There is yet one other literary force, powerful in our day, that has been largely influenced by Crabbe. Those who love the novels of Mr. Thomas Hardy, whom we rejoice to see with us at this Celebration,—his Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, and many another book that touches the very heart of things in nature and human life, will rejoice to hear that this great writer has admitted George Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work. I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe, whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever. “Crabbe was our first great English realist” Mr. Hardy would tell you if only we could persuade him to speak from this platform, as unfortunately he will not.
Lastly let us take Crabbe as a great story-teller. He has many more ideas than most of the novelists. That is why we do well to recall the hint
of the writer who said that when a new work came out we should take down an old one from our shelves. Instead of the “un-idead” novels, that come out by the dozen and are so popular. I wish we could agree to read Crabbe’s novels in verse. Unhappily their form is against them in the present age. But it would not be at all a misfortune if we could make Crabbe’s Tales once more the vogue. They are good stories, absorbingly interesting. They leave a very vivid impression on the mind. Once read they are unforgettable.
I have seen it stated that these stories are old-fashioned both in manner and in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintain they are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter-day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It is this essential modernity that is to make Crabbe’s place in English literature secure for generations yet to come.
Finally, Crabbe’s place in English literature is as the bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With him begins that “enthusiasm of humanity” which the eighteenth
century so imperfectly understood. Byron and Wordsworth, disliking each other cordially, did well to praise him, for he was their forerunner. A master of pathos, you may find in his work incentive to tears and laughter, although sometimes the humour, as in The Learned Boy, is sadly unconscious.
But I must bring these rambling remarks to a close, and in doing so I must once again quote that other Suffolk worthy to whom many of us are very much attached, I mean Edward FitzGerald. When Sir Leslie Stephen wrote what is to my mind a singularly infelicitous essay on Crabbe in the Cornhill, he quoted the remark, which seemed to be new to FitzGerald, as to Crabbe being a “pope in worsted stockings”—a remark made by Horace Smith of Rejected Addresses, although I have seen it ascribed to Byron and others. “Pope in worsted stockings,” exclaimed FitzGerald, “why I could cite whole paragraphs of as fine a texture as Molière; ‘incapable of epigram,’ the jackanapes says—why, I could find fifty of the very best epigrams in five minutes,” and later, in another letter he writes—
I am positively looking over my everlasting Crabbe again; he naturally comes in about the fall of the year.
Here surely is an appropriate quotation, a little prophetic perhaps, for our gathering—the “everlasting Crabbe.” We cannot all love Crabbe as much as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain if after this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems more sympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proud of the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closely identified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writer is closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man—a Suffolk man he was—yet even more in the future than in the past, he is destined to gain the whole world for his parish. He is the everlasting Crabbe!