GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832) When Goldsmith sat down to sketch for all time the picture of his native village, it was after an absence of eighteen years and he saw it through a tinted haze of retrospect and soft sentimental reflection. Crabbe came to his task fresh from the hardships of his youth; he wrote with his eye on the object'; and he painted the cot as Truth will paint it and as Bards will not,' in all the reality of its hard and sordid detail. The Village was Aldborough, a rude fishing port on the frowning coast' of Suffolk. Here Crabbe was born, the eldest child of a collector of salt-duties. After a scattered education which consisted partly in loading butter and cheese in the neighboring port, he was apprenticed, at fourteen, to a surgeon near Bury St. Edmunds, who employed him in 'hoeing turnips.' After some years of study he set up as a surgeon in his native village; but his rewards were meager and he desired to marry. In the meantime, he had begun to cultivate the Muses and he resolved to try his lot in London. On the verge of starvation, he was taken up by Burke, who introduced him to his distinguished friends, aided the publication of his first successful poem, The Library (1781), and induced him to exchange the knife for the prayer-book. Returning to Aldborough as a curate, he became, shortly after, through Burke's introduction, a protégé of the Duke of Rutland, and was never again in want. His literary fame, during most of his life; was based on The Village, which he published in 1783 and followed with a silence of twenty-four years, broken only by the publication of a trifling poem, The Newspaper (1785). During these years he wrote and destroyed large quantities of verse and a treatise on botany and busied himself with domestic life, but was especially occupied in healing both the minds and bodies of the poor of his various parishes. His second period of publication, beginning with The Parish Register (1807), including The Borough (1810) and Tales in Verse (1812), and concluding with Tales of the Hall (1819), brought him into the world of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. He outlived the second and died in the same year with the last. Crabbe's powerful realism has been greatly admired by the men of his own craft. He has, as Tennyson said, a world of his own.' It is a far more populous world than that of Cowper or even of Wordsworth and it is not more unlovely than that of Burns; but he brought to its interpretation little of the tenderness of the first, the internal brightness' of the second, or the human tears and laughter of the third. We may be stunned or impressed by Crabbe's world, but we will never love it. On which, a boy, he climbed the loftiest bough, Then his first joy, but his sad emblem now. He once was chief in all the rustic trade; His steady hand the straightest furrow made; Full many a prize he won, and still is proud To find the triumphs of his youth allowed; A transient pleasure sparkles in his eyes, 192 He hears and smiles, then thinks again and sighs": For now he journeys to his grave in pain; The rich disdain him; nay, the poor disdain : Alternate masters now their slave command, Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand, And, when his age attempts its task in vain, With ruthless taunts, of lazy poor complain. Oft may you see him, when he tends the sheep, 200 His winter charge, beneath the hillock weep; Oft hear him murmur to the winds that blow O'er his white locks and bury them in snow, When, roused by rage and muttering in the morn, He mends the broken edge with icy thorn: 'Why do I live, when I desire to be 206 At once, from life and life's long labor free? Like leaves in spring, the young are blown away, Without the sorrows of a slow decay; I, like yon withered leaf, remain behind, 210 Nipped by the frost, and shivering in the wind; There it abides till younger buds come on Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapors, flagging, play, 230 And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day; There children dwell who know no parents' care; Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there! Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed; Dejected widows with unheeded tears, 236 And crippled age with more than childhood fears; The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they! The moping idiot, and the madman gay. Here too the sick their final doom receive, Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve, 241 Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow, Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below; Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow |