Alfred Ainger

“ To travel through the borough from end to end is to pass through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and under a cloudy heaven, with only rare gleams of sunshine, and patches of blue sky. These, when they occur, are proportionally welcome. They include some exquisite descriptions of nature, though with Crabbe it will be noticed that it is always the nature close about his feet, the hedge-row, the meadow, the cottage-garden: as his son has noted, his outlook never extends to the landscape beyond. ”

“ For his object was to portray an English rural village in its ideality—rural loveliness—enshrining rural innocence and joy—and to show how man's vices, invading it from the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to be attributed to the insidious attacks from without. ”

“ For even the village of trim gardens and cherished Bibles has its "slums," and on these slums Crabbe proceeds to enlarge with almost ferocious realism:—
"Here, in cabal, a disputatious crew Each evening meet; the sot, the cheat, the shrew; Riots are nightly heard:—the curse, the cries Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies, While shrieking children hold each threat'ning hand, And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand; Boys, in their first-stol'n rags, to swear begin; And girls, who heed not dress, are skill'd in gin." ”

“ All speak aloud, are happy and are free, And glad they seem, and gaily they agree. What, though fastidious ears may shun the speech, Where all are talkers, and where none can teach; Where still the welcome and the words are old, And the same stories are for ever told; Yet theirs is joy that, bursting from the heart, Prompts the glad tongue these nothings to impart; That forms these tones of gladness we despise, That lifts their steps, that sparkles in their eyes; That talks or laughs or runs or shouts or plays, And speaks in all there looks and all their ways. ”

“ He must deal with the happinesses of life and not only with its miseries; with its harmonies and not only its dislocations. He must remember the thousand homes in which is to be found the quiet and faithful discharge of duty, inspired at once and illumined by the family affections, and not forget that in such as these the strength of a country lies. Crabbe is often spoken of as our first great realist in the poetry and fiction of the last century, and the word is often used as if it meant chiefly plain-speaking as to the sordid aspects of life. ”

“ The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George Crabbe, not unjustly, "thought scorn."
"The village life, and every care that reigns O'er youthful peasants and declining swains, What labour yields, and what, that labour past, Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last; What form the real picture of the poor, Demand a song—the Muse can give no more. Fled are those times when in harmonious strains The rustic poet praised his native plains: No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse, Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse ”

“ Weak thou art not, yet not enough on guard Where wit and humour keep their watch and ward. Men gay and noisy will o'erwhelm thy sense, Then loudly laugh at Truth's and thy expense: While the kind ladies will do all they can To check their mirth, and cry 'The good young man!'"
Meantime there were alleviations of the poet's lot. If the guests of the house were not always convinced by his arguments and the servants did not disguise their contempt, the Duke and Duchess were kind, and made him their friend. Nor was the Duke without an intelligent interest in Crabbe's own subjects. ”

“ Assuredly no more striking antithesis to Crabbe's habitual impressions of human life can be found than in the touching and often beautiful couplets of Rogers, a poet as neglected today as Crabbe. Rogers's picture of wedded happiness finds no parallel, I think, anywhere in the pages of his brother-poet:—
"Across the threshold led, And every tear kissed off as soon as shed, His house she enters, there to be a light Shining within, when all without is night; A guardian angel o'er his life presiding, Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing! ”

“ The story is of the slightest—an incident rather than a story. The lover, joyous and buoyant, traverses the dreary coast scenery of Suffolk, and because he is happy, finds beauty and charm in the commonest and most familiar sights and sounds of nature: every single hedge-row blossom, every group of children at their play. The poem is indeed an illustration of Coleridge's lines in his ode Dejection:
"O Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live,— Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud." ”

“ For instance, the poem opens with an introduction of some length in which the general aspects of village life are described. Crabbe begins by repudiating any idea of such life as had been described by his predecessor:—
"Is there a place, save one the poet sees, A land of love, of liberty, and ease; Where labour wearies not, nor cares suppress Th' eternal flow of rustic happiness: Where no proud mansion frowns in awful state, Or keeps the sunshine from the cottage-gate; Where young and old, intent on pleasure, throng, And half man's life is holiday and song? ”

“ There are men who, under the impulse of a purely materialist science, declare the sense of moral freedom to be an illusion. This is of course a gross error. But what has largely played into the hands of this error is the exaggerated idea of human freedom which is ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by ignoring our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this that we need to have brought home to us. There is an admirable story among George Crabbe's Tales called 'The Gentleman Farmer.' The hero starts in life resolved that he will not put up with any bondage. ”

“ In the story of The Patron, the young student living as the rich man's guest is advised by his father as to his behaviour with a fulness of detail obviously derived from Crabbe's own recollections of his early deficiencies:—
"Thou art Religion's advocate—take heed. Hurt not the cause thy pleasure 'tis to plead; With wine before thee, and with wits beside, Do not in strength of reasoning powers confide; What seems to thee convincing, certain, plain, They will deny and dare thee to maintain; And thus will triumph o'er thy eager youth, While thou wilt grieve for so disgracing truth. ”

“ They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend, Or seek companions at their journey's end? Here are not those whom they when infants knew; Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew; Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived; Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived ”

“ It was because Crabbe too often laid greater stress on the ugliness than on the beauty of things, that he fails to that extent to be the full and adequate painter and poet of humble life.
He was a dispeller of many illusions. He could not give us the joy that Goldsmith, Cowper, and William Barnes have given, but he discharged a function no less valuable than theirs, and with an individuality that has given him a high and enduring place in the poetry of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Who pants for triumph seldom wins the race: Venture not all, but wisely hoard thy worth, And let thy labours one by one go forth Some happier scrap capricious wits may find On a fair day, and be profusely kind; Which, buried in the rubbish of a throng, Had pleased as little as a new-year's song, Or lover's verse, that cloyed with nauseous sweet, Or birthday ode, that ran on ill-paired feet. Merit not always—Fortune Feeds the bard, And as the whim inclines bestows reward None without wit, nor with it numbers gain ”

“ Indeed, at this juncture, the rhymed heroic couplet, as a vehicle for the poetry of imagination, was tottering to its fall, though it lingered for many years as the orthodox form for university prize poems, and for occasional didactic or satirical effusions. Crabbe, very wisely, remained faithful to the metre. For his purpose, and with his subjects and special gifts, none probably would have served him better. For narrative largely blended with the analytical and the epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse (had he ever mastered it) would have sufficed. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ After quoting Sir Leslie Stephen's most true remark that "with all its short-and long-comings Crabbe's better work leaves its mark on the reader's mind and memory as only the work of genius can, while so many a more splendid vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark behind." FitzGerald adds: "If this abiding impression result (as perhaps in the case of Richardson or Wordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked in through the longer process by which the man's peculiar genius works, any abridgement, whether of omission or epitome, will diminish from the effect of the whole." ”

“ We have the authority of Crabbe's son and biographer for saying that he never really cared for the profession he had adopted. What proficiency he finally attained in it, before he forsook it for ever, is not quite clear. But it is certain that his residence among the more civilised and educated inhabitants of Woodbridge was of the greatest service to him. He profited notably by joining a little club of young men who met on certain evenings at an inn for discussion and mutual improvement. To this little society Crabbe was to owe one chief happiness of his life. ”

“ Crabbe intended to ask whether it was safe to desert truth and nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even though Virgil had set the example. Johnson's version seems to obscure rather than to make clearer this interpretation. Crabbe, after this protest against the conventional, which, if unreal at the outset, had become a thousand times more wearisome by repetition, passes on to a daring presentation of real life lived among all the squalor of actual poverty, not unskilfully interspersed with descriptions equally faithful of the barren coast-scenery among which he had been brought up. ”

“ Then, too, Thomson's "lovely young Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share of influence. But Crabbe's achievement was practically a new thing. The success of The Parish Register was largely that of a new adventure in the world of fiction. Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might discover in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories—for a truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could not be unshared. ”

“ Crabbe's son thought good to devote several pages of his Memoir to the question why his father, having now no unmarried son to be his companion, should not have taken such a sensible step as to marry again. For the old man, if he deserved to be so called at the age of sixty-two, was still very susceptible to the charms of female society, and indeed not wholly free from the habit of philandering—a habit which occasionally "inspired feelings of no ordinary warmth" in the fair objects of "his vain devotion." One such incident all but ended in a permanent engagement. ”

“ Upon my soul I'm sorry for the lad; And now, no doubt, th' obliging world will say That my harsh usage help'd him on his way: What! I suppose, I should have nursed his muse, And with champagne have brighten'd up his views, Then had he made me famed my whole life long, And stunn'd my ears with gratitude and song. ”

“ The loneliness and weariness of workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and friends, in "the day-room of a London workhouse," have been lately set forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe's Borough:—
"Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet? Who learn the story current in the street? Who to the long-known intimate impart Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart? ”

“ If he must not conceal the sterner side, equally is he bound to remember the sunnier and more serene. If a poet is to deal justly with the life of the rich or poor, he must take into fullest account, and give equal prominence to, the homes where happiness abides. ”

“ Who slily drops quotations all about Packet or Post, and points their merit out; Who advertises what reviewers say, With sham editions every second day; Who dares not trust his praises out of sight, But hurries into fame with all his might; Although the verse some transient praise obtains, Contempt is all the anxious poet gains"
The Newspaper seems to have been coldly received by the critics, who had perhaps been led by The Village to expect something very different, and Crabbe never returned to the satirical-didactic line. ”

“ Nay, there's a charm beyond what nature shows, The bloom is softer and more sweetly glows; Pierced by no crime and urged by no desire For more than true and honest hearts require, They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed Through the green lane,—then linger in the mead,— Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom,— And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum ”

“ Though a village is the scene of meeting between my two principal characters, and gives occasion to other characters and relations in general, yet I no more describe the manners of village inhabitants. My people are of superior classes, though not the most elevated; and, with a few exceptions, are of educated and cultivated minds and habits." In making this change Crabbe was also aware that some kind of unity must be given to those new studies of human life. ”

“ Sybil is by no means unwilling to enter the holy state, if the right man can be found. Indeed, she is wearying of the aimless life she lives with her worldly aunt, and the gradual change in her thoughts and hopes is indicated in a passage of much delicacy and insight:
"Jonas now ask'd his daughter—and the Aunt, Though loth to lose her, was obliged to grant.— But would not Sybil to the matron cling, And fear to leave the shelter of her wing? No! in the young there lives a love of change, And to the easy they prefer the strange! ”