridge. He is going to Paris, but will not stay long. Mrs. Spencer’s album. Agree to dine at Curzon Street. A welcome letter from —-. This makes the day more cheerful. Suppose it were so. Well, ’tis not! Go to Mr. Rogers, and take a farewell visit to Highbury. Miss Rogers. Promise to go when —-. Return early. Dine there, and purpose to see Mr. Moore and Mr. Rogers in the morning when they set out for Calais.”

On the whole, however, Crabbe may have found, when these fascinating experiences were over, that there had been safety in a multitude. For he seems to have been equally charmed with Rogers’s sister, and William Spencer’s daughter, and the Countess of Bessborough, and a certain Mrs. Wilson,–and, like Miss Snevellicci’s papa, to have “loved them every one.”

Meanwhile Crabbe was working steadily, while in London, at his new poems. Though his minimum output was thirty lines a day, he often produced more, and on one occasion he records eighty lines as the fruit of a day’s labour. During the year 1818 he was still at work, and in September of that year he writes to Mary Leadbeater that his verses “are not yet entirely ready, but do not want much that he can give them.” He was evidently correcting and perfecting to the best of his ability, and (as I believe) profiting by the intellectual stimulus of his visit to London, as well as by the higher standards of versification that he had met with, even in writers inferior to himself. The six weeks in London had given him advantages he had never enjoyed before. In his early days under Burke’s roof he had learned much from Burke himself, and from Johnson and Fox, but he was then only a promising beginner. Now, thirty-five years later, he met Rogers, Wordsworth, Campbell, Moore, as social equals, and having, like them, won a public for himself. When his next volumes appeared, the workmanship proved, as of old, unequal, but here and there Crabbe showed a musical ear, and an individuality of touch of a different order from anything he had achieved before. Mr. Courthope and other critics hold that there are passages in Crabbe’s earliest poems, such as _The Village_, which have a metrical charm he never afterwards attained. But I strongly suspect that in such passages Crabbe had owed much to the revising hand of Burke, Johnson, and Fox.

In the spring of 1819 Crabbe was again in town, visiting at Holland House, and dining at the Thatched House with the “Literary Society,” of which he had been elected a member, and which to-day still dines and prospers. He was then preparing for the publication of his new Tales, from the famous house in Albemarle Street. Two years before, in 1817, on the strength doubtless of Rogers’s strong recommendation, Murray had made a very liberal offer for the new poems, and the copyright of all Crabbe’s previous works. For these, together, Murray had offered three thousand pounds. Strangely enough, Rogers was at first dissatisfied with the offer, holding that the sum should be paid for the new volumes alone. He and a friend (possibly Campbell), who had conducted the negotiation, accordingly went off to the house of Longman to see if they could not get better terms. To their great discomfiture the Longmans only offered L1000 for the privilege that Murray had valued at three times the amount; and Crabbe and his friends were placed in a difficult position. A letter of Moore to John Murray many years afterwards, when Crabbe’s _Memoir_ was in preparation, tells the sequel of the story, and it may well be given in his words:

“In this crisis it was that Mr. Rogers and myself, anxious to relieve our poor friend from his suspense, called upon you, as you must well remember, in Albemarle Street; and seldom have I watched a countenance with more solicitude, or heard words that gave me much more pleasure than when, on the subject being mentioned, you said ‘Oh! yes. I have heard from Mr. Crabbe, and look upon the matter as all settled.’ I was rather pressed, I remember, for time that morning, having an appointment on some business of my own, but Mr. Rogers insisted that I should accompany him to Crabbe’s lodgings, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing him relieved from his suspense. We found him sitting in his room, alone, and expecting the worst; but soon dissipated all his fears by the agreeable intelligence which we brought.

“When he received the bills for L3000, we earnestly advised that he should, without delay, deposit them in some safe hands; but no–he must take them with him to Trowbridge, and show them to his son John. They would hardly believe in his good luck, at home, if they did not see the bills. On his way down to Trowbridge, a friend at Salisbury, at whose house he rested (Mr. Everett, the banker), seeing that he carried these bills loosely in his waistcoat pocket, requested to be allowed to take charge of them for him: but with equal ill success. ‘There was no fear,’ he said, ‘of his losing them, and he must show them to his son John.'”

It was matter of common knowledge in the literary world of Crabbe’s day that John Murray did not on this occasion make a very prudent bargain, and that in fact he lost heavily by his venture. No doubt his offer was based upon the remarkable success of Crabbe’s two preceding poems. _The Borough_ had passed through six editions in the same number of years, and the _Tales_ reached a fifth edition within two years of publication. But for changes in progress in the poetic taste of the time, Murray might safely have anticipated a continuance of Crabbe’s popularity. But seven years had elapsed since the appearance of the _Tales_, and in these seven years much had happened. Byron had given to the world one by one the four cantos of _Childe Harold_, as well as other poems rich in splendid rhetoric and a lyric versatility far beyond Crabbe’s reach. Wordsworth’s two volumes in 1815 contained by far the most important and representative of his poems, and these were slowly but surely winning him a public of his own, intellectual and thoughtful if not as yet numerous. John Keats had made two appearances, in 1817 and 1818, and the year following the publication of Crabbe’s _Tales of the Hall_ was to add to them the Odes and other poems constituting the priceless volume of 1820–_Lamia and other Poems_. Again, for the lovers of fiction–whom, as I have said, Crabbe had attracted quite as strongly as the lovers of verse–Walter Scott had produced five or six of his finest novels, and was adding to the circle of his admirers daily. By the side of this fascinating prose, and still more fascinating metrical versatility, Crabbe’s resolute and plodding couplets might often seem tame and wearisome. Indeed, at this juncture, the rhymed heroic couplet, as a vehicle for the poetry of imagination, was tottering to its fall, though it lingered for many years as the orthodox form for university prize poems, and for occasional didactic or satirical effusions. Crabbe, very wisely, remained faithful to the metre. For his purpose, and with his subjects and special gifts, none probably would have served him better. For narrative largely blended with the analytical and the epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse (had he ever mastered it) would have sufficed. But in Crabbe’s last published volumes it was not only the metre that was to seem flat and monotonous in the presence of new proofs of the boundless capabilities of verse. The reader would not make much progress in these volumes without discovering that the depressing incidents of life, its disasters and distresses, were still Crabbe’s prevailing theme. John Murray in the same season published Rogers’s _Human Life_ and Crabbe’s _Tales of the Hall_. The publisher sent Crabbe a copy of the former, and he acknowledged it in a few lines as follows:

“I am anxious that Mr. Rogers should have all the success he can desire. I am more indebted to him than I could bear to think of, if I had not the highest esteem. It will give me great satisfaction to find him cordially admired. His is a favourable picture, and such he loves so do I, but men’s vices and follies come into my mind, and spoil my drawing.”

Assuredly no more striking antithesis to Crabbe’s habitual impressions of human life can be found than in the touching and often beautiful couplets of Rogers, a poet as neglected today as Crabbe. Rogers’s picture of wedded happiness finds no parallel, I think, anywhere in the pages of his brother-poet:–

“Across the threshold led,
And every tear kissed off as soon as shed, His house she enters, there to be a light Shining within, when all without is night; A guardian angel o’er his life presiding, Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing! How oft her eyes read his; her gentle mind To all his wishes, all his thoughts, inclined; Still subject–ever on the watch to borrow Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow. The soul of music slumbers in the shell, Till waked to rapture by the master’s spell; And feeling hearts–touch them but rightly–pour A thousand melodies unheard before.”

It may be urged that Rogers exceeds in one direction as unjustifiably as Crabbe in the opposite. But there is room in poetry for both points of view, though the absolute–the Shakespearian–grasp of Human Life may be truer and more eternally convincing than either.

CHAPTER X

THE TALES OF THE HALL

(1819)

The _Tales of the Hall_ were published by John Murray in June 1819, in two handsome octavo volumes, with every advantage of type, paper, and margin. In a letter of Crabbe to Mrs. Leadbeater, in October 1817, he makes reference to these Tales, already in preparation. He tells his correspondent that “Remembrances” was the title for them proposed by his friends. We learn from another source that a second title had been suggested, “Forty Days–a Series of Tales told at Binning Hall.” Finally Mr. Murray recommended _Tales of the Hall_, and this was adopted.

In the same letter to Mrs. Leadbeater, Crabbe writes: “I know not how to describe the new, and probably (most probably) the last work I shall publish. Though a village is the scene of meeting between my two principal characters, and gives occasion to other characters and relations in general, yet I no more describe the manners of village inhabitants. My people are of superior classes, though not the most elevated; and, with a few exceptions, are of educated and cultivated minds and habits.” In making this change Crabbe was also aware that some kind of unity must be given to those new studies of human life. And he found at least a semblance of this unity in ties of family or friendship uniting the tellers of them. Moreover Crabbe, who had a wide and even intimate knowledge of English, poetry, was well acquainted with the _Canterbury Tales_, and he bethought him that he would devise a framework. And the plan he worked out was as follows:

“The Hall” under whose roof the stories and conversations arise is a gentleman’s house, apparently in the eastern counties, inhabited by the elder of two brothers, George and Richard. George, an elderly bachelor, who had made a sufficient fortune in business, has retired to this country seat, which stands upon the site of a humbler dwelling where George had been born and spent his earliest years. The old home of his youth had subsequently passed into the hands of a man of means, who had added to it, improved the surroundings, and turned it into a modern and elegant villa. It was again in the market when George was seeking a retreat for his old age, and he purchased it–glad, even under the altered conditions, to live again among the loved surroundings of his childhood.

George has a half-brother, Richard, much younger than himself. They are the children of the same mother who, some years after her first widowhood, had married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by whom she had this second child. George had already left home to earn his living, with the consequence that the two brothers had scarcely ever met until the occasion upon which the story opens. Richard, after first trying the sea as a profession, had entered the army during the war with Napoleon; distinguished himself in the Peninsula; and finally returned to his native country, covered with glory and enjoying a modest pension. He woos and wins the daughter of a country clergyman, marries, and finds a young family growing up around him. He is filled with a desire to resume friendly relations with his half-brother George, but is deterred from making the first advances. George, hearing of this through a common friend, cordially responds, and Richard is invited to spend a few weeks at Binning Hall. The two brothers, whose bringing up had been so different, and whose ideas and politics were far removed, nevertheless find their mutual companionship very pleasant, and every evening over their port wine relate their respective adventures and experiences, while George has also much to tell of his friends and neighbours around him. The clergyman of the parish, a former fellow of his college, often makes a third at these meetings; and thus a sufficient variety of topic is insured. The tales that these three tell, with the conversations arising out of them, form the subject matter of these _Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe devised a very pleasant means of bringing the brother’s visit to a close. When the time originally proposed for the younger brother’s stay is nearing its end, the brothers prepare to part. At first, the younger is somewhat disconcerted that his elder brother seemed to take his departure so little to heart. But this display of indifference proves to be only an amiable _ruse_ on the part of George. On occasion of a final ride together through the neighbouring country, George asks for his brother’s opinion about a purchase he has recently made, of a pleasant house and garden adjoining his own property. It then turns out that the generous George has bought the place as a home for his brother, who will in future act as George’s agent or steward. On approaching and entering the house, Richard finds his wife and children, who have been privately informed of the arrangement, already installed, and eagerly waiting to welcome husband and father to this new and delightful home.

Throughout the development of this story with its incidental narratives, Crabbe has managed, as in previous poems, to make large use of his own personal experience. The Hall proves to be a modern gentleman’s residence constructed out of a humbler farmhouse by additions and alterations in the building and its surroundings, which was precisely the fate which had befallen Mr. Tovell’s old house which had come to the Crabbe family, and had been parted with by them to one of the Suffolk county families. “Moated Granges” were common in Norfolk and Suffolk. Mr. Tovel’s house had had a moat, and this too had been a feature of George’s paternal home:

“It was an ancient, venerable Hall,
And once surrounded by a moat and wall; A part was added by a squire of taste
Who, while unvalued acres ran to waste, Made spacious rooms, whence he could look about, And mark improvements as they rose without; He fill’d the moat, he took the wall away, He thinn’d the park and bade the view be gay.”

In this instance, the squire who had thus altered the property had been forced to sell it, and George was thus able to return to the old surroundings of his boyhood. In the third book, _Boys at School_, George relates some of his recollections, which include the story of a school-fellow, who having some liking for art but not much talent, finds his ambitions defeated, and dies of chagrin in consequence. This was in fact the true story of a brother of Crabbe’s wife, Mr. James Elmy. Later, again, in the work the rector of the parish is described, and the portrait drawn is obviously that of Crabbe himself, as he appeared to his Dissenting parishioners at Muston:

“‘A moral teacher!’ some, contemptuous, cried; He smiled, but nothing of the fact denied, Nor, save by his fair life, to charge so strong replied. Still, though he bade them not on aught rely That was their own, but all their worth deny, They called his pure advice his cold morality.

* * * * *

He either did not, or he would not see, That if he meant a favourite priest to be, He must not show, but learn of them, the way To truth–he must not dictate, but obey; They wish’d him not to bring them further light, But to convince them that they now were right And to assert that justice will condemn All who presumed to disagree with them: In this he fail’d, and his the greater blame, For he persisted, void of fear or shame.”

There is a touch of bitterness in these lines that is unmistakably that of a personal grievance, even if the poet’s son had not confirmed the inference in a foot-note.

Book IV. is devoted to the _Adventures of Richard_, which begin with his residence with his mother near a small sea-port (evidently Aldeburgh); and here we once more read of the boy, George Crabbe, watching and remembering every aspect of the storms, and making friends with the wives and children of the sailors and the smugglers:

“I loved to walk where none had walk’d before, About the rocks that ran along the shore; Or far beyond the sight of men to stray, And take my pleasure when I lost my way; For then ’twas mine to trace the hilly heath, And all the mossy moor that lies beneath: Here had I favourite stations, where I stood And heard the murmurs of the ocean-flood, With not a sound beside except when flew Aloft the lapwing, or the grey curlew,
Who with wild notes my fancied power defied, And mock’d the dreams of solitary pride.”

And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal experiences to make out the material for his work, the same also holds with regard to the incidental Tales. Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not of his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits the same of others. One, as we have seen, happened in the Elmy family; another was sent him by a friend in Wiltshire, to which county the story belonged; while the last in the series, and perhaps the most painful of all, _Smugglers, and Poachers_ was told to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly, whom he had met at Hampstead, only a few weeks before Romilly’s own tragic death. Probably other tales, not referred to by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered by the poet in his intercourse with his parishioners, or submitted to him by his friends. We might infer this from the singular inequality, in interest and poetical opportunity, of the various plots of these stories. Some of them are assuredly not such as any poet would have sat down and elaborated for himself, and it is strange how little sense Crabbe seems to have possessed as to which were worth treating, or could even admit of artistic treatment at all. A striking instance is afforded by the strange and most unpleasing history, entitled _Lady Barbara: or, The Ghost_.

The story is as follows: A young and beautiful lady marries early a gentleman of good family who dies within a year of their marriage. In spite of many proposals she resolves to remain a widow; and for the sake of congenial society and occupation, she finds a home in the family of a pious clergyman, where she devotes herself to his young children, and makes herself useful in the parish. Her favourite among the children is a boy, George, still in the schoolroom. The boy grows apace; goes to boarding-school and college; and is on the point of entering the army, when he discovers that he is madly in love with the lady, still an inmate of the house, who had “mothered him” when a child. No ages are mentioned, but we may infer that the young man is then about two and twenty, and the lady something short of forty. The position is not unimaginable, though it may be uncommon. The idea of marrying one who had been to her as a favourite child, seems to the widow in the first instance repulsive and almost criminal. But it turns out that there is another reason in the background for her not re-entering the marriage state, which she discloses to the ardent youth. It appears that the widow had once had a beloved brother who had died early. Those two had been brought up by an infidel father, who had impressed on his children the absurdity of all such ideas as immortality. The children had often discussed and pondered over this subject together, and had made a compact that whichever of them died first should, if possible, appear to the survivor, and thus solve the awful problem of a future life. The brother not long after died in foreign parts. Immediately after his death, before the sister heard the news, the brother’s ghost appeared in a dream, or vision, to the sister, and warned her in solemn tones against ever marrying a second time. The spirit does not appear to have given any reasons, but his manner was so impressive and so unmistakable that the lady had thus far regarded it as an injunction never to be disobeyed. On hearing this remarkable story, the young man, George, argues impatiently against the trustworthiness of dreams, and is hardly silenced by the widow showing him on her wrist the mark still remaining where the spirit had seized and pressed her hand. In fine, the impassioned suitor prevails over these superstitious terrors, as he reckons them, of the lady–and they become man and wife.

The reader is here placed in a condition of great perplexity, and his curiosity becomes breathless. The sequel is melancholy indeed. After a few months’ union, the young man, whose plausible eloquence had so moved the widow, tires of his wife, ill-treats her, and breaks her heart. The Psychical Society is avenged, and the ghost’s word was worth at least “a thousand pounds.” It is difficult for us to take such a story seriously, but it must have interested Crabbe deeply, for he has expended upon it much of his finest power of analysis, and his most careful writing. As we have seen, the subject of dreams had always had a fascination for him, of a kind not unconnected perhaps with the opium-habit. The story, however it was to be treated, was unpromising; but as the _denouement_ was what it proved to be, the astonishing thing is that Crabbe should not have felt the dramatic impropriety of putting into the young man’s mouth passages of an impressive, and almost Shakespearian, beauty such as are rare indeed in his poetry. The following lines are not indeed placed within inverted commas, but the pronoun “I” is retained, and they are apparently intended for something passing in the young suitor’s mind:

“O! tell me not of years,–can she be old? Those eyes, those lips, can man unmoved behold? Has time that bosom chill’d? are cheeks so rosy cold? No, she is young, or I her love t’engage Will grow discreet, and that will seem like age: But speak it not; Death’s equalising age Levels not surer than Love’s stronger charm, That bids all inequalities be gone,
That laughs at rank, that mocks comparison. There is not young or old, if Love decrees; He levels orders, he confounds degrees: There is not fair, or dark, or short, or tall, Or grave, or sprightly–Love reduces all; He makes unite the pensive and the gay, Gives something here, takes something there away; From each abundant good a portion takes, And for each want a compensation makes; Then tell me not of years–Love, power divine, Takes, as he wills, from hers, and gives to mine.”

In those fine lines it is no doubt Crabbe himself that speaks, and not the young lover, who was to turn out in the sequel an unparalleled “cad.” But then, what becomes of dramatic consistency, and the imperative claims of art?

In the letter to Mrs. Leadbeater already cited Crabbe writes as to his forthcoming collection of Tales: “I do not know, on a general view, whether my tragic or lighter Tales, etc., are most in number. Of those equally well executed the tragic will, I suppose, make the greater impression.” Crabbe was right in this forecast. Whether more or less in number, the “tragic” Tales far surpass the “lighter” in their effect on the reader, in the intensity of their gloom. Such stories as that of _Lady Barbara, Delay has Danger, The Sisters, Ellen, Smugglers and Poachers_, Richard’s story of _Ruth_, and the elder brother’s account of his own early attachment, with its miserable sequel–all these are of a poignant painfulness. Human crime, error, or selfishness working life-long misery to others–this is the theme to which Crabbe turns again and again, and on which he bestows a really marvellous power of analysis. There is never wanting, side by side with these, what Crabbe doubtless believed to be the compensating presence of much that is lovable in human character, patience, resignation, forgiveness. But the resultant effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of cheering. The fine lines of Wordsworth as to

“Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight; And miserable love, that is not pain
To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind, and what we are,”

fail to console us as we read these later stories of Crabbe. We part from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human nature. We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally base and sordid.

The _Tales of the Hall_ are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe’s earlier poems. He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry’s supremest heights. Moreover, the poems contain passages of description which, for truth to Nature, touched by real imagination, are finer than anything he had yet achieved. The story entitled _Delay has Danger_ contains the fine picture of an autumn landscape seen through the eyes of the miserable lover–the picture which dwelt so firmly in the memory of Tennyson:

“That evening all in fond discourse was spent, When the sad lover to his chamber went, To think on what had pass’d, to grieve, and to repent: Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh On the red light that fill’d the eastern sky: Oft had he stood before, alert and gay, To hail the glories of the new-born day; But now dejected, languid, listless, low, He saw the wind upon the water blow,
And the cold stream curl’d onward as the gale From the pine-hill blew harshly down the dale; On the right side the youth a wood survey’d, With all its dark intensity of shade;
Where the rough wind alone was heard to move, In this, the pause of nature and of love, When now the young are rear’d, and when the old, Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold– Far to the left he saw the huts of men, Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen; Before him swallows, gathering for the sea, Took their short flights, and twitter’d on the lea; And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done, And slowly blacken’d in the sickly sun; All these were sad in nature, or they took Sadness from him, the likeness of his look, And of his mind–he ponder’d for a while, Then met his Fanny with a borrow’d smile.”

The entire story, from which this is an extract, is finely told, and the fitness of the passage is beyond dispute. At other times the description is either so much above the level of the narrative, or below it, as to be almost startling. In the very first pages of _Tales of the Hall_, in the account of the elder brother’s early retirement from business, occur the following musical lines:

“He chose his native village, and the hill He climb’d a boy had its attraction still; With that small brook beneath, where he would stand And stooping fill the hollow of his hand To quench th’ impatient thirst–then stop awhile To see the sun upon the waters smile,
In that sweet weariness, when, long denied, We drink and view the fountain that supplied The sparkling bliss–and feel, if not express, Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness.”

Yet it is only a hundred lines further on that, to indicate the elder brother’s increasing interest in the graver concerns of human thought, Crabbe can write:

“He then proceeded, not so much intent, But still in earnest, and to church he went Although they found some difference in their creed, He and his pastor cordially agreed;
Convinced that they who would the truth obtain By disputation, find their efforts vain; The church he view’d as liberal minds will view, And there he fix’d his principles and pew.”

Among those surprises to which I have referred is the apparently recent development in the poet of a lyrical gift, the like of which he had not exhibited before. Crabbe had already written two notable poems in stanzas, _Sir Eustace Grey_ and that other painful but exceedingly powerful drama in monologue, _The Hall of Justice_. But since the appearance of his last volumes, Crabbe had formed some quite novel poetical friendships, and it would seem likely that association with Rogers, though he saw and felt that elegant poet’s deficiencies as a painter of human life, had encouraged him to try an experiment in his friend’s special vein. One of the most depressing stories in the series is that of the elder brother’s ill-fated passion for a beautiful girl, to whom he had been the accidental means of rendering a vital service in rescuing her and a companion from the “rude uncivil kine” in a meadow. To the image of this girl, though he never set eyes on her again for many years, he had remained faithful. The next meeting, when at last it came, brought the most terrible of disillusions. Sent by his chief to transact certain business with a wealthy banker (“Clutterbuck & Co.”), the young merchant calls at a villa where the banker at times resided, and finds that the object of his old love and his fondest dreams is there installed as the banker’s mistress. She is greatly moved at the sight of the youthful lover of old days, who, with more chivalry than prudence, offers forgiveness if she will break off this degrading alliance. She cannot resolve to take the step. She has become used to luxury and continuous amusement, and she cannot face the return to a duller domesticity. Finally, however, she dies penitent, and it is the contemplation of her life and death that works a life-long change in the ambitions and aims of the old lover. He wearies of money-making, and retires to lead a country life, where he may be of some good to his neighbours, and turn to some worthy use the time that may be still allowed him. The story is told with real pathos and impressive force. But the picture is spoiled by the tasteless interpolation of a song which the unhappy girl sings to her lover, at the very moment apparently when she has resolved that she can never be his:

“My Damon was the first to wake
The gentle flame that cannot die; My Damon is the last to take
The faithful bosom’s softest sigh; The life between is nothing worth,
O! cast it from thy thought away; Think of the day that gave it birth,
And this its sweet returning day.

“Buried be all that has been done,
Or say that nought is done amiss; For who the dangerous path can shun
In such bewildering world as this? But love can every fault forgive,
Or with a tender look reprove;
And now let nought in memory live, But that we meet, and that we love.”

The lines are pretty enough, and may be described as a blend of Tom Moore and Rogers. A similar lyric, in the story called _The Sisters_, might have come straight from the pen which has given us “Mine be a cot beside a hill,” and is not so wholly irrelevant to its context as the one just cited.

Since Crabbe’s death in 1832, though he has never been without a small and loyal band of admirers, no single influence has probably had so much effect in reviving interest in his poetry as that of Edward FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald was born and lived the greater part of his life in Suffolk, and Crabbe was a native of Aldeburgh, and lived in the neighbourhood till he was grown to manhood. This circumstance alone might not have specially interested FitzGerald in the poet, but for the fact that the temperament of the two men was somewhat the same, and that both dwelt naturally on the depressing sides of human life. But there were other coincidences to create a strong tie between FitzGerald and the poet’s family. When FitzGerald’s father went to live at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, in 1835, Crabbe’s son George had recently been presented to the vicarage of the adjoining parish of Bredfield (FitzGerald’s native village), which he continued to hold until his death in 1857. During these two and twenty years, FitzGerald and George Crabbe remained on the closest terms of friendship, which was continued with George Crabbe’s son (a third George), who became ultimately rector of Merton in Norfolk. It was at his house, it will be remembered, that FitzGerald died suddenly in the summer of 1883. Through this long association with the family FitzGerald was gradually acquiring information concerning the poet, which even the son’s _Biography_ had not supplied. Readers of FitzGerald’s delightful _Letters_ will remember that there is no name more constantly referred to than that of Crabbe. Whether writing to Fanny Kemble, or Frederick Tennyson, or Lowell, he is constantly quoting him, and recommending him. During the thirty years that followed Crabbe’s death his fame had been on the decline, and poets of different and greater gifts had taken his place. FitzGerald had noted this fact with ever-increasing regret, and longed to revive the taste for a poet of whose merits he had himself no doubt. He discerned moreover that even those who had read in their youth _The Village_ and _The Borough_ had been repelled by the length, and perhaps by the monotonous sadness, of the _Tales of the Hall_. It was for this reason apparently (and not because he assigned a higher place to the later poetry than to the earlier) that he was led, after some years of misgiving, to prepare a volume of selections from this latest work of Crabbe’s which might have the effect of tempting the reader to master it as a whole. Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe’s verse, what was ordinarily called an “anthology” was out of the question. FitzGerald was restricted to a single method. He found that readers were impatient of Crabbe’s _longueurs_. It occurred to him that while making large omissions he might preserve the story in each case, by substituting brief prose abstracts of the portions omitted. This process he applied to the Tales that pleased him most, leaving what he considered Crabbe’s best passages untouched. As early as 1876 he refers to the selection as already made, and he printed it for private circulation in 1879. Finally, in 1882, he added a preface of his own, and published it with Quaritch in Piccadilly.

In his preface FitzGerald claims for Crabbe’s latest work that the net impression left by it upon the reader is less sombre and painful than that left by his earlier poems. “It contains,” he urges, “scarce anything of that brutal or sordid villainy of which one has more than enough in the poet’s earlier work.” Perhaps there is not so much of the “brutal or sordid,” but then in _The_ _Parish Register_ or _The Borough_, the reader is in a way prepared for that ingredient, because the personages are the lawless and neglected poor of a lonely seaport. It is because, when he moves no longer among these, he yet finds vice and misery quite as abundant in “a village with its tidy homestead, and well-to-do tenants, within easy reach of a thriving country-town,” that a certain shock is given to the reader. He discovers that all the evil passions intrude (like pale Death) into the comfortable villa as impartially as into the hovels at Aldeburgh. But FitzGerald had found a sufficient alleviation of the gloom in the framework of the Tales. The growing affection of the two brothers, as they come to know and understand each other better, is one of the consistently pleasant passages in Crabbe’s writings. The concluding words of FitzGerald’s preface, as the little volume is out of print and very scarce, I may be allowed to quote:–

“Is Crabbe then, whatever shape he may take, worth making room for in our over-crowded heads and libraries? If the verdict of such critics as Jeffrey and Wilson be set down to contemporary partiality or inferior ‘culture,’ there is Miss Austen, who is now so great an authority in the representation of genteel humanity, so unaccountably smitten with Crabbe in his worsted hose that she is said to have pleasantly declared he was the only man whom she would care to marry. If Sir Walter Scott and Byron are but unaesthetic judges of the poet, there is Wordsworth who was sufficiently exclusive in admitting any to the sacred brotherhood in which he still reigns, and far too honest to make any exception out of compliment to any one on any occasion–he did nevertheless thus write to the poet’s son and biographer in 1834: ‘Any testimony to the merit of your revered father’s works would, I feel, be superfluous, if not impertinent. They will last from their combined merits as poetry and truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first made their appearance’–a period which, be it noted, includes all Wordsworth’s own volumes except _Yarrow Revisited_, _The Prelude_, and _The Borderers_. And Wordsworth’s living successor to the laurel no less participates with him in his appreciation of their forgotten brother. Almost the last time I met him he was quoting from memory that fine passage in _Delay has Danger_, where the late autumn landscape seems to borrow from the conscience-stricken lover who gazes on it the gloom which it reflects upon him; and in the course of further conversation on the subject Mr. Tennyson added, ‘Crabbe has a world of his own’; by virtue of that original genius, I suppose, which is said to entitle and carry the possessor to what we call immortality.”

Besides the stories selected for abridgment in the volume there were passages, from Tales not there included, which FitzGerald was never weary of citing in his letters, to show his friends how true a poet was lying neglected of men. One he specially loved is the description of an autumn day in _The Maid’s Story_:–

“There was a day, ere yet the autumn closed, When, ere her wintry wars, the earth reposed; When from the yellow weed the feathery crown, Light as the curling smoke, fell slowly down; When the winged insect settled in our sight, And waited wind to recommence her flight; When the wide river was a silver sheet, And on the ocean slept th’ unanchor’d fleet, When from our garden, as we looked above, There was no cloud, and nothing seemed to move.”

Another passage, also in Crabbe’s sweeter vein, forms the conclusion of the whole poem. It is where the elder brother hands over to the younger the country house that is to form the future home of his wife and children:–

“It is thy wife’s, and will thy children’s be, Earth, wood, and water! all for thine and thee. * * * * *
There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view, She knows our deed, and she approves it too; Before her all our views and plans were laid, And Jacques was there to explain and to persuade. Here on this lawn thy boys and girls shall run, And play their gambols when their tasks are done, There, from that window shall their mother view The happy tribe, and smile at all they do; While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight Shalt cry, ‘O! childish!’ and enjoy the sight.”

FitzGerald’s selections are made with the skill and judgment we should expect from a critic of so fine a taste, but it may be doubted whether any degree of skill could have quite atoned for one radical flaw in his method. He seems to have had his own misgivings as to whether he was not, by that method, giving up one real secret of Crabbe’s power. After quoting Sir Leslie Stephen’s most true remark that “with all its short-and long-comings Crabbe’s better work leaves its mark on the reader’s mind and memory as only the work of genius can, while so many a more splendid vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark behind.” FitzGerald adds: “If this abiding impression result (as perhaps in the case of Richardson or Wordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked in through the longer process by which the man’s peculiar genius works, any abridgement, whether of omission or epitome, will diminish from the effect of the whole.” FitzGerald is unquestionably in sight of a truth here. The parallel with Wordsworth is indeed not exact, for the best of Wordsworth’s poetry neither requires nor admits of condensation. _The Excursion_ might benefit by omission and compression, but not _The Solitary Reaper_, nor _The Daffodils_. But the example of Richardson is fairly in point. Abridgments of _Clarissa Harlowe_ have been attempted, but probably without any effect on the number of its readers. The power of Richardson’s method does actually lie in the “soaking process” to which FitzGerald refers. Nor is it otherwise with Crabbe. The fascination which his readers find in him–readers not perhaps found in the ranks of those who prefer their poetry on “hand-made paper”–is really the result of the slow and patient dissection of motive and temptation, the workings of conscience, the gradual development of character. These processes are slow, and Crabbe’s method of presenting them is slow, but he attains his end. A distinction has lately been drawn between “literary Poetry,” and “Poetry which is Literature.” Crabbe’s is rarely indeed that of the former class. It cannot be denied that it has taken its place in the latter.

The apology for Crabbe’s lengthiness might almost be extended to the singular inequalities of his verse. FitzGerald joins all other critics in regretting his carelessness, and indeed the charge can hardly be called harsh. A poet who habitually insists on producing thirty lines a day, whether or no the muse is willing, can hardly escape temptations to carelessness. Crabbe’s friends and other contemporaries noted it, and expressed surprise at the absence in Crabbe of the artistic conscience. Wordsworth spoke to him on the subject, and ventured to express regret that he did not take more pains with the workmanship of his verse, and reports that Crabbe’s only answer was “it does not matter.” Samuel Rogers had related to Wordsworth a similar experience. “Mr. Rogers once told me that he expressed his regret to Crabbe that he wrote in his later works so much less correctly than in his earlier. ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘but then I had a reputation to make; now I can afford to relax.'” This is of course very sad, and, as has already been urged, Crabbe’s earlier works had the advantage of much criticism, and even correction from his friends. But however this may be, it may fairly be urged that in a “downright” painter of human life, with that passion for realism which Crabbe was one of the first to bring back into our literature, mere “polish” would have hindered, not helped, the effects he was bent on producing. It is difficult in polishing the heroic couplet not to produce the impression of seeking epigrammatic point. In Crabbe’s strenuous and merciless analyses of human character his power would have been often weakened, had attention been diverted from the whole to the parts, and from the matter to the manner. The “finish” of Gray, Goldsmith, and Rogers suited exquisitely with their pensive musings on Human Life. It was otherwise with the stern presentment of such stories of human sin and misery as _Edward Shore_ or _Delay has Danger._

CHAPTER XI

LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE

(1819-1832)

The last thirteen years of Crabbe’s life were spent at Trowbridge, varied by occasional absences among hiss friends at Bath, and in the neighbourhood, and by annual visits of greater length to the family of Samuel Hoare at Hampstead. Meantime his son John was resident with him at Trowbridge, and the parish and parishioners were not neglected. From Mrs. Hoare’s house on Hampstead Heath it was not difficult to visit his literary friends in London; and Wordsworth, Southey, and others, occasionally stayed with the family. But as early as 1820, Crabbe became subject to frequent severe attacks of neuralgia (then called _tic douloureux_), and this malady, together with the gradual approach of old age, made him less and less able to face the fatigue of London hospitalities.

Notwithstanding his failing health, and not infrequent absence from his parish–for he occasionally visited the Isle of Wight, Hastings, and other watering-places with his Hampstead friends–Crabbe was living down at Trowbridge much of the unpopularity with which he had started. The people were beginning to discover what sterling qualities of heart existed side by side with defects of tact and temper, and the lack of sympathy with certain sides of evangelical teaching. His son tells us, and may be trusted, that his father’s personal piety deepened in his declining years, an influence which could not be ineffectual. Children, moreover, were growing up in the family, and proved a new source of interest and happiness. Pucklechurch. was not far away, and his son George’s eldest girl, Caroline, as she approached her fourth birthday, began to receive from him the tenderest of letters.

The most important incident in Crabbe’s life during this period was his visit to Walter Scott in Edinburgh in the early autumn of 1822. In the spring of that year, Crabbe had for the first time met Scott in London, and Scott had obtained from him a promise that he would visit him in Scotland in the autumn. It so fell out that George the Fourth, who had been crowned in the previous year, and was paying a series of Coronation progresses through his dominions, had arranged to visit Edinburgh in the August of this year. Whether Crabbe deliberately chose the same period for his own visit, or stumbled on it accidentally, and Scott did not care to disappoint his proposed guest, is not made quite clear by Crabbe’s biographer. Scott had to move with all his family to his house in Edinburgh for the great occasion, and he would no doubt have much preferred to receive Crabbe at Abbotsford. Moreover, it fell to Scott, as the most distinguished man of letters and archaeologist in Edinburgh, to organise all the ceremonies and the festivities necessary for the King’s reception. In Lockhart’s phrase, Scott stage-managed the whole business. And it was on Scott’s return from receiving the King on board the Royal yacht on the 14th of August that he found awaiting him in Castle Street one who must have been an inconvenient guest. The incidents of this first meeting are so charmingly related by Lockhart that I cannot resist repeating them in his words, well known though they may be:–

“On receiving the poet on the quarter-deck, his Majesty called for a bottle of Highland whisky, and having drunk his health in this national liquor, desired a glass to be filled for him. Sir Walter, after draining his own bumper, made a request that the king would condescend to bestow on him the glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health: and this being granted, the precious vessel was immediately wrapped up and carefully deposited in what he conceived to be the safest part of his dress. So he returned with it to Castle Street; but–to say nothing at this moment of graver distractions–on reading his house he found a guest established there of a sort rather different from the usual visitors of the time. The Poet Crabbe, to whom he had been introduced when last in London by Mr. Murray of Albemarle Street, after repeatedly promising to follow up the acquaintance by an excursion to the North, had at last arrived in the midst of these tumultuous preparations for the royal advent. Notwithstanding all such impediments, he found his quarters ready for him, and Scott entering, wet and hurried, embraced the venerable man with brotherly affection. The royal gift was forgotten–the ample skirt of the coat within which it had been packed, and which he had hitherto held cautiously in front of his person, slipped back to its more usual position–he sat down beside Crabbe, and the glass was crushed to atoms. His scream and gesture made his wife conclude that he had sat down on a pair of scissors, or the like: but very little harm had been done except the breaking of the glass, of which alone he had been thinking. This was a damage not to be repaired: as for the scratch that accompanied it, its scar was of no great consequence, as even when mounting the ‘cat-dath, or battle-garment’ of the Celtic Club, he adhered, like his hero, Waverley, to _the trews_.”

What follows in Lockhart’s pages is also too interesting, as regards Scott’s visitor himself, to be omitted. The Highland clans, or what remained of them, were represented on the occasion, and added greatly to the picturesqueness of the procession and other pageantry. And this is what occurred on the morning after the meeting of Scott and his guest:–

“By six o’clock next morning Sir Walter, arrayed in the ‘Garb of old Gaul,’ (which he had of the Campbell tartan, in memory of one of his great-grandmothers) was attending a muster of these gallant Celts in the Queen Street Gardens, where he had the honour of presenting them with it set of colours, and delivered a suitable exhortation, crowned with their rapturous applause. Some members of the Club, all of course in their full costume, were invited to breakfast with him. He had previously retired for a little to his library, and when he entered the parlour, Mr. Crabbe, dressed in the highest style of professional neatness and decorum, with buckles in his shoes, and whatever was then befitting an English clergyman of his years and station, was standing in the midst of half-a-dozen stalwart Highlanders, exchanging elaborate civilities with them in what was at least meant to be French. He had come into the room shortly before, without having been warned about such company, and hearing the party conversing together in an unknown tongue, the polite old man had adopted, in his first salutation, what he considered as the universal language. Some of the Celts, on their part, took him for some foreign Abbe or Bishop, and were doing their best to explain to him that they were not the wild savages for which, from the startled glance he had thrown on their hirsute proportions, there seemed but too much reason to suspect he had taken them; others, more perspicacious, gave in to the thing for the joke’s sake; and there was high fun when Scott dissolved the charm of their stammering, by grasping Crabbe with one hand, and the nearest of these figures with the other, and greeted the whole group with the same hearty _good-morning_.”

In spite, however, of banquets (at one of which Crabbe was present) and other constant calls upon his host’s time and labour, the southern poet contrived to enjoy himself. He wandered into the oldest parts of Edinburgh, and Scott obtained for him the services of a friendly caddie to accompany him on some of these occasions lest the old parson should come to any harm. Lockhart, who was of the party in Castle Street, was very attentive to Scott’s visitor, Crabbe had but few opportunities of seeing Scott alone. “They had,” writes Lockhart, “but one quiet walk together, and it was to the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel and Mushat’s Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by _The Heart of Midlothian_ had given him an earnest wish to see. I accompanied them; and the hour so spent–in the course of which the fine old man gave us some most touching anecdotes of his early struggles–was a truly delightful contrast to the bustle and worry of miscellaneous society which consumed so many of his few hours in Scotland. Scott’s family were more fortunate than himself in this respect. They had from infancy been taught to reverence Crabbe’s genius, and they now saw enough of him to make them think of him ever afterwards with tender affection.”

Yet one more trait of Scott’s interest in his guest should not be omitted. The strain upon Scott’s strength of the King’s visit was made more severe by the death during that fortnight of Scott’s old and dear friend, William Erskine, only a few months before elevated to the bench, with the title of Lord Kinedder. Erskine had been irrecoverably wounded by the circulation of a cruel and unfounded slander upon his moral character. It so preyed on his mind that its effect was, in Scott’s words, to “torture to death one of the most soft-hearted and sensitive of God’s creatures.” On the very day of the King’s arrival he died, after high fever and delirium had set in, and his funeral, which Scott attended, followed in due course. “I am not aware,” says Lockhart, “that I ever saw Scott in such a state of dejection as he was when I accompanied him and his friend Mr. Thomas Thomson from Edinburgh to Queensferry in attendance upon Lord Kinedder’s funeral. Yet that was one of the noisiest days of the royal festival, and he had to plunge into some scene of high gaiety the moment after we returned. As we halted in Castle Street, Mr. Crabbe’s mild, thoughtful face appeared at the window, and Scott said, on leaving me, ‘Now for what our old friend there puts down as the crowning curse of his poor player in _The Borough_:–

“To hide in rant the heart-ache of the night.”‘”

There is pathos in the recollection that just ten years later when Scott lay in his study at Abbotsford–the strength of that noble mind slowly ebbing away–the very passage in _The Borough_ just quoted was one of those he asked to have read to him. It is the graphic and touching account in Letter XII. of the “Strolling Players,” and as the description of their struggles and their squalor fell afresh upon his ear, his own excursions into matters theatrical recurred to him, and he murmured smiling, “Ah! Terry won’t like that! Terry won’t like that!!”

The same year Crabbe was invited to spend Christmas at his old home, Belvoir Castle, but felt unable to face the fatigue in wintry weather. Meantime, among other occupations at home, he was finding time to write verse copiously. Twenty-one manuscript volumes were left behind him at his death. He seems to have said little about it at home, for his son tells us that in the last year of his father’s life he learned for the first time that another volume of Tales was all but ready for the press. “There are in my recess at home,” he writes to George, “where they have been long undisturbed, another series of such stories, in number and quantity sufficient for another octavo volume; and as I suppose they are much like the former in execution, and sufficiently different in events and characters, they may hereafter, in peaceable times, be worth something to you.” A selection from those formed the _Posthumous Poems_, first given to the world in the edition of 1834. The _Tales of the Hall_, it may be supposed, had not quite justified the publisher’s expectations. John Murray had sought to revive interest in the whole bulk of Crabbe’s poetry, of which he now possessed the copyright, by commissioning Richard Westall, R.A., to produce a series of illustrations of the poems, thirty-one in number, engravings of which were sold in sets at two guineas. The original drawings, in delicate water-colour, in the present Mr. John Murray’s possession, are sufficiently grim. The engravings, lacking the relief of colour, are even more so, and a rapid survey of the entire series amply shows how largely in Crabbe’s subjects bulks the element of human misery. Crabbe was much flattered by this new tribute to his reputation, and dwells on it in one of his letters to Mrs. Leadbeater.

A letter written from Mrs. Hoare’s house at Hampstead in June 1825 presents an agreeable picture of his holiday enjoyments:–

“My time passes I cannot tell how pleasantly when the pain leaves me. To-day I read one of my long stories to my friends and Mrs. Joanna Baillie and her sister. It was a task; but they encouraged me, and were, or seemed, gratified. I rhyme at Hampstead with a great deal of facility, for nothing interrupts me but kind calls to something pleasant; and though all this makes parting painful, it will, I hope, make me resolute to enter upon my duties diligently when I return. I am too much indulged. Except a return of pain, and that not severe, I have good health; and if my walks are not so long, they are more frequent. I have seen many things and many people; have seen Mr. Southey and Mr. Wordsworth; have been some days with Mr. Rogers, and at last have been at the Athenaeum, and purpose to visit the Royal Institution. I have been to Richmond in a steamboat; seen also the picture-galleries and some other exhibitions; but I passed one Sunday in London with discontent, doing no duty myself, nor listening to another; and I hope my uneasiness proceeded not merely from breaking a habit. We had a dinner social and pleasant, if the hours before it had been rightly spent; but I would not willingly pass another Sunday in the same manner. I have my home with my friends here (Mrs. Hoare’s), and exchange it with reluctance for the Hummums occasionally. Such is the state of the garden here, in which I walk and read, that, in a morning like this, the smell of the flowers is fragrant beyond anything I ever perceived before. It is what I can suppose may be in Persia or other oriental countries–a Paradisiacal sweetness. I am told that I or my verses, or perhaps both, have abuse in a boot of Mr. Colburn’s publishing, called _The Spirit of the Times_. I believe I felt something indignant; but my engraved seal dropped out of the socket and was lost, and I perceived this moved me much more than the _Spirit_ of Mr. Hazlitt.”

The reference is, of course, to Hazlitt’s _Spirit of the Age_, then lately published In reviewing the poetry of his day Hazlitt has a chapter devoted to Campbell and Crabbe. The criticism on the latter is little more than a greatly over-drawn picture of Crabbe’s choice of vice and misery for his subjects, and ignores entirely any other side of his genius, ending with the remark that he would long be “a thorn in the side of English poetry.” Crabbe was wise in not attaching too much importance to Hazlitt’s attack.

Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, mentioned in the letter just cited, saw much of Crabbe during his visits to Hampstead. A letter from Joanna to the younger George speaks, as do all his friends, of his growing kindliness and courtesy, but notes how often, in the matter of judging his fellow-creatures, his head and his heart were in antagonism. While at times Joanna was surprised and provoked by the charitable allowances the old parson made for the unworthy, at other times she noted also that she would hear him, when acts of others were the subject of praise, suggesting, “in a low voice as to himself,” the possible mixture of less generous motives. The analytical method was clearly dominant in Crabbe always, and not merely when he wrote his poetry, and is itself the clue to much in his treatment of human nature.

Of Crabbe’s simplicity and unworldliness in other matters Miss Baillie furnishes an amusing instance. She writes:–

“While he was staying with Mrs. Hoare a few years since I sent him one day the present of a blackcock, and a message with it that Mr. Crabbe should look at the bird before it was delivered to the cook, or something to that purpose. He looked at the bird as desired, and then went to Mrs. Hoare in some perplexity to ask whether he ought not to have it stuffed, instead of eating it. She could not, in her own house, tell him that it was simply intended for the larder, and he was at the trouble and expense of having it stuffed, lest I should think proper respect had not been put upon my present.”

Altogether the picture presented in these last years of Crabbe’s personality is that of a pious and benevolent old man, endearing himself to old and new friends, and with manners somewhat formal and overdone, representing perhaps what in his humbler Aldeburgh days he had imagined to be those of the upper circles, rather than what he had found them to be in his prosperous later days in London.

In the autumn of 1831 he was visiting his faithful and devoted friends, the Samuel Hoares, at their residence in Clifton. The house was apparently in Princes Buildings, or in the Paragon, for the poet describes accurately the scene that meets the eye from the back-windows of those pleasant streets:–

“I have to thank my friends for one of the most beautiful as well as comfortable rooms you could desire. I look from my window upon the Avon and its wooded and rocky bounds–the trees yet green. A vessel is sailing down, and here comes a steamer (Irish, I suppose). I have in view the end of the Cliff to the right, and on my left a wide and varied prospect over Bristol, as far as the eye can reach, and at present the novelty makes it very interesting. Clifton was always a favourite place with me. I have more strength and more spirits since my arrival at this place, and do not despair of giving a good account of my excursion on my return.”

It is noteworthy that Crabbe, who as a young man witnessed the Lord George Gordon Riots of 1780, should, fifty years later, have been in Bristol during the disgraceful Reform Bill Rising of 1831, which, through the cowardice or connivance of the government of the day, went on unchecked to work such disastrous results to life and property. On October the 26th he writes to his son:–

“I have been with Mrs. Hoare at Bristol, where all appears still. Should anything arise to alarm, you may rely upon our care to avoid danger. Sir Charles Wetherell, to be sure, is not popular, nor is the Bishop, but I trust that both will be safe from violence–abuse they will not mind. The Bishop seems a good-humoured man, and, except by the populace, is greatly admired.”

A few days later, however, he has to record that his views of the situation were not to be fulfilled. He writes:–

“Bristol, I suppose, never in the most turbulent times of old, witnessed such outrage. Queen’s Square is but half standing; half is a smoking ruin. As you may be apprehensive for my safety, it is right to let you know that my friends and I are undisturbed, except by our fears for the progress of this mob-government, which is already somewhat broken into parties, who wander stupidly about, or sleep wherever they fall wearied with their work and their indulgence. The military are now in considerable force, and many men are sworn in as constables; many volunteers are met in Clifton Churchyard, with white round one arm to distinguish them, some with guns and the rest with bludgeons. The Mayor’s house has been destroyed; the Bishop’s palace plundered, but whether burned or not I do not know. This morning a party of soldiers attacked the crowd in the Square; some lives were lost, and the mob dispersed, whether to meet again is doubtful. It has been a dreadful time, but we may reasonably hope it is now over. People are frightened certainly, and no wonder, for it is evident these poor wretches would plunder to the extent of their power. Attempts were made to burn the Cathedral, but failed. Many lives were lost. To attempt any other subject now would be fruitless. We can think, speak, and write only of our fears, hopes, or troubles. I would have gone to Bristol to-day, but Mrs. Hoare was unwilling that I should. She thought, and perhaps rightly, that clergymen were marked objects. I therefore only went half-way, and of course could learn but little. All now is quiet and well.”

In the former of these last quoted letters Crabbe refers sadly to the pain of parting from his old Hampstead friends,–a parting which he felt might well be the last. His anticipation was to be fulfilled. He left Clifton in November, and went direct to his son George, at Pucklechurch. He was able to preach twice for his son, who congratulated the old man on the power of his voice, and other encouraging signs of vigour. “I will venture a good sum, sir,” he said “that you will be assisting me ten years hence.” “Ten weeks” was Crabbe’s answer, and the implied prediction was fulfilled almost to the day. After a fortnight at Pucklechurch, Crabbe returned to his own home at Trowbridge. Early in January he reported himself as more and more subject to drowsiness, which he accepted as sign of increasing weakness. Later in the month he was prostrated by a severe cold. Other complications supervened, and it soon became apparent that he could not rally. After a few days of much suffering, and pious resignation, he passed away on the third of February 1832, with his two sons and his faithful nurse by his side. The death of the rector was followed by every token of general affection and esteem. The past asperities of religious and political controversy had long ceased, and it was felt that the whole parish had lost a devout teacher and a generous friend. All he had written in _The Borough_ and elsewhere as to the eccentricities of certain forms of dissent was forgotten, and all the Nonconformist ministers of the place and neighbourhood followed him to the grave. A committee was speedily formed to erect a monument over his grave in the chancel. The sculptor chosen produced a group of a type then common. “A figure representing the dying poet, casting his eyes on the sacred volume; two celestial beings, one looking on as if awaiting his departure.” Underneath was inscribed, after the usual words telling his age, and period of his work at Trowbridge, the following not exaggerated tribute:–

“Born in humble life, he made himself what he was. By the force of his genius,
He broke through the obscurity of his birth Yet never ceased to feel for the
Less fortunate;
Entering (as his work can testify) into The sorrows and deprivations
Of the poorest of his parishioners; And so discharging the duties of his station as a Minister and a magistrate,
As to acquire the respect and esteem Of all his neighbours.
As a writer, he is well described by a great Contemporary, as
‘Nature’s sternest painter yet her best.'”

A fresh edition of Crabbe’s complete works was at once arranged for by John Murray, to be edited by George Crabbe, the son, who was also to furnish the prefatory memoir. The edition appeared in 1834, in eight volumes. An engraving by Finden from Phillips’s portrait of the poet was prefixed to the last volume, and each volume contained frontispieces and vignettes from drawings by Clarkson Stanfield of scenery or buildings connected with Crabbe’s various residences in Suffolk and the Yale of Belvoir. The volumes were ably edited; the editor’s notes, together with, quotations from Crabbe’s earliest critics in the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_, were interesting and informing, and the illustrations happily chosen. But it is not so easy to acquiesce in an editorial decision on a more important matter. The eighth volume is occupied by a selection from the Tales left in manuscript by Crabbe, to which reference has already been made. The son, whose criticisms of his father are generally sound, evidently had misgivings concerning these from the first. In a prefatory note to this volume, the brothers (writing as executors) confess these misgivings. They were startled on reading the new poems in print at the manifest need of revision and correction before they could be given to the world. They delicately hint that the meaning is often obscure, and the “images left imperfect.” This criticism is absolutely just, but unfortunately some less well-judging persons though “of the highest eminence in literature” had advised the contrary. So “second thoughts prevailed,” instead of those “third thoughts which are a riper first,” and the Tales, or a selection from them, were printed. They have certainly not added to Crabbe’s reputation. There are occasional touches of his old and best pathos, as in the story of Rachel; and in _The Ancient Mansion_ there are brief descriptions of rural nature under the varying aspects of the seasons, which exhibit all Crabbe’s old and close observation of detail, such as:–

“And then the wintry winds begin to blow, Then fall the flaky stars of gathering snow, When on the thorn the ripening sloe, yet blue, Takes the bright varnish of the morning dew; The aged moss grows brittle on the pale, The dry boughs splinter in the windy gale.”

But there is much in these last Tales that is trivial and tedious, and it must be said that their publication has chiefly served to deter many readers from the pursuit of what is best and most rewardful in the study of Crabbe. To what extent the new edition served to revive any flagging interest in the poet cannot perhaps be estimated. The edition must have been large, for during many years past no book of the kind has been more prominent in second-hand catalogues. As we have seen, the popularity of Crabbe was already on the wane, and the appearance of the two volumes of Tennyson, in 1842, must farther have served to divert attention from poetry so widely different. Workmanship so casual and imperfect as Crabbe’s had now to contend with such consummate art and diction as that of _The Miller’s Daughter_ and _Dora_.

As has been more than once remarked, these stories belong to the category of fiction as well as of poetry, and the duration of their power to attract was affected not only by the appearance of greater poets, but of prose story-tellers with equal knowledge of the human heart, and with other gifts to which Crabbe could make no claim. His knowledge and observation of human nature were not perhaps inferior to Jane Austen’s, but he could never have matched her in prose fiction. He certainly was not deficient in humour, but it was not his dominant gift, as it was hers. Again, his knowledge of the life and social ways of the class to which he nominally belonged, does not seem to have been intimate. Crabbe could not have written prose fiction with any approximation to the manners of real life. His characters would have certainly _thou’ed_ and _thee’ed_ one another as they do in his verse, and a clergyman would always have been addressed as “Reverend Sir!”

Surely, it will be argued, all this is sufficient to account for the entire disappearance of Crabbe from the list of poets whom every educated lover of poetry is expected to appreciate. Yet the fact remains, as FitzGerald quotes from Sir Leslie Stephen, that “with all its short-and long-comings, Crabbe’s better work leaves its mark on the reader’s mind and memory as only the work of genius can,” and almost all English poets and critics of mark, during his time and after it, have agreed in recognising the same fact. We know what was thought of him by Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson. Critics differing as widely in other matters as Macaulay, John Henry Newman, Mr. Swinburne, and Dr. Gore, have found in Crabbe an insight into the springs of character, and a tragic power of dealing with them, of a rare kind. No doubt Crabbe demands something of his readers. He asks from them a corresponding interest in human nature. He asks for a kindred habit of observation, and a kindred patience. The present generation of poetry-readers cares mainly for style. While this remains the habit of the town, Crabbe will have to wait for any popular revival. But he is not so dead as the world thinks. He has his constant readers still, but they talk little of their poet. “They give Heaven thanks, and make no boast of it.” These are they to whom the “unruly wills and affections” of their kind are eternally interesting, even when studied through the medium of a uniform and monotonous metre.

A Trowbridge friend wrote to Crabbe’s son, after his father’s death, “When I called on him, soon after his arrival, I remarked that his house and garden were pleasant and secluded: he replied that he preferred walking in the streets, and observing the faces of the passers-by, to the finest natural scenes.” There is a poignant line in _Maud_, where the distracted lover dwells on “the faces that one meets.” It was not by the “sweet records, promises as sweet,” that these two observers of life were impressed, but rather by vicious records and hopeless outlooks. It was such countenances that Crabbe looked for, and speculated on, for in such, he found food for that pity and terror he most loved to awaken. The starting-point of Crabbe’s desire to portray village-life truly was a certain indignation he felt at the then still-surviving conventions of the Pastoral Poets. We have lately watched, in the literature of our own day, a somewhat similar reaction against sentimental pictures of country-life. The feebler members of a family of novelists, which some one wittily labelled as the “kail-yard school,” so irritated a young Scottish journalist, the late Mr. George Douglas, that he resolved to provide what he conceived might be a useful corrective for the public mind. To counteract the half-truths of the opposite school, he wrote a tale of singular power and promise, _The House with the Green Shutters_. Like all reactions, it erred in the violence of its colouring. If intended as a true picture of the normal state of a small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs. But for Mr. Douglas’s untimely death–a real loss to literature–he would doubtless have shown in future fictions that the pendulum had ceased to swing, and would have given us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human life. With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never ceased to act until his life’s end. The leaven of protest against the sentimentalists never quite worked itself out in him, although, no doubt, in some of the later tales and portrayals of character, the sun was oftener allowed to shine out from behind the clouds

We must not forget this when we are inclined to accept without question Byron’s famous eulogium. A poet is not the “best” painter of Nature, merely because he chooses one aspect of human character and human fortunes rather than another. If he must not conceal the sterner side, equally is he bound to remember the sunnier and more serene. If a poet is to deal justly with the life of the rich or poor, he must take into fullest account, and give equal prominence to, the homes where happiness abides. He must remember that though there is a skeleton in every cupboard, it must not be dragged out for a purpose, nor treated as if it were the sole inhabitant. He must deal with the happinesses of life and not only with its miseries; with its harmonies and not only its dislocations. He must remember the thousand homes in which is to be found the quiet and faithful discharge of duty, inspired at once and illumined by the family affections, and not forget that in such as these the strength of a country lies. Crabbe is often spoken of as our first great realist in the poetry and fiction of the last century, and the word is often used as if it meant chiefly plain-speaking as to the sordid aspects of life. But he is the truest realist who does not suppress any side of that which may be seen, if looked for. Although Murillo threw into fullest relief the grimy feet of his beggar-boys which so offended Mr. Ruskin, still what eternally attracts us to his canvas is not the soiled feet but the “sweet boy-faces” that “laugh amid the Seville grapes.” It was because Crabbe too often laid greater stress on the ugliness than on the beauty of things, that he fails to that extent to be the full and adequate painter and poet of humble life.

He was a dispeller of many illusions. He could not give us the joy that Goldsmith, Cowper, and William Barnes have given, but he discharged a function no less valuable than theirs, and with an individuality that has given him a high and enduring place in the poetry of the nineteenth century.

There can be no question that within the last twenty or thirty years there has been a marked revival of interest in the poetry of Crabbe. To the influence of Edward FitzGerald’s fascinating personality this revival may be partly, but is not wholly, due. It may be of the nature of a reaction against certain canons of taste too long blindly followed. It may be that, like the Queen in _Hamlet_, we are beginning to crave for “more matter and less art”; or that, like the Lady of Shalott, we are growing “half-sick of shadows,” and long for a closer touch with the real joys and sorrows of common people. Whatever be the cause, there can be no reason to regret the fact, or to doubt that in these days of “art for art’s sake,” the influence of Crabbe’s verse is at once of a bracing and a sobering kind.

INDEX

A

_Aaron the Gipsy_
Addison
_Adventures of Richard, The_
Aldeburgh
_Allegro_ (Milton)
Allington (Lincolnshire)
_Ancient Mansion, The_
_Annals of the Parish, The_ (Galt) _Annual Register, The_
Austen, Jane
Autobiography, Crabbe’s

B

Baillie, Agnes
–Joanna
Barnes, William
Barrie, J.M.
Barton, Bernard,
_Basket-Woman, The_ (Edgeworth)
Bath
Beccles
Belvoir Castle
Biography, Crabbe’s
“Blaney”
_Borough, The_
Boswell
Bowles, William Lisle
_Boys at School_
Bristol
Bunbury, Sir Henry
Burke
Burns
Butler, Joseph
Byron