A Plea for Crabbe

IT would be a pleasure to suppose that the new edition of Crabbe in a single volume ¹ would at last bring to him that popularity which his lover, FitzGerald, labored so insistently to create, but any such hope is bound to be frustrate. Here is, in fact, one of the curiosities of literature : that a poet who has been admired so extravagantly by the wisest of England’s readers should fail, I do not say of popularity, but even of recognition among critics and historians. For certainly no one would call Crabbe popular, and to realize the neglect of the critics we need only turn to the most sympathetic study of the poet in recent years and read Mr. Woodberry’s opening words: “ We have done with Crabbe.” Yet to Byron this was “ the first of living poets ; ” and Byron’s epigram, “ Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best,” — commonly misquoted, by the way, — is on the lips of a host of readers who have never so much as opened a volume of Crabbe’s works. Nor was Byron alone among the great men of that period to reverence what we have elected to forget. On his deathbed Fox called for Crabbe’s poems, and in the sorrows of Phoebe Dawson found consolation while his life was ebbing away. And of Scott we are told that these same poems were at all times more frequently in his hands than any other work except Shakespeare, and that during his last days at Abbotsford the only books he asked to be read aloud to him were his Bible and his Crabbe. But the true worshiper of our poet’s genius was that gentle cynic and recluse, Edward FitzGerald. There is something really pathetic in FitzGerald’s constant lamentation that no one reads his “ eternal Crabbe.” Our English Omar at least is popular, and it looks as if the Suffolk poet were to attain a kind of spurious fame from the way his name is imbedded in the letters of the “ Suffolk dreamer.”

Now it is superfluous to say that a writer who has been so lauded by the greatest poet, the most ardent orator, the most honored novelist, and the most refined letter-writer of England in a century must himself have possessed extraordinary qualities. Yet it remains true that Crabbe is not read, is not even likely to be much read for many years to come ; and the reason of this is perfectly simple : his excellencies lie in a direction apart from the trend of modern thought and sentiment, while his faults are such as most strongly repel modern taste.

As for the faults of Crabbe, it is enough to say that he is an avowed imitator of Pope in all formal matters, and that the antithetic style of the master too often descends in him to a grotesque flaccidity. It would not be impossible to quote a dozen lines almost as absurd as the parody in Rejected Addresses: —

But even where his style is wrought with nervous energy, it fails to attract an audience who have tasted the rapturous liberties of Shelley and Keats, and who love to take their sentiment copiously in unrestrained draughts. They do not see that the despised heroic couplet permits the narrative poet to condense into a pair of verses the insignificant joinings of a tale which in any other form would occupy a paragraph; nor does it interest them that in the hands of a moral poet the couplet is like a keen twoedged sword to strike this way and that. They are only offended by what seems to them the monotonous seesaw of the rhythm ; and a style which constantly opposes an effort of the judicial understanding at every pause in the flow of sentiment repels those who think wit (in the old sense of the word) a poor substitute for celestial inspiration. It is partly a matter of psychology, partly a matter of inscrutable taste, that a generation of readers who are attracted by the slipshod rhythms of Epipsychidion or Endymion should find the close-knit periods of Crabbe unendurable.

To me personally there is no tedium, but only endless delight, in these mated rhymes which seem to pervade and harmonize the whole rhythm. And withal they help to create the artistic illusion, that wonderful atmosphere, I may call it, which envelops Crabbe’s world. No one, not even the most skeptical of Crabbe’s genius, can deny that he has succeeded in giving to his work a tone or atmosphere peculiarly and consistently his own. It would be curious to study this question of atmosphere in literature, and determine the elements that go to compose it. Why are the works of Dickens or Smollett or Spenser, to choose almost at random, so marked by a distinctive atmosphere, while in a greater writer, in Shakespeare for example, it may be less observable ? Something of bulk is necessary to its existence, for it can hardly be created by a single book or a single poem. A certain consistency of tone is needed, and a unity of effect. It cannot exist without perfect sincerity in the writer ; and, above all, there is required some idiosyncrasy of genius, some peculiar emotional or intellectual process in the author’s mind, which imposes itself on us so powerfully that when we arise from his works the life of the world no longer seems quite the same to us ; for we have learned to see the quiet fields of nature and the thronging activities of mankind through a new medium.

All these qualities, and more particularly this individuality of vision, pervade Crabbe’s descriptive passages and his portraits of men. They color all his painting of inanimate things, but they are most evident, perhaps, in his pictures of the sea, whose varied aspects, whether sublime or intimate, seem to have become a part of his sensitive faculties through early associations. He has caught the real life of the sea, its calm and tempest or sudden change, as few poets in English have done. Especially he loves the quiet scenes, the beach when the tide retires ; when all is calm at sea and on land, and the wonders of the shore lie glittering in the sunlight or the softer light of the moon. Even more characteristic are his pictures of the muddy, oozing shallows, as in that passage where the dull terrors of such a waste are employed to heighten the most tragic of his Tales: —

There, if anywhere in English, is the artist’s vision, the power to concentrate the mind upon a single scene until every detail in its composition is corroded on the memory, and the skill, no less important, to select and arrange these details to a clearly conceived end.

These lines may serve to exemplify another trait of Crabbe’s genius, the rare union of scientific detail with pervading human interest. He was, in fact, all his life a curious and exact student of botany and geology. Even in his old age he kept up these scientific pursuits, and his son, in the excellent biography, tells how the old man on his visits would leave the house every morning, rain or shine, and go alone to the quarries to search for fossils and to pick up rare herbs on the wayside. “ The dirty fossils,” says the dutiful son, “ were placed in our best bedroom, to the great diversion of the female part of my family; the herbs stuck in the borders, among my choice flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them,” — a pretty picture of busy eld. Of this inanimate lore of plants and rocks Crabbe is most prodigal in his verse, but, by some true gift of the Muses, it never for a moment obscures the human interest of the narrative. After all, it was man, and the moral springs in man, that really concerned him. As he himself says, the best description of sea or river is incomplete.

Even when he submits his art to minute descriptions, as for instance to a study of the growth of lichens, there still lurks this human ethical instinct behind the scientific eye. Read in their proper place, the following lines are but a little lesson to set forth the associations of mortal antiquity: —

I choose these lines for citation because they form, perhaps, the most purely descriptive passage in Crabbe ; and even here it is really the associations of generations of mankind with an ancient house of worship that stir the poet’s feelings. For pieces of greater scope one should go to such pictures as the ocean tempest in The Borough, which I would not spoil by quoting incomplete. In his study of the Roman decadent poets, M. Nisard has instituted a careful comparison of the storm scenes in the Odyssey, the Æneid, and the Pharsalia, showing the regular increase from Homer down of descriptive matter added for merely picturesque effect, apart from its connection with the human action involved. It would not be easy to find a better example of extended description completely fused with human interest than this tempest in The Borough. Every detail of that animated picture is interpreted through human activity and emotion. This does not mean that Crabbe’s attitude toward nature is that of an emotional pantheism which uses the outer world as a mere symbol of the soul. Very far from that: the human emotions are in this passage the direct outcome of a sharply defined natural occurrence. In another scene, one that has achieved a kind of fame among critics, he tells the story, in his quiet, satirical manner, of a lover who goes a journey to meet his beloved. The lover’s way leads him over a barren heath and a sandy road, but, in his state of exalted expectation, everything that meets his eye is charged with loveliness. At last he arrives only to find his mistress has gone away, — gone, as he thinks, to see a rival. He follows her, and now his way takes him

But all is hideous to his jealous eye. “ I hate these scenes ! ” he cries : —

All this is the furthest possible remove from vague reverie; it is a bit of amusing psychology, tending to distinguish more sharply between man and nature rather than to blend them in any haze of symbolism.

It may be imagined from Crabbe’s power over details that he should excel in another sort of description, in scenes of still life, which come even closer to the affairs of humanity; and, indeed, there are scattered through his poems little genre pictures that for minuteness and accuracy can be likened only to the masterpieces of Dutch art in that kind. The locus classicus (if such a term may be used of so unfamiliar a poet) of this genre writing is the section of The Borough that describes the dwellings of the poor. I cannot refrain from quoting a few of the introductory lines to show how skillfully he prepares the mind for the picture that is to succeed : —

And this is the poet who has been censured for lack of descriptive powers ! Of the scene that follows, — the “ long boarded building,” with one vast room, where the degraded families of the outcast are huddled together, — no selection can convey anything but the most inadequate impression ; it must be read intact, and once read it will cling to the memory forever. Here, at least, is a bit that is as vivid as a picture by Van Ostade or Teniers : —

It must be clear even from these imperfect selections that Crabbe was able to envelop his inanimate world with an atmosphere peculiar to his own genius. As for the human beings that move through his scenes, if one were given to comparisons, he would probably liken them to the people of Dickens. The comparison is apt both for its accuracy and its limitations. The world of Crabbe is on the surface much like that of Dickens, but examined more closely it is seen to be less pervaded with humor, and more with wit; its pathos, too, is less pungent and firmer, and its moral tone is quite diverse. Save in his later Tales of the Hall, — which, after all, are scarcely an exception to the rule, — the characters in Crabbe’s poems are taken from the ranks of the humble and poor; they are in external appearance the London folk of Dickens transferred to the country. But they rarely ever descend, like Dickens’s portraits, into caricature, for the reason that their divergencies grow more from some inner guiding moral trait, and are less the mere outward distinctions of trick and manner. They are, too, more directly the outcome of divergent individual will; they are, for this reason, more perfectly rounded out in their personality, and they bear with them more complete a sense of moral responsibility for their associations.

We are carried to the green lanes and sandy shores of England, but it is not the land of old poetic illusions. Here are no scenes of idyllic peace, no Corydons murmuring liquid love to Phyllis or Neæra in the shade. I do not mean to imply that the orthodox pastoral dreams are without justification, for that would be to condemn the central theme of Paradise Lost, not to mention a host of minor poems justly beloved. But certainly these dreams lie perilously near to mawkishness and insincerity, and if for no other reason we could admire Crabbe for his manly resistance to their easy allurements. It seems that he set himself deliberately to ridicule and rebuke the common vapidities of that facile school. In those introductory lines to The Village, notable chiefly because they were tampered with by Dr. Johnson, he directly satirizes the poets — and his master, Pope, was in youth one of the worst sinners in this respect — who imitate Virgil rather than nature. He too had sought the sweet peace and smiling resignation of rural life, but instead he had found only the cry of universal labor and contention : —

An atmosphere of gloom is, indeed, over Crabbe’s human world ; not moroseness or morbid sentimentality, but a note of stern judicial pity for the frailties and vices of the men he knew and portrayed. His own early life in a miserable fishing hamlet on the Suffolk coast, under a hard father, his hard years of literary apprenticeship in London, and then for a time the salt bread of dependency as private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, gave him a knowledge of many sorrows which years of comparative prosperity could not entirely obliterate. He is at bottom a true Calvinist, showing that peculiar form of fatalism which still finds it possible to magnify the free will, and to avoid the limp surrender of determinism. Mankind as a body lies under a fatal burden of suffering and toil, because as a body men are depraved and turn from righteousness; but to the individual man there always remains open a path up from darkness into light, a way out of condemnation into serene peace. And it is with this mixture of judicial aloofness and hungering sympathy that Crabbe dwells on the sadness of long and hopeless waiting, the grief of broken love, the remorse of wasted opportunities, the burden of poverty, the solitude of failure, which run like dark threads through most of his Tales. And in one poem, at least, he has attained the full tragic style with an intensity and singleness of effect that rank him among the few master poets of human passion. The story of Peter Grimes — his abuse of his old father, his ill treatment of the workhouse lads bought from London, and his final madness and death — is the most powerful tragedy of remorse in the English language. I have already quoted the picture of the desolate shallows and “ the lazy tide in its hot slimy channel ” where the wretch sought to hide his guilt; but not less perfect in its art is Peter’s own story of the three lonely reaches in the river where the images of his victims used to rise up and haunt his vision: —

Then madness struck into his soul: —

But if the atmosphere of these poems is sombre, that does not mean they are without brighter glimpses of joy. As he himself expresses it, they are relieved by “ gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose.” In fact, Crabbe has contrived to include a vast number of human interests and passions in these simple Tales. There are pages of literary satire on the Gothic romances of the day, more neatly executed even than Northanger Abbey. There are poems, like the second letter of The Borough, overflowing with tender sentiment; tales such as Phoebe Dawson, where the pathos is almost too painful to be easily supported. There are stories of quaint playfulness, like The Frank Courtship. Humor, too, is not wanting, and now and then comes a stroke of memorable wit. Jealousy, ambition, pride, vanity, despair, and all the petty tyrannies of conceit are set off with marvelous acuteness. Even abounding joy is not absent. I do not know but the sense of charm, of homely intimate life, of tranquil resignation, is, for all their dark colors, the final impression of these Tales. And everywhere they show the delightful gift of the story-teller. Each separate poem is a miniature novel wrought out with unflagging zest and almost impeccable art. The story of the younger brother in Tales of the Hall glows again with “ the sober certainty of waking bliss ; ” and the older brother’s history begins with a rapturous tide of romantic dreaming that fairly sings and pulses with beauty. The whole of this second story is, in fact, a literary masterpiece, for its scenes of joy, followed by despondency and heroic forbearance, controlled throughout by the unerring psychological instinct of the poet.

But this unerring instinct is not confined to any one tale ; it guides the poet in the creation of all his multitudinous characters. At first, perhaps, as we see the ethical motives that underlie a character so clearly defined, it seems the poet is dealing merely with a moral type; but suddenly some little limitation is thrown in, some modification of motive, which changes the character from a cold abstraction to a living and unmistakable personality. Crabbe has been called a realist; and in one sense the term is appropriate, but in the meaning commonly given to the word it is singularly inept. The inner moral springs of character are what first interested him, and his keen perception of manners and environment only serves to save him from the coldness of eighteenth-century abstractions.

I have dwelt at length on these phases of Crabbe’s work which would strike even a casual reader, for the sufficient reason that the casual reader in his case scarcely exists. The real problem, as I have already intimated, is to explain why a poet of such great, almost supreme powers should fail to preserve a place in the memory of critics, not to mention his lack of a popular audience. His failure is due in part, no doubt, to the use of a metrical form which we choose to contemn, but chiefly it is due to the fact that he is at once of us and not of us. His presentation of the world is in spirit essentially modern, so that we do not grant him the indulgence unconsciously allowed to poets who describe a different form of society, and whose appeal to us is impersonal and general; while at the same time he ignores or even derides what has become the primary emotion we desire in our literary favorites. Since the advent of Shelley and Wordsworth and the other great contemporaries of Crabbe our attitude toward nature has altered profoundly. We demand of the poet a minute, almost a scientific acquaintance with the obscurer beasts and flowers ; but still more we demand, if the poet is to receive our deeper admiration, a certain note of mysticism, a feeling of some vast and indefinable presence beyond the finite forms described, a lurking sense of pantheism by which the personality of the observer seems to melt into what he observes or is swallowed up in a vague reverie. When we think of the great nature passages of the century, we are apt to recall the solemn mysteries of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey or Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. Even in poets who are not frankly of the romantic school, and who are imbued with the classical spirit, the same undercurrent of reverie is heard. Matthew Arnold’s verse is full of these subtle echoes. It may be caused by a tide of reminiscence which dulls the sharpness of present impressions, as in so simple a line as this : —

or it may be present because the words are overfreighted with reflection, as in the closing lines of The Future : —

but everywhere this note of reverie runs through the greater modern poets. Now of science Crabbe owned more than a necessary share, but for reverie, for symbolism, for mystic longings toward the infinite, he had no sense whatever. It is quite true, as Goethe declared, that a “sense of infinitude ” is the mark of high poetry, and I firmly believe that the absence of this sense is the one thing that shuts Crabbe out of the company of the few divinely inspired singers, — the few who bring to us gleanings from their “ commerce with the skies,” to use old Ovid’s phrase. But it is also true that this sense of infinitude as it speaks in Homer and Shakespeare is something far more sober and rational than the musings of the modern spirit, — something radically different from the brooding rhapsodies of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound ; and Crabbe’s very limitations lend to his verse a brave manliness, a clean good sense, that tone up the mind of the reader like a strong cordial.

And there is the same difference in Crabbe’s treatment of humanity. Wordsworth, feeling this difference, was led to speak slightingly of Crabbe’s “ unpoetical mode of considering human nature and society.” His repulsion may be attributed in part to Crabbe’s constant use of a form of analysis which checks the unconstrained flow of the emotions ; but the chasm between the two is deeper than that. Wordsworth was ready to ridicule the sham idyllic poetry as freely as Crabbe or any other ; but, at bottom, are not Michael and the leech-gatherer, and a host of others that move through Wordsworth’s scenes, the true successors of the Corydons and Damons that dance under the trees on the old idyllic swards ? In place of pastoral dreams of peace we hear now “ the still, sad music of humanity.” Yet it is the same humanity considered as a whole ; humanity betrayed by circumstances and corrupted by luxury, but needing only the freedom of the hills and lakes to develop its native virtues; humanity caught up in some tremulous vision of harmony with the universal world ; it is, in short, the vague aspiration of what we have called humanitarianism, and have endowed with the solemnities of a religion. If this is necessary to poetry, Crabbe is undoubtedly “ unpoetical.” In him there is no thought of a perfect race made corrupt by luxury, no vision of idyllic peace, no musing on humanity as an abstraction, but always a sturdy understanding of the individual man reaping the fruits of his own evil doing or righteousness; his interest is in the individual will, never in the problem of classes. His sharply defined sense of man’s personal responsibility coincides with his lack of reverent enthusiasm toward nature as an abstract idea, and goes to create that unusual atmosphere about his works which repels the modern sentimentalist. So it happens, we think, that he can appeal strongly to only a few readers of peculiar culture ; for it is just the province of culture or right education — is it not ? — that it shall train the mind to breathe easily an atmosphere foreign to its native habit.

Paul Elmer More.