I have given thus much time to Crabbe’s life story because it interests me, and I do not believe that it is possible nowadays to kindle a very profound interest in any writer without a definite presentation of his personality. Apart from his biography—his three biographies by George Crabbe the second, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, and Canon Ainger, there are the seven volumes of his works. Now I do not imagine that any great accession will
be made to the ranks of Crabbe’s admirers by asking people to take down these seven volumes and read them right through—a thing I have myself done twice, and many here also I doubt not. Rather would I plead for a reprint of Edmund FitzGerald’s Selections, or failing that I would ask you to look at the volume of Selections made by Mr. Bernard Holland, or that other admirable selection by the Rev. Anthony Deane. “I must think my old Crabbe will come up again, though never to be popular,” wrote FitzGerald to Archbishop Trench. Well, perhaps the “large still books” of the older writers are never destined to be popular again, but they will always maintain with genuine book lovers their place in English Literature, and if the adequate praise they have received from many good judges is well kept to the front there will be constant accessions to the ranks, and readers will want the whole of Crabbe’s works in which to dig for themselves. Crabbe’s place in English Literature needed not such a gathering as this to make it secure, but we want celebrations of our literary heroes to keep alive enthusiasm, and to encourage the faint-hearted.
In the glorious tradition of English Literature, then, Crabbe comes after Cowper and before Wordsworth. There is a lineal descent as clear and well-defined as any set forth in the peerages of “Burke” or “Debrett.” We read in vain if we do not fully grasp the continuity of creative work. Cowper was born in 1731, Crabbe in 1754, and Cowper was called to the Bar in the year that Crabbe was born. In spite of this disparity of years they started upon their literary careers almost at the same time. The Village was published in 1783, and The Task in 1785, yet Cowper is in every sense the elder poet, inheriting more closely the traditions of Pope and Dryden, coming less near to humanity than Crabbe, and being more emphatically a child of the eighteenth century in its artificial aspects. It is impossible to indict a whole century with all its varied accomplishments, and the century that produced Swift and Cowper and Crabbe had no lack of the finer instincts of brotherhood. Yet the century was essentially a cruel one. Take as an example the attitude of naturally kindly men to the hanging of Dr. Dodd for forgery. Even Samuel Johnson, who did
what he could for Dodd, did not find, as he should have done, his whole soul revolted by such a punishment for a crime against property. Cowper has immense claim upon our regard. He is one of the truest of poets, and one of the most interesting figures in all English literature, although no small share of his one-time popularity was due to his identification with Evangelicalism in religion. Cowper had humour and other qualities which enabled him to make the universal appeal to all hearts which is the test of the greatest literature—the appeal of “John Gilpin,” the “Lines” to his Mother’s Portrait, and his verses on “The loss of the Royal George.” Crabbe made no such appeal, and he has not the adventitious assistance that association with a religious sect affords. Hence the popularity he once enjoyed was more entirely on his merits than was that of Cowper. He was the first of the eighteenth century poets who was able to see things as they really are. Therein lies his strength. Were they poets at all—those earlier eighteenth century writers? It sounds like rank blasphemy to question it, but what is poetry? Surely it is the expression artistically in rhythmic form—
or even without it—of the sincerest emotions concerning nature and life. The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere—a very bad poet can be that—but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfect art. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters of language every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but not poets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson that claim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emancipate himself from the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emancipated himself still further. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poet even if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many know Crabbe only by the parody of his manner in Rejected Addresses:
John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs Esquire;
But when John Dwyer listed in the blues,
Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs’s shoes.
and it must be admitted that there are plenty of lines like these in Crabbe, as for example:—
Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred’s sire
Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher.
or this:—
The church he view’d as liberal minds will view
And there he fixed his principles and pew.