[In the following essay, Whitehead explores how Crabbe's personal life is revealed in his poetry, and how facts about his life can be used to understand his writing.]

Although contemporary literary theory has increasingly ignored or devalued the role of the author in literary works, the reading public at large has continued to show a lively interest in the individual author's life, his personality, and his psychology. In recent years, for example, there has been a flood of new biographies of distinguished poets, novelists, and dramatists, and these have often achieved massive sales. This appetite for intimate personal revelation cannot find a great deal to feed on in Crabbe's published work. His tales are built upon observation rather than self-analysis or self-display; and although he often enables the reader to enter vividly into the feelings of the characters, the poet's own relation to these characters remains for the most part notably detached and objective. This continues to be the case even where we have reason to believe that he is drawing upon his own life experience in a more than usually direct way. Thus in “The Patron,” tale 5 in Tales (1812), it cannot be doubted that much of the convincing detail is taken from Crabbe's own experience at Belvoir from 1782 to 1785 as domestic chaplain to the duke of Rutland, or that the inspiration for the poem was fueled by resentment at some of the treatment he received during that period; yet no one could sensibly suppose that the tale is in any sense a direct transcription from his own life. Crabbe clearly made good use of his memories of both country mansion and townhouse (the cold and empty waiting room at the latter is rendered with evident authority); but the aspiring young poet (son of “A Borough-Bailiff, who to law was train'd”) is equally clearly not a surrogate for Crabbe's youthful self but a character in his own right. In a similar way, although the route traversed by Orlando in “The Lover's Journey,” tale 10 in Tales (1812), was unquestionably one well known to Crabbe in his own person, the narrative in this case is carefully detached from personal resonances, the better to concentrate on the poem's more generalized and near-philosophical theme.

There are a few poems and fragments of poems, principally ones published posthumously, that invite a more personal application. And we can turn also to the attractively written Life, compiled by his son around the time of the poet's death and first published as part of the 1834 edition of the Poetical Works. Although this was toned down and softened in certain respects, partly out of filial devotion, partly in deference to the advice of Moore, Rogers and others, it does within its limits give a credible and lively impression of the poet's personality; and it can be supplemented by reference to some of the poet's letters that have survived. The material is too scanty to be made into a convincing psychobiography, but there is enough of it to provide some interesting personal background relevant to our understanding of the poetry.

As has already been mentioned, the bulk of this poetry has an ambience that is calm, level-headed, and somewhat undemonstrative. The characteristic tone gives the impression of a carefully controlled utterance—controlled not only in its patterning of the versification and its organization of the verbal texture but also in its publicly modulated presentation of facts and feelings. It is here, above all, that we sense a continuance of the Augustan poetic tradition, recalling that, as Ian Watt has phrased it: “The adjective Augustan surely evokes a special way of speaking—precise in syntax, elegant in diction, and very detached in its attitude to the subject, to the audience, and even to the self and its feelings.”¹ (Watt goes on to describe the “most characteristic mode” of the Augustan voice as “ironic”; and although in Crabbe's tales irony surfaces only intermittently, the ironic note is seldom far away.) The poetic persona suggested by this “way of speaking” is one that sets out to trace, behind the multifarious idiosyncrasies of human behavior, a rational moral order governing the whole of the created universe; and if there is any sense of strain generated by the difficulties of this enterprise, it shows itself as a rule only in the vitality and energy of Crabbe's narrative and character drawing. Yet the characteristic poetic tension that guarantees his avoidance of shallow complacency must have had its source in some degree of internal conflict; and it is elsewhere than in the tales themselves that we are forced to look for this.

The most obvious starting point is the shortish autobiographical poem entitled “Infancy,” written between 1814 and 1816, and first published, posthumously, in the 1834 edition. In its avowed concern with personal reminiscence, these 141 lines, though shaped into heroic couplets, are unlike anything else in Crabbe's poetic output; among other things, they differ in being unusually bleak and gloomy in their outlook upon life. The general proposition set out in the early part of the poem is that the “pleasure” that we all seek is essentially no more than relief from pain or discomfort.

For what is Pleasure that we toil to gain?
'Tis but the slow or rapid Flight of Pain.
Set Pleasure by, and there would yet remain,
For every Nerve and Sense, the Sting of Pain:
Set Pain aside, and fear no more the Sting,
And whence your Hopes and Pleasures can ye bring?

(23-28)

This austere doctrine is illustrated for us first by the observation that the Lover's “Rapture” results from removal of the “Grief” caused by his mistress's absence—a causal relationship said (a little cynically) to be proved by the fact that it soon dissipates once marriage has removed the cause. Second, there follows Crabbe's more overtly personal testimony that in looking back over his memories he finds that “Grief” both struck early and remains long in the mind, whereas “Joys” are ephemeral and evanescent “like phosphoric light / Or Squibs and Crackers on a Gala Night.” The most memorable part of the poem, however, is an extended account of a single childhood day that Crabbe describes as “Emblematic” of his life—an oft-repeated pattern which began with ardent anticipation and enjoyment and ended in dissatisfaction and disillusionment.

Sweet was the Morning's Breath, the inland Tide,
And our Boat gliding, where alone could glide
Small Craft and they oft touch'd on either Side.
It was my first-born Joy. I heard them say,
“Let the child go; he will enjoy the day.”

(85-89)

But the enjoyment soon evaporates when the boating party reaches a town, and the adults, “on themselves intent,” forget about their infant companion:

I lost my Way, and my Companions me,
And all, their Comforts and Tranquillity.
Mid-day it was, and as the Sun declin'd,
The early Rapture I no more could find.
The Men drank much, to whet the Appetite,
And growing heavy, drank to make them light;
Then drank to relish Joy, then further to excite.
Their Chearfulness did but a Moment last;
Something fell short or something overpast.
The lads play'd idly with the Helm and Oar
And nervous Ladies would be set on Shore,
Till Civil Dudgeon grew and Peace would smile no more.

(100-111)

These few lines of shrewd social observation offer a good example of what Lilian Haddakin justly calls Crabbe's characteristic “sardonic astringency.” Immediately following this human discord the climate takes a hand in order to add its own contribution to the day's mortifications.

                    Now on the colder Water faintly shone
The sloping Light—the cheerful Day was gone;
Frown'd every Cloud, and from the gather'd Frown
The Thunder burst and Rain came pattering down.
My torpid Senses now my Fears obey'd
When the fierce Lightning on the Water play'd.
Now all the Freshness of the Morning fled,
My Spirits burden'd and my heart was dead;
The female Servants show'd a Child their fear
And Men, full wearied, wanted Strength to chear;

(112-21)

Crabbe now returns to his original proposition about the nature of “Pleasure”:

And when at length the dreaded Storm went past,
And there was Peace and Quietness at last,
'Twas not the Morning's Quiet—it was not
Pleasures reviv'd but Miseries forgot:
It was not Joy that now commenc'd her Reign,
But mere relief from Wretchedness and Pain.

(122-27)

The deep pessimism with which Crabbe extends the pattern of this childhood day to cover that of all his later experience has no parallel in the tales, though it may underlie the more dispirited passages in a few of them.

Crabbe wrote this unpublished and unrevised poem in the aftermath of his wife's death, and some of the concluding lines have an explicit reference to the disappointments of his married life:

Ev'n Love himself, that Promiser of Bliss,
Made his best Days of Pleasure end like this:
He mix'd his Bitters in the Cup of Joy
Nor gave a Bliss uninjur'd by Alloy.
All Promise they, all Joy as they began!
And these grew less and vanish'd as they ran!
Errors and Evils came in many a Form,
The Mind's Delusion and the Passions' Storm.
The promised Joy that, like the Morning, rose,
Broke on my View, grew clouded in its Close;
Friends who together in the Morning sail'd
Parted ere Noon, and Solitude prevail'd.

The extent to which the evident distress in these lines should be applied specifically to the disappointments of his marriage may not be wholly certain, but they clearly send us to an aspect of Crabbe's experience that must have had a central importance for him. We have little certain knowledge about it, however. In 1783 Crabbe was married to Sarah Elmy after a lengthy engagement during which his future wife had given him much moral support in his hard struggle to become established as a poet. In its beginnings their marriage seems to have been a happy one, but only two out of the seven children born to them survived into adulthood, and after the death in 1793 of an infant son, Mrs. Crabbe began to show signs of a nervous disorder that was to last, with some fluctuations in its severity, until her death in 1813. Crabbe's son limits himself to the following rather tight-lipped account:

[The nervous disorder] proved of an increasing and very lamentable kind; for, during the hotter months of almost every year, she was oppressed by the deepest dejection of spirits I ever witnessed in any one, and this circumstance alone was sufficient to undermine the happiness of so feeling a mind as my father's. Fortunately for both, there were long intervals, in which, if her spirits were a little too high, the relief to herself and others was great indeed. Then she would sing over her old tunes again—and be the frank, cordial, charming woman of earlier days.²

For the rest there are some indications in Crabbe's correspondence suggesting that his wife's illness made it difficult for him to keep up the friendly contacts that his naturally sociable disposition inclined him towards; and certainly his domestic difficulties seem to have become known among his friends and acquaintances from about 1803 onwards. Southey wrote to a friend in 1808:

It was not long before his [Crabbe's] wife became deranged, and when all this was told me by one who knew him well, five years ago, he was still almost confined in his own house, anxiously waiting upon this wife in her long and hopeless malady. A sad history! It is no wonder he gives so melancholy a picture of human life.³

Other rumors, such as Mitford's report that Mrs. Crabbe had formed a “prodigious” collection of Bath stones, should perhaps be treated more cautiously. For the most authoritative testimony we have to turn to a letter written by Crabbe to Mrs. Alethea Lewis, a friend of long standing, on 25 October 1813, a few weeks after his wife's death.

She has been dying these ten years: more I believe & I hope I am very thankful that I am the Survivor. … I cannot weigh Sorrows in a Ballance or make Comparisons between different Kinds of Affliction, nor do I judge whether I should have suffered most to have parted with my poor Sally, as I did part (if indeed such was parting) or to have seen her pass away with all her Faculties, feelings, senses acute & awake as my own. When I doubt of our parting (a conscious feeling on both sides that we were separating) you will judge of the propriety of such Expressions, for with Respect to Intellect & the more enquiring & reasoning of the Faculties, she, dear Creature, had lost these even years since: The will sometimes made an Effort, but Nature forbad: the mind was veiled, clouded & by Degrees lost. Then too were the Affections wrecked: No I was no more than another! not so much as the Woman who administered to the hourly Calls for small Comforts. The senses remained & even too acute but I hope, I believe there was not pain with the Restlessness which preceded the Evening of the 20th of Septr & for her, there was no Morning after that.

Appetite & Strength had been decaying for 2 or 3 years, but very gradually. … Medical Men could do nothing: my poor Mrs Crabbe only lived to the present: we could not speak of the past. We could not hope together for the future: all was centred in the Moment's feeling & when I stood over her & carried my thoughts backward to the Mind that was, the Intelligence that might have been gained, the Improvement, the Communication that we should have made if—but it is not in Men to foresee nor to repine but to submit. God almighty grant me a Spirit of absolute and total Resignation.⁴

This moving firsthand account brings home both the extent and the depth of the anguish caused by his wife's manic-depressive illness, and may suggest that this misfortune must have played a large part in leading him to wrestle in his poetry with those aberrant areas of human experience that his Augustan predecessors had tended to leave out of their reckoning. Perhaps it accounts also for the remarkably compassionate understanding that he extends not only to the mentally deranged but to sinners as well.

Crabbe's son gives a more muted account of his mother's death. “During a long period before her departure,” he tells us, “her mind had been somewhat impaired by bodily infirmities; and at last it sank under the severity of the disease.” He does, however, provide his own confirmation of the intensity of Crabbe's regret at the disappointments of his marriage by quoting the following comment written in his father's hand upon the outside of an old letter of his wife's: “Nothing can be more sincere than this, nothing more reasonable and affectionate; and yet happiness was denied.”

Two days after his wife's death Crabbe was afflicted by an alarming illness, which, his son tells us, “bore a considerable resemblance to acute cholera without sickness.” For a time his life was thought to be in danger, but an improvement, followed by a very gradual recovery, was effected by the administration of emetics—a “species of medicine” to which, according to his son, Crabbe had always had “a great aversion.” If this laconic comment is taken in conjunction with the lines in part 2 of the early poem Inebriety describing in rather unpleasant detail the drunken vomiting of the young fop Fabricio, we may perhaps hazard the conjecture that Crabbe suffered from a somewhat phobic attitude toward vomit, such that the compulsion toward control that we have already noted in his poetic utterance either extended to or was rooted in a neurotic concern about control over bodily function. This guess (it is little more) would certainly be consonant with what little we know about the ailment for which he was prescribed opiates from middle age onwards. His son tells us that Crabbe at first thought the vertigo to which he was subject was “indicative of a tendency to apoplexy”; but after an “alarming attack” that took place in Ipswich around 1790 he was examined by a Dr. Clubbe, whose diagnosis was, “[L]et the digestive organs bear the whole blame: you must take opiates.” The biographer continues:

From that time his health began to amend rapidly, and his constitution was renovated; a rare effect of opium, for that drug almost always inflicts some partial injury, even when it is necessary: but to him it was only salutary—and to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it may be attributed his long and generally healthy life.

From this, and from another comment elsewhere in the biography, we may reasonably infer a psychosomatic illness with its main symptoms affecting the digestive system. Relevant in this connection are his son's comments on the improvement in spirits enjoyed by Crabbe after his removal to Trowbridge in 1814:

But a physical change that occurred in his constitution, at the time of the severe illness that followed close on my mother's death, had, I believe, a great share in all these happy symptoms. It always seemed to be his own opinion that at that crisis his system had, by a violent effort, thrown off some weight or obstruction that had been, for many years previously, giving his bodily condition the appearance of a decline,—afflicting him with occasional fits of low fever, and vexatiously disordering his digestive organs. In those days, “life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,” was an expression not seldom in his mouth; and he once told me, he felt that he could not possibly live more than six or seven years. But now it seemed that he had recovered not only the enjoyment of sound health, but much of the vigour and spirit of youthful feelings.

It is hard to doubt that the “weight or obstruction” referred to here was the physical correlate of a psychic oppression resulting from the painful and probably conflicting feelings induced by Mrs. Crabbe's illness, and that the crisis that followed her death was a mental as well as a physical one.

Among the more self-revelatory poems that remained unpublished during the poet's lifetime there are a few whose subject matter is dreams. Before discussing them and their possible relation to his opium taking, however, it will be appropriate to refer to a dream that is reported in the biography. The following extract is taken from the entry for 21 July in the journal that Crabbe kept during his 1817 visit to London:

I returned late last night, and my reflections were as cheerful as such company could make them, and not, I am afraid, of the most humiliating kind; yet, for the first time these many nights, I was incommoded by dreams, such as would cure vanity for a time in any mind where they could gain admission. Some of Baxter's mortifying spirits whispered very singular combinations.⁵ None, indeed, that actually did happen in the very worst of times, but still with a formidable resemblance. It is doubtless very proper to have the mind thus brought to a sense of its real and possible alliances, and the evils it has encountered, or might have had; but why these images should be given at a time when the thoughts, the waking thoughts, were of so opposite a nature, I cannot account. So it was. Awake I had been with the high, the apparently happy: we were very pleasantly engaged, and my last thoughts were cheerful. Asleep, all was misery and degradation, not my own only, but of those who had been.—That horrible image of servility and baseness—that mercenary and commercial manner! It is the work of imagination, I suppose; but it is very strange.

When taken in conjunction with another recurrent dream in which he was tormented by some lads whom he could not thrash because they were made of leather, this suggests a powerful repressed sense of guilt that can be seen to surface in the ravings of Sir Eustace Grey and in the posthumously published dream poem, “The World of Dreams.” On one level Sir Eustace Grey's tribulations are presented as just retribution for his jealous revenge-murder of his unfaithful wife and her young seducer; but on a deeper level he accepts his punishment as merited on account of his earlier lack of Christian faith and devotion:

I never then my God address'd,
                    In grateful Praise or humble Prayer;
And if His Word was not my jest!
          (Dread Thought!) it never was my Care.
I doubted: Fool I was to doubt!

(96-100)

In his madness his overpowering preoccupation is with himself as a “man of Sin”:

          A Soul defil'd with every Stain,
That man's reflecting Mind can pain.

(327-28)

In “The World of Dreams” too it is the dreamer's “sin” (line 25) that “admits the shadowy throng” of “black Enemies” who are responsible for nightmarish visions.

It has been argued convincingly, first by M. H. Abrams and later by Alethea Hayter,⁶ that these two poems (and also the dream fragment “Where am I now?”) are constructed around memories drawn from opium-induced dreaming, as manifested in characteristically strange imagery relating to variations in light, rapid movement over vast distances, variations in consciousness of time and space, and so on. As we have noted earlier, the visions of Sir Eustace Grey are not particularly appropriate to his case history, but do very much resemble the visionary experiences recorded by other opium takers. What is to our immediate purpose, however, is the extent to which these alarming sensations are presented as consequent upon a sense of unworthiness and consciousness of sin. In “The World of Dreams” (a vivid and strongly felt poem) the most affecting passage is one in which the dreamer is reunited with the image of his late wife only to have her snatched away again by the malevolent sprites who control his dreaming. The other (unfinished) poem, “Where am I now?,” is much less powerful, and its interest relates more to the further light it casts upon Crabbe's mental processes than to any intrinsic poetic merit. These three atypical poems (all written in stanza form and not in heroic couplets) do, however, provide insight into the existence of a turbulent and tension-ridden inner life that could not easily have been guessed at from the reading of Crabbe's most characteristic poems and tales.

As has already been suggested, this characteristic work leaves behind above all the impression of a quest for control—an objective to be attained, first of all, by the controlled understanding and controlled representation of a known world, but also, more centrally, by the confident marshaling of all the evidence for the presence in that world of a just and divinely ordained moral order. Now there can be little doubt that in this endeavor Crabbe saw himself as engaged simply in conveying “th'instructive truth” about human nature and the human lot, and that consciously he would have experienced no sense of strain about matching his imagined world with the tenets of his Christian faith. Yet the poetic energy that gives continuing life to the best of his verse-narrative does seem to suggest that underneath the calm surface there may lurk unacknowledged and unsuspected tensions. In addition to the challenge (already discussed) from new manifestations in the intellectual and cultural sphere, this chapter has pointed up some indications that in his personal life, too, Crabbe was subject, during his most productive period, to considerable strains. In the light of our more recently acquired understanding of the way unconscious forces operate in the human mind, we may perhaps speculate that in Crabbe there can be observed at work the archetypal Freudian poet who, like a child at play, “creates a world of his own or, more truly, rearranges the things of his world and orders it in a new way that pleases him better.”⁷

Notes

1. See Watt, “Ironic Voice,” 101.

2. Life, chap. 7, 155-56.

3. See Southey, Selections from the Letters, 2:90-91.

4. Crabbe, Selected Letters and Journals, 117-18.

5. A reference to Andrew Baxter (1686-1750), who had suggested in his Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1733) that dreams are caused by the action of spiritual beings. The allusion is taken up again in the phrase “Baxter's sprites” in the second stanza of the poem “The World of Dreams.”

6. Abrams, Milk of Paradise, and Hayter, Opium.

7. Freud, Collected Papers, 4:174.

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. The Milk of Paradise. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1934.

Crabbe, George. Selected Letters and Journals. Edited by Thomas C. Faulkner. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985.

Crabbe, George. Poetical Works. 8 vols. London: Murray, 1834.

Crabbe, George [Crabbe's son]. The Life of the Rev. George Crabbe, LL.B., by his son the Rev. George Crabbe, A.M. London: Murray, 1834.

Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers. Vol. 4. London: Hogarth Press, 1949.

Southey, Robert. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Edited by J. W. Warter. London: Longman, 1856.

Watt, Ian. “The Ironic Voice.” In The Augustan Age: Approaches to its Literature, Life and Thought, edited by Ian Watt. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1968.