What most distinguished Landor from other writers is. . .. the exceptional aim and direction of his art.
Landor’s position may in general terms be best defined by saying that he was a classic writing in a romantic age. In calling him a classic, I do not of course refer merely to his scholarship, or to the fact that a considerable part of his work deals with subjects of ancient Greece and Rome. It is true that Landor was a scholar, and in Latin especially a scholar of unusual power and attainments. The acquisitions of his Rugby days, vivified by imagination and strengthened by after-study, remained with him always; and he wrote and thought in Latin as naturally and as willingly as in English. Probably no other writer has illuminated with stronger flashes of poetical insight a more familiar book-knowledge of Rome. And certainly no other writer so trained on thoughts of Rome, none so steeped in Latinity, has had an equally just appreciation of the genius and the charm of Hellas. Both in style and sentiment Landor’s writing was vitally influenced by Latin models; but from the first he realised for himself, what the classical scholarship of his age was only then beginning to realise, the essential inferiority of the Roman genius to the Greek. He put Greece in her right place; and if his Athenian statesmen and orators, if the Pericles and Phocion and Demosthenes of his creation are apt, by a certain self-conscious and set dignity of attitude, to recall Roman rather than Greek originals, yet when it comes to the true enchanted world of Plellas, to scenes or narratives from the beautiful undecaying Greek mythology, here Landor is perfectly at home; with admirable grace, freedom, and fitness he creates figures that move and act, and suffer and are consoled, in the “gravely-gladsome light” of that imaginary world:
And through the trumpet of a child of Rome
Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece.
Concerning this part of Landor’s work, taken at its best, Mr. Swinburne has in those two felicitous lines said the last word.
It is not scholarship, however, it is not a predilection for classic subjects, nor even a happy art in handling them, that can make a writer that which we understand by the word classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of subject than of treatment, although to some subjects the one mode of treatment may be more appropriate, and to some the other. And here let us listen to Landor himself. “The classical, like the heroic age,” writes he in his epistle to the author of Festus,
Is past; but poetry may re-assume
That glorious name with Tartar and with Turk,
With Goth or Arab, Sheik or Paladin,
And not with Roman or with Greek alone.
The name is graven on the workmanship.
“The name is graven on the workmanship,” and to define for our present purpose the difference between the classical and the romantic modes of workmanship: in classical writing every idea is called up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its effect by its own unaided power. In romantic writing, on the other hand, all objects are exhibited as it were through a coloured and iridescent atmosphere. Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the temper of the classical writer is one of self-possession. No matter what the power of his subject, the classical writer does not fail to assert his mastery over it and over himself, while the romantic writer seems as though his subject were ever on the point of dazzling and carrying him away. On the one hand there is calm, on the other hand enthusiasm: the virtues of the one style are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment: the virtues of the other style are glow of spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion. Of imaginative literature in England the main effort has from the first been romantic The Elizabethans were essentially romantic, some of them extravagantly so: Shakespeare, who could write in all manners, was in a preponderating degree romantic, and never more so than in his treatment of Greek and Roman themes. To quote again the same critical epistle of Landor’s own,
Shakespeare with majesty benign called up
The obedient classics from their marble seat,
And led them through dim glen and sheeny glade.
And over precipices, over seas
Unknown by mariner, to palaces
High-arch’d, to festival, to dance, to joust,
And gave them golden spur and vizor barred,
And steeds that Pheidias had turned pale to see.
Of the great English poets, Milton was the most classical, beholding the vast images that filled his mind’s eye in steady rather than in iridescent light, defining them when they are capable of definition, and maintaining a majestic self-possession in their presence. In Paradise Lost the images indeed are often such as no power could define: the perfection of the classical style in Milton’s work is to be found rather in Samson Agonistes and in some of the sonnets; while in Paradise Regained the characteristics of the style are pushed to excess. Then followed an age, the age of Anne and the first Georges, of which the literature claimed for itself the title of classical, and was indeed marked by uncommon qualities of clearness, calmness, and precision. But then it was not a literature of imagination; it was only a literature of the understanding and fancy. In the regions of the imagination, of poetry in the higher sense, the literature of that age rarely laid hold of the object at all; it dealt, not in realities, but in literary counters and catchwords bearing a merely conventional value to the mind. By the time when Landor began to write, people were getting tired of this conventional literary currency, and learning to crave for something real in poetry. His immediate contemporaries were Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb; spirits born to unlock again for the English race the sealed treasure-houses of the poetical imagination.
Neither in choice of subject nor in treatment was the work of these men, nor that of the yet more fervid spirits who soon followed them, of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, deliberately or consistently romantic in the same sense as that of a certain group of contemporary writers in Germany was romantic, and still more that of the brilliant and acutely self-conscious group who assumed the title a generation afterwards in France. In the work of the English writers of this age, the romantic and the classical modes of treatment are mixed. The romantic mode, however, prevails; as in an age of re-awakening, an age of imaginative conquest and discovery, enthusiasm is the temper to be expected, and the light wherein objects naturally appear is the vibrating or coloured light, the halo, as it is commonly called, of romance. Scott and Coleridge in their early days both copied the romantic models of Germany. A few years later Scott was to figure in the eyes of all Europe as the great master of the romance of Scottish scenery and of the medieval past, and a few later again, Byron as the great master of the romance of travel, and of social and religious revolt. Meanwhile Coleridge had already written, in the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Kubla Khan, examples of a romantic poetry more highly wrought and more magical in suggestion than any work either of Scott or Byron. Lamb, in alliance with Coleridge, had made himself the apostle of the romantic spirit as it is exhibited in the old English drama and lyric. Southey, whose natural gifts and instincts were for the classical manner of writing, tried hard to write romantically, and did so in a few ballads, but in epics like Thalaba and Kehama compassed little of the true romantic beyond remoteness of subject and irregularity of form. Wordsworth, the most determined enemy of false classicism, was in much of his writing truly classical. The qualities of Wordsworth’s work on which Mr. Matthew Arnold with so much justice insists, when he speaks of his style as being “bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur,” or again as a style “relying solely on the weight and force of that which with entire fidelity it utters,” those are qualities distinctively characteristic of the classical manner in literature. It is, of course, true that from many of Wordsworth’s utterances the indispensable elements of weight and force are wanting: there is a large part of his work wherein either the themes are too trifling, or the thoughts are too sterile, to sustain and dignify a classical treatment. There is also another part of it, and that the part which many of us most value, wherein he writes under the dominion of emotions and ideas having their sources too far withdrawn in the depths of our nature to be perfectly grasped, strongly as Wordsworth by comparison with any other writer has grasped them. It is not indeed to the romantic manner, nevertheless it is to a suggestive and adumbrative manner quite distinct from the classical, that Wordsworth’s writing in these latter moods belongs: and they are the moods which yielded him his inspiring revelations of a spiritual power in nature; his communings with
The human soul of Universal Earth
Dreaming on things to come;"
his
sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
his imperfectly recovered pictures of the mind, accompanied
with gleams of half-extinguished thought.
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
To Landor this portion of Wordsworth’s work had little meaning: he had little interest in any ideas but those which could be perfectly grasped, and exhibited in precise lineaments like the shapes of antique gods. From the beginning the peculiar aim and direction of his art made themselves apparent. While Wordsworth and Coleridge were meditating among the Quantock Hills their volume of Lyrical Ballads, to which Wordsworth contributed his Lines on Revisiting Tintern Abbey, and Coleridge his Ancient Mariner, Landor was wandering beside the estuaries of Caermarthenshire, alone with Pindar and Milton, and meditating his narrative poem of Gebir. The theme which he had chosen, a confused quasioriental theme of primeval warfare and enchantment, was pre-eminently suggestive of a romantic treatment. The treatment Landor attempted to apply to it was classical. The result as a whole is marred by excessive condensation of meaning and abruptness of transition, but has always powerfully impressed poets and students of poetry by the precise and strong presentment of its individual images. We are in a land of incantation; but there is nothing undefined or vague about the nature of the perils that environ us. We approach the ruined city of Masar. “Begone,” cries the weird woman of the ruins,
Begone, nor tarry longer, or ere morn
The cormorant in his solitary haunt
Of insulated rock or sounding cove
Stands on thy bleached bones and screams for prey.
Or we descend into the kingdom of the damned, and hear the sound of the infernal river—
A river rolling in its bed.
Not rapid—that would rouse the wretched souls,
Not calmly—that would lull them to repose.
But with dull weary lapses it still heaved
Billows of bale, heard low, but heard afar.”
For this accurate and firm definition of things, however visionary and unearthly, the romantic manner substitutes a thrilling vagueness and confusion, as for instance in the Ancient Mariner—
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen;
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken,
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and groaned and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound.”
Similarly in the description of beauty, the type, the perfection of romantic workmanship is Shakespeare’s—
Rubies unparagon’d,
How dearly they do’t! ’Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o' the taper
Bows towards her, and would undcr-peep her lids,
To see the enclosed lights, now canopied
Under those windows, white and azure, laced
With blue of heaven’s own tinct.
Landor can realise the presence and the charm of beauty with a vividness and a delicacy not so far behind those of Shakespeare himself: but it is in another manner: he trusts to the simple facts, and does not suffer himself to go beyond them: he shows us beauty, even under the most enchanting circumstances, not in this tremulous and coruscating light, but in quiet light, thus—
Downcast were her long eye-lashes, and pale
Her cheek, but never mountain ash displayed
Berries of colour like her lip so pure,
Nor were the anemones about her hair
Soft, smooth, and wavering like her face beneath.
In the interpretation of scenery, again, compare the woodland twilight of Keats—
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways:
Compare these and the beautiful lines that follow them—
I cannot tell what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
with a twilight of Landor’s—
Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is left discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers under them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the shells in our path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus.”
The presence of the twilight and its spell are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in the work of Keats, only they are felt and realised in a widely different manner. Neither is the difference merely that between the poetical and the prose form of expression; it is that between one mood or temper of imaginative work and another. The romantic manner, the manner of Shakespeare and Coleridge and Keats, with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and measured preciseness of statement. Nay, we may go further, and say that it is in the romantic manner that the highest pitch of poetry has assuredly been reached: in the perfect and felicitous specimens of that manner English poetry has given us something more poetical even than Greece or Rome ever gave us. But on the other hand the romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, to inferior work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate. Whereas about true classical writing there can be no illusion. It presents to us conceptions calmly realised in words that exactly define them, conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on themselves, it relies for its value “solely on the weight and force of that which with entire fidelity it utters,” or if not on these qualities solely, at least on them together with our sense of mastery and of fitness in the utterance.
To write in this strong and severe manner was consciously Landor’s aim from the beginning. The question next arises, what is the value of the conceptions which he in this manner seeks to present to us; what were the powers of mind which he brought to bear on the business of literature as he conceived it? To almost every English writer, himself of high power, from the days of the first publication of Gebir to our own, Landor’s natural and acquired gifts have seemed to be of the first order. Who indeed that has ever read him can doubt it ? In an age of distinguished spirits, he was for height and range of power unquestionably one of the most distinguished. Neither were his natural gifts more remarkable than the strenuousness with which he cultivated them. From a lower, or at least a far more broken, level of character than Milton, Landor through all his length of days devoted himself to great thoughts and studies with a persistence resembling Milton’s own, and with an equally scornful withdrawal of himself from vulgar pleasures and ambitions. It is true that he was not one of those spirits in the age who opened up new intellectual or moral horizons, or revealed new sources of imaginative sustenance to the mind. Rather he kept his gaze fastened on objects which have an equal value for every age, on the known actions and heroic shapes of history, and on the great permanent conditions of human life and experience. On these he mused with not less absorption than independence of spirit, his familiarity with the best literature being turned to account by him in avoiding rather than in repeating the thoughts of others. He had a soul in love with heroism, in love with freedom, in love with beauty, and as ardent in indignation as in compassion. He had a strong and finely-touched imagination, and a masculine and confident understanding, in which robust prejudice and perfect lack of prejudice were strangely blended. The master faculty in his mind was certainly the poetic or imaginative faculty. This in his creative work ranges with equal assurance from the extreme of strength to the extreme of tenderness. In images of terror what other writer has shown greater daring, or a firmer stroke, than Landor in a picture like this of the funeral pyre consuming the last survivor among the besieged citizens of Numantia?
He extended his withered arras, he thrust forward the gaunt links of his throat, and upon gnarled knees, that smote each other audibly, tottered into the civic fire. It, like some hungry and strangest beast on the innermost wild of Africa, pierced, broken, prostrate, motionless, gazed at by its hunter in the impatience of glory, in the delight of awe, panted once more, and seized him!
Beside instances of this kind, where for force of grasp Landor’s hand resembles that of his own Count Julian—“the hand,” as Julian says to Roderick,
that hurl’d thy chariot o’er its wheels,
And held thy steeds erect and motionless
As molten statues on some palace gates
Beside instances like this, it would be easy to set others in which he is no less admirable for tenderness of touch. In dealing with womanhood and infancy, and especially when his theme takes him into the house of mourning, Landor can surpass all except the very greatest writers by the depth of his intuition, by the exquisite delicacy of his approach; his dealings with human weakness and affliction are then like those dealings with the flowers which he tells us of—
I never pluck the rose; the violet’s head
Hath shaken'with my breath upon its bank
And not reproach’d me; the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure/lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoil’d, nor lost one grain of gold.
Even in work that is not creative, nor in its main intention poetical, even in reflective and discursive writing,/it is from the poetic faculty that Landor’s thoughts derive much of their colour. It has been said of him with great justice by Mr. Lowell, that in the region of discursive thought we cannot so properly call him a great thinker, as a man who had great thoughts, For a great thinker the operations of his mind were too unsystematic. Judgments, indeed, he framed and expressed on many of the great topics of human meditation, but isolated judgments standing each by itself, and not connected by any ratiocinative process with one another. Of these judgments some are marked by an original and benignant wisdom, others by headstrong prejudice, others again represent in a weighty and lucid form the average conclusions of mankind. But it is characteristic of Landor’s thinking in all moods alike, that for every conclusion of his understanding he has an imaginative similitude always ready, and often a whole cluster of them. These similitudes of Landor’s serve sometimes to disguise more or less effectively a fallacy, and sometimes admirably to illuminate and recommend a truth: but few thoughts of his are complete without them; and in his typical thoughts the judgment and the similitude are inseparable. When Landor, for instance, says, “The noble mansion is most distinguished by the beautiful images it retains of beings passed away ; and so is the noble mind,” that is one of his typical thoughts concerning life; and again it is one of his typical thoughts concerning literature when he says, of the mixture of fact and fiction in the early legends of a people—
What was vague imagination settles at last and is received for history. It is difficult to effect and idle to attempt the separation : it is like breaking off a beautiful crystallisation from the vault of some intricate and twilight cavern, out of mere curiosity to see where the accretion terminates and the rock begins.
In the illustrations from Landor’s writing which have thus far occurred to us, and even in those quoted expressly to illustrate his poetical or imaginative power, examples in prose have found place interchangeably with examples in verse. The reason is, that in his prose Landor could be at least as poetical as in his verse. To say this is of course to imply for his poetry properly so called a certain measure of condemnation. The born poet is not himself except in verse; he finds in its effects his ideal delight, and in its laws the truest freedom. Landor wrote in verse abundantly and well, but hardly with the full instinct of the born poet. His verse has many fine qualities, now of stateliness and weight, now of grace, clearness, and crispness, and always of sobriety and vigour ; but it lacks the perfection of spontaneous charm, it even lacks something of the born poet’s certainty of ear. Landor was a great admirer and student of the harmonies of Milton, but in analysing them he seems not unfrequently to miss the mark; and his own verse is Miltonic only by the majesty of single lines and phrases. The variety and continuity of harmony in Milton’s blank verse, its prolonged, involved, and sustained movements, what De Quincey calls its “solemn planetary wheelings,” it was beyond his means to rival. De Quincey has chosen a fine passage of Landor’s blank verse, and has shown with great justice and ingenuity how by a simple change, which did not occur to its author, its movement might have been amplified and enriched. The passage is from Landor’s tragedy of Count Julian, where Hernando says of Julian—
No airy and light passion stirs abroad
To ruffle or to soothe him; all are quell’d
Beneath a mightier, sterner stress of mind.
Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and unmoved,
Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men;
As oftentimes an eagte, ere the sun
Throws o’er the varying earth his early ray,
Stands solitary, stands immovable
Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his eye,
Clear, constant, unobservant, unabased,
In the cold light, above the dews of morn.”
“One change,” says De Quincey in commenting on this passage, “suggests itself to me as possibly for the better, viz. if the magnificent line—
Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men,
were transferred to the secondary object, the eagle, and placed after what is now the last line, it would give a fuller rythmus to the close of the entire passage ; it would be more literally applicable to the majestic and solitary bird than to the majestic and solitary man ”—at which point we may break off from De Quincey, whose suggestion, so far at least as concerns the rhythm of the passage, needs only to be tried in order to be accepted. It is perhaps after all in the lighter vein of blank verse that Landor’s happiest effects are attained ; for instance in the blank verse of the Hellenics,—
Onward the vessel flew the skies again
Shone bright, and thunder roll’d along, not wroth,
But gently murmuring to the white-wing’d sails,"—
or in the blank verse of the meditative and elegiac pieces,—
Thou sleepest not forgotten, nor unmoum’d,
Beneath the chestnut shade of St. Germain.
Meanwhile I wait the hour of my repose,—
while occasionally, even in his good work, he exhibits instances of metrical poverty, like this —
Aeon had grieved, he said, grieved bitterly, But Aeon had complied; 'twas dutiful."
In his odes and irregular lyrics Landor has fine flights alternately with awkward pauses and declensions, not of sound only, but sometimes of sense also. In casting, as he was in the habit of doing, his daily meditations into homelier metres, into the couplet or quatrain of eight-syllable lines, he was often extremely happy. He handles these forms in a manner almost as neat and bright as that of Prior, with a touch from time to time of weightier thought and higher poetry than any of which the age of Prior was capable: and the only thing to be said against his best work in this vein is that it is almost too classically direct and simple; so devoid is it of trick or mannerism as to be in style almost impersonal.
On the whole, then, fine as is much of Landor’s work in verse, justly as examples of it must claim a place in any collection of his writings, we shall agree with his own estimate when he treats it as the work, comparatively speaking, of an amateur: comparatively, that is, to his work in prose. “Poetry was always my amusement, prose my study and business.” In fact it is in prose that Landor’s powers and his cultivation of them make themselves most truly felt. Of the very few English writers who have written prose like artists or like masters, Landor, whether he is read by few or many, must always be counted among the first. There are limits, indeed, to the excellence of his prose, in that its structure is too regular and firm for perfect freedom. Its affinities are with the prose of the best Latin rather than with that of the best Greek writers: with Latin, “the expression of law,” as Professor Jebb has admirably put it, rather than with Greek, “the voice of life. ” But of this severely regulated and measured prose, this prose which is as deliberately removed from the casualness of common speech as the figures of ideal sculpture are removed from the casualness of common life, of this severe and sententious prose Landor’s writing furnishes in English the best example. That he is never stiff and never declamatory would be too much to say; but these are the incidental blemishes of a style which in its kind often reaches per-fection. Landor’s feeling for the value and weight of words was of tntit sort which comes from a habitual conversance with the bpst writers, and with the best writers only; and his choice of them is as sound and scrupulous as is the structure of nts-^§entences. He imitates no model, but when he aims at eflebts of pomp he can be as majestic as any of the great seventeenth-century masters of eloquence, from Hooker to Milton himself, without their tendency to involution of thought and entanglement of clauses; and when he aims at effects of simplicity he can be as plain as the great eighteenth-century masters of easy prose, as Addison or Goldsmith, without their tendency to negligence and triviality. There is besides about everything he utters an air of authority and breeding, there is a lofty tone at once peremptory and urbane, which is wholly personal. Especially is Landor distinguished by the beauty of sound in his single sentences. Instances of this beauty we need not give; the pages that follow are full of them. Such is the harmony of his best prose that strains of it haunt the ear and memory with an effect almost as pleasurable and stirring as strains of verse. At the same time few writers have been farther removed from the fault of breaking up their prose into the fixed and recurrent rhythms of verse itself. No one, again, is less open to the charge of constructing harmonies in the air, or cultivating effects of sound apart from sense. Excess rather than poverty of meaning is at all times characteristic of Landor’s writing; and in theory he objects to any beauty of style except that which proceeds from the rigidly accurate and just expression of ideas. “Never look abroad for any kind of ornament; Apollo, either as the god of day, or the slayer of the Python, had nothing about him to obscure his clearness, or impede his strength.” “Natural sequences and right subordination of thoughts, and that just proportion of numbers in the sentences which follows a strong conception, are the constituents of true harmony.” And again, “Whatever is rightly said, sounds rightly.” “I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.” It is a new revelation of the beauty and nobility of the English tongue, it is a testimony at the same time to the power and selection of his thoughts, that Landor, writing as he in general does with due observance of his own principles, produces strains of a harmony so masculine and full.
With these high gifts and powers, then; with his range and energy of imagination and thought, and his love for what all love, for heroism, beauty, and freedom; with his vigorous and pure, if somewhat unequal and impersonal style in poetry, and with his prose style which is in its kind unrivalled; how is it that Landor has not taken a more prominent place among the acknowledged great writers of his country ? How is it that even by those who would not dispute his rank he is nevertheless so little read ? The answer to these questions has been partly given already. The classical manner in literature for one thing, in which Landor by instinct and on principle wrote, appeals necessarily to a smaller public than the romantic manner. Necessarily, because classical writing asks more of the reader than romantic, and in a certain sense does less for him. The classical writer assumes that his reader will estimate for himself the ideas which are presented to him: the romantic writer eagerly proclaims the impressiveness of his own ideas as he presents them. The classical writer handles great thoughts and images, and even great passions, collectedly, like one accustomed, and expecting his reader to be accustomed, to none other. The romantic writer from whatever he handles catches fire, and his fire is contagious j his excitement breeds excitement in the reader; and a public which is slow to appreciate the grave reality of power and passion in a poem like Wordsworth’s Affliction of Margaret is eager in its appreciation of the clamorous parade of pdwer and passion in a poem like Byron’s Corsair. The classical writer, in a word, appeals only to those who know for themselves what is good: the romantic writer appeals to everybody, and is often appreciated above his value. Landor knew this perfectly well, and deliberately narrowed his appeal to the few. But the response has been even more limited and longer in coming than he foresaw. There is in every generation a public, although not a large one, which can enjoy the best literature for itself, and for whom the classical manner of writing is, in itself no stumbling-block, but an attraction. Yet even of this public, not many in each generation have thus far been attracted to Landor; it is only the minority of this minority who have enjoyed him.
One reason is that, allied with Landor’s scornful and not unworthy disregard of vulgar favour, there was also in him a want of legitimate literary tact. The operations of his mind were governed, not by sympathy with the minds of others, but exclusively by private impulse. Moreover, and this is the worst, those operations were in their nature peculiarly inconsecutive. With all his great and various powers, and with all his serious and strenuous cultivation of them, Landor was deficient in the instincts of sequence and connection. The energies of his mind were inexhaustible, but its workings, whether of imagination or of thought, consisted not so much of coherent trains as of independent and imperfectly connected acts. Hence an abruptness, a lack of organic construction and evolution, whereby the interest of the reader is constantly subject to be baffled and disappointed. Hence also, and from the further failure of instinct to perceive where a reader is likely to be ignorant of an allusion, or to be baffled by a suppression, or to miss drawing an inference or catching a clue, arises in Landor’s work the occasional fault of actual obscurity. He was determined to say nothing superfluous, and nothing, if it could be avoided, that another had said before him; but to be obscure was the very opposite of his desire. It is a failure of his art, as he himself acknowledges, when he is so.
No estimate of Landor or of his powers can be just in which these shortcomings are not acknowledged. They condemned to comparative futility the efforts of the first twenty-five years of his literary career; the years during which the vital work of his contemporaries, Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge, and even of his juniors, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, was accomplished. During those years, besides a few love-poems and elegies, Landor’s chief productions in literature had been Gebir, Count Julian, and the Latin Idyllia Heroica. In spite of its original and powerfully grasped imagery, Gebir as a narrative poem fails by over-condensation and abruptness. Count Julian, in spite of its sublime conception and some pregnant passages, fails as a tragedy for want of right construction and evolution. To have written the Idyllia Heroica at all, at least under the impression that solid literary fame was to be won by exercises of that kind, however masterly, showed a misapprehension of the relations of scholarship to life. It was not until after 1820 that Landor began the Imaginary Conversations, the production of which, and of the three books that are each a kind of separate and amplified imaginary conversation, the Examination of Shakspeare, Pericles and Aspasia, and The Pentameron, constitutes his most solid title I to glory. In no other form of composition could his powers have found larger scope than in this; in no I other could defect of strict evolution, and of tact in taking the reader with him, tell less against him. But even in this free and unexacting form of composition, those defects do nevertheless tell against Landor heavily. Readers, the minority of a minority, who love the great qualities of imagination and thought and style too well to let anything deter them from their enjoyment, have felt the defects and overcome them. Less tenacious readers feel them and are deterred.
The Imaginary Conversations of Landor divide themselves roughly into two classes: one of short and stirring scenes, scenes of emotion and generally also of action: the other of long and quiet scenes, scenes mainly of discussion and reflection. Over and above the strength and purity of style which are common to all alike, Landor’s more impassioned dialogues derive their value from his fine poetic and historic sense in the choice of characters and situations (though like an artist he makes of history his servant and not his master), from his chivalrous ideals of behaviour and sentiment, and from his admirable strokes of insight into the heart. In types of heroism and tenderness he is often a true dramatic creator, though not in those of meanness or cruelty, which he constructs from the outside, fiercely and satirically. But even in these short scenes, written in a form which does not demand much strictness of evolution, we are often aware of disconcerting gaps and breaks of sequence in the chain of the emotions; and sometimes, too, of passages where the posture and rhetoric merely of the situation, and not its real emotions, are presented to us. In the longer dialogues Landor made comparatively little attempt at dramatic character or creation. Rather he selected and brought together the various personages of history, in order to distribute among them the matter of his own incessant and lofty meditations. In his own likeness created he them, sometimes with a paradoxical neglect, but oftener with just sufficient observance, of probabilities. The virtues of this class of conversations are their extraordinary energy, fulness, and ripeness of thought and imagery, and the fine sense of dignity and urbanity, of grace, and sometimes of humour, which is shown in the intercourse of the personages. Their faults are the frequent intrusion of irrelevant apologues and disquisitions, with a want of argumentative sequence, and of sufficient organic connection between one part of the same dialogue and another. They are full of noble things, but they rarely “go,” or only for a few pages at a time.
The reader who in the midst of his admiration asks himself whither he is progressing, and to what end being conducted from what beginning, is often obliged to acknowledge that he has not been progressing at all, but only, as Mr. Leslie Stephen in his acute though unsympathetic criticism puts it, “marking time.” And, unfortunately, where sequence is wanting, where the reader does not feel himself led on by some coherent chain either of reasoning or feeling, though admiration may indeed be excited, yet interest can hardly by any possible combination of excellences be detained.
Landor’s indomitable, solitary activity was only brought to an end, as every one knows, in our own day, long after all his contemporaries had gone to rest. His last twenty-five years were devoted to the production, in prose, of more Imaginary Conversations, with many occasional utterances on the political circumstances of the day; and in verse, of more dramas and dramatic scenes, with a new class of narrative poems, the Hellenics, shorter, lighter, and brighter than those of his youth, and the best of them contributing a real and brilliant addition to the poetical literature of the century; besides an abundance of occasional verses, often full of a fine meditative grace, and; touched as few things in literature are touched with the mellowness and dignity of patriarchal age.
In the series of seven stout volumes wherein alone; these various writings of Landor are now easily accessible, while there is much which every one who reads at all might be expected to know and care for, there is much also in which only the professed student of literature can take interest. The object of the present Golden Treasury is not to effect a complete separation of the acceptable from the unacceptable parts of Landor’s work: such a separation I would be in fact impossible, moreover the bulk of what is good would far exceed the limits of our undertaking: it is to present in a convenient and familiar shape such a selection of his best work as shall fairly represent therange and variety of his powers. Verse, from the nature of the case, finds a place side by side with prose in the selection. Landor himself was much given to mixing them. With him, as I have already indicated, verse and prose do nqt, as with most writers, represent a higher and a lower form of literature respectively, but merely alternative forms; and prose he writes frequently at a higher pitch, as well as on the whole with a more accomplished art, than in verse. It is not, then, according to their form, but according to their contents, that the selections which follow have primarily been arranged.
The first section contains examples of Landor’s imaginative and creative work, secondarily divided into those which are dramatic and those which are narrative in form. Here are given in full some of the best of the short prose dialogues of emotion, with one or two in verse, and with a few passages of a similar impassioned kind, extracted from longer conversations; the personages ranging from heroes and heroines of Greek mythology to those of modern history. Landor, with his disdain for superfluities, and his love for the naked presentment of ideas, rarely condescends in these scenes to supply a syllable of preface or stage direction: I have prefixed to such as seemed to need it a few words explaining the situation. Then comes the narrative division, beginning with a few extracts from the strong and vivid, but abrupt and sometimes difficult poetry of Landor’s youth: these are followed by a selection from the later and admirable, light, bright, and truly Greek Hellenics: and these by some of the separate narrative episodes that lie embedded like jewels in Landor’s longer prose works. There is nothing in literature which quite resembles these; there are very few things in literature better. De Quincey, whom the ordinary handbooks and compendiums of English literature as unduly, I think, magnify as they neglect Landor, is commonly quoted as the especial modern master in English of impassioned prose. De Quincey is indeed an author well worthy of study. He was a man of eloquence and attainments; of a strong though eccentric vein of imagination; and of solid, though again in great part eccentric, thought and research. He was full of ingenuity and resource, but full also of conceit and affectation; loving above all things to flourish his resources, and to make circuits round about his subject, discoursing to us of the fine disclosures which he is about to make, and in the end as often as not making none; a remarkable writer, as it seems to me, in the second order, but a bad model, and in hardly anything a really great or straightforward master. In the field of high imaginative prose especially, to insist on De Quincey’s Ladies of Sorrow or his Daughter of Lebanon, when there exist such masterpieces as Landor’s Dream of Boccaccio and Dream of Petrarca, is surely to call away attention from the best to the second best.
The second section of our Golden Treasury contains examples of Landor’s reflective and discursive manner, chiefly from the longer conversations and other prose writings. And here it has been necessary to proceed by the method of short extracts almost entirely. If any of the long conversations had been given in full, it would have been necessary for proportion’s sake to give those of Epicurus with Leontion and Temissa, and of Plato with Diogenes, from among the Greek; those of the two Ciceros, and of Lucullus and Caesar, from among the Roman; and from among the English, that of Marvel and Milton, with that of Barrow and Newton or of Penn and Peterborough at least. This within our limits was out of the question. Moreover I think a fuller representation of Landor’s mind was to be obtained by the method I have followed, of grouping according to their subject-matter thoughts taken not from a few only but from a wide range of his discursive writings. The thoughts of Landor suffer less than that of almost any other man in being thus detached from their context. Many of them, indeed, we know to have been originally framed independently, and thrust into their context afterwards. As thus extracted and grouped, they indeed are partly shorn of the charm which comes from those attractive qualities of intercourse and bearing with which Landor. endows his speakers. But they will serve to show of what substance his mind was made. “We should hesitate to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached passages complete in themselves,” so wrote Mr. Lowell of Landor while he was still alive; and again, “We should be at a loss to name the writer of English prose who is his superior, or, setting Shakespeare aside, the writer of English who has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature.” It is especially of Landor as an aphoristic writer that this section will enable the reader to judge.
A moral or intellectual teacher of the great revealing, initiating order Landor is not: but he is one whose utterances dwell in our thoughts and make them richer. In the sphere of life and conduct he unites great force and originality of observation with a noble benignity of temper; and there are few generous virtues and few lofty pleasures but come recommended from his mind to ours in a new light of imaginative beauty, and with a new and memorable charm of presentment. In the sphere of politics and government, it must be allowed that he never got much beyond the elementary principles of love of freedom and hatred of tyranny. These principles, we must however remember, he in the Europe of his time saw continually in danger of extinction. On their behalf he felt and wrote as passionately throughout the greater part of a century as during their brief life-days did either Byron or Shelley. But of the complexity of political organisms and political problems Landor had no conception, and practical as he believed and intended much of his writing on politics to be, it is usually so much high-minded declamation and no more. From these trumpet-calls against kings and oppressors, our selection passes on to Landor’s utterances concerning his own art of letters. No one had a larger or closer knowledge of the best literature of all ages. No one, moreover, felt more kindly to his contemporaries, or took a manlier pleasure in praising them, or was less capable of spoiling praise by partiality. Landor’s sayings concerning the duty and temper of the critic might furnish a code for the guidance of every one undertaking that office. Of his own writing a considerable part is critical, and his criticism is often detailed and analytic; but most commonly in the technical and verbal sense; in the spiritual or psychological sense more rarely. For this latter kind of analysis Landor was not so well endowed as some of his contemporaries. De Quincey, for ever questing in a circuit, when from time to time he gets really on the scent; Coleridge, when from his speculative labyrinths he emerges into straight paths and daylight; are both of them subtler critics than Landor. If Landor is ever subtle, it is in the analysis not of the mind, but of the heart; witness his famous commentary on the Paolo and Francesca of Dante. It is for range and largeness of critical survey, and for weight and felicity in the expression of broad synthetic judgments on literature and the workers in literature, that Landoi is really incomparable. “With a vigorous and easy motion,” to use a phrase of his own, “such as the poets attribute to the herald of the gods,” he ranges from; Homer to Virgil, and from Pindar to Catullus, and from the ancients down to his own contemporaries, dealing out his ripe, authoritative judgments right and left. Of his treatment of the technicalities of English spelling and English style I have given only one or two brief examples, interesting and masterly as these, too, often are. Neither have I thought it desirable to spell his work in these selections as he liked it spelt, but in the usual way. “Talkt,” “quencht,” and the other peculiar usages which Landor so stoutly advocated, may have much to recommend them, but neither his advocacy nor that of others has made them prevail, and in a book intended to be read they seemed better abandoned.
Finally, I have put into a separate section examples of Landor’s writing about persons and about himself. These are chiefly in verse. Landor had two personalities, an inner one, so to speak, disguised by an outer; the inner being that of a stately and benign philosopher, the outer that of a passionate and rebellious schoolboy. Of the external and superficial Landor, the man of headlong impulses and disastrous misapprehensions and quarrels, enough and to spare has been said and repeated. But together with this indignant, legendary Landor, we must not forget that there existed the other Landor, the noble and gentle heart, the rich and bountiful nature, the royally courteous temper, which won and held the loving admiration of spirits like Southey and the Hares, like Leigh Hunt and Forster and Dickens, like Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and even of one so grudging of admiration as Carlyle. That Landor’s inner and nobler self had little hold on or government over his other self must be admitted. From his nature’s central citadel, to use a mediaeval figure, of Pride, High Contemplation, and Honourable Purpose, he failed to keep ward over its outlying arsenals of Wrath, which Haste and Misjudgment were for ever wantonly igniting, to the ruin of his own fortunes, and the dismay of his neighbours and well-wishers.
Landor in truth never fairly faced or contended against these turbulent and explosive elements in his own character, but after every new experience of their consequences forgot or laughed them off. Neither does his literary self-consciousness extend to them, or it extends to them but faintly. It is the philosophic and benignant Landor, walking in spirit “with Epicurus on the right hand, and Epictetus on the left,” that speaks to us in his personal writings almost alone. First in this section I have tried to group the verses of all dates relating to his early love and life-long friend, “Ianthe.” Next comes a selection of poems embodying a few of his other most cherished reminiscences and affections, and especially his idealising affection for Southey. Next, some of his judgments on himself and on others, delivered with his high air of authority now in prose and now in verse; and lastly the expressions of that dignified and serene mood in which in his old age he was accustomed to contemplate the approach of death.
This, then, is what I have tried to do for Landor: to bring together in a familiar shape a sufficient body, first of his creative and impassioned writing, next of his reflective and discursive writing, and lastly of his personal and occasional writing, to represent for readers in general the range and character of his so incomplete yet so extraordinary powers. If I have performed my task at all rightly, the result ought to many readers to be welcome. Even the student already well acquainted with Landor may be glad to possess in such a shape a selection of his most characteristic things. Not, I am well aware, that any true student will ever in his heart quite approve another’s selection from an author he loves, or fail to feel convinced that he could have made a better one himself: but even to the student I may at least remark that in the notes at the end of the volume he will find matter which may interest him, and which is not readily to be found elsewhere. Primarily, however, it is not for him that the volume is intended, but for that large class of readers who have an appetite for the best literature, but not the leisure, or not the tenacity, to overcome difficulties in its approach. Landor in his contempt for popularity intentionally put some difficulties in the way of those seeking to approach him, and more unintentionally, by his deficiency in tact and in consecutiveness of mind. These deficiencies, as it seems to me, prevent him from being one of the greatest, but they do not prevent him from being one of the great. English writers, and in proportion as it helps to make this great writer no longer by name only, but really known, will the purpose of my work have been accomplished.
Bibliography
Landor, Walter Savage. Selections from the Writings. Ed. Sidney Colvin. London: Macmillan, 1920. This volume is a reprint of the original 1882 edition.
Last modified 24 December 2019