George Crabbe's Reverence for Realism
MATTERS FACTUAL
Historians, travailing helpfully on official sources, tend to arrive at the ‘shocking realism’ fallacy. These sources reflect a perspective from above, in which the agricultural labourer is not a person but a problem that needs solving. The full horror of the problem may be shockingly exposed, but it is fallacious to take this approach as the realistic one. It is also dangerous to assume that a poet who shares this de haut en bas perspective is more realistic than one who does not. William Hazlitt provides an important warning against the easy equation of shocking fact with realism in his Lectures on the English Poets. He rightly saw that Crabbe was often as official and officious as rubber stamps, or rubber bullets:
He describes the interior of a cottage like a person sent there to distrain for rent. He has an eye to the number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform himself and the reader whether a joint-stool stands upon three legs or upon four. … If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer's Boy, Crabbe is too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would convert the world into a vast infirmary. He is the kind of Ordinary, not of Newgate, but of nature. His poetical morality is taken from Burn's Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants.
(pp. 190-2)
Richard Burn's The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (1755) gave beaky magistrates an A to Z of whom to send down, together with a fistful of heavy hints about how to do it. He knew how to deal with idle apprentices, blasphemers, buggers, dissenters, poachers, Roman Catholics, servants and vagrants. He also cast a stern glance at the poor in general. Hazlitt very rarely missed his target, particularly if it was a ponderous, slow-moving one like Crabbe. He appears to be referring specifically to the inventory which Crabbe laboriously draws up towards the end of his letter on ‘The Poor and Their Dwellings’ in The Borough (1810). Such inventories certainly give the appearance of realistic documentary as they deal with matters factual. Yet Crabbe is playing one of the oldest tricks in the empiricist's cooked book. He tells us whether a stool has three legs or four. We feel unable to argue with facts like these. By the time that Crabbe has measured everything from side to side, we may well be too tired to distinguish between fact and opinion. Crabbe collects facts because he is ‘an overseer of the country poor’. Empiricism itself is not a neutral position. It needs, as Hazlitt suggests, to be associated with beadles, gaolers, magistrates and all those set in authority over us. The collection of facts must not be divorced from their abuse.
Historians, then, tend to mistake an official version of rural England for the official, or accurate, account. This is probably why they often quote Crabbe's famous description of the workhouse in Book One of The Village (1783) as an example of what conditions were really like. This description may tell us what ‘overseers’ like Crabbe felt about workhouses, but it does not provide evidence about what conditions were really like for the overseen or observed. Clare, like Hazlitt, felt that Crabbe should not be allowed to fool most of the people for most of the time into believing that his descriptions were documentary or realistic ones:
Crabbe writes about the peasantry as much like the Magistrate as the Poet. He is determined to show you their worst side: and as to their simple pleasures and pastoral feelings, he knows little or nothing about them. …1
Clare's idea of hell on earth was to be shut up for a week with Crabbe and to have to listen to him moralizing about the poor. It must have been like wading through crude oil trying to talk to Crabbe. His poetry, as Clare suggests, is at best one-sided and highly selective. Mrs Gaskell, who was disposed to be more charitable towards him, also felt that he was unable to perceive that life need not necessarily always be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. His concentration on the ‘worst side’ of rural society does provide information about and insights into the bureaucratic mind. The full horror may be exposed, but this is not necessarily the full story. There are a number of pictures of country life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crabbe's is just one of them. They have all been shot from different angles, and the camera's eye altering, alters all. Crabbe's obsession with the ‘worst side’ of rural society was just as selective, polemical and distorting as, say, what John Constable used to refer to as opera-house pastoral. Like Clare, D. H. Lawrence resented the way in which the overseers palmed off opinions as facts. He took the French artist Jules Bastien Lepage to task for failing to appreciate that a realistic portrayal of rural society did not necessarily have to be stern and grim:
Grey pictures of French peasant life—not one gleam, not one glimmer of sunshine—that is speaking literally—the paint is grey, grey-green, and brown. The peasant woman is magnificent—above all things, capable: to work, to suffer, to endure, to love—not, oh Bastien Lepage, oh Wells! Oh the God that there isn't—to enjoy. … Surely, surely Bastien Lepage and Wells are not the Truth, the whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.2
Parson Crabbe saw life as an assault course or endurance test. The thought for the day from the pulpit at the beginning of The Borough is that endurance and submission should be the order of the day. That was an order. As Hazlitt noticed, he had all the subtlety of an elephant's foot. His grim picture should never be taken for the whole truth. The very notion of the whole truth is itself a legal fiction, which is used by magistrates when sending the buggers and the gypsies down.
READING THE REGISTER
Crabbe maintained in his Preface to ‘The Parish Register’ (1807) that his picture of rural society was a balanced one, yet it has all the balanced arrogance and bias of a school report. Crabbe's theme is one that still continues to fall on the stony floors of the school assembly room:
How pass'd the youthful, how the old their days;
Who sank in sloth, and who aspired to praise;
Their tempers, manners, morals, customs, arts;
What parts they had, and how they 'mploy'd their parts;
By what elated, soothed, seduced, depress'd,
Full well I know—these records give the rest.
(I, 9-14)3
He took care to point out that only those who conformed to his image of the deserving poor would be receiving prizes on speechday:
Toil, care, and patience bless th' abstemious few,
Fear, shame, and want the thoughtless herd pursue.
(I, 29-30)
This pupil will go far, perhaps even as far as me, if he tries to be exactly like me. If he refuses to conform, then the further away he goes from me the better for all concerned. There are a limited number of teacher's pets, but the vast majority are merely a herd of real swine. They do not even deserve sham pearls of wisdom. Crabbe's poetry, like the school report, is a peg on which a number of prejudices are hung. He certainly believed that there was considerable room for improvement as far as the majority of the rural poor was concerned. There were extreme cases, however, when even his own brilliant teaching could not make any impression. He hoped that the ground would cover these rogues. He liked what he knew or understood. Despite the illusion of balance and objectivity, his reports on rural England were reports on his own schoolmasterly prejudices, which were written for the parent rather than the pupil. After a description of the undeserving poor which makes Victorian temperance tracts appear restrained, he comments:
Ye who have power, these thoughtless people part,
Nor let the ear be first to taint the heart!
(I, 210-11)
‘The Parish Register’ was written by one who had power for others in the same fortunate position. It appeals to ‘the true physician’ to walk ‘the foulest ward’ (I, 213). It urges the schoolmaster to be abroad:
Whence all these woes?—From want of virtuous will,
Of honest shame, of time-improving skill;
From want of care t' employ the vacant hour,
And want of ev'ry kind but want of power.
(I, 226-9)
An hour a day keeps the devil at bay. It is no accident that the village ‘schoolmarm’ is singled out for particular praise. She adopts an orphan and sets the child exactly the right example:
Then I behold her at her cottage-door,
Frugal of light,—her Bible laid before,
When on her double duty she proceeds,
Of time as frugal, knitting as she reads.
Her idle neighbours, who approach to tell
Some trifling tale, her serious looks compel
To hear reluctant—while the lads who pass,
In pure respect walk silent on the grass.
Then sinks the day; but not to rest she goes,
Till solemn prayers the daily duties close.
(I, 599-608)
The moral of Crabbe's story is that frugality and piety are virtues which society ought to be taught to respect.
Crabbe attempts to authenticate his descriptions in two ways. First, he can personally and knowingly vouch ‘full well’ for their accuracy. Second, if anybody should doubt the validity of his personal experience, ‘these records give the rest’. The argument is, of course, dangerously circular. If you object to the prejudices in the school report, then the mark book is produced with a flourish. You are told that you are unable to object to facts or ‘records’. Yet these ‘records’ enshrine the same prejudices as the reports. When a historian wants to reconstruct the history of a particular parish, he certainly has to rely quite heavily on the damp or dusty registers of births, marriages and deaths. The Annalistes and the demographers have shown that, if questions are asked and assumptions and classifications challenged, these ‘records’ are of historical rather than purely antiquarian interest. If Wordsworth often writes about rural society like a fussy folklorist, Crabbe exhibits all the faults of the fusty antiquarian. This does not just mean that, as Hazlitt noticed, he accumulated detail. It also means that he tended to accept existing classifications. His society is divided into God's poor, the Devil's poor and the poor devils. He always found it difficult to unbuckle the bible belt.
Crabbe suggests that he offers us a realistic description of ‘the simple annals of my parish poor’ (I, 2) in ‘The Parish Register’. He makes the same claim at the end of the poem as well:
Thus, as the months succeed, shall infants take
Their names; thus parents shall the child forsake;
Thus brides again and bridegrooms blithe shall kneel,
By love or law compell'd their vows to seal,
Ere I again, or one like me, explore
These simple annals of the Village Poor.
(III, 965-70)
It is true that he does offer some individual portraits of the agricultural labourer. Isaac Ashford is presented as ‘a wise good man, contented to be poor’ (III, 307). He is an instructive example of what God's, and therefore Parson Crabbe's, poor ought to be like. Even his criticism of parish relief has its place in Crabbe's neat and orderly scheme of things. It is cautiously advanced and meant to suggest that those ‘who have power’ ought to put their various workhouses in order. Crabbe, the sternest of markers, gives full marks to Reuben and Rachel for prudently postponing their marriage until they could actually afford to live together. The Devil's poor are also referred to. The ‘rustic infidel’ is as black as Ashford is white:
But he, triumphant spirit! all things dared,
He poach'd the wood, and on the warren snared;
'Twas his, at cards, each novice to trepan,
And call the wants of rogues the rights of man;
Wild as the winds, he let his offspring rove,
And deem'd the marriage-bond the bane of love.
(I, 812-7)
Like Hannah More, Crabbe did not draw shades of grey. The labourers were either ‘noble’, or else they were gamblers, infidels, poachers and radicals to a devil. Crabbe's society is not just a black and white one, it is also a static one. Samuel Smiles might have presented Richard Monday, the workhouse orphan who makes good, as an encouraging example for all those on the self-help ladder. Yet Crabbe is concerned to show that Monday only makes his way in the world through low cunning and obsessive selfishness. The virtues of patience, perseverance and frugality, which Smiles offered as social passports to the mid Victorian artisans, were used by Parson Crabbe to make the labourers content with their station in life. If Isaac Ashford made the mistake of trying to quit both social and geographical place, he would realize pretty soon that we are all poor devils. The rich have their trials and tribulations as well. There is, as Crabbe put it in ‘The Parish Register’, ‘one fate’ (I, 508), which catches up with the rich as well as the poor. This was also a constant theme in his sermons.
‘The Parish Register’ gives rise to two expectations, neither of which is fulfilled. First, despite the way in which the ‘records’ are referred to, the labourers are presented as stereotypes. They would not have been out of place in counter-revolutionary tracts. Second, despite the emphasis on the fact that this is a poem about the poor, it is by no means concerned exclusively with them. It deals extensively with farmers and tradesmen. Crabbe was a better observer of the rural professional and commercial classes than he was of the poor. This may have been because the Crabbe family had always been, according to his son, only ‘somewhat above the mass in point of situation’.4 George Crabbe therefore found it psychologically essential to continually assert and affirm his own distance from this ‘mass’. His obsession with ‘records’ may be seen as part of this distancing process. He had been forced to work as a labourer on Slaughden Quay, near Aldeburgh, for a few months in 1767. He did not want to repeat or remember the experience. This was his blacking factory. He therefore attempted to keep the labourers at arm's length by hiding their individuality behind a series of rigid classifications and pious homilies. He was, however, in something of a social no-man's-land himself. He became a respectable pillar of society, in other words a clerical magistrate and a pluralist. Yet he had his fingers trodden on as he ascended his own self-help ladder. This was particularly true of the period when he was the Duke of Rutland's domestic chaplain. Crabbe remained at Belvoir, even though most of the household had followed the Duke to Ireland on his appointment as Lord Lieutenant. Those that stayed amused themselves at the expense of the self-made, self-important chaplain. Crabbe was partially to reopen the wounds inflicted by the patronage system when he came to write ‘The Patron’ for his Tales (1812). It was inevitable that he should have felt, and been made to feel, insecure when he was attached to one of the great aristocratic families. The values of Estate entailed a rigid sense of place. Crabbe experienced the same insecurities and tensions, in less dramatic forms, throughout his life. This made him prone to satire, but seemed to restrict his subject matter to the group into which he had risen. He wrote about the labourers like a magistrate, but was able to point out the private vices that lurked behind the public virtues of the magistrates themselves.
‘The Dumb Orators’ in Tales illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Crabbe's social vision. It deals with the rivalry between Justice Bolt and a radical orator named Hammond. Although Bolt is a true blue church-and-king Tory, he is also presented as being a somewhat overpowering one. The causes he championed were close to Crabbe's pocket, but the way he did so left a certain amount to be desired. He is both proud and vindictive. While he is touring the Midlands, he drops into a debating club. It is there that he is forced to listen to Hammond's radical polemic against church and state. Although he is a bully-boy in his own backyard, his courage fails him when it comes to playing his part in foreign parts. The roles are, however, reversed a few years later. Hammond is forced to endure Bolt's heady rhetoric and extravagant gestures. He is taunted into trying to make a reply:
By desperation urged, he now began:
‘I seek no favour—I—the Rights of Man!
Claim; and I—nay!—but give me leave—and I
Insist—a man—that is—and in reply,
I speak’.—Alas! each new attempt was vain:
Confused he stood, he sate, he rose again;
At length he growl'd defiance, sought the door,
Cursed the whole synod, and was seen no more.
(454-61)
Bolt basks in the glory of his triumph. It is a hollow one, since all that has been proved is that radical orators are also unable to preach to the unconverted. Crabbe's apologists might claim that such poetic narratives should not be interpreted ideologically. This particular one is a satire on the presentation of ideologies of both right and left. It points to universal human failings, which lie behind the accidents of social position. That is certainly Crabbe's theory, but in practice the dice are loaded against Hammond. He is used primarily as a foil to probe and expose Justice Bolt's double standards. Crabbe writes about other magistrates satirically, but treats the labourers and their representatives like a magistrate. He registers their presence, but is quite willing to throw the book at them if they start being naughty behind his back.
OFFICIOUS DOCUMENTARY
Jessica Mitford described in The Making of a Muckraker (1979) how honourable rebels ought to treat noble causes, when she outlined the way in which she approached an investigation of the American deep south. She regarded it as essential to
slide into the daily lives of people, to soak up their ordinary conversation, to savor their manner and manners, to achieve an oblique rather than a direct look was my plan. Slightly easier said than done, I found; people are always shoving you off to talk to community leaders or to meetings where the Problem is under discussion.
(p. 61)
This technique may be described as radical documentary. It is crucial to bypass official versions of events. The direct highway, the straight and narrow path, is always going to be blocked by people who want to hit you over the head with rubber stamps, rubber truncheons or some other version of the reality principle. They are the real problem. It is therefore essential to take the eyes and ears into the byways to record impressions about ‘the daily lives of people’. These impressions should not be presented in the form of a voice-of-God narration, but rather as your own personal assessment. The documentary ought, in other words, to be signed. Official documentary is much safer and more predictable. You do not waste time, nervous energy and expensive footage attempting to discover something as elusive and abusive as the voice of the people. It is much better to arrange a series of interviews with the great and the good. They will then suggest whom you ought to interview. You then present your conclusions in a form appropriate to the whole truth.
Crabbe does take to the byways in The Borough, but only after an exhaustive and often exhausting plod around the corridors of power. It is only after he has been shown representatives of ‘The Poor and Their Dwellings’ that he decides it is time to extend the official guided tour:
Farewell to these; but all our poor to know,
Let's seek the winding lane, the narrow row—
(242-3)
Crabbe is too professional a reporter merely to report verbatim what the spokesmen say, but he usually likes to call on them first. His approach is essentially institutional and bureaucratic. The borough is broken down into its constituent parts relatively easily: the church, the professions, the trades, the hospital, the schools, the prison, the almshouse and so on. The poem does encroach upon the guide-book's privilege. It is, however, also concerned with probing the weaknesses of such official positions and statements.
Crabbe was too busy proving that he had slid out of the ‘daily lives of the people’ to want to slide back. One of the ways in which he attempted to confirm his laboriously acquired professional status was by reminding such as cared to attend that ethics should never be dropped. Converts are usually a little too zealous about principles and standards. Crabbe attacked contemporary lawyers for preying on the community like the spider on the fly. He felt that quack doctors, who gambled on the people's gullibility, were letting the professional side down. His satire on the professions is lame and tame when compared with those of William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson. Yet it still has to be seen as the focal point of the poem. It serves two functions. First, as suggested, it is meant to keep the professionals on their toes. Second, it is used to support the ‘one fate’ argument and thus to argue in favour of the status quo. The ‘weary rustic’ is moved along with all the firmness of a local policeman when he begins to question his station of life in Letter IX:
Ah! go in peace, good fellow, to thine home,
Nor fancy these escape the general doom;
Gay as they seem, be sure with them are hearts
With sorrow tried; there's sadness in their parts.
If thou couldst see them when they think alone,
Mirth, music, friends, and these amusements gone;
Couldst thou discover every secret ill
That pains their spirit, or resists their will;
Couldst thou behold forsaken Love's distress,
Or Envy's pang at glory and success,
Or Beauty, conscious of the spoils of Time,
Or Guilt, alarm'd when Memory shows the crime—
All that gives sorrow, terror, grief, and gloom:
Content would cheer thee, trudging to thine home.
(179-92)
The labourer ought to be whistling all the way to his hovel, since there is always bound to be somebody worse off than him. Material wealth brings its own trials and tribulations. Crabbe may try to suggest that The Borough is a slice of documentary realism, yet the social doctor is dishing out the prescriptions. The labourers ought to be content with the simple life because they do not have to be concerned with the doubts and difficulties that apparently lie in wait for those with large bank accounts. The ‘one fate’ argument sounds plausible enough in theory, but in practice there appears to be one fate for the poor and another one for the rich. Crabbe sets out an official code of conduct for the rich in general and the professions in particular, but sternly reminds the labourer that, as few can really live up to these ethical standards, they are bound to suffer pangs of remorse and guilt. If the labourer actually follows the equally rigid social code which is prescribed for him, then he really will be better off.
Crabbe's reputation as a realistic poet of the poor is an unrealistic one. ‘Peter Grimes’ is one of sketches of ‘The Poor of the Borough’. It is, thanks in part to Benjamin Britten's adaptation of it, perhaps Crabbe's best known piece. As many approach it through anthologies, it is worth stressing that ‘The Poor of the Borough’ only make their appearance at the end of the poem itself. Official documentary always starts at the top. Like so many of Crabbe's other characters, Grimes is no stranger to the bureaucratic machinery of local government. Indeed, Crabbe's treatment of this particular story ought to confirm his reputation as the official poet of officialdom, the poet laureate of red-tape. Grimes's father ‘seem'd that life laborious to enjoy’ (3). He knew when he was well off. Grimes himself does not accept this social prescription. He rejects his father's authority and inevitably that of the paternalist society as well:
With greedy eye he look'd on all he saw,
He knew not justice, and he laugh'd at law;
On all he mark'd he stretch'd his ready hand;
He fish'd by water, and he filch'd by land:
Oft in the night has Peter dropp'd his oar,
Fled from his boat and sought for prey on shore;
(40-5)
Slaughden Quay was threatening to destroy Crabbe's professional world. It was being allowed to do this as local government turned a blind eye to the dangers of social anarchy. The local community do not pay any attention to Grime's use and abuse of his first apprentice:
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shiv'ring in the winter's cold;
None put the question,—‘Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food?—What, man! the lad must live:
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed.’
None reason'd thus and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’
(69-78)
Crabbe's approach is similar to that adopted by the great American journalist Lincoln Steffens in his The Shame of the Cities (1904). Steffens argued that the investigative journalist ought to try to make his readers aware of two related facts. First of all, that a ‘shock, horror, probe’ exposure of corruption in high places is too easy. It is also bad journalism, since it usually displaces the blame from the community as a whole. The people are seldom as pure and innocent as they pretend to be. Thus, secondly, the real story ought always to be how much corruption they actually accept as part and parcel of everyday life. The inhabitants of Crabbe's Borough accept the ill-treatment of apprentices as a fact of life.
The local community is unable to police itself, so magistrates like Crabbe have a crucial part to play in the maintenance of law and order. There is an inquest after the death of the second apprentice. Although the jury suspected Grimes of foul play, they were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. The moral of Crabbe's story is that wet liberalism causes more problems that it solves. You have to be stern to be kind. It is only after the third apprentice has met a sticky end that local government finally begins to flex its legal muscles. Grimes is summoned to the Moot Hall to ‘tell his tale before the burghers all’ (156). Mr Mayor forbids him to have any more apprentices and warns him that he will feel the full weight of the law if he disobeys this command. Such chastisement is too little and too late. Crabbe believed that an abuse of, or a loophole in, any part of the professional structure of local government was bound to diminish its effectiveness and credibility. Grimes is able to get the apprentices in the first place because the workhouses in London do not maintain high administrative and professional standards. He is able to exploit these apprentices because magistrates and burghers reflect rather than set standards. Slaughden Quay can only be controlled and repressed through ruthless attention to professional codes and conduct.5 Crabbe listened to official spokesmen, but was often rather impatient with them. He saw himself as the true spokesman for the magistrate, the doctor, the priest and the rural professions generally. His poetry, far from being a realistic treatment of the rural poor, is a polemic for officialdom, as it ought to be rather than as it was.
VILLAGE FATES
Crabbe suffered from many ailments. The physician attempted to heal himself by taking doses of opium. Stiff or pastoral neck was the least of his problems, for he was not given to gazing back at the good old days of rural England. His dog collar was a little too new and tight for this kind of backward glancing. He did uphold the old-fashioned virtues of plain speaking and honest dealing against the modern vices of ostentatious wheeling and devious dealing when he dealt with the professions, in The Borough and elsewhere. Yet such pastoralism was not as explicit in his presentation of rural society. It is Benbow, rather than Crabbe himself, who indulges in the traditional lament for the good old ways of rural England in The Borough. Benbow dwells fondly on the memory of Asgill, an eighteenth-century wenching and trenching squire, but Crabbe implies that such nostalgic reflections ought to be treated more soberly than Benbow himself is ever capable of doing. The Village also takes a sober look at pastoral refreshment. Crabbe suggests that rural society represents economic pain rather than emotional or aesthetic pleasure for the vast majority of its inhabitants:
I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms;
But, when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place,
And see the mid-day sun, with fervid ray,
On their bare heads and dewy temples play;
While some, with feebler hands and fainter hearts,
Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts:
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?
(I, 39-48)
Pastoral needs to be countered by the exposure of ‘real ills’. The tight close-up on real people and real places should replace blurred shots of imaginary landscapes. Crabbe's rural wasteland has few saving rustic graces. The village green is as bare and barren of people as it is of vegetation. Smuggling is the only sport the ‘wild amphibious race’ (I, p. 85) are interested in. The young men have become smugglers and poachers every one. Crabbe's later poetry may smack of antiquarianism, but in Book One of The Village his perspective appears to be closer to that of the social anthropologist. He explores relationships between the bleak environment and the ‘race’ who are doomed to inhabit it. This perspective is still that of an ‘overseer’, but it seems to be a more sensitive one than that of the stern magistrate. It appears to support an environmental interpretation of poverty. Like Gilbert White and a whole host of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century parsons, Crabbe was an accomplished natural historian. He includes the rural labourers in his natural history of an English village. He uses the techniques of the natural historian as another way of distancing himself from his subject matter.
Crabbe's satire on pastoral perspectives is certainly sharp and to the point, yet, as in his later poetry, his main concern seems to be that ‘those that have power’ should exercise it according to the rules and regulations. Quack doctors and negligent priests make the labourer's stern existence even worse than it should be. The quack is actually protected by the very people who have the power to expose him:
A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
Whose murd'rous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
And whose most tender mercy is neglect.
(I, 282-5)
The magistrates are also indirectly responsible for the sour charity which is doled out grudgingly in the workhouse. The priest adds the final insult to the injury of a labourer's life and death:
The busy priest, detain'd by weightier care,
Defers his duty till the day of prayer;
And, waiting long, the crowd retire distress'd,
To think a poor man's bones should lie unbless'd.
(I, 343-6)
This priest prefers his pack of hounds to his flock of sheep. Crabbe certainly lays on the detail about the misery of agricultural life as thickly as possible, but it would be wrong to assume that he is arguing in favour of a fundamental change in the economic relationships of rural society. The poem is addressed to the leaders of this society. Its language of ‘them and us’ is very explicit. Crabbe appears to be accumulating the counter-pastoral detail as a way of trying to shock magistrates, priests and doctors back into an awareness that they have duties and responsibilities as well as privileges.
If this is so, then it may be possible to challenge the view that The Village contains two distinct and very different poems. It is often maintained that Book One offers realistic counter-pastoral, while Book Two reverts to more familiar pastoral idioms. First of all, as already suggested, de haut en bas counter-pastoral should never be regarded as realistic. Second, the two parts of the poem are linked by the controlling perspective of the overseer. Crabbe can certainly be accused of licking the hand which fed him when he came to write the panegyric to Rutland's brother, Lord Manners. The parson does indeed know enough who knows a Duke. Although Crabbe could not accept the back-handers of aristocratic patronage fast enough, such grovelling may not have caused quite such a rupture in the poem's message as has often been assumed. He continues to explore the same themes in Book Two. He describes rural slums and suggests that the labourer's brutish existence needs to be related to the breakdown of responsible authority. The justice of the peace who finally puts down the drunken riot on the village green is yet another local official who wants privilege without responsibility. He uses the law to cow the local inhabitants and does not practise what he preaches. He takes a stern line with the ‘country copulatives’, but enjoys seducing country girls himself. This justice likes his piece on the side. Crabbe follows this description of the breakdown of law and order with the ‘one fate’ argument:
So shall the man of power and pleasure see
In his own slave as vile a wretch as he;
In his luxurious lord the servant find
His own low pleasures and degenerate mind:
And each in all the kindred vices trace
Of a poor, blind, bewilder'd, erring race;
Who, a short time in varied fortune past,
Die, and are equal in the dust at last.
(II, 93-100)
Such pessimistic theorizing should not disguise the fact that in practice Crabbe prescribes two fates. The labourer must reconcile himself to the fact that life is an endurance test. If he complains, then he ought to be made to realize that everybody else, regardless of their social position, is having their dismal score totted up by that stern marker in the sky. Those higher up the social scale might score very badly, since they are required to discharge certain social functions. As they are only human, their performance is always bound to fall short of the desired effect. The labourer's fate is to endure passively. Such endurance ought to be supported by the activity of the professional classes in providing a responsible paternalism.
Crabbe uses the examples of Manners's devotion to duty at the end of Book Two to encourage all local officials to play their bureaucratic parts. Manners is the solution to the local corruption which Crabbe exposes in Book One. He uses the oak tree to symbolize the potential power and authority of the territorial aristocracy:
As the tall oak, whose vigorous branches form
An ample shade and brave the wildest storm,
High o'er the subject wood is seen to grow,
The guard and glory of the trees below;
(II, 119-22)
Manners may also be seen as the solution to the problems that the labourers have in suffering and being still. Their lives are symbolized by blighted or withered trees. The re-establishment of responsible paternalism will get the sap rising again. The stables of corruption will be cleansed and the tall oak will protect the smaller trees from blight. Although there are tensions and inconsistencies between the two books of The Village, it is important to remember that Crabbe is always the ‘overseer of the country poor’. It is then perhaps inevitable that the poem should end with a tribute to the aristocracy as the natural overseers of the overseers. This is part of Crabbe's polemic for officialdom as it ought to be rather than as it was.
Notes
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Quoted by J. Wilson, Green Shadows: The Life of John Clare (London, 1951), p. 146.
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H. T. Moore (ed.), The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1962), 2 vols., I, pp. 51-2.
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All quotations from A. W. Ward (ed.), Poems by George Crabbe (Cambridge, 1905), 3 vols.
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E. Blunden (ed.), The Life of George Crabbe by His Son (London, 1947 edn), p. 10.
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Grimes appears to have broken almost every rule in Richard Burn's book [The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (1755)]. See I, pp. 45 and 51-3.
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