The volume containing The Parish Register, The Village, and others, appeared in the autumn of 1807; and Crabbe's general acceptance as a poet of mark dates from that year. Four editions were issued by Mr. Hatchard during the following year and a half—the fourth appearing in March 1809. The reviews were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, and within two days of the appearance of this article, according to Crabbe's son, the whole of the first edition was sold off.
At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite pleasure. At the time "when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn," he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real life. After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar benefit. The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then sunk. When Crabbe published his Parish Register, the novels of the day were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck the note of a new development in her Castle Rackrent, not to mention the delightful stories in The Parents' Assistant, Simple Susan, Lazy Lawrence, or The Basket-Woman. Galt's masterpiece, The Annals of the Parish, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk. The Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant. Miss Mitford's sketches in Our Village—the nearest in form to Crabbe's pictures of country life--were to come later still. Crabbe, though he adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really a chief founder of the rural novel—the Silas Marner and the Adam Bede of fifty years later. Of course (for no man is original) he had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors. Pope was his earliest master in his art. And what Pope had done in his telling couplets for the man and woman of fashion—the Chloes and Narcissas of his day—Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson's "lovely young Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share of influence. But Crabbe's achievement was practically a new thing. The success of The Parish Register was largely that of a new adventure in the world of fiction. Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might discover in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories—for a truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could not be unshared.
In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now reduced by the publisher to the form of two small volumes, and in their fourth edition) to Walter Scott, who acknowledged them and Crabbe's accompanying letter in a friendly reply, to which reference has already been made. After mentioning how for more than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of a personal introduction to Crabbe, and how, as a lad of eighteen, he had met with selections from The Village and The Library in The Annual Register, he continues:—
"You may therefore guess my sincere delight when I saw
your poems at a late period assume the rank in the public consideration which they so well deserve. It was a triumph
to my own immature taste to find I had anticipated the
applause of the learned and the critical, and I became very
desirous to offer my gratulor among the more important
plaudits which you have had from every quarter. I should
certainly have availed myself of the freemasonry of authorship
(for our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Abhorson's)
to address to you a copy of a new poetical attempt, which I
have now upon the anvil, and I esteem myself particularly obliged
to Mr. Hatchard, and to your goodness acting upon his
information, for giving me the opportunity of paving the way
for such a freedom. I am too proud of the compliments
you honour me with to affect to decline them; and with
respect to the comparative view I have of my own labours
and yours, I can only assure you that none of my little folks,
about the formation of whose tastes and principles I may be
supposed naturally solicitous, have ever read any of my own
poems—while yours have been our regular evening's amusement
My eldest girl begins to read well, and enters as well
into the humour as into the sentiment of your admirable
descriptions of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has
seldom existed among those who know by experience that
there are much better things in the world than literary
reputation, and that one of the best of those good things is
the regard and friendship of those deservedly and generally
esteemed for their worth or their talents. I believe many
dilettante authors do cocker themselves up into a great
jealousy of anything that interferes with what they are
pleased to call their fame: but I should as soon think of
nursing one of my own fingers into a whitlow for my private
amusement as encouraging such a feeling. I am truly sorry
to observe you mention bad health: those who contribute so
much to the improvement as well as the delight of society
should escape this evil. I hope, however, that one day your
state of health may permit you to view this country."
This interchange of letters was the beginning of a friendship that was to endure and strengthen through the lives of both poets, for they died in the self-same year. The "new poetical attempt" that was "on the anvil" must have been The Lady of the Lake, completed and published in the following year. But already Scott had uneasy misgivings that the style would not bear unlimited repetition. Even before Byron burst upon the world with the two first cantos of Childe Harold, and drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, Scott had made the unwelcome discovery that his own matter and manner was imitable, and that others were borrowing it. Many could now "grow the flower" (or something like it), for "all had got the seed." It was this persuasion that set him thinking whether he might not change his topics and his metre, and still retain his public. To this end he threw up a few tiny ballons d'essai—experiments in the manner of some of his popular contemporaries, and printed them in the columns of the Edinburgh Annual Register. One of these was a grim story of village crime called The Poacher, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe. Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into another's mould. A few lines may suffice, in evidence. The couplet about the vicar's sermons makes one sure that for the moment Scott was good-humouredly copying one foible at least of his original:—
"Approach and through the unlatticed window peep.
Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep; Sunk 'mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun
Stoop to the west, the plunderer's toils are done.
Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand,
Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand,
While round the hut are in disorder laid
The tools and booty of his lawless trade;
For force or fraud, resistance or escape
The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape;
His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards,
And the filched lead the church's roof affords—
(Hence shall the rector's congregation fret,
That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.)
The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there,
Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare,
Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare.
Bartered for game from chase or warren won,
Yon cask holds moonlight,[[5]] seen when moon was none;
And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart,
To wait the associate higgler's evening cart."
Happily for Scott's fame, and for the world's delight, he did not long pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. Rokeby appeared, was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of Waverley and the need of conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever. But his affection for Crabbe never waned. In his earlier novels there was no contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters—and it was Crabbe's Borough to which he listened with unfailing delight twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.
FOOTNOTES:
[!-- Note Anchor 5 --][Footnote 5: A cant term for smuggled spirits.]