Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the
_Quarterly_ reviewer, how far many passages in _The Borough_, when
concerned with low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in
reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had
never been disputed. He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life
indeed, and in the same rhymed metre. "If all that kind of satire
wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as
genuine poetry," then what becomes of the author of _The Canterbury
Tales_? Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to
this question. He could not discern that the treatment is everything,
and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself--the
spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these,
gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension.
From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on
whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing
that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this
nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of
course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and
his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both
described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly
where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and
could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often
excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The
_Quarterly_ reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description
in _The Borough_ of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of
the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very
graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather
metrical fiction than poetry. There is more of the essence of poetry in
a single couplet of Pope's: