soothes without irritation; it is not exacting in its demands; it does not require us to reform our poor law, or our pensions, or our drainage; at the most it 'implores the passing tribute of a sigh', and then its earliest readers were dismissed, as after a sermon, with a pleasing sense of an obligation discharged in a thoroughly well-bred fashion. If we recall how, less than twenty years after the publication of the Elegy, James Hargreaves' house and machinery were destroyed by the mob, this little sidelight let in from England's industrial condition will show how remote from actuality was Gray's acquaintance with the lot of the poor. The new order tugged in one direction, but by taste, affinity, and tradition he retired to his scholar's seclusion. A reformer malgré 80i. VER § 2. GEORGE CRABBE. ERY different in this respect was the daring indignation of George Crabbe (1754-1832)1. Collins died when he was five years old, and Gray when he was seventeen, and the temptations and hesitancies to which the elder poets had listened and deferred, the half-timid, half-venturesome intelligence with which they had looked out from their cloisters on a new world blushing to a new spring, their coy yet artful resolves to break away from the Pope conventions,— the papal infallibility of Reason,-their fresh, shy observation conveyed in such serious wise, the kind of virginity which restrained even their boldest advances in matter or form, were all overborne and swept away on the copious streams of verse which the younger poet poured out through his long and active career. In respect to metrical devices, he was an innovator without experimentation. He found the heroic couplet at hand, as a serviceable and familiar poetic weapon, 1 George Crabbe: Poems. Edited by Adolphus William Ward, Litt.D., Hon. LL.D., F.B.A., Master of Peterhouse. 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1905. George Crabbe and his Times, 1754-1832: a Critical and Biographical Study. By René Huchon. Translated from the French by Frederick Clarke, M.A. John Murray, 1907. In and he manipulated it to his own purpose. When it emerged from his use, it was a new form of verse. respect to style, he may be called a realist without theories. In the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, his greater contemporaries, we shall be sated with theorizing about poetics. Crabbe was naïvely content to practise what others preached. rustic It is difficult to draw a line in time between the new The age and the old; the dates and the facts do not always muse. correspond. The true distinction resides in states of feeling and of temperament, and a key to this difference is found in the contrast between Gray's Elegy (1750) or Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1769) and Crabbe's The Village, in two books, of 1783. The separation in time is negligible; little more than twelve years divided the two last, and the more remarkable, accordingly, is the opposition in their points of view. Gray's pastoral we have briefly examined; turning to Goldsmith's, we note that it was inscribed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and that Dr. Johnson wrote the last four verses, thus ranging it definitely on the side of the classical tradition. It is more important to note that the poet's purpose was political. For four or five years he had observed, in his country excursions', a depopulation of the country, or, as we call it now, the signs of a rural exodus. Goldsmith, let us say at once, was an Irishman resident in London, and a member of Johnson's club. He had written The Traveller, The Citizen of the World, and The Vicar of Wakefield, and, his financial troubles temporarily over, he had settled in the Temple to write biographies and histories, and gay comedies for Covent Garden. In this busy literary life, with its urban friendships and distractions, it is likely that 'country excursions' would be partly reminiscent and partly superficial. There was nothing in his preparation for The Deserted Village which resembled the training and experience of Crabbe, the Suffolkshire poet. It is one thing to write, like Goldsmith, of the idyllic village preacher who was passing rich with forty pounds a year'; it is another thing to grow up like Crabbe, as one of many children born to an obscure customsofficer whose yearly salary was one-fourth of that sum. The one may, perhaps, be said to appeal to the literary sense, and the other to the literal; and the contrast between the two will be found in the poems we are considering. ; Despite the political theme which lent direction to his musings, Goldsmith does not get away from the pastoral view of the country. The stock epithets and diction are utilized in full. The labouring swain' is cheered by plenty and health, precisely as Gray's 'forefathers' had driven their team in 'jocund' mood. The same sober' herd went 'lowing o'er the lea' 'village statesmen', own brothers to the villageHampden' of Gray, ' talked with looks profound', and 'the breezy covert of the warbling grove was composed in the echo of the breezy call of incense-breathing morn'. The lament at the depopulation, ascribed, in the dedicatory epistle, to the increase of our luxuries', is heightened, of course, by lingering reflections 6 on the decline from a golden age, but how savage in effect is the satire with which Crabbe crushed the whole illusion a brief dozen years after 1 On Mincio's banks, in Cæsar's bounteous reign, The happy youth assumes the common strain, In tinsel trappings of poetic pride? The Village, i. 15–48. From this challenge there was no appeal; for this A troop of wit courage there was no surrender. These peasants, nesses. sweating in public beneath the glare of the noonday sun, were the first of a long train of witnesses, summoned by Crabbe from the fields, to rebuke the meretricious images of rural plenty and rustic innocence which the idea of the country had been employed to 1 So Cowper wrote of Pope in Table Talk that he— Made poetry a mere mechanic art, And every warbler has the tune by heart. |