English Men of Letters: Crabbe Part 3

Ah! no: a shepherd of a different stock.

And far unlike him, feeds this little flock: A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task As much as G.o.d or man can fairly ask; The rest he gives to loves and labours light, To fields the morning, and to feasts the night; None better skilled the noisy pack to guide, To urge their chase, to cheer them, or to chide; A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day, And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play: Then, while such honours bloom around his head, Shall he sit sadly by the sick man's bed, To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal To combat fears that e'en the pious feel?"

Crabbe's son, after his father's death, cited in a note on these lines what he hold to be a parallel pa.s.sage from Cowper's _Progress of Error_, beginning:--

"Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest, A ca.s.socked huntsman, and a fiddling priest."

Cowper's first volume, containing _Table-Talk_ and its companion satires, appeared some months before Crabbe's _Village_. The shortcomings of the clergy are a favourite topic with him, and a varied gallery of the existing types of clerical inefficiency may be formed from his pages. Many of Cowper's strictures were amply justified by the condition of the English Church. But Cowper's method is not Crabbe's.

The note of the satirist is seldom absent, blended at times with just a suspicion of that of the Pharisee. The humorist and the Puritan contend for predominance in the breast of this polished gentleman and scholar.

Cowper's friend, Newton, in the Preface he wrote for his first volume, claimed for the poet that his satire was "benevolent." But it was not always discriminating or just. The satirist's keen love of ant.i.thesis often weakens the moral virtue of Cowper's strictures. In this earliest volume anger was more conspicuous than sorrow, and contempt perhaps more obvious than either. The callousness of public opinion on many subjects needed other medicine than this. Hence was it perhaps that Cowper's volume, which appeared in May 1782, failed to awaken interest. Crabbe's _Village_ appeared just a year later (it had been completed a year or two earlier), and at once made its mark. "It was praised," writes his son, "in the leading journals; the sale was rapid and extensive; and my father's reputation was by universal consent greatly raised, and permanently established, by this poem," The number of anonymous letters it brought the author, some of grat.i.tude, and some of resentment (for it had laid its finger on many sores in the body-politic), showed how deeply his touch had been felt. Further publicity for the poem was obtained by Burke, who inserted the description of the Parish Workhouse and the Village Apothecary in _The Annual Register,_ which he controlled. The same pieces were included a few years later by Vicesimus Knox in that excellent Miscellany _Elegant Extracts_. And Crabbe was to learn in later life from Walter Scott how, when a youth of eighteen, spending a snowy winter in a lonely country-house, he fell in with the volume of _The Annual Register_ containing the pa.s.sages from _The Village;_ how deeply they had sunk into his heart; and that (writing then to Crabbe in the year 1809) he could repeat them still from memory.

Edmund Burke's friend, Edward Shackleton, meeting Crabbe at Burke's house soon after the publication of the poem, paid him an elegant tribute. Goldsmith's, he said, would now be the "deserted" village.

Crabbe modestly disclaimed the compliment, and a.s.suredly with reason Goldsmith's delightful poem will never be deserted. For it is no loss good and wise to dwell on village life as it might be, than to reflect on what it has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What made Crabbe a now force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a long oblivion, as the true antidote to Sentimentalism. The reader is not put off with pretty imaginings, but is led up to the object which the poet would show him, and made to feel its horror. If Crabbe is our first great realist in verse, he uses his realism in the cause of a true humanity. _Facit indignatio versum._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: I cannot deny myself the pleasure of here acknowledging my indebtedness to a French scholar, M. Huchon of the University of Nancy.

M. Huchon is himself engaged upon a study of the Life and Poetry of Crabbe, and in the course of a conversation with me in London, first called my attention to the volume containing this letter. I agree with him in thinking that no previous biographer of Crabbe has been aware of its existence.]

CHAPTER IV

LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE AND AT MUSTON

(1783-1792)

"The sudden popularity of _The Village_" writes Crabbe's son and biographer, "must have produced, after the numberless slights and disappointments already mentioned, and even after the tolerable success of _The Library_, about as strong a revulsion in my father's mind as a ducal chaplaincy in his circ.u.mstances; but there was no change in his temper or manners. The successful author continued as modest as the rejected candidate for publication had been patient and long-suffering."

The biographer might have remarked as no less strange that the success of _The Village_ failed, for the moment at least, to convince Crabbe where his true strength lay. When he again published a poem, two years later, he reverted to the old Popian topics and methods in a by no means successful didactic satire on newspapers. Meantime the occasional visits of the Duke of Rutland and his family to London brought the chaplain again in touch with the Burkes and the friends he had first made through them, notably with Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was also able to visit the theatre occasionally, and fell under the spell, not only of Mrs.

Siddons, but of Mrs. Jordan (in the character of Sir Harry Wildair). It was now decided that as a n.o.bleman's chaplain it would be well for him to have a university degree, and to this end his name was entered on the boards of Trinity College, Cambridge, through the good offices of Bishop Watson of Llandaff, with a view to his obtaining a degree without residence. This was in 1783, but almost immediately afterwards he received an LL.B. degree from the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was obtained for Crabbe in order that he might hold two small livings in Dorsetshire, Frome St. Quintin and Evershot, to which he had just been presented by Thurlow. It was on this occasion that the Chancellor made his memorable comparison of Crabbe to Parson Adams, no doubt pointing to a certain rusticity, and possibly provincial accent, from which Crabbe seems never to have been wholly free. This promotion seems to have interfered very little with Crabbe's residence at Belvoir or in London.

A curate was doubtless placed in one or other of the parsonage-houses in Dorsetshire at such modest stipend as was then usual--often not more than thirty pounds a year--and the rector would content himself with a periodical flying visit to receive t.i.the, or inquire into any parish grievances that may have reached his ear. As incidents of this kind will be not infrequent during the twenty years that follow in Crabbe's clerical career, it may be well to intimate at once that no peculiar blame attaches to him in the matter. He but "partook of the frailty of his times." During these latter years of the eighteenth century, as for long before and after, pluralism in the Church was rather the rule than the exception, and in consequence non-residence was recognised as inevitable, and hardly matter for comment. The two Dorsetshire livings were of small value, and as Crabbe was now looking forward to his marriage with the faithful Miss Elmy, he could not have afforded to reside. He may not, however, have thought it politic to decline the first preferment offered by so important a dispenser of patronage as the Lord Chancellor.

Events, however, were at hand, which helped to determine Crabbe's immediate future. Early in 1784 the Duke of Rutland became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The appointment had been made some time before, and it had been decided that Crabbe was not to be on the Castle staff.

His son expresses no surprise at this decision, and makes of it no grievance. The duke and the chaplain parted excellent friends. Crabbe and his wife were to remain at Belvoir as long as it suited their convenience, and the duke undertook that he would not forget him as regarded future preferment. On the strength of these offers, Crabbe and Miss Elmy wore married in December 1783, in the parish church of Beccles, where Miss Elmy's mother resided, and a few weeks later took up their abode in the rooms a.s.signed them at Belvoir Castle.

As Miss Elmy had lived for many years with her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. John Tovell, at Parham, and moreover as this rural inland village played a considerable part in the development of Crabbe's poetical faculty, it may be well to quote his son's graphic account of the domestic circ.u.mstances of Miss Elmy's relatives. Mr. Tovell was, like Mr. Hathaway, "a substantial yeoman," for he owned an estate of some eight hundred a year, to some share of which, as the Tovells had lost their only child, Miss Elmy would certainly in due course succeed. The Tovells' house at Parham, which has been long ago pulled down, and rebuilt as Paritam Lodge, on very different lines, was of ample size, with its moat, so common a feature of the homestead in the eastern counties, "rookery, dove-cot, and fish-ponds"; but the surroundings were those of the ordinary farmhouse, for Mr. Tovell himself cultivated part of his estate.

"The drawing-room, a corresponding dining-parlour, and a handsome sleeping apartment upstairs, were all _tabooed_ ground, and made use of on great and solemn occasions only--such as rent-days, and an occasional visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer. At all other times the family and their visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen along with the servants. My great-uncle occupied an armchair, or, in attacks of gout, a couch on one side of a large open chimney.... At a very early hour in the morning the alarum called the maids, and their mistress also; and if the former were tardy, a louder alarum, and more formidable, was heard chiding their delay--not that scolding was peculiar to any occasion; it regularly ran on through all the day, like bells on harness, inspiriting the work, whether it were done well or ill." In the annotated volume of the son's memoir which belonged to Edward FitzGerald, the writer added the following detail as to his great-aunt's temper and methods:--"A wench whom Mrs. Tovell had pursued with something weightier than invective--a ladle, I think--whimpered out 'If an angel from Hiv'n were to come mawther'"

(Suffolk for _girl_) "'to missus, she wouldn't give no satisfaction.'"

George Crabbe the younger, who gives this graphic account of the _menage_ at Parham, was naturally anxious to claim for his mother, who so long formed one of this queer household, a degree of refinement superior to that of her surroundings. After describing the daily dinner-party in the kitchen--master, mistress, servants, with an occasional "travelling rat-catcher or tinker"--he skilfully points out that his mother's feelings must have resembled those of the boarding-school miss in his father's "Widow's Tale" when subjected to a like experience:--

"But when the men beside their station took, The maidens with them, and with these the cook; When one huge wooden bowl before them stood, Filled with huge b.a.l.l.s of farinaceous food; With bacon, ma.s.s saline! where never lean Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen: When from a single horn the party drew Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new; When the coa.r.s.e cloth she saw, with many a stain, Soiled by rude hands who cut and came again-- She could not breathe, but with a heavy sigh, Reined the fair neck, and shut th' offended eye; She minced the sanguine flesh in frustums fine, And wondered much to see the creatures dine!"

The home of the Tovells has long disappeared, and it must not therefore be confused with the more remarkable "moated grange" in Parham, originally the mansion of the Willoughbys, though now a farmhouse, boasting a fine Tudor gateway and other fragments of fifteenth and sixteenth century work. An engraving of the Hall and moat, after Stanfield, forms an ill.u.s.tration to the third volume of the 1834 edition of Crabbe.

When Crabbe began _The Village_, it was clearly intended to be, like _The Borough_ later, a picture of Aldeburgh and its inhabitants. Yet not only Parham, but the country about Belvoir crept in before the poem was completed. If the pa.s.sage in Book I. beginning:--

"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,"

describes pure Aldeburgh, the opening lines of Book II., taking a more roseate view of rural happiness:--

"I, too, must yield, that oft amid those woes Are gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose, Such as you find on yonder sportive Green, The squire's tall gate, and churchway-walk between, Where loitering stray a little tribe of friends On a fair Sunday when the sermon ends,"

are drawn from the pleasant villages in the Midlands (perhaps Allington, where he was afterwards to minister), whither he rambled on his botanising excursions from Belvoir Castle.

George Crabbe and his bride settled down in their apartments at Belvoir Castle, but difficulties soon arose. Crabbe was without definite clerical occupation, unless he read prayers to the few servants left in charge; and was simply waiting for whatever might turn up in the way of preferment from the Manners family, or from the Lord Chancellor. The young couple soon found the position intolerable, and after less than eighteen months Crabbe wisely accepted a vacant curacy in the neighbourhood, that of Stathern in Leicestershire, to the humble parsonage of which parish Crabbe and his wife removed in 1785. A child had been born to them at Belvoir, who survived its birth only a few hours. During the following four years at Stathern were born three other children--the two sons, George and John, in 1785 and 1787, and a daughter in 1789, who died in infancy.

Stathern is a village about four miles from Belvoir Castle, and the drive or walk from one to the other lies through the far-spreading woods and gardens surrounding the ducal mansion. Crabbe entered these woods almost at his very door, and found there ample opportunity for his botanical studies, which were still his hobby. As usual his post was that of _loc.u.m tenens_, the rector, Dr. Thomas Parke, then residing at his other living at Stamford. My friend, the Rev. J.W. Taylor, the present rector of Stathern, who entered on his duties in 1866, tells me of one or two of the village traditions concerning Crabbe. One of these is to the effect that he spoke "through his nose," which I take to have been the local explanation of a marked Suffolk accent which accompanied the poet through life. Another, that he was peppery of temper, and that an exceedingly youthful couple having presented themselves for holy matrimony, Crabbe drove them with scorn from the altar, with the remark that he had come there to marry "men and women, and not lads and wenches!"

Crabbe used to tell his children that the four years at Stathern were, on the whole, the happiest in his life. He and his wife were in humble quarters, but they were their own masters, and they were quit of "the pampered menial" for ever. "My mother and he," the son writes, "could now ramble together at their ease amidst the rich woods of Belvoir without any of the painful feelings which had before chequered his enjoyment of the place: at home a garden afforded him healthful exercise and unfailing amus.e.m.e.nt; and his situation as a curate prevented him from being drawn into any sort of unpleasant disputes with the villagers about him"--an ambiguous statement which probably, however, means that the absent rector had to settle difficulties as to t.i.the, and other parochial grievances. Crabbe now again brought his old medical attainments, such as they were, to the aid of his poor parishioners, "and had often great difficulty in confining his practice strictly within the limits of the poor, for the farmers would willingly have been attended _gratis_ also." His literary labours subsequent to _The Village_ seem to have been slight, with the exception of a brief memoir of Lord Robert Manners contributed to _The Annual Register_ in 1784, for the poem of _The Newspaper,_ published in 1785, was probably "old stock." It is unlikely that Crabbe, after the success of _The Village,_ should have willingly turned again to the old and unprofitable vein of didactic satire. But, the poem being in his desk, he perhaps thought that it might bring in a few pounds to a household which certainly needed them. "_The Newspaper_, a Poem, by the Rev. George Crabbe, Chaplain to his Grace the Duke of Rutland, printed for J.

Dodsley, in Pall Mall," appeared as a quarto pamphlet (price 2s.) in 1785, with a felicitous motto from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ on the t.i.tle-page, and a politic dedication to Lord Thurlow, evincing a grat.i.tude for past favours, and (unexpressed) a lively sense of favours to come.

_The Newspaper_ is, to say truth, of little value, either as throwing light on the journalism of Crabbe's day, or as a step in his poetic career. The topics are commonplace, such as the strange admixture of news, the interference of the newspaper with more useful reading, and the development of the advertiser's art. It is written in the fluent and copious vein of mild satire and milder moralising which Crabbe from earliest youth had so a.s.siduously practised. If a few lines are needed as a sample, the following will show that the methods of literary puffing are not so original to-day as might be supposed. After indicating the tradesman's ingenuity in this respect, the poet adds.--

"These are the arts by which a thousand live, Where Truth may smile, and Justice may forgive.

But when, amid this rabble-rout, we find A puffing poet, to his honour blind: Who slily drops quotations all about Packet or Post, and points their merit out; Who advertises what reviewers say, With sham editions every second day; Who dares not trust his praises out of sight, But hurries into fame with all his might; Although the verse some transient praise obtains, Contempt is all the anxious poet gains"

_The Newspaper_ seems to have been coldly received by the critics, who had perhaps been led by _The Village_ to expect something very different, and Crabbe never returned to the satirical-didactic line.

Indeed, for twenty-two years he published nothing more, although he wrote continuously, and as regularly committed the bulk of his ma.n.u.script to the domestic fire-place. Meantime he lived a happy country life at Stathern, studying botany, reading aloud to his wife, and by no means forgetting the wants of his poor parishioners. He visited periodically his Dorsetshire livings, introducing his wife on one such occasion, as he pa.s.sed through London, to the Burkes. And one day, seized with an acute attack of the _mal du pays_, he rode sixty miles to the coast of Lincolnshire that he might once more "dip," as his son expresses it, "in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh."

In October 1787, Crabbe's household were startled by the news of the death of his friend and patron the Duke of Rutland, who died at the Vice-regal Lodge at Dublin, after a short illness, at the early age of thirty-three. The duke, an open-handed man and renowned for his extravagant hospitalities, had lived "not wisely but too well." Crabbe a.s.sisted at the funeral at Belvoir, and duly published his discourse then delivered in handsome quarto. Shortly after, the d.u.c.h.ess, anxious to retain their former chaplain in the neighbourhood, gave Crabbe a letter to Thurlow, asking him to exchange the two livings in Dorsetshire for two other, of more value, in the Vale of Belvoir. Crabbe waited on the Chancellor with the letter, but Thurlow was, or affected to be, annoyed by the request. It was a thing, he exclaimed with an oath, that he would not do "for any man in England." However, when the young and beautiful d.u.c.h.ess later appealed to him in person, he relented, and presented Crabbe to the two livings of Muston in Leicestershire, and Allington in Lincolnshire, both, within sight of Belvoir Castle, and (as the crow flies) not much more than a mile apart. To the rectory house of Muston, Crabbe brought his family in February 1789. His connection with the two livings was to extend over five and twenty years, but during thirteen of those years, as will be seen, he was a non-resident. For the present he remained three years at the small and very retired village of Muston, about five miles from Grantham. "The house in which Crabbe lived at Muston," writes Mr. Hutton,[2] "is now pulled down. It is replaced by one built higher up a slight hill, in a position intended, says scandal, to prevent any view of Belvoir. Crabbe with all his ironies had no such resentful feelings; indeed more modern successors of his have opened what he would have called a 'vista,' and the castle again crowns the distance as you look southward from the pretty garden."

Crabbe's first three years of residence at Muston were marked by few incidents. Another son, Edmund, was horn in the autumn of 1790, and a few weeks later a series of visits were paid by Crabbe, his wife and elder boy, to their relations at Aldeburgh, Parham, and Beccles, from which latter town, according to Crabbe's son, they visited Lowestoft, and were so fortunate as to hear the aged John Wesley preach, on a memorable occasion when he quoted Anacreon:--

"Oft am I by women told, Poor Anacreon! thou grow'st old . . . . .

But this I need not to be told, 'Tis time to _live_, if I grow old."

In 1792 Crabbe preached at the bishop's visitation at Grantham, and his sermon was so much admired that he was invited to receive into his house as pupils the sons of the Earl of Bute. This task, however, Crabbe rightly declined, being diffident as to his scholarship.

In October of this year Crabbe was again working hard at his botany--for like the Friar in _Romeo and Juliet_ his time was always much divided between the counselling of young couples and the "culling of simples"--when his household received the tidings of the death of John Tovell of Parham, after a brief illness. It was momentous news to Crabbe's family, for it involved "good gifts," and many "possibilities."

Crabbe was left executor, and as Mr. Tovell had died without children, the estate fell to his two sisters, Mrs. Elmy and an elderly spinster sister residing in Parham. As Mrs. Elmy's share of the estate would come to her children, and as the unmarried sister died not long after, leaving her portion in the same direction, Crabbe's anxiety for the pecuniary future of his family was at an end. He visited Parham on executor's business, and on his return found that he had made up his mind "to place a curate at Muston, and to go and reside at Parham, taking the charge of some church in that neighbourhood."

Crabbe's son, with the admirable frankness that marks his memoir throughout, does not conceal that this step in his father's life was a mistake, and that he recognised and regretted it as such on cooler reflection. The comfortable home of the Tovells at Parham fell somehow, whether by the will, or by arrangement with Mrs. Elmy, to the disposal of Crabbe, and he was obviously tempted by its ampler room and pleasant surroundings. He would be once more among relatives and acquaintances, and a social circle congenial to himself and his wife. Muston must have been very dull and lonely, except for those on visiting terms with the duke and other county magnates. Moreover it is likely that the relations of Crabbe with his village flock were already--as we know they were at a later date--somewhat strained. Let it be said once for all that judged by the standards of clerical obligation current in 1792, Crabbe was then, and remained all his life, in many important respects, a diligent parish-priest. Mr. Hutton justly remarks that "the intimate knowledge of the life of the poor which his poems show proves how constantly he must have visited, no less than how closely he must have observed." But the fact remains that though he was kind and helpful to his flock while among them in sickness and in trouble--their physician as well as their spiritual adviser--his ideas as to clerical absenteeism were those of his age, and moreover his preaching to the end of his life was not of a kind to arouse much interest or zeal. I have had access to a large packet of his ma.n.u.script sermons, preached during his residence in Suffolk and later, as proved by the endors.e.m.e.nts on the cover, at his various inc.u.mbencies in Leicestershire and Wiltshire. They consist of plain and formal explanations of his text, reinforced by other texts, entirely orthodox but unrelieved by any resource in the way of ill.u.s.tration, or by any of those poetic touches which his published verse shows he had at his command. A sermon lies before me, preached first at Great Glemham in 1801, and afterwards at Little Glemham, Sweffling, Muston, and Allington; at Trowbridge in 1820, and again at Trowbridge in 1830. The preacher probably held his discourses quite as profitable at one stage in the Church's development as at another. In this estimate of clerical responsibilities Crabbe seems to have remained stationary. But meantime the laity had been aroused to expect better things. The ferment of the Wesley and Whitefield Revival was spreading slowly but surely even among the remote villages of England. What Crabbe and the bulk of the parochial clergy called "a sober and rational conversion" seemed to those who had fallen under the fervid influence of the great Methodist a savourless and ineffectual formality. The extravagances of the Movement had indeed travelled everywhere in company with its worthier fruits. Enthusiasm,--"an excellent good word until it was ill-sorted,"--found vent in various shapes that were justly feared and suspected by many of the clergy, even by those to whom "a reasonable religion" was far from being "so very reasonable as to have nothing to do with the heart and affections." It was not only the Moderates who saw its danger. Wesley himself had found it necessary to caution his more impetuous followers against its eccentricities. And Joseph Butler preaching at the Rolls Chapel on "the Love of G.o.d" thought it well to explain that in his use of the phrase there was nothing "enthusiastical." But as one mischievous extreme generates another, the influence of the prejudice against enthusiasm became disastrous, and the word came too often to be confounded with any and every form of religious fervency and earnestness. To the end of his days Crabbe, like many another, regarded sobriety and moderation in the expression of religious feeling as not only its chief safeguard but its chief ornament. It may seem strange that the poetic temperament which Crabbe certainly possessed never seemed to affect his views of life and human nature outside the fields of poetic composition. He was notably indifferent, his son tells us, "to almost all the proper objects of taste. He had no real love for painting, or music, or architecture, or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of landscape. But he had a pa.s.sion for science--the science of the human mind, first; then, that of nature in general; and lastly that of abstract qualities."

If the defects here indicated help to explain some of those in his poetry, they may also throw light on a certain lack of imagination in Crabbe's dealings with his fellow-men in general and with his parishioners in particular. His temperament was somewhat tactless and masterful, and he could never easily place himself at the stand-point of those who differed from him. The use of his imagination was mainly confined to the hours in his study; and while there, if he had his "_beaux moments_," he had also his "_mauvais quarts d'heure_."

Perhaps if he had brought a little imagination to bear upon his relations with Muston and Allington, Crabbe would not have deserted his people so soon after coming among them. The stop made him many enemies.

For here was no case of a poor curate accepting, for his family's sake, a more lucrative post. Crabbe was leaving the Vale of Belvoir because an accession of fortune had befallen the family, and it was pleasanter to live in his native county and in a better house. So, at least, his action was interpreted at the time, and Crabbe's son takes no very different view. "Though tastes and affections, as well as worldly interests, prompted this return to native scenes and early acquaintances, it was a step reluctantly taken, and I believe, sincerely repented of. The beginning was ominous. As we were slowly quitting the place preceded by our furniture, a stranger, though one who knew my father's circ.u.mstances, called out in an impressive tone, 'You are wrong, you are wrong!'" The sound, he afterwards admitted, found an echo in his own conscience, and during the whole journey seemed to ring in his ears "like a supernatural voice."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: See a pleasant paper on Crabbe at Muston and Allington by the Rev. W.H. Hutton of St John's College, Oxford, in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for June 1901.]