ESC: English Studies in Canada

Ronald B. Hatch, Crabbe’s Arabesque: Social Drama in the Poetry of George Crabbe (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976). xvi, 284. $14.00 In a recent study of George Crabbe, Terence Bareham suggests that the poet “drew strength from exactly where his polemical and spiritual weakness may appear to lie.” 1 What Bareham means by this paradox is that, because like most of the Anglican priesthood of his time Crabbe felt no need to reformu­ late his theology or to differ from the prevailing latitudinarian attitudes, he could be naturally and agreeably indirect in his defence of values. But Crabbe’s obliqueness in matters of religion and politics poses a problem for criticism. While his poetry is neither dogmatic nor doctrinaire, a strong and decided sense of ethics impelled him to write; yet, to describe the rela­ tion between his ideological diffidence and his constant concern for human and social issues requires extreme critical tact. Bareham himself does not manage to harmonize his judgment that, when the priest in Crabbe takes over, his poems achieve their most satisfying aesthetic completeness (p. 75) with his conclusion that Crabbe’s art chiefly consists in portraying the unique features of an individual’s nature as distinct from ideal or typical human qualities (p. 236). The danger is, as in Bareham’s case, that the critic’s un­ clear sense of the poet’s obliqueness may lead him to overestimate both the representational elements of the poetry and its fusion of morality and aesthetics. In addition to finding the relation between Crabbe’s ideas and literary concerns problematic, the critic is faced with the challenge of placing the poet in his proper literary context and approaching him with the correct aesthetic criteria. In his recent book Peter New explains this difficulty by arguing that Crabbe is neither an Augustan nor a Romantic and that his poems are sui generis because they derive from no tradition of narrative verse nor found one.2On the one hand, New shows that Crabbe possessed a distinctive under­ standing of the process by which a character becomes what he is through time and as a consequence of moral decisions, which allies his poems with modern novelistic and psychological criteria (p. 22). But, on the other hand, that New can see the poet as an upholder of absolute moral law whose narra­ tive detailing, far from reflecting a relativistic impulse, was intended to pro­ mote the capacity to judge properly in distinct situations and whose imagina­ tion, disciplined by the traditional aesthetic of imitation, could in his best poems, such as “Peter Grimes,” fully represent and reproduce a conscious­ ness while simultaneously judging it by metaphors (p. 97) evidences Crabbe’s connections with eighteenth-century values and rhetoric. The strain, how­ ever, of placing Crabbe in the context both of subsequent psychological and narrative criteria and of Augustan moral and rhetorical values ultimately obliges New to celebrate Crabbe for depicting the shape of human nature, a stance which says nothing very precise about the juncture of form and con­ tent, and of traditional and modem aesthetic values, in his poetry. Although he has much in common with the aforementioned critics, Ronald Hatch provides a more rigorous account of the relation of Crabbe’s ideas and values and of the poet’s literary context partly because he is both more selec­ tive and polemical in his treatment of the poetry and partly because he at­ tempts to integrate background information and criticism closely. Indeed, Hatch is deliberately unorthodox in his estimation of Crabbe’s career and yet enthusiastically acts as an apologist for his subject’s poetic integrity. While describing, more accurately than has been done before, the way in which Crabbe’s poems are informed by actual social, moral, and religious issues, Hatch is adamant that they are not valuable simply as social documents. He not only emphasizes the non-didacticism of Crabbe’s thinking to argue that the poet presents his ideas dramatically, as distinct from systematically, but insists that Crabbe synthesizes eighteenth-century values in an essentially radical literary manner. Hatch’s stance and method seem to suggest, some­ what extremely, that this synthesis...