[MR. CRABBE]
To The London Magazine for May 1821, Hazlitt contributed an essay on Crabbe, under the heading ‘Living Authors, No. V.’ The greater part of this essay was republished in The Spirit of the Age (see vol. IV. pp. 348 et seq.), but some passages were omitted which are here supplied.
In the Magazine the first paragraph (which differs to some extent from the opening of the Spirit of the Age essay) runs as follows:
‘The object of Mr. Crabbe’s writings seems to be, to show what an unpoetical world we live in: or rather, perhaps, the very reverse of this conclusion might be drawn from them; for it might be said, that if this is poetry, there is nothing but poetry in the world. Our author’s style might be cited as an answer to Audrey’s inquiry, “Is poetry a true thing?” If the most feigning poetry is the truest, Mr. Crabbe is of all poets the least poetical. There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe. Literal fidelity serves him in the place of invention; he assumes importance by a number of petty details; he rivets attention by being prolix. He not only deals in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar, the least animating, and most unpleasant kind; but he relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which he dissects the most trivial objects—and, for the interest he excites on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called out to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches of the peace; and makes out a parish register of accidents and offences. He takes the most trite, the most gross and obvious, and revolting part of nature, for the subject of his elaborate descriptions; but it is nature still, and Nature is a great and mighty goddess. “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.”[[82]] It is well for the reverend author that it is so. Individuality is, in his theory, the only definition of poetry. Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever makes an exact image of any thing on the earth below, however deformed or insignificant, according to him, must succeed and he has succeeded. Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of our living writers. That he is so, can be accounted for on no other principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world about us and our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any manner powerfully and directly reminds us of it. His Muse is not one of the daughters of Memory, but the old toothless mumbling dame herself, doling out the gossip and scandal of the neighbourhood, recounting, totidem verbis et literis, what happens in every place in the kingdom every hour in the year, and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels. But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous, leaving nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest grievances, a village oracle and critic, most veritable, most identical, bringing us acquainted with persons and things just as they happened, and giving us a local interest in all she knows and tells. The springs of Helicon are, in general, supposed to be a living stream, bubbling and sparkling, and making sweet music as it flows; but Mr. Crabbe’s fountain of the Muses is a stagnant pool, dull, motionless, choked up with weeds and corruption; it reflects no light from heaven, it emits no cheerful sound:—his Pegasus has not floating wings, but feet, cloven feet that scorn the low ground they tread upon;—no flowers of love, of hope, or joy spring here, or they bloom only to wither in a moment; our poet’s verse does not put a spirit of youth in every thing, but a spirit of fear, despondency and decay; it is not an electric spark to kindle and expand, but acts like the torpedo touch to deaden and contract: it lends no rainbow tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the heart; it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view the current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited, half-underground, muddy, and clogged with all creeping things. The world is one vast infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary; to read him is a penance; yet we read on! Mr. Crabbe is a fascinating writer. He contrives to “turn diseases to commodities,” and makes a virtue of necessity. He puts us out of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should do; yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to another. His morbid feelings droop and cling to the earth; grovel, where they should soar; and throw a dead weight on every aspiration of the soul after the good or beautiful. By degrees, we submit and are reconciled to our fate, like patients to a physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell. We can only explain this by saying, as we said before, that Mr. Crabbe gives us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the distressing; that he does this thoroughly, with the hand of a master; and we forgive all the rest!’—
The essay then proceeds as in The Spirit of the Age, with a few trifling variations, down to the words ‘inscribed to the Rutland family!’ (vol. IV. p. 351, last line), after which there is the following long passage, omitted from that work [the quotations are indicated in brackets]:
‘But enough of this; and to our task of quotation.’ The poem of The Village sets off nearly as follows:
‘“No; cast by Fortune on a frowning coast,” etc. [The Village, i. 49–62].
‘This plea, we would remark by the way, is more plausible than satisfactory. By associating pleasing ideas with the poor, we incline the rich to extend their good offices to them. The cottage twined round with real myrtles, or with the poet’s wreath, will invite the hand of kindly assistance sooner than Mr. Crabbe’s “ruin’d shed”; for though unusual, unexpected distress excites compassion, that which is uniform and remediless produces nothing but disgust and indifference. Repulsive objects (or those which are painted so) do not conciliate affection, or soften the heart.’
‘“Lo! where the heath with withering brake grown o’er,” etc. [The Village, i. 63–84].[[83]]
‘This is a specimen of Mr. Crabbe’s taste in landscape-painting, of the power, the accuracy, and the hardness of his pencil. If this were merely a spot upon the canvas, which might act as a foil to more luxuriant and happier scenes, it would be well. But our valetudinarian “travels from Dan to Beersheba, and cries it is all barren.” Or if he lights “in a favouring hour” on some more favoured spot, where plenty smiles around, he then turns his hand to his human figures, and the balance of the account is still very much against Providence, and the blessings of the English Constitution. Let us see.
‘“But these are scenes where Nature’s niggard hand,” etc. [The Village, I. 131–153.][[84]]
‘Grant all this to be true; nay, let it be told, but not told in “mincing poetry.”[[85]] Next comes the Workhouse, and this, it must be owned, is a master-piece of description, and the climax of the author’s inverted system of rural optimism.
‘“Thus groan the Old, till by disease opprest,” etc. [The Village, I. 226 to the end of Book I.][[86]]
‘To put our taste in poetry, and the fairness of our opinion of Mr. Crabbe’s in particular, to the test at once, we will confess, that we think the two lines we have marked in italics:
‘“Him now they follow to his grave, and stand
Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand”—
worth nearly all the rest of his verses put together, and an unanswerable condemnation of their general tendency and spirit. It is images, such as these, that the polished mirror of the poet’s mind ought chiefly to convey; that cast their soothing, startling reflection over the length of human life, and grace with their amiable innocence its closing scenes; while its less alluring and more sombre tints sink in, and are lost in an absorbent ground of unrelieved prose. Poetry should be the handmaid of the imagination, and the foster-nurse of pleasure and beauty: Mr. Crabbe’s Muse is a determined enemy to the imagination, and a spy on nature.
‘Before we proceed, we shall just mark a few of those quaintnesses of expression, by which our descriptive poet has endeavoured to vary his style from common prose, and so far has succeeded. Speaking of Quarle he says:
‘“Of Hermit Quarle we read, in island rare,
Far from mankind and seeming far from care;
Safe from all want, and sound in every limb;
Yes! there was he, and there was care with him.”[[87]]
· · · · ·
‘“Here are no wheels for either wool or flax,
But packs of cards—made up of sundry packs.”[[88]]
· · · · ·
‘“Fresh were his features, his attire was new;
Clean was his linen, and his jacket blue:
Of finest jean, his trowsers, tight and trim,
Brush’d the large buckle at the silver rim.”[[89]]
‘To compare small things with great, this last touch of minute description is not unlike that in Theseus’s description of his hounds:
‘“With ears that sweep away the morning dew.”[[90]]
· · · · ·
‘“Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant,
Where once my motive, now the thoughts of want.
Women like me, as ducks in a decoy,
Swim down a stream, and seem to swim in joy.”[[91]]
· · · · ·
‘“But from the day, that fatal day she spied
The pride of Daniel, Daniel was her pride.”[[92]]
‘As an instance of the curiosa felicitas in descriptive allusion (among many others) take the following. Our author, referring to the names of the genteeler couples, written in the parish register, thus “morals” on the circumstance:
‘“How fair these names, how much unlike they look,” etc. [The Parish Register, II. 283–300.]
‘The Library and the Newspaper, in the same volume, are heavy and common-place. Mr. Crabbe merely sermonises in his didactic poetry. He must pierce below the surface to get at his genuine vein. He is properly himself only in the petty and the painful. The Birth of Flattery is a homely, incondite lay. The author is no more like Spenser than he is like Pope. The ballad of Sir Eustace Grey is a production of great power and genius. The poet, in treating of the wanderings of a maniac, has given a loose to his conception of imaginary and preternatural evils. But they are of a sort that chill, rather than melt the mind; they repel instead of haunting it. They might be said to be square, portable horrors, physical, external, not shadowy, not malleable; they do not arise out of any passion in the mind of the sufferer, nor touch the reader with involuntary sympathy. Beds of ice, seas of fire, shaking bogs, and fields of snow, are disagreeable matters of fact; and though their contact has a powerful effect on the senses, we soon shake them off in fancy. Let any one compare this fictitious legend with the unadorned, unvarnished tale of Peter Grimes, and he will see in what Mr. Crabbe’s characteristic strength lies. He is a most potent copyist of actual nature, though not otherwise a great poet. In the case of Sir Eustace, he cannot conjure up any phantoms from a disordered imagination; but he makes honest Peter, the fisherman of the Borough, see visions in the mud where he had drowned his ’prentice boys, that are as ghastly and bewitching as any mermaid. We cannot resist giving the scene of this striking story, which is in our author’s exclusive manner. “Within that circle none durst walk but he.”[[93]]
‘“Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,” etc. [The Borough, Letter XXII. 171–204.]’
The last paragraph, following this quotation, is the same as in The Spirit of the Age (vol. IV. pp. 352–3).