they also suggest a contrast. Burke's experienced eye would detect that if there was something in Crabbe's more Pope-like couplets that was not found in Pope, so there was something here more poignant than even in Goldsmith.
Crabbe's son reflected with just pride that there must have been something in his father's manners and bearing that at the outset invited Burke's confidence and made intimacy at once possible, although Crabbe's previous associates had been so different from the educated gentry of London. In telling of his now-found poet a few days afterwards to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Burke said that he had "the mind and feelings of a gentleman." And he acted boldly on this assurance by at once placing Crabbe on the footing of a friend, and admitting him to his family circle. "He was invited to Beaconsfield," Crabbe wrote in his short autobiographical sketch, "the seat of his protector, and was there placed in a convenient apartment, supplied with books for his information and amusement, and made a member of a family whom it was honour as well as pleasure to become in any degree associated with." The time thus spent was profitable to Crabbe in other ways than by enlarging his knowledge and ideas, and laying the foundation of many valued friendships. He devoted himself in earnest to complete his unfinished poems and revise others under Burke's judicious criticism. The poem he first published, The Library, he himself tells us, was written partly in his presence and submitted as a whole to his judgment. Crabbe elsewhere indicates clearly what were the weak points of his art, and what tendencies Burke found it most necessary he should counteract. Writing his reminiscences in the third person years later, he naively admitted that "Mr. Crabbe had sometimes the satisfaction of hearing, when the verses were bad, that the thoughts deserved better; and that if he had the common faults of inexperienced writers, he had frequently the merit of thinking for himself." The first clause of this sentence might be applied to Crabbe's poetry to the very end of his days. Of his later and far maturer poems, when he had ceased to polish, it is too true that the thoughts are often better than their treatment. His latest publisher, John Murray, used to say that in conversation Crabbe often "said uncommon things in so common a way" that they passed unnoticed. The remark applies equally to much of Crabbe's poetry. But at least, if this incongruity is to exist, it is on the more hopeful side. The characteristic of so much poetry of our own day is that the manner is uncommon, and the commonness resides in the matter.
When Crabbe had completed his revisions to his own satisfaction and his adviser's, Burke suggested the publication of The Library and The Village, and the former poem was laid before Mr. Dodsley, who only a few months before had refused a poem from the same hand. But circumstances were now changed, and Burke's recommendation and support were all-sufficient. Dodsley was all politeness, and though he declined to incur any risk—this was doubtless borne by Burke—he promised his best endeavours to make the poem a success. The Library was published, anonymously, in June 1781. The Monthly and the Critical Reviews awarded it a certain amount of faint praise, but the success with the general public seems only to have been slight.
When Burke selected this poem to lay before Dodsley, he had already read portions of The Village, and it seems strange that he should have given The Library precedence, for the other was in every respect the more remarkable. But Burke, a conservative in this as in other matters, probably thought that a new poet desiring to be heard would be wiser in not at once quitting the old paths. The readers of poetry still had a taste for didactic epigram varied by a certain amount of florid rhetoric. And there was little beyond this in Crabbe's moralisings on the respective functions of theology, history, poetry, and the rest, as represented on the shelves of a library, and on the blessings of literature to the heart when wearied with business and the cares of life. Crabbe's verses on such topics are by no means ineffective. He had caught perfectly the trick of the school so soon to pass away. He is as fluent and copious—as skilful in spreading a truism over a dozen well-sounding lines—as any of his predecessors. There is little new in the way of ideas. Crabbe had as yet no wide insight into books and authors, and he was forced to deal largely in generalities. But he showed that he had already some idea of style; and if, when he had so little to say, he could say it with so much semblance of power, it was certain that when he had observed and thought for himself he would go further and make a deeper mark. The heroic couplet controlled him to the end of his life, and there is no doubt that it was not merely timidity that made him confine himself to the old beaten track. Crabbe's thoughts ran very much in antithesis, and the couplet suited this tendency. But it had its serious limitations. Southey's touching stanzas—
"My days among the dead are passed,"
though the ideas embodied are no more novel than Crabbe's, are worth scores of such lines as these—
"With awe, around these silent walks I tread;
These are the lasting mansions of the dead:
'The dead!' methinks a thousand tongues reply;
'These are the tombs of such as cannot die!
Crowned with eternal fame, they sit sublime,
And laugh at all the little strife of Time'"
CHAPTER III
FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE