while believed in Pope, and had a sturdy solid contempt for
Methodism. Cowper's guide, Newton, would have passed with him for a
nuisance and a fanatic. Crabbe is a thorough realist. In some ways he
may be compared to his contemporary Malthus. Malthus started, as we
know, by refuting the sentimentalism of Rousseau; Crabbe's _Village_ is
a protest against the embodiment of the same spirit in Goldsmith. He is
determined to see things as they are, with no rose-coloured mist. Crabbe
replies to critics that if his realism was unpoetical, the criterion
suggested would condemn much of Dryden and Pope as equally unpoetical.
He was not renouncing but carrying on the tradition, and was admired by
Byron in his rather wayward mood of Pope-worship as the last
representative of the legitimate school. The position is significant.
Crabbe condemns Goldsmith's 'Nature' because it is 'unnatural.' It means
the Utopian ideal of Rousseau which never did and never can exist. It
belongs to the world of old-fashioned pastoral poetry, in which Corydon
and Thyrsis had their being. He will paint British squires and farmers
and labourers as he has seen them with his own eyes. The wit has become
for him the mere fop, whose poetry is an arbitrary convention, a mere
plaything for the fine ladies and gentlemen detached from the living
interests of mankind. The Pope tradition is still maintained, but is to
be revised by being brought down again to contact with solid earth.
Therefore on the one hand he is thoroughly in harmony with Johnson, the
embodiment of common sense, and on the other, excited the enthusiasm of
Wordsworth and Scott, who, though leaders of a new movement, heartily
sympathised with his realism and rejection of the old conventionalism.
Though Crabbe regards Cowper's religion as fanaticism, they are so far
agreed that both consider that poetry has become divorced from reality
and reflects the ugly side of actual human nature. They do not propose a
revolution in its methods, but to put fresh life into it by seeing
things as they are. And both of them, living in the country, apply the
principle to 'Nature' in the sense of scenery. Cowper gives interest to
the flat meadows of the Ouse; and Crabbe, a botanist and lover of
natural history, paints with unrivalled fidelity and force the flat
shores and tideways of his native East Anglia. They are both therefore
prophets of a love of Nature, in one of the senses of the Protean word.
Cowper, who pro