them, he walked firmly among those realities to which he cared to give no more than a side-glance from time to time; he lived his own life quietly and rationally, doing always exactly what he wanted to do, and with so fine a sense of the subtlety of mere worldly manners, that when, at his one moment of worldly success, in 1793, he refused the post of drawing-master to the royal family, he gave up all his other pupils at the same time, lest the refusal should seem ungracious on the part of one who had been the friend of revolutionaries. He saw visions, but not as the spiritualists and the magicians have seen them. These desire to quicken mortal sight, until the soul limits itself again, takes body, and returns to reality; but Blake, the inner mystic, desired only to quicken that imagination which he knew to be more real than the reality of nature. Why should he call up shadows when he could talk 'in the spirit with spiritual realities'? 'Then I asked,' he says, in the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' 'does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so? He replied: "All poets believe that it does."!

Of the definite reality of Blake's visions there can be no question; no question that, as he once wrote, 'nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God, and in the abysses of the accuser.' But imagination is not one, but manifold: and the metaphor, professing to be no more than metaphor, of the poet, may be vision as essential as the thing actually seen by the visionary. The difference between imagination in Blake and in, say, Shakespeare, is that the one (himself a painter) has a visual imagination and sees an image or metaphor as a literal reality, while the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a more purely mental way, adds a 'like' or an 'as,' and the image or metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation, and takes you less by surprise. But to Blake it was the universe that was metaphor.

GEORGE CRABBE (1758-1832) 1

COLERIDGE, who usually said the right thing about poetry, said of Crabbe: 'In Crabbe there is an absolute defect of the high imagination; he gives me little or no pleasure: yet, no doubt, he has much power of a certain kind.' It is this power of a certain kind, not, obviously at least, of an essentially poetic kind, that we have to disentangle and define, if we can, in the work of the poet who, more than any other, carried on into the nineteenth the traditions of the eighteenth century.

In several of his prefaces, Crabbe was at the pains to explain and even to justify what he had done in his poetry. With his admirable frankness he confesses: 'With me the way I take is not a matter of choice, but of necessity': or, as he puts it elsewhere: 'What I thought I could best describe, that I attempted.' 'I have,' says a manuscript fragment printed by his son, 'chiefly, if not exclusively, taken my subjects and characters from that order of society where the least display of vanity is generally to be found, which is placed between the humble and the great. It is in this class of mankind that more originality of character, more variety of fortune, will be met with.' In a letter to his friend in old age, Mrs. Leadbeater, he says: 'I will tell you readily about my creatures, whom I endeavoured to paint as nearly as I could and dared. . . . There is not one of whom I had not in my mind the original; but I was obliged, in some cases, to take them from their real situations, in one or two instances to change even the sex, and, in many, the circumstances. . . . Indeed, I do not know that I could paint merely from my own fancy; and there is no cause why we should.'

In the preface to the 'Tales' of 1812, Crabbe makes his most

1 (1) Inebriety (anonymous), 1774. (2) The Candidate, 1780. (3) The Library, 1781. (4) The Village, 1783. (5) The Newspaper, 1785. (6) The Parish Register, 1807. (7) The Borough, 1810. (8) Tales in Verse, 1812. (9) Tales of the Hall, 1819. (10) Poetical Works, 8 vols. 1834.

serious attempt to meet the criticisms of those who doubted whether his original and powerful work was, in the strict sense, poetry. 'It has been already acknowledged,' he says, 'that these compositions have no pretensions to be estimated with the more lofty and heroic poems; but I feel great reluctance in admitting that they have not a fair and legitimate claim to the poetic character.' He is one of those, he says, 'who address their productions to the plain sense and sober judgment of their readers, rather than to their fancy and imagination'; and he affirms that many genuine poems ‘are adapted and addressed to the common-sense of the reader, and prevail by the strong language of truth and nature.' 'Who will complain,' he asks in a passage intended for this preface, 'that a definition of poetry, which excludes a great part of the writings of Pope, will shut out him'? For, he says, both in Pope and Dryden, there is, 'no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere.'

Actuality of relation, nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere: was there ever so just a description, so severe a condemnation, of a great part of the poetry of Crabbe? It is rarely needful to judge any writer except out of his own mouth: be sure that, if once he begins to justify himself against objections, he will confess by the way more fatal deficiencies than those he was already charged with. In a note added by Wordsworth in later life to the early poem of 'Lucy Gray,' he says pointedly: 'The way in which the incident was treated and the spiritualising of the character might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to throw over common life with Crabbe's matter of fact style of treating subjects of the same kind.' It was here that Crabbe had the critics of the day on his side, and it was because this 'strong language of truth and nature' was set to the fixed eighteenth-century cadences, and was untinged by any 'light that never was, on sea or land,'

that he was accepted, while Wordsworth was only laughed at. Crabbe did, indeed, do something which was out of fashion then: he took nature fearlessly at first hand, and set down what he saw as he saw it; and so he was a liberating influence. But he was no revolutionary; his sympathies, in matters of literature, were always with the past through which he had lived.

The life of Crabbe takes us back into the heart of the eighteenth century. When, at the age of twenty-four, standing by 'a shallow, muddy piece of water, as desolate and gloomy as his own mind, called the Leech-pond,' he determines to go to London and venture all,' Chatterton had but just committed suicide, and his only acquaintances in London warn him of a fate that may well come to be his, they think. He starves in poor lodgings, tries the booksellers in vain 'with a view to publication,' and looks out, in the way of the period, for a patron. He finds one, just not too late, in Burke, and the way is made smooth for him. Lord Thurlow asks him to breakfast, and puts an envelope into his hand as he is leaving; it contains one hundred pounds. A living is found for him in the Church, and he goes back to his native town as a curate, having met Sir Joshua Reynolds, and been growled at by Dr. Johnson, who bids him 'Never fear putting the strongest and best things you can think of into the mouth of your speaker, whatever may be his condition.'

His first poem, we must remember, was published at Ipswich in 1775; and between "The Newspaper? of 1785, in which the better start of 'The Village' is abandoned for a mere imitation of Pope, and the next poem which he published, 'The Parish Register,' his first really poetical work, there was an interval of twenty-two years. By that year, 1807, a new century had come with new ideals, men were fighting for the existence of their old models, Wordsworth had brought in a new humanity, Coleridge a new magic, Scott a new romance. How much had Wordsworth learnt from the close grappling with reality in 'The Village of 1783, which appeared five years

before the 'Lyrical Ballads'? And is it fanciful to think that Crabbe, in turn, during those years of silence, had learnt something from the 'Lyrical Ballads'? 'There were few modern works,' says his son, 'which he opened so frequently' as 'the earlier and shorter poems of what is called the Lake School.' He did not learn what he could not quite unlearn from his eighteenth-century training, for in the fifth line of his poem of 1807 he still says 'Nymphs and Swains' when he means the young men and women of his parish. But I can imagine the work of Wordsworth coming to him as work which after all did, in its different way, something which he was trying to do, equally without a model, and in another form of the 'strong language of truth and nature.'

What we know of the life of Crabbe, as it is told in the excellent memoir by his elder son, can be seen, from the first, building up the poet, with all his strength and limitations. He was born on the East Coast, at Aldborough, where his father, 'a man of imperious temper and violent passions,' was Salt-master, or collector of the salt-duties. The house in which he was born was long since washed away by the sea; it was a dark house with small windows, glazed with diamond panes. Aldborough was then a small town of two unpaved streets, in which hardly any one but fishermen and pilots lived. The spring-tides battered down the houses, from time to time. Inland, the land was sandy and full of weeds, the trees few and stunted; marshy land lay between the river and the beach. The whole desolation of the coast, and of the discoloured sea, has gone into the verse of Crabbe, to which it has indeed given its harsh and gloomy colouring. At eighteen he began to write verse and to study botany, on which he wrote a book, which, on the advice of a friend, he burned; to find out later on that he had made some discoveries which were left for others to name and classify. His son tells us that he never saw him doing nothing; 'out of doors he had always some object in view, a flower, or a pebble, or his note-book, in his hand;