The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson by Henry Crabb Robinson

First published: 1870

Type of work: Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence

Critical Evaluation:

Because of his passion for literature and metaphysics, and his special affinity for knowing those men of his time who were worth knowing, Henry Crabb Robinson managed to encompass in his person many of the significant intellectual trends of the first half of the nineteenth century. His DIARY reveals him as a highly characteristic post-Enlightenment mind; his encounters with German, French, and particularly English literary figures have produced a mine of information about the special temper of exuberance during the period; yet there emerges from the work as well the picture of a modest and engaging man. While still a young man, having turned to the Law for a living, he realized he could never become great; but he never ceased to follow the lure of the controversial ideas and outstanding men of his age. His mild demeanor, his exquisite tact and generosity, made him the friend of writers as various as Goethe, Wordsworth, Blake, Lamb, Landor, and Coleridge.

Robinson’s life as he recorded it in the DIARY was outwardly uneventful, yet full of pleasurable transitions from introspection to social intercourse. He never married, but the range of his acquaintances and friendships was enormous, as was the extent of his correspondence. Yet we also have frequent glimpses of the solitary Robinson, alone in a room reading voluminously in the philosophy and literature of his contemporaries, cultivating his DIARY, or traveling on the Continent to improve his mind.

Robinson was born on May 13, 1775, at Bury St. Edmunds. His childhood was a happy one; however, because the Robinsons were Dissenters he was excluded from education at a public school or a university, and at age fifteen he was articled as a law clerk to a Colchester attorney. During the next few years he went to see John Wesley preach, rejoiced at the outbreak of the French Revolution, became a Jacobin, and read Godwin’s POLITICAL JUSTICE. Then after an unsettled life in London during the closing years of the eighteenth century, a time when he began in earnest his reading and theater-going habits and developed a mature interest in politics, he went to Germany in 1800 with money from a legacy. The next five years of independent travel and study in Germany were the crucial period of his life. With no settled plans, he began to absorb the German language and culture. By the time he returned home, he had traveled widely in Germany, had read deeply in its literature and in the emerging transcendental philosophy, had known Weimar in its great days and talked with Goethe, Schiller, Brentano, Voss, and many others. With Coleridge and Carlyle, he became one of the first English Germanophiles, an extremely eloquent advocate, for example, of the strengths and beauties of Goethe in literature and of Kant in philosophy. If the formative influence of Germany on English thought during the period between 1810 and 1850 can hardly be overrated, Robinson himself deserves much of the credit.

At Frankfurt, his first major stop, Robinson became acquainted with the poet Clemens Brentano. In July, 1801, he moved on to Grimma where, with great difficulty, he began reading Kant in earnest. After meeting Goethe and Herder at Weimar, he remarked on Goethe’s immense dignity and oppressive handsomeness. Finally he settled at Jena, enrolled in the University there, and began studies in Latin and Greek and in contemporary German writing. He heard Schelling’s lectures on aesthetics and thought them obscure; his acute sympathetic insight and strength of mind won him an intimacy with von Knebel; while at the same time he indulged in some good-natured student clowning, got into trouble for parodying an inept professor named Eichstadt, and was friendly enough with his fellow students to learn a good deal about their secret dueling societies. In 1804 he met Mme. de Stael. Not knowing Parisian customs, he was puzzled to be shown into her bedroom to meet the great lady as she sat decorously in her bed. In return for her introductions to many of the literary giants of Weimar, Robinson gave her lucid explanations of current German philosophies. He was later to perform the same task of intermediary for English audiences.

After a stay in England, Robinson returned to Germany as a correspondent for The Times in 1807. Later he went to Spain, where he covered the revolution in 1808. He left The Times during the next year, lived a literary life in London for a time, all the while uncertain of his future, and then in January, 1812, entered the office of a barrister. He went to the bar, he said, to acquire a “gentlemanly independence” and “society with leisure.” In spite of his own disclaimers, it is clear that he was an active lawyer on the Norfolk circuit, and an able one; at the end of every year he noted accurately in pounds the steady increase in his income. From this time on he agitated for the reform of legal process in England, and he became an active enemy of the slave trade.

The DIARY itself begins in 1811, during his thirty-sixth year, at a time when he was solidifying friendships with Blake, Wordsworth, Lamb, and Coleridge. The months on the circuit alternated with summer tours to Wales or the Continent, and Robinson combined with his professional life an amazingly varied round of dinners, lectures, theater-going, reading, and social intercourse with people of all ranks and opinions.

Robinson was fifty-three when, in 1828, he gave up the practice of law to devote himself to self-improvement, talk, and philanthropy. It was during this harvest of leisure that he increased his correspondence, became a mentor to many young writers, paid hundreds of social visits to the great and the insignificant alike, and watched his old friends die off one by one. In the year of his retirement he was one of the first to buy shares in the recently founded London University, afterwards University College. His long and honorable connection with University College as a member of the Managing Council extended to the time of his death. It was here too that he practiced the art of conversation, which even then was becoming a rare phenomenon and indistinguishable from argument. Henry Crabb Robinson was always an eminently clubbable man, someone who could listen as well as perform, whether he was dining at College or spending his annual Christmas vacation with the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount.

It was as a genial and social man that Robinson was remembered after his death in 1867. As a conversationalist and companion of several generations of Englishmen, he never made an enemy. In fact, this talent for conversation makes the DIARY a work of continuing importance. Robinson the diarist is a mine of information on nineteenth century literary history. He was one of the first men to argue for the greatness of Goethe and Wordsworth. He saw immediately the significance of the LYRICAL BALLADS, and he was one of the initial supporters of Hazlitt and Keats. He transcribed the opinions, and catalogued the eccentricities, of both Coleridge and Blake; he was the friend of Charles Lamb and it is not insignificant to note that he recorded many of Lamb’s best puns. He went to the theater for pleasure and recorded his responses to performances in Weimar and London from the days of Mrs. Siddons, at the turn of the century, to the 1865 performance of TWELFTH NIGHT with Miss Kate Terry in the title role. Again, over a period of years, he attended the lectures of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Flaxman on the fine arts, and, later, of Emerson, Faraday, and Carlyle. In many cases his notes are all we possess of those lectures.

Robinson’s DIARY remains one of the most important single contemporary sources on the life and opinions of Wordsworth. He was Wordsworth’s contemporary in time and temperament and shared with the poet an enthusiasm for the French Revolution and for Godwin in the 1790’s. Both resided in Germany at the turn of the century; both gave their pity and friendship to the unfortunate Lambs; and both profited from the brilliant monologues of Coleridge. They were twice traveling companions on picturesque tours to the Continent. Robinson in the DIARY evinced an affectionate but skeptical regard for the poet. Often forgetting or garbling his friend’s remarks, or merely listening for the sake of pleasure and not transcription, he lacked—to use his own phrase—“the Boswell faculty.” Instead, we see Wordsworth en famille, or walking around the lake at Grasmere, or wondering whether he ought to travel three hundred miles to London for the Queen’s dance, or reacting stoically to the unexpected death of his daughter Dora. Robinson was the intermediary between Wordsworth and Coleridge during their misunderstanding; and his description of the motives and the frequent pettiness of the great men involved is our best record of this literary quarrel. There are accounts as well of Wordsworth on Byron, on Chatterton, on Milton, on the penny post, on politics, on the order in which his poems should be read, as well as some engaging discussion of Wordsworth’s faults and virtues as a friend. This personal material is invaluable. In addition, it is worth noting that Robinson’s comments on Wordsworth’s poems are just and often demonstrate an acute knowledge of their texture, spirit, and relative importance. Almost all of Robinson’s correspondence, particularly that with Wordsworth, exhibits an intense literary discussion of a sort unknown in our day in personal letters.

Often enough Robinson was a prosy and unselective diarist. One is obliged to use the index to find topics and names of importance. But he was alert to much of the best writing and talking of his age, and he himself evoked a portion of that intellectual activity. Obviously the thread of his own life as it is conveyed by his memoranda is for us not so important as the particulars of interesting men which the DIARY preserves. Nevertheless his day to day jottings show him as a shrewd and generous man, possessed with a keen scent for literary and human greatness and a marvelous capacity for friendship.