reflects no light from heaven, it emits no cheerful
sound: no flowers of love, of hope, or joy spring
up near it, or they bloom only to wither in a moment.
Our poet’s verse does not put a spirit of youth
in every thing, but a spirit of fear, despondency,
and decay: it is not an electric spark to kindle
or expand, but acts like the torpedo’s touch
to deaden or contract. It lends no dazzling tints
to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the heart,
it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view
the current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited,
half under ground, muddy, and clogged with all creeping
things. The world is one vast infirmary; the
hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary, of which our author
is the overseer: to read him is a penance, yet
we read on! Mr. Crabbe, it must be confessed,
is a repulsive writer. He contrives to “turn
diseases to commodities,” and makes a virtue
of necessity. He puts us out of conceit with
this world, which perhaps a severe divine should do;
yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to
another. His morbid feelings droop and cling
to the earth, grovel where they should soar; and throw
a dead weight on every aspiration of the soul after
the good or beautiful. By degrees we submit,
and are reconciled to our fate, like patients to the
physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell.
We can only explain this by saying, as we said before,
that Mr. Crabbe gives us one part of nature, the mean,
the little, the disgusting, the distressing; that
he does this thoroughly and like a master, and we
forgive all the rest.
Mr. Crabbe’s first poems were published so long
ago as the year 1782, and received the approbation
of Dr. Johnson only a little before he died.
This was a testimony from an enemy; for Dr. Johnson
was not an admirer of the simple in style or minute
in description. Still he was an acute, strong-minded
man, and could see truth when it was presented to
him, even through the mist of his prejudices and his
foibles. There was something in Mr. Crabbe’s
intricate points that did not, after all, so ill accord
with the Doctor’s purblind vision; and he knew
quite enough of the petty ills of life to judge of
the merit of our poet’s descriptions, though
he himself chose to slur them over in high-sounding
dogmas or general invectives. Mr. Crabbe’s
earliest poem of the Village was recommended
to the notice of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds;
and we cannot help thinking that a taste for that sort
of poetry, which leans for support on the truth and
fidelity of its imitations of nature, began to display
itself much about that time, and, in a good measure,
in consequence of the direction of the public taste
to the subject of painting. Book-learning, the
accumulation of wordy common-places, the gaudy pretensions
of poetical fiction, had enfeebled and perverted our
eye for nature. The study of the fine arts, which
came into fashion about forty years ago, and was then
first considered as a polite accomplishment, would