English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

"In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,
Tityrus, the pride of Mantuan swains, might sing.
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,
Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?"

Johnson substituted the following, and Crabbe accepted the revised version:—

"On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the Golden Age again,
Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?"

The first four lines of Johnson are beyond question an improvement, and it is worth remark in passing how in the fourth line he has anticipated Cowper's "made poetry a mere mechanic art."

But in the concluding couplet, Crabbe's meaning seems to lose in clearness through the change. Crabbe intended to ask whether it was safe to desert truth and nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even though Virgil had set the example. Johnson's version seems to obscure rather than to make clearer this interpretation. Crabbe, after this protest against the conventional, which, if unreal at the outset, had become a thousand times more wearisome by repetition, passes on to a daring presentation of real life lived among all the squalor of actual poverty, not unskilfully interspersed with descriptions equally faithful of the barren coast-scenery among which he had been brought up. It has been already remarked how Crabbe's eye for rural nature had been quickened and made more exact by his studies in botany. There was little in the poetry then popular that reproduced an actual scene as perfectly as do the following lines:—

"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye:
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high above the slender sheaf
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade;
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,
And a sad splendour vainly shines around."

Crabbe here perceives the value, as Goldsmith had done before him, of village scenery as a background to his picture of village life. It suited Goldsmith's purpose to describe the ideal rural community, happy, prosperous, and innocent, as contrast with that depopulation of villages and corruption of peasant life which he predicted from the growing luxury and selfishness of the rich. But notwithstanding the title of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that remains in our memories. The dominant thought expressed is the virtue and the happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry. There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious and "lucrative" tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an English rural village in its ideality—rural loveliness—enshrining rural innocence and joy—and to show how man's vices, invading it from the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to be attributed to the insidious attacks from without. Goldsmith, for example, drew an immortal picture of the village pastor, closely modelled upon Chaucer's "poor parson of a town," his piety, humility, and never failing goodness to his flock.—

"Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And even his failings leaned to virtue's side;
But in his duty prompt at every call
He watched and wept; he prayed and felt for all.
And as a bird each fond endearment tries
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."

Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and dilapidation:—

"There children dwell who know no parents' care:
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there.
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed"