disregard of the accepted code of
propriety. But the points on which he parts company with his more
distinguished contemporaries is equally obvious. Mr. Stopford Brooke has
lately been telling us with great eloquence what is the theology which
underlies the poetical tendencies of the last generation of poets. Of
that creed, a sufficiently vague one, it must be admitted, Crabbe was by
no means an apostle. Rather one would say he was as indifferent as a
good old-fashioned clergyman could very well be to the existence of any
new order of ideas in the world. The infidels, whom he sometimes
attacks, read Bolingbroke, and Chubb, and Mandeville, and have only
heard by report even of the existence of Voltaire. The Dissenters, whom
he so heartily detests, have listened to Whitefield and Wesley, or
perhaps to Huntington, S.S.--that is, as it may now be necessary to
explain, Sinner Saved. Every newer development of thought was still far
away from the quiet pews of Aldborough, and the only form of Church
restoration of which he has heard is the objectionable practice of
painting a new wall to represent a growth of lichens. Crabbe appreciates
the charm of the picturesque, but has never yet heard of our elaborate
methods of creating modern antiques. Lapped in such ignorance, and with
a mind little given to speculation, it is only in character that Crabbe
should be totally insensible to the various moods of thought represented
by Wordsworth's pantheistic conceptions of nature, or by Shelley's
dreamy idealism, or Byron's fierce revolutionary impulses. Still less,
if possible, could he sympathise with that love of beauty, pure and
simple, of which Keats was the first prophet. He might, indeed, be
briefly described by saying that he is at the very opposite pole from
Keats. The more bigoted admirers of Keats--for there are bigots in
matters of taste or poetry as well as in science or theology or
politics--would refuse the title of poet to Crabbe altogether on the
strength of the absence of this element from his verses. Like his most
obvious parallels in painting, he is too fond of boors and pothouses to
be allowed the quality of artistic perception. I will not argue the
point, which is, perhaps, rather a question of classification than of
intrinsic merit; but I will venture to suggest a test which will, I
think, give Crabbe a very firm, though, it may be, not a very lofty
place. Though I should be unwilling to be reckoned as one of Macaulay