English Men of Letters: Crabbe Part 6

For even the village of trim gardens and cherished Bibles has its "slums," and on these slums Crabbe proceeds to enlarge with almost ferocious realism:--

"Here, in cabal, a disputatious crew Each evening meet; the sot, the cheat, the shrew; Riots are nightly heard:--the curse, the cries Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies, While shrieking children hold each threat'ning hand, And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand; Boys, in their first-stol'n rags, to swear begin; And girls, who heed not dress, are skill'd in gin."

It is obvious, I think, that Crabbe's representations of country life here, as in _The Village_ and _The Borough_, are often eclectic, and that for the sake of telling contrast, he was at times content to blend scenes that he had witnessed under very opposite conditions.

The section ent.i.tled "Baptisms" deals accordingly with many sad instances of "base-born" children, and the section on "Marriages" also has its full share of kindred instances in which the union in Church has only been brought about by pressure from the parish authorities. The marriage of one such "compelled bridegroom" is related with a force and minuteness of detail throughout which not a word is thrown away:--

"Next at our altar stood a luckless pair, Brought by strong pa.s.sions and a warrant there; By long rent cloak, hung loosely, strove the bride From every eye, what all perceived, to hide.

While the boy-bridegroom, shuffling in his pace, Now hid awhile, and then exposed his face; As shame alternately with anger strove The brain, confused with muddy ale, to move, In haste and stammering he perform'd his part, And look'd the rage that rankled in his heart: (So will each lover inly curse his fate, Too soon made happy, and made wise too late:) I saw his features take a savage gloom, And deeply threaten for the days to come.

Low spake the la.s.s, and lisp'd and minced the while, Look'd on the lad, and faintly tried to smile; With soften'd speech and humbled tone she strove To stir the embers of departed love: While he, a tyrant, frowning walk'd before, Felt the poor purse, and sought the public door, She sadly following in submission went And saw the final s.h.i.+lling foully spent; Then to her father's hut the pair withdrew, And bade to love and comfort long adieu!

Ah! fly temptation, youth, refrain! refrain!

I preach for ever; but I preach in vain!"

There is no "mealy-mouthed philanthropy" here. No one can doubt the earnestness and truth of the poet's mingled anger and sorrow. The misery of irregular unions had never been "bitten in" with more convincing force. The verse, moreover, in the pa.s.sage is freer than usual from many of Crabbe's eccentricities. It is marked here and there by his fondness for verbal ant.i.thesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists have not overlooked. The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse than d.i.c.kens's mention of the lady who went home "in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indulgence in this habit is never a mere concession to the reader's flippant taste. His epigrams often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:--

"Too soon made happy, and made wise too late."

The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful. The gradual steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hundred lines with a fidelity not surpa.s.sed in the case of the story of Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality. The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as Frederick Walker's _Lost Path_, or Langhorne's "Child of misery, baptized in tears." That it will ever again be ranked with such may be doubtful, for _technique_ is the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and Crabbe's _technique_ is too often defective in the extreme.

These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at proper intervals by some of lighter complexion. There is the gentleman's gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names of his plants,--Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio. Then we have the gallant, gay Lothario, who not only fails to lead astray the lovely f.a.n.n.y Price, but is converted by her to worthier aims, and ends by becoming the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic suitor.

There is an impressive sketch of the elderly prude:--

"--wise, austere, and nice, Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice";

and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants to the tender mercies of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described in lines curiously antic.i.p.ating Hood's _Haunted House_:--

"--forsaken stood the Hall: Worms ate the floors, the tap'stry fled the wall: No fire the kitchen's cheerless grate display'd; No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey'd; The crawling worm that turns a summer fly, Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die The winter-death:--upon the bed of state, The bat shrill shrieking woo'd his flickering mate."

In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:--

"Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the c.u.mbrous scene; Presents no objects tender or profound But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around."

And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing "some scholar" read the list of her t.i.tles and her virtues, "looked disdain and said":--

"Away, my friends! why take such pains to know What some brave marble soon in Church shall show?

Where not alone her gracious name shall stand, But how she lived--the blessing of the land; How much we all deplored the n.o.ble dead, What groans we uttered and what tears we shed; Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise; Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave, The n.o.ble Lady to our sorrows gave!"

These portraits of the ign.o.ble rich are balanced by one of the "n.o.ble peasant" Isaac Ashford, drawn, as Crabbe's son tells us, from a former parish-clerk of his father's at North Glemham. Coming to be past work through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the probability of the parish poorhouse, and reconciling himself to his lot is happily spared the sore trial:--

"Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view!

But came not there, for sudden was his fate, He dropp'd, expiring, at his cottage-gate.

I feel his absence in the hours of prayer, And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there: I see no more those white locks thinly spread Round the bald polish of that honour'd head; No more that awful glance on playful wight, Compell'd to kneel and tremble at the sight, To fold his fingers, all in dread the while, Till Mister Ashford soften'd to a smile; No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer, Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there:-- But he is blest, and I lament no more A wise, good man, contented to be poor."

Where Crabbe is represented, not unfairly, as dwelling mainly on the seamy side of peasant and village life, such pa.s.sages as the above are not to be overlooked.

This final section ("Burials") is brought to a close by an ingenious incident which changes the current of the vicar's thoughts. He is in the midst of the recollections of his departed flock when the tones of the pa.s.sing-bell fall upon his ear. On sending to inquire he finds that they tell of a new death, that of his own aged parish-s.e.xton, "old Dibble"

(the name, it may be presumed, an imperfect reminiscence of Justice Shallow's friend). The speaker's thoughts are now directed to his old parish servant, and to the old man's favourite stories of previous vicars under whom he has served. Thus the poem ends with sketches of Parson Addle, Parson Peele, Dr. Grandspear and others--among them the "Author-Rector," intended (the younger Crabbe thought) as a portrait of the poet himself. Finally Crabbe could not resist the temptation to include a young parson, "a youth from Cambridge," who has imbibed some extreme notions of the school of Simeon, and who is shown as fearful on his death-bed lest he should have been guilty of too many good works. He appeals to his old clerk on the subject:--

"'My alms-deeds all, and every deed I've done, My moral-rags defile me every one; It should not be:--what say'st thou! Tell me, Ralph.'

'Quoth I, your Reverence, I believe you're safe; Your faith's your prop, nor have you pa.s.s'd such time In life's good works as swell them to a crime.

If I of pardon for my sins were sure, About my goodness I would rest secure.'"

The volume containing _The Parish Register, The Village_, and others, appeared in the autumn of 1807; and Crabbe's general acceptance as a poet of mark dates from that year. Four editions were issued by Mr.

Hatchard during the following year and a half--the fourth appearing in March 1809. The reviews were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_, and within two days of the appearance of this article, according to Crabbe's son, the whole of the first edition was sold off.

At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite pleasure. At the time "when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn," he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real life. After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar benefit. The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then sunk. When Crabbe published his _Parish Register_, the novels of the day were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck the note of a new development in her _Castle Rackrent_, not to mention the delightful stories in _The Parents' a.s.sistant, Simple Susan, Lazy Lawrence_, or _The Basket-Woman_. Galt's masterpiece, _The Annals of the Parish_, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk. The Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant. Miss Mitford's sketches in _Our Village_--the nearest in form to Crabbe's pictures of country life--were to come later still. Crabbe, though he adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really a chief founder of the rural novel--the _Silas Marner_ and the _Adam Bede_ of fifty years later. Of course (for no man is original) he had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors. Pope was his earliest master in his art. And what Pope had done in his telling couplets for the man and woman of fas.h.i.+on--the Chloes and Narcissas of his day--Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson's "lovely young Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share of influence. But Crabbe's achievement was practically a new thing. The success of _The Parish Register_ was largely that of a new adventure in the world of fiction. Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might discover in its workmans.h.i.+p, the poem was read for its stories--for a truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could not be unshared.

In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now reduced by the publisher to the form of two small volumes, and in their fourth edition) to Walter Scott, who acknowledged them and Crabbe's accompanying letter in a friendly reply, to which reference has already been made. After mentioning how for more than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of a personal introduction to Crabbe, and how, as a lad of eighteen, he had met with selections from _The Village_ and _The Library_ in _The Annual Register_, he continues:--

"You may therefore guess my sincere delight when I saw your poems at a late period a.s.sume the rank in the public consideration which they so well deserve. It was a triumph to my own immature taste to find I had antic.i.p.ated the applause of the learned and the critical, and I became very desirous to offer my _gratulor_ among the more important plaudits which you have had from every quarter. I should certainly have availed myself of the freemasonry of authors.h.i.+p (for our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Abhorson's) to address to you a copy of a new poetical attempt, which I have now upon the anvil, and I esteem myself particularly obliged to Mr. Hatchard, and to your goodness acting upon his information, for giving me the opportunity of paving the way for such a freedom. I am too proud of the compliments you honour me with to affect to decline them; and with respect to the comparative view I have of my own labours and yours, I can only a.s.sure you that none of my little folks, about the formation of whose tastes and principles I may be supposed naturally solicitous, have ever read any of my own poems--while yours have been our regular evening's amus.e.m.e.nt My eldest girl begins to read well, and enters as well into the humour as into the sentiment of your admirable descriptions of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has seldom existed among those who know by experience that there are much better things in the world than literary reputation, and that one of the best of those good things is the regard and friends.h.i.+p of those deservedly and generally esteemed for their worth or their talents. I believe many dilettante authors do c.o.c.ker themselves up into a great jealousy of anything that interferes with what they are pleased to call their fame: but I should as soon think of nursing one of my own fingers into a whitlow for my private amus.e.m.e.nt as encouraging such a feeling. I am truly sorry to observe you mention bad health: those who contribute so much to the improvement as well as the delight of society should escape this evil. I hope, however, that one day your state of health may permit you to view this country."

This interchange of letters was the beginning of a friends.h.i.+p that was to endure and strengthen through the lives of both poets, for they died in the self-same year. The "new poetical attempt" that was "on the anvil" must have been _The Lady of the Lake_, completed and published in the following year. But already Scott had uneasy misgivings that the style would not bear unlimited repet.i.tion. Even before Byron burst upon the world with the two first cantos of _Childe Harold_, and drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, Scott had made the unwelcome discovery that his own matter and manner was imitable, and that others were borrowing it. Many could now "grow the flower" (or something like it), for "all had got the seed." It was this persuasion that set him thinking whether he might not change his topics and his metre, and still retain his public. To this end he threw up a few tiny _ballons d'essai_--experiments in the manner of some of his popular contemporaries, and printed them in the columns of the _Edinburgh Annual Register_. One of these was a grim story of village crime called _The Poacher_, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe. Scott was earnest in a.s.suring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's metre, and as far as he could compa.s.s it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into another's mould. A few lines may suffice, in evidence. The couplet about the vicar's sermons makes one sure that for the moment Scott was good-humouredly copying one foible at least of his original:--

"Approach and through the unlatticed window peep.

Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep; Sunk 'mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun Stoop to the west, the plunderer's toils are done.

Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand, Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand, While round the hut are in disorder laid The tools and booty of his lawless trade; For force or fraud, resistance or escape The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the c.r.a.pe; His pilfered powder in yon nook he h.o.a.rds, And the filched lead the church's roof affords-- (Hence shall the rector's congregation fret, That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.) The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there, Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare, Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare.

Bartered for game from chase or warren won, Yon cask holds moonlight,[5] seen when moon was none; And late-s.n.a.t.c.hed spoils lie stowed in hutch apart, To wait the a.s.sociate higgler's evening cart."

Happily for Scott's fame, and for the world's delight, he did not long pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. _Rokeby_ appeared, was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of _Waverley_ and the need of conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever. But his affection for Crabbe never waned. In his earlier novels there was no contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters--and it was Crabbe's _Borough_ to which he listened with unfailing delight twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: A cant term for smuggled spirits.]

CHAPTER VII

_THE BOROUGH_

(1809-1812)

The immediate success of _The Parish Register_ in 1807 encouraged Crabbe to proceed at once with a far longer poem, which had been some years in hand. _The Borough_ was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, continued at Muston after the return thither in 1805, and finally completed during a long visit to Aldeburgh in the autumn of 1809. That the Poem should have been "in the making" during at least eight years is quite what might be inferred from the finished work. It proved, on appearance, to be of portentous length--at least ten thousand lines. Its versification included every degree of finish of which Crabbe was capable, from his very best to his very worst. Parts of it were evidently written when the theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet that might pa.s.s muster in respect of scansion and rhyme. In the preface to the poem, on its appearance in 1810, Crabbe displays an uneasy consciousness that his poem was open to objection in this respect. In his previous ventures he had had Edmund Burke, Johnson, and Fox, besides his friend Turner at Yarmouth, to restrain or to revise. On the present occasion, the three first-named friends had pa.s.sed away, and Crabbe took his MS. with him to Yarmouth, on the occasion of his visit to the Eastern Counties, for Mr. Richard Turner's opinion. The scholarly rector of Great Yarmouth may well have shrunk from advising on a poem of ten thousand lines in which, as the result was to show, the pruning-knife and other trenchant remedies would have seemed to him urgently needed. As it proved, Mr. Turner's opinion was on the whole "highly favourable; but he intimated that there were portions of the new work which might be liable to rough treatment from the critics."

_The Borough_ is an extension--a very elaborate extension--of the topics already treated in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. The place indicated is undisguisedly Aldeburgh; but as Crabbe had now chosen a far larger canvas for his picture, he ventured to enlarge the scope of his observation, and while retaining the scenery and general character of the little seaport of his youth, to introduce any incidents of town life and experiences of human character that he had met with subsequently.

_The Borough_ is Aldeburgh extended and magnified. Besides church officials it exhibits every shade of nonconformist creed and practice, notably those of which the writer was now having unpleasant experience at Muston. It has, of course, like its prototype, a mayor and corporation, and frequent parliamentary elections. It supports many professors of the law; physicians of high repute, and medical quacks of very low. Social life and pleasure is abundant, with clubs, card-parties, and theatres. It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons, and schools for all cla.s.ses. The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos or sections, written as "Letters" to an imaginary correspondent who had bidden the writer "describe the borough," each dealing with its separate topic--professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players, almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. These descriptions are relieved at intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in _The Parish Register_--the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a prisoner in the gaol. Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe's previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent defects of workmans.h.i.+p, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity, though to many a reader to-day such, episodes may be chiefly known to exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay's _Essays_, where he speaks of "that pathetic pa.s.sage in Crabbe's _Borough_ which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child."

The pa.s.sage 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 f.a.n.n.y'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 pa.s.s, And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender gra.s.s, Wh.o.r.e dwarfish flowers among the gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ps at distance and the boats at hand, And now they walk upon the sea-side sand, Counting the number, and what kind they be, s.h.i.+ps softly sinking in the sleepy sea: Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold The glittering waters on the s.h.i.+ngles rolled; The timid girls, half dreading their design, Dip the small foot in the r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 s.h.i.+nes upon; And those live lucid jellies which the eye Delights to trace as they swim glittering by: Pearl-sh.e.l.ls 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: