its gracious amenities, that eighteenth century, for I do not believe that there is a man in the ranks of the present Government, or of the present Opposition, who would take all this trouble for a poor unknown who had appealed to him merely by two or three long letters recounting his career. Nay, Cabinet Ministers are less punctilious than formerly, and the newest type, I understand, leaves letters unanswered. I can imagine the attitude of one of our modern statesmen in the face of two quite bulky packages of many sheets from a young author. He would request his secretary to see what they were all about, and then would follow the curt answer—“I am directed by Dash to say that he cannot comply with your request.” Burke not only wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, but enclosed Crabbe’s letter to him, a quite wonderful piece of autobiography. [100] All Crabbe’s admirers should read that letter. Crabbe apologizes for writing again, and refers to “these repeated attacks on your patience.” “My
father,” he said, “had a place in the Custom House at Aldeburgh. He had a large family, a little income and no economy,” and then the story of his life up to that time is told to Burke in fullest detail.
Again, there is that other statesman-admirer of Crabbe, Charles James Fox. Fox gave to Crabbe’s work an admiration which never faltered, and on his death-bed requested that the pathetic story of Phœbe Dawson in The Parish Register should be read to him—it was, we are told, “the last piece of poetry that soothed his dying ear.”
In Lord Holland’s Memoirs of the Whig Party there is a statement by his nephew which no biographer so far has quoted:—
I read over to him the whole of Crabbe’s Parish Register in manuscript. Some parts he made me read twice; he remarked several passages as exquisitely beautiful, and objected to some few which I mentioned to the author and which he, in almost every instance, altered before publication. Mr. Fox repeated once or twice that it was a very pretty poem, that Crabbe’s condition in the world had improved since he wrote The Village, and his view of life, likewise The Parish Register, bore marks of considerably more indulgence to our species; though not so many as he could have wished, especially as the few touches of that nature were beautiful in the extreme. He was particularly struck with the description of the substantial happiness of a farmer’s wife.
From great novelists the tributes are not less noteworthy than from great statesmen. Jane Austen, whose personality perhaps has more real womanly attractiveness than that of any sister novelist of the first rank, declared playfully that if she could have been persuaded to change her state it would have been to become Mrs. Crabbe; and who can forget Sir Walter Scott’s request in his last illness: “Read me some amusing thing—read me a bit of Crabbe.” They read to him from The Borough, and we all remember his comment, “Capital—excellent—very good.” Yet at this time—in 1832—any popularity that Crabbe had once enjoyed was already on the wane. Other idols had caught the popular taste, and from that day to this there was to be no real revival of appreciation for these poems. There were to be no lack of admirers, however, of the audience “fit though few.” Byron’s praise has been too often quoted for repetition. Wordsworth, who rarely praised his contemporaries in poetry, declared of Crabbe that his works
“would last from their combined merit as poetry and truth.” Macaulay writes of “that incomparable passage in Crabbe’s Borough which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child”—the passage in which the condemned felon
Takes his tasteless food, and when ’tis done,
Counts up his meals, now lessen’d by that one,—
a story which Macaulay bluntly charges Robert Montgomery with stealing. Lord Tennyson, again, at a much later date, admitted that “Crabbe has a world of his own.”
Not less impressive surely is the attitude of the two writers as far as the poles asunder in their outlook upon life and its mysteries—Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald. The famous theologian, we learn from the Letters and Correspondence collected by Anne Mozley, writes in 1820 of his “excessive fondness” for The Tales of the Hall, and thirty years later in one of his Discourses he says of Crabbe’s poems that they are among “the most touching in our language.” Still another twenty years, and the aged cardinal reread Crabbe to find that he