George Crabbe

The Critical Heritage

Arthur Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134782420
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

POETICAL WORKS (WITH LIFE)

January-September 1834

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This collected edition included Posthumous Tales in addition to the works published in the poet’s lifetime. The reviewers concentrated their attention on the Life by Crabbe’s son, George. The extracts below do not include criticism of the biography at any length.

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54. ‘Farewell, dear Crabbe!’

1834

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The following verses form the conclusion of the Life. They are by John Shute Duncan (1769–1844), Fellow ofNew College, Oxford (1791–1829) and a barrister. They represent a fair summary of Crabbe’s poetic qualities.

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Farewell, dear CRABBE! thou meekest of mankind,

With heart all fervour, and all strength of mind.

With tenderest sympathy for others’ woes,

Fearless, all guile and ma1ice to expose:

Steadfast of purpose in pursuit of right,

To drag forth dark hypocrisy to light,

To brand th’ oppressor, and to shame the proud,

To shield the righteous from the slanderous crowd;

To error lenient and to frailty mild,

Repentance ever was thy welcome child:

In every state, as husband, parent, friend,

Scholar, or bard, thou couldst the Christian blend.

Thy verse from Nature’s face each feature drew,

Each lovely charm, each mole and wrinkle too.

No dreamy incidents of wild romance,

With whirling shadows, wilder’ d minds entrance;

But plain realities the mind engage,

With pictured warnings through each polished page.

Hogarth of Song! be this they perfect praise:—

Truth prompted, and Truth purified thy lays;

The God of Truth has given thy verse and thee

Truth’s holy palm-His Immortality.

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55. J. G. Lockhart, unsigned reviews, Quarter Review

January 1834, 1, 468–508 and October 1834, lii, 184–203

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Lockhart, Scott’s biographer and son-in-law, edited the Quarterly from 1825. This review was published by John Murray, who was also Crabbe’s publisher, and no doubt through Murray Lockhart helped with the revision of Posthumous Tales.

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This is the first of a series of eight volumes, in which we are about to have before us the life, journals, and annotated poems of Mr. Crabbe, in the same portable shape, and at the same rate of cost, as the Life and Works of Lord Byron, and the poetry of Sir Walter Scott; illustrated, moreover, in the same exquisite manner, by designs from our best artists. We hardly doubt that this attempt to extend the circulation of Crabbe’s poetry, especially among the less affluent classes of the community, will be attended with as much success as either of the previous adventures to which we have alluded. Placed by Byron, Scott, Fox, and Canning, and, we believe, by every one of his eminent contemporaries, in the very highest rank of excellence, Crabbe has never yet become familiar to hundreds of thousands of English readers well qualified to appreciate and enjoy his merits. ‘The poet of the poor,’ as his son justly styles him, has hitherto found little favour except with the rich; and yet, of all English authors, he is the one who has sympathized the most profoundly and tenderly with the virtues and the sorrows of humble life — who has best understood the fervours of lowly love and affection — and painted the anxieties and vicissitudes of toil and penury with the closest fidelity and the most touching pathos. In his works the peasant and the mechanic will find everything to elevate their aspirations, and yet nothing to quicken envy and uncharitableness. He is a Christian poet — his satire is strong, but never rancorous — his lessons of virtue are earnest but modest — his reprehensions of vice severe but brotherly. He only needs an introduction into the cottage, to supplant there for ever the affected sentimentality and gross sensualism of authors immeasurably below him in vigour and capacity of mind, as well as in dignity of heart and character, who have, from accidental circumstances, outrun him for a season in the race of popularity.

When about seven-and-twenty years ago, Crabbe, after half a lifetime spent in retirement and silence, broke upon the world for the second time in his Parish Register and ‘Sir Eustace Grey,’ a great deal of very pretty writing was bestowed on the illustration of three deep propositions : — namely, (this was not a very novel one,) that poetry is read for the sake of the excitement it gives to our minds and feelings; that painful emotions are more energetic and exciting than pleasurable ones; and that, as Mr. Crabbe dealt more exclusively than any other modern poet in sad and dismal subjects, he must eventually, of course, outstrip all his rivals in popular favour. The world has outlived all reverence for such juvenile pedantry as made the staple and glory of the school of criticism we have been alluding to: in other words, it has come to be the fashion to test metaphysical generalizations (as they were called) by fact; and the slightest application of that criterion must be sufficient for the utter demolition of the ingenuities in question. Every man that lays his hand on his own breast, knows perfectly well that painful emotions are not necessarily more powerful than pleasurable ones. Is there anything of pain in the enthusiasm of the chase; or

In the stern joy which warriors feel

In foemen worthy of their steel;

[Scott, The Lady of the Lake, V, st. io]

or in the rapture of successful love, or the generous glow of active benevolence? And then, as to the probable ultra-popularity of a poet whose claim should be founded on his exclusive devotion to themes of woe and calamity, is it not wonderful that it should not have occurred even to a metaphysician to ask who, de facto, are the most universally popular of the great poets of past ages? Is Homer less popular than Euripides? Who is, and ever has been, the most popular of all Roman writers? — who but the one that has hardly one touch of melancholy in his composition — the most thoroughly worldly, shrewd, good-humoured painter of life and manners that ever handled a pen — Horace? Is Dante more popular than Ariosto? Racine than Rabelais? Calderon than Cervantes? or Klopstock than Goethe? Here, at home, who are and ever will be the most popular of our own poets? Speaking of works of any considerable bulk, which can be named beside those of Shakespeare and Pope? And will any man pretend that Shakespeare’s tragedy has at any time enjoyed more favour than his comedy, or that Pope has counted one worshipper of his pathos for a hundred admirers of his wit? We need not go into the works of Mr. Crabbe’s own contemporaries. If he himself were never to gain general favour except by reason of the painful emotions he excites, we should still despair of his fate; but the truth is, Crabbe can hardly be said to deal more largely in such emotions than either Byron, or Wordsworth, or Moore; and indeed, no poet ever was, or ever will be, popular in this country that deals exclusively in such materials. The national taste is, on the whole, a manly one; it is felt that life is made up of light and shadow in pretty equal proportions — and the only art that can permanently fix and please us, is that which has scope enough to reflect life in its own contrasts. Crabbe’s deep, and sometimes dreadful pathos, tells on us a thousand times more than it would otherwise have done, by reason of the wit, the humour, the playful humanity with which he relieves it. A short piece of thorough anguish is very well; but we venture to say that the habitual readers of Crabbe (and most of those who read him at all have him constantly in their hands) do not turn the most frequently to ‘Sir Eustace Grey,’ or ‘Peter Grimes.’ We should as soon expect to be told that Allan’s ‘Pressgang’ has been more liked than his ‘Shepherds’ ‘House-heating,’ or that Wilkie’s ‘Distraining for Rent’ has been a more lucrative print than ‘Blindman’s Buff’ or ‘The Chelsea Pensioners.’

The vulgar impression that Crabbe is throughout a gloomy author, we ascribe to the choice of certain specimens of his earliest poetry in the ‘Elegant Extracts’¹ — the only specimens of him that had been at all generally known at the time when most of those who have criticized his later works were young. That exquisitely-finished, but heart-sickening description, in particular, of the poor-house in The Village, fixed itself on every imagination; and when The Register and Borough came out, the reviewers, unconscious perhaps of the early prejudice that was influencing them, selected quotations mainly of the same class. Generalizing critics are apt to think more of their own theory than of their author’s practice; and we assert, without hesitation, that it would be easy to select from Crabbe a volume at least of most powerful, most exciting, and most characteristic poetry, which should hardly, in a single line, touch on any but the pleasurable emotions of our nature; of cunning but altogether unvenomed ridicule; of solemn but unsaddening morality; and of that gentle pathos which is a far more delicious luxury than ever sprung from gaiety of spirit ….

… We mean, at present, to confine ourselves to the easy and humble task of reviewing, in a very cursory manner, the last volume of the younger Crabbe’s edition of his father’s poetical works — that which consists entirely of new matter. In the other volumes of the series, various little pieces have for the first time been published — and some of these appear to us highly meritorious: indeed, the dialogue called ‘Flirtation’ (in vol. v.) is a fair specimen of his lightest humour; and ‘The World of Dreams’ (vol. iv.), though obviously unfinished in some parts, is on the whole a lyrical composition of extraordinary power, interest, and beauty. But the editor reserved unbroken for his concluding volume those Tales which the poet himself had destined and prepared for posthumous publication; and to these we must give the space that we have now at our disposal … .

The posthumous volume offers, indeed, no tale entitled to be talked of in the same breath with the highest efforts of Crabbe’s genius — no ‘Peter Grimes’ — no ‘Ellen Orford’ — no ‘Sir Owen Dale’ — no ‘Patron’ — no ‘Lady Barbara;’ but it contains, nevertheless a series of stories, scarcely one of which any lover of the man and the poet would wish to have been suppressed: every one of them presenting us with pithy couplets, which will be treasured up and remembered while the English language lasts; and some of them, notwithstanding what the editor candidly says as to the general want of the lime labor, displaying not only his skill as an analyst of character, but in a strong light also his peculiar mastery of versification. The example of Lord Byron’s ‘Cor sair’ and ‘Zara’ had not, we suspect, been lost upon him. In some of these pieces he has a freedom and breadth of execution which we doubt if he ever before equalled in the metre to which he commonly adhered — insomuch, that in place of a ‘Pope in worsted stockings’ (as James Smith has called him), we seem now and then to be more reminded of a Dryden in a one-horse chaise.

One of the most amusing of these stories is the first of them, entitled ‘Silford Hall, or the Happy Day.’ …

Small as it was, the place could boast a School, …

[I,7–17; 78–93, 121–45, 164–9; 220–3, 238–47; 302–5, 315–38, 347–64; 384–415 ; 426–31; 463–76, 477–94.]

Crabbe is never greater than in dreams. We have already alluded to that lyric recently published, which no one could have written but the author of ‘Sir Eustace Grey.’ In a lighter vein, what can be better than the dreams of Peter Perkin, when, having explored all the galleries and libraries, and saloons of Silford Hall, he is told the housekeeper’s dinner will not be for an hour yet — walks abroad into the gardens, and falls asleep under some huge oaks, as old, he doubts not, as Julius Cxsar?

I am so happy, and have such delight, …

[I, 661–99; parts of Poetical Works, VIII,1834, 32–4]

Dream on, dear boy ! …

[Ward III, 534–6.]

The ‘Family of Love’ is perhaps the best tale in this volume ….

He had a sturdy multitude to guide, …

[II,120–45f 164–83; 214–53, 264–80; 342–9; 354–95; 400–22, 427–30; 435–6; 447–54, 459–62; 471–6.]

The story of ‘The Equal Marriage’ is a much shorter one than this truly excellent ‘Family of Love;’ and the subject is neither an interesting nor a new one — the sudden break-up of all affection and all comfort, consequent on the termination of the honeymoon allotted to a rake and a coquette, who have mutually deceived each other, and in so far themselves … .

[III,1–19, 26–34, 43–60; 240–66.]

From ‘Rachel,’ the only thoroughly sad story in this volume, we extract the following picture of a deserted and heart-broken woman: —

One calm, cold evening, when the moon was high, …

[IV,121–6, 149–51]

‘Villars’ is the history of a creature of imagination, tormented by the levity and, indeed, vice of a beautiful woman whom his infatuated admiration compels him on every occasion to forgive: there is, we have no doubt, truth in the conception — but the conclusion has not been adequately developed. The following sketch is in the best style of Crabbe’s coast scenery: —

Villars long since, as he indulged his spleen …

[V, 399–416]

… This plans¹ is essentially much the same with that of the Tales of the Hall; but the characters of the ‘Poet’ and the ‘Friend,’ in whose dialogue these histories are brought out, have been left almost blanks, which is a sad falling off. The scene, however, seems to be undoubtedly laid at Aldborough; and, indeed, the following lines in the introductory section are little more than the versification of a passage in Mr. Crabbe’s diary, describing his sensations on visiting his native place in very advanced life, which was inserted by his son in the Biographical Memoir —

Yes ! — twenty years have pass’d, and I am come, …

[VI, 63–74, 77–86, 89–92]

My grave informer doubted, then replied, …

[VII, 58–76, 82–4; VIII, 1–8, 83–100]

‘The Ancient Mansion’ is one of the best pieces in this collection … .

Her servants all, if so we may describe …

[X, 32–7, 42–7; 58–60, 7o–101; 114–65]

How bows the market, when from stall to stall …

[XI, 55–70, ror-8, 121–30, 137–8, 141–2]

Miranda sees her morning levee fil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Critical Heritage Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• General Editor's Preface
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Note on the Text
• The Candidate (1780)
• The Library (1781)
• The Village (1783)
• The Newspaper (1785)
• Poems (1807)
• The Borough (1810)
• Tales (1812)
• Tales of the Hall (1819)
• Poetical Works (with Life) (1834)
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX