BOOKS.

GEORGE ORABBE.* Dunnsrn the last quarter of a century there has been a steady revival of interest in the works of George Crabbe. George Crabbe held a narrow, though a charming, mirror before the still landscape of his age, and imperishably fixed the pic- ture by the alchemy of genius. He has won a permanent place in English literature, though it is not in the front rank. Great genius deals with Nature in quite other fashion. It wrestles with her after Jacob's fashion at Peniel, "until the breaking of the day," and wins from her at a great price secrete and blessings and power to illuminate the lives of men. Coleridge and Charlotte Brontë exhibit the loneliness, the wrestling, the conquests of genius in a way that Crabbe never approaches save in his rarest and greatest moments.

But the fact that this true imitator of Nature, who represents the transition period between the literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is not quite the peer of the creative geniuses of literature is certainly no reason for neglect. The present age is also a period of literary transition, and there is much for us to learn to-day from the sombre though minute realism and the ever persuasive narrative of Crabbe. For this reason we must welcome the Life of George Crabbe by the Master of the Temple. It is an admirable monograph per- vaded by a literary style that is felt rather than observed—a great thing at a time when the distinction between style and epigrammaticism is totally obscured—it is self-restrained and sympathetic, and brings vividly before the reader this eighteenth-century clergyman, who was a priest in spite of himself and a poet in spite of his epoch. We do not think, however, that it will supplant Mr. T. E. Kebberriftife of George Crabbe (1888). Each book has its particular value, and every lover of Crabbe must perforce possess both. Neither contains the gruesome story of the theft in 1847 of the poet's skull from Trowbridge Churchyard, and its restoration in 1876.

Crabbe's life is one that somewhat naturally attracts the biographer. It contains many elements of the fairy-tale, and the human touch that comes with the sudden decline and the living death of the poet's wife seems almost out of place with the record of a steady progress from immeasurable poverty to Holland House and to Mr. Rogers's breakfast-table. Crabbe was born on Christmas Eve, 1754, in the sea-threatened borough of Aldeburgh. He was the eldest son of a retired village schoolmaster, who had succeeded his father in the scarcely less arduous post of Collector of Salt-duties. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a country doctor, and in 1771 his father was able to pass him on to Mr. Page, a doctor at Woodbridge. That the boy of seventeen disliked his profession is not clear. In "The Library" he calls doctors "ye first seducers of my easy heart." It was near Woodbridge that he met Miss Sarah Elmey, whom he married eleven years later, and who subsequently brought him a con- siderable fortune. But that part of the fairy-story was far enough away in 1775, when Crabbe's apprenticeship ended, and he returned to Aldeburgh to find a home stricken with poverty and drink. He commenced practice in his native town, and obtained a measure of success that left ample time for botanising, and ere he was starved out (both in body and soul) his mind had stored up those flowers of the field which to this day blossom sweetly and freshly on the landscape of his books. In April, 1780, he set sail for London, "master of a box of clothes, a small ease of surgical instruments, and three pounds in money." The fairy-story had begun with a vengeance.

The heart-breaking first year in London somehow came

• Crabbe. By Alfred Ainger. "English Men a Lettere Series." London: Macmillan and Co. Pe. net.]

near its end,—a lamentable end : "want stared him in the face, and a gaol seemed the only immediate refuge for his head." He had already been master of nothing for some eight months. But the Providence that wateheth over poets had suddenly, almost without his knowing it, made him a master of verse. His efforts with publishers and patrons had almost all failed. Success, nay, even provender, seemed beyond reach. In entire despair, he wrote a pathetic, manly letter to the great and great-hearted Edmund Burke, and having delivered it, "paced up and down Westminster Bridge all night in an agony of suspense." When he called in the morning Burke had already read the letter and the enclosed poems. He recognised that "a new and genuine poet had arisen." Burke not only saw him and gave him money, but at once placed Crabbe in the position of a friend and admitted him into his family circle. The impossible had happened, and the good fairy of the story ceased not to wave her wand. With a rapidity that shames the pages of Grimm she trans- formed the starving, untrained, but ever cheerful surgeon into a Bachelor of Laws, a priest, a ducal chaplain, a country clergyman of repute, a man of means, and one of the leaders of English literary society. Canon Ainger tells the story with sympathy and insight, and loses none of the clear light thrown on the poet's character by his son's dispassionate biography.

Crabbe's poetry falls into three distinct periods. The first (1781-95) comprised " The Library," "The Tillage," and "The Newspaper." Specimens of the poems that eventually formed the first and second of these secured Burke's support. More than twenty years elapsed before Crabbe's second period (1807-12) began with the publication of his" Parish Register," followed by "The Borough" and "Tales." The third period includes "Tales of the Hall" (1819) and "Posthumous Tales," published in 1834, two years after the poet's death, in the collected edition of his works. Of the work of the first period, "The Village" is certainly the most notable. It directly contrasted the ideal England with the extremely sordid reality, and it struck an entirely new realistic note. But "The Library," published anonymously in 1781, was neither inconsiderable nor immature. The Monthly Review in declaring it to be "the production of no common pen" was but stating a truth. "The Village," however, as we have said, struck a new note:— " There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious and lucrative' tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an English rural village in its ideality—rural loveli- ness—enshrining rural innocence and joy—and to show how man's vices, invading it from the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to be attributed to the insidious attacks from without."

It might, however, have been added that Crabbe's realism is misleading, for it represented the worst aspects of rural life drawn from the worst districts. There were then, as there are now, rural parishes that tended to approximate to Auburn rather than to Aldeburgh. George Crabbe in many of the characteristics of his art closely resembles Emile Zola, but in none more than in this persistent determination to describe the sordid, the mean, and the immoral. But Crabbe felt (as Zola felt) the thick darkness before the dawn in a way that never affected Goldsmith. Crabbe yearned for a time- " When all the fiercer passions cease (The glory and disgrace of youth)."

He imagines a time when reason roles, passion sleeps, and folly is fled. Now, he cries, "of laurels let us go in quest."

B ut-

" For laurels, 'tis alas! too late. What is possess'd we may retain,

But for new conquests strive in vain."

It is the despairing cry of the dying age that has suddenly realised the need for reality. Power, strength, happiness, joy, and the movement of life have gone. Crabbe's is the last sad note of the long literary epoch which opened with Marlowe's mighty line.

But Crabbe was not unworthy of his epoch. He told the new age with no uncertain voice that the salvation of literature lay in the return to Nature, and Scott and Wordsworth drank in this truth from the voice of the last descendant of the Elizabethans. Both in his second and his third period he preached this doctrine in tale after tale with a

persistency that illuminates his atmosphere of gloom more effectually than his occasional glints of humour. Nor was his verse only embroidered with rare transcripts of natural flowers. His lyrical gifts were very real, and make one regret his adherence to the heroic couplet, though we agree with Canon Aiager that he did so "with a wise knowledge of his own powers." "Sir Eustace Grey," full of the "dream-scenery" of the opium-eater—written, there can be little doubt, under the stimulus of opium—is a striking instance of almost lyric force which is here, and deservedly, set out very fully. Other instances may perhaps be quoted. The year 1778 gives us four lines of promise :—

"Friendship is like the gold refined, And all may weigh its worth ;

Love like the ore, brought undesig,n'd In virgin beauty forth."

While a song from the "Posthumous Tales" shows that the baud never lost its cunning :—

"No prince or peasant lad am I,

Nor crown nor crook to me belong, But I will love thee till I die, And die before I do thee wrong."

The beautiful Ophelia-song in "The Sisters" (" Tales of the Hall ") should also, at least in part, be quoted :— "Let me not have this gloomy view About my room, around my bed; But morning roses, wet with dew, To cool my burning brows instead.

Oh! let the herbs I loved to rear Give to my sense their perfumed breath ; Let them be placed about my bier, And grace the gloomy house of death.

Raise not a turf, nor set a stone, That man a maiden's grave may trace, But thou, my Lucy, come alone, And let affection find the place."

We may close this notice of a true poet's work with a refer- ence to the gleam of optimism that flashes out at the end of the terrible "Hall of Justice." The wretched heroine of the story, who declares as the keynote of her life that—

"My better thoughts my life disdain'd, But yet the viler led my will," feels that her baby grandchild, who ought to be stained with every hereditary vice, may yet demonstrate the mercy of God. The idea as the poet puts it in the following image is true and ennobling :—

"Yet as the dark and muddy tide When far from its polluted source, Becomes more pure and purified, Flows in a clear and happy course,

In thee, dear infant! so may end Our shame, in thee our sorrows cease ! And thy pure course will then extend, In floods of joy, o'er vales of peace."