, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we have
discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?

And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in _The Spirit of the Age_, and I need not
here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.[6] Much that he says even in
the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of _Liber Amoris_.
Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
Here in a couple of lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
the imagination, you see what was passing _in a poetical point of
view_."

Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
"striking"; for, H