English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

He finds his old love, who had been faithful to her engagement for ten years, and then (believing Allen to be dead) had married. She is now a widow, with grown-up children scattered through the world, and is alone. Allen then tells his sad story. The ship in which he sailed from England had been taken by the Spaniards, and he had been carried a slave to the West Indies, where he worked in a silver mine, improved his position under a kind master, and finally married a Spanish girl, hopeless of ever returning to England though still unforgetful of his old love. He accumulates money, and, like Crabbe's brother, incurs the envy of his Roman Catholic neighbours. He is denounced as a heretic, who would doubtless bring up his children in the accursed English faith. On his refusal to become a Catholic he is expelled the country, as the condition of his life being spared:

"His wife, his children, weeping in his sight,
All urging him to flee, he fled, and cursed his flight."

After many adventures he falls in with a ship bound for England, but again his return is delayed. He is impressed (it was war-time), and fights for his country; loses a limb, is again left upon a foreign shore where his education finds him occupation as a clerk; and finally, broken with age and toil, finds his way back to England, where the faithful friend of his youth takes care of him and nurses him to the end. The situation at the close is very touching—for the joy of re-union is clouded by the real love he feels for the Spanish wife and children from whom he had been torn, and who are continually present to him in his dreams.

Nor is the treatment inadequate. It is at once discernible how much Crabbe had already gained by the necessity for concentration upon the development of a story instead of on the mere analysis of character. The style, moreover, has clarified and gained in dignity: there are few, if any, relapses into the homelier style on which the parodist could try his hand. Had the author of Enoch Arden treated the same theme in blank-verse, the workmanship would have been finer, but he could hardly have sounded a truer note of unexaggerated pathos.

The same may be said of the beautiful tale of The Lover's Journey. Here again is the product of an experience belonging to Crabbe's personal history. In his early Aldeburgh days, when he was engaged to Sarah Elmy with but faint hope of ever being able to marry, it was one of the rare alleviations of his distressed condition to walk over from Aldeburgh to Beccles (some twenty miles distant), where his betrothed was occasionally a visitor to her mother and sisters. "It was in his walks," writes the son, "between Aldeburgh and Beccles that Mr. Crabbe passed through the very scenery described in the first part of The Lover's Journey; while near Beccles, in another direction, he found the contrast of rich vegetation introduced in the latter part of that tale; nor have I any doubt that the disappointment of the story figures out something that, on one of these visits, befell himself, and the feelings with which he received it.

"Gone to a friend, she tells me;—I commend
Her purpose: means she to a female friend?"

For truth compels me to say, that he was by no means free from the less amiable sign of a strong attachment—jealousy." The story is of the slightest—an incident rather than a story. The lover, joyous and buoyant, traverses the dreary coast scenery of Suffolk, and because he is happy, finds beauty and charm in the commonest and most familiar sights and sounds of nature: every single hedge-row blossom, every group of children at their play. The poem is indeed an illustration of Coleridge's lines in his ode Dejection:

"O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live,—
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud."

All along the road to his beloved's house, nature wears this "wedding-garment." On his arrival, however, the sun fades suddenly from the landscape. The lady is from home: gone to visit a friend a few miles distant, not so far but that her lover can follow,—but the slight, real or imaginary, probably the latter, comes as such a rebuff, that during the "little more—how far away!" that he travels, the country, though now richer and lovelier, seems to him (as once to Hamlet) a mere "pestilent congregation of vapours." But in the end he finds his mistress and learns that she had gone on duty, not for pleasure,—and they return happy again, and so happy indeed, that he has neither eyes nor thoughts for any of nature's fertilities or barrennesses—only for the dear one at his side.

I have already had occasion to quote a few lines from this beautiful poem, to show Crabbe's minute observation—in his time so rare—of flowers and birds and all that makes the charm of rural scenery—but I must quote some more: