CRABB ROBINSON.*
IT seems an easy way to fame, to know most of the celebrities of the day and to keep a diary. It is probably the most difficult. Celebrities, as acquaintances, are in danger of saying nothing worth the immense trouble of entering in a diary, and the diarist is in danger of coming to regard himself as a celebrity, too. Crabb Robinson, friend of a host of famous men and women, among whom his latest editor • Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth. Lamb, &c.: being SeLmtions from the Remain.: of Henry Crabb Robinson. Edited by Edith 5. Morley. London; Longman', [re, 6d. net.] names, exempli gratia, " Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Lambs, Blake, Hazlitt and Landor ; Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Arndt, Tieck and Schlegel ; Madame de Stael, Irving, Dr.
Arnold and Robertson," appears to have possessed the temperament best suiting with his opportunities. Even he, when approaching his ninety-second year, was heard to reflect " a real feeling that his life had been thrown away " ; but by that time lie had completed a diary of which there can scarcely be a rival. It records fifty-six years of a crowded life day by day, and at times word for word.
The edition of this enormous journal made by Dr. Sadler in 1869, and subsequently, has made familiar most of the diarist's information of especial surviving interest. What the public had small chance of seeing was the selection made by the diarist himself from his chronicles, when he was an old man, under the heading of " Reminiscences " ; for these have not previously passed from manuscript into print. To speak frankly, these " Reminiscences " in themselves are a not altogether clarifying recast of the original log-book.
Comparative quotations readily show this : where the " Diary" proceeds
" December 80th, 1818: After dinner a rubber at Lamb's ; then went with Lamb and Burney to Rickman's ; H,azlitt there. Cards, as usual, were our amusement. Lamb was in a pleasant mood. Rickman spoke of Chatterton's forgeries. I saw one manuscript in which he had seventeen kinds of e's all written differently. 'Oh,' said Lamb, `that must have been modern— written by one of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease.' . . . "
the " Reminiscences " have
" December 30th, with Lamb, Hazlitt, &c., at Rickman's. Rick- man produced one of Chatterton's forgeries. In one MS. there were seventeen kinds of little ee's. 'This must be modem,' said Lamb,
• and written by one of the Mob of Gentlemen who write with ease.' " Such is the general measure of difference between the original and the retrospective accounts.
It is the " Reminiscences " from which Miss Morley has
drawn most of the materials of the new volume, but she adds unpublished detail from the " Diary." This affects, particu- larly, the disturbance of Coleridge's friendship with Words- worth in 1811 and 1812. In this matter Crabb Robinson, as in a good many others, was more than a diarist. With the minute attention to what was said, that perhaps was in his nature as an East Anglian born, he docketed Coleridge's grievance and Wordsworth's reply, and succeeded (against the predictions of Charles Lamb himself) in reconciling the pair. Wordsworth sent Coleridge a satisfying letter : but " I should add," says Robinson, " that the greater part of
the letter was written by me."
EDMUND BLUNDEN.
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