we write. Give me a manly, rough line, with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing but their oily smoothness to recommend them! "I have said thus much, as I hinted in the beginning, because I have just finished a much longer poem than the last, which our common friend will receive by the same messenger that has the charge of this letter. In that poem there are many lines, which an ear, so nice as the gentleman's who made the above-mentioned alteration, would undoubtedly condemn; and yet (if I may be permitted to say it) they cannot be made smoother without being the worse for it. There is a roughness on a plum, which nobody that understands fruit would rub off, though the plum would be much more polished without it. But lest I tire you, I will only add, that I wish you to guard me from all such meddling; assuring you that I always write as smoothly as I can; but that I never did, never will, sacrifice the spirit or sense of a passage to the sound of it."-Cowper, in Letter to Mr. Johnson, his publisher, undated (No. 330 in Lucas's ed.). 145. OLNEY HYMNS This was a collection of hymns written by Cowper and John Newton at Olney, Cowper's residence in Buckinghamshire from 1767 to 1786. "The profound personal religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced theological element into English poetry which continually increased till it died out with Browning and Tennyson."-Stopford Brooke, in English Literature (1880). LIGHT SHINING OUT OF DARKNESS This hymn is often entitled God Moves in a Mysterious Way. According to legend, Cowper one day proposed to commit suicide at a certain place as a sacrifice required of God, but as the driver of the vehicle could not find the place, Cowper returned home and composed this poem. THE TÁSK "The history of the following production is briefly this:-A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject. He obeyed; and, having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair-a Volume!"-From Cowper's prefatory Advertisement. The lady referred to was Mrs. Austin, a friend of Cowper. "I send you four quires of verse [The Task), which having sent, I shall dismiss from my thoughts, and think no more of, till I see them in print. I have not after all found time or industry enough to give the last hand to the points. I believe, however, they are not very erroneous, though in so long a work, and in a work that requires nicety in this particular, some inaccuracies will escape. Where you find any, you will oblige me by correcting them. "In some passages, especially in the Second Book, you will observe me very satirical. Writing on such subjects I could not be otherwise. I can write nothing without aiming at usefulness: it were beneath my years to do it, and still more dishonorable to my religion. I know that a reformation of such abuses as I have censured is not to be expected from the efforts of a poet; but to contemplate the world, its follies, its vices, its indifference to duty, and its strenuous attachment to what is evil, and not to reprehend were to approve it. From this charge at least I shall be clear, for I have neither tacitly nor expressly flattered either its characters or its customs. I have paid one, and only one compliment, which was so justly due, that I did not know how to withhold it, especially having so fair an occasion;-I forget myself, there is another in the First Book to Mr. Throckmorton,-but the compliment I mean is to Mr. Smith. It is, however, so managed, that nobody but himself can make the application, and you, to whom I disclose the secret: a delicacy on my part, which so much delicacy on his obliged me to the observance of. "What there is of a religious cast in the volume I have thrown towards the end of it, for two reasons; first, that I might not revolt the reader at his entrance and secondly, that my best impressions might be made last. Were I to write as many volumes as Lope de Vega, or Voltaire, not one of them would be without this tincture. If the world like it not, so much the worse for them. I make all the concessions I can, that I may please them, but I will not please them at the expense of conscience. "My descriptions are all from nature: not one of them second-handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience: not one of them borrowed from books, or in the least degree conjectural. In my numbers, which I have varied as much as I could (for blank verse without variety of numbers is no better than bladder and string), I have imitated nobody, though sometimes perhaps there may be an apparent resemblance; because at the same time that I would not imitate, I have not affectedly differed. "If the work cannot boast a regular plan (in which respect, however, I do not think it altogether indefensible), it may yet boast, that the reflections are naturally suggested always by the preceding passage, and that except in the Fifth Book, which is rather of a political aspect, the whole has one tendency: to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure, as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue."-Cowper, in Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, Oct. 10, 1784. Throckmorton and Smith were friends of Cowper. Lopa de Vega, a Spanish dramatist and poet of the 17th century, is said to have written 1800 plays, besides 400 poems. Voltaire was a prolific French writer of the 18th century. "How do you like Cowper? Is not The Task a glorious poem? The religion of The Task, bating a few scraps of Calvinist divinity, is the religion of God and nature, the religion that exalts, that ennobles man."Robert Burns, in Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Dec. 25, 1795. "I have been reading The Task with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend, who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat of Cowper.'"-Lamb, in Letter to Coleridge, Dec. 5, 1796. The phrase quoted by Lamb was Coleridge's. 148. 149. "Is the kitchen-garden indeed poetical? Today, perhaps; but tomorrow, if my imagination is barren, I shall see there nothing but carrots and other kitchen stuff. It is my sensation which is poetic, which I must respect, as the most precious flower of beauty. Hence a new style. It is no longer a question, after the old oratorical fashion, of boxing up a subject in a regular plan, dividing it into symmetrical portions, arranging ideas into files, like the pieces on a draught-board. Cowper takes the first subject that comes to hand-one which Lady Austin gave him at haphazard-The Sofa, and speaks about it for a couple of pages; then he goes whither the bent of his mind leads him, describing a winter evening, a number of interiors and landscapes, mingling here and there all kinds of moral reflections, stories, dissertations, opinions, confidences, like a man who thinks aloud before the most intimate and beloved of his friends. The best didactic poems,' says Southey [Life of Cowper, 1. 341], 'when compared with The Task, are like formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery.' This is his great poem, The Task. If we enter into details, the contrast is greater still. He does not seem to dream that he is being listened to; he only speaks to himself. He does not dwell on his ideas, to set them in relief, and make them stand out by repetitions and antitheses; he marks his sensation and that is all. We follow it in him as it is born, and we see it rising from a former one, swelling, falling, remounting, as we see vapor issuing from a spring, and insensibly rising, unrolling, and developing its shifting forms. Thought, which in others was curdled and 150. rigid, becomes here mobile and fluent; the rectilinear verse grows flexible; the noble vocabulary widens its scope to let in vulgar words of conversation and life. At length poetry has again become lifelike; we no longer listen to words, but we feel emotions; it is no longer an author but a man who speaks. His life is there perfect, beneath its black lines, without falsehood or concoction; his whole effort is bent on removing falsehood and concoction. When he describes his little river, his dear Ouse, 'slow winding through a level plain of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled o'er' [The Task, 1, 163-64 (p. 146)], he sees it with his inner eye, and each word, cæsura, sound, answers to a change of that inner vision. It is so in all his verses, they are full of personal emotions, genuinely felt, never altered or disguised; on the contrary, fully expressed, with their transient shades and fluctuations; in a word, as they are, that is, in the process of production and destruction, not all complete, motionless, and fixed, as the old style represented them. Herein consists the great revolution of the modern style. The mind, outstripping the known rules of rhetoric and eloquence, penetrates into profound psychology, and no longer employs words except to mark emotions."-Taine, in History of English Literature, Book 4, ch. 1. 560 ff. Cf. Blake's The Book of Thel, 93 fr. (p 170). THE POPLAR-FIELD "People nowadays, I believe, hold this style and metre light; I wish there were anyone who could put words together with such exquisite flow and evenness."-Palgrave, in Personal Recollections, printed in Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son (1897). ON THE RECEIPT OF MY MOTHER'S PICTURE OUT OF NORFOLK "I have lately received from a female cousin of mine in Norfolk, whom I have not seen these thirty years, a picture of my own mother. She died when I wanted two days of being six years old; yet I remember her perfectly, find the picture a strong likeness of her, because her memory has been ever precious to me, have written a poem on the receipt of it: a poem which, one excepted, I had more pleasure in writing, than any that I ever wrote. That one was addressed to a lady whom I expect in a few minutes to come down to breakfast, and who has supplied to me the place of my own mother-my own invaluable mother, these six-and-twenty years. Some sons may be said to have had many fathers, but a plurality of mothers is not common."-Cowper, in Letter to Mrs. King, March 12, 1790. Cowper refers to Mrs. Unwin; the poem addressed to her is To Mary (p. 153). 46 fr. Cf. this passage with the following stanza from Tennyson's In Memoriam (102, 1-4): We leave the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky; The roofs, that heard our earliest cry, Will shelter one of stranger race. 151. 153. YARDLEY OAK Elton regards this fragment as the best work of Cowper's imagination. (A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 1, 84). The tree described in this poem stood in Yardley hunting ground, near Cowper's house in Buckinghamshire, England. It was nearly 23 feet in girth; it is said to have been planted by the daughter of William the Conqueror. 143. The following lines, crossed through in the manuscript, are sometimes printed in the poem between lines 143 and 144. Thou, like myself, hast stage by stage attain'd Life's wintry bourn; thou, after many years, Soon teems with others, and in spring they grow. So pass mankind. One generation meets The quoted lines are from Cowper's translation of the Iliad, 6, 175-79. The Mæonian is Homer, reputed to have been a native of ancient Mæonia, in Lydia, Asia Minor. EDITIONS Poetical Works, 8 vols., ed., with his Letters and Journals and a Life, by his son (London, Murray, 1834); in 1 vol. (1901). Poems, 3 vols., ed. by A. W. Ward (Cambridge English Classics ed.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1905-07; New York, Putnam). Poetical Works, ed., with a Critical Introduction by A. J. and R. M. Carlyle (Oxford Univ. Press, 1914). Selections from the Poems, ed., with an Introduction, by A. Deane (London, Methuen, 1903). BIOGRAPHY Ainger, A.: Crabbe (English Men of Letters Series: New York and London, Macmillan, 1903). Broadley, A. M. and Jerrold, W.: The Romance of an Elderly Poet (London, Paul, 1913). Huchon, R.: Un Poète Réaliste, George Crabbe (Paris, 1906); English trans. by F. Clarke, as George Crabbe and His Times (New York, Dutton, 1907). Kebbel, T. E.: Life of George Crabbe (Great Writers Series: London, Scott, 1888). CRITICISM Brooke, S. A.: "From Pope to Cowper," Theology in the English Poets (London, King, 1874; New York, Dutton, 1910). Collins, J. C. : "The Poetry of Crabbe," The Fortnightly Review, Oct., 1907 (82:575). Elton, O.: "The Poetry of Crabbe," Blackwood's Magazine, Jan., 1909 (185:78). Gifford, W.: "The Borough," The Quarterly Review, Nov., 1810 (4:281). Hazlitt, W.: "Mr. Campbell and Mr. Crabbe," The Spirit of the Age (London, 1825); "On Thomson and Cowper," Lectures on the English Poets (London, 1818); Collected Works, ed. Waller and Glover (London, Dent, 1902-06; New York, McClure), 4, 343; 5, 85. Hutton, W. H.: "Some Memories of Crabbe," Cornhill Magazine, June, 1901 (83:750). Jeffrey, F.: Criticisms in The Edinburgh Review:-"The Borough," April, 1810 (16:30); "Poems," April, 1808 (12:131); "Tales in Verse," Nov., 1812 (20:277); "Tales of the Hall," July, 1819 (32:118). Lockhart, J. G.: "Life and Poems of Crabbe," The Quarterly Review, Jan., 1834 (50:468). More, P. E.: "A Plea for Crabbe," The Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1901 (88:850). More, P. E.: Shelburne Essays, First Series (New York and London, Putnam, 1906). Saintsbury, G.: Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, First Series (London, Percival, 1890; New York, Scribner). Shorter, C. K.: Immortal Memories (New York, Harper, 1907). Stephen, L.: Hours in a Library, 3 vols. (London, Smith, 1874-79; New York and London, Putnam, 1899); 4 vols. (1907). Symons, A.: The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (London, Constable, 1909; New York, Dutton). Walpole, S.: Essays, Political and Biographical (New York, Dutton, 1908). Woodberry, G. E.: "A Neglected Poet," The At lantic Monthly, May, 1880 (45:624); Makers of Literature (New York, Macmillan, 1901). BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, J. P.: In Kebbel's Life of George Crabbe (1888). Bartholomew, A. T.: In Poems by George Crabbe, ed. by A. W. Ward (1905-07). Huchon, R.: In George Crabbe and His Times, translated by F. Clarke (1907). CRITICAL NOTES "Yet Truth sometimes will lend her noblest fires, This fact in Virtue's name let Crabbe attest; "There was in each of the four British poets, 'Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom, [Crabbe, The Lover's Journey, 120-23.] we observe that the reign of empty verbiage is over, and that the poets who shall for the future wish to bring concrete ideas before us will do so in sincere and exact language. That position once regained, the revival of imaginative writing is but a question of time and of opportunity."Gosse, in A Short History of Modern English Literature (1898). For Jeffrey's criticism of Crabbe's poems, see p. 884. See also Wordsworth's note on Lucy Gray (p. 1362a); and Byron's Letter to Murray, Sept. 15, 1817 (p. 1220a). recluse in his life. But the force and fidelity of his descriptions of the scenery of his native place and of the characteristics of the rural population give abiding interest to his work. His pathos is genuine and deep, and to some judgments his later works atone for the diminution in tragic interest by their gentleness and simple humor."-Stephen, in Dictionary of National Biography (1887). THE BOROUGH "When the reader enters into the poem, he will find the author retired from view, and an imaginary personage brought forward to describe his Borough for him: to him it seemed convenient to speak in the first person: but the inhabitant of a village, in the center of the kingdom, could not appear in the character of a residing burgess in a large sea-port; and when, with this point, was considered what relations were to be given, what manners delineated, and what situations described, no method appeared to be so convenient as that of borrowing the assistance of an ideal friend: by this means the reader is in some degree kept from view of any particular place, nor will he perhaps be so likely to determine where those persons reside, and what their connections, who are so intimately known to this man of straw. con "From the title of this poem, some persons will, I fear, expect a political satire,-an attack upon corrupt principles in a general view, or upon the customs and manners of some particular place; of these they will It find nothing satirized, nothing related. may be that graver readers would have preferred a more historical account of so siderable a borough-its charter, privileges, trade, public structures, and subjects of this kind; but I have an apology for the omission of these things, in the difficulty of descriping them, and in the utter repugnancy which subsists between the studies and objects of topography and poetry. What I thought I could best describe, that I attempted :-the sea, and the country in the immediate vicinity; the dwellings, and the inhabitants; some incidents and characters, with an exhibition of morals and manners, offensive perhaps to those of extremely delicate feelings, but sometimes, I hope, neither unamiable nor unaffecting: an election indeed forms a part of one Letter, but the evil there described is one not greatly nor generally deplored, and there are probably many places of this kind where it is not felt. "From the variety of relations, characters, and descriptions which a borough affords, several were rejected which a reader might reasonably expect to have met with: in this case he is entreated to believe that these, if they occurred to the author, were considered by him as beyond his ability, as subjects which he could not treat in a manner satisfactory to himself. Possibly the admission of some will be thought to require more CRITICAL NOTES apology than the rejection of others in such Croker had the reputation of being a great variety, it is to be apprehended, that almost talker. Hazlitt, in his Pulpit Oratory (Collected every reader will find something not accord- Works, ed. Waller and Glover, 12, 276) records an ing with his ideas of propriety, or something incident which gave Croker the nickname of repulsive to the tone of his feelings; nor "Talking Potato:"-"Some years ago, a periodicould this be avoided but by the sacrifice of cal paper was published in London, under the every event, opinion, and even expression, title of the Pic-Nic. It was got up under the which could be thought liable to produce auspices of a Mr. Fulke Greville, and several such effect; and this casting away so largely writers of that day contributed to it, among of our cargo, through fears of danger, though whom were Mr. Horace Smith, Mr. Dubois, Mr. it might help us to clear it, would render our Prince Hoare, Mr. Cumberland, and others. On vessel of little worth when she came into some dispute arising between the proprietor and port. I may likewise entertain a hope, that the gentlemen-contributors on the subject of an this very variety, which gives scope to ob- advance in the remuneration for articles, Mr. Fulke jection and censure, will also afford a bet- Greville grew heroic, and said, 'I have got a ter chance for approval and satisfaction. young fellow just come from Ireland, who will "Of these objectionable parts many must be to me unknown; of others some opinion may be formed, and for their admission some plea may be stated. undertake to do the whole, verse and prose, politics and scandal, for two guineas a week, and if you will come and sup with me tomorrow night, you shall see him, and judge whether I am not "In the first Letter is nothing which par- right in closing with him.' Accordingly, they met ticularly calls for remark, except possibly the next evening, and the WRITER OF ALL WORK the last line-giving a promise to the reader was introduced. He began to make a display of that he should both smile and sigh in the his native ignorance and impudence on all subperusal of the following Letters. This may jects immediately, and no one else had occasion appear vain, and more than an author ought to say anything. When he was gone, Mr. Cumto promise; but let it be considered that berland exclaimed, 'A talking potato, by God!" the character assumed is that of a friend, The talking potato was Mr. Croker, of the Adwho gives an account of objects, persons, miralty. Our adventurer shortly, however, reand events to his correspondent, and who was therefore at liberty, without any imputation of this kind, to suppose in what manner he would be affected by such descriptions."From Crabbe's Preface. turned to his Own country, and passing accidentally through a town where they were in want of a ministerial candidate at an Election, the gentleman of modest assurance offered himself, and succeeded. "They wanted a Jack-pudding,' said the father of the hopeful youth, and so they JOHN WILSON CROKER (1780-1857), chose my son.'" p. 913 EDITIONS The following note by Hazlitt is found in his The New School for Reform (Collected Works, 7, 183): "A certain Talking Potatoe (who is now one of the props of Church and State), when he first came to this country, used to frighten some respectable old gentlewomen, who invited him to supper, by asking him for a slice of the 'leg of the Savior,' meaning a leg of lamb; or a bit of the Holy Ghost pie,' meaning a pigeon-pie on the table. Ill-nature and impertinence are the same in all schools." Croker Papers, The: Correspondence and Diaries Littell's Living Age, “A Quartet of Quarterly Re- Nation, The, Feb. 5, 1885 (40:120). Quarterly Review, The, April, 1909 (210:748). Sillard, P. A.: The Gentleman's Magazine, Aug., 1898 (285:145). Walpole, S.: "The Croker Papers," Essays, Polit This is the review which Shelley, Byron, and others erroneously thought hastened the death of Keats. See Shelley's Preface to Adonais (p. 1340a) and stanzas 36-37 (p. 735); also Byron's Don Juan, XI, 60 and n. 5 (p. 610), and note (p. 1226b). ALLAN CUNNINGHAM (1784-1842), Songs and Poems, ed., with an Introduction, by ical and Biographical (New York, Dutton, Littell's Living Age: July, 1845 (6:69); May, 1908). 1847 (13:469). |