CRABB ROBINSON BY HIMSELF
MODEST as he was, and intent on preserving materials for the biographies of others, Crabb Robinson would have been surprised to know that his own career would be the subject of twentieth-century writers. Two years ago Miss Edith Morley—from whom the new edition of the Diary is still to come—published his Life and Times ; and now Dr. Balser offers a concise account of him, derived from the same great store of papers in Dr. Williams' Library, and pointed with frequent quotations new to print. Dr. Baker's book brings out particularly the earlier experiences and activities of Crabb Robinson, and only about a fourth of its pages are allotted to the last sixty years of Crabb's long life. The steady concen- tration of the narrative upon the diarist himself, and the avoidance of digression (how tempting here !) into the works and days of his famous friends," may be, conveyed in the fact that Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb obtain only three or four references apiece in the index, and Blake none at all. If Crabb Robinson might have been surprised, or amused, at this devoted personal attention, he would have been a little alarmed at finding his writings the subject of an appended bibliographical outline. Few of us perhaps realised what a number of scattered pamphlets and articles he wrote : " He always wished, like the high-born lady who was compelled for her livelihood to sell muffins, that no one might hear the cry of any little pamphlet which he published." Nevertheless, as Dr. Baker's list makes ,clear, he deserves consideration as an author ; from 1795, when he defended Godwin and his theories, to 1850 when he discussed the newly-revealed " Prelude !' of Wordsworth, he was often the expositor of important and extensive subjects. Dr. Baker, who has plenty of items to chronicle, does not direct his readers to the Vaterlanchsche Annalen (Hamburg) of 1131o, to which Crabb Robinson contributed a pioneer paper on Blake.
Nothing arises in these straightforward chapters to con- tradict the traditional notion of Robinson's characteristics, habits and movements ; of his passion for simple truth, and his regard for genius. The details are largely new, and though generally slight additions they give Dr. Baker's book a value of its own ; he has not obscured them with ambitious writing. The familiar voice sounds out of the past again, but the words are varied. The " first impression " of Wordsworth is typical : " He is a sloven and his manners are not prepossessing, his features are large and coarse ; his voice is not attractive, his manner tho' not arrogant yet indicates a sense of his own worth. He is not attentive to others." These objections, as we know, did not prevent Robinson from idolising the poet. Presently he collected Browning, " one of the young half crazy poets whose prose conversation is much more agreeable than their wild verses." Dr. Baker's extracts fill in the available record of Crabb Robinson's editorship of The Times, and of his fight for the reputation of Thomas Clarkson against the biographers of Wilberforce ; and, if one tends to mistake Crabb's endless precision and firmness of phrase for a stolidity of mind, there is his romantic utterance of z861 on the American Civil War to prove that he was all his life prepared
for revolution as a means of progress. n BLUNDEN.
Previous page
