Finally there came—for I am hastily recapitulating Crabbe’s story—the years of prosperity, curacies, rectories, the praise of great contemporaries, but nothing surely more edifying than the burning of piles of manuscripts so extensive that no fireplace would hold them. The son’s account of his assisting at these conflagrations is
not the least interesting part of his biography, the merits of which I desire to emphasize.
People who make jokes about that most succulent edible, the crab, when the poet Crabbe is mentioned in their presence—and who can resist an obvious pun—are not really far astray. There can be little doubt but that a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the “shellfish,” as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in calling it; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of an ancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear of Cromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct from what I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found in Aldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet’s life. For there cannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of his origin. His family, it is clear, came first from Norfolk. The Crabbes of Norfolk were farmers, the Crabbes of Suffolk always favoured the seacoast, and all the glory that surrounds the name of the poet to whom we do honour to-day is reflected in the town in which he was born and bred. Aldeburgh is Crabbe’s
own town, and it is an interesting fact that no other poet can be identified with one particular spot in the way in which Crabbe can be identified with this beautiful watering-place in which we are now assembled. Shakspere was more of a Londoner than a Stratfordian; nearly all his best work was written in London, and many of the most receptive years of his life were spent in that city. Milton’s honoured name is identified with many places, apart from London, the city of his birth. Shelley, Byron and Keats were essentially cosmopolitans in their writings as in their lives. Wordsworth was closely identified with Grasmere, although born in a neighbouring county; but he went to many and varied scenes, and to more than one country, for some of his most inspired verses. Then Cowper, the poet of whom one most often thinks when one is recalling the achievement of Crabbe, is a poet of some half-dozen places other than Olney, and perhaps his best verses were written at Weston-Underwood. Now George Crabbe in the years of his success was identified with many places other than Aldeburgh: with Belvoir Castle, with Muston, and with Trowbridge, where he died,
and some of his admirers have even identified him with Bath. When all this is allowed, it is upon Aldeburgh that the whole of his writings turned, the place where he was born, where he spent his boyhood, and the earlier years of a perhaps too sordid manhood, whither he returned twice, as a chemist’s assistant and as curate. It is the place that primarily inspired all his verses. Aldeburgh stands out vividly before us in each succeeding poem—in The Village, The Borough, The Parish Register, The Tales, and even in those Tales of the Hall, composed in later life in faraway Trowbridge. Crabbe’s vivid observations indeed come home to every one who has studied his works when they have visited not only Aldeburgh but its vicinity. Every reach of the river Ald recalls some striking line by him: the scenery in The Lover’s Journey we know is a description of the road between Aldeburgh and Beccles, and all who have sailed along the river to Orford have recognized that no stream has been so perfectly portrayed by a poet’s pen. Here in his writings you may have a suggestion of Muston, here of Allington, and here again of Trowbridge; but in the main it is the Suffolk scenery that most
of us here know so well that was ever in his mind.
When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway to identify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes were identified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that of Sir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement that up to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, all that is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrase beloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies that any county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great a writer. Yet I venture to say that within the next ten years the “Crabbe Country” will sound as familiar to the officials of the Great Eastern as the “Wordsworth Country” does to those of the Midland or the North Western. It is true that once in the bitterness of his heart the poet referred to Aldeburgh as “a little venal borough in Suffolk” and that he more than once alluded to his unkind reception upon his reappearance as a curate, when he had
previously failed at other callings. “In my own village they think nothing of me,” he once said. But who does not know how the heart turns with the years to the places associated with childhood and youth, and Crabbe was a remarkable exemplification of this. A well-known literary journal stated only last week that “Crabbe’s connexion with Aldeburgh was not very protracted.” So far from this being true it would be no exaggeration to say that it extended over the whole of his seventy-eight years of life. It included the first five-and-twenty years almost entirely. It included also the brief curacy, the prolonged residence at Parham and Glenham, frequent visits for holidays in after years, and who but a lover of his native place would have done as his son pictures him doing when at Stathern—riding alone to the coast of Lincolnshire, sixty miles from where he was living, only to dip in the waves that also washed the beach of Aldeburgh and returned immediately to his home. “There is no sea like the Aldeburgh sea,” said Edward FitzGerald, and we may be sure that was Crabbe’s opinion also, for revisiting it in later life he wrote:—
There once again, my native place I come
Thee to salute, my earliest, latest home.
One picture in Crabbe’s life stands out vividly to us all—the long years of devotion given by him to Sarah Elmy, and the reciprocal devotion of the very capable woman who finally became his wife. Crabbe’s courtship and marriage affords a pleasant contrast to the usual unhappy relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe’s powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state of things.