English Men of Letters: Crabbe Part 10

Crabbe's son rightly included in his _Memoir_ several extracts from his father's Diary kept during this visit. They are little more than briefest entries of engagements, but serve to show the new and brilliant life to which the poet was suddenly introduced. He constantly dined and breakfasted with Rogers, where he met and was welcomed by Rogers's friends. His old acquaintance with Fox gave him the _entree_ of Holland House. Thomas Campbell was specially polite to him, and really attracted by him. Crabbe visited the theatres, and was present at the farewell banquet given to John Kemble. Through Rogers and Campbell he was introduced to John Murray of Albemarle Street, who later became his publisher. He sat for his portrait to Pickersgill and Phillips, and saw the painting by the latter hanging on the Academy walls when dining at their annual banquet. Again, through an introduction at Bath to Samuel h.o.a.re of Hampstead, Crabbe formed a friends.h.i.+p with him and his family of the most affectionate nature. During the first and all later visits to London Crabbe was most often their guest at the mansion on the summit of the famous "Northern Height," with which, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth so touchingly a.s.sociated his name, in the lines written on the death of the Ettrick Shepherd and his brother-poets:

"Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe, forth looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath."

Between Samuel h.o.a.re's hospitable roof and the _Hummums_ in Covent Garden Crabbe seems to have alternated, according as his engagements in town required.

But although living, as the Diary shows, in daily intercourse with the literary and artistic world, tasting delights which were absolutely new to him, Crabbe never forgot either his humble friends in Wilts.h.i.+re, or the claims of his own art. He kept in touch with Trowbridge, where his son John was in charge, and sends instructions from time to time as to poor pensioners and others who were not to be neglected in the weekly ministrations. At the same time, he seems rarely to have omitted the self-imposed task of adding daily to the pile of ma.n.u.script on which he was at work--the collection of stories to be subsequently issued as _Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe had resolved, in the face of whatever distractions, to write if possible a fixed amount every day. More than once in the Diary occur such entries as: "My thirty lines done; but not well, I fear." "Thirty lines to-day, but not yesterday--must work up."

This antic.i.p.ation of a method made famous later in the century by Anthony Trollope may account (as also in Trollope's case) for certain marked inequalities in the merit of the work thus turned out. At odd times and in odd places were these verses sometimes composed. On a certain Sunday morning in July 1817, after going to church at St.

James's, Piccadilly (or was it the Chapel Royal?), Crabbe wandered eastward and found inspiration in the most unexpected quarter: "Write some lines in the solitude of Somerset House, not fifty yards from the Thames on one side, and the Strand on the other; but as quiet as the sands of Arabia. I am not quite in good humour with this day; but, happily, I cannot say why."

The last mysterious sentence is one of many scattered through, the Diary, which, aided by dashes and omission-marks by the editorial son, point to certain sentimentalisms in which Crabbe was still indulging, even in the vortex of fas.h.i.+onable gaieties. We gather throughout that the ladies he met interested him quite as much, or even more, than the distinguished men of letters, and there are allusions besides to other charmers at a distance. The following entry immediately precedes that of the Sunday just quoted:--

"14th.--Some more intimate conversation this morning with Mr. and Mrs. Moore. They mean to go to Trowbridge. He is going to Paris, but will not stay long. Mrs. Spencer's alb.u.m. Agree to dine at Curzon Street. A welcome letter from ----. This makes the day more cheerful. Suppose it were so. Well, 'tis not! Go to Mr. Rogers, and take a farewell visit to Highbury. Miss Rogers. Promise to go when ----.

Return early. Dine there, and purpose to see Mr.

Moore and Mr. Rogers in the morning when they set out for Calais."

On the whole, however, Crabbe may have found, when these fascinating experiences were over, that there had been safety in a mult.i.tude. For he seems to have been equally charmed with Rogers's sister, and William Spencer's daughter, and the Countess of Bessborough, and a certain Mrs.

Wilson,--and, like Miss Snevellicci's papa, to have "loved them every one."

Meanwhile Crabbe was working steadily, while in London, at his new poems. Though his minimum output was thirty lines a day, he often produced more, and on one occasion he records eighty lines as the fruit of a day's labour. During the year 1818 he was still at work, and in September of that year he writes to Mary Leadbeater that his verses "are not yet entirely ready, but do not want much that he can give them." He was evidently correcting and perfecting to the best of his ability, and (as I believe) profiting by the intellectual stimulus of his visit to London, as well as by the higher standards of versification that he had met with, even in writers inferior to himself. The six weeks in London had given him advantages he had never enjoyed before. In his early days under Burke's roof he had learned much from Burke himself, and from Johnson and Fox, but he was then only a promising beginner. Now, thirty-five years later, he met Rogers, Wordsworth, Campbell, Moore, as social equals, and having, like them, won a public for himself. When his next volumes appeared, the workmans.h.i.+p proved, as of old, unequal, but here and there Crabbe showed a musical ear, and an individuality of touch of a different order from anything he had achieved before. Mr.

Courthope and other critics hold that there are pa.s.sages in Crabbe's earliest poems, such as _The Village_, which have a metrical charm he never afterwards attained. But I strongly suspect that in such pa.s.sages Crabbe had owed much to the revising hand of Burke, Johnson, and Fox.

In the spring of 1819 Crabbe was again in town, visiting at Holland House, and dining at the Thatched House with the "Literary Society," of which he had been elected a member, and which to-day still dines and prospers. He was then preparing for the publication of his new Tales, from the famous house in Albemarle Street. Two years before, in 1817, on the strength doubtless of Rogers's strong recommendation, Murray had made a very liberal offer for the new poems, and the copyright of all Crabbe's previous works. For these, together, Murray had offered three thousand pounds. Strangely enough, Rogers was at first dissatisfied with the offer, holding that the sum should be paid for the new volumes alone. He and a friend (possibly Campbell), who had conducted the negotiation, accordingly went off to the house of Longman to see if they could not get better terms. To their great discomfiture the Longmans only offered 1000 for the privilege that Murray had valued at three times the amount; and Crabbe and his friends were placed in a difficult position. A letter of Moore to John Murray many years afterwards, when Crabbe's _Memoir_ was in preparation, tells the sequel of the story, and it may well be given in his words:

"In this crisis it was that Mr. Rogers and myself, anxious to relieve our poor friend from his suspense, called upon you, as you must well remember, in Albemarle Street; and seldom have I watched a countenance with more solicitude, or heard words that gave me much more pleasure than when, on the subject being mentioned, you said 'Oh! yes.

I have heard from Mr. Crabbe, and look upon the matter as all settled.' I was rather pressed, I remember, for time that morning, having an appointment on some business of my own, but Mr. Rogers insisted that I should accompany him to Crabbe's lodgings, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing him relieved from his suspense. We found him sitting in his room, alone, and expecting the worst; but soon dissipated all his fears by the agreeable intelligence which we brought.

"When he received the bills for 3000, we earnestly advised that he should, without delay, deposit them in some safe hands; but no--he must take them with him to Trowbridge, and show them to his son John. They would hardly believe in his good luck, at home, if they did not see the bills. On his way down to Trowbridge, a friend at Salisbury, at whose house he rested (Mr. Everett, the banker), seeing that he carried these bills loosely in his waistcoat pocket, requested to be allowed to take charge of them for him: but with equal ill success. 'There was no fear,' he said, 'of his losing them, and he must show them to his son John.'"

It was matter of common knowledge in the literary world of Crabbe's day that John Murray did not on this occasion make a very prudent bargain, and that in fact he lost heavily by his venture. No doubt his offer was based upon the remarkable success of Crabbe's two preceding poems. _The Borough_ had pa.s.sed through six editions in the same number of years, and the _Tales_ reached a fifth edition within two years of publication.

But for changes in progress in the poetic taste of the time, Murray might safely have antic.i.p.ated a continuance of Crabbe's popularity. But seven years had elapsed since the appearance of the _Tales_, and in these seven years much had happened. Byron had given to the world one by one the four cantos of _Childe Harold_, as well as other poems rich in splendid rhetoric and a lyric versatility far beyond Crabbe's reach.

Wordsworth's two volumes in 1815 contained by far the most important and representative of his poems, and these were slowly but surely winning him a public of his own, intellectual and thoughtful if not as yet numerous. John Keats had made two appearances, in 1817 and 1818, and the year following the publication of Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_ was to add to them the Odes and other poems const.i.tuting the priceless volume of 1820--_Lamia and other Poems_. Again, for the lovers of fiction--whom, as I have said, Crabbe had attracted quite as strongly as the lovers of verse--Walter Scott had produced five or six of his finest novels, and was adding to the circle of his admirers daily. By the side of this fascinating prose, and still more fascinating metrical versatility, Crabbe's resolute and plodding couplets might often seem tame and wearisome. Indeed, at this juncture, the rhymed heroic couplet, as a vehicle for the poetry of imagination, was tottering to its fall, though it lingered for many years as the orthodox form for university prize poems, and for occasional didactic or satirical effusions. Crabbe, very wisely, remained faithful to the metre. For his purpose, and with his subjects and special gifts, none probably would have served him better. For narrative largely blended with the a.n.a.lytical and the epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse (had he ever mastered it) would have sufficed. But in Crabbe's last published volumes it was not only the metre that was to seem flat and monotonous in the presence of new proofs of the boundless capabilities of verse. The reader would not make much progress in these volumes without discovering that the depressing incidents of life, its disasters and distresses, were still Crabbe's prevailing theme. John Murray in the same season published Rogers's _Human Life_ and Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_. The publisher sent Crabbe a copy of the former, and he acknowledged it in a few lines as follows:

"I am anxious that Mr. Rogers should have all the success he can desire. I am more indebted to him than I could bear to think of, if I had not the highest esteem. It will give me great satisfaction to find him cordially admired.

His is a favourable picture, and such he loves so do I, but men's vices and follies come into my mind, and spoil my drawing."

a.s.suredly no more striking ant.i.thesis to Crabbe's habitual impressions of human life can be found than in the touching and often beautiful couplets of Rogers, a poet as neglected today as Crabbe. Rogers's picture of wedded happiness finds no parallel, I think, anywhere in the pages of his brother-poet:--

"Across the threshold led, And every tear kissed off as soon as shed, His house she enters, there to be a light s.h.i.+ning within, when all without is night; A guardian angel o'er his life presiding, Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing!

How oft her eyes read his; her gentle mind To all his wishes, all his thoughts, inclined; Still subject--ever on the watch to borrow Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow.

The soul of music slumbers in the sh.e.l.l, Till waked to rapture by the master's spell; And feeling hearts--touch them but rightly--pour A thousand melodies unheard before."

It may be urged that Rogers exceeds in one direction as unjustifiably as Crabbe in the opposite. But there is room in poetry for both points of view, though the absolute--the Shakespearian--grasp of Human Life may be truer and more eternally convincing than either.

CHAPTER X

THE TALES OF THE HALL

(1819)

The _Tales of the Hall_ were published by John Murray in June 1819, in two handsome octavo volumes, with every advantage of type, paper, and margin. In a letter of Crabbe to Mrs. Leadbeater, in October 1817, he makes reference to these Tales, already in preparation. He tells his correspondent that "Remembrances" was the t.i.tle for them proposed by his friends. We learn from another source that a second t.i.tle had been suggested, "Forty Days--a Series of Tales told at Binning Hall." Finally Mr. Murray recommended _Tales of the Hall_, and this was adopted.

In the same letter to Mrs. Leadbeater, Crabbe writes: "I know not how to describe the new, and probably (most probably) the last work I shall publish. Though a village is the scene of meeting between my two princ.i.p.al characters, and gives occasion to other characters and relations in general, yet I no more describe the manners of village inhabitants. My people are of superior cla.s.ses, though not the most elevated; and, with a few exceptions, are of educated and cultivated minds and habits." In making this change Crabbe was also aware that some kind of unity must be given to those new studies of human life. And he found at least a semblance of this unity in ties of family or friends.h.i.+p uniting the tellers of them. Moreover Crabbe, who had a wide and even intimate knowledge of English, poetry, was well acquainted with the _Canterbury Tales_, and he bethought him that he would devise a framework. And the plan he worked out was as follows:

"The Hall" under whose roof the stories and conversations arise is a gentleman's house, apparently in the eastern counties, inhabited by the elder of two brothers, George and Richard. George, an elderly bachelor, who had made a sufficient fortune in business, has retired to this country seat, which stands upon the site of a humbler dwelling where George had been born and spent his earliest years. The old home of his youth had subsequently pa.s.sed into the hands of a man of means, who had added to it, improved the surroundings, and turned it into a modern and elegant villa. It was again in the market when George was seeking a retreat for his old age, and he purchased it--glad, even under the altered conditions, to live again among the loved surroundings of his childhood.

George has a half-brother, Richard, much younger than himself. They are the children of the same mother who, some years after her first widowhood, had married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by whom she had this second child. George had already left home to earn his living, with the consequence that the two brothers had scarcely ever met until the occasion upon which the story opens. Richard, after first trying the sea as a profession, had entered the army during the war with Napoleon; distinguished himself in the Peninsula; and finally returned to his native country, covered with glory and enjoying a modest pension. He woos and wins the daughter of a country clergyman, marries, and finds a young family growing up around him. He is filled with a desire to resume friendly relations with his half-brother George, but is deterred from making the first advances. George, hearing of this through a common friend, cordially responds, and Richard is invited to spend a few weeks at Binning Hall. The two brothers, whose bringing up had been so different, and whose ideas and politics were far removed, nevertheless find their mutual companions.h.i.+p very pleasant, and every evening over their port wine relate their respective adventures and experiences, while George has also much to tell of his friends and neighbours around him. The clergyman of the parish, a former fellow of his college, often makes a third at these meetings; and thus a sufficient variety of topic is insured. The tales that these three tell, with the conversations arising out of them, form the subject matter of these _Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe devised a very pleasant means of bringing the brother's visit to a close. When the time originally proposed for the younger brother's stay is nearing its end, the brothers prepare to part. At first, the younger is somewhat disconcerted that his elder brother seemed to take his departure so little to heart. But this display of indifference proves to be only an amiable _ruse_ on the part of George. On occasion of a final ride together through the neighbouring country, George asks for his brother's opinion about a purchase he has recently made, of a pleasant house and garden adjoining his own property. It then turns out that the generous George has bought the place as a home for his brother, who will in future act as George's agent or steward. On approaching and entering the house, Richard finds his wife and children, who have been privately informed of the arrangement, already installed, and eagerly waiting to welcome husband and father to this new and delightful home.

Throughout the development of this story with its incidental narratives, Crabbe has managed, as in previous poems, to make large use of his own personal experience. The Hall proves to be a modern gentleman's residence constructed out of a humbler farmhouse by additions and alterations in the building and its surroundings, which was precisely the fate which had befallen Mr. Tovell's old house which had come to the Crabbe family, and had been parted with by them to one of the Suffolk county families. "Moated Granges" were common in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Mr. Tovel's house had had a moat, and this too had been a feature of George's paternal home:

"It was an ancient, venerable Hall, And once surrounded by a moat and wall; A part was added by a squire of taste Who, while unvalued acres ran to waste, Made s.p.a.cious rooms, whence he could look about, And mark improvements as they rose without; He fill'd the moat, he took the wall away, He thinn'd the park and bade the view be gay."

In this instance, the squire who had thus altered the property had been forced to sell it, and George was thus able to return to the old surroundings of his boyhood. In the third book, _Boys at School_, George relates some of his recollections, which include the story of a school-fellow, who having some liking for art but not much talent, finds his ambitions defeated, and dies of chagrin in consequence. This was in fact the true story of a brother of Crabbe's wife, Mr. James Elmy. Later, again, in the work the rector of the parish is described, and the portrait drawn is obviously that of Crabbe himself, as he appeared to his Dissenting paris.h.i.+oners at Muston:

"'A moral teacher!' some, contemptuous, cried; He smiled, but nothing of the fact denied, Nor, save by his fair life, to charge so strong replied.

Still, though he bade them not on aught rely That was their own, but all their worth deny, They called his pure advice his cold morality.

He either did not, or he would not see, That if he meant a favourite priest to be, He must not show, but learn of them, the way To truth--he must not dictate, but obey; They wish'd him not to bring them further light, But to convince them that they now were right And to a.s.sert that justice will condemn All who presumed to disagree with them: In this he fail'd, and his the greater blame, For he persisted, void of fear or shame."

There is a touch of bitterness in these lines that is unmistakably that of a personal grievance, even if the poet's son had not confirmed the inference in a foot-note.

Book IV. is devoted to the _Adventures of Richard_, which begin with his residence with his mother near a small sea-port (evidently Aldeburgh); and here we once more read of the boy, George Crabbe, watching and remembering every aspect of the storms, and making friends with the wives and children of the sailors and the smugglers:

"I loved to walk where none had walk'd before, About the rocks that ran along the sh.o.r.e; Or far beyond the sight of men to stray, And take my pleasure when I lost my way; For then 'twas mine to trace the hilly heath, And all the mossy moor that lies beneath: Here had I favourite stations, where I stood And heard the murmurs of the ocean-flood, With not a sound beside except when flew Aloft the lapwing, or the grey curlew, Who with wild notes my fancied power defied, And mock'd the dreams of solitary pride."

And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal experiences to make out the material for his work, the same also holds with regard to the incidental Tales. Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not of his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits the same of others.

One, as we have seen, happened in the Elmy family; another was sent him by a friend in Wilts.h.i.+re, to which county the story belonged; while the last in the series, and perhaps the most painful of all, _Smugglers, and Poachers_ was told to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly, whom he had met at Hampstead, only a few weeks before Romilly's own tragic death. Probably other tales, not referred to by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered by the poet in his intercourse with his paris.h.i.+oners, or submitted to him by his friends. We might infer this from the singular inequality, in interest and poetical opportunity, of the various plots of these stories. Some of them are a.s.suredly not such as any poet would have sat down and elaborated for himself, and it is strange how little sense Crabbe seems to have possessed as to which were worth treating, or could even admit of artistic treatment at all. A striking instance is afforded by the strange and most unpleasing history, ent.i.tled _Lady Barbara: or, The Ghost_.

The story is as follows: A young and beautiful lady marries early a gentleman of good family who dies within a year of their marriage. In spite of many proposals she resolves to remain a widow; and for the sake of congenial society and occupation, she finds a home in the family of a pious clergyman, where she devotes herself to his young children, and makes herself useful in the parish. Her favourite among the children is a boy, George, still in the schoolroom. The boy grows apace; goes to boarding-school and college; and is on the point of entering the army, when he discovers that he is madly in love with the lady, still an inmate of the house, who had "mothered him" when a child. No ages are mentioned, but we may infer that the young man is then about two and twenty, and the lady something short of forty. The position is not unimaginable, though it may be uncommon. The idea of marrying one who had been to her as a favourite child, seems to the widow in the first instance repulsive and almost criminal. But it turns out that there is another reason in the background for her not re-entering the marriage state, which she discloses to the ardent youth. It appears that the widow had once had a beloved brother who had died early. Those two had been brought up by an infidel father, who had impressed on his children the absurdity of all such ideas as immortality. The children had often discussed and pondered over this subject together, and had made a compact that whichever of them died first should, if possible, appear to the survivor, and thus solve the awful problem of a future life. The brother not long after died in foreign parts. Immediately after his death, before the sister heard the news, the brother's ghost appeared in a dream, or vision, to the sister, and warned her in solemn tones against ever marrying a second time. The spirit does not appear to have given any reasons, but his manner was so impressive and so unmistakable that the lady had thus far regarded it as an injunction never to be disobeyed. On hearing this remarkable story, the young man, George, argues impatiently against the trustworthiness of dreams, and is hardly silenced by the widow showing him on her wrist the mark still remaining where the spirit had seized and pressed her hand. In fine, the impa.s.sioned suitor prevails over these superst.i.tious terrors, as he reckons them, of the lady--and they become man and wife.

The reader is here placed in a condition of great perplexity, and his curiosity becomes breathless. The sequel is melancholy indeed. After a few months' union, the young man, whose plausible eloquence had so moved the widow, tires of his wife, ill-treats her, and breaks her heart. The Psychical Society is avenged, and the ghost's word was worth at least "a thousand pounds." It is difficult for us to take such a story seriously, but it must have interested Crabbe deeply, for he has expended upon it much of his finest power of a.n.a.lysis, and his most careful writing. As we have seen, the subject of dreams had always had a fascination for him, of a kind not unconnected perhaps with the opium-habit. The story, however it was to be treated, was unpromising; but as the _denouement_ was what it proved to be, the astonis.h.i.+ng thing is that Crabbe should not have felt the dramatic impropriety of putting into the young man's mouth pa.s.sages of an impressive, and almost Shakespearian, beauty such as are rare indeed in his poetry. The following lines are not indeed placed within inverted commas, but the p.r.o.noun "I" is retained, and they are apparently intended for something pa.s.sing in the young suitor's mind:

"O! tell me not of years,--can she be old?

Those eyes, those lips, can man unmoved behold?

Has time that bosom chill'd? are cheeks so rosy cold?

No, she is young, or I her love t'engage Will grow discreet, and that will seem like age: But speak it not; Death's equalising age Levels not surer than Love's stronger charm, That bids all inequalities be gone, That laughs at rank, that mocks comparison.

There is not young or old, if Love decrees; He levels orders, he confounds degrees: There is not fair, or dark, or short, or tall, Or grave, or sprightly--Love reduces all; He makes unite the pensive and the gay, Gives something here, takes something there away; From each abundant good a portion takes, And for each want a compensation makes; Then tell me not of years--Love, power divine, Takes, as he wills, from hers, and gives to mine."

In those fine lines it is no doubt Crabbe himself that speaks, and not the young lover, who was to turn out in the sequel an unparalleled "cad." But then, what becomes of dramatic consistency, and the imperative claims of art?

In the letter to Mrs. Leadbeater already cited Crabbe writes as to his forthcoming collection of Tales: "I do not know, on a general view, whether my tragic or lighter Tales, etc., are most in number. Of those equally well executed the tragic will, I suppose, make the greater impression." Crabbe was right in this forecast. Whether more or less in number, the "tragic" Tales far surpa.s.s the "lighter" in their effect on the reader, in the intensity of their gloom. Such stories as that of _Lady Barbara, Delay has Danger, The Sisters, Ellen, Smugglers and Poachers_, Richard's story of _Ruth_, and the elder brother's account of his own early attachment, with its miserable sequel--all these are of a poignant painfulness. Human crime, error, or selfishness working life-long misery to others--this is the theme to which Crabbe turns again and again, and on which he bestows a really marvellous power of a.n.a.lysis. There is never wanting, side by side with these, what Crabbe doubtless believed to be the compensating presence of much that is lovable in human character, patience, resignation, forgiveness. But the resultant effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of cheering. The fine lines of Wordsworth as to