English Men of Letters: Crabbe Part 2

CHAPTER III

FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE

(1781-1783)

Thus far I have followed the guidance of Crabbe's son and biographer, but there is much that is confused and incomplete in his narrative. The story of Crabbe's life, as told by the son, leaves us in much doubt as to the order of events in 1780-1781. The memorable letter to Burke was, as we have seen, without a date. The omission is not strange, for the letter was written by Crabbe in great anguish of mind, and was left by his own hand at Burke's door. The son, though he evidently obtained from his father most of the information he was afterwards to use, never extracted this date from him. He tells us that up to the time of his undertaking the Biography, he did not even know that the original of the letter was in existence. He also tells us that until he and his brother saw the letter they had little idea of the extreme poverty and anxiety which their father had experienced during his time in London. Obviously Crabbe himself had been reticent on the subject even with his own family. From the midsummer of 1780, when the "Journal to Mira" comes to an end, to the February or March of the following year, there is a blank in the Biography which the son was unable to fill. At the time the fragment of Diary closes, Crabbe was apparently at the very end of his resources. He had p.a.w.ned all his personal property, his books and his surgical implements, and was still in debt. He had begged a.s.sistance from many of the leading statesmen of the hour without success. How did he contrive to exist between June 1780 and the early months of 1781?

The problem might never have been solved for us had it not been for the accidental publication, four years after the Biography appeared, of a second letter from Crabbe to Burke. In 1838, Sir Henry Bunbury, in an appendix to the _Memoir and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer_ (Speaker of the House of Commons, and Shakspearian editor), printed a collection of miscellaneous letters from distinguished men in the possession of the Bunbury family. Among these is a letter of Crabbe to Burke, undated save as to the month, which is given as June 26th. The year, however, is obviously 1781, for the letter consists of further details of Crabbe's early life, not supplied in the earlier effusion. At the date of this second letter, Crabbe had been known to Burke three or four months. During that time Crabbe had been constantly seeing Burke, and with his help had been revising for the press the poem of _The Library_, which was published by Dodsley in this very month, June 1781.

The first impression, accordingly, produced on us by the letter, is one of surprise that after so long a period of intimate a.s.sociation with Burke, Crabbe should still be writing in a tone of profound anxiety and discouragement as to his future prospects. According to the son's account of the situation, when Crabbe left Burke's house after their first meeting, "he was, in the common phrase, 'a made man'--from that hour." That short interview "entirely, and for ever, changed the nature of his worldly fortunes." This, in a sense, was undoubtedly true, though not perhaps as the writer meant. It is clear from the letter first printed by Sir Henry Bunbury, that up to the end of June 1781, Crabbe's future occupation in life was still unfixed, and that he was full of misgivings as to the means of earning a livelihood.

The letter is of great interest in many respects, but is too long to print as a whole in the text[1]. It throws light upon the blank s.p.a.ce in Crabbe's history just now referred to. It tells the story of a period of humiliation and distress, concerning which it is easy to understand that even in the days of his fame and prosperity Crabbe may well have refrained from speaking with his children. After relating in full his early struggles as an imperfectly qualified country doctor, and his subsequent fortunes in London up to the day of his appeal to Burke, Crabbe proceeds--"It will perhaps be asked how I could live near twelve months a stranger in London; and coming without money, it is not to be supposed I was immediately credited. It is not; my support arose from another source. In the very early part of my life I contracted some acquaintance, which afterwards became a serious connection, with the niece of a Suffolk gentleman of large fortune. Her mother lives with her three daughters at Beccles; her income is but the interest of fifteen hundred pounds, which at her decease is to be divided betwixt her children. The brother makes her annual income about a hundred pounds; he is a rigid economist, and though I have the pleasure of his approbation, I have not the good fortune to obtain more, nor from a prudent man could I perhaps expect so much. But from the family at Beccles I have every mark of their attention, and every proof of their disinterested regard.

They have from time to time supplied me with such sums as they could possibly spare, and that they have not done more arose from my concealing the severity of my situation, for I would not involve in my errors or misfortunes a very generous and very happy family by which I am received with unaffected sincerity, and where I am treated as a son by a mother who can have no prudential reason to rejoice that her daughter has formed such a connection. It is this family I lately visited, and by which I am pressed to return, for they know the necessity there is for me to live with the utmost frugality, and hopeless of my succeeding in town, they invite me to partake of their little fortune, and as I cannot mend my prospects, to avoid making them worse." The letter ends with an earnest appeal to Burke to help him to any honest occupation that may enable him to live without being a burden on the slender resources of Miss Elmy's family. Crabbe is full of grat.i.tude for all that Burke has thus far done for him. He has helped him to complete and publish his poem, but Crabbe is evidently aware that poetry does not mean a livelihood, and that his future is as dark as ever. The letter is dated from Crabbe's old lodging with the Vickerys in Bishopsgate Street, and he had been lately staying with the Elmys at Beccles. He was not therefore as yet a visitor under Burke's roof. This was yet to come, with all the happy results that were to follow. It may still seem strange that all these details remained to be told to Burke four months after their acquaintance had begun. An explanation of this may be found in the autobiographical matter that Crabbe late in life supplied to the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1816. He there intimates that after Burke had generously a.s.sisted him in other ways, besides enabling him to publish _The Library_, the question had been discussed of Crabbe's future calling. "Mr. Crabbe was encouraged to lay open his views, past and present; to display whatever reading and acquirements he possessed, to explain the causes of his disappointments, and the cloudiness of his prospects; in short he concealed nothing from a friend so able to guide inexperience, and so willing to pardon inadvertency."

Obviously it was in answer to such invitations from Burke that the letter of the 26th of June 1781 was written.

It was probably soon after the publication of _The Library_ that Crabbe paid his first visit to Beaconsfield, and was welcomed as a guest by Burke's wife and her niece as cordially as by the statesman himself.

Here he first met Charles James Fox and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through the latter soon became acquainted with Samuel Johnson, on whom he called in Bolt Court. Later in the year, when in London, Crabbe had lodgings hard by the Burkes in St. James's Place, and continued to be a frequent guest at their table, where he met other of Burke's distinguished friends, political and literary. Among these was Lord Chancellor Thurlow to whom Crabbe had appealed, without success, in his less fortunate days. On that occasion Thurlow had simply replied, in regard to the poems which Crabbe had enclosed, "that his avocations did not leave him leisure to read verses." To this Crabbe had been so unwise as to reply that it was one of a Lord Chancellor's functions to relieve merit in distress. But the good-natured Chancellor had not resented the impertinence, and now hearing afresh from Burke of his old pet.i.tioner, invited Crabbe to breakfast, and made him a generous apology. "The first poem you sent me, Sir," he said, "I ought to have noticed,--and I heartily forgive the second." At parting, Thurlow pressed a sealed packet containing a hundred pounds into Crabbe's hand, and a.s.sured him of further help when Crabbe should have taken Holy Orders.

For already, as the result of Burke's unceasing interest in his new friend, Crabbe's future calling had been decided. In the course of conversations at Beaconsfield Burke had discovered that his tastes and gifts pointed much more clearly towards divinity than to medicine. His special training for the office of a clergyman was of course deficient.

He probably had no Greek, but he had mastered enough of Latin to read and quote the Latin poets. Moreover, his chief pa.s.sion from early youth had been for botany, and the treatises on that subject were, in Crabbe's day, written in the language adopted in all scientific works. "It is most fortunate," said Burke, "that your father exerted himself to send you to that second school; without a little Latin we should have made nothing of you: now, I think we shall succeed." Moreover Crabbe had been a wide and discursive reader. "Mr. Crabbe," Burke told Reynolds, "appears to know something of every thing." As to his more serious qualifications for the profession, his natural piety, as shown in the diaries kept in his days of trial, was beyond doubt. He was well read in the Scriptures, and the example of a religious and much-tried mother had not been without its influence. There had been some dissipations of his earlier manhood, as his son admits, to repent of and to put away; but the growth of his character in all that was excellent was unimpeachable, and Burke was amply justified in recommending Crabbe as a candidate for orders to the Bishop of Norwich. He was ordained on the 21st of December 1781 to the curacy of his native town.

On arriving in Aldeburgh Crabbe once more set up housekeeping with a sister, as he had done in his less prosperous days as parish doctor. Sad changes had occurred in his old home during the two years of his absence. His mother had pa.s.sed away after her many years of patient suffering, and his father's temper and habits were not the better for losing the wholesome restraints of her presence. But his att.i.tude to his clergyman son was at once changed. He was proud of his reputation and his new-formed friends, and of the proofs he had given that the money spent on his education had not been thrown away. But, apart from the family pride in him, and that of Miss Elmy and other friends at Parham, Crabbe's reception by his former friends and neighbours in Aldeburgh was not of the kind he might have hoped to receive. He had left the place less than three years before, a half-trained and unappreciated pract.i.tioner in physic, to seek his fortune among strangers in London, with the forlornest hopes of success. Jealousy of his elevated position and improved fortunes set in with much severity. On the other hand, it was more than many could tolerate that the hedge-apothecary of old should be empowered to hold forth in a pulpit. Crabbe himself in later life admitted to his children that his treatment at the hands of his fellow-townsmen was markedly unkind. Even though he was happy in the improved relations with his own family, and in the renewed opportunities of frequent intercourse with Miss Elmy and the Tovells, Crabbe's position during the few months at Aldeburgh was far from agreeable. The religious influence, moreover, which he would naturally have wished to exercise in his new sphere would obviously suffer in consequence. The result was that in accordance with the a.s.surances given him by Thurlow at their last meeting, Crabbe again laid his difficulties before the Chancellor. Thurlow quite reasonably replied that he could not form any opinion as to Crabbe's present situation--"still less upon the agreeableness of it"; and hinted that a somewhat longer period of probation was advisable before he selected Crabbe for preferment in the Church.

Other relief was however at hand, and once more through the watchful care of Burke. Crabbe received a letter from his faithful friend to the effect that he had mentioned his case to the Duke of Rutland, and that the Duke had offered him the post of domestic chaplain at Belvoir Castle, when he might be free from his engagements at Aldeburgh. That Burke should have ventured on this step is significant, both as regards the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess, and Crabbe. Crabbe's son remarks with truth that an appointment of the kind was unusual, "such situations in the mansions of that rank being commonly filled either by relations of the family itself, or by college acquaintances, or dependents recommended by political service and local attachment." Now Burke would certainly not have recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in his _protege_ any such defects of breeding or social tact as would have made his society distasteful to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess. Burke, as we have seen, described him on their first acquaintance as having "the mind and feelings of a gentleman." Thurlow, it is true, after one of Crabbe's earlier interviews, had declared with an oath (_more suo_) that he was "as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen." But Thurlow was not merely jesting. He knew that Fielding's immortal clergyman had also the "mind and feelings of a gentleman," although his simplicity and ignorance of the world put him at many social disadvantages. It was probably the same obvious difference in Crabbe from the common type of n.o.bleman's chaplain of that day which made Crabbe's position at Belvoir, as his son admits, full of difficulties. It is quite possible and even natural that the guests and visitors at the Castle did not always accept Crabbe's talents as making up for a certain want of polish--or even perhaps for a want of deference to their opinions in conversation. The "pampered menials"

moreover would probably resent having "to say Amen" to a newly-discovered literary adventurer from the great metropolis.

In any case Crabbe's experience of a chaplain's life at Belvoir was not, by his son's admission, a happy one. "The numberless allusions," he writes, "to the nature of a literary dependent's existence in a great lord's house, which occur in my father's writings, and especially in the tale of _The Patron_, are, however, quite enough, to lead any one who knew his character and feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding the kindness and condescension of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess themselves--which were, I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with grat.i.tude--the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many painful circ.u.mstances, and productive in his mind of some of the acutest sensations of wounded pride that have ever been traced by any pen." It is not necessary to hold Crabbe himself entirely irresponsible for this result. His son, with a frankness that marks the Biography throughout, does not conceal that his father's temper, even in later life, was intolerant of contradiction, and he probably expressed his opinions before the guests at Belvoir with more vehemence than prudence. But if the rebuffs he met with were long remembered, they taught him something of value, and enlarged that stock of worldly wisdom so prominent in his later writings. In the story of _The Patron_, the young student living as the rich man's guest is advised by his father as to his behaviour with a fulness of detail obviously derived from Crabbe's own recollections of his early deficiencies:--

"Thou art Religion's advocate--take heed.

Hurt not the cause thy pleasure 'tis to plead; With wine before thee, and with wits beside, Do not in strength of reasoning powers confide; What seems to thee convincing, certain, plain, They will deny and dare thee to maintain; And thus will triumph o'er thy eager youth, While thou wilt grieve for so disgracing truth.

With pain I've seen, these wrangling wits among, Faith's weak defenders, pa.s.sionate and young; Weak thou art not, yet not enough on guard Where wit and humour keep their watch and ward.

Men gay and noisy will o'erwhelm thy sense, Then loudly laugh at Truth's and thy expense: While the kind ladies will do all they can To check their mirth, and cry '_The good young man!_'"

Meantime there were alleviations of the poet's lot. If the guests of the house were not always convinced by his arguments and the servants did not disguise their contempt, the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess were kind, and made him their friend. Nor was the Duke without an intelligent interest in Crabbe's own subjects. Moreover, among the visitors at Belvoir were many who shared that interest to the full, such as the Duke of Queensberry, Lord Lothian, Bishop Watson, and the eccentric Dr. Robert Glynn. Again, it was during Crabbe's residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother, Lord Robert Manners, died of wounds received while leading his ship, _Resolution_, against the French in the West Indies, in the April of 1782. Crabbe's sympathy with the family, shown in his tribute to the sailor-brother appended to the poem he was then bringing to completion, still further strengthened the tie between them. Crabbe accompanied the Duke to London soon after, to a.s.sist him in arranging with Stothard for a picture to be painted of the incident of Lord Robert's death. It was during this visit that Crabbe received the following letter from Burke.

The letter is undated, but belongs to the month of May, for _The Village_ was published in that month, and Burke clearly refers to that poem as just received, but as yet unread. Crabbe seems to have been for the time off duty, and to have proposed a short visit to the Burkes;--

"Dear Sir,--I do not know by what unlucky accident you missed the note I left for you at my house. I wrote besides to you at Belvoir. If you had received these two short letters you could not want an invitation to a place where every one considers himself as infinitely honoured and pleased by your presence. Mrs. Burke desires her best compliments, and trusts that you will not let the holidays pa.s.s over without a visit from you I have got the poem; but I have not yet opened it. I don't like the unhappy language you use about these matters. You do not easily please such a judgment as your own--that is natural; but where you are difficult every one else will be charmed. I am, my dear sir, ever most affectionately yours,

EDMUND BURKE."

The "unhappy language" seems to point to Crabbe having expressed some diffidence or forebodings concerning his new venture. Yet Crabbe had less to fear on this head than with most of his early poems. _The Village_ had been schemed and composed in parts before Crabbe knew Burke. One pa.s.sage in it indeed, as we have seen, had first convinced Burke that the writer was a poet. And in the interval that followed the poem had been completed and matured with a care that Crabbe seldom afterwards bestowed upon his productions. Burke himself had suggested and criticised much during its progress, and the ma.n.u.script had further been submitted through Sir Joshua Reynolds to Johnson, who not only revised it in detail but re-wrote half a dozen of the opening lines.

Johnson's opinion of the poem was conveyed to Reynolds in the following letter, and here at last we get a date:--

_March_ 4, 1783.

"Sir,--I have sent you back Mr. Crabbe's poem, which I read with great delight. It is original, vigorous, and elegant.

The alterations which I have made I do not require him to adopt; for my lines are perhaps not often better than his own: but he may take mine and his own together, and perhaps between them produce something better than either.

He is not to think his copy wantonly defaced: a wet sponge will wash all the red lines away and leave the pages clean.

His dedication will be least liked: it were better to contract it into a short, sprightly address. I do not doubt of Mr.

Crabbe's success. I am, Sir, your most humble servant,

SAMUEL JOHNSON."

Boswell's comment on this incident is as follows:--"The sentiments of Mr. Crabbe's admirable poem as to the false notions of rustic happiness and rustic virtue were quite congenial with Dr. Johnson's own: and he took the trouble not only to suggest slight corrections and variations, but to furnish some lines when he thought he could give the writer's meaning better than in the words of the ma.n.u.script." Boswell went on to observe that "the aid given by Johnson to the poem, as to _The Traveller_ and _Deserted Village_ of Goldsmith, were so small as by no means to impair the distinguished merit of the author." There were unfriendly critics, however, in Crabbe's native county who professed to think otherwise, and "whispered that the ma.n.u.script had been so _cobbled_ by Burke and Johnson that its author did not know it again when returned to him." On which Crabbe's son rejoins that "if these kind persons survived to read _The Parish Register_ their amiable conjectures must have received a sufficient rebuke."

This confident retort is not wholly just. There can be no doubt that some special mannerisms and defects of Crabbe's later style had been kept in check by the wise revision of his friends. And again, when after more than twenty years Crabbe produced _The Parish Register_, that poem, as we shall see, had received from Charles James Fox something of the same friendly revision and suggestion as _The Village_ had received from Burke and Johnson.

_The Village_, in quarto, published by J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, appeared in May 1783, and at once attracted attention by novel qualities. Among these was the bold realism of the village-life described, and the minute painting of the scenery among which it was led. Cowper had published his first volume a year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general interest, and had met with no sale. Burns had as yet published nothing.

But two poetic masterpieces, dealing with the joys and sorrows of village folk, were fresh in Englishmen's memory. One was _The Elegy in a Country Churchyard_, the other was _The Deserted Village_. Both had left a deep impression upon their readers--and with reason--for two poems, more certain of immortality, because certain of giving a pleasure that cannot grow old-fashioned, do not exist in our literature. Each indeed marked an advance upon all that English descriptive or didactic poets had thus far contributed towards making humble life and rural scenery attractive--unless we except the _Allegro_ of Milton and some pa.s.sages in Thomson's _Seasons_. Nor was it merely the consummate workmanship of Gray and Goldsmith that had made their popularity. The genuineness of the pathos in the two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray it was blended with a melancholy that was native to himself. Although their authors had not been brought into close personal relations with the joys and sorrows dealt with, there was nothing of sentiment, in any unworthy sense, in either poet's treatment of his theme. But the result of their studies of humble village life was to produce something quite distinct from the treatment of the realist. What they saw and remembered had pa.s.sed through the transfiguring medium of a poet's imagination before it reached the reader. The finished product, like the honey of the bee, was due to the poet as well as to the flower from which he had derived the raw material.

It seems to have been generally a.s.sumed when Crabbe's _Village_ appeared, that it was of the nature of a rejoinder to Goldsmith's poem, and the fact that Crabbe quotes a line from _The Deserted Village_, "Pa.s.sing rich on forty pounds a year," in his own description of the village parson, might seem to confirm that impression. But the opening lines of _The Village_ point to a different origin. It was rather during those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the conventional pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of _The Village_ he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head.

The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George Crabbe, not unjustly, "thought scorn."

"The village life, and every care that reigns O'er youthful peasants and declining swains, What labour yields, and what, that labour past, Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last; What form the real picture of the poor, Demand a song--the Muse can give no more.

Fled are those times when in harmonious strains The rustic poet praised his native plains: No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse, Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehea.r.s.e; Yet still for these we frame the tender strain, Still in our lays fond Corydons complain, And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal, The only pains, alas! they never feel."

At this point follow the six lines which Johnson had subst.i.tuted for the author's. Crabbe had written:--

"In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring, t.i.tyrus, the pride of Mantuan swains, might sing.

But charmed by him, or smitten with his views, Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?"

Johnson subst.i.tuted the following, and Crabbe accepted the revised version:--

"On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign, If t.i.tyrus found the Golden Age again, Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong, Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?"

The first four lines of Johnson are beyond question an improvement, and it is worth remark in pa.s.sing how in the fourth line he has antic.i.p.ated Cowper's "made poetry a mere mechanic art."

But in the concluding couplet, Crabbe's meaning seems to lose in clearness through the change. Crabbe intended to ask whether it was safe to desert truth and nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even though Virgil had set the example. Johnson's version seems to obscure rather than to make clearer this interpretation. Crabbe, after this protest against the conventional, which, if unreal at the outset, had become a thousand times more wearisome by repet.i.tion, pa.s.ses on to a daring presentation of real life lived among all the squalor of actual poverty, not unskilfully interspersed with descriptions equally faithful of the barren coast-scenery among which he had been brought up. It has been already remarked how Crabbe's eye for rural nature had been quickened and made more exact by his studies in botany. There was little in the poetry then popular that reproduced an actual scene as perfectly as do the following lines:--

"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 withered ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye: There thistles stretch their p.r.i.c.kly 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 clasping tares cling round the sickly blade; With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, And a sad splendour vainly shines around."

Crabbe here perceives the value, as Goldsmith had done before him, of village scenery as a background to his picture of village life. It suited Goldsmith's purpose to describe the ideal rural community, happy, prosperous, and innocent, as contrast with that depopulation of villages and corruption of peasant life which he predicted from the growing luxury and selfishness of the rich. But notwithstanding the t.i.tle of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that remains in our memories. The dominant thought expressed is the virtue and the happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry.

There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fict.i.tious and "lucrative" tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an English rural village in its ideality--rural loveliness--enshrining rural innocence and joy--and to show how man's vices, invading it from the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to be attributed to the insidious attacks from without. Goldsmith, for example, drew an immortal picture of the village pastor, closely modelled upon Chaucer's "poor parson of a town," his piety, humility, and never failing goodness to his flock.--

"Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride, And even his failings leaned to virtue's side; But in his duty prompt at every call He watched and wept; he prayed and felt for all.

And as a bird each fond endearment tries To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies, He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."

Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and dilapidation:--

"There children dwell who know no parents' care: Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there.

Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed"

The dying pauper needs some spiritual consolation ere he pa.s.ses into the unseen world,

"But ere his death some pious doubts arise, Some simple fears which bold, bad men despise; Fain would he ask the parish priest to prove His t.i.tle certain to the joys above: For this he sends the murmuring nurse, who calls The holy stranger to these dismal walls; And doth not he, the pious man, appear, He, 'pa.s.sing rich with forty pounds a year'?