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GEORGE CRABBE 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM STRANG, B.A. 
 
 (JOHN OLIVER HOBBE5 MEMORIAL SCHOLAR, 1912) 
 
 BEING THE QUAIN ESSAY 
 
 1913 
 (University College, London) 
 
 Xon6on: Tllniversiti? of Xon&on ipress 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD. 
 BY HODDER & STOUGHTON, WARWICK SQUARE, E.C. 
 
A.3o-^n3 
 
 TO 
 
 MRS. GREQORY FOSTER 
 
GEOEGE CEABBE 
 
 The story of the life of the Rev. George Grabbe 
 is one which is marked by two outstanding inci- 
 dents — an adventure of wonderful hazard and an 
 extraordinarily fortunate vindication of the per- 
 severance exhibited in it. All that came before 
 may be summed up as restlessness and disappoint- 
 ment, oppressive to him who reads. What fol- 
 lowed was a long, final course of ripening, full of 
 smaller activities, but settling in the last years 
 into placidity. 
 
 The story of his education as a poet contains, 
 first, a groping after a true means of expression, 
 then the discovery, and after that a ruthless self- 
 pruning, in consequence of which his powers had 
 a plentiful stock to draw upon, and so were able 
 to bring forth good fruit which matured as his life 
 advanced. Perhaps in the end there was too much 
 mellowness. 
 
 As is natural, the two stories are blended; and 
 it is Burke who forms the centre of connection. 
 There was something in Crabbe's poetry as weU 
 as in his letters and personahty which compelled 
 Burke's attention and regard. And it was Burke 
 who gave the poet the longed-for opportunity of 
 making his poetical way. 
 
2 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 It is well to read the life of Crabbe by his son, 
 also George and also reverend, for that work helps 
 us to get rid of many of our delusions concerning 
 the author of The Borough and the Tales in Verse. 
 Crabbe is generally misunderstood both by those 
 who take upon themselves to write of him, and 
 by those who merely read or claim to read him. 
 Those who read him mostly limit themselves to 
 those things which encourage misunderstanding : 
 that is, they scamper through The Village or 
 Peter Orimes. If they do not do this, they read 
 something else, carelessly, and find what they 
 have been told to find — that is, what Hazlitt ^ 
 found in The Village. " Mr. Crabbe' s great fault 
 is certainly that he is a sickly, a querulous, a 
 uniformly dissatisfied poet ; " Mr. Crabbe " check- 
 mates Tityrus and Virgil at the game of pastoral 
 cross-purposes, disables aU his adversary's white 
 pieces, and leaves none but black ones on the 
 board," and so on, decies, centies repetita. Hazlitt 
 says that he has read the Tales and finds that 
 " they turn, one and aU, upon the same sort of 
 teazing, helpless, mechanical, unimaginative dis- 
 tress," a statement so utterly vicious that it is 
 inexplicable except by the critic's prejudice and 
 the carelessness which is its natural consequence. 
 It is, of course, futile to claim that Crabbe is one 
 of those writers of high motive power who can 
 inspire their readers to go forward on their way 
 with a stronger hope ; he is neither a Shakespeare 
 
 1 In " The Spirit of the Age " : on " Mr. Campbell and Mr. 
 Crabbe." 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 3 
 
 nor a Browning; but he is not a dead- weight. 
 That quality of his which does most to give that 
 strange and evil impression is his hatred of all 
 affectation and heartless sentiment, made all the 
 more keen by the quick sense that he has of 
 detecting them under all their masks. This atti- 
 tude grows suddenly upon him at a certain point in 
 his life, and drives him to write The Village. But 
 even there, and still more in his later works, as 
 also in the Juvenilia, there is compensation, for 
 he has that supreme gift of sympathy with what 
 is seen to be mean, a gift which is the most valued 
 treasure of the masters of comedy. Added to this, 
 there is shrewd observation of human character 
 and manners, together with a humoiu" which 
 extends from pathos to mischief, and a zest which 
 at its worst is perseverance. 
 
 He, more than any other writer, is " damned 
 with faint praise " — as one who has done good 
 work but is tmpleasant to read. In HazHtt's 
 words concerning the Tales, " in proportion as 
 the interest increases, they become more op- 
 pressive." This is only one of the many evil 
 reports about Crabbe's work that go their rounds 
 in literary histories and critical essays; it has 
 been mentioned here because it is the most 
 specious and the most pernicious, and also because 
 it has had an influence on the opnion which 
 people hold concerning the man himseK. 
 
 It is curious to notice what a taint hangs round 
 some of the writers of the second half of the 
 eighteenth century, a taint of something dull. 
 
4 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 drab and uninteresting. It is not a thing founded 
 very firmly on fact, but an atmosphere which is 
 encountered on first acquaintance, and dissipated 
 only after we have enough knowledge to arouse 
 and sustain sympathy. This is a difficulty which 
 is found in no other period of our literary history. 
 Neither with " the giant race before the flood," 
 nor with the characteristic seventeenth-century 
 poets, i. e. the Metaphysical School, nor with 
 Dryden and his followers in the Augustan Age do 
 we find a stumbhng-block set in our way. Some 
 have the high fame which lasts unchanged through 
 generation after generation ; some have a pleasing 
 quaintness, some a swinging stride or a deft 
 precision of touch which has nothing old-fashioned 
 in it. But when the last of these are gone, and 
 the lights of " the Town " have died down one 
 by one, and the glamour of the Augustan world 
 of patronage has faded away, there comes a race 
 of poets who are insulated and we are forced to 
 make a preliminary effort before we can get the 
 current of sympathy to flow. Why there is this 
 feehng is not easy to explain f uUy, but the literary 
 conditions of that time have much to do with it. 
 The early struggles of Thomson, who is very early, 
 but stands on the edge of the cloud, of Johnson 
 and Goldsmith and Crabbe, are cases in point; 
 yet this is not absolutely true, for Chatterton 
 suffered and yet is not one of the " worsted- 
 stocking " crew. Chatterton and Blake and Burns 
 stand apart, and are not overshadowed by the 
 cloud which gives a covering of drab to the poetry 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 5 
 
 of the second half of the eighteenth century, 
 whether it follows the tune of Pope or Thomson. 
 The stagnation of the poetry proceeds from some- 
 thing in the men themselves and reacts on our 
 opinion of them. The prevalence of the Moral 
 Essay which is often a fanfare of words and 
 usually lacks the activity that is born of contact 
 with life, makes the world of poetry a dead or 
 rather a hibernating one. There is no life till 
 the spring comes and the sun breaks through the 
 cloud; then there is a new world which, like the 
 Augustan world, is aUve, but with a fuller and 
 more palpitating Hfe — the world of " Adonais " 
 and the " Essays of Elia." What is unfortunate 
 in the old, dead world is that the just suffer with 
 the unjust; Cowper and Crabbe with Erasmus 
 Darwin. And in spite of Boswell's " Life of 
 Johnson " and Cowper's Letters, we at first doubt 
 whether there can be any of that interest and 
 charm in the lives of the " worsted-stocking " 
 poets which we are so ready to find in the more 
 modern and romantic world of their successors. 
 Clever people who talk cleverly of Shelley and 
 Blake may be repelled by Crabbe and, what is 
 worse, by Cowper, because Crabbe was not a 
 freethinker and an eccentric, nor Cowper a writer 
 of Prophetic Books. That is literary snobbery; 
 a misunderstanding of the party adopted and the 
 party scorned. There are many things in the 
 life of Crabbe, as in his works, that are depressing ; 
 but it is a mistake to give them too great a signifi- 
 cance. It is a like mistake which is made by 
 
6 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 those who look on the mountain peaks of history 
 and neglect the valleys, who calculate the well- 
 being of Great Britain having Trafalgar and 
 Waterloo as data, the condition of the people 
 being accounted negligible, and so neglected. 
 Crabbe sometimes writes on sordid subjects, 
 sordidly, though far less often than is generally 
 supposed. In spite of this, his real vein runs as 
 often through the mischievous as through the 
 serious; and his great characteristic is an irony 
 which may be as gentle as Chaucer's, though more 
 crude, and has a wider range, though it seldom 
 proceeds from saeva indignatio. This is a point 
 which must be emphasised hereafter. So with 
 his hfe. His youth was full of disappointment, 
 yet he was not blighted as many another has been. 
 Underneath there always ran as strongly as ever 
 the current of that brave and eager and charming 
 personality which is so often lost sight of by 
 those who care not to give the pains to search 
 for it. 
 
 He was born in December 1754 at Aldborough,i 
 a squalid, weather-worn village on the Suffolk 
 coast, set in a flat, uninteresting and unproductive 
 country. His father was at that time collector 
 of salt-duties ; an active, intelligent man, he spent 
 his spare time in fishing, keeping a wary eye for 
 smugglers, solving mathematical problems and 
 rhyming. But as the poet grew up to manhood, 
 the father gave way to the ravages of an evil 
 temper and a craving for alcohol, and deteriorated 
 
 1 Now Aldeburgh, and a watering-place. 
 
GEOKGE CRABBE 7 
 
 into one of those mean minds which it was his 
 son's delight to study and depict. 
 
 George went to a dame-school, and his observant, 
 sensitive nature won the favour of the dame. 
 Thence after a while he was sent to Bungay, and 
 later to Stowmarket, where he suffered at the 
 hands of a bully — treatment which the timid 
 day-dreamer never forgot, but added to his stock 
 of things to be spoken against. At thirteen he 
 left school, and all that he acquired after this 
 was by his own unaided efforts. 
 
 Medicine was the profession chosen by the son 
 of the salt-master. He served his first apprentice- 
 ship at the other end of the county with a Mr. 
 Smith, who called himself apothecary, but was 
 farmer also, and gave the duties of apprentice- 
 labourer to the youth who was afterwards to be 
 author-doctor and author-rector. Crabbe revolted 
 and went home. A second apprenticeship was 
 served with Mr. Page (doctor-chemist) at Wood- 
 bridge, a village enriched since then by memories 
 of Bernard Barton and of Edward Fitzgerald, 
 Crabbe's doughtiest champion. Woodbridge pos- 
 sessed an inn, and the young apprentice joined a 
 company of young men who used to assemble 
 there and talk literature. It seems, as M. Huchon ^ 
 suggests, that good fellows, wine and poetry at 
 times slackened his self-control at this club. A 
 steadjdng influence came with the appearance of 
 Sarah Elmy, with whom he fell in love and 
 
 ^ Author of " Un po^te r6aliste anglais : George Crabbe." 
 A veritable encyclopsedia. 
 
8 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 afterwards married, but long afterwards; this 
 enforced delay furnishes him with a theme treated 
 many a time in his poetical writings. Miss Elmy 
 is the Mir a who inspires much of his juvenile 
 poetry. Just as he was about to leave Woodbridge 
 he published at Ipswich his first long poem, 
 Inebriety — the fruit of observation at the inn, 
 which was not exclusively a literary tavern. 
 
 This was in 1775. His seven years of appren- 
 ticeship availed him little. He returned to his 
 native village and was forced, as in the old days, 
 to roll salt-casks and pile butter-tubs until he 
 obtained the small post of surgeon to the Work- 
 house. He takes up the study of botany and 
 even goes to London for several months to continue 
 his studies in surgery. When he returns he finds 
 his practice lost and himself distrusted as a trifler, 
 a poet-doctor. This is only the beginning of his 
 trouble. Serious illness attacks both himself and 
 Mira ; he is harassed by religious questions. Almost 
 in despair, he takes the decisive step of his life 
 and, borrowing five pounds, sets out for London 
 in April 1780. Whatever hopes he may have had 
 were dashed to the ground, and it was only by 
 repeated visits to the pawnbroker and by the 
 acceptance of help from Mira ^ — who had httle 
 
 ^ This fact is comparatively new. It was found, with 
 other valuable information, in the Bunbury Letter, or Crabbe's 
 third letter to Burke, discovered by M. Huehon in " The 
 Correspondence of Sir Th. Hanmer — and other relicks of a 
 gentleman's family," edited by Sir Henry Bunbury. A note 
 therein adds, " This letter was sent by Mr. Burke to Sir 
 Charles Bunbury, who took a warm interest in Mr. C. 's welfare," 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 9 
 
 enough to spare — that he was able to exist until 
 his letter to Burke in March of the next year 
 opened up for him the prospect of a brighter 
 future. He had apphed for posts; he had sent 
 poems to publishers; he had asked help from 
 North, who put him ofif; to Shelburne of the 
 Opposition, who ignored him; to Thurlow, the 
 Lord Chancellor, who was coldly polite and wrote— 
 with " senatorial dignity of face," we doubt not — 
 " regretting that his avocations did not leave him 
 leisure to read verses." It is a surprise to find 
 that in one thing he was successful — the publica- 
 tion (anonymously) of The Candidate, an address 
 to the Authors of the " Monthly Review." Then, 
 after over a year of misery, he addressed himself 
 to Burke in a manly letter, enclosing specimens 
 of his poetry, among them parts of The Library 
 and The Village. Burke, in spite of overwhelming 
 political cares, took the young poet under his 
 protection. It was not the least noble action 
 in his annus mirabilis of 1780-81. Crabbe now 
 gained hope and confidence by the publication 
 of The Library and by his introduction by his 
 patron to a wider circle. He was highly esteemed 
 by all who met him, even by the brusque and 
 strong-worded Chancellor, who repented and gave 
 him £100. Burke continued his good deeds, for 
 the poet having expressed a desire to take orders, 
 his benefactor opened a way for him, and he was 
 ordained curate of Aldborough. His hardships 
 are now over, for the most part, and the course 
 of his life is no longer rocky and steep. 
 
10 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 He was at this time twenty-seven. The rest 
 of his life, though it is as long as half a century, 
 will not take long to sum up. The parish of 
 Aldborough thought little of its upstart and 
 shoddy curate, and invented evil tales ; he thought 
 still less of his flock and took his departure for 
 Belvoir Castle, for Burke had once more come to 
 the rescue and had obtained for him the post of 
 chaplain to the Duke of Rutland. There he 
 continued to extend his knowledge of men and 
 flowers, and to write poetry. He now made his 
 mark in the latter, for in May 1783, The Village 
 was pubhshed. Dr. Johnson had given his ap- 
 proval and suggested some alterations, which the 
 author adopted. With fame and a competence, 
 he now thought fit to marry, and in December 1783 
 he and his Mira were united. Two years later 
 came The Newspaper, and the beginning of a 
 silence lasting through twenty-two years. During 
 this time, Crabbe enjoyed a long series of livings, 
 wandering from Belvoir back to Suffolk and 
 gravitating once more in 1805 to his rectory of 
 Muston in the Vale of Belvoir, having lost two of 
 his sons, and bringing back a wife enfeebled in 
 mind ; for Mira was afflicted with a slow weakening 
 of the mental activities accompanied by a peevish 
 hypochondria, and the poet was, naturally, tied 
 very strictly to his home. This anxiety lasted as 
 long as Mira lived, and burned itself upon the 
 poet's mind; for it is this same sort of gradual 
 deterioration which is a typical subject in his 
 narrative works, 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 11 
 
 It is from Muston that he dates his volume of 
 1807, a reprint of some of his earlier pieces, together 
 with new works like The Parish Register and Sir 
 Eustace Grey. This volume gave Crabhe a fame 
 in the new Hterary world, in place of that won in 
 the old world of 1783, and now much faded by 
 time. The Borough in 1810, and especially the 
 Tales in Verse in 1812, gave him a wider renown. 
 The Borough is perhaps not so happy an effort as 
 The Parish Register, but the Tales were enthusi- 
 astically received by critics and by the public, 
 who required five editions in two years — the yeajs, 
 it is interesting and instructive to notice, of 
 " Childe Harold," " The Giaour " and " Waverley." 
 
 Crabbe made good his hold on the new genera- 
 tion and began a pleasant friendship with one of 
 its twin idols, Walter Scott. In one way he 
 belonged to the old order, and had to suffer for 
 it : there arose a Duke of Rutland who knew 
 not Crabbe, so he was forced to exchange the 
 living of Muston for that of Trowbridge in Wilt- 
 shire. 
 
 He now enters upon his last stage and has to 
 tramp it alone, for his Mira's life has at last 
 flickered out. His hfe at Trowbridge was varied 
 by a visit to London in 1817, where under the 
 wing of Rogers he was introduced into the literary 
 circles, especially into the Holland House set. He 
 made the acquaintance of Moore and Campbell, 
 of James Smith, who parodied him in " Rejected 
 Addresses," of Brougham and Canning, and of 
 Murray, who was to publish in 1819 his next, and 
 
12 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 last, work— ^'^e Tales of the Hall. In 1822 he 
 visited Edinburgh and entered the circle of the 
 north, meeting Scott, James Hogg, Lockhart, 
 Henry Mackenzie, Christopher North, and, above 
 aU, Jeffrey, to whom the old man's works were a 
 comfort and a vindication of the right in that age 
 of romantic chimeras. On the morning after his 
 return from excursions like these, the shrewd 
 but simple-hearted poet would settle down to 
 his usual work of visitation and study, as though 
 he did not know what a literary " lion " was. 
 Such was the gentle tenor of his Ufe until he came 
 to his end in February 1832, preserving to the 
 last that exuberance of thought which seems, 
 from his son's words, to have been the chief 
 characteristic of his mind. 
 
 Now, mental activity is not a quality which is 
 usually associated with Crabbe, whom Hazlitt 
 calls " a sickly, a querulous, a uniformly dis- 
 satisfied poet." He is thought of as " Pope in 
 worsted-stockings," a slow-minded, almost boorish 
 country parson who takes upon himself to bring 
 a message of universal woe. Cowper is another 
 who has fallen under the same sort of ban; but 
 in his case the charge is childishness, effeminacy, 
 finicalness. Both charges are unjust. Crabbe 
 was, indeed, a country parson who lived a quiet 
 life; and Cowper' s mind was certainly not one of 
 the most virile; yet in both of them there is a 
 cheerfulness, livehness and enterprise, which people 
 seem unwilling to admit. It is weU to learn that 
 mischief is not the property of Chaucer alone. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 13 
 
 " With that this egle gan to crye : 
 ' Lat be,' quod he, ' thy fantasye ; 
 Wilt thou lere of sterres aught ? ' 
 ' Nay, certainly,' quod I, ' right naught ; 
 And why ? for I am now to old.' " 
 
 That is characteristic, and well done ; but Cowper 
 
 and Crabbe can do it also in their own way, as 
 
 when Cowper uses mock-heroic periphrasis in a 
 
 quiet way — 
 
 " the eclipse 
 That Metropolitan volcanos make. 
 Whose Stygian throats breathe darkness all day long ; " 
 
 or when he coins quips and epigrams in a more 
 noisy way. Crabbe's poems are full of mischief 
 which varies from the couplet which even Fitz- 
 gerald thought very bad — 
 
 " The church he view'd as liberal minds will view, 
 And there he fix'd his principles and pew " — 
 
 from this to the imperturbable smile with which 
 he wrote the following — 
 
 '"Me hath the sly seducer oft withstood,' 
 Said pious Jachin, — ' but he gets no good ; 
 I pass the house where swings the tempting sign, 
 And pointing, tell him, " Satan, that is thine " ; ' " 
 
 Or, if something more vigorous and spirited is 
 required, take a passage from his account of some 
 of the absurd novels which he has read — 
 
 "Then was I led to vengeful monks, who mix 
 With nymphs and swains, and play unpriestly tricks ; 
 Then view'd banditti who in forest wide. 
 And cavern vast, indignant virgins hide; 
 Who, hemm'd with bands of sturdiest rogues about, 
 Find some strange succour, and come virgins out." 
 
 He had a charming personality. All who met 
 
14 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 him spoke of him in the highest terms. And, to 
 take one case only, there must have been some- 
 thing extremely attractive in a man who could 
 in a few hours gain the admiration of Burke. 
 There was nothing masterful in him; it was 
 probably cheerful and dignified urbanity, an 
 honest smile and sound common sense — all of 
 which may be found in the portrait by Thomas 
 Philips.! Fox said of him, " If he had his deserts, 
 he would have walked before us aU," and this 
 respect was gained in spite of the fact that he 
 never did justice to the powers of his mind in 
 his intercourse with men. This is what Moore 
 says in a letter to Murray, and it is corroborated 
 by Lockhart, who brings out, in addition to this 
 quiet benevolence of manner, the shrewdness and 
 activity of the poet's mind. " His unsophisticated, 
 simple, and kind address put everybody at ease 
 with him ; and, indeed, one would have been too 
 apt to forget what lurked beneath that good- 
 humoured unpretending aspect, but that every 
 now and then he uttered some brief, pithy remark, 
 which showed how narrowly he had been scrutin- 
 ising into whatever might be said or done before 
 him, and called us to remember, with some awe, 
 that we were in the presence of the author of 
 The Borough:' 
 
 His son is more explicit. " As the chief char- 
 acteristic of his heart was benevolence, so that 
 of his mind was a buoyant exuberance of thought 
 and perpetual exercise of intellect." Nothing 
 
 * Frontispiece to Volume I (Life) of the edition of 1834. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 15 
 
 shows the first quality better than his relations 
 with his invalid wife and growing boys. To the 
 latter he was both father and companion. No 
 childhood could be happier than theirs. In early 
 days there were fairy-tales of his own invention, 
 " all sparkling with gold and diamonds, magic 
 fountains and enchanted princesses " ; and as the 
 time went on, there would be the oft-repeated 
 invitation " Now, old fellows, it is my duty to 
 read to you." Best of aU, perhaps, there is the 
 testimony of Mary Leadbeater, a new-found friend 
 of old days. " Thus our friend John James Lecky 
 describes thee . . . and has placed thee so before 
 our view, that we all but see and hear thee, 
 frequently going out and coming into the room, 
 with a book in thy hand, and a snule and friendly 
 expression on thy hps — ^the benevolence which 
 swam in thy eyes, and the cordial shake of both 
 hands with which thou partedst with him — and 
 thou came out with him in the damp night, and 
 sent thy servant with bim to the inn, where he 
 should not have lodged, had there been room for 
 him in thy own house." His correspondence with 
 Mrs. Leadbeater is fuU of cheerful things, and she 
 is one of those who do him justice, although she 
 falls into the usual error about Cowper, " dear 
 Cowper, our other moral poet." Crabbe, however, 
 she says, is " enlivened by that flow of cheerfulness 
 which he so sadly wanted." " Child of simplicity 
 and virtue," writes Crabbe to her from Trowbridge, 
 " how can you let yourself be so deceived ? Am I 
 not a great fat Rector, living upon a mighty income, 
 
16 GEOKGE CRABBE 
 
 while my poor curate starves with six hungry 
 children, upon the scraps that f aU from the luxur- 
 ious table ? Do I not visit that horrible London, 
 and enter into its abominable dissipations ? Am 
 I not this day going to dine on venison and drink 
 claret ? Have I not been at election dinners, and 
 joined the Babel-confusion of a town-hall ? Child 
 of simphcity ! am I fit to be a friend to you and 
 the peaceful, mild, pure, gentle people about 
 you ? " A Uttle more whimsicality, a few allu- 
 sions, and one would think of EHa. 
 
 Along with this benevolent and gentle cheer- 
 fulness, there was, as we have seen, a zest and 
 eagerness of mind. Here the son comes nobly to 
 our aid with a passage which is a revelation to 
 those who like to picture the poet as he lived. 
 " He had," says the biographer, " an inexhaust- 
 ible resource within himself. ... I can safely 
 assert, that, from the earhest time I recoUect 
 him, down to the fifth or sixth year before his 
 death, I never saw him (unless in company) seated 
 in a chair, enjoying what is called a lounge — ^that 
 is to say, doing nothing. Out of doors he had 
 always some object in view — a flower, or a pebble, 
 or his note-book, in his hand ; and in the house, if 
 he was not writing, he was reading." It is the 
 same all through his life. We see him as a child 
 running in and out the inns and round about the 
 quays, watching, noting, insatiably curious. Those 
 who read " Richard's account of his- Occupations 
 in his early life " contained in Book IV of The 
 Tales of the Hall, wiU find a very pleasant passage 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 17 
 
 of autobiography which describes this same long- 
 ing for activity. It teUs how with " mind and 
 thoughts as restless as the wave " he gave atten- 
 tion to all that passed ; how he sought eagerly for 
 those who by their mien seemed disposed to teU 
 him tales of wrecks, of icy mountains and wounded 
 monsters of the deep; how he loved to mingle 
 with the " lewd, amphibious, rude, contentious 
 crew " of seamen who lounged on the quay; how 
 shepherds on the heath and smugglers in their 
 cave were the objects of his childish curiosity. 
 Of his love of reading, the many catalogues of 
 bookshelves and lists of romances scattered here 
 and there in his works wiU bear witness. Parts 
 of the story teU of a deeper and more serious 
 motion of the mind — how, as he says in The 
 Village, he " sought the simple life that nature 
 yields " ; and this is written in a fuller, freer, and 
 more sonorous style than usual. 
 
 " 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 gray curlew, 
 Who with wild notes my fancied power defied. 
 And mock'd the dreams of solitary pride." 
 
 This Fourth Book of The Tales of the Hall is 
 Crabbe's " Prelude," and, like Wordsworth's, helps 
 
18 GEORGE GRABBE 
 
 us to avoid easy and ill-founded opinions concerning 
 its author. 
 
 As he grows up, he develops enthusiasm for 
 mathematics, for botany and entomology — indeed, 
 for natural history in general. He improves his 
 Latin, and teaches himself French and Italian. 
 Burke might well say to Sir Joshua Reynolds — 
 " Mr. Crabbe appears to know something of 
 everything." This exuberance, zest, gusto, is 
 the keynote of his life, which, though limited, is 
 not cramped. It is this also which supphes the 
 chief justification of his poetry against those who 
 follow Hazlitt in thinking him a maker of mechani- 
 cal facsimiles. Crabbe took up his subjects glee- 
 fully and composed in high spirits, and if, as it 
 appears, his works are not enough to prove it, 
 there is the fact that as he built up and polished 
 his verses, his face lit up and his gestures became 
 animated, whether he was on foot or on horseback. 
 
 But with this gusto we must couple one reser- 
 vation, namely, that it often prefers to exercise 
 itself in the autumn tints. Crabbe had a partly 
 natural and partly mahcious liking for those 
 things which " really pohte people " (to use his 
 own phrase) prefer to neglect. It is seen in many 
 ways. " In botany, grasses, the most useful, 
 but the least ornamental, were his favourites; in 
 minerals, the earths and sands; in entomology, 
 the minuter insects. . . . He never seemed to be 
 captivated by the mere beauty of natural objects." 
 So it is with his descriptions of nature, though 
 there is more variety than is generally supposed. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 19 
 
 And from among his fellow-men, it is the mean 
 mind that he delights to choose for analysis. 
 
 This is not all. While as a writer he is almost 
 always fuU of high spirits, and while he has a keen 
 delight in the smaller activities of his daily life, 
 he is never carried away by any larger enthusiasm ; 
 if he is ever likely to do this, he turns upon himself. 
 There are examples to prove that in early boyhood 
 he had this proneness to disillusion. All the joy 
 which an excursion in a saiUng-boat with his elders 
 can give to a small boy was dissipated, ere the 
 homecoming, by premonition of evil and by that 
 evil when it came in the shape of a storm, when, 
 as he says — 
 
 "All the freshness of the morning fled, 
 My spirits burden'd, and my heart was dead." 
 
 M. Huchon thinks that it was the steriHty and 
 meanness of his environment that crushed his 
 spirits in early youth. But there was more in it 
 than this passive inward melancholy, and, in any 
 case, Crabbe never lost all his dash. One should 
 not forget the honesty and the active perspicuity 
 of mind which were in the man. He was sus- 
 picious of presumption and affectation, not only 
 in others, but also in himself. He writes in his 
 " Journal to Mir a " from London, during his time 
 of trial, " Eor the first time in my life that I 
 recollect, I have written three or four stanzas, 
 that so far touched me in the reading them, as 
 to take off the consideration that they were things 
 of my own fancy. Now, if ever I do succeed, I 
 
20 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 will take particular notice if this passage is 
 remarked." Then he turns upon himself — " if 
 not, I shall conclude 'twas mere self-love — ^but 
 if so, 'twas the strangest, and, at the same time, 
 strongest disguise she ever put on." ^ And there 
 is the same thing to be read in his strange lack 
 of self-confidence and seK-assertion at other times 
 — in the often too servile tone in which he ad- 
 dressed his patrons; in his excessive trust in the 
 critical acumen of others rather than his own, 
 when remodelling and retouching his work; in 
 the helpless and useless explanations and apologies 
 which appear in some of his prefaces. With 
 regard to others he is clear-sighted enough, and 
 his enthusiasm for observation leads him to lack 
 of enthusiasm for the main object of his obser- 
 vation, that is, life in general. There is nothing 
 more true than to say that, if we look at the 
 subjects in their outline, Cr abbe's poetry is, from 
 beginning to end, the poetry of disillusion in a 
 light or serious form. This is the paradox about 
 him, that although the subject of his work is in 
 its very essence unenthusiastic, yet it remains 
 true that the work itself is full of enthusiasm. 
 As a man, he may not hold high opinions concern- 
 ing the nobility of his fellows, but his disillusion 
 is certainly not a bitter pessimism, for he mingles 
 
 ^ Here is the parallel passage in The Library, written about 
 the same time — 
 
 " Smiling o'er a lucky line, 
 Ye thought the sudden sentiment divine, 
 Then paused and doubted." 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 21 
 
 benevolence with his scepticism; as an artist he 
 has a profound belief in his people, and thinks it 
 worth while to portray them with all the zest of 
 which he is capable. 
 
 There is in Crabbe, in addition to this mental 
 activity, a strain of adventurousness which once 
 or twice issues freely in deeds. Possibly he 
 inherited it. His father was a vigorous man, and 
 two of his brothers felt the caU of the sea : one 
 became captain of a slave-ship and the other was 
 a trader in Central America, whose story forms 
 the basis of George's tale of " The Parting Hour." 
 George, too, had his great adventure, and other 
 smaller ones also. One of these latter is worth 
 noticing because it strikes one as a revelation of 
 the man. It seems that, being suddenly seized 
 with an intense longing to look once more on the 
 sea of his boyhood, he straightway took horse and 
 rode the sixty miles that lay between it and 
 Stathern, where he then was, " dipped in the 
 waves that washed the beach of Aldborough," 
 and then rode the sixty miles back. 
 
 It is possible, as M. Huchon suggests, that 
 Crabbe made the mistake of expecting to be 
 shoved into an easy post as soon as he reached 
 London, and in the hope of obtaining this through 
 a patron, disdained to roll up his sleeves. " De 
 nos jours, il eut aspire a griflEonner ses vers sur 
 un pupitre de sous-chef de bureau." In this 
 respect, the critic says, he compares unfavourably 
 with Johnson, who showed a more stubborn courage 
 in like circumstances. M. Huchon also almost 
 
22 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 sneers at the poet because he was glad to receive 
 good payment for his poetry, as though he made 
 a trade of it. Apart from the unfairness of the 
 charge, Crabbe might have been justified by an- 
 other place in Johnson's Life, for the Dictator 
 held that only a fool would write for nothing. The 
 document which dispels any lingering suspicions 
 that Crabbe was mercenary and lacking in back- 
 bone is the " Journal to Mira," so different from 
 that other London Journal of happier days when 
 he was a literary Hon. It was pretty often that 
 his "last shilling became eightpence," yet he could 
 send a cheerful message to his SaUy. Sometimes, 
 he almost despaired, but for the most part he bore 
 up bravely and persevered. " God help me, my 
 Sally, I have but a cowardly heart, yet I bear up 
 as well as I can; and if I had another shilling 
 would get something to-night to keep these gloomy 
 thoughts at bay, but I must save what I have, 
 in hopes of having a letter to pay for to-morrow." 
 What does him honour is his enthusiastic faithful- 
 ness to the Muses, in proof of which stands the 
 rash despoihng of his narrow purse to purchase 
 the works of one of their favourites, to wit, " three 
 volumes of Dryden's Works, octavo, five shillings." 
 Crabbe is one of those poets in whose works 
 we can trace a definite development, a slow 
 evolution where each work takes up and modifies 
 the quahties of its predecessor. The Parish 
 Register grows out of The Village ; the Tales of 
 the Hall spring from the Tales in Verse. In each 
 case the modification is of the same sort and tends 
 
GEOKGE CRABBE 23 
 
 in the same direction, so that it is true to say 
 that, as The Village is to The Parish Register, so 
 are the Tales to the Tales of the Hall. Crabbe is 
 in this respect akin to Shakespeare and Keats 
 (to mention two only). But whereas the author 
 of " Hjrperion " and the " Ode to Maia " was 
 stricken by the hand of death just as he appeared 
 to be reaching the higher ranges, in the case of 
 Shakespeare there was a descent from the cloudy 
 grandeur of the peak, down the warm southern 
 slope of the hillside. There is the same softening, 
 the same disintegration of stubborn strength at 
 the end of the work of the Rector of Trowbridge. 
 
 Another thing is that his poetry, like Cowper's, 
 is in the simplest way made out of the common 
 things of his life. In both we find a simpUcity 
 of relation between life and works which marks 
 them out from many others. They run the 
 stream of their days into their written words 
 without great use of the elaborate process of 
 distillation which Wordsworth employs, or of the 
 inexplicable analysis and deduction of the great 
 epic and dramatic writers. This is more true of 
 "The Task" and "the divine chit-chat" of 
 Cowper's Letters than of The Parish Register and 
 the Tales ; but it is important in Crabbe in more 
 ways than one. 
 
 Crabbe had a keen devotion to facts — ^facts of 
 mathematics, facts of botany, facts about rural 
 life and about human nature in general. He 
 finds facts lying ready to his hand, and sees no 
 need to range more widely in search of material; 
 
24 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 especially as he manifests, once that he has seen 
 the world, a healthy scepticism, growing more 
 tolerant as the years pass by, towards visions and 
 visionary things. The observation of character 
 and the analysis of motive become his hobby, and 
 any man is more interesting to him than any 
 landscape whatever. This supplies him with 
 subjects for as many narratives and descriptions 
 as he may wish to write. His range is limited to 
 the experience of a generally uneventful life ; yet 
 the limitation is useful, for it enables him to show 
 that narrowness does not necessarily mean lack 
 of variety. And surely, a human mind, although 
 it be but a mean one, is no small province after 
 all. " I do not know," says he, " that I could 
 paint merely from my own fancy; and there is 
 no cause why we should. Is there not diversity 
 sufficient in society? and who can go, even but 
 a little, into the assemblies of our fellow-wanderers 
 from the way of perfect rectitude, and not find 
 characters so varied and so pointed, that he need 
 not call upon his imagination ? " It was, no 
 doubt, a misfortune that Crabbe was lacking in a 
 taste for beautiful things; yet, if he had had a 
 " real love for painting, or music, or architecture, 
 or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties 
 of landscape," he might conceivably have been 
 no better than he is. For it is just that scepticism 
 and that disillusion which make him what he is 
 above all — a sincere poet. He will have none of 
 the sententious and dictatorial morahsings of so 
 many of his contemporaries who write without 
 feeling; he will not pufE himself out with vain 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 25 
 
 circumlocutions, but works out a colloquial style 
 for himself and one which well expresses the 
 character of his mind. He will write nothing but 
 what he knows and has felt. Therefore he takes 
 as material what he has seen or heard or experi- 
 enced : — Aldborough and its people, his hatred 
 of the medical profession, his dislike of Methodists, 
 his love for romances, the slow decay of a mind, 
 the psychology of knaves and fools, the hard lot 
 of poets, and more topics than we can mention 
 here. We have his own authority for saying 
 that there is no single character in any of his 
 works that was not founded on some person 
 whom he actually knew or whose history he had 
 heard. 
 
 This being so, it is fitting that he should often 
 scrutinise his own mind and its history just 
 as he does the minds of others. In some of 
 the earlier poems this appears as oppressive 
 doubtings whether his abilities are worth a great 
 deal, or as restless inquiries into the state of his 
 mind. In the " Journal to Mir a " and the 
 " Bunbury Letter " and in his short autobio- 
 graphical sketch (given by his son), there is a 
 more simple statement of facts. There are chance 
 references here and there, and, finally, in "The 
 Adventures of Richard " and in " Silford Hall," 
 the first of the " Posthumous Tales," we have 
 two poetical accounts of incidents in his early 
 life. He is always ready to talk about himself; 
 and it is significant that the man who was unable 
 to fiU the eager ears of the literary men of London 
 in 1817 with tales of Burke, could, nevertheless. 
 
26 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 a few years later, write his two long poetical 
 confessions. " SiHord Hall " shows how clearly 
 he retained his early impressions. It teUs of a 
 happy day spent in viewing Chevely, one of the 
 seats of the Rutlands, where he was impressed 
 by aU he saw — the gloomy chapel, the tapestry, 
 books and statues, the biUiard-room and the 
 housekeeper who was his guide, the dinner in 
 the servants' haU; he notes especially the terror 
 which came upon him when his guide left him 
 alone in the majestic hall, for he peopled it with 
 all the uncanny powers which he knew from his 
 fairy-tales. He seems to have been sensitive and 
 highly-strung, for though he rejoiced in gay 
 scenes — 
 
 " Yet oft with this a softening sadness dwelt, 
 While feeling thus, he marvelled why he felt — 
 ' I am not sorry,' said the Boy, ' but still 
 The tear will fall — I wonder why it will.' " 
 
 But at no time is he subject to any illusions 
 about himself. Except slightly in his early days, 
 he does not wax sentimental about his own 
 development, and does not resemble in any way 
 those restless spirits whose greatest happiness 
 Hes in showing forth to the world their own un- 
 happiness — Rousseau or Chateaubriand or Byron. 
 Nor, on the other hand, does he coUect up his 
 impressions and work them together into an 
 artistic whole. He does not, like those poets who 
 honestly and legitimately wish to " rehve their 
 inward life before the world," write a " Dichtung 
 und Wahrheit " or a " Prelude." He merely 
 states those things which have happened to him. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 27 
 
 without any inference or grouping or generalisa- 
 tion. It is his genius to state and not to spend 
 time in discussion. He Hkes facts for their own 
 sake. 
 
 For this reason, he can generally be trusted. 
 And yet there is something that often comes 
 between the reader and the truth. It is not 
 sentimentality, but rather the opposite — mischief 
 or a tone of defiance, " The Journal to Mira " 
 and the story of Richard perhaps give the best 
 impression. The former, written in the midst 
 of a bitter experience, has no bitterness in it; 
 the latter, written in after days when the poet 
 was easily inclined to mischief, remains perfectly 
 serious. Even if we may suspect that he had 
 taken lessons from the new poets in the matter 
 of self-examination, there is no reason to charge 
 him with pretence or imitation. A passage like 
 the following need not imply a knowledge of 
 Wordsworth — although at this time Crabbe did 
 know him both as man and as poet. It merely 
 illustrates what has been said before, that Crabbe 
 hkes to indulge in the pleasures of memory, and 
 exemplifies also the curious way that he has of 
 looking upon nature as a background to the mind 
 of his characters, as harmonising with mental 
 mood or as taking its colours according to the 
 state of mind of the observer. 
 
 " I loved to stop at every creek and bay 
 Made by the river in its winding way, 
 And call to memory — ^not by marks they bare, 
 But by the thoughts that were created there." 
 
 He soon returns to his mischief again, for the 
 
28 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 story of Peter Perkin in " Silford Hall " is full of 
 it. The boy has finished his business with the 
 steward — 
 
 " ' Good day ! ' he said, but lingered as he spoke — 
 ' Good day,' and gazed about with serious look ; 
 Then slowly moved, and then delay'd a while, 
 In dumb dismay which raised a lordly smile 
 In those who eyed him — ^then again moved on. 
 As all might see, unwilling to be gone." 
 
 The housekeeper enters and the boy timidly asks 
 to see the wonders of the Hall — 
 
 " The ruling Lady, smiling, said, ' In truth 
 Thou shalt behold them all, my pretty youth. 
 Tom ! first the creature to the stable lead. 
 Let it be fed ; and you, my child, must feed ; 
 For three good hours must pass ere dinner come,' — 
 ' Supper,' thought he, ' she means, our time at home.' " 
 
 There is one thing of which he will not speak 
 in after hf e — not even to his sons — and that is 
 the London episode of 1780-81. It is this, with 
 the events that led up to it, that gives the defiant 
 tone to those autobiographical documents which 
 date from that period of his life : to that passage 
 in The Village which tells how he " fied from 
 these shores where guilt and famine reign " ; to 
 his first letter to Burke, where his bitterness is 
 turned upon himself rather than upon his fellow- 
 viUagers — " I came to London, with three pounds, 
 and flattered myself this would be sufficient to 
 supply me with the common necessaries of Hfe, 
 till my abilities should procure me more ; of these 
 I had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity 
 contributed to my delusion." It is the same 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 29 
 
 with the Bunbury Letter — a concise account, 
 dignified because concise and bitter in spite of 
 its dignity, where he does not lower himself to 
 gibe or complain, but gives a clear, cold state- 
 ment of facts, writing with a detachment which 
 is terrible to witness when we feel the tortured 
 and noble soul beneath. " My business was the 
 most trifling and lay amongst the poor, I had 
 a sister who starved with me ; and on her account 
 it now pains me to say that we often wanted 
 bread; we were unwilling to add to my father's 
 distress by letting him see ours, and we fasted 
 with much fortitude. Everyone knew me to be 
 poor; I was dunned for the most trifling sums, 
 and compelled to pay the rent of my hut weekly, 
 for my landlord was Justice of the Corporation 
 and a man of authority. . . . After three years 
 spent in the misery of successful struggle, I found 
 it necessary for me to depart, and I came to 
 London." 
 
 When we come to examine his works, it is this 
 same visit to London which marks an important 
 turning-point. Li fact, it was the making of 
 Crabbe. The works written during this time of 
 shadow and shortly afterwards, while its em- 
 bittering influence is still strong, are too often 
 taken as complete examples of Crabbe' s genius. 
 It is not recognised that The Village and The 
 Library and the rest of their group are merely 
 intermediate, and are the productions of that 
 time in which he is learning his most painful 
 lessons. The Village and The Newspaper mark 
 
30 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 the end of Crabbe's satiric period; when he re- 
 appears twenty years later, he has learnt to think 
 that formal satire is not the only thing worth 
 writing. This does not mean that he has become 
 any more credulous than before. 
 
 The main lines are these. He seems to have 
 been born with a predisposition to satirical obser- 
 vation or acquired it from his father; there is 
 also a delicate sensibility which was at first 
 predominant in his " gentle mother's welcome 
 boy." Then came the world and its troubles 
 and suffocated for a time the gentler impulses, 
 not without benefit to the poet, for it checked 
 an early tendency to sentimentality. At the 
 same time it gave a sharper edge to the formerly 
 good-tempered habit of observation : it gave also 
 the compensation — a surer play of the tool. The 
 virtue of this painful process is shown in this, 
 that it leaves both qualities refined and put in 
 harmony one with the other. The new poems of 
 1807 show how well the work has been done, and 
 for this reason it would be well if critics of Crabbe 
 would focus their attentions on The Parish 
 Register rather than on The Village. Literary 
 historians may, if they please, continue to insist 
 on the importance of The Village ; but those who 
 wish to understand Crabbe will do well to begin 
 with The Parish Register. 
 
 As to the " Juvenilia," their two great faults, 
 as we should expect, are sentimentality and 
 bitterness, but these poems show clearly the 
 progress in Crabbe's mind. The first defect is 
 not due to his mother, nor to his innocent delight 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 31 
 
 in " Arabian Nights and Persian Tales." His 
 reading in the English classics,^ which was wide 
 enough, should have cured him of it. Lancelot 
 and Guy may have had something to do with it, 
 but the great evil certainly was the " Poet's Cor- 
 ner " of the " Monthly Magazine " which his 
 father contemptuously tossed to him and which 
 the youngster sedulously imitated. It is no 
 wonder that he wrote a deal of nonsense, and 
 became fond of talking in a self-conscious and 
 self-commending fashion of George Crabbe, Poet. 
 After a while he saw the foUy of aU this, and 
 teUs us himself that London taught him to think 
 more humbly of his talents. What is more, he 
 never again stops to worry because he fails to 
 find in himself a master-mind. And, as to senti- 
 ment, he is fighting it tooth and nail in The 
 Library and The Village. In spite of all this, 
 however, he had some measure of freedom from 
 the very first; for the second of his extant poems 
 is a skit on lovers, beginning — 
 
 " My days, oh ye lovers, were happily sped. 
 Ere you or your whimsies got into my head." 
 
 His trouble began very early — at some time in 
 early boyhood, probably, when he may have 
 received some affront from the " bold, artful, 
 surly, savage race " of villagers, as he calls them 
 in good, round language like that of Milton or 
 Ben concerning the same " many-headed monster- 
 thing." But the first note of bitterness is sounded 
 in a "Fragment written at Midnight" (1779) 
 
 ^ Milton and Young ; Pope, Goldsmith and Gray ; Marlowe, 
 Shakespeare, Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others. 
 
32 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 where he talks of " the restless ocean, emblem 
 of my mind." Thence he goes on to gibe, time 
 after time, at the favom-s showered on " titled 
 nothings," and the mood reaches its best, because 
 least undignified, expression in The Village and 
 the Bunbury Letter. 
 
 Once more, as above, it is necessary to qualify, 
 because there is one important satirical poem 
 which has none of this unpleasantness — Inebriety, 
 which is, for this reason and others, more char- 
 acteristic of Crabbe's manner than The Village, 
 although The Village is by far the greater work. 
 It is a satire, but a satire without a theory. It 
 does not carry along with it such a burden of moral 
 indignation as comes with the long poems of 1780- 
 83. In this unbiassed outlook it resembles the 
 poems of 1807 and later, where Crabbe throws 
 his theories overboard. Also, it is based on Pope 
 as The Village bears on it the mark of Johnson — 
 and in this way stands in the same class as most 
 of Crabbe's work, for of the two tunes which we 
 find in him, it is the antithetical Hit rather than 
 the sonorous beat which predominates. And 
 then, again, Crabbe has already chosen the path 
 which he is to foUow for the greater part of his 
 life — that which leads him in time to a study of 
 the mean mind. 
 
 The great thing about it is that it is written in 
 a good temper, and, in fact, is avowedly a mock- 
 heroic poem with similes and invocation. 
 
 " The mighty spirit, and its power, which stains 
 The bloodless cheek, and vivifies the brains, 
 I sing." 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 33 
 
 And although he has no praises to sing of 
 " Scotch Drink " or any other, as Burns had, yet 
 the picture of the " Bacchanalian rustic " reehng 
 home is in the true spirit of the " Jolly Beggars," 
 in spite of its intentionally inflated style. The 
 second half of the poem is less interesting because 
 the writer has lost the impartial tone of parody 
 and turns to satirical portraits of typical topers, 
 adding a spice of moral indignation. The style 
 is a queer jumble : there are imitations and 
 parodies of Pope's various tunes, from that of the 
 "Pastorals" to that of "The Essay on Man," 
 mingled with that good-humoured, defiant plain- 
 ness of style which is Crabbe's own — 
 
 " When bowl the second charms like bowl the first." 
 
 There is one thing which links Inebriety with 
 The Village though its importance in the former 
 is inconsiderable, namely, the thesis that rich 
 and poor are addicted to the same vices and 
 subject to like misfortunes. In Inebriety the 
 proud, the mean, the selfish and the great are 
 assembled together for no more serious purpose 
 than that Inebriety may wave her wand over 
 them all. It supphes here a convenient frame- 
 work, whereas in The Village this thesis is the 
 dominant note. Unlike the earlier poem. The 
 Village was written in a bad temper, and to 
 substantiate a theory. 
 
 For Crabbe, it must be observed, begins to 
 evolve several important opinions during his 
 time of refining in London. They appear as well 
 
34 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 in The Library as in The Village. They are all 
 sceptical. He sees no more visions for the present. 
 Reason has dissipated all the glamour which he 
 enjoyed in youth — 
 
 " For who so blest or who so great as I, 
 Wing'd round the globe with Rowland or Sir Guy ? " 
 
 But now, says he — 
 
 " My doughty giants all are slain or fled, 
 And all my knights — blue, green, and yellow — dead ! " 
 
 He spends his time on dragons of his own kind 
 now, pernicious dragons that flood the land with 
 poison. Those, for instance, who laud what they 
 caU the golden age, when laws were not — 
 
 " Bound by no ties which kept the soul in awe, 
 They dwelt at liberty, and love was law." 
 
 If he has small belief in the noble savage he 
 has as little in his brother, the pastoral swain, 
 who provides a starting-point for The Village. 
 Then again, there is in the first draft ^ of The 
 Library a long passage about sentimental novels — 
 
 " the brood of old Romance 
 Conceived by folly on the coast of France." 
 
 He detested the insincerity of those who preached 
 virtue and practised it not, or who muflfled up 
 mawkishness in the cloak of virtue. Crabbe 
 makes Delia write in the usual strain to her ever- 
 faithful Lucinda, and then comments — 
 
 1 Original MS. There were two editions — 1781 and 1783. 
 The next publication was in the Volume of 1807, where there 
 are many alterations. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 35 
 
 " Thus, gentle passions warm the generous maid, 
 No more reluctant, and no more afraid; 
 Thus Virtue shines, and in her loveliest dress 
 Not over nice, nor Virtue to excess." 
 
 There is nothing original in these opinions; these 
 were common property in those days and come 
 into all the satirists. There is hardly a topic in 
 Crabbe's satire that cannot be paralleled from 
 Cowper — even down to — 
 
 " Nectareous essences, Oljmipian dews. 
 Sermons, and city feasts, and fav'rite airs, 
 Aethereal journeys, submarine exploits. 
 And Katterfelto, with his hair on end 
 At his own wonders, wond'ring for his bread." 
 
 Cowper, also, has his fling at sentimental novels — 
 
 " Ye novelists, who mar what ye would mend, 
 Sniv'ling and driv'ling folly without end. 
 Whose corresponding misses fill the ream 
 With sentimental frippery and dream." 
 
 Crabbe, like Cowper, writes poems on truth, and 
 the progress of error, and the former pays special 
 attention to what his contemporary calls " feign'd 
 Arcadian scenes," 
 
 The Village begins with a plea for sincerity, and 
 declares tb.at they who glorify the happiness of 
 humble life under the guise of pastoral or anything 
 else are insincere, unthinking and unfeeling. Their 
 easy optimism disgusts him. 
 
 " On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign. 
 If Tityrus found the Golden Age again. 
 Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong. 
 Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song ? " 
 
 These hnes form one of Dr. Johnson's emenda- 
 tions, accepted by the author, and well expresses 
 
36 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 the mind of one who held that pastoral was 
 " easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting." So to 
 continue — 
 
 " Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains, 
 Because the Muses never knew their pains," 
 
 or — 
 
 " To sing of shepherds is an easy task." 
 
 Now the question arises, for what is Crabbe 
 pleading? Why does he wish to rend away 
 " the tinsel trappings of poetic pride " which 
 bedizen and conceal the real ills of the poor? 
 What is the predominant motive for writing? 
 Is it bitter hatred of insincerity and too credulous 
 sentimentality, or is it a burning compassion for 
 human suffering ? Whatever drove him to write 
 The Village, it was not the latter wholly. Sym- 
 pathy he always had; his later poems are full 
 of it, and even in The Village it has not been 
 wholly soured. Still, it is well to remember that 
 The Village was written in a bad-tempered, icono- 
 clastic spirit. There are two idols to be smashed, 
 two limited views to be denounced. Those who 
 have, suppose (and are glad to suppose, for their 
 own peace of mind) that those who have not are 
 happy and virtuous. Those who have not are 
 obsessed with the idea that those who have are 
 happy and fortunate. Crabbe rephes that the 
 poor are, like the rich, not over righteous; that 
 the rich, like the poor, are not always fortunate ; 
 and that neither can be said to be cumbered with 
 happiness. In fact, he comes back to the old 
 position, lightly taken up in Inebriety, that there 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 37 
 
 is much common ground between rich and poor, 
 and bad ground withal. He extends the dictum 
 which appears in The Library — 
 
 " Some drops of comfort on the favour'd fall, 
 But showers of sorrow are the lot of all" 
 
 If we take this point of view, there is no need 
 to find in The Village, as some have done, a lack 
 of unity in construction or in theory. The mistake 
 is to think that Crabbe holds a brief for the poor, 
 and then to ask why there was any necessity for 
 the second book, after his hero, the poor old man, 
 was dead and buried ; then further, to ask why he 
 should seem to scorn so bitterly his humble heroes, 
 and, by the introduction of the lament for Lord 
 Robert Manners, seem to change his theme from 
 an inteUigent and original protest against senti- 
 mental views of poverty to a didl, banal theory 
 of universal Ul. There is no change, the theory 
 is bad-tempered and banal aU the time. 
 
 To show the real iUs of the poor is only part 
 of Crabbe's work. The construction is clear, if 
 not very well in proportion, and wiU show his 
 intention. First, a protest against two of the 
 ways in which people gloss over the sufferings of 
 the poor — the pastoral way and the sentimental 
 way. Both come, ultimately, to the same thing 
 — easy, careless optimism; but the latter is more 
 important and flourishes in the works of Goldsmith, 
 and those who are fond of bringing in the cornu- 
 copia, whQe pastoral is played out. " Try it for 
 yourself," he says, " and then your idle praises 
 wiU wither at your Ups, and you will find that 
 
38 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 Nature's niggard hand gives scant enjoyment of 
 those blessings which you find in rural life — 
 health, fair landscape, homely, healthy fare, and 
 peaceful days. There is no peace, not even in 
 old age. Old age means the workhouse, the 
 fussy, heartless apothecary and the jovial, heart- 
 less parson; and the end of old age is to become 
 one of the ' happier dead.' " 
 
 The second book is shorter, and less fully 
 worked out, but still a complement to the first. 
 Some frail joys the poor have, he admits, but they 
 are shadowed by rampant vices — theft and slander 
 and drunkenness and unchastity : this, to show 
 the rich that all men are of the same " poor, 
 blind, bewilder'd, erring race." He tells these 
 vices with no sparing pen, for they were those of 
 that " wild amphibious race " of Aldborough who 
 embittered the days of his early manhood. Then 
 he turns to the poor and says that it is not they 
 alone who are the victims of sorrow and distress, 
 and gives as an example the death of Lord Robert 
 Manners. If the elegy is too long for the poem, 
 and if the admonition to the poor is extravagant — 
 
 " If such there be, then let your murmurs cease, 
 Think, think of him, and take your lot in peace," 
 
 still the idea is sound, and completes the circle. 
 
 The Village has a theory which is not a plea 
 but a protest. The iconoclastic spirit controls 
 the poem, and if there breaks in strongly at times 
 a deep spirit of sympathy, it springs from the 
 background, almost accidentally. It may be said 
 of Crabbe that he can gain enthusiasm for any- 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 39 
 
 thing of which he writes, even for those miserable 
 mortals whose sad fate he makes still more sad 
 and repulsive to show to the fuU his disgust with 
 those who caU them happy, to substantiate his 
 opinion that in this world there is a surfeit of 
 sadness, and to satisfy a private grudge against 
 this class in particular. What makes the matter 
 worse, is that this tendency to enthusiasm works 
 in two ways. We can understand the confession 
 of the poor old man, written with a tenderness of 
 feeling which makes it one of the best examples 
 of the author's nobler manner. 
 
 " Why do I liye when I desire to be 
 At once from life and life's long labour free ? 
 like leaves in spring, the young are blown away, 
 Without the sorrows of a slow decay; 
 I, like yon wither'd leaf remain behind, 
 Nipt by the frost, and shivering in the wind." 
 
 But there comes something, in addition, which 
 Crabbe may claim as more peculiarly his own, this, 
 namely, that, when he describes the woes of the 
 poor, the theme catches him up and he seems to 
 delight in piling woe on woe with a zest which in 
 no way corresponds to any ulterior theorising 
 motive that he may have. 
 
 Crabbe's Village is " nature pictured too severely 
 true," and although it is weU not to gush sen- 
 tentiously about the pleasures of hope and such 
 things, it is well also to remember that sometimes — 
 
 " In Hope's garden grow 
 Wreaths for each toil, a charm for every woe," 
 
 as he, indeed, did in The Parish Register, when 
 he is saner of mood. His theory, like Words- 
 
40 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 worth's opinion and practice as regards diction, 
 may be an ofEence, and, in any case, is a thing 
 for which allowance must be made. That done, 
 it need not, and does not, conceal the true merits 
 of the poet. 
 
 Now comes the crucial point. How is it that 
 with aU the so-caUed disadvantages of a sordid 
 and woeful subject and a bad temper, and in 
 spite of the rather ominous threat to paint the 
 cot " as Truth wiU paint it, and as Bards wiU 
 not," The Village stUl remains a poem to which 
 one can return again and again with pleasure, and 
 enjoy as all poetry is enjoyed? If with Hazlitt 
 we hold that " Mr. Crabbe's Helicon is choked 
 up with weeds and corruption," we find ranged 
 against us aU those great men and keen critics of 
 his own and a later age to whom he was a dehght 
 and a consolation ; — -Johnson and Horace Walpole ; 
 Fox and Scott, both of whom found comfort in 
 him when nearing their end; Wordsworth and 
 Byron; Jeffrey and Wilson; Tennyson, Newman 
 and Fitzgerald — to name only a few. But, apart 
 from any question of authority, the crowning — 
 though obvious — explanation is that Crabbe is a 
 poet. 
 
 This is what Hazhtt substantially denies. " He 
 has an ugly subject," says the critic in effect; 
 " his work js necessarily ugly, because he makes 
 no choice among the ugly things before him, but 
 mechanically transcribes what he sees, and so 
 makes an exact facsimile." Having arrived at 
 this stage, he has a perfect right to ask (as he 
 does) why Crabbe took the trouble to put into 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 41 
 
 harsh and metallic verse what would have been 
 more to the point in prose. He contrasts Crabbe's 
 work with Pope's " In the worst inn's worst room 
 see Villiers lies." " Pope describes what is strik- 
 ing, Crabbe would have described merely what 
 was there. ... In Pope . . . there is an appeal 
 to the imagination; you see what is passuig in a 
 poetical point of view. In Crabbe there is no 
 foU, no contrast, no impulse given to the mind." 
 
 Hazlitt is here trumping up a case against 
 Crabbe, but he knows better than to suppose that 
 descriptions of ugly things are themselves ugly — 
 as his criticism of Pope shows. Yet his argument 
 against Crabbe comes to almost the same thing. — 
 " Crabbe describes ugly things ; his descriptions 
 are true because they are facsimiles ; because they 
 are facsimiles they are ugly." 
 
 Crabbe's descriptions are not facsimiles, for the 
 facsimile is not possible in any art. Neither are 
 they necessarily ugly, for art is not a copy of life. 
 And of Crabbe especially, these statements are 
 right, for there is in him a spirit which Hazlitt 
 missed, that zest which has been called to 'witness 
 before. 
 
 The capital mistake is to turn one's mind ever 
 upon the subject, a lesson which Hazhtt might 
 have learnt again and again from Lamb, whose 
 opinion on Hogarth is to the point here. Lamb 
 takes up the cudgels on behalf of his idol against 
 those who " confound the painting of subjects in 
 common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar 
 artist." Why should we be for ever hugging our 
 names and theories, and passing by unregarded 
 
42 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 what we scorn as being outside the pale? Look 
 at the execution, for thought can unvulgarise any 
 subject. Then he goes on to talk of " Gin Lane " 
 — but it might well be of Crabbe, " Here is 
 plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon 
 a superficial view ; and accordingly a cold spectator 
 feels himself immediately disgusted or repelled. 
 I have seen many turn away from it, not being 
 able to bear it." But there is " imagination in 
 it — that power which draws all things to one: — 
 which makes things animate and inanimate, 
 beings with their attributes, subjects and their 
 accessories, take one colour, and serve to one 
 effect. Everything — to use a vulgar expression — 
 tells J'"' Here is a simple example — 
 
 " Lo ! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, 
 Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor ; 
 From thence a length of burning sand appears, 
 Where the thin harvest waves its wither 'd ears ; 
 Rank weeds, that every art and care defy. 
 Reign o'er the land and rob the blighted rye : 
 There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar. 
 And to the ragged infant threaten war; 
 There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil ; 
 There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil ; 
 Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf, 
 The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf; 
 O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade. 
 And claspiag tares cling round the sickly blade ; 
 With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, 
 And a sad splendour vainly shines around." 
 
 The landscape is not attractive and Crabbe knows 
 it; yet he himself has a sober appreciation of it, 
 and feels the joy of creation when he makes 
 poetry of it. The more one reads this and similar 
 passages, the more one realises that he is using 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 43 
 
 his details, not to make a catalogue, but in order 
 that each may carry a Uttle leaven with it. We 
 do not remember the thistles and mallows and 
 charlock, nor the red and blue of poppy and 
 bugloss, but an impression soaks into one's- mind, 
 aptly summed up by the last line — " And a sad 
 splendour vainly shines aroiuid." What could 
 be less of a facsimile than the following lines on 
 the workhouse ? 
 
 " Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor, 
 Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door ; 
 There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, 
 And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day." 
 
 These two quotations would seem sufficient to 
 prove that Crabbe is not a man of facts only, 
 but also a man of design, to use Ruskin's phrases. 
 When we come to the apothecary, whom Crabbe 
 dislikes, the same artistic joy may be found again. 
 As a man, Crabbe detests him; but as an artist, 
 he loves to picture him, as the first couplet shows 
 well enough — 
 
 " Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat, 
 All pride and business, bustle and conceit." 
 
 So with the whole poem. It is a story of ugly 
 and repulsive things, yet it is a beautiful poem. 
 Crabbe makes this of it almost in spite of himself, 
 for he has no wish to paUiate the sorrow and sin 
 that he finds. While we hear the bitter tone, we 
 are carried away by the creative joy of the artist 
 far above the grovelling theory; and the pain of 
 others, which in the " cockpit of life " would make 
 us start back in horror, becomes in the artist's 
 
44 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 presentation, as it were, our own sorrow. This 
 has its compensations, for it does not shatter, 
 but consolidates and leaves calm after storm. 
 One's own sorrows are true tragedy. 
 
 Crabbe's ideas in The Village, then, the prose 
 doctrine which began the game, do not matter, 
 as far as the poetry itself is concerned. They are 
 in his case easily separable. Such is not the case 
 with Wordsworth (especially) and with other 
 poets of the new school; — with them the ideas 
 have often no independent existence except as 
 poetry, and are in themselves poetical. 
 
 " One impulse from a vernal wood, 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can." 
 
 That is not philosophy, nor even a matter of 
 reason at all; it is poetry, and as anything else 
 would be mere absurdity; it is not the highest 
 poetry, because it is an attempt to put out a 
 poetical belief in too reasonable form, Crabbe is 
 always logical enough. All his life he is a critic 
 and observer, and comes naturally to narrative 
 as his proper business. It is of that sort where 
 unreason is out of place, and is besides a more 
 pleasant outlet for shrewdness than satire or 
 moral essay. 
 
 His Hfe cuts across two ages, and the problems 
 connected with each part of it differ. The clear- 
 sighted intelligence and the sceptical, unspeculative 
 cast of his mind join him closely with those who 
 lived in the days before the coming of German 
 philosophy : yet he breaks away on his own line 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 45 
 
 with his interest in common things and with his 
 rediscovery of the narrative kind of poetry, which 
 was not well cultivated in the eighteenth century. 
 In the next century he stands as one of the old 
 school : yet he has qualities that attract men of 
 all opinions and is able to supply, even at this 
 early date, work which points forward, if feebly, 
 to Browning and Meredith — though it was not 
 this that appealed most strongly to his readers. 
 
 The mention of Browning and Meredith shdws 
 that we have changed our ground. We began 
 speaking about the poet's ideas; we have ended 
 in psychology. The change is a sound one and 
 is the best illustration of what is meant by the 
 difference in the problems that face us in the two 
 periods of Crabbe's life. The Crabbe of 1783 is 
 a satirist and a poet : the Crabbe of 1807 is on 
 his way to attain the wider scope of a teller of 
 tales in verse, and by 1812 he has reached his 
 full achievement in that direction. One never 
 thinks of approaching The Village and the Tales 
 from the same point of view. The thing is im- 
 possible. 
 
 The Village is of all Crabbe's works the most 
 deserving of the title of poem, for there the 
 poetry is throughout solemn and sustained. And 
 if his greatest and most characteristic work lies 
 elsewhere, still, he never regains the conciseness 
 and sureness of touch for which The Village is 
 unique, and never again catches for any long 
 space its Johnsonian solemnity of tone. Indeed, 
 it was not his way to be always whoUy serious, 
 even in the saddest of his tales. He liked variety, 
 
46 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 and seems to have made it a thing to be tried 
 for; but he paid the penalty by thereby con- 
 tracting two bad habits — proUxity and an often 
 shameless levity — which are so common in him 
 that one wonders at the conciseness, uniform- 
 ity, and high seriousness of The Village. Once 
 or twice only, he gets nearer the earth and 
 lets himself drop into that condensed, epigram- 
 matic, sharp-cornered style of his, as in the 
 portrait of the apothecary who " carries fate and 
 physic in his eye." Of course, this is just the 
 right style for the fussy, consequential little man. 
 Crabbe knows these things, and although he 
 became sadly slipshod later, sees what carefulness 
 in verse means. It is difl&cult to exaggerate the 
 carefulness of metre and expression exercised in 
 The Village, both in the beating out of single lines 
 and in the building of periods. One cannot 
 forbear to quote once more two lines which 
 illustrate this fact in a high degree, as well as the 
 two truths that Crabbe can give rich impressions 
 in few words, and that " for the purposes of a 
 picture it does not matter that mud is muddy " — 
 
 " There where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, 
 And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day." 
 
 The Library, on the other hand, shows some of 
 the variety of his style. It is full of moralising 
 and useful knowledge, a veritable treatise de omni 
 scihili, a later son of the " Georgics," and a brother 
 of "The Art of Preserving Health" and "The 
 Sugar Cane." He has not yet declared war on 
 the moralised song. The style, too, is often a 
 jog-trot and lacks crispness — 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 47 
 
 " We see how reason calms the raging mind, 
 And how contending passions urge mankind : 
 Some, won by virtue, glow with sacred fire, 
 Some, lured by vice, indulge the low desire." 
 
 Sometimes this dullness is enlivened in a mechani- 
 cal way by antithesis, sometimes by the use of the 
 slow, solemn, dignified stride — 
 
 " Like some vast flood, unbounded, fierce, and strong. 
 His nature leads ungovern'd man along : " 
 
 or, on the other hand, by the use of that comic, 
 undignified, vigorous style which comes in at all 
 times, in and out of season — 
 
 " Our nicer palates lighter labours seek, 
 Cloy'd with a iolio-Numier once a week; 
 Bibles, with cuts and comments, thus go down : 
 E'en light Voltaire is numier'd through the town." 
 
 The best things in the poem are in those places 
 where his humour breaks in. One of them is an 
 addition in the reprint of 1807 — when he says of 
 the good old days of religion that, then, to doubt 
 was " guilt extreme," 
 
 " And all was gospel that a monk could dream." 
 
 It gives us a sad shock to hear, in the next line, 
 that — 
 
 " Insulted Reason fled the grovelling soul." 
 
 Best of aU, perhaps, is the occasion when he comes 
 across a shelf of his old favourites, the romance- 
 books; and while stiU remembering them with 
 affection, he is not altogether respectful. The 
 important point about it is the zest with which 
 it is written, and this is seen especially in his making 
 
48 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 the romance condemn itself with its own lips, if 
 one may use the expression, just as sentimental 
 misses, Calvinists, Arminians, Atheists, and fools 
 of all sorts are made to do in The Library and all 
 through his later works. When he does this, he 
 is not writing satire at all, for he proves that there 
 is something which he values even more than his 
 thesis. What he is writing is something ■ nearer 
 parody. 
 
 " Hark ! hollow blasts through empty courts resound, 
 And shadowy forms with staring eyes stalk round; 
 See ! moats and bridges, walls and castles rise, 
 Ghosts, fairies, demons, dance before our eyes; 
 Lo ! magic verse inscribed on golden gate. 
 And bloody hand that beckons on to fate : — 
 ' And who art thou, thou little page, unfold ? 
 Say, doth thy lord my daribel withhold ? 
 Go teU him straight. Sir Knight, thou must resign 
 The captive queen; — ^for Claribel is mine.' " 
 
 Crabbe's literary occupations between 1785 and 
 1807 are interesting, though aU that he wrote was 
 destroyed, save what appears in the volume pub- 
 lished in the latter year. An English Treatise on 
 Botany, three novels, and three tales in verse are 
 among the works which went as fuel for the 
 periodic bonfires in his garden. Even at this early 
 date, he has a leaning towards narrative, though 
 he is not yet ripe for it. It is only after the 
 experience given by The Parish Register and The 
 Borough that he will be able to produce his Tales 
 in Verse. The stages of development, as we shall 
 see, are not hard to trace. What these early 
 attempts prove, however, is that he was not in 
 any large measure influenced in his choice of 
 medium by the revival of narrative poetry, that 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 49 
 
 is, by Scott and Byron. He began with novels, 
 and these of his own peculiar tjrpe. " Reginald 
 Glanshawe " was, we are told, the portrait of *' an 
 assuming, overbearing, ambitious mind, rendered 
 interesting by some generous virtues, and grad- 
 ually wearing down into idiotism " — which is a 
 good general statement of the work in the study 
 of character done by Crabbe in later days, and is 
 peculiarly applicable to " Edward Shore." An- 
 other began with the description of a wretched 
 room, not so well done, his wife told him, as his 
 poetical work. Novels being, apparently, too 
 large for him to handle, he turned to verse and 
 adapted the story of Naaman, based a tale on the 
 Pedlar of SwafiEham and wrote another called 
 " Gipsy Will." These not proving satisfactory, 
 he left pure narrative for a time and wrote the 
 nondescript Parish Register, where, however, 
 his true narrative genius had room to exercise 
 itself. 
 
 This is the real value of The Parish Register, 
 that it marks a clear step towards narrative, and 
 this very fact implies that there is less propaganda 
 work in it. This, in its turn, makes it Ukely that 
 it will be written with more freedom and openness 
 than its solemn predecessor. The Village. To 
 illustrate these things and to show their con- 
 nection will not cause much difficulty. 
 
 At the very outset, as has been noticed often 
 enough, Crabbe declares in so many words that 
 he has been guilty of malicious misrepresentation, 
 and that for his story of the Baptisms, Marriages, 
 and Burials which appear in his Register he has 
 
60 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 found a new basis — good and evil mixed, the 
 " bitter-sweet " life — 
 
 " but man has skill 
 And power to part them when he feels the will." 
 
 But he makes no theory of it after he has finished 
 prologising. He starts off with an account of 
 what is pleasant, probably as a direct contrast to 
 The Village ; then he does his worst for what is 
 unpleasant, though with a grotesqueness which 
 is lacking in the earlier poem. If it is elevation 
 of tone that makes The Village readable, it is pure 
 glee that saves this part of The Parish Register. 
 
 " Here in cabal, a disputatious crew 
 Each evening meet ; the sot, the cheat, the shrew : 
 Riots are nightly heard : — ^the curse, the cries 
 Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies; 
 While shrieking children hold each threat'ning hand, 
 And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand : 
 Boys, in their first-stol'n rags, to swear begin. 
 And girls, who heed not dress, are skill 'd in gin." 
 
 Moral indignation is no longer in his province. 
 After the prologue the real business begins; and 
 though, as he teUs his little stories and paints his 
 little pictures, he stops sometimes to tell us that 
 life is " bitter-sweet," it obstructs neither him 
 nor us. It does not reaUy matter. He is merely 
 apologising for former misdeeds, and does not 
 make it a thing to be proved up to the hilt. He 
 has caught the impartial tone. Only once does 
 he bring in anything that reminds us of The 
 Village — 
 
 " Your sweetest food will but your life sustain. 
 And your best pleasure be a rest from pain." 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 51 
 
 He has no respect for this opinion. If he had, 
 would he put it into the mouth of Sir Edward 
 Archer, the amorous knight whose only object 
 in maintaining the position is to persuade Fanny 
 Price to cast away the happiness of her rustic life ? 
 Crabbe does not confine himself to yokels and 
 low persons. The Register tells of several whom 
 the world counts high, who can write a fair hand — 
 
 " The bridegroom's letters stand in row above, 
 Tapering, yet stout, like pine-trees in his grove," — 
 
 far different from the crooked scrawls of the 
 clowns. Besides Sir Edward Archer, there are 
 Sir Richard Monday, the parvenu; a Lady of the 
 Manor, and the five rectors of Dibble, the Sexton, 
 one of whom is the poet himself. And apart even 
 from these, the characters are not solely " the 
 poor laborious natives of the place." He does 
 not neglect " him that grazes " and " him that 
 farms," both of whom have a fair share in the 
 fat of the land ; the Widow Goe, for instance, who — 
 
 " Lost her husband when their loves were young. 
 But kept her farm, her credit, and her tongue," 
 
 and thereby throve. Besides, there is the jolly 
 landlord of the Old Crown Inn, whose portrait 
 comes as a flash of the real Crabbe after the essay- 
 stuff, good enough in its way, of the introduction 
 to the section on Burials — 
 
 "What I behold are feverish fits of strife, 
 'Twixt fears of djdng and desire of life : 
 Those earthly hopes, that to the last endure; 
 Those fears, that hopes superior fail to cure; 
 At best a sad submission to the doom, 
 Which, turning from the danger, lets it come." 
 
52 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 That is the old humdrum couplet with no 
 character behind it. At other times Crabbe has 
 a wonderful dexterity in making all sorts of lights 
 shine through his couplets at a moment's notice, 
 and can reduce the inertia of the measure and give 
 it pliability; so, when he begins his Register-list, 
 the tune is unmistakable. 
 
 " With Andrew Collett we the year begin, 
 The blind, fat landlord of the Old Crown Inn — 
 Big as his butt, and, for the self-same use. 
 To take in stores of strong fermenting juice. 
 On his huge chair beside the fire he sate. 
 In revel chief, and umpire in debate ; 
 Each night his string of vulgar tales he told ; 
 When ale was cheap and bachelors were bold : 
 His heroes all were famous in their days, 
 Cheats were his boast and drunkards had his praise." 
 
 Can this indeed be the author of The Village ? 
 Where is his saeva indignatio ? 
 
 On the contrary, Crabbe looks on the gay old 
 rogue with sympathetic eyes without in any way 
 associating himself with his point of view, further 
 than consenting to use it for artistic purposes. 
 He offers nothing in excuse, says nothing in 
 mitigation of the fault. On the other hand, he 
 cannot turn up his eyes in moral disgust. In 
 fact no moral solution to the problem is given, 
 and no attempt made to attain thereto. Crabbe 
 wiU not take sides. 
 
 With the same glee he tells of Peter Pratt, the 
 gardener, who must needs name his child Lonicera ; 
 moreover, it gives him an opportunity to air his 
 botanical lore, for all the world like Chaucer 
 telling of the mishap of Phaeton, and asking 
 naively of the reader " Wilt thou lere of sterres 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 63 
 
 aught ? " And so with the ancient maiden who 
 has a house full of glittering treasures, all in nice 
 order, all as cold as their mistress; — where, as 
 usual, he works for the impression with an energy 
 that does not flag. 
 
 The unfortunates complete the tale — Phoebe 
 Dawson and her sisters in misfortune, Robin 
 Dingley, the tramp, and, in a less degree, Gerard 
 Ablett, whose quiver is too fuU for his purse. 
 And even here we find yet once again the answer 
 to the argument of The Village in Isaac Ashford, 
 " the wise good man contented to be poor." Few 
 things show more clearly, too, how Crabbe can be 
 respectful without forfeiting the virtue of humour. 
 
 " I feel his absence in the hours of prayer, 
 And view his seat and sigh for Isaac there : 
 I see no more the white locks thinly spread 
 Round the bald polish of that honour 'd head; 
 No more that awful glance on playful wight, 
 Compell'd to kneel and tremble at the sight. 
 To fold his fingers, all in dread the while. 
 Till Mister Ashford soften'd to a smile." 
 
 The inevitable conclusion which we draw from 
 all this is that Crabbe is learning to care far more 
 for the character of his people than for the circum- 
 stances in which they are placed. His emancipa- 
 tion is complete enough for him to use with effect 
 that comic device which allows people to expose 
 the meanness and limitation of their minds. He 
 has caught the knack of letting his characters 
 put their own cases, and is especially successful 
 if these cases are hjrpocritical or naif or egotistical, 
 or possessed of some such quahty. In the con- 
 fessions of the old man in The Village, and of 
 
64 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 Isaac Ashford, as in that of La Fontaine's poor 
 woodcutter who calls for Death, all is solemn. 
 But Crabbe has a manner like Chaucer's, or like 
 the other style of La Fontaine, who, like Crabbe, 
 writes dull prefaces in prose, good letters and 
 poetry of disillusion, though he is neat where the 
 rector is cumbrous. 
 
 " What sholde he studie, and make him-selven wood, 
 Upon a book in cloisfcre alwey to poure, 
 Or swinken with his handes, and laboure, 
 As Austin bit ? How shal the world be served ? 
 Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved." 
 
 That is Chaucer putting the Monk's case for him. 
 Here is the king of beasts putting his own — 
 
 " Pour moi, satisfaisant mes appdtits gloutons, 
 
 J'ai d6vor6 force moutons. 
 Que m'avaient-ils fait ? Nulle offense ; 
 M§me il m'est arrive quelquefois de manger 
 
 Le berger. 
 Je me devouerai done, s'il le faut ; mais je pense 
 Qu'il est bon que chacun s'accuse ainsi que moi." 
 
 Crabbe catches the same malicious note in many 
 of the confessions and case-puttings in The Parish 
 Register, and after. Sir Edward Archer, Leah 
 Cousins, and her rival, Doctor Glibb, give us 
 nothing particularly good ; but the " self -com- 
 mending, self -confiding mind " of the dying man, 
 the thoughts of the Widow Goe when about to 
 depart this life — 
 
 " No preparation for my soul's affairs, 
 No leave petition 'd for the barn's repairs;" — 
 
 as well as the creed of the infidel poacher are 
 worth attention, if merely to show Crabbe as one 
 of those men of active intelligence who count 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 55 
 
 Chaucer among their leaders. The rustic infidel 
 believed 
 
 " in neither God nor ghost ; 
 That when the sod upon the sinner press'd. 
 He, like the saint, had everlasting rest; 
 That never priest believed his doctrines true. 
 But would, for profit, own himself a Jew, 
 Or worship wood and stone, as honest heathen do ; 
 That fools alone on future worlds rely. 
 And all who die for faith, deserve to die." 
 
 This has been chosen because it is complementary 
 to the stripping bare of another hater of the 
 priesthood — the Calvinistic preacher in The 
 Borough — 
 
 " See their priesthood piling book on book ; 
 Yea, books of infidels, we're told, and plays. 
 Put out by heathens in the wink'd-on days; 
 The very letters are of crooked kind, 
 And show the strange perverseness of their mind. 
 Have I this learning ? When the Lord would speak. 
 Think ye he needs the Latin and the Greek ? 
 And lo ! with all their learning, when they rise 
 To preach, in view the ready sermon lies; 
 Some low-prized stuff they purchased at the stalls, 
 And more like Seneca's than mine or Paul's." 
 
 Crabbe has two distinct manners; that seen in 
 this dramatic monologue (of which a part only has 
 been quoted) is one of them — that mood of 
 irreverence for things human which cuts him 
 away from some of the common opinions com- 
 placently held by many people at that time, and 
 summed up in the following lines from Campbell — 
 
 " Eternal Nature ! When thy giant hand 
 Had heaved the floods, and fixed the trembling land. 
 When life sprang startling at thy plastic call. 
 Endless her forms, and man the lord of all." 
 
56 GEOKGE CRABBE 
 
 He has also his solemn and reverent manner, 
 but even here he is as far from the easy optimism 
 of some of the moral essajdsts as from the deep 
 belief that Wordsworth had in the overpowering 
 nobleness that could be found in humble souls, 
 and from the " hyperbolical and hypocritical 
 professions of universal philanthropy " (as he 
 calls them) which came with great facihty from 
 the mouths of the lovers of France. With human 
 nature viewed philosophically, and with man in 
 relation to the Universe of which he forms part — 
 with these he has no concern. He takes an im- 
 partial interest in particular human characters, 
 and to exalt or degrade them is not his business. 
 If he has any idea behind his practice, it is that 
 humble people are worth studying and putting 
 into a story without raising them to a higher 
 power. Not that he likes them for their mean- 
 ness, as HazUtt would say. It is pleasant to be 
 able to quote Ruskin in defence, and to call him, 
 as Ruskin does, an exponent of healthy naturahsm, 
 as opposed to the sensuaUsm of those who revel 
 in filth for filth's sake. On the contrary, he likes 
 them for the good use that he can make of them, 
 despite meanness or ugliness or humbleness; — or 
 rather, to use the Nietzchean formula, he likes 
 them for the power that he has of making art 
 out of them, and therefore is not a purveyor of 
 " pohce or detective-art." 
 
 The Parish Register is a poem of pictures of all 
 sorts, but none are better than those which breathe 
 calmness or a strong, yet gentle, pathos : for 
 example, there is the glimpse which we catch of 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 67 
 
 the old schoolmistress as she sits at her cottage 
 door in the cool of the evening, knitting, her Bible 
 on her knee; or, again, the Miller's daughter in 
 her affliction, where Crabbe, who has not a light 
 hand, attains a gentleness of touch and reverence 
 of manner which he never surpasses, and which 
 remind us of certain sketches of " Geoffrey 
 Crayon." 
 
 "Throughout the lanes she glides, at evening's close, 
 And softly lulls her infant to repose; 
 Then sits and gazes, but with viewless look, 
 As gilds the moon the rippling of the brook; 
 And sings her vespers, but in voice so low. 
 She hears their murmurs as the waters flow : 
 And she too murmurs, and begins to find 
 The solemn wanderings of a wounded mind." 
 
 He had been reading Mrs, Inchbald, it seems, and 
 his MiUer's daughter and Phoebe Dawson are of 
 the same line as Agnes Primrose in " Nature and 
 Art " and as Hetty Sorrel later. But there is a 
 more important influence than this, which has 
 not been sufficiently noticed. Where did Crabbe 
 learn that slow, liquid tune of the passage just 
 quoted, which is so diflferent from his usual snappy 
 measure ? Is it too venturesome to suppose that 
 he has the flow of Spenser's verse in his ears, 
 especially in view of the following facts : that 
 Spenser was one of his favourite poets; that the 
 poems of 1807 are dotted here and there with 
 quotations from Spenser and manifest allusions 
 to him; that in the Birth of Flattery, he turns to 
 allegory and sets off with two Spenserian stanzas 
 (though not particularly good ones); and that in 
 the tale of Sir Eustace Orey, he has the same 
 
58 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 smooth, continuous verse, with the characteristic 
 Spenserian turn in the middle of the stanza? 
 
 " Upon that boundless plain, below, 
 The setting sun's last rays were shed, 
 And gave a mild and sober glow, 
 Where all were still, asleep or dead; 
 Vast ruins in the midst were spread, 
 Pillars and pediments sublime. 
 Where the grey moss had formed a bed. 
 And clothed the crumbling spoils of time." 
 
 Sir Eustace Grey is a strange poem in itself, and 
 still more strange in being found amongst the 
 works of Crabbe. At first there appears to be 
 nothing in it which will connect it with the rest 
 of his work ; — nothing except the heading, " Scene- 
 — A Mad-House," which may afford comfort to 
 some, but does not go far. The couplet is aban- 
 doned for a stanza of fuller rhythm, and the un- 
 dignified, colloquial style is exchanged for one 
 which is noble and elevated, and altogether free 
 from mountebank tricks. There, if anywhere in 
 Crabbe, is poetry which may be enjoyed without 
 any necessity for an acquired taste. Further, 
 the usual observation of everyday business gives 
 place to a following of a wandering mind thj^ough 
 all its travels and tortures. Pact is ousted by 
 phantasmagoria, and the poem may be called 
 romantic. Still, it is easy to exaggerate its 
 uniqueness. It is the first on the list of Crabbe's 
 tales, having been begun in 1804 and published 
 in the Volume of 1807. He seems to have made 
 experiments in versification about this time, 
 employing octosyllabics in quatrains, single, double 
 or triple, as in The Hall of Justice, Woman, and 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 59 
 
 Reflections, respectively. He was not satisfied 
 with either tale or metre, and went on with 
 his couplets in The Parish Register and The 
 Borough. 
 
 However that may be. Sir Eustace Grey has 
 things in common with those episodes in The 
 Parish Register which, by reason of their length 
 and movement, depart from the simple portrait 
 and approach the scope of the tale. The theme, 
 ia spite of phantasmagoria, is characteristic : a 
 mind broken down by the world or by its own 
 foolishness, or by both. A man is fuU of happi- 
 ness; his wife is unfaithful and he sees her pine 
 and die; he becomes mad, thinks himself perse- 
 cuted by two pitiless demons who urge him the 
 whole world over; then rehgious feeling brings 
 peace to his mind. He teUs his story. " Robin 
 Dingley " in The Parish Register is sUghter but 
 similar : a poor man has a legacy ; the claim is 
 proved, but lawyers cheat him; the disappoint- 
 ment turns his brain, and he becomes a Rambler, 
 rmming away periodically, no one knows where. 
 
 In one respect, indeed. Sir Eustace Grey is more 
 characteristic than the other. The Parish Register 
 is comparatively small, and its parts are written 
 concisely — Crabbe ha^s no room to work himseK 
 up. In Sir EvMace Grey he makes use of his 
 opportunities, and, although the swing of the 
 verse is maintained, the piling up of the tortures 
 of the madman is excessive. Crabbe's great fault 
 is deUberation. He Ukes to take his time, and 
 work things out thoroughly, and in this he does 
 not improve as time goes on. If the fit is not 
 
60 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 on him, he has recourse to perseverance, which 
 is rather chilling. 
 
 Thirdly, Crabbe makes Sir Eustace reveal 
 himself. The story gains in value by being in the 
 first person. In fact, it is in the main a dramatic 
 monologue, and so refers back to what we 
 have seen in the Register, and forward to what 
 is one characteristic of the poet's narrative 
 method. 
 
 The Parish Register has been treated at length 
 because it gives in the most pleasant and most 
 succinct form some of those qualities in Crabbe 
 which, unfortunately, go so frequently unnoticed : 
 — his urbanity, his humour, his pleasant sceptical 
 observation, his real ability as a painter of pictures 
 and as a story-teller, the variety of his work, his 
 joy in artistic creation; — this as well as the 
 Crabbe whom we all know, " Nature's sternest 
 painter, yet the best," the poet of the miseries 
 and sad stories of his parish poor. He has been 
 badly treated; the "Elegant Extracts" began 
 the slander, andHazlitt, being a person of authority, 
 'finished what the Extracts began. And in spite 
 of all that good men have said against it, the 
 slander remains. 
 
 It is a useful argument, too, against the com- 
 monly held opinion that " in The Village, the first 
 work of his maturer style, Crabbe reached his 
 highest level; indeed, his later work may be 
 looked upon as little more than an expansion of 
 what he did there." One learns much about 
 Crabbe by forgetting for a while that he ever 
 was one who may have had theories about rustic. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 61 
 
 or any, life, especially as these came in his early 
 unhappy years. 
 
 Crabbe did not long delay in giving the public 
 another taste of his new self; for in 1810 appeared 
 The Borough, a colossal poem of about ten thousand 
 lines, in twenty-four letters, each devoted to some 
 aspect of life in a seaport, or to individuals in 
 whom the author was interested. The poem has 
 several sorts of importance. On the one hand, 
 it is the crowning achievement of the author in 
 that class of poetry which he made his own — 
 realistic description of men and things. In the 
 second place, it has, like The Parish Register, a 
 distinct place in his development in his own 
 particular style of narrative. 
 
 The Borough, as the early critics saw, is not so 
 easy to defend as The Parish Register. It has 
 greater beauties, but it has graver defects. Much 
 of this evil may be set down to the score of bulk, 
 but bulk will not explain the epidemic of deep 
 heart searchings concerning their ideas of poetry 
 which fell upon the reviewers on the appearance 
 of The Borough. Jeffrey, whose review of the 
 volume of 1807 is just, except in so far as it is 
 used as a point of departtu-e for an excursus 
 against the Lake School with its " fantastical 
 oddity and puling childishness," here finds himself 
 in so great difficulty that he must resort to special 
 pleading and hammer out a fitting definition of 
 poetry — rather apologetically — " For it is common 
 human nature, and common human feelings, after 
 all, that form the true source of interest in poetry 
 of every description." Six months later, Gifford, 
 
62 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 too, thinks he must judge by principles, and, 
 declaring that poetry should be the paradise of 
 fancy and a refuge from the hard world, can give 
 no such favourable judgment as the Scottish critic. 
 The two defects pointed out by Jeffrey show 
 clearly what was troubling him. " He has de- 
 scribed many things not worth describing ... he 
 has frequently excited disgust, instead of pity or 
 indignation, in the breasts of his readers." 
 
 Now Crabbe himself recognised that his work 
 lay open to this kind of attack, and, being as 
 usual, in dreadful terror lest he should be mis- 
 understood, determined to forestall criticism by 
 a prefatory explanation and defence. Later, 
 taking up Jeffrey's challenge, he adds to the 
 discussion in the Preface to the Tales. His 
 custom had been to allow another to weed out 
 from his work those parts which seemed objection- 
 able. Now, however, he thinks that he is old 
 enough to decide some few points for himself; 
 and so he goes on, piling up the most wearisome 
 and foohsh apologies for certain trivial points 
 which may be thought open to objection by 
 " really polite people, with cultivated minds and 
 harmonious tempers," some of the overflow being 
 collected in notes added at the end of the poem. 
 Though most of the Preface is nonsense, one or 
 two saUent points give it some value : — the fact 
 that he has begun to defend the fidelity of his 
 descriptions of things, individuals or society, and 
 this as an absolute thing, without reference to 
 the untruthfulness of others. In so far as it 
 refers to society, it does not mean that the poor 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 63 
 
 only are to be described, and simply because so 
 many people like to leave them out; nor does it 
 mean that the miseries of the poor are to be 
 described because bards like to talk of " Mincio's 
 banks." The declaration is nothing more than a 
 justification for his giving importance to those 
 things which are evil and unpleasant — the real 
 evil as a complement to the real good which is in 
 the world, and not as against the false good 
 which is plastered over the world by dishonest 
 people. He is haU afraid of this constructive 
 principle of his, though it is implicit in the un- 
 obtrusive " bitter-sweet " principle of The Parish 
 Register — so timid that he can talk as follows : — 
 " The Poor are here almost of necessity introduced, 
 for they must be considered, in every place, as a 
 large and interesting portion of its inhabitants." 
 
 Then also, there are other things — a supple- 
 mentary defence of his faithful method, contained 
 in his ironical references to " reaUy poUte people," 
 a bowing to the wants of the public in the matter 
 of variety, and a second defensive stand, this time 
 on the question of his choice of subject, his line 
 of argument being that if want and suffering in 
 real life do not sear the mind of the beholder deeply, 
 can they do so when portrayed by the poet's pen ; 
 in fact, do they not then excite feelings of pity 
 and abhorrence which are not only pleasant but 
 useful? This last, in a slight way, anticipates 
 Jeffrey's second objection. 
 
 The Preface to the Tales is more substantial 
 and more carefully worked out, and suggests that 
 Crabbe has profited by the good sense and broad 
 
64 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 method of his critic. For the third time, he 
 declares that his powers are not adequate for 
 tasks which others would set him. As in the 
 Prefaces of 1807 and 1810 he puts away from 
 him first religious and patriotic poetry, then the 
 poetry of general political satire, of history and 
 of topography, so now he turns away from the 
 epic wreath which (as he thinks) Jeffrey points 
 out to him as a prize to be won, preferring the 
 greater variety of incident and the more minute 
 display of character which his powers are able to 
 supply. After that, he comes to the main point, 
 and, like Jeffrey and Gifford, feels called upon to 
 overhaul his ideas on the art of poetry, and their 
 relation to his own work. The whole discussion 
 is fruitless, though well developed; and the con- 
 clusion at which he arrives, after a good deal of 
 talk, is, briefly, this — " If I am to be shut out 
 from the temple of the Muses because I speak too 
 plainly, then I am content, because my fellows in 
 profanity will be Chaucer and Dryden and Pope." 
 He holds a brief for those writers who describe as 
 faithfully as they can, men, manners and things, 
 " who address their productions to the plain sense 
 and sober judgment of their readers, rather than 
 to their fancy and imagination," and for " that 
 actuality of relation, this nudity of description, 
 and poetry without an atmosphere." That the 
 poetry of which he is speaking is not so bare and 
 harsh as it seems, and includes a good deal of work 
 which causes offence to nobody, is proved by the 
 inclusion of Chaucer in his gang, and by the sort 
 of poetry which he brings up in opposition, namely, 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 65 
 
 nothing more formidable than poetry which takes 
 captive the imagination of the readers, elevating 
 them " above the grossness of actual being, into 
 the soothing and pleasant atmosphere of supra- 
 mundane existence." So much for the question 
 of style and method. As for the subjects of his 
 poetry, he repeats, and with justice, his former 
 argument that description or narration of painful 
 things need not stun the reader. This time he 
 goes farther, and declares that the subjects, 
 whether painful or pleasant, real or fictitious, do 
 not matter in themselves. The pleasant effect 
 which poetry makes on us depends " neither upon 
 the events related (whether they be actual or 
 imaginary), nor upon the characters introduced 
 (whether taken from life or fancy), but upon the 
 manner in which the poem itself in conducted." 
 
 In this last particular, Crabbe's defence of him- 
 self needs little supplement. It is none of our 
 business to criticise the subject which an author 
 thinks fit to choose; he generally knows better 
 than most other people what is best. What we 
 have a right to ask is whether he has fulfilled his 
 pledges, and how far. Postulate that Crabbe 
 chose to talk about the uninviting, or at least 
 uninspiring, things of this world : — sickly flowers 
 and stunted grass, mud, hovels, an almshouse 
 and its vicious inmates; much that is merely 
 undistinguished — a vicar without individuaUty 
 and a curate without a competence, burgesses 
 with low ideals and mean minds; a great deal 
 that is pleasant but ordinary ; with now and again 
 
66 GEOEGE CRABBE 
 
 a touch, of greatness, as " the wise man contented 
 to be poor." The question is, as always. What 
 has he made of them ? This is the trouble which 
 was worrying the critics. " What vulgar details," 
 they cry — " What a low phase of life ! — What 
 clumsy, ugly people ! " But, says George Eliot ^ 
 in reply, " these fellow-mortals, every one, must 
 be accepted as they are ; you can neither straighten 
 their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify 
 their dispositions. . . . Do not impose on us any 
 aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region 
 of Art those old women scraping carrots with 
 their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking 
 holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs 
 and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent 
 over the spade and done the rough work of the 
 world — those homes with their tin-pans, their 
 brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters 
 of onions." 
 
 This matter of truth or fidelity or realism is 
 especially important in regard to a descriptive 
 poem like The Borough. That poem would prove 
 the same things as The Parish Register, but in 
 addition it presents other problems, owing to the 
 fuller opportunities which it ojBEers. Bulk has 
 this great disadvantage, that it gives Crabbe an 
 opportunity to be dull. It has, however, this 
 advantage, that it allows him to make deeper 
 researches into character and thus to collect 
 material for the Tales. 
 
 Fidelity does not necessarily mean either fao- 
 1 " Adam Bede " : Chapter XVIT. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 67 
 
 simile or mechanical dulness, and refers to other 
 things besides pictures. There is, for instance, a 
 very shrewd fideUty to fact in the old man who 
 has made truth his watchword, and who employs 
 in the promulgation thereof the perspicuity of a 
 suspicious mind. 
 
 " When the sun's rays, enfeebled as they pass 
 (And shorn of splendour) through the storied glass, 
 Faintly displays the figures on the floor, 
 Which pleased distinctly in their place before." 
 
 The style is poor, even for Crabbe ; but the extract 
 shows the quality of his mind. In the world of 
 romance, not merely the sun, but the pale moon 
 can shine through a casement and cast jewelled 
 colours on the floor and elsewhere. And so with 
 epitaphs. He would have been little more re- 
 spectful to Gray's " Elegy " than he was to 
 Goldsmith's " Deserted Village." 
 
 " All this of Jacob Holmes ? for his the name ; 
 He thus kind, liberal, just, religious 1 — Shame ! 
 What is the truth ? Old Jacob married thrice ; 
 He dealt in coals, and avarice was his vice." 
 
 He is still the same sceptical spirit, as may be 
 seen in his continued opposition to gush and 
 sentiment and literary dishonesty — the latter 
 now not exemphfied by the pastoral bards, but 
 by Mrs. Radcliffe; as for gush in relation to the 
 beauties of nature, " The Lover's Journey " in 
 the Tales should be noted. Orlando rides out to 
 see his Laura, and in the joy of expectation, sees 
 beauty in all that he passes, talks about rustics 
 in the strain of Goldsmith, and of a fen, as follows — 
 
68 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 " ' Various as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,' 
 Exclaimed Orlando : ' all that grows has grace ; 
 All are appropriate — bog, and marsh, and fen. 
 Are only poor to undiscerning men; 
 Here may the nice and curious eye explore 
 How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor,' " 
 
 and so on. " Very true," says Crabbe, " but you 
 do not mean it. This is gush." Watch this same 
 Orlando. He rides on, finds his lady gone away, 
 travels onwards through beautiful country, and 
 thus comments — 
 
 " ' I hate these long green lanes ; there's nothing seen 
 In this vile country but eternal green; 
 Woods ! waters ! meadows ! Will they never end ? 
 'Tis a vile prospect : — Gone to see a friend ' ! " 
 
 Crabbe has no ill-feeling against those who talk 
 about what are called the beauties of nature : he 
 does it himself upon occasion. " But," says he, 
 " you must do it sincerely, and you must not let 
 your admiration blind you to other sorts of beauty 
 that I could show you." The proof of this comes, 
 as a good omen, on the first page of The Borough, 
 and is a fitting defence against " really polite 
 people." He admits the beauty of 
 
 " That winding streamlet, limpid, lingering, slow. 
 Where the reeds whisper when the zephyrs blow." 
 
 He insists on the other aspect also, and says a 
 word in praise of the roll of the tide over samphire- 
 banks and salt-wort and withering sea-weed and 
 broken stakes embedded in the mud. Orlando 
 sinned greatly, for this is an example of what he 
 really saw, in Crabbe' s words — 
 
 " Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom. 
 Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 69 
 
 Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh; 
 
 Here the soft slimy mallow of the marsh. 
 
 Low on the ear the distant billows sound, 
 
 And just in view appears their stony bound; 
 
 No hedge nor tree conceals the glowing sun, 
 
 Birds, save a wat'ry tribe, the district shun. 
 
 Nor chirp among the reeds where bitter waters run." 
 
 Now, Crabbe's fidelity is not the merely negative 
 thing which we have been considering hitherto. 
 It may insist on truth to fact and bring in mean 
 things when they are neglected. But it also takes 
 mean things and shows their beauty — 
 
 " What time the moon arising shows the mud, 
 A shining border to the silver flood : 
 When, by her dubious light, the meanest views, 
 Chalk, stones, and stakes, obtain the richest hues." 
 
 The poet, who might have said with W. D. Howells, 
 that dulness was dear to him, really likes this 
 scenery, as he tells us in a note to " The Lover's 
 Journey." He sees beauty in it, and, knowing 
 that others do not Uke it, takes a pleasure, half- 
 sincere and half-malicious, in describing it. 
 
 And, indeed, whatever opinion he may hold 
 concerning his scenes, he can make good pictures 
 of them — as we have seen before — ^whether those 
 in The Village or that splendid mud-passage in 
 " Peter Grimes " which aroused HazUtt's ire. 
 There is no need to go over the business again : 
 it is sufficient to say here that those who do not 
 like the description of the scene which oppressed 
 the soul of Peter Grimes " with misery, grief and 
 fear " have no right to like " Mariana " or the 
 Third Part of Shelley's " Sensitive Plant." There 
 is poetical intelligence of the same sort in all three, 
 clever craftsman though Tennyson be. 
 
70 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 " About a stone-cast from the wall 
 A sluice mth blacken 'd waters slept, 
 And o'er it many, round and small. 
 The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 
 Hard by a poplar shook alway. 
 All silver -green with gnarled bark : 
 For leagues no other tree did mark 
 The level waste, the rounding gray. 
 She only said, ' My life is dreary. 
 He Cometh not,' she said; 
 She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 
 I would that I were dead ! ' " 
 
 In each of the three cases, part of the value of 
 the description lies in the connection of the scene 
 with a human mind, and so each description tends 
 to some central point : in Shelley it is a pestilential 
 desolation, as of death; in Tennyson it is weary 
 solitude; in Crabbe it is a dull unvaried sadness. 
 The poet of " Peter Grimes " has this additional 
 quality, too, that, choosing to do one thing at a 
 time, unhke the others who are lyrists and do 
 two things at once, he can put all his power into 
 the description and still has enough over to stand 
 back and look on in criticism. His description, 
 for all its dulness, is not without mischief. It is 
 unfair to cut out an extract, but it must be, for 
 the whole is too long to quote — 
 
 "There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, 
 There hang his head, and view the lazy tide 
 In its hot slimy channel slowly glide ; 
 Where the small eels that left the deeper way 
 For the warm shore, within the shallows play; 
 Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud, 
 Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood; — 
 Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace 
 How sidelong crabs had scrawl 'd their crooked race ; 
 Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry 
 Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye; 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 71 
 
 What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come, 
 And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home. 
 Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom." 
 
 It is only " really polite " and squeamish persons 
 who will prefer Enoch Arden's fish — 
 
 " Enoch's ocean spoil 
 In ocean-smelling osier." 
 
 The most poetic passages in Crabbe are his 
 descriptions of nature and his pathetic scenes : 
 the affliction of the Miller's daughter ; Sir Eustace 
 Grey ; the dream of the convict and the death of 
 the sailor beside his sweetheart, in The Borough ; 
 portions of "The Parting Hour" and "The 
 Sisters " and many others of the Tales. It is here 
 that we find what Jeffrey calls " the sweet and 
 seldom sounded chord of lyric inspiration, the 
 lightest touch of which instantly charms away 
 all harshness from his numbers, and all lowness 
 from his themes." He is particularly successful 
 in describing monotony of sight and sound, and 
 stillness or slow movement — 
 
 "Be it the summer noon : a sandy space 
 The ebbing tide has left upon its place ; 
 Then just the hot and stony beach above. 
 Light twinkling streams in bright confusion move ; — 
 Then the broad bosom of the ocean keeps 
 An equal motion; swelling as it sleeps. 
 Then slowly sinking; curling to the strand. 
 Faint, lazy waves o'ercreep the ridgy sand. 
 Or tap the tarry boat with gentle blow. 
 And back return in silence, smooth and slow." 
 
 He cannot write " ribbed sea-sand," but he notes 
 the fact, and " ridgy " is good enough for him. 
 He is not a poet of single words, but of passages. 
 
72 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 and it might be noted how the swing of the verse 
 becomes appropriately more full and stately at 
 the fifth line, and how this, and the alliteration, 
 take the weight off the rhymes, which are not 
 strong enough to bear great stress without seeming 
 absurd. 
 
 Also, this is a broader and more single-eyed 
 
 view of nature than he usually obtains, for his 
 
 usual method is to use piled-up detail, well chosen 
 
 and well controlled. This latter is a dangerous 
 
 method, especially for Crabbe, who likes to carry 
 
 things out to a conclusion in a deliberate way, 
 
 step by step — ^hence he often is guilty of repetition 
 
 or cataloguing. It is often amusing, provided 
 
 that he works with gusto, for then his work is 
 
 enlivened by vivid detail, the note of malice and 
 
 rebelUon, queer rhymes, distorted and exaggerated 
 
 parallelism and ill-yoked^couples. It is, also, often 
 
 heavy and tedious. The Borough is responsible 
 
 for much of this, and the Tales inherit it. Even 
 
 Fitzgerald had to apply the scissors to The Tales 
 
 of the Hall. Jeffrey had a right to complain that 
 
 Crabbe described some things that were not worth 
 
 describing. It is not always well to be endowed 
 
 with a keen and penet:^"ating observation and a 
 
 zest for facts of all sorts, nor always wise to look 
 
 on flowers with the eye of a botanist, unless one 
 
 has a well-developed sense of self-criticism and a 
 
 happy appreciation of the reader's patience. In 
 
 this last respect, Crabbe is a novice and a muddler. 
 
 Sometimes, as we have seen, the thing is well done, 
 
 for Crabbe has managed to put power into his 
 
 hands. In other places there seems to be a 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 73 
 
 guardian angel watching over the man, turning 
 his mistakes to gain. There are hundreds of 
 places in The Borough where Crabbe is talking 
 in a steady way about the miscellaneous things 
 which make up a great part of the work, and 
 where yet he can be read with toleration, although 
 theoretically he has no right to succeed. The 
 letter on Inns, for example, treats the subject as 
 follows : — " A difficult Subject for Poetry — Invo- 
 cation of the Muse — ^Description of the Principal 
 Inn and those of the first Class — The large deserted 
 Tavern — Those of a second order — Their company 
 — One of particular Description — A lower Kind of 
 Public-Houses : yet distinguished among them- 
 selves — Houses on the Quays for Sailors — The 
 Green Man — ^its Landlord, and the adventure of 
 his Marriage, etc." It seems as stoUd and pedes- 
 trian as anything one could find anyiphere, not a 
 httle absurd, even. Most people never venture 
 deeper than the table of contents. Even those 
 who take the plunge, too, often miss what is there. 
 M. Huchon, for example, whose work has left many 
 marks in these pages, can see no other elements 
 in Crabbe's realism than " description, satire, 
 pessimism." I do not blame : I merely marvel 
 at his perseverance in reading through the works 
 of Crabbe, and pity him for his misfortune in 
 missing so much of the humour.^ To the grand 
 qualities of the poet he is consistently fair, as most 
 
 ^ M. Huchon devotes to Crabbe's hamour a part of his 
 section on the Tdks in Verse, but this is what he says — 
 " Realists et satirique k la fois, Crabbe devait n6cessairement 
 atteindre a I'humour, ne fUt-ce que far instards." 
 
74 GEORGE CEABBE 
 
 people are. The lighter note which comes in in a 
 multitude of variations at all sorts of places is 
 neglected by him as by all except Fitzgerald and 
 the author of the "Theatre" in "Rejected 
 Addresses." It is this, above all things, that 
 lifts Crabbe out of the quicksands and miry clay. 
 It cannot make him great, but it makes him 
 readable in those parts which lack the wider 
 sweep of imagination required for character-study 
 or story-telling : even in these latter it is not 
 negligible. He is a free spirit, not to be easily 
 weighed down by any subject into platitude or 
 droning moraUsation or declamation or even the 
 mere " accomplishment of verse." His poetry 
 has some of the virtues of " Don Juan " and 
 " The Address to the Deil." Jeffrey and others 
 go far wrong in passing harsh condemnation on 
 his mannerisms. Jeffrey should have seen that 
 they were one of the manifestations of the active 
 spirit which was saving him from further perusal 
 of elegant poetry full of bombast and platitude — 
 with the thought of a schoolboy's essay eked out 
 by sententious talk about " dark-soul'd atheists " 
 and heavenly maids called Inoculation. A dis- 
 engaged, mischievous, ironical and disillusioned 
 spirit, with just enough benevolence to keep it 
 from bitterness and enough zest to prevent 
 stagnation — this is as near as we can get to the 
 source of Crabbe' s less dignified style — 
 
 " She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept, 
 And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept." 
 
 All the anticlimax and antithesis, the insignificant 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 75 
 
 rhyming words and rude, expressive diction, the 
 puns and jingles, the mock-heroic passages and 
 pieces of buffoonery, the harsh turns and broken 
 conciseness of lines Like the following card-room 
 conversation — 
 
 " ' Who deals ? — you led — ^we're three by cards — ^had you 
 Honour in hand ? ' — ' Upon my honour, two,' " — 
 
 all these things may be explained on this ground. 
 They are often badly done, and some things are 
 inexcusable. But one is less inclined to complain 
 about the most outrageous jingle than about the 
 absolute dulness of a couplet like the following — 
 
 " It seems to us that our reformers knew 
 Th' important work they undertook to do." 
 
 The dry and knotty texture of Crabbe's style may 
 be, as Wordsworth said, the cause of his impopu- 
 larity. It certainly is characteristic of him. That 
 is why the parody in " Rejected Addresses " is 
 one of the best criticisms of the poet ever penned. 
 It brings out this eccentricity and shows, also, 
 how the style can make readable a persevering 
 description of petty things. 
 
 " Perchance, while pit and gallery cry, ' Hats off ! ' 
 And awed Consumption checks his chided cough. 
 Some giggling daughter of the Queen of Love 
 Drops, reft of pin, her playbill from above : 
 like Icarus, while laughing galleries clap, 
 Soars, ducks, and dives in air the printed scrap ; 
 But, wiser far than he, combustion fears. 
 And, as it flies, eludes the chandeliers; 
 Till, sinking gradual, with repeated twirl. 
 It settles curling, on a fiddler's curl; 
 Who from his powder'd pate the intruder strikes, 
 And, for mere malice, sticks it on the spikes." 
 
76 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 There are some things which force on us a 
 comparison between Crabbe and Wordsworth. 
 Wordsworth's theory and Crabbe's practice in the 
 matter of diction points to no more probably than 
 a common honesty, or disUke of dishonesty in 
 literature. The same may be said of Cowper who 
 learnt to play tricks as well as to write homespun 
 — although he cannot parallel Crabbe's outspoken 
 reference to Bunyan — 
 
 " Bunyan's famed Pilgrim rests that shelf upon, 
 A genius rare but rude was honest John." 
 
 Cowper will not go so far, and passes by on the 
 other side — 
 
 " I name thee not, lest so despised a name 
 Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame." 
 
 The attitudes of Crabbe and Wordsworth to- 
 wards rustic or rather humble life causes more 
 difficulty. Both take an interest in the hves of 
 the poor; both look upon them as men, rather 
 than as poor men. After that there is divergence : 
 Wordsworth's interest is poetic and forms part 
 of his grand view of man, nature and society — 
 " this sanctity of nature given to man." Crabbe 
 has no grand views; his interest is scientific and 
 is centred in the mind of the man ; he is a psycholo- 
 gist, a student of character, hke the novelists; 
 and might have said with Browning : " The 
 development of a soul; little else is worth study." 
 
 " Come, then, fair Truth ! and let me clearly see 
 The minds I paint, as they are seen in thee; 
 To me their merits and their faults impart; 
 Give me to say, ' frail being ! such thou art,' 
 And closely let me view the naked human heart." 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 77 
 
 This is his final position, and is of great import- 
 ance. Nothing that we can say will leave the 
 position of The Village and its group impaired. 
 A satire both on the poor and on their slanderers, 
 it also contains the idea that the poor need no 
 condescension and can stand by themselves, and 
 are, indeed, worthy of study on their own account. 
 It is not concerned with character. It js a poem 
 on the sins and sufferings of the poor — in so far 
 as it concerns them at all. Even as such it is a 
 new thing — different from Thomson, who is con- 
 descending, and from Cowper, who is more easily 
 offended, whose moral indignation leaves no room 
 for the impartial pleasure of the author in his 
 work, and who, moreover, has less harsh ideas 
 of the hardships endured. The Parish Register 
 is different; it is not a poem on the sins and 
 miseries of the poor, but rather a poem on the 
 characters of the poor, and others. Crabbe rises 
 above the question of rich and poor altogether, 
 and becomes a student of minds. When The 
 Borough comes, this is again evident. He pro- 
 fesses to prefer " men and the deeds of men " a^ 
 subjects, almost apologises for the poor, puts them 
 in at the end of the book, picks out foTir of them, 
 not because they are poor, but because they have 
 mean minds, and gives them each a letter to him- 
 self. Before their turn came he was amusing 
 himself with Lawyers, Doctors, Burgesses, and 
 the like. Then, once more, in the Tales, the 
 characters are predominantly of the middle class 
 with a fair sprinkling of gentry. In fact, Crabbe's 
 position is like John Gait's — " It was to the natural 
 
78 GEOKGE CRABBE 
 
 character that my studies were directed. ... I 
 have been but Kttle susceptible for a long time 
 of the difference of that drapery in which so many 
 think all the differences of rank consist ; for I have 
 looked more to God's creatures than at the works 
 of the tailor or milliner " ; — and although Gait 
 differed from Crabbe in building his characters 
 from hints of others rather than from personal 
 observation, and though the " Annals of the 
 Parish " have a sociological interest which is 
 altogether absent in Crabbe, still, the Rev. Micah 
 Balwhidder of Dalmailing is a character after 
 Crabbe's own heart, and might find a place in the 
 interludes of The Tales of the Hall were quarters 
 made suitable for him. 
 
 But he chooses less innocent people than the 
 Rev. Micah for his portrait-gallery in The Borough ; 
 they are full length this time and not miniatures 
 as in the Register. He is something like that 
 humorist who called forth a stern rebuke from 
 the author of The Borough for buying a ramshackle 
 tenement and letting it to the poor — a home 
 
 " Where he delights to see the creatures come : 
 ' They may be thieves ; ' — ' Well, so are richer men ; ' " 
 
 Once again, the same method as before. He likes 
 to get behind the scenes and make his people 
 reveal what is in their inmost thoughts, and 
 though this well suits his ironic temper, it brings 
 pathos with it as well. Notice the two poor old 
 bodies who could not prosper in the world, for lack 
 of perseverance in helping themselves. They 
 console each other — 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 79 
 
 " 'Twas not a world for them, Grod help them ! They 
 Could not deceive, nor flatter, nor betray; 
 But there's a happy change, a scene to come. 
 And they, God help them ! shall be soon at home." 
 
 With this there comes wider practice in dialogue 
 and conversation ; card-room talk or this gem from 
 the smoking-club, the time being past midnight — 
 
 " ' Then, as I said, and — ^mind me — as I say. 
 At our last meeting — you remember ' — ' Ay ; ' 
 ' Well, very well — ^then freely as I drink 
 I spake my thought — you take me — ^what I think : 
 And sir, said I, if I a freeman be. 
 It is my bounden duty to be free.' " 
 
 But the important characters are drawn in a more 
 ambitious fashion than before. The Vicar and 
 Curate (Letter II) and Sir Denys Brand (XIII) are 
 merely expanded portraits of the simple kind found 
 in the Register, but in Jachin (XIX), Abel Keene 
 (XXI) and Peter Grimes (XXII), we find a new 
 quahty, the germs of which lie embedded in 
 Reginald Glanshaw, Robin Dingley, and Sir Eustace 
 Grey — the gradual deterioration or wearing down 
 of a character. Blaney and CleHa of the Alms- 
 house differ from these three. Blaney is vicious 
 and Clelia vain, and both go on practising their 
 besetting sins as usual until they are brought 
 inevitably to their last poor home and, as far as 
 possible, afterwards. With them the change is 
 material only. With the others there is mental 
 and moral degradation, and all three go gradually 
 to a miserable end : Jachin dies of shame and 
 remorse, Keene commits suicide, and Grimes 
 becomes melancholy and then mad. Ellen Orford 
 (XX) is the only one who can stand in this pretty 
 band of knaves and yet not only avoid falling to 
 
80 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 the depths, but actually survive with character 
 strengthened. 
 
 It is against these that Jeffrey levels his second 
 charge, that they excite nothing but disgust in 
 the mind of the reader. His argument is not 
 foolishness : he holds the perfectly sane opinion 
 that we have no right "to be forced to look 
 closely upon festering heaps of moral filth and 
 corruption. ' ' Not depravity merely, but depravity 
 in vacuo, without circumstance, is what he con- 
 demns. " For though it be generally true, that 
 poetical representations of suffering and guilt 
 produce emotion, and consequently delight, yet 
 it certainly did not require the penetration of 
 Mr. Crabbe to discover, that there is a degree of 
 depravity which counteracts our sympathy with 
 suffering, and a degree of insignificance which 
 extinguishes our interest in guilt." Here Jeffrey 
 is better versed in principles than in Crabbe. 
 He had no right to call Peter Grimes disgusting 
 and Jachin dull and pointless as well. And if 
 Abel Keene and Ellen Orford are to be condemned, 
 it is for clumsy handling rather than for naked 
 depravity. With Blaney he comes nearer the 
 mark, for this time he is dealing with a festering 
 heap of moral filth and corruption, depravity in 
 vacuo. But what right has he to rate Clelia 
 higher than her companion? Why should he 
 deign to praise her, with reservations, while the 
 picture of the rake and spendthrift is passed by 
 with a shudder ? Is it because she is merely vain, 
 instead of being depraved ? If this is so, we should 
 ask why chronic vanity should make a better 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 81 
 
 picture, ipso facto, than depravity, and suggest 
 that Jeffrey should have extended his principle 
 to other things than depravity. In fact, the 
 pictures of Clelia and Blaney are equally un- 
 pleasant to look upon, because vanity in vacuo 
 is no better than depravity in vacuo from the 
 point of view of the audience. Men and women 
 cannot be insulated from the great scheme of 
 things, and live. If we tear up by the roots a 
 flower or a weed from this garden or wilderness 
 called hfe we must not expect it to flourish unless 
 we bring with it some of the common earth in 
 which it and aU others of its kind grow. So that 
 those who talk love to their heart's discontent in 
 the pastoral romances stand no nearer to the life- 
 spring than Blaney or Clelia, who have no place 
 among their fellows in the land of the living, but 
 lie in a stagnant Sheol, airless and sunless. Pup- 
 pets may make good fun in real romance; they 
 have a heart ready swept and garnished for our 
 occupation, so that we may play their part for 
 them; and, likewise, it is hardly worth while 
 putting characters into romances, for they are 
 apt to cause wrangling when the reader goes 
 about to exercise what Stevenson calls his privilege 
 — that, namely, of consciously playing the part 
 of the hero. But one gets no good by dissecting 
 puppets — a few mechanical joints, nothing more. 
 Blaney and Clelia are abstractions, humours, and, 
 what is worse, have nothing to say for themselves. 
 They are two good moral illustrations for a sermon 
 on texts from which King David was fond of 
 preaching — 
 
82 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 " For evil-doers fret thou not 
 thyself unquietly; 
 Nor do thou envy bear to those 
 that work iniquity. 
 For, even like unto the grass, 
 soon be cut down shall they; 
 And, like the green and tender herb, 
 they wither shall away." 
 
 For once, Crabbe is a preacher and deserves the 
 dispraise, so undeservedly meted out to him on 
 all occasions by M. Huchon, for writing sermonising 
 poetry. His thesis on this occasion is contained 
 in the following lines from Blaney — 
 
 " Come ye ! who live for pleasure, come, behold, 
 A man of pleasure when he's poor and old." 
 
 If at other times Crabbe has any text at all, it 
 is sometimes near to La Fontaine's moral theory 
 — " It is the wisest policy in this world to avoid 
 being a fool," and sometimes, " Beware of Dis- 
 senters, especially Methodists." 
 
 Jachin and Grimes have a share in the life of 
 the world, humble, perhaps, but of the same kind as 
 animates lago and Guido Franceschini. The air 
 blows upon them, and where they are the sunlight 
 plays. There is life in them, and whenever there 
 is life the artist may grant his admiration and 
 transfer that life to his work, faithfully, harmon- 
 ising all harshness, as it is his business to do, but 
 without untruthfulness. They are characters, not 
 moral examples merely, though they have some 
 elements of this latter in them. The proof is that, 
 unlike Blaney and Clelia, they cannot- be detached 
 from the form in which they are given. Their 
 stories are not lists of counts in illustration of the 
 same thing. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 83 
 
 Both letters are studies in the psychology of 
 knaves. Jachin, all through, is the lighter weight 
 and is, appropriately, described in a trickier style 
 than Peter Grimes. A pious parish-clerk, who 
 sees the finger of Satan in all that tempts man- 
 kind, is himself tempted by malicious acquaint- 
 ances with the blandishments of wine and women, 
 and resists successfully and arrogantly. Crabbe 
 now formally dismisses the playful Muse who has 
 been making Jachin put his own case, because 
 " there is no jesting with distress and crime," 
 which are to follow. Satan, who appears to have 
 " taken the thing amiss," now makes Jachin 
 persuade himself that he is justified by his poverty 
 in steahng from the poor-box which is in his charge. 
 Jachin falls, and after a year or so is caught, and, 
 shunned by all, dies of shame. Though there is 
 no jesting in this latter part, there is no turning 
 up of the eyes in horror at the crime. That, to 
 Crabbe, is a waste of time. He is afraid of pathos 
 also and uses it charily, classing it with sentimen- 
 taUty and gush and the other insincerities. He 
 preserves for himself and for others, if they will 
 join him, the not necessarily lamentable spectacle 
 of a mean-spirited man proposing sophistical 
 arguments to himself, but agrees that, for the time 
 being, it will be well to discard the more hilarious 
 tone, and, at the end, allows a little pathos — ^but 
 not too much. 
 
 ' In each lone place, dejected and dismay'd, 
 Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid ; 
 Or to the restless sea and roaring wind 
 Gave the strong yearnings of a ruin'd mind : 
 
84 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 On the broad beach, the silent summer day, 
 
 Stretch 'd on some wreck, he wore his life away; 
 
 Or where the river mingles with the sea, 
 
 Or on the mud -bank by the elder-tree, 
 
 Or by the bounding marsh-dyke, there was he." 
 
 Crabbe's self-restraint in plotting the main 
 lines of his stories is one of his greatest quali- 
 ties, and makes a strange contrast with the 
 mannerism and prolixity with which he sometimes 
 adorns the parts. The same unwillingness to be 
 deterred from his purpose is still more evident in 
 " Peter Grimes." He seems here singularly loath 
 to waste more words than are necessary — except 
 at the end, where Peter tells his woes, which 
 drags a little. He goes from point to point with 
 a level head, relentlessly. The verse has in parts 
 the strong beat not easily found in Crabbe outside 
 The Village. All this is useful in emphasising 
 the heavy grinding needed to wear down the 
 mind of Grimes, who is harder than Jachin. 
 The process is slow, for Grimes is " untouched by 
 pity, unstung by remorse, and uncorrected by 
 shame," like Marmion, Crabbe says, " But the 
 corrosion of hopeless want, the wasting of unabated 
 disease, and the gloom of unvaried solitude, will 
 have their effect on every nature," and the spirit 
 of the man who could murder three apprentices 
 without a tremor is at last broken, and he passes 
 to dehrium and death. Crabbe has a rigid justice, 
 and aU his evil-doers pay sorely for their deeds, 
 but I cannot believe with M. Huchon that he 
 manages his stories in this way solely to teach us 
 a moral lesson. " Crabbe, en nous montrant les 
 ravages secrets que le vice cause en nous et les 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 85 
 
 consequences fatales qu'il entraine, cherche a nous 
 rendre plus circonspects et meilleurs." This is 
 not said by the way, for he heads his chapter on 
 the Tales, " Crabbe, Conteur et Moraliste." There 
 is something to be said for his point of view, and 
 this is exemplified by the fact that Blaney and 
 Clelia were intended as a warning, and that, at 
 the end of The Borough, Crabbe states that he 
 attacks crime and folly, not criminals and fools. 
 This latter is of less value because it seems much 
 like a repetition of what he says insistently in the 
 Preface — that he does not attack fools, but their 
 foUy — and therefore is part of his fear to give 
 ofifence, even to fools. ^ There is much against 
 it ; — an express statement in The Tales of the Hall 
 that he despises those tellers of tales who break 
 up their work with moralisation, and a hit at the 
 worthy rector in the same work who wished to 
 state the moral thesis of his tale before he began 
 it ; then the fact that his business was to examine 
 the " gradual change in human hearts," and the 
 effects of the triumph of time, so that his interests 
 lie in the process as much as in the end. In fact, 
 some of the stories are in the nature of cases. Can 
 a man of such a character be ground down ; if so, 
 how ? Anyway, what could one possibly learn 
 from " Peter Grimes," except that it is morally 
 reprehensible to slay one's apprentices, and dan- 
 gerous to frequent mud-flats thereafter ? If more 
 
 ^ As the Preface in " Rejected Addresses " has it : — " My 
 clerical profession has taught me how extremely improper it 
 would be by any allusion, however slight, to give any uneasi- 
 ness, however trivial, to any individual, however foolish or 
 wicked." 
 
86 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 proof is needed, there is the fact that some of the 
 incidents, like that of James and Juliet in the 
 Letter on Inns, are shamelessly and hilariously 
 un-moral. Where he punishes, his pitilessness 
 is that of logic, not of morality. There is often 
 a hardness in him that reminds us of the way in 
 which doctors relish " a good case," for profes- 
 sional, not humanitarian reasons. This may be 
 a healthy attitude for a narrative poet to take up, 
 but it should have (and has) its harshness toned 
 down by softer feelings of benevolence and humour. 
 
 These stories in The Borough are of a simple 
 sort, concerned with one person only. Jachin 
 and Abel Keene are, from the point of view of 
 development, the more important. They show 
 two men with mediocre minds — one being frigidly 
 pious and the other a simple soul — who are 
 assailed by direct temptation from within and 
 from without, and fall. This is the tale at its 
 simplest. In some respects Abel Keene marks 
 an advance, for there a second main character 
 appears, Abel's sister, who throws light on the 
 scene. And moreover, Abel, being more of a fool 
 than Jachin, and falling in a more foolish way, is 
 more closely allied to those who take their place 
 in Crabbe's Gallery of Fools, the Tales in Verse. 
 
 Crabbe's tales, contained in the three sections. 
 Tales in Verse, Tales of the Hall and Posthumous 
 Tales, are the crown of his work and form the 
 bulk of it. It is indeed strange that a man, two- 
 thirds of whose work is narrative, should ground 
 what common fame he has almost exclusively 
 on the remaining third. Yet it is so, for Crabbe 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 87 
 
 is to most people who have heard of him, the 
 author of The Village above all things. This is j 
 one of the unfairnesses of Hterary history, which 
 demands that if a man is not a very great poet, 
 that work of his shall be best known which has 
 the greatest historical significance, and the re- 
 mainder, even though it be his best, shall be 
 ignored. And yet, it is not certain that The 
 Village is very much more significant than the 
 Tales, even from a historical point of view. 
 JefiErey did well to say that Crabbe was the most 
 original writer whom he ever knew, for his was 
 originality in its simplest sense — he found things 
 out slowly, for himself. It seems proved beyond 
 all doubt that the tales evolved naturally and 
 neatly from the line of his other works, the 
 development taking place chiefly along the line 
 of character study, with parallel progress in 
 technical things such as dialogue and dramatic 
 monologue. If this is so, there is no need to 
 cast about for influences. In any case, they 
 could come from one direction only, the pre- 
 romantic period, for he had his scheme in his 
 head before he read " The Lay of the Last Min- 
 strel " at a bookstall, and declared that a new 
 and great poet had appeared. One Jihing is 
 certain, that he learnt his verse at the feet of 
 Pope, with glances at Spenser, Johnson and 
 Goldsmith; and it is probable that he made his 
 first acquaintance with satiric portraiture in 
 Dryden and Pope, as most people do. He may 
 have obtained something from the periodic essay- 
 ists, for one of his tales (" The Learned Boy ") 
 
88 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 is founded on a paper by Addison. Indeed, Crabbe 
 in his tales is nearer the novelists than the poets, 
 and may possibly owe something to the former. 
 
 Why then did he write in verse ? But was 
 there any reason why he should do otherwise ? 
 He had tried novels and failed; he had written 
 verse all his life and had been successful in that 
 kind of matter which would be used for narrative ; 
 and then, tales in verse were in vogue at the time. 
 
 His verse is the least fortunate part of his 
 poetic apparatus; for the couplet, although it 
 was taken up by two of the most quick-witted of 
 men, Dryden and Pope, has in these days become 
 a symbol of dulness and the old fashion, owing 
 to less intelligent employment of it by their apes. 
 Crabbe's verse has a pecuUar double effect. We 
 seem to hear two tunes in it. One is the remem- 
 brance of the old-fashioned couplet, and in this 
 guise it obstructs our hearing of the true note of 
 Crabbe, which is modern, and that of a man not 
 easily deceived. It is obvious, and at first an 
 offence; but after some practice we begin to 
 hear the other, which is a type of the man's 
 sceptical spirit, shot through the older and more 
 ponderous cadence. It is perhaps this combina- 
 tion which often helps to give that peculiar 
 undercurrent of irony and mental reservation and 
 imperturbable mischief which appears, curiously, 
 in some very good narrative ; — in Chaucer's tales, 
 and, if one can trust translations, in Irish and 
 Icelandic prose and " The Little Flowers of St. 
 Francis." Crabbe, as usual, suffers from lack of 
 fineness. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 89 
 
 " Once he the names of saints and patriarchs old, 
 Judges and kings, and chiefs and prophets, told; 
 Then he in winter nights the Bible took, 
 To count how often in the sacred book 
 The sacred name appear'd, and could rehearse 
 Which were the middle chapter, word, and verse, 
 The very letter in the middle placed. 
 And so employ'd the hours that others waste." 
 
 In a wider way, too, he declares his affinity with 
 great narrative writers. Apart from any question 
 of character-drawing or power of observation, the 
 strength of his handling proves him one of the 
 best narrative poets. This is a subject about 
 which he does not say much, for in so far as he 
 is interested critically in his own work at all, it 
 is the subject and questions connected therewith 
 that attract his attention. But one little technical 
 note in " Resentment " explains much of his 
 attitude. It is not his intention to play tricks 
 with the reader, as do some writers whom he 
 could mention; anyhow, what is the good, he 
 asks, for the public has had enough practice now 
 to be perfect in guessing riddles proposed by 
 the authors. So, when a long-lost character 
 comes up in a new guise, let us make no mystery 
 of it, for — 
 
 " As these tricks and stratagems are known, 
 'Tis best, at once, the simple truth to own." 
 
 He is at his old game, tilting at shams, but in 
 high good-humour, as is proved by his high- 
 spirited discourse on novels of the terror-and- 
 wonder and sentimental schools which introduces 
 the story of EUen Orford. He writes his tales 
 almost in defiance of these popular books, sub- 
 
90 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 stituting for their chaos what the critics of the 
 eighteenth century called Nature — all that con- 
 stitutes sound writing. Their melodrama he 
 replaced by a plain story with its successive points 
 deployed in an honest manner. Their effusion 
 and insincerity of sentiment are rejected for a 
 stern restraint. He disliked them for their im- 
 probabiUty, which means not so much that the 
 events were necessarily such as could not happen 
 in real life (though this they often were) but that 
 the authors were trying to deceive him by arbitrary 
 linking of events, and failed, for he, having given 
 to these same authors " many sixpences and 
 tears," had at last found the way to pick holes 
 in their poor fabric. With true romance hke that 
 of Scott, he had no quarrel; for true romance 
 does not invite analysis. He even goes so far 
 as to write a version of Guy of Warwick himself, 
 and quite good reading it is ; and in spite of Guy 
 and in spite of Crabbe, it remains short and 
 concise. Without being a parody, it makes fun 
 of the hero, unobtrusively — 
 
 " But what to Guy were men, or great or small, 
 Or one or many ? — ^he despatched them all ; 
 A huge dun Cow, the dread of all around, 
 A master-spirit in our hero found; 
 'Twas desolation all about her den — 
 Her sport was murder, and her meals were men." 
 
 When he writes his own tales, he disclaims any 
 intention to impose on the reader, but calls him 
 into conference, and in a level-headed way proceeds 
 to examine these poor fools of mortals. There 
 are few things more anti-romantic than Crabbe's 
 narrative work, because, instead of the false links 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 91 
 
 of melodrama or the airy web of rpmance, he uses 
 the strong chain of logic to bind up his parts. 
 Perhaps in these unsound romantic stories we 
 find the strongest influence on Crabbe, and that 
 influence is a warning rather than an encourage- 
 ment. _ 
 
 As a critic of romance Crabbe resembles Peacock 
 and Jane Austen in his clear-minded avoidance 
 of deception. Miss Austen had good reason to 
 think of Crabbe as her favourite, a better reason 
 than Mrs. Leadbeater and others who thought 
 him a moral poet, for the author of " Sense and 
 Sensibility " saw in him a kindred spirit. They 
 worked out independently in " Ellen Orford " ^ 
 and " Northknger Abbey " their objection to 
 Mrs. Radcliffe. They are equally emphatic in 
 their protest against that sentimentality which 
 excludes common sense. They set up a new sort 
 of fiction which depends on the common life of 
 ordinary people for its interest. Historically, 
 they stand apart, like Peacock and Landor, from 
 the romantic welter, less because they belong to 
 the old school than because they are free spirits 
 and labour under no delusions concerning the new. 
 
 Crabbe's relation with Jane Austen (who liked 
 to call herseK Mrs. Crabbe) does him more justice 
 than that which holds between those honest 
 fellows, Rogers and Campbell, whom Byron forced 
 upon him. With them he looks back on things 
 in which he has no important share, " the accom- 
 
 ^ The note to " Ellen Orford " on this same subject makes 
 good reading. Except for a sentence at the end, it sums up, 
 curiously enough, the opinions on Crabbe held by those who 
 follow Hazlitt. 
 
92 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 plishment of verse," for their rock is not as his 
 rock. With Miss Austen he stands on his own 
 ground as a good narrative poet with a fresh 
 and useful point of view. 
 
 The attitudes of the two towards their characters 
 are in essence similar. They treat them as people 
 whom it is their duty or pleasure to rid of any 
 illusions which they may harbour. Emma Wood- 
 house, Marianne Dashwood, and Elizabeth Bennet 
 have limited ideas in the same way as Gwyn, 
 Edward Shore, Arabella or Sybil Kindred; but 
 while Miss Austen invariably turns her material 
 into comedy, Crabbe has, in addition, a strong 
 genius for tragedy. In any case, she is the more 
 facile and delicate worker; but he, if he is slower 
 of movement and heavier of hand, has a wider 
 range, a keener observation, and a deeper know- 
 ledge of the human heart, all of which help him 
 to anticipate in a definite way some of the psycholo- 
 gical, anti-sentimental work of Meredith, whose 
 Diana, being called no longer Diana but Tony, 
 has learnt her lesson and stepped down from her 
 pedestal of foolishness to the common wisdom 
 and reality of Mother Earth. These comparisons 
 have no impertinence in them, and do not neglect 
 real differences in subtlety and profundity. Their 
 usefulness lies in suggesting that the tales are not 
 meaningless and insipid, and in bringing out the 
 truth that their author is an intelligent man 
 who works out, if only in bold outline, some 
 problems which his observation of life has brought 
 to his mind. 
 
 Crabbe' s tales tell of the process by which men 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 93 
 
 come to disillusion or disappointment ; the wisdom 
 of this world asketh a fall, says he, and so he 
 writes the story of the fall. His irony consists in 
 an opposition of things as they are to things as 
 they are thought by fools to be ; if people are fools 
 themselves, they suffer disillusion, with varying 
 degrees of severity; if they have too sanguine a 
 trust in the wisdom or virtue of their fellows, they 
 suffer disappointment. , 
 
 " Ah ! foolish men ! how could ye thus depend, 
 One on himself, the other on his friend ? " 
 
 Illogical things like fate or accident do not appear 
 as significant factors except in " The Parting 
 Hour," which, for that reason, and because char- 
 acter plays little part in it, is neither comic nor 
 tragic, but pathetic. Allen Booth and Judith 
 Flemming are victims of the storms of fate, through 
 no fault of their own. They are prevented by 
 poverty from marrying; Allen goes abroad to 
 seek his fortune in the employment of a rich 
 relative, but, falling in with Spaniards on the 
 way, is made a slave in Central America. Hope- 
 less of escape, he marries and remains there 
 twenty years. He is forced to flee from his 
 family and wanders about the world twenty 
 years more, and then is able to return, a broken 
 man, to his own town, where he finds Judith 
 again, widowed. The tale closes with a picture 
 of Judith watching tenderly over the troubled 
 sleep of him whom the memory of their young 
 attachment makes dear to her still. The story 
 has that " flow of feeling " which Wordsworth 
 found lacking in Crabbe, yet there is no overflow. 
 
94 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 Crabbe does not lose his head, although there is 
 a temptation in such a tale to strive for effect by 
 forced grouping and excessive pathos. It is 
 interesting to see how carefully Crabbe watches 
 himself and avoids his usual method of observing 
 a slow decay of ideals and mental power. He 
 sees that, though it may be justified where char- 
 acter and responsibility are, it is too dangerous 
 where everything is endured unfairly. He does 
 not transport the reader successively to Allen in 
 his forty years of exile and Judith in her forty 
 years of loneliness. He cuts this out altogether, 
 confining his attention to the contrast between 
 farewell and return, and then, when the solution 
 is reached and the dull hunger of disappointment 
 past, he gives an outline of Allen's adventures as 
 heard from the Ups of the man himself. 
 
 The other tales have a family likeness one to 
 another. Gwyn, the Gentleman Farmer, is an 
 apostle of independence and a hater of the tyranny 
 of law, creeds and conventions; he ends by 
 voluntarily submitting to the yoke of a quack 
 doctor, a Methodist preacher and a wife. Edward 
 Shore, a proud, aspiring, erratic spirit, is confident 
 in the power of reason to dispense with the need 
 for moral laws; he finds that his reason cannot 
 prevent his committing a grievous sin; too proud 
 to repent, he sinks deeper and deeper till at last 
 his sense of humiliation shatters his mind and 
 " heedless children call him ' Silly Shore.' " 
 Stephen Jones, the Learned Boy, a half-witted 
 fellow, imbibes freethinking notions, and is 
 quickly convinced of their falsity by a thrashing 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 95 
 
 from his father. These are some of the fools. 
 There is a second class of those who trust others 
 too credulously : the squire (in " The Squire and 
 the Priest ") who, galled by an unrelenting priest, 
 trains up a young fellow who will leave him to 
 his indulgences undisturbed, finds that his protege 
 has turned Methodist and galls him more than 
 the other; the Methodist brethren who convert a 
 blackguard (in " The Convert ") and give him a 
 stationer's shop, are horrified to see that he intro- 
 duces worldly literature beside his tracts ; Rupert, 
 in " Procrastination," leaves his Dinah with her 
 aunt to seek his fortune abroad, returns and finds 
 that she, having inherited from her relative a 
 paltry love of hoarding as well as a hoard, is too 
 much obsessed by these to retain any affection 
 for him; George, in " The Brothers," a jolly and 
 generous sailor, who helps his mean and miserly 
 brother Isaac financially, and having been disabled 
 in war, returns expecting a haven of refuge; 
 instead, he is treated first with disrespect and 
 then with cruelty, and dies of ill-treatment. 
 There is also a lesser kind of fool like Nancy Moss 
 in " The Widow's Tale," Sybil Kindred in " The 
 Frank Courtship," and Arabella, who have " miss- 
 ish " ideals in the matter of lovers, picked up in 
 books or at a high school for girls, and are taught 
 by time or experience to swallow those ideals and 
 be content with something less romantic. 
 
 This classification, which brings out the sameness 
 of the stories, must be supplemented by another 
 which emphasises the variety of treatment. The 
 ironical contrast between supposition and reality 
 
96 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 has not always the same weight and intensity, a 
 fact which is overlooked by those who see in 
 Grabbe little but gloom. Even JejBErey, who 
 knows better than this, is not at his ease with 
 the lighter tales, and skips them, heaving a deep 
 sigh of relief when he finds himself once more in 
 contact with " the human sympathies," It may 
 be that Jeffrey is right, but the fact remains that 
 out of the whole collection of twenty-one tales in 
 Crabbe's first volume, there are not more than 
 half a dozen where the contrast brings with it 
 any powerful stress on the emotions. These are 
 —in addition to "The Parting Hour "—" Pro- 
 crastination," " The Patron," " Edward Shore," 
 " Resentment " and " The Brothers." The last 
 two belong to a class of which " King Lear " is 
 a type, stories of cold, persevering, possibly 
 hypocritical disregard for the bonds of kinship, 
 where the stress lies in the watching of the slow 
 torture, either from the part of the agent, as in 
 " Resentment," or of the sufferer, as in " The 
 Brothers." The others are stories which, like 
 Chaucer's " Troilus and Criseyde," exemplify the 
 triumph of time and the world in breaking down 
 at last the faith that men are foolish enough to 
 place in themselves and others. Here also it is 
 the slow process of disintegration which makes the 
 stress — 
 
 "the gradual change in human hearts, 
 That time, in commerce with the world, imparts." 
 
 Crabbe's stories are plain and bare, without the 
 complications of " King Lear " and " Troilus and 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 97 
 
 Criseyde," and they remain one of the best possible 
 proofs of the vaUdity of narrative to take up those 
 tragic stories which are, in their simplest state, 
 unfitted for drama because they have too Uttle 
 action and too much waiting, and because it seems 
 true that ordinary people are not strong enough 
 to take upon their shoulders the parts of heroes 
 in a tragic drama. 
 
 As for the lighter stories, they are more in the 
 nature of epigrams, written for the sake of a witty 
 contrast between the first and last states of a man 
 rather than as a study of what Hes between the 
 two poles. StiU, they often preserve the report of a 
 slow development as part of the game, as in " The 
 Gentleman Farmer," who has the same malady 
 as Edward Shore, but as he has a less noble mind 
 and less pride, gives in to the forces of law and 
 order — 
 
 " Lo ! now the change complete : the convert Gwyn 
 Has sold his books, and has renounced his sin; 
 Mollet his body orders, Wisp his soul. 
 And o'er his purse the lady takes control." 
 
 This tale is in form, though not in spirit, near 
 to the more serious group. Some are much 
 slighter of texture with less cohesion and a more 
 rapid process of disillusionment. The Learned 
 Boy picks up his new mental lumber slowly and 
 timidly, and with infinite pains learns to build 
 an edifice which shall appear imposing, but the 
 whole card-castle is demoUshed with a cut of the 
 birch. Orlando, too, in that pretty fancy, " The 
 Lover's Journey," is a victim of three successive 
 sorts of fooUshness according as his mood is 
 
98 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 modified by anticipation, disappointment, and 
 realisation. 
 
 But it is useless to go on giving notes of this 
 sort, because the subtlety of these witty tales 
 cannot be understood tiU they are read. The wit, 
 like the plots themselves, draws its piquancy from 
 contrast, and is found very often in the speeches 
 of those who at one time say one thing and at 
 another something different, the reason being 
 known to the reader; or it may be that a speech 
 is witty because the speaker refers back in an 
 unconsciously ironical way to something which 
 has been told before. This is why the liveliness 
 of Crabbe's tales has been missed. Readers are 
 too hasty and find nothing save dulness, naturally, 
 because the poet's effects are always prepared 
 deliberately and quietly, and so are worth close 
 attention. 
 
 Here are some quotations from " The Learned 
 Boy " which illustrate the method clearly, if 
 rather more baldly than in the context. First, a 
 sentiment from his tempter concerning the Bible — 
 
 " ' Nay, nay ! ' the friend replied, 
 ' You need not lay the good old book aside ; 
 Antique and curious, I myself indeed 
 Read it at times, but as a man should read ; 
 A fine old work it is, and I protest 
 I hate to hear it treated as a jest; 
 The book has wisdom in it, if you look 
 Wisely upon it, as another book : 
 For superstition (as our priests of sin 
 Are pleased to tell us) makes us blind within : 
 Of this hereafter — ^we will now select 
 Some works to please you.' " 
 
 Stephen returns home and tumbles out his new 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 99 
 
 information pell-mell, on being rebuked by his 
 pious grandam — 
 
 " And now my child, they say 
 Thy faith like water runneth fast away; 
 The prince of devils hath, I fear, beguiled 
 The ready wit of my backsliding child." 
 
 The blindness of the old dame in missing the 
 foolishness of her boy is another motive in the 
 story. His wit is not ready, but weak. 
 
 " On this, with lofty looks, our clerk began 
 His grave rebuke, as he assumed the man — 
 ' There is no devil,' said the hopeful youth, 
 ' Nor prince of devils ; that I know for truth : 
 Have I not told you how my books describe 
 The arts of priests and all the canting tribe ? 
 Your Bible mentions Egypt, where it seems 
 Was Joseph found when Pharaoh dream 'd his dreams : 
 Now in that place, in some bewilder 'd head 
 (The learned write), religious dreams were bred; 
 Whence through the earth, with various forms combined. 
 They came to frighten and afflict mankind. 
 Prone (so I read) to let a priest invade 
 Their souls with awe, and profit to his trade : 
 So say my books . . . 
 Why so amazed, and so prepared to pray? 
 As if a Being heard a word we say : 
 This may surprise you; I myself began 
 To feel disturb 'd, and to my Bible ran; 
 I now am wiser — ^yet agree in this, 
 The book has things that are not much amiss; 
 It is a fine old work, and I protest 
 I hate to hear it treated as a jest : 
 The book has wisdom in it, if you look 
 Wisely upon it as another book ! ' " — 
 
 This, from the boy who had been taught to 
 spend his leisure seeking the middle chapter, verse, 
 word and letter in the Holy Book, and was com- 
 forted when his grandam told him the fate of his 
 bullying school-fellows, and bade him 
 
100 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 " shun the beastly crew ; 
 Whom Satan ruled, and who were sure to lie, 
 Howling in torments when they came to die." 
 
 He returns to this belief when the lash appears — 
 
 " Oh ! I shall die — my father ! do receive 
 My dying words; indeed I do believe; 
 The books were lying books, I know it well. 
 There is a devil, oh ! there is a hell ; 
 And I'm a sinner : spare me, I am young, 
 My sinful words were only on my tongue; 
 My heart consented not ; 'tis all a lie : 
 Oh ! spare me then, I'm not prepared to die." 
 
 The irony is more obvious than usual, because 
 Stephen is weak-minded, and easy to hit. Shrewder 
 people like Justice Bolt, one of the " Dumb 
 Orators," Counter and Clubb in " The Wager," 
 and Jonas Kindred and his wife in " The Frank 
 Courtship," suffer in the same way. The case 
 of the last two is instructive in showing Crabbe's 
 carefulness in drawing his minor characters. While 
 there is the main plot of Sybil, the romantic 
 maiden, who would have none but a lover who 
 came in fear and trembling, and Josiah, the sober 
 youth and grave, who instead of wooing, preaches, 
 Sybil's father and mother have their own troubles 
 also. The case was this — 
 
 " Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire. 
 Was six feet high, and look'd six inches higher; 
 Erect, morose, determined, solemn, slow. 
 Who knew the man, could never cease to know; 
 His faithful spouse, when Jonas was not by, 
 Had a firm presence and a steady eye; 
 But with her husband dropp'd her look and tone, 
 And Jonas ruled un question 'd and alone." 
 
 He read, and oft would quote the sacred words — 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 101 
 
 " How pious husbands of their wives were lords ; 
 Sarah call'd Abraham lord ! and who could be. 
 So Jonas thought, a greater man than he ? " 
 
 Certainly, there was peace in the house, though 
 not that of harmony — 
 
 " But it was that which one superior will 
 Commands, by making all inferiors still; 
 Who bids all murmurs, all . objections cease, 
 And with imperious voice announces — Peace ! " 
 
 The two plots are combined when the mother 
 begs her daughter to take the mild young man; 
 for, says she, so long as peace is in your home, 
 love matters not; and then, when Josiah returns 
 after the ordeal of wooing, begs him almost tear- 
 fully to give as lenient an account of the daughter 
 as he can, so that her stern husband's wraAhr may 
 not be aroused — " Will you preserve our peace, 
 Josiah ? say ! " Curiously enough, the husband 
 has also been teaching from experience, and tries 
 to hearten the timid youth with tips how to tame 
 the frivolous one and rule " unquestion'd and 
 alone." The poet has profited well from the 
 practice which he had, in The Parish Register and 
 The Borough, in putting dramatic speeches in the 
 mouths of his characters. 
 
 The tragedies and the witty tales are the most 
 satisfactory of all. Those of the intermediate 
 class make less pleasant reading, because the 
 irony is bitter and grating instead of being either 
 overwhelming or half-fanciful. For this reason, 
 tales hke " Arabella " or " Squire Thomas " are, 
 like " Troilus and Cressida " and " Measure for 
 Measure," best left alone by aU who have not 
 
102 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 full trust in the author. They add nothing to 
 his reputation. 
 
 Wherein lies Cr abbe's greatness as a narrative 
 poet ? What, first, are his merits ? 
 * First, as foundation of all, a wonderful power 
 of observation. Nothing astounds us more in 
 reading the tales than to find that every corner 
 has been filled up with the gleanings of a " chiel' " 
 who wandered among his fellows, " takin' notes." 
 We come with the apprehension that we may be 
 bored with declamation or moralising or helpless 
 circlings around the matter in hand. We soon 
 find our error. The more one studies him, the 
 more one is convinced that Crabbe writes little 
 at random, and studies his characters as carefully 
 as their prototypes, his neighbours. This is the 
 triumph of Crabbe' s realism, the following of a 
 mind in all its devious wanderings through good 
 and evil, nobility and pettiness. It is wonderful 
 how much thinking the characters do in the short 
 space given them for their exercises. With per- 
 severance and delight he notes little twists and 
 turns on the surface and underground ; sometimes 
 describes in his own words ; sometimes gives notes 
 of conversations; sometimes makes his persons 
 reveal their inmost thoughts for the reader's 
 benefit. There is no need to labour the point; 
 but one is apt to lose the wonder of it by much 
 reading of modem novels. He studies critically 
 the mind's commerce with itself, when that 
 study was not in fashion, even in novels. From 
 the popular novels of sensation he could not learn 
 much, and almost our only clue is that he knew 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 103 
 
 " Clarissa Harlowe," though this concerns his 
 practice of minute study rather than his note of 
 detachment and criticism. How advanced he is 
 may be seen from his resemblance to the only 
 man who has admitted his influence in his work — 
 Mr. Hardy. Not only in descriptions of objects, 
 but also in the critical attitude towards the 
 characters, they have definite resemblances — if 
 we allow for differences of scope and medium. 
 Fancy Day is enough of a fool to delight Crabbe, 
 and Dick Dewy is dissected with the same accuracy 
 as Jachin and the two Dumb Orators. " For 
 several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with 
 the inward eye of reflection so anxiously set on 
 his passages at arms with Fancy, that the road 
 and scenery were as a thin mist over the real 
 pictures of his mind. Was she a coquette ? The 
 balance between the evidence that she did love 
 him and that she did not was so nicely struck, 
 that his opinion had no stability. She had let 
 him put his hand upon hers ; she had allowed her 
 eyes to drop plump into the depths of his — his into 
 hers— ^three or four times; her manner had been 
 very free with regard to the basin and towel ; she 
 had appeared vexed at the mention of Shinar. 
 On the other hand, she had driven him about the 
 house like a quiet dog or cat, said Shinar cared 
 for her, and seemed anxious that Mr. Maybold 
 should do the same." Crabbe has nothing so 
 deft and sparkling as this; he goes about his 
 business slowly and, as Murray said of him, says 
 uncommon things in a common way. He had 
 not, as Mr. Hardy had, opportunities for a course 
 
104 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 of study in the French Realists or Naturalists; 
 yet he has points in common with them. But 
 he works in a simpler way and with less blatant 
 artistic theories. If he has not the brute energy 
 of Balzac, he has, perhaps, a closer psychological 
 cohesion — and he is altogether without the 
 curiosity which causes Flaubert and Zola to 
 pry into the origins of evil and to burrow in 
 search of the roots of a character. He takes fools 
 as they stand. He does not speculate as to how 
 they become prone to foolishness, but tells what 
 happens because they are fools. The question of 
 realism itself is not worth discussing. It would 
 lead us into bogs and fenny places, and all that 
 we should arrive at would probably be — " If all 
 this that we find in Crabbe is realism, then Crabbe 
 is a realist." 
 
 The second merit is that of dialogue. Indeed, 
 the very fact that we can see clearly in the char- 
 acters the marks of careful observation is a proof 
 that the dialogue has played its part and has been 
 fashioned with a touch sure enough to avoid 
 waste of good material. Crabbe knows how to 
 vary the tone with the individual and his mood, 
 as is seen in the extracts from " The Learned Boy," 
 quoted above. And if he did not feel sure of his 
 ground, he would not be so ready as he is to turn 
 aside into monologue or dialogue. 
 
 But can these two things alone explain Crabbe' s 
 success in his art, even with the advantages of a 
 ready wit and a steady hand? For the lighter 
 tales they are sufficient, for in these there is no 
 very strong central impulse. In the tragic tales 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 105 
 
 a stronger spirit works through and through the 
 stuff, welding it together, purging from it the 
 epigrammatic sting, and replacing this with a 
 fuller flow of feeling. This power is imagination, 
 and herein lies the greatness of Crabbe's tales.^ 
 Observation and good dialogue belong to other 
 things besides narrative ; but when the imagination 
 of a narrative poet takes them up as instruments, 
 it can leave marks which are to be found nowhere 
 so fitly as in great narrative, as we shall see. 
 
 Of course, if one is of Matthew Arnold's mind, 
 it is open to doubt whether Crabbe's work really 
 is worth serious consideration. He seems to run 
 foul of our author at every turn. " What then 
 are the situations, from the representation of 
 which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment 
 can be derived? They are those in which the 
 suffering finds no vent in action ... in which 
 there is everything to be endured, nothing to be 
 done. . . . When they occur in actual life, they 
 are painful, not tragic ; the representation of them 
 in poetry is painful also." Then, again, are we 
 to believe that a poem affects us more than another 
 " simply because . . . the action is greater, the 
 personages nobler, the situations more intense," 
 and that " this is the true basis of the interest in 
 a poetical work, and this alone ? " 
 
 As to the first statement, the answer is simply, 
 solvitur ambulando. If, as you say, stories of 
 suffering without action are painful, how is it that 
 people read them ? If " Resentment," " The 
 Brothers " and " Edward Shore " have this as 
 their chief element, how is it that the public of 
 
106 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 England bought up five editions of the volume 
 which contained them, within two years of its 
 first appearance, for the sake of these very tales, 
 which one of the greatest critics of the day had 
 pointed out as being the most worthy of attention ? 
 
 As for the representation of painful things being 
 itself painful, we have had Crabbe's own defence 
 and Jeffrey's theory. It shall be Stevenson this 
 time — " Phantom reproductions of experience, 
 even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure ; 
 while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can 
 torture and slay." 
 
 Lastly, Matthew Arnold's final statement is too 
 noisy and petulant. It may be true that the 
 grand style is the most imposing ; but there is no 
 certainty that it is confined to actions and per- 
 sonages that are noble before the poet touches 
 them. Nor do such subjects guarantee the attain- 
 ment of grandeur. And if it is wrong to despise 
 the antiquity of actions which Homer and the 
 tragedians saw fit to use — which is the beginning 
 of Arnold's argument — it is much more wrong to 
 pass an edict against all subjects which would not 
 pass the censorship of the Homers and Virgils — 
 which is what his argument comes to in the end. 
 One might as well burn one's novels at once. Why 
 should writers be penalised solely for exercising 
 their freedom of choice in themes ? Has one a 
 right to wag a finger of warning at them and 
 declare that, if they do not choose in such and 
 such a way, they wiU come to a bad end and 
 languish in an underworld of shadows? Why 
 should the art which treats of angels and heroes 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 107 
 
 exclude from honour that which shows us old 
 women scraping carrots, or a jolly sailor who is 
 too credulously generous to a mean and hypo- 
 critical brother, and trusts him, to his own per- 
 dition? We are come back to Lamb's Essay on 
 Hogarth, and the seventeenth chapter of " Adam 
 Bede," called to witness above. 
 
 It is pleasant to leave Matthew Arnold and 
 approach Stevenson, who, devotee of romance 
 as he is, is not always prejudiced against the 
 ware of artificers who work in different stufi. 
 He has discovered some of the tricks of that 
 business which we must call, in accordance with 
 his humble remonstrance, the art of narrative. 
 And Crabbe, being, as we say, a writer of good 
 narrative, may find his true justification and a 
 chronicle of his greater virtues in the words of 
 the genial gossiper on romance. 
 
 We have said that neither dialogue nor obser- 
 vation of character — ^not even the power to map 
 out a character — ^is the crown of narrative. These 
 are merely the raw material. It is not enough to 
 make character and dialogue true to fact. They 
 must be true in the circumstances. " Our art is 
 occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much 
 in making stories true as in making them typical ; 
 not so much in capturing the lineaments of each 
 fact, as in marshalhng all of them towards a 
 common end. For the welter of impressions, all 
 forcible but all discreet, which hfe presents, it 
 substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, 
 all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming 
 at the same efifect, all eloquent of the same idea. 
 
108 GEOEGE CRABBE 
 
 all chiming together like consonant notes in music 
 or like the graduated tints in a good picture." 
 Here is the real difference between the grave and 
 the gay tales. In the latter Crabbe has his epigram 
 to enforce, and while there is the rigid frame 
 enclosing the story, the gaps must be made 
 interesting somehow. Apart from the epigram 
 of the story, the interest lies in the style of that 
 which fills in the spaces; the very ideal is cen- 
 trifugal, the wit must be kept up, each couplet 
 must bring its share of effervescence or else the 
 story will fall flat for want of interest. In the 
 circumstances, it is the right policy. With " The 
 Brothers " and its kind, the story needs no en- 
 forcing. It is strong enough to work on the mind 
 of the reader, unaided. This is now the ideal and 
 all things must efface themselves for the story's 
 sake — dialogue, description, style, even character 
 — all must be toned down so that the whole effect 
 of the story may bear down on the reader, and 
 soak into his mind. It is noticeable, too, that 
 before the stress comes, at the beginning of the 
 tales when he is setting down his postulates, the 
 style has a more definite ring than when he is 
 engaged with the burden of the proof. Then, the 
 verse becomes bare and prosaic with hardly even 
 Crabbe' s usual " snap " in it. 
 
 These are some of the outward signs of the 
 working of the imagination in narrative, which, 
 as we are at present viewing it, is appreciated not 
 so much for what is in the tale as for what has 
 been eliminated — that is, all that would distract. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 109 
 
 As to how the story is made to work into the 
 mind, that cannot be described in itself and is, 
 besides, a thing pecuUar to the art of narrative. 
 It is also hard to describe the impression made 
 on the mind by a tale like " The Brothers." 
 Perhaps Stevenson's parallel between art and 
 a geometrical proposition will serve, both as 
 regards the bareness of outline and the typical, 
 abstract generaUsing of the bitterness of actual 
 experience. " A proposition of geometry does 
 not compete with hfe; and a proposition of 
 geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a 
 work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue 
 to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither 
 represents it. The novel, which is a work of art, 
 exists not by its resemblances to hfe, which are 
 forced and material, as a shoe must still consist 
 'of leather, but by its immeasurable difference 
 from life, which is designed and significant, and 
 is both the method and the meaning of the work." 
 That one of Crabbe's designs in these tales was 
 to generalise suffering and take the edge off it, 
 is proved by one technical point, this, namely, 
 that neither George in " The Brothers " nor 
 Merchant Paul in " Resentment " is allowed to 
 state his own case : both are made noble by 
 silence. Nor are they seen through the eyes of 
 their tormentors, that would be too cruel. All 
 that we know of Paul's misery comes from the 
 loving and compassionate and forgiving maid, 
 Susan, who is contrasted so well with her stern 
 and unrelenting mistress. From a window in 
 
no GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 their mansion they see the erring husband with 
 his poor'load of sand in the driving snow. " Think 
 on his crime," says the mistress — 
 
 "Think on his crime." — "Yes, sure 'twas very wrong; 
 But look, (God bless him !) how he gropes along." 
 
 In hke manner, George's days are comforted, 
 his miseries shared and his memory ennobled 
 by his little nephew, one of the few children in 
 Crabbe's works. 
 
 " The Brothers " is the best of all the Tales in 
 Verse because it is not flawed. There are errors 
 of proportion in some of the others : in " Edward 
 Shore " there are one or two digressions and too 
 much moraUsing; in "The Patron," a very long 
 and very dull letter from John's father, which, 
 like that given to the Learned Boy, " was good 
 advice, and meant, 'My son, be good;'" in 
 " Resentment " Crabbe steps in twice with notes 
 to the reader, and the story does not finish well. 
 It is worth noticing, too, that in " Procrastina- 
 tion," where the stress is Hghter, the style through- 
 out is of stronger cast than that of " The Brothers." 
 
 So much for the conduct of the story. Crabbe 
 has still another narrative virtue which appears 
 when the stories reach a crisis or memorable point. 
 Then, the style rises out of its restrained channel 
 and the energy or poetry of the writer rushes 
 forth in full flow. " The threads of a story come 
 from time to time together and make a picture 
 in the web; the characters fall from time to time 
 into some attitude to each other or to nature, 
 which stamps the story home like an illustration. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 111 
 
 Crusoe, . recoiling from the footprint, Achilles 
 shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bend- 
 ing the great bow. Christian running with his 
 fingers in his ears, these are the culminating 
 moments in the legend, and each has been printed 
 in the mind's eye for ever." Crabbe has examples 
 of this " plastic part " of poetry, for he was an 
 adept at painting pictures, as is proved by the 
 old Schoolmistress or the Miller's Daughter in 
 The Parish Register, the spirit of the scene being, 
 in each case, a reflection of the mind of the person 
 concerned. It is precisely this need in narrative 
 that the epic simile was invented to supply, and 
 Crabbe, for all his powers in the matter of pictures, 
 is exemplary in his restraint and could have 
 taught a good lesson to those who will put in a 
 simile or a picture on the sUghtest provocation. 
 
 He has his long similes, but only one which is 
 in any way heroic — 
 
 " As a male turkey straggling on the green, 
 When by fierce harriers, terriers, mongrels seen," 
 
 and so on in this strain for sixteen hnes more. 
 The difference between that and the beautiful 
 symboUc pictures in the tragic tales shows as well 
 as anjrthing the great range of Crabbe' s powers. 
 The pictures themselves are not all of the same 
 sort. Some, like the final scene of " Procrastina- 
 tion " or the unrest of Shore and his companion 
 in the hour of their temptation, depict states of 
 mind simply, without the use of symbol to con- 
 centrate the impression; others, like the autumn 
 landscape in " The Patron," are symbols simply. 
 
112 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 here typifying the bhghting of John's hopes of 
 favour from the patron and his sister — 
 
 " Cold grew the foggy mom, 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 display'd their melancholy hue; 
 Save the green holly with its berries red, 
 And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread." 
 
 " The Brothers " is bare even of this ornament, 
 for there is no crisis; things move more slowly, 
 and Isaac is not the man to cause a scene of hard 
 struggle. " The Parting Hour," however, is well 
 supplied with scenes of deep pathos — the return 
 of Allen Booth or Judith watching over the 
 sleeping man. If one must choose again, let it be 
 another watcher and another ward, Anna and her 
 unfortunate lover, Edward Shore — part of the 
 magnificent ending of that terrible tale — 
 
 " 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." 
 
 Actuahty of relation, nudity of description, 
 poetry without an atmosphere, with occasional 
 bursts of finer writing which unlike those described 
 by Matthew Arnold in his Preface of 1853, do not 
 constitute the sole merit of the poem, and do not 
 strive merely to palliate the mediocre stuff with 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 113 
 
 which writers fill up the gaps, but are valuable 
 less for themselves alone than for the insight which 
 they give, by their very infrequency, into the 
 power and restraint with which the whole action 
 is conceived — this is the great merit of the Tales 
 in Verse. 
 
 The spirit of The Tales of the Hall is different. 
 What is lost in restraint, bareness, is gained in 
 atmosphere, and while much that is essential 
 remains unaltered, we have to chronicle a wearing 
 down of hard edges in many directions. 
 
 A new turn appears sometimes in diction and 
 phrasing, taking us away from epigram — 
 
 "Breathe the pure fragrance of their life away," 
 or — 
 
 "This was my dream — In some auspicious hour, 
 In some sweet solitude, in some green bower, 
 Whither my fate should lead me, there, unseen, 
 I should behold my fancy's gracious queen. 
 Singing sweet song ! that I should hear awhile. 
 Then catch the transient glory of a smile; " 
 or — 
 
 " 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 ddnk and view the fountain that supplied 
 The sparkling bliss — and feel, if not express, 
 Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness." 
 
 That, if we may be so bold as to say so — and we 
 have some authority from Professor Elton — is 
 Keats of 1817-18. Here is Coleridge, from The 
 Borough. 
 
 " And now they walk upon the sea-side sand. 
 Counting the number and what kind they be, 
 Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea." 
 
114 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 And he has the tune of blank verse in his head 
 when he begins the tale of " Rachel," which is 
 akin to that of Margaret in " The Excursion." 
 
 " It chanoed we walk'd upon the heath, and met 
 A wandering woman; her thin clothing wet 
 With morning fog." 
 
 Then again, in the motto which heads " Ellen 
 Orford " there is " Marmion," used with disrespect. 
 Crabbe had been reading " Marmion " again about 
 this time, and quotes a passage as one of the 
 mottoes to " Peter Grimes," and in the Preface 
 points out likenesses between the two rufl&ans, 
 Scott's and his own. It may have been Scott's 
 example that prompted him to set out one of the 
 Books in The Tales of the Hall in octosyllabics. 
 This draft was not published, and the verse is 
 not quite like Scott's — 
 
 " As instinct prompted, forth I ran. 
 Resolved to show myself a man, 
 And plucking forth an oaken bough. 
 Ran like Guy to fight the Cow." 
 
 Most of the passages just quoted come from 
 The Tales of the Hall, and taken with the fair 
 number of passages which show a loosening of the 
 couplet by enjambement, suggest that, since the 
 publication of the Tales in 1812, Crabbe has been 
 reading more widely and assimilating his new 
 models, and unconsciously perhaps, for that 
 reason and others, such as age and an estabUshed 
 reputation, is writing with a less rigid carefulness. 
 
 So, too, the new tales are longer than those of 
 the preceding volume, and more prolix, especially 
 those which are part of the frame, such as the 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 115 
 
 adventures of the two brothers and their ordinary 
 dinner-table conversation, with the moralisings 
 of the elder. The two brothers, George and 
 Richard, after many years of estrangement, meet 
 at Binning Hall, the seat of George, whet is much 
 the elder. Each tells the story of his life, and 
 then George has tales to teU about acquaintances 
 in the district whom they meet in their excursions 
 together; Richard listens with pleasure, although 
 before the meeting he had thought to himseU, 
 full of independence, " I will not hear your tales 
 the whole day long." The conclusion is that 
 Greorge, who is rich and lonely, learns to value the 
 companionship of his poorer brother and buys a 
 seat for him and his family in the neighbourhood 
 of his own HaU. Crabbe's interest is still psy- 
 chological and he preserves his old perspicuity in 
 scanning the minds of his characters. It was 
 open to him to write a tale of adventure, for 
 Richard had fought in the Peninsula; but he 
 preferred to write what is more like a " document 
 d'histoire morale " than a tale of battles in Spain. 
 But, as with his own Old Bachelor, " Time began 
 to play his usual tricks with him," and he " began 
 to prose." This new manner is worth remarking 
 not because it is either very good or very bad, 
 but because it is very different from the concise- 
 ness and sharp utterance of most of the Tales in 
 Verse. A genial tone pervades most of what con- 
 cerns Greorge and Richard, and there is much good- 
 natured gessip — 
 
 "To land like this no botanist will come, 
 To seek the precious ware he hides at home ; 
 
116 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 Pressing the leaves and flowers with effort nice, 
 As if they came from herbs of Paradise; 
 Let them their favourites with my neighbours see, 
 They have no — what? — ^no habitat with me." 
 
 The cheerfulness appears, curiously enough, in 
 Jeffrey's summary even, the critic for once de- 
 scending from his place of high dignity. 
 
 It may not appeal to everybody, but there is 
 a good deal that is charming in the intercourse 
 of these two lovable fools — fools still, for Crabbe 
 seldom lets his people go quite unscathed, but 
 fools on whom it is impossible to exercise a sharp 
 wit, who, in fact, call for a play of benevolent 
 humour. The introduction and the interludes 
 show, better than the tales in either collection, 
 the genial disposition of the poet ; which is indeed 
 fitting, for if Richard is Crabbe in early youth, 
 George is Crabbe when older and more disillusioned. 
 
 The copious autobiographical passages in The 
 Tales of the Hall are significant of a new develop- 
 ment in Crabbe, namely, that he is now more 
 disposed to treat with respect people's feelings 
 about themselves. He grows sentimental, and 
 holds sentimentality less in abhorrence. As before 
 he lets people put their own cases and relate their 
 own histories, giving them, in the cases of George, 
 Richard, the Old Bachelor and the Maid, carte 
 blanche, a thing he had never done before. And 
 though he gives them more sympathy, though 
 his irony is less blatant, he is never drawn into 
 the vortex. He either lets drop a gentle hint 
 that the speakers are not void of foolishness, or 
 makes them save themselves, as he saves himself. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 117 
 
 by the superior wisdom with which one looks 
 back on one's past feelings and opinions. The 
 best example of all to show this is the Sixth 
 Book, which tells of the conclusion of Richard's 
 adventures and the events that led up to the 
 great happiness of his life, his marriage with 
 Matilda. In this connection, Crabbe, in the 
 person of George, becomes eloquent for the first 
 time, on the subject of human happiness : George, 
 because of vague regrets for happiness unattained ; 
 Crabbe in the remembrance of his domestic feUcity 
 in the past, when Mira was alive. 
 
 In parallel with aU this, is the softening of wit 
 and irony, however gentle, into humour, which is 
 now in consequence more pervasive than before. 
 This is the quality which intoxicated Fitzgerald 
 and filled his letters with references to Crabbe and 
 to the readings in The Tales of the Hall which he 
 intended to publish. An article appeared in 
 "The Atlantic Monthly" (May 1880) by G. E. 
 Woodberry, where the writer, among other things, 
 dismissed Crabbe's " trials at Humour." Fitz- 
 gerald comments in defence of his " Great Gun " 
 in a letter to a friend, his book of selections having 
 been circulated privately in 1879 — " It was mainly 
 for the Humour's sake that I made my Uttle work : 
 Humour so evident to me in so many of the Tales 
 (and Conversations), and which I meant to try 
 and get a hearing for in the short Preface I had 
 written in case the book had been published. I 
 thought these tales showed the ' stern Painter ' 
 softened by his Grand Climacteric, removed from 
 the gloom and sadness of his early associations. 
 
118 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 and looking to the Follies rather than to the Vices 
 of men, and treating them often in something of a 
 Moliere way, only with some pathetic humour 
 mixed, so as these Tales were almost the only one 
 of his Works which left an agreeable impression 
 behind them. But if so good a Judge as Mr. 
 Woodberry does not see all this, I certainly could 
 not have persuaded John Bull to see it : and 
 perhaps am wrong myself in seeing what is not 
 there." 
 
 And besides this quality of humour, there is 
 also a fuller pathos than elsewhere. If " The 
 Old Bachelor " will stand for the one, " The 
 Sisters " or " Ruth " exemplify the other. As 
 with " The Parting Hour," the conclusions are 
 of great power and beauty. Ruth and her lover 
 are more than betrothed, when, on the eve of 
 their wedding day, the youth is carried relent- 
 lessly off by a press-gang, and is soon after slain 
 in battle. A preaching weaver then woos, with 
 nauseous perversions of Scripture, the loathing 
 and widowed bride. Her father urges her to 
 wed him. Ruth drowns herself. It is not a 
 matter of character, but of the limits of human 
 endurance, and Crabbe does not fail his theme. 
 The story is told by Ruth's mother, so that, once 
 again, the sufferer is silent and the deepest work- 
 ings of the mind in agony are not revealed, and 
 at the last, the stress is reflected from that of the 
 mother. Ruth does not return; it is a night of 
 terrible storm; the father begins to relent and 
 fear, to pray and read the Bible; they go to 
 neighbours and wayfarers ; they search the beach 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 119 
 
 and then the father sees an apparition which 
 convinces him of her death, which is described 
 to them subsequently by an eye-witness — 
 
 " But ! what storm was in that mind ? What strife, 
 That could compel her to lay down her life ? 
 For she was seen within the sea to wade. 
 By one at distance, when she first had pray'd ; 
 Then to a rock within the hither shoal 
 Softly and with a fearful step she stole; 
 Then, when she gain'd it, on the top she stood 
 A moment still — and dropt into the flood ! " 
 
 " The Sisters " is a character study and has a 
 gentler kind of pathos. The source of interest 
 is the contrast between the dispositions of the 
 two sisters, Lucy and Jane, their choice of lovers, 
 their attitude towards the ingratiating scoundrel 
 who is to rob them of their worldly wealth, the 
 effects on each when the lovers — each in his own 
 way — change their manner on hearing of the 
 loss; then the final picture of Lucy as protector 
 to her more highly strung .and impulsive sister, 
 Jane, whose mind is affected by her lover's 
 brutality — 
 
 " Would I could lose this bitter sense of wrong, 
 And sleep in peace, but it will not be long ! 
 And here is something, Lucy, in my brain, 
 I know not what — ^it is a cure for pain; 
 But is not death ! — ^no beckoning hand I see, 
 No voice I hear that comes alone to me; 
 It is not death, but change ; I am not now 
 As I was once — ^nor can I tell you how; 
 Nor is it madness — ask, and you shall find 
 In my replies the soundness of my mind." 
 
 Those wanderings of a wounded mind, no less 
 than the song which closes the tale, gives its value 
 to the end of " The Sisters." As a whole, " The 
 
120 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 Sisters " is the greater tale, for little of " Ruth " 
 is of great value except the catastrophe, while the 
 former is strong work throughout. And in spite 
 of two terrible flaws within six Unes of the passage 
 just quoted, the cHmax of " The Sisters " may 
 compare well with that of " Ruth " which has 
 some obscurities to match the errors of taste in 
 the other. Preferences will depend on taste and 
 mood, and, in spite of the good words which M. 
 Huchon has spoken for " Ruth," it is possible to 
 believe that what an intense working of the 
 imagination has done there, has been done with 
 as much merit in the final scene of " The Sisters " 
 by that method so characteristic of Crabbe, the 
 slow elaboration of an effect so that it soaks into 
 the reader's mind almost imperceptibly. In any 
 case, both poems have this characteristic, that 
 their catastrophes have to be emphasised; the 
 points are made to give the stories value. 
 
 Both are good, but neither can rival that which 
 goes by the unattractive name of " Smugglers and 
 Poachers " and which — although Fitzgerald caUed 
 it long and ill-told — ^is the greatest of all Crabbe's 
 tales. The story is truly tragic, and the con- 
 clusion comes inevitably and needs no emphasis. 
 
 James and Robert Shelley are foundlings who 
 as they grow up gain the respect of their neigh- 
 bours; their characters are a contrast, James 
 being as steady, trustworthy and prudent as 
 Robert is impulsive, generous and adventurous. 
 Each, unknown to the other, falls in love with 
 Rachel, a village maid; she goes into service at 
 the Hall, where James is employed, and Robert, 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 121 
 
 shut oJEE from her company, seeks comfort in 
 excitement and joins a band of smugglers and 
 poachers, after finding some moral justification 
 for his action. Rachel, who in her heart prefers 
 Robert, worries about him, but is too innocent 
 to know that he is committing crime, and further, 
 she distrusts the evil things said of his brother 
 by James, who is now head-keeper. The brothers 
 become open enemies, and James continues to use 
 his brother's crime unscrupulously to gain favour 
 with Rachel, but unsuccessfully; this goes on till 
 the poachers are captured, Robert among them. 
 What will James do? He goes to Rachel and 
 promises that Robert's life shall be saved if she 
 wiU consent to marry him. What will Rachel 
 do ? She goes to Robert and puts the case to him. 
 What will Robert do ? Full of the dread of death, 
 Robert chooses life, and puts the burden upon 
 Rachel once more. She is married to James, 
 and, before the day of the trial comes, the poachers 
 escape from prison. They organise another raid, 
 and James calls together his band in opposition 
 and goes out. After a time, Rachel becomes 
 anxious and goes out also, and amid the sights 
 and sounds of night which fiU her with super- 
 stitious dread, she suddenly finds Robert, half- 
 dead, a bullet in his temples. And, as she is 
 beginning to reahse with anguish the fuU signifi- 
 cance of what she has found, the keepers come 
 up with the body of her husband, shot dead. The 
 two brothers had met in the dark and, unknow- 
 ingly, slain each other. Rachel lives on — 
 
122 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 " As men will children at their sports behold, 
 And smile to see them, though unmoved and cold, 
 Smile at the recollected games, and then 
 Depart and mix in the affairs of men : 
 So Rachel looks upon the world and sees 
 It caimot longer pain her, longer please, 
 But just detain the passing thought, or cause 
 A gentle smile of pity or applause; 
 And then the recollected soul repairs 
 Her slumbering hope, and heeds her own affairs." 
 
 The conflict of motives is there clearly enough. 
 It is a story of mean minds, a tragedy without 
 generosity. Both James and Robert overcome 
 the temptation to be generous : James has steeled 
 himself against it; Robert needs some effort. 
 Had James been generous, we should have had 
 a story of renunciation ; had Robert been generous, 
 we should have had another example to add to 
 the " seintes legendes of Cupide " '; as it is, both 
 remain ignoble and the catastrophe brings ruin 
 upon just and unjust, the weak ones are weeded 
 out and the innocent suffer. The conclusion is 
 worked in the right way — the Ught is switched 
 from the brothers to Rachel. She is the centre 
 of the story, and if we have any sympathy for 
 Robert it is simply because we see him through 
 Rachel's eyes. And so, at the end it is she 
 whom we see and not the brothers. They are not 
 worthy that we should watch them stand face 
 to face, in the dayhght. Neither is noble enough 
 to be slain by the other except by accident, in the 
 darkness. 
 
 It is possibly more than a coincidence that there 
 should be strong kinship between the plots of 
 Crabbe's " Smugglers and Poachers " and Mr. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 123 
 
 Masefield's "Daffodil Fields." Whether this is 
 so or not, the likeness is sufficiently close to give 
 importance to the diflEerences. One of these 
 concerns this very matter of the conclusion. In 
 Mr. Masefield's poem the two rivals meet among 
 the daffodils and beat each other's hfe out while 
 the sun shines on them. James and Robert would 
 not have been strong enough to bear that. The 
 men in " The Daffodil Fields " had nobleness in 
 them, and the story could be told from their point 
 of view till the very end. " The Daffodil Fields " 
 is a tragedy for three people, " Smugglers and 
 Poachers " for one only. 
 
 Apart altogether from the plot, there are import- 
 ant differences. Mr. Masefield brings in supple- 
 mentary things to add weight to the story — the 
 whole motive of the fields of daffodils, a voyage 
 to South America with full illustrations, and 
 many, many pictures besides. And while these 
 things soak into the mind in much the same way 
 as Crabbe's work, one cannot help feeling that 
 the great weakness of our contemporary lies where 
 Crabbe's strength lay. We have seen how effect- 
 ively Crabbe uses pictures when his stories reach 
 a crisis, and how sparing he is in his use of them. 
 Mr. Masefield proves by example that where great 
 stress is, much description is wrong, especially if 
 that stress is long continued. In a short poem 
 where the story is thin, description may bring 
 cohesion with it — as in " The Eve of St. Agnes; " 
 but in a poem like " The Daffodil Fields," " mere 
 poetry," however honestly written, spoils the 
 story and the story spoils our enjoyment of the 
 
124 GEOEGE CRABBE 
 
 poetry, and as it is the story that matters, the 
 description should go. 
 
 This would seem a fitting place to end this 
 essay. We might see Crabbe as a writer of 
 Comedy in " The Preceptor Husband " or " The 
 Natural Death of Love " ; we might watch him 
 departing more and more from his epigrammatic 
 stories, and drawing nearer to the stufiE of ordinary 
 novels, as in the framework of The Tales of the 
 Hall or in " The Family of Love," and then see 
 him suddenly come back to his epigrams in the 
 series called " Farewell and Return," published 
 posthumously. But there is no need ; and if that 
 excuse is not sufficient, let us use some of Chaucer's 
 — " I am tired and old; I have many other things 
 to do, and so I will stop now, * for ese of yow and 
 los of tyme.' " 
 
 ^ And so we leave Crabbe. An attempt has been 
 made to pick out those things which show his 
 intelligence, and by so doing to praise him rightly. 
 If too little has been said in his dispraise, it is 
 because his faults are so well known that most 
 people are offended before they approach him. 
 From Hazlitt, of whom no more need be said, 
 and Coleridge, who declared that " in Crabbe 
 there is an absolute defect of the high imagination " 
 and Landor, who made Porson say (not unkindly), 
 "Crabbe wrote with a twopenny nail, and scratched 
 rough truths and rogues' facts on mud walls," 
 from this to Fitzgerald there is a considerable 
 space: Fitzgerald who defends his "old Man" 
 against aU comers be they Woodberry or Leslie 
 Stephen, claiming for him humour and imagina- 
 
GEORGE CRABBE 125 
 
 tion, and who confesses that many passages can, 
 as he says, " make my heart glow — yes, even out 
 at the eyes — though so familiar to me." 
 
 If Johnson was right in saying, "It is useless 
 to criticise what nobody reads," then this essay 
 is one of the works of supererogation. Not that it 
 is a useless addition to Crabbe's means of salvation, 
 but rather that neither it nor anything else can 
 save him from a prolonged sojourn, not in hell, 
 but in purgatory. He was justly appreciated in 
 his own day, but Fitzgerald about the year 1880 
 could not make John Bull think fairly of him, and 
 there seems to be no hope for him in the near 
 future, unless our present day apostles of disillusion, 
 and Mr. John Masefield with his tales in verse can 
 put John Bull in a fit state of mind to receive him. 
 
 That he is worth reading is certain, but he is 
 not one of the greatest writers. He is a good 
 example of that class of writers who have in them 
 the material for a literary giant, but yet have not 
 the final gift which will raise them to a place 
 among the highest. By his tales he must stand 
 or fall, and they are indeed such that they will 
 repay study and will not easily grow stale even 
 after much more attention than they have received 
 hitherto. But they lack the finishing touch. 
 The material is good — as good as Shakespeare's 
 or Browning's or that of the great novehsts; the 
 plans are set out firmly ; the foundations strongly 
 established and the walls sound; but one looks in 
 vain for " the cloud-capp'd towers " above. They 
 fall short because the material is not put to its 
 full use. The plots are as good as they can be, 
 
126 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 well-told and full of the fruits of observation, the 
 characters sketched with sure touch and put in 
 proportion to the story in which they appear; 
 but they need inspiration, they are not fully alive. 
 They are not all lay figures like Blaney or Clelia. 
 They are something more than shadows, but in 
 none of them is life full blown. " It is one thing," 
 says Stevenson, " to remark and to dissect, with 
 the most cutting logic, the complications of life, 
 and of the human spirit; it is quite another to 
 give them body and blood in the story of Ajax 
 or Hamlet." Crabbe is at a disadvantage in 
 having to dissect as a first process, being a student 
 of character and not a purveyor of incident. And 
 he is successful in so far as his people live in the 
 place where they are put, in their proper environ- 
 ment. George, Richard, the two Sisters, Rachel 
 and the two Shelleys are alive as long as we read 
 the tale; but when we shut the book and try to 
 add them also, as they seem worthy, to the gallery 
 of heroes which we carry in our minds, we find that 
 they are gone, leaving abstractions in their place. 
 We know them no longer, and can say no more 
 of them than could George's tenants concerning 
 the new squire, whom, for lack of knowledge, 
 they could neither praise nor blame — 
 
 " Ask them, ' Who dwelt within that lofty wall ? ' 
 And they would say, 'The gentleman was tall; 
 Look'd old when follow'd, but alert when met. 
 And had some vigour in. his movements yet ; 
 He stoops, but not as one infirm; and wears 
 Dress that becomes his station and his years.' " 
 
 Printed for the Uhivebsitt of Lohdos Press, Ltd., by 
 Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd., London and Bungay