eaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
individual; never do you reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this--Hazlitt
seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
one of the things which make _poesis non ut pictura_, it is not all, and
I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
that not poetry?

The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
Joubert--that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
the music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
get some music married to even moderate mean