lived by literature and saw much of the lives and
ways of poets and pamphleteers, he must have gained
some experience that served him later in good stead.
There was a flavour of truthfulness in Crabbe’s
story that could hardly be delusive, and a strain
of modesty blended with courage that would at once
appeal to Burke’s generous nature. Again,
Burke was not a poet (save in the glowing periods
of his prose), but he had read widely in the poets,
and had himself been possessed at one stage of his
youth “with the
furor poeticus.”
At this special juncture he had indeed little leisure
for such matters. He had lost his seat for Bristol
in the preceding year, but had speedily found another
at Malton—a pocket-borough of Lord Rockingham’s,—and,
at the moment of Crabbe’s appeal, was again actively
opposing the policy of the King and Lord North.
But he yet found time for an act of kindness that
was to have no inconsiderable influence on English
literature. The result of the interview was that
Crabbe’s immediate necessities were relieved
by a gift of money, and by the assurance that Burke
would do all in his power to further Crabbe’s
literary aims. What particular poems or fragments
of poetry had been first sent to Burke is uncertain;
but among those submitted to his judgment were specimens
of the poems to be henceforth known as the
The
Library and
The Village. Crabbe afterwards
learned that the lines which first convinced Burke
that a new and genuine poet had arisen were the following
from
The Village, in which the author told of
his resolution to leave the home of his birth and
try his fortune in the city of wits and scholars—
“As on their neighbouring beach
yon swallows stand
And wait for favouring winds to leave
the land;
While still for flight the ready wing
is spread:
So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;
Fled from those shores where guilt and
famine reign,
And cried, ’Ah! hapless they who
still remain—
Who still remain to hear the ocean roar;
Whose greedy waves devour the lessening
shore;
Till some fierce tide, with more imperious
sway,
Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;
When the sad tenant weeps from door to
door,
And begs a poor protection from the poor!”
Burke might well have been impressed by such a passage.
In some other specimens of Crabbe’s verse, submitted
at the same time to his judgment, the note of a very
different school was dominant. But here for the
moment appears a fresher key and a later model.
In the lines just quoted the feeling and the cadence
of The Traveller and The Deserted Village
are unmistakable. But if they suggest comparison
with the exquisite passage in the latter beginning—
“And as the hare, whom hounds and
horns pursue,
Pants to the place from which it first
she flew,”
they also suggest a contrast. Burke’s experienced
eye would detect that if there was something in Crabbe’s
more Pope-like couplets that was not found in Pope,
so there was something here more poignant than even
in Goldsmith.