Book: Crabbe, (George)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER X


THE TALES OF THE HALL

(1819)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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