ucceeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
_ad hoc_ so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.
Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession--the
"happiness denied"--had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
evident, though the minute elaboration of the views themselves is
almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
manner, if he ever tried to do so.

With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
Regist