CRABBE. LONG before the philosophic passion for mankind met and deepened, in Wordsworth and Shelley, the waters of Romance, we can trace a larger humanity slowly gaining on our eighteenth century writers, and taking in fresh types and social layers. The humble and the dowdy, the pariahs and eccentrics of the earth, the trader, the seaman, and the bourgeois could stir the imagination after all. Wesley claimed their souls; Oglethorpe, Howard, and other noble reformers, won them better schools and prisons; Johnson was their helpmate; Fielding with friendly deep irony, and Hogarth with the affection that chastises, took their likenesses; and Gray thought of them gently when they were dead. In all this there is little doctrine. We are seldom told of the rights of the poor, or of their abstract equality with ourselves, or of the poetic spark in their natures, or of the value of landscape to their education, or of the hope that some day, under a new heaven, they may be happy and redeemed. Such ideas come fully to light, and win prosaic or inspired form, in the tracts of Bentham and Godwin, in the prefaces to the "Lyrical Ballads," and in "Prometheus Unbound"-with many a premonitory flash, as of no summer lightning, in the verse of Blake. Such apostles are unlike the earlier poets and story-tellers, who, with an oldfashioned equipment of theory, simply watch humanity and describe it. The last of these is George Crabbe, who is a rhyming novelist of real poetic mark, and whose code and ruling conceptions precede-and in no way prophesy - those of 1789, though he wrote on till 1819 and even later and lived till 1832. His first work of any character, "The Village," came out in 1783, in the same decade as Blake's "Poetical Sketches," Burns's Kilmarnock poems, and Cowper's "Task." For this Crabbe is miscalled a pioneer, though he really stands at the close of a literary age. If he is a pioneer at all, it is more in the history of fiction than in that of poetry. His style and verse, with some exceptions, are of the old school. His aims are those of the preacher and the photographic satirist, not those of the makers of romance. Hence his vogue and its long eclipse. Burke launched him and Johnson greeted him; he was thinking in their own spirit; he chronicled realities of their own time in a cadence which they knew and sanctioned; he tacked a homespun moral to a concrete anecdote in a familiar rhyme which disconcerted nobody. If he wrote to show up Goldsmith's idyllic picture of Auburn, he did so only in a modification of that classical style and rhetoric, of which Goldsmith had used another modification. Later, the arch-reviewers Jeffrey and Gifford, who briefed themselves against Wordsworth and his fellows, poured their praise on Crabbe, and indeed rated him more truly than a later age, if with some extravagance. Crabbe was priceless to them; he showed what could be done in the old poetic manner which they officially upheld, as distinct from the new poetic manner which they were vainly committed to obstructing. But their praises perished with their rule, to the detriment of Crabbe's glory, which dwindled, although Scott honoured him, and Byron, in a famous line, spoke to his "sternness" and veracity. Wordsworth's appreciation is of note, being unwittingly a tribute to the "classical" school which he detested. Crabbe's works, he said, "will last, from their combined merits as Poetry and Truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first made their appearance." He especially admired the sketch of the poorhouse in "The Village," no doubt for its "truth"; but the "poetry," which is in the minute style of Pope when Pope drew the deathbed of Zimri Duke of Buckingham, Wordsworth might at best have been expected to tolerate "Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day ; 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. . . ." As the more winged kind of poetry triumphed, this sort of excellence went out of vogue, and Crabbe with it, to be defended from time to time by connoisseurs like Edward FitzGerald. But the reason why Crabbe is little read lies deeper than the advent of Keats and Tennyson, or than his own undeniable gift for being lengthy and obvious. His scene is too like that of life as we know it really to be; and most of us, so far from rejoicing in that scene, go to poetry and fiction in order to forget it and to be charmed out of all necessity for reckoning with it. But there is a minority. Crabbe's stories, like those of the late George Gissing, must retain a small yet stubborn public, who do not mind being made to wince by the representation of life as they know it to be, even though the tones of the recital be hard, grim, and didactic. The chronicles of Aldborough at the close of the eighteenth century, and of New Grub Street at the end of the nineteenth, do they not endure like hammered iron work? Why should they be pleasant? So Crabbe of late years has received anew the notice of scholars. The Cambridge edition of his works by Dr Adolphus Ward is to be commended for textual fulness and precision; and M. René Huchon has produced a monograph as faithful and exhaustive as Crabbe's own "Borough. The Life of the poet by his son still holds its place as one of the best, frankest, and discreetest of our biographies. The rare sallies of Crabbe into romantic verse are remarkable. They are not in the fashion of "Marmion" or "Lara," but in that of the "Lyrical Ballads," whose occasional influence upon him is manifest though never avowed. "Sir Eustace Grey," "The World of Dreams," and "The Hall of Justice," none of them printed earlier than 1805, are in fact "lyrical ballads," not novelettes in heroic couplet. The author has read Coleridge and Wordsworth, but rises to a high, nervous, passionate note of his own, which, had it failed and flagged less often, would have raised him nearer to their province. One example may serve. Sir Eustace Grey, who is in a madhouse, after telling, in a sane and dispiriting style enough, the story of his wife's elopement, suddenly startles us by reciting how the "illfavoured Ones," the demons of his delirium, bore his dispossessed spirit along sea and land, through fen and over precipice, and by the salt scents of the foreshore. Some of the stanzas are the finest in this peculiar order between "The Ancient Mariner" and "Ravelston " The contrast shows in what opposite fashion romance and realism work when a tale has to be told. The romantic imagination of Coleridge or Keats, or of Crabbe in these few pieces, evolves itself in a series of liberating touches. It is like a new butterfly or young bird which begins with weak gentle flights, but goes further and higher every moment, and at last is out of sight of the ground where it could only crawl or struggle one way. We are left with the sense of freedom and release, and, even if the subject be painful or tragic, of expansion and joy. But this is not the normal way of the imagination in writers like Crabbe. They are bound to the fatalities of this earth, to the chainwork of real cause and effect, to expressiveness and not to beauty. Their fancy works by exclusion, not by expansion. They shut one door upon charm, and another upon freedom. Their scenery is hueless and exact "The few dull flowers that o'er the place are spread Grows the salt lavender that lacks foil harsh, And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh." tive success as fall to the lot of the other half. Most of his tales are of this complexion; they are such as we hear every day, and they leave in the memory that sediment of regret without surprise which of all feelings is the least accessible and the most exasperating to youth. For youth, or for a for his own epoch-Crabbe did young forward-looking epochnot write. In 1820, he had become a stranger, save in his rarer moods, and a chance survivor ; and that is why, beside Byron or Coleridge, he and his style are so instructive. Both orders of style are good, and art and thought are incomplete without them both. Indeed, they are apt to recur in a curious rhythm, one overlapping the other, and of this rhythm a ture is made up; as we see by great deal of inventive literaconfronting the first part of the "Romance of the Rose" with the second, or "The Winter's We have to denote these conTale" with "The Alchemist." trasting modes of art by such This is a tolerable allegory rough terms as romantic and of the garden of Crabbe's own realistic. But, while both are fancy. He relates his passages good, the after-world, which of the human comedy in much is always young the same tone. and not He enjoys middle-aged, finds a nobler tracing frustrate lives and the nourishment in the freer and slow degeneration of the soul. He notes the outward obstructions and inward faintings of ordinary men or women, who at last appear to us, in Hamlet's phrase, either as lapsed in time and passion, like half the persons over fifty whom we encounter, or as winning, at the utmost, some such tempered grey happiness or rela VOL CLXXXV.-NO. MCXIX. happier kind of creation; which F of Churchill. He advanced from the general to the concrete, from tirades like "Inebriety" to descriptions like those of "The Village." But in "The Village" he is trying to depict real life in half-real language. The Poor and the Great, Sloth and Danger, the finny tribe, the deluded fair, and the stout churl with his teeming mate, are still queerly obtrusive amidst the literal, thudding diction which Crabbe was to retain and shape so aptly. But he can already draw a scene or a silhouette; and the excellent sketch of his hunting parson, who fights shy of pauper deathbeds, is possibly provoked by Goldsmith's idyl. But he cannot yet model a portrait, or invent a situation, or tell a story; and at this point he pauses for twentyfour years, improving his art in silence, curbing the desire to publish, burnishing and rejecting. When he produced "The Parish Register" (1807) and "The Borough" (1810), it was plain that he had not altered but only bettered his methods, and that he was still doing an eighteenth century thing in an eighteenth century way. The tune was finer, but it was played on the old instrument. His portraits are now those of a master, but they are of the type already made classical by Dryden and Pope; only the social scene is changed, and people are called by their names. Instead of Shimei and Chloe, Jacob Holmes and Peter Grimes. In the preface to the "Tales" (1812), Crabbe appeals formally to the shades of his poetic an cestors to warrant this method now the "fair representation of existing character"- and expresses his willingness "to find some comfort in his expulsion from the rank and society of Poets, by reflecting that men much his superiors are likewise cut out." But he can exhibit a situation and a scene, as well as draw a "character." He has begun to find his ultimate and characteristic form of the Tale, which is sometimes a mere anecdote, but in its fullest development is a foreshortened and dramatic lifehistory. He has even gone further, and tried to brace his tales together into a larger unity by some "associating circumstance," after the manner of Chaucer and Boccaccio. But this last effort he found a strain. "The Parish Register is artificially assorted under births, marriages, and deaths; and in "The Borough" the wish to be doggedly exhaustive hurts the performance. It is a survey of Aldborough, done from memory, with trades, clubs, alms- houses, inns, and elections all painfully gazetted. He describes jelly-fish, and the "various tribes and species of marine vermes," in verse which Gifford hailed as "pleasing and éveillé," but which is as glossy and repugnant as Erasmus Darwin's. Also he discourses on preparatory schools, and on the "mode of paying the borough minister." For these misdeeds his excuse is their |