Demons his guides, and death his doom."
Two fiends of darkness are told off to tempt him. One, presumably the Spirit of Gambling, robs him of his wealth, while the Spirit of Mania takes from him his reason, and drags him through a hell of horriblest imaginings. And it is at this point that what has been called the "dream-scenery" of the opium-eater is reproduced in a series of very remarkable stanzas:
The setting sun's last rays were shed,
And gave a mild and sober glow,
Where all were still, asleep, or dead;
Vast ruins in the midst were spread,
Pillars and pediments sublime,
Where the grey moss had form'd a bed,
And clothed the crumbling spoils of time.
"There was I fix'd, I know not how,
Condemn'd for untold years to stay:
Yet years were not;—one dreadful Now Endured no change of night or day;
The same mild evening's sleepy ray
Shone softly-solemn and serene,
And all that time I gazed away,
The setting sun's sad rays were seen.
"At length a moment's sleep stole on,—
Again came my commission'd foes;
Again through sea and land we're gone,
No peace, no respite, no repose:
Above the dark broad sea we rose,
We ran through bleak and frozen land;
I had no strength their strength t' oppose,
An infant in a giant's hand.
"They placed me where those streamers play,
Those nimble beams of brilliant light;
It would the stoutest heart dismay,
To see, to feel, that dreadful sight:
So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright,
They pierced my frame with icy wound;
And all that half-year's polar night,
Those dancing streamers wrapp'd me round
"Slowly that darkness pass'd away,
When down, upon the earth I fell,—
Some hurried sleep was mine by day;
But, soon as toll'd the evening bell,
They forced me on, where ever dwell
Far-distant men in cities fair,
Cities of whom no travellers tell,
Nor feet but mine were wanderers there
"Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,
As on we hurry through the dark;
The watch-light blinks as we go past,
The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark;
The watch-tower's bell sounds shrill; and, hark!
The free wind blows—we've left the town—
A wide sepulchral ground I mark,
And on a tombstone place me down.
"What monuments of mighty dead!
What tombs of various kind are found!
And stones erect their shadows shed
On humble graves, with wickers bound; Some risen fresh, above the ground,
Some level with the native clay:
What sleeping millions wait the sound,
'Arise, ye dead, and come away!'
Alas! they stay not for that call;
Spare me this woe! ye demons, spare!—
They come! the shrouded shadows all,—
'Tis more than mortal brain can bear;
Rustling they rise, they sternly glare
At man upheld by vital breath;
Who, led by wicked fiends, should dare
To join the shadowy troops of death!"
For about fifteen stanzas this power of wild imaginings is sustained, and, it must be admitted, at a high level as regards diction. The reader will note first how the impetuous flow of those visionary recollections generates a style in the main so lofty and so strong. The poetic diction of the eighteenth century, against which Wordsworth made his famous protest, is entirely absent. Then again, the eight-line stanza is something quite different from a mere aggregate of quatrains arranged in pairs. The lines are knit together; sonnet-fashion, by the device of interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh lines rhyming. And it is singularly effective for its purpose, that of avoiding the suggestion of a mere ballad-measure, and carrying on the descriptive action with as little interruption as might be.
The similarity of the illusions, here attributed to insanity, to those described by De Quincey as the result of opium, is too marked to be accidental. In the concluding pages of his Confessions, De Quincey writes: "The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive ... This disturbed me very much less than the vast expansion of time. Sometimes I seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night."
Compare Crabbe's sufferer:—
Condemn'd for untold years to stay
Yet years were not;—one dreadful Now Endured no change of night or day."
Again, the rapid transition from one distant land to another, from the Pole to the Tropics, is common to both experiences. The "ill-favoured ones" who are charged with Sir Eustace's expiation fix him at one moment
That crowns the steeple's quiv'ring spire"
just as the Opium-Fiend fixes De Quincey for centuries at the summit of Pagodas. Sir Eustace is accused of sins he had never committed:—
For treasons to my soul unfit;
I've been pursued through many a town
For crimes that petty knaves commit."
Even so the opium-eater imagines himself flying from the wrath of Oriental Deities. "I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the Ibis and the Crocodile trembled at." The morbid inspiration is clearly the same in both cases, and there can be little doubt that Crabbe's poem owes its inception to opium, and that the frame work was devised by him for the utilisation of his dreams.
But a curious and unexpected dénouement awaits the reader. When Sir Eustace's condition, as he describes it, seems most hopeless, its alleviation arrives through a religious conversion. There has been throughout present to him the conscience of "a soul defiled with every stain." And at the same moment, under circumstances unexplained, his spiritual ear is purged to hear a "Heavenly Teacher." The voice takes the form of the touching and effective hymn, which has doubtless found a place since in many an evangelical hymn-book, beginning
Come the way to Zion's gate;
There, till Mercy let thee in,
Knock and weep, and watch and wait.
Knock!—He knows the sinner's cry.
Weep!—He loves the mourner's tears.
Watch!—for saving grace is nigh
Wait,—till heavenly light appears."
And the hymn is followed by the pathetic confession on the sufferer's part that this blessed experience, though it has brought him the assurance of heavenly forgiveness, still leaves him, "though elect," looking sadly back on his old prosperity, and bearing, but unresigned, the prospect of an old ago spent amid his present gloomy surroundings. And yet Crabbe, with a touch of real imaginative insight, represents him in his final utterance as relapsing into a vague hope of some day being restored to his old prosperity:
Thus quickly all my pleasures end;
But I'll remember, when I pray,
My kind physician and his friend:
And those sad hours you deign to spend
With me, I shall requite them all.
Sir Eustace for his friends shall send,
And thank their love at Greyling Hall."[4]
The kind physician and his friend then proceed to diagnose the patient's condition—which they agree is that of "a frenzied child of grace," and so the poem ends. To one of its last stanzas Crabbe attached an apologetic note, one of the most remarkable ever penned. It exhibits the struggle that at that period must have been proceeding in many a thoughtful breast as to how the new wine of religion could be somehow accommodated to the old bottles:—
"It has been suggested to me that this change from restlessness to repose in the mind of Sir Eustace is wrought by a methodistic call; and it is admitted to be such: a sober and rational conversion could not have happened while the disorder of the brain continued; yet the verses which follow, in a different measure," (Crabbe refers to the hymn) "are not intended to make any religious persuasion appear ridiculous; they are to be supposed as the effect of memory in the disordered mind of the speaker, and though evidently enthusiastic in respect to language, are not meant to convey any impropriety of sentiment."
The implied suggestion (for it comes to this) that the sentiments of this devotional hymn, written by Crabbe himself, could only have brought comfort to the soul of a lunatic, is surely as good a proof as the period could produce of the bewilderment in the Anglican mind caused by the revival of personal religion under Wesley and his followers.
According to Crabbe's son Sir Eustace Grey was written at Muston in the winter of 1804-1805. This is scarcely possible, for Crabbe did not return to his Leicestershire living until the autumn of the latter year. Probably the poem was begun in Suffolk, and the final touches were added later. Crabbe seems to have told his family that it was written during a severe snow-storm, and at one sitting. As the poem consists of fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex construction, the accuracy of Crabbe's account is doubtful. If its inspiration was in some degree due to opium, we know from the example of S.T. Coleridge that the opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of memory or the accurate presentation of facts. After Crabbe's death, there was found in one of his many manuscript note-books a copy of verses, undated, entitled The World of Dreams, which his son printed in subsequent editions of the poems. The verses are in the same metre and rhyme-system as Sir Eustace, and treat of precisely the same class of visions as recorded by the inmate of the asylum. The rapid and continuous transition from scene to scene, and period to period, is the same in both. Foreign kings and other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in ghostly and repellent forms:—
Into a large and Gothic hall,
Seated with those I never sought—
Kings, Caliphs, Kaisers--silent all; Pale as the dead; enrobed and tall,
Majestic, frozen, solemn, still;
They make my fears, my wits appal,
And with both scorn and terror fill."
This, again, may be compared, or rather contrasted, with Coleridge's Pains of Sleep, and it can hardly be doubted that the two poems had a common origin.
The year 1805 was the last of Crabbe's sojourn in Suffolk, and it was made memorable in the annals of literature by the appearance of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. Crabbe first met with it in a bookseller's shop in Ipswich, read it nearly through while standing at the counter, and pronounced that a new and great poet had appeared.
This was Crabbe's first introduction to one who was before long to prove himself one of his warmest admirers and friends. It was one of Crabbe's virtues that he was quick to recognise the worth of his poetical contemporaries. He had been repelled, with many others, by the weak side of the Lyrical Ballads, but he lived to revere Wordsworth's genius. His admiration for Burns was unstinted. But amid all the signs of a poetical renaissance in progress, and under a natural temptation to tread the fresh woods and pictures new that were opening before him, it showed a true judgment in Crabbe that he never faltered in the conviction that his own opportunity and his own strength lay elsewhere. Not in the romantic or the mystical—not in perfection of form or melody of lyric verse, were his own humbler triumphs to be won. Like Wordsworth, he was to find a sufficiency in the "common growth of mother-earth," though indeed less in her "mirth" than in her "tears," Notwithstanding his Eustace Grey, and World of Dreams, and the really powerful story of Aaron the Gipsy (afterwards to appear as the The Hall of Justice), Crabbe was returning to the themes and the methods of The Village. He had already completed The Parish Register, and had The Borough in contemplation, when he returned to his Leicestershire parish. The woods of Belvoir, and the rural charms of Parham and Glemham, had not dimmed the memory of the sordid little fishing-town, where the spirit of poetry had first met him, and thrown her mantle round him.
And now the day had come when the mandate of the bishop could no longer be ignored. In October 1805, Crabbe with his wife and two sons returned to the Parsonage at Muston. He had been absent from his joint livings about thirteen years, of which four had been spent at Parham, five at Great Glemham, and four at Rendham, all three places lying within a small area, and within reach of the same old friends and relations. No wonder that he left the neighbourhood with a reluctance that was probably too well guessed by his parishioners in the Vale of Belvoir.
[Footnote 3: Richard Turner of Yarmouth was a man of considerable culture, and belonged to a family of scholars. His eldest brother was Master of Pembroke, Cambridge, and Dean of Norwich: his youngest son was Sir Charles Turner, a Lord Justice of Appeal; and Dawson Turner was his nephew. Richard Turner was the intimate friend of Dr. Parr, Paley, and Canning.]
[Footnote 4: Readers of Lockhart's Biography will remember that in one of Scott's latest letters to his son-in-law, before he left England for Naples, he quoted and applied to himself this stanza of Sir Eustace Grey. The incident is the more pathetic that Scott, as he wrote the words, was quite aware that his own mind was failing.]
CHAPTER VI
"When in October, 1805, Mr. Crabbe resumed the charge of his own parish of Muston, he found some changes to vex him, and not the less because he had too much reason to suspect that his long absence from his incumbency had been, partly at least, the cause of them. His cure had been served by respectable and diligent clergymen, but they had been often changed, and some of them had never resided within the parish; and he felt that the binding influence of a settled and permanent minister had not been withdrawn for twelve years with impunity. A Wesleyan missionary had formed a thriving establishment in Muston, and the congregations at the parish church were no longer such as they had been of old. This much annoyed my father; and the warmth with which he began to preach against dissent only irritated himself and others, without bringing back disciples to the fold."
So writes Crabbe's son with his wonted frankness and good judgment. Moreover, besides the Wesleyan secession, the mischievous extravagances of William Huntington (S.S.) had found their way into the parish. To make matters worse, a former gardener of Crabbe's had set up as a preacher of the doctrines of this fanatic, who was still attracting crowds in London. Then, too, as another fruit of the rector's long absence, strange stories of his political opinions had become current. Owing, doubtless, to his renewed acquaintance with Dudley North at Glemham, and occasional association with the Whig leaders at his house, he had exposed himself to the terrible charge that he was a Jacobin!
Altogether Crabbe's clerical position in Leicestershire, during the next nine years, could not have been very comfortable. But he was evidently still, as always, the devout and kindly pastor of his flock, and happily for himself, he was now to receive new and unexpected tributes to his popularity in other fields. His younger son, John, now eighteen years of age, was shortly to go up to Cambridge, and this fresh expense had to be provided for. To this end, a volume of poems, partly old and partly new, had been for some time in preparation, and in September 1807, it appeared from the publishing house of John Hatchard in Piccadilly. In it were included The Library, The Newspaper, and The Village. The principal new poem was The Parish Register, to which were added Sir Eustace Grey and The Hall of Justice. The volume was prefaced by a Dedication to Henry Richard Fox, third Lord Holland, nephew and sometime ward of Charles James Fox, and the reason for such dedication is told at greater length in the long autobiographical introduction that follows.
Twenty-two years had elapsed since Crabbe's last appearance as an author, and he seems to have thought it due to his readers to give some reason for his long abstention from the poet's 'idle trade.' He pleads a higher 'calling,' that of his professional duties, as sufficient excuse. Moreover, he offers the same excuse for his 'progress in the art of versification' being less marked than his readers might otherwise expect. He then proceeds to tell the story of the kindness he had received from Burke (who had died in 1797); the introduction by him to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through him again to Samuel Johnson. He gives in full Johnson's note approving The Village, and after a further laborious apology for the shortcomings of his present literary venture, goes on to tell the one really relevant incident of its appearance. Crabbe had determined, he says, now that his old valued advisers had passed away, not to publish anything more—
as I might with some confidence rely upon. I looked for a
friend who, having the discerning taste of Mr. Burke and the
critical sagacity of Doctor Johnson, would bestow upon my
MS. the attention requisite to form his opinion, and would
then favour me with the result of his observations; and it
was my singular good fortune to obtain such assistance—the
opinion of a critic so qualified, and a friend so disposed to
favour me. I had been honoured by an introduction to the
Right Hon. Charles James Fox, some years before, at the
seat of Mr. Burke; and being again with him, I received a
promise that he would peruse any work I might send to him
previous to its publication, and would give me his opinion.
At that time I did not think myself sufficiently prepared;
and when afterwards I had collected some poems for his inspection,
I found my right honourable friend engaged by the
affairs of a great empire, and struggling with the inveteracy
of a fatal disease. At such time, upon such mind, ever disposed
to oblige as that mind was, I could not obtrude the
petty business of criticising verses; but he remembered the
promise he had kindly given, and repeated an offer which though I had not presumed to expect, I was happy to receive.
A copy of the poems, now first published, was sent to him,
and (as I have the information from Lord Holland, and his
Lordship's permission to inform my readers) the poem which
I have named The Parish Register was heard by Mr. Fox,
and it excited interest enough by some of its parts to gain for
me the benefit of his judgment upon the whole. Whatever he
approved, the reader will readily believe, I have carefully
retained: the parts he disliked are totally expunged, and
others are substituted, which I hope resemble those more
conformable to the taste of so admirable a judge. Nor can I
deny myself the melancholy satisfaction of adding that this
poem (and more especially the history of Phoebe Dawson,
with some parts of the second book) were the last compositions
of their kind that engaged and amused the capacious, the
candid, the benevolent mind of this great man."
It was, as we have seen, at Dudley North's residence in Suffolk that Crabbe had renewed his acquaintance with Fox, and received from him fresh offers of criticism and advice. And now the great statesman had passed beyond reach of Crabbe's gratitude. He had died in the autumn of 1806, at the Duke of Devonshire's, at Chiswick. His last months wore of great suffering, and the tedium of his latter days was relieved by being read aloud to—the Latin poets taking their turn with Crabbe's pathetic stories of humble life. In the same preface, Crabbe further expresses similar obligations to his friend, Richard Turner of Yarmouth. The result of this double criticism is the more discernible when we compare The Parish Register with, its successor, The Borough, in the composition of which Crabbe admits, in the preface to that poem, that he had trusted more entirely to his own judgment.
In The Parish Register, Crabbe returns to the theme which he had treated twenty years before in The Village, but on a larger and more elaborate scale. The scheme is simple and not ineffective. A village clergyman is the narrator, and with his registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials open before him, looks through the various entries for the year just completed. As name after name recalls interesting particulars of character and incident in their history, he relates them as if to an imaginary friend at his side. The precedent of The Deserted Village is still obviously near to the writer's mind, and he is alternately attracted and repelled by Goldsmith's ideals. 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:—
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?
Vain search for scenes like these! no view appears,
By sighs unruffled, or unstain'd by tears;
Since vice the world subdued and waters drown'd,
Auburn and Eden can no more be found."
And yet the poet at once proceeds to describe his village in much the same tone, and with much of the same detail as Goldsmith had done:—
Source of his pride, his pleasure, and his gain, Screen'd from the winter's-wind, the sun's last ray
Smiles on the window and prolongs the day;
Projecting thatch the woodbine's branches stop,
And turn their blossoms to the casement's top;
All need requires is in that cot contain'd,
And much that taste untaught and unrestrain'd
Surveys delighted: there she loves to trace,
In one gay picture, all the royal race;
Around the walls are heroes, lovers, kings;
The print that shows them and the verse that sings."
Then follow, as in The Deserted Village, the coloured prints, and ballads, and even The Twelve Good Rules, that decorate the walls: the humble library that fills the deal shelf "beside the cuckoo clock"; the few devotional works, including the illustrated Bible, bought in parts with the weekly sixpence; the choice notes by learned editors that raise more doubts than they close. "Rather," exclaims Crabbe:
Who with no deep researches vex the brain;
Who from the dark and doubtful love to run,
And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun."
The last line of which he conveyed, no doubt unconsciously, from Young. Nothing can be more winning than the picture of the village home thus presented. And outside it, the plot of carefully-tended ground, with not only fruits and herbs but space reserved for a few choice flowers, the rich carnation and the "pounced auricula":—
Meet and rejoice a family of friends:
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."
This charming passage is thoroughly in Goldsmith's vein, and even shows markedly the influence of his manner, and yet it is no mere echo of another poet. The scenes described are those which had become dear and familiar to Crabbe during years of residence in Leicestershire and inland Suffolk. And yet at this very juncture, Crabbe's poetic conscience smites him. It is not for him, he remembers, to deal only with the sweeter aspects, though he knows them to exist, of village life. He must return to its sterner side:—
But vice and misery now demand the song;
And turn our view from dwellings simply neat,
To this infected Row we term our Street."
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:—
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."
It is obvious, I think, that Crabbe's representations of country life here, as in The Village and The Borough, are often eclectic, and that for the sake of telling contrast, he was at times content to blend scenes that he had witnessed under very opposite conditions.
The section entitled "Baptisms" deals accordingly with many sad instances of "base-born" children, and the section on "Marriages" also has its full share of kindred instances in which the union in Church has only been brought about by pressure from the parish authorities. The marriage of one such "compelled bridegroom" is related with a force and minuteness of detail throughout which not a word is thrown away:—
Brought by strong passions and a warrant there;
By long rent cloak, hung loosely, strove the bride
From every eye, what all perceived, to hide.
While the boy-bridegroom, shuffling in his pace,
Now hid awhile, and then exposed his face;
As shame alternately with anger strove
The brain, confused with muddy ale, to move,
In haste and stammering he perform'd his part,
And look'd the rage that rankled in his heart:
(So will each lover inly curse his fate,
Too soon made happy, and made wise too late:)
I saw his features take a savage gloom,
And deeply threaten for the days to come.
Low spake the lass, and lisp'd and minced the while,
Look'd on the lad, and faintly tried to smile;
With soften'd speech and humbled tone she strove
To stir the embers of departed love:
While he, a tyrant, frowning walk'd before,
Felt the poor purse, and sought the public door,
She sadly following in submission went
And saw the final shilling foully spent; Then to her father's hut the pair withdrew,
And bade to love and comfort long adieu!
Ah! fly temptation, youth, refrain! refrain!
I preach for ever; but I preach in vain!"
There is no "mealy-mouthed philanthropy" here. No one can doubt the earnestness and truth of the poet's mingled anger and sorrow. The misery of irregular unions had never been "bitten in" with more convincing force. The verse, moreover, in the passage is freer than usual from many of Crabbe's eccentricities. It is marked here and there by his fondness for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists have not overlooked. The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse than Dickens's mention of the lady who went home "in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indulgence in this habit is never a mere concession to the reader's flippant taste. His epigrams often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:—
The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful. The gradual steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality. The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as Frederick Walker's Lost Path, or Langhorne's "Child of misery, baptized in tears." That it will ever again be ranked with such may be doubtful, for technique is the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and Crabbe's technique is too often defective in the extreme.
These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at proper intervals by some of lighter complexion. There is the gentleman's gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names of his plants,—Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio. Then we have the gallant, gay Lothario, who not only fails to lead astray the lovely Fanny Price, but is converted by her to worthier aims, and ends by becoming the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic suitor. There is an impressive sketch of the elderly prude:—
Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice";
and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants to the tender mercies of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described in lines curiously anticipating Hood's Haunted House:—
Worms ate the floors, the tap'stry fled the wall:
No fire the kitchen's cheerless grate display'd;
No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey'd;
The crawling worm that turns a summer fly,
Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die
The winter-death:—upon the bed of state,
The bat shrill shrieking woo'd his flickering mate."
In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:—
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;
Presents no objects tender or profound
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around."
And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing "some scholar" read the list of her titles and her virtues, "looked disdain and said":—
What some brave marble soon in Church shall show?
Where not alone her gracious name shall stand,
But how she lived—the blessing of the land;
How much we all deplored the noble dead,
What groans we uttered and what tears we shed;
Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes
Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise;
Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave,
The noble Lady to our sorrows gave!"
These portraits of the ignoble rich are balanced by one of the "noble peasant" Isaac Ashford, drawn, as Crabbe's son tells us, from a former parish-clerk of his father's at North Glemham. Coming to be past work through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the probability of the parish poorhouse, and reconciling himself to his lot is happily spared the sore trial:—
But came not there, for sudden was his fate,
He dropp'd, expiring, at his cottage-gate.
I feel his absence in the hours of prayer,
And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there:
I see no more those white locks thinly spread
Round the bald polish of that honour'd head;
No more that awful glance on playful wight,
Compell'd to kneel and tremble at the sight,
To fold his fingers, all in dread the while,
Till Mister Ashford soften'd to a smile;
No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer,
Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there:—
But he is blest, and I lament no more
A wise, good man, contented to be poor."
Where Crabbe is represented, not unfairly, as dwelling mainly on the seamy side of peasant and village life, such passages as the above are not to be overlooked.
This final section ("Burials") is brought to a close by an ingenious incident which changes the current of the vicar's thoughts. He is in the midst of the recollections of his departed flock when the tones of the passing-bell fall upon his ear. On sending to inquire he finds that they tell of a new death, that of his own aged parish-sexton, "old Dibble" (the name, it may be presumed, an imperfect reminiscence of Justice Shallow's friend). The speaker's thoughts are now directed to his old parish servant, and to the old man's favourite stories of previous vicars under whom he has served. Thus the poem ends with sketches of Parson Addle, Parson Peele, Dr. Grandspear and others—among them the "Author-Rector," intended (the younger Crabbe thought) as a portrait of the poet himself. Finally Crabbe could not resist the temptation to include a young parson, "a youth from Cambridge," who has imbibed some extreme notions of the school of Simeon, and who is shown as fearful on his death-bed lest he should have been guilty of too many good works. He appeals to his old clerk on the subject:—
My moral-rags defile me every one;
It should not be:—what say'st thou! Tell me, Ralph.'
'Quoth I, your Reverence, I believe you're safe;
Your faith's your prop, nor have you pass'd such time
In life's good works as swell them to a crime.
If I of pardon for my sins were sure,
About my goodness I would rest secure.'"
The volume containing The Parish Register, The Village, and others, appeared in the autumn of 1807; and Crabbe's general acceptance as a poet of mark dates from that year. Four editions were issued by Mr. Hatchard during the following year and a half—the fourth appearing in March 1809. The reviews were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, and within two days of the appearance of this article, according to Crabbe's son, the whole of the first edition was sold off.
At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite pleasure. At the time "when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn," he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real life. After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar benefit. The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then sunk. When Crabbe published his Parish Register, the novels of the day were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck the note of a new development in her Castle Rackrent, not to mention the delightful stories in The Parents' Assistant, Simple Susan, Lazy Lawrence, or The Basket-Woman. Galt's masterpiece, The Annals of the Parish, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk. The Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant. Miss Mitford's sketches in Our Village—the nearest in form to Crabbe's pictures of country life--were to come later still. Crabbe, though he adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really a chief founder of the rural novel—the Silas Marner and the Adam Bede of fifty years later. Of course (for no man is original) he had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors. Pope was his earliest master in his art. And what Pope had done in his telling couplets for the man and woman of fashion—the Chloes and Narcissas of his day—Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. 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.
In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now reduced by the publisher to the form of two small volumes, and in their fourth edition) to Walter Scott, who acknowledged them and Crabbe's accompanying letter in a friendly reply, to which reference has already been made. After mentioning how for more than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of a personal introduction to Crabbe, and how, as a lad of eighteen, he had met with selections from The Village and The Library in The Annual Register, he continues:—
your poems at a late period assume the rank in the public consideration which they so well deserve. It was a triumph
to my own immature taste to find I had anticipated the
applause of the learned and the critical, and I became very
desirous to offer my gratulor among the more important
plaudits which you have had from every quarter. I should
certainly have availed myself of the freemasonry of authorship
(for our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Abhorson's)
to address to you a copy of a new poetical attempt, which I
have now upon the anvil, and I esteem myself particularly obliged
to Mr. Hatchard, and to your goodness acting upon his
information, for giving me the opportunity of paving the way
for such a freedom. I am too proud of the compliments
you honour me with to affect to decline them; and with
respect to the comparative view I have of my own labours
and yours, I can only assure you that none of my little folks,
about the formation of whose tastes and principles I may be
supposed naturally solicitous, have ever read any of my own
poems—while yours have been our regular evening's amusement
My eldest girl begins to read well, and enters as well
into the humour as into the sentiment of your admirable
descriptions of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has
seldom existed among those who know by experience that
there are much better things in the world than literary
reputation, and that one of the best of those good things is
the regard and friendship of those deservedly and generally
esteemed for their worth or their talents. I believe many
dilettante authors do cocker themselves up into a great
jealousy of anything that interferes with what they are
pleased to call their fame: but I should as soon think of
nursing one of my own fingers into a whitlow for my private
amusement as encouraging such a feeling. I am truly sorry
to observe you mention bad health: those who contribute so
much to the improvement as well as the delight of society
should escape this evil. I hope, however, that one day your
state of health may permit you to view this country."
This interchange of letters was the beginning of a friendship that was to endure and strengthen through the lives of both poets, for they died in the self-same year. The "new poetical attempt" that was "on the anvil" must have been The Lady of the Lake, completed and published in the following year. But already Scott had uneasy misgivings that the style would not bear unlimited repetition. Even before Byron burst upon the world with the two first cantos of Childe Harold, and drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, Scott had made the unwelcome discovery that his own matter and manner was imitable, and that others were borrowing it. Many could now "grow the flower" (or something like it), for "all had got the seed." It was this persuasion that set him thinking whether he might not change his topics and his metre, and still retain his public. To this end he threw up a few tiny ballons d'essai—experiments in the manner of some of his popular contemporaries, and printed them in the columns of the Edinburgh Annual Register. One of these was a grim story of village crime called The Poacher, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe. Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into another's mould. A few lines may suffice, in evidence. The couplet about the vicar's sermons makes one sure that for the moment Scott was good-humouredly copying one foible at least of his original:—
Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep; Sunk 'mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun
Stoop to the west, the plunderer's toils are done.
Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand,
Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand,
While round the hut are in disorder laid
The tools and booty of his lawless trade;
For force or fraud, resistance or escape
The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape;
His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards,
And the filched lead the church's roof affords—
(Hence shall the rector's congregation fret,
That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.)
The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there,
Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare,
Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare.
Bartered for game from chase or warren won,
Yon cask holds moonlight,[5] seen when moon was none;
And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart,
To wait the associate higgler's evening cart."
Happily for Scott's fame, and for the world's delight, he did not long pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. Rokeby appeared, was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of Waverley and the need of conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever. But his affection for Crabbe never waned. In his earlier novels there was no contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters—and it was Crabbe's Borough to which he listened with unfailing delight twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.