‘“I must be loved;” said Sybil; “I must see
The man in terrors, who aspires to me:
At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,
His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;
And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,
What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:
Nay, such the raptures that my smiles inspire,
That reason’s self must for a time retire.”“Alas! for good Josiah,” said the dame,
“These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame;
He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!
He cannot, child:”—the child replied, “He must.”’
Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no critic at all likely to be in the society’s service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.
But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame—for was he not one of the favourite poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician’s life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe’s name be brought upon the reader’s quivering lip?
To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe’s.
WORN-OUT TYPES.
It is now a complaint of quite respectably antiquity that the types in which humanity was originally set up by a humour-loving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief—it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true—bad ones for the most part; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us. A cheerfully-disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told, with that mixture of asperity and contempt so
properly reserved for those who take cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously, ‘And how would that matter?’ the position of things becomes serious, and demands a few minutes’ investigation.
As we said at the beginning, the complaint is an old one—most complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own countrymen, and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this curse of the Continent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt, wrote as follows:
‘It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalize and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; we learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike, mere readers—spectators, not actors in the scene and lose all proper personal identity. The templar—the wit—the man of pleasure and the man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser—Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d’Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute littérature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.’
Very pretty writing, certainly; [244] nor can it be disputed that uniformity of surroundings puts a tax upon originality. To make bricks and find your own straw are terms of bondage. Modern