English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

But lines such as these in fact occur only at long intervals. Crabbe's couplets are more often pedestrian rather than grotesque.

The poet himself, as the witty brothers relate with some pride, was by no means displeased or offended by the liberty taken. When they met in later years at William Spencer's, Crabbe hurried to meet James Smith with outstretched hand, "Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?" Again, writing to a friend who had expressed some indignation at the parody, Crabbe complained only of the preface. "There is a little ill-nature—and I take the liberty of adding, undeserved ill-nature—in their prefatory address; but in their versification they have done me admirably." Here Crabbe shows a slight lack of self-knowledge. For when to the Letter on Trades the following extenuating postscript is found necessary, there would seem to be hardly any room for the parodist:

"If I have in this Letter praised the good-humour of a man
confessedly too inattentive to business, and if in the one on Amusements, I have written somewhat sarcastically of 'the
brick-floored parlour which the butcher lets,' be credit given
to me that in the one case I had no intention to apologise for
idleness, nor any design in the other to treat with contempt
the resources of the poor. The good-humour is considered as
the consolation of disappointment, and the room is so mentioned
because the lodger is vain. Most of my readers will
perceive this; but I shall be sorry if by any I am supposed to
make pleas for the vices of men, or treat their wants and
infirmities with derision or with disdain."

After this, Crabbe himself might have admitted that the descent is not very far to the parodist's delightful apology for the change from "one hautboy" to "one fiddle" in the description of the band. The subsequent explanation, how the poet had purposely intertwined the various handkerchiefs which rescued Pat Jennings's hat from the pit, lest the real owner should be detected, and the reason for it, is a not less exquisite piece of fooling:—"For, in the statistical view of life and manners which I occasionally present, my clerical profession has taught me how extremely improper it would be by any allusion, however slight, to give any uneasiness, however trivial, to any individual, however foolish or wicked." It might perhaps be inferred from such effusions as are here parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of humour. This would certainly be too sweeping an inference, for in many of his sketches of human character he gives unmistakable proof to the contrary. But the talent in question—often so recklessly awarded or denied to us by our fellow-creatures—is very variable in the spheres of its operation. The sense of humour is in its essence, as we have often been told, largely a sense of proportion, and in this sense Crabbe was certainly deficient. The want of it accounts for much more in his writings than for his prose notes and prefaces. It explains much of the diffuseness and formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp the great truth how much the half may be greater than the whole.

In spite, however, of these defects, and of the inequalities of the workmanship, The Borough was from the first a success. The poem appeared in February 1810, and went through six editions in the next six years. It does not indeed present an alluring picture of life in the provinces. It even reminds us of a saying of Tennyson's, that if God made the country, and man made the city, then it was the devil who made the country-town. To travel through the borough from end to end is to pass through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and under a cloudy heaven, with only rare gleams of sunshine, and patches of blue sky. These, when they occur, are proportionally welcome. They include some exquisite descriptions of nature, though with Crabbe it will be noticed that it is always the nature close about his feet, the hedge-row, the meadow, the cottage-garden: as his son has noted, his outlook never extends to the landscape beyond.

In the respects just mentioned, the qualities exhibited in the new poem have been noticed before in The Village and The Parish Register. In The Borough, however, appear some maturer specimens of this power, showing how Crabbe's art was perfecting by practice. Very noticeable are the sections devoted to the almshouse of the borough and its inhabitants. Its founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn from life. The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all his poorer neighbours in distress:—

"A twofold taste he had; to give and spare,
Both were his duties, and had equal care;
It was his joy to sit alone and fast,
Then send a widow and her boys repast:
Tears in his eyes would, spite of him, appear,
But he from other eyes has kept the tear:
All in a wintry night from far he came
To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame,
Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant
A lingering, but reforming punishment:
Home then he walked, and found his anger rise
When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes;
But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed
To Heaven in hope, he calmly sank to rest."

The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth year was past, a building was seen rising on the green north of the village—an almshouse for old men and women of the borough, who had struggled in life and failed. Having built and endowed this harbour of refuge, and placed its government in the hands of six trustees, the modest donor and the pious lady-relative who had shared in his good works passed quietly out of life.

This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees who succeeded to the management after the founder's death, among them a Sir Denys Brand, a lavish donor to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the founder had been humble and modest. This man defeats the intentions of the founder by admitting to the almshouses persons of the shadiest antecedents, on the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in their day:

"Not men in trade by various loss brought down,
But those whose glory once amazed the town;
Who their last guinea in their pleasure spent,
Yet never fell so low as to repent:
To these his pity he could largely deal,
Wealth they had known, and therefore want could feel."