GEORGE CRABBE

I have chosen the subject of George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, partly out of attachment to the county of my birth, but also because I have certain faint though undoubted family links in connection with him.[2] In addition to this, his character, as a man as well as a poet, has a certain attraction for me; and even though there has been a revival of interest in him, comparatively few have studied him, or are acquainted with the facts of his life. Crabbe, however, was singularly fortunate in having a son, possessed of many valuable qualities as a biographer, for not only was he affectionate, and extraordinarily proud of his father, but at the same time he was not blind to his defects as a man or as a writer. And it must be remembered that Crabbe at his death occupied a place in public estimation, together with Scott and Byron; that the latter had described him as “Nature’s sternest painter and the best,” and had written of him, “Crabbe, the first of living poets.” A son, therefore, who under such circumstances could refrain from indiscriminating eulogy of a beloved father just after his death must be a man to be trusted.

George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Aldeburgh, a somewhat squalid little fishing town on the coast of Suffolk, rejoicing, however, in the dignity of a corporation, and returning two members to Parliament. His father was saltmaster and general factotum of the borough; a man, to all appearances, of rough manners, not improved by unfortunate circumstances; but sufficiently intelligent to recognise that in George he had a son who would repay a good education.[3] Not that with his narrow means he could do much; but he certainly did his best, and more than could be expected. George was intended for the medical profession; and it may be of interest to hear how a boy was educated to be a doctor in the eighteenth century. Young Crabbe was sent to school at Bungay, where he remained till his eleventh or twelfth year. He was next sent to a Mr. Richard Haddon at Stowmarket, where he showed considerable aptitude for mathematics, in which his father was also proficient. His master, to quote the biography, “though neither a Porson nor a Parr, laid the foundations of a fair classical education also.” But he soon had to return home and had to work in the warehouse of Slaughden Quay, piling up butter and cheese, duties which the poor boy—he was but thirteen, and was of a dreamy, meditative temperament—bitterly resented. But his father had not forgotten that George was to be a doctor, and seeing an advertisement, “Apprentice Wanted,” he sent him to Wickhambook, near Bury St. Edmunds. There he was treated as a mere drudge, slept with the ploughboy, worked on the farm, and learned his profession apparently by delivering medicine bottles to the neighbouring villages. In 1771, he removed to Woodbridge as apprentice to a Mr. Page, where he pursued his studies under more favourable circumstances. Here it was he met his future bride, Miss Elmy, at the neighbouring village of Parham, won a prize poem in the Lady’s Magazine owned by a Mr. Wheble, on the subject of “Hope”; and later he published at Ipswich a poem entitled “Inebriety,” in the preface of which he apologises “for those parts wherein I have taken such great liberties with Mr. Pope.” And it was certainly to Pope that Crabbe owed his inspiration. Now to imitate Pope’s versification is easy, and to copy his mannerisms not impossible; but to gain a double portion of his spirit, to emulate his epigrammatic terseness, above all to acquire anything like his knowledge of life and human nature can only be done by a man who is even in a measure akin to him in genius. Whether Crabbe was, it must be our endeavour to decide.

“Inebriety” did not catch on in Suffolk, a land which bears the epithet “silly” in two senses. I prefer the one which alludes to its numerous churches, “selig,” or pious. At any rate, no young author could expect an appreciative audience of clerics when he wrote thus:

Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 1775 and once more returned to Aldeburgh. His family circumstances were extremely distressed, his father had changed for the worse, and his mother’s health had broken down. Again he was compelled to act as a warehouseman at Slaughden Quay. He managed to get to London for a short time, nominally to walk the hospitals; but having no funds he had, as he expresses it, to “pick up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he could.” After ten months’ privation, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant of a surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill,[4] who had opened a shop in the borough, and on his retirement Crabbe, though “imperfectly grounded in the commonest details of his profession,” set up for himself. His medical career was a complete failure. He had not the requisite knowledge and lacked means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt himself to the rough surroundings amid which he lived. Aldeburgh was peopled, to quote his own words, by—

Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar by the relatives of Miss Elmy, to whom he was now engaged, regarded as a failure by his rough but not ungenerous father, Crabbe’s life was far from happy; the only relaxation he found was in the study of botany, and the only encouragement in the society of the officers of the Warwickshire militia, who were for a time quartered in the town. Their colonel, General Conway, showed the young surgeon attention, and gave him some valuable Latin books on botany. At last, wearied and disgusted with his life, Crabbe gave up attempting to be a doctor; and, aided by a loan of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for the borough, he made his way to London in 1780 as a literary adventurer.[5]

The early struggles of a man who has won literary fame are only of importance in so far as they affect his subsequent work. Crabbe’s intellect was essentially scientific rather than imaginative. His poetry is, like Dutch art, remarkable for the finish of details and for exactness of observation. It is the same when he depicts what he saw as when he describes emotions and feelings. He had to understand before he could write. His hobby, as we have seen, was botany: he first showed talent as a mathematician; nor, because he failed in his medical work, need we suppose that his want of success was due in any way to intellectual deficiencies. Place Crabbe in a different situation. Suppose him to have walked the hospitals of London or Edinburgh, and to have made his way as a physician. He might well have taken an honoured place among the scientific men of his age. But look at the facts. His training was hardly better than that of an assistant in a chemist’s store in the most remote village nowadays. This, for example, was the hospital which Crabbe had “walked”:

We see the influence of Pope in the versification; but of personal experience in the subject.

True, Crabbe detested his profession, and thus apostrophises medical books as—

But for all this, when in later life as a clergyman he used to prescribe for his poorer parishioners, he seems to have shown a power of diagnosis which made it evident that, though he failed as a surgeon apothecary, he might, had he had the requisite education, have succeeded as a consulting physician.[7]

Because he took Holy Orders and won his fame as a poet while a clergyman, Crabbe’s experiences, on which he founded his rhymed tales—for such his poems really are—are considered to have been mainly clerical. But, to understand him aright, we must remember that he was more or less engaged in the practice of medicine from the age of fourteen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy to quote many lines wherein the doctor and not the parson is revealed, and he never lost the professional dislike of quacks or contempt of valetudinarians.

Let us now consider how Crabbe’s experiences of Aldeburgh appear in his poems. I will take most of my extracts from his early poem, “The Village,” but a few will be from “The Borough,” which did not appear till more than twenty years later.

In “The Village” Crabbe boldly asks:

and declines to follow the fashion of speaking of rural life as the height of felicity. He says:

In this spirit he describes the barren coast of East Suffolk, not then the haunt of the holiday-maker and the golfer, but the battleground of the smuggler and the preventive men, the home of—

This description of the barren land about the coast well illustrates Crabbe’s power of observation:

We have already heard of the workhouse hospital and the “potent quack” who attended to the sick. Let us now listen to Crabbe’s description of the young clergyman who ministered to the afflicted of his village:

But I must reluctantly forbear to quote more from “The Village,” and ask you to turn your attention to two passages in “The Borough,” which show what sort of men lived in Crabbe’s native town, and also indicate the power our author has in depicting two very different characters.

I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, first. Grimes was one of those human monsters who delight in cruelty; and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to its shame, furnished victims for its exercise in workhouse apprentices. The guardians of the overflowing workhouses of London were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous numbers by binding children as apprentices to masters, who practically became the owners of the little victims they were paid to teach.

Grimes did several of these wretched boys to death by his cruelty, which was notorious in the borough, but the shocking thing was that nobody troubled to interfere.

At last Grimes, who seems to have been never quite sane in his brutality, went mad, and died raving at visions of his aged father and the boys he had done to death.

More inviting is a picture of another fisherman, the mayor of the borough:

At last he saved £240 ($1200), and asked a friend what to do with it. The friend suggests “put it out on interest.”

The friend tells Daniel that he will be paid five per cent. every year.

With great difficulty the principle of a mortgage is explained, and at last,

Such was the simplicity of the good folk of Aldeburgh, and so little news of the great world reached the place that, when Crabbe, at the age of twenty-five or six, went to London in 1780, he had never heard of the genius and tragic fate of Chatterton.

I shall pass over the terrible year our aspirant for fame spent in the Metropolis. It is a matter of personal pride to me to quote the following passage from the “Life”:

I am glad to think my great-grand-parents understood the duty of hospitality.

At last, after a terrible struggle with poverty and the unsuccessful publication of a poem called “The Candidate,” Crabbe, who had hitherto sought for a patron in vain, found one in Edmund Burke. It is said that the following lines, expressive of the writer’s feelings on quitting Aldeburgh, satisfied Burke that his petitioner was a poet:

Burke selected two poems, “The Village” and “The Library,” for publication. He introduced Crabbe to Fox, and also to Reynolds: the latter brought him to Dr. Johnson; and when Burke heard that Crabbe desired to be ordained, he induced Dr. Yonge, Bishop of Norwich, to overlook his unacademic education, and to admit him to the ministry. Lord Thurlow, himself an East Anglian, had at first refused to receive Crabbe, but now treated him with much kindness, and gave him £100 ($500); so Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh a clergyman—a very different position from that which he had occupied on leaving—and was shortly summoned thence to be domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, on the recommendation of his firm friend, Mr. Burke. From the Duke’s seat at Belvoir “The Village” was published, after it had been submitted to Burke and Johnson. Naturally Crabbe’s sentiments about rustic happiness and virtue accorded with the views of the worthy doctor, but it is pleasing to remark the kindness which made him at the height of his fame labour to improve the work of the younger poet. Very characteristic are Johnson’s corrections of Crabbe’s manuscript. Here is how Crabbe writes at the commencement of “The Village”:

From Johnson’s hands little remains unchanged:

I cannot feel very certain myself that the poet or his corrector got the concluding line right.

I must now pass somewhat hurriedly over a long period. In 1785 Crabbe published “The Newspaper,” and for twenty-two years he settled down to his clerical duties and did not reappear as an author. He lived at Stathern and Muston in Leicestershire the happy, domestic life of a country clergyman, returning to Suffolk when his wife inherited a share in the estate of her uncle, Mr. Tovell, at Parham.

In 1807 Crabbe appeared once more as a poet with “The Parish Register,” and from this time his fame was unquestioned. “The Borough” followed and then “The Tales.” But I need not weary you with dates and details. A new generation arose to encourage Crabbe. His first poems had been hailed by Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox; his later by Scott, Byron, Lord Holland, and Rogers. His last days were spent in comfort and comparative affluence at Trowbridge, to which he had been appointed by a later Duke of Rutland. In 1817 he was lionised in London, and in 1822 he paid his famous visit to Edinburgh and found Sir Walter Scott in the midst of that preposterous pageant in which the King and Sir William Curtis, Alderman of the City of London, delighted the Scottish nation by appearing at Holyrood, tremendous in Stewart tartan, with claymore, philabeg, and other accessories of the garb of old Gaul. Scott, unwearied by his efforts to organise the King’s visit, had time to welcome a brother poet, and it will be remembered that so delighted was he to greet one whose writings had so often occupied his attention that he sat down on the sacred glass out of which George IV had deigned to drink, with the natural result.[9] Crabbe lived on till February, 1832, passing away, full of years and honours, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

Crabbe’s works are sufficient to fill seven volumes, and it is not possible to do more than endeavour to form an estimate of him by limiting oneself to a few topics. I must content myself with three, and I fear that even then I cannot do justice to these. Those I propose are:

I. Crabbe as reflecting the manners of his age.

II. As a delineator of character.

III. His place as a poet.

I. I have spoken of Crabbe’s scientific education—such as it was—and of his power of observation, and I find, even in later life, more of the doctor than the parson. It is for this reason that his work is of more value than that of greater poets in reflecting his age. For Crabbe was not one of those who let “fancy lead the way,” but dealt with sober realities of experience, and even refrained from generalising or theorising. For the religious life of the period Crabbe’s poems are an invaluable document of which historians have, I suggest, made too little use. There is no reason to suppose that our author took Orders simply to secure literary leisure. His early diaries prove him a most devout man, and the fact that he occupied himself twenty-two years in parish work, without publishing, shows his devotion to his profession. Yet he apparently saw no harm in accepting two livings in Dorsetshire from the Lord Chancellor, which he scarcely ever went near, but took other work in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any compunctions later in leaving his parishes in the Midlands to the care of a non-resident clergyman in order to live on his wife’s property in Suffolk; and he evidently considered the then Duke of Rutland unduly slow in providing for him. He was not always popular with his parishioners. This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had been known under less prosperous circumstances, but he met with a good deal of opposition when, after his long residence in Suffolk, he returned to Muston; and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly for his flock, and only slowly won their sincere respect. A strict moralist, he had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a staunch Whig he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind. The serious and the profane alike distrusted him. The worldly remonstrated at his description of the workhouse chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and in deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines in “The Library”:

make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarised from Dryden:

Let us consider the clergy and religious teachers generally as he describes them.

I can only allude to the five rectors, whom old Dibble, the village clerk in the “Parish Register,” remembered. First comes “Good Master Addle,” who

and “dozing died”; Next was Parson Peele, whose favourite text was “I will not spare you,” and with “piercing jokes, and he’d a plenteous store,” raised the tithes all round. Dr. “Grandspear” followed Peele, a man who never stinted his “nappy beer,” and whom even cool Dissenters wished and hoped that a man so kind, “A way to heaven, though not their own, might find.” After him came the “Author Rector”—

He was succeeded by the young man from Cambridge, assailed in his youth by a “clamorous sect,” who preached “conviction” so violently that “Our best sleepers started as they slept.”

But says old Dibble:

And it is on this point that Crabbe is so illuminating as to the spirit of his age. His difficulties as a clergyman were due rather to the fanaticism than to the indifference of his flock. In “Sir Eustace Grey,” a very powerful description of a madman who finds religious peace at last, the poet concludes,—

As the doctor recommends a moderate and temperate life as the best preventive of disease, and distrusts strong remedies and universal panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the best medical tradition) regards the pastoral work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most respects, he is severe on what the eighteenth century styled “enthusiasm,” and on sentimentalism in religion generally.

Thus, in “The Borough” we have in the letter on religious sects a description of the contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had for Church teaching:

This “cauld morality,” as Scott makes Mr. Trumbull call it in “Redgauntlet,” is contrasted with a really rousing sermon:

Crabbe often found his work hindered by a sort of fatalistic quietism which gave no hope to the “unconverted,” even when they sought the aid of the minister of religion. In “Abel Keene” we have the story of a merchant’s clerk who abandoned his faith, and then in days of poverty came for help:

Crabbe had very little toleration for spiritual valetudinarians. He liked a good practical Christianity and was a little inclined to class the overscrupulous with the malades imaginaires. In “The Gentleman Farmer” we have a cleverly told story of a man of property, a professed atheist and an avowed enemy of priests and doctors. At last he fell ill; and his artful housekeeper, the meek Rebecca, produces a Scotch cousin, Dr. Mollet. He is so successful that Rebecca decides to allow the Rev. Mr. Whisp, a converted ostler, to advise her master. Mollet and Whisp between them point out that it is his duty to marry Rebecca. Then the three batten happily on their victim:

Though Crabbe lived in the days of the French Revolution and Tom Paine, infidelity seems to have given him far less trouble than the enthusiasm of his parishioners. In “The Learned Boy” we have the tale of a precocious lad such as our poet detested, a mean little creature, neat and docile at school, to whom much could be taught because he could imitate without reflecting:

As it was impossible to make such a lad into a farmer like his honest father, he was sent to an office in town and picked up some up-to-date views of the Bible from a brother-clerk. On his return he thus explained his views to his grandmother, much to the dear old lady’s distress:

The father, overhearing his hopeful son, treats him to a long discourse, driven home with a cartwhip, and concluding:

I have dealt hitherto with the subject of religion as showing how Crabbe can be used to illustrate his age. For politics I may refer to the witty tale of “The Dumb Orators”; for social life to “Amusements in the Borough,” and to “Clelia” and “Blaney” in the same collection.

II. In the biography the son writes with much discrimination of his father’s genius:

I believe that in delineation of character Crabbe is an artist indeed, worthy to rank with Jane Austen and the Brontës, and perhaps even more subtle than these ladies. He was not without a certain cynicism, and his powers of critical observation were great. He draws the drunken old reprobate in “The Borough,” the magnificent “Sir Denys Brand,” the gentle, suffering “Ellen Orford,” the University don in “Schools,” with masterly skill. I can only indicate his power in this respect by a few inadequate quotations.

The sketches of the characters in the almshouses in “The Borough” I commend to you as masterpieces. Clelia and Blaney had come down in life, and were without much excuse. They had been jobbed into the institution by Sir Denys Brand, and his words at the meeting of trustees throw a world of light on the baronet’s character. Of Blaney he says:

Of Clelia:

But though these two are powerfully drawn, Crabbe expends more care and skill in depicting Benbow, who had been

Benbow, whenever he could find an audience, used to dilate on “The men of might to mingle strong drink,” whom he had known. There was Squire Asgill, whose manor house was a disgrace and scandal to the countryside. It is needless to particularise. I can explain best by saying that his life was that of Sir Pitt Crawley in his later days, only he was more hospitable and generous. Let us see the worthy squire at his best, in church:

A still greater hero of Benbow’s was Captain Dowling, who was ready to drink against any rival: