"I am anxious that Mr. Rogers should have all the
success he can desire. I am more indebted to him than I
could bear to think of, if I had not the highest esteem. It
will give me great satisfaction to find him cordially admired.
His is a favourable picture, and such he loves so do I, but
men's vices and follies come into my mind, and spoil my
drawing."
Assuredly no more striking antithesis to Crabbe's habitual impressions of human life can be found than in the touching and often beautiful couplets of Rogers, a poet as neglected today as Crabbe. Rogers's picture of wedded happiness finds no parallel, I think, anywhere in the pages of his brother-poet:—
"Across the threshold led,
And every tear kissed off as soon as shed,
His house she enters, there to be a light
Shining within, when all without is night;
A guardian angel o'er his life presiding,
Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing!
How oft her eyes read his; her gentle mind
To all his wishes, all his thoughts, inclined;
Still subject—ever on the watch to borrow
Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow.
The soul of music slumbers in the shell,
Till waked to rapture by the master's spell;
And feeling hearts—touch them but rightly—pour
A thousand melodies unheard before."
It may be urged that Rogers exceeds in one direction as unjustifiably as Crabbe in the opposite. But there is room in poetry for both points of view, though the absolute—the Shakespearian—grasp of Human Life may be truer and more eternally convincing than either.
CHAPTER X
THE TALES OF THE HALL
(1819)
The Tales of the Hall were published by John Murray in June 1819, in two handsome octavo volumes, with every advantage of type, paper, and margin. In a letter of Crabbe to Mrs. Leadbeater, in October 1817, he makes reference to these Tales, already in preparation. He tells his correspondent that "Remembrances" was the title for them proposed by his friends. We learn from another source that a second title had been suggested, "Forty Days—a Series of Tales told at Binning Hall." Finally Mr. Murray recommended Tales of the Hall, and this was adopted.
In the same letter to Mrs. Leadbeater, Crabbe writes: "I know not how to describe the new, and probably (most probably) the last work I shall publish. Though a village is the scene of meeting between my two principal characters, and gives occasion to other characters and relations in general, yet I no more describe the manners of village inhabitants. My people are of superior classes, though not the most elevated; and, with a few exceptions, are of educated and cultivated minds and habits." In making this change Crabbe was also aware that some kind of unity must be given to those new studies of human life. And he found at least a semblance of this unity in ties of family or friendship uniting the tellers of them. Moreover Crabbe, who had a wide and even intimate knowledge of English, poetry, was well acquainted with the Canterbury Tales, and he bethought him that he would devise a framework. And the plan he worked out was as follows: