Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was wrong to indulge all those inversions, those translocations, those ground and lofty syntactical tumblings which have mainly constituted poetic license, the ladies again relented, and allowed that there was much to say for what our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, or agreed as nearly as nine ladies could, that it was perhaps time that poetry should, as it certainly might, write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its true English place, and the adjective walking soberly before the noun; shunning those silly elisions like ne'er and o'er, and, above all, avoiding the weak and loathly omission of the definite article. Of the tinkle, by which they supposed the contrary-minded sister meant the rhyme, they said they could very well remember when there was no such thing in poetry; their native Greek had got on perfectly well without it, and even those poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns managed very well with blank verse.
The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these ladies, both because they were really great authorities and because it is always best to agree with ladies when you can. Besides, it would not have seemed quite the thing when they were inclining to this favorable view of their sister's contrary-mindedness, to take sides against her. In short, the Easy Chair reserved its misgivings for some such very intimate occasion as this, when it could impart them without wounding the susceptibilities of others, or risking a painful snub for itself. But it appeared to the Chair that the Muses did not go quite far enough in justifying the convention, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a form, existed. They could easily have proved that much of the mystical charm which differences poetry from prose resides in its license, its syntactical acrobatics, its affectations of diction, its elisions, its rhymes. As a man inverting his head and looking at the landscape between his legs gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect, so literature forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes really achieves something richly strange by the novel and surprising postures permissible in verse. The phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear keeps lingering in its porches, loath to let them depart, are usually full of these licenses. They have a witchery which could be as little proved as denied; and when any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere rigidly to the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty which is a sort of treason to his calling and will go far toward undoing him.
While the ladies of that club were talking, some such thoughts as these were in our mind, suggested by summer-long reading of a dear, delightful poet, altogether neglected in these days, who deserves to be known again wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is proof, indeed, how shallow was all the debate about realism and romanticism that the poetic tales of George Crabbe were never once alleged in witness of the charm which truth to condition and character has, in whatever form. But once, long before that ineffectual clamor arose, he was valued as he should be still. Edmund Burke was the first to understand his purpose and appreciate his work. He helped the poet not only with praises but with pounds till he could get upon his feet. He introduced Crabbe's verse to his great friends, to Doctor Johnson, who perceived at once that he would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who felt the brother-artist in him; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose oaths were harder than his heart toward the fearlessy fearful young singer. The sympathy and admiration of the highest and the best followed him through his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox loved him and his rhyme, and wished his tales to be read to him on the bed he never left alive. Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the brilliant Canning wrote him letters of cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the generous, the magnanimous, hailed him brother, and would always have his books by him; none of his poems appeared without the warmest welcome, the most discriminating and applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the first critic of his long day.
Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness of persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean, the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they abound in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen analysis, sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to bear the name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed.
Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same cæsura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that travel is the fool's paradise. For such a person to realize anything the terms are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a period of the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must first of all get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that; any one else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which is neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than it has worried along with hitherto.
XXV
A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK
They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he instantly felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in fiction of late. As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated by a delicate pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one else might have seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which compassion suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job, and he was not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and then say: "No, they don't want us any more. I don't understand why; it is very strange; but it is perfectly certain."
"Yes, there's no doubt of that," the young man returned, in a despair tinged with resentment.