English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

Meantime there were alleviations of the poet's lot. If the guests of the house were not always convinced by his arguments and the servants did not disguise their contempt, the Duke and Duchess were kind, and made him their friend. Nor was the Duke without an intelligent interest in Crabbe's own subjects. Moreover, among the visitors at Belvoir were many who shared that interest to the full, such as the Duke of Queensberry, Lord Lothian, Bishop Watson, and the eccentric Dr. Robert Glynn. Again, it was during Crabbe's residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother, Lord Robert Manners, died of wounds received while leading his ship, Resolution, against the French in the West Indies, in the April of 1782. Crabbe's sympathy with the family, shown in his tribute to the sailor-brother appended to the poem he was then bringing to completion, still further strengthened the tie between them. Crabbe accompanied the Duke to London soon after, to assist him in arranging with Stothard for a picture to be painted of the incident of Lord Robert's death. It was during this visit that Crabbe received the following letter from Burke. The letter is undated, but belongs to the month of May, for The Village was published in that month, and Burke clearly refers to that poem as just received, but as yet unread. Crabbe seems to have been for the time off duty, and to have proposed a short visit to the Burkes;—

"Dear Sir,—I do not know by what unlucky accident
you missed the note I left for you at my house. I wrote
besides to you at Belvoir. If you had received these two
short letters you could not want an invitation to a place
where every one considers himself as infinitely honoured and
pleased by your presence. Mrs. Burke desires her best
compliments, and trusts that you will not let the holidays
pass over without a visit from you I have got the poem;
but I have not yet opened it. I don't like the unhappy
language you use about these matters. You do not easily
please such a judgment as your own—that is natural; but
where you are difficult every one else will be charmed. I am,
my dear sir, ever most affectionately yours,
EDMUND BURKE."

The "unhappy language" seems to point to Crabbe having expressed some diffidence or forebodings concerning his new venture. Yet Crabbe had less to fear on this head than with most of his early poems. The Village had been schemed and composed in parts before Crabbe knew Burke. One passage in it indeed, as we have seen, had first convinced Burke that the writer was a poet. And in the interval that followed the poem had been completed and matured with a care that Crabbe seldom afterwards bestowed upon his productions. Burke himself had suggested and criticised much during its progress, and the manuscript had further been submitted through Sir Joshua Reynolds to Johnson, who not only revised it in detail but re-wrote half a dozen of the opening lines. Johnson's opinion of the poem was conveyed to Reynolds in the following letter, and here at last we get a date:--

March 4, 1783.
"Sir,—I have sent you back Mr. Crabbe's poem, which I
read with great delight. It is original, vigorous, and elegant.
The alterations which I have made I do not require him to
adopt; for my lines are perhaps not often better than his
own: but he may take mine and his own together, and
perhaps between them produce something better than either.
He is not to think his copy wantonly defaced: a wet sponge
will wash all the red lines away and leave the pages clean.
His dedication will be least liked: it were better to contract
it into a short, sprightly address. I do not doubt of Mr.
Crabbe's success. I am, Sir, your most humble servant,
SAMUEL JOHNSON."

Boswell's comment on this incident is as follows:—"The sentiments of Mr. Crabbe's admirable poem as to the false notions of rustic happiness and rustic virtue were quite congenial with Dr. Johnson's own: and he took the trouble not only to suggest slight corrections and variations, but to furnish some lines when he thought he could give the writer's meaning better than in the words of the manuscript." Boswell went on to observe that "the aid given by Johnson to the poem, as to The Traveller and Deserted Village of Goldsmith, were so small as by no means to impair the distinguished merit of the author." There were unfriendly critics, however, in Crabbe's native county who professed to think otherwise, and "whispered that the manuscript had been so cobbled by Burke and Johnson that its author did not know it again when returned to him." On which Crabbe's son rejoins that "if these kind persons survived to read The Parish Register their amiable conjectures must have received a sufficient rebuke."

This confident retort is not wholly just. There can be no doubt that some special mannerisms and defects of Crabbe's later style had been kept in check by the wise revision of his friends. And again, when after more than twenty years Crabbe produced The Parish Register, that poem, as we shall see, had received from Charles James Fox something of the same friendly revision and suggestion as The Village had received from Burke and Johnson.

The Village, in quarto, published by J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, appeared in May 1783, and at once attracted attention by novel qualities. Among these was the bold realism of the village-life described, and the minute painting of the scenery among which it was led. Cowper had published his first volume a year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general interest, and had met with no sale. Burns had as yet published nothing. But two poetic masterpieces, dealing with the joys and sorrows of village folk, were fresh in Englishmen's memory. One was The Elegy in a Country Churchyard, the other was The Deserted Village. Both had left a deep impression upon their readers—and with reason—for two poems, more certain of immortality, because certain of giving a pleasure that cannot grow old-fashioned, do not exist in our literature. Each indeed marked an advance upon all that English descriptive or didactic poets had thus far contributed towards making humble life and rural scenery attractive—unless we except the Allegro of Milton and some passages in Thomson's Seasons. Nor was it merely the consummate workmanship of Gray and Goldsmith that had made their popularity. The genuineness of the pathos in the two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray it was blended with a melancholy that was native to himself. Although their authors had not been brought into close personal relations with the joys and sorrows dealt with, there was nothing of sentiment, in any unworthy sense, in either poet's treatment of his theme. But the result of their studies of humble village life was to produce something quite distinct from the treatment of the realist. What they saw and remembered had passed through the transfiguring medium of a poet's imagination before it reached the reader. The finished product, like the honey of the bee, was due to the poet as well as to the flower from which he had derived the raw material.

It seems to have been generally assumed when Crabbe's Village appeared, that it was of the nature of a rejoinder to Goldsmith's poem, and the fact that Crabbe quotes a line from The Deserted Village, "Passing rich on forty pounds a year," in his own description of the village parson, might seem to confirm that impression. But the opening lines of The Village point to a different origin. It was rather during those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the conventional pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of The Village he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head. The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George Crabbe, not unjustly, "thought scorn."

"The village life, and every care that reigns
O'er youthful peasants and declining swains,
What labour yields, and what, that labour past,
Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last; What form the real picture of the poor,
Demand a song—the Muse can give no more.
Fled are those times when in harmonious strains
The rustic poet praised his native plains:
No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,
Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse;
Yet still for these we frame the tender strain,
Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel."

At this point follow the six lines which Johnson had substituted for the author's. Crabbe had written:—