English Men of Letters: Crabbe eBook

Alfred Ainger
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 219 pages of information about English Men of Letters.

English Men of Letters: Crabbe eBook

Alfred Ainger
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 219 pages of information about English Men of Letters.
the best of Wordsworth’s poetry neither requires nor admits of condensation. The Excursion might benefit by omission and compression, but not The Solitary Reaper, nor The Daffodils.  But the example of Richardson is fairly in point.  Abridgments of Clarissa Harlowe have been attempted, but probably without any effect on the number of its readers.  The power of Richardson’s method does actually lie in the “soaking process” to which FitzGerald refers.  Nor is it otherwise with Crabbe.  The fascination which his readers find in him—­readers not perhaps found in the ranks of those who prefer their poetry on “hand-made paper”—­is really the result of the slow and patient dissection of motive and temptation, the workings of conscience, the gradual development of character.  These processes are slow, and Crabbe’s method of presenting them is slow, but he attains his end.  A distinction has lately been drawn between “literary Poetry,” and “Poetry which is Literature.”  Crabbe’s is rarely indeed that of the former class.  It cannot be denied that it has taken its place in the latter.

The apology for Crabbe’s lengthiness might almost be extended to the singular inequalities of his verse.  FitzGerald joins all other critics in regretting his carelessness, and indeed the charge can hardly be called harsh.  A poet who habitually insists on producing thirty lines a day, whether or no the muse is willing, can hardly escape temptations to carelessness.  Crabbe’s friends and other contemporaries noted it, and expressed surprise at the absence in Crabbe of the artistic conscience.  Wordsworth spoke to him on the subject, and ventured to express regret that he did not take more pains with the workmanship of his verse, and reports that Crabbe’s only answer was “it does not matter.”  Samuel Rogers had related to Wordsworth a similar experience.  “Mr. Rogers once told me that he expressed his regret to Crabbe that he wrote in his later works so much less correctly than in his earlier.  ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘but then I had a reputation to make; now I can afford to relax.’” This is of course very sad, and, as has already been urged, Crabbe’s earlier works had the advantage of much criticism, and even correction from his friends.  But however this may be, it may fairly be urged that in a “downright” painter of human life, with that passion for realism which Crabbe was one of the first to bring back into our literature, mere “polish” would have hindered, not helped, the effects he was bent on producing.  It is difficult in polishing the heroic couplet not to produce the impression of seeking epigrammatic point.  In Crabbe’s strenuous and merciless analyses of human character his power would have been often weakened, had attention been diverted from the whole to the parts, and from the matter to the manner.  The “finish” of Gray, Goldsmith, and Rogers suited exquisitely with their pensive musings on Human Life.  It was otherwise with the stern presentment of such stories of human sin and misery as Edward Shore or Delay has Danger.

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English Men of Letters: Crabbe from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.