English Men of Letters: Crabbe

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the information he was afterwards to use, never extracted this date from him. He tells us that up to the time of his undertaking the Biography, he did not even know that the original of the letter was in existence. He also tells us that until he and his brother saw the letter they had little idea of the extreme poverty and anxiety which their father had experienced during his time in London. Obviously Crabbe himself had been reticent on the subject even with his own family. From the midsummer of 1780, when the

er consists of further details of Crabbe's early life, not supplied in the earlier effusion. At the date of this second letter, Crabbe had been known to Burke three or four months. During that time Crabbe had been constantly seeing Burke, and with his help had been revising for the press the poem of The Library, which was published by Dodsley in this very month, June 1781. The first impression, accordingly, produced on us by the letter, is one of surprise that after so long a period of intimate association with Burke, Crabbe should still be writing in a tone of profound anxiety and discourag

not the good fortune to obtain more, nor from a prudent man could I perhaps expect so much. But from the family at Beccles I have every mark of their attention, and every proof of their disinterested regard. They have from time to time supplied me with such sums as they could possibly spare, and that they have not done more arose from my concealing the severity of my situation, for I would not involve in my errors or misfortunes a very generous and very happy family by which I am received with unaffected sincerity, and where I am treated as a son by a mother who can have no prudential reason to rejoice that her daughter has formed such a connection. It is this family I lately visited, and by which I am pressed to return, for they know the necessity there is for me to live with the utmost frugality, and hopeless of my succeeding in town, they invite me to partake of their little fortune, and as I cannot mend my prospects, to avoid making them worse." The letter ends with an earnest appeal to Burke to help him to any honest occupation that may enable him to live without being a burden on the slender resources of Miss Elmy's family. Crabbe is full of gratitude for all that Burke has thus far done for him. He has helped him to complete and publish his po

e a frequent guest at their table, where he met other of Burke's distinguished friends, political and literary. Among these was Lord Chancellor Thurlow to whom Crabbe had appealed, without success, in his less fortunate days. On that occasion Thurlow had simply replied, in regard to the poems which Crabbe had enclosed, "that his avocations did not leave him leisure to read verses." To this Crabbe had been so unwise as to reply that it was one of a Lord Chancellor's functions to

n that subject were, in Crabbe's day, written in the language adopted in all scientific works. "It is most fortunate," said Burke, "that your father exerted himself to send you to that second school; without a little Latin we should have made nothing of you: now, I think we shall succeed." Moreover Crabbe had been a wide and discursive reader. "Mr. Crabbe," Burke told Reynolds, "appears to know something of every thing." As to his more serious qualifications for the profession, his natural piety, as shown in the diaries kept

his former friends and neighbours in Aldeburgh was not of the kind he might have hoped to receive. He had left the place less than three years before, a half-trained and unappreciated practitioner in physic, to seek his fortune among strangers in London, with the forlornest hopes of success. Jealousy of his elevated position and improved fortunes set in with much severity. On the other hand, it was more than many could tolerate that the hedge-apothecary of old should be empowered to hold forth in a pulpit. Crabbe himself in later life admitted to his children that his treatment at the hands of his fellow-townsmen was markedly unkind. Even though he was happy in the improved relations with his own family, and in

or dependents recommended by political service and local attachment." Now Burke would certainly not have recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in his protégé any such defects of breeding or social tact as would have made his society distasteful to the Duke and Duchess. Burke, as we have seen, described him on their first acquaintance as having "the mind and feelings of a gentleman." Thurlow, it is true, after one of Crabbe's earlier interviews, had declared with an oath (more suo) that he was "as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen." But Thurlow was not merely jesting. He knew that Fielding's immortal clergyman had also the "mind and feelings of a g

I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with gratitude-the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many painful circumstances, and productive in his mind of some of the acutest sensations of wounded pride that have ever been traced by any pen." It is not necessary to hold Crabbe himself entirely irresponsible for this result. His son, with a frankness that marks the Biography throughout, does not conceal that his father's temper, even in later life, was intolerant of contradic

igion's advoc

use thy pleasur

re thee, and w

gth of reasonin

, certain, plain, They will d

triumph o'er t

grieve for so

een, these wrang

fenders, passio

not, yet not e

umour keep thei

isy will o'erw

gh at Truth's a

ladies will d

rth, and cry 'The

tric Dr. Robert Glynn. Again, it was during Crabbe's residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother, Lord Robert Manners, died of wounds received while leading his ship, Resolution, against the French in the West Indies, in the April of 1782. Crabbe's sympathy with the family, shown in his tribute to the sailor-brother appended to the poem he was then bringing to completion, still further strengthened the tie between them. Crabbe accompanied the Duke to London soon a

not know by what

e I left for you a

Belvoir. If you ha

ould not want an in

iders himself as inf

resence. Mrs. Bur

usts that you will

a visit from you I

opened it. I don'

bout these matters

ment as your own-t

ult every one else w

ver most affec

ND B

n it indeed, as we have seen, had first convinced Burke that the writer was a poet. And in the interval that followed the poem had been completed and matured with a care that Crabbe seldom afterwards bestowed upon his productions. Burke himself had suggested and criticised much during its

h 4,

you back Mr. Cra

ht. It is original, v

ch I have made I do

are perhaps not of

ake mine and his

m produce something

his copy wantonly d

ed lines away and l

be least liked: it w

rightly address. I

I am, Sir, your mo

L JOH

ve the writer's meaning better than in the words of the manuscript." Boswell went on to observe that "the aid given by Johnson to the poem, as to The Traveller and Deserted Village of Goldsmith, were so small as by no means to impair the distinguished merit of the author." There were unfriendly critics, however, in Crabbe's native cou

heck by the wise revision of his friends. And again, when after more than twenty years Crabbe produced The Parish Register, that poem, as we shall

ep impression upon their readers-and with reason-for two poems, more certain of immortality, because certain of giving a pleasure that cannot grow old-fashioned, do not exist in our literature. Each indeed marked an advance upon all that English descriptive or didactic poets had thus far contributed towards making humble life and rural scenery attractive-unless we except the Allegro of Milton and some passages in Thomson's Seasons. Nor was it merely the consummate workmanship of Gray and Goldsmith that had made their popularity. The genuineness of the pathos in the two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray it was blended with

t seem to confirm that impression. But the opening lines of The Village point to a different origin. It was rather during those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the u

fe, and every c

peasants and d

lds, and what,

, finds at last; What form

-the Muse can

times when in h

t praised his

ow, in smooth

beauty or their

hese we frame t

lays fond Cor

boys their amor

s, alas! they

which Johnson had substituted for

, where peaceful

de of Mantuan sw

him, or smitten

oets court the

Nature shall

ads, or Virgil

ollowing, and Crabbe acce

ks, in Caesar's

ound the Gol

ds the flatteri

oes of the M

Nature shall

ot where Fancy,

ment, and it is worth remark in passing how in the fourth line

terpretation. 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 faith

th, with withering

rf that warms the

ength of burnin

harvest waves i

hat every art

land, and rob t

stretch their p

agged infant

odding, mock th

bugloss paints

gh above the

llow waves h

hoot the charloc

es cling round t

ints the rocky

ndour vainly s

and the happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry. There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious and "lucrative" tears that he shed. 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, in

ve the wretche

ilings leaned t

uty prompt a

ept; he prayed a

each fond en

-fledged offspri

art, reproved

hter worlds, an

this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an unmitigat

dwell who know n

w no children's

atrons on thei

es, and moth

spiritual consolation ere he

eath some piou

rs which bold,

ask the parish

rtain to the

s the murmuring

nger to these

he, the pious

ich with forty

pherd of a di

him, feeds th

, who thinks h

od or man ca

es to loves and

orning, and to

illed the nois

ase, to cheer th

, he shoots thro

whist, devotes t

h honours bloom

sadly by the

ope he feels n

s that e'en th

note on these lines what he hold to be a parallel p

mourn with me

tsman, and a fi

just. The satirist's keen love of antithesis often weakens the moral virtue of Cowper's strictures. In this earliest volume anger was more conspicuous than sorrow, and contempt perhaps more obvious than either. The callousness of public opinion on many subjects needed other medicine than this. Hence was it perhaps that Cowper's volume, which appeared in May 1782, failed to awaken interest. Crabbe's Village appeared just a year later (it had been completed a year or two earlier), and at once made its mark. "It was praised," writes his son, "in the leading journals; the sale was rapid and extensive; and my father's reputation was by universal consent greatly raised, and permanently established, by this poem," The number of anonymous letters it brought the author, some of gratit

ul poem will never be deserted. For it is no loss good and wise to dwell on village life as it might be, than to reflect on what it has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What made Crabbe a now force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a long oblivion, as the tr

TNO

Huchon is himself engaged upon a study of the Life and Poetry of Crabbe, and in the course of a conversation with me in London, first called my a