CRABB ROBINSON

Evening Star, Issue 22032, 18 May 1935, Page 6

CRABB ROBINSON

.’. BOSWELL OF LAST CENTURY

Wherever you turn in English literary history of the early nineteenth century, you find Crabb Robinson —taking tea with Lamb and notes of Coleridge’s conversation, making himself' useful to Wordsworth, paying a duty call on T)e Quincey, expressing displeasure at Ha/,litt’s conduct, or breakfasting with Samuel Rogers. He was inevitable it any literary gathering, yet he was not it writer and had.little to recoin mem! him to anybody's attention (writes Malcolm' Ejwin, in the- ‘ Observer ’). The son of a tanner, he was born at Bury St. Edmunds in 1775. His parents were Dissenters, and his only schooling vvas at “ bis uncle's small and very inferior academy.” Articled to a solicitor, he became a fervent Jacobin undci the influence of the French Revolution and Godwin’s ‘ Political Justice ’; ha had literary leanings, and when an uncle left him a small competence lu< went to Germany for a university education. i As a student of Jena he began bis hobbv of collecting celebrities; he knew Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder,, paid court to Madame De Stael, and hobnobbed with the Bloomsbury of Weimar. On his return to England after five years his knowledge of German inspired ‘The Times’ send him as special correspondent to Altona; afterwards he went as war correspondent to Corunna. He then calmly .decided that He had “ no genius or taste whatever, and, renouncing literary ambition, got himself called to the bar, practising so successfully that, after seventeen)' years, he was able to retire at. the age of fifty-three with a fortune sufficient for his needs. He had many active interests ; he assisted in founding University College and in the movement for abolition of slavery. With a naive curiosity like Pepys’s, he was greedy fot “ thrills ” ; he was “ ameng the first to go by train, to see the telegraph operated. to have an anaesthetic, and to be photographed.” / . He lacked the gift of expression—“ven his letters are prosy and jejune Acknowledging the fact, he resolved to secure literary fame in spite of being unable to write. He'was sociable, and in Germany he bad learned how to make himself agreeable to. literary men. He knew how to flatter the vanity of men like Lamb and Wordsworth, who valued his friendship because he was an appreciative listener, and because, with his business capacity and common sense, he made himself practically useful. He spent his Whole leisure in literary society/ and noted everything daily in his diary. Lacking any literary gift, he was neither a Boswell nor a Forster, •but he followed Boswell’s methods and had some of Forster’s flair > for having a finger in everybody’s affairs. » As he compiled volume after volume of his diary, lie revised, amended, and added reminiscences; it was no haphazard journal that hey kept, but a store oLcaVefully considered information, the material a. JuMversal Boswell for a literary histqr.y, of ;hfs time. In old age, he, inJfde no secret ..of his, ambition ; be boasted that, if-, he had' set about it, ’ha-might “ have siipplied a, few volumes superior in - value ’’ - to Boswell. : for; “certainly the names recorded iri his t»reat work ’are •< not so important as Goethe, Schiller.'Herder, Wieland. the Duchesses Amelia and Louisa of Weimar, and Tieck —as Madame de Stael, La Fayette, Abbe Gregoire. Benjamin Constant —as Wordsworth. Southey. Coleridge, Lamb, Rogers, Hazlitt, Mrs Barbanld, Clarkson,” and he “could add'a'great number of minor stars. Regarding his remiriiscences with the possessive tenderness of a connoisseur collector, he gloated over the vision of posthumous fame, like a financier amassing a huge fortune for the pleasure of what the figure would look like in the newspapers after hjs death. The object of a book about Crabb llobinson is to depict his personality so as to gauge his reactions towards his friends. This Dr Edith Morley has attempted’ in the ‘ Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson,’ for she intends ,lier hook as “ an introduction to the 'forthcoming selections from his diary and reminiscences-which include all his references to contemporary English writers.” She lias written an enthusiastic and authoritative study of ; his life, but the- finalities of the diarist hardly emerge as they do from his own prosaic jottings. She is insufficiently selective, obscuring the _ anecdote of vital biographical significance in a superfluity of detail, and her narrative is hampered by repetition and digression. Twice in' the space of a page she particularises Robinson’s becoming a pupil to the barrister Littledalc, and twice goes out of her way to mention his inclusion of a translation ffom Arndt in bis review of Wordsworth’s ‘ Convention of Cintra,’ while she too often irritatingly breaks off to address her readers. It is perhaps a confession of weakness that she prints in an appendix nn extract from Bagehot’s essay (which is easily accessible in the ‘ Everyman ’ edition of Id's ‘ Literary Studies’), in which “old Crabb” comes more vitally to life than in all Dr Morley’s painstaking book. *