Lovers' Journeys, Widows' Tales: Crabbe and Bloomfield, by Hugh Underhill
Bloomfield’s ‘Walter and Jane’ (Rural Tales, 1802) concerns a lover journeying to meet a beloved, which perhaps inevitably brings to mind Crabbe’s verse Tale ‘A Lover’s Journey’ (Tale 10, Tales in Verse, 1812). The two poets were roughly contemporary: George Crabbe, the elder of the two born in 1754, Robert Bloomfield 12 years later, though dying in 1823 before Crabbe in 1832. Both were born and bred in Suffolk and both possessed a strong sense of place; both were of humble origins (Crabbe a notch above the labouring class by birth but still in early life well acquainted with hardship and poverty). Crabbe’s The Village was published in 1783, The Farmer’s Boy 1800, Rural Tales 1802, Crabbe’s The Borough 1810 and his Tales in Verse 1812, The Banks of Wye 1811. As noted by John Lucas in ‘Crabbe’s Assistance’ (Newsletter no. 30), when Bloomfield fell upon hard times in 1816 and an appeal was directed ‘To the Friends and Admirers of Robert Bloomfield’ to raise a subscription for him, Crabbe’s response, as well as echoing Johnson’s words on Woodhouse, to an extent resembled that of Byron concerning the Bloomfields (Robert and his brother Nat) in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and later in his Hints from Horace (see Newsletter no.11) that the Bloomfields had been mistakenly encouraged to attempt poetry. Crabbe’s comment is considerably less barbed than Byron’s, but as John Lucas asks, what did he think of Bloomfield as a poet? We cannot be certain, but insofar as he read Bloomfield’s work at all he does not appear from the tone of that response to have been to any great degree one of those ‘admirers’. Crabbe’s works do not appear in the catalogue of books sold after Bloomfield’s death, but one would think he must at least have known of Crabbe’s work. Nevertheless these two poets lived through the same social and economic developments in their contemporary England, the same currents of thought and feeling, which inevitably form the context of their writing, so that comparisons readily suggest themselves, despite the differences in feeling and attitude which I intend to touch on here. And it may be noted in passing that on account of their social status, patronage was a large issue for both. In both poems a lover’s perceptions of the landscape and objects he passes are imposed by his subjective mood – eager anticipation, apprehension, dejection.
James Thomson, the model for Bloomfield as a poet of the natural world, had proceeded on the ostensible assumption that that world can be objectively seen, described and generalized. Crabbe’s Tales derive much of their energy from the tension between an outlook grounded in that same eighteenth-century or Augustan objectivity and faith in reason (by Augustan we mean those eighteenth-century poets who took the Classics of the period of Augustus in particular as exemplars), and his sensibility to the Romantic currents running in favour of ‘feeling’ and the need to trust it. Bloomfield’s cast of mind was also formed by the eighteenth-century, but he takes a decided step away from the ‘Augustan’ in his wholly unsceptical embracing of that need to trust feeling. Both poems, then, participate in this transitional movement, and feed into Romantic concerns with the relationship between the perception of objects in the outer world and subjective states. Also of significance is the way Crabbe, as we see in his early poem The Village (1783), follows Goldsmith in ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770) in voicing a sense that the pastoralism of such as Thomson and Gray no longer represents a real experience of rural England (‘But times are altered’, says Goldsmith). That is if traditional pastoral ever did: Crabbe is more radical than Goldsmith. He will give us, he says, in a much-quoted line, ‘the real picture of the poor.’ But after that early essay in a kind of documentary and generalizing deflation of conventional pastoral, he turned to narratives concerning particular lives, though as I have suggested those lives are always embedded in and informed by a ‘real picture’ of English society. What we find in ‘The Lover’s Journey’ is a radical uncertainty in the young lover about the nature of what he is observing, an uncertainty both of feeling and judgement. Crabbe himself adopts an authorial impartiality, apparent in both an amused, lightly satirical detachment from his characters and an opening moral-philosophical generalization, which the Tale is to exemplify. This is a statement about the interplay of objects, sense-impressions, and emotional states: It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes / Present the object, but the mind descries; / And thence delight, disgust, or cool indiff’rence rise (1-3).
This is a more down-to-earth account of perception than that of David Hartley’s ‘association of ideas’, so influential at the time, and one rooted in Crabbe’s profound attentiveness to the way people actually behave. His lover’s capacity to colour what he sees with his own fluctuating states of mind readily leads us to question the security of his moral vision as well as of his ‘love’ for his ‘Laura’. The lovers’ fancifulness includes their bestowing of the machinery of popular Romance on what otherwise appears to be a conventional relationship between two young people from middle-class families. To each other, they are Laura (the Lady in Petrarch’s sonnets) and Orlando (the lover in As You Like It), though they are, the narrator drily tells us, Susan and John ‘in the parish register’ (23). The gently mocking phrases – Orlando is Laura’s ‘faithful slave’, he is a ‘fond traveller’ – are those of experience looking at innocence rather than of the stern judge of youthful folly; the tone throughout the tale is lightly comic. Not only, however, does this initial dry observation neatly imply the lovers’ immature fantasizing, but in its play on levels of perception it measures youthful fervour against social reality, actual circumstances.
Now landscape-description is intrinsic to ‘The Lover’s Journey’, but not as in what one might loosely term ‘nature poetry’. Crabbe’s interest is in human relationship to the natural scene, and in using landscape-description to reveal psychology or states of mind. Orlando arrives in eager anticipation at his destination only to find that his beloved has already left to visit a friend – ‘He hurried forth, for now the town was nigh – / “The happiest man of mortal men am I.” / Thou art! but change in every state is near, / (So may the wretched hope, the blest may fear)’ (204-7). He is promptly beset by vexation and by jealous doubts and fears. Petulantly riding to join his beloved through a ‘fair’ landscape of ‘deep, fat meadows’ (252), he takes every opportunity to find fault. ‘“I hate these scenes,” Orlando angry cried’ (244). And with a deft half-line, Crabbe underlines what is colouring Orlando’s perceptions: ‘“’Tis a vile prospect: – Gone to see a friend!”’ (263).
Part of the richness of this tale is that it neatly surveys the social stratification of the time, from gypsies, through labourers, the middle classes, to the prosperous landowning class. Orlando passes a great Hall and park-prospect, the kind of scene so often celebrated in poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as epitomising all that was best – order, plenty, hospitality – in the English social dispensation, but from which Orlando now draws the moral that ‘for one so bless’d, / A thousand reasoning wretches are distress’d’ (275-6). The reproach to grandeur and pride looks to have justification, one which finds ready echoes in Bloomfield, but here it is a perception seized upon to suit his state of mind. He is adrift, constantly vacillating, unable to apply proper measure and proportion to his view of the world beyond himself, uninstructed both in personal emotions and in the way his own economic security and independence make him, unlike the poor blacksmith in Bloomfield’s tale, protected. Climbing a hill, he gains a view of a wedding-ceremony, and extraordinarily, since his own purpose is marriage with Laura, he launches into a tirade against marriage, his ‘spleen beheld them with prophetic view’ (298; earlier he had deplored ‘spleen’.) He foresees a life of ceaseless distresses necessarily entailed in marriage. Yet as he grows near to his goal (316), ‘the resentment melted all away’, and he is kindly and joyfully greeted by Laura. Subsequently, on the return journey of the couple to her home, the two lovers are so utterly engrossed in each other that they are oblivious to the scenes around them, as Orlando is on his own return journey on the ‘morrow’ to his home. For the mind to be ‘absent’ and the eye ‘vacant’, as they are described, may suggest that the couple are now sufficiently assured of each other to put aside their romantic excesses, but there is little here, surely, to persuade us of a very active engagement with reality.
Robert Bloomfield’s ‘Walter and Jane’ opens:
Bright was the summer sky, the Mornings gay,
And Jane was young and chearful as the Day.
Tufts of green Broom, that full in blossom vied,
And grac'd with spotted gold the upland side,
The level fogs o'erlook'd; too high to share;
So lovely Jane o'er looked the clouds of Care; (1-8)
Here’s ‘The Lover's Journey’, similarly summery:
Fair was the morning, and the month was June,
When rose a lover; love awakens soon;
Brief his repose, yet much he dreamt the while
Of that day's meeting, and his Laura’s smile.
It is much the same pacing and pitch, the same turn of the line on a caesura, the same rise and fall, the same point of rest on the rhyme. This is the eighteenth-century heroic couplet, but subtly modified by each poet to do a new sort of job and masterfully deployed by each for narrative effect. Significantly, however, Bloomfield affects us as more easy-going, he has that peculiar way of appearing to let the verse take its own course (though in fact he’s wholly in control of the direction the narrative is taking), without Crabbe’s sceptical, satiric bite. Bloomfield’s lovers are also looked upon from the lightly amused vantage point of later life, and there are touches of comedy, but rather than assuming Crabbe’s critical distance from his young people, Bloomfield asks the maturer reader to enter sympathetically into their lives: ‘Age, tell me true, nor shake your locks in vain, / Tread back your paths, and be in love again’. His tale is of a ‘poor blacksmith’, a village servant-girl, and a humble widow, providing no scope for the pampered and second-hand sentiment of Crabbe’s ‘Orlando’ and ‘Laura’. Bloomfield’s lovers would be hard put to it to make sense of those affected names. Jane has little thought of ‘love’ until she notices how Walter suspends his labours whenever she passes his forge. There’s none of that irony which Crabbe imparts to Orlando’s view of ‘joyful rustics’ and village maidens (80), nothing picturesque or romanticized about Walter’s ‘Straw-roof’d Shed, in ranges where / Hung many a well-turn’d Shoe and glitt’ring Share’ (17-18). It’s presented to us for just what it is, and what he makes is valued for its workmanlike quality. Yet the unexpected death of Jane’s Mistress and hence loss of her position is given to us with a rapid narrative economy matching Crabbe’s:
When at the Goal that bounds our prospects here,
Jane’s widow'd Mistress ended her career’ (33-4, a very Crabbe-like ring).
The mansion sold, (Jane’s peaceful home no more,)
A distant village own'd her for its Queen,
Another service, and another scene;
But could another scene so pleasing prove,
Twelve weary miles from Walter and from Love? (36-40)
Walter, however, loses little time in travelling those twelve miles to visit her; the next sabbath-day ‘had scarcely dawned when Walter hied / O’er hill and dale, Affection for his Guide.’ That word affection carries, as it were, Bloomfield’s signature, and suggests a different texture of feeling here. But this opens a passage which in early editions of Rural Tales carries the synoptic page head ‘The Lover’s Journey’ (this 10 years before the publication of Crabbe’s tale). And it is a journey in some ways comparable with the first part of Orlando’s, in the landscape passed through (a heath, common land) but also in the exhilaration which makes light of the twelve miles:
O’er the brown Heath his pathless journey lay,
Where screaming Lapwings hail’d the op’ning day.
High rose the Sun, the anxious Lover sigh’d;
His slipp’ry soles bespoke the dew was dried;
His last farewell hung fondly on his tongue
As o’er the tufted Furze elate he sprung;
Trifling impediments; his heart was light,
For Love and Beauty glow’d in fancy’s sight; (51-8)
But again, significant differences: Walter is on foot (he shoes the horses of the farmers and gentry but can keep no horse himself), and the authenticity of detail – the journey is ‘pathless’ but Walter finds his way easily – must come from knowing precisely what it is like to make such a journey on foot across such a landscape and in that weather. His vision of his beloved may be aided by ‘fancy’ but the fancifulness is minimal: this is a young man who is, surely, closer to reality than Orlando. The meeting with Jane ‘Renew’d his passion, – but destroy’d his peace’ (60) (effective rhetorical balancing.) He is suddenly beset by ‘A clay-cold damp of doubts and fears’ (64), but these are none of the solipsistic jealousies which afflict Orlando: the page head here becomes ‘Self-Denial’, something Orlando certainly never contemplates. Nor does Orlando ever face these confrontations with ‘Conscience’ and the hard economic realities of what marriage means for a poor man: ‘Truth, at whose shrine he bow’d, inflicted pain; / And Conscience whisper’d, “never come again”’ (61-2). Walter denies himself visits to Jane but ‘A month’s sharp conflict only serv’d to prove / The pow’r, as well as truth, of Walter’s love’ (77-8). He resolves to go to Jane again after all, but primarily out of consideration for her feelings – ‘His own sweet, injur’d, unoffending Maid’ (79). The page head is now ‘The renew’d Journey’, which again somewhat parallels Crabbe’s tale, for despite the fine day and the pleasantness of the summer heath, Walter is soon overcome by irresolution and ‘anguish’. He sinks down upon ‘the scatter’d Daisies’ (87), paralyzed by conflict between his sense of the worth and ‘truth’ of his and Jane’s love for each other, his confidence in his own capacity for hard work to support a wife, but realistic fears for the future should they marry. At length, in a lovely image of separate rivulets of water merging, he is almost at the point of recognizing their union as right and irresistible. With a deft dramatic touch, it is precisely at this moment that he is roused from his lethargy by ‘a gentle sound’ of footsteps. ‘His heart beat high, for Jane herself was there’ (137, 142). This moment of willed yet in part coincidental meeting has an effect of dramatic and psychological inevitability. For a few moments Jane distrustfully holds herself back from Walter. The feigned indifference here, the attempted display of ‘maiden pride’, are reminiscent of Crabbe’s power to anatomize tactical or self-deceiving emotional ploys. Jane speaks:
‘I’ve travelled all these weary miles with pain,
To see my native village once again;
And show my true regard for neighbour Hind;
Not like you, Walter, she was ever kind.’
’Twas thus, each soft sensation laid aside,
She buoy’d her spirits up with maiden pride;
Disclaim’d her love, e’en while she felt the sting;
’What, come for Walter's sake!’ Twas no such thing.
But when astonishment his tongue releas’d,
Pride's usurpation in an instant ceas’d. (151-160)
‘Pride’ is another Bloomfield signature-word, a recurrent pejorative. This couple are incapable of sustaining any kind of false pride or emotional manoeuvring, Walter is ‘untaught’ and can only speak in plain words what he feels: ‘“My dearest Jane,” the untaught Walter cried, / As half repell’d he pleaded by her side; / “My dearest Jane, think of me as you may”’ (177-9).
So they set off together, the narrative detail affirming their mutual accord, to visit the elderly widow Hind. They share a joy in the widow’s humble home – ‘Small was its store, and little they desir’d’ (182).They find her effortfully drawing water from her well, and Walter hurries to her assistance; immediately, with intuitive, indeed maternal, sympathy, she discerns that all has not been well with Jane. Bloomfield here indulges in some atmospheric scene-painting and mood-setting:
Now, while the Seed-cake crumbled on her knee,
And Snowy Jasmine peeped in to see;
And the transparent Lilac at the door,
Full to the Sun its purple honours bore,
The clam’rous Hen her fearless brood display’d,
And march'd around; while thus the Matron said:
‘Jane has been weeping, Walter; - prithee why?’ (195-201)
Even the fiercely maternal hen participates in this picture of unspoilt naturalness and caring domesticity; the lilac and jasmine seem actively beneficent agents, the seed-cake, plain as it is, is an emblem of unforced sharing and hospitality. Jane ‘felt for Walter’ and pleads with the widow not to ‘scold’ him for ‘he has much to say’ (207-9) whereupon Walter explains the circumstances of the young couple’s distress. Hearing his doubts about a man so poor as him marrying, the widow launches into an account of her own marriage, her life with Hind, just as poor as Walter: an instance of the centrality Bloomfield accorded women’s narrative, and his view of older women as steadying influences in village life, seeing things in proportion (what Orlando can’t do). She puts the case for the primacy of love irrespective of wealth: ‘…Love plied his arrows thicker still:/ And prov’d victorious; – as he always will, / We brav’d Life’s storm together…’ (223-5).
Here a further correspondence with, and difference from, Crabbe offers itself. Widow Hind’s life-experience has been markedly in contrast to that of Crabbe’s widow in ‘The Widow’s Tale’ (again Tales in Verse 1812). For widow Hind love and marriage have furnished an inestimable enrichment; for Crabbe’s widow, love and marriage have brought only distress and disappointment, even if, finally, a kind of acquiescent ease. Her young friend Nancy, a farmer’s daughter, has returned home from being rather fancily educated and tends like Laura and Orlando to romanticize herself. The refined manners she has learned cause her to rebel against her father’s insistence that she should play her part in the farm tasks and his hope that she might marry a neighbouring young farmer. The widow recounts the history of her own marriage and persuades Nancy to put aside romantic dreams and marry sensibly. ‘Let not romantic views your bosom sway,’ she exhorts Nancy, ‘Yield to your duties, and their call obey:’ (351-2) At this point in Bloomfield’s poem, effectively deferred till this late stage in the narrative, we learn for the first time of ‘Walter’s kinsman’. This uncle, we hear from the widow, has just died. Bloomfield deftly combines the introduction of this personage who in the remaining 100 lines or so of the poem is to be the source of a significant development, with the assertion by the widow of the overriding value she places upon, once again, ‘Affection’, emphasised by its repetition:
that Drone,
Your poor old Uncle, Walter, liv’d alone.
He died the other day: when round his bed
No tender soothing tear Affection shed –
Affection! ’twas a plant he never knew; -
Why should he feast on fruits he never grew? (225-230)
The contrast is with those who through their love brave Life’s storm together. The way the widow endorses the quality of affection in terms of the natural world – ‘plant’, ‘fruits’ – might be seen as a critique of the artificial game-playing of such as ‘Laura’ and ‘Orlando’. The page head now becomes ‘The Victory’: ‘Love, conquering power, with unrestricted range / Silenc’d the arguments of Time and Change’ (239-40). ‘Time and Change’: those two elements which preoccupied Crabbe throughout his writings – we wonder what their effect upon such as Orlando and Laura is going to be. ‘Dame, I am a fool,’ cries Walter (247). He had, he says, considered going for a soldier (the threat from Napoleonic France was ever-present at this time) and forgetting his love for Jane. But instead of wielding a sword, he will stay and ‘make Shares’ (257) (Bloomfield’s readers would have caught the allusion to Isaiah: ‘and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares’ 2.4); he turns to Jane – ‘“And you, sweet Girl,” – ’ (258), but the line is cut short as ‘a glancing shadow at the door / Announc’d a guest’ (260-61). (It is important to note, however, that at both lines 135-6 and here the ‘victory’ has been achieved by Walter within himself before events arrive to smooth its way.) The local Squire, having watched from his window Walter and Jane pass on their way to Widow Hind’s, has followed, bringing with him the savings Walter’s uncle had ‘with a miser’s spirit worshipt’ (274) left with him in trust for Walter. The contrast between the miserly uncle and the generous group gathered in the widow’s cottage is pointed; what are abstract moral precepts in so much eighteenth-century poetry are concrete moral actions here. The squire makes his own addition to the good fortune:
He [the Squire] found what oft the generous bosom seeks,
In the Dame’s court’seys and Jane’s blushing cheeks,
That consciousness of Worth, that freeborn Grace,
Which waits on Virtue in the meanest place.
‘Here , in this Purse, (what should have cheer'd a Wife,)
Lies, half the savings of your Uncle’s life!
I know your history, and your wishes know;
And love to see the seeds of Virtue grow.
I’ve a spare Shed that fronts the public road:
Make that your Shop; I’ll make it your abode. (276-80, 283-8)
This somewhat fairy-tale resolution of Bloomfield’s narrative is represented as the just desert of virtue and good-heartedness. Surely not the world as Bloomfield or Crabbe experienced it, but perhaps to be read, like much in Bloomfield’s work, as emblematic of his values and characteristic of his remarkable readiness to put faith in life and the human capacity for right feeling. Crabbe so often implies that love can only flourish where there is social and economic compatibility, and fairy-tale endings don’t occur. Indeed, even where that compatibility appears to exist, as between Laura and Orlando, the tale is non-committal about how much substance there is in their ‘love’. Bloomfield’s poem does recognize the necessity of some accommodation of love to social and economic reality. But what is insisted is that given love and right feeling ‘Comforts may be procur’d and want defied, / Heav’ns! With how small a Sum, when right applied!’ (295-6). ‘Hope promis’d fair to cheer them to the end: / With Love their guide, and Goody for their friend’ (340-1). One might add that where for Bloomfield friendship comes to the assistance of love, under Crabbe’s more sceptical scrutiny it may be in danger of disrupting love – it is at the bidding of a friend that Laura is absent from home when Orlando first arrives.