Soil’d by rude hands who cut and came again;
She could not breathe, but, with a heavy sigh,
Reined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye;
She minced the sanguine flesh in pastimes fine
And wondered much to see the creatures dine.”
Then Mr. Crabbe goes on to describe Mr. Tovell’s cronies, who came after dinner, and enjoyed their punch, prosperous farmers or wealthy yeomen like himself. Their talk was at times too much for Mrs. Tovell, who withdrew; but “the servants, being considered much in the same point of view as the animals dozing on the hearth, remained.”
The life of Crabbe the poet as told by his son is an admirable piece of biography, and the Rev. George Crabbe, junr., was to my mind at least as good a realist in prose as his father in poetry. I wonder if I am right in conjecturing that you in New England had at the same time old farmers not very unlike Mr. Tovell who lived in prosperous simplicity like the old Suffolk Yeoman, rough in manner, coarse in expression, and blunt in sensibility, yet with an honest independence of character which redeemed much which to our eyes may seem repulsive.[17]
But the object of my remarks in this lecture has been to endeavour to give you an idea of what England, or part of it, was like about 1800; because I have another side of the picture to shew in my next lecture. The primitive simplicity of the peasant and the farmer was doomed to disappear, and the process had already begun. Still, side by side with a luxurious civilisation there were many traces of a roughness belonging to an early period in human development. To bring these facts into light, I do not think that the choice of my native county of Suffolk is a bad one.
When we turn from the peasant and trader, who in those days had little influence in controlling the country, to the classes which exercised power in the land, we come, as it were, to the surface of things; but, to use an agricultural metaphor, we cannot explain the crop without some knowledge of the soil. The explanation of many things, strange now to us in the most highly polished social circles, can be found in the character of the middle and lower classes of the time. When we come in my next lecture to deal with academic life we shall find men of the highest intellect marked by much of the uncouthness of the people described by Crabbe or Cobbold, for many scholars had passed their early days in the same surroundings; and when we go a step higher and associate with the wits, dandies, and politicians of the Regency, I think we shall acknowledge that only a very thin crust of superficial polish lay between them and the people whom they affected to despise. But this similarity does not merely extend to the faults of society; it is to be found in its virtues also. There is no lack of virile strength in the characters to which I have drawn your attention to-day; their good qualities are as marked as their defects, and we recognise in nearly every one of them qualities which brought England safe through a great crisis in its history.
APPENDIX TO “MARGARET CATCHPOLE”