English Men of Letters: Crabbe Part 7

"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 pa.s.sions 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 inst.i.tution 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sistance 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! G.o.d! 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 ant.i.thesis, 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 _Amus.e.m.e.nts_, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s through much ign.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s of pensioner Crabbe selects three for his minute a.n.a.lysis 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 t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sist Crabbe in the constant watching of the patient. This circ.u.mstance 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 subst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sages 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.ses 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:

"See how the world its veterans rewards-- A youth of frolics, an old age of cards."