ART. II.-1. The Works of the Rev. George Crabbe. In 1 volume. London: John Murray. 1901.

2. Selections from Crabbe. Edited by BERNARD HOLLAND. London: Arnold. 1899.

3. The Borough. London: Dent. 1902.

CRABBE's place on the slopes if not on the heights of Parnassus is so secure that he needs no apologist to win him a hearing. That his popularity has increased in recent years, we may judge from the fact that two volumes of selections from his poems have been published lately, and a biography and criticism by Canon Ainger is promised. The public will not read Crabbe as a whole: but Mr. Bernard Holland is right in thinking that those who read his selections will wish to read more; for, with all his faults and limitations, Crabbe fascinates. Mr. Crabbe,' said Murray, 'said uncommon things in a common way; an admirable description of much of his writing. One would be glad to remember his felicities, not to have much of him by heart. His manner can never be popular. But Crabbe is read for the thought, not the manner. He is interesting because human nature is interesting. His peculiarities will always make him the poet of a few; and those who relish him may not be the most fastidious judges of poetry, may dispense too easily with grace and flexibility, the sonorous phrase and the sky-climbing inspiration, and too easily condone the prosaic versification, the commonplace utterance, and the too frequent descent into bathos; but anyone who acquires a taste for Crabbe will be always finding something new to make him worth reading again.

We wonder why, being able to write so well, he sometimes wrote so ill; why, with such an art of story-telling, he did not elaborate his narratives, and bring out into finished studies the characters which he outlined so skilfully; why he preferred verse to prose; why, with so much pathetic and tragic power in his hand, he dwelt for the most part upon the matter-of-fact and often sordid details of middle-class households. We wonder and read on, and read again, unable to resist the attraction of this perplexing writer.

Crabbe's character is no less perplexing than his poetry. His autobiography, written in 1816, tells much, but conceals more. Autobiography may be coloured, even intentionally coloured, as in Wahrheit und Dichtung,' or George Sand's

'Histoire de ma Vie,' but it is necessarily written from a unique point of view, and has an intrinsic truth apart from considerations of fact. This and no other was the man whom Montaigne or St. Augustine or Rousseau or Walter Scott saw in his own looking-glass. Does it follow, because others saw a different image, that the autobiographer is shortsighted or dishonest? Crabbe indeed seems to have had something of Burns's 'giftie '--he did not care to draw a flattering likeness, he looked at himself impartially and even with something of irony. There was irony in the story of his life. He might have lived and died, dumb and obscure, as an apothecary in his native town. He might have forced the world to hear him, as Johnson did. He did neither. He knew that independence must be bought, and is most conveniently bought with money, and he was not ashamed to go where money is.' Facing fortune with a capital of five pounds, and that borrowed, he went to London, found in Burke a lifelong friend as well as a patron; took orders and got preferment, married at twenty-nine the woman whom he had courted as a boy; became first known, and then famous, took the world's praise as he took his tithe; preached, botanised, and geologised; and lived by turns the life of a country parson and of a small squire, diversified only by occasional visits to London, where he was lionised with the best, and by dutiful attendance as chaplain on the ducal family at Belvoir, where he was patronised more than his independent spirit liked. For a moralist and weeping philosopher his life was too easy, and too tame for an ambitious man. What he wanted was not fame, but leisure to write, and live his own life undisturbed by the claims of patrons or the tiresome importunities of rural society. This was afforded by the 'Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitæ ;'

and he tells us himself how he found and used his opportunity, what was his aim in life, and how he pursued it:

'No, 'tis not worldly gain, although by chance
The love of learning may to wealth advance;
Nor station high, though in some favouring hour
The sons of learning may arrive at power;
Nor is it glory, though the public voice
Of honest praise will make the heart rejoice.
But 'tis the mind's own feelings give the joy,
Pleasures she gathers in her own employ.

For this the poet looks the world around
Where form and life and reasoning man are found;

He loves the mind, in all its modes, to trace,
And all the manners of the changing race;
Silent he walks the road of life along,

And views the aims of its tumultuous throng.'

Once provided for, he pleased himself and was at ease; kept silence for twenty years without caring for his fame or losing it, in outward appearance a pococurante indolent man; and all the while 'Nature's sternest painter,' and an unsparing satirist and critic within the narrow circle which he marked out for himself. If he had chosen to live in the world and write about the foibles and vices of the great, he might have had a more conspicuous place in poetry: but he might have failed; and a man is what he is, and not what his critics would have him be.

The facts of Crabbe's life are soon told. It is not easy to see what their influence upon his character may have been. We may conclude without much hesitation that to have been appreciated as a child and a boy might have sweetened his nature. He felt keenly the harshness of his home and the contempt thrown upon his talent. He found congenial companions neither at Aldborough nor at his country homes. Knowing himself superior to the rough and uncultivated herd who called themselves his equals, he had not tact enough to conceal his knowledge. Their equal he had never been; for he had begun life in a humbler station than theirs, and had been suddenly lifted to an independent position in which he could choose his company. And in fact he chose the company of his own family and a very small circle of friends beyond it. His neighbours were nothing to him. His children, to whom he was the tenderest of fathers, and whose education he took entirely into his own hands, his garden and study, his observations in botany, geology and entomology took up most of his time; and always and all day long he was composing. No wonder the doctors, near him thought him

lawyers and parsons who lived morose and proud.

Crabbe (says his son) wanted taste. There was a want of harmony in his character, a negligence of pleasing and an occasional roughness of manner, or the opposite fault of over-smoothness, which showed his rustic origin. He was confident and tenacious of his own opinion, and played the Johnson in company, without much skill, when his temper was warmed by opposition. He was the last man to act the part of the obsequious chaplain. Feeling himself the equal or the superior of the noble fox-hunters and racing men who

frequented Belvoir, in whose eyes he was no more than the Duke of Rutland's domestic priest, he must have experienced what he describes in 'The Patron' :—

'When he his Lordship and the Lady saw,

Brave as he was, he felt oppressed with awe;
And spite of verse, that so much praise had won,
The Poet found he was the Bailiff's son.'

His temper was sometimes in fault, and there was a vein of pride in his nature-honest pride, but stiff. 'He might not,' says his son, I can well believe, catch readily the manners appropriate to his station-his tact was not of 'that description-and he ever had an ardent passion for 'personal liberty, inconsistent with enjoyment under the 'constraint of ceremony.' He had a taste for spacious rooms, good cheer, and good company, flowing conversation, the society of graceful women, and all that makes the life of the great ones of the earth enviable; all this contrasting with Republican opinions and the pride of birth, which belongs to poor and rich alike. He did not disguise his opinions in the Tory palace, and suffered 'more than once' the indignity of drinking salt water in the place of a Tory toast. Why more than once? He would have shown a right spirit in quitting a house where such a thing was possible. We cannot explain it perhaps the recollection of some loss of self-control on the occasion may have cooled his morning's reflections, and determined him not to break with the duke, whose kindness was unfailing. His pride took fire at once when the duke's son came into the title, and he felt that he belonged to the 'men of the old race; he 'determined to withdraw himself, and give way to stronger candidates for notice.' The new duke gave him the livings of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and Croxton; more he could hardly have wished, and had no right to expect; but we see in his relations with greatness a temper which could accept obligation, but not acknowledge it (except in dedications), and we are conscious of an ungraciousness of feeling, a want of taste, which is the jarring note in Crabbe's life as well as in his writings. Again, we read that when he returned to his rectory at Muston he made enemies by preaching too hotly, and often against dissent, which had made head in the place, partly by his own neglect whilst he was living as a country gentleman at

* Letter to Sir Walter Scott.

VOL. CXCVIII. NO. CCCCV.

D

Parham, and doing clerical duty there instead of attending his own cure. So high was the resentment of his parishioners that on his leaving Muston for Trowbridge the bells to welcome his successor were rung before he and his family were out of hearing. But in spite of faults of nature and manners, Crabbe was adored by his family, loved by his friends, liked and admired by such men as Burke, Fox, Wordsworth, and Scott; and their appreciation far outweighs any shortcomings, which, indeed, were of a kind to give piquancy to his company.

Perhaps the shaft of satire in the following lines may have been, in part, directed inwards; for in so reflective a writer we may look for self-portraiture:

Though mild benevolence our Priest possessed,
"Twas but by wishes or by words expressed.
Circles in water, as they wider flow,

The less conspicuous in their progress grow,
And when at last they touch upon the shore,
Distinction ceases, and they're viewed no more.
His love, like that last circle, all embraced,
And with effect that never could be traced.

Now rests our Vicar. They who knew him best,
Proclaim his life t' have been entirely rest;
Free from all evils which disturb his mind,
Whom studies vex and controversies blind.'

And this

'Then came the Author-Rector: his delight
Was all in books; to read them, or to write:
Women and men he strove alike to shun,
And hurried homeward when his tasks were done:

Careless was he of surplice, hood, and band,—
And kindly took them as they came to hand;
Nor, like the doctor, wore a world of hat,
As if he sought for dignity in that:

He talked, he gave, but not with cautious rules;
Nor turned from gipsies, vagabonds, or fools;
It was his nature, but they thought it whim,
And so our beaux and beauties turned from him.'

He had the eye to see, the mind to judge, and the heart to feel; but outside his books and papers his action was slow and halting. Probably he was too sensitive and conscious of shortcomings to give much effective support in personal intercourse, to advise and rebuke with authority, and had too little buoyancy of spirit to encourage and stimulate or