SOURCE: Brewster, Elizabeth. “George Crabbe and William Wordsworth.” University of Toronto Quarterly 42, no. 2 (winter 1973): 142-56.

[In the following essay, Brewster explores the link between Crabbe and Wordsworth, including how they influenced each other as writers, offers a critical comparison of certain works, and comments on previous critics' observations.]

It is perhaps a pity that, if George Crabbe and William Wordsworth have their names associated together, it is usually in rivalry, and largely through the reviews of their works by Francis Jeffrey. The two poets had more in common than Jeffrey would have admitted, and might have had more sympathy with each other's work than they had if they had not been so frequently placed in opposition by their most influential reviewer.

Wordsworth, like Sir Walter Scott, made his first acquaintance with Crabbe's works as a schoolboy, from the extracts of The Village reprinted in the Annual Register in 1783; and, like Scott, he was so struck by the extracts at the time that he memorized them.¹ The young Wordsworth especially admired the lines from the description of the Parish Poor-house,

                    Far the happiest they
The moping idiot and the madman gay.

It was an unfortunate coincidence that Crabbe broke his long silence (from 1785) with his publication of the Poems of 1807 in the same year that Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes appeared. To a twentieth-century reader the likeness between the poems of the two authors may seem as great as the differences; but Francis Jeffrey, in reviewing Crabbe's Poems, in April 1808, chose to elevate Crabbe at the expense of Wordsworth and therefore sought to contrast them at every turn. He had to admit the similarity of their subject matter. He says, ‘These gentlemen [Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey] write a great deal about rustic life, as well as Mr Crabbe; and they even agree with him in dwelling much on its discomforts.’² Even in small topics he found that there was a likeness of choice. Wordsworth and Crabbe both chose to write on village schoolmasters and on ‘frail damsels.’ (He might have added that both were interested in depicting madness.) The difference is one, he seems to think, of treatment, or point of view. ‘Mr Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are … The gentlemen of the new school, on the other hand, scarcely ever condescend to take their subjects from any description of persons at all known to the common inhabitants of the world; but invent for themselves certain whimsical and unheard of beings, to whom they impute some fantastical combination of feelings, and then labour to excite our sympathy for them, either by placing them in incredible situations, or by some strained and exaggerated moralisation of a vague and tragical description.’³

Wordsworth hardly needs, at this date, to be defended from Jeffrey's criticism. There is, of course, a grain of truth in what Jeffrey is saying. (He was, of course, no fool, and a critic of considerable ability.) Crabbe's stories of Phoebe Dawson or Lucy of the Mill are more realistically told, for example, than ‘The Thorn’ or ‘Ruth’; yet the basic situation is the same. If one is ‘incredible,’ so is the other. ‘The Thorn’ differs from Crabbe's similar stories in that the emphasis is more lyric than narrative. This lyric emphasis, however, might have been found in Crabbe's ‘Sir Eustace Grey,’ which appeared in the 1807 volume and which Jeffrey quotes with approval, although, perhaps significantly, a somewhat qualified approval. Like ‘The Thorn,’ ‘Sir Eustace Grey’ is a vivid representation of madness; but, with its account of Sir Eustace's wanderings, it resembles even more Coleridge's ‘Ancient Mariner’ and the nightmarish accounts of De Quincey's opium dreams.

If ‘Sir Eustace Grey’ is a more fantastic poem than might be expected from one whom Jeffrey was upholding as realistic, many of Wordsworth's early poems are more realistic than he seems to allow. Of the characters in the Lyrical Ballads, Simon Lee, with his ‘weak ankles,’ is certainly not a ‘whimsical and unheard of being.’ The story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill was founded on what Wordsworth took to be a true anecdote, and one which Crabbe might have used if he had known it. ‘Michael’ (1800), with its grave pathos, remains close to the realities, even though the aged shepherd is presented with more dignity than Crabbe allows, for example, to his ‘noble Peasant,’ Isaac Ashford. One suspects that Crabbe might have turned with more interest to writing of the ‘evil courses’ to which Luke gave himself in the ‘dissolute city,’ rather than to a consideration of Michael's solitary endurance. Within limits, there is likeness between the two poets in their work up to their 1807 publications. Both men describe with some degree of realism men and women, often those in humble life; both are interested in madness or states of mind bordering on it; and both seek for effects of pathos in accounts of desertion and separation. There are, however, differences. One might say that Wordsworth has greater depth of feeling, Crabbe greater breadth of interest. Wordsworth is more inclined than Crabbe to make his country people symbolic of noble endurance, as in ‘Resolution and Independence’ and ‘Michael,’ and he sees the natural surroundings as imparting dignity and virtue to the people who live among them.⁴ Crabbe does not idealize his country people. They may be ‘coarsely kind and comfortably gay,’ but they are rarely ‘noble.’ The natural background is of little importance in ‘The Parish Register.’ In The Village its importance is negative. The heath, the ‘length of burning sand,’ the thistles and tares, provide a ‘sad splendour’ which is a suitable background for man's misery. And nature is cruel as well as ‘niggard.’ The ‘greedy waves’ and flood carry away the poor man's hut. Another difference between the two men at this stage is that Wordsworth is more exclusively interested than is Crabbe in humble people. Crabbe includes in ‘The Parish Register’ accounts of people of different rank—the Lady of the Hall, the avaricious Catherine Lloyd, Sir Edward Archer (the ‘amorous knight’), a wealthy farmer's widow such as the Widow Goe, a shop-keeper who has gained riches. Both poets are interested in character, but Crabbe's interest is more in the faults and foibles of his characters than is Wordsworth's.

It might be supposed that Crabbe's continued use of the heroic couplet might be one source of preference for a conservative critic. Yet, although Wordsworth's metrical forms are more varied than Crabbe's, they are certainly not untraditional. Blank verse, sonnets, Spenserian stanzas, ballad imitations, and odes were all well-established poetic forms of the time. Also, Crabbe's 1807 volume itself presented a fair amount of metrical variation, although not as much as Wordsworth's work. ‘Sir Eustace Grey’ and ‘The Hall of Justice’ verge on the ballad imitation, and ‘The Birth of Flattery’ is partially in Spenserian stanzas.

The praise given to Crabbe at his expense could hardly have endeared Crabbe to Wordsworth. Wordsworth comments to Samuel Rogers, in September 1808: ‘I am happy to find that we coincide in opinion about Crabbe's verses; for poetry in no sense can they be called …’ He continues that there is nothing in this new publication as good as the description of the workhouse in The Village, and even in The Village he thinks the description of the Apothecary is not true to life. Indeed, ‘If the picture were true to nature, what claim would it have to be called Poetry? At the best, it is the meanest kind of satire, except the purely personal. The sum of all is, that nineteen out of 20 of Crabbe's pictures are mere matter of fact; with which the Muses have just about as much to do as they have with a Collection of Medical reports, or of Law Cases.’⁵ One cannot imagine (considering his earlier admiration) that Wordsworth would have indulged in quite so bitter an attack on Crabbe's poetry, however it might differ from his own, if he had not been feeling the sting of Jeffrey's attacks on him, both in the review of Crabbe's Poems and in the earlier review of his own Poems, in Two Volumes. Russell Noyes has pointed out that at this period Wordsworth's financial necessity, with a young and growing family, was such that he was especially eager for success in the sale of these volumes, and had consequently hoped for good reviews.⁶ It is not surprising that some of the resentment which he could not help feeling towards Jeffrey, and which he expressed vigorously at times against him, should have been transferred to the poet whom Jeffrey professed to prefer to him and praised for qualities opposite to his own. A lingering resentment against Crabbe seems to colour Wordsworth's attitude towards him even after the other poet's death, although this resentment is mingled with a half grudging admiration. Crabbe, in turn, seems to have taken a partial cue for his attitude to Wordsworth from Jeffrey, although he had some appreciation of his abilities. Jeffrey's efforts, although they may have been partially responsible for some spirit of hostility between the two poets had at least one good result: each must certainly have been aware of what the other was writing; each had a strong motive for curiosity as to the other's work.

Crabbe's Borough (1810) and Tales (1812) preceded the publication of Wordsworth's Excursion. Jeffrey still expressed his admiration for Crabbe in his review of The Borough (April 1810). There may possibly be a side glance at Wordsworth in his comment, ‘He has no moralizing swains or sentimental tradesmen; and scarcely ever seeks to charm us by the artless graces or lowly virtues of his personages.’⁷ Yet what he says in favour of Crabbe's choice of subjects might also have been said in favour of Wordsworth's: ‘In point of fact, we are all touched more deeply as well as more frequently, in real life, with the sufferings of peasants than of princes; and sympathise much oftener, and more heartily, with the successes of the poor, than of the rich and distinguished.’⁸ His praise of The Borough is not without qualifications. He complains of Crabbe's ‘lapse into disgusting representations’⁹ and mentions as examples ‘the story of Frederic Thompson, of Abel Keene, of Blaney, of Benbow, and a good part of those of Grimes and Ellen Orford.’

Interestingly enough, the partially condemned stories of Abel Keene, Peter Grimes, and Ellen Orford bear some resemblance to Wordsworthian examples of pathos. The melancholy wanderings of Abel Keene or Peter Grimes, like those of Jachin, bear a family resemblance to the wanderings of Martha Ray or Ruth. The Borough also contains a much higher proportion of natural description than is to be found in The Village or ‘The Parish Register,’ and in the accounts of Peter Grimes and Jachin the natural background is used partly as an external representation of the inner feelings of the central character and partly (as in ‘Michael’) as a means of universalizing the story, of placing it in a larger frame. The descriptions in ‘Peter Grimes’ are well known. Here is the less familiar account of the last days of Jachin, the Parish-Clerk:

In each lone place, dejected and dismay'd,
Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid;
Or to the restless sea and roaring wind
Gave the strong yearnings of a ruin'd mind;
On the broad beach, the silent summer-day,
Stretch'd on some wreck, he wore his life away;
Or where the river mingles with the sea,
Or on the mud-bank by the elder-tree,
Or by the bounding marsh-dyke, there was he …

[xix, 270-8]

Although this passage does not quite attain the dignified pathos of the conclusion of ‘Michael,’ it reaches close to it. The similarity may be seen by placing next to it a passage from ‘Michael’:

                    Among the rocks
He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud,
And listened to the wind; and, as before,
Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep,
And for the land, his small inheritance.
And to that hollow dell from time to time
Did he repair, to build the Fold of which
His Flock had need.

[455-62]

Crabbe has no single line which has the noble severity of Wordsworth's ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (466), but Wordsworth himself could hardly have found fault here with Crabbe's strong, unadorned diction.

Something must be said here of that debatable topic, Crabbe's diction. Crabbe is sometimes spoken of as continuing to use the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth century, the kind of diction to which Wordsworth objected in his famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Thomas Quayle writes, ‘The recognized “elegancies” and “flowers of speech” still linger on. A peasant is still a swain, poets are sons of verse, fishes the finny tribe, country folk the rural tribe. The word nymph appears with a frequency that irritates the reader …’¹⁰ And Arthur Symons complains that in 1807 ‘he still says “Nymphs and Swains” when he means the young men and women of his parish.’¹¹ But most of the examples Quayle cites in his discussion of Crabbe are from the early poems, ‘Midnight,’ The Candidate, ‘Inebriety,’ and The Village. It is true that Crabbe uses personifications now and then throughout his work. So, for that matter, does Wordsworth. It is true that he continues to mention ‘nymphs,’ although when he does so in later poems it is usually in a somewhat comic context. But, with these exceptions, the poetry in his later volumes is as close as Wordsworth's—perhaps closer—to being ‘a selection of the language really spoken by men.’ Alfred Ainger more justly says that, although Crabbe had no theories about diction, he was delivered from the excessive use of poetic diction by ‘a first-hand association with men and nature.’ Ainger continues: ‘He was ever describing what he had seen and studied with his own eyes, and the vocabulary of the bards who had for generations borrowed it from one another failed to supply him with the words he needed.’¹² Ainger points out especially the absence of poetic diction in ‘Sir Eustace Grey.’¹³ More recently, Lilian Haddakin feels obliged to defend Crabbe from the opposite charge—that of being too prosaic—by pointing out that ‘while the vocabulary is that of common discourse, and, while the alterations in the normal word-order are few,’ Crabbe manages to obtain poetic force by means of the movement of his verse and the concentration of his style.¹⁴

It is hard to say whether the theories expressed in Wordsworth's Preface had any share in Crabbe's gradual abandonment of poetic diction. His native tendency to write with his eye on the object would probably have made him avoid poetic diction even if he was not influenced by the precept and example of another poet, but he must have been interested in what Wordsworth was doing. Whether or not Crabbe had read the Lyrical Ballads before the publication of the Poems of 1807, Jeffrey's review would have been fairly sure to arouse his interest in Wordsworth. In 1813 he was writing to Scott about Wordsworth, ‘whom I read & laughed at till I caught a touch of his disease & now really like many of the simplicities …’¹⁵ The language used here implies an acquaintance with the poems long enough to bring about a change in attitude. It also implies (‘caught a touch of his disease’) a degree of influence. The younger Crabbe says of his father, ‘He was for several years, like many other readers, a cool admirer of the earlier and shorter poems of what is called the Lake School; but, even when he smiled at the exceeding simplicity of the language, evidently found something in it peculiarly attractive; for there were few modern works which he opened so frequently—and he soon felt and acknowledged, with the public, that, in the simplicity was veiled genius of the greatest magnitude.’¹⁶

Perhaps Jeffrey felt that Crabbe had caught some of Wordsworth's laughable ‘simplicity’ of language in the Tales of 1812, since he complains of Crabbe's ‘flat and prosaic’ diction.¹⁷ It is somewhat surprising, however, that when Jeffrey praises Crabbe or singles out passages from the Tales for commendation, it is for qualities which he shared with Wordsworth. He praises, for example, the pathos of ‘The Parting Hour’ and ‘The Brothers.’ He quotes with commendation the description of the heath in ‘The Lover's Journey’:

Small black-legg'd sheep devour with hunger keen
The meager herbage; fleshless, lank and lean:
He saw some scatter'd hovels; turf was pil'd
In square brown stacks …

or the description of an autumn morning in ‘The Patron’:

Cold grew the foggy morn; the day was brief;
Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf;
The dew dwelt ever on the herb; the woods
Roar'd with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods …

He says, in words which might have applied to Wordsworth, ‘There are a greater number of instances on which he has combined the natural language and manners of humble life with the energy of true passion, and the beauty of generous affection.’¹⁸ When he criticizes Crabbe, it is, as Wordsworth might have done, for ‘a want of habitual fire, and of a tone of enthusiasm.’¹⁹ And he fails to single out for praise that special virtue which Crabbe did not share with Wordsworth or with many of his poetical contemporaries, except Byron in Don Juan—the dry wit which invaded even Crabbe's most pathetic flights. He habitually undervalues Crabbe's ‘facetiousness,’ as he calls it, and speaks with little enthusiasm of the Tales where it is a strong element—‘The Dumb Orators,’ for example, or ‘The Gentleman Farmer.’ On the whole, if Jeffrey values Crabbe more highly than Wordsworth, it is not, by this date, for those qualities which most differentiate him from Wordsworth.

Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) probably comes closer to Crabbe, at least as a teller of pathetic stories, than his earlier work does. Wordsworth here follows Crabbe's example in including people from the ‘middling’ rank of life as well as from the very poorest classes—the Pastor, for example, and the Solitary. His principal characters were based largely, as were Crabbe's, on actual observation, and there is an attempt to give realistic details. One must not, of course, overrate the possibilities of influence. The Excursion was begun in 1795, and passages from the story of Margaret, which seems so close in spirit to ‘The Parting Hour,’ were among the earliest parts of the poem to be written, at a period when Wordsworth could not have been influenced by Crabbe's pathos. One notices an exactitude of detail in the description of Margaret's garden such as Wordsworth might have discovered even in the early Crabbe:

                    Daisy-flowers and thrift
Had broken their trim border-lines, and straggled
O'er paths they used to deck: carnations, once
Prized for surpassing beauty, and no less
For the peculiar pains they had required,
Declined their languid heads, wanting support.
The cumbrous bind-weed, with its wreaths and bells,
Had twined about her two small rows of peas,
And dragged them to the earth.

[Excursion, i, 722-30]

The section of The Excursion closest to the manner of Crabbe is contained in the sixth and seventh books. These books are made up of a series of brief stories, told by the Parson, about the people now buried in the rural churchyard. They thus correspond to some extent to Part iii of ‘The Parish Register,’ in which Crabbe's clergyman tells of the year's burials. There is the account of a youth who, like the younger sister in Crabbe's ‘The Mother,’ wastes away as the result of a broken heart. There is the story, not unlike the account of Frederick in Letter xii of The Borough, of a young man ‘Gay, volatile, ingenious, quick to learn,’ who returns as a Prodigal to his father

                    from hovels where abides
Necessity, the stationary host
Of vagrant poverty; from rifted barns
Where no one dwells but the wide-staring owl …

[vi, 344-7]

There is the account of the woman who is ruled by ‘avaricious thrift’ and ‘a strange thraldom of maternal love.’ There is the inevitable pathetic story of seduction in the account of Ellen and her child. And there is the description of the old clergyman who

                                                                                                                                  loved
The sound of titled names, and talked in glee
Of long-past banquetings with noble friends.

[vii, 216-18]

The orthodox piety of The Excursion, as well as its pathos, has similarities to Crabbe's work. The Solitary, who has lost his Christian faith partly as a result of his personal misfortunes and partly because of the French Revolution, is opposed in argument by the Parson and the Wanderer. Crabbe also had been concerned to represent and oppose arguments against Christianity in ‘The Dumb Orators’ and ‘The Gentleman Farmer,’ although his representations are comic rather than serious; and he had depicted the disintegrating effect on the personality of lack of faith in ‘Edward Shore.’

If Wordsworth hoped that the closer approach to Crabbe's realistic pathos in The Excursion would conciliate Jeffrey, he was mistaken. It was on this occasion (November 1814) that Jeffrey wrote his notorious ‘This will never do’ review. Yet, to be just to Jeffrey, he does single out for commendation some of the best passages in The Excursion. Jeffrey had a taste for landscape painting and pathos, and was willing to admit the talents of Wordsworth and Crabbe when they were employed on the pictorial or the pathetic. But he was baffled by Wordsworth's ‘mysticism,’ and he rather disliked Crabbe's ‘jocularity.’

Crabbe, in writing to his Irish friend Mary Leadbeater, may have been influenced by Jeffrey's opinions when he speaks rather slightingly of the ‘sentimental, metaphysical pedlar’ of The Excursion; but he does speak of his ‘respect for Mr Wordsworth's feelings and genius and opinions.’²⁰ In spite of his amusement at Wordsworth's Pedlar, there is something of the Wanderer's nature in his own Richard, of Tales of the Hall (1819). This collection is one in which Crabbe showed especially the influence of contemporary trends: a greater subjectivity, a higher proportion of natural description, and more lyrical intensity than previous volumes. Tales of the Hall is, in some respects, Crabbe's Prelude, with a strong autobiographical element. The accounts of the youth of Richard and, to a certain extent, of George (the two brothers who are central characters in the cycle of tales) are in their own way accounts of the ‘growth of a poet's mind.’ Crabbe himself, according to his son, admitted the likeness of his own youth to that of Richard,²¹ and the pursuits of the young Richard were likely to produce a poet of man and of nature such as Crabbe became:

“I sought the town, and to the ocean gave
My mind and thoughts, as restless as the wave;
Where crowds assembled, I was sure to run,
Heard what was said, and mused on what was done;
Attentive listening in the moving scene,
And often wondering what the men could mean …
Whatever business in the port was done,
I, without call, was with the busy one;
Not daring question, but with open ear
And greedy spirit, ever bent to hear.
To me the wives of seamen loved to tell
What storms endanger'd men esteem'd so well;
What wond'rous things in foreign ports they saw,
Lands without bounds, and people without law.
No ships were wreck'd upon that fatal beach,
But I could give the luckless tale of each …”

[iv, 295-300, 305-14]

The interest in human action and in the spoken narrative is here seen at an early stage. The boy who ‘Heard what was said, and mused on what was done’ would continue to do so throughout his life. The boy wandering about the quay, ‘unobserved as weed upon the wave,’ peering into ‘the open shops of craftsmen,’ sitting at the fireside of the inn, where the patrons thought that he had ‘not a mind / That takes a notice,’ was laying up those early stores of observation which would make his tales and his descriptions of a seaside town possible.

In spite of this greater subjectivity of the Tales of the Hall as compared to his previous work, it must be admitted that Oliver Sigworth is right in generally contrasting the objectivity of a typical Crabbe poem with the subjectivity of a typical Wordsworth poem. ‘A Wordsworth poem is usually about Wordsworth, while one by Crabbe is oriented not towards the poet's psyche, but towards the observed world.’²²

Crabbe, although he paints some aspects of youth with tenderness, does not, like Wordsworth, think of the child as a ‘Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!’ He sees him as having the potential fallibility of the man

                                        there are in minds the seeds
Of good and ill, the virtues and the weeds …

[iii, 98-9]

Yet for him, in Wordsworth's phrase, ‘The Child is father of the Man,’ but in a way of which Wordsworth was not thinking:

Years from the mind no native stain remove,
But lay the varnish of the world above.
Still, when he can, he loves to step aside,
And be the boy without a check or guide;
In the old wanderings he with pleasure strays,
And reassumes the bliss of earlier days.

[iii, 110-15]

A deliberate imitation of Wordsworth by Crabbe occurs in his unfinished blank verse poem, ‘In a Neat Cottage,’ written in 1822, but not published until 1960, in Arthur Pollard's edition of New Poems by George Crabbe (Liverpool 1960). Here the language and the movement of the verse is so much in the manner of Wordsworth that one can only conclude that Crabbe was trying to see how close he could come to his much criticized rival.

Crabbe and Wordsworth do not seem to have met until relatively late in life. They seem to have been unacquainted as late as 1817, when Crabbe wrote to Elizabeth Charter that, although he had met most contemporary writers at the home of Samuel Rogers, he had not met the Lake Poets.²³ They did, however, meet eventually, both at the home of Samuel Rogers and at the home of the Hoares on Hampstead Heath. Crabbe mentions having seen Wordsworth and Southey in 1825.²⁴ An anecdote which takes several forms dates from about this time. Sir Walter Scott records in his Journal for 3 January 1825: ‘Talking of Wordsworth, he [Huntly Burn] told Anne [Scott's daughter] and me a story, the object of which was to show that Crabbe had no imagination. He, Sir George Beaumont, and Wordsworth, were sitting together in Murray the bookseller's back room. Sir George, after sealing a letter, blew out the candle, which had enabled him to do so, and exchanging a look with Wordsworth, began to admire in silence the undulating thread of smoke which slowly arose from the expiring wick, when Crabbe put on the extinguisher. Anne laughed at the instance, and enquired if the taper was wax, and being answered in the negative, seemed to think that there was no call on Mr Crabbe to sacrifice his sense of smell to their admiration of beautiful and evanescent forms.’²⁵ The story seems to have been one which Scott enjoyed. He told it to Thomas Moore when the latter visited him in October 1825. Moore, who was inclined to think Wordsworth conceited, exclaimed, ‘What wretched twaddle!’²⁶ Wordsworth objected to the accuracy of the anecdote, however. Writing to Lockhart in 1838, he said, ‘The anecdote of Crabbe and the candle smoke was often told me by Sir George Beaumont, and in the conclusion drawn from it by him I concurred, not so much as set down by Sir Walter that it was a proof of the Poet's want of imagination as of a sense of beauty, but I was not present when the thing occurred.’²⁷

Wordsworth, like some others, did not think highly of Crabbe's conversational powers. Mrs Eliza Fletcher, in her Autobiography, said that Wordsworth considered him ‘a dull man in conversation. He said he did not either give information, nor did he enliven any subject by discussion.’²⁸ In the Fenwick note to the ‘Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg,’ he makes the similar complaint that in general society Crabbe's talk was below the level that might have been expected from one of his gifts. Yet he adds that, when he walked with him on Hampstead Heath, he found his conversation more satisfactory, especially because of his scientific knowledge. Wordsworth's evidence, like that of others, seems to point to the conclusion that Crabbe was not a good conversationalist in large groups but that, with one or two people, and on subjects in which he felt a special interest, he could converse well enough.

This note and the poem which it accompanies are curiously illustrative of Wordsworth's double attitude to Crabbe. The poem, written in 1835, mourns the death of the group of writers—James Hogg, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Crabbe, and Mrs Hemans—who had died within the space of a few years. He writes,

Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,
Like London with its own black wreath,
On which with thee, O Crabbe! forthlooking,
I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath.

Perhaps he felt uneasy lest his readers might think these lines an indication of friendship for Crabbe. At any rate, after criticizing his conversation, he proceeds to criticize his poetry, saying that Crabbe was not ‘a diligent labourer’ as a poet. Like Samuel Rogers, he was disturbed by the casual attitude which Crabbe professed towards poetic technique, and annoyed by his blunt ‘It is not worth while.’ Yet, in the midst of his criticism, he checks himself to speak of Crabbe as a man ‘so conversant with permanent truth, and whose writings are so valuable an acquisition to our country's literature.’

The same seesaw of conflicting feelings is evident in other expressions of opinion. In 1815 he had grumbled to Henry Crabb Robinson about Crabbe's ‘unpoetical mode of considering human nature and society.’²⁹ In 1819, in somewhat mellower mood, he spoke of him ‘in terms of almost unmingled praise, conceiving that his works would be turned to, with curiosity and pleasure, when the rapid march of improvement, in another century, had altered the manners, and situation, of the peasantry of England.’³⁰ In 1825, Lockhart reported, in a letter to his wife, ‘Wordsworth says Crabbe is always an addition to our classical literature, whether he be or be not a poet. He attributes his want of popularity to a want of flow of feeling,—a general dryness and knottiness of style and matter which it does not soothe the mind to dwell upon.’³¹ Here it is interesting to hear Wordsworth echoing Jeffrey's complaint of a lack of ‘enthusiasm and fire.’ The letter which he wrote to Crabbe's son when the son was preparing to write the Life of his father is, of course, highly complimentary: ‘They will last, from their combined merits as Poetry and Truth full as long as any thing that has been expressed in Verse since they first made their appearance.’³² Such funereal compliments to the lately dead must be taken with a grain of salt, even when coming from someone as blunt as Wordsworth usually was about other men's poetry.

Wordsworth's comparisons of Crabbe to other authors are interesting. He recognized Crabbe's likeness to Jane Austen, but the ‘admirable copy of life’ which they both presented was not enough to give him pleasure, since it was not ‘clarified … by the pervading light of imagination.’³³ He commended John Langhorne's treatment of common life as being more ‘philosophical and poetical’ than Crabbe's, although Langhorne's work had ‘many faults in style from which Crabbe's more austere judgment preserved him.’³⁴ But he preferred Crabbe to Elizabeth Barrett, whose poems were ‘too ideal’ for him. ‘I want flesh and blood; even coarse nature and truth, where there is a want of refinement and beauty, is better than the other extreme.’ He classes Crabbe, along with Chaucer and Burns, in this ‘natural and sensual school.’ But Crabbe, although he ‘has great truth,’ is ‘too far removed from beauty and refinement.’³⁵ Finally, in the note attached to his own ‘Lucy Gray,’ he contrasts ‘the imaginative influences, which I have endeavored to throw over common life, with Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind.’

The references of the two authors to each other, especially Wordsworth's references to Crabbe, seem, on the whole, to indicate a lukewarm appreciation, probably partly resulting from feelings of rivalry fostered by Jeffrey's reviews, partly from a natural tendency to undervalue each other's special gifts. Crabbe, in spite of his sincere piety, was through much of his life not sympathetic to too warm a religious devotion, and, in spite of his sensibility to landscape, was not given to thinking of it as possessing spiritual values. Wordsworth's devout approach to nature was therefore likely to leave him cold. He was probably also suspicious of a portrayal of rustic human nature so much more optimistic than his own, and inclined therefore to be wary of such creations as Wordsworth's ‘sentimental, metaphysical pedlar.’ Wordsworth, as we see from his criticism of Jane Austen, was inclined to undervalue the realistic and witty presentation of society. Yet he did realize the value of Crabbe's regard for truth. It must also be added that, if his praise of Crabbe was faint, his praise of Byron, Scott, and Keats was even fainter and his praise of Coleridge not much more generous. Crabbe had as much of Wordsworth's praise as did other major writers of his time.

But, if the two poets did not lavish extravagant praises on each other, they certainly read each other's work. Wide as were some of the differences between them, they also had points of likeness. Both treated, although in very different manners, the concerns of ordinary men. Both used, in much of their work, the plain language of everyday life. Both had a strong taste for pathos and used similar pathetic themes—desertion, separation, disappointment in love, madness. Both had a deep and enduring love, which pervades their poems, for the landscapes of their childhoods, Wordsworth for the wild and lofty landscape of the Lake District, Crabbe for the bleak and fenny Suffolk coast. Some of their similarities were probably spontaneous. Others were probably the result of catching each other's ‘disease.’ Certainly they grew closer to each other with the years. Wordsworth's Excursion has more of Crabbe's realism than have the Lyrical Ballads. The Tales of the Hall has more of Wordsworth's lyricism and pathos than have Crabbe's earlier poems.

Notes

1. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford 1939), iii, 1376. The edition of Crabbe's poetry used is normally the eight-volume Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe (London 1834), but line numberings are from The Poetical Works of George Crabbe, ed. A. J. Carlyle and R. M. Carlyle (London 1908). The edition of Wordsworth used is The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford 1940-9).

2. Francis Jeffrey, review, Edinburgh Review, xii (April 1808), 133. Although all references are to the original articles in the Edinburgh Review, the specific quotations given have not been changed in Jeffrey's revision, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (London 1844). As Ronald B. Hatch has pointed out in a note in Review of English Studies, xxi (Feb. 1970), 56-62, Jeffrey does change his attitude in the revision, especially in the direction of softening his attack on Wordsworth, but it is still an attack.

3. Ibid.

4. Norman Winn, in his dissertation ‘The Treatment of Humble Life in the Poetry of George Crabbe and William Wordsworth’ (phd, University of Washington 1955), states that this aspect of Wordsworth's work has been exaggerated. He points to Peter Bell as one who has been impervious to natural influences and to the soldier described in ‘Ruth’ as under the less benign influences of nature. He points out that the Wanderer and Matthew are not true rustics, since they have been educated, and the Wanderer reads Milton (pp. 156-61). Wordsworth's attitudes were not consistent, yet it still remains generally true that especially in early years he thought of natural influences as being beneficial.

5. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford 1937), i, 244

6. Russell Noyes, Wordsworth and Jeffrey in Controversy (Bloomington 1941), 12

7. Edinburgh Review, xvi (April 1810), 31

8. Ibid., 33

9. Ibid., 36

10. Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction: A Study of Eighteenth Century Verse (London 1924), 50

11. Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (New York 1909), 54

12. Alfred Ainger, Crabbe (London 1903), 2-3

13. Ibid., 84

14. Haddakin, The Poetry of Crabbe (London 1955), 156

15. Quoted in Sir Walter Scott, Letters, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London 1937), iii, 279n

16. Crabbe, Poetical Works (London 1834), i, 172

17. Edinburgh Review, xx (Nov. 1812), 304

18. Ibid., 279

19. Ibid., 304

20. Leadbeater Papers, 2nd ed. (Dublin 1862), ii, 394

21. Crabbe, i, 18

22. Oliver Sigworth, Nature's Sternest Painter (Tucson 1965), 65

23. A. M. Broadley and W. Jerrold, The Romance of an Elderly Poet (London 1913), 172

24. Letter quoted in René Huchon, George Crabbe and His Times (New York 1907), 472

25. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh 1927), iv, 335

26. Moore, Memoirs, ed. Lord John Russell (London 1853-6), iv, 335

27. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ii, 928

28. Edinburgh 1874, 216, quoted in M. L. Peacock, The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore 1950), 236

29. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, ed. Thomas Sadler (London 1872), i, 253

30. The Brothers Wiffen, ed. S. R. Pattison (London 1880), 38, quoted in Peacock, 235

31. Quoted in Peacock, 235

32. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, iii, 1377

33. Sara Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters (New York 1874), 77

34. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ii, 829

35. Peacock, 182