Life & Wisdom Quote by George Crabbe

There is a hard, almost Protestant suspicion baked into Crabbe's line: comfort corrupts craft. "Feed the musician, and he's out of tune" isn’t a folksy aside about lunch; it’s a compact theory of motivation, aimed like a pin at patronage and complacency. The joke works because it flips the expected moral. Feeding someone should steady them, strengthen them, make the work better. Crabbe insists the opposite: satiation dulls attentiveness, and art, in his view, depends on a certain edge of hunger.

Crabbe wrote as a poet with an unusual intimacy with ordinary life and its pressures, and he lived in a Britain where artists were often tethered to patrons, prizes, and polite institutions. The line carries that social texture. "Feed" can mean literal food, but it also stands in for being indulged: money, praise, security, the softening effects of approval. Once the musician is comfortable, the discipline that keeps him "in tune" slips. The subtext is less about artists being fickle than about systems that reward them into mediocrity.

It’s also a sly warning to the audience. If you want art that bites, don’t expect it to purr. Crabbe’s cynicism is economical: he compresses a whole argument about incentives into a single, domestic action and an immediate consequence. The result is a proverb that sounds like common sense, then reveals itself as a critique of how society buys the appearance of culture and loses the music.