all else around us, as the instruments appear to the mechanical and fleshly and materials of the poetic imagination, eye, and in all their nakedness and but in which every detail and minute bareness, unmodified by any feeling of touch is scrupulously and conscien- the writer, and unexalted by the imatiously faithful; while this fidelity as gination. to particulars is the mere frost-work on the rock of universal Truth, the marbles and mosaics which cover buttresses of granite and cramps of iron. Observation supplies the armory, but genius calls up the legion of living men, to wear the breast-plates and to wield the swords. There is a Dutch picture of Christ among the Soldiers, in which every hair of the beards, every thread of the garments, is painted with a reality which would satisfy barbers and weavers. The whole is utterly false; for there is no attempt at expressing the scornful cruelty of the persecutors, or the holy and godly patience of the sufferers. As the productions of Raphael and Correggio differ from this, so the works of poets differ from those of men who are merely copyists. The latter are as much less living, as a statue than the Hermione of the "Winter's Tale." Though the accidents be the clothing, the principles are the life. His Between these two classes,-those who indite pastorals in which the characters are unnatural fancies, and who are a portion of the great body of authors without either intuition or observation, and those who are possessed of both the one and the other, there is a third, to which Mr. Crabbe belongs the persons, namely, whose power is entirely outward, but who are accurate watchers and examiners of all that goes on around them. mind is not a window which admits light, but a looking-glass which accurately reflects whatever is placed opposite to it. He exhibits his personages, not in the general illumination of any master ideas, but in the literal individuality of the particular facts. He describes them, not by means of the creative imagination, which would picture them surrounded indeed by the peculiar circumstances of English society, yet as men still more than peasants; but he shows them as they 18 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series. Such, we think, is nearly the character of Mr. Crabbe as a describer of the lower ranks of men. It is in this character that we have first spoken of him, because it is in this that he is most remarkable. The three kinds of writers on this class of subject, are simply specimens of the three great divisions of thinkers on all subjects. There are some who can neither reason, imagine, nor observe, and therefore fancy,-some who collect the minutiæ without a large or philosophic insight,-some who look at details merely in subordination to principles. The first has furnished us with the men who describe shadows and fragments of humanity, the parents of such pastorals as Pope's, and such tragedies as Dryden's and Addison's. The second contains the authors, to the rank of whose works we must refer a good deal of Defoe, Smollett, and the American Brown, and almost all of Crabbe. The third is made up of Dantes, Shakspeares, Miltons, and Wordsworths, the prime glories of humanity. All the subjects of Mr. Crabbe's compositions are treated with precisely the same laborious and literal fidelity as the hovels and workhouses where he especially delights to sojourn. His ladies and gentlemen are not beings of his own, imagined in accordance firstly and chiefly to the laws of nature and of poetry, and only secondly and subordinately in agreement with the peculiar influences of that part of society. They are portraits copied in every hair and wrinkle from the originals, and in which, as in all such portraits, the higher and more universal characteristics are almost entirely omitted. He does not paint the man he has seen and known, but the nose, the coat, the manners, and the actions of the man, to the omission of those powers which make him an agent. As a well-natured person, he breaks the monotonous selfishness of his heroes The little production of the former, and heroines with occasional touches of kindliness and tenderness; but, having no philosophy higher than that of the world around him, we never see him delighting to clear from the mind which he is dealing with, its crust and filth, and so to open out the fountains of another life which are buried and sealed beneath. But that which this writer does attempt to exhibit is completely brought before us. He never, indeed, paints in a single word, by using one which shall be a key-note to our imagination. He describes only for our memory. His Muse is the parent, not the offspring, of Mnemosyne. But what he attempts he does thoroughly; we see in his pages the very oiled paper in the windows, the very patches on the counterpane. When he talks of dust upon a floor, or stains upon a tablecloth, we might use the words of the Persian, and exclaim, "What dirt have we eaten !" Every riband in the cap of a hand-maid, every button on the coat of a beggar, we know them all with the precision of military martinets. And he describes, in the same way, landscapes,houses,thoughts, feelings. Those who have seen or felt what he talks of, start at seeing their recollections reproduced in all the vivacity of the original sensations. But he is utterly untranslateable. The imagination is the great interpreter; and, supposing the same degree of intelligence, Calderon is as delightful to an Englishman as to a Spaniard Shakspeare as wonderful to a German as to us. But the effect of Mr. Crabbe's writings does not depend upon the degree to which our nobler faculties are developed, but to the accident of our having observed the very same objects as himself, and experienced the same annoyances from the same casual and transitory causes. As an illustration of the different methods in which Mr. Crabbe, and a really great poet, treat the same subject, we will extract some stanzas of Wordsworth's, and a portion of the poem called "The Lover's Journey." from which we give an extract, is remarkably favorable to Mr. Crabbe, as being one which the greatest of critics (the author of "The Biographia Literaria") has declared would appear to greater advantage in prose. It is named "The Beggars." Both passages are quoted as mere descriptions of gipsies. The first is Wordsworth's : : Cursing his tardy aid-her mother there Each feature now the steady falsehood wears; And, by the sadness in his face, appears Must wildly wander each unpractised cheat! What shame and grief, what punishment and pain, Sport of fierce passions, must each child sus tain Ere they, like him, approach their latter end, Without a hope, a comfort, or a friend !" In the first place, how clear and brilliant is the picture of the gipsy woman in the first of Wordsworth's stanzas. There is no more indisposition to blink the use of common words for common things than in Mr. Crabbe; but he produces an infinitely greater effect with the same cheap materials. In the second stanza how much there is of genuine imagination; and how little does this great poet require in order to raise our minds aloft, and transport them to the most distant domains of poetic beauty; and see, again, in the third, that powerful and original phrase, flung forth bright and perfect from the creative mind, in which the beautiful vagrant is called "a weed of glorious feature!" In the next strophe how bright and vivid a picture is shown to us of the boys, with their flower-wreathed hats, chasing the crimson butterfly; a sunny masterly representation, which is admirably kept up in the following stanza; and, in the last of the portions we have quoted, with what godlike power does the author carry us away with these gipsy boys on the wings of the morning! These are particular beauties, a few gems though of no common lustre; but there is a more continuous and even a rarer merit, in the smooth and majestic course of the versification, and never halting, and never over-burthened; and, above everything, what we do not hesitate to call the perfection of the language. There is not a thought which could be more concisely expressed without the diminution of its beauty; not a word patched in for the sake of the metre, not a descriptive epithet which does not serve to suggest tenfold more than it expresses. Let us turn from this to our original subject. We do not wish to dwell upon the different turn of mind indicated in the manner of the two poets when they look at similar objects, at the gladness and sympathy on the one hand and the cynicism on the other; but let us observe the latter lines as a mere work of art. The construction of the first four lines is obviously faulty. We know not whether it be the wife who "is just borrowed from the bed,”— -or the rug which is "by the hand of coarse indulgence fed." The next verses simply express, as it might be expressed in prose, the physiognomy of the gipsy, and on these, at least, no pretensions to poetry can be raised. What can be more awkward, or less agreeable to the strict accuracy professed by the opponents of "irregular unclassical poetry," than the use of the word state at the end of the couplet "Her blood-shot eyes on her unheeding mate Were wrathful turn'd, and seem'd her wants to state." The description is strong, plain, and good, such as we expect in a good book of essay, travel, or novel; till we find another instance of obscure and faulty construction in the phrase, "Assumed through years, Each feature now the steady falsehood wears.' It would really seem that the "features" had been "assumed through years," instead of the falsehood. In the following couplet to what does "their" refer; and, with similar carelessness, towards the close of the passage, it would seem that " punishment and pain" are the "sport of fierce passions," rather than the children. The description on the whole contains not appeared under false pretences,emphatic and even eloquent phrases; a situation which, besides its liability but there is not one touch of imagina- to detection, almost always gives a tion from the beginning to the end, certain awkwardness of demeanor. which, by the pleasurable exercise of Mr. Crabbe's unmetrical writing is our faculties, might in some degree not particularly happy; but it is much take off the pain necessarily felt in better (looking merely at the style) reading such an account. In the next than his verse. And there are not paragraph, it is the purpose of the many more agreeable or more useful author to show how happiness over- books of a similar nature than might flows from the heart on all around it, be made by turning his tangled rhyme and in how glad and gay a light the into easy prose. His strong plain most wretched objects will be seen by sense, shrewd humor, acute observathe cheerful. But, instead of repre- tion, and faithful portraitures, would senting Orlando, the hero of the story, be instructive and delightful, and give as connecting what he sees with joyous us, what we have not, a standard book associations, and free from every re- on the manners and characters of the membrance of guilt or sorrow, he great masses of English society. makes him reflect, that, though the gipsies are highly criminal and deserving of punishment, yet he is not called upon to inflict it; and accordingly he gives them money. We have said that there are no poetical beauties in this passage of Mr. Crabbe's writings, and have shown that there are several errors of composition. Yet we believe it to be as faultless as any portion of similar length, and equal talent, in all his works. It is powerful writing, though not poetry; and we only wish that it, and the rest of his productions, had The moral evils resulting from his works are, in our view, not light, though he himself is obviously a benevolent and thinking man; for the virtues which he describes, and to which he solicits our admiration, are won from the shadowy limbs of compromise and opinion. He is evidently no believer in the possibility of much greater goodness than that of the average respectability around us; and there is no sin which he treats with more bitter reprobation than dissent from the doetrines of the Church of England. He flew to his castle of Ehrenfels, He built him, in haste, a tower tall In the tide, for his better assurance; But they swam the river, and scal'd the wall, And worried him past endurance. One morning his skeleton there was seen, By a load of flesh the lighter; They had picked his bones uncommonly clean, And eaten his very mitre ! Such was the end of the bishop of Mentz, CONVERSATIONS ON GEOLOGY.* As THE form of conversations on the more interesting parts of philosophy which has recently become so popular, is only the revival of the classical models of Xenophon, Plato, and Cicero, adapted to modern study and cast into the style of modern composition. a method of exciting interest, and affording room for apt illustrations, it is immeasurably beyond the clumsy, dry, and lifeless plan too frequently followed of question and answer, inasmuch as it carries with it the thread of a narrative which the question-and-answer system is perpetually snapping asunder. Besides, the speakers in a conversation may be characterised by peculiarities of sentiments and style of thinking, so as to render a book something like a genuine picture of a fireside dialogue. This was carefully attended to by the ancients; and, making allowance for the difference of style and manners, the author of the work before us appears to have kept this constantly in view. The speakers are a mother, and her son and daughter. The boy is represented as inquisitive after facts, and much more ready to start objections to any proposed opinion or theory, that is, he is less credulous than we should suppose any boy to be; yet, as his mode of objecting is the very life of the book, we are willing to let this hypercriticism go for nothing. The girl does not take quite so much share in the dialogue as we could wish; but, when she does, it is usually to make some remark founded upon taste and love of the picturesque, rather than on the deeper and dryer subjects which her brother is represented as bringing forward-For example: "Edward.-A romantic science, mother! That is certainly a very unusual expression. "Mrs. R. That is of little consequence, if it be correct; and I think I can show it to be so, even independently of the fanciful systems which I have just hinted at. Do you not say, Christina, that botany is a beautiful science? "Christina.-Yes; I think it is, indeed; for it invites us to the fields in the beautiful months of spring and summer, and makes us admire the beauty of the budding trees, the springing grass, and the opening blossoms : it enhances the pleasure of every walk, and sometimes, I have fancied, makes the sunshine itself look brighter when it falls upon a flowergarden. "Mrs. R.-And have I not heard you, Edward, calling astronomy sublime? "Edward. It deserves, indeed, to be called so, I think; for it raises our thoughts above the earth and its little scene of change and bustle, and leads the mind to contemplate the starry universe and the infinity of space, which God has peopled with suns and worlds. "Mrs. R.-Then, if you call Botany beautiful, and Astronomy sub * Conversations on Geology; comprising a Familiar Explanation of the Huttonian and Wernerian Systems; the Mosaic Geology as explained by Mr. Granville Penn; the late Discoveries of Professor Buckland, Humboldt, Dr. Macculloch, and others. 1 vol. 12mo. (with Engravings.) Pp. 371. London, 1828. |