For this task, he was
peculiarly
well equipped.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
Indeed, so far as the
criticism deals with Wordsworth’s theory of 'poetic diction, it
cannot but strike the reader as carping ; not to mention the
appearance of treachery involved in attacking a theory for which
he himself was commonly held, and, probably, with some justice,
to be, in part, responsible. As critic of Shakespeare's dramatic
genius, his part is less ambiguous, though even this is complicated
by questions of unacknowledged debts to Schlegel. He was the
first English writer to insist that every work of art-in this
instance, every play-is, by its very nature, an organic whole ;
and that, if this is harder to discern in the complicated structure
of Shakespearean and much other modern drama, it is because,
at least in the nobler examples, such plays are not less, but more,
vitally articulated ; not less, but more, spontaneous and organic
Structure, scenic effect, poetry, character-all are shown to spring
from the same common root in the spirit of the poet; each to
enhance the imaginative effect which, instinctively, he had in view.
And he enforces this, not as a mere abstract doctrine—though it
lies at the core of his theory of beauty—but by an exposition of
individual masterpieces which, for subtlety and suggestiveness,
had certainly, if we except Goethe's masterly criticism of Hamlet,
never been approached. It remains true that, having done so
,
much, he might justly have been expected to do even more; and
that nothing but his own nervelessness, at once the cause and
effect of the opium habit, could have prevented him from doing it.
If, in literary criticism, there has sometimes been a disposition
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
Yet, his importance in the history of English philosophy is not
to be denied. It is neither more nor less than to have stood
## p. 136 (#158) ############################################
136
[ch.
Coleridge
against the current which, for the last century, had swept every-
thing before it; to have assailed the mechanical philosophy
which, from the time of Locke, had firmly entrenched itself in
this country and in France; and, however much he may have
been overborne by the prejudices of the moment, at least to
have paved the way for their ultimate exposure and defeat. Even
at the moment, in the high tide of Bentham's influence, his
labours were by no means in vain. As writer-still more, in his
talk and in his personal influence—he served for a rallying point
to all who felt, if they could not explain to themselves, the
inadequacy of the prevailing system : the one man who was
capable of laying bare its fallacies, the one man who was able
to give a reasoned account of the larger faith after which they
were blindly groping. The evidence of this is to be found in
the lives of such men as Arnold and Maurice ; or, more com-
pactly, in the generous essay of Mill and the brilliant, but not
too generous, chapter devoted to the subject in Carlyle's Life
of Sterling.
In philosophy, as he himself would have been the first to
acknowledge, he was building on the foundations laid by Kant
and, to a less degree, by Fichte and Schelling. At what time
he became acquainted with the writings of Kant, is a disputed
point. He himself seems to place it in 18002; and, though he was
constitutionally inaccurate about all matters of fact, it is hard to
see why this date, the period immediately following his return
from Germany, should not be accepted. The question is hardly
one of supreme importance. For, despite some unlucky borrowings
from Schelling (alas ! unacknowledged), he was in no sense a mere
adapter, still less a mere copyist, from the Germans? He worked,
as all philosophers must work, on hints furnished by his pre-
decessors; and that is all.
His aim was to show the necessity of replacing the mechanical
interpretation of life and nature, which he found in possession
of the field, by one consistently spiritual, indeed religious. And
he carries out this purpose over the whole field of experience :
in metaphysics and philosophy ; in ethics and politics ; not to
mention his application of the same principle to imaginative
creation, as briefly indicated in the preceding section. In
1 Biographia, chap. ix.
2 The passage in Biographia, chap. XI (pp. 124–7), which forms the introduction
to Coleridge's metaphysical system, is an unblushing translation (with a misquotation
from Horace faithfully reproduced) of Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus,
$S 1, 2. The rest of the chapter is largely an adaptation from the same work.
## p. 137 (#159) ############################################
VI]
6
Metaphysics and Psychology 137
metaphysics, his work is probably less satisfactory than in any other
branch of his vast subject. And that, partly because he is here
more ready than elsewhere to follow the hazardous guidance of
Schelling ; partly because the temptation to press speculative
truth into the service of a particular religious creed was more
than he was able wholly to resist. Hence, with all his subtlety,
he does not succeed in driving home the essentially creative
action of the mind in the process of knowledge—and that, after
all, is the main point at issue—at all as clearly as Kant had
done before him. And, by his use of the distinction between
the “reason' and the understanding'-a distinction originally
due to Kant for the purpose of bolstering up opinions origin-
ally derived from a wholly different source, he opens the door to
all kinds of fallacies and perversions. With Kant, the distinction
between the reason and the understanding has a purely restrictive
purpose. Its effect is to deny to the former anything more than
a ‘regulative' or suggestive function in the ordering of knowledge;
and to claim from the latter, which, froin its nature, must always
go hand in hand with a sensible intuition, the sole title to the
discovery of truth. In other words, it is a distinction which leads
a
straight to what have since come to be known as agnostic con-
clusions. To Coleridge, it serves a purpose exactly the reverse.
So far from separating the spheres of the two faculties, he sweeps
away all barriers between them. He allows to the one an ap-
parently unlimited power of re-affirming what the other had found
it necessary to deny; and thus exposes himself to Carlyle's sarcasm
that he had discovered 'the sublime secret of believing by the
reason what the understanding had been obliged to fling out as
incredible. ' It would be grossly unfair to say that this exhausts
the teaching of Coleridge in the region of metaphysics. His
criticism of the mechanical system-and, in particular, of the
theory of association, as elaborated by Hume and Hartley-
would, in itself, suffice to overthrow any such assertion! But it
can hardly be denied that this is the side of his doctrine on which
he himself laid the heaviest stress ; nor, again, that it is the side
upon which he is most open to attack.
In the kindred field of psychology, his results are both sounder
in themselves and more absolutely his own. His records of the
working of the mind, especially under abnormal or morbid con-
ditions, are extraordinarily minute and subtle. It would hardly
be too much to say that he is the founder of what has since
1 Biographia, chaps. V-VIII.
6
## p. 138 (#160) ############################################
138
[CH.
Coleridge
become a distinct, and most fruitful, branch of philosophy: the
study of experimental psychology. And this, which is fully known
only to those who are familiar with Anima Poeto, is, perhaps, his
most original contribution to philosophy.
In ethics, he is more upon the beaten track. But it was a
track almost unknown to Englishmen of his day. And it is his
lasting service, at the moment when the utilitarian scheme of
things swept all before it, to have proclaimed the utter in-
sufficiency of any doctrine which did not start from the postulate
of duty. Here, once more, he bases his teaching upon that of
Kant. But he enters a just protest, as Schiller had done before
him, against the hard saying that the highest goodness is that
which tramples upon the natural instincts of the heart. And,
throughout his exposition, as given in Aids to Reflection, he
shows (as, from his personal experience, he well might) a sense of
human frailty—a sense, that is, of one of the two main elements
of the problem—which the noble stoicism of Kant had been too
apt to treat as matter for nothing but shame and contempt.
Few, probably, now think of Coleridge in connection with
political philosophy. Yet, there is no subject to which, through-
out life, he gave more time and thought; from the days of
Conciones ad populum and The Watchman (1795-6) to those of
The Friend (1809—10; 1818), or of The Constitution of Church
and State (1830). Coleridge habitually spoke of himself as the heir
of Burke. And that constitutes at once the strength and the
weakness of his position as political philosopher. More systematic,
but with far less of imaginative and historic insight than his
master, he inherited, in fact, both the loves and the hates of
Reflections and Letters on a Regicide Peace.
On the negative side, he is the fiery foe of the rights of man, of
Jacobinism, of the sovereignty of the people. And he makes no
effort to disentangle the truth which under a crude form, no
doubt-found expression in watchwords which, in his early man-
hood, had shaken Europe to her depths and had in no sense lost
their power when he died. To the end, he was unable to see that
no state, which does not draw its will from the whole body of its
members, can be regarded as fully organised or developed ; and
that this was the ideal which the French revolution, perhaps
before the time was ripe, certainly through many crimes and
blunders, was striving to make good. Against this ideal, he had
nothing to propose but that of a government, based upon the will
of the propertied classes only, and imposing itself upon the rest
## p. 139 (#161) ############################################
vi]
Political Philosophy
139
6
of the community from above. The result is that, at the present
day, his theory seems ludicrously out of date: far more so than
that of the Jacobins, or of Le Contrat social, which he does his
best to cover with ridicule and contempt. So childish, indeed, was
his fear of Jacobinism, so keen his scent for the faintest breath of
its approach that, when Erskine brought in a bill, the first of its
kind, for the prevention of cruelty to animals (1809), he denounced
it, in his largest capitals, as 'the strongest instance of legislative
Jacobinism? ' It was bad enough that rights should be demanded
for men; to concede them to animals was iniquitous and absurd.
In spite of these follies, it is right to acknowledge that his criticism
of Jacobinism and of Le Contrat social, however little we may
agree with it, reveals powers beyond the reach of any man living
in England at the time ; probably, if we except Hegel, beyond the
reach of any man in Europe? .
Yet, as with all thinkers worthy of the name, it is in expounding
the positive side of his doctrine that his powers are seen at their
brightest and most convincing. The core of his creed, as of Burke's,
lay in the conviction that the civic life of man is the offspring not
of deliberate calculation, the cautious balancing of comparative
advantages,' but of instincts, often working unknown to himself,
which are rooted in the deepest fibres of his nature. He is assured
that the state, so far from being a cunning piece of mechanism,
put together at the will of individuals and to be taken to pieces at
their pleasure, is something larger and more enduring than the
individuals who compose it. He knows that, in a very real sense, ,
it has a life of its own : a life which, at countless points, controls,
no less than it is controlled by, theirs. He believes that the moral,
as well as the material, existence of men is largely determined by
the civic order into which they are born. And he infers that, if
this order be roughly shaken, the moral, as well as the material,
well-being of those who belong to it is grievously emperilled.
These are the vital principles which lie behind all that he wrote
on political matters, and which find their best expression, charac-
teristically barbed by a bitter attack on Hume, in an eloquent
passage of one of his Lay Sermons.
1 Letters, vol. II, p. 635.
? The Friend, ed. 1837, vol. 1, pp. 240—266; vol. II, pp. 28–30. Essays on his
own Times, pp. 543—550.
3 The Statesman's Manual, 1816.
## p. 140 (#162) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
GEORGE CRABBE
-
t
6
GEORGE CRABBE was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk,
on 24 December 1754. His father, a collector of salt-duties at the
harbour, was a man of both high tastes and low. Rather dis-
reputable in his later years, he had, as a young man, kept school,
and used to read Milton, Young and other poets aloud to his family.
Destined for the profession of medicine, George was apprenticed
to a medical practitioner in Wickhambrook, near Bury St Edmunds,
from whose surgery, three years later, he passed into that of a
doctor at Woodbridge. Here he remained from 1771 to 1775, and
became acquainted with Sarah Elmy, who, though ten years were
to pass before they were married, exercised from the first a
softening and brightening influence on the rather grim nature of
the unformed youth. Just about the time of their meeting, Crabbe
made his first known appearance in print as a poet. In ‘the poets'
corner' of a ladies' magazine in 1772 appeared several pieces of
verse, some signed ‘G. Ebbare' and one ‘G. Ebbaac,' which are
held to be by Crabbel. One of these, consisting of two very pretty
stanzas, called The Wish, celebrates the poet's 'Mira,' which was
the poetical name given by Crabbe to Sarah Elmy.
In 1775, just before the close of his apprenticeship at Wood-
bridge, Crabbe put his powers to a severe test, by publishing with
an Ipswich bookseller a poem, in three parts, entitled Inebriety.
From the description of the cottage library in part 1 of The Parish
Register2 and other references in Crabbe's works, we know that, in
boyhood, his favourite reading had been romantic; but, by the
time he wrote Inebriety, he must have made a close study of the
poetic dictator of the day, Pope. Much of Inebriety is composed
of frank imitation, or parody, of An Essay on Man and The
Dunciad; while, here and there, Crabbe proves his knowledge
of Gray. Echoes of these poets, being mingled with language drawn
i George Crabbe, ed. Ward, A. W. , Cambridge English Classics, vol. I, pp. y-viii.
2 11. 95—126. See, also, The Borough, letter xx, Ellen Orford, 11. 11--119.
## p. 141 (#163) ############################################
CH. VII]
Early Life
141
by the doctor's apprentice from his art, and presented in rimed
heroic verse, at once laboured and slipshod, leave Inebriety one
of the rawest poems ever written. Yet, if there is plenty of
affectation about the youthful satirist, it is not sentimental
affectation. Crabbe shows signs already of that revolt against
idealisation which was to inspire his mature work. To him,
inebriety is an evil, and he describes with vigour and point its
evil effects in all classes of life.
His apprenticeship over, Crabbe returned home to Aldeburgh,
without any prospects and with very little knowledge of the science
of healing. Owing to his mother's illness and his father's intem-
perance and violent nature, his home was unhappy. During these
years, the iron must have entered into his soul. He tried to
practise his profession at Aldeburgh, and was appointed parish
doctor. Meanwhile, however, he was studying nature, and especially
botany, with results which, if of no service to him as doctor, were
to be of great value to his poetry. He continued to read much
and to think much, and he found his mind turning definitely to
faith and piety. Sarah Elmy was his consolation and hope (many
years later, in one of the Tales called The Lover's Journey, he
wrote a famous description of a visit to her); and he went on
writing poetry, a little of which has survived. To the years
1775—9 belong several religious poems, an impressive little
piece on Mira', which tells how she drew the author from the
relief of 'false pleasures' to 'loftier notions,' and a blank verse
work entitled Midnight, which, if very gloomy, ends on a note of
sane and sturdy courage.
At length, he could not endure life at Aldeburgh any longer.
Towards the end of 1779, he made up his mind to stake his all on
literary work in London and, in April 1780, with assistance from
Dudley North, a relative of the prime minister, he set sail from
Slaughden quay. In London, he took a lodging close to the Royal
Exchange, near some friends of Miss Elmy who lived in Cornhill,
and set to work revising a couple of plays and some prose essays
which he had brought with him, studying botany and entomology
in the country round London, and keeping a journal addressed to
Mira. The year was to him one of privation and disappointment.
Among the poems that, without success, he attempted to publish
were an epistle, in his favourite couplets, to prince William (after-
wards William IV), a satirical Epistle from the Devil (apparently
a revised version of an earlier poem, The Foes of Mankind) and
1 Ward, u. 8. vol. 1, p. 38.
6
## p. 142 (#164) ############################################
142
[CH.
George Crabbe
6
JM
4
an Epistle to Mira, in both of which he uses anapaests. No publisher
would accept these poems, in spite of a biting introduction by
their author, under the pseudonym ‘Martinus Scriblerus. Lords
North, Shelburne and Thurlow, one after another, turned
,
a deaf ear to the author, though his compliment in verse to
Shelburne deserved some reward. And when, probably in August
1780", he found a printer willing to print two hundred and fifty
copies of another poem, it did not bring him in anything but one
or two slighting reviews. Crabbe, who, in several works of this
period, describes his own feelings and condition, hereupon addressed
to 'the Authors of the Monthly Review' a letter in verse, in which
a
he practically asks them to advise him whether he should persevere
in poetry or not, bestowing on himself, by the way, some satirical
advice on the methods that lead to success. There is nothing re-
markable about the poem except the amazing simplicity of the idea.
The kindness of the wigmaker with whom he lodged, occasional
help from Sarah Elmy's family and the pawning of his possessions
just sufficed to save Crabbe from destitution; but his condition
was very bad indeed when, in something like despair, he wrote,
probably in February or March 1781, a letter to Edmund Burke.
This letter, which is still extant, he left, with some specimens of
his poetry in manuscript, at Burke's house in Charles street,
St James's. Burke granted an interview, found Crabbe to have
'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,' gave him money for his
immediate needs and became his patron. Among the poems then
submitted by Crabbe to Burke was The Library; and this was the
poem which Burke recommended for publication. First, however,
it must be revised; the thoughts were often better than the
The revision was carried out under Burke's eye. The
Library was published by Dodsley, 24 July 1781. It did not bear
any author's name, and there is not anything in the poem itself to
declare it Crabbe's. It smacks throughout of Pope and of the
poetical commonplace of the day. The author imagines himself in
a library and utters his glib reflections upon the provinces of
theology, history and so forth, and upon the relief from care afforded
by reading. Any other of the poets of the day might have written
it, and it did not advance Crabbe's reputation.
With the next publication, the case was different. The packet
left with Burke had contained portions of a poem which attempted
to contrast village life, as the writer knew it, with the Arcadian
| Huchon, R. , Un Poète Réaliste Anglais, p. 139, n. 1.
? It is reproduced in facsimile by Huchon, u. 8.
ve
es.
## p. 143 (#165) ############################################
VII]
The Village
143
life described by authors of pastorals. When completed, the poem
was published as The Village. Before, however, its appearance
turned the fortunes of Crabbe as poet, his fortunes as a man had
already been turned through the influence of Burke. Burke in-
vited him to stay at Beaconsfield, introduced him to his powerful
friends, Fox, Reynolds, Thurlow (who presented him with £100 and
forgave him an old insult), and then, finding the bent of his mind to
be towards holy orders, recommended him to the bishop of Norwich,
who ordained him, December 1781, when he was all but twenty-
seven years old, to the curacy of Aldeburgh. At Aldeburgh,
Crabbe, as usual, was not happy. His father was proud of him;
but the neighbours regarded him as an upstart. Change from one
awkward situation to another came with the offer of the post of
private chaplain to the duke of Rutland at Belvoir, whither Crabbe
went in 1782. In spite of 'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,'
which Burke had found in him, there seems to have been a kind
of bluntness, perhaps merely that of a strong and sincere mind
(Thurlow once said that he was 'as like Parson Adams as twelve
to a dozen '), which unfitted him for a ducal chaplaincy; and,
though the portrait of 'my lord,' in The Patron, is not drawn
from the duke of Rutland, who treated Crabbe with kindness and
consideration, some of John's difficulties there set out were,
doubtless, borrowed from the poet's own experience. However,
he was now free from anxiety, constantly meeting people of learn-
ing and taste and blessed with plenty of leisure for his poetic
work.
Crabbe went to Belvoir in or about August 1782. In May
1783, the publication of The Village revealed his peculiar qualities
as a poet. The poem had been completed and revised under
Burke's guidance, and submitted by Reynolds to Johnson, who
declared it'original, vigorous, and elegant,' and made an alteration
which cannot be wholly approved'. The originality of the poem
won it immediate success? Such a work may, almost, be said to
have been needed. The taste for pastorals, running down from
the Elizabethan imitations of Theocritus and Mantuan to Ambrose
6
1 The Village, 1, 11. 15—20. Crabbe's original lines may be seen in Works (1834),
114, n. 4.
2 The daring novelty of Crabbe's poetic treatment of the poor may be gauged by a
curious parallelism between The Borough, letter xvm, The Poor and their Dwellings,
11. 354 899. , and the lines recited by the poet'in letter XFV of Goldsmith's The Citizen
of the World. Goldsmith's lines were written as burlesque; Crabbe’s, copied in all
seriousness. The present writer is indebted to Canon A. C. Deane of Great Malvern for
pointing out this loan.
6
Xxx
myn
## p. 144 (#166) ############################################
144
[CH.
George Crabbe
whe
ܐܶܬ݁ܝܺ
ܚi ji
I
2
ro
Philips, Allan Ramsay and Thomson, had worn itself out. Gay's
Shepherd's Week, with its parody of Philips, had helped to kill it ;
and Crabbe, certainly, owed something to the form and tone of
Gay's poem. Yet, the impulse had continued in another form.
Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village, and Gray, in An Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard, though completely free from
pastoral affectation, had, at any rate in Crabbe's opinion, idealised
the life and character of the villager. Crabbe, who, perhaps
from early youth, had contrasted his knowledge of life round
Aldeburgh with the smooth alternate verse' read aloud to him
by his father, where
fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel? ,
conceived the idea of telling the truth about country folk as he
saw it.
For this task, he was peculiarly well equipped. He knew
the life of the country poor by personal experience; and his studies
in botany and other branches of natural science-possibly, even the
mental shortsight which, all his life, kept his vision very close to
its object-enabled him to substitute for the graceful vagueness
of pastoral poets a background drawn with minute exactness. In
seven consecutive lines of The Village, thistles, poppies, bugloss,
mallow and charlock are mentioned by name, each in a manner
which proves it to have been closely observed; and it is said that
Aldeburgh, Great Parham and the country around Belvoir are all
recognisable in the several descriptions of scenery. As with his
background, so with his persons. The desire to tell the truth as
he saw it was the intellectual passion which governed Crabbe in
all bis mature poetry. The side of truth which he saw was,
however, nearly always the gloomy side. Nature's sternest
painter, yet her best’ Byron said of him, in a wellknown line,
of which the first part probably remains true, while the second
seems to overlook the fact that even village life has a bright side.
This may be found in The Cotter's Saturday Night. An unhappy
youth spent in a rough home may have tinged Crabbe's mind;
but his sturdy dislike of sentimentalism was an enduring character-
istic. So he becomes linked with the 'realists' of later times.
Man is not to be served by iridescent visions of what he is not,
but by pity awakened by the knowledge of what he is.
In spite of this revolt against sentimentalism, The Village, like
| The Village, 1, 11. 12–14.
## p. 145 (#167) ############################################
VII]
6
Later Life
145
Crabbe's later poems, shows substantial fairness. Its picture is
not all gloom. If we contrast his clergyman with the parson of
The Deserted Village, the poem is entirely free from the note, to
be described, perhaps, as petulant, which occurs more than once
in Cowper's satires, which had been published, with not much
immediate success, a few months before The Village.
The workmanship of The Village reaches a point which
Crabbe never passed. The poem bad the advantage, as we have
seen, of revision by Burke and Johnson, and the heroic couplets,
which were always Crabbe's favourite metre, lack the fluency of
The Library, and the rugged carelessness of his later poetry.
They are sufficiently polished, without losing any of his peculiar
sharpness ; and his love of epigram and of antithesis, that amounts
almost to punning, is kept in check. The originality and vigour,'
'
if not the 'elegance,' of the poem, were immediately recognised.
Burke put extracts from it into The Annual Register for 1783,
where Scott read the description of the workhouse so earnestly that
he could repeat it more than ten years later. As Horace Walpole
wrote to Mason, Crabbe 'writes lines that one can remember. '
To The Annual Register for 1783, Crabbe contributed an
obituary notice of his patron's brother, Lord Robert Manners,
whose death in a seafight, while in command of The Resolution,
he had sung in some fine lines feebly tacked on to the end of
The Village; but he did not publish any more poetry for nearly
two years. And, then, he did not give the public anything worthy
of him. It is difficult to believe that The Newspaper, a satire
published March 1785, was not an early work, written, perhaps,
just after Burke had given his approval to The Library, which it
closely resembles. In fact, after The Village, Crabbe did not
publish any important poetry for more than twenty-two years.
During most of these years he was writing verse and destroying it;
during some of them, no doubt, he was living it, rather then writing
it, for, on 15 December 1783, he was married to Sarah Elmy. During
the years that followed, Crabbe wrote three prose romances and,
on his wife's advice, destroyed them; withdrew, before publication,
on the advice of a friend, a projected volume of poems; and worked
hard at various branches of science and at reading in several
languages.
At length, in October 1807, at the age of nearly fifty-three, he
published another volume, which contained, besides reprints of
The Library, The Village and The Newspaper, some new poems.
Of these, the longest and most important, The Parish Register,
10
E. L. XI.
CH. VII.
## p. 146 (#168) ############################################
146
[ch.
George Crabbe
7
23
' #
develops the theme of The Village and first brings Crabbe into
prominence as a teller of stories. A country clergyman (such is
the scheme of the poem) is looking through his registers, and
utters the reflections and memories stirred in him, in turn, by the
entries of births, marriages and deaths. Crabbe's desire to be
just is evident from his inclusion of certain happy scenes (sug-
gested, probably, rather by his own parishes than by his recol-
lections of Aldeburgh) and of fortunate people ; but the bent of
his mind is equally evident in his manner of turning away from the
description of the charming cottage, with its pictures, its books and
its garden,
To this infected row we term our street.
The Parish Register contains some of the best and the best-
known passages in Crabbe's poems, notably the story of Phoebe
Dawson, which touched the heart of Fox during his lingering death
in the autumn before its publication. Meeting Crabbe at Dudley
North's house, Fox urged him to publish more poetry, and
offered to read and revise his manuscript. The Parish Register,
then, had the benefit of Fox's advice, as The Village had enjoyed
that of Burke and Johnson; and Crabbe, as he tells us in his
preface to the volume, had followed it scrupulously-doubtless to
the advantage of the couplets. In subject and treatment, the
poem was sufficiently novel to create some stir. It has been pointed
out that the impulse given to English fiction by the Roger de
Coverly papers in The Spectator was exhausted. With the
exception of Miss Edgeworth, there was not any novelist then
telling stories that approached the truth about humble and
ordinary folk; and, in The Parish Register, Crabbe revived an
impulse that passed on, in course of time, to George Eliot and,
after her, to living writers?
As in all his poetry, the moral purpose is made very clear.
Most of the unhappiness related is ascribed to the ungoverned
passions or the weaknesses of the characters, to the lack of that
prudence, moderation and selfcontrol which he consistently ad-
vocated, in matters temporal and spiritual. He desires to warn
all who might find themselves in like circumstances, and, at the
same time, to rouse pity in the minds of his readers for sinning
and suffering humanity. The first requisite for a poet with these
aims is a sympathetic understanding; and Crabbe, later, was to
2
1 E. g. by Ainger, Crabbe (English Men of Letters), p. 103.
? For Crabbe's attitude towards romantic tales in general, see, especially, The
Borough, letter xx, Ellen Orford, 11. 11–119.
## p. 147 (#169) ############################################
VII]
The Borough
147
show, even more clearly than he shows in The Parish Register,
his mastery of what novelists know as psychology.
Of the other poems in the 1807 volume, The Hall of Justice is
a strong and horrible narrative, in stanzas, of the life of a gipsy
woman; while The Birth of Flattery is a pompous allegory showing
how flattery is the fortunate child of poverty and cunning. More
remarkable is Sir Eustace Grey, a poem very different from
Crabbe's usual pedestrian and minutely ‘natural' work. In or
about 1790, Crabbe had been recommended by his doctor to take
opium for severe indigestion; and opium-taking became a habit.
It was suggested by Edward FitzGerald that opium influenced
Crabbe's dreams, and, through them, Sir Eustace Grey and The
World of Dreams, a poem of somewhat the same nature, which
was first printed after his death. The scene of Sir Eustace Grey
is a madhouse, where a patient, once rich and happy, relates
to his physician and a visitor his downfall and the visions of his
madness. Parallels have been found between some of these
imaginings and those recorded by De Quincey in The Confessions
of an Opium-Eater. The poem, which is written in eight-line
stanzas with linked rimes, is wild and forcible in a very high
degree; but Crabbe, with fine art, allows it to sink gradually to
rest with Sir Eustace's account of his conversion by what the poet
admitted to be a 'methodistic call,' his singing of a hymn and the
reflections of the physician.
Crabbe's next publication was The Borough, a poem in twenty-
four parts or ‘letters,' published in April 1810. Like The Village
and The Parish Register, it describes life and character as the
poet had seen them in Aldeburgh. Yet, not in Aldeburgh only;
for this borough might, to some extent, stand for any country
town of moderate size. In a series of letters to á correspondent,
the author gives an account of the town, the church, the religious
bodies, the politics, professions, amusements, the workhouse, the
poor, the prisons, the schools and many other features of the
town's life. As the work is much longer than its predecessors, so
it shows an increase in Crabbe's scope and power. There was no
one now to revise his writings; and The Borough remains a very
uneven work, both in matter and in versification ; yet, Crabbe,
who had spent eight years upon the poem, was not then so in-
different to craftsmanship as he became later. Parts of The
Borough are very dull; excess of detail makes other parts tedious;
and there is much clumsiness and flatness of expression. Never-
theless, The Borough contains some of Crabbe's finest work, and
a
10-2
## p. 148 (#170) ############################################
148
[CH.
George Crabbe
.
shows an advance in his power of divining motive and depicting
character. The portraits of the clergy and the ministers, and of
the inhabitants of the almshouses, show rare penetration and vigour
in description; and, if Crabbe found himself unable to construct
in verse, or in prose, a novel in which the characters should act
and react upon each other, he remains a master of the individual
portrait. For poignancy and poetic beauty, nothing in all his
work, perhaps, equals the description of the condemned felon's
dream of his youth at home?
Little more than two years elapsed before Crabbe published
another volume of poetry, in some ways his best. Tales, issued
in September 1812, shows an advance on The Borough in the art
of revealing character by narrative. Many of the twenty-one stories
are constructed on the same plan-initial happiness converted
gradually into misery by intellectual pride or ill-regulated passion;
but the variety of the treatment and of the characters prevents
monotony. And, if any one were tempted to accuse Crabbe of a
lack of humour, Tales should avert such a charge. In this set of
stories, more than in any other, he exhibits a humour, bitter, no
doubt, but profound, searching and woven into the very stuff of the
tale. The Gentleman Farmer, with its exposition of the daring free-
thinker enslaved in three different kinds of bondage—to a woman,
a quack doctor and an ostler turned preacher; The Patron, with
its picture of the noble family's reception of their poet-protégé's
death; the masterly comedy of the wooing of a worlding and a
puritan in The Frank Courtship—these and several others show
Crabbe in complete control of his material, and exercising upon it
more of the poet's (or, rather, perhaps, of the novelist's) intellec-
tual and emotional labour than he usually bestowed upon the fruits
his observation. Two of the tales have extraneous interests.
Tennyson knew and admired Crabbe's poems, and may have made
use in Enoch Arden of his recollections of The Parting Hour; and
Charles Lamb founded on The Confidant a comedy called The Wife's
Trial, which, in turn, gave Maria Edgeworth an idea for Helen.
After Tales, Crabbe did not publish anything more for seven
years. He was now a poet of wide reputation, and was welcomed
by Rogers, Campbell and others on the visits to London which his
wife's death in 1813 set him free to pay. In the spring of 1814,
he was appointed to the cure of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, where he
was within reach of William Lisle Bowles, of Lord Bath and of the
1 The Borough, letter XXIII, Prisons, 11. 2894329.
? Printed in Blackwood's Magazine, December 1828.
## p. 149 (#171) ############################################
VII]
Tales of the Hall
149
interesting people who lived in Bath or came there to take the
waters. He appears to have worked meanwhile, with the regu-
larity of an Anthony Trollope, at his poetry; and the results of
this manner of work may be detected in his next volume, Tales
of the Hall, published in July 1819. He had always been a
careless or a wilful workman. Left to himself, and more careless
than ever, now that his fame was established and his age advanced,
he indulged more freely than before in unnecessary detail, in
sentences distorted for the sake of a rime, in flatness approaching
doggerel, in verbosity and antithesis. Some of his critics, among
them Jeffrey, had complained of the lack of connection between
the stories in his earlier volumes. The objection seems trivial;
and, in Tales of the Hall, Crabbe's device of making brothers
who are scarcely acquainted with one another exchange stories
seems futile, when all these stories clearly bear the impress of a
single mind. As usual, Crabbe took most of his material from
people and events he had observed, or from true stories related
to him; and one very interesting passage in Tales of the Hallı
appears to be a portrait of himself. The time had gone by when
Crabbe could justly be accused, as he had been by Jeffrey, of
'disgusting representations. ' Smugglers and Poachers in Tales
of the Hall is a terrible story; but, in most of these poems, as in
Tales, Crabbe is dealing with people of a higher social grade
than his early models. Though most of the stories are sad, there
is less scope for brutality, and more for minute and sympathetic
study of the finer shades of thought and temper. The Widow is
a fine piece of high comedy; the twice-widowed lady's letter to
her third suitor is shrewdly ironical; while a passage in Delay
has Danger3, describing a peevish wife, is, perhaps, the best
example that could be chosen of the sharp and vivid effect to
which Crabbe could attain by his epigrammatic, antithetic manner.
Tales of the Hall was the last volume of poems by Crabbe
published in his lifetime. At Trowbridge, he lived in comfort,
winning, by degrees, the esteem of his parishioners (a tribute
which, in other cures, he had not wholly gained), working hard at
poetry and paying visits to his friends. At the house of the
Hoares in Hampstead, he met Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers,
Joanna Baillie and others; and he paid a memorable visit to Scott
in Edinburgh. He died at Trowbridge, in February 1832. At his
death, many volumes of poetry in manuscript were found in his
1 Book XIV; The Natural Death of Love, 11. 3—42. Book xvii, 11. 407-445.
3 Book xiii, 11. 733—744.
a
## p. 150 (#172) ############################################
150
George Crabbe
[CH.
ord
house, and selections from these were printed in the collected
edition of his works, edited by his son, George Crabbe, which
was published in 1834. They include one delightful tale, Silford
Hall; or, The Happy Day, which describes the visit of a poor boy
to a great house over which he is shown by the housekeeper; and
one shrewd piece of comedy, The Equal Marriage, in which a
male and a female coquette marry to their joint discomfort.
The Farewell and Return is a series of short poems describing
the fortunes of a man's acquaintances before and after his long
absence from his native town. They contain some admirable work,
such as the poem called The Ancient Mansion, which tells how
the local great house had been bought and spoiled by a newcomer.
But, in reading these posthumous tales, it is just to remember
that they had not been finally passed for the press by the author,
whose reputation they do little to enhance. The lyric was not his
best means of expression, and he used it rarely; but the quatrain,
His Mother's Wedding-Ring, shows a beautifully turned thought,
and the short poem on his dead wife, Parham Revisited, is simple
and passionate. The unpublished poems by Crabbe, collected from
manuscripts in the possession of the university of Cambridge and
printed in the Cambridge English Classics edition of his works,
include other examples of his work in lyric poetry.
Between the publication of Crabbe's first work and of his last,
a revolution had come over English poetry. He began to write in
a barren time, when the power of Pope was waning, and nothing
new had yet arisen to take its place. Almost contemporaneously
with The Village, his first characteristic poem, appeared the first
volume of Cowper. During Crabbe's long silence, the influence of
Cowper was to spread; and, by the time of Crabbe's death, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, Campbell, Byron, Shelley and Keats had done
their work for English poetry. It says much for one who, though an
innovator in subject, belonged to the previous age in execution, that
he held his own throughout life and for some time afterward. He
told the plain truth about peasants; yet he called them ‘swains,'
as if Lyrical Ballads had never been published. Poetry took on
a hundred new or revived forms; yet he clung, with very few re-
missions, to his couplets. In spite of all, his work was read and
admired by the very men who were trying to set poetry free
from the shackles in which he continued to labour. Almost alone
among the voices of the new school, Hazlitt's was raised against
him; and Hazlitt's wellknown attack can best be explained by
1 The Spirit of the Age. · Waller and Glover's Hazlitt, vol. iv, pp. 348 ff.
भ
## p. 151 (#173) ############################################
VII]
Crabbe's Couplets
151
a moment of spleen. The admiration of Wordsworth for Crabbe's
work was warm. Lyrical Ballads had not done anything to affect
Crabbe's style, and the two poets, both starting from the same point,
a recognition of sympathetic interest in common life, had followed
widely different paths; but, like Tennyson, at a later date, Words-
worth valued highly the independence and truth of Crabbe's sturdy,
old-fashioned poetry, and saw in it, what Hazlitt failed to see, the
beauty born of poetic passion.
Though Crabbe has paid the penalty of neglect, exacted from
all poets who are careless of form, he was undoubtedly wise to
keep almost exclusively to his couplets. No metre could be better
suited to his close sketches of character or to the level development
of his tales. When at its worst, his work is very bad, and an easy prey
to clever parodists like the authors of Rejected Addresses, who, in
a few trenchant lines, brought all its faults into the light. When at
its best, it is more than good narrative verse. In certain passages,
particularly in passages of description, it rises to an intense and
passionate beauty, all the minute details which Crabbe liked to
record being caught up into the dramatic mood of the moment,
in a manner which, it is sometimes supposed, was unknown before
Maud. A notable example of this dramatic propriety may be
found in The Patron, the fifth of the Tales (ll. 426—433), where
the presumptuous protégé's too happy summer in his patron's
country house is at an end, and his doom is approaching. Save
for the word 'melancholy,' the passage consists of description
which might be termed bald. Crabbe does not make any attempt,
as a 'pastoral' poet would have done, to explain to his readers
the mood inspired by the scene; but the intensity of his observa-
tion and his choice of the most effective among the details bring
the scene itself vividly to the mind's eye. A parallel passage, which
contains also a touch of poetic magic, is that in Delay has Danger,
the thirteenth book of Tales of the Hall (11. 703—724), where
the halfhearted betrothed, already wishing himself free, looks out
of his window. Such economy, and the resulting intensity, are rather
the exception than the rule with Crabbe. Too often, as in the early
part of Amusements, the ninth letter of The Borough, he spoils
the effect of beautiful passages of sympathetic description, like that
of the boat leaving the ship, by dwelling too long on the species
of the medusa (sea-nettle),' or the 'marine vermes,' or other such
things, that interested the man of science rather than the poet. In
spite of this excess, he gave the poetry of nature new worlds to
conquer (rather than conquered them himself) by showing that
9
## p. 152 (#174) ############################################
152
[CH. VII
George Crabbe
the world of plain fact and common detail may be material for
poetry; just as, in dealing with the characters of men and women,
he enlarged the scope of both poetry and fiction. He was not,
like Wordsworth, a lofty and passionate dreamer; so far is he from
possessing the engaging tenderness of Cowper, that often, even at
his finest moments, he repels by his ruthless insistence upon the
truth as he sees it. On the other hand, his keen, if rugged,
.
sympathy widely separates his ' realism ’ from the dreary chronicle
of a Zola; and his not infrequent doggerel comes from his saying
too much, not from saying anything beside the mark. He has left
some vivid and beautiful passages of descriptive poetry, some
admirably told tales and a long gallery of profound and lively
portraits; and, by the intensity of his vision, the force of his mind
and his sturdy sincerity, he ploughed for future workers wide
tracts which, before him, poetry had allowed to lie fallow.
## p. 153 (#175) ############################################
CHAPTER VIII
SOUTHEY
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THERE are few English writers who have been the subject of
more controversy in different kinds than Robert Southey. Esti-
mates of his positive worth as a poet have varied from the certainly
rather excessive notions of it entertained by himself and by
Landor, to the mere impertinence of Emerson's 'Who is Southey? '
Very few persons have endeavoured to give full value to that
singular combination of proficiency and performance in the two
harmonies wherein he has, perhaps, only one rival in English
literature. The absence—an absence which, perhaps, is the chief
instance of a scandal that too often affects English, as compared
with foreign, literature—of even an attempt at a complete edition
of at least his bookwork, has complicated the difficulty of dealing
with him. Even though the old odia-political, theological and
other-have, to some extent (by no means wholly), settled down,
he is—it may be admitted partly by his own fault-apt to rouse
them in single cases and passages after a disturbing fashion. And
there is one pervading condition of a dangerous kind attending his
work, from which he was almost the first, if by no means the last,
to suffer.
This condition was the difficulty—which his prudence and self-
denial reduced to some extent, but which weighed on him all his
life and finally killed or helped to kill him-of adjusting the vita
to the vivendi causae. If Southey had had a private fortune or a
lightly burdened office or benefice of any kind ; if he had had the
gift of bachelorhood and the further gift of a college fellowship;
if he had been able to draw profit from professional work which
left time for writing ; if several other ‘ifs and ands' had trans-
formed themselves in the practical fashion of the saying---not
merely would he, probably, have died in perfect mental health, but
he would have left us work (if he had left any at all, which is an
important proviso) including more definite masterpieces than he
actually achieved. But fate would not have it so. He had no
>
## p. 154 (#176) ############################################
154
[CH.
Southey
>
fortune; and, more than once, he rather stood in the way of his
own luck. He was a born ‘family man’; and, what is more, a most
hospitable, charitable and generous person? He not only refused,
after some efforts, all professional work, but was, probably, in a
measure, incapable of any. He would not have been able to live
his own life anywhere except in the depths of the country; but
he could only live that life there by spending what would have
been now enormous, and must, even then, have been considerable,
sums upon a vast library. To supply these necessities, there was
only one way-hackwork for the press. He began this at a very
unfavourable time, when, as he has somewhere said, a whole day's
work would bring him in some ten shillings, and, though he lived
into a more golden age, he never, as had even Coleridge at one
time, had that regular work for daily and weekly periodicals which
alone really makes an income. Even so, there might have been
difficulties ; for he did not like being "edited'; he would not, as
he says himself, 'regard pen-and-inkmanship as a trade'; and the
consequence was that, while he was perpetually interrupting his
more ambitious work to ‘boil the pot,' these interruptions merely
performed that office and seriously interfered with the other.
Thus, being not a mere gutter journalist but a man of letters
of the higher, if not highest, rank, he was ill content with this
hackwork. He wanted to do, and he did, great work in prose and
,
verse ; and, with such work, after a, perhaps, treacherously pros-
perous beginning, he had scarcely any luck—perhaps because, as
Scott thought, he mismanaged bis affairs with his publishers. As
for the pensions which were constantly thrown in his face by his
political decriers, the facts are simply these. He had-and, for
some time, could hardly have lived without it-an allowance of
£160 a year from his rich schoolfellow Charles Wynn; he gave this
up when he received a government pension rather less than more
than it in value (it was nominally £200, but was largely reduced
by fees and taxes); the laureateship added less than £100 (the
whole of which, and a little more, he at once devoted to life in-
surance), and, very late in his life, Sir Robert Peel gave him £300
more. In 1816, he had declined offers from Lord Liverpool which,
1 Literary coincidences are sometimes amusing. It so happens that, as Grosvenor
Bedford, the father, was a frequent agent of Horace Walpole's charities, so was
Grosvenor Bedford, the son, of Southey's, and we have numerous letters, from principal
to agent, on the subject, in both cases. Horace was by no means stingy in this way;
but it is rather curious to compare his scale of benefaction and Southey's, remembering
that the one was a richly endowed sinecurist and bachelor, the other a man with a
rather large family, who lived almost wholly by ill-paid exertions of his own.
## p. 155 (#177) ############################################
VIII]
His Youth
155
though apparently somewhat vague, would certainly have tempted
most men, at a time when he was actually pressed for money. A
little later, he refused the editorship of The Times with, it is said,
£2000 a year attached. It may be taken as certain that, if his
gains, including these pensions, during a lifetime of almost unbroken
work, resulting, occasionally, in firstrate literature, were summed
up and divided yearly, the average income would be found to
be not half of that of some places since created for persons of no
merit who perform services of no value.
Southey's life was what is called uneventful; but its circum-
stances were too intimately connected with the character of his
work to permit complete neglect of them. He was born (1774) in
Bristol, of a Somerset family, old, entitled to bear arms, in one of
its branches possessed of some fortune, but not of any historical
distinction, and, so far as his own immediate connections were con-
cerned, obscure and unfortunate. His father, who was a linendraper,
failed in business, and died early; but Southey received unusual,
if, on one side, fitful, assistance from his mother's relations. His
uncle, a clergyman named Thomas Hill, was almost a father to
him; and his half-aunt, Miss Tyler, made him free of her house till
his own eccentricities, and her wrath at his marriage, drove him
out. From his very earliest childhood, he seems to have been
a devourer of books, especially in English literature, and more
especially in poetry. His uncle sent him to Westminster, where
he made valuable friends. But the 'strong contagion' of the
French revolution caught him there; and he was expelled for his
concern in a school magazine the principles of which are sufficiently
indicated by its title, The Flagellant. He was thus cut off from
proceeding, as usual, to Christ church, but he went to Balliol
(1792), where he stayed for a year and a half 'working,' in the strict
sense, not at all, but reading immensely, advancing in Jacobinism,
making the acquaintance of Coleridge and, with him and others,
starting the famous scheme of 'pantisocracy' or 'aspheterism,
a miniature socialist republic to be carried out anywhere or
nowhere. The vicissitudes of this association are not for us; but
they ended, so far as Southey was concerned, in his relinquishing
the scheme and marrying (1795) Edith Fricker, but starting from
the church door, and alone, for Portugal, to comply with the
demands of his uncle, who was chaplain at Lisbon.
How he there laid the foundation of that knowledge of the
peninsular literatures which formed one of the special studies of
his life and supplied the subjects of more than one of his chief
>
## p. 156 (#178) ############################################
156
[CH.
Southey
emrifauen
.
criticism deals with Wordsworth’s theory of 'poetic diction, it
cannot but strike the reader as carping ; not to mention the
appearance of treachery involved in attacking a theory for which
he himself was commonly held, and, probably, with some justice,
to be, in part, responsible. As critic of Shakespeare's dramatic
genius, his part is less ambiguous, though even this is complicated
by questions of unacknowledged debts to Schlegel. He was the
first English writer to insist that every work of art-in this
instance, every play-is, by its very nature, an organic whole ;
and that, if this is harder to discern in the complicated structure
of Shakespearean and much other modern drama, it is because,
at least in the nobler examples, such plays are not less, but more,
vitally articulated ; not less, but more, spontaneous and organic
Structure, scenic effect, poetry, character-all are shown to spring
from the same common root in the spirit of the poet; each to
enhance the imaginative effect which, instinctively, he had in view.
And he enforces this, not as a mere abstract doctrine—though it
lies at the core of his theory of beauty—but by an exposition of
individual masterpieces which, for subtlety and suggestiveness,
had certainly, if we except Goethe's masterly criticism of Hamlet,
never been approached. It remains true that, having done so
,
much, he might justly have been expected to do even more; and
that nothing but his own nervelessness, at once the cause and
effect of the opium habit, could have prevented him from doing it.
If, in literary criticism, there has sometimes been a disposition
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
Yet, his importance in the history of English philosophy is not
to be denied. It is neither more nor less than to have stood
## p. 136 (#158) ############################################
136
[ch.
Coleridge
against the current which, for the last century, had swept every-
thing before it; to have assailed the mechanical philosophy
which, from the time of Locke, had firmly entrenched itself in
this country and in France; and, however much he may have
been overborne by the prejudices of the moment, at least to
have paved the way for their ultimate exposure and defeat. Even
at the moment, in the high tide of Bentham's influence, his
labours were by no means in vain. As writer-still more, in his
talk and in his personal influence—he served for a rallying point
to all who felt, if they could not explain to themselves, the
inadequacy of the prevailing system : the one man who was
capable of laying bare its fallacies, the one man who was able
to give a reasoned account of the larger faith after which they
were blindly groping. The evidence of this is to be found in
the lives of such men as Arnold and Maurice ; or, more com-
pactly, in the generous essay of Mill and the brilliant, but not
too generous, chapter devoted to the subject in Carlyle's Life
of Sterling.
In philosophy, as he himself would have been the first to
acknowledge, he was building on the foundations laid by Kant
and, to a less degree, by Fichte and Schelling. At what time
he became acquainted with the writings of Kant, is a disputed
point. He himself seems to place it in 18002; and, though he was
constitutionally inaccurate about all matters of fact, it is hard to
see why this date, the period immediately following his return
from Germany, should not be accepted. The question is hardly
one of supreme importance. For, despite some unlucky borrowings
from Schelling (alas ! unacknowledged), he was in no sense a mere
adapter, still less a mere copyist, from the Germans? He worked,
as all philosophers must work, on hints furnished by his pre-
decessors; and that is all.
His aim was to show the necessity of replacing the mechanical
interpretation of life and nature, which he found in possession
of the field, by one consistently spiritual, indeed religious. And
he carries out this purpose over the whole field of experience :
in metaphysics and philosophy ; in ethics and politics ; not to
mention his application of the same principle to imaginative
creation, as briefly indicated in the preceding section. In
1 Biographia, chap. ix.
2 The passage in Biographia, chap. XI (pp. 124–7), which forms the introduction
to Coleridge's metaphysical system, is an unblushing translation (with a misquotation
from Horace faithfully reproduced) of Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus,
$S 1, 2. The rest of the chapter is largely an adaptation from the same work.
## p. 137 (#159) ############################################
VI]
6
Metaphysics and Psychology 137
metaphysics, his work is probably less satisfactory than in any other
branch of his vast subject. And that, partly because he is here
more ready than elsewhere to follow the hazardous guidance of
Schelling ; partly because the temptation to press speculative
truth into the service of a particular religious creed was more
than he was able wholly to resist. Hence, with all his subtlety,
he does not succeed in driving home the essentially creative
action of the mind in the process of knowledge—and that, after
all, is the main point at issue—at all as clearly as Kant had
done before him. And, by his use of the distinction between
the “reason' and the understanding'-a distinction originally
due to Kant for the purpose of bolstering up opinions origin-
ally derived from a wholly different source, he opens the door to
all kinds of fallacies and perversions. With Kant, the distinction
between the reason and the understanding has a purely restrictive
purpose. Its effect is to deny to the former anything more than
a ‘regulative' or suggestive function in the ordering of knowledge;
and to claim from the latter, which, froin its nature, must always
go hand in hand with a sensible intuition, the sole title to the
discovery of truth. In other words, it is a distinction which leads
a
straight to what have since come to be known as agnostic con-
clusions. To Coleridge, it serves a purpose exactly the reverse.
So far from separating the spheres of the two faculties, he sweeps
away all barriers between them. He allows to the one an ap-
parently unlimited power of re-affirming what the other had found
it necessary to deny; and thus exposes himself to Carlyle's sarcasm
that he had discovered 'the sublime secret of believing by the
reason what the understanding had been obliged to fling out as
incredible. ' It would be grossly unfair to say that this exhausts
the teaching of Coleridge in the region of metaphysics. His
criticism of the mechanical system-and, in particular, of the
theory of association, as elaborated by Hume and Hartley-
would, in itself, suffice to overthrow any such assertion! But it
can hardly be denied that this is the side of his doctrine on which
he himself laid the heaviest stress ; nor, again, that it is the side
upon which he is most open to attack.
In the kindred field of psychology, his results are both sounder
in themselves and more absolutely his own. His records of the
working of the mind, especially under abnormal or morbid con-
ditions, are extraordinarily minute and subtle. It would hardly
be too much to say that he is the founder of what has since
1 Biographia, chaps. V-VIII.
6
## p. 138 (#160) ############################################
138
[CH.
Coleridge
become a distinct, and most fruitful, branch of philosophy: the
study of experimental psychology. And this, which is fully known
only to those who are familiar with Anima Poeto, is, perhaps, his
most original contribution to philosophy.
In ethics, he is more upon the beaten track. But it was a
track almost unknown to Englishmen of his day. And it is his
lasting service, at the moment when the utilitarian scheme of
things swept all before it, to have proclaimed the utter in-
sufficiency of any doctrine which did not start from the postulate
of duty. Here, once more, he bases his teaching upon that of
Kant. But he enters a just protest, as Schiller had done before
him, against the hard saying that the highest goodness is that
which tramples upon the natural instincts of the heart. And,
throughout his exposition, as given in Aids to Reflection, he
shows (as, from his personal experience, he well might) a sense of
human frailty—a sense, that is, of one of the two main elements
of the problem—which the noble stoicism of Kant had been too
apt to treat as matter for nothing but shame and contempt.
Few, probably, now think of Coleridge in connection with
political philosophy. Yet, there is no subject to which, through-
out life, he gave more time and thought; from the days of
Conciones ad populum and The Watchman (1795-6) to those of
The Friend (1809—10; 1818), or of The Constitution of Church
and State (1830). Coleridge habitually spoke of himself as the heir
of Burke. And that constitutes at once the strength and the
weakness of his position as political philosopher. More systematic,
but with far less of imaginative and historic insight than his
master, he inherited, in fact, both the loves and the hates of
Reflections and Letters on a Regicide Peace.
On the negative side, he is the fiery foe of the rights of man, of
Jacobinism, of the sovereignty of the people. And he makes no
effort to disentangle the truth which under a crude form, no
doubt-found expression in watchwords which, in his early man-
hood, had shaken Europe to her depths and had in no sense lost
their power when he died. To the end, he was unable to see that
no state, which does not draw its will from the whole body of its
members, can be regarded as fully organised or developed ; and
that this was the ideal which the French revolution, perhaps
before the time was ripe, certainly through many crimes and
blunders, was striving to make good. Against this ideal, he had
nothing to propose but that of a government, based upon the will
of the propertied classes only, and imposing itself upon the rest
## p. 139 (#161) ############################################
vi]
Political Philosophy
139
6
of the community from above. The result is that, at the present
day, his theory seems ludicrously out of date: far more so than
that of the Jacobins, or of Le Contrat social, which he does his
best to cover with ridicule and contempt. So childish, indeed, was
his fear of Jacobinism, so keen his scent for the faintest breath of
its approach that, when Erskine brought in a bill, the first of its
kind, for the prevention of cruelty to animals (1809), he denounced
it, in his largest capitals, as 'the strongest instance of legislative
Jacobinism? ' It was bad enough that rights should be demanded
for men; to concede them to animals was iniquitous and absurd.
In spite of these follies, it is right to acknowledge that his criticism
of Jacobinism and of Le Contrat social, however little we may
agree with it, reveals powers beyond the reach of any man living
in England at the time ; probably, if we except Hegel, beyond the
reach of any man in Europe? .
Yet, as with all thinkers worthy of the name, it is in expounding
the positive side of his doctrine that his powers are seen at their
brightest and most convincing. The core of his creed, as of Burke's,
lay in the conviction that the civic life of man is the offspring not
of deliberate calculation, the cautious balancing of comparative
advantages,' but of instincts, often working unknown to himself,
which are rooted in the deepest fibres of his nature. He is assured
that the state, so far from being a cunning piece of mechanism,
put together at the will of individuals and to be taken to pieces at
their pleasure, is something larger and more enduring than the
individuals who compose it. He knows that, in a very real sense, ,
it has a life of its own : a life which, at countless points, controls,
no less than it is controlled by, theirs. He believes that the moral,
as well as the material, existence of men is largely determined by
the civic order into which they are born. And he infers that, if
this order be roughly shaken, the moral, as well as the material,
well-being of those who belong to it is grievously emperilled.
These are the vital principles which lie behind all that he wrote
on political matters, and which find their best expression, charac-
teristically barbed by a bitter attack on Hume, in an eloquent
passage of one of his Lay Sermons.
1 Letters, vol. II, p. 635.
? The Friend, ed. 1837, vol. 1, pp. 240—266; vol. II, pp. 28–30. Essays on his
own Times, pp. 543—550.
3 The Statesman's Manual, 1816.
## p. 140 (#162) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
GEORGE CRABBE
-
t
6
GEORGE CRABBE was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk,
on 24 December 1754. His father, a collector of salt-duties at the
harbour, was a man of both high tastes and low. Rather dis-
reputable in his later years, he had, as a young man, kept school,
and used to read Milton, Young and other poets aloud to his family.
Destined for the profession of medicine, George was apprenticed
to a medical practitioner in Wickhambrook, near Bury St Edmunds,
from whose surgery, three years later, he passed into that of a
doctor at Woodbridge. Here he remained from 1771 to 1775, and
became acquainted with Sarah Elmy, who, though ten years were
to pass before they were married, exercised from the first a
softening and brightening influence on the rather grim nature of
the unformed youth. Just about the time of their meeting, Crabbe
made his first known appearance in print as a poet. In ‘the poets'
corner' of a ladies' magazine in 1772 appeared several pieces of
verse, some signed ‘G. Ebbare' and one ‘G. Ebbaac,' which are
held to be by Crabbel. One of these, consisting of two very pretty
stanzas, called The Wish, celebrates the poet's 'Mira,' which was
the poetical name given by Crabbe to Sarah Elmy.
In 1775, just before the close of his apprenticeship at Wood-
bridge, Crabbe put his powers to a severe test, by publishing with
an Ipswich bookseller a poem, in three parts, entitled Inebriety.
From the description of the cottage library in part 1 of The Parish
Register2 and other references in Crabbe's works, we know that, in
boyhood, his favourite reading had been romantic; but, by the
time he wrote Inebriety, he must have made a close study of the
poetic dictator of the day, Pope. Much of Inebriety is composed
of frank imitation, or parody, of An Essay on Man and The
Dunciad; while, here and there, Crabbe proves his knowledge
of Gray. Echoes of these poets, being mingled with language drawn
i George Crabbe, ed. Ward, A. W. , Cambridge English Classics, vol. I, pp. y-viii.
2 11. 95—126. See, also, The Borough, letter xx, Ellen Orford, 11. 11--119.
## p. 141 (#163) ############################################
CH. VII]
Early Life
141
by the doctor's apprentice from his art, and presented in rimed
heroic verse, at once laboured and slipshod, leave Inebriety one
of the rawest poems ever written. Yet, if there is plenty of
affectation about the youthful satirist, it is not sentimental
affectation. Crabbe shows signs already of that revolt against
idealisation which was to inspire his mature work. To him,
inebriety is an evil, and he describes with vigour and point its
evil effects in all classes of life.
His apprenticeship over, Crabbe returned home to Aldeburgh,
without any prospects and with very little knowledge of the science
of healing. Owing to his mother's illness and his father's intem-
perance and violent nature, his home was unhappy. During these
years, the iron must have entered into his soul. He tried to
practise his profession at Aldeburgh, and was appointed parish
doctor. Meanwhile, however, he was studying nature, and especially
botany, with results which, if of no service to him as doctor, were
to be of great value to his poetry. He continued to read much
and to think much, and he found his mind turning definitely to
faith and piety. Sarah Elmy was his consolation and hope (many
years later, in one of the Tales called The Lover's Journey, he
wrote a famous description of a visit to her); and he went on
writing poetry, a little of which has survived. To the years
1775—9 belong several religious poems, an impressive little
piece on Mira', which tells how she drew the author from the
relief of 'false pleasures' to 'loftier notions,' and a blank verse
work entitled Midnight, which, if very gloomy, ends on a note of
sane and sturdy courage.
At length, he could not endure life at Aldeburgh any longer.
Towards the end of 1779, he made up his mind to stake his all on
literary work in London and, in April 1780, with assistance from
Dudley North, a relative of the prime minister, he set sail from
Slaughden quay. In London, he took a lodging close to the Royal
Exchange, near some friends of Miss Elmy who lived in Cornhill,
and set to work revising a couple of plays and some prose essays
which he had brought with him, studying botany and entomology
in the country round London, and keeping a journal addressed to
Mira. The year was to him one of privation and disappointment.
Among the poems that, without success, he attempted to publish
were an epistle, in his favourite couplets, to prince William (after-
wards William IV), a satirical Epistle from the Devil (apparently
a revised version of an earlier poem, The Foes of Mankind) and
1 Ward, u. 8. vol. 1, p. 38.
6
## p. 142 (#164) ############################################
142
[CH.
George Crabbe
6
JM
4
an Epistle to Mira, in both of which he uses anapaests. No publisher
would accept these poems, in spite of a biting introduction by
their author, under the pseudonym ‘Martinus Scriblerus. Lords
North, Shelburne and Thurlow, one after another, turned
,
a deaf ear to the author, though his compliment in verse to
Shelburne deserved some reward. And when, probably in August
1780", he found a printer willing to print two hundred and fifty
copies of another poem, it did not bring him in anything but one
or two slighting reviews. Crabbe, who, in several works of this
period, describes his own feelings and condition, hereupon addressed
to 'the Authors of the Monthly Review' a letter in verse, in which
a
he practically asks them to advise him whether he should persevere
in poetry or not, bestowing on himself, by the way, some satirical
advice on the methods that lead to success. There is nothing re-
markable about the poem except the amazing simplicity of the idea.
The kindness of the wigmaker with whom he lodged, occasional
help from Sarah Elmy's family and the pawning of his possessions
just sufficed to save Crabbe from destitution; but his condition
was very bad indeed when, in something like despair, he wrote,
probably in February or March 1781, a letter to Edmund Burke.
This letter, which is still extant, he left, with some specimens of
his poetry in manuscript, at Burke's house in Charles street,
St James's. Burke granted an interview, found Crabbe to have
'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,' gave him money for his
immediate needs and became his patron. Among the poems then
submitted by Crabbe to Burke was The Library; and this was the
poem which Burke recommended for publication. First, however,
it must be revised; the thoughts were often better than the
The revision was carried out under Burke's eye. The
Library was published by Dodsley, 24 July 1781. It did not bear
any author's name, and there is not anything in the poem itself to
declare it Crabbe's. It smacks throughout of Pope and of the
poetical commonplace of the day. The author imagines himself in
a library and utters his glib reflections upon the provinces of
theology, history and so forth, and upon the relief from care afforded
by reading. Any other of the poets of the day might have written
it, and it did not advance Crabbe's reputation.
With the next publication, the case was different. The packet
left with Burke had contained portions of a poem which attempted
to contrast village life, as the writer knew it, with the Arcadian
| Huchon, R. , Un Poète Réaliste Anglais, p. 139, n. 1.
? It is reproduced in facsimile by Huchon, u. 8.
ve
es.
## p. 143 (#165) ############################################
VII]
The Village
143
life described by authors of pastorals. When completed, the poem
was published as The Village. Before, however, its appearance
turned the fortunes of Crabbe as poet, his fortunes as a man had
already been turned through the influence of Burke. Burke in-
vited him to stay at Beaconsfield, introduced him to his powerful
friends, Fox, Reynolds, Thurlow (who presented him with £100 and
forgave him an old insult), and then, finding the bent of his mind to
be towards holy orders, recommended him to the bishop of Norwich,
who ordained him, December 1781, when he was all but twenty-
seven years old, to the curacy of Aldeburgh. At Aldeburgh,
Crabbe, as usual, was not happy. His father was proud of him;
but the neighbours regarded him as an upstart. Change from one
awkward situation to another came with the offer of the post of
private chaplain to the duke of Rutland at Belvoir, whither Crabbe
went in 1782. In spite of 'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,'
which Burke had found in him, there seems to have been a kind
of bluntness, perhaps merely that of a strong and sincere mind
(Thurlow once said that he was 'as like Parson Adams as twelve
to a dozen '), which unfitted him for a ducal chaplaincy; and,
though the portrait of 'my lord,' in The Patron, is not drawn
from the duke of Rutland, who treated Crabbe with kindness and
consideration, some of John's difficulties there set out were,
doubtless, borrowed from the poet's own experience. However,
he was now free from anxiety, constantly meeting people of learn-
ing and taste and blessed with plenty of leisure for his poetic
work.
Crabbe went to Belvoir in or about August 1782. In May
1783, the publication of The Village revealed his peculiar qualities
as a poet. The poem had been completed and revised under
Burke's guidance, and submitted by Reynolds to Johnson, who
declared it'original, vigorous, and elegant,' and made an alteration
which cannot be wholly approved'. The originality of the poem
won it immediate success? Such a work may, almost, be said to
have been needed. The taste for pastorals, running down from
the Elizabethan imitations of Theocritus and Mantuan to Ambrose
6
1 The Village, 1, 11. 15—20. Crabbe's original lines may be seen in Works (1834),
114, n. 4.
2 The daring novelty of Crabbe's poetic treatment of the poor may be gauged by a
curious parallelism between The Borough, letter xvm, The Poor and their Dwellings,
11. 354 899. , and the lines recited by the poet'in letter XFV of Goldsmith's The Citizen
of the World. Goldsmith's lines were written as burlesque; Crabbe’s, copied in all
seriousness. The present writer is indebted to Canon A. C. Deane of Great Malvern for
pointing out this loan.
6
Xxx
myn
## p. 144 (#166) ############################################
144
[CH.
George Crabbe
whe
ܐܶܬ݁ܝܺ
ܚi ji
I
2
ro
Philips, Allan Ramsay and Thomson, had worn itself out. Gay's
Shepherd's Week, with its parody of Philips, had helped to kill it ;
and Crabbe, certainly, owed something to the form and tone of
Gay's poem. Yet, the impulse had continued in another form.
Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village, and Gray, in An Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard, though completely free from
pastoral affectation, had, at any rate in Crabbe's opinion, idealised
the life and character of the villager. Crabbe, who, perhaps
from early youth, had contrasted his knowledge of life round
Aldeburgh with the smooth alternate verse' read aloud to him
by his father, where
fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel? ,
conceived the idea of telling the truth about country folk as he
saw it.
For this task, he was peculiarly well equipped. He knew
the life of the country poor by personal experience; and his studies
in botany and other branches of natural science-possibly, even the
mental shortsight which, all his life, kept his vision very close to
its object-enabled him to substitute for the graceful vagueness
of pastoral poets a background drawn with minute exactness. In
seven consecutive lines of The Village, thistles, poppies, bugloss,
mallow and charlock are mentioned by name, each in a manner
which proves it to have been closely observed; and it is said that
Aldeburgh, Great Parham and the country around Belvoir are all
recognisable in the several descriptions of scenery. As with his
background, so with his persons. The desire to tell the truth as
he saw it was the intellectual passion which governed Crabbe in
all bis mature poetry. The side of truth which he saw was,
however, nearly always the gloomy side. Nature's sternest
painter, yet her best’ Byron said of him, in a wellknown line,
of which the first part probably remains true, while the second
seems to overlook the fact that even village life has a bright side.
This may be found in The Cotter's Saturday Night. An unhappy
youth spent in a rough home may have tinged Crabbe's mind;
but his sturdy dislike of sentimentalism was an enduring character-
istic. So he becomes linked with the 'realists' of later times.
Man is not to be served by iridescent visions of what he is not,
but by pity awakened by the knowledge of what he is.
In spite of this revolt against sentimentalism, The Village, like
| The Village, 1, 11. 12–14.
## p. 145 (#167) ############################################
VII]
6
Later Life
145
Crabbe's later poems, shows substantial fairness. Its picture is
not all gloom. If we contrast his clergyman with the parson of
The Deserted Village, the poem is entirely free from the note, to
be described, perhaps, as petulant, which occurs more than once
in Cowper's satires, which had been published, with not much
immediate success, a few months before The Village.
The workmanship of The Village reaches a point which
Crabbe never passed. The poem bad the advantage, as we have
seen, of revision by Burke and Johnson, and the heroic couplets,
which were always Crabbe's favourite metre, lack the fluency of
The Library, and the rugged carelessness of his later poetry.
They are sufficiently polished, without losing any of his peculiar
sharpness ; and his love of epigram and of antithesis, that amounts
almost to punning, is kept in check. The originality and vigour,'
'
if not the 'elegance,' of the poem, were immediately recognised.
Burke put extracts from it into The Annual Register for 1783,
where Scott read the description of the workhouse so earnestly that
he could repeat it more than ten years later. As Horace Walpole
wrote to Mason, Crabbe 'writes lines that one can remember. '
To The Annual Register for 1783, Crabbe contributed an
obituary notice of his patron's brother, Lord Robert Manners,
whose death in a seafight, while in command of The Resolution,
he had sung in some fine lines feebly tacked on to the end of
The Village; but he did not publish any more poetry for nearly
two years. And, then, he did not give the public anything worthy
of him. It is difficult to believe that The Newspaper, a satire
published March 1785, was not an early work, written, perhaps,
just after Burke had given his approval to The Library, which it
closely resembles. In fact, after The Village, Crabbe did not
publish any important poetry for more than twenty-two years.
During most of these years he was writing verse and destroying it;
during some of them, no doubt, he was living it, rather then writing
it, for, on 15 December 1783, he was married to Sarah Elmy. During
the years that followed, Crabbe wrote three prose romances and,
on his wife's advice, destroyed them; withdrew, before publication,
on the advice of a friend, a projected volume of poems; and worked
hard at various branches of science and at reading in several
languages.
At length, in October 1807, at the age of nearly fifty-three, he
published another volume, which contained, besides reprints of
The Library, The Village and The Newspaper, some new poems.
Of these, the longest and most important, The Parish Register,
10
E. L. XI.
CH. VII.
## p. 146 (#168) ############################################
146
[ch.
George Crabbe
7
23
' #
develops the theme of The Village and first brings Crabbe into
prominence as a teller of stories. A country clergyman (such is
the scheme of the poem) is looking through his registers, and
utters the reflections and memories stirred in him, in turn, by the
entries of births, marriages and deaths. Crabbe's desire to be
just is evident from his inclusion of certain happy scenes (sug-
gested, probably, rather by his own parishes than by his recol-
lections of Aldeburgh) and of fortunate people ; but the bent of
his mind is equally evident in his manner of turning away from the
description of the charming cottage, with its pictures, its books and
its garden,
To this infected row we term our street.
The Parish Register contains some of the best and the best-
known passages in Crabbe's poems, notably the story of Phoebe
Dawson, which touched the heart of Fox during his lingering death
in the autumn before its publication. Meeting Crabbe at Dudley
North's house, Fox urged him to publish more poetry, and
offered to read and revise his manuscript. The Parish Register,
then, had the benefit of Fox's advice, as The Village had enjoyed
that of Burke and Johnson; and Crabbe, as he tells us in his
preface to the volume, had followed it scrupulously-doubtless to
the advantage of the couplets. In subject and treatment, the
poem was sufficiently novel to create some stir. It has been pointed
out that the impulse given to English fiction by the Roger de
Coverly papers in The Spectator was exhausted. With the
exception of Miss Edgeworth, there was not any novelist then
telling stories that approached the truth about humble and
ordinary folk; and, in The Parish Register, Crabbe revived an
impulse that passed on, in course of time, to George Eliot and,
after her, to living writers?
As in all his poetry, the moral purpose is made very clear.
Most of the unhappiness related is ascribed to the ungoverned
passions or the weaknesses of the characters, to the lack of that
prudence, moderation and selfcontrol which he consistently ad-
vocated, in matters temporal and spiritual. He desires to warn
all who might find themselves in like circumstances, and, at the
same time, to rouse pity in the minds of his readers for sinning
and suffering humanity. The first requisite for a poet with these
aims is a sympathetic understanding; and Crabbe, later, was to
2
1 E. g. by Ainger, Crabbe (English Men of Letters), p. 103.
? For Crabbe's attitude towards romantic tales in general, see, especially, The
Borough, letter xx, Ellen Orford, 11. 11–119.
## p. 147 (#169) ############################################
VII]
The Borough
147
show, even more clearly than he shows in The Parish Register,
his mastery of what novelists know as psychology.
Of the other poems in the 1807 volume, The Hall of Justice is
a strong and horrible narrative, in stanzas, of the life of a gipsy
woman; while The Birth of Flattery is a pompous allegory showing
how flattery is the fortunate child of poverty and cunning. More
remarkable is Sir Eustace Grey, a poem very different from
Crabbe's usual pedestrian and minutely ‘natural' work. In or
about 1790, Crabbe had been recommended by his doctor to take
opium for severe indigestion; and opium-taking became a habit.
It was suggested by Edward FitzGerald that opium influenced
Crabbe's dreams, and, through them, Sir Eustace Grey and The
World of Dreams, a poem of somewhat the same nature, which
was first printed after his death. The scene of Sir Eustace Grey
is a madhouse, where a patient, once rich and happy, relates
to his physician and a visitor his downfall and the visions of his
madness. Parallels have been found between some of these
imaginings and those recorded by De Quincey in The Confessions
of an Opium-Eater. The poem, which is written in eight-line
stanzas with linked rimes, is wild and forcible in a very high
degree; but Crabbe, with fine art, allows it to sink gradually to
rest with Sir Eustace's account of his conversion by what the poet
admitted to be a 'methodistic call,' his singing of a hymn and the
reflections of the physician.
Crabbe's next publication was The Borough, a poem in twenty-
four parts or ‘letters,' published in April 1810. Like The Village
and The Parish Register, it describes life and character as the
poet had seen them in Aldeburgh. Yet, not in Aldeburgh only;
for this borough might, to some extent, stand for any country
town of moderate size. In a series of letters to á correspondent,
the author gives an account of the town, the church, the religious
bodies, the politics, professions, amusements, the workhouse, the
poor, the prisons, the schools and many other features of the
town's life. As the work is much longer than its predecessors, so
it shows an increase in Crabbe's scope and power. There was no
one now to revise his writings; and The Borough remains a very
uneven work, both in matter and in versification ; yet, Crabbe,
who had spent eight years upon the poem, was not then so in-
different to craftsmanship as he became later. Parts of The
Borough are very dull; excess of detail makes other parts tedious;
and there is much clumsiness and flatness of expression. Never-
theless, The Borough contains some of Crabbe's finest work, and
a
10-2
## p. 148 (#170) ############################################
148
[CH.
George Crabbe
.
shows an advance in his power of divining motive and depicting
character. The portraits of the clergy and the ministers, and of
the inhabitants of the almshouses, show rare penetration and vigour
in description; and, if Crabbe found himself unable to construct
in verse, or in prose, a novel in which the characters should act
and react upon each other, he remains a master of the individual
portrait. For poignancy and poetic beauty, nothing in all his
work, perhaps, equals the description of the condemned felon's
dream of his youth at home?
Little more than two years elapsed before Crabbe published
another volume of poetry, in some ways his best. Tales, issued
in September 1812, shows an advance on The Borough in the art
of revealing character by narrative. Many of the twenty-one stories
are constructed on the same plan-initial happiness converted
gradually into misery by intellectual pride or ill-regulated passion;
but the variety of the treatment and of the characters prevents
monotony. And, if any one were tempted to accuse Crabbe of a
lack of humour, Tales should avert such a charge. In this set of
stories, more than in any other, he exhibits a humour, bitter, no
doubt, but profound, searching and woven into the very stuff of the
tale. The Gentleman Farmer, with its exposition of the daring free-
thinker enslaved in three different kinds of bondage—to a woman,
a quack doctor and an ostler turned preacher; The Patron, with
its picture of the noble family's reception of their poet-protégé's
death; the masterly comedy of the wooing of a worlding and a
puritan in The Frank Courtship—these and several others show
Crabbe in complete control of his material, and exercising upon it
more of the poet's (or, rather, perhaps, of the novelist's) intellec-
tual and emotional labour than he usually bestowed upon the fruits
his observation. Two of the tales have extraneous interests.
Tennyson knew and admired Crabbe's poems, and may have made
use in Enoch Arden of his recollections of The Parting Hour; and
Charles Lamb founded on The Confidant a comedy called The Wife's
Trial, which, in turn, gave Maria Edgeworth an idea for Helen.
After Tales, Crabbe did not publish anything more for seven
years. He was now a poet of wide reputation, and was welcomed
by Rogers, Campbell and others on the visits to London which his
wife's death in 1813 set him free to pay. In the spring of 1814,
he was appointed to the cure of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, where he
was within reach of William Lisle Bowles, of Lord Bath and of the
1 The Borough, letter XXIII, Prisons, 11. 2894329.
? Printed in Blackwood's Magazine, December 1828.
## p. 149 (#171) ############################################
VII]
Tales of the Hall
149
interesting people who lived in Bath or came there to take the
waters. He appears to have worked meanwhile, with the regu-
larity of an Anthony Trollope, at his poetry; and the results of
this manner of work may be detected in his next volume, Tales
of the Hall, published in July 1819. He had always been a
careless or a wilful workman. Left to himself, and more careless
than ever, now that his fame was established and his age advanced,
he indulged more freely than before in unnecessary detail, in
sentences distorted for the sake of a rime, in flatness approaching
doggerel, in verbosity and antithesis. Some of his critics, among
them Jeffrey, had complained of the lack of connection between
the stories in his earlier volumes. The objection seems trivial;
and, in Tales of the Hall, Crabbe's device of making brothers
who are scarcely acquainted with one another exchange stories
seems futile, when all these stories clearly bear the impress of a
single mind. As usual, Crabbe took most of his material from
people and events he had observed, or from true stories related
to him; and one very interesting passage in Tales of the Hallı
appears to be a portrait of himself. The time had gone by when
Crabbe could justly be accused, as he had been by Jeffrey, of
'disgusting representations. ' Smugglers and Poachers in Tales
of the Hall is a terrible story; but, in most of these poems, as in
Tales, Crabbe is dealing with people of a higher social grade
than his early models. Though most of the stories are sad, there
is less scope for brutality, and more for minute and sympathetic
study of the finer shades of thought and temper. The Widow is
a fine piece of high comedy; the twice-widowed lady's letter to
her third suitor is shrewdly ironical; while a passage in Delay
has Danger3, describing a peevish wife, is, perhaps, the best
example that could be chosen of the sharp and vivid effect to
which Crabbe could attain by his epigrammatic, antithetic manner.
Tales of the Hall was the last volume of poems by Crabbe
published in his lifetime. At Trowbridge, he lived in comfort,
winning, by degrees, the esteem of his parishioners (a tribute
which, in other cures, he had not wholly gained), working hard at
poetry and paying visits to his friends. At the house of the
Hoares in Hampstead, he met Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers,
Joanna Baillie and others; and he paid a memorable visit to Scott
in Edinburgh. He died at Trowbridge, in February 1832. At his
death, many volumes of poetry in manuscript were found in his
1 Book XIV; The Natural Death of Love, 11. 3—42. Book xvii, 11. 407-445.
3 Book xiii, 11. 733—744.
a
## p. 150 (#172) ############################################
150
George Crabbe
[CH.
ord
house, and selections from these were printed in the collected
edition of his works, edited by his son, George Crabbe, which
was published in 1834. They include one delightful tale, Silford
Hall; or, The Happy Day, which describes the visit of a poor boy
to a great house over which he is shown by the housekeeper; and
one shrewd piece of comedy, The Equal Marriage, in which a
male and a female coquette marry to their joint discomfort.
The Farewell and Return is a series of short poems describing
the fortunes of a man's acquaintances before and after his long
absence from his native town. They contain some admirable work,
such as the poem called The Ancient Mansion, which tells how
the local great house had been bought and spoiled by a newcomer.
But, in reading these posthumous tales, it is just to remember
that they had not been finally passed for the press by the author,
whose reputation they do little to enhance. The lyric was not his
best means of expression, and he used it rarely; but the quatrain,
His Mother's Wedding-Ring, shows a beautifully turned thought,
and the short poem on his dead wife, Parham Revisited, is simple
and passionate. The unpublished poems by Crabbe, collected from
manuscripts in the possession of the university of Cambridge and
printed in the Cambridge English Classics edition of his works,
include other examples of his work in lyric poetry.
Between the publication of Crabbe's first work and of his last,
a revolution had come over English poetry. He began to write in
a barren time, when the power of Pope was waning, and nothing
new had yet arisen to take its place. Almost contemporaneously
with The Village, his first characteristic poem, appeared the first
volume of Cowper. During Crabbe's long silence, the influence of
Cowper was to spread; and, by the time of Crabbe's death, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, Campbell, Byron, Shelley and Keats had done
their work for English poetry. It says much for one who, though an
innovator in subject, belonged to the previous age in execution, that
he held his own throughout life and for some time afterward. He
told the plain truth about peasants; yet he called them ‘swains,'
as if Lyrical Ballads had never been published. Poetry took on
a hundred new or revived forms; yet he clung, with very few re-
missions, to his couplets. In spite of all, his work was read and
admired by the very men who were trying to set poetry free
from the shackles in which he continued to labour. Almost alone
among the voices of the new school, Hazlitt's was raised against
him; and Hazlitt's wellknown attack can best be explained by
1 The Spirit of the Age. · Waller and Glover's Hazlitt, vol. iv, pp. 348 ff.
भ
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VII]
Crabbe's Couplets
151
a moment of spleen. The admiration of Wordsworth for Crabbe's
work was warm. Lyrical Ballads had not done anything to affect
Crabbe's style, and the two poets, both starting from the same point,
a recognition of sympathetic interest in common life, had followed
widely different paths; but, like Tennyson, at a later date, Words-
worth valued highly the independence and truth of Crabbe's sturdy,
old-fashioned poetry, and saw in it, what Hazlitt failed to see, the
beauty born of poetic passion.
Though Crabbe has paid the penalty of neglect, exacted from
all poets who are careless of form, he was undoubtedly wise to
keep almost exclusively to his couplets. No metre could be better
suited to his close sketches of character or to the level development
of his tales. When at its worst, his work is very bad, and an easy prey
to clever parodists like the authors of Rejected Addresses, who, in
a few trenchant lines, brought all its faults into the light. When at
its best, it is more than good narrative verse. In certain passages,
particularly in passages of description, it rises to an intense and
passionate beauty, all the minute details which Crabbe liked to
record being caught up into the dramatic mood of the moment,
in a manner which, it is sometimes supposed, was unknown before
Maud. A notable example of this dramatic propriety may be
found in The Patron, the fifth of the Tales (ll. 426—433), where
the presumptuous protégé's too happy summer in his patron's
country house is at an end, and his doom is approaching. Save
for the word 'melancholy,' the passage consists of description
which might be termed bald. Crabbe does not make any attempt,
as a 'pastoral' poet would have done, to explain to his readers
the mood inspired by the scene; but the intensity of his observa-
tion and his choice of the most effective among the details bring
the scene itself vividly to the mind's eye. A parallel passage, which
contains also a touch of poetic magic, is that in Delay has Danger,
the thirteenth book of Tales of the Hall (11. 703—724), where
the halfhearted betrothed, already wishing himself free, looks out
of his window. Such economy, and the resulting intensity, are rather
the exception than the rule with Crabbe. Too often, as in the early
part of Amusements, the ninth letter of The Borough, he spoils
the effect of beautiful passages of sympathetic description, like that
of the boat leaving the ship, by dwelling too long on the species
of the medusa (sea-nettle),' or the 'marine vermes,' or other such
things, that interested the man of science rather than the poet. In
spite of this excess, he gave the poetry of nature new worlds to
conquer (rather than conquered them himself) by showing that
9
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152
[CH. VII
George Crabbe
the world of plain fact and common detail may be material for
poetry; just as, in dealing with the characters of men and women,
he enlarged the scope of both poetry and fiction. He was not,
like Wordsworth, a lofty and passionate dreamer; so far is he from
possessing the engaging tenderness of Cowper, that often, even at
his finest moments, he repels by his ruthless insistence upon the
truth as he sees it. On the other hand, his keen, if rugged,
.
sympathy widely separates his ' realism ’ from the dreary chronicle
of a Zola; and his not infrequent doggerel comes from his saying
too much, not from saying anything beside the mark. He has left
some vivid and beautiful passages of descriptive poetry, some
admirably told tales and a long gallery of profound and lively
portraits; and, by the intensity of his vision, the force of his mind
and his sturdy sincerity, he ploughed for future workers wide
tracts which, before him, poetry had allowed to lie fallow.
## p. 153 (#175) ############################################
CHAPTER VIII
SOUTHEY
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THERE are few English writers who have been the subject of
more controversy in different kinds than Robert Southey. Esti-
mates of his positive worth as a poet have varied from the certainly
rather excessive notions of it entertained by himself and by
Landor, to the mere impertinence of Emerson's 'Who is Southey? '
Very few persons have endeavoured to give full value to that
singular combination of proficiency and performance in the two
harmonies wherein he has, perhaps, only one rival in English
literature. The absence—an absence which, perhaps, is the chief
instance of a scandal that too often affects English, as compared
with foreign, literature—of even an attempt at a complete edition
of at least his bookwork, has complicated the difficulty of dealing
with him. Even though the old odia-political, theological and
other-have, to some extent (by no means wholly), settled down,
he is—it may be admitted partly by his own fault-apt to rouse
them in single cases and passages after a disturbing fashion. And
there is one pervading condition of a dangerous kind attending his
work, from which he was almost the first, if by no means the last,
to suffer.
This condition was the difficulty—which his prudence and self-
denial reduced to some extent, but which weighed on him all his
life and finally killed or helped to kill him-of adjusting the vita
to the vivendi causae. If Southey had had a private fortune or a
lightly burdened office or benefice of any kind ; if he had had the
gift of bachelorhood and the further gift of a college fellowship;
if he had been able to draw profit from professional work which
left time for writing ; if several other ‘ifs and ands' had trans-
formed themselves in the practical fashion of the saying---not
merely would he, probably, have died in perfect mental health, but
he would have left us work (if he had left any at all, which is an
important proviso) including more definite masterpieces than he
actually achieved. But fate would not have it so. He had no
>
## p. 154 (#176) ############################################
154
[CH.
Southey
>
fortune; and, more than once, he rather stood in the way of his
own luck. He was a born ‘family man’; and, what is more, a most
hospitable, charitable and generous person? He not only refused,
after some efforts, all professional work, but was, probably, in a
measure, incapable of any. He would not have been able to live
his own life anywhere except in the depths of the country; but
he could only live that life there by spending what would have
been now enormous, and must, even then, have been considerable,
sums upon a vast library. To supply these necessities, there was
only one way-hackwork for the press. He began this at a very
unfavourable time, when, as he has somewhere said, a whole day's
work would bring him in some ten shillings, and, though he lived
into a more golden age, he never, as had even Coleridge at one
time, had that regular work for daily and weekly periodicals which
alone really makes an income. Even so, there might have been
difficulties ; for he did not like being "edited'; he would not, as
he says himself, 'regard pen-and-inkmanship as a trade'; and the
consequence was that, while he was perpetually interrupting his
more ambitious work to ‘boil the pot,' these interruptions merely
performed that office and seriously interfered with the other.
Thus, being not a mere gutter journalist but a man of letters
of the higher, if not highest, rank, he was ill content with this
hackwork. He wanted to do, and he did, great work in prose and
,
verse ; and, with such work, after a, perhaps, treacherously pros-
perous beginning, he had scarcely any luck—perhaps because, as
Scott thought, he mismanaged bis affairs with his publishers. As
for the pensions which were constantly thrown in his face by his
political decriers, the facts are simply these. He had-and, for
some time, could hardly have lived without it-an allowance of
£160 a year from his rich schoolfellow Charles Wynn; he gave this
up when he received a government pension rather less than more
than it in value (it was nominally £200, but was largely reduced
by fees and taxes); the laureateship added less than £100 (the
whole of which, and a little more, he at once devoted to life in-
surance), and, very late in his life, Sir Robert Peel gave him £300
more. In 1816, he had declined offers from Lord Liverpool which,
1 Literary coincidences are sometimes amusing. It so happens that, as Grosvenor
Bedford, the father, was a frequent agent of Horace Walpole's charities, so was
Grosvenor Bedford, the son, of Southey's, and we have numerous letters, from principal
to agent, on the subject, in both cases. Horace was by no means stingy in this way;
but it is rather curious to compare his scale of benefaction and Southey's, remembering
that the one was a richly endowed sinecurist and bachelor, the other a man with a
rather large family, who lived almost wholly by ill-paid exertions of his own.
## p. 155 (#177) ############################################
VIII]
His Youth
155
though apparently somewhat vague, would certainly have tempted
most men, at a time when he was actually pressed for money. A
little later, he refused the editorship of The Times with, it is said,
£2000 a year attached. It may be taken as certain that, if his
gains, including these pensions, during a lifetime of almost unbroken
work, resulting, occasionally, in firstrate literature, were summed
up and divided yearly, the average income would be found to
be not half of that of some places since created for persons of no
merit who perform services of no value.
Southey's life was what is called uneventful; but its circum-
stances were too intimately connected with the character of his
work to permit complete neglect of them. He was born (1774) in
Bristol, of a Somerset family, old, entitled to bear arms, in one of
its branches possessed of some fortune, but not of any historical
distinction, and, so far as his own immediate connections were con-
cerned, obscure and unfortunate. His father, who was a linendraper,
failed in business, and died early; but Southey received unusual,
if, on one side, fitful, assistance from his mother's relations. His
uncle, a clergyman named Thomas Hill, was almost a father to
him; and his half-aunt, Miss Tyler, made him free of her house till
his own eccentricities, and her wrath at his marriage, drove him
out. From his very earliest childhood, he seems to have been
a devourer of books, especially in English literature, and more
especially in poetry. His uncle sent him to Westminster, where
he made valuable friends. But the 'strong contagion' of the
French revolution caught him there; and he was expelled for his
concern in a school magazine the principles of which are sufficiently
indicated by its title, The Flagellant. He was thus cut off from
proceeding, as usual, to Christ church, but he went to Balliol
(1792), where he stayed for a year and a half 'working,' in the strict
sense, not at all, but reading immensely, advancing in Jacobinism,
making the acquaintance of Coleridge and, with him and others,
starting the famous scheme of 'pantisocracy' or 'aspheterism,
a miniature socialist republic to be carried out anywhere or
nowhere. The vicissitudes of this association are not for us; but
they ended, so far as Southey was concerned, in his relinquishing
the scheme and marrying (1795) Edith Fricker, but starting from
the church door, and alone, for Portugal, to comply with the
demands of his uncle, who was chaplain at Lisbon.
How he there laid the foundation of that knowledge of the
peninsular literatures which formed one of the special studies of
his life and supplied the subjects of more than one of his chief
>
## p. 156 (#178) ############################################
156
[CH.
Southey
emrifauen
.
