Born, at Aldeborough, 24 Dec. 1754. Educated at private schools at Bungay and Stowmarket. After leaving school, worked in warehouse at Slaughden; apprenticed as errand-boy to a doctor at Wickham Brook, near Bury St. Edmunds, 1768; to a surgeon at Woodbridge, 1771. Contrib. to “Wheble’s Mag.,” 1772. Returned to Aldeborough, 1775, to work in warehouse. Studied medicine. After a visit to London, became assistant to surgeon in Aldeborough, and afterwards set up in practice there. To London to make living by literature, April 1780. Ultimate success, mainly through assistance of Burke. Ordained Deacon, 21 Dec. 1781, as curate to Rector of Aldeborough. Ordained Priest, Aug. 1782. To Belvoir, as Chaplain to Duke of Rutland, 1782. Given degree of LL.B. by Archbishop of Canterbury, and presented (by Thurlow) with livings of Frome, St. Quentin and Evershot, Dorsetshire. Married Sarah Elmy, Dec. 1783. Accepted curacy of Stathern, 1785. Contrib. to “Annual Register,” 1784. Voluminous writer, but published little. Exchanged Dorsetshire livings for Rectorship of Muston and Allington, and settled at Muston 25 Feb. 1789. Removed to Parham as curate of Sweffling and Great Glemham, 1792. Took Great Glenham Hall, 1796. Returned to Muston, Oct. 1805. Wife died, 31 Oct. 1813. Rector of Trowbridge Wiltshire, and Croxton, near Belvoir, June 1814. Visited London, 1817 and 1822. Visited Scott in Edinburgh, autumn 1822. Died, at Trowbridge, 3 Feb. 1832. Buried there. Works: “Inebriety” (anon.), 1775; “The Candidate,” 1780; “The Library” (anon.), 1781; “The Village,” 1783; “The Newspaper,” 1785; “A Discourse … after the funeral of the Duke of Rutland,” 1788; “Poems,” 1807; “The Parish Register,” 1807; “The Borough,” 1810; “Tales,” 1812; “The Variation of public opinion and feelings considered,” 1817; “Tales of the Hall,” 1819. Posthumous: “Posthumous Sermons,” ed. by J. D. Hastings, 1850. Collected Works: with letters, and Life by his son George, 1834.

Personal

  The people with whom I live perceive my situation, and find me to be indigent and without friends. About ten days since, I was compelled to give a note for seven pounds, to avoid an arrest for about double that sum which I owe. I wrote to every friend I had, but my friends are poor likewise…. Having used every honest means in vain, I yesterday confessed my inability, and obtained, with much entreaty, and as the greatest favour, a week’s forbearance, when I am positively told, that I must pay the money, or prepare for a prison. You will guess the purpose of so long an introduction. I appeal to you, Sir, as a good, and, let me add, a great man. I have no other pretensions to your favour than that I am an unhappy one…. Can you, Sir, in any degree, aid me with propriety?—Will you ask any demonstrations of my veracity? I have imposed upon myself, but I have been guilty of no other imposition. Let me, if possible, interest your compassion. I know those of rank and fortune are teased with frequent petitions, and are compelled to refuse the requests even of those whom they know to be in distress: it is, therefore, with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour; but you will forgive me, Sir, if you do not think proper to relieve.

  Crabbe is absolutely delightful—simple as a child, but shrewd, and often good-naturedly reminding you of the best parts of his poetry. He took his wine cheerfully—far from excess; but his heart really seemed to expand; and he was full of anecdote and social feeling.

	True Bard!—and simple, as the race
	Of true-born poets ever are …
	Friend of long years! of friendship tried
	Through many a bright and dark event;
	In doubts, my judge—in taste, my guide—
	In all, my stay and ornament!

  He went into Mr. Burke’s room, a poor young adventurer, spurned by the opulent and rejected by the publishers, his last shilling gone, and all but his last hope with it: he came out virtually secure of almost all the good fortune that, by successive steps, afterwards fell to his lot—his genius acknowledged by one whose verdict could not be questioned—his character and manners appreciated and approved by a noble and capacious heart, whose benevolence knew no limits but its power—that of a giant in intellect, who was, in feeling, an unsophisticated child—a bright example of the close affinity between superlative talents, and the warmth of the generous affections. Mr. Crabbe had afterwards many other friends, kind, liberal, and powerful, who assisted him in his professional career; but it was one hand alone that rescued him when he was sinking. In reflecting upon the consequences of the letter to Burke—the happiness, the exultation, the inestimable benefits that resulted to my father,—ascribing, indeed, my own existence to that great and good man’s condescension and prompt kindness—I may be pardoned for dwelling upon that interview with feelings of gratitude which I should but in vain endeavour to express.

  Perhaps no man of origin so very humble ever retained so few traces of it as he did, in the latter years, at least, of his long and chequered life. There was no shade of subserviency in his courtesy, or of coarseness in his hilarity; his simplicity was urbane;—the whole demeanour exactly what any one would have pronounced natural and suitable in an English clergyman of the highest class, accustomed, from youth to age, to refined society and intellectual pursuits—gentle, grave, and venerable—and only rendered more interesting by obvious unfamiliarity with some of the conventional nothings of modern town-bred usage.

  We have tried to draw his mental, but not his physical likeness. And yet it has all along been blended with our thoughts, like the figure of one known from childhood, like the figure of our own beloved and long-lost father. We see the venerable old man, newly returned from a botanical excursion, laden with flowers and weeds (for no one knew better than he that every weed is a flower—it is the secret of his poetry), with his high narrow forehead, his grey locks, his glancing shoe-buckles, his clean dress somewhat ruffled in the woods, his mild countenance, his simple abstracted air.

  Crabbe, after his literary reputation had been established, was staying for a few days at the old Hummums; but he was known to the coffee-room and to the waiters merely as “Mr. Crabbe.” One forenoon, when he had gone out, a gentleman called on him, and while expressing his regret at not finding him, happened to let drop the information that Mr. Crabbe was the celebrated poet. The next time that Crabbe entered the coffee-room he was perfectly astonished at the sensation which he caused; the company were all eagerness to look at him, the waiters all officiousness to serve him.

  Crabbe, when I first saw him, was an old gentleman, with white hair, and the mildest possible manner. He gave no indication of the vigor and shrewdness which he put forth in his verse. I remember that Moore was at Rogers’ house one morning when Crabbe was breakfasting there, and when they were engaged to dine at some nobleman’s house. Moore cautioned him, in the morning, to stand up and be manly. “For God’s sake, Crabbe,” said he, “don’t be so very grateful when we go to Z—’s house to-night.”

  He was stern only in verse. His was the gentle, kindly nature of one who loving God loved man, and all the creatures God has made. His early struggles, less for fame than the bare means of existence, may surely furnish a lesson, and, in their result, an encouragement, to those who labor for either through difficulties it might seem impossible to overcome.

  His preaching attracted large congregations. He was a clergyman of the old-fashioned school, a good friend to the poor, for whose benefit he still practised medicine, and a preacher of good homespun morality. But he was indifferent to theological speculations, suspicious of excessive zeal, contemptuous towards “enthusiasts,” and heartily opposed to Wesleyans, evangelicals, and other troublesome innovators.

General

  I have sent you back Mr. Crabbe’s poem, which I read with great delight. It is original, vigorous, and elegant. The alterations which I have made I do not require him to adopt, for my lines are, perhaps, not often better [than] his own; but he may take mine and his own together, and perhaps between them produce something better than either. He is not to think his copy wantonly defaced; a wet sponge will wash all the red lines away, and leave the pages clean. His Dedication will be least liked: it were better to contract it into a short sprightly address. I do not doubt of Mr. Crabbe’s success.

	Truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires,
	And decorate the verse herself inspires:
	This fact in Virtue’s name let Crabbe attest;
	Though Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best.

  I must not conclude without thanking you very gratefully for the pleasure I received in reading your extracts from Crabbe’s “Borough;” some of which, particularly the “Convict’s Dream,” leave far behind all that any other living poet has written.

  It is very pleasing to perceive, that, in his best passages, Mr. Crabbe is, practically at least, a convert to the good old principle of paying some regard to fancy and taste in poetry. In these passages he works expressly for the imagination; not perhaps awakening its loftiest exertions, yet studiously courting its assistance, and conciliating its good will. He now accommodates himself to the more delicate sympathies of our nature, and flatters our prejudices by attaching to his pictures agreeable and interesting associations. Thus it is that, for his best success, he is indebted to something more than ungarnished reality. He is the Paladin, who on the day of decisive combat, laid aside his mortal arms, and took only the magic lance.

Crabbe, asking questions concerning Greek hovels.

  Crabbe, the first of living poets.

  Original, terse, vigorous, and popular. He is the Hogarth of modern bards: or rather, I should say, if he display Hogarth’s power of conception, his pictures are finished with the point and brilliancy of Teniers. Every body reads, because every body understands, his poems: but the subjects are too frequently painful, by being too true to nature.

  Crabbe with all his defects stands immeasurably above Wordsworth as the Poet of the Poor.

  He not only deals in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which he dissects the most trivial objects—and for the interest he excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches of the peace; and makes out a parochial list of accidents and offenses. He takes the most trite, the most gross and obvious and revolting part of nature, for the subject of his elaborate descriptions; but it is Nature still, and Nature is a great and mighty Goddess!… Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of our living authors. That he is so, can be accounted for on no other principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world about us, and our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any manner powerfully and directly reminds us of it.

Crabbe, whose dark gold is richer than it seems.

  That incomparable passage in Crabbe’s “Borough,” which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child.

  [Crabbe] is a cold and remorseless dissector, who pauses, with the streaming knife in his hands, to explain how strongly the blood is tainted, what a gangrene is in the liver, how completely the sources of health are corrupted, and that the subject is a thorough bad one…. God deliver us from Crabbe in the hour of depression. Pictures of moral, and mental, and bodily degradation, are frequent through all his works; he is one of Job’s chief comforters to the people.

  I think Crabbe and Southey are something alike; but Crabbe’s poems are founded on observation and real life—Southey’s on fancy and books. In facility they are equal, though Crabbe’s English is of course not upon a level with Southey’s, which is next door to faultless. But in Crabbe there is an absolute defect of the high imagination; he gives me little or no pleasure: yet, no doubt, he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature. I read all sorts of books with some pleasure, except modern sermons and treatises on political economy.

  Crabbe is inventive; but most of the characters he draws are the reverse of poetical. There is nothing poetical in the description of a poor-house and its inhabitants.

  I take no pleasure in Crabbe’s unpoetical representations of human life. And though no one can dispute that he had a powerful pen, and could truthfully portray what he saw, yet he had an eye only for the sad realities of life. As Mrs. Barbauld said to me many years ago, “I shall never be tired of Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village,’—I shall never look again into Crabbe’s ‘Village.’” Indeed, this impression is so strong, that I have never read his later works, and know little about them.

  The sun getting very strong, we halted the chair in a shady corner, just within the verge of his verdant arcade around the court-wall; and breathing the coolness of the spot, he [Scott] said, “Read me some amusing thing—read me a bit of Crabbe.” I brought out the first volume of his old favorite that I could lay hand on, and turned to what I remembered as one of his most favourite passages in it—the description of the arrival of the Players in the “Borough.” He listened with great interest, and also, as I soon perceived, with great curiosity. Every now and then he exclaimed, “Capital—excellent—very good—Crabbe has lost nothing”—and we were too well satisfied that he considered himself as hearing a new production, when, chuckling over one couplet, he said—“Better and better—but how will poor Terry endure these cuts?” I went on with the poet’s terrible sarcasms upon theatrical life, and he listened eagerly, muttering, “Honest Dan!” “Dan won’t like this.” At length I reached those lines—

	Sad happy race! soon raised and soon depressed,
	Your days all passed in jeopardy and jest;
	Poor without prudence, with afflictions vain,
	Not warned by misery, nor enriched by gain.

“Shut the book,” said Sir Walter—“I can’t stand more of this—it will touch Terry to the very quick.”

  I have given a larger space to Crabbe in this republication than to any of his contemporary poets; not merely because I think more highly of him than of most of them, but also because I fancy that he has had less justice done him. The nature of his subjects was not such as to attract either imitators or admirers, from among the ambitious or fanciful lovers of poetry; or, consequently, to set him at the head of a School, or let him surround himself with the zealots of a Sect: And it must also be admitted, that his claims to distinction depend fully as much on his great powers of observation, his skill in touching the deeper sympathies of our nature, and his power of inculcating, by their means, the most impressive lessons of humanity, as on any fine play of fancy, or grace and beauty in his delineations. I have great faith, however, in the intrinsic worth and ultimate success of those more substantial attributes; and have, accordingly, the strongest impression that the citations I have here given from Crabbe will strike more, and sink deeper into the minds of readers to whom they are new (or by whom they may have been partially forgotten), than any I have been able to present from other writers.

  Seriously, we hope that much of Crabbe’s writing will every year become less and less readable, and less and less easily understood; till, in the milder day, men shall have difficulty in believing that such physical, mental, and moral degradation, as he describes, ever existed in Britain; and till, in future Encyclopædias, his name be found recorded as a powerful but barbarous writer, writing in a barbarous age.

  George Crabbe was not merely a poet, but the poet who had the sagacity to see into the real state of things, and the heart to do his duty—the great marks of the true poet, who is necessarily a true and feeling man. To him popular education, popular freedom, popular advance into knowledge and power, owe a debt which futurity will gratefully acknowledge, but no time can cancel.

  I have said that Crabbe was the least imaginative of poets. He has no imagination in the commonly received sense of the term; there is nothing of creation in his works; nay, I dare affirm, in opposition to that refined critic, Sir James Mackintosh, that there was no touch of an idealizing tendency in his mind; yet he is a poet; he is so through his calm but deep and steady sympathy with all that is human; he is so by his distinguished power of observation; he is so by his graphic skill. No literature boasts an author more individual than Crabbe.

  If originality, if the striking out a new path, constitutes one of the highest claims to poetical excellence, few are entitled to stand in the same rank with Crabbe. Indeed, it would be difficult to point to any prototype, either as regards his style or his subjects. The nearest approach I have met with to his sententiousness, is in the old, quaint, pointed satires of Dr Donne; and something of his graphic truth and elaborate minuteness of description may be found in the verse of Chaucer, more especially “The Canterbury Pilgrims.” But Crabbe added much—very much—which is unequivocally his own, and which acknowledges no borrowed lustre.

  I am awfully sleepy and stupid, or should try to say something about the only book I have read for a long while back—Crabbe, whose poems were known to me long ago, but not at all familiarly till now. I fancy one might read him much of tener and much later than Wordsworth—than almost any one.

  It is difficult to find a single passage, not too long for quotation, which will convey any tolerable notion of the power and beauty of Crabbe’s poetry, where so much of the effect lies in the conduct of the narrative—in the minute and prolonged but wonderfully skillful as well as truthful pursuit and exposition of the course and vicissitude of passions and circumstances.

  Crabbe adds particular to particular, scattering rather than deepening the impression of reality, and making us feel as if every man were a species by himself.

  Mrs. Wister quite mistook the aim of my Query about Crabbe: I asked if he were read in America for the very reason that he is not read in England. And in the October Cornhill is an Article upon him (I hope not by Leslie Stephen), so ignorant and self-sufficient that I am more wroth than ever. The old story of “Pope in worsted stockings”—why I could cite whole Paragraphs of as fine texture as Molière—incapable of Epigram, the Jackanapes says of “our excellent Crabbe”—why I could find fifty of the very best Epigrams in five minutes. But now do you care for him? “Honour bright?” as Sheridan used to say. I don’t think I ever knew a Woman who did like C., except my Mother. What makes People (this stupid Reviewer among them) talk of worsted Stockings is because of having read only his earlier works: when he himself talked of his Muse as

“Muse of the Mad, the Foolish, and the Poor,”

the Borough: Parish Register, etc. But it is his Tales of the Hall which discover him in silk Stockings; the Subjects, the Scenery, the Actors, of a more Comedy kind: with, I say, Paragraphs, and Pages, of fine Molière style—only too often defaced by carelessness, disproportion, and “longueurs” intolerable. I shall leave my Edition of Tales of the Hall, made legible by the help of Scissors and Gum, with a word or two of Prose to bridge over pages of stupid Verse. I don’t wish to try and supersede the Original, but, by the Abstract, to get People to read the whole, and so learn (as in Clarissa) how to get it all under command. I even wish that some one in America would undertake to publish—in whole, or part by part—my “Readings in Crabbe,” viz., Tales of the Hall: but no one would let me do the one thing I can do.

  Though Crabbe occupies so marked a place in the history of English poetry, he has not met in our own generation with all the attention which he deserves…. As an observer and painter of the individual truths of nature no poet has ever approached him.

  He liked Crabbe much, and thought that there was great force in his homely tragic stories. “He has a world of his own. There is a ‘tramp, tramp, tramp,’ a merciless sledge-hammer thud about his lines which suits his subjects.” And in speaking of him he would cite Byron’s “Nature’s sternest painter yet the best.”

  Lord Holland had not quite left the eighteenth century behind him. He preferred Dryden to Shakespeare and Crabbe to Wordsworth. It is difficult to conceive that, even in the eighteenth century, such estimates could have been common—though Wordsworth used to designate that century as “the dark age”—but they did not seem to excite surprise at Holland House. Crabbe, I think, had been personally known there; but I doubt whether, in that society, personal association went for much in the estimate of values. On Crabbe’s death, Lord Melbourne rubbed his hands and took a view of it which was more than consolatory: “I am so glad when one of these fellows dies, because then one has his works complete on one’s shelf and there is an end of him.”

  One who owns the unrivalled distinction of having been the favourite poet of the three greatest intellectual factors of the age (scientific men excepted),—Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Cardinal Newman.

  The “Village” was intended as an antithesis to Goldsmith’s idyllic sentimentalism. Crabbe’s realism, preceding even Cowper and anticipating Wordsworth, was the first important indication of one characteristic movement in the contemporary school of poetry. His clumsy style and want of sympathy with the new world isolated him as a writer, as he was a recluse in his life. But the force and fidelity of his descriptions of the scenery of his native place and of the characteristics of the rural population give abiding interest to his work. His pathos is genuine and deep, and to some judgments his later works atone for the diminution in tragic interest by their gentleness and simple humour. Scott and Wordsworth had some of his poetry by heart. Scott, like Fox, had Crabbe read to him in his last illness (Lockhart, ch. lxxxiii). Wordsworth said that the poems would last as long as anything written in verse since their first appearance (note to “Village,” bk. i. in Collected Works). Miss Austen said that she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. Jeffrey reviewed him admiringly, and in later years E. FitzGerald, the translator of “Omar Khayyám,” wrote (1882) an admiring preface to a selection in which he says that Lord Tennyson appreciates them equally with himself. Cardinal Newman speaks of the “extreme delight” with which he read “Tales of the Hall,” on their appearance.

  He certainly succeeds in conveying his own tone of feeling to his reader—that Nature is uninteresting and has nothing in common with man. His eye for Nature was as poor as his ear for music. And we have reason to be thankful that the same wisdom which caused him to lay aside his flute, on finding that after many a painful hour he could not even master “Over the Water to Charlie,” caused him also to refrain from inflicting more natural descriptions, than were necessary on his readers…. It is not wonderful then that Crabbe should be neglected when he has none of our three staples of existence to offer us—no treasures of nature-drawing, no psychological research, and no beauty of language.

  The question has been sometimes asked whether Crabbe was either a great poet or a great writer. If he was the first he was the second…. He has left behind him a body of poetry, which, whether we regard the delineation of manners, the knowledge of character, the strength of passion, or the beauty of description combined in it, need not shrink from comparison with works of which the fame is much more widely extended. Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, to say nothing of the later poets, each, no doubt, excelled Crabbe in some of these particulars; but they are not united to the same extent in any one of them. This distinction does not necessarily make him either so delightful a companion, or so great a poet, as those that I have named. But it qualifies him to take rank with the best of them as a Great Writer.

  Crabbe’s description is perhaps the most nakedly realistic of any in English poetry; but it is an uncommonly good one. Realism has a narrow compass, and Crabbe’s powers were confined strictly within it; but he had the best virtues of a realist. His physical vision—his sight of what presents itself to the eye—was almost perfect; he saw every object, and saw it as it was.

  Wherefore send me Crabbe. ’Twere a pleasant leap from the Pisces to Cancer…. People talk about Crabbe, but they don’t read him. Urge them to do so: likely enough you will only get them to read your article, but that will do them a lot of good; and it certainly will do me good, old Crabbian though I profess myself.

  We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs of England’s country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match, painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, and the great sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines.

  With the exactness of a Dutch painter he is apt to spoil his pictures with vulgar detail, and mar his descriptions with prosaic and commonplace allusions. But, allowing for these defects there remains a large body of powerful poetry which occupies a place of its own in English literature. Crabbe was pre-eminently the poet of the poor. In early life he had lived among them and mingled with their joys and sorrows, and as he grew older, whether in the capacity of a surgeon’s assistant, or in the discharge of a clergyman’s duty, he must have often witnessed the extremities of sin and suffering which he afterwards so vividly described.

  Nature with him is seen in her bare simplicity—austere often, sometimes ugly in her nakedness.

  Crabbe has none of the Grace of the new dispensation, if he has some glimpses of its Law. He sails so close to the wind of poetry that he is sometimes merely prosaic and often nearly so. His conception of life is anti-idealist almost to pessimism, and he has no fancy. The “jewels five words long” are not his: indeed there clung to him a certain obscurity of expression which Johnson is said to have good-naturedly smoothed out in his first work to some extent, but from which he never got quite free…. No writer of his time had an influence which so made for truth pure and simple, yet not untouched by the necessary “disprosing” processes of art. For Crabbe is not a mere realist; and whoso considers him as such has not apprehended him. But he was a realist to this extent, that he always went to the model and never to the pattern-drawing on the Academy walls. And that was what his time needed. His general characteristics are extremely uniform: even the external shape and internal subject-matter of his poems are almost confined to the shape and matter of the verse-tale. He need not, and indeed cannot, in a book like this, be dealt with at much length. But he is a very great writer, and a most important figure at this turning-point of English literature.

  It is superfluous to say that a writer who has been so lauded by the greatest poet, the most ardent orator, the most honored novelist, and the most refined letter-writer of England in a century must himself have possessed extraordinary qualities. Yet it remains true that Crabbe is not read, is not even likely to be much read for many years to come; and the reason of this is perfectly simple: his excellencies lie in a direction apart from the trend of modern thought and sentiment, while his faults are such as most strongly repel modern taste…. To me personally there is no tedium, but only endless delight, in these mated rhymes which seem to pervade and harmonize the whole rhythm. And withal they help to create the artistic illusion, that wonderful atmosphere, I may call it, which envelops Crabbe’s world. No one, not even the most skeptical of Crabbe’s genius, can deny that he has succeeded in giving to his work a tone or atmosphere peculiarly and consistently his own.