Parson and Poet
ON finishing this book I wondered whether there is any value in long analytical biographies, since this short life creates with the simp:est means the picture of a man so vivid and complete that it seems as if no discoveries about Crabbe can add to it. The poet Crabbe is one of the strangest and most attractive figures in English literature, a village Leonardo, without of course Leonardo's tre- mendous genius. But there is something enigmatic and patriarchal about the glimpses we have of him, whether he is walking the hedges in search of rare weeds, composing couplets as he chips out fossils in the Wiltshire quarries, viewing the great meteor of 1783 as he stands in his stirrups one hand stretched at the sky, or writing on a letter of his dead wife: "Nothing could be more sincere than this— and yet happiness was denied."
To his parishioners he was more enigmatic than patriarchal. When he left his parish at Muston they rang the church bells before he was out of the vicarage, for his natural reserve suggested a knowledge of primaeval secrets which belong properly to the magician. He always aroused hostility and suspicion in simple people until they were won by his quiet kindliness. "He had a passion for science— the science of the human mind first ; then that of nature," says his son. Although there was nothing magical, his villagers were right in suspecting a power • the wisdom which comes from devotion to the exact and the absolute. The son does not try to analyse it or to penetrate his father's reserve. To do so would be not to know him, since it was an essential part of him. As it is, we believe that we know exactly why he lived and wrote as he did.
In the preface the son calls his book " this humble memoir." But it is his part in it which makes it so remarkable and beautiful. He was a gentle and sensitive man, devoted to his father, and suffi- ciently like to say things a more ordinary person would have concealed. Referring to the deference the poet expected when Speaking in conversation, he says : " There was an unfair principle in this expectation which I could never think in harmony with the general modesty of his nature." But he inherited some of his father's talent as well as his honesty. The account of Crabbe's death is truly movingjnd the work of an artist. He writes of child- hood, that quagmire for the author, with equal sensitivity. " Now and then youthful tenderness of feeling does return—especially if we should happen to hear some pleasing melody, even chimes of distant bells, a flood of early remembrances and warm affections flows into his mind, and we dwell on the past with the fondest regret ; for such scenes are never to return ; yet, though painful, these impressions are ever mingled with delight ; we are tenacious of their duration and feel the better for the transient susceptibility." Like his father he is the man with the sour name and the sweet
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