“I am afraid, sir, I disgust you with this very drill narration, but believe me punished in the misery that occasions it. You will conclude that during this time I must have been at more expense than I could afford—indeed, the most parsimonious could not have avoided it. The printer deceived me, and my little business has had every delay. The people with whom I live perceive my situation and find me to be indigent and without friends. About ten days since I was compelled to give a note for seven pounds to avoid an arrest for about double that sum which I owe. I wrote to every friend I had, but my friends are poor likewise; the time of payment approached, and I ventured to represent my case to Lord Rochford. I begged to be credited for this sum till I received it of my subscribers, which I believe will be within one month: but to this letter I had no reply, and I have probably offended by my importunity. Having used every honest means in vain, I yesterday confessed my inability, and obtained with much entreaty and as the greatest favour a week’s forbearance, when I am positively told that I must pay the money or prepare for a prison.
“You will guess the purpose of so long an introduction. I appeal to you, sir, as a good, and let me add, a great man. I have no other pretensions to your favour than that I am an unhappy one. It is not easy to support the thought of confinement, and I am coward enough to dread such an end to my suspense.
“Can you, sir, in any degree aid me with propriety?
“Will you ask any demonstration of my veracity?
“I have imposed upon myself, but I have been guilty of no other imposition. Let me, if possible, interest your compassion. I know those of rank and fashion are teased with frequent petitions, and are compelled to refuse the requests even of those whom they know to be in distress; it is therefore with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour, but you will forgive me, sir, if you do not think proper to relieve. It is impossible that sentiments like yours can proceed from any but a humane and generous heart.
“I will call upon you, sir, to-morrow, and if I have not the happiness to obtain credit with you I must submit to my fate. My existence is a pain to myself, and every one near and dear to me are distressed in my distress. My connections, once the source of happiness, embitter the reverse of my fortune, and I have only to hope a speedy end to a life so unpromisingly begun, in which (though it ought not to be boasted of) I can reap some consolation from looking to the end of it.
“I am, sir, with the greatest respect,
“Your obedient and most humble servant,
“George Crabbe.”
Burke replied immediately, appointing an interview, from which dated the change in Crabbe’s fortune. Money was given to him, apartments provided for him at Beaconsfield, where he was treated as if he belonged to the generous statesman’s own family,—the very publisher who had refused his poems was ready enough to publish them when Edmund Burke suggested his doing so, and even Lord Thurlow gave him a hundred-pound note. Through his patron’s influence the surgeon afterwards became a clergyman and chaplain to the Duke of Rutland. In 1807 the copyright of Crabbe’s poems was sold for three thousand pounds.
Another article in Thackeray’s belief was, that “without necessity,” as he said in Fraser’s Magazine (1846), “men of genius would not work at all, or very little. It does not follow,” said he, “that a man would produce a great work even if he had leisure. Squire Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon with his land, and his rents, and his arms over the porch, was not the working Shakespeare; and indolence, or contemplation if you like, is no unusual quality in literary men.”
The reader will find, in my chapter on the “Impecuniosity of Artists,” a curious contrast to this opinion in that expressed by Ruskin, in his ’Political Economy of Art.‘ Our great art critic draws a touching picture of the man of genius, toiling painfully through his early years of obscurity and neglect, yearning vainly for the peace and time requisite for producing great works. And Sir Bulwer Lytton, writing pathetically of poor Leman Blanchard, whom Thackeray knew personally, said,—