colouring.  If intended as a true picture of the normal state of a small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs.  But for Mr. Douglas’s untimely death—­a real loss to literature—­he would doubtless have shown in future fictions that the pendulum had ceased to swing, and would have given us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human life.  With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never ceased to act until his life’s end.  The leaven of protest against the sentimentalists never quite worked itself out in him, although, no doubt, in some of the later tales and portrayals of character, the sun was oftener allowed to shine out from behind the clouds

We must not forget this when we are inclined to accept without question Byron’s famous eulogium.  A poet is not the “best” painter of Nature, merely because he chooses one aspect of human character and human fortunes rather than another.  If he must not conceal the sterner side, equally is he bound to remember the sunnier and more serene.  If a poet is to deal justly with the life of the rich or poor, he must take into fullest account, and give equal prominence to, the homes where happiness abides.  He must remember that though there is a skeleton in every cupboard, it must not be dragged out for a purpose, nor treated as if it were the sole inhabitant.  He must deal with the happinesses of life and not only with its miseries; with its harmonies and not only its dislocations.  He must remember the thousand homes in which is to be found the quiet and faithful discharge of duty, inspired at once and illumined by the family affections, and not forget that in such as these the strength of a country lies.  Crabbe is often spoken of as our first great realist in the poetry and fiction of the last century, and the word is often used as if it meant chiefly plain-speaking as to the sordid aspects of life.  But he is the truest realist who does not suppress any side of that which may be seen, if looked for.  Although Murillo threw into fullest relief the grimy feet of his beggar-boys which so offended Mr. Ruskin, still what eternally attracts us to his canvas is not the soiled feet but the “sweet boy-faces” that “laugh amid the Seville grapes.”  It was because Crabbe too often laid greater stress on the ugliness than on the beauty of things, that he fails to that extent to be the full and adequate painter and poet of humble life.

He was a dispeller of many illusions.  He could not give us the joy that Goldsmith, Cowper, and William Barnes have given, but he discharged a function no less valuable than theirs, and with an individuality that has given him a high and enduring place in the poetry of the nineteenth century.