English Men of Letters: Crabbe

by Alfred Ainger

"That evening all in fond discourse was spent,
When the sad lover to his chamber went,
To think on what had pass'd, to grieve, and to repent:
Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh
On the red light that fill'd the eastern sky:
Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,
To hail the glories of the new-born day;
But now dejected, languid, listless, low,
He saw the wind upon the water blow,
And the cold stream curl'd onward as the gale
From the pine-hill blew harshly down the dale;
On the right side the youth a wood survey'd,
With all its dark intensity of shade;
Where the rough wind alone was heard to move,
In this, the pause of nature and of love,
When now the young are rear'd, and when the old,
Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold—
Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen;
Before him swallows, gathering for the sea,
Took their short flights, and twitter'd on the lea;
And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
And slowly blacken'd in the sickly sun; All these were sad in nature, or they took
Sadness from him, the likeness of his look,
And of his mind—he ponder'd for a while,
Then met his Fanny with a borrow'd smile."

The entire story, from which this is an extract, is finely told, and the fitness of the passage is beyond dispute. At other times the description is either so much above the level of the narrative, or below it, as to be almost startling. In the very first pages of Tales of the Hall, in the account of the elder brother's early retirement from business, occur the following musical lines:

"He chose his native village, and the hill
He climb'd a boy had its attraction still;
With that small brook beneath, where he would stand
And stooping fill the hollow of his hand
To quench th' impatient thirst—then stop awhile
To see the sun upon the waters smile,
In that sweet weariness, when, long denied,
We drink and view the fountain that supplied
The sparkling bliss—and feel, if not express,
Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness."

Yet it is only a hundred lines further on that, to indicate the elder brother's increasing interest in the graver concerns of human thought, Crabbe can write:

"He then proceeded, not so much intent,
But still in earnest, and to church he went
Although they found some difference in their creed,
He and his pastor cordially agreed;
Convinced that they who would the truth obtain
By disputation, find their efforts vain;
The church he view'd as liberal minds will view,
And there he fix'd his principles and pew."

Among those surprises to which I have referred is the apparently recent development in the poet of a lyrical gift, the like of which he had not exhibited before. Crabbe had already written two notable poems in stanzas, Sir Eustace Grey and that other painful but exceedingly powerful drama in monologue, The Hall of Justice. But since the appearance of his last volumes, Crabbe had formed some quite novel poetical friendships, and it would seem likely that association with Rogers, though he saw and felt that elegant poet's deficiencies as a painter of human life, had encouraged him to try an experiment in his friend's special vein. One of the most depressing stories in the series is that of the elder brother's ill-fated passion for a beautiful girl, to whom he had been the accidental means of rendering a vital service in rescuing her and a companion from the "rude uncivil kine" in a meadow. To the image of this girl, though he never set eyes on her again for many years, he had remained faithful. The next meeting, when at last it came, brought the most terrible of disillusions. Sent by his chief to transact certain business with a wealthy banker ("Clutterbuck & Co."), the young merchant calls at a villa where the banker at times resided, and finds that the object of his old love and his fondest dreams is there installed as the banker's mistress. She is greatly moved at the sight of the youthful lover of old days, who, with more chivalry than prudence, offers forgiveness if she will break off this degrading alliance. She cannot resolve to take the step. She has become used to luxury and continuous amusement, and she cannot face the return to a duller domesticity. Finally, however, she dies penitent, and it is the contemplation of her life and death that works a life-long change in the ambitions and aims of the old lover. He wearies of money-making, and retires to lead a country life, where he may be of some good to his neighbours, and turn to some worthy use the time that may be still allowed him. The story is told with real pathos and impressive force. But the picture is spoiled by the tasteless interpolation of a song which the unhappy girl sings to her lover, at the very moment apparently when she has resolved that she can never be his:

"My Damon was the first to wake
The gentle flame that cannot die;
My Damon is the last to take
The faithful bosom's softest sigh;
The life between is nothing worth,
O! cast it from thy thought away;
Think of the day that gave it birth,
And this its sweet returning day.
"Buried be all that has been done,
Or say that nought is done amiss;
For who the dangerous path can shun
In such bewildering world as this?
But love can every fault forgive,
Or with a tender look reprove;
And now let nought in memory live,
But that we meet, and that we love."

The lines are pretty enough, and may be described as a blend of Tom Moore and Rogers. A similar lyric, in the story called The Sisters, might have come straight from the pen which has given us "Mine be a cot beside a hill," and is not so wholly irrelevant to its context as the one just cited.

Since Crabbe's death in 1832, though he has never been without a small and loyal band of admirers, no single influence has probably had so much effect in reviving interest in his poetry as that of Edward FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald was born and lived the greater part of his life in Suffolk, and Crabbe was a native of Aldeburgh, and lived in the neighbourhood till he was grown to manhood. This circumstance alone might not have specially interested FitzGerald in the poet, but for the fact that the temperament of the two men was somewhat the same, and that both dwelt naturally on the depressing sides of human life. But there were other coincidences to create a strong tie between FitzGerald and the poet's family. When FitzGerald's father went to live at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, in 1835, Crabbe's son George had recently been presented to the vicarage of the adjoining parish of Bredfield (FitzGerald's native village), which he continued to hold until his death in 1857. During these two and twenty years, FitzGerald and George Crabbe remained on the closest terms of friendship, which was continued with George Crabbe's son (a third George), who became ultimately rector of Merton in Norfolk. It was at his house, it will be remembered, that FitzGerald died suddenly in the summer of 1883. Through this long association with the family FitzGerald was gradually acquiring information concerning the poet, which even the son's Biography had not supplied. Readers of FitzGerald's delightful Letters will remember that there is no name more constantly referred to than that of Crabbe. Whether writing to Fanny Kemble, or Frederick Tennyson, or Lowell, he is constantly quoting him, and recommending him. During the thirty years that followed Crabbe's death his fame had been on the decline, and poets of different and greater gifts had taken his place. FitzGerald had noted this fact with ever-increasing regret, and longed to revive the taste for a poet of whose merits he had himself no doubt. He discerned moreover that even those who had read in their youth The Village and The Borough had been repelled by the length, and perhaps by the monotonous sadness, of the Tales of the Hall. It was for this reason apparently (and not because he assigned a higher place to the later poetry than to the earlier) that he was led, after some years of misgiving, to prepare a volume of selections from this latest work of Crabbe's which might have the effect of tempting the reader to master it as a whole. Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe's verse, what was ordinarily called an "anthology" was out of the question. FitzGerald was restricted to a single method. He found that readers were impatient of Crabbe's longueurs. It occurred to him that while making large omissions he might preserve the story in each case, by substituting brief prose abstracts of the portions omitted. This process he applied to the Tales that pleased him most, leaving what he considered Crabbe's best passages untouched. As early as 1876 he refers to the selection as already made, and he printed it for private circulation in 1879. Finally, in 1882, he added a preface of his own, and published it with Quaritch in Piccadilly.

In his preface FitzGerald claims for Crabbe's latest work that the net impression left by it upon the reader is less sombre and painful than that left by his earlier poems. "It contains," he urges, "scarce anything of that brutal or sordid villainy of which one has more than enough in the poet's earlier work." Perhaps there is not so much of the "brutal or sordid," but then in The Parish Register or The Borough, the reader is in a way prepared for that ingredient, because the personages are the lawless and neglected poor of a lonely seaport. It is because, when he moves no longer among these, he yet finds vice and misery quite as abundant in "a village with its tidy homestead, and well-to-do tenants, within easy reach of a thriving country-town," that a certain shock is given to the reader. He discovers that all the evil passions intrude (like pale Death) into the comfortable villa as impartially as into the hovels at Aldeburgh. But FitzGerald had found a sufficient alleviation of the gloom in the framework of the Tales. The growing affection of the two brothers, as they come to know and understand each other better, is one of the consistently pleasant passages in Crabbe's writings. The concluding words of FitzGerald's preface, as the little volume is out of print and very scarce, I may be allowed to quote:—