Book: Crabbe, (George)

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The passage referred to is the once-famous description of the condemned
Felon in the "Letter" on _Prisons_. Macaulay had, as we know, his
"heightened way of putting things," but the narrative which he cites, as
foil to one of Robert Montgomery's borrowings, deserves the praise. It
shows Crabbe's descriptive power at its best, and his rare power and
insight into the workings of the heart and mind. He has to trace the
sequence of thoughts and feelings in the condemned criminal during the
days between his sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier days
that haunt his pillow--days when he wandered with his sweetheart or his
sister through their village meadows:--

"Yes! all are with him now, and all the while
Life's early prospects and his Fanny's smile.
Then come his sister and his village friend,
And he will now the sweetest moments spend
Life has to yield,--No! never will he find
Again on earth such pleasure in his mind
He goes through shrubby walks these friends among,
Love in their looks and honour on the tongue.
Nay, there's a charm beyond what nature shows,
The bloom is softer and more sweetly glows;
Pierced by no crime and urged by no desire
For more than true and honest hearts require,
They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed
Through the green lane,--then linger in the mead,--
Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom,--
And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum;
Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass,
And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender grass,
Whore dwarfish flowers among the grass are spread,
And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed;
Then 'cross the bounding brook they make their way
O'er its rough bridge--'and there behold the bay!--
The ocean smiling to the fervid sun--
The waves that faintly fall and slowly run--
The ships at distance and the boats at hand,
And now they walk upon the sea-side sand,
Counting the number, and what kind they be,
Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea:
Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold
The glittering waters on the shingles rolled;
The timid girls, half dreading their design,
Dip the small foot in the retarded brine,
And search for crimson weeds, which spreading flow,
Or lie like pictures on the sand below:
With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun,
Through the small waves so softly shines upon;
And those live lucid jellies which the eye
Delights to trace as they swim glittering by:
Pearl-shells and rubied star-fish they admire,
And will arrange above the parlour fire,--
Tokens of bliss!--'Oh! horrible! a wave
Roars as it rises--save me, Edward! save!'
She cries:--Alas! the watchman on his way
Calls and lets in--truth, terror, and the day!"

Allowing for a certain melodramatic climax here led up to, we cannot
deny the impressiveness of this picture--the first-hand quality of its
observation, and an eye for beauty, which his critics are rarely
disposed to allow to Crabbe. A narrative of equal pathos, and once
equally celebrated, is that of the village-girl who receives back her
sailor-lover from his last voyage, only to watch over his dying hours.
It is in an earlier section (No. ii. _The Church_), beginning:

"Yes! there are real mourners--I have seen
A fair sad girl, mild, suffering, and serene,"

too long to quote in full, and, as with Crabbe's method generally, not
admitting of being fairly represented by extracts. Then there are
sketches of character in quite a different vein, such as the vicar,
evidently drawn from life. He is the good easy man, popular with the
ladies for a kind of _fade_ complimentary style in which he excels; the
man of "mild benevolence," strongly opposed to every thing new:

"Habit with him was all the test of truth:
'It must be right: I've done it from my youth,'
Questions he answered in as brief a way:
'It must be wrong--it was of yesterday.'"

Feeble good-nature, and selfish unwillingness to disturb any existing
habits or conventions, make up his character:

"In him his flock found nothing to condemn;
Him sectaries liked--he never troubled them:
No trifles failed his yielding mind to please,
And all his passions sunk in early ease;
Nor one so old has left this world of sin,
More like the being that he entered in."

An excellent companion sketch to that of the dilettante vicar is
provided in that of the poor curate--the scholar, gentleman, and devout
Christian, struggling against abject poverty to support his large
family. The picture drawn by Crabbe has a separate and interesting
origin. A year before the appearance of _The Borough_, one of the
managers of the Literary Fund, an institution then of some twenty years'
standing, and as yet without its charter, applied to Crabbe for a copy
of verses that might be appropriate for recitation at the annual dinner
of the Society, held at the Freemasons' Tavern. It was the custom of the
society to admit such literary diversions as part of the entertainment.
The notorious William Thomas Fitzgerald had been for many years the
regular contributor of the poem, and his efforts on the occasion are
remembered, if only through the opening couplet of Byron's _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, where Fitzgerald is gibbeted as the
_Codrus_ of Juvenal's satire:

"Still must I hear? shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl
His creaking couplets in a Tavern-Hall?"

His poem for this year, 1809, is printed at length in the _Gentleman's
Magazine_ for April--and also Crabbe's, recited at the same dinner.
Crabbe seems to have composed it for the occasion, but with the
intention of ultimately weaving it into the poem on which he was then
engaged. A paragraph prefixed to the lines also shows that Crabbe had a
further object in view. "The Founder of this Society having intimated a
hope that, on a plan which he has already communicated to his particular
Friends, its Funds may be sufficiently ample to afford assistance and
relief to learned officiating Clergymen in distress, though they may not
have actually commenced Authors--the Author, in allusion to this hope,
has introduced into a Poem which he is preparing for the Press the
following character of a learned Divine in distress."

Crabbe's lines bearing on the proposed scheme (which seems for a time at
least to have been adopted by the administrators of the Fund) were left
standing when _The Borough_ was published, with, an explanatory note.
They are effective for their purpose, the pathos of them is genuine, and
worthy of attention even in these latter days of the "Queen Victoria
Clergy Fund." The speaker is the curate himself:

"Long may these founts of Charity remain,
And never shrink, but to be filled again;
True! to the Author they are now confined,
To him who gave the treasure of his mind,
His time, his health,--and thankless found mankind:
But there is hope that from these founts may flow
A side-way stream, and equal good bestow;
Good that may reach us, whom the day's distress
Keeps from the fame and perils of the Press;
Whom Study beckons from the Ills of Life,
And they from Study; melancholy strife!
Who then can say, but bounty now so free,
And so diffused, may find its way to me?
Yes! I may see my decent table yet
Cheered with the meal that adds not to my debt;
May talk of those to whom so much we owe,
And guess their names whom yet we may not know;
Blest, we shall say, are those who thus can give,
And next, who thus upon the bounty live;
Then shall I close with thanks my humble meal,
And feel so well--Oh! God! how shall I feel!"

Crabbe is known to most readers to-day by the delightful parody of his
style in the _Rejected Addresses,_ which appeared in the autumn of 1812,
and it was certainly on _The Borough_ that James Smith based his
imitation. We all remember the incident of Pat Jennings's adventure in
the gallery of the theatre. The manner of the narrative is borrowed from
Crabbe's lighter and more colloquial style. Every little foible of the
poet, when in this vein, is copied with great skill. The superfluity of
information, as in the case of--

"John Richard William Alexander Dwyer,"

whose only place in the narrative is that he preceded Pat Jennings's
father in the situation as

"Footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire";

or again in the detail that,

"Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy
Up as a corn-cutter--a safe employ"

(a perfect Crabbian couplet), is imitated throughout, Crabbe's habit of
frequent verbal antithesis, and even of something like punning, is
exactly caught in such a couplet as:

"Big-worded bullies who by quarrels live--
Who give the lie, and tell the lie they give."

Much of the parody, no doubt, exhibits the fanciful humour of the
brothers Smith, rather than of Crabbe, as is the case with many
parodies. Of course there are couplets here and there in Crabbe's
narratives which justify the burlesque. We have:

"What is the truth? Old Jacob married thrice;
He dealt in coals, and avarice was his vice,"

or the lines which the parodists themselves quote in their
justification,

"Something had happened wrong about a Bill
Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill,
So to amend it I was told to go,
And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co."

But lines such as these in fact occur only at long intervals. Crabbe's
couplets are more often pedestrian rather than grotesque.

The poet himself, as the witty brothers relate with some pride, was by
no means displeased or offended by the liberty taken. When they met in
later years at William Spencer's, Crabbe hurried to meet James Smith
with outstretched hand, "Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?" Again,
writing to a friend who had expressed some indignation at the parody,
Crabbe complained only of the preface. "There is a little
ill-nature--and I take the liberty of adding, undeserved ill-nature--in
their prefatory address; but in their versification they have done me
admirably." Here Crabbe shows a slight lack of self-knowledge. For when
to the Letter on _Trades_ the following extenuating postscript is found
necessary, there would seem to be hardly any room for the parodist:

"If I have in this Letter praised the good-humour of a man
confessedly too inattentive to business, and if in the one on
_Amusements_, I have written somewhat sarcastically of 'the
brick-floored parlour which the butcher lets,' be credit given
to me that in the one case I had no intention to apologise for
idleness, nor any design in the other to treat with contempt
the resources of the poor. The good-humour is considered as
the consolation of disappointment, and the room is so mentioned
because the lodger is vain. Most of my readers will
perceive this; but I shall be sorry if by any I am supposed to
make pleas for the vices of men, or treat their wants and
infirmities with derision or with disdain."

After this, Crabbe himself might have admitted that the descent is not
very far to the parodist's delightful apology for the change from "one
hautboy" to "one fiddle" in the description of the band. The subsequent
explanation, how the poet had purposely intertwined the various
handkerchiefs which rescued Pat Jennings's hat from the pit, lest the
real owner should be detected, and the reason for it, is a not less
exquisite piece of fooling:--"For, in the statistical view of life and
manners which I occasionally present, my clerical profession has taught
me how extremely improper it would be by any allusion, however slight,
to give any uneasiness, however trivial, to any individual, however
foolish or wicked." It might perhaps be inferred from such effusions as
are here parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of humour. This
would certainly be too sweeping an inference, for in many of his
sketches of human character he gives unmistakable proof to the contrary.
But the talent in question--often so recklessly awarded or denied to us
by our fellow-creatures--is very variable in the spheres of its
operation. The sense of humour is in its essence, as we have often been
told, largely a sense of proportion, and in this sense Crabbe was
certainly deficient. The want of it accounts for much more in his
writings than for his prose notes and prefaces. It explains much of the
diffuseness and formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp
the great truth how much the half may be greater than the whole.

In spite, however, of these defects, and of the inequalities of the
workmanship, _The Borough_ was from the first a success. The poem
appeared in February 1810, and went through six editions in the next six
years. It does not indeed present an alluring picture of life in the
provinces. It even reminds us of a saying of Tennyson's, that if God
made the country, and man made the city, then it was the devil who made
the country-town. To travel through the borough from end to end is to
pass through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and under a cloudy
heaven, with only rare gleams of sunshine, and patches of blue sky.
These, when they occur, are proportionally welcome. They include some
exquisite descriptions of nature, though with Crabbe it will be noticed
that it is always the nature close about his feet, the hedge-row, the
meadow, the cottage-garden: as his son has noted, his outlook never
extends to the landscape beyond.

In the respects just mentioned, the qualities exhibited in the new poem
have been noticed before in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. In
_The Borough_, however, appear some maturer specimens of this power,
showing how Crabbe's art was perfecting by practice. Very noticeable are
the sections devoted to the almshouse of the borough and its
inhabitants. Its founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of
the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions
follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn
from life. The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives
in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes
his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all his poorer neighbours in
distress:--

"A twofold taste he had; to give and spare,
Both were his duties, and had equal care;
It was his joy to sit alone and fast,
Then send a widow and her boys repast:
Tears in his eyes would, spite of him, appear,
But he from other eyes has kept the tear:
All in a wintry night from far he came
To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame,
Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant
A lingering, but reforming punishment:
Home then he walked, and found his anger rise
When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes;
But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed
To Heaven in hope, he calmly sank to rest."

The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth year was past, a
building was seen rising on the green north of the village--an almshouse
for old men and women of the borough, who had struggled in life and
failed. Having built and endowed this harbour of refuge, and placed its
government in the hands of six trustees, the modest donor and the pious
lady-relative who had shared in his good works passed quietly out of
life.

This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees who succeeded to
the management after the founder's death, among them a Sir Denys Brand,
a lavish donor to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the
founder had been humble and modest. This man defeats the intentions of
the founder by admitting to the almshouses persons of the shadiest
antecedents, on the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in
their day:

"Not men in trade by various loss brought down,
But those whose glory once amazed the town;
Who their last guinea in their pleasure spent,
Yet never fell so low as to repent:
To these his pity he could largely deal,
Wealth they had known, and therefore want could feel."

From this unfit class of pensioner Crabbe selects three for his minute
analysis of character. They are, as usual, of a very sordid type. The
first, a man named "Blaney," had his prototype in a half-pay major known
to Crabbe in his Aldeburgh days, and even the tolerant Jeffrey held that
the character was rather too shameless for poetical treatment. The next
inmate in order, a woman also drawn from the living model, and disguised
under the title of _Clelia_, is a study of character and career, drawn
with consummate skill. Certain abortive attempts of Crabbe to write
prose fiction have been already mentioned. But this narrative of the
gradual degradation of a coquette of the lower middle class shows that
Crabbe possessed at least some of the best qualities of a great
novelist. Clelia is, in fact, a kind of country-town Becky Sharp, whose
wiles and schemes are not destined to end in a white-washed reputation
at a fashionable watering-place. On the contrary she falls from one
ignominy to another until, by a gross abuse of a public charity, she
ends her days in the almshouse!

One further instance may be cited of Crabbe's persistent effort to
awaken attention to the problem of poor-law relief. In his day the
question, both as to policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor
relief, was still unsettled. In _The Borough_, as described, many of the
helpless poor were relieved at their own homes. But a new scheme, "The
maintenance of the poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred,"
seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that time confined to
that county. It differed from the workhouse of to-day apparently in this
respect, that there was not even an attempt to separate the young and
old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and vicious from the
respectable and honest. Yet Crabbe's powerful picture of the misery thus
caused to the deserving class of inmate is not without its lesson even
after nearly a century during which thought and humanity have been
continually at work upon such problems. The loneliness and weariness of
workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and
friends, in "the day-room of a London workhouse," have been lately set
forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_,
with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the
following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe's _Borough_:--

"Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet?
Who learn the story current in the street?
Who to the long-known intimate impart
Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart?
They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend,
Or seek companions at their journey's end?
Here are not those whom they when infants knew;
Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew;
Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived;
Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived;
Whom time and custom so familiar made,
That looks the meaning in the mind conveyed:
But here to strangers, words nor looks impart
The various movements of the suffering heart;
Nor will that heart with those alliance own,
To whom its views and hopes are all unknown
What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy,
Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy?
'Tis cheerless living in such bounded view,
With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new;
Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep;
The day itself is, like the night, asleep."

The essence of workhouse monotony has surely never been better indicated
than here.

_The Borough_ did much to spread Crabbe's reputation while he remained,
doing his duty to the best of his ability and knowledge, in the quiet
loneliness of the Vale of Belvoir, but his growing fame lay far outside
the boundaries of his parish. When, a few years later, he visited London
and was received with general welcome by the distinguished world of
literature and the arts, he was much surprised. "In my own village," he
told James Smith, "they think nothing of me." The three years following
the publication of _The Borough_ were specially lonely. He had, indeed,
his two sons, George and John, with him. They had both passed through
Cambridge--one at Trinity and the other at Caius, and were now in holy
orders. Each held a curacy in the near neighbourhood, enabling them to
live under the parental roof. But Mrs. Crabbe's condition was now
increasingly sad, her mind being almost gone. There was no daughter, and
we hear of no other female relative at hand to assist Crabbe in the
constant watching of the patient. This circumstance alone limited his
opportunities of accepting the hospitalities of the neighbourhood,
though with the Welbys and other county families, as well as with the
surrounding clergy, he was a welcome guest.

_The Borough_ appeared in February 1810, and the reviewers were prompt
in their attention. The _Edinburgh_ reviewed the poem in April of the
same year, and the _Quarterly_ followed in October. Jeffrey had already
noticed _The Parish Register_ in 1808. The critic's admiration of Crabbe
had been, and remained to the end, cordial and sincere. But now, in
reviewing the new volume, a note of warning appears. The critic finds
himself obliged to admit that the current objections to Crabbe's
treatment of country life are well founded. "His chief fault," he says,
"is his frequent lapse into disgusting representations." All powerful
and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in "images of distress,"
but these images must never excite "disgust," for that is fatal to the
ends which poetry was meant to produce. A few months later the
_Quarterly_ followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a more
questionable doctrine. The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary
canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it
happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its
place. "We turn to poetry," he says, "not that we may see and feel what
we see and feel in our daily experience, but that we may be refreshed by
other emotions, and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the
realities of life in the paradise of Fancy."

The appearance of these two prominent reviews to a certain extent
influenced the direction of Crabbe's genius for the remainder of his
life. He evidently had given them earnest consideration, and in the
preface to the _Tales_, his next production, he attempted something like
an answer to each. Without mentioning any names he replies to Jeffrey in
the first part of his preface, and to the _Quarterly_ reviewer in the
second. Jeffrey had expressed a hope that Crabbe would in future
concentrate his powers upon some interesting and connected story. "At
present it is impossible not to regret that so much genius should be
wasted in making us perfectly acquainted with individuals of whom we are
to know nothing but their characters." Crabbe in reply makes what was
really the best apology for not accepting this advice. He intimates that
he had already made the experiment, but without success. His peculiar
gifts did not fit him for it. As he wrote the words, he doubtless had in
mind the many prose romances that he had written, and then consigned to
the flames. The short story, or rather the exhibition of a single
character developed through a few incidents, he felt to be the method
that fitted his talent best.

Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the
_Quarterly_ reviewer, how far many passages in _The Borough_, when
concerned with low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in
reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had
never been disputed. He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life
indeed, and in the same rhymed metre. "If all that kind of satire
wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as
genuine poetry," then what becomes of the author of _The Canterbury
Tales_? Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to
this question. He could not discern that the treatment is everything,
and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself--the
spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these,
gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension.
From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on
whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing
that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this
nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of
course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and
his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both
described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly
where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and
could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often
excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The
_Quarterly_ reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description
in _The Borough_ of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of
the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very
graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather
metrical fiction than poetry. There is more of the essence of poetry in
a single couplet of Pope's:

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