No More Learning

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
.
works; how he returned, lived with his wife at Bristol or London
and elsewhere, dutifully tried the law, but found it as hopelessly
uncongenial as he had previously, in his hotter Jacobin time,
found the church and medicine; how he paid a second visit (1800)
to Lisbon, this time with his wife, and how, after trying various
abodes and giving himself up to the press and various employ-
Betting Fodtments, including a private secretaryship to the -Irish secretary
Corry, he settled, where Coleridge had already established himself
id Barisalire (and, at first, with him), at Greta hall, Keswick, thus becoming
,
a Lake poet,' would take long to tell. But, rolling stone as he
had been for some thirty years, he here found his resting-place
(though that was hardly the term for a home of Southey) for life.
He never left it again, save for short holiday absences; he became,
after being, in a way, Coleridge's guest or, at least, his house
partner, the host and, for a time, the supporter of Coleridge's
family; he collected the great library already mentioned; he
begat sons and daughters, and was passionately fond of them,
suffering intensely from the deaths of some of them, especially
those of his eldest son, Herbert, and his youngest daughter, Isabel
At last, in 1834, his wife's mind gave way, and she soon died. The
shock completed what, if it had not altogether caused, inordinate
brainwork had, beyond all doubt, helped, a mental breakdown in
bis own case. He found a second wife, or, rather, a nurse, in
the poetess Caroline Bowles; but she could only attend upon
his decline, and he died of softening of the brain in 1843.
It is impossible wholly to pass over that question of political
tergiversation which plays a large part in Southey's actual history,
owing, partly, to the time at which he lived, and, partly, to
the rather unscrupulous ability of some of his enemies; but,
partly, also, it must be confessed, to that rather unlucky touch of
selfrighteousness which was almost the only fault in his otherwise
blameless character. The present writer has never seen the
question of the character and duration of Southey's political and
religious unorthodoxy examined at length ; and there is not room
for such an examination here ; but there are ample and final
materials for it in his Letters. It was, undoubtedly, brought on
by that 'prince of the air,' a momentary epidemic of popular
opinion, and by the common, though not universal, opposition of
clever boys to the powers that be; it was hardened by the unwise
한
​1 The manner, as well as the amount, contributed. As he says himself (Letters, vol. 111,
p. 64), 'I am given to works of supererogation, and could do nothing to my own satis-
faction if I did not take twice as much labour as any other person would bestow upon it. '


## p. 157 (#179) ############################################

VIII]
His Politics
157
severity of William Vincent at Westminster; it was shaken so
early as the execution of Marie-Antoinette and the downfall of
the Girondists; and, by 1796, the patient had got to writing : 'as
for pigs, they are too like the multitude. ' All was safe after that;
though a few minor relapses follow for a short time. It may be
allowed, even by the most sympathetic judgment, that Southey had
not a political head; in fact, he admitted it himself when choosing
his subjects for The Quarterly. His account of the matter in his
famous reply to William Smith as to the resuscitation of Wat
Tyler-one of the finest things of the kind, for matter and style,
ever written—to the effect that he had always had an ardent desire
for the melioration of mankind,' but that 'as he grew older his
ideas as to the best means of that melioration changed,' is adequate,
accurate and final. But the position which it indicates is, obviously,
an incomplete one. As Coleridge had too much logic, Southey had
too little ; and he was always laying himself open to reproaches of
actual inconsistency, which is important, as well as of retrospective
inconsistency, which is futile. He never had been a thorough
Jacobin, and he never became a thorough tory. To the end of
his life, he had odd semisocialist ideas ; he never could see Pitt's
greatness, not because he detected that statesman's real faults, but
because the old 'nervous impression' of dislike remained ; and he
never forgave the Anti-Jacobin attacks on himself. Not at any
period of his life, for fear or favour, was it possible for Southey to
acquiesce in what he did not think right; but what he thought
right generally depended, not on any coherent theory, not on any
sound historical observation, but on a congeries of personal likings,
dislikings, experiences and impressions generally. This is really
the conclusion of the whole matter respecting his politics, and no
ore need be said about it.
As is probably the case with all great readers and most copious
writers, Southey began both processes, in more than the school
sense of reading and writing, very early. He seems to have had
almost congenital affinity to poetry and romance, and this, or
mere accident, sent him, when almost a child, from Tasso in
translation, of course) to Ariosto, and from Ariosto to Spenser, in
a way which the most critical pedagogue could not have improved.
As a child, also, he filled quires, if not reams, with verse ; and,
though he had too much sense to preserve, or, at least, to print,
any of these plusquam juvenilia, it is probable that we should
not have found in them anything like the striking difference from
his future work which is discernible in those of Milton, of Coleridge,


## p. 158 (#180) ############################################

158
[CH.
Southey
2
of Shelley and of Tennyson. His early letters, too, contain
specimens of the halfdoggerel anapaests, which Ansteyl had
made popular a generation earlier, and which continued, for
at least another, to be written with a familiar and current pen
by persons of good, as well as of indifferent, wits. But (speaking
under correction) the earliest thing that he regularly published and
acknowledged—the Ode to Horror, dated 1791, when the author
was seventeen-is a somewhat better than Della Cruscan (v. inf. )
effort to follow Collins very far off. Some other pieces (of the
same kind, mostly, but including a terribly flat monodrama on, of
all subjects, Sappho) date from the next year or two; and, then,
we come to the notorious Wat Tyler, ‘written in three days at
Oxford' during the year 1794, and surreptitiously and invidiously
published from a stolen copy twenty-three years later. Southey
failed in recourse to the law owing, perhaps, to one of the most
extraordinary 'quillets' of a legal mind? ever recorded. Therefore
he himself included it in his works and very sensibly made not the
slightest correction, merely explaining the date and circumstances
of its composition. Wat Tyler remains most cheerful reading. It is
a short drama in verse of three acts only, and of, perhaps, some eight
or nine hundred lines. If its actual authorship and circumstances
were not known, a good critic might take it for a deliberate and
very happy parody of the cruder and more innocent utterances of
sentimental republicanism. Wat and his fellows clothe these
utterances in the wellknown theatrical lingo of the time; and
arrange them in unexceptionable, if slightly uninspired, blank
verse. For an intelligent and educated audience, the thing might
still make a most laughable 'curtain-raiser' or afterpiece, more
particularly as its fustian fallacies are of a kind constantly revived.
But, as a serious composition, it is not, and could not be, of the
very slightest value. It remained, however, as has been said, un-
known for all but a quarter of a century; but, at the same time,
and, indeed, earlier, the author had been busy on an epic, Joan of
Arc, which appeared in 1795, was received with something like
enthusiasm and, by actually passing through five editions, showed
the nascent taste which was to grow to the advantage of Scott and
Byron. Southey altered it a good deal, and, little as he was
disposed to undervalue his own work, always acknowledged its
TE
2
1 Cf. p. 173, post.
? Lord Eldon held that, as it was a mischievous work and contrary to the public
welfare, there could not be any property in it-and, consequently, no means of stopping
the mischief and the public danger.


## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

VIII)
His Blank Verse
159
'great and numerous faults. ' It is doubtful, however, whether he
ever saw, or would have acknowledged if it had been pointed out
to him, the most fatal fault of all-a fault shared by most-
fortunately not by all-of his longer poems that followed. That
fault is the adoption of blank verse for a long narrative poem,
a proceeding which nobody, save Milton and Tennyson, has ever
carried out successfully, while Tennyson himself, and others who
have come near success, have usually broken up the single narra-
tive into a cluster of shorter pieces.
For, to achieve such success, the verse must have qualities of
its own, like those of Milton or Tennyson, which are almost inde-
pendent of the subject, and which reinforce its interest to such an
extent that the reader never thinks of saying 'A good story; but
it would have been better in prose. ' Some readers, certainly, do
say this, not merely in reference to Joan, but to Madoc and
Roderick. Southey's blank verse is, indeed, never bad; but it
also never, or in the rarest possible instances, has this intrinsic
character; and it is a remarkable instance of the almost invari-
able soundness of his general critical principles, however the de
te fabula may have sometimes escaped him, that he expressly
recognised? 'the great difficulties of the measure, and its dis-
advantages in always exposing the weak parts of a long poem.
During the time when he was loyally endeavouring to repay
his uncle's -kindness by adopting some profession, he partly
suspended his 'long-poem’ writing. But, in the last years of
the century, he produced many smaller pieces, generally good,
sometimes all but consummate and really important to history.
There is still rubbish : many of those poems on the slave trade
which have gone some way towards avenging the poor African by
the boredom if not anguish which they have inflicted on the white
brethren of his oppressors; Botany Bay Eclogues (but, indeed,
these were earlier and contemporary with Wat Tyler), the much
ridiculed, and, no doubt, wrongly constructed, sapphics and dac-
tylics, which reflect the same temper. But, especially during his
sojourn at Westbury, near Bristol, he also wrote lyrics and ballads
of very much greater value. Here, in 1798, was composed that
admirable Holly-Tree which softened even Hazlitt, and which,
with My days among the Dead are passed, twenty years later,
shows Southey at his very best both as a poet and as a man.
But the most important productions of this time, if not the
best, were the Ballads. Most of the best of these were written
· Letters, vol. II, p. 354.


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160
Southey
[CH.
between 1796 and 1798; and, although none of them possesses
anything like the poetical power of The Ancient Mariner, it is
nearly certain that Southey preceded Coleridge in his appreciation
and practice of the ballad principle of anapaestic equivalence in
mainly iambic measures, though he may have followed others,
from Anstey down to Lewis, in adopting the pure anapaest. From
another point of view, he deserves the credit of blending the spirit
of the then popular terror-novel with touches of humour, so as to
produce the effect for which there is, perhaps, no single word ex-
cept the French macabre. This, which was afterwards pushed still
further by Hood, Praed and Barham, has provided English with a
sort of hybrid style, capable of easy degeneration in various ways,
but, at its best, almost peculiar and quite delectable. Southey
himself was sometimes content with the mere singsong of the
eighteenth century ballad, and sometimes overstepped the
treacherous line which keeps ghastly humour from bad taste.
But, in divers instances, such as The Cross Roads, Bishop Hatto
and the famous Old Woman of Berkeley, he has hit the white;
while, in less mixed modes, The Well of St Keyne, The Inchcape
Rock, the almost famous Battle of Blenheim and, perhaps, Queen
Orraca should be added to his tale of complete successes. From
the point of view of form, they had a most powerful influence in
loosening the bonds of eighteenth century metre; and, from that
of combined form and matter, they exercised the same influence
more widely. It ought never to be forgotten, though it too often
is, that Southey was particularly influential in the days when better
poets of his own age were still forming themselves and when other
better poets, younger as well as better, had not produced anything.
Yet, all this was itself the work of a very young man; in the
earlier cases,
of a mere boy; and, when Southey returned to the
long poem with Thalaba (1801, but very long in hand), he was only
six- or seven-and-twenty. But this was not only by far the most
ambitious, it was, also, though less important and much less well in-
spired than the Ballads, the most audaciously experimental of the
work he had yet tried. Rimeless metres outside the regular blank
verse were, of course, not absolutely novel in English. Campion
had tried them and gone near to beauty two centuries earlier ;
Collins had tried them in the last generation and gone nearer ;
just before Southey himself and Frank Sayers (v. inf. ) had used
them on a larger scale. But nobody had adventured a really
long poem in them. Southey did, and with the same remarkable
appreciation of metrical theory as well as practice which he had
1


## p. 161 (#183) ############################################

VIII]
Thalaba
161
a
shown in the ballad case. The great danger of unrimed verse in
English is that (from that natural tendency of the language which
showed itself as early as Chaucer's prose) it will fall into more or
less complete and continuous iambic decasyllables, unless it is
arranged, either into somewhat un-English line-moulds as it had
been by Campion, or into very definitely marked and identical
stanzas, as it had been by Collins—with the result, in both cases,
of a monotony which would be intolerable in a long poem. Sayers
had notoriously fallen into the trap, as have, since, Matthew Arnold
and W. E. Henley. Southey, with his eyes open to it, determined
that he would avoid it, and he did. Thalaba, though not quickly
admired, was much liked by good wits of his own generation, and
not without reason. The story is by no means uninteresting and,
if not exactly the characters, the situations are good. There are
far finer passages in it than in Joan of Arc; indeed, some of the
incidents, and more of the descriptions, are really poetical. But
the unfamiliarity and aloofness of the whole thing are not carried
off by the diable au corps of Vathek or the sheer story interest of
The Arabian Nights themselves; and the unrimed versification
perpetually harasses and hampers the reader as something, per-
haps, admirable, but, somehow, not enjoyable—in other words, as
a disappointment and a mistake.
Besides Joan of Arc and the Minor Poems written before and
during the Westbury sojourn, Southey, in 1794, had collaborated
with Coleridge in the worthless Fall of Robespierre, and with his
other brother-in-law, Lovell, in a small collection of lesser verse.
He had also issued the first of his many volumes of prose as
Letters from Spain and Portugal (1797). This, without Wat
Tyler, then unpublished, but with Thalaba, made more than half-
a-dozen volumes in hardly more than as many years. But a longer
gap occurred-one, indeed, of four years—till, though he did not
quite know it, he had settled down at Keswick, and started on the
career which was only to close with his death, and to leave plentiful
matter for posthumous publication. In 1805, however, he re-
appeared with two volumes of verse-Metrical Tales and Madoc.
The former contained not a little of the nondescript, but acceptable,
work above described ; the latter, which had been many years on
the stocks, was introduced with a flourish ('Come, for ye know me!
I am he who sung'), warranted by classical precedents rather
than in accordance with the modesty expected from English poets.
Although, like Thalaba, it sold very slowly and disappointed the
hopes which the reception of the far inferior Joan of Arc had
11
a
a
E, L, XL.
CH. VIII.


## p. 162 (#184) ############################################

162
[ch.
Southey
و ن ): نه
raised in its author, it was very much admired by no common
judges; and there are, I believe, one or two among the now in-
frequent readers of Southey who rank it highly. To others, the
peculiar curse referred to above seems to rest on it. The adven-
tures of the son of Owen Gwyneth in his own land and in Mexico
are neither uninteresting nor ill-told. But some rebellious minds
cannot away with the vehicle of telling-
This is the day when in a foreign grave
King Owen’s relics shall be laid to rest-
and are wholly unable to perceive anything in it to be desired
above ‘This is the day when King Owen’s relics shall be laid to
rest in a foreign grave. '
There can, however, be no doubt that Madoc greatly raised
Southey's position as a poet; for Scott was only beginning, the
world would not have anything of Wordsworth's, Coleridge was
silent and the greater, younger poets had not begun. In the next
seven or eight years before his appointment to the laureateship in
1813, he produced his very best works, in verse and prose re-
spectively, The Curse of Kehama and The Life of Nelson; he
joined (1809) The Quarterly Review, which was almost his main
source of income for the rest of his life (though, for a very few
years, he drew considerable sums from Ballantyne's Annual
Register); he began the mightiest of all his works, The History of
Brazil (1810–19), originally planned as merely a part of a still
huger History of Portugal, and (besides revising the old transla-
tions of Amadis and Palmerin and executing the charming one
of The Chronicle of the Cid) he wrote two popular miscellanies, as
they may be termed, The Letters of Espriella (1807) and Omniana
(1812).
As a historian and reviewer, Southey may be considered here
generally; some remarks on the two lighter books may follow; but
Kehama and the Nelson cannot be left without separate notice.
If almost the widest possible reading, a keen curiosity and interest
in the things both of life and literature, common sense tempered by
humour, unwearying application, a disposition, if with some foibles
and prejudices, on the whole singularly equable and amiable and
an altogether admirable style, could make a good historian and a
good reviewer, Southey ought to have been one of the very best of
both classes. It would, perhaps, be too much to say that he actually
1 His observed knowledge of human nature was extraordinary. The wonderful and
should-be famous letter about Hartley Coleridge as a child is the master document of
this; but there are hundreds of others.
!


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

VIII]
As Historian and Reviewer
163
was.
6
In history, he was apt to attack too large subjects, and to
exhibit, in dealing with them, a certain absence of that indefinable
grasp of his subject which the historian requires in order to grasp his
reader. Episodes, as in the later Expedition of Orsua (1821), or
short statements, as in Nelson itself, he could manage admirably;
and, for this reason, his reviews are much better than his histories,
though it is not easy to judge the former exhaustively, since they
have never been collected and are believed to be, in some cases,
impossible of identification. But the magisterial style which the
early Reviews affected (though he himself sometimes protested
against it) was rather a snare to Southey, and it cannot be said
that his best work is there.
The two productions of a lighter character mentioned above
deserve a place on that shelf or in that case of books for occasional
reading with which the wise man should always provide himself.
Southey's earlier Letters from Spain and Portugal were written
before he had thoroughly mastered his own inimitable style: but
those, two years later, ‘from England,' assigned to an imaginary
young Spaniard Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, are much better.
They belong to a wellknown class, and, no doubt, cannot compete with
the work of such masters in that class as Montesquieu or Goldsmith.
But they contain, perhaps, a more accurate picture of English ways
in the very beginning of the nineteenth century than exists anywhere
else, as well as some curiosities, such as the accounts of Brothers
and Joanna Southcott. Omniana has interest of a different kind
or kinds. It is not (as it has been sometimes pronounced to
be) a mere commonplace-book : it is a commonplace-book made
original. The enormous store of reading which supplied the post-
humous Commonplace Books of the author, and which was more
substantively utilised in The Doctor, does, indeed, supply the
texts; but, for the most part, if not always, these are retold or, at
least, commented on in that author's own words. An additional
piquancy undoubtedly lies in the fact that Coleridge undertook to
be, and, to a small extent, was, a contributor; though, as usual, he
defaulted save to that small extent. To anyone who reads the
book for a first time, or even for a second or a third, at an interval
long enough to allow him to forget the exact whereabouts or subjects
of Coleridge's contributions, it is no small amusement to stumble on
the Estesian 'proofs. ' No prose can be pleasanter to read or more
suitable to its wide range of subjects than Southey's; but, when
you come to such a sentence as ‘A bull consists in a mental juxta-
position of incongruous ideas with the sensation but without the
a
>
11–2


## p. 164 (#186) ############################################

164
Southey
[CH.
sense of connection' you know that another than Southey has been
there.