Whig at the same
election at Trowbridge. His politics were summed up in backing his
friends of both parties. But he did see, as politicians are only
beginning to see to-day, that the ultimate solution was a social one and
not a mere question of political parties. Generations have passed away
since he lived, and men are still shouting themselves hoarse to prove
that in this Shibboleth or in that may be found the salvation of the
country, yet we have still our thousands on the verge of starvation, we
have still the very poor in our midst, and the problem seems as far from
solution as ever. But it would be all the better for the State if we
could keep the questions raised by Crabbe in his wonderful pictures more
continually in view,--lacking in taste as they may sometimes seem to weak
stomachs, coarse, unvarnished narratives though they be of a life which
is really almost entirely sordid.

Then let us turn to Crabbe's gallery of pictures. Phoebe Dawson, and the
equally pathetic Ruth, Blaney and Clelia, Peter Grimes and many another.
They are as clearly defined a set of entirely human beings as any Master
has given us. It is not assuredly in George Eliot, as Canon Ainger
suggests, that I find an affinity to Crabbe among the moderns, but in two
much greater writers of quite different texture, Balzac and Dickens. Had
Crabbe not been bounded and restrained by the conventions of his cloth,
he might have become one of the most popular story-tellers in our
literature--the English Balzac. At a hundred points Charles Dickens is
an entire contrast to Crabbe--in his buoyant humour, his gaiety of heart,
in the glamour that he throws over the life of the poor, a glamour that
was more present in the early Victorian era than in our own, but Crabbe
is with Balzac and with Dickens in that he presents as no other moderns
have done living pictures of suffering human lives.

There is yet one other literary force, powerful in our day, that has been
largely influenced by Crabbe. Those who love the novels of Mr. Thomas
Hardy, whom we rejoice to see with us at this Celebration,--his
_Woodlanders_, _The Return of the Native_, _Far from the Madding Crowd_,
and many another book that touches the very heart of things in nature and
human life, will rejoice to hear that this great writer has admitted
George Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work.
I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe