English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal experiences to make out the material for his work, the same also holds with regard to the incidental Tales. Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not of his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits the same of others. One, as we have seen, happened in the Elmy family; another was sent him by a friend in Wiltshire, to which county the story belonged; while the last in the series, and perhaps the most painful of all, Smugglers, and Poachers was told to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly, whom he had met at Hampstead, only a few weeks before Romilly's own tragic death. Probably other tales, not referred to by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered by the poet in his intercourse with his parishioners, or submitted to him by his friends. We might infer this from the singular inequality, in interest and poetical opportunity, of the various plots of these stories. Some of them are assuredly not such as any poet would have

sat down and elaborated for himself, and it is strange how little sense Crabbe seems to have possessed as to which were worth treating, or could even admit of artistic treatment at all. A striking instance is afforded by the strange and most unpleasing history, entitled Lady Barbara: or, The Ghost.

The story is as follows: A young and beautiful lady marries early a gentleman of good family who dies within a year of their marriage. In spite of many proposals she resolves to remain a widow; and for the sake of congenial society and occupation, she finds a home in the family of a pious clergyman, where she devotes herself to his young children, and makes herself useful in the parish. Her favourite among the children is a boy, George, still in the schoolroom. The boy grows apace; goes to boarding-school and college; and is on the point of entering the army, when he discovers that he is madly in love with the lady, still an inmate of the house, who had "mothered him" when a child. No ages are mentioned, but we may infer that the young man is then about two and twenty, and the lady something short of forty. The position is not unimaginable, though it may be uncommon. The idea of marrying one who had been to her as a favourite child, seems to the widow in the first instance repulsive and almost criminal. But it turns out that there is another reason in the background for her not re-entering the marriage state, which she discloses to the ardent youth. It appears that the widow had once had a beloved brother who had died early. Those two had been brought up by an infidel father, who had impressed on his children the absurdity of all such ideas as immortality. The children had often discussed and pondered over this subject together, and had made a compact that whichever of them died first should, if possible, appear to the survivor, and thus solve the awful problem of a future life. The brother not long after died in foreign parts. Immediately after his death, before the sister heard the news, the brother's ghost appeared in a dream, or vision, to the sister, and warned her in solemn tones against ever marrying a second time. The spirit does not appear to have given any reasons, but his manner was so impressive and so unmistakable that the lady had thus far regarded it as an injunction never to be disobeyed. On hearing this remarkable story, the young man, George, argues impatiently against the trustworthiness of dreams, and is hardly silenced by the widow showing him on her wrist the mark still remaining where the spirit had seized and pressed her hand. In fine, the impassioned suitor prevails over these superstitious terrors, as he reckons them, of the lady—and they become man and wife.

The reader is here placed in a condition of great perplexity, and his curiosity becomes breathless. The sequel is melancholy indeed. After a few months' union, the young man, whose plausible eloquence had so moved the widow, tires of his wife, ill-treats her, and breaks her heart. The Psychical Society is avenged, and the ghost's word was worth at least "a thousand pounds." It is difficult for us to take such a story seriously, but it must have interested Crabbe deeply, for he has expended upon it much of his finest power of analysis, and his most careful writing. As we have seen, the subject of dreams had always had a fascination for him, of a kind not unconnected perhaps with the opium-habit. The story, however it was to be treated, was unpromising; but as the dénouement was what it proved to be, the astonishing thing is that Crabbe should not have felt the dramatic impropriety of putting into the young man's mouth passages of an impressive, and almost Shakespearian, beauty such as are rare indeed in his poetry. The following lines are not indeed placed within inverted commas, but the pronoun "I" is retained, and they are apparently intended for something passing in the young suitor's mind:

"O! tell me not of years,—can she be old?
Those eyes, those lips, can man unmoved behold?
Has time that bosom chill'd? are cheeks so rosy cold?
No, she is young, or I her love t'engage
Will grow discreet, and that will seem like age:
But speak it not; Death's equalising age
Levels not surer than Love's stronger charm,
That bids all inequalities be gone,
That laughs at rank, that mocks comparison.
There is not young or old, if Love decrees;
He levels orders, he confounds degrees:
There is not fair, or dark, or short, or tall,
Or grave, or sprightly—Love reduces all;
He makes unite the pensive and the gay,
Gives something here, takes something there away;
From each abundant good a portion takes,
And for each want a compensation makes;
Then tell me not of years—Love, power divine,
Takes, as he wills, from hers, and gives to mine."

In those fine lines it is no doubt Crabbe himself that speaks, and not the young lover, who was to turn out in the sequel an unparalleled "cad." But then, what becomes of dramatic consistency, and the imperative claims of art?

In the letter to Mrs. Leadbeater already cited Crabbe writes as to his forthcoming collection of Tales: "I do not know, on a general view, whether my tragic or lighter Tales, etc., are most in number. Of those equally well executed the tragic will, I suppose, make the greater impression." Crabbe was right in this forecast. Whether more or less in number, the "tragic" Tales far surpass the "lighter" in their effect on the reader, in the intensity of their gloom. Such stories as that of Lady Barbara, Delay has Danger, The Sisters, Ellen, Smugglers and Poachers, Richard's story of Ruth, and the elder brother's account of his own early attachment, with its miserable sequel—all these are of a poignant painfulness. Human crime, error, or selfishness working life-long misery to others—this is the theme to which Crabbe turns again and again, and on which he bestows a really marvellous power of analysis. There is never wanting, side by side with these, what Crabbe doubtless believed to be the compensating presence of much that is lovable in human character, patience, resignation, forgiveness. But the resultant effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of cheering. The fine lines of Wordsworth as to

"Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight;
And miserable love, that is not pain
To hear of, for the glory that redounds
Therefrom to human kind, and what we are,"

fail to console us as we read these later stories of Crabbe. We part from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human nature. We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally base and sordid.

The Tales of the Hall are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems. He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's supremest heights. Moreover, the poems contain passages of description which, for truth to Nature, touched by real imagination, are finer than anything he had yet achieved. The story entitled Delay has Danger contains the fine picture of an autumn landscape seen through the eyes of the miserable lover—the picture which dwelt so firmly in the memory of Tennyson: