Part 4

I believe that in delineation of character Crabbe is an artist indeed, worthy to rank with Jane Austen and the Brontës, and perhaps even more subtle than these ladies. He was not without a certain cynicism, and his powers of critical observation were great. He draws the drunken old reprobate in “The Borough,” the magnificent “Sir Denys Brand,” the gentle, suffering “Ellen Orford,” the University don in “Schools,” with masterly skill. I can only indicate his power in this respect by a few inadequate quotations.

The sketches of the characters in the almshouses in “The Borough” I commend to you as masterpieces. Clelia and Blaney had come down in life, and were without much excuse. They had been jobbed into the institution by Sir Denys Brand, and his words at the meeting of trustees throw a world of light on the baronet’s character. Of Blaney he says:

“‘’Tis true,’ said he, ‘the fellow’s quite a brute-- A very beast; but yet, with all his sin, He has a manner--let the devil in.’”

Of Clelia:

“‘With all her faults,’ he said, ‘the woman knew How to distinguish--had a manner, too, And, as they say, she is allied to some In decent station--let the creature come.’”

But though these two are powerfully drawn, Crabbe expends more care and skill in depicting Benbow, who had been

“a jovial trader; men enjoyed The night with him: the day was unemployed.”

Benbow, whenever he could find an audience, used to dilate on “The men of might to mingle strong drink,” whom he had known. There was Squire Asgill, whose manor house was a disgrace and scandal to the countryside. It is needless to particularise. I can explain best by saying that his life was that of Sir Pitt Crawley in his later days, only he was more hospitable and generous. Let us see the worthy squire at his best, in church:

“His worship ever was a churchman true, He held in scorn the methodistic crew; May God defend the Church and save the King, He’d pray devoutly and divinely sing. Admit that he the holy day would spend As priests approved not, still he was a friend; Much then I blame the preacher as too nice To call such trifles by the name of vice; Hinting, though gently and with cautious speech, Of good example--’tis their trade to preach.

* * * * *

A weaker man, had he been so reviled, Had left the place--he only swore and smiled.”

A still greater hero of Benbow’s was Captain Dowling, who was ready to drink against any rival:

“Man after man they from the trial shrank, And Dowling ever was the last that drank.”

But we must leave the old reprobate, and go on to a far subtler delineation of character. Sir Denys Brand, to use Crabbe’s own words, was “maybe too highly placed for an author, who seldom ventures above middle life to delineate.” It is admitted that Sir Denys was a real person, and the biographer withholds his name out of consideration for his family.[10] It must be remembered that Crabbe’s nature was both proud and sensitive, and the scathing satire he expends on Sir Denys was probably provoked by some real or fancied slight.

He is one of the trustees of the almshouses. He took the office--

“True ’twas beneath him; but to do men good Was motive never by his heart withstood.”

Sir Denys is an aristocratic prig of the first water, and Crabbe hated prigs. He is one of those men who can be, with a certain amount of truth, described as possessing all the virtues:

“In him all merits were decreed to meet, Sincere though cautious, frank and yet discreet, Just all his dealings, faithful every word, His passions’ master and his temper’s lord.”

His benevolence was splendid, and known to all men:

“He left to meaner minds the simple deed, By which the houseless rest, the hungry feed; His was a public bounty, vast and grand, ’Twas not in him to work with viewless hand.

* * * * *

He the first lifeboat plann’d; to him the place Is deep in debt--’twas he revived the race.”

Yet nobody liked him--

“’Twould give me joy [says Crabbe] some gracious deed to meet That has not called for glory in the street; Who felt for many, could not always shun, In some soft moment to be kind to one; And yet they tell us, when Sir Denys died, That not a widow in the borough cried.”

III. Perhaps it may be said that the subject of my lecture was after all rather a commonplace old gentleman, and if what I have said leaves this view, it is because I have failed to convey the effect which the study of his works has left upon me. He certainly made a great impression in his time, and was hailed as a true poet in an age of poets. Nor is an age always wrong when it acclaims a man in whom posterity sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with Byron as a poet would be as absurd as to place his little stories on a level with the romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. But in his own time men rated him very highly, and this is the more remarkable because he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, who achieved his reputation in the nineteenth. He saturated himself in Pope and Dryden, and the wits of a bygone age, and never conformed to the taste of his own. The romantic movement, much as he admired Scott’s writings, never influenced Crabbe nor does he seem to have been affected by the Lake Poets. He was simply himself: simple-minded if sensitive, full of courage, and with a quiet dignity of his own. Unworldly, yet remarkably shrewd, curiously blind to the beauties of Nature and of art, yet wonderfully alive to the marvels of the world and the pathos of life. Stern and uncompromising as a realist, he lacked neither sympathy nor imagination, and possessed a saving sense of descriptive humour. Lord Thurlow said of him, “He’s as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen, by G--d,” and he has much of the winning simplicity of Fielding’s charming clerical creation. And yet he had the elevation of character and the genius with fearless hand to tear the veil which hid the lives of the poor from their richer neighbours, to expose the cruelty, injustice, and rapacity of an age which for all its greatness was singularly callous and unsympathetic of weakness and suffering; and Crabbe may take his place not only with the poets of his time, but with the Clarksons, the Howards, the Frys, and the good men and women who succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical humanity. We need not grudge him the generous commendation of the greatest among his contemporary poets--

“Nature’s sternest painter and her best.”

FOOTNOTES:

[2] My father’s first cousin, the Ven. Robert Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, the intimate friend of Edward Fitzgerald, was the grandson of a native of Aldeburgh who owned the _Unity_ smack in which Crabbe sailed to London in 1780. My maternal great-grandparents, as will appear, also knew the poet.

[3] One cannot fail to recall Horace’s generous acknowledgement of the liberality of his father, “macro pauper agello,” in sending him to Rome to be educated. _Sat._ I. vi. 71.

[4] In the “Life” by his son it is implied that Crabbe was Maskill’s assistant; but this is denied in Huchon’s “George Crabbe and his Times,” p. 63.

[5] So the “Life.” Huchon points out that his name at this time was Long, and that he subsequently assumed the name of North. Crabbe went to London on the _Unity_ smack, the property of Robinson Groome, grandfather of Archdeacon Groome, the intimate friend of E. Fitzgerald. Huchon, _op. cit._, p. 81.

[6] “The Village.”

[7] In the “Life” Crabbe is said to have prescribed for his parishioners at Muston with great success.

[8] For this abominable system see Walpole, “History of England from 1815,” vol. i, p. 163, and his quotations from Romilly and Yonge. Dickens, of course, alludes to the apprenticing of parish-boys in “Oliver Twist.”

[9] Lockhart’s “Life of Scott.” Huchon points out several obvious discrepancies. “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 435.

[10] He is said to have been “Challoner Arcedekne, who built Glevering Hall,” near Parham. Huchon, “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 309. The bitterness of the satire lies in the little known fact that at the time the family of Arcedekne was not in the eighteenth century reckoned among the old county families: their fortune having been recently acquired in the East Indies.

LECTURE III

MARGARET CATCHPOLE

May I invite you to-day to a remote corner of England and ask you to associate with rather humble folk? Our heroine is a servant maid; her romance is her love for a smuggler and the faithful affection of a young farmer. The greatest personages to whom I shall introduce you are a Suffolk brewer and his worthy lady and uncommonly numerous family, one of whom was my grandfather. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine that men alive within our memory should have shared even as young children in the scenes I have to describe--the lawlessness of the country, the wild acts recorded, the stilted language employed by the chief actors. The strange callousness of the criminal code, the very piety displayed by some of the principal characters, are completely out of date and almost incomprehensible. The author himself of this true romance, though he only died in 1877, evidently wrote and thought in ways quite alien to those now in vogue.

I shall continue what I have said about Crabbe by attempting briefly to describe the county of Suffolk (the South-folk), which must occupy our attention during this lecture. I do so with no apology, for I believe that many a New England family tree springs from roots deeply embedded in its soil.

One thing realised by every child born in East Anglia is that he is not one of those inferior people who are born in the “Shires.” His native land is not called after any town, Northampton, Bedford, Leicester, or Cambridge: he belongs to a race, not to a territorial division, invented less than a thousand years ago. He and his kinsmen, the North folk, are East Anglians; and the rest of the world are to him “furriners,” or people who came from the “Sheeres.” Not that he is an unmixed race--far from it. The peasantry were in the land long before the Angles arrived. They are a small dark people, who have survived countless invasions and will probably outlive modern civilisation. When you see them beating a field or covert for game and kill hares and rabbits by throwing their sticks with unerring aim, you feel that they do much as their ancestors did before the dawn of history. The Anglian is a big blond man slow of speech and apparently somewhat dull, but in a bargain he is seldom the loser. The little town of Hadleigh was once the capital of Alfred’s rival, Guthrum, the Dane; and the Norse origin of many families reveals itself in Grimwood, Grimwade, Grimsey, and Grimes. Flemings and Dutch, French Huguenots, have all contributed to the population of East Anglia; but despite the blending of nationalities there is a strong feeling of a common tie binding all these heterogeneous elements together. Yet there are curious local divisions existing to this day. The eastern and western parts of the county are at constant feud. When the county councils were established in the ‘eighties,’ Suffolk had to be divided into East and West, because the two would not work together. When last year the county was made a single diocese, Ipswich would not allow the ancient western monastic town of Bury St. Edmunds to give the bishop his title; and Bury St. Edmunds scorned to submit to the richer but less aristocratic Ipswich. So in desperation the diocese had to be called ‘St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich.’

To look at an Ordnance map one would say that Suffolk was very flat and eminently agricultural. The highest hill I could find was 402 feet above the sea; seldom does the land rise over 200 feet. Yet a motor drive in Suffolk gives one the sensation of having been on a switchback railway. One is never on the level, and some of the little ascents and descents are very sharp. The beautiful church towers are usually on hills and the churches are often placed outside the villages. The road or ‘street’ (Roman _stratum_) on each side of which the hamlet stands frequently runs up a hill. The lanes are narrow and muddy; and at the bottom of a hill often waterlogged. Communication must have been exceedingly difficult--a fact which explains many peculiarities of the people.

Nowhere is there a sharper line drawn by nature in the county than between the agricultural land in the centre and the coast. Rarely do the corn lands reach the sea. A belt of breezy commons, bright with gorse, extends almost from Lowestoft to Ipswich, and a glance at the map shews how thin the population is. Only by branch lines of recent construction does the railway reach the Suffolk coast. Cut off by a wild tract of commons and marshes, the inhabitants of the little ports formed strangely isolated communities, and regarded with no friendly eye the villagers of the interior, marrying only among themselves and keeping carefully apart. A brief survey of the coast throws a light on the character of the people. All along the shore the five fathom line, sometimes half a mile, sometimes as much as three miles from the shore, marks the continual encroachment of the North Sea. Towns like Aldeburgh and Dunwich, once standing a mile or more from the shore, are now, as in the case of the first, threatened by the waves; or, like Dunwich, once a famous seaport, almost entirely washed away and submerged. Occasionally, as from Aldeburgh to Orford, the sea makes its own breakwater by casting up long banks of shingle, and even now, for nearly ten miles, save for coastguard stations and lighthouses, the Suffolk foreshore is absolutely uninhabited.

One of the most striking features of the coast is the inland tidal rivers. In the south are the Stour and the Orwell, which converge at the important harbour of Harwich; and at the head of the tidal waters of the Orwell is Ipswich. The river itself when the tide is high is a most beautiful estuary with parks and woods sloping down to the water--Stoke Park, Wherstead Park, Woolverstone on the south, Alnesbourn Priory and Orwell Park on the north. A few miles north of the estuary of the Orwell and Stour is the river Deben, which culminates inland at Woodbridge and was the scene of many a solitary boating expedition by the famous translator of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald. Then comes the shingle bank I have spoken of, parting the river Ore from the sea, as far as Slaughden, when it turns inland and becomes the Alde, giving its name to Aldeburgh. Great salt marshes in many places fringe these rivers and impart an air of desolation to the surrounding scenery.

Rightly to appreciate this curious country we must divest ourselves of modern ideas, forget that we can be in London in two hours, ignore the fact that the commons have been turned into golf courses, that the people are occupied by letting lodgings, that their harvest is the holiday season, and that we can motor on most of the roads in comfort. One must go back, and not so very far after all, to a time when it would have needed a guide to enable you to find Aldeburgh and the coast, and when you would have received the reverse of a hearty welcome from its inhabitants, “a surly race” who viewed strangers with “a suspicious eye,” and no wonder, since they had the best of reasons for concealing “the way they got their wealth.” You must transport yourself into this past, if you would wish to understand what the poet Crabbe has to tell you about his native place.

I think I caught something of his spirit when I went to Aldeburgh to prepare myself for writing this lecture. It was on a chill December day, damp and cold with a northeast wind. I had had a cold for a week and it lay very heavily on my chest, so my spirits were the reverse of buoyant. Rain was falling as I made my way along the deserted High street and walked to Slaughden Quay, where Crabbe was born, and as a young man worked at rolling casks from the hookers to the stores. A “dirty sea” at low tide was breaking against the shingle bank, and on the other side was the valley of the Alde and dreary marshes stretching to the low uplands on the horizon. On the rising ground above the town rose the church tower of Aldeburgh; and one could well imagine what a dreary home the desolate quay and the squalid little town must have been, when the only approach was by the harbourless sea, or by sandy tracks over a bleak moor, or by the sluggish river winding through the marsh.

The peculiarities of East Anglia, both inland and on the coast, are reflected in its inhabitants. It is a country which by its isolation has fostered strong originality in all classes, manifesting itself frequently in a species of coarseness of fibre and sensibility. The people have not a character for high intelligence, at any rate in Suffolk, where “silly” is the epithet applied to the county. Despite this fact perhaps no part of Great Britain has produced so many “worthies” of the highest order. In almost every one of these the “animal” is very strong and the intelligence is dominated by practical considerations. Suffolk and Norfolk respectively have bred perhaps the two greatest of English statesmen--Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Robert Walpole. Wolsey impressed his contemporaries by his native force and arrogance; and Bishop Creighton explains in his biography of him how sane a view he took of his country’s position in regard to the politics of Europe. Walpole, with the tastes of a boorish squire, little delicacy of mind, and a cynical contempt for mankind, was an unrivalled financier and minister in days of material prosperity. In the forefront among the pioneers of English science stands the famous Suffolk name of Bacon. In his great achievements and his equally serious faults Francis Bacon, Viscount Verulam, is an East Anglian. His luminous mind is seen in the singularly lucid English in which his thoughts are expressed, his rough common-sense reveals itself in the way in which he brushes aside the speculative theories of the philosophers, and goes directly for results based on practical experiment. And on the darker side, the unscrupulous way in which he crushed friend and foe alike in order to attain the position, which his genius entitled him to take in the country, discloses the same lack of sensibility which we frequently see in the East Anglian character.

Among the great judges few take a higher place than Lord Thurlow. Scarcely anyone could inspire such fear by the mere force of his personality than he. Whether in the House of Lords, when he crushed the Duke of Grafton, who twitted him with being a _novus homo_; or in the law courts; or at his own table in private life, where, in his old age, he could make the greatest wits of the day retire in discomfiture, he shewed himself an antagonist to be dreaded. Yet, as Crabbe attests, under that rough exterior beat a kind heart.

Not only the genius of Nelson, the son of a Norfolk Rector, as well as the moral failure which cast a stain on the unparalleled lustre of his name, may be traceable to his native soil. Even to-day there is one to whom England looks with confidence, though his stern practical ability inspires but little affection, among whose proud and well-deserved titles is the name of his mother’s home, an out-of-the-way Suffolk village; for on entering the peerage Earl Kitchener assumed the style of Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspal.[11]

The force of character which produces great men is certain almost to manifest itself for evil also, and we recognise the truth of much of Crabbe’s stern realism in the characters to which he introduces us. As Dr. Jessop, a singularly acute observer of the Norfolk villager, points out, the criminal annals of East Anglia disclose outbursts of remarkable ferocity on the part of its inhabitants. Side by side with this vindictive spirit is a proneness to superstition, generally of a gloomy character. Aldeburgh has records of many portents and apparitions in its annals; nowhere was the witch finder more active than in Suffolk; and, even in the later half of the nineteenth century, a woman suspected of being a witch was done to death in the neighbouring county of Essex. We have seen in Crabbe how what was then called “enthusiasm” in religion drove more than one of his characters into a despair of gloom. Not that there was not a great deal of genuine piety: the churches of East Anglia are the glory of the countryside, and many of the most magnificent are due to the liberality of its traders and manufacturers in the days when it was one of the industrial centres of English life. Indeed, it may not be merely local vanity which explains the contemptuous epithet “silly” as carrying with it not a slight but a compliment--the word being used in its older sense as the equivalent of the German _selig_, “pious.” Nowhere did the Reformation obtain a stronger hold than in the diocese of Norwich; and its roll of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary was exceptionally large. Forcefulness for good or evil, superstition, and genuine piety all play their part in the story I am now about to ask you to consider. The popularity in Suffolk of the life of Margaret Catchpole--though the literary merit of the book is not great--is a testimony that her tale strikes a sympathetic chord to this day.

I must preface what I have to say by a few remarks about the author of the book. The Rev. Richard Cobbold was the son of John Cobbold, a wealthy brewer of the Cliff House, Ipswich, by his second wife, who plays so important a part in the story I am about to put before you. Mrs. Cobbold was a very remarkable woman, a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds, an author of some repute; and, what was most unusual at the time, an eloquent public speaker. She married Mr. Cobbold when he was a widower with fourteen children and had by him a large family herself--six sons and a daughter. Richard was the youngest son, being born in 1797 and dying in his eightieth year in 1877. He was Rector of Wortham, a parish in the north of Suffolk, an author of repute in his day, highly respected as a devoted clergyman, a strong churchman, and a keen and active sportsman. In 1845 he brought out “Margaret Catchpole.” In his preface he says: “The public may depend upon the truth of the main features of this narrative; indeed, most of the facts recorded were matters of public notoriety at the time of their occurrence. The author who details them is a son with whom this extraordinary female lived and from whose hands he received the letters and facts here given.” The story of Margaret Catchpole told in the novel is briefly as follows: