In order to understand Crabbe's narrative art, it is necessary to examine the relation that his work bears to the prose fiction of his time. A number of critics and scholars—chiefly Jeffrey, Sigworth, Speirs, and Kroeber—have observed, though only in passing, that this relationship exists: “many of the stories,” Jeffrey says, “may be ranked by the side of the inimitable tales of Miss Edgeworth; and are calculated to do nearly as much good among that part of the population with which they are principally occupied.”¹ Crabbe was a voracious reader of novels, a not entirely disinterested one; his son recalled that “even from the most trite of these fictions, he could sometimes catch a train of ideas that was turned to excellent use; so that he seldom passed a day without reading part of some such work, and was never very select in the choice of them.”² More than that, around the turn of the century he wrote three novels, which he then proceeded to destroy. His son remembered that the first novel he wrote

was entitled The Widow Grey; but I recollect nothing of it except that the principal character was a benevolent humourist. … The next was called Reginald Glanshaw, or the Man who commanded Success; a portrait of an assuming, overbearing, ambitious mind, rendered interesting by some generous virtues, and gradually wearing down into idiotism. I cannot help thinking that this Glanshaw was drawn with very extraordinary power; but the story was not well-managed in the details. I forget the title of his third novel; but I clearly remember that it opened with a description of a wretched room, similar to some that are presented in his poetry.

(Crabbe, Jr., Life, p. 47)

Anyone who is familiar with Crabbe's poetry will see at once that the poet Crabbe and the novelist Crabbe worked with the same material: in either capacity he traced the turns and movements of the heart and mind. The unpublished novels were, I believe, experiments undertaken by Crabbe in his search for a form that would carry what he knew and wished to say, one congenial to his training and principles and still significant to his contemporaries. The narrative poet assimilated the experience of the unpublished novelist. That is not all, however. The clearly discernible ties between verse satire and the kind of novels that Crabbe's contemporaries were writing during the 1790s requires consideration. Precisely because of his loyalty to the values inherent in satire, Crabbe found the late-century novel certainly an attractive, indeed a logical solution to his problems.

Although satiric poetry had failed as a “serious” poetic genre during the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, the subjects and purposes of the satirist had not been abandoned. The novelist who represented the minds and manners of his time assumed in part the satirist's role. It was generally held during the eighteenth century that representations of “existing character” and contemporary life were the proper province of verse satire; the writers of one school of prose fiction and Crabbe adopted these grounds as their own. As the “manners and characters which occur in ordinary life” were the subjects of satire, so for the novel

Imitations of life and character have been made their principal object. Relations have been professed to be given of the behaviour of persons in particular[ly] interesting situations, such as may actually occur in life; by means of which, what is laudable or defective in character and conduct, may be pointed out, and placed in an useful light.³

The novelists themselves, from Defoe and Richardson on, repeat in one preface after another that “this work is addressed to the public as a history of life and manners. …”⁴ Elizabeth Inchbald, writing in 1807, defines the novel's useful ends, its interest in ordinary life, its affinity with earlier verse satire:

Let her therefore read certain well-written novels, and she will receive intimation of two or three foibles, the self-same as those, which, adhering to her conduct, cast upon all her virtues a degree of ridicule.—These failings are beneath the animadversions of the pulpit. They are so trivial, yet so awkward, that neither sermons, history, travels, nor biography, could point them out with propriety. …

And what book so well as a novel, could show to the enlightened Lord Henry——the arrogance of his extreme condescension? Or insinuate to the judgment of Lady Eliza——the wantonness of her excessive reserve? …

That Prebendary is merciful to a proverb—excluding negligence towards holy things—of which he thinks himself the holiest. Certain novels might make these people think a second time.⁵

Inchbald advocates holding a mirror up to life—Boileau's satiric mirror—so that the reader can recognize his own foibles and vices and be instructed accordingly. This view of the novel was widely accepted during the early years of the nineteenth century, as a casual reading of the reviews will readily reveal. Though the imitation of “ordinary life and manners” was no longer the business of the poet, who had more elevated tasks on hand, it is commonplace to say that novels are

the closest imitation of men and manners; and are admitted to examine the very web and texture of society, as it really exists, and as we meet it when we come into the world. If the style of poetry has “something more divine in it,” this savours more of humanity. We are brought acquainted with an infinite variety of characters … for the greater part, more true to general nature than those which we meet with in actual life—and have our moral impressions far more frequently called out, and our moral judgements exercised, than in the busiest career in existence.⁶

Sir Walter Scott, discussing the novels of Jane Austen, Crabbe's most distinguished admirer, observed that a “new style of novel has arisen within the last fifteen or twenty years,” one relying on “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.”⁷ The equivalent of this kind of novel was Flemish painting, the “low” school to which Crabbe's work was often likened. This “new style of novel” gives “accurate and unexaggerated delineations of events and characters” and replaces “formal dissertations or shorter and more desultory moral essays”; “the praise and blame of the moralist” are now “bestowed, not in general declamation, on classes of men, but on individuals representing those classes, who are so clearly delineated and brought into action before us, that we seem to be acquainted with them, and feel an interest in their fate.”⁸

Truth, lowness, and usefulness are the terms common to verse satire and the novel that these reviewers described. What Crabbe was not supposed to do as a poet, he could do as a novelist: “During one or two of his winters in Suffolk, he gave most of his evening hours to the writing of Novels, and he brought not less than three such works to a conclusion.”⁹

Nevertheless, Crabbe concluded that he could not write a good novel and he abandoned this experiment. The tales “Sir Eustace Grey” and “The Hall of Justice,” published in Poems, 1807, are another experiment—this time Crabbe essayed the pathetic tale—and that, too, was set aside. In The Borough Crabbe returned to the verse tale, having formulated at last a kind of narrative that would assimilate, without simplifying, his complex material and his equally complex attitude toward that material. He employed the progress of the eighteenth-century preceptive tale and projected the principal incident in a modified version of the declamation characteristic of the pathetic tale; but the unity, cumulative force, and sustaining strength of the tales in The Borough and Tales in Verse and Tales of the Hall arise from their action, an action of the mind working in accord with the real tendencies of things. Nothing like this is to be found in the verse tale in England until Crabbe's tales, yet in novels produced by members of his own generation the same principle directs the narrative. It is definitive, distinguishing their work from that of others among their contemporaries.

The novelists that mattered to Crabbe were not the Gothic novelists, who incorporated into prose narration the descriptive doctrine of poetry and who brought the least of corporeal presences, but still corporeal, to the eye, registering the movement of a tapestry or a guttering candle but not the movements of a mind. Nor is it to Fielding or Richardson or Smollett that one must look for Crabbe's fellows. The writers important to an understanding of Crabbe's narrative art are William Godwin (Caleb Williams, 1793), Thomas Holcroft (The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, 1794-1797), Elizabeth Inchbald (Nature and Art, 1796), and, later, Maria Edgeworth.¹⁰ Holcroft stated their position without qualifications of any kind: “All well written books, that discuss the actions of men, are … histories of the progress of the mind. …”¹¹ Holcroft, whose application of this principle is a rambling history or episodic education, offers in Hugh Trevor obvious parallels to the subjects of several of Crabbe's tales.¹²Caleb Williams, as Godwin said in his preface, is a novel about “THINGS AS THEY ARE”; “it is a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world.”¹³ Like Holcroft, Godwin saw the actions of men as the history of mental processes, but he saw the mind's action in highly particular terms, minute in its operations and dominant in the development of plot:

My vein of delineation, where the thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of proceeding in which they afterward embarked.¹⁴

In the words “gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages … primarily to adopt a particular way of proceeding,” one finds the key not only to Godwin's and Inchbald's fiction but also to Crabbe's tales. Crabbe, like Godwin, recognized that the mind's evolution is gradual yet, in the consequences, drastic:

          Minutely trace man's life; year after year,
Through all his days let all his deeds appear,
And then, though some may in that life be strange,
Yet there appears no vast nor sudden change;
The links that bind those various deeds are seen,
And no mysterious void is left between.
          But let those binding links be all destroy'd,
All that through years he suffer'd or enjoy'd;
Let that vast gap be made, and then behold—
This was the youth, and he is thus when old;
Then we at once the work of Time survey,
And in an instant see a life's decay.(15)

(ll. 1-14)

Interestingly, almost the same terms that Godwin used to describe his own “vein of delineation” were employed by The Christian Observer's reviewer in describing Crabbe's “vein,” which, of course, he found sadistic:

Mr. Crabbe is a fine dissector: his moral knife lays open to universal gaze, with a firm and unshaken touch, and in horrible truth and fidelity, the breathing vitals, the spirantia exta of his victims. The mental sufferings he seems to take a delight in pourtraying are often worked up with a poignancy that would leave the very cruellest spectator, a Domitian himself, or a French mob, nothing to desire.¹⁶

Godwin's theory of the mind informs and determines the narrative of Caleb Williams, whose action arises from the ruling passion, complicated by a native disposition, intensified by external circumstances, and at last transformed by its exercise into an intolerable obsession. Falkland's noble mind is agitated and poisoned by the passion for “chivalric Honour”; this was “his ruling passion, the thought that worked his soul to madness.” The ruling passion of Williams initially is “curiosity,” in the end to be supplanted by “remorse.” Falkland, driven in painful circumstances by his ruling passion, murders, then betrays, and finally persecutes. Williams, at first entangled by his curiosity, finally under the pressure of his sufferings—“the benevolence of my nature was in a great degree turned to gall”—listens in “an evil hour” to his “resentment and impatience” and betrays Falkland, only to submit to the possession of the most horrible of all ruling passions, remorse: “It was too late. The mistake I had committed was now gone, past all power of recall.” The novel concludes with Falkland dead and Williams appalled by his own act: “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate …”; he summarizes the process that destroyed both men:

Falkland! thou enteredst upon thy career with the purest and most laudable intentions. But thou imbibedst the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth; and the base and low-minded envy that met thee … operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness. Soon, too soon, by this fatal coincidence, were the blooming hopes of thy youth blasted for ever! … From that moment thy benevolence was, in great part, turned into rankling jealousy and inexorable precaution. Year after year didst thou spend in this miserable project of imposture; and only at last continuedst to live, long enough to see, by my misjudging and abhorred intervention, thy closing hope disappointed, and thy death accompanied with foulest disgrace!

(pp. 377-78, passim)

J. M. S. Tompkins has found in Caleb Williams “what so few contemporary novels have, unity of structure and of atmosphere.” Tompkins justly argues that Godwin's novel, though a novel of suspense, is by no means a Gothic novel. Suspense has for Godwin “a cogent meaning, but it was not a Gothic meaning,” for suspense is contingent on the action of Williams's mind and unity is achieved precisely because Godwin concentrates on mental processes. “Mystery,” as Tompkins has observed, “is not valuable in itself, but as the stimulus of Caleb's mental growth; prison and woodland provide no scenic background, and the purpose of suspense is not to enchant the reader; it is the intellectual repercussions of these conditions that are studied; they are the agents in the psychological development of Caleb”:

There is not much dialogue, and little emphasis on the single scene; but a continuous probing commentary winds itself round incident and character, and the very impartiality with which the inquiry is conducted … adds to the oppression. Godwin's “metaphysical dissecting knife” lays bare the movements of intense, lonely, self-involved and tormented minds … and in this respect Caleb Williams extended the scope of the novel.¹⁷

Godwin and Crabbe were painting, as Trapp had said poets, by definition, must paint, the motions of the mind and the springs and movements of the heart, the tempers, passions, natures, and manners of men. They, like Inchbald in the story of Agnes Primrose in Nature and Art, hold to the principle that nothing must be permitted to intervene between the operations of the passions on the mind and the outcome of the story. In other words, no coincidence will intercede to save the character from the consequences of his passions and deeds, nor will poetic justice be imposed on the plot to divert it from the probable conclusion of similar events in the “real” world: things indeed as they are and only as they are. Godwin invents improbabilities in order to support this principle; everything will work in the end to trap and destroy.

Anna Letitia Barbauld, in the introduction to The British Novelists (1810), seems not to have recognized that an important transformation had been effected in prose fiction. “Every incident in a well written composition is introduced for a certain purpose, and made to forward a certain plan.” Who would deny this? It did not occur to her that the plan could have any end other than “vice must be punished and virtue rewarded.” She therefore distinguishes firmly between the conduct of the novel and “the real course of nature”: “It was very probable … that Gil Blas, if a real character, would come to be hanged; but the practised novel-reader knows well that no such event can await the hero of the tale.” The reader of Tom Jones has “no doubt but that, in spite of his irregularities and distresses, his history will come to an agreeable termination”:

And why does he foresee all this? Not from the real tendencies of things, but from what he has discovered of the author's intentions. But what would have been the probability in real life? Why … Jones would pass from one vicious indulgence to another, till his natural good disposition was quite smothered under his irregularities—that Sophia would either have married her lover clandestinely, and have been poor and unhappy, or she would have conquered her passion and married some country gentleman with whom she would have lived in moderate happiness, according to the usual routine of married life. But the author would have done very ill so to have constructed his story. If Booth had been a real character, it is probable that his Amelia and her family would not only have been brought to poverty, but left in it; but to the reader it is much more probable that by some means or other they will be rescued from it, and left in possession of all the comforts of life.¹⁸

Godwin's assumptions are quite different; accordingly, he is ready to use fiction as a means of asking and answering, “But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows” (Caleb Williams, p. 377). Godwin, Crabbe, and Inchbald wish to demonstrate that the system of worldly rewards is by no means commensurate with any system of private virtue; by no means at all will “some means or another” interfere with the “real tendencies of things”: the smothering of a good disposition by vicious deeds or the smothering of a social passion by a selfish one. The heroine's virtue will not be saved; the loyal lover will not be rewarded with the lady or her wealth; innocence will become guilty and then more guilty; a villain will destroy innocence and then escape all punishment but that which his own mind inflicts. That is the “real course of nature” and that is “how things are” in the narratives of these writers. The process is irreversible, and if remorse comes, it comes too late. In the Gothic novel, remorse is the given; in these novels and in many of Crabbe's tales, it is the sterile consequence toward which the work tends. The good may be shown in their goodness and the wicked blamed in their wickedness, but they are not rewarded or punished according to their desserts.

Narratives based on the system of poetic justice, in which all the difficulties are symmetrically resolved at the end, had as a means of holding the reader's interest precisely the power of fulfilling the reader's expectations step-by-step by leading him toward a conclusion that he had foreseen from the beginning. Godwin, Crabbe, and Inchbald work against that system; they violate the expectations of the reader by carrying him toward a conclusion that he might acknowledge as true to life, but, for him, not true to the established procedures of fiction. The final power that these novels and tales have is that they push matters in the direction of an entirely different kind of inevitability. One reason that critics found Crabbe's tales so “lacerating,” “painful,” and “disgusting” is simply that they were being dragged, against their will and against their preconceptions, over rough and unfamiliar ground, and “numbers” only intensified the difficulty.

Crabbe explicitly repudiates the system of poetic justice on more than one occasion and implicitly rejects it in all of his practice. In “Ellen Orford” (The Borough) the narrator complains “That books, which promise much of life to give, / Should show so little how we truly live” (ll. 15-16).¹⁹

Life, if they'd search, would show them many a change,
The ruin sudden and the misery strange!

(ll. 21-22)

The generality of writers, however, seek “a single spot in fairy-ground; / Where … / plots are laid and histories are told” (ll. 26-28):

These let us leave, and at her sorrows look,
Too often seen, but seldom in a book;
Let her who felt, relate them.—On her chair
The heroine sits—in former years the fair,
Now aged and poor; but Ellen Orford knows
That we should humbly take what Heav'n bestows.

(ll. 120-25)

Then follows a tale of “real life”: seduction, suicide, religious despair, idiocy, executions, incest, blindness. Crabbe represents Ellen Orford's life as it probably would happen—perhaps as it did happen—following her from youth and hope to old age and resignation. Again, in “Resentment,” in Tales in Verse, Crabbe attacks the conventions of contemporary fiction and describes his own practice:

In vain an author would a name suppress,
From the least hint a reader learns to guess;
Our favourites fight, are wounded, hopeless lie;
Survive they cannot—nay, they cannot die:
Now, as these tricks and stratagems are known,
'Tis best, at once, the simple truth to own.
          This was the husband—in an humble shed
He nightly slept, and daily sought his bread.
Once for relief the weary man applied;
“Your wife is rich,” the angry vestry cried;
Alas! he dared not to his wife complain,
Feeling her wrongs, and fearing her disdain.(20)

(ll. 305-22, passim)

Again, in “The Mother” (Tales in Verse), true love, virtue, money, all promise domestic happiness, but the selfish vanity of a girl's mother intervenes and ruins what would have been a standard ending in fiction not in accord with the real course of nature: “Yes! reason sanctions what stern fate denies …” (l. 172).²¹ The tale ends with the prospective bridegroom married to someone else, the heroine dead, and the mother unmoved by the destruction she has caused. Remorse does not overtake this shallow nature: “The mother lives, and has enough to buy / Th'attentive ear and the submissive eye / Of abject natures …” (ll. 341-43).

Godwin said, “Change the society.” Crabbe said, “Accept what Heaven bestows; be resigned.” But both agreed that Things as They Are is the proper subject of fiction and that Things as They Are is very hard on people with minds.

Elizabeth Inchbald agreed, too, notably in her second and last novel, Nature and Art, her “deeply pathetic story,” which Crabbe read to his family and which they found heartbreaking because of its “associations” with persons in their neighborhood.²²

Nature and Art attacks English society—the church, the rich, the aristocracy, the judiciary—all the respectables. The main story resembles an apologue, whereas the secondary plot is the pathetic story of Agnes Primrose that moved Crabbe's family; the work as a whole concludes with a precept, to which the subplot contributes its forceful share: “Let the poor then … no more be their own persecutors—no longer pay homage to wealth—instantaneously the whole idolatrous worship will cease—the idol will be broken.”²³ Resembling a short tale, the subplot is easily detached from the preceptive main plot. Inchbald avoids sentimentality as she traces her heroine's destiny—she is sparing of effects, dedicated as she is to the concise and incisive. Nor does she wish to bring the whole sad story fully to the eye of the reader or to make him the spectator of anything but a few climactic incidents. Then the few, spare strokes come home, as she meant them to do. Above all, she intends to delineate the operations of Agnes Primrose's mind, to trace the gradually accumulating impulses that bring the girl to ruin. Once that is accomplished, descriptive circumstances may rouse the reader's sympathy.

Agnes Primrose, beginning as a virtuous and hopeful young woman, ends on the gallows, a prostitute and criminal. Her story is an ethical progress toward the culminating pathos of a principal incident. Seduced and abandoned by an ambitious young man, she leaves her home to support herself and her child in London. At last she is hired as a maid of all work in a brothel, and in time she becomes one of the prostitutes herself, then a streetwalker, and finally a criminal. A period of eighteen years is covered by the action, years in which passions work upon a certain temper of mind in particular circumstances. What happens may be broken into two phases. In the first of these, passions and rationalizations work upon her “pliant” mind and against her “heart” to condition her to becoming a prostitute:

At first she shuddered at those practices she saw, at those conversations she had heard; and blest herself that poverty, not inclination, had caused her to be a witness of such profligacy, and had condemned her in this vile abode to be a servant, rather than in the lower rank of mistress.—Use softened those horrors every day—at length, self-defense, the fear of ridicule, and the hope of favour, induced her to adopt that very conduct from which her heart revolted.

In her sorrowful countenance, and fading charms, there yet remained attraction for many visitors—and she now submitted to the mercenary profanations of love; more odious, as her mind had been subdued by its most captivating, most endearing joys.

(p. 338)

Rationalization binds her to the choice to which habit, passion, and circumstance have brought her:

While incessant regret whispered to her “that she ought to have endured every calamity rather than this,” she thus questioned her nice sense of wrong—“Why, why respect myself, since no other respects me? Why set a value on my own feelings, when no one else does?”

Degraded in her own judgment, she doubted her own understanding when it sometimes told her she had deserved better treatment—for she felt herself a fool in comparison with her learned seducer, and the rest who despised her. “And why,” she continued, “should I ungratefully persist to contemn women, who alone are so kind as to accept me for a companion?

(p. 338)

Her desire for sympathy and the good nature that this desire implies influence her conclusions and contribute to her disaster; but specious reasoning will not save her from the consequences of her acts, nor will the narrator save her:

In speculation, these arguments appeared reasonable, and she pursued their dictates—but in the practice of the life in which she was plunged, she proved the fallacy of the system; and at times tore her hair with frantic sorrow. …

But she had gone too far to recede. … Now, alas! the time for flying was past—all prudent choice was over—even all reflection was gone for ever—or only admitted on compulsion, when it imperiously forced its way amidst the scenes of tumultuous mirth, of licentious passion, of distracted riot, shameless effrontery, and wild intoxication—when it would force its way—even through the walls of a brothel.

(pp. 338-39)

Agnes Primrose's progress toward the gallows is represented as an internal action. Time passes, and other chapters concerned with the main plot intervene; then Inchbald returns to Agnes Primrose. The undescribed years have carried her from the relative dignity of the brothel to the midnight streets. The second phase of her progress begins, for she has been carried as far down in the world as prostitution can bring her. Now she must move toward death, and Inchbald makes it clear that the nature of Agnes Primrose's destiny is contingent on the nature of her mind:

Had these miseries, common to the unhappy prostitute, been alone the punishment of Agnes—had her crimes and sufferings ended in distress like this, her story had not perhaps been selected for a public recital; for it had been no other than the customary history of thousands of her sex. But Agnes had a destiny yet more fatal.—Unhappily, she was endowed with a mind so sensibly alive to every joy, and every sorrow, to every mark of kindness, every token of severity, so liable to excess in passion, that, once perverted, there was no degree of error from which it would revolt.

(p. 346)

Passions and arguments, more “criminal” in their assumptions and conclusions after the hard usage of the years, again work upon her, on this occasion to join a gang of thieves and sharpers. In three paragraphs, Inchbald delineates the process of ratiocination, the circumstances to which Agnes Primrose had been brought after years of suffering, and the fatal strength of her native disposition toward goodness.

Taught by the conversation of the dissolute poor … or by her own observation on the worldly reward of elevated villany, she began to suspect “that dishonesty was only held a sin, to secure the property of the rich; and that, to take from those who did not want, by the art of stealing, was less guilt, than to take from those who did want, by the power of the law.”

By false, yet seducing opinions such as these, her reason estranged from every moral and religious tie, her necessities urgent, she reluctantly accepted the proposal to mix with a band of sharpers and robbers; and became an accomplice in negotiating bills forged on a country banker.

But though ingenious in arguments to excuse the deed before its commission; in the act, she had ever the dread of some incontrovertible statement on the other side of the question. Intimidated by this apprehension, she was the veriest bungler in her vile profession—and on the alarm of being detected, while every one of her confederates escaped and absconded, she alone was seized—was arrested … and committed to the provincial jail … to take her trial—for life or death.

(pp. 346-47)

As one might guess, her judge is the man who had seduced her. Recognition and a pardon are in order, but neither occurs. He does not know who she is, he condemns her, and she is executed. Only when it is too late does he learn her identity. Like Caleb Williams and Crabbe's villains and weaklings, he has only useless remorse ahead of him. The trial, presented in a four-and-a-half-page chapter, constitutes the principal incident of the tale of Agnes Primrose. What Inchbald has provided thus far is a progress, a summary of internal events, all accumulating and gathering force for the pathetic encounter in the courtroom. The principal incident is organized in terms of contrast, and descriptive strokes bring this contrast to the eye and heart of the reader.

When, in the morning, she was brought to the bar, and her guilty hand held up before the righteous judgment-seat of William—imagination could not form two figures, or two situations more incompatible with the existence of former familiarity, than the judge and the culprit—and yet, these very persons had passed together the most blissful moments that either ever tasted!—Those hours of tender dalliance were now present to her mind—His thoughts were more nobly employed in his high office—nor could the haggard face, hollow eye, desponding countenance, and meager person of the poor prisoner, once call to his memory … his former youthful, lovely Agnes!

She heard herself arraigned, with trembling limbs and downcast looks … before she ventured to lift her eyes up to her awful judge.—She then gave one fearful glance, and discovered William, unpitying but beloved William, in every feature!

(pp. 348-49)

The contrast is carried back into the past, with the author stepping in to make matters clear:

“What defense have you to make?”

It was William spoke to Agnes!—The sound was sweet—the voice was mild, was soft, compassionate, encouraging! …—not such a voice as when William last addressed her; when he left her undone and pregnant. …

She could have hung upon the present words for ever! She did not call to mind that this gentleness was the effect of practice, the art of his occupation …—In the present judge, tenderness was not designed for the consolation of the culprit, but for the approbation of the auditors.

There were no spectators, Agnes, by your side when last he parted from you—if there had, the awful William had been awed to marks of pity.

(p. 349)

As the incident continues, the particulars are sketched in with an increasing degree of specificity:

Again he put the question, and with these additional sentences, tenderly and emphatically delivered—“Recollect yourself—Have you no witnesses? No proof in your behalf?”

A dead silence followed these questions.

He then mildly, but forcibly, added—“What have you to say?”

Here, a flood of tears burst from her eyes, which she fixed earnestly upon him, as if pleading for mercy, while she faintly articulated,

“Nothing, my lord.” …

He summed up the evidence—and every time he was compelled to press hard upon the proofs against her, she shrunk, and seemed to stagger with the deadly blow—writhed under the weight of his minute justice, more than from the prospect of a shameful death.

The jury consulted but a few minutes—the verdict was—

“Guilty.”

She heard it with composure.

But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head, and rose to pronounce her sentence—she started with a kind of convulsive motion—retreated a step or two back, and lifting up her hands, with a scream exclaimed—

“Oh! not from you!”

(pp. 350-51)

An exclamation which, Barbauld said, “electrifies the reader, and cannot but stir the coldest feelings. … Judgement and observation may sketch characters, and often put together a good story; but strokes of pathos such as the one just mentioned … can only be attained by those whom nature has endowed with her choicest gifts.”²⁴

The scene and chapter conclude with Agnes Primrose's fate determined and the contrast still much in evidence:

Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered, William delivered the fatal speech, ending with—“Dead, dead, dead.”

She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.

(p. 351)

Crabbe employs the same narrative structure in many of his tales, particularly those in Tales in Verse: a series of quasi incidents representing an internal action of the mind progressing toward and culminating in a principal incident, an encounter of cruel contrasts; although Crabbe is working within the limits of the couplet and the short verse tale, he covers the same extensive and subtle ground, the working out of a mental process that consumes a whole lifetime. Like Inchbald, he uses contrast as the organizing principle of the culminating incident, but, within the limits imposed by 500 or 700 lines, an even more intense kind of concentration of material is required in Crabbe's tales. Moreover, he accepts the eighteenth century's doctrine that narrative poetry must bring its circumstances to the eye. The question is, how does he manage to accommodate all these intentions? First, he narrows his subject drastically, but what he does can be understood better if we first consider one of Maria Edgeworth's tales.

Maria Edgeworth also accepted the “real” as the decisive term for fiction: “Did you,” she asked Elizabeth Inchbald, “really draw the characters from life, or did you invent them?”; she is speaking here of Inchbald's first novel, A Simple Story, which she praised in these words: “I never read any novel—I except none—I never read any novel that affected me so strongly, or that so completely possessed me with the belief in the real existence of all the people it represents.”²⁵ Scattered along the bottom margin of Edgeworth's stories are frequent footnotes stating that a certain event or detail is “real”:

It is remarkable, that several incidents which have been objected to as impossible or improbable, were true. For instance, the medical case, vol. ii. p. 217. …

A bishop was really saved from suffocation by a clergyman in his diocese (no matter where or when) in the manner represented. … A considerable estate was about seventy years regained, as described … by the discovery of a sixpence under the seal of a deed.²⁶

At the same time, Maria Edgeworth also upheld a system of education that, like the novels of Godwin and Inchbald and the tales of Crabbe, assumed a certain theory of the mind as its basis. However, a more important purpose intervened; this system of education must prove its efficacy: “These Tales have been written to illustrate the opinions delivered in ‘Practical Education.’”²⁷ To make the system attractive, Edgeworth found poetic justice necessary. The result is that the mind and “real life” in a tale by Maria Edgeworth, excepting the early Castle Rackrent, must work with a narrative intention that, however efficiently and thoroughly it makes its point, is essentially at odds with its material, for at the end of a tale by Maria Edgeworth everyone is exactly where he ought to be in terms of a poetically just distribution of worldly rewards and punishments, and no one is quite where the real tendencies of things carry Agnes Primrose or Caleb Williams or the characters in Crabbe's tales. The result in Edgeworth's fiction, then, is an illustrative compound of truth and fiction, and she often had difficulties in combining the two: “Madame de Fleury is mostly true: Maria says she has often observed that it is very difficult to make truth and fiction mix well together.”²⁸

At the same time her narratives are governed by precept as no narrative discussed here has been since “The Hermit” by Parnell. This, too, created difficulties:

We are, in the main, of your opinion, that Erasmus and his letters are tiresome; but then, please [to] recollect that we had our moral to work out, and to show, to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the reader, how in various professions young men may get on without patronage. To the good of our moral we were obliged to sacrifice; perhaps we have sacrificed in vain.²⁹

Crabbe was aware of Maria Edgeworth's work, and he was ambivalent:

Did you know R. L. Edgeworth? You know the one omission in all the works of his daughter, and her sentiments are said to be derived from him? Were they indeed unbelievers in revealed religion? It is a questionable point in England with those who knew them only in their publications. Miss Edgeworth, as a moralist is almost unexceptionable—I do not say entirely so; and if she has the misfortune to be without the comfort which the Gospel affords, she has performed a difficult task in preserving her morals unconnected with religion. If she believe in any sense of the word, even the lowest, I perceive no reason for her reserve, since she needed not to have been so pointed as to have espoused any of the various denominations of Christians. Of her general character, I am disposed to think highly, and of her writings almost enthusiastically. She has that happy faculty of letting you know what she means, so that you do not have to stop every little while and say to yourself, “What is all this about?”³⁰

It is not an easy task to imagine Maria Edgeworth having difficulty in “preserving her morals,” and in the terms “almost unexceptionable” and “almost enthusiastically” there is evident an uneasiness in Crabbe not entirely limited to the welfare of Maria Edgeworth's immortal soul, for he found a grating insufficiency in the orderly demonstration of the Edgeworthian system that conformed so readily to the already existing system of poetic justice. In “The Learned Boy” (Tales in Verse) Crabbe takes typical Edgeworthian material and assumptions and mocks them. The central character is a not very bright boy who, lacking other virtues, writes a neat hand, arrives punctually, and works diligently at his desk in the office. This simple mind, first possessed by a trifling religiosity, is taken over by an equally foolish atheism, but during this whole process Stephen Jones remains orderly, even in the acquisition and arrangement of infidel books:

          The books were view'd, the price was fairly paid,
And Stephen read, undaunted, undismay'd—
But not till first he paper'd all the row,
And placed in order, to enjoy the show;
Next letter'd all the backs with care and speed,
Set them in ranks, and then began to read.

(ll. 303-8)³¹

This is a promising beginning for a boy in a tale by Maria Edgeworth. Crabbe goes on to insist, however, that the principle of order of the kind Edgeworth advocated was too simple a proposition for the complexities of life:

          The love of order,—I the thing receive
From reverend men, and I in part believe—
Shows a clear mind and clean, and whoso needs
This love but seldom in the world succeeds;
And yet with this some other love must be,
Ere I can fully to the fact agree.
Still has the love of order found a place
With all that's low, degrading, mean, and base,
With all that merits scorn, and all that meets disgrace:
In the cold miser, of all change afraid;
In pompous men, in public seats obey'd;
In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones,
Franciers of flowers, and lads like Stephen Jones;
Order to these is armour and defense,
And love of method serves in lack of sense.

(ll. 309-27, passim)

There are disagreements between Crabbe and Edgeworth, which one must be conscious of before comparing them. Nonetheless, though their opinions about the best end for mankind might have differed, they held much in common: both took their stories from “real life,” or tried to make it seem that they did. Where they carried these stories is, of course, a different matter.

Taking Edgeworth's “Rosanna” (1802) as an example, one sees that this long prose tale yields several possible groundworks for tales by Crabbe.³² I am not saying that Crabbe borrowed these subjects from Edgeworth—on the contrary, but I would say that a tale by Maria Edgeworth separates easily into a number of subjects that Crabbe could have “worked up into something.” “Rosanna” is a story about the exemplary family of Farmer Gray; the precise degree of its exemplariness is defined by a number of contrasts afforded by persons in the neighborhood. If one neighbor, O'Doughterty, is honest but not industrious, another neighbor, Hopkins, is dishonest but industrious. The Grays represent the happy instance of the honest and the industrious, and, to be both secure and happy, people in the social class of the Grays ought to take this example to heart. The neighborhood includes other exemplary kinds, who illustrate various home truths. High station assures neither security nor morality: the squire, who is seeking reelection to Parliament, has sold himself to the party in power and lusts after Farmer Gray's daughter and is thereby a rival to his serving-man. Even Farmer Gray's two sons have a brief, atypical moment when they imprudently consider the possibility of enlisting. Hopkins, the middleman, is the kind of subject that would have offered Crabbe an opportunity to construct a narrative about the progress of avarice in a man's mind, a process that Edgeworth does not delineate. In “The Struggles of Conscience,” Crabbe builds a story out of a man's dialogue with his conscience over a period of decades, during which time he continues to deceive himself and his conscience about his shady business dealings until, after a particularly reprehensible deed, his conscience is suddenly awakened, resoundingly and permanently. Taking the simple grouping of master, servant, and farm girl in “Rosanna,” one can see what Crabbe did with similar material in “'Squire Thomas,” a tale discussed in chapter 3. The two brothers, who in “Rosanna” wisely refrain from going off to war, are similar to a pair to be found in “The Brothers” (Tales in Verse). In Crabbe's tale, one brother does go off to sea while the other remains on land to exploit the sailor's generosity, and, after rejecting his impoverished and dying sailor-brother, the landsman ends with the inevitably sterile remorse.³³

What one sees here is comparable material, not sources; Crabbe carries his stories off in a direction alien to Edgeworth, who plants her standard in the essentially preceptive on behalf of a militant poetic justice. Both work with “real” situations, but one develops these in accord with the “real course of nature” and the other acts on the grounds that vice must be punished and virtue rewarded in terms that self-interest can comprehend.

Jeffrey therefore had a point when he observed that Crabbe's tales could be “ranked by the side of the inimitable tales of Miss Edgeworth.” Yet the “weighty and practical precept” of Edgeworth's tales does not determine the conduct of Crabbe's tales. In his attack on Crabbe the reviewer of The Christian Observer asks, “Does he instruct us?” No, the reviewer concludes, he really does not, except on a relatively low plane. It is true that his delineations of character are “conducive to the cultivation of that discriminative faculty … so useful in our intercourse with mankind”; it is also true that his “inimitable home strokes” help us to judge “our own minds and our own motives”; and of course it is true that he offers “direct satire on some of the most common, and therefore, perhaps, most fatal errors which meet us in our ordinary plans of life. …”³⁴ In short, Crabbe does in his verse tales what Inchbald said the novelist must do, but unfortunately, Crabbe does not elevate either his subjects or his readers above all this, as a poet should. Nor can we read Crabbe and learn how to improve our position in society and still stay happy and decent, as we can when we read Edgeworth's tales. Crabbe, unlike Godwin and Inchbald, does not indict the unjust system of society that creates wicked passions and then punishes us for them, especially if we are poor. Yet, despite these differences, Crabbe as a narrative poet holds more in common with these writers than with any other group of narrative writers.

As analytic as Godwin, often employing a narrative structure, not similar to, but identical with, Inchbald's story of Agnes Primrose, and looking to “real life” for his groundwork, as did the exemplary Maria Edgeworth, Crabbe, the narrative poet, created a new kind of verse tale, marked by his closest affinities. In the larger view, one does not have to look at the verse tale of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to explain the peculiar narrative art of Crabbe; something much closer to him is immediately at hand, the prose fiction that he read every day and that he himself produced during one period of his life. Much has been made of Crabbe's relation to Augustan verse satire, and probably too much cannot be made of it—it is essential to an understanding of Crabbe's poetry, narrative or otherwise. His loyalty to it was, in effect, the origin of his literary troubles; yet the intention of the satirical verse tradition was still active, even in Crabbe's own period, though in another form. Between Crabbe's poetry and the moral epistles of Pope and the satires of Churchill stands the novel. Crabbe's final achievement as a poet is that he adapted the novel to narrative poetry and that, in so doing, he remained faithful to those principles he had accepted on his setting out as a poet.

Notes

1. See Francis Jeffrey, “Review of Tales in Verse,” Edinburgh Review 20 (1812): 278-79; Alfred Ainger, Crabbe (New York, 1903), p. 104; F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (New York, 1947), p. 125; Oliver Sigworth, Nature's Sternest Painter: Five Essays on the Poetry of George Crabbe (Tucson, Ariz., 1965), p. 127; Karl Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art (Madison, Wis., 1960), p. 120; John Speirs, “Crabbe as Master of the Verse Tale,” Oxford Review 1(1966):3-40.

2. George Crabbe, Jr., The Life of George Crabbe by his Son, in The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe (London, 1851), p. 44.

3. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Poetry and Belles Lettres (London, 1823), pp. 546, 509.

4. Samuel Richardson, “Preface,” Clarissa Harlowe, in Works, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen (London, 1883), 4:xiii.

5. Elizabeth Inchbald, “Novel-writing,” The Artist; A Collection of Essays, ed. Prince Hoare (London, 1810), 1:xiv, 14-15.

6. [William Hazlitt] “The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties, A Novel, by Madame D'Arblay,” Edinburgh Review 24(1815):320.

7. Quoted from [Richard Whately], “Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” Quarterly Review 24(1821):352 [originally appeared in Scott's review of Emma, Quarterly Review 14(1815):188-201.]

8. [Whately] 24:353, 357.

9. Crabbe, Jr., Life, pp. 46-47.

10. Inchbald submitted Nature and Art “to her three literary friends, Mr. Holcroft, Mr. Godwin, and Mr. Hardinge …” (James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald [London, 1833], 1:315). A few years later Maria Edgeworth submitted her work to Inchbald for criticism; the correspondence ensuing offers revealing commentary on their art of fiction (Ibid., 2:129-212, passim). Amelia Opie and Mary Leadbeater, both friends of Crabbe, are linked with this group. Opie inherited the pathetic side of Inchbald's art; Edgeworth adapted Inchbald's preceptive vein to the Edgeworthian system. In addition, Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories (1788) and Hannah More's Repository Tracts (1795) are prototypes of Edgeworth's work.

11. Thomas Holcroft, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (London, 1794), 1:vi-vii.

12. For example, Holcroft has a lengthy episode about the sufferings of a boy apprenticed to a sadistic master, in many ways like “Peter Grimes”; the miseries of the young poet in Crabbe's “The Patron” have much in common with those described by Holcroft in his account of patronage.

13. William Godwin, “Preface,” The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are, ed. George Sherburn (New York and Toronto, 1960), p. xxiii—hereafter cited as Caleb Williams).

14. “Godwin's own Account of Caleb Williams,” Caleb Williams, p. xxviii.

15. “The Parting Hour,” Poems, 2:28-40.

16. Review of Tales of the Hall, Christian Observer (1819): 657.

17. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (Lincoln, Neb., 1961), pp. 309-11.

18. Anna L. Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” The British Novelists (London, 1810), 1:55-57, passim (hereafter cited as British Novelists).

19. “Ellen Orford,” Poems, 1:470-79.

20. “Resentment,” Poems, 2:229-41.

21. “The Mother,” Poems, 2:114-23.

22. Crabbe, Jr., Life, p. 44.

23. Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, in British Novelists, 27:375.

24. Barbauld, British Novelists, 28:iv.

25. Boaden, Memoirs 2:152-54, passim. Mary Leadbeater, an imitator of Edgeworth, writes to Crabbe: “The characters … have the convincing power of reality over the mind, and I maintain that the pictures are drawn from life. To enquire whether this is the case is the excuse which I make to myself for writing this letter” (Mary Leadbeater, ed., The Leadbeater Papers, 2d ed. [London, 1862], 2:336-37). Crabbe replied that nearly all his characters were drawn from life (Leadbeater Papers, 2:340-41).

26. Maria Edgeworth, “Preface to the Third Edition,” Patronage, 3d ed. (London, 1815), 1:v-vi.

27. R. L. Edgeworth, “‘Preface’ to Moral Tales,” Tales and Novels of Maria Edgeworth (London, 1893), 1:vi.

28. R. L. Edgeworth, Letter to Elizabeth Inchbald, Oct. 2, 1809, Boaden, Memoirs, 2:150.

29. Maria Edgeworth, Letter to Elizabeth Inchbald, Feb. 14, 1814, ibid., 2:194-95.

30. Leadbeater Papers, 2:370-71.

31. “The Learned Boy,” Poems, 2:277-91.

32. Maria Edgeworth, “Rosana,” Tales and Novels 2:194-244.

33. “The Brothers,” Poems, 2:265-75.

34. Review of Tales of the Hall, Christian Observer 18(1819):659-61.

Works Cited

Works by Crabbe

Crabbe, George. Poems. Edited by A. W. Ward. 3 vols. Cambridge: University Press, 1905-1907.

Works Relating to Crabbe

Crabbe, George, Jr. The Life of George Crabbe by his Son. In The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe. London, 1851.

Contemporary Reviews of Crabbe's Work

Review of Tales of the Hall. Christian Observer 18(1819):650-68.

Prose Fiction

Barbauld, Anna L., ed. The British Novelists. 50 vols. London, 1810.

Godwin, William. The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are. Edited by George Sherburn. New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Co., 1960.

Holcroft, Thomas. The Adventures of Hugh Trevor. 6 vols. London, 1794-1797.

Inchbald, Elizabeth. Nature and Art. In The British Novelists. Edited by Anna L. Barbauld, vol. 27. London, 1810.